Supportive

Quick thing from Twitter! had some fun, expected waaaay more HS tbf lol plus an extra from my buddy @turntechtestament ‘s webcomic Radioactive underground you should def check it out!

MY SPECIAL BOY

And the guy from my webcomic is also here i guess

The spiritual successor to Miette

Might I also add

May i add the piece from artist Verbal Vomit

Glad to see we’re all in agreement that cats talk like disparaged victorian children

I keep reading these as either with french accents or the Chamberlain from The Dark Crystal Netflix series 

Well with those Im all caught up! Next week well be back on a single page update. Finally were staring to know a bit better whats going on but.. conspiracies? are we sure? >_>

-COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN-

I now see why I struggled with showing my interests to my parents when I was a kid.

I’m listening to my cousin going on about Fortnite. The kid adores the game and is talking about the battle pass and he how hopes to get it later on today.

My mum just flatly says she doesn’t know what that means and has told him to hurry up as they go through the door, not giving my cousin any wiggle room to explain what it means. Fortnite is special to him, he wants to talk about it, he wants to engage but how can he when at that moment, the adult he’s talking to shuts him down?

Why can’t some people just take a damn minute to listen, REALLY listen to what kids are saying? He’ll now sit in the car in complete silence because his aunt isn’t interested in what he likes.

I’m not saying everyone has to be a fountain of knowledge for things like that. Hell, you don’t have to like what another person’s into but for the love of god, at least TRY and give it a go in understanding why it’s so important to that person.

“Oooh, that sounds neat! Tell me about it?” Is one of the best things you can say to a kid. (Or an author.) It matters less that you understand it than it does that they are allowed- are *encouraged*- to explain it

And also, if you’re truly lost:

“I’m not sure what that is, can you explain it to me?”

Kids LOVE getting to tell an adult something the adult doesn’t know. It makes them feel important because hey, we’re grownups! We know everything! Wait, we don’t? Wow! Let me tell you!

also if you’re like me you’ve had your family just up and say everything you like is stupid and that’s like. the worst possible thing please just fuckin listen to kids

Adhd b like..... i have one activity on tuesday thats like an hour long but im gonna consider that a busy day so no I can’t make any other plans on that day

funnyjunk is ok sometimes

just saw a post that said that cringe culture is good actually because “hey, it’s not opression.” you realize that things that aren’t oppression…. can be bad too… ?

a) you’re absolutely right, things that aren’t technically oppression can also be really bad, and b) cringe culture is ableist, which is oppression. so that post was double wrong :)

A New History of Fandom Purges

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.

I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.

Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.

The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.

Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.

Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.

Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.

By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.

There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.

1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.

2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.

3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.

So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.

this is great!

It also complies with the “killer theory”. I don’t remember exact names, but people in online games are generally divided into four groups:

- explorers research game opportunities, they don’t mind playing alone, usually don’t hurt others, but sometimes they can exploit game weaknesses

- achievers play to win, to gain points, popularity. They need both explorers who know all perks, and socializers - as their followers and support

- socializers - they play because their friends are all here, they like to be together, they are usually most of the players, they can be easily led astray

- killers - for some reasons they come to hurt others, be it hurtful remarks in the chats or disturbing behavior

A tiny amount of killers is manageable and even profitable. (All four types are important). Killers raise stakes for the achievers, give socializers something to talk about in their groups and give explorers incentives to invent something new.

Angered explorers are the top predators here - but they must be seriously offended, and since they play on the outskirts of the game, killers rarely fight them. Killers usually go for the weakest (socializers) or most noticeable (achievers).

But if the game, by its design, somehow attracts to much killers, who scare socializers, leave achievers without their rewards and - by choking the environment - make it boring for the explorers (what I gonna explore here? ten kinds of dick-related-nicknames? Pff!) - they effectively kill the game.

This is awesome. In fandom terms, I think whether a fandom tends to be, in general, a pretty decent place to be with a small tire fire here or there, or one big flaming dumpster fire, probably has a lot to do with who the 1% in that fandom are. If you’re unlucky enough to be in a fandom where a couple of the tire-fire people are the ones who run the exchanges, or the most influential shippers of your particular small pairing, or the big BNF, you are screwed. Even though the vast majority of the fandom undoubtedly still consists of sane and decent people, it’s going to be really hard to avoid the 1%, and they’ll actively drive people out. 

On the other hand, some of my best times in fandom have been in calm, sane corners of fandoms that I knew had raging dumpster fires going elsewhere, but I never had to deal with them because my part of the fandom was quite nice.

