#medium livejournal

[vraska-theunseen]

watching (whatever) this podcast and these guys r reading the candy land wiki and it's written so seriously like surmising abt the hereditary monarchy and caste system of candyland it's such a good bit and it reminds me of this story the northern caves which u all should read its so interesting it's abt a group of fans on a forum who obsess over this children's book series written by a man with a very specific moral philosophy whose work became increasingly overly complex and inscrutable and a few of them meet up after one of them gets his hands on the author's last unpublished behemoth

[sassygrrl32]

Brand New Blog At Blogger-Rachel Holbert Jones Page

I have a brand new blog that is strictly for microblogging. It’s similar to this one except I haven’t kept this one up like I should have. I couldn’t find a microblogging site I really liked so I chose blogspot and created a blogger blog. The new site is https://rachelholbertjonespage.blogspot.com Until next time……..My story-page……..A Brand New Update: Rehabbing Malachi’s boat on Lake Keowee…

[luciacaminoz]

CODEX ENTRY

SOLONA "SOL" CASTILLO Caitiff • Courier • Catalyst

“[…] exists in the liminal between monster and martyr.”

IDENTITY Name: Solona María Alejandra Castillo

Aliases: “Sol” (most common), "Soledad" (courier alias; Camarilla dossiers; later by Nuevo León’s and the greater Gulf's crime syndicates and Kindred circuits), "Soli" (family; childhood nickname), "Lady Selene" (Julian's LiveJournal fanfics) Clan: Caitiff (botched Embrace; presumed Banu Haqim) Generation: 11th -> 9th by 2020 (post-diablerie and 2100X vitae infusion) Sire: Julian Sim (Banu Haqim) Birthdate: November 1st, 1974 (Scorpio sun, Cancer moon, Pisces rising) Embraced: November 2nd, 2000 (age 26, Sierra Vista, AZ) Humanity: 6

PHYSICAL PROFILE Height: 5’7 | Weight: 130 lbs Appearance: Asian/Hispanic female. A study in contrasts—delicate bone structure, thick brows, rounded full lips. Almond eyes, densely lashed and restless. Scar tissue a silver slice from left oral commissure to earlobe (timing belt snap at 17). Build: Hourglass; fleshy curves with coltish limbs—feminine, lithe and capable. Walks with a lazy, hip-first sway. Skin: Medium tan olive skin: deeper/healthier undertones with Blush of Life active; slightly greyer, washed-out complexion otherwise. Hair: Espresso-dark, waist-length waves; often tied back with gold wire, beads, stolen Panda Express chopsticks, in a messy or braided ponytail, baby hairs wild or strategically framing her face. Eyes: Cajeta in crude oil—that final shade of brown before all light’s swallowed by black hole. Voice: Husky contralto. Sandoval-family Spanish-soft lilt, Sonoran cadence. Laugh is rare, disarming, warm.

Distinguishing Marks:

Tattoos: Scorpion (right hand), kingsnake (left ankle), twin hummingbirds (left hip), Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (full back mural). Various smaller tattoos and stick-and-pokes all over.

Moles: Scattered. Concentrated clusters on neck, breast, and shoulder.

Scent & Blood Profile: Burning mesquite, sage, cacao, offset with chamoy and tamarind tang.

Style: Desert punk, apocalypse saint — thrifted slip dresses, mutilated band tees, tiny camisoles and bandeaus, oversized jackets. Baggy or low-rise jeans, cutoff shorts. Last-legs denim and beaten-soft leather. Matte blacks, stark whites, warm earth tones: dried blood red, ochre, rust, sienna. Safety pin mods, bandanas, citrine studs and turquoise beads sewn throughout; rosaries repurposed as anklets. Favors sneakers, lace-up combat boots; strappy sandals and metallic accents on more formal occasions.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE MBTI: INFJ Enneagram: Type 4w5 Fatal Flaw: Loyalty above self-preservation Core Fear: Fundamentally worthless/useless Core Desire: To feel real (to herself, which she often mistakes for feeling needed/wanted/put to use by others) Vice: Self-Sacrifice Virtue: Empathy Concept: The Martyr Who Bites/The Scorpion Saint — bleeding heart wrapped in barbed wire, equal parts ghost and hurricane. The wound (loneliness and longing) as an entity. Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Key Traits:

Empath (derogatory): Reads rooms like a bloodhound, absorbs pain (voluntary or not). Not above using human fragility (wants, fears, darker desires) for gain; can backfire or become overwhelmed when a trigger is present.

Self-Loathing: But resilient; trying not to make a big deal of it.

Haunting Vulnerability: Projects an aura of quiet, tragic beauty behind the stoicism.

Nurturer: Instinctively gentle with children, animals, broken things. Watches out for women at truck-stops, diners, gas stations, clubs; those who are lost; those working long nights alone.

Twisted Sensuality: Sex > or = communication. Will use sex as both weapon and comfort; a way to ground or to escape; deflect or emphasize.

Protective Fury: Will eviscerate anyone and anything (including the Masquerade) threatening her very few loved ones.

Beast Resonance: Inland Taipan (lethal precision) × Solifugae (desert hunger) × Arizona Bark Scorpion (deceptively strong venom).

*Manifests when Protean is in use as slit pupils, lightened irises, extended fangs, unnerving stillness.

Predator Type: Siren (sometimes suppressed)

Preferred Vessels: Construction workers, single fathers, anyone with over-clocked minds, calloused hands, in need of release, etc. Not a strict preference, however.

Method: Seductive predation (“I’ll make it good for you”) followed on occasion by post-feed guilt-vomiting.

Blood Resonance: Melancholic (frequent), Choleric (from Julian), Sanguine (from Ryan).

Mental Health: Depression, depersonalization and chronic dissociation made worse after Aila’s diablerie and Julian’s abandonment. Developed Bulimic derangement due to intense trauma of blood bond breaking down.

SKILLSET & DISCIPLINES

Disciplines:

Blood Sorcery: (butcher-shopped and jury-rigged from Julian’s initial schooling. Cruder than Banu Haqim or Tremere techniques but brutally efficient.)

Dust to Dust: Blood/vitae siphon.

Crimson Lasso: Razor-wire whips of congealed vitae.

Veil of María: Illusions woven from heat-haze and opponent blood loss.

