“happy new year!” i say. "excuse me,“ someone replies. it is gandalf. “but what do you mean? do you wish me a happy new year, or mean that it is a happy new year whether I want it or not; or that you feel happy this new year; or that it is a new year to be happy in?”

(Image description: the asexual, aromantic, queer chevron, polyamory, pansexual, intersex, leather, more color more pride, trans, and genderqueer pride flags with the words “the future of pride is radically inclusive” centered in white text.)

May 25th

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Happy Glorious 25th of May, Discworlders! May your lilacs bloom and your angels rise up high!

Oh, and GNU Terry Pratchett of course :)

The lilacs are blooming…

Every year May 25th comes around and every year I have the need to put into words just why this book stayed with me for so long. But mostly it comes down to this: despite Night Watch’s sudden shift to a darker, heavier tone, it avoids being unnecessarily cruel to its characters just for the sake of plot. And of course, this is true of all the Discworld books, people striving to be better, to do better, but I think it’s significant in context of how dark this book is - especially since going by chronological reading order, this is the bleakest book we encounter up until this point.

This Ankh-Morpork that we’re submerged in is so alien at that point in her timeline, it’s gruesome and cruel and oppressive because it’s under a gruesome, cruel and oppressive tyrant. Yet despite that, there is still kindness in the heart of the book - it values old Vimes’ mercy and young Sam’s innocence, it values the fact that Vimes wants to avoid undue violence, to save as many as he can, and shield people from the tyranny for as long as he can.

It’s such an emotionally charged book and there is a lot of darkness in the story itself- a blood-thirsty serial killer, power-hungry men, ruthless paranoia, and the awful, inhumane underbelly of a regime - but where most other books would have done so, it avoids traumatizing its characters just to establish that. Darker shifts in tone so often entails that the narrative doles out meaningless suffering and trauma just to establish itself. Night Watch ultimately avoids that, because it uses other means to make the text feel heavy and oppressive. Part of it is from the plot itself, in that Vimes knows what happens behind closed doors, he know what Swing is capable of and the knowledge of that threat is high-risk enough to let readers know of the stakes.

The main emotional conflict instead comes from Vimes battling with himself, reconciling with wanting to go home versus, well, Sam Vimes being Sam Vimes, which means doing his best at saving everyone, history, timeline and causality be damned. We know that young Sam will become cynical and bitter and drunk somewhere down the line, we know that half the Night Watchmen will die, we know that the city will remain cruel despite this Hail Mary attempt at revolution. Which is why the narrative is so intent on telling us that Vimes’ kindness matters - in mentoring young Sam, in getting the prisoners off the Hurry-Up Wagon, in preventing undue riots and undue brutality, in keeping the fighting away from Barricade as long as possible. The city’s going to hell in a hand basket, might as well make people’s lives easier.

Vimes can’t save Ankh-Morpork from history taking its due course, but the powerful emotional catharsis is seeing him coming to the decision to try and save everyone anyway – simply because he can’t envision himself not doing it. So he digs his heels in and makes whatever difference he can in the moment.

Because Night Watch in an inevitable tragedy - only one of the two stories can have a happy ending and in order for Sam Vimes to go back to the present, to his wife and his son and his Watch and his city, the revolution has to fail or else that timeline ceases to exist. There is no way for him to save both his men and his future but he’ll be damned if it doesn’t try - he wouldn’t be Sam Vimes otherwise. Every time it I re-read it still feels like he’s that close to succeeding.

It could have so easily been grimdark and ~gritty~ but ultimately it avoids because it centres on a few basic themes that forms the core in the story. The heart of it is about camaraderie of a handful of men too weird and incompetent and ugly, the tentative hope in the uprising, and the sheer bloody determination of Sam Vimes’ refusal to give up on the people around him.

Happy 25th of May everyone 

Allllllllll the love to fic writers right now, past and present. I don’t think I would have slept in the last week without ao3 (all the love to creators and keepers of our own archive!) and a story to calm my brain and remind me of love. Y'all are heroes, and I am endlessly grateful.

