#I WAS FRIENDLY AS CAN BE. AND THEY BLOCKED ME. PRESUMABLY BECAUSE THEY DUG THROUGH THIS BLOG

[vonpharma]

“handwaving genuine, good-hearted concrit, to refusing to even engage in the conversation at all, to constant changes that make the event less fun for a huge chunk of us”

Do you mind if I ask more about this? I’ve also participated in sicktember (casually) and I haven’t really noticed anything that fit this, so I just wanted to ask more about your experiences if you were comfortable elaborating. I’m mostly curious what changes were made that made the event less fun (other than delay in prompts released I heard about that)

yeah sure! right off the bat i wanna say that this is not something i was like. PISSED OFF or intending to start any drama about, just some stuff that made the event less enjoyable for me.

i also wanna say that you haven't noticed it because sicktember is very very careful to not publish anything that makes them look bad. they do not engage with any of their replies or asks unless they can spin it in a very sanitized, pr-friendly manner. try creeping through the tags and replies on some of their posts, and while a lot of shit is deleted or lost, you can still see traces of it, some of which i will link to here.

the prompts becoming more delayed. i wasn't here in 2021 (when they dropped in early march), but in 2022 they dropped in mid may. that was awesome because it gave us all lots of time to prep--my favourite thing about sicktember is how accessible of a prompt event it is! the prompts don't all drop like a week before the event starts, you have all summer to write so if you have a full time job or responsibilities you can still participate. this year they made it very clear the prompts were ready to go in may but didn't drop them until mid-june.

when people started sending asks about this, they responded thusly. they maintain this weird kinda... pr-friendly, stepford smiley vibe whenever anyone tries to open a dialogue with them? and it just comes across as so dismissive of anyone trying to make genuine points.

here they say that "many things go into planning prompts" but don't elaborate on that at all. for context, the night before this ask, they had made it clear that the prompts were all ready to go. the hand-waving comes in the form of all the "suggestions" they offer here--"well, you don't have to do every prompt!" (but i want to. it's fun. it feels good. and that's what i've done in the past) "you can write after september!" (i did that last year. it was kind of miserable. i like posting with everyone, it feels like a big celebration!) "we give you like 100 days!" (that's cool. but you could give us more at no detriment to yourself. a lot of us didn't make the deadline last year.)

check the notes on this post and you'll see several disappointed contributors/fans who are trying to open a dialogue with the event runners, all of whom were ignored. several people have reached out to me saying that their asks about this were ignored.

2. last year, they said they would only be accepting fills on the sicktember blog through submissions, and only posting 10 random ones a day. in the past, sicktember has reblogged every single fill directly from the writers.

here's why this is shitty:

when you submit something to a blog, the blog owner then becomes the one who effectively "owns" its engagement. that means any notes, reblogs, comments, follows, etc. all go to sicktember. they do not go to the person who MADE THE STORY. if you, the author, want to see what people are saying about your work, you have to pull up the sicktember window and obsessively check it. if you want to respond to any comments, you give sicktember more notes.

this is just more work, especially if you still want those notes. you would then have to make TWO posts, one on your personal blog and one on sicktember's. and people are probably disinclined to reblog a story twice. it is not exposure or engagement to do this, it actively robs authors of engagement.

sicktember might not even post your fill. they pick ten random ones a day. this is because...

they literally admitted that they lose followers when they reblog every fill. they said aloud that it is all about engagement for them. maintaining followers means more to them than highlighting the contributions of all the people who are making their event what it is. they are quite literally trying to maximize followers and stealing engagement from their contributors. it's kind of fucking insidious.

the only valid point here is the thing about reducing mod workload. still, they could've just... opened apps for another mod? inquired for some extra help? lord knows i would've jumped at the opportunity to curate! i'm sure others would've too.

contrast this to whumptober, who religiously reblog every single fill despite being a much longer running event than sicktember.

this is why i started @sicktemberfeed. with permission, but the mods were even weird about THAT... i asked if it would be ok to make, and they said "well, it's not like we could stop you." weird fucking answer. it's fine to say no.

