#i remember the good old days

[dollypopup]

Not a question per say but I thought this was an interesting Reddit post and I know you've said similar stuff in the past (https://www.reddit.com/r/BridgertonRants/comments/1ibjy0z/do_some_polins_even_like_colin_bridgerton/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)

Oh man, I was sick of the 'make Colin grovel/beg/suffer' nonsense all the way back in SEASON 2!!!!! It's a shame it continues to be all too prominent of a theme in Polin in general. (honestly, this is why I stopped reading and writing fics) but whoever the person who made that rant is, I wanna be friends with them! I feel like a lot of Colin fans have been outspoken about how unfairly he's treated in what should be his fandom, but because we're a minority in the fandom, we get pushed out by polin fans who just. . .don't like him? (Why they gravitate to this ship I will NEVER know) And the people talking about how 'Oh, they're not *really* Polin fans, they're Pen stans!' like. . .they're still the ones that went on Polin fics (including my own?) and talked about how Colin didn't deserve her? They still wrote so called 'Polin' fics with no pushback at all of Penelope abusing him and it being totally fine? They were all too happy to see Colin pushed to the wayside time and time again? Can't lay down with dogs and be surprised you have fleas in the morning, you know?

Like it's genuinely no surprise to me that Pen stans who hated Colin but still shipped Polin for the sake of Pen getting her prize became Nicola stans who hate Luke because they're mad that they didn't get together.

I miss the Polin that were *both* ride or die for each other in fandom. Since S2 I feel like it's just Pen being an OOC girlboss queen and Colin being her footstool in way too much of this fanbase. God forbid he have any emotion other than full fawning over her. smh

I think we go through cycles in the fandom. Maybe we're in a new era of people recognizing how toxic Polin is/was/can be and people are calling out how weird it is that the fanbase seemingly hates half the ship. But idk, I feel like this is just another person who will be pushed off to the side because though what they said was true, people just don't wanna hear it. I will always ALWAYS stand by the fact that people can write whatever they want and deserve respect in fandom. I avoid any of those fics because I try not to say negative things to or about creators. But sometimes I so badly want to be like 'if you read this from his perspective, is it a love story, or is it a tragedy?' and like. . .most of the time, from his POV in these stories, it's a tragedy. And there's really not a lot of variety (most of the stories that countered the typical 'colin begs and suffers and grovels and is called an idiot' narrative have left) so it's all there is. And you just can't help but come to the conclusion that this fandom just. . .doesn't like him.

Which sucks, he's fantastic. Polin deserves love stories where they're both treated well.

[looseygooseylemonsquoosey]

Oh boy I wish there was an active social media network that wasn't as visible as instragram or twix but but still had people actually on it

[crispyliza]

Fanfiction in the late 2000s-early 2010s was wild bc you'd find a beautifully written story with the most compelling heart-wrenching plot you've ever seen and the author's note would be like:

Author with a username like ~SasukesWaifuxD~ : Ohayo gozaimasu! ↖(^▽^)↗, I'm sowwy it took me so long to update (๑•́_•̀๑)

tsundere twink from their fic : It was about damn time you idiot (눈‸눈)

~SasukesWaifuxD~ : Hey now! It's not my fault the plot bunnies kept wunning away fwom me (╥﹏╥)

tsundere twink: W-watever, it's not like I missed you or anything (💢,,>﹏<,,) b-baka!

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Thistle Debut Day!

[lazylittledragon]

some of my recents i forgot to post :3

[remcadll]

Wow crazy how it’s been two months since mha ended. what the hell was that btw

[shrugsinchinese]

Silly comic I started LAST winter that’s pretty ooc now cause of the new episodes haha

I just wanted to play with silly dnd fashion so here u go

[ranchstoryblog]

Fandom Memories: HMFarm

Hmmm. So, nearly a quarter of you whippersnappers wanna hear about the good ol' days, huh? Well, back in the day, you wouldn't just hang out on one or two big websites to try to find people who shared your niche interests among a million random users. Everything had its own dedicated site, with its own special pack of weirdos that you probably wouldn't find anywhere else. Home grown fandom, sprouting from the cement sidewalks of the freshly paved internet like so many weeds with pretty little flowers on top. So, let's take a little stroll down memory lane and visit one of the oldest fan sites with Archive.org's "Wayback Machine."

Ahh, just like I remember it. This here is "Harvest Moon Farm." 'course, we just called it HMFarm, like the URL did. This used to be the place to be. The prime progenitor of all farmin' fansites in the English speaking community. Maybe not the literal first, but up until around 2005, this was where you would go if you wanted to know anythin' about digital farmin'. It truly was a magical place to visit.

This screenshot isn't the oldest design, but it's the one I fondly remember. The majority of my time using the site was during the lead-up to A Wonderful Life, which was probably also when it was the most active as an information source. Seeing the screenshots, checking the forums, speculatin', wonderin', dreamin'... It's a warm feeling. I can't really describe how it felt to look at these shots for the first time. Granted, they were mostly sourced from various places like IGN or Newtechnix, but who wanted to go to THOSE messy sites when all the info I wanted was right here? IGN wasn't telling me how to revive the Vineyard in Harvest Moon 64 while I was waiting for AWL news either.

Our first look at the character we would come to know as Muffy, the sheer novelty of being able to go into the townsfolk's glorious, 3D-rendered rooms, the apparent misidentification of flowering tomatoes... The webmaster, Gamergirl87, would caption each one as well. Some of the captions of those screenshots ended up not being exactly true, but it was the closest thing to on-going coverage we really had. Who else was there to trust?

