#the account i think yahoo as a site still exists

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

Facebook. Originally, I created it to keep in touch with my highschool friends. I don't use it as much tbh.

*for our purposes, a youtube account only counts if you’ve used it to post videos.

reblog for reach/bigger sample size!!

[bulbagarden]

guess what??? bulbapedia had its 50,000th wiki article created a bit ago, and to celebrate we made a news article celebrating bulbapedia! i'm actually in it, soo... take a look if you'd like!! (this was written by our twitter admin and my overlord wyndoncalling)

Celebrating 50k Bulbapedia articles with our favourite wiki pages!

As one of the world's largest media franchises, Pokémon is monolithic to say the least. Documenting every facet of this gargantuan IP is a task perhaps only the most dedicated and/or foolhardy would embark on, yet that's exactly what our Bulbapedia team and thousands of selfless contributors have done over eighteen long years! With Pokémon now encompassing nine generations of main series games along with dozens of spin-offs, mobile games, movies, anime and manga series, merchandise and much more, the wiki itself has grown in tandem - we recently hit a whopping 50,000 articles!

To celebrate, we've compiled a list from across the Bulbagarden team of our favourite wiki articles. For our non-wiki team members, these might simply be pages that they enjoy reading and help inform their work in other aspects of the site. For wiki Staff, these could instead be pages that they've sunk many productive hours into. Read on for an eclectic collection of articles detailing some of the most obscure corners of the Pokémon franchise!

Credits to Staff artist Sirius for the awesome header image!

WyndonCalling (Social Media) - Tall grass

On the one hand, I think it's faintly hilarious that anyone would go into such detail for a mundane and omnipresent mechanic of the main series games; the tall grass that awaits the player on every starting route just feels so self-explanatory in function. On the other hand, I think it speaks volumes about the commitment and mentality of the Bulbapedia team and contributors that no scrap of information is left undocumented - on the tall grass page you'll find the basic details about how it works, but also variations such as tall grass and seaweed, animations of the Cut mechanic, in-battle effects, and more. Who knew that simple grass could be so fascinating in a world with flame-throwing dragons and electric mice?

Runner-up - List of Pokémon by base stats

As the Admin of the Bulbagarden Twitter account, I'm always on the hunt for interesting trivia to share; having the base stats of all Pokémon in one, sortable place makes it so much easier to make fun comparisons between species (did you know that Krabby has more Attack than Eternatus?).

Maverick Nate - Bulbapedia - Coin (TCG) (and its three subpages: Gens 1-4, Gens 5-6, and Gens 7-8)

This page is what I consider my best accomplishment during my 10 years as Bulbapedia's TCG Leader. There is an incredible amount of research, time, (and personal financial investment) baked into the article, and it always gives me a swell of pride when I update it with fresh images of newly acquired coins. There are over 700 different coins documented here, and I still fondly remember the long-night research sessions I would have with my best friend when we would do things like watch countless YouTube openings to figure out release information, check out endless eBay and Yahoo Auctions listings for never-before-seen coins, hold up physical coins to a spotlight trying to determine the Holofoil pattern. Our other friends would poke fun at us for researching in the field, (which was just our excuse to go shopping for newly released TCG products with new coins or hitting up garage sales and card shops on the off chance they had old ones). All of those years of effort produced what is now considered the definitive list of all coins in existence for coin enthusiasts. Whenever I see people online referencing it and using it for their own collections, I just have to smile, knowing that my favorite article is helping people all around the globe.

Wowy (Bulbapedia) - Red (Masters)

This page is just an example for all the character pages for Pokémon Masters. As one of the main editors covering Pokémon Masters when the game was first released, I feel very content to see many other editors who have taken the mantle to make Bulbapedia's coverage of the game quite comprehensive! I also enjoy the gallery section at the bottom because there are some sweet artwork pieces that come out of the game / the PMEX Twitter.

Runner Up - Face board

An article that was initially written for fun ended up being moved from the userpage to the main Bulbapedia page. Like the tall grass page, it's a niche page that showcases how much we like to document every minor and obscure detail in the franchise (albeit there is still so much to cover)!

Lisia (Social Media) (omg HIIII that's me!!!!) (姉ちゃん見て見て、あたしテレビだ。。) - Pokémon world in relation to the real world

This is a very extensive page, and it's very useful for a lot of different things! I use it for worldbuilding for fanfiction and roleplay stuff usually, but it's fun to look at just in general as well! I remember looking at the page first like... years ago, and it blew my mind to see that the Pokémon world was actually based off of real locations! It's something that I'd call a huge resource for anyone who creates Pokémon fanworks, especially written ones!