Protean: (self-manifested, self-taught. Lettow imparts some teaching during the events of Night Road.)

Feral Weapons: Claws distend, fangs elongate (4”, curved), able to unhinge jaw like a serpent.

Scorpion’s Touch/Kodoku: Blackened talons that secrete paralytic venom (duration: 10 mins, Sorcery Combo).

Earth Meld: Limited to sinking into sand/loose soil.

Celerity: (Julian’s tutelage in Monterrey, post-Night Road. Utterly rudimentary—nothing flashy. Yet.)

Skills:

Mechanical Prodigy: Hotwires most cars in 8.3 seconds. Anything pre-2020 <15 seconds. Engine whisperer. Favors muscle cars, JDMs, motorcycles.

Courier: Knows every backroad from Tucson to Tijuana.

Getaway Driver: Speeds and drifts like a wraith. Offensive and defensive maneuvers.

Languages: Fluent Spanish, English; rusty Tagalog.

Streetwise: Subtle and lowkey, with high wits and composure. Competently navigates cop checkpoints and hunter cells; gang, cartel and certain Anarch territories.

Weaknesses:

Guilt: Under/Overfeeds, self-flagellates, hesitates mid-fight, leaves survivors.

Mortal Melancholy: Overcompensates with Blush of Life during sex/feeding. Stares at couples and families. Hoards Ryan's pictures of sunsets and his nieces' crayon masterpieces.

Dyslexic: Shies away from text communication and academics, tries to memorize everything including maps and operating systems.

Restlessness: Russian nesting doll of sadness wrapped in horny, wrapped in 'I can fix him', wrapped in 'Fuck it', and prone to paranoid and Fugue states. And wrapped in more horny.

Triggers: Julian’s “Solona”’s, Aila's stirring, children, migrants, girls with a familiar hollowness. Ryan's tenderness, specifically.

BIOGRAPHY Early Life (1974-2000): Born in Soledad, CA, to a Mexican mechanic (Javier Castillo) and Filipina seamstress (Luningning “Lu” Reyes). Older brother Tiago (Los Zetas enforcer) taught her to throw punches, change oil, hide bodies. Moved to Sierra Vista, AZ, at 8. Dropped out of high school at 16. Worked dad’s garage nights, toyed with community college, dated town bad boys, miscarried at 22. Ultimately directionless. Embraced by Julian at 26.

Fledgling Years (2000-2010): Julian’s shadow, best friend, lover, partner-in-crime. Camarilla wetwork: border ops, hits, drops, clean ups. Diablerized Aila (2010). Julian abandoned her a month later.

Wilderness Years (2010-2017): Independent courier gigs, smuggling, trafficking, gun-running. Crying in truck-stop showers; learning to control purging episodes after feeding. Restricted to bagged blood.

Alternate Universe (2018+): Tremere fetter analysis delayed, awaiting further instruction before making return trip to Texas state; granted temporary hospitality in Miami. Subsequently tangled in Chantry bullshit, Gulf drug and gun trade, and the political chess courtesy of a Lasombra rolling in. Also: Ryan Donahue.

Night Road & Beyond (2021+): Reunited with Julian. 2100X catalyst. Infiltrated Viper Club, retrieved Beckoning data, destabilized Second Inquisition’s presence in Southern AZ (for now). Main Mission Objective: Sabbat death cult in Monterrey. Side Mission Objective: Who the fuck took that shot.

Affiliations: Julian Sim & 2100X; Independent (ex-Camarilla-adjacent) courier; Ricardo 'Ric' Lorenz's Miami heist crew (by extension of Ryan Donahue).

[fmaoldficarchive]

Any size posts will recieve a masterpost, include an image of the winamps as shown above, credits to the creator if I can find them, download and play in browser links, an archived backup of the download file and hopefully also the ability to play in browser will be archived 🤞 I haven't tested that last part yet. (Also - a sneak peak of some of the skins I've found at the top!)

Details and pros/cons under the cut:

I already have more winamp skins saved than tumblr will allow images in a single post, and there's still more out there for me to find (I found images of some I don't have on a french fansite in the WM but the download files weren't archived and they don't work 😞) So at the bare minimum we're getting two huge posts, probably more in the future. Pros & cons of each:

Singular posts (1 skin = 1 post)

pros: Neat posts, able to be individually tagged so a wall of images of unrelated characters won't show up in people searching for fic by character tag, people will get notifications when new winamps are added in the future cons: Massively spamming everyone while initially uploading them all, users in masterpost having to open well over 30 links just to see all their options because of the image limit, could take me a couple days to get them all fully posted, crosslinked and back to doing fics

A few giant posts (up to 30 skins per post, a la LiveJournal icon lists, with links and credits in a list below)

pros: a lot of options visible quickly and simutaneously, easier for a user to open two or three large posts from a masterpost than tons of smaller ones, makes comparing skins fast and easy cons: potentially confusing for users to figure out which link goes to which image, massive wall of images. Editing posts to add new winamps in the future won't give anyone notifications unless they subscribe to every post or I make an announcement every time.

Posts by character/group (All skins with Ed & Al )

pros: all specific character options available simutaneously, easier to compare all in a specific group to see which you like best, very few tabs open to see all options cons: Some groups looking desolate from only having 1-2 skins each while others are overflowing. Groups with many options getting messy and confusing as more are added over time and cause link confusion. The pedantics of 'Ed & Al skins post, Ed & Winry skins post, Ed & Al & Winry skins post' resulting in A) way more group posts than necessary to account for one or two one-off group skins or B) the same skins and links uploaded multiple times for each character, making large posts even more cluttered. Wall of images. Editing posts to add new winamps in the future won't give anyone notifications unless they subscribe to every character post or I make an announcement every single time.

