rahirah

[rahirah]

The wildfeed was when the episode was transmitted to the network. If you had a satellite TV and knew how to tune to the right frequency, then you could watch that transmission, about a week early and commercial free. (Dori, the person who transcribed the wildfeed for the Buffy/Spike and Spike-redemptionist mailing lists and forums, was still active on Tumblr until a few years ago; not sure if she still is.) We had wildfeed transcripts every week, not just for Seeing Red.

The main scandal I remember was the Great Spoiler Scandal, which I was peripherally involved with. There were several websites which posted spoilers for upcoming episodes, weeks or months in advance. The less reputable of these sites just made shit up. The more reputable ones had sources on set -- crew members who were willing to make a few extra bucks by clandestinely selling shooting scripts to the 'spoiler whores' as they called themselves. Another legit source of spoilers was a casting website which posted 'sides' -- short fragments of upcoming scripts which were used to cast extras and guest roles. (I still have some of the sides saved on hard drive somewhere.)

The spoiler websites would post hints and dribs and drabs from their various sources. They were REALLY big deals in fandom, and they protected said sources jealously, both because they didn't want the sources to dry up, and because they liked being an exclusive club with secret knowledge. There was an informal but rigidly policed agreement between the various spoiler sites that they would never, ever share their raw material with the hoi polloi.

I was friends with the person who ran one of the biggest and most reliable spoiler sites, Wendy's Spoiler Zone. She was the one who broke the news that the writers were planning to kill Tara -- which Stephen DeKnight then publicly denied, causing the Kitten Board (the main Willow/Tara 'shipper forum) to hate Wendy's guts for 'spreading misinformation' and then hate her even more when Tara actually died. (They already didn't like her because for reasons I've never been able to figure out, they hated Spike and Spuffy shippers, and although Wendy was scrupulously neutral on her spoiler site, she was known to be a Spuffy shipper.)

Wendy, in addition to doing public spoiler posts on her website, had a small group of friends, including me, who were not part of the super-special-spoiler-hound cadre. And Wendy let us see the raw material. We did so on a private mailing list, and to the best of my knowledge, none of us ever passed it on or endangered her sources. Buuuuut...

In late S6/early S7 Spuffy/redemptionista fandom was eating itself alive. There were two main factions, people who were still optimistic that Joss was working towards a Spuffy end game, and those who, well, weren't. There were a lot of public catfights on the major redemptionista mailing lists, lists split in two, Positivistas banned all negative discussion of the show on their lists, on and on. One of the people in Wendy's little private spoiler list was a Positivista, an absolutely rabid one. Most of the rest of us were either Negativistas or neutral. We debated the direction of the show amongst ourselves like everyone else, and we knew that our Positivista member (who was, coincidentally, the person who had created and owned the mailing list we were using) was upset... we just had no idea how upset.

We got the first clue when I and another member of the private list were separately told by Positivista that everyone else in the list had made an even MORE secret list without us, because we were 'too negative' and everyone hated us. She and I immediately got together, compared notes, and then started contacting other members. Turned out there was in fact another even secreter list, but no, everyone did not hate us. My friend and I more or less shrugged and went, "OK, whatever, have fun," and failed to stomp off or blow up or whatever Positivista had expected.

So next morning we woke up and A) we'd been kicked out of the list, along with everyone else in the group who was either 'too negative' or too friendly with the negative people B) Positivista published the entire email archive of the list to every forum and board she was a member of (carefully redacted so that nothing bad that she or her remaining friends had said was still included.) The list had been in existence since early S6. It had private real life info about the members. It had conversations where the members talked very frankly about people, boards, and fanfic they didn't like. And it had Wendy's spoiler info.

For most of the members, this was humiliating and embarrassing. It caused rifts in friendships. For Wendy, it was a fannish career-killer. The spoiler hound community was furious, and cut her out completely. The furor went on for weeks.

The irony was, Wendy still had her set-side sources. And our little ragtag group had accurate spoiler info weeks ahead of anyone else until the end of the show -- Wendy, in fact, was the person who anonymously published the entire shooting script of Chosen weeks before it aired, just as a fuck-you.

Other stuff I recall was like the Crawford Street Mansion's "Year of Xander" (Xander focused message board, completely made up spoilers, board owner who was apparently a compulsive liar, next season was always going to be the year of Xander) and William the Poet ('spoiler source' that appeared in S7 and server up a mishmash of other spoiler sites' news mashed up with mangled allusions and metaphors, and convinced too many otherwise moderately intelligent people that he knew what he was talking about.) But those weren't so much scandals as fandom as usual.

