#also look up for forums or sites with people writing

[lisafication]

For those who might happen across this, I'm an administrator for the forum 'Sufficient Velocity', a large old-school forum oriented around Creative Writing. I originally posted this on there (and any reference to 'here' will mean the forum), but I felt I might as well throw it up here, as well, even if I don't actually have any followers.

This week, I've been reading fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a site run by the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit. This isn't particularly exceptional, in and of itself — like many others on the site, I read a lot of fanfiction, both on Sufficient Velocity (SV) and elsewhere — however what was bizarre to me was encountering a new prefix on certain works, that of 'End OTW Racism'. While I'm sure a number of people were already familiar with this, I was not, so I looked into it.

What I found... wasn't great. And I don't think anyone involved realises that.

To summarise the details, the #EndOTWRacism campaign, of which you may find their manifesto here, is a campaign oriented towards seeing hateful or discriminatory works removed from AO3 — and believe me, there is a lot of it. To whit, they want the OTW to moderate them. A laudable goal, on the face of it — certainly, we do something similar on Sufficient Velocity with Rule 2 and, to be clear, nothing I say here is a critique of Rule 2 (or, indeed, Rule 6) on SV.

But it's not that simple, not when you're the size of Archive of Our Own. So, let's talk about the vagaries and little-known pitfalls of content moderation, particularly as it applies to digital fiction and at scale. Let's dig into some of the details — as far as credentials go, I have, unfortunately, been in moderation and/or administration on SV for about six years and this is something we have to grapple with regularly, so I would like to say I can speak with some degree of expertise on the subject.

So, what are the problems with moderating bad works from a site? Let's start with discovery— that is to say, how you find rule-breaching works in the first place. There are more-or-less two different ways to approach manual content moderation of open submissions on a digital platform: review-based and report-based (you could also call them curation-based and flag-based), with various combinations of the two. Automated content moderation isn't something I'm going to cover here — I feel I can safely assume I'm preaching to the choir when I say it's a bad idea, and if I'm not, I'll just note that the least absurd outcome we had when simulating AI moderation (mostly for the sake of an academic exercise) on SV was banning all the staff.

In a review-based system, you check someone's work and approve it to the site upon verifying that it doesn't breach your content rules. Generally pretty simple, we used to do something like it on request. Unfortunately, if you do that, it can void your safe harbour protections in the US per Myeress vs. Buzzfeed Inc. This case, if you weren't aware, is why we stopped offering content review on SV. Suffice to say, it's not really a realistic option for anyone large enough for the courts to notice, and extremely clunky and unpleasant for the users, to boot.

Report-based systems, on the other hand, are something we use today — users find works they think are in breach and alert the moderation team to their presence with a report. On SV, this works pretty well — a user or users flag a work as potentially troublesome, moderation investigate it and either action it or reject the report. Unfortunately, AO3 is not SV. I'll get into the details of that dreadful beast known as scaling later, but thankfully we do have a much better comparison point — fanfiction.net (FFN).

FFN has had two great purges over the years, with a... mixed amount of content moderation applied in between: one in 2002 when the NC-17 rating was removed, and one in 2012. Both, ostensibly, were targeted at adult content. In practice, many fics that wouldn't raise an eye on Spacebattles today or Sufficient Velocity prior to 2018 were also removed; a number of reports suggest that something as simple as having a swearword in your title or summary was enough to get you hit, even if you were a 'T' rated work. Most disturbingly of all, there are a number of — impossible to substantiate — accounts of groups such as the infamous Critics United 'mass reporting' works to trigger a strike to get them removed. I would suggest reading further on places like Fanlore if you are unfamiliar and want to know more.

Despite its flaws however, report-based moderation is more-or-less the only option, and this segues neatly into the next piece of the puzzle that is content moderation, that is to say, the rubric. How do you decide what is, and what isn't against the rules of your site?

Anyone who's complained to the staff about how vague the rules are on SV may have had this explained to them, but as that is likely not many of you, I'll summarise: the more precise and clear-cut your chosen rubric is, the more it will inevitably need to resemble a legal document — and the less readable it is to the layman. We'll return to SV for an example here: many newer users will not be aware of this, but SV used to have a much more 'line by line, clearly delineated' set of rules and... people kind of hated it! An infraction would reference 'Community Compact III.15.5' rather than Rule 3, because it was more or less written in the same manner as the Terms of Service (sans the legal terms of art). While it was a more legible rubric from a certain perspective, from the perspective of communicating expectations to the users it was inferior to our current set of rules  — even less of them read it,  and we don't have great uptake right now.

And it still wasn't really an improvement over our current set-up when it comes to 'moderation consistency'. Even without getting into the nuts and bolts of "how do you define a racist work in a way that does not, at any point, say words to the effect of 'I know it when I see it'" — which is itself very, very difficult don't get me wrong I'm not dismissing this — you are stuck with finding an appropriate footing between a spectrum of 'the US penal code' and 'don't be a dick' as your rubric. Going for the penal code side doesn't help nearly as much as you might expect with moderation consistency, either — no matter what, you will never have a 100% correct call rate. You have the impossible task of writing a rubric that is easy for users to comprehend, extremely clear for moderation and capable of cleanly defining what is and what isn't racist without relying on moderator judgement, something which you cannot trust when operating at scale.

Speaking of scale, it's time to move on to the third prong — and the last covered in this ramble, which is more of a brief overview than anything truly in-depth — which is resources. Moderation is not a magic wand, you can't conjure it out of nowhere: you need to spend an enormous amount of time, effort and money on building, training and equipping a moderation staff, even a volunteer one, and it is far, far from an instant process. Our most recent tranche of moderators spent several months in training and it will likely be some months more before they're fully comfortable in the role — and that's with a relatively robust bureaucracy and a number of highly experienced mentors supporting them, something that is not going to be available to a new moderation branch with little to no experience. Beyond that, there's the matter of sheer numbers.

Combining both moderation and arbitration — because for volunteer staff, pure moderation is in actuality less efficient in my eyes, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, but we'll treat it as if they're both just 'moderators' — SV presently has 34 dedicated moderation volunteers. SV hosts ~785 million words of creative writing.

AO3 hosts ~32 billion.

These are some very rough and simplified figures, but if you completely ignore all the usual problems of scaling manpower in a business (or pseudo-business), such as (but not limited to) geometrically increasing bureaucratic complexity and administrative burden, along with all the particular issues of volunteer moderation... AO3 would still need well over one thousand volunteer moderators to be able to match SV's moderator-to-creative-wordcount ratio.

Paid moderation, of course, you can get away with less — my estimate is that you could fully moderate SV with, at best, ~8 full-time moderators, still ignoring administrative burden above the level of team leader. This leaves AO3 only needing a much more modest ~350 moderators. At the US minimum wage of ~$15k p.a. — which is, in my eyes, deeply unethical to pay moderators as full-time moderation is an intensely gruelling role with extremely high rates of PTSD and other stress-related conditions — that is approximately ~$5.25m p.a. costs on moderator wages. Their average annual budget is a bit over $500k.

So, that's obviously not on the table, and we return to volunteer staffing. Which... let's examine that scenario and the questions it leaves us with, as our conclusion.

Let's say, through some miracle, AO3 succeeds in finding those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer moderators. We'll even say none of them are malicious actors or sufficiently incompetent as to be indistinguishable, and that they manage to replicate something on the level of or superior to our moderation tooling near-instantly at no cost. We still have several questions to be answered:

How are you maintaining consistency? Have you managed to define racism to the point that moderator judgment no longer enters the equation? And to be clear, you cannot allow moderator judgment to be a significant decision maker at this scale, or you will end with absurd results.

How are you handling staff mental health? Some reading on the matter, to save me a lengthy and unrelated explanation of some of the steps involved in ensuring mental health for commercial-scale content moderators.

How are you handling your failures? No moderation in the world has ever succeeded in a 100% accuracy rate, what are you doing about that?

Using report-based discovery, how are you preventing 'report brigading', such as the theories surrounding Critics United mentioned above? It is a natural human response to take into account the amount and severity of feedback. While SV moderators are well trained on the matter, the rare times something is receiving enough reports to potentially be classified as a 'brigade' on that scale will nearly always be escalated to administration, something completely infeasible at (you're learning to hate this word, I'm sure) scale.

How are you communicating expectations to your user base? If you're relying on a flag-based system, your users' understanding of the rules is a critical facet of your moderation system — how have you managed to make them legible to a layman while still managing to somehow 'truly' define racism?

How are you managing over one thousand moderators? Like even beyond all the concerns with consistency, how are you keeping track of that many moving parts as a volunteer organisation without dozens or even hundreds of professional managers? I've ignored the scaling administrative burden up until now, but it has to be addressed in reality.