3. i didn't speak out about point 2, but did speak out a little bit on this blog about point 1. @yes-i-am-happyaspie's husband (@spaceninjas42) dug through my blog, somehow found my untagged critique (it was not vitriolic or cruel, just a plea for an open discussion) and started getting on my case for talking about it on my personal blog. there was a second, much more vitriolic reply that he left but i was a dingus and blocked him as soon as i saw it, which means it's now marked deleted and i have no way of getting it back or proving it. that's kind of a "just trust me bro" situation.

4. the prompts this year were not very good. that is a purely subjective opinion i have, but a lot of us agree that they really stray from the concept of sickfic. we have a lot of heavier whump events floating around and the appeal of sicktember is that it is for fluffier, more low stakes stuff. seeing "cardiac arrest" and "anaphylaxis" and "medieval treatment" on there had me and a lot of others scratching our heads. their response to this is always "just sub it out!" but when we start running out of alt prompts because so many of the main ones are not what the audience is vibing with... there is room for critique there. there is room for a discussion.

i can't stress enough that the problem isn't necessarily these changes--they are not dealbreakers! the problem was sicktember's attitude. every single time anyone in the community tried to say 'hey, i think this idea could use work/tweaking' the response was basically just, again, the happy-go-lucky stepford smiler pr voice "we'd like to remind you that blah blah blah! happy writing, authors!" and absolute refusal to talk to their community at all. as i've said many times, this is not a dichotomy--where one side is "we fold to any criticism! our fans control us!" and the other side is "you're not entitled to anything! we run this event for free despite our busy lives!" like you can very much find a happy medium there but they just. do not.

none of that is a deal breaker, genuinely. i was still planning on participating up until the very end, and i obviously am now.

what was a deal breaker was them posting harry potter shit.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 4- almost off the map

North West Scotland is beautiful. North East Scotland...not so much. Or certainly not around John O’Groats. We had time before our ferry to Orkney to visit John O’Groats and also Dunnet Head, which is the most Northerly point of mainland Britain (we are collecting the cardinal points on this trip). We spent approximately 3 minutes each at both of these sites as they were brutally cold and windy. 

Not much in the way of landscape features to break up the wind in those parts…as a result we were super early for the ferry and got to eat a depressing late breakfast in their not-great tiny cafe at the port.

The ferry crossing was surprisingly smooth (although Marcel claimed he was feeling seasick and needed to eat something cool to help the nausea and then wolfed down two ice creams). Orkney has been much contested over the ages. I’m not sure why. It’s very flat and very, very windy. We went for a brief beach walk to stretch our legs after the journey. The “highlight” was finding some mussels growing on weird things like a shoe sole and a bottle and returning them to the sea. Well that and retreating rapidly to our airbnb to turn the heating on to the max.

The next morning we headed out to see St Magnus’s cathedral, the most northerly cathedral in the UK. Those Orcadians...pretty morbid. Or they loved pirates. Either way there was a great amount of skull and crossbones on their graves.

Next we went out to see some windswept standing stones- in fact the local neolithic population loved them so much they put two pretty much right next to each other 5,000 years ago, which is convenient when it’s really cold and you really don’t want to leave the car for very long.

Our next stop was to see if we could get on a tour of Maeshowe. The website suggested booking was essential, but wouldn’t let us book online for the same day. Since all the tours for the rest of the week were available to book, I thought we should take our chances and just turn up. Unsurprisingly it was not sold out.

It was however super cool (although photographs are not allowed inside). 

I’m glad I didn’t do my research in advance, because to get in you have to make your way through a 10m long, 1m high tunnel, which is really not my cup of tea. Also we were warned we would probably be dive bombed by some swallows that were nesting in there (we were, they were not thrilled to see us). However it’s a pretty cool 5,000 year old tomb that is shaped like a pyramid, make of enormous stone blocks and was dry and out of the wind. She was explaining that not very much was known about this place, save that only bones were put in (along with pottery and jewellery) and suggested that maybe the bones were left to be cleaned by wild animals first. Was tempted to say that a few days in the wind out here would soon scour the flesh of the bones.