Runner Up - Lisia (i had to LOL)

Maybe it's a little... self-serving? But I really like this article of my personal namesake; she's my favorite character after all! She's a relatively minor character within the whole of Pokémon so there's not a whole lot of information about her, so I like reading all the stuff there is about her! It makes me happy that people have put work into articles about everyone, because well... in a way I wouldn't be me without it. I should probably contribute to it sometime!

Orchid (Forums) - Pokémon food

I picked this article because it is astoundingly comprehensive on its topic, and offers a lot of really interesting insight into the Pokémon universe as a whole. From Poffins, to prey, to parasites, to Slowpoke Tails... it's all here! It's amazing how having all this information in one place puts into perspective just how much there is to cover on what, at a glance, might seem like such a simple subject. I find myself coming back here every now and then just out of curiosity (or perhaps to settle a debate about what an Aerodactyl really eats).

Runner-up - Twerp

This page is silly and I love it. I've even shown this one to friends and family who are fellow Pokémon fans, and they've gotten just as much of a kick out of it as I have! But as amusing of a read as it may be, what I love most about this page is the fact that even a short and lighthearted bit of terminology like this is documented thoroughly here, just like anything else would be. All across Bulbapedia, you can find so much care and detail put into the littlest of things, and that does bring a smile to my face

DapperCody (Multimedia) - Ash Ketchum

Like many people, I grew up watching the Pokémon anime as a youngster. I enjoy Ash's article because it is comprehensive account of the quarter century that he has graced our screens - looking it over is very nostalgic. The history section with photos is fantastic, and I love being able to see all the Pokémon he has ever owned or used and their current status. It also has an extensive trivia section like all my favorite articles do. I've fallen down the anime rabbit hole on Bulbapedia numerous times, and Ash's page is a great place to start.

Runner Up - Ash's Noctowl

See all of the above, but from a different perspective. Pages for individual Pokémon from the anime are fantastic to get a glimpse into all the highlights from their time in the spotlight, and what better example of this than my personal favorite, Noctowl? The move history is really neat, especially the fact that it designates the moves recently used (and the illegal ones when applicable). Did you know Noctowl was the first Shiny Pokémon in the anime?

bthrussellUK (Bulbapedia) - Pokémon Battle Chess

I really love this article because I think it’s an example of what Bulbapedia is great at; taking obscure Pokémon topics (especially outside of Japan) and saving them from being lost to the sands of time. The original Pokémon Battle Chess website has been taken offline, so without articles like this one, the game would be forgotten. Instead, because it’s here, I decided to find and buy a copy of both Pokémon Battle Chess BW Version and Pokémon Battle Chess and use them to help expand the gameplay section of the article. They're actually pretty fun games! Now I just need a copy of Pokémon Battle Chess W…

Runner Up - Pokémon games

It looks like it's just a really long list... and it is! But for me it's a really great reminder of how massive Pokémon is, how many games have been released in the last 26 years, and how many different platforms Pokémon games have released on. Ever heard of the Advanced Pico Beena or the iQue Player?

Whether they're popular or niche, wide-ranging or obscure, we hope you've enjoyed our short tour of our favourite Bulbapedia articles! Do you have your own? Are you tickled by the trivia on a given page? You can let us know on our forums or Discord server - or even start editing yourself!

The wiki can never have too many contributors, and if your love of Pokémon is as deep as ours we'd be delighted to have you with us for the next 50,000 articles!

(lisia note: thank you for reading!!!!!!!!!! hopefully you enjoyed it!)

[apoptoses]

what about ☃️ and ↪️ ?

(for the domestic headcanons meme)

Anon you didn't assign any characters so I'm assuming this is free reign to choose them myself!!

☃ What they wear around the house <- Armand

I love thinking about the evolution of his style because he's just had such a weird existence.

You know how if you let a little kid dress themselves they'll pick something totally random, like their elsa costume or the suit they had to wear to that one wedding the family went to, and they'll commit to it no matter where they're going and what they're doing?

I think that was Armand at home in DM era. Just inappropriately dressed because he didn't understand the concept of taking off your hard pants and getting comfy when you get in the door. It would be 2am and Daniel would be in lounge pants, meanwhile Armand is still fully suited up from the opera while he fucks around in the kitchen. And Daniel was just bewildered by how he was totally unbothered by hanging out on the couch with his cummerbund or windbreaker or whatever still on regardless of how hot it was.

(It got better though, a few lessons in 'hey, I'll ravish you if you take off the stay-pressed chinos and chill out in my t-shirts and boxers' fixed him of that, and to this day his private-time clothes are the shirt of whatever lover he has in town)

↪ Internet browsing activities <- Marius

God, what isn't being researched in his browser at any given time?

I think the introduction of wikipedia was a real tenuous time for him and Daniel. Like that man got high on being able to edit any article he wanted and would sit at the computer for hours correcting history's biggest myths, and then getting twisted up with humiliating rage when his edits got taken down for not having any sources cited. And no, Marius, you don't count as a source just because you were there, sorry dude. Them's the rules.