What are you doing to sweep through your archives? SV is more-or-less on-top of 'old' works as far as rule-breaking goes, with the occasional forgotten tidbit popping up every 18 months or so — and that's what we're extrapolating from. These thousand-plus moderators are mostly going to be addressing current or near-current content, are you going to spin up that many again to comb through the 32 billion words already posted?

I could go on for a fair bit here, but this has already stretched out to over two thousand words.

I think the people behind this movement have their hearts in the right place and the sentiment is laudable, but in practice it is simply 'won't someone think of the children' in a funny hat. It cannot be done.

Even if you could somehow meet the bare minimum thresholds, you are simply not going to manage a ruleset of sufficient clarity so as to prevent a much-worse repeat of the 2012 FF.net massacre, you are not going to be able to manage a moderation staff of that size and you are not going to be able to ensure a coherent understanding among all your users (we haven't managed that after nearly ten years and a much smaller and more engaged userbase). There's a serious number of other issues I haven't covered here as well, as this really is just an attempt at giving some insight into the sheer number of moving parts behind content moderation:  the movement wants off-site content to be policed which isn't so much its own barrel of fish as it is its own barrel of Cthulhu; AO3 is far from English-only and would in actuality need moderators for almost every language it supports — and most damning of all,  if Section 230 is wiped out by the Supreme Court  it is not unlikely that engaging in content moderation at all could simply see AO3 shut down.

As sucky as it seems, the current status quo really is the best situation possible. Sorry about that.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for scamming my ex out of an extremely valuable virtual pet?

🐓🥤to recognize. This might be a very long post with a lot of added context for a very niche hobby and a very small actual conflict.

I religiously play a virtual pet site called Chicken Smoothie. It's a pretty old site as far as virtual pet games go, starting back in 2008, so there is a pretty solid established site economy. Just for some context, Every pet on the site has a rarity, ranging from "OMG So Common" to "OMG So Rare", being the most common and most rare respectively. But there are rarities within those rarities, where some OMGSRs can be worth more than others based on species and demand. For example, an OMGSR dog from 2008 will be worth more than an OMGSR rat from 2008 despite being the same highest rarity and year, because people prefer the dogs over rats. These pets can get extremely valuable. You can't sell them for real money (according to site rules, but of course there's a black market), but the site has its own virtual currency you can buy (with real money) and trade for called Chicken Dollars, and you can also trade a valuable pet for other valuable pets. It gets very complicated, with the community coming up with its own set of value terms each pet can have. I'm not getting into specifics there, that's not important.

Every year, on December 18th, CS has gift boxes you can adopt from. These gift boxes can contain any rare pet from any previous year, including special "Unreleased pets" that you can only get from these Dec 18th boxes, with a very slim chance. These unreleased pets are some of the most valuable and rarest in the game.

Recently, I had seen my ex posting on the forums. I didn't know he had an account, he had made it within this year, long after I got the fuck away from him, and I only knew it was him because he uses the same username everywhere. This person had groomed me, physically abused me when we were together (we no longer live anywhere near each other, thankfully) and has always been emotionally manipulative. He does not know I play, and he wouldn't recognize my account as me. I took a note of his account and left it be for a while, until December 18th hit and I took a peek at what he had got. And what he got was one of the new Unreleased pets, which currently at the time of writing this only looks like a box of cereal. (Most pets on the site have growth stages.) And even better, all his groups were open for trade, so I took a chance and sent an extremely terrible trade. I told him that this pet would only be a recent rare, and I offered him a "Very Rare" rarity (but not very valuable) pet from 2018, telling him I was overpaying. (In the CS community, this is known as Ninjaing, and it's Not A Good Thing To Do). I didn't expect him to accept it, I at least thought he'd be smart enough to ask in the trade advice thread that is literally pinned on the home page for December 18th, but he didn't. He took my word for it and accepted the trade, and now I own an unreleased pet that will eventually end up as an OMGSR.

What I did was not a bannable offence. He will not get his unreleased pet back. The CS mods are laughable at worst, incompetent at best, and don't do anything to stop scamming. They have an "eh, sucks to be you, sorry, be smarter next time" mentality when people get scammed (Which is insane because there are literal single digit aged children allowed on this site!!!)

After taking a bit to think about it, I do feel a bit guilty because I really would not do this in any other circumstances. I hate scamming. I did what I did out of anger and contempt, and I do feel a bit guilty because in essence, I scammed a new player that didn't have much else and didn't know any better.

I'm still keeping that unreleased cereal box no matter what though

What are these acronyms?

[cy-cyborg]

We have communities - Writing disability quick tips

So often, stories centred on disabled characters, especially in modern settings, emphasise how lonely or isolated the character is because of their disability, especially if it’s a newly acquired disability or one that non-disabled people assume would have a big impact on our ability to do “fun stuff”. This will often be accompanied by statements of “no-one understands what living with [insert disability here]” is like!

And while isolation and loneliness are things a lot of disabled people deal with, a lot of us are not completely alone either, especially in the modern day.

Just like any group of people with shared experiences, we find one another. Sometimes this is through formal systems; some spinal rehabilitation centres for example, will pair newly paralysed people up with a mentor who’s had a similar form of paralysis for much longer to help guide the person while the adjust to their new disability. Other more formal systems can look like disability sporting organisations - the one I used to work for used to specifically encourage very newly disabled people to join so they didn’t feel like the had to learn everything about their disability alone, or support groups.

Other times though, these communities are much less formal. They may look like online forums, such as the ones on Reddit, built by and for disabled people to talk about their experiences and seek recommendations from others in the same boat, or parts of larger social media sites. For example, on Tumblr, there aren’t really any formal groups, but thanks to the hashtags we use in our posts, we often find one another fairly quickly there. We sometimes also carve out our own little subsections of fandom or hobby spaces, brought together by the shared interest itself, how things like disability might impact the way you interpret or interact with it, and how we can modify it (in the case of hobbies) to make it work for us.

A lot of disability communities, formal or otherwise, also form out of necessity, such as advocacy groups run by and for disabled people, and those built around ensuring the rights of disabled people are protected.

Isolation and loneliness are problems within the disabled community that many of us deal with, but this tends to be more in the context of isolation from the wider public, exclusion from public spaces and events (despite there being laws that are supposed to stop this because they’re often not enforced), disconnect from non-disabled friends and family, etc, most of which are the result of systematic issues or the lack of understanding or care and support from non-disabled people in our lives. Not always, but often.

The communities made by and for disabled people though are often (at least in part) made to help make up for this, and they’re more common than you might think, you just have to know where to look. It would be nice to see more creators reflecting this in their work a bit more often, or at least acknowledging that they are there, even if your character chooses not to engage with them.

However, as a reminder to authors and creatives: These communities, especially the online ones, are for disabled people, they are not there for you to use as a reference as a creator. Some communities are ok with you being there to learn, so long as you listen and don’t try to speak over/bombard their members with questions. Others are not. The ones that are, typically will have something written somewhere if it’s online (e.g. subreddits that accept writers wanting to write disabled characters will often have it written in the “about” section or the rules). There are also dedicated groups and platforms for non-disabled people seeking to learn more about us and our communities, which can be excellent resources for creatives like writers. Just remember to be mindful of where you are and respectful of people’s spaces and boundaries when doing your research.

[cutewebgraphics]

Can you list the websites where you get your graphics from?

Hello!

I had another question like this and wrote a big long answer & when I went to save it as a draft, it disappeared!!! X_X I'll do my best to write it out again!

I don't actually know how I do it... I go into a blind haze and wake up hours later with dozens of tabs open and hundreds of graphics in my downloads. Not really, but it feels like it sometimes ^^'''

Usually, I start out by reverse image searching a graphic I already have on image search engines like Google Images, Yandex, etc. and opening a bunch of sites that host that same graphic, or by going into the 'similar images' section and looking for interesting graphics, thumbnails and sites that way. I look out for text-hosting (blogging, fanfiction) sites, self-hosted websites, forums and foreign language sites - I find a lot of my favorites from Japanese, Hindi and Italian-speaking sites in particular! From there I look for hyperlinks to other sites and start going down rabbit holes. I avoid popular image-hosting sites like Giphy and Pinterest, as well as popular English social media sites like Twitter and Instagram.

Text-hosting sites like Wattpad and Asianfanfics are good for finding organized collections of graphics, mainly layout-related graphics like dividers, headers and footers.

I find a lot of my decorative text on forums.

Blogging and foreign social media sites (especially Japanese as Japan invented emoji and decomail!) support .GIFs more often and I find a lot of tiny inline-sized pixels there.

Personal sites are great for doll collections!

Finding specific user accounts on these sites and pawing through their post history, uploads and friends is my favorite way to find little 'gold mines'. I sometimes also enter a general query into image search engines i.e. 'christmas divider pixel say' and filter by Colour -> Transparent and Type -> Animated (Google Images) to look for graphics and sites that way, but I find it to be quite surface-level and don't get a lot to chew on.