[funsosfunzone]

older and/or underrated back to the future fic recs!

one of the many joys of being in an older fandom is that there's years, if not decades of fic to sort through, but you do have to do a fair bit of sorting.

criteria: all fics must have been initially posted 2016 or earlier. if they're ao3, they have sub-150 kudos.

authors/websites:

kristen sheley - fun continuations/elaborations on the canon. very well researched and well written! some other fun bttf goodies as well, including summaries of early screenplay drafts

mary jean holmes - her stories are only available through the wayback machine these days, and i'm afraid, but they're incredibly well written stories within their own expansive universe. if you're having trouble seeing the PDF after you click the 'download' link, try going back to an older snapshot.

futurefix.net - this isn't so much a rec as much as a snapshot as to what BTTF fanfic looked like between the years of 2007 and 2010. quality varies wildly, and some links are dead/only available through the wayback machine but it's an interesting site regardless.

fics (fanfiction.net/ao3):

the strangeness of marty mcfly - a series of outsider POVs, from the western union man to goldie wilson to griff tannen. i love an outsider POV so i'm biased but they're so good.....

back to the future prequel - an imagining of the start of doc and marty's relationship in the lone pines timeline. slightly corny, but fun

deceit - biff POV? biff POV. one shot, quick read, feeds my love of outsider POVs.

15 minutes above the fold - i made another post about this one because i love it that much. nontraditional fic told through the medium of the hill valley newspaper's front page!

the boy beyond time - this is an unfinished doctor who crossover. don't look at me like that. it's good.

subtextual homesick alien - following his encounter with darth vader, george thinks about aliens.

4am, this letter - missing scene from bttf I where marty decides to write the letter to doc

a visit with an old friend - doc brown visits an aged marty in his nursing home. very bittersweet.

that's probably enough for now! if anyone has any more favorites please do share (especially from livejournal or other non-ffn/ao3 sites! those ones can be tough to track down).

[slayersweek]

2024 SLAYERS SECRET SANTA INFO AND SIGNUP FORM:

Hello! Please read over the following before signing up. Thank you!

What ‘Secret Santa’ Means: You create a fanwork, and you’ll receive one in return. Everyone who wishes to participate will provide prompts that they’d like to see completed, and another participant will be assigned their prompts and will complete one of those prompts (which one is completed is up to the person they’re assigned to).

When you submit your prompts, you are welcome (and encouraged) to tell me anything you are uncomfortable with or don’t wish to do (pairings, genre, rating, etc), that way the prompts you’re given are something you’re comfortable writing/drawing.

Rules and Regulations:

1) Watch this tumblr!  If you do not have a tumblr yourself, please put it in your bookmarks and remind yourself to check it often.

2) Can I ask for ____?  You can ask for whatever you want- rating, genre, etc. However, please keep in mind that if you’re asking for something super unusual, you might want to provide some broader prompts as well.

3) How long do I have to signup?  Signups will end on Saturday, November 30, 2024. That is all month to sign up!!

4) When is the deadline?  Please have your piece completed and posted by Friday, January 31, 2025. You can post your gift anytime starting from Wednesday, December 25, 2024.

5) How do I post it?  Post it in your own tumblr and link it to us or tag us (@slayersweek) so we can reblog it over here. You may link to where your fanwork is posted off tumblr (to livejournal, dreamwidth, ff.net, ao3, deviantart, etc) in your post.

6) How long does fic have to be?  At least eight hundred words. It doesn’t need to be super-long of course, but we want everyone to get something that’s more than drabble length.

7) Are there any extra requirements for the art?  It can be done in any medium (digital, colored pencil, copic, sketch, etc). Just remember that this is a gift for someone, so make sure it’s a completed piece!

8) Can I do fancomics?  Yes. Absolutely.

9) What if I need to drop out?  Then I would ask you to please let me know as soon as possible (and before the December 25th deadline) so we can arrange a pitch hitter for you. Failure to notify me will ban you from future events.

10) What is a pitch hitter?  If someone has to drop out, I’d still like their giftee to get a gift. A pitch hitter is someone who is willing to do a second fanwork in order to make sure no one goes without a gift.

11) What type of prompts should I give?  Prompts can be anything from something vague like “Lina, Gourry, Amelia, and Zelgadis exchange gifts,” “Sylphiel and Martina go to the beach” to something specific like “I’d like to see a fic where Lina and Gourry are pulled into an undersea world. The two end up facing an ancient source of magic, and they must team up with many witch and wizard allies. I’d like if it featured Lina/Gourry and Zelgadis/Amelia, and if possible… some Filia/Valgaav? A happy ending, please!” You must submit a minimum of three prompts or I cannot fairly give your requests to your Santa.

Please make them more than a characters name. It does not have to be Christmas themed and you do not have to be detailed, but give people something to work with!

12) I have another question!  Then please ask it via our askbox (anon asks are enabled).

Okay, I’m ready to signup! Please copy and paste the below form and submit it to the SlayersWeek inbox to sign up.

GIVING: Tumblr Username: Email or Alternate Contact:   Specialty (Fanfic or Fanart- If you can do both, you may list both): Highest Rating You’ll Work With: Will Not Work With (Any characters, pairings, genres, scenarios, you won’t do): RECEIVING: Do Not Want (Any characters, pairings, ratings, genres, scenarios, etc you don’t want to receive): Do You Prefer fic, art, or no preference?: Three Prompts: 1) 2) 3) Can you pitch hit if someone drops out?:

Please SUBMIT your completed form HERE. If you have any further questions, you can direct them to this blog HERE, or to my personal HERE.

[crosaidi]

i'll be honest: i'm not worried about tumblr going under anytime soon. most big social media sites like this don't just go under that fast. hell, livejournal still exists, ya'll. i think worst case scenario we get it left on life support/not many updates and more ads, or it gets sold again, but c'est la vie. i don't think it's going anywhere soon and if it does it'll be pretty obvious for awhile.

that said, i do wish there would be a dedicated long-form roleplaying site that had lasting power. all the potentials have died before they got off the ground, and all the short-form sites like bluesky etc don't have as much appeal. discord is great but harder to meet new people. it's interesting because there used to be forums, MUDs, a lot more social sites, but those have kind of gone largely extinct.

revive the old 90s/early 2000s RP mediums, is what I say.

[blubberquark]

Are Game Blogs Uniquely Lost?

