This Too Shall Pass

Item: Christmas Tree Cannon

This is what happened when a fanfic site is profit driven. Wattpad sucks 😞

The email from Wattpad is so condescending imagine pressuring writers to update and work while they are doing it for free and fun. Also the discovery? Algorithm? Of Wattpad looks like a stressful popularity contest 😑

Hey I just wanna quickly say that you only get these if someone reports the story. I've barely updated on Wattpad in the past two years and haven't gotten any of these, mostly because I don't even have an audience over there who has the potential or drive to report my fics. So, corporate greed is bad, yes, but it's also readers being buttheads

Hmm, that's interesting! You know what happens if someone reports a story for being incomplete on AO3? Jack shit, because not churning out content for your fun little hobby is not a reportable offense on AO3! And that's because, unlike Wattpad, AO3 isn't profiting off of your work, either directly or indirectly, and so when readers are buttheads, the AO3 abuse mods ignore them, instead of sending out weird automated messages harassing writers for daring to have a wip.

There should be a fanfic writing game called the showrunners challenge where someone writes a story and partway through someone else can play things like "actor leaves after 4000 more words" or "topic now too politically sensitive due to unforeseen world events" or "lost rights to that reference"

I need this to be a real game right the hell now

I do not have the energy do do a full layout right now b/c it is kickstarter season and I am under water, but here's a prototype that can be solo-played (you can also have a friend just pick from the lists if you want that pvp feeling.)

Showrunner's Challenge By Runawaymarbles (also sorta by sprintingowl)

Begin writing a fanfic. It is a feature length television program being watched every week by thousands. There is no plan. The industry is in shambles. The writer's room is barely hanging on.

At the end of each chapter, roll a d12.

1 Everything at once. Roll twice, use both. If you get this again, keep rolling. Your only way out is to stop getting 1s. 2 Product placement! The next chapter must center (and subtly promote the features of) a product belonging to the most recent brand you've seen. 3 Fan favorite. Your most recently mentioned character (or named object) is now beloved by the audience. You must give it a bigger part in the story, a special destiny, or an important new romance or friendship. If you get this twice for the same character or object, the adoration cools and you must go back to treating the character or object normally. 4 Executive meddling. You must change to a different genre. You cannot go back to a genre until you have changed genres three times since then. 5 Audiences are craving more coziness. The next chapter must be completely low stakes and set you at ease. 6 Audiences are craving more suspense. The next chapter must take place entirely in a single location, ideally just a single room, and build tension with every exchange of dialog. 7 Audiences are craving more action. The next chapter needs to involve at least one extended fight scene, and the weapons must be the last three objects mentioned. 8 Audiences are craving more romance. The next chapter needs to involve a deep, sappy confession of either love or admiration between two characters that have not previously been romantically involved. 9 Go to the most recent line in your fic that references a brand. Due to ongoing legal action, that brand cannot be mentioned again, but you score 1 audience point every time you allude to it in a way that paints it in a negative light. 10 The two most recently mentioned characters' actors have, IRL, gone through a VERY messy divorce or friend breakup. You cannot put them in the same scene, but they must both remain relevant parts of the show. If you get this with the same two characters again, they reconcile. 11 The most recent negative event (stabbing, poisoning, banishment to jupiter) is now the center of a very real IRL news story. You must immediately pivot away from all plotlines involving it and, if possible, also find away to apologize for even thinking to include it without breaking character. 12 The most recently mentioned character's actor has decided to leave the show. You must write them out in the next chapter. If you are brave, also roll a d12. 1--6, they were well loved and their sendoff must be as flowery as possible. 7--12, they were despised by the cast and crew. Mulch them.

You win if you can complete the fic in a state of relative coherency.

Alternate Game Mode: TV Digest Version

Don't write full chapters, just summaries of what happens in each chapter.

Alternate Game Mode: Realism Edition

Start your fanfic with your own telling of the first episode of an existing show, then proceed from there.

Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here

Now, a skirt that’s too long will be harder to work in–skirts brushing the floor may look elegant, but is also a tripping hazard–but that is not a problem with skirts in general, it’s a problem with that particular skirt not being suited to being worked in. Skirts are very practical. You can hike them up if you’re hot or need more freedom to maneuver (this is called “girding your loins”). If you need to carry something, you can lift up your hem and make a pouch just like the person in yellow in the bottom picture above. If you need to handle something hot, a skirt generally has enough material you can hold it out from your body to use as a hot pad. (Tight skirts were only used by people who didn’t need to work/move until the invention of elastic fabric.)

Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both “I’m so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabric” and “I don’t walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.”

Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janet’s tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not below…)

Love this post, and want to add: another example of the “empowerment means shitting on feminity” is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while she’s on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)

Or to quote one of my all favorite posts, “fuck women’s contribution to our survival.”

Historically, skirts have been the garment of choice for almost every culture, gender and class. Breeches, or pants, were created specifically for riding horses.

Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.

*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT

(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldn’t fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)

Ancient Rome

Modern Morocco

Medieval Europe

Traditional Saudi Arabia

16th century Russia

Traditional Papua New Guinea

16th century Turkey

Modern India

i deliver propane.  this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through people’s yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold.  i was the first woman my company ever hired.

and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC.  they told me i’d trip, i’d get stuck, i’d freeze, i’d quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was.  i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me “women didn’t work outside then.  they stayed in the house all the time.”  and that’s when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing women’s history–if you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.

anyway i’ve been doing this job in a skirt for three years now, and all the men should be jealous of my complete range of movement and infinite layering potential.

Another thing to keep in mind is that often a garment can be cumbersome if you’re not used to it, but no problem at all if you’ve worn it everyday for years and years.

