#and I would like to make like longform blog posts on there

[cicadaland]

I made a spacehey page and I'm going to set it up :) it's spacehey.com/houg

[winternimbus]

god. i'm catching up on what happened to moira predstrogen and i am fuming just reading about it. i don't have any longform analysis for it but the fact that this site's staff can just essentially entirely nuke the blog of a prominent trans woman overnight because she posted a COMPLETELY SAFE FOR WORK TRANSITION TIMELINE OF HERSELF, and not to mention the deranged mass-reporting mob justice that she's been facing which lead to her blog getting annihilated wholesale! plus like! with how staff won't reinstate her blog AT ALL, alongside making cheeky snarky aggressive comments to her--sit down and think for one moment, no wonder why us transfems are so constantly angry all the time; this is the double-standard kiwifarms harassment campaign bullshit we have to CONSTANTLY face on a day-to-day basis! you just know if this horseshit happened to a prominent trans guy on this site we would NOT hear the end of it. but when it happens to a prominent tgirl here, suddenly it's justified because she's "evil" or someshit like that? make it make sense learning that callout post culture is predominantly and disproportionately wagered against transfems, and that people will literally just make things up about trans women--and people will uncritically eat it up and go out to burn the witch without thinking is just. that stuff flips your worldview on it's head. especially as a trans woman. anyways predstrogen is 100% justified in her righteous anger about this case. i hope she wins the harassment case that she's planning on filing

[olderthannetfic]

Most of my dash is people moving to cohost or mastodon or bluesky over the photomatt thing and posting goodbyes. I don’t know if *tumblr* is dying, but the specific community I love here appears to be leaving. This isn’t my first time seeing a social media community crumble, but I feel particularly adrift rn, especially with the collapse of the NaNoWriMo forums, which were my main social platform for years and years.

Any advice as to how I can find a new social platform that fits me? Ideally it would be a space that supports longform text and back-and-forths in the comments.

--

The key thing to realize is that lots of platforms we loved in the past had absolutely garbage features—at least at the point when we set up camp there. Both LJ and Tumblr had features that were absolute ass and then somewhat improved before tanking again in various ways. The next hot platform will also suck, just like the last 10.

If you want longform text and discussion, start by posting longform text and responding to anything even remotely response-worthy that anyone sends you.

Granted, twitter clones directly prevent longform text, but a lot of the time, the main sticking point is culture. Everyone told me that Tumblr wasn't good for longform text, that it violates social norms to post it without a readmore, etc. Years of How To Tumblr posts discouraged this behavior. Tumblr haters pining for LJ still constantly tell me that discussion is impossible here due to the lack of threaded comments...

To that, I say it's only impossible for cowards who aren't willing to fill people's dashboards with 37 of the same post and all its chatty reblogs on the same day.

Cowards, I tell you!

Who says I can't post 90% text-only and a million long-ass posts to the gifset-and-no-commentary website?

--

The actual features are only marginally important. Social conventions like linking to the ask you're referencing or snipping irrelevant stuff from the prior e-mail chain can take care of most feature issues.

The important part is either following a community or making the community come to you. Being consistently active is a huge part of it. If you're publicly findable and friendly, people will come hang out where you are or invite you places. It can take a while to get visible enough, but it does work. It's a matter of having the energy and time to invest.

Another key is to recognize that a lot of people feel adrift. If your blog/forum/discord server is the logical place for them to collect, they will do so. They have to know it exists and they have to find it welcoming, but that's all it really takes to collect up people who are feeling lonely and unmoored.

[cosmerelists]

What The Radiant Orders Would See as their Fandom Job on the Internet

Orders on the internet requested by @justheretoreadnotwrite :) 

Justheretoreadnotwrite pointed me to this very fun 17th Shard thread, and asked if I could do a riff on the Radiant Orders being on the internet. Since I wanted to try avoiding the jokes already there, I thought I would focus in on how they'd act in fandom on the internet. Specifically, what would each Order think is their Duty in Fandom?

1. Edgedancers: Finding & Leaving Comments for Zero-Kudo Fics

The Edgedancers make it their mission to listen to those who are forgotten--in this case, fics with no kudos, no comments, or no notes. The Edgedancers come to read them, like them, and comment on them!

2.  Lightweavers: Posting Fanart & Engaging in Character RP chats

You want your favorite character or OC to have art drawn of them? Just ask your nearest Lightweaver! Or, if you just wish you could roleplay with your favorite character, the Lightweavers can do that too. They are, like, VERY good at pretending to be other characters.

3. Bondsmiths: Writing Alt-Text

The Bondsmiths want to make sure that fandom is accessible to all, so they're out there writing descriptions and alt-text for any fanart or tweets or other images that screenreaders might struggle over. Barriers of communication are no match for our friendly Bondsmiths.

4. Truthwatchers: Writing Call-Out Posts

If someone is out there stealing art and posting it on their own blog/twitter/pinterest page as if it's their own....well, they better hope a Truthwatcher doesn't find them. Those Truthwatchers will be telling the original artist, and they may just write a call-out post if they have to.

5.Elsecallers: Writing, just, Really Excellent Analyses and Guides

The Elsecallers are the scholars of fandom. They are writing really in-depth analyses of both the original source and of your fanfic, and they're here posting guides about how to accurately portray, like, dyeing practices of x-century. 

