#changes over time

[destinationtoast]

Question: Several years ago, you outlined the most common fic wordcounts for AO3. Given that the data was from 2014, will you do an update to see if fics have gotten, on average, longer/shorter over time? (P.S. Thank you for creating these! I've followed your blog for a number of years, and your analyses help put fandoms and fandom trends in perspective.)

Good question (and thank you :) )! I just took a look, and I was interested to find that AO3 fanworks have, on average, gotten longer over the past 10 years.

Here's the data from 2014:

And here's updated data from 2024:

(Edited to fix an incorrect max word count)

These graphs, along with the data and any clarifications and corrections are also available on AO3.

[inkbotkowalski]

I think I'm finally an adult because I've started craving dark(er) chocolate

[rrcraft-and-lore]

The Great Raan of Kutch, one of the largest salt marsh deserts...in the woooooooooooooorld!

At twilight, you might be greeted with skies of soft rose quarts and washed amethysts.

This magical place is found in the Thar Desert in Gujarat India.

Once, this beautiful part of the world was part of the Arabian Sea as a large and long set of shallows. Over time, the slow geological uplift (what's also responsible for other parts of India - hi Himalayas), cut off the Raan and turned it into a still navigable lake. Then...with time, it began to dry.

[captainjonnitkessler]

The second you start talking about some mysterious "they" that are controlling society in some fashion, you are engaging in dangerous conspiratorial thinking even if you're being woke about it. "They" did not institute the 40 hour work week specifically so you would be too tired to revolt. "They" did not invent the sleek minimalist aesthetic in order to crush the spirit of art in the common people. "They" are not pushing mediocre media into the mainstream in order to poison people's critical thinking skills.

Your best case scenario after that is you talk to someone who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about and you get embarrassed because you can't answer basic questions about your own ideology because you never learned anything past "the ruling class/capitalists/politicians are making things bad and if we got rid of them the bad things would all go away!"

Your worst case scenario is obviously the woo-to-fascist pipeline and you end up believing Jews are poisoning American food supplies with GMOs in order to turn us all into beta cucks, so like . . . maybe just stop blaming "them" before you fall down that route.

Obligatory round of disclaimers: Yes, sometimes people do bad things. Be specific about exactly who is doing what instead of ascribing it to some vague group of shadowy elites. Yes, sometimes things in society are bad. Learn to identify the root causes of complex social issues instead of assuming that they're actually extremely simple to fix and we're just not doing it because of some vague group of shadowy elites. Yes, minimalism isn't for everyone. Learn that some people don't share your tastes and get the fuck over it for the love of god.

[softichill]

[wonkyjaw]

Quilt update. This is split somewhere in the blues and I have to sew that together and then I have to add one more yellow row to the top. Then the quilt top is finally, finally done.

[havenshereagain]

DPxDC Idea

Danny working at Wayne Enterprises as some sort of engineer, uses the in-house app for all his blueprints and stuff

He starts getting notes from a coworker in-app, and assumes its this annoying older guy in his department who constantly undermines him because of his age, despite his education and past achievements (i feel like in this AU the Fentons react well to the reveal and they work together on a number of non-lethal ecto inventions that have Danny's name attached to them)

Except one day his coworker mentions never using the app, and Danny suddenly realizes there's only one other TD he could've been arguing with in the notes of the app

[skarabrae-stone]

My parents were still on the party line when they moved to the house I grew up in in the early 90s. In fact, for a long time we technically were STILL on the party line, but all our neighbors had paid to get private lines, so we were the only ones on it.

We had a cassette-tape answering machine in the 90s/2000s, but I don't remember it having any problems with getting erased. We just had to remember to erase the tape from time to time, or we'd run out of room. We had a tape recorder that we used to record any particularly meaningful messages.

Also, if you left the phone off the hook, it would give the busy signal but wouldn't ring. My friend's mom had a bad habit of leaving the phone off the hook, so when we called their house, we'd frequently get the busy signal, even if nobody there was actually talking on the phone or using the computer.

I was just talking to my grandmother, who worked as a telephone operator for a summer job when she was a teenager in the 1950s. She said that back then (at least in her town-- she lived in a small town), you didn't dial someone's number when you wanted to call them. You just picked up the phone, and that would connect you to the operator. The operator would ask what number you were calling, and then would connect you with that number. If it was long distance, I think you'd get connected to a long-distance service.

From the operator's end, she said a light would show up next to the number of the person calling, so that's how the operator knew to pick it up. Calls would be connected via physical cables-- I guess there were plugs next to each number on the switchboard, so the operator would plug a cable in for the person calling and the number they were making the call to, and flip a switch to connect them.

Also, you used to be able to ask the operator to call you in the morning to wake you up, and my great grandparents on my grandfather's side met because Great Grandma was a telephone operator, and would call my great grandfather every morning to wake him up. (This would have been in the 1920s, I believe.)

Have been thinking a lot lately about how, when a new technology emerges, people who were born after the shift have trouble picturing exactly what The Before was like (example, the fanfic writer who described the looping menu on a VHS tape), and even people who were there have a tendency to look back and go "Wow, that was... wild."

Today's topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it's not the only game in town, it's an entirely different thing now.

(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)

for most of the heyday of the landline, there was no caller ID of any kind. Then it was a premium service, and unless you had a phone with Caller ID capability-- and you didn't-- you had to buy a special box for it. (It was slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes.)

Starting in the early nineties, there WAS a way to get the last number dialed, and if desired, call it back. It cost 50 cents. I shit you not, the way you did it was dialing "*69". There's no way that was an accident.

If you moved, unless it was in the same city-- and in larger cities, the same PART of the city-- you had to change phone numbers.

As populations grew, it was often necessary to take a whole bunch of people and say "Guess what? You have a new area code now."