I'm sure there was a l;ot more, but honestly, at this late date a lot of it is a blur.

one of my favorite genres of youtube video is people explaining early 2000s fandom drama in great detail. these were more popular a few years ago, i think most youtubers have sadly moved on to more current internet drama. but for some reason, to my knowledge at least, no one has ever covered the buffy fandom in one of these videos. i assume this is primarily because as big as btvs was, it obviously wasn't the cultural juggernaut that harry potter or lord of the rings were. so while i know there was fandom drama, and there were certainly ship wars, it probably was just never big enough to create msscribe or (god forbid) thanfiction levels of insanity. but i am curious, if anyone who was around back then is aware of any btvs fandom scandals beyond the expected ship war bullshit? feel free to share btw, i'm genuinely curious.

the only one i know, and this is due to research i did for a very a weird and self-indulgent paper i wrote as an undergrad (long story) is that "seeing red" was actually leaked in advance. or, to be more accurate, there was some sort of mistake made by the network involving something called wildfeeds (tbh i don't really understand the technicalities here) that allowed a small community of fans that relied on piracy anyway to pirate "seeing red" a week early. unsurprisingly when that happened spoilers for the episode spread immediately. and obviously that's a hell of an episode to get spoiled for, so i was curious what the fandom response was. i managed to find like one fan group whose conversations during the week in between the leaking of "seeing red" and its airing have been miraculously preserved on google drive. honestly, the response isn't that interesting. i think i was hoping to find like full on conspiracy theory denial of the episode, tjlc style, and some people did suggest that the episode was fake, but for the most part people seemed pretty cognizant of the fact that there was no way in hell that upn and mutant enemy would film an entirely fake episode just to mislead a few online fans. so it didn't turn out to be much of a fandom drama story (or much of a paper either).

that said, if you are curious as to what the immediate reaction was, here are some links to various posts from around this time:

“A fake wild-feed maybe? SPOILERS.” Alt.fan.buffy-the-vampire-slayer. May 1, 2002.

“BtVS officially sucks now (‘Seeing Red’ spoilers).” alt.fan.buffy-the-vampire-slayer. May 8, 2002.

“Forum Question: What are ‘Kittens’ and ‘W/T Shippers’???.”alt.fan.buffy-the-vampire-slayer. April 30, 2002.

“Is the Big Scooby Death Such a Bad Thing? (Spoiler- whatever, we all know who it is).” alt.fan.buffy-the-vampire-slayer. May 7, 2002.

“Is TV-Fan Posting Counterproductive? 5:30 AM Musings..” alt.fan.buffy-the-vampire-slayer. April 6, 2002.

“Keeping the gay vote (spoilery speculation).” alt.fan.buffy-the-vampire-slayer. April 25, 2002.

“Seeing Red’ Wildfeed... (SPOILERS).” alt.fan.buffy-the-vampire-slayer. April 29, 2002.

[rahirah]

Opened A03 for the first time in years to try to find Willow/Tara fic and every single one they are background characters and not just to Buffy/Spike but like for…….Stiles Stilinski and Spike…..??? Is there nothing out there or am I just too old to figure out how to navigate this site.

Buffy people pls help me out, are there any fics I should know of. Old archive sites. Anything. pls

[rahirah]

What Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did in 2024.

I started this project back in January and for most of a year, every week, I came up with the highlights of what the Biden-Harris Administration did. I did it because it felt to me our media and national conversion was broken, our government was doing huge things that it felt like almost no one knew about. It's amazing how often I struggled to find a single news source that wanted to cover a huge life changing project.

This is the last Friday before Election Day, and if you haven't already voted, take a minute to go back and look at the last 40 weeks, and decide, do you like these things or want literally the reverse on every issue.

Week 1 January 19th

Week 2 January 26th

Week 3 February 2nd

Week 4 February 9th

Week 5 February 16th

Week 6 February 23rd

Week 7 March 1st

Week 8 March 8th

Week 9 March 15th

Week 10 March 22nd

Week 11 March 29th

Week 12 April 5th

Week 13 April 12th

Week 14 April 19th

Week 15 April 26th

Week 16 May 3rd

Week 17 May 10th

Week 18 May 18th

Week 19 May 24th

Week 20 May 31st

Week 21 June 7th

Week 22 June 14th

Week 23 June 21st

Week 24 June 28th

Week 25 July 5th

Week 26 July 12th

Week 27 July 19th

Week 28 July 26th

Week 29 August 2nd

Week 30 August 9th

Week 31 August 16th

Week 32 August 30th

Week 33 September 6th

Week 34 September 13th

Week 35 September 20th

Week 36 September 27th

Week 37 October 4th

Week 38 October 11th

Week 39 October 18th

Week 40 October 25th

Feel free to reblog this or go back and reblog a favorite, one that impacts your life or the one from the week of your birthday, whatever.

and remember to read past the headlines and dig to find out what your government is up to, it might shock you how much is happening that no one talks about.

[rahirah]

In case any Americans are not aware of this: the rest of the world is FUCKING TERRIFIED of how this election is going to go. If trump wins, it affects more than just America. If trump wins, it will fuck so many other countries in so many ways.