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

Figuring this out is important if we want to make predictions about the future of the small web, and about the viability of different efforts to get more people to contribute. We can't figure it out now, because we can't measure the ground truth of web sites that are already gone. Right now, the small web is mostly about the small web, not about stamp collecting or knitting. If we really manage to revitalise the small web, will it be like the small web of today except bigger, the web-1.0 of old, or will certain topics and communities be lost again?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting "Let the Platforms Burn"

This week on my podcast, I read “Let the Platforms Burn,” a recent Medium column making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be:

https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

The platforms used to be source of online stability, and many argued that by consolidating the wide and wooly web into a few “curated” silos, the platforms were replacing chaos with good stewardship. If we wanted to make the internet hospitable to normies, we were told, we had to accept that Apple and Facebook’s tightly managed “simplicity” were the only way to get there.

But today, all the platforms are on fire, all the time. They are rocked by scandals every bit as awful as the failures of the smaller sites of yesteryear, but while harms of a Geocities or Livejournal moderation failure were confined to a small group of specialized users, failures in the big silos reach hundreds of millions or even billions of people.

What should we do about the rolling crisis of the platforms? The default response — beloved of Big Tech’s boosters and critics alike — is to impose rules on the platforms to make them more hospitable places for the billions they’ve engulfed. But I think that will fail. Instead, I think we should make the platforms less important places by freeing those billions.

That’s the argument of the column.

Think of California’s wildfires. While climate change has increased the intensity and frequency of our fires, climate (and neglect by PG&E) is merely part of the story. The other part of the story is fire-debt.

For millennia, the original people of California practiced controlled burns of the forests they lived, hunted, and played in. These burns cleared out sick and dying trees, scoured the forest floor of tinder, and opened spaces in the canopy that gave rise to new growth. Forests need fire — literally: the California redwood can’t reproduce without it:

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/giant-sequoia-needs-fire-grow/15094/

But this ended centuries ago, when settlers stole the land and declared an end to “cultural burning” by the indigenous people they expropriated, imprisoned, and killed. They established permanent settlements within the fire zone, and embarked on a journey of escalating measures to keep that smouldering fire zone from igniting.

These heroic measures continue today, and they’ve set up a vicious cycle: fire suppression creates the illusion that it’s safe to live at the wildlife urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to the fire zone — and their presence creates political pressure for even more heroic measures.

The thing is, fire suppression doesn’t mean no fires — it means wildfires. The fire debt mounts and mounts, and without an orderly bankruptcy — controlled burns — we get chaotic defaults, the kind of fire that wipes out whole towns.

Eventually, we will have to change tacks: rather than making it safe to stay in the fire zone, we’re going to have to make it easy to leave, so that we can return to those controlled burns and pay down those fire-debts.

And that’s what we need to do with the platforms.

For most of the history of consumer tech and digital networks, fire was the norm. New platforms — PC companies, operating systems, online services — would spring up and grow with incredible speed, only to collapse, seemingly without warning.

To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, you need to understand two concepts: network effects and switching costs.

Network effects: A service enjoys network effects if it increases in value as more people use it. AOL Instant Messenger grows in usefulness every time someone signs up for it, and so does Facebook. The more users, the more reasons to join. The more people who join, the more people will join.

Switching costs: The things you have to give up when you leave a product or service. When you quit Audible, you have to throw away all your audiobooks (they will only play on Audible-approved players). When you leave Facebook, you have to say goodbye to all the friends, family, communities and customers that brought you there.

Tech has historically enjoyed enormous network effects, which propelled explosive growth. But it also enjoyed low switching costs, which underpinned implosive contraction. Because digital systems are universal (all computers can run all programs; all nodes on the network can connect to one another), it was historically very easy to switch from one service to another.

Someone building a new messenger service or social media platform could import your list of contacts, or even use bots to fetch the messages left for you on the old service and put them in the inbox on the new one, and then push your replies back to the people you left behind. Likewise, when Apple made its iWork office suite, it could reverse-engineer the Microsoft Office file formats so you could take all your data with you if you quit Windows and switched to MacOS:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

This dynamic — network effects growth and low switching costs contraction — is why we think of tech as so dynamic. It’s companies like DEC were able to turn out minicomputers that shattered the dominance of mainframes. But it’s also why DEC was brought so low that a PC company, Compaq — was able to buy it for pennies on the dollar. Compaq — a company that built an empire by making interoperable IBM PC clones — was itself “disrupted” a few years later, and HP bought it for spare change found in the sofa cushions.

But HP didn’t fall to Compaq’s fate. It survived — as did IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook. Somehow, the cycle of “good fire” that kept any company from growing too powerful was interrupted.

Today’s tech giants run “walled gardens” that are actually walled prisons that entrap their billions of users by imposing high switching costs on them. How did that happen? How did tech become “five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four?”

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

The answer lies in the fact that tech was born as antitrust was dying. Reagan hit the campaign trail the same year the Apple ][+ hit shelves. With every presidency since, tech has grown more powerful and antitrust has grown weaker (the Biden administration has halted this decay, but it must repair 40 years’ worth of sabotage).

This allowed tech to “merge to monopoly.” Google built a single successful product — a search engine — and then conquered the web by buying other peoples’ companies, even as their own internal product development process produced a nearly unbroken string of flops. Apple buys 90 companies a year — Tim Cook brings home a new company more often than you bring home a bag of groceries:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18531570/apple-company-purchases-startups-tim-cook-buy-rate

When Facebook was threatened by an upstart called Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg sent a middle-of-the-night email to his CFO defending his plan to pay $1b for the then-tiny company, insisting that the only way to secure eternal dominance was to eliminate competitors — by buying them out, not by being better than them. As Zuckerberg says, “It is better to buy than compete”:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

As tech consolidated into a cozy oligopoly whose execs hopped from one company to another, they rigged the game. They colluded on a criminal “no-poach” deal to suppress their workers’ wages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

And they colluded to illegally rig the ad-market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

This collusion is the inevitable result of market concentration. 100 squabbling tech companies will be at each others’ throats, unable to agree on catering for their annual meeting much less a common lobbying agenda. But boil those companies down to a bare handful and they’ll quickly converge on a single hymn and twine their voices in eerie harmony:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/16/compulsive-cheaters/#rigged

Eliminating antitrust enforcement — letting companies buy and merge with competitors, permitting predatory pricing and other exclusionary tactics — was the first step towards unsustainable fire suppression. But, as on the California wildland-urban interface, this measure quickly gave way to ever-more-extreme ones as the fire debt mounted.