And thanks to kacy's headcanons about him being an internet auction freak I can't keep from imagining that he's also got at least ten tabs open with ebay or christies or some other auction site so he can bid on weird shit to fill up his house with. His email (which is now a gmail account, because Benji finally convinced him having a yahoo mail account in 2024 is embarrassing) so he can keep in touch with that research team that's scanning documents from Herculaneum. r/Stocism so he can argue with randos about the correct interpretation of Marcus Aurelius and Diogenes.

And littered in between are random websites where he's gift shopping, because imo he's a great gift giver- it's just easier to express that he cares and/or is sorry with surprise items than to say it in words. In fact that ebay auction of 17th century bobbin lace might be intended to be sent along to someone else when he wins it.

And idk probably some femdom porn in a private browser too.

[80486]

just unfollowed more than half of the blogs i was following. if i'm still following you it's either because we are a mutual, or your account is a curious memory (hi @hipsterrunoff).

i don't know why i check this account anymore, i guess for the aforementioned memory. this is one of the online accounts i've had the longest, and it means something to me in a weird way because of that (and not to mention all of the autobiographical blogging baggage the current username carries with it from the late 2010s, iykyk).

i do think that, related to that last thought, i misused and misunderstood tumblr for the last decade. it was an easy place to post photos and longform traumadump (sorry, journal, or err, write autofiction). near 15 years ago i liked the photographers that posted here before instagram stole that (and eviscerated the medium in the process). but we all know tumblr of the 2010s wasn't an art space, it was a fandom space (i will leave it at that). i should have been building my own thing. i should have been making photo zines, writing a massive tome (100,000 word .txt file), hosting my own website, etc. i posted about this sentiment at the time extensively, but nothing ever stuck because the network effects of being here (the friendships i have here) were (and are!) too valuable to let go.

so i don't know what to make of all of this. this blog still exists. i still look at it from time to time. i wish i could curate a killer following. i know none of this will happen. i am resentful about automattic buying tumblr - they have actively done nothing to make it better (it needed to be more are.na or vienna hypertext than whatever they have tried to do). verizon/oath/yahoo should have killed it. obviously this site brings in no money and the userbase actively hates the staff. parting thought: this site existing is a net negative for culture.

[contentment-of-cats]

Part II: Growing Pains

When we ended Part I of our overview of Fandom, we saw fic evolving from Zines and independent publishing to fic specific platforms such as Fanfic.net, LiveJournal, Ao3, and Dreamwidth. The hand-off from one platform to the next was not always a process of evolution, nor a smooth transition, rather often necessity demanding invention. With the transition from paper to online exposure came the opportunity to develop community and an opportunity for problems.

We’re back at the Asker’s Studio™️, so grab a cat, move a cat, kick the toys out of the way and get comfortable.

Today, I would like to discuss what I like to generally define as Growing Pains. These are the issues that arose on all fronts which ranged from the highly personal, to technical assaults that threatened the mere existence of fic, online.

I have chosen a few topics that reflect on the evolution, creation and demise of Fandom platforms/archives/host sites. Let’s begin with the big one: Censorship. Over the months, I have heard fragments about a wave of censorship that hit both FF.net & LiveJournal. I understand that the results caused rifts/fragmentation in the fandoms. Since those platforms existed before my time, could you briefly describe what they were, how they served your needs, and what ultimately led to their demise?

Out of the ashes grows a rose: AO3. I understand that Ao3 was borne as the answer to the failings of the aforementioned FF.net & LiveJournal. However, it is not without its own attacks/problems - as recent as the last two weeks, hackers with content issues successfully took down the site for a solid day. Could you add any insights to these purity attacks & whether they are a continuation of the long war on creativity? Even less spoken of are issues of internal strife, regarding fic content/underage content. Having participated in several Fandom platforms/host sites, was the creation of Ao3 the answer that Fandom participants were looking for, or do problems evolve along with solutions? (I invite @olderthannetfic to feel invited offer any historical perspectives on the creation of AO3 at this time)

Finally, I would like to throw out what I call The Next Frontier: the introduction of AI. Many of us have locked our accounts and designated them Registered Users Only, as the AI beast lands like a pack of Death Eaters. We see the entertainment industry walking the picket lines with AI being one of the contract issues. Can you offer some insight on this topic?

This is a hackneyed list of issues - both human & technological - that has confronted Fandom/fic over its long and short history. Please feel free to add, abridge, omit or expand on anything I have brought up. As always, thank you very much for your time..

*settles in*

I wanted to answer this sooner, but really needed to think about some of my answers. This has been through a few drafts, so hold steady.

