how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims) 

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first 

I’ve been here since 2016 and I didn’t realize this.

Time to go deep diving into my tags!

I suspect it was a previous version of this post which taught me about /chrono which I have found invaluable.

/archive/tagged/ is also probably more useful than I realize but I don’t remember to try it very often

do me a solid and just reblog this saying what time it is where you are and what you’re thinking about in the tags.

Vote blue no matter who.

CASUAL Chappell Roan

I have no idea what this is actually from, but I 100% saw Lucy and the Sea Girl. 😍

I hope every writer who sees this writes LOADS the next few months. Like freetime opens up, no writers block, the ability to focus, etc etc you're able to write loads & make lots of progress <3

Sapphic Blues

Welcome to the Sapphic Blues Event Week! The week begins April 23 and ends April 30 at midnight. 

The ship for this week is…Newsbians! All other related concepts- Sarah-focused content, Katherine-focused content, their individual stories- may be featured, along with the characters and general context of the Newsies fandom!  

Acceptable submissions for the week include written works, artwork, and playlists (if interested in submitting a creation of another variation, please refer to the rules/FAQ or ask moderators). 

There are no specific days for any specific AUs or themes, but some ideas and suggestions include: childhood best friends, soulmates, enemies to lovers, unrequited love. You may include any other characters or tropes, but please try to keep the focus on either the ship itself or the characters directly involved. 

Due to the specificity of this week, please refrain from works that heavily feature another related ship as the main plot point (ie. Jatherine, Jatherid). If it is present as a reason for angst, that is acceptable. Please do not write a Jatherine fic just because you aren’t a Sarah/Katherine fan. There will be opportunities for those types of work at a later date. 

The collection will be posted April 16 on AO3! You may submit finished works to this collection before April 23, but they will not be announced or displayed until the week officially begins.

FAQ

Rules

If only you knew

Calling all fandom journalists—both current and aspiring! As promised, we've put together a doc for pitching Fansplaining (which will temporarily become a written-only publication after Flourish's last episode next month). If you've got an idea that fits in with our general tone and approach, please send int our way!

We highlight these pieces in the doc, but in case folks are unaware that we're *currently* a written publication as well as a podcast, here's a sample of some of the stuff we've published over the years!

Also please note: we're v transparent about money here. We *deeply* appreciate our Patreon support, but we can't afford to pay a ton or publish super frequently with the current amount we take in. So if any generous folks are interested in sponsoring smart, substantive writing on fandom in the future, please get in touch. fansplaining at gmail dot com. :-))

As promised! I wrote about the illegal fanbinding that's led to writers deleting their works recently, how that connects to the current pull-to-publish wave, and what happens when the rapidly expanding sphere of fic readers starts to get disconnected from *fandom*:

We'll also talk about this in some capacity on the next episode of @fansplaining! (In contrast with today's episode, on the non-monetized, gift-economy practices of many fanbinders, whose hobby is also imperiled by the people selling and buying fic.)

This is really a fantastic article, and I recommend reading it!

While the timing of the Renegade Fansplaining episode and the increased discussion of illegal selling of fic in Harry Potter circles was unfortunate and has caused some confusion, it's also reflective of how the last few years have gone. Renegade Bookbinding Guild in its current form does not exist in a vacuum. (Please note I am not speaking officially for Renegade here).

@armoredsuperheavy gave us a firm foundation in anti-capitalist sentiment in Renegade, but as Renegade grew larger fanbinding also grew more prominent in other spaces besides ours. Some of those spaces were profiting off of the selling of HP fic. Direct confrontation seemed to work out best from inside of the Dramione fandom, so we turned to look at how we could affect things more indirectly, and how we wanted to impact our community. I watched volunteers in Renegade brainstorm events that would center a celebration of the authors and promote the gifting of author copies, how to best promote our ethos and the fandom gift economy on social media, determine how best to protect and manage typesets kept within the group, and dedicate time to teach and lower the barrier for entry into fanbinding so people could just do it themselves rather than buying it.

In 2022 we formalized the Renegade Code of Conduct, directly motivated by the profiteering we saw elsewhere. The ethics in the Code of Conduct weren't new - they had been common topics of conversation within Renegade - but it's much easier to have something to point to as things escalated.