The tech’s oligarchs have spent decades both suppressing laws that would limit their extractive profits (there’s a reason there’s no US federal privacy law!), and, crucially, getting new law made to limit anyone from “disrupting” them as they disrupted their forebears.

Today, a thicket of laws and rules — patent, copyright, anti-circumvention, tortious interference, trade secrecy, noncompete, etc — have been fashioned into a legal superweapon that tech companies can use to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers, and prevent them from making or using interoperable tools to reduce their switching costs and leave their walled gardens:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Today, these laws are being bolstered with new ones that make it even more difficult for users to leave the platforms. These new laws purport to protect users from each other, but they leave them even more at the platforms’ mercy.

So we get rules requiring platforms to spy on their users in the name of preventing harassment, rather than laws requiring platforms to stand up APIs that let users leave the platform and seek out a new online home that values their wellbeing:

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/lawful-awful-control-over-legal-speech-platforms-governments-and-internet-users

We get laws requiring platforms to “balance” the ideology of their content moderation:

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/16/texas-social-media-law/

But not laws that require platforms to make it easy to seek out a new server whose moderation policies are more hospitable to your ideas:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

The platforms insist — with some justification — that we can’t ask them to both control their users and give their users more freedom. If we want a platform to detect and block “bad content,” we can’t also require the platform to let third party interoperators plug into the system and exchange messages with it.

They’re right — but that doesn’t mean we should defend them. The problem with the platforms isn’t merely that they’re bad at defending their users’ interests. The problem is that they can’t defend those interests. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t merely monumentally, personally unsuited to serving as the unelected, unaacountable social media czar for billions of people in hundreds of countries, speaking thousands of languages. No one should have that job.

We don’t need a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need no Mark Zuckerbergs. We don’t need to perfect Zuck — we need to abolish Zuck.

Rather than pouring our resources into making life in the smoldering wildlife-urban interface safe, we should help people leave that combustible zone, with policies that make migration easy.

This month, we got an example of how just easy that migration could be. Meta launched Threads, a social media platform that used your list of Instagram followers and followees to get you set up. Those low switching costs made it easy for Instagram users to become Threads users — and the network effects meant it happened fast, with 30m signups in the first morning:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/06/meta-launches-threads-and-its-important-for-reasons-that-most-people-wont-care-about/

Meta says it was able to do this because it owns both Insta and Threads. But Meta doesn’t own the list of accounts that you trust and value enough to follow, or the people who feel the same way about you. That’s yours. We could and should force Meta to let you have it.

But that’s not enough. Meta claims that it will someday integrate Threads into the Fediverse, the collection of services based on the ActivityPub standard, whose most popular app is Mastodon. On Mastodon, you not only get to export your list of followers and followees with one click, but you can import those followers and followees to a new server with one click.

Threads looks incredibly stupid, a “Twitter alternative you would order from Brookstone,” but there are already tens of millions of people establishing relationships with each other there:

https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing

When they get tired of “brand-safe vaporposting,” they’ll have to either give up those relationships, or resign themselves to being trapped inside another walled-garden-cum-prison operated by a mediocre tech warlord:

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-algorithmic-anti-culture-of-scale

But what if, instead of trying to force Zuck to be a better emperor-for-life, we passed rules requiring him to let his subjects flee his tyrannical reign? We could require Threads to stand up a Fediverse gateway that let users leave the service and set up on any other Fediverse servers (we could apply this rule to all Fediverse servers, preventing petty dictators from tormenting their users, too):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Zuck founded an empire of oily rags, and so of course it’s always on fire. We can’t make it safe to stay, but we can make it easy to leave:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

This is the thing platforms fear the most. Network effects work in both directions: if your service grows quickly because people value one another, then it will shrink quickly when the people your users care about leave. As @zephoria-blog​ recounts, this is what happened when Myspace imploded:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

Platforms collapse “slowly, then all at once.” The only way to prevent sudden platform collapse syndrome is to block interoperability so users can’t escape the harms of your walled garden without giving up the benefits they give to each other.

We should stop trying to make the platforms good. We should make them gone. We should restore the “good fire” that ended with the growth of financialized Big Tech empires. We should aim for soft landings for users, and stop pretending that there’s any safe way to life in the fire zone.

We should let the platforms burn.

Here’s the podcast:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/07/16/let-the-platforms-burn-the-opposite-of-good-fires-is-wildfires/

And here’s a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @internetarchive​; they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_446/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_446_-_Let_the_Platforms_Burn.mp3

And here’s my podcast feed:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Tonight (July 18), I’m hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It’s in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop’s fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:

https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins

[Image ID: A forest wildfire. Peeking through the darks in the stark image are hints of the green Matrix "waterfall" effect.]

Image: Cameron Strandberg (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fire-Forest.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[merlincinema]

Merlin Cinema Round 1 Masterpost

This year, we've had some fantastic fanworks in the form of fic, artwork, and manips. These authors and artists not only blew our minds but forced us to think out of the box and made us so grateful to have such an amazing, hardworking group of people involved in this year's fest. We congratulate all the participants of this year's fest for their successful posting. Without you all, this fest would not have been a success. So, without further ado, we proudly present to you this year's masterlist:

[Art+Fic] Mise En Place by s0mmerspr0ssen, papysanzo based on Bella Martha Pairing: Merlin/Arthur Rating: E Word Count: 30k Medium: Digital Art

[Fic] The Mistaken Bride and the Dragon by Chaosgenes based on I Am Dragon Pairing: Merlin/Arthur Rating: T Word Count: 2,130

[Art+Fic] The Hawk and the Bear by Excited_Insomniac, Papysanzo89 based on Ladyhawk Pairing: Merlin/Arthur Rating: T Word Count: 15.7k Medium: Digital Art

[Art] Merlin Stardust AU by dollopbrain based on Star Dust Pairing: Merlin/Arthur Rating: G Medium: Digital Art

[Fic] The screams of the innocents by HadrianPeverellBlack based on Silence of the Lambs Pairing: Merlin/Arthur Rating: T Word Count: 3048

[Fic] For Merlin by HadrianPeverellBlack based on The Departed Pairing: Merlin & Arthur Rating: T Word Count: 622

[Fic] Return to Oz by Sage_Owl based on Return to Oz Pairing: Ygraine/Uther, Gen Rating: T Word Count: 10,035