The older the house, the fewer phone jacks it had. When I was a kid, the average middle-class house had a phone jack in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom. Putting in a new phone jack was expensive... but setting up a splitter and running a long phone cord under the carpet, through the basement or attic, or just along the wall and into the next room was actually pretty cheap.

Even so, long phone cords were pretty much a thing on every phone that could be conveniently picked up and carried.

The first cordless phones were incredibly stupid. Ask the cop from my hometown who was talking to his girlfriend on a cordless phone about the illegal shit he was doing, and his wife could hear the whole thing through her radio.

For most of the heyday of the landline, there was no contact list. Every number was dialed manually. Starting in the mid-eighties, you could get a phone with speed dial buttons, but I cannot stress how much they sucked, because you had to label them with a goddamn pencil, you only had ten or twenty numbers, reprogramming them was a bitch, and every once in a while would lose all of the number in its memory.

All of the phone numbers in your city or metro area were delivered to you once a year in The Phone Book, which was divided between the White Pages (Alphabetic), the Yellow Pages (Businesses, by type, then alphabetic), and the Blue Pages (any government offices in your calling area (which we will get to in a moment)).

Listing in the white pages was automatic; to get an unlisted number cost extra.

Since people would grab the yellow pages, find the service they need, and start calling down the list, a lot of local business names where chosen because they started with "A", and "Aardvark" was a popular name.

Yes, a fair chunk of the numbers in it were disconnected or changed between the time it was printed and it got to your door, much less when you actually looked it up.

One phone line per family was the norm.

Lots and lots and LOTS of kids got in trouble because their parents eavesdropped on the conversation by picking up another phone connected to the same line.

A fair number of boys with similar voices to their father got in trouble because one of their friends didn't realize who they were talking to.

And of course, there were the times where you couldn't leave the house, because you were expecting an important phone call.

Or when you were in a hotel and had to pay a dollar per call. (I imagine those charges haven't gone away, but who pays them?)

Since you can't do secondary bullet points, I'll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.

these precursors to voicemail were a fucking nightmare.

The first generation of consumer answering machines didn't reach the market until the mid-eighties. They recorded both the outgoing message and the incoming calls onto audio cassettes.

due to linear nature of the audio cassette, the only way to save an incoming call was to physically remove the cassette and replace it with a new one.

they were prone to spectacular malfunction; if the power went out, rather than simply fail to turn back on, they would often rewind the cassette for the incoming messages to the beginning, because it no longer knew where the messages were, or how many there were.

Another way they could go wrong was to start playing the last incoming call as the outgoing message.

Most people, rather than trying to remember to turn it on each time they went out and turn it off when they got back, would just leave it on, particularly when they discovered that you could screen incoming calls with it.

Rather a lot of people got themselves in trouble because they either didn't get to the phone before the answering machine, or picked up when they heard who was calling, and forgot that the answering machine was going-- thus recording some or all of the phone call.

Eventually the implemented a feature where you could call your answering machine, enter a code, and retrieve your messages. The problem was that most people couldn't figure out how to change their default code, and those that did didn't know it reset anytime the power went out. A guy I went to college with would call his ex-girlfriend's machine-- and her current boyfriend's-- and erase all the messages. He finally got busted when she skipped class and heard the call come in.

And, of course, there's the nightmare that was long-distance.

Calls within your local calling area were free. (Well, part of the monthly charge.) This usually meant the city you lived in and its suburbs. Anything outside this calling area was an extra per-minute charge.

This charge varied by time of day and day of the week, which made things extra fun when your friend on the west coast waited until 9pm for the lower charges, but you were on the east coast and it was midnight.

Depending on your phone company, and your long distance plan, the way your long distance work varied wildly. Usually in-state was cheaper-- with zones within the state that varied by price, and out of state had its own zones.

Your long distance plan came in lots and lots of distracting packages, and was billed to your phone bill.

At one point, when I was living in North Carolina, a scammer set themselves up as a long distance company and notified the phone company that a shitload of people had switched to their service. They got caught fairly quickly, but I was annoyed because they were actually charging less than AT&T.

"Would you like to change your long distance plan" was the 80's and 90's equivalent of "We have important news about your car insurance."

Had a friend who lived at the edge of a suburb in Birmingham, and for her to call her friend two miles down the street was long-distance, because the boundary of the calling area was right between them.

[suja-janee]

I’ve been losing my mind over these guys recently

[bixels]

Scary Sunset.

I'm concepting things way outta order in this story, but I'm sure you can piece things together. Context is for a storybeat where, after defeating and capturing Adagio (thus having all three sirens in her possession), Sunset enacts her revenge plot to release the sirens on Canterlot as Thea discovers she's been manipulated. In a confrontation, the two scuffle and fight over the siren orbs while Sunset struggles with her conflicting wants and emotions.

[terracottakore]

having early era etho thoughts again

[friendlyneighborhoodghostpal]

i’m just gonna say it i love how kaos handled orpheus and eurydice. i really did, im a huge greek mythology nerd and that story has always been about the refusal to give someone up even when you should, its not a love story its a story about grief. and i just- ah they did something really cool there didn’t they? i’m gonna rewatch the season and like properly form my opinions but i really like it.

[lucabyte]

On autonomy, and what it means to be Obliged to Help.

Bonus:

[heartorbit]

find another role, carry on the show

[i-like-to-look-at-your-back]

Sleeping off

[lovealwayssay]

I just did some math and, if Cas is as old as the earth, his 12 years with Dean is equivalent to like 0.08 seconds in a human lifespan. That’s less than 1/10th of a second, shorter than the blink of an eye. He knew Dean for such a short amount of time compared to his entire existence and it was enough to fundamentally change everything about Cas and how he sees the world. That’s absolutely insane to me.