Censorship:

In the beginning (Usenet), there was always censorship. The fandoms would start off with 'all are welcome' but that was never actually the truth. Popular ships always eclipsed rarepairs, and people got downright nasty about it and there was also a lot of anti-smut action. Then there was the slash vs. het vs. noromo (no romance - now called 'gen) disputes. The fragmentation came with e-groups and members only listservs where people could write their stories without the censorship of the majority or characterization cops. There was still more fragmentation over other subjects, the purity police existed to make more wedges. The first time I ever saw a fight over 'queer' being a slur was on a Skinner/Mulder e-group so that was around 1996ish. E-groups purged a lot of slash and smut lists before it was bought by Yahoo, and Yahoo did the same.

Archives were curated sites on accessible hosting sites like Geocities, Angelfire, and so on. either dedicated to a specific fandom, pairing, or genre. Posting power rested in the hands of an archivist or a board of archivists. There was a lot of favoritism, and some authors posted their own work on a private website and often joined a ring of likeminded sites.

Fanfiction came out of the woodwork of the internet in 1998 when fanfiction.net came to be. FF.net was the equivalent of a publisher's 'slush pile.' A knocked-over fire-hydrant geyser of fic and fandoms as opposed to the neatly bottled and displayed stuff. It took a while, but the tweaks started in the early 2000's (dammit I am so fucking old) with banning works from a specific source (Anne Rice, Archie, Terry Goodkind etc.), then moving on to banning reader insert, filk and songfic, RPF, NC-17 and sexually explicit material (purging existing content also). They banned CYOA, Self-Insert, Character/Reader (You) fic. A lot of this was for two reasons.

The leadership of ff.net wanted to make the site attractive to advertisers.

They wanted to play nice with publishers, studios, media, real people depicted in fic, and intellectual property attorneys.

The migration to LJ placed fic in the hands of the author. They could post whatever they wanted and screw the mods.

If fanfiction came out of the woodwork on ff.net, it came out of the closet on LJ.

LJ came along in 2000ish, it originally was a place for fans to interact with other fans - like a forum where you could also post fic. The ban and excision of NC-17 and explicit fic from FF.net made LJ into a fandom hub, and for a short while kept the fan-run archives from dying out. However, even the hosting services did not want smut, slash, or other possibly-prosecutable fic on their servers, and were shutting down those sites. It was haphazard, but not random, as fandom grudges and the purity police would rat archives out.

LJ also saw the rise of the BNF, and also the phenomenon of Dark Fandom and Fandom Wank (FW originated on LJ and was driven off several platforms). LJ was sold to 6 Apart in 2005, and the Russian company SUP in 2007, with the founders mostly bolting after Strikethrough and Boldthrough - instigated by Warriors for Innocence (actual identity unknown, speculation attributes to Ms.Scribe). However, 6 Apart and SUP also wanted to - you guessed it - make LJ profitable. WFI was arguably the first successful, large format purity troll. I was already moving away from LJ and FF.net at the time, that just hammered the nail in.

Archive of Our Own:

That leads us to Ao3 (called AoOO and cue the 'Werewolves of Fandom' jokes), began with a 2007 LJ post by @astolat. The genesis of Ao3 was widely mocked, but fifteen years later it is still standing. I remember hearing about it and wondering if it had any relation to the essay 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf.

"But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain."

I view the attacks on Ao3 as an attack on marginalized groups using nontraditional media. There are still vast numbers of people who do not want women or other marginalized groups to have a room of one's own, much less an archive, much less an archive that can't be held by the balls via their wallet, or threatened with a squad of foot soldiers with Esquire and Juris Doctor next to their name. Ao3 is now a part of fandom culture - good, bad, and ugly - and is a target for purity trolls using straw man, gaslighting, and red herrings to pull Ao3 apart for their own purposes.

Ao3 does have the problems that any institution has - and those unique to those dependent on user-generated content. It has its own internal struggles with the content that users generate as it pertains to underage/noncon and other squicks. To censor or not to censor? Is it enough to ask grown ass people to tag their work or to ask other presumably grown ass people to use tags when to eliminate content they do not want to see? are they doing enough to attract a diverse staff? How is that staff being treated? It is non-profit, staffed with volunteers, and lives on funding drives like US public television and NPR. It has a big enough base that understands the mission and is active enough to parse board candidates. In much the same way as NPR/Public Television, the content is a draw for trolls. Legacy media was the means to control the message, but when you can shoot content on your phone, write and publish from your connected device, the media can't control the message. It scares the piss out of people who have every reason to want to control the message.

When people attack Ao3, their reasons are spurious troll food for the most part. There's another, deeper, more nefarious agenda at work.

AI and the War On Creativity:

AI art, music, and writing is the idea of someone who views media as something to be consumed. You buy a book, you watch a show, and that is monetized.

Nobody has ever successfully monetized fandom.

The war between creators and media controllers heated up when technology handed creators the tools to make their own content and the platforms to distribute it whether it's video, writing, art, or music. AI is an attempt to wrest that control back.