I also have a (neglected...) Discord server with a tiny lovely community of people that share their finds, help others find specific graphics, troubleshoot and pass around interesting websites and tools with one another. I've been a bit absent from the Discord during the school year but want to swallow the social anxiety & become more active now...!

I hope this helps give a rough idea of my process, but it really isn't a science and is more just glorified web-surfing x) Have fun!

[facingthenorthwind]

Don't get involved with Wookieepedia

We all know Wookieepedia — it’s the Star Wars wiki, and an invaluable resource for fic writers everywhere. I’m not telling you not to look at Wookieepedia, but I do need to warn you not to get involved with the community. If you do want to edit it, then never join the discord or get involved with the forums (Senate Hall). It’s a cesspit of bigotry, and you cannot change it.

I tried. Along with a very well-known and vocal user named Immi Thrax, we tried to push back against misogyny and queerphobia. We thought we succeeded. You might have seen supposed “progress” on Wook: the addition of pronouns in the infobox, the addition of an anti-discrimination policy and an apology from the male wook admins for historical abuse towards marginalised editors. We did this. We, along with a small group of queer women and nonbinary editors, badgered the admins to write that apology for months, spoon-feeding them the things they needed to address and telling them that the early piss-weak drafts were unacceptable. We demanded infobox pronouns. We demanded an anti-discrimination policy and worked with them to add a glossary. 

And then they ran us off the website.

We had a side server specifically for women and nonbinary people, with a few channels that also contained men we trusted. A woman (who was voted in as an admin after Immi) took screenshots from this private server and then posted them publicly. The screenshots were taken completely out of context and misrepresented their contents. The woman who took the screenshots deleted messages in them to make us look worse. They slandered us and put us in danger, because Immi has been targeted by dangerous corners of the internet before (which they were well aware of), and we were terrified we would be doxxed. All of the men approved of this, forced Immi to resign, and spread blatant lies about us. Wook users attacked us, and it was deemed perfectly acceptable to do so.

When I wrote the initial forum post about sexism and misogyny on the website, Master Fredcerique, one of the admins, told me that he was in fear of losing his job during 2021 because of discord screenshot leaks, and that "Safety for everyone was of utmost importance" to him, hence requesting I not provide usernames for my examples of bigotry. It is clear that Immi, myself and others in those screenshots do not count in this 'everyone'. I wonder why he wanted to protect the perpetrators of misogyny but was happy to endanger women!

As a result of this horrific breach of trust and privacy, every single queer woman and almost every nonbinary wook editor has left the site. We were too radical, and they had to destroy us. Sure, a woman did this, but I don’t think it’s an accident that a cishet woman who self-describes as a Republican in Florida forced the two loud leftist lesbians off the site. And the men approved of everything she’s done and contributed to it. One (1) man (notably not an admin) stood up for us, and he was banned for doing it. 

So don’t join wook. If you do edit, don't trust anyone. Have every single conversation about wook in public, where people can never take your words out of context. Do not participate in DMs, group chats or any wook-related servers, including the official one. Marginalised editors' very existence is a disruption to the status quo of Wookieepedia, and there is every possibility you will be seen as a threat, even if you are not initially treated as one.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

hi derin! i’ve been following you for a little while, and also bemoaning the nature of publishing fiction (indie or trad) for a little bit longer than that, and i only just realized today that…of course web serials are a thing i can also do!

i really love the idea of publishing serially (though i’m not totally sure i CAN, i’d like to try), so while i add this to my list of potential paths, do you have any advice for getting started? building an audience? marketing? figuring out if writing/publishing this way will work for you to begin with?

i know that’s a lot of questions, and you don’t have to answer all of them! i’m throwing spaghetti at a wall out here. i hope you have a good day though, and thanks in advance!

Getting started in web serial writing

Web serial writing has the lowest barrier of entry of any major method of publishing your story. You can literally just start. There are two steps:

start writing your story

decide how/where you want to publish it

The writing part, I assume you have handled. The important thing to note here is that you gotta see the project through. Start and don't stop until you're done. For publishing, you have a few options:

1. Publish on a website designed for web serial novels

There are a few of these around, they're usually free to publish on (although most offer a paid account to give you ad space or boost you int he algorithm or whatever), and your best choice generally depends on which one happens to gravitate to a niche that best suits your kind of work. The big names in this industry are Royal Road and Scribblehub, which, last I checked up on them (about a year ago) tended towards isekai and light erotica respectively. (You absolutely can publish outside these niches on these sites, it's just much harder to get traction.) Publishing somewhere like this comes with multiple advantages. Firstly, there's a writing community right there to talk to; there's usually a forum or something where people gather to talk about reading or writing on the site. Second, the site itself is designed specifically to publish web serials, and will come with a good layout and hit trackers and 'where you left off' buttons for the reader and all that; generally all you have to do is copy-paste the text of a chapter into the page and the site will do everything else for you. Third, there's an audience sitting right there, browsing the 'latest arrivals' or 'most popular' page of the site; if you can get high in the algorithm, you have to do little if any marketing.

The downsides of such places usually come down to the same things as the advantages. Such sites are a flooded market. Your story absolutely will drown in a sea of other stories, a great many of them terrible, and most of them with the advantage of catering to the site's niche. Gaining an audience there is often a matter of trying to game an algorithm, and the community can be... variable. Some of these places are nice but most of them are a bunch of authors trying to tear down everyone around them to make their own work look better by comparison int he hopes of poaching audiences for their story instead. If you go this route, I'd recommend shopping around for a site that fits you personality and writing style (or just posting on many sites at once; you can also do that).

These places also tend to get targeted by scrapers who will steal your story and sell it as an ebook, which is very annoying.

2. publish on another site

Plenty of people publish web serials here on Tumblr. I do not know why. This site is TERRIBLY set up for that. It makes tracking stories and updates a pain in the arse (people end up having to *manually tag every reader whenever they post an update*), building and maintaining archives are annoying, community building is surprisingly difficult for a social media site, and it's just generally far more work for both writer and reader than it needs to be. You often do have a ready-made audience, though.

This does tend to work better on other sites. Reddit has multiple communities for reading and writing various types of fiction; publishing on these is a bit more work than somewhere like Royal Road, but not very much, and many of these communities are very active. There aren't as many forums around as there used to be, but you might be able to find fiction hosting forums, if that's what you prefer. And of course, many writers who simply want to write and don't mind not being paid choose to write on AO3.

These sites are a good middle ground compromise for people who want a ready-made community and don't mind putting in a bit of extra work.

3. make your own site

This is what I did. You can make a website for free, giving people a hub to find you and all your work, designed however you like. You can also pay for a website if you want it to be a little bit nicer. This option is the most work, but gives you the most control and leaves you free of having to worry about any algorithm.

The obvious downside of this is that there's no community there. If you host your work on your own website, you need to bring people to it. You need to build an audience on your own. This is not an easy thing to do.

Building an audience (general advice)

Here is some general advice about building an audience:

1. Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.

If you want people to read your writing, the best piece of advice I can possibly give you is have an update schedule and update on time, always. If you need to take a break, give people as much warning as possible and tell them exactly when you will be back, and come back then. Do not take unnecessary breaks because you don't feel like writing. (Do take breaks if you get carpal tunnel or need time off for a major life event or something -- your health is more important than the story.) If you're taking a lot of breaks to avoid burnout, you're doing it wrong -- you need to rework your whole schedule from the start and slow down updates to make these breaks unnecessary. Two chapters a month with no breaks is a billion times better than four chapters a month with frequent burnout breaks.

Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.

A reliable schedule is the #1 factor in audience retention. If readers need to randomly check in or wait for notifications from you to check if there's an update, guess what? Most of them won't! They'll read something else. You want your audience to be able to anticipate each release and fit it in their own schedule. I cannot overstate the importance of this.

2. If you can, try to make your story good.

We writers would love to live in a world where this is the most important thing, but it actually isn't. Plenty of people out there are perfectly happy to read hot garbage. How do I define 'hot garbage'? It doesn't matter. Think of what you would consider to be just a terrible, no-effort, pointless garbage story that the world would be better off without. Someone is out there writing that right now, making US$2,500/month on Patreon.

It is, however, a real advantage if you can make your story good. At the very least, it should be worth your audience's time. Preferably, it should also be worth their money, and make them enthusiastic enough to try to get their friends into it. Managing this is massively advantageous.

3. Accept that you're not going to get a big audience for a really long time. Write consistently and update on schedule every time anyway.

It took me over a year to get my second patron. For the first year, I updated Curse Words every single week, on schedule, for over a year, and had maybe... four readers. One of them was a regular commenter. One of them was my first patron. There was no one else.