So first of all, PLEASE VOTE. The rest of the world doesn't get to vote in your election, but we do get directly impacted by your election, so please do what we can't, and vote.

Secondly, remember that you're not just voting for America. You're voting on behalf of the all the countries that will be impacted by this election.

Please, for the love of God, vote blue, and save not just America from a second trump term, but the whole goddamn world.

[rahirah]

They're...OK? S8 is kind of a rambling mess, with good parts, and parts I hate with the fury of a thousand white-hot suns. S9 starts off with a really annoying subplot, but then turns into a decentish adventure. S10-11 are pretty good, but if you don't like Spuffy, you may not like them. S12 is a rushed hot mess. Worth it is you can read them for cheap or free, I'd say.

people who know these things: are any of the buffy continuation comics worth it ?

[rahirah]

Happy 27th anniversary to them ❤️

September 29th, 1997

[rahirah]

Arizona still has jaguars! Or jaguar, at least! One was spotted (see what I did there) in Jan 2024!

gonna be honest nothing has fucked with my head more than learning that the UK only has three species of snake. like what do you mean three? three species with twelve subspecies? three native species but a ton of other nonnative ones? three species technically but it's an accident of ancient taxonomy?

nope. just three

[rahirah]

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 there are multiple pages, the script will page through results for you until there are no more fics to download

you can check your fanfic-savin' folder for unfinished fics and automatically update them if there are new chapters. you can also check for new fics in series!

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.

[rahirah]

Part of Willow's problem was that she was powerful, but didn't think things through. So I feel like if she had done that, it would turn out that the money get clocked as counterfeit, or is traced to a robbery, or something that would get Buffy in more trouble, cause the writers had this whole BOOTSTRAPS! thing going on that season.

Season 6 Willow was powerful enough to raise the dead and send people to another dimension. She couldn't magic some money to pay the bills? That would have been helpful really.

[rahirah]

big thank you to the person who created waistcoats

[rahirah]

[rahirah]

As a data point, I had a hobbyhorse as a kid in the 1960s, but it's been a loooooong time since I've seen one in the wild. I've seen "hobbyhorse" used as a term for a spcial interest used much more recently and frequently than I've seen the actual item.

We should go back to using terms like "hobby horse" instead of "special interest" or "hyperfocus".

Just acknowledge that some people really like certain subjects, no need to clinicalize it.

--

Hobby horse strikes me about like soap box.

[rahirah]

here's my theory. the teen years are bad years for lesbians. twenties also not great. thirties seem good from what i've seen. forties, fifties, these are where a lesbian shines. sixties and onward, still pretty good. and the longer you live, the closer you come to becoming the world's oldest living lesbian. which is a good idea

[rahirah]

[rahirah]

A tip for excellent writing I just learned: Don't introduce a character with their Dramatic Backstory. It makes readers go "oh alright this is the Dramatic Background Story Character" and establishes a baseline of Tragic, either for the story as a whole or this character in particular. With no contrast of light and dark, pure darkness isn't impactful, it just looks like the absence of anything to look at.

If you really want someone's dramatic backstory to hit the audience like a gut punch, let them get to know the character first. That way the dark backstory doesn't come off as a description of who they are, but an explanation to why they are the way they are. Bonus points for connecting it to something that's already been established as a part of the character - what a devastating blow to suddenly put together that hold on, that funny quirky thing that they always do is a fucking trauma response.

[rahirah]

BTVS “Every Outfit” !!! Xx

Can’t believe I got there in the end! When I started I genuinely never thought I would get to this point!!!

BTVS is my favourite show and Buffy is my fave fictional character, no competition! I’ve always loved her fashion and it felt right to express my endless love for my gal but drawing all her looks!!!

This is my magnum opus! My greatest artistic achievement!!!

I wanna thank you all for the love and support during this project! First and foremost I was drawing this series for me but the excitement y’all shared honestly helped me fly through it! After finishing an episode I couldn’t wait for y’all to see it!!!

It has meant so much honestly and I’m so happy you all where here for the journey!!!

The other Buffy ladies will get their love eventually! Lots of my fave ladies will get their love soon! But I won’t be doing an every single outfit series for another character, it feels right that Buffy will hold that honour!!! ♥️

[rahirah]

So there's going to be a general election

There is going to be a general election in the UK on the 4th July.

You can register to vote here. It should take five minutes. ⬇⬇⬇

You will be asked for your national insurance number, but you can still register if you don't have one. Your national insurance number will be on any payslips or tax forms if you're not sure what it is.

If you are voting in person, you will need photo ID. If you do not have photo ID, you can apply for a Voter Authority Certificate FOR FREE. To apply, you'll need a recent digital photo of yourself and proof of your identity.

Apply for a Voter Authority Certificate here ⬇⬇⬇

If you are unable to vote in person, you can apply for a postal vote HERE or apply for a proxy vote (where someone else votes on your behalf) HERE.