In a mixed blessing for future archaeologists, drunk Vikings broke in 850 years ago to get shelter from the weather, threw out all the bones and artefacts and scratched drunken runes all over the wall. Which are apparently great examples of rune carvings in terms of technical skills, but in keeping with modern graffiti are mostly about how tall the person writing is, how cool the person writing is and then casting aspersions of the chastity of particular women.

Our next stop was over the other side of the island at Skara Brae. This is a 5,000 year old village by the coast that was buried for centuries by the sand dunes and then suddenly turned up after a storm. It was mostly buried at the time as well, to try and keep out the horrendous weather. Inside the houses, it mostly resembles the Flintstones attempting to recreate the Ikea catalogue. They have a lot of apparently easy to mine sandstone in Orkney and presumably not that many convenient to harvest trees, so everything (beds, dressers, storage etc) is made of of slabs of stone. It’s pretty cool.

Since if you see a couple of the neolithic sites, they encourage you to get an explorers pass, next we went to the Broch of Gurness. This is an iron age (oh so modern) village which used to have a 10m tower (the broch) in which has mostly fallen down. There isn’t a LOT of explanation at the site, but there was a very friendly cat living in the broch which was way more fun than an information board.

Our final historical stop was the Brough of Birsay, which was a pictish (getting gradually more modern here) settlement on a tidal island. Our stop here was brief, but we wanted to get maximum value for money out of our pass!

Then, being super mature, we visited the village of Twatt. Because people keep stealing the Twatt road signs (we drove around fruitlessly looking for one for ages) and so the council took away the remainders, the only thing you can pose with is the Twatt church bench. 

We turned out not to be the only people on this immature mission so in a moment of tourist camraderie, we took photos of the others so everyone could have a photo of their group at the Twatt Church. And on our way back from Twatt to Kirkwall we did manage to find out road sign that hadn’t been removed yet!

The next morning, it was time to head back to the mainland. Orkney has some amazing early archeological stuff….but we weren’t sad to say goodbye to the weather.

The day we mostly spent...driving. We stopped off briefly to have a walk at a place called Dornoch but it was so windy it just wasn’t worth it.

We decided instead we’d have a walk when we reached our destination, the town of Tomintoul in the Cairngorms but it took so long to get there on all the little winding roads that it was close to dark by the time of our arrival and we only had time for a very brief wander on the estate as the sun went down.

Having had some very grey and miserable days recently, we were pretty excited to wake up and see glorious sunshine. This was especially good as we’d decided to go up the Cairngorm Funnicular Railway, and apparently on bad days (so I imagine a lot of the time) you just see cloud and nothing else. Instead we were treated to beautiful views from the viewing platform at the top. You can’t leave the viewing platform though in case you ruin the local flora. Which was a bit weird to me as it’s not like you can’t walk in the Swiss Alps and somehow they survive to produce a profusion of wild flowers that definitely wasn’t present here…

We then went on a very pretty, almost too hot, walk to a beautiful green loch called An Lochan Uaine. 

It was so lovely and still when we reached there I almost wished we could swim, but then remembered that feeling too hot in thermal tights and a jumper is very different from feeling hot enough in swimwear to immerse yourself in cold water.

After a brief lunch stop, we then went on a second loch walk, around Loch Eilein. It’s another very pretty loch, which has as an added extra a tiny ruined castle on an island in it.

The next day we headed South to Edinburgh. On the way we stopped off for a lovely beach walk at the St Cyrus Nature Reserve. There was a waterfall at the end and we walked for AGES to get to it, only to be thwarted from reaching it (in my case) by a giant granite boulder. I sent Marcel up to have a look. On the way back down the beach we spotted a crate and dug it out the sand hoping to find millions in buried pirate treasure, but alas it was only a stupid fisheries crate (thankfully empty and not full of rotting sardines or something).