6. Willshapers: Writing Character x Reader Fics and Creating OCs

The Willshapers are out there putting themselves into fandom worlds--and helping you do the same. They're great at creating their own OCs and/or self-inserts, and they're the ones writing all of the Character x Reader fics as well.

7. Stonewards: Writing the Majority of the Actual Fanfic

In terms of sheer output--like keeping the fandom running by doing the hard work of actually writing fics--the Stonewards are leading the way. If there's such a thing as the "front lines" of fandom, I think it's people filling A03 and creating longform content.

8. Windrunners: Forum/Discord Moderation

The Windrunners want to make sure that fandom spaces are protected & safe for their members, so they're likely to take on the role of administrators or moderators--kinda like, you know, being the king's guard but here the the "king" is 19 people who all want to talk about the same character.

9. Dustbringers: Being the Most Popular Person in the Fandom

The Dustbringers are the "great power / great responsibility" order. They know they could level that city or dissolve that person into atoms or whatever, but they have more restraint that that. Probably. In the same way, Dustrbingers are The Person in their fandom. If they choose to retweet or reblog or boost your fic/art/analysis, you are made, my friend. On the other hand, if they decide you're an enemy...

10. Skybreakers: Following the Rules. The Internet Rules. 

Listen, the Skybreakers don't judge rules, they follow rules. So if a fandom on the internet has rules, the Skybreakers really have no choice to follow them. You know, like Rule 34 for example.

So yes, the Skybreakers are out there making sure there is porn of your favorite character. You're welcome.

[baejax-the-great]

ao3 exists, plus it doesnt even matter what terms i search for on tumblr 100% of the time theres fanfiction. literally you can search any words on this website and some kpop guy/ reader fanfics flood the results every single fucking time. plus some of us are not here for fandoms??? your circus/clown analogy is stupid

So I'm incredibly allergic to shrimp-- to the point where if I ate a single shrimp I would die, to the point where I don't really consider shrimp food anymore--and it's the weirdest thing, yesterday i went to Target to buy hair conditioner, and they were selling shrimp. Don't they know it wasn't what I was looking for and I can't eat it anyway? Why would they do this? Totally fucked up of those shrimp catchers to try to poison me like that.

But analogies clearly aren't your thing, so let me break this down for you.

AO3 does indeed exist, but your suggestion that fanfic live there and ONLY there is akin to saying that imgur exists, so nobody should be posting images, whether they be photos or art, on any other website. Twitter exists (sort of), so really nobody should be posting shit posts or hot takes that are fewer than 140 characters or whatever.

Not everyone uses AO3. There is no law saying that if you write fanfic, you must post it on AO3 and nowhere else. There will never be a law that says that, because that's not how the internet works. Tumblr, one of the few social media sites that allows longform blogging, is in fact a great alternative to AO3 for one-shots. It's a little trickier for multi-chapter posts, but I've seen people make it work.

AO3 is not social media. People can't DM there, send asks, make friends, bump their post to the top of the feed (unless they are an asshole who is about to get blocked by half of fandom for pulling that move). Do you like social media? I mean you're here, on tumblr, bothering a total stranger, so you must see some value to it. Guess what--fanfic authors also enjoy being on social media and sharing what they've been up to, including their WIPs.

Things you aren't looking for being part of your searches is literally just life on the internet at all times forever. Earlier this month I was looking for a reference of draped fabric for drawing purposes. I googled 'chiton drawing' (chitons like the ancient Greeks used to wear), and all I got were drawings of molluscs of the genus 'chiton.' Alright, I did a google search for "toga drawing" and learned that there is an anime girl named Toga and people very much enjoy drawing her. Were the artists of the molluscs or the anime girl to blame for me having to slog through a bunch of irrelevant pictures to find one that could help me with my drawing? No. They correctly labeled what they were doing. That's just life.

Seeing fanfic in the tag doesn't harm you. At all. It doesn't matter if you find it cringe, or it's a ship you don't like, or it's xReader. For like ten seconds you looked at words you didn't particularly like, and then you moved on. How is that different from literally any other post on tumblr? I see bad takes and essays I don't care about on this site all the time. It's called scrolling. Again, this will be the case for every website on the internet forever. Are you telling me you read every tweet in your feed? Every reddit post? Sometimes you see irrelevant stuff. I guarantee some of my mutuals have already deemed this long ass post irrelevant and are scrolling on by. What makes fiction that much more abhorrent to you than the rest of the nonsense?

If you really hate seeing fanfic, tumblr has content blocking and tag blocking. You can block the phrase "x Reader." You can block the tag "fanfic." You can block all sorts of things, and if that doesn't work, you can just block the writers whose existence annoys you.

Sorry man, you personally not liking fandom and not using tumblr for it has really no bearing on what everyone else is doing. Like it or not, tumblr is a hub of fandom, and fanfic authors are going to be a part of every fandom on this green earth. Just because you came to the circus in order to admire the pretty fabric used on the tents doesn't mean the performers are in the wrong for doing their thing.

[holydoublenegative]

It’s me Fem!

And this is my passion project comic Holy Double Negative

This blog will be exclusively centered around posting the comic pages for HDN, as well as any other content relating to it.

