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It's just an experiment ...

@northernstardust / northernstardust.tumblr.com

(cats, nice pictures, Captain America/Stucky, Teen Wolf/Sterek, Star Trek and occasionally some other things, might be NSFW)
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veeaziel

every day i am percieved™️

There is a reason for this though!

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start "rewarding” the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

Fanfic, as a genre, has been uniquely helpful and accessible to many neurodivergent readers who would otherwise struggle to immerse themselves in stories. I’m glad so many of you have found a way to love and enjoy reading again! The important thing is that you are spending time inside stories you love–the way those stories are published or presented to the world is just one detail.

*holds your hand* no, we’re ALL bitches

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nianeyna

Well folks I've been sitting on this little script for ages and finally decided to just go ahead and publish it. What does it do?

  • you can enter any ao3 link - for example, to your bookmarks or an author's works page - and automatically download all the works and series that are linked from that page in the format of your choice
  • if your format of choice is epub (sorry, this part doesn't work for other file formats), you can check your fanfic-savin' folder for unfinished fics and automatically update them if there are new chapters
  • if you're a dinosaur who uses Pinboard, you can back up all the Pinboard bookmarks you have that link to ao3
  • don't worry about crashing ao3 with this! this baby takes forever to run, guaranteed. anyway ao3 won't let me make more than one request per second even if I wanted to so it's quite safe

I've been working on this for about two years and it's finally in a state where it does everything I want and isn't breaking every two seconds, so I thought it was time to share! I hope y'all get some use out of it.

note: this is a standalone desktop app that DOES NOT DO ANYTHING aside from automate clicking on buttons on the ao3 website. Everything this script does, can be done by hand using ao3's regular features. It is just a utility to facilitate personal backups for offline reading - there's no website or server, I have no access to or indeed interest in the fics other people download using this. No plagiarism is happening here, please don't come after me.

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ao3org
In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.
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