Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

‘that sounds like a lot-” “A thousand at least, Beau!’ “well, if it has to be done 💕💕💕.’

commissions!|kofi

commission for @wyrmzier of their Vampire Pirate Captain Sirena, blessing us with her perfect pipes 🎵 ✨commission info in source link below✨

simple commission for @becauseithrewgasandamatchonher of his DM-sona, how handsome is he, holding out his universe to us?? ⭐⭐⭐

✨commission info in source link below✨

Stats Round-Up for the #EndOTWRacism Campaign!

We’ve also had 156 people sign up for future actions!

Again, a MASSIVE THANK YOU to everyone who participated and signal boosted our message!

Happy APAHM and here’s a poem comic about my experiences being trans and Chinese I did in three days for my English class! 

Hey everyone!! I just wanted to say thank you so much for 17k+ notes. This is the farthest my art has ever reached, and out of all my pieces, I’m so glad it could have been this one. It’s been so so so nice to read the tags and find it connecting with so many other people, and it’s been so so so nice to see other trans Chinese people finding the comic? It’s so comforting to see other people having similar experiences to mine and it’s just such a good feeling to know we’re not alone in this :) So thank you all!!!!

Oh and- Bodhisattva Guanshiyin is transfem but to clarify, she is traditionally nonbinary!!

MORE CHINESE TRANS CONTENT BLEASE

End OTW Racism: A Call To Action

A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization

This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies

AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)

As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.

We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.

On AO3

On tumblr

On Twitter

Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!

What Do We Want?

Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:

These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.

OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:

Why Are We Doing This?

16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.

In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.

Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:

By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.

Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.

It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.

This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.

We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.

— Arabelle Sicardi, from “The Year in Ugliness.”

it's Ramadhan tomorrow!!!

Have a great one my fellow brother and sisters!

— Adrianne Kalfopoulou, “Poem in Pieces, a Log,” A History of Too Much

CW: antisemitism, pale of settlement, pogroms, genocide, cultural erasure

I don't think goyim can really conceive of how much Jews actually hold back in our criticism of antisemitism in media, and when you hear us it is often because we see a dangerous message that you don't... Yet.

I have a complicated relationship with Tim Burton's rendition of The Corpse Bride. I love it as a beautiful piece of stop motion art, but it isn't what it should have been, he took a Jewish story from the Pale and with intention stripped it of its Jewish origins. This alone is incredibly antisemitic. The criticism you will hear has probably been "this is a Jewish story, it should have retained its Jewish elements" but have you heard why we feel strongly about this story?

The story of the corpse bride is incredibly important to me and was born from Jewish trauma and Christian violence. Mobs would routinely attack Jewish weddings, they would murder brides and they would bury them in unmarked graves by the roadside still in their wedding clothes, they reasoned that without Jewish wives there are no Jewish mother's. Jews are intrinsic to the story.

It is antisemitism to take our story, about our pain, at the hands of non-jews and strip it for "useful" parts, in fact it is heartbreaking every time.

We are often forced to pick our battles and fighting a battle over a movie that has already been released by a director with a cult following is not worth it, you only hear us speak up in numbers when the antisemitism may lead to another century of violence, because raising our voice means picking a fight, because so many of you already see our pain as inconvenient and it is exhausting to never be heard.

-anyone can reblog

how to solve a rubik’s cube a gay valentine’s/anniversary comic about trying to impress a boy (my now boyfriend) [rbs&follows>likes]

{Alice Oseman, Radio Silence/ Emily Palermo, from Untitled/ Franz Kafka, from Diaries/ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar/ Marya Hornbacher, Waiting/ Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Galatea Kazantzaki wr. c. May 1922/ Mahmoud Darwish/ Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova; "The Old Portrait"/ Lyric Hunter, from "A Garden," Swallower/ Albert Camus/ Varsha/ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One}

Time I had new headshots, mm?

{ Mahmoud Darwish/ Virginia Woolf/ Edgar Allan Poe, from a Letter to Helen Whitman, "The Last Letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman"/ Albert Camus, The Possessed (transl. By O'Brien)/ Emily Dickinson/ Anton Chekhov, The Complete Works of Anton Chekhov "The Two Volodyas"/ Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes/ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women/ Yann Martel, Life of Pi/ Cameron Awkward-Rich, Meditations in an Emergency/ De profundis/ Oscar Wilde}

lucille clifton the book of light: “climbing” \ pia brambley

buy me a turmeric latte

Chris Abani, from "Fragrance", 3 poems pub. Air Light Magazine [transcript in ALT]