But why has illegal selling escalated so much in Harry Potter and Dramione fandom? (conversely I have literally never seen a single one of the fics I've bound listed for sale, and some of them are hugely popular).

I think Elizabeth is entirely accurate here in pointing at context collapse as the problem. There is of course two sides - the sellers and the buyers. The sellers are outright grifters of both sides - if they're on Etsy, 90% of the time they're selling the same type of cheap binding you get from a print on demand company (i.e. worth about $20) marked up to $100-200, the rip-off of the century. If they're on Mercari, it's common to see people reselling books at a higher cost that they paid only materials and shipping for (back when authors were allowing at-cost bindings). Which fuck that, any bound fic in *my* library isn't leaving my grubby little paws unless gifted or in my will.

I really don't think this kind of grift would work as well if the potential buyers were more steeped in fandom culture. While I'm not in Dramione myself, the fandom is so huge you cannot avoid seeing it. I've seen Manacled get recommended right alongside trad-pub romantasy (in romance book clubs!), sent to big booktokers, and both heard and seen people asking in comments "where can I get this book?" Because the context is not there! They don't know what fanfic is or even what that means or any of the community associations with how fanfic is created. These dramione fics are many people's first encounter with fanfic, and if not properly explained many of them will just think it's a book they have to buy. The casual readers are the primary target of this grift - they go and type "manacled book" into google to find where to get it and receive a bunch of etsy listings. Case in point:

And there are even sellers of these popular dramione fics titles as ebooks, which is absolutely ridiculous and shows for a fact that people are just googling titles to find something they were told was a great book.

Looking at the trends of what's been targeted for profiting, I really do think this is currently centered in the Harry Potter fandom (especially the het fics). There's very few fics that fit the bill to be exploited in this way, so while very high profile I don't think most non-HP fan authors should be concerned.

But I do think there's a lesson to be learned from this, because it COULD happen to other fandoms, so we must make sure it doesn't. I think this has shown us we have to be careful about how we are introducing fanfiction stories to those outside of your normal community. It's great to get validation from mainstream culture, but it is more important to ensure that we are connecting people we are sharing with into the fandom context web, rather than cutting the fic out and presenting it to them without context. I think this is probably especially important on algorithm-driven apps like tiktok, where you don't know who will be shown your videos (though as I am not a tiktok creator I don't know the best way to address this).

I've seen a lot of people on Instagram in fandom working very hard to try and spread some understanding of fanfic culture to new fandom members, and I think that's a great start. But to help really shut down the problem, I think it has to be included as part of the first introduction to a fic - and the way they read that fic should probably be directly on Ao3. Of the articles I've seen about the problem, I think this one hits the nail on the head best for where we might be able to address how things get off the rails. I have hope that this is a problem we can keep isolated as the dramione fans work to contain it (efforts are underway that I've seen!). My heart goes out to the authors that have been affected like this, and I know there's been a lot of anxiety. Let's do our best to create a positive environment for our fandoms and give our authors positive engagement instead.

Ahhhh thank you so much for SUCH a thoughtful response, Des!! 💞

(I interviewed Des and a few others for a piece about Renegade which should be out any day now (?? this is not in my control). The timing on all of this has been unfortunate for sure—I reached out to Renegade to profile them at the start of February, before all this other stuff really started melting down.)

I strongly agree with everything you wrote—and I think in addition to sharing within that "fandom context web" another thing that will help is strengthening that those webs. In the piece I mention the posts we all see here on Tumblr regularly (like this one that passed my dash this morning) about no one commenting, reblogging, etc. anymore. I say this with a grain of salt because I was a lurker for my first 15 years in fandom—tons of people don't participate! But if you are up for participating even a little, there are a lot of small ways to fight fic shifting towards a pure author-promoting-to-readers situation, like commenting and leaving prompts in fests and making rec lists and just, like, befriending writers in your fandom.

I do think this is getting harder and harder—over the past year, we've spent a lot of time on Fansplaining talking about the shortening life cycles of fandoms. How do you create ties between fans if people only stick around for six weeks? I don't know how to solve that; it's the changing entertainment models, it's the platforms, it's the new learned behaviors.... But thinking about all this helps me be a better member of my own fandom, imo.