My audience has grown pretty rapidly, for this industry.

You're not gonna start publishing chapters for a big, vibrant community. You're just not. And you have to keep going anyway. These days, I have a pretty good readership, and those couple of loyal readers (who I appreciate beyond words) have grown into a much larger community, who hang out and debate theories with each other and liveblog and drag in new readers and make fanart. My discord has over 550 members, with volunteer moderators and regular fan artists and its own little in-jokes and games and readers who make a point of welcoming newcomers and helping them navigate the discord, all with very little input from me. I start crying when I think about these people, who do the bulk of my social and marketing work for me just because they want to help, and my patrons who, after writing for over 4.5 years, have recently helped me pass an important threshold -- my web serial (via patreon) now pays my mortgage repayments. I can't live off my writing alone, but boy is that a massive fucking step.

You're not gonna have that when you start. You're gonna have a couple of friends. And that's it. Maybe for a year. Maybe less, if you're good at marketing and lucky. Maybe longer.

You have to update on schedule, every time, anyway.

Building an audience (more specific advice)

"Yeah, that's great, Derin, but where can I find my fucking audience?" Well, if you publish on a web serial site, then the audience is there and you jsut need to grab their affention using the tools and social norms offered to you by the site. I utterly failed at this and cannot help you there. You can still use these other tips to bring in readers from off-site.

1. Paid ads

I've never paid for ads so I can't offer advice on how to do it. I've Blazed a couple of posts on Tumblr; they weren't helpful. This is, however, an option for you.

2. Actually tell people that your story exists and where they can find it.

I used to have a lot of trouble with this. I didn't want to bother people on Tumblr and soforth by telling them about my personal project. Unfortunately you kind of have to just get over that. Now I figure that if people don't want TTOU spam, they can just unfollow me. If you're like me and want to just politely keep your story to yourself... don't. You're shooting yourself in the foot doing that.

You need to mention your story. Link your story in your bio on whatever social media sites you use. Put it in your banner on forums. Make posts and memes about it. Eventually, if you're lucky, extremely valuable readers will start to talk about your story and meme and fanart it for you, but first, you need to let them know it exists.

It will always feel weird to do this. Just accept that people can unfollow you if they want, and do it anyway.

3. Leverage existing audiences and communities

Before I started doing this web serial thing, I used to write a lot of fanfic. The original audience that trickled in for Curse Words comes from AO3, where I was doing a full series rationalist rewrite of Animorphs. They knew how I wrote and wanted more of it. Nowadays, I still occasionally pull in readers through this route. Most of my new readers these days come from a different community -- people who follow me on Tumblr. Occasionally I bring in people who don't follow me because we'll be talking about how one of my stories relates to something different, and fans of that thing might decide they want to check my stories out.

Your first readers will come from communities that you're already in and that are already interested in something similar to what you're doing (people reading my fanfic on AO3 were already there for my writing, for instance). Keep these people in mind when you start out.

One additional critical source of existing communities is your readers themselves. A huge number of my readers are people I've never been in any group with -- they were pulled in by their friends, relatives, or community members who were reading my stories and wanted them to read them too. This is an absolutely invaluable source of 'advertising' and it is critically important to look after these people. enthusiastic readers, word-of-mouth advertisers, and fan artists are the people who will bring in those outside your immediate bubble.

4. Your "where to find me" hub

If you're publishing on your own website, you can simply link everything else to your homepage, and put all relevant links there. For example, I can link people to derinstories.com , which links out to all my stories, social media I want people to find me on (you don't have to link all your social media), patreon, discord, et cetera. If you don't have your own website, you're going to have to create a hub like this in the bios of every site where you garner audiences from. This is the main advantage of publishing on your own website.

Monetisation

There are a few different kinds of monetisation for web serials, but most of them boil down to 'use a web serial format to market your ebook', which to be honest I find pretty shady. These authors will start a web serial, put in enough to hook an audience for free, and then stop posting and release an ebook, with the intention of making readers pay for the ending. Now, to be clear, I am absolutely not against publishing and selling your web serial -- I'm doing exactly that, with Curse Words. I am against intentionally and knowingly setting up the start of a web serial as a 'demo' without telling your audience that that is what you are doing, soliciting Patreon money for it, and then later yanking it away unfinished and demanding money for the ending.

Monetisation of these sorts of stories is really just monetisation for normal indie publishing with the web serial acting as an ad, and I have no advice for how to do that successfully.

Your options of monetisation for a web serial as a web serial are a bit more limited. They essentially come down to merchandise (including ebooks or print books) or ongoing support (patreon, ko-fi, etc.) Of these, the only one I have experience with is the patreon model.

This model of monetisation involves setting up an account with a regular-donation site such as patreon, providing the base story for free, and providing bonuses to patrons. You can offer all kinds of bonuses for patrons. Many patrons don't actually care what the bonus is, they're donating to support you so that you can keep writing the story, but they still like to receive something. But some patrons do donate specifically for the bonuses, so it's worth choosing them with care.

The most common and most effective bonus for web serials is advance chapters -- if people are giving you money, give them the chapters early. You can also offer various bonus materials, merchandise, or voting rights on decisions you need to make in the future. 'Get your character put in the story' is a popular high-tier reward. If you're looking for reward ideas, you can see the ones I use on my patreon.

Patreon used to offer the ability to set donation goals, where you could offer something when you were making a certain amount total or had a certain number of subscribers. They recently removed this feature because Patreon hates me personally and doesn't want me to be happy, so you kind of have to advertise it yourself now if you want to use these goals. I release chapters of unrelated stories at donation goals, and I found this to be far more effective than I thought it would be.

The important factor for this kind of monetisation is that it's ongoing. The main advantage of this is that it makes your income far more regular and predictable than normal indie publishing -- your pledges will go up or down over a month, but not by nearly as much as book sales can. The main thing to keep in mind is that it's not a one-time sale, which means that however you organise things, you want to make sure that donating keeps on being worth it, month after month. Offering bonuses that aren't just one-time bonuses, but things that the patron can experience every month, helps here. So does making sure that you have a good community where patrons can hang out with other patrons. (Offering advance chapters does both of these things -- the patron can stay ahead in the story and discuss stuff with other patrons that non-patrons haven't seen. I've found that a lot of my patrons enjoy reading an emotionally devastating chapter ahead of time, discussing it, and then all gathering a week or two later to watch the unsuspecting non-patrons experience it for the first time.)

Whatever method you use for monetisation, rule #1 is (in the words of Moist Von Lipwig): always make it easy for people to give you money. The process of finding out how to give you money should be easy, as should the process of actually doing it. And, most importantly, the spender should feel like it's worth it to give you money. This is a big part of making it easy to give you money. Make your story worth it, make your bonuses worth it, make sure that they're happy to be part of your community and that they enjoy reading and supporting you. And remember that support comes in many forms -- the fan artist, the word-of-mouth enthuser, the person who makes your social hub a great place to be, the patron, all of these people are vital components in the life support system that keeps your story going. And you're going to have to find them, give them a story, and build them a community, word by word and brick by brick.

It's a long process.

Good luck.

.

[irisbleufic]

Of all the bullshit I never expected to be back on with the same intensity of October through December of 2000, Beetlejuice was not it. But I finally got to see the musical yesterday, and the part of me that has adored all 94 episodes of the animated series from the moment I started watching them on ABC Saturday mornings in 1989 just fucking flared—this fond, awful tightness in my chest. It’s the first TV show I ever imprinted on; it’s been with me since childhood. Surreal.

About 4 years into watching the cartoon, I finally saw the live-action movie that the cartoon was based on. I hated it, because it was so malevolent and empty compared to the incredible world-building characters in the animated series. Serious shout-outs to Stephen Ouimette and Alyson Court for all that stunning, hilarious, and often moving voicework.

Now, okay, I need to go back to 2000 again to make this all make sense. I’d watched the show from 1989 until whenever the 4th season ended. It wasn’t until I was in my first semester of college, newly transplanted to New England, that I found a couple folks within my program who had loved the show growing up, too. I ordered all of the episodes on VHS. It was difficult to track them all down in 2000, and it was expensive. But I pulled it off, and we had Friday night watch parties for weeks over the month of October. But that is not where this ends.

I was in the process of winding down the writing I’d been doing on Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow for the entirety of my senior year of high school. Suddenly, I’m in college and watching this fucking cartoon and thinking, there is so much heart in this. How the fuck is there so much heart. I haven’t seen two characters this wholesome codependent in, well, ever. I went looking for forums and mailing lists devoted to the cartoon. I found a mailing list. There were a handful of artists drawing amazing fancomics on there, and they were like, what do you do? Oh. I write. And they were like: do you understand how desperately some of us have wanted fic, but just can’t find it?