I can’t think of a better demonstration of the trust AO3 has built up with its extraordinarily invested userbase than the fact that, when they had to make an emergency change that affects the Tickybox Stat Numbers For Your Monkey Brain To Obsess Over, literally all the comments are “that blows and my monkey brain is sad, but we understand and we love you, thanks for keeping the site running as smoothly as you can.” Like. Can you imagine a Tumblr or LiveJournal staff post getting that kind of response?

BIG, HUGE thanks to @rollychan for crunching the numbers and making the charts. This data is based on 4,639 respondents to the kudos poll.

 What do kudos mean?

Respondents were able to select all meanings that apply to them. 

According to people who self-identify as readers:

According to people who self-identify as writers:

According to people who self-identify as both readers and writers:

The poll currently has 10,160 respondents. I am going to stop accepting responses at this point and link these results. I hope you find this as interesting as I do! I learned a thing!

We’re running out of room in the kudos table, so these behind-the-scenes changes are necessary to ensure you can keep leaving kudos for a long time to come. The removal of duplicate kudos – which were the result of a bug – is a side effect of the changes we’re making to keep kudos working.

\o/

For those who were wondering, the duplicate kudos weren’t the problem. The 659 million hearts as a whole were almost too big for the old system to handle. So the coders are shifting over to a new way to store kudos. That new way requires that all kudos on a work be unique, so the database will check that from now on. Because databases require consistency in their rules, it means the old duplicates must also be removed.

Three cheers for the coding volunteers, who saw this coming and prepared for it!

Automatic Dark Mode on AO3

Do you use dark mode on your phone or computer? Do you wish AO3 would switch to dark mode when your device did? Good news! AO3 recently added a new option for skins that can help with that.

Here’s what you need to do to make AO3 automatically switch to the Reversi skin when you enable dark mode on your device:

If your device is currently set to light mode, you won’t notice anything. But when you switch your device to dark mode, the Reversi skin will be applied to the Archive! When you switch back to light mode, you’ll see the regular white and red layout again.

For information on browser compatibility, please refer to MDN’s prefers-color-scheme page. 

For help with AO3 site skins, please check the Skins and Archive Interface FAQ.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am an AO3 volunteer, but this is not an official post.

Seriously, tho: y’all hate what’s on AO3 so much?

GO MAKE YOUR OWN SITE. 

I mean, let’s face it: if they did create their own site, they’d be learning valuable, marketable, saleable skills - even if they tried and failed, they’d still be learning at least some of what’s required to set up and host a fan-fiction website (or indeed any other kind of data repository).  Yeah, they’d be taking a risk - but learning how to take a risk, and decide whether the risk is worth taking is another economically saleable skill.  Nailing down what they think of as “acceptable” and how to precisely define this, note where the edge cases lie, come up with rules about how to make decisions on those edge cases and so on?  That is a TREMENDOUSLY useful skill, folks!  Negotiating things like contracts with suppliers, coders and so on (if you’re not going to go the “wholly volunteer” way that the OTW did) is another useful skill.  Managing the money for the project, figuring out how much you need, how much you can raise, what you can do with what you’ve raised, and so on… another valuable skill.

Really, there is a lot to be gained by getting up, getting out there, and taking a swing at setting up their own fanfic archive.  If nothing else, it’s a wonderful way of gaining resume fodder, because it shows you’re able to do all these things, and you have all these skills.

The one skill the AO3 detractors do appear to be cultivating in abundance, however, is the one which is least economically valued.  Folks, the market for “people who can sit on their arses and point out all the flaws in a project without offering worthwhile solutions” is absolutely and utterly saturated to the point of crystallisation.  Nobody is going to pay you to do that. 

(Also, if you hate AO3 that much, you don’t have to use it.  Promise.)

They are not interested in making their own site. They are interested in getting power and exerting control over others - especially people, especially womenm who are their elders. They are interesting in forcing others to do what they want and live the way they think is best. They are little fascists. 

“Folks, the market for “people who can sit on their arses and point out all the flaws in a project without offering worthwhile solutions” is absolutely and utterly saturated to the point of crystallisation.”