I’m currently a full-time student so as of now there won’t be a consistent uploading schedule. This is also my first Longform comic that I’ll be making so there’s bound to be a lot of learning as I go on how to approach this

But I’m very excited for starting this project. I’ve been wanting to make stories for since I could draw, and this is my first step :> so I hope you all will wish me luck

Also if I would have to write the material on holy double negative it would probably be PG-13 so please keep that in mind when the pages come out

Summary:

Riley Mars is the antichrist and he’s been told all his life that One he turns 18 he’ll bring upon the Apocalypse (which he very much does not want to do) and in retaliation for Lucifer creating the antichrist his brother Michael decided to have his own child to essentially be an anti-antichrist because he’s petty like that doesn’t want the apocalypse to happen not because he cares about the world ending, but just to piss off Lucifer, thus Michael has his child Able Iglesias, even after all the other archangels said it was a bad idea and to not do it but it happens so we’re here. And things only get more complicated.

wouldn’t the anti-antichrist just be Christ again? Well kinda, but also no.

[askmarshandbroflovski]

In response

((OOC

i checked this blog today to make sure it hadnt been deleted and saw a few things in the inbox. i want to clear up a couple of things. if this is the last post to ever hit this blog, so be it, but heres the endcase:

no, i decided not to make the end comic. i wrote this story nine years ago with someone i loved very much. it sort of became a net for my feelings about my loss and addiction. it was messy and weird and put a lot of my perspectives on display. ive been clean for two years now and i think its okay not to tie up this story with a neat end. like stan and kyle, i graduated and i got older and i have a career. thats all it would have been. i would have tried to ascribe some deeper meaning to making a dumb thing in high school, and i would have tried really hard to make it feel like the way things were back then were okay. i dont really feel like revisiting it. comics are hard. it took me a very long time to write and create something that can be read in maybe an afternoon. maybe you just had to be there. by following stan and kyle for as long as it took, you followed me and my coming to grips with being a person. really, this was just longform vent art about whatever dumb bullshit occurs to a high school junior. but i know it helped some people and entertained some other people so, i will be leaving it up. i just dont think ill ever slap a neat bow on it. my story wont have a neat end and neither will stan and kyles.

no, i wont end the craig blog either. i havent logged into that one in a while and i think if tumblr wants to wash it away thats okay. it was a way for me to reclaim some control over a narrative and maybe explore some deeper feelings (surprise, my birth father Also went missing, who knew) but it ultimately didnt amount to much. whatever happened to craig is up to you. my interpretation wasnt liked much anyway, and to have an askblog, you need people to be curious about the premise. i didnt connect as much with it and the frustration associated with running a project like that outweighed whatever i got out of it. i still dont know what that was.

anyway. i moved onto writing dnd campaigns and i am still alive. i still make art sometimes. i still get anxious when i see the inbox notifs, but these days, 9 times out of 10 its spam. i hope you guys all liked the south park post-pandemic aged up specials. i didnt, but im nitpicky and kind of bitter about the idea altogether. i havent seen an active askblog since 2017 but hey. be nice to people who make things. if you feel so inclined, maybe go make something for yourself. id like to thank the people who were curious and had fun here. id like to thank sekrit, neggy, rachel, five, ozzy and nadia. id like to thank everyone who let me tell my story. its just not over yet.

[shadowgast-recs-weekly]

Survey Results! Finally!

I’m finally getting to posting the survey results! It’s taken about a month longer than I expected – work got busy and my laptop screen is busted. Also, writing this out took was longer than I expected – ten pages in total.  And that’d be a horrible tumblr post.  So instead, here’s the main findings and the longform answers, and you can take a look at the google doc here for a more in depth analysis from each question.

Main Findings:

Respondents are about evenly divided as to whether or not they reblog.

People generally kudos and comment!

Nobody knows we have a fic randomizer.  (We have a fic randomizer. It’s on the spreadsheet)

Sixty percent of respondents either do or would self rec

The biggest write in answer for why people don’t rec is shyness

The biggest reason for why people don’t read is they don’t remember to go back

Opening up the reclist is contentious, people are generally okay with a script and could use a reminder

What we're doing/did in response:

There’s now a @reclister role on AiFL, request it to get pinged when the rec list goes up or to get reminders as to when to rec

I’m posting what fics have been recced with the 24 hour reminder and the tag list.

I’ve added ‘Less Common Authors’ as a possible theme

I’m going to open up the reccing sheet to everyone – I just have to lock down some stuff first

I’ll update the value filters for the reccing sheet

I’m going to work on a script that updates the basic fields (title, author, word count, rating, ect) for the form.  This one might take a bit.

And now , the long form responses, under the cut:

Thanks to everyone who was thankful that I was doing this! We’re just going to be a thanks ouroboros, happily!

The reason I don’t rec every week is that I find writing summaries hard, everything else is easy for me/The summaries aren’t very useful to me:

So, a short guide to writing summaries for recs:

If the author has something that works – you can always copy it. Part of the reason why this isn’t ‘just a copy and paste what they have’ option is that AO3 summaries can take up space, and we don’t want folks to get sad about having to scroll lots. But if the author has a sentence at the bottom of the summary that explains everything, there’s no reason to do more work.