That is the wrong thing to say to me when I’m on a downward spiral of realizing I’m not going to escape a fandom without getting myself into a project so long that it’s all I’ll be doing for fucking months on end. If you’re one of the people who knew me back then, you know what I did for those four months in the fall/winter of 2000. I wrote a novel. Sure, I came close to failing a couple of classes, but it was the first time I understood exactly what I was capable of building as a fanwriter. Maybe even as a real writer.

“Time Will Tell” was hosted on a friend’s Angelfire site for a handful of years. People found it via LiveJournal, too, because I linked it there. I put it on AO3 somewhere circa 2012 and took it down again in 2017 because I didn’t feel there was enough interest in it, and also, my 19-year-old editorial foibles and typos were aspects I wanted to amend in it.

The musical took more inspiration from the cartoon than the film. I’m stunned and grateful for that. I found the “Time Will Tell” file buried pretty deep in my Gmail folders. I’ve been reading it since the drive home last night. I just can’t believe there’s now enough of a fandom for me to consider finally polishing it and getting it back online. It’s one of my two oldest surviving pieces of writing.

Anyway, sorry for the Gotham fic delays that I’d been trying to get a handle on. Now that the semester’s over, I feel that getting this thing I wrote twenty-three years ago back to the light of day is the best use of my time for a couple weeks.

If you’re one of the people who read “Time Will Tell” back in the day, thank you. I don’t know how many people out there still remember it beyond maybe ten or so friends I’m still in contact with all these years later. I’m sorry it disappeared for a while.

[lacefuneral]

ok i've seen some posts about the tumblr alternative cohost but none that were actually helpful so!

(disclaimer: i am very new to this website. users who have been there longer can and should chime in with additions and/or corrections)

Cohost Introduction Post

What is cohost?

Cohost is a fledgling website that is essentially a tumblr clone, but with its own culture and site-specific features. It is also very much a work in progress. You are encouraged to talk in the cohost forum to suggest changes for devs, report bugs, and upvote other people's suggestions. This website WILL grow and change over time. And as such, I do not know if/when the information I share here will be outdated. Edit: To answer an ask I received, anyone can join cohost without an invite. It used to be invite-only. It is not this way anymore.

Is "adult content" allowed there?

Yes. Cohost is not on the app store, meaning that it is not subject to Apple's specifications. You can post illustrations, writing, and photographs (cohost does not support any video formats at this time, just gifs). Cohost has an elaborate filtering and trigger warning system (moreso than tumblr), and you can disable adult content for your entire account or for individual tags. I actually don't engage with the adult content at all on there. Visual CSEM (both real and fictional) is specifically forbidden (although frankly I think the guidelines could be stricter wrt written content. Still, does seem to handle this better than AO3 does, going as far to say that written content about real minors is forbidden.)

How are minors protected?

The minimum age to join cohost is 16, and requires proof of parental permission to join. Users who are under 18 are automatically age-gated and cannot view adult content.

If cohost isn't on the app store, how is it used?

You can, of course, use cohost on a computer, but it is designed with mobile in mind. Opening the website on any IOS browser, clicking "share", and then "add to home screen" will install an app for you to use. The same can be done on an android. There is a guide here.

How does cohost work?

First, you create an account. Then you wait for approximately two days (read: weekdays) for the account to be activated. This is done to prevent spam bots. In the meantime, edit your profile. List some interests, your pronouns, your other social media links. Give yourself an icon. Note: icon and banner file sizes are small. You may need to shrink and compress images.

After the two days are up, make your first post! Write a basic introduction (with what you feel comfortable you feel sharing) and list some interests you like, maybe some hobbies, media, etc. And then tag this post with "#welcome to cohost". This will let existing members know that someone new has joined, and they may initiate conversation and/or follow you.

Next, go to the search and type in "The Cohost Global Feed" and click on the tag. Bookmark this tag. This is essentially one giant community space where you can find random users. (There is currently some discourse on the website as to whether this tag existing is a "bad thing" or not because "cohost isn't supposed to have a global tag". Just ignore that lol). Next, go back to search and type in things you like. TV shows, maybe. Video games. Music. Anything. See if people have posted in the tags. Follow them. Comment on their stuff. Click "like" to bookmark the post if you want to.

Most crucially, make sure that you bookmark the actual tag so you can look in that tag again later without having to manually type it each and every time. Also, you get a feed called "bookmarked tags" which allows you to scroll through all of them at once, which replaces the "for you" feature other websites have.

You can "share" a post (called "rebug" in user slang) which serves the same purpose as a reblog on tumblr. In a rebug, you can add your own tags or comment in the body of the post. Cohost users do not talk in tags as much as tumblr users - they tend to prefer to speak in the body of a rebug, or in the comment section (replies). At this time, you cannot view all reblogs. But you can view all comments in the comment section. Any post that is rebugged will preserve the tags of the OP, with any additional tags added being attributed to you. Rebugs are named after the website mascot Eggbug, a purple bee-like insect.

Posts are called "chosts" - and shitposting is called "shitchosting." Two examples of global shitposting tags are "#css crimes" - which is when a person does goofy things with the HTML/CSS editor to make colorful text, fake chat windows, and such - and "#shitchosting" which is a general shitposting tag. I've also seen people use tags like "#random".

If a post makes you laugh, check out the OP's profile. See if they post frequently, and if you have any common interests. If you realize you want to block or mute someone instead, you can.

You can send asks just like on tumblr, but your inbox must be manually opened first. So remember to do that.

How do I look at my own blog?

This is one of my gripes about the UI. You would think, intuitively, you would click here (at the top of the screen). But you would be wrong!

It is ACTUALLY under the sidebar menu, called "Profile." And I'm not the only one to to complain about this. (To get back to your dashboard, by the way, you click on the cohost logo.)

Are there sideblogs?

Yes! Each sidepage (sideblog) has its OWN set of likes AND followed pages (blogs). This allows you to easily switch between multiple sets of dashboards. A lot of users use this to have a SFW dashboard and an adult content dashboard. But it works like tumblr, too. You can have a side page/dashboard for whatever you'd like. Maybe one of your pages is for programming. Maybe another is for photography. You switch between your pages by clicking the arrow next to your icon/username at the top of the screen. ("Ohhhhh.... THAT'S what that's for.")

What's the userbase on there like?

Mostly programmers. Trans people. Furry artists. Plural systems. Furry trans plural programmers. Certainly a lot of shitposters. The website is trans-run and, as such, has zero tolerance for TERFs. Everyone seems pretty friendly from what I can tell. And there's very much a culture of "follow someone randomly based on their vibes" that doesn't happen as much on tumblr. Tumblr is more like "I really like this TV show, I'm going to follow 40 blogs about just this interest." Because the cohost community is so much smaller, there is a lot less content overall, especially fandom content. You can't follow 40 fandom pages because your fandom tag has a total of 3 posts, all made by one person approximately a year ago (well. for me anyway).

Cohost, then, actually has much more in common with real-life socialization. You seek out people with interests that may be very different from your own, and to find a common interest is very exciting! Unlike tumblr, you are encouraged to tag as much as possible. This allows your posts to be seen, to find common interests. And, of course, don't forget to look in "#Welcome To Cohost" too! You may find some new friends there.

What file formats can I post in?

Currently, I am aware of basic image formats working (like jpeg, png) animated gifs, and mp3s. You currently cannot upload videos to cohost. I believe the reason is not related to server costs, but rather as a way to curb the uploading of copyrighted content.

How does cohost make money?

There are no ads, and yet, as far as I am aware, cohost is operating comfortably. There is, however, an entirely optional "cohost plus" that is $5 USD a month. Currently, there are a few perks, but not enough to convince me.

What if I think something about cohost should change?

Cohost has a forum where users can submit ideas for features and other users can discuss/upvote those ideas.

Here is a list of posts made for newcomers to read:

[pluraldeepdive]

I want to share this article archived by the wayback machine in 1997 and I believe to be written by Dr. John M. Grohol. Here is a link to the archived page. I feel like it's helpful to see a piece of history like this because, even almost THIRTY YEARS later, people are still called fake or have doubt cast on them for simply being open on the Internet about having DID or being a system!

_________________________

"The Prevalence of Multiples Online

Multiple Personality Disorder or DID Seems Prevalent Online

We see a growing number of individuals who visit our Web site and write us e-mail, as well as participate in mental health chats, that seem to have multiple personality disorder (MPD), or the disorder's newest name, dissociative identity disorder (DID). People with DID seem to be in many support rooms found online for mental health support. We even host a popular discussion forum for MPD/DID here on Mental Health Net.

So what's this all about? Is DID really that prevalent online?? Does the online world somehow draw more people with DID to it? Is DID being diagnosed more often because of more accurate tests? What's going on here??