[Fic] An Adventure Involving Dragons by thenerdyindividual based on Barbie Island Princess Pairing: Gwaine/Merlin/Arthur Rating: M Word Count: 70 118

[Fic] That Loving Feeling by ravenwilds based on Top Gun Pairing: Merlin/Arthur, Gwen/Gwaine Rating: T Word Count: 32,500

[Art] Sweet Home Ealdor by Esseff based on Sweet Home Alabama Pairing: Merlin/Arthur Rating: T Medium: Edits/Manips

View this post on Tumblr | LiveJournal | Discord

[sassygrrl32]

Finally Got Tire Fixed In Slidell, La~Rachel Holbert Jones

I got into the Walmart Auto Care Center (formerly Tire & Lube) this morning to get the car tire for the Ford Flex fixed. It turns out there was nothing wrong with the car tires. It was just low on air but all four were low on air by about 12 pounds which is surprising. I’m equally surprised the tire pressure warning didn’t come on sooner. I thought it would come on when the tires dropped by only…

[homestuckreplay]

Webcomics at Day 100 #4: explodingdog

Pages read: 2000-01-10 - 2000-09-17 (100 update days, but over 500 pages) & 2009-04-13 - 2009-05-26 (a further 13 days/42 pages)

Reason for selection: explodingdog may have been the first popular webcomic to work from reader submissions, and its drawings look like they were made in MS Paint, both key features of early Homestuck. explodingdog also broke containment, with many of its drawings spread elsewhere without attribution, such as being turned into LiveJournal icons or even painted on a building in Seattle.

Original run: 2000-2015, with lots of pages but an intermittent update schedule. Ongoing while Homestuck is getting started.

Content warnings: Extreme (but very abstract/cartoon) violence, gross-out humor involving bodily fluids

Overall thoughts:

I love the idea for this comic. Readers send in a short phrase via email, which can be absolutely anything, and artist Sam Brown chooses the ones that inspire him and draws a picture based on that phrase. However, reading the comic as an archive in the future, I don’t love the execution. Quite a few of the drawings made me openly groan, roll my eyes, or shake my head. There were definitely a few that got genuine laughs out of me, but they were a small percentage.

None of this is intended as shade to the artist – Brown seems like a decent guy based on the interviews I’ve read, and I hope he had fun making this. Running a webcomic for fifteen years is an impressive feat in itself, but this one just isn’t for me, at this point, in its current form.

Brown has stated that he has ‘never really seen explodingdog as a comic’ and calls his work a ‘collaborative art project’ although his reasoning hinges on the idea that comics have to be funny, and that humor isn’t the goal of his work. I personally think that comics are a medium that can work in any genre, not just comedy, and so webcomic is appropriate. In an essay, Kyle Conway argues that explodingdog is an absurdist theater performance, employing improvisation and experienced as live by its audience. Conway also highlights the design of the website, where instead of placing the most recent installment on the homepage as most webcomics do, individual titles have to be clicked on to see the accompanying artwork. In Brown’s words, ‘the story happens in your head’ between the title and image.

Conway’s arguments make sense from his position as a real-time reader. A huge draw of explodingdog is the knowledge that the captions came from ordinary folk on the internet, and that you, the reader, could submit a caption, and a cooler guy on the internet would think it was interesting or poignant or funny enough to make a drawing out of. The moment between clicking on the page’s title and seeing its corresponding image, where the reader comes up with their own interpretation of the title, is meaningful when the drawings are given out a handful at a time on sporadic days.

But these things don’t work the same in an archive. There’s a much greater distance between the reader and the creator, with no chance of personally becoming part of the work. And having to click every individual page from the menu isn’t a smooth reading experience for over 500 pages at once – there’s no ‘next’ button, although weirdly the entire image on each page functions as a ‘previous’ button, which makes an accidental click really frustrating. Brown knew from the start that creating art on the internet made it more temporary than physical art, as websites changed form over time – in a 2006 interview, he said ‘i think it is very possible that either because of government regulation or changes in technology or greedy corporations or a combination of all three, the internet as we expect it to be in 2006 won’t exist in ten years.’

The response to explodingdog during its release seems extremely positive, with lots of people praising how it twists the meaning of prompts and comes up with unexpected interpretations. I personally found that it got very repetitive, very fast. The same twists would happen in a lot of drawings, and would usually involve 2000s-era internet humor such as robots, aliens, stick figures bleeding due to missing their head or limbs, green monsters that are referred to as ‘monkeys,’ and riffs on the idea that ‘other people are stupid.’ There are recurring characters, including the Red Robot – famous enough to be featured in quite a few other webcomics – a second robot that grows roses in its stomach, a guy watching TV in a space wasteland, Phil, and more.

In some cases, an entire picture is reused. ‘better than being lost in the city’ (6/29/2000) and ‘In the morning things will be better’ (7/13/2000) feature the exact same piece of art, the later one slightly zoomed in. ‘toast from a toaster’ (1/11/2000), ‘Toast goes in the toaster’ (6/19/2000) and ‘Toast’ (7/17/2000) all three contain the same image. The gimmick, as discussed often by Brown, is that the images are inspired by the captions – not that the images already existed and happened to fit something that was submitted. I really hope this disappears in later years.

Like other comics I’ve read, I did notice a lot of improvement in the art between 2000 and 2009 in terms of complexity and ease of understanding. In both cases the art is mostly irregular, childlike stick figures and blobs, with no intent for the art to be technically good. In 2000, there’s a lot of muted colors including browns, grays, khakis and oranges. The color palette often isn’t nice to look at (in my opinion) and as the images often depict unpleasant things such as vomit and lobotomies, they sometimes feel like shock value art. In 2009, the colors have brightened and become more varied, and there’s more use of backgrounds even when the image doesn’t require it. The stick figures are more polished with smoother lines. I was surprised to learn that Brown was already a fine art graduate in 2000; in the nicest possible way, he does such a good job of hiding any actual skill.e

I think that even in the modern day there is great potential for certain explodingdog comics to be used as reaction images or ‘tag your oc’ style memes. However, due to the nature of the project, I think this comic would be better enjoyed as a greatest hits collection than as a full archive.

