demossteness

“Morpheme is the Smallest Meaningful Unit in a Language“

is the linguistic equivalent of

“Mitochondria is the Powerhouse of the Cell”

I would like to stop being a starving artist and just be a regular artist, please.

tags by op

judy hopps is a cop who leverages a strangers felony tax evasion to get him to put his life in danger and work around the clock so that she can keep her job

she then presumably helps him cover up his crime to get him a job on the same police force

judy hopps has some very nice feet but we need to remember that she’s still a cop

just fyi for everyone out there using tumblr on this day that you can reblog a post without the extra commentary by clicking the OP’s URL on the original post

She is a cop and all cops are already unsexy

I’m sorrynotsorry to everyone in the notes just learning that Tumblr is a place for horny furries to blog about acab.

Unfortunately, Judy Hopps is very sexy AND ALSO a cop and therefore a bastard, and insisting that all cops are automatically unsexy is still attaching appearances to morality. Remembering that things can be sexy and evil, or ugly and good is imperative! Forgetting this derails and disrupts the conversation.

what terminally online looks like will depend on your primary platform. twitter brain worms look very different from tiktok brain worms and tumblr brain worms are a whole other species

Twitter brain worms: don't even LOOK at me if you think someone can be repticosexual and dipporomantic at the same time. and yall can not reclaim faggot either 💅

tiktok brain worms: aw rippedgutscore is out already? damn and I didn't even get to wear any of the 35 pieces I got from shein for it and now I have to throw all of them out! oh well on to catfish girl. hey did you get the new temu anti wrinkle Stanley cup yet?

tumblr brain worms: you fuckers think VICTOR FUCKING FRANKENSTEIN is capable of topping???? I have to laugh. nah imma frankenfuck that old man into pieces and look God in the eye while i do it. get that old man Frankenpreg.

Facebook brain worms: oh my god did you see they're putting amino acids in school lunches to turn your kids TRANS. aw what a cute baby peacock! God's creations truly are beautiful *looking at the most obvious ai image you've ever seen*

YouTube brainrot: *lengthy and highly opinionated analysis of a movie you've never seen*

Someone’s in the corner on tumblr weakly pointing out that Frankenstein was a pretty young guy objectively (age gap frankenpreg discourse)

thinking about that post of people assuming ao3 has an algorithm and also about how bonkers persistent the view is that ao3 is social media lite. like with startling regularity I get comments saying something along the lines of "it's probably weird to comment on a fic this old--" no it isn't!!!! this is an archive I am literally just assuming you searched for a selection of specific tags or sorted by kudos or looked back on my pseud or any other number of completely normal ways to use an archive site ?? kill the tiktok ghost in your brain and comment on old stuff it's NOT weird

Guess how many people contact us regularly to ASK for us to have an algorithm, go ahead. Because it's many. And I always take a little bit of enjoyment in explaining that no, we're not going to build a system to recommend fics to you based on your kudos, because for one thing that would be extra work, and for another thing that would require us to be tracking and using a lot more of your data than we want to. We actually do not want to monitor that people who liked Fic A also liked Fic B, or that people who like the tag "butt plugs" might also enjoy the tag "anal fisting", or whatever other nonsense seems to be the expectation these days. I already know enough (more than I'd love, in a perfect world!) about people's reading habits, and I don't want to have that knowledge deployed via algorithms on the Archive just because someone really wants an automated conveyer belt of content being streamed directly into their feed based on us extrapolating from their most commonly used tags or their most frequently visited works or whatever.

(I also do not want to imagine how many people would contact us to yell at us the second they got a 'bad' recommended fic. "I can't believe that you recommended this to me, you monsters!")

Anyway here's my favourite sentence to include in my answers: "We hope instead that users will take control of their own experience using the Archive, and choose for themselves what works they wish to view or not view." Apparently a novel view in this day and age.

The thing that's become clear to me over the past few years is that many people are not good at constructing searches. Recently, someone in a fandom I don't even know was trying to find a particular thing and coming up with no fic; in less than 20 seconds I was able to hand over a list of more than 100 of that thing. This is not a stupid person! this is someone without a particular skill that I have, probably because for me it's a job skill -- it's something I do a lot. Not on ao3, obviously, but constructing effective searches is transferable.

I think a LOT of people don't have this skill. I always boost ao3 search tutorials when I see them for this reason! And if you DON'T have this skill, The Algorithm is so helpful. It's doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you. I get the appeal of that.

But ao3 is never gonna be that place, so instead I shall recommend: find some ao3 search tutorials, bookmark them, they will save your reading life many times. Also bookmark your favorite searches.

Speaking of people not knowing how to use AO3, take a look at this post I reblogged a little while ago: https://www.tumblr.com/lierdumoa/741225032412512256/

The OP posted this poll:

To be blunt, If you are looking for fic on AO3 using these tags ... you probably aren't very good at finding fic.

99% of AO3 authors who write romance do not put a #romance tag on their fanfic. They will instead tag it with the ship and with the specific romantic tropes that appear in the fic. If you search for romance this way, you are missing out on the vast majority of the romance fic on the archive.