From our experiences, it seems clear that a little bit of everything is involved in the greater numbers of people who suffer from this disorder showing up online. First is the greater knowledge and education amongst behavioral healthcare professionals about this disorder. If they know what to look for, which they are better trained to do more now than ever, they are more likely to be able to accurately diagnosed MPD/DID in individuals. This has been accomplished by greater research in this area in recent years as well as more information being trickled down to the clinicians who actually do most of the diagnosing and therapy of individuals with this disorder.

In addition to greater numbers of individuals being diagnosed with this disorder, many more of those people who get the diagnosis are coming online to find out more information and support for their problem. While there is still debate about how prevalent MPD/DID is within the general population, finding reliable and accurate epidemiological information about the disorder can often be difficult, if not downright impossible. Much of this is due to the political debate which has surrounded the diagnosis of MPD/DID in the past few years (Coons, 1989). Many misconceptions still exist and are even perpetrated by some mental health professionals. So information found online may fill some people's needs with this disorder.

But because it is a rare disorder, it also means there won't be any support groups available in their community for this problem. Like rare medical conditions and the popularity support groups for those have enjoyed online, so too are MPD/DID groups popular online. People with this disorder have found one another and can discuss issues that only other people with DID/MPD can understand and sympathize with.

Last, the symptoms of DID/MPD are such that there is often times an accompanying (and justified) social fear, out of concern of the ramifications of switching personalities when in the company of others (whether at work, at home, at a party, etc.). This fear is not nearly as powerful or present when in an online chat room or discussion forum. This is probably because such forums are devoid of many of the social cues and nonverbal communications which may encourage an emerging personality to present him or herself. It may be easier, in fact, for someone who suffers from MPD/DID to talk to others in such a forum because of the ability to remain present in a singular personality.

There is no clear reason why so many people seem to have this disorder in online chat rooms. It is likely a combination of factors which have resulted in this perception. This should be no need or cause for alarm, since individuals who have DID/MPD we've spoken to have overwhelmingly given high marks to the experiences they've had in online support rooms and forums. As more and more people come online, we will expect to find more rare mental disorders represented, especially those which have a social component which may be helped through an online modality of communications."

[styrofauxm]

So...you're questioning if you are aromantic and/or asexual...

...and you don't know where to start.

Well, here! This is my compilation of all the things that helped me figure myself out. I would adore it if other arospec and/or acespec individuals added on as well.

Resources/Research:

1. Forums

Being able to talk to people about my experiences was really helpful and validating. Being able to see other people's experiences that were similar to mine was also so helpful.

For asexuality, there's AVEN. There's a specific section for questioning people as well. For that section, I recommend only posting, not reading other people's posts. There's also this FAQ section with a ton of helpful information about asexuality in general. Overall, I suggest browsing the site, and posting any questions you have.

(small disclaimer: in my time there, I found AVEN to be pretty unfriendly to aromantic people. I have it on good authority that the problem has been solved, but I want to be honest that my personal experience wasn't all sunshine and rainbows)

For aromanticism, there's Arocalypse. It's a smaller forum than AVEN, but also supportive and helpful. There's an Anonymous Q&A section, where you can post without an account, as well as a Discussion section where you can learn more about aromanticism. There's also a non-forum FAQ, with additional resources linked at the top. Similarly to AVEN, stay off the posts of other questioning people, browse the site, and post any questions you have.

If neither of those work for you, I recommend Reddit, but only as a last resort. The moderation there can be interesting, and there's a lot of in-fighting. But, in my opinion, it's important to have that space if you need it.

2. Videos

Seeing people talk about being asexual/aromantic is really helpful for solidifying that they are real things for real people, not just concepts on the internet. They also provide the information in a more streamlined way than forums do.

My number one recommendation for this is Ash Hardell's series on asexuality and aromanticism. There's 3 parts (One Two Three). There's a ton of good information there, presented by asexual and aromantic people.

My second recommendation is to just go to Youtube and look up "am I asexual" or "am I aromantic". This will pull up a lot of videos of people talking through their own experiences.

3. Articles

If you want to read about asexuality and/or aromanticism, it's better to use the forums. Articles about us are often outdated or include incorrect information. Similarly, the forums are awful at giving information about what sexual and/or romantic attraction is.

That's what articles are more useful for. There's a ton out there describing the experience of sexual and romantic attraction, as well as the development of it in humans. That's very helpful for figuring out if you actually feel it or not.

When looking stuff up about sexual/romantic attraction, make sure you use sources you can trust. Sexual attraction is an area where pseudoscience thrives. If you don't know the source, this site is great for checking if it is factual and unbiased.

Non-Research Stuff To Do:

1. Write down your thoughts

One of the issues I ran into while questioning is that I would figure something out, then a few weeks later, doubt myself on that. So I started writing stuff down. This both helps you remember stuff, and verifies that it happened.

2. Just try out the label(s)

Just use them. It doesn't hurt anybody, and you can always stop. You can use the umbrella terms acespec and/or arospec, or just use aromantic and/or asexual (which also function as umbrella terms). This will give you a feel for if the label is right for you. Remember, it's okay to be wrong.

3. Seek out positivity

Go find asexual and/or aromantic people who celebrate being asexual and aromantic. It's helpful in feeling comfortable enough to use the label(s).

What Not To Do:

1. Do not read other questioning people's stuff

This isn't helpful, just confusing. Trust me. Read it after you have yourself figured out.

2. Do not go through the microlabels

Going through microlabels is helpful once you know you are acespec and/or arospec. Not before. Put the queer wiki down. It won't save you.

3. Do not go into spaces that focus on issues

This also isn't helpful, just upsetting. These spaces are helpful for people who are confident in their identities. Not for people questioning.

Other:

Go through the notes! Hopefully, people have added stuff!

[vintage-vermin]

I like Ongezellig, it popped up like half a decade ago on my feed randomly. Thought it was cutely done, saw Maya and was "oh no, she just like me fr fr" Waited and saw part 3 show up and then the rest.

I sometimes just have stuff that I love, but don't even bother engaging the fandom in any way. There are shows that have helped me be less of a cunty teenager decades ago that i love, but I have never gone to a fan forum or searched tags on any site. Sometimes I only search out the creative parts of the fandom and don't bother with discussions.

I love the random little things you can find on sites like Tumblr or other art-focused platforms for Ongezellig. Redraws, OC's in the shows style and fun pieces of some of the background characters Because oh, oh no, I'm not a fan of the rest of the community. But we'll hit that up later. Later. The creator made webcomics before. Had a little youtube channel with YTP's and some random reviewy stuff. Had an old Deviantart with some furry and the rare pony thing. Did an interview for a dutch comic collection ages ago that was a fun read.

(So, you only have to mail this letter) (Mailbox has a colloquial word where it's shortened to 'bus', same word as the vehicular one. "To put a letter on the bus") (... Yes, the one without wheels) He had a little comic named 'Caiasos' that was a bit of a disjointed adventure. Followed with Mayo & Curry. Simplistic 3-4 panel comics with a bit of a newspaper format.

(One day, Mayo wondered what ink tasted like) (You know that's poisonous, right?) (The box reads "Correction Fluid") A lot of the Mayo & Curry stuff is dutch snackbar puns or kinda standard early webcomic 'sleaze' as I can only describe it. Ever read like Chugsworth Academy?

(Hey Curry, it's not really clear what our relationship is in this comic. Are we family, girlfriends, roommates...) (Haha, silly Mayo. If you read the comics well it's very obvious.) (Anyway, time for walks!) Cute enough I suppose. I used to read Sexylosers when I was like 15, who am I to truly complain.

The creator did some creative & animation schooling and made a fun project. Some of you may have seen this one fly by, too!

Somewhere around the same time, he also made a little bumper for a comic festival.

He would also do little bits on dutch history, wether it be the Dutch History Iceberg video that got popular a bit ago or his more comedic Stille Willem videos. Studio Massa, the creator, was looking to get the Ongezellig show picked up. Some of the early episodes do throw in a school shooting thing and some very dutch middleschool discrimination to the Belgians. Granted, these are pilots. Would it have been picked up, I'm sure a few things here and there would get a fix up. This did not come to pass after a long time of trying to showcase it and even finishing his pilot series. However, he did land a job at a national tv station. I hope to see new projects of his over time, maybe even bring 1 or 2 of his old characters to new life in another show.

Little write-up on my experience with a subsection of it's fandom and community under the cut, feel free to ignore at your own discretion.