Le Figaro have a newly published photograph from inside Notre Dame shortly before the roof collapsed, as molten lead fell into the nave. (+)

This is what I love about photojournalism. It is just a history of moments where human beings have gone “I know I should really be hauling ass out of here but I have to get a picture of this”

STOP SELLING BOUND FANFICTION

I cannot blame them for pulling their works, in fact I'm proud of them for doing so. Fanfiction is a community of gifting. As authors we write fics and share our works for free. Fanfiction is a weird, fragile, liminal space that can crumble at any time. This fragility needs to be respected.

If you want fanfiction to be around for you to enjoy, then the rules need to be respected!

You can bind fics. You can gift bound fics. DO NOT SELL BOUND FICS!!

Or soon we won't have fanfiction anymore and the world will be much darker for it.

Hi all - I'm going to do some education here, because I teach, among other things, about social media and fanfiction and copyright, and I think the reasons why selling bound fanfiction is bad need to be spelled out. Especially for those of you who have grown up since the 2000s, fic is such a normalized part of the internet that you probably don't realize the implications of this.

First, let me be very clear about something. If you are binding a printed copy of an author's work and selling it for profit, and you didn't ask that author's permission to do so, you are doing something illegal. You are making money off of someone's intellectual property when they didn't agree to let you do that. And that's illegal, full stop.

This is why, by the way, printing and binding a copy for yourself is fine. Printing and binding a copy as a gift for a friend is fine. You aren't making any money, you're paying for the materials and doing the labor, and you aren't mass-distributing it for anyone who wants to buy one.

Now, is this a little more complicated because fanfiction itself is free? Sure. I can see someone arguing, "But authors put up their stories for free, and I'm just charging for the cost of the binding. I'm not trying to make a profit." True. But, if you did not ask the author's permission, making and selling printed copies of their work is still illegal. You still stole their product, something that they created, and are trying to sell it. It's like you are selling cheap Kate Spade knockoffs on a street corner. And, you monetized something that the original author intended to be free to readers.

I am sure someone will also make the point that fanfic authors don't have a lot of legal standing in this. They write their work for free, and fanfiction is, itself, derivative of the original work. This is true. But that is exactly why this kind of selling of fic is dangerous! You are exposing the author of that fan work (not to mention yourself!) to lawsuits because you are selling something that infringes on the copyright of the original author! And frankly, I can't believe Etsy hasn't shut down these sellers already, because they become legally liable too, when people are selling illegal products on their site.

Think of it this way. I'll invoke JKR here because she's ridiculously rich from a series that a lot of people loved, and because a lot of the fic authors being harmed right now are part of HP fandom. If you are selling bound HP fanfic, you are infrining on JKR's copyright of her work. JKR could send her entire team of lawyers after you, and hound you for the rest of your life, and you would lose, because making money off of derivative work is part of the definition of copyright infringement. You could try to argue that you aren't doing it for profit, that you aren't making money, but you would probably lose. JKR can let her lawyers argue against you until the end of time.

In addition - I'll say it again - you are infringing on the intellectual property of the HP fanfic author. Would it be harder for a fic author to make this case in a legal court? Sure, because their work is already derivative, and only the original elements of the fic are their property. But if you took that work and printed it and sold it without their permission, they could still seek damages. They weren't the ones doing the printing or making money. They weren't the ones infringing on JKR's copyright and taking money away from her profits. You, the bookbiner, were.

These kind of actions are the things that upset the very careful balance fandom has with media companies. Fandom only works in the way it does now because media companies recognized that fandom generated a lot of free publicity and enthusiasm for their products. But this? Selling fanficiton that the authors didn't give you permission to sell, and that JKR didn't give you permission to write? This is the kind of nightmare that sends fandom back into the shadows, into the days of being sued by Anne Rice and Marion Zimmer Bradley and by every Disney property under the sun, and we all go back to sneaking each other 'zines at cons because it's the only way to stay under the radar.

Learn some fandom history, and something about the legalities of copyright, and CUT. THIS. SHIT. OUT.

2024 is the year you will experience the financial freedom and stability you've been praying for. No more waiting.

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.

Then bring me luck

the day after I posted this last time I was notified that I was selected for a really cool mentorship gig and got an unrelated glowing review at work