After that we stopped in Dundee to see the Discovery. As you may or may not know from previous blog posts detailing other obscure attractions we’ve visited, I’m quite fond of Antarctica. So I was pretty excited to see the Discovery, which took Scott and Shackleton down there. Also they had lots of information in an attached museum about how it was build and I love stuff about building big things so; massive win. Marcel probably enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed all those bloody stone circles, so we are even.

We had a lovely dinner and brunch with Esther (where we got a belated wedding present!) and then we headed south.

First stop off was Rosslyn chapel, which is a huge £9 to get in and you can’t take your camera. Which meant that although it has some interesting and weird carvings, like maize before America was discovered (although I think it’s just an untalented mason’s depiction of grapes) and greed being depicted as a virtue, I was busy feeling ripped off and glowering.  Marcel suggested a walk around there as it was beautifully sunny but I was keen to move on.

So we said goodbye to Scotland and headed down to our next stop. This was Lindisfarne in Northumberland. Naturally by the time we reached the causeway out there, it was peeing with rain. We dashed from the car park into a local cafe, and from there into the museum attached to the ruins of the priory. My enthusiasm for museums about early Christainity is strongly correlated to the weather, so I studied it with interest. Apparently it was founded by a pioneer from Iona, where we’d also been rained on, so there was some symmetry there…

By the time we’d studied every board in the museum (I’m now an expert on 5th-11th century Christainity in the UK), it had stopped raining. We wandered around the ruins and then headed up to this little observation tower on a hill behind it where you got gorgeous views of the bay, including an area of sunbathing seals and I was really annoyed I’d left my nice camera in the car because I didn’t want it getting rained on.

With the remaining light left to us, we headed to nearby Bamburgh beach. This has a very scenic castle behind it, is huge and was amazingly empty at 6pm on a sunny Saturday evening. Northumberland is my new favourite county.

We had quite far to go for our stop that night (a hotel called the Centre of Britain, for reasons I couldn’t really work out because it is in no way the centre of the mainland UK), so we ended up stopping for Mexican in a town called Hexham on the way. We were the only people in the restaurant. It was a bit strange.

The hotel was also rather strange, our bedroom came off the conference room (which made me glad the next day was Sunday, so I wouldn’t have to worry about opening the wrong door in the morning whilst looking for the bathroom and coming face-to-face with 12 confused business men) and we were kept up pretty late by screaming drunk people outside, which was strange as it looked like a pretty quite market town on the way in (although screaming drunk people are always more tolerable when you know there is no chance that you are going to be on shift and stitching them up later).

Sunday dawned...with rain. We had a pretty damp trip to Housesteads Roman Fort and a wander along Hadrian’s Wall there. They get around the fact that the wall is pretty low by building in it places at the top of some pretty steep drops- another unexpected vertigo joy when you are just trying to have a potter and pretend to be a roman legionnary etc.

Afterwards we headed on into Durham because Marcel was keen to see the cathedral. What we didn’t realise was that it was “parents drop off their freshers in Durham” day. Traffic could broadly be described as hellish and the cathedral was pretty busy with parents who were clearly get something positive out of the long drive there (well apart from ditching their teenager for the term). It’s quite a nice cathedral (and features St Cuthbert’s shrine, who was a saint from Lindisfarne, so more connections) but they don’t let you take pictures, which always annoys me (I get no flash, but no pictures at all...irritating).

We had to buy some food in Durham, and if we thought the rest of the town was bad in terms of students-with-parents, we had underestimated the awfulness of going to a giant Tesco. It was full of parents loading their student up on essentials, but obviously no one normally shopped there, so it was an aimless mass of overloaded trolleys. I was not amused.

Finally we escaped and drove to Whitby. Whitby is just as slightly creepy and seaside eccentric as I was hoping it would be. 

We had a wander around the town and out onto the pier and then ate surprisingly good Thai for dinner in a place literally inside the train station (you could view the very empty platforms; I’m guessing it doesn’t have much of a regular service here). And so ended week 4 on the road!