I went on a little deepdive to find out more a bit ago, I didn't follow the Petje-af or the Discord at the times of their inception or popularity. One of the first places you end up is imageboards and booru's. What a treat. Some of the ' documentation' of the shows reception online is very muddled. Encyclopedia Dramatica kinda stuff. Inane terms and barely understandable references to sites or people. He also has a KF thread that lists a large amount of uncomfortable information. By the time I found a few of those boards and booru's, it was already clear that they had some mass-extinction thing happen a few years ago and had to rebuild an imageboard and a booru or 2. Dragging myself to the very first page already got me greeted with "WE WILL REBUILD" sentiments. I get that there's a certain combination in the show that will bring in a specific audience. Underage characters and some historically charged discrimination. There's an underlying edginess to one of the characters that brings in a certain type of people. I have seen multiple posts and write-ups spanning a few years between eachother where people sort of announce they are done with the shows fanbase on this level. Lot's of adult art of these characters. While most places seem to be purged of this and plenty of (THIS POST HAS BEEN DELETED) messages all over by this time. There's a sentiment shared across a lot of these types of fans. "fucking tr00ns ruined my fucking show" I've come across plenty of junk where some one makes a call to action because they found some one with a trans flag in their bio and posted some art of the show. I can't really find the root of this problem. All that seems to have actually happened is that a buncha people were being massive bigots in the discord, got banned for it and then they got indignant about it. There's mention that some one spammed some boards with the show ages ago and somehow invited tons of transphobia into the room. Like I said, it's all muddled and written from certain perspectives.

It's like that one part of the K-on fanbase really. I just find strange and a bit of a shame that there's such an active and hostile subsection of this little fandom. I have come across multiple write-up from people who just can't interact with their fun little show without some out-there types showing up. Even little videos that try to bring this show to a larger audience find their comments littered with bizarre callouts to the small imageboard groups. A prized possession of that snippet of the community is a game about Mymy shooting up her school. I understand this is supposed to be a niche layer of fandom that's still pretty isolated to 4/5 sites at most. I understand that there will always be outliers. I dunno, frustration about a fun little show made manifest.

[secondbeatsongs]

Please elaborate on the Judy Blume fact

from the mid-00s to the early '10s, Random House had a website called "Random Buzzers", a place for kids and teens to talk about books

they had fun activities (short story contests, writing prompts, quizzes, etc), and for some of the activities, you got rewarded points, which you could then use to buy books in their online store.

it was a fun time! I really liked writing short stories and poems and stuff for the contests, and this wasn't like (afaik)...predatory? it wasn't something where the site was going to take these stories and use them later, it was just...for fun.

unfortunately, the site is down now, and with it all of the cool stories/art/poems/etc that people made. :/ but thankfully, I have most of my stuff backed up.

anyway! this site also had events where an author would join their discussion forum for a few days to answer a bunch of questions and talk with people. and one time they had Judy Blume join, and I got to chat with her a bit!

I talked about the books of hers I'd read, and showed a picture of my copy of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and she told me that she was impressed I had a copy that was so old, and also that she'd always been annoyed with the cover art for that edition, because the cut of Margaret's dress made her look pregnant. xD

I also talked about how because I was homeschooled, I liked reading books about kids going to public school, because I would never know what that was like - and she said that made her wish she had written her books more descriptively, which I thought was sweet.

anyway, we had a nice talk, and she left the forum a couple days later, and that was that.

then, some time later, Judy Blume was at the national book festival, so I went, hoping that she would sign my book. and when I got up to the front of the autograph line, I said, "hi, I don't know if you remember me, but I talked with you once on random buzzers"

and...she did remember me! she knew my username, and that I was homeschooled, and she was excited that I had come to see her, and that she got to sign my book (even if it was a cover design she didn't like xD)

she just seemed really nice, and I'm glad to have had that experience.

[ghostsandmirrors]

Questions for the mun - all Basics please? Don't hate me lol

Questions for the mun.

pfft, I could never. I am going to miss one question because someone else sent it, too.

(under read more because that's 12 questions)

When did you first start writing? 2008. I was on Mibba (writing site) and someone's journal post was an advert for a Proboards Potter forum.

In what language did you start writing? English. It was only like 2019 that I started trying to learn another language och jag är så dålig på talar svenska x.x (and I'm so bad at talking Swedish)

If your mother tongue is not the language you write now, what caused you to switch languages? N/A - one day I'll get good enough at Swedish to RP in it but that ain't today.

What was the first muse that you’ve written? Her name was Judy Lewis on that Proboards site in 2008. I also wrote her twin brother (Jesse Lewis). She was a Slytherin half-blood, he was a Hufflepuff half-blood.

I once answered an ask about her on the Bringer's blog so here's the link.

Do you still write your first muse? Nope. I consider remaking her sometimes--especially when memes ask about first muses--but I think she belongs in 2008 and in the fanfic I was writing at the time.

What is the muse that you write for the longest? This is answered here. The answer is Bam (first made 2009 on a Potter site I made); 2009 Gerard Way had that vibe and then they dyed their hair red and Danger Days came out and I was like 👀👀👀

Also because of Bam, and me being so specific when it came to making graphics (avatars and signatures), I can tell you which year a Gerard Way picture came from between the years of 2003 and 2013 based entirely on their hair.

I used to think I was neurotypical btw. Teenage me making a Notepad document of Gerard Way GIFs organised by hair style and year ('long black, 2005') like, 'yeah, this is a normal level of interest in a subject.' It is not, but it is a fun fact I get to whip out now.

In what style did you start to write (First person, third person, *-style or novel-style?) I have always written in third person, past tense, I guess novel-style? Used to do a lot of one-liners but--and I actually mentioned this to someone the other day--I ended up on a lot of sites with minimum word counts (usually only like 100 words, which sounds like a lot but is surprisingly small).

My longest post pre-Tumblr was like 2k words because me and a thread partner were just seeing how long we could make our posts in that specific thread. We also tried to go back to one-liners only for a thread (for fun) and we were struggling.

What caused you to start writing? What was your key point? General writing was probably this one book series about a man who lived with a family that made clay dragon statues and the dragon statues came to life. I looked it up; The Last Dragon Chronicles. I did not read all of them.

RP specifically was the site advert coming when I had like just started writing a Potter fanfic of Goblet of Fire from the point of view of Random OC (Judy Lewis, who was a Gryffindor in the fic).

Do you regret starting writing? No. It taught me how to spell, for starters. I was dogshit at spelling and grammar back in the day and I've gotten so much better just through practice and actually learning what things are used for. Also like... you get the best reactions. Even if I ever managed to quit RP--which I don't think I will--I would never be able to fully stop writing because of those reactions. One way or another, I will inflict fictional suffering on people.

As a kid, I wanted to be an author. Making characters and worlds is way too fun.

Is there anything you would have changed when you started writing now that you have more experience? RP specific; no. Writing in general; I'd have started writing proper English from the beginning and not spent years deciding that full stops are only used for the end of a paragraph, actually.

Also some of the older characters don't have their apps saved at all and I'm still mad about it. I struggled making Arnulf because his old app and all his old information is gone. I'm gonna die mad at past me about like 17 different things and it's fine because they deserve it.

How do you describe writing / rp to others? Generally I don't, but if I had to, I would describe it as 'y'know writing a story? It's like that but you only control one character.' It's not accurate--NPCs exist--but like it's the closest I can get considering I'm genuinely trash at describing anything lmao

On what platform did you start to write? Accidentally answered this in the first answer. Oops. Proboards. I actually refused to go to other forum sites for the longest time because I didn't understand the coding for posts. On Proboards it was like [b]bold[/b], on InvisionFree it was <b>bold</b>, I think Jcink was [b]bold[/b]?

I did eventually also go on InvisionFree (one site, a Buffy/The Vampire Diaries crossover site) and Jcink (multiple sites, mostly Marvel/DC crossover sites, a couple of panfandom sites, a town site?, and at least one Potter site). Jcink might be my favourite of the three.

There was also 'Boards' which was to Proboards what Jcink was to InvisionFree (Jcink sites have 'powered by InvisionFree' at the bottom, Boards sites had 'powered by Proboards').

[hpowellsmith]

Hello there! I've been wanting to replay the older Baldur's Gate games, and was searching around for mlm NPC romance mods. I saw yours mentioned and found your site with some googling, but it seems the place they were hosted at is gone now (Spellhold Studios). I was wondering if you still have the mods available somewhere? Either way, I hope you have a great day!

OK, this has made go down a modding-community rabbit hole! I hadn't done anything with our Baldur's Gate 2 mods, or looked at them really, since 2015 and I really appreciate it because they're something that brought my wife and I a ton of joy, and they were the first interactive narratives I made.

Links, descriptions, and comments below because it is Long:

I got in touch with folks on the Gibberlings3 forum which is, wonderfully, still going strong, and have given permission for Faren and Nathaniel to be uploaded to the Spellhold Studios GitHub (which has a bunch of other mods too - do check out Adrian, Isra, and Ninde in particular!) to the team maintaining it. That may be a little while as some of the team are ill right now, but once I hear that it's done, I'll post about it here; I've also been pointed to some links where the mods were mirrored. Note that I haven't tested these myself on a current BG2 install, but it is easy to uninstall WeiDU mods if there's a problem.