If the author didn’t provide a one sentence summary, then include the basics of the plot. (Essek gets dicked down by Caleb, Essek and Caleb skip through the wildflowers together, aeorian magic turns Caleb into a capybara and Essek into a hot tub filled with oranges, ect).  Then add an adjective or two that has something to do with tone.  (A hilarious story about Essek being dicked down by Caleb, a tense account of Essek and Caleb skipping through the wildflowers together; Aerian magic turns Caleb into a capybara and Essek into a hot tub full of oranges. It’s surprisingly romantic.) Think about how it made you feel, what genre you would put it in, what tags you’d add on storygraph.

Don’t worry if it’s kind of dry! A) It’s probably less dry than you think, and b) you can do more gushing within the ‘what you liked about it’ section.

One last thing to remember – there’s no one right way to make a summary, people are looking for different things.

If the rec form was opened up to people who aren’t on AIFL don’t you think the name would need to be changed to reflect that it’s not an AIFL thing anymore?

Maybe! I wasn’t planning on not posting it on AiFL, and I’d suspect that the majority of reccers would still be AiFL members (just because getting notifications of something on tumblr is a lot harder).  But to be honest, this would be a relatively small issue.

I'm not a huge shadowgast fan, but I think reclists are cool, and sometimes the fics are relevant to my interests

Thanks!  Have you heard about the other reclists?  There’s @critter-genfic-events for a genfic one that was started by @Professor-Rye and is now being run by @operafloozy, there’s @widomaukficrecs, and I also have the reccing blog tools (group version or single user) in case you want to start your own!

Less a suggestion and more a general thought. I believe the anonymity of the reccers is an important part of this process and I am in no way saying that should be removed, but at the same time, it does feel impersonal, like a lack of commitment to one's tastes. Word of mouth doesn't tend to sway me to read new fic when I don't know the mouths the words are coming from. That said, take this with a grain of salt because, for the time being, I'm not the target audience of the rec lists.

Hey thanks for the comment! I agree with you! There’s a definite trade off in not knowing whether a reccer’s tastes line up with your own. It means that there’s not a great way to add moderation into the rec list, and with anonymity being an ever- dwindling resource on the internet, people’s attitudes towards it have shifted further into suspicion of intent. Even when it’s something like a rec list, I think there can be an anxiety about people finding a way to use it to bully authors – moreso than even having a consistent pseudonym. When really, I think there’s a good reason why reccers might want anonymity. Admitting you like something can be a vulnerable act! Social anxiety was the number one write-in reason as to why people didn’t rec, as is. I want people to feel comfortable reccing fics that are weird or kinky or require a lot of different warnings, and I wanted people to feel comfortable reccing their own fics. And it’s one thing to leave a kudos on someone’s work while signed in – something nobody else is going to see unless they bother to look – and another to put your name saying you enjoy any sort of beastiality or noncon or whatever else where any purity culture lover can object to on tumblr for all to see. The last thing I want is for people to be hurt or harassed because they participated in something that’s supposed to be a net good.

Anyway, this is all saying that I don’t think your concern is unfounded – and while I’m not likely to change anything about this rec list’s anonymity, if anyone else wants to try their hand at running one, it’s something to think about.

Also, I know I tend to read fic the same way, but it does seem to be a ton of repeat authors week-to-week, so maybe if once in a while the list can be to branch out to a never recc’d person?

I really like this idea, but the logistics of it are a little complex. I crunched the numbers, and out of 558 recs, there’s been 175 authors recced. Which is admittedly is a lot of overlap, but also that’s a lot to expect reccers to keep track of.  But a top ten list should be doable!  I crunched the numbers a couple of different ways – top numbers of times an author was recced, top number of different fics recced by an author, and top number of themes recced, which got me a list of fourteen authors – that seems doable. It’s now a possible theme.

More Information I got from number crunching includes:

86 authors have only been recced once

418 fics have been recced, 324 have only been recced once.

Most recced fics are Hard Mouth at seven times.

Royalgreen has had the most recs at 24, the most fics recced at 18, and the most themes recced at 17, but they also have 51 Critical Role Fics, so.

Further info can be found in this details sheet. I've also added a randomizer for general use, just because.

knowing upcoming themes further in advance

This can be done – it’s how the genfic rec list is currently set up. (as a note, while I’m currently running the genfic rec list, @professor-rye was the one to create it).

The AiFL rec list is currently set up so you can rec fics after the tumblr post, with the idea that people would probably look at the list of recs at the google sheet – which I realize isn’t the way it’s currently used. So you can still rec later, it just doesn’t have the same visibility.  (The two exceptions for this are the ‘older recs’ and the ‘hidden gems’ recurring themes, because we know they’re going to recur and they’re not likely to be ineligible when the theme rolls around again, the way works in progress might be).

Logistically, the selecting the upcoming themes in advance doesn’t work as well from the admin side. Instead of remembering that next week is the last Tuesday of the month, I’ve got to remember to count the Tuesdays and order the progress.  Right now the way it goes is that we pick the theme from the randomizer right before we post the reclist, so the same theme gets pasted into the ‘next week’s theme’ section, the google form, and the tumblr post at the same time. If I’m choosing a theme a month out, I select next month’s theme, add it to the google form, then go back and check what I’d selected a month ago and post that into the tumblr post and next week’s theme. 

There’s also the fact that if we give too much lead time, it means folk procrastinate and forget. Most of the recs currently come in soon after I post the tag list or the 24 reminders as is, and while some people on the gen fic reclist post for multiple weeks at a time, I find that most of the recs are for the week of, anyway.