Of course people who rarely/never wear skirts are going to have a harder time working in them than people who wear them every day! I wear shirts with big puffy sleeves everyday, and I never have any trouble with them, but someone who’s used to t shirts probably would.

I have to strongly disagree with the assertion that bifurcated garments are only useful for riding horses though. Plenty of cultures wore some form of pants, wether they had horses or not. Often you’ll see bifurcated garments with skirts layered on top of them.

Try and tell me that traditional Inuit women’s clothing includes trousers because they were riding horses they didn’t have and not because it’s sometimes -40 there. Skirts without anything underneath are very practical in some parts of the world, but in others you would quite literally freeze your junk off.

Bifurcated garments are useful for keeping cold drafts out! Or for keeping bugs from biting you, or just showing off your legs! And probably good for keeping sand out too, but I’ve never encountered a sand storm. None of this goes against all the other stuff about skirts being practical of course, but you can make a pro-skirt post without minimizing the usefulness or ubiquity of bifurcated things.

I wear below-knee skirts and dresses exclusively* and have for a number of years. The one thing I have to say about What People Say About Skirts is:

When someone tells you that you “can’t do X in a skirt”, they are wrong.

Specifically, they are leaving out some critical modifiers. It’s not true that you physically cannot do various things - ride horse, climb tree, run hard - in a loose skirt such as normal people have historically worn. What they may not be aware that they mean is: you cannot do those things in a socially acceptable fashion, which generally means without a chance of anyone seeing your underwear/lack of underwear. If you are in serious danger, or are alone, or simply choose not to care about this, I promise you can do those things just fine.

(Personally, in my life I find that I can also shovel snow in a skirt, because my scandinavian heritage makes me get warm VERY fast when I’m exercising. Obviously snow is not Super Cold Weather, but: you can do it. It will kind of suck if it goes over the tops of your shoes, though. Get good shoes.)

*It’s not a religion thing or anything, I just hate shopping for pants and wearing pants that don’t fit right or have bad texture so much that I quit forever. If it sucks, hit the bricks!

This is about skirts, but I want to add another thing to the truly EXCELLENT “if you can pretend women were too hobbled by their clothes” thing above.

I run a corseting panel at anime conventions. I always start it with my feet up on the table, chatting with the audience until start time. Then I say “so, who believes I’m corseted right now?” WITHOUT FAIL the people who raise their hands are all veteran cosplayers, often wearing a corset of their own. Then I say “you’re right, I am. How many of you believe I’m tightlaced?”

The hands go down. My shirt comes off. I turn around to show them my laces and tell them tightlacing is defined as a waist reduction of over 4”, and I’m at slightly over 6”.

Then I turn back around and say “also, I’ve pushed a stalled car across eight lanes of intersection like this” and you should see the faces. They’re gobsmacked. They’re HOOKED. They never quite know what to say after that revelation. I never bother telling them I wasn’t even breathing hard because I know they wouldn’t believe me.

Women were not nearly as hobbled by their clothing as you think.

not to mention that corsets are actually incredibly helpful if you’re a farmer, or you’re someone who has to be on their hands and knees a lot. they provide excellent back support. the history writer Ruth Goodman has written a lot about it. also, if you genuinely believe no one can do work in a skirt, watch literally any history re-enactors with women. you’ll see the kind of freedom of movement a skirt offers.

I often find that a lot of the “you can’t do ANYTHING in a skirt!!!” comes from the (very real!) fight for western women in European and European-influenced cultures to be allowed to wear pants if we wanted to. they’re conflating a sexist lack of free choice with a garment ITSELF being inherently sexist- and further, assuming that it was also impractical

nobody bats an eye at the notion of Roman soldiers or rugged Scotsmen wearing skirt-like garments in historical fiction, re: practicality. but when women wear them, suddenly it’s all “that’s impossible to move in!” and “she’s so constrained and hampered by her skirts!”

(and before anyone says “but a long silk Victorian bustle skirt is different from a kilt,” yes, it is. but nobody was trying to do serious physical activity beyond dancing in a silk bustle skirt. as for long…see above)

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

HEY wanna read but annoyed on where to find copies of books?

Here's an archive with millions of PDFs of books and papers and magazines and essays and stuff.

Friends, I hate to share this, because I know the effect it's going to have in my life. But I also know that sharing is caring

Have you heard of Colourmart? A magical place with lots and lots of yarns where the price includes worldwide shipping?

I've got 3 different cones of cobweb yarn in my cart and with the 20% new user discount I might not have to put any back

I'm loving all the "oh no" happening in the tags, but this was my favourite

Shoutout to Baldurs Gate 3 for having a magical girl transformation sequence but instead of a teenager in a short skirt it's a lesbian aasimar paladin in full plate about to open 13 cans of fucking whoop ass

Hey OP? This poll made me cry

My favourite kind of poll is ones where OP clearly made a VERY incorrect assumption

Stray cats 🐈

I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache

life just goes on no matter what

I'm not having a bad day but I'm gonna look anyway, so there.

I’m not having a

bad day but I’m gonna look

anyway, so there.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Welcome to the Protestant Work Ethic where if you are not working for 16 hours a day you are a Sinner that will Burn In Hell. Unless of course you are rich in which case you are Blessed by God and can go to Heaven without lifting a finger.

heard a story on a podcast that some Christian missionaries showed these rural Cambodian farmers how to double their crop yields. the missionaries came back a year later and were surprised the Cambodians had grown basically the same amount of crops but the farmers were like “yeah this is great, we got everything we need for the year and only had to do half as much work”

and if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the current North American work environment I don't know what will

Bothering the beast

950 yards of gradient 2 ply from 4 ounces of Ramboulliet wool, WPI is probably at least 35 or so but i am too busy petting the skein to check it. i'm so happy with how it came out, still have a lot of work to do on my fine yarn skills but look at it!