99.9% of AO3 authors who write sports fic do not put a #Sports tag on their fanfic. They will put the name of the specific sport, in the context of an AU tag like #Alternate Universe - Football, or you will find sports fic under a specific sports fandom like #Hockey RPF. Maybe this has changed, but last I checked, the AO3 tag wranglers have not made #Sports an umbrella tag that shows results for all sports related tags.

If this is how you search for fic, you're missing out on a lot of great fic that fits these categories, but doesn't use these tagging conventions.

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Upon seeing this, I decided to add my own poll to the post, that I think better reflects how AO3's tagging system actually works.

As you can see, I listed the kind of tags that I've actually seen authors reliably use.

I don't just assume that all the romance fic will have a romance tag on it. I look through a ship tag. When I find stories I like, I pay attention to what kinds of tags authors are actually using, and I use those tags to find similar fic.

Some fandoms have tagging conventions that only exist within those fandoms. For example, virtually every AO3 BtVS fanfic author who writes a fic set in season 6 puts a #Season/Series 6 tag on the fic. That's just BtVS. In other fandom communities, authors don't consider this a thing worth tagging. You just have to read fic summaries looking for phrases like "right after Dean got pulled out of hell" to figure out what season the story takes place in.

In the Transformers fandom, all most of the smut authors tag their smut #Sticky Sexual Interfacing, or sometimes just #Sticky (for sex between robots; I don't know how sex between a robot and a human is tagged in that fandom as it's a lot less common/popular than sex between robots). I have no idea why they call it that. All I know is you'll find more Transformers porn using this tag than you will using a tag like #porn or #smut.

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TL&DR You can't assume that people will categorize things the way you like to categorize things.

You have to actually learn a fandom community's preferred method of categorization, and then search according to their method, not your own. Otherwise, you're going to have a really hard time finding what you're looking for.

"this work is problematic because of how it handles [subject]": reasonable premise for media criticism

"this work is problematic because it depicts [subject]": do not pass go do not collect $200 this is, as a general rule, a functionally reactionary and conservative argument

I think even more importantly:

"this work is problematic and you should be critical of the viewpoints it presents while engaging with it": reasonable premise for media criticism

"this work is problematic therefore everyone who engages with it is evil": do not pass go do not collect $200 this is, as a general rule, a functionally reactionary and conservative argument

the thing that gave you anxiety attacks for 2 years straight will be resolved on a random Wednesday morning btw

I've had this little idea in my head for a while now, so I decided to sit down and plot it out.

Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be some sort of One-Worksheet-Fits-All situation. This is meant to be a visual representation of some type of story planning you could be doing in order to develop a plot!

Lay down groundwork! (Backstory integral to the beginning of your story.) Build hinges. (Events that hinge on other events and fall down like dominoes) Suspend structures. (Withhold just enough information to make the reader curious, and keep them guessing.)

And hey, is this helps... maybe sit down and write a story! :)

i think some of you dont like narratives or stories or characters i think you just like fanfiction tropes

protagonists can and will be sexist, racist, insensitive, cruel, stupid, etc, especially towards the beginning of a story. these are called character flaws and they are a surprise tool that will lead to narrative fulfillment later

I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains

The Kids are indeed Alright.

We must teach them the Lore of things,

like piracy, and how to find stuff at the Library, and Unions, and what it's not legal for job applications to ask you.

when i hear complaints about the boomers, i say "was it not boomers getting shot by cops while protesting against the war in vietnam? Were not boomers the ones who insisted that banks would no longer require a cosign from a husband or father for a woman to open an account or have a credit card? Did they not literally take us to the moon?"

When i hear complaints about gen x i say " did not gen x bear the brunt of AIDS and the creation of the 'inner city'? wasn't it gen-x marching for queer rights and women's body autonomy and a change in corrupt banking policies in some of the largest protests in the country's history?"

when i hear complaints about millennials, i say "have not millennials fought against and lived through so many 'once in a generation' disasters they should by all rights have given up by now? Are not millennials those who rally against the status quo? the industry killers, the cop protesters, they who live through unending hardship as the economic noose tightens, leading the charge for sustainability and socio-economic reform?"

when i hear complaints about gen-z i say "hasn't gen-z gotten involved younger, and been involved stronger, in the continuance of these noble traditions? Are they not living without even the broken pieces of the promise given to the generations that came before? haven't they had their childhoods derailed by the imminence of consequences for actions they were never even present for?"

when i hear complaints about generation alpha i say "HOW DARE YOU. How dare you malign these souls who will have to fix so much that they did not have a hand in ruining... or else die of these mistakes made before they were born. How dare you do the work of our shared oppressors and alienate our fresh blood. You are not to mistreat and mock the youngest soldiers in this fight, no! you point out to them the best targets, you share your rations, you show them how to stay alive, because anyone in the trenches with us is our brethren, our sistren. Our safety and our strength."

don't let the worst kind of stand up comedian tell you other generations are terrible. Don't let the worst kind of headline convince you each generation is against the other. Don't let the worst kind of oppressive force keep us divided along lines that mean nothing real. Because that is how they win.