Everyone who reblogged this and said something like, "These are all so good!" Or, "I can't choose!" - you have extended my life by at least fifteen seconds. Each.
I also love it when people say what dynamic they chose, and which characters (fanfic or original) fit it.
@bywayofmemory "This third person we both adore will make our awkward arranged marriage bearable" REMINDS ME OF A FIC!
The first is literally Arthur, Gwen and Merlin.
You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?
--
I'm dying.
Nonnie, seriously?
No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.
Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.
A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.
Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/
For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.
Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)
But also notice how many people voted: 562.
That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.
Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.
Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.
You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.
The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.
This is important info to put out there, and I constantly forget that "fandom" as it is now is nothing like the community we had then. This is a good resource for understanding what was going on with the creation of AO3 in particular, but it's also a great example of why older fans say that we miss the Livejournal era of fandom so much.
AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn't is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ--when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.
(The ads you'll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site--not the most important reasons by a long shot as you'll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)
We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not "content creators," and people who didn't write fanfiction were not "the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent." We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting "online" friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.
If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else's LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.
I really miss LJ. I miss the connection I felt to my community there.
#fandom is supposed to be a community -- not a two-tiered system of sellers and buyers
Yup.
making a separate thread for help links 💖 i will add more links as i find them !!
post w/ part two can be found here
PALESTINE
CONGO
SUDAN
if there is anything that needs to be added, please feel free to add them onto this post !! I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE IT !!!! i made this thread for basic level information about these genocides; this is not to make you an expert in these topics. if anything is inaccurate, please feel free to tell me and i will correct it !
PLEASE ADD INFORMATION ABOUT OTHER GENOCIDES IF YOU KNOW ANY !!!!!
everything should cost one dollar, ten dollars, or one hundred dollars. a drinky drink is one dollar. a t shirt is ten dollars. rent is one hundred. i might be convinced to allow one thousand dollars for some very big purchases like a house. i get it, you're running a business. i'm not unreasonable.
Oddly specific. Got a deposit for 6,837 today
fuck it, i never ever do those “reblog for X, this one really works!” posts, but this one doesn’t have any of that BS, this is just straight up wishing us good things; and then the comment doesn’t even say any of that either. Zero claims on this post, all positive vibes
May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love
Me actively participating in my own love-life:
Me reading the 100th angsty fanfiction about my otp falling in love:
We are together in every universe and in every life time.
Therapists are just…. Common sense filters
Me: yeah so I just don’t have the energy to get up and make myself a sandwich or wait for something to cook so I just. Don’t
Her: why don’t you just eat the sandwich components without putting them together
Me:
Her: you can just eat a handful of cheese and some sandwich meat. You don’t have to make a sandwich.
Me:
Me: what
Therapists finding loopholes for mental illness things is one of my favorite things about dealing with mental illness because it really helps me understand that just because a reaction is Common doesn’t mean it’s Right. Does doing dishes stress you out a lot? Buy paper plates. Do your obsessive thoughts make you worry about leaving your curling iron on so you drive home from work to check? Just put the curling iron in your purse and bring it to work with you while we work on tackling where this worry comes from. Symptom management doesn’t have to look like drudgery.
i used to go days without showering because seeing my body was so upsetting that i would end up spiraling and then i realized i could simply turn the lights out. it took some getting used to but i’ve been showering with the lights off for years and it’s now one of my favorite parts of my day.
do whatever you want nothing is real and there’s no need to inflict unnecessary suffering on yourself just to try to seem “normal”
I love this post
Hmmm
These kinds of loopholes make life so. Much. Better.
One of my favorite stories is this lady had extremely bad OCD. Every day she’d be late to work because she was convinced that her hair dryer was going to burn down the house so would always have to turn around and check it. Multiple times a day even. A bunch of doctors tied to “fix” her of that fear, until one day she got a doctor that suggested she bring the hair dryer with her. Other doctors were annoyed, saying that wasn’t a the correct way to help, but she gave it a go. When she had that fear, she’d look over and see the hair dryer unplugged in the seat next to her and was able to carry on. I think it’s such a perfect example of actually helping someone instead of forcing them into a neurotypical standard.
That story helped me stop repeatedly checking if my front door was locked. Instead of checking that the door was locked over and over I would check my security system app. If it’s on it will alert me if the front door opens.
“…actually helping someone instead of forcing them into a neurotypical standard” should be added to the Hippocratic Oath.
Started reading about the door and I thought they were gonna say they took the door with them
a brief summary of the favourite (2018)
someone from the uk: im in sixth form
me: how many regenerations do you have left
Every single odd number has an “e” in it.
LISTEN-
Not all of them. 30 and 50 aren’t spelled with the letter e in it …
father god
…if you can split a number in half evenly, it’s even. 30 and 50 are odd.
-_-’
(15+15=30
25+25=30)
25+25 = 30? You sure about that??
Lord have mercy….
Bye
3 days into 2018 smh
LMAOOOOOOO
One
Three
Five
Nine
And since everything else after that is a variant of these numbers, then all odds have the letter ‘E’.
🗣YOU FORGOT SEVEN!!
It keeps getting worse.
LMAOOO WHAT IS GOING ON
My head hurts…
This is why that Tumblr University shit was the dumbest idea ever just look at this
who failed yall?
IM SCREAMING
You whole ass forgot about eight - a number with an e and is pretty fucking even
why would 8 be brought up if it’s EVEN in a post about ODDS??????? the post said “every single ODD number has an ‘e’ in it” not “every single number with an ‘e’ is odd” what the fuck
3 days until 2019 and we’re still here
this post just gets worse and worse
This post manifested into my house and killed me in 7 different timelines.
i just lost brain cells
SKAMBOOK bookmarks ;-)
Happy new year!
And the link is New year’s presents from Korea Kosegruppa!
Enjoy! :-)