Anyway, I’m not completely against this, but currently the drawbacks outweigh the perks. Figuring out a different way to sort the upcoming themes for the genfic list is on my to-do list, maybe afterwards I’ll come back and revisit.

[futurefind]

Hiatus Announcement

//I've alluded to it before but now I'm actually verbalizing it so!! Hiatus announcement be upon ye!! More specifically, a 'pseudo' hiatus, where I'll basically be putting entire blog on 'request only'— I'll prob keep lurking, likely keep posting About my blorbos, absolutely keep any threads, but... Gestures.

Tl;dr, because I'm not good about talking About feelings, and to try and talk about it would make me feel like I'm guilt tripping etc etc: I'm extremely low spoons, and about as low confidence, so I don't have the energy to be proactive and 100% initiate like... anything.

And it'd feel misleading to say 'oh I'm not on hiatus :)' as if I'm on full activity when I'm... not!

If you initiate stuff I'll return the favor and babble back, up to and including just asking me to do xyz (blorbo babbles, inbox raiding, etc)!!

(Edit/PS: As always my discord's available to moots, @/nethernor_i, but since I'll be lurking tumblr IMs also work as usual!!)

(Edit 8.4.24: Just to state the obvious for obvious's sake, again: PLEASE INITIATE/DM/ETC if you want anything!! When I say request only I mean it and so outside of that I'm gonna presume you're not keen on me / us doing anything.)

EDIT / UPDATE (8.7)

I said I wasn't gonna talk about the why's of my hiatus but I can't stop thinking about it and it's not not relevant to share even if it can't be helped so: that'll be below the cut since it's insecurity / vent / negative adjacent :')

Tl;dr, though: I don't feel comfortable here on tumblr anymore and that's what's impacting my activity / presence / confidence / etc, not just universally low spoons across the board. When I came back it was for sake networking for rp and making friends Through rp, but at current it's fizzled out and i'm much more comfortable focusing on private rp / rp groups than on here

(But if we have preexisting threads on here I won't drop them, juuuuust don't be afraid to add & poke me on discord to lmk when you've replied<3)

(again, this is below the cut for vent/negative/insecurity reasons, so if youre not up for that dwai) - any further Regular updates will be put above this section lol

idk I feel the simplest and most 'objective' way to put it is that my intent of 'keep dash tiny and small and palatable to prevent getting overwhelmed' is severely biting me in the ass bc it leads to extremely like... disproportionate? desires of activity??? where I'm looking to get lots of activity from (for example), like, ~5 people, but they are both not looking for turbo activity with me specifically and have interactions with 20+ people they're looking to keep up with (if, not necessarily, wrt longform rp) — on top of all the once-very-active moots that have dipped off into the void entirely, not just wrt ~our rp~

and like... subjectively??? i have like no sense of relationship decay, but exponentially horrific emotional permanence (the thing that lets you know you're cared about even when ppl are not directly talking to you or the like), and combined with the negative feedback loop of 'low confidence -> low activity -> less confidence bc less activity ->->' ???

it creates a very very Not Fun mix that makes me feel alone and lonely, like i'd be ignored even screaming in a crowded room, and feeling like what interactions i Do get are moreso an after thought or pity rather than reciprocated enthusiasm.

and its like. idk. it feels like law of diminishing returns but also w at least five secret spices of guilt about it—whether it's because i'm not 'trying hard enough' to 'earn' the 'attention', or because i'm 'blaming' ppl for the completely lighthearted nbd act of just... not making me a 'favorite' and making me feel 'entitled/spoiled' for just missing people

[jerzwriter]

as a writer, when you put in all that hard effort into creating this massive story with so much thought and research, it just gets swept away and with people more inclined towards reading one shots and Tumblr's own interface designed for blog posts and not longform fiction like say, in ao3, it is unsurprising to find people gravitate towards fluff and stuff that gets wrapped up in 1k-2k words.

There isn't really a lot of interest in people wanting to read something that gravitates away from romance in the slightest. People want the engagement stories, the days leading up to it, they want the cute dates and that's perfectly fine too, but there really isn't any point complaining about engagement anymore because the fandom has just shrunk exponentially and it only makes sense to support each other's work because you like the author and you hope they keep writing time after time.

I don't know if I'm making sense lol, this is just my two cents on the situation and many random shovels of thoughts.

I do hope we get a fandom renaissance or something but that would require people to share, reblog and actively be a patron for people's works and not everyone has the time for that in this post-covid era, which is totally understandable too. I just hope we find a middle ground so people of all niches can be accepted and they can reach their audience.

While fandom events do encourage people to create; as a catalyst, the readers always play the primary part in making sure that encouragement sustains enough for authors to create. After a while it gets pointless to just shout out things into the void and you're left wondering if the stuff you create really matters or not; even if you think you're writing for yourself and you matter, it gets tedious 😭😭

OMG THIS. THIS. THIS. THIS. THIS!!!!!!

THIS!!!!!

Not going to lie… there are days lately I am like “It is time to just hang it up”, bit it still brings me some joy in a world that isn’t always so great. So I do it. But the desire to produce isn’t always there, and when it is, it is more likely to be short, simple, and like you said, that’s fine too. But I miss delving into deeper, more substantial content. But who is going to take the time to do it if … as you said… you are screamed into a void.