To the Powers That Be, fandom is a resource that needs to be squeezed for money. People consuming fanworks for free are people not giving their money to Disney, Sony, Warner Bros, and so on. The PTB have taken over the cons, despite the inclusion of artists alleys, so that they can once again control the media and control the message. The PTB like to deem themselves creators and disruptors. However, creative human beings are an unruly lot. The PTB want creatives and what they produce, but under their control. No unions, no contracts, no pesky IP issues.

An AI has no rights, no needs, no true consciousness and thus can only copy or derive when it 'creates' content. Their 'disruption' is for everyone but themselves. So when we bar them from scraping our content, they see it as our refusing to give them something that they are entitled to use.

AI scraping from Ao3 and venues like DeviantArt are attempts to make unpaid use of creators' content. Creators write and create art that is uncompensated, which is then shared. Some writers and artists have 'tip jars' or take commissions, but the vast majority get nothing but comments and likes. Since this work is uncompensated, the PTB deem it 'free' and therefore they can do what they want with it. When they scrape a work to train their AI, they are working to replace creatives. Full stop.

For that matter, a scraper doesn't need to be from Google or MicroSoft. You can download scrapers for Wattpad like this one:

There are also tools available on sites like GitHub that can be used to scrape Ao3 and FF.net. Moreover, there are a fuckton of AI specifically marketed for fanfiction writing to fanfiction writers - all of which have been trained on fan-generated content. There are AIs for art and for music. It could be argued that these AI will help people unleash their own creativity, improve stories, and unearth creative potential. The thing is that none of these tech companies does anything for free in the long term.

Finally, the US Copyright office has ruled that you can't copyright anything - image, writing, music, video - that you create with an AI. anyone can use it for any purpose, without you having any legal recourse. There must be a minimal 'human involvement' - in this particular case, the art generated by a human entering text prompts into an AI was deemed insufficient to meet the standard. The ruling is the first of its kind, and more will follow, but keep in mind that you are one ruling from the AI creators assuming a stake in your work.

[rcbcapc]

Viral Vans-Teal and Grey or Pink and White???

Similar to "the dress" does anyone else remember this picture of the viral vans? Supposedly, some saw pink and white while others saw teal and grey. Initially, I saw teal and grey but eventually, I saw both!

In an attempt to verify its true colors, I tried tracking it down to the original post. When I googled "Viral Vans" I came across an article from a local news station's website in Roanoke Virginia. They cited multiple tweets of people debating on the color so it may have started on Twitter.

I then Googled "Viral Vans Twitter Post". I clicked on a Yahoo article titled "Twitter Can't Decide What Color These Viral Vans Sneakers Are". It states that it began with user @TFILDOLANS asking her followers "What colour is this?". When I tried clicking on the user handle the Twitter page said the account didn't exist. Later in the same article, it mentioned that @dolandmalik, however, was the person who initially took the picture. It seemed a little too unclear with so many Twitter handles.

After searching more I finally googled "the pink and white vans original social media post" which landed me on timesofindia.com. They attributed the post to a woman from the UK but I couldn't get any more information so I copied and pasted that paragraph from the article into Google. This took me to thehollywoodgossip.com where they claimed it was Nicole Coulthard who first shared the picture to a Facebook group called "GIRLSMOUTH". Pictured below is the original post.

Furthermore, they cited the Metro as being the source Coulthard spoke to in regard to the controversial picture. I made my way to this UK news site and the story unfolded there.

According to Nicole, the picture was sent to her by a friend who had texted the picture to her "mum" and her mum texted her back mentioning the blue hue of the sneaker. Her daughter told her that the shoe was in fact pink, not blue, but eventually saw it how her mum did. As a result of their difference in color perception, she sent the picture to Nicole who agreed it was pink. After an argument, Nicole decided to post it to the Facebook group GIRLSMOUTH to get others' opinions. The response, of course, was large and varied. From there it went viral.

I tried accessing the GIRLSMOUTH Facebook group which still exists. I accessed their Instagram as well all the way back to 2017 but couldn't find the post of the Van sneaker. I don't think it's on their regular Facebook feed either because it was only posted to the community group which I am not a part of.

I noticed that in the tweet from @TFILDOLAN, when she asked "What colour is this?" she used the British form of the word color. This would confirm to me that it did originate over in the UK and that this Twitter user was possibly part of the Facebook group. She then was the first to spread it across Twitter where it would go viral.

So the answer is...it is pink and white! It was the lighting of the photo that contributed to dual perceptions. Many took to the science behind it but basically, color is the result of light reflected off of an object and all of our brains can perceive that light differently. In this particular picture, it can be seen two different ways. Others "color corrected" or attempted to show people the way they possibly didn't see it at first.