It's a little off topic, but I think at one point after learning about the GBA connectivity, I must have dreamed about this very gallery and seeing a screenshot of a Gamecube-ized Popuri with the caption that Mineral Town villagers would visit after connecting the GC and GBA together. At least, I'm pretty sure it was a dream. I've met some people who claim they saw the same thing, but none of us have been able to find that screenshot or comment again.

The one that would most catch my attention was the one on the left here. I didn't have a PlayStation 2, so I was coming fresh off of the GameBoy and Nintendo 64 when going into A Wonderful Life. The pond, the mysterious glowing plants, the mood and ambiance of their lighting, the little tree on the door... Naturally, I mirrored it on my first day the remake was available.

It's a real shame that the message boards are poorly preserved, since it doesn't look like there was a news post about the pre-order plush cow. I was hoping to find the name of whoever it was that convinced me to commit my first ever preorder. I still have the receipt, but without the forum post it's really only tangentially related to HM Farm.

'course, just learning about existing games and upcoming games wasn't the only good thing HM Farm was for. As I alluded to, there was a whole community here! While it's a shame that the message boards aren't well preserved by the Wayback Machine, you know what is?

The "ideas" list! This incredible time capsule was one of the first "interactive" parts of the site, starting in the year 2000. It's kind of fun to see how many of these ideas actually happened. Obviously, new characters and personalities were probably expected, but Animal Parade would eventually feature a honeymoon, several games have clothing and other customization, a mall, city, and pig would be added as soon as GBC 3, a goat would be in A Wonderful Life... It's actually amazing how prescient a lot of the suggestions are.

I'd share the whole thing, but the amount of e-mail addresses involved gives me pause. Still, there's a couple I wanna highlight:

Considering how often I still hear about people wanting to marry the moms and people attributing it to just "the fans getting older," it's funny to see Laserion lay out that, no, we've always been like this. Right down to using Manna's unhappy marriage and Lillia's husband never returning as valid reasons they should be available.

Tuan145, on the other hand, I just find extremely amusing because of the specific "2002 Escalade" part. Yes, this is clearly the ideal vehicle for all farmers in the Story of Seasons universe. This is now accepted headcanon. The boat was added in GBC 3 too, so obviously a 2002 Escalade is going to be added any day now.

Another thing that's amazingly well preserved is the site's fan art section. There's a few missing images here and there, but for the most part the entire thing is open to explore. People of basically all ages and skill levels happily submitted their creations, including original characters, digital art, traditional art, crossovers with popular series like Sailor Moon, a liiittle bit of drug use... Y'know, all the kinds of things you'd expect to see in a fan art gallery of the day.

Even better, some of the artists are still doing art today! Looking around, I quickly discovered one of my favorites, Rina Cat, is now on Blue Sky. I made sure to ask for permission to repost their art before including it here. Reaching out to everyone would be a bit much though, so I'll just encourage you to just browse the gallery using the Wayback Machine yourself. There's poetry and fanfics too!

There's a lot more to the site, including useful bits of history like keeping track of release dates for games, pre-release screenshots, and information that was only available on Japanese websites at the time, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Unfortunately, though the site continued to be updated until 2010 and stayed online until 2021, it's no longer available on the regular internet and the URL doesn't seem safe to access anymore. I wanted to include an interview with the former webmaster as well, but all their readily available contact information was tied to the website and I haven't had any luck so far in finding other means of contact. If I have any success, I'll be sure to make a follow-up! If you have any memories of HMFarm, or other fan sites, I'd be happy to hear about it.

[mythropigman]

I dont want to miss them. But I do.

Cheeky buggers

[navree]

"rhaenys could have ended the war by dracarysing all the greens right there" yes because a distant relation to the throne deciding to barbecue an anointed and publicly positively hailed king and his entire family who is well loved within the city and in multiple other parts of the country for the sake of the succession of a far-away princess no one was ever on board with who hasn't been seen by the populace in literal years, her psycho husband, her three obvious bastards, and two toddlers from the psycho husband would go over super well with westeros and especially in king's landing where scores of the still-cheering population were killed for no reason by that same dragon who would do the barbecuing, because when targaryens act unilaterally without thinking of how the people would react there's never any problem, which is why the storming of the dragonpit and robert's rebellion were actually just collective delusions dreamed up by readers who hate rhaenyra and not key parts of the story and house targaryen's history that directly contributed to their demise and are intrinsic to the plot

truly team black stans are made up of only the most genius and media literate amongst us

[luck-of-the-drawings]

so REVENGE, HUH? or justice, if that makes you feel better. it tastes the same when cooked just right. 'I REALLY WANTED A BROTHER.' such a shame to burn a bridge you so desperately wanted to keep, especially when it wasnt even you who started the fire. especially when you hope that not a single fragment of that bridge ever washes ashore.[MAY IT ROT FAR FROM MY SIGHTS] an unfortunate loss! atleast he has his friends.

[whirlybirbs]

“what’s the name of thor’s hammer?”

“jonathan?”

[ballpointpensuperfan]

Woe, Micheal Afton be upon ye.

[dustykneed]

--Really, Doctor?

[jawz]

that person blocked me and said i'm "on the wrong side of queer history" thinking i'm a heterosexual homophobe, girl i'm gay AND i transitioned in 2011 when your dumb ass didnt even know what transgender meant LMAOOOO meanwhile the mastectomy gofundme on their page fondly recalls being jealous of women with breast cancer. because we all know how lucky those women are.

[poinsettiapavilion]

Potd?

gottem