Relevance to Homestuck: explodingdog is one of the webcomics linked from MSPA under the heading ‘No Shortage of Good Websites,’ and due to its prominence in the 2000s, may have been a direct influence on Hussie choosing to work from reader commands. They’re both comics that collaborate with their audience and invite readers who want to share in the work’s creation.

In explodingdog, the images vary on how they relate to the captions – some draw the phrase straight up, some are a ‘yes and,’ some are a direct response (if the caption is a question) and some feel unrelated, but feature a stick figure who could possibly be saying that caption. The ‘yes and,’ where Brown uses the phrase and adds a second, followup phrase that changes the context, were the most effective ones for me. This might be because they felt the most Homestuck – Hussie does the same move where they take a reader command and add something else so that the command is followed, but is different to intended. A recent example is p.597, where the command is ‘Use ice maker, it’s still hot around here.’ and the response is ‘yes, Dave uses the ice maker, and it’s full of cherry bombs, not ice.’

Finally, both comics put out a large number of pages per day, unlike the majority of comics which stick to a single page per day. Both explodingdog and Homestuck published 4-6 pages on most update days in their first years, and both occasionally broke into double digits. Clearly some aspect of their creation is designed to make a lot of content, as fast as possible, to the point that some readers might consider them quantity over quality.

Continue reading? In a 2004 interview Brown said ‘my website is available to anyone on the Internet for free, but millions of people would rather see porn or sports scores.’ I’m not huge on either porn or sports scores but I still think I am one of those people.

[shelandsorcery]

High Intensity Comic Work

So my first round of art school was a fine art degree. And I didn't really know a lot about art careers and I wasn't really sure what I WANTED to be doing, but I did kind of chafe against the "comics aren't art" vibe some teachers had. And then Shannon Gerard came and talked. And Shannon's gone on to do a lot, a LOT of really cool stuff (http://shannongerard.org) but her talk was about, or at least mentioned, how she was doing comics as part of a cross-disciplinary masters, by making them with lithographic prints. Which is, I think, a real flex. Like, it's one thing to draw a comic, and another thing to draw it backwards, soak it in chemicals, and then, one page at a time, pull the right amount of successful prints from the stone, before you could draw the next page. It still boggles my mind. Just fuckin incredible. And her process did two things - it elevated the medium to something the more traditional fine art faculty would engage with, and it also used the then popular genre of autobio/confessional comics, which probably also helped get fine art profs to connect with the project. So my memory of her talk is prettttty faded, but what it did was give me permission to be a real shit about bringing comics back into my fine art work. Clearly I just needed to use more punishing mediums! So I did. Did I have anything to say WITH those comics? No. Would that stop me? Also no. So, in my final year of art school, baby artist shel decided to paint and etch comics of the most banal shit you can think of.

I did a BUNCH of these, and if you think these painted ones are... slow and meditative....

Wait'll you see the blood, sweat and tears I poured into intaglio prints of empty spaces:

These were etched and aquatinted into copper plates, printed by wiping ink into every crevasse in the metal and then wiping all the excess ink off the face, then squeezing them through a huge heavy press, one print at a time.

That said I do still like these haunted window views inspired by taking the subway up past Yorkdale station every day for school. But oh my god the LABOUR it took to make these. Was that the secret to making them fine art? I do not know, I just know I gave it a real good try. I even screenprinted a deconstructed journal comic, god help me:

Anyways, the last piece I made this way was also the first fine art painting I ever sold, and it was titled "waiting" and it was a journal comic about doing my first Canzine alone when my teammate ditched. Painted in layers and layers of acrylic, across six canvases.

Did I use these as livejournal icons for years after? Yes. Anyways now when I feel like I'm being a bit of a try-hard, I at least know where I learned it. Oh my gosh okay I did make ONE more of these, the year after I graduated. It's very angsty.

Read the full article

[xplrvibes]

What do you think about how oversexualized Colby is? Aswell as how often his friends would mention putting Colby in their video for views and aswell as trying to get "good clips" of him for the fan girls? It cant be just me who thought that was a little weird. I mean I wouldn't like it if my friends did that. Also what do you think about people who make sad edits of Sam and Colbys life?

I'm going to answer the last thing first, just to keep you all on your toes.

The sad edits are funny to me. I like those ones where it's like, "Hey Colby, do you think in another universe, I didn't survive breaking my back?" And then Sam is a ghost or whatever. Those are so phenomenally childish and stupid that when I come across them, I just laugh. They're like terrible fanfics fit into 30 second edits.

Here's the thing (side tangent incoming): I am an old school fandom person. I came up in the days when there was an impenetrable fortress built between fandom works - such as fanfics and edits and meta works, head canons, shipping etc - and the person/media you were "stanning." I vividly remember the first time someone mentioned the word fanfic at a Supernatural convention. That person got booed by the rest of the crowd and was persona non-grata on LiveJournal after that.

Fandom was fandom and the subject of said fandom was adamantly Not Allowed Past The Fortress Walls.

Cut to 2025 and people are out here making solby edits and tagging Sam, Colby and Malia in them, making shipping edits about Colby and the Holy Trinity and fighting about which one he looked best with and again - tagging him and Malia in it (wanna know why he unfollowed Stas and Amber? Maybe look to shit like that for your answer lol), gleefully telling Colby all about the rpg they are in where they had rpg Colby get rpg Tara Yummy pregnant, making edits of the guys dying and becoming ghosts that haunt the other and asking them to please watch and comment on it, making Satrina edits and tagging them both in it when they've moves on years ago, sending them links to wattpad fanfics of themselves...the fortress has fallen. No, the fortress was torn apart by the people who were living behind it and now they're out there just...throwing every little bit of formerly private fandom media and literature at these people for notices without thinking for a second that maybe Sam and Colby don't want to watch themselves die set to "The Night We Met" or want to read about themselves in some horribly written omegaverse fic (is there omegaverse snc out there? I'm almost scared to ask) or get NSFW fanart of them on their public Instagram wall.

Anyway, all this to say: I find the concept of taking this medium that used to be private and very much behind the curtain and posting it in the hopes that Sam or Colby comment on it and go, "Wow sncfangrl4eva3456, thanks for inventing a universe where I died from this thing that happened to me, beautiful and haunting tribute to my love for my bff," objectively hilarious.