We always talked of “silent readers”. Well, I think a lot of them are even gone now, but I am sure some remain. But at this point if we don’t encourage one another, I think we will have very little outside of occasional shared screenshots within a year.

A year ago, the fandom was smaller, but I couldn’t have imagined hanging it up. Now, I think, “after I tell this… chances are I have nothing left to give.” And thats from someone who always has a new idea. Hey, that hyperactive mind fucks me enough, I am grateful for the good things it gives me too! lol But even for my Tobias and Casey, which are truly my heart, I can see an end. Today, it is all day by day.

Thank you for this… this post says it ALL.

[calchexxis]

FANFIC APPRECIATION MEME

FANFIC APPRECIATION MEME

Post recommendations for your ten favourite fanfics and tag the authors if possible. Tell us what you like about their work.

Tag five people of your choice to do the meme too."

I was tagged by @blood-lich-crow @heroinejinx and @ghostofyaz

Fair warning, I do not read much Fanfic anymore as I spend most of my time writing it, so some of these fics are probably going to feel really scattered. With that said, let’s get into it.

LIGHTCANNON (Lux/Jinx)

Non-Linear Growth by @booking-and-blogging (Elfen1012 on Ao3)

A lot of people reading my work have said that Flashbangs is the Lightcannon bible, but if that’s true then NLG by Elfen1012 is the Lightcannon New Testament. It hits the ground running from the perspective of a Jinx that is trying to piece herself back together after the end of Arcane and it is something to behold. I cannot recommend this enough.

Luxurious Anarchy by @cannibalelf (Cannibal_Elf on Ao3)

A kind of Soulmate-lite longform fic in which Lux is drawn across the span of Valoran to find her one-and-only: Jinx, mad and still struggling with the events of Arcane. This is just a really fantastic romp through the world of Piltover and Zaun, thoroughly enjoyable on every level. The prose are punchy, the narrative is clean, and I really enjoyed my time with it.

Friction Coefficient by @blood-lich-crow ( Blood_Lich_Maeve on Ao3)

I would argue this is probably the best Modern!AU Lightcannon on Ao3 right now, at least in my very subjective opinion. It gracefully deals with a lot of delicate topics like internalized (and external) homophobia and transphobia, trans issues, and addiction. This is one of the messiest romances I’ve ever read and I am here for it. 

PISTOLWHIP (Caitlyn/Jinx)

the lover of my impossible soul by Goldfyshie927 on Ao3

This Modern!AU features Caitlyn as a professional escort who is drawn into a relationship with the wealthy and chaotic Jinx in order to keep her father happy and convince him she had mellowed out somewhat. The profound sense of loneliness you get from both characters throughout the story, and the way they inelegantly mesh together is really profound, and I look forward to seeing more of this story come out. Big recommendation for very unusual ship.

SYLVAINA (Sylvanas/Jaina)

Vintage by (jointly) @redisaid and @uninspired--poet

How do I put this. To date, I’ve read the entirety of Vintage six times. Vintage isn’t just a fanfiction I think is good. Vintage is one of the fanfictions I go back reread every now and again to remind myself what willful romance is supposed to look like. In this Modern!AU where Jaina is a college student and scion of a wealthy family, while Sylvanas is the owner of a small, failing vintage goods shop in New York. It’s a story about falling in love and then choosing to stay that way despite the many things that crop up. It’s about coming up against the difficulties in relationships and choosing love, with all its messy difficulties, over the path of least resistance. Read this, I am begging you.

Fearless by @redisaid

This might be the best example of modern magic I’ve ever read. It’s as subtle as it is overt, and as entrenched a part of the world as it is wholly separate from it. Jaina, a ghost-eating witch, finds a house haunted by a powerful banshee, and fully intends to consume her for power. Over the course of the story, that changes, and everything from the side characters, to the small moments, to the strong finish has stuck with me to the point that it inspires aspects of my own writing.

Within The Drift by @uninspired--poet

It’s hard to do a good crossover, even when the crossover’s make a kind of thematic sense. Writing a good crossover when the two subjects have jack shit in common is testament to a great author’s skill. Within The Drift is a fantastically put together sci-fi/fantasy action-romance crossing over Pacific Rim with World of Warcraft, featuring Sylvanas and Jaina as contentiously drift compatible pilots. I’ve read this story back to front several times, and it never gets old.

KAZULA (Azula/Katara)

Measure Each Step to Infinity by paxbanana

Set in Post-Canon ATLA, Measure is fantastic enemies-to-lovers-to-wives story full of angst, intrigue, action, and redemption. It has one of my favorite depictions of Azula and, surprisingly, Aang, which the story humanizes wonderfully. Azula is as morally gray as ever, and her struggle to leave behind the horrors of war and emotional abuse inflicted on her by her father to be better, and Katara’s growing dedication and devotion to her over the course of the story is gripping.

KORVIRA (Korra/Kuvira)

you know you'd look good in my hand by Goldfyshie927 on Ao3

Phenomenal Modern!AU Kuvira fic and I will shamelessly plug this because I love a good bartender character. Kuvira and Korra instantly charm in the first chapter, and their friendship blossoms into a lot more. This is a story that’s impossible to summarize without spoilers, but it is an absolute rollercoaster of emotions, drama, angst, and disaster gays from start to finish and you’d be doing yourself a favor by reading it.