In either case, no one is wrong because it can be seen two ways but the original color is in fact pink and white. Vans eventually took to Twitter to confirm...

[catthu]

Random Childhood Memory

Sometimes some random event or reference just triggers long forgotten pathways in my brain, and I am reminded of things I hadn't thought about for at least 15 years now.

In high school, I was very into this MMORPG called Priston Tale and spent a lot of time on the Vietnamese server. I didn't realize this at the time, but the social scene, social order, and social games of such a microcosm was so fascinating. I played an archer and created a clan for archers called [A]vengers with my other archer friends. I also joined a Vietnamese community full of people who were into digital painting ("CG", as we called it at the time) and started practicing to create fanart of the game. I created a deviant art account that didn't get any art until much later -- all my initial work was uploaded on this other Vietnamese art website whose name and url I can't remember. And if I can, it probably doesn't exist anymore anyway!

But I did make some friends on the site, and even met up with them in person! I admired a particular archer and artist on the site who went by the pseudonym flute, the first time I saw his oil painting of his girlfriend (titled "She"). I don't remember how, but we became friends and spent a lot of time chatting on Yahoo Messenger.

Another archer friend flute I had was called Akari. Years later, when I wanted a book to study for my Physics SAT 2 (back before the days of Amazon), Akari found the book in Hanoi and sent it to me as a gift.

Flute, Akari and I, along with another person who I cannot remember at the moment, started a project together. We wanted to create a wiki of mythologies related to the game -- god, goddesses, prophecies, clergy, legends, and so on. We never got anywhere with the project, but flute painted a very cool artwork of the team represented as four elementals. Flute was earth, Akari was air, the person I can't remember was fire, and I (the only girl in the group) was water.

I've forgotten a lot of things, but strangely, I can still picture this artwork really well in my head. A swirling dark blue / black landscape in the background, with the four elementals centered and taking up most of the screen. At the bottom was flute, a brown earth elemental half-burrowed, pushing up from the ground glowing in lava. Left was Akari, a wispy air elemental with the most angular face, just like his real face, and an all-knownig smirk. Top was the fire elmental, whose details I can't remember much, just like the person he represented. Right was me, an all-blue water elemental (Avatar color, but transluscent) with a mermaid tail, sleek back long hair and a head too big for her body.

I spent some time looking for this painting or other references related to these people on the web, but unfortunately most of it has disappeared. Ah, I'd have loved to be able to see that painting again. But it's strange to think how I haven't thought of it in 15 years, and all of the sudden it's all I could think about for a couple of hours.

[viniter]

how many email addresses did you have? i don’t mean work/school addresses and other side addresses. i mean the primary email you use to register for stuff... have you switched a bunch of times or are you still on your very first one?

[backofthebookshelf]

The DMCA and You; or, why Tumblr won’t get sued over Post+

 I keep seeing people saying “doesn’t Tumblr understand they’re inviting an avalanche of lawsuits” and being baffled that people think this, and then I remembered that most of you were not both alive and in fandom in 1998 and therefore probably haven’t spent hours reading through the DMCA trying to figure out exactly how it was going to screw us. (Turns out we were right, but not nearly pessimistic enough.) So gather ‘round, children, it’s time for another bout of fandom history.

You have to understand what the internet looked like in 1998. Most people didn’t have internet access at home, and for those who did, you got a whopping 54 kbps (yes, that’s kilobytes per second) (compare that to 4G wireless, which 14 Mbps, not to mention, you know, wireless) unless you wanted to shell out for ISDN, which was twice the speed and five times the cost. Only 47% of American adults “went online” at all, never mind the two to six hours per day that current internet users are estimated to spend.

And I mean, why would you? There wasn’t that much there. If you wanted to post something online, your first and best option was to pay for web hosting of your own, or mooch off a friend’s. Or you could get a Geocities site, which would be plastered with ads and limited you to such a small amount of storage that you couldn’t have more than a couple dozen low-resolution images at best, or you could post on a message board (which would be essentially mooching off of a friend’s paid web hosting, because most sites that hosted message boards were just some guy who wanted to have a place to chat with his friends that wasn’t a Yahoo! email list), where you might get permission to post three or four images at a time. Music? Rude, takes up too much bandwidth, don’t do that to people. Video? You’re hilarious. (I once left my computer on for a week while I attempted to illegally download a copy of Velvet Goldmine but I finally gave up and got it from the video store instead.)

But still, at the time that was magic, and as more and more stuff found its way online, somebody who held a copyright somewhere (read: music studios and Disney) realized they had to get out in front of things. And into this brave new world came the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was passed in 1998 and was already skewing the shape of the internet of the future when it came into effect in 2000.

It did a lot of dumb things but the one we’re concerned about is the “safe harbor” provision, which basically says that in the case of an online copyright infringement, there are three parties: the infringer, the copyright holder, and the internet host, and the host is not a part of the copyright dispute.