Faren is a bisexual True Neutral fighter/thief (I can't remember if he's dual-classed or multi-classed) who's easygoing, down-to-earth, and up for partying, with a bit of a checkered past - his adventuring party died in one of the dungeons you can visit in BG2, and since then he's been picking up dodgy jobs, feeling a bit adrift, and trying to get his life back on track. That's where the PC comes in! You can befriend him or romance him (starting with either a casual or more committed tone, then committing further if you want to), and he has a personal quest in which a shady figure from his past wants him to do one last job. He was our third mod, and we'd developed our skills with writing and scope a lot by then. When I play BG2, I play with Faren! You can currently download Faren here. It's the version updated in 2015 with more banters with modded NPCs and the Enhanced Edition characters; there may be compatibility issues installing it with other newer mods but do give it a try.

I found The Luxley Family, which was our second mod, on the GitHub here. From a cursory (rusty) glance it looks like it should be compatible with Enhanced Edition, but the storyline is only for Shadows of Amn and doesn't continue into Throne of Bhaal. Sebastian and Andrei (Chaotic Neutral bard with a custom kit and Lawful Neutral monk respectively) are members of a mysterious, reclusive family who are under a curse. Sebastian's a worldly playwright who's showing his polite but moody teenage cousin Andrei the sights when they bump into the PC. They aren't romanceable, but you can have a fling with Sebastian, who's bisexual, if you let/help him mess up his life sufficiently.

Nathaniel is a Lawful Good gay fighter with a lot of feelings. He was our first mod and I am really proud of the impact he had on a lot of people and even other games back in the day, but if you play, go in expecting a LOT of feelings good and bad, relationship drama, and angst! (There's something very sad about the fact that as teens we could not imagine a D&D setting without homophobia back then; the idea of a knightly order thinking well of gay people just didn't cross our minds. it's extraordinary how much better a lot of things are now, including the queerness in D&D streams, books, and of course Baldur's Gate 3. Interestingly, we didn't include homophobia in the Luxley Family or Faren and I don't remember how conscious that was; maybe we'd become more hopeful by then.) You can download an outdated version of Nathaniel here but I don't think it will be compatible with Enhanced Edition.

Thank you so much for messaging! I didn't realise they weren't able to be downloaded anymore and I am really keen for digital art to be preserved (as well as players getting to smooch hot guys, of course).

(Digression - my wife and I have a couple of almost-finished mods on our computer: a lesbian cleric of Talos which she wrote, and a bi Valygar romance that I wrote. And, if it's among two computers' ago worth of external hard drive storage, the ending for the Luxley Family story. Who knows, maybe one day...)

[da12thkind]

Tumblr and The Old Internet Re-Awakens, An Opinion Essay

This is going to be a super long post about my thoughts on the current state of the internet, with a chunk of what I'm about to say having been stuff I've already said elsewhere on other sites. To save your dash, I'll be putting a READ MORE break.

The fact that Twitter and Reddit have basically been destroyed by their own hubris is both hilarious and sad. It's funny because "ha ha rich man's hubris" but also sad because this is very emblematic of the current direction many social media companies that have been at the top for too long are going.

Ever since the muskrat purchased Twitter, it was clear from the beginning that something seriously wrong had happened, with worse decisions to follow. Something I hadn't realized was just how extensive the ripple effects of this would be. Reddit is now being destroyed by their leader's desire for more and more money, as if they needed any more.

I've been having this conversation with my friends via Discord and with strangers on the Starmen dot net forums. The writing is on the walls. The internet is moving towards a future that caters to advertisers more than its users. If there's even the slightest hint of getting more money by screwing over users, the higher ups of a given site will be chomping at the bit.

Where does that leave us?

Well, with Reddit and Twitter both now in a state of complete and total self-destruction, albeit rather slowly, we have seen an influx of new and returning users. Fantastic! I love when an old place gets new life breathed into it.

That being said, I don't believe that Tumblr is the bastion of The Old Internet, far from it, and many of you would agree.

Instead, I think that the resurgence in Tumblr's popularity could be just the first step towards the return of The Old Internet. We have the power to go back to the days of making our own websites. Information on web design and web programming are available online for free, in addition to many places offering free hosting services for a basic website or blog that don't need many bells or whistles (just don't go to GoDaddy).

Tumblr, in my opinion, once you know how to use the advanced editing tools, can make for a great "Baby's First Web Blog." There are some users on here that have made GORGEOUS blogs that will absolutely blow you away.

What about peer-to-peer communications?

We've seen that Discord has been another victim to the plague that is internet gentrification. They've removed the discriminators for usernames, had a store put in, and so many other little changes that have consistently annoyed the end users.

That being said... Discord is not going to be falling apart anytime soon. It's still a fantastic way to connect with many people at once and have quick access to all your different communities.

However, you could make the case, and I certainly try to, that internet forums fulfill the same thing. It is true that forums for many topics have drifted into the void of internet history, but is that not simply the nature of the internet? Communities sprout up, thrive, have an internal way, break apart, and start anew. We've seen that with many Discord servers, albeit rather small ones.

I will still hold my ground that forums should be revitalized if we truly want to go back to the days of old.

What does the future hold?

I... don't know. Despite my vast horde of opinions, research, and second-hand accounts of what The Old Internet was like and how The Current Internet is becoming, I cannot say for absolute certainty that we will see a total collapse of these tech empires. At the very least, however, I do believe that they will become hollowed shells of their former selves.

I have yet to talk about YouTube and its history, and, to be quite frank with you all, I simply must avoid that topic for now. All I will say is that I implore my fellow content creators, specifically those that create Video On-Demand content for YouTube and TikTok, to look into creating your own websites to host your content in the event that something happens to these empires, too. If you don't have offline copies of your videos, do so when you can.

That will be it for now. Thank you for reading this essay. I love your faces. Stay safe.

[mxjackparker]

If you're thinking about getting into online fandom roleplaying, whether you're new or coming back to it, here's a post about how to do that!

I've seen posts going around recently about how online fandom roleplaying is dying off, but there are still thriving roleplaying spaces for those interested enough to look. Here's how to get into it!

Consider what you want to roleplay:

What fandoms do you want to roleplay and how popular are they?

Do you want to be completely anonymous?

Would you like to send rapid shorter responses?

Would you like a long-term roleplay, or a one-off?

Are you seeking NSFW content?

Also, who do you want to roleplay and how much do you know about that character or their setting? Do a quick bit of research by looking at their fan wiki or taking another look at the content the character comes from. Look up a few memorable phrases they say and mannerisms they have, to make roleplaying them authentic.

Decide what website to use:

Depending on what kinds of things you want to roleplay, and your style preferences. you may want to choose a different site. Here are some examples.

Rolechat.org: An anonymous roulette type chat site, where you are matched with a random person using the same tags as you. You can add tags for fandoms or pairing you wish to roleplay with. Roleplays here are fast-paced, have shorter replies, and you can find many potential roleplayers under each tag. There is an 18+ section, however there is no age verification to access it, so I would not recommend any NSFW roleplaying here as you can't know the partner's age. You can also save a log of your roleplays!

Tumblr: If you search certain tags, often [fandom] rp will do, you'll find roleplayers and people seeking roleplay partners! A roleplay blog is an option, but you can also find partners to roleplay with in your DMs.

CheRP: A forum where you can post ads to seek roleplay partners. You can get verified here, and choose to only roleplay with those who are over 18. Those using this site are much more likely to want to plan roleplays and do something long-term, and may exchange e-mails or social media with you!

Discord: If you're someone seeking group roleplays, this may be your best bet! There are many discord servers which cater to finding roleplay partners, to be found on disboard.org, and if you join a large roleplay server for this then there will be ads by smaller servers for you to find your niche! You can add friends on here, keep track of roleplays and search through them afterwards, plus chat instantly.

There are many more - and you can feel free to mix and match!

Learn the etiquette:

You'll learn the culture of the site you use as you go, but you should know the basics before you start.

When you want to speak OOC (out of character), you should use brackets ((like this)) or [like this], and in this way you can give background info on a scenario or make suggestions about how the roleplay should go.

Make a dedicated roleplay e-mail, in case someone wants to exchange socials and/or e-mails after a really good roleplay!

Prepare some starters or ideas:

I know it's nerve-wracking, but once you've decided what you want to roleplay and where... it's time to put yourself out there! Write up a starter, or an outline of a roleplay you'd like to work on, or an ad for a roleplay partner, and lets get going!

If you want to help out with my current project about online roleplay, I'm surveying online fandom roleplayers for a book I'm writing here! Find more info about OOC: Exploring Online Fandom Roleplay here.