PILTOVER’S FINEST (Caitlyn/Vi)

Run At The Cup. by @thehomelybadger (TheHomelyBadger on Ao3)

I’ve reviewed this story before on this very blog so I really feel it’s necessary to have it here. I don’t read a lot of CaitVi but this one absolutely knocks it out of the park. Or rather, into the goal. Run At The Cup is a Hockey!AU, it’s a fantastic underdog story of a brand-new NHL team, the Zaun Sumprats, and it’s mix of sports jargon, action-packed hockey games, and interpersonal and political drama make for an absolutely gripping story.

[the-hollyday]

The Bitch is Back

Admittedly this is a wild title for someone who had absolutely zero presence or following on this website in the past, despite spending unending hours reblogging pictures of old cameras and cigarettes when I was a teenager and early university student. But I'm back.

Everything feels quite different, I'm finding myself having to search directory items for functions that I could do with my eyes closed when I was 16; "where are my drafts", "are likes default public or private". Other questions you can't google as easily. Is it uncool to use a free blog theme? How are you viewed in the microcosm culture of the website for using a picture of your real face instead of a character or avatar?

The main drive to get back in to tumblr was to escape from twitter, which I was starting to feel like was making me stupider. There are two accounts I'll miss: my friend Autumn who posts photos of her beautiful sewing and quilting projects (she tufted a chair the other day??? She's so cool.) and that menswear guy who's always dunking on people wearing bad suits.

The other main reason was that I want to write. And I want to write about me. I'm trying to develop some more language and attention-span improving habits; my partner Jethro sat down on the couch with me the other day and told me that he was starting to feel worried about the amount of time I'm spending just aimlessly scrolling before getting up to start my day in the mornings. I agree with him, and it's not even like the habit makes me feel good. It's just void stuffing. We'll start with a migration to a new website where I can write longform. But, you know, wherever you go, there you are.

That's right, Poorly Translated Mod Caroline.

It's felt like a much busier summer than it actually has been, but pockets of very high activity have left me feeling exhausted frequently. My brother in law Fionn came to stay with us from Toronto for a couple days so we took him out to experience some true Vancouver culture: shooting pool and drinking two pitchers of beer at the Ivanhoe.

We also stuffed him full of good pasta and bread at my favourite Italian place before putting him on the plane back home.

I love dive bar graffiti.

I also completed annual summer maintenance at my theatre. We usually put on movies while we clean lights and this year the request was for 1954 Godzilla. This was a really interesting watch (that I'm not prepared to fully tackle in this post) but suffice to say I did not expect to cry while watching a movie I believed to be primarily about a giant lizard. Or how hard it would be to try and read subtitles while you're trying to clean lights.

The last big summer 2024 adventure is quickly on the horizon, Jethro and I fly to Japan a week from today for my first trip off continent. I'm very excited, and also a little scared. I'm a worrier by nature so it's been a productive exercise in preventing worry by action rather than succumbing to procrastination, but also the letting go of things that just aren't that important. And I'm sure I'll find new things to worry about once I'm there.

[iteration-anomaly]

OOC:

This is a kinda bittersweet post for me to make.

When I first started Dissonance Ascending, I adored it. Over time though, the expectations that I held for myself were too high for it to remain enjoyable for me to write for.

Along the way I have still truly appreciated and found it entertaining to read everyone's reactions and responses. I'd like to thank people for taking an interest in this little thing I started in the first place. I genuinely did not expect people to actually, well, care about it. I thought that it'd quickly be forgotten, even by myself, and we'd all move on from it.

That didn't happen. But I think now is the time to move on from it, in a sense. All related posts will remain up. However, I am saying that this is the probable cancellation of Dissonance Ascending as a roleplay event. Through experience I've realised that longform, more serious roleplay like this just isn't for me. I miss the days of this blog that were the casual and often silly posts made. Little shenanigans between traveller friends that made me happy when I saw other people finding them amusing too.

Dissonance Ascending might return one day as an independently written fanfiction, probably changed a fair amount but with the base plot intact. I'm making no promises on that but it is an idea I would like to keep with me. Especially since I look back to the start of it all and smile.

Anomaly is still here. Tulosnodons and Omn probably will be too. I have other characters as well who I've not brought up on this blog that might also make an appearance in the future. Maybe even Erebus will have an occasional cameo! Dissonance Ascending as you know it might be ending, but this blog will likely remain for as long as I'm on Tumblr.

Thank you to everyone who has ever read a single post here.

[prismatoxic]

i love tumblr's format at its core and it is my preferred platform for longform rambling but like. the fact that my art gets exponentially more engagement on aethy is definitely making me talk more about my characters on aethy and not here 😭

like tumblr loves fanart and that's fine! i get it, it's the majority of what i engage with on here too, but i'm not like. expecting comments or even reblogs half the time. a like would genuinely go a long way, i just want to feel like i'm not shouting into the void 😔

but maybe my perception is skewed bc i always scroll back through my dash to the last post i saw. with few exceptions i really don't miss posts people i follow are making. but i remember my ex used to follow like, thousands of blogs bc it satisfied her to always have things moving. i got upset once that she never saw a damn thing i posted and she was like, oh, lol, i don't see anything anyone posts.

so, idk. i don't think people should be engaging with my OC bullshit if they're not interested. i'm mutuals with a lot of fandom people who assuredly don't care, and that's genuinely fine. i'm not asking anyone to start caring. but if you do care, if you see my art and it makes you feel some positive emotion, maybe just like it? i promise you don't actually have to say anything or put it on your blog. i just like the reassurance that it's being seen.

i could also stand to tag my OC posts with more things but uh. idk what to use. does anyone even check "original character" or "artists of tumblr" for new content??