As far as the people who would use Colby for views goes: he referenced that enough times in the past that I think he harbored a deep rooted resentment for being used like that for a long time, but only recently seemed to realize that he can set boundaries and cut people out of his life who weren't in his life for anything outside of clout, and I'm happy for him on that front. He really was the thumbnail king of 2017-2022. There were some people who would put him in thumbnails of videos he wasn't even in, that's how bad that was getting.

Notice how that doesn't seem to happen anymore. That's growth on his part. Good for him. That jelly spine of his finally got a little steel (said with love).

The oversexualization of Colby: I actually don't think it's nearly as bad as it used to be (a combination of having a girlfriend, thus making him unattractive to people who spent years looking at him as their stand-in boyfriend, and simply never posting himself doing anything anymore will do the trick), but that was definitely an issue back in the day.

And Colby himself - as desperately insecure and seeking validation as he often was - didn't seem to mind some of the out of pocket comments as long as they were funny and flirty and not creepy, so in a way, some of it was encouraged. His friends knew he didn't mind some of it and wouldn't put up a stink even if he did mind, so a lot of that was just them all playing into the narrative as well.

I think he was more annoyed and fed up with the death threats, the rampant shipping and then slut shaming of him and every human being he came into contact with, and the getting canceled for putting his left foot before his right, than he was about people calling him hot or saying they'd want to do [insert sexual thing here] with him. So, most of it was good natured.

Some shit, though - wow. Some of the shit back in the day bordered on sexual harrassment, you ask me. Some of the things people said and did towards him (fans and real life friends) really did paint him as this object that was there just to be hot and live up to their fantasies and sometimes it was taken way over a line.

Anyway, I think (although I don't keep up with what people are saying across platforms anymore, maybe I'm wrong) that it has calmed down considerably in recent years, and now he's just mostly known as that guy from Sam and Colby, which is probably fine by him 🤣.

[hdowlpost]

How To Submit Your Gifts

We had people ask about submitting the H/D Owlpost gifts and the header templates. :)

So here comes the Submission Info for Your Gifts! First things first: If you have any problems, concerns, or questions about your gifts or giftees, please email us at hdowlpostmaster@gmail.com.

You still have almost four weeks until November 22 when submissions are due! We cleared off all the mice droppings and pumpkin seeds gift wrappings and ribbons from last year's fest, and the Owlery is spic & span, waiting for all your sparkly gifts to arrive. The AO3 Collection for H/D Owlpost 2024 is open.

If you haven't confirmed your Assignment yet, please do so now.

We will send out Check-in mails in the next days. Please reply to them so we know that you are on track with your Owlpost gifts. A short "All well" is perfectly fine. Or tell us how we can help you!

Don't wait with your submission until you've created all your gifts: It's best for us when you send us each gift as soon as you've finished it, one after the other.

SUBMISSION INFO:

• Please post your gift fics, podfics, art, pictures of craft gifts, recipes etc. to the Harry/Draco Owlpost 2024 Collection! The Collection is moderated and unrevealed, so gifts will not be revealed before the posting date. You as the creator will remain anonymous until we de-anon the Collection for the Big Reveal on January 12, 2025.

• After having posted your gift to AO3, please fill out the header template below and send it to the mod email: hdowlpostmaster@gmail.com We will use this header for posting your gift at LiveJournal, tumblr and the Owlpost Discord.

• When sending your email, include your username in the subject line as well as the name of your recipient. EXAMPLE: "Username - Gift for X") --> "Owl_Saviour - Gift for Blond_Git"

• Please send the header for each of your gifts in a separate email. It makes our job so much easier.

• If you want us to post your fic to A03, let us know and we'll happily post it for you.

Gift Header

Here's the template for the header.

Gift from: Title: Summary: Word Count OR Art Medium OR Podfic Length: Rating: Contains: Notes:

( TITLE )

FOR PODFIC GIFTS, please add: Podfic cover: add here who created the podfic cover, you or someone else Podfic length: add the length of your podfic Podfic gifts are not anonymous.

ABOUT BETA GIFTS: If you are gifting a beta reading, please contact your giftee and offer your beta services. For beta-reading gifts, anonymity is waived between gifter and giftee. But please do not tell other people or post about the beta gift you are giving. The beta reader should still be anon for fandom at large. The betaed fic does not have to be Drarry or even a Harry Potter fic. It can be any story that is agreed upon between the beta and author. Beta-readings should be completed by the submission deadline of @hdowlpost Fest (November 22, 2024). Once you have finished the beta, please send us an email and tell us which story you betaed. Thank you! ♥

ABOUT COMMENT/REVIEW GIFTS: Please use this alternative header.

Gift from: Review/Comment of: TITLE OF FIC Summary of Fic: Word Count of Fic: Rating of Fic: Commenter's Notes:

Last and final things: Email us if you have any problems. We are very generous with extensions and we totally understand that people may need an extension. So don't hesitate to ask for for one. We try to make Owlpost work for everyone and have as little stress as possible. ♥ If you need to drop out of the fest, please email and tell us. We swear that we understand; life happens, no judgement. But we need to know so we can find pinch-hitters. ♥ ♥

Your Owl Postmasters @kittymiaomeow and @vaysh11 & the Owls

[fanwork-exchange-promos]

Multifandom: New Year's Countdown 2024 - Sign-up Open Till November 30

Posted by: lee_bella newyearcntdown is running New Year's Countdown 2024, a multi-fandom December prompt challenge focusing on the end of the year and winter holidays. Sign-up is required to participate in it. You can create your own list of prompts with the prompts provided. You can also request for the mod to create a prompt list for you. There are several levels of difficulty: Easy (post a total of 8 works), Moderate (post a total of 12 works), Hard (aim to post all 25 days), and Overachiever (aim to post all 31 days). This mainly serves as a personal goal; you are not required to stick to it. Sign-up is open from November 1 to November 30. See the links below for the Dreamwidth and Livejournal sign-up post. Links: Dreamwidth | Livejournal | AO3 | Rules & Prompts | Sign-up on DW | Sign-up on LJ Medium: Accepts any medium of any length. Welcomes both fanworks and original works. Timeline: Sign-up: November 1 - November 30 Posting opens: December 1 Posting soft close: December 25 Posting hard close: December 31 comments via The Fandom Calendar https://ift.tt/lPpmR6e