Prior to this, if Sony or Disney or whoever found an illegal copy of their intellectual property (read: an mp3 or an avi) online, they’d go after whoever owned the server it lived on. Which made sense! If you find stolen TVs in someone’s basement, you go after the guy who owns the basement, and “I didn’t know my deadbeat brother in law was stealing TVs” is something you’ll have to prove in a court of law.

But internet companies like Geocities and Yahoo! and anyone else who offered random users the chance to post things on the internet using a free account said wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense. Because the internet is not like a physical basement; we have no reason to see someone carrying stolen mp3s down the basement stairs, and the scale is such that we couldn’t see all of them if we tried (unless we banned all mp3s, which means goodbye, MySpace, and goodbye indie bands). You wouldn’t go after a landlord in New York because their tenant in New Jersey is stealing TVs, would you?

So the DMCA said fine, we understand that the internet as it currently exists, and as it is attempting to exist (remember this is still the height of the dot.com boom and people are making money hand over fist by just owning websites), can’t operate if we try to do this. So instead of letting big companies sue big companies over copyright law, we’ll let big companies sue individual humans over copyright violations. That’s much more fair.

Of course most of what resulted wasn’t lawsuits at all; it was individuals getting threatening letters from Sony and Disney promising them that they were planning to sue but if you, Joe User, will just delete the thing you posted from the internet, we’re willing to make this all go away. And people did, because fuck, who’s going to duke it out with Disney?

The DMCA is the reason tumblr exists in the first place (not to mention twitter, and facebook, and essentially the entire part of the internet that isn’t either an ad or a news website). Technically, if tumblr was responsible for copyright violations, they’re already a prime target for a lawsuit, because they’re running ads on a website where people post copyright violations on a daily basis. Adding the opportunity for you to make money off your copyright violations doesn’t make them any more liable than they already are, which is not at all.

So here’s what predict will happen with Post+ at the beginning: absolutely nothing. A few people will monetize gifsets or fanfiction or vids and no one will pay attention and no one will care. But some small creators, people who post original fiction, people who post craft patterns, people who post insightful analysis, will start using it as part of their actual revenue stream. Sooner or later someone will be making enough money that it pings someone’s radar, and sooner or later someone making money will slip up and post something that could plausibly be a copyright violation, and they won’t get sued. They’ll get a takedown notice, a threatening letter from whoever owns the thing they infringed upon (...so Disney), and they’ll pull the thing. But it’s hard to pull things from the internet, much harder than it used to be, and nearly impossible the way tumblr works. So they get another takedown notice. Or Disney’s lawyers go through their blog with a fine-toothed comb and they start getting more and more unreasonable takedown notices, but now they’re scared and fuck, who’s going to duke it out with Disney? So they take their blog down entirely, and now that person is a little bit poorer and Disney is out the cost of four or five stamps and envelopes and the time their lawyer spent fifteen years ago drafting the takedown notice template.

I guarantee you that the people who decided to implement this know that this is going to happen, and they do not care. We’ve reached the “we could make this website work if we could just get rid of fandom” stage, which never ends well for the website but they never seem to learn that. So please, please don’t try to monetize fandom content on the assumption that tumblr is going to be the one to get slapped with a lawsuit for it, that’s just not how it works. It never has been and it never will be.

[moonsess]

10.05.22 An Introduction

Right, hello. 

I used to be an avid user of Tumblr back in the day. I’ve seen it through fandoms and controversies and amazing friendships. It was once a huge part of my daily life as a young teenager. Now that I am somewhat older, I have not had much use of it at all. Yahoo’s buy-out of the site coincided quite nicely with my steady departure from young teenager-hood, and I have since not had much use of the site at all. 

Much has changed in this (almost) decade. Not only in my personal life but also on the platform itself. I have gone to university, I have travelled, I have gone on multiple self-discovery journeys. Yet, I feel like I am in several ways much in the same place I was nine or ten years ago. It is not a pleasant feeling and I am here to change it. 

I have, many a times in fact, deleted several of my various social media accounts, not least Tumblr. Who knows which account number of mine this one is? But here I am once again, on a site that very much helped shape me as a person. However, I am doing things differently this time around. This time, this blog, it just for me. It is for my thoughts, my questions and ponderings of life. It is to share conversations and interations. On here I can rant and I can complain and most importantly, I can appreciate and learn. I am wanting to put down into words my own thoughts, whether fully formed or not at all. I want to share reviews of things I read and summaries of things I learn. I want a record of my progress and change in this period of my life. I have never been one to publicly share progress - you only share the results, right? That seems to be the way social media works these days. It is not for me. I have never been very good at posting on my socials, on Twitter I never tweet, on Facebook I never post, Tumblr has been deleted off my phone innumerable amounts ot times and Instagram sees a post perhaps once a year. 