[fatehbaz]

I'm sorry, this may be a nonsense question or it may be rude, but my intent is genuine curiosity-

Your longform posts frequently have atypical spacing between words. Double and even triple spaces, both between sentences and within them.

Is this an artifact of pdf text recognition struggling with full-justified paragraphs? Is it remnant of cut/copy/pasting over multiple edits? Something else?

It's not distracting from the texts, and I don't mean to make you self conscious. It's just something I've found myself getting more curious about as it continues.

Thank you for what you do, I've encountered so many brilliant writers and articles and thoughtways through your sharing that I doubt I would have heard/felt otherwise!

No need to apologize. Not a strange question at all, thank you.

Nor is yours an unexpected question. I’ve been conscious of the weird spacing issues for, well, years now. (The spacing issues are not visible to me on desktop at all. They’re occasionally visible to me when viewing my own text posts on mobile app.)

And I do think I've finally learned how it happens. (As far as I can tell, it is an artifact of copy-pasting, and it specifically only happens when I have an already-saved draft on tunglr. I put text into a draft here. Then, if I copy text from my own unpublished drafts, and then paste into a newer draft post to trim down text, this is where the problem happens and the spaces appear phantom-like from the aether.) I almost never copy-paste directly from an online source; especially not worth the effort to copy from a PDF. If an article is available to read online, I almost always manually transcribe it rather than copy-paste. And the other text posts you see on my blog, I had to find either an actual book, PDF, literal photocopy image, print version of an article at the library, whatever, and I manually/personally transcribe the text.

Anyway. Thank you for the kindness, and for caring enough to make the effort to send the message.

(Grateful, to be here, to learn from kinder, funnier, more careful, more thoughtful people around me: the people here with lived experience, with clever insight, the authors/thinkers i read/share, my friends on this site. Wincing at myself here, sorry for the cloying earnestness. Relieved and glad to hear that some stuff that I do, say, share might sometimes have a positive influence on anyone. This is humbling, thank you.)

[fishrpg]

Laying Out The Ground Rules

In a few days I'm planning on starting the Hexplore24 challenge. It's based on an idea by the Monsters and Mazes blog to replace the ritual of this year's Dungeon23. Basically you create a solo campaign that you play effectively in real time. One day of game time is one day in the real world.

Unfortunately, the challenge as written doesn't really jive with my workflow. That's because if I'm playing a solo game, I'll want to document EVERYTHING and that takes a lot of time and brain power that I can't necessarily spare with work and school obligations. Also I tend to prefer my hexes to be relatively densely populated with content so there aren't really truly empty hexes. I want to do something where I can legitimately spend only a few minutes doing each day without the extra pressure of longform solo journally. That means I'll need to tweak the specifics of the challenge a bit. This is just as much for me as it is for anyone following along, because I'll probably be periodically adjusting the rules and stuff to suit my schedule.

But as it stands today, here's what I'm thinking my Hexplore24 challenge will entail:

Create one or two hex's worth (or hex equivalent) of stuff each day. This might be a landmark, a questgiver, an encounter, a dungeon, or something else.

Every month, I'll change up the theme so I don't get bored. The theme for January rooted in the traditional D&D wilderness aesthetic.

The theme for the next month will generally be selected at random from a list, and there won't be any duplicates. Every fourth month, though, I'll allow myself the privilege of manually choosing a theme so I can keep my personal interest up in case I get several months of prompts that aren't terribly interesting to me.

Although I will be working on this project every day and will want to post every day, I'm only going to publicly commit to posting twice a week so that I won't feel like a failure if I miss a day. I'll probably post more than that, but I need to make space for those times when I can't churn out stuff like a machine.

I'm not going to be creating a character or party who interacts with the world in a sandbox adventure; this is to be more of a neutral observer or cartographer who merely documents the world as it is explored.

I'm also toying with the idea of including a few "freestyle days," which are days where I can go back to a previous day and flesh it out more. Like adding a map to a town, or a layout to a dungeon, or extra steps and treasure to quest. The exact scope of this section is still to be determined.

Oh, and here's the table I'll be using to choose my themes!

Hexplore24 Potential Themes

Generic Fantasy (City Exploration)

Western (Traditional) (October)

Western (Weird) (August)

Sci-Fi (Planetary)

Sci-Fi (Space) (November)

Cyberpunk (June)

Post-Apocalyptic

Folklore/Mythology (April)

Steampunk

Ancient Culture

Modern (December)

Pirates (May)

Cartoon (September)

Pulp Martial Arts

Spooky/Horror (December)

Superhero

Pulp Prehistoric (March)

Grimdark Fantasy

Redwall-Inspired (July)

Undersea (February)

Feel free to send me asks or suggestions of stuff you would like to see!