Large fandoms are a mixed blessing that way … more and bigger tire fires (and more visible to outsiders), but also, with more people and more ships, it’s easier to find cozy little pockets of sanity in which to nest.

I think this also speaks to how important it is to manage your own fandom experiences too: any fandom will seem like a raging dumpster fire of you follow people who engage in that sort of behavior, even if it’s just as a gawker on the sidelines who reblogs drama posts while eating popcorn. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen some post about ‘all this drama!!!’ and I’m over here like, ‘what? There was drama? Huh. Not in my neck of the woods, I guess.’ Like I literally have no clue what, if any, specific recent drama the OP is referring to that might have prompted this post, but with around 20 years in fandom under my belt, I’ve seen plenty before.

If you feel like a fandom is getting too toxic, that hopefully shouldn’t mean you can no longer enjoy the things you like, either the canon or the fandom. Your first step should be to stop following/engaging with people who propagate the toxic behavior and replace them with people who create things you actually like. This can include unfollowing, tag blocking, or even blocking blogs. You have to actively step away from that 1% – which might take some doing, & will likely require unfollowing more than just one person/blacklisting more than one tag, since toxic fandom types often seem closely interconnected, whether they’re friends encouraging each other’s drama or enemies constantly fighting back and forth – and go looking for the other 99.

I mean, if you allow yourself to stand right next to a tire fire, then of course the whole world will feel like it’s burning!

For anyone who might be writing fic in order to raise money/donations for a cause, please remember not to mention that anywhere on AO3. It is against the Terms of Service to charge money for fic, even if that money is not going to you, personally. Please don’t mention commissions or donations or fundraising or patreon or kofi etc etc in a fic or on your profile. ❤

I will boost this signal, mostly for myself because my brain is apparently a fucking colander and I can’t remember shit sometimes; and also add, if you’re the one who commissioned a fic, don’t mention that on ao3 either. Not even in your bookmarks! I forget other people can see my notes there. Please don’t get your writing friends in trouble, like I almost did a couple of times :( 

Just say ‘i asked for this pairing/trope/continuation/whatever’ Don’t say ‘i commissioned this’.

i’ve had “if you enjoy my writing, click here” with a link to my kofi in all of my end notes for a couple years and nothing’s happened, so maybe try that

Nope. You’re still breaking their TOS by having a site like ko-fi directly linked, and if anyone finds that out or someone reports you, you can lose your entire account. They have to enforce these rules in order to protect us from copyright laws. It’s why for decades individual fandom creators used to put “I do not own this work or profit from it” at the start of every fic/chapter.

What you can do, is say “follow me on tumblr” and promote your ko-fi on your tumblr. But I’ve seen people do the link to their ko-fi/patreon without explicitly mentioning them and still losing their accounts or getting hit by warnings cause someone reported them. (The one person I knew who outright lost their account just kept doing it repeatedly despite multiple warnings, like a doofus, so that was on them.)

(I think there may be exceptions for certain charity drives, but I don’t think ko-fi and patreon are protected by that)

Hi! Former AO3 Abuse team member here! It’s been a bit, so I’ll admit that my knowledge may be slightly out of date. But generally speaking you cannot:

Link Directly to:

If you link and are reported your work is in danger of being deleted, but you will be given a warning and time to fix any issues.

You also cannot mention that a work was directly commissioned with $$, hide the rest of your work/novel/chapter/ or in any way paywall the remainder of your work. Things like “support my writing here!!” are usually no go.

General phrasings like trade, requested, asked for, etc are OK.

Joy is correct in saying linking to your tumblr which advertises your kofi or fundraiser is ok.

If you are reported, the AO3 team will do their best to let you know EXACTLY what works and what phrasing is not allowed. They do issue a blanket “responsible for the rest of your works” statement so be thorough.

AO3 WILL NOT DELETE YOUR WORK, BAN YOU, OR IN ANY WAY REMOVE ITEMS WITHOUT WARNING. IF YOUR WORK IS DELETED YOU WILL RECEIVE AN EMAIL CONTAINING THE DELETED WORK. KEEP YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS CURRENT. NEVER USE A STUDENT EMAIL ACCOUNT.

Thank you for that 💖

pacific rim be like, we’re gonna give you unparalleled tenderness between two warriors, each with a tragic past that has hardened them emotionally, and we’re gonna do it in the context of a movie about fighting giant space monsters with huge robots. fucking checks all my boxes thank you

In a shitty society that is built on taking as much as you possibly can and giving as little as you possibly can, compassion is punk-rock as hell.