@megpie71 Thank you for this phrasing; it’s perfect! :’)

Long essay incoming…

One big irony in all this is that it is incredibly easy to set up a dev instance of Ao3 (I tried it this weekend; hope to squash some bugs!). They don’t even need to write their own code! xD But of course, it’s not about that. They already have spaces they could use– fanfiction.net, wattpad– these platforms censor, and invite correspondingly dull writing as a result. Because that’s the thing. You need freedom of expression for art to flourish.

What this lot want is the quality of writing on Ao3, but they also want to tell artists what to do, and they don’t realise that these things are mutually exclusive. The specific moral panics are irrelevant; they’re upset because they can’t handle the word ‘no’.

I think part of this is because they’re used to being treated like customers. Most software these folks encounter is vended by companies, and they’re told it’s designed to serve them. These companies constantly repeat things like 'your opinion matters’, and they care about their number of users– so there’s a group here trying to apply tactics that are used to protest businesses. They think if enough people who contribute nothing make enough noise, Ao3 will feel pressured to change, to 'satisfy the customer base’, or something.

And, well, nope. Because Ao3 does not need them. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of leverage (and the entire reason why Ao3 has the model it does, lol). They think of themselves as customers. They are not. They don’t understand that when companies care about the number of users, it’s because those users can be monetised, and that that does not apply here. They try to shame Ao3 for a lack of an app, without realising that companies just push apps for tracking and advertising purposes, and a mobile website works equally well. I think they believe that Ao3 ultimately aspires to look 'professional’ and 'corporate’, and they don’t perceive that a demographic that has been systematically economically disenfranchised has had quite some time to reject the capitalist aesthetic. :P

(And of course they’re authoritarians who don’t read enough to spot the obvious historical parallels, or the obvious misogyny. It’s fascinating material for sociologists!)

Well, there’s my rant. Fwiw, you see the same dynamics in all sorts of free software projects. People believe that if they use something, anyone involved in creating or maintaining it owes them a favour. It’s very strange.

Fic Event Collections

If you're running an event with a fic collection on AO3 it is helpful to include information in the event profile.

Doing this makes it easy for people to find your fics, join your groups, and participate in your events in the future.

wow, what a gorgeous month to remember autism isn’t a disease and there’s no “cure for autism” and there shouldn’t have to be one just because allistic people can’t get the hell over themselves and realise other people experience the world differently and have different needs and require different accommodations. terrific.

autism is literally a neurological and development condition but ok sure yeah keep with the feel good platitudes, you absolute tit

There’s a strong difference between a “disease” and a “condition”, you absolute tit

Think of it this way. 83% of computers (laptop and desktop) use Windows. 13% use Mac. The vast majority of software is developed for windows, with another significant fraction developed for or adapted to mac, because that’s what most people use and it’s all most people understand.

Now imaging you’re one of the 1.4% of computers are running Linux. This doesn’t mean you’ve got a windows machine with a virus, it doesn’t mean your computer is broken, it doesn’t mean it needs to get replaced with a more common operating system. It’s not quite as good at some things most people take for granted, but it’s significantly better at a bunch of other things. But if you have a problem with your computer, the vast majority of people won’t have any idea what you’re talking about. They’ll give advice for how to deal with a similar issue on their own computer, and it will be worthless. The only people with any idea what you’re going through are going to be on linux forums. And you can mostly muddle through all the things everybody else can do with improvisation and lots of WINE, but it sure would be nice if the devs of that video game you were looking forward to would like, acknowledge the existence of your demographic.

Now imagine that on top of all that, the primary linux support system had been taken over by a bunch of assholes who’ve never so much as looked at a command prompt in their lives. but who have declared themselves the Voice of Linux Users and keep spending millions of dollars on campaigns “educating” everybody about how using linux makes you a fundamentally bad and stupid person so your laptop needs to be burned immediately to force you to get a correct computer.

i love that analogy so fucking much

As an IT person who uses linux and as a mother of one, possibly two autistic kids:

The states casting ballots on Super Tuesday together comprise 40% of the U.S. population. If your state is listed below - you’re one of them! Early voting is open today and tomorrow in many areas - be sure to check out what’s going on in your local area, and vote!

✅🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈✅

Alabama

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Maine

Massachusetts

Minnesota

North Carolina

Oklahoma

Tennessee

Texas

Utah

Vermont

Virginia

Via PrideVMC