As of writing this, I am three weeks away from my term of studying abroad to be over. I think exchange programmes like the one I am currently on are heavily glamourised as well as romanticised. I know I, along with countless of other people in my situation, have an image, a hope or a desire, for their exchange period to be life-changing. That is what traveling is supposed to do, right? It is supposed to give you new perspectives, to make you grow and learn as a human, and most importantly, it is supposed to help you find yourself - perhaps in a spiritual sense even. This has not been my experience, and I am still mourning that my experience was not that. I wished for it just as everyone else, but it was not what happened at all. And I am learning that that is okay. However, I still yearn for that live-changing, self-discovering, fulfilling experience. I need that big change adventure.

All this is to say that this is it, this is my big change, my adventure. There are no rules, no plans and no restrictions on the blog or on myself. I am here to exist in a space that I hope will be welcoming and accepting. I have no expectation that anyone will see or interact with this blog - that is almost the point, is it not? This is for me, and I am excited about it. 

[nullconvention]

I went looking for some old friends I came up with in high school, in particular a pretty boy in Brazil I always really liked - we all played in the same Serial Experiments: Lain RP back on Yahoo! groups. (I was not a cool teenager.) He maintained several accounts with the same handle, and I was friends with him in a lot of them. Many of those are gone now - they just don't exist. Others do - Deviant Art, ICQ, whatever. Some of them are shells of themselves, like LJ. (RIP)

I noticed a similar trend - after a certain time frame around 2011 on the earlier end and 2015 for stragglers - pretty much all posts by people who were not professionals just STOPPED. Friends from high school disappeared all at once. You can see the time stamps, last posts. 2011, 2013, 2015. I think about what happened around that time. Facebook took off when I was in college. Like it literally launched as an invite only, college only site. I was an early adopter. But about a decade ago, "social media" had basically finished the transmogrification of the early web.

What you saw is a massive user extinction event. Sites everywhere just fucking died. It became a Facebook monoculture. In this environment only "social media" thrived. It salted the digital environment for everything else. One by one, my friends disappeared.

Now, I'm pretty sure they're still out there. But they probably are active in a single social media environment. They don't maintain an art site or a personal site or a journal, they don't maintain fan works. They're gone. Digital ghosts. The trail for my friend ran cold in 2015. I'm sure they're out there, but where? I only knew his handle. I have a name, but it feels invasive to search past a certain point. I left a message. Maybe they'll see it.

[olderthannetfic]

Hey, sorry to ask this, but a few days ago I saw a post/discussion about the history of original work on ao3 (i.e. how and when it was allowed). I thought it was in my likes, but it's not, and I thought you had reblogged it recently, but I didn't find it. I was wondering if you have seen this discussion around? Or where I can find more about it? This specific post talked abt how who defended original work on ao3 were not the BNFs, if that helps.

That was me running my mouth in the reblogs of something or other. It’s just the one comment.

But what’s that you say? Some tl;dr about a pet topic? Don’t mind if I do! ;) (To be honest, most of this debate happened years ago, and a lot of the long meta was by me back then too, so…)

Okay, so, the situation with Original Works is actually super interesting and a microcosm of early years OTW wank.

This is going to be even more tl;dr than my usual. To try to summarize very briefly:

There were two big cultural factions. One thought “original” was the opposite of “fan”. That one was in charge of OTW. It was hard to get voices from the other side into the debate because they already felt excluded from OTW.

This divide broke down more or less into Ye Olde Slash Fandom on the “it’s the opposite” side and anime fandom on the “WTF?” side. Americans on one side and a lot of non-US, non-English language fandom on the other.

I. Media Fandom, Anime Fandom, and Early OTW

I went to that first fundraising party that astolat threw in New York City back in… god… 2007? 2008? I wasn’t on the Board or any official position until the committees got started later, but I was around right from the very beginning.

Whether you’re looking at volunteers or at people who commented on astolat’s original post, there were always a variety of fans from a variety of fannish backgrounds. People aren’t absolutely in one camp or another, and fannish interests change over time. If you go dig through Dreamwidth posts to find who was actually participating in this debate at the time, half of them are probably in the other camp now.

If you think like that sounds like a preamble to me making a bunch of offensively sweeping generalizations and divvying fans up into little groups, you’d be right! Haha.

I.a. Ye Olde Media Fandom

There are a lot of camps of people who like fanfic. One of the biggest divisions has been Ye Olde Media Fandom vs. anime fandom. Astolat’s social circle–my LJ social circle–was filled with people with decades of fannish experience and a deep knowledge of the Media Fandom side of things.

Those fandom history treatises that start with K/S zines in Star Trek fandom in the 70s and move on through the mainstream buddy cops like Starsky & Hutch to the more niche, sff buddy cops like Fraser and Ray or Jim and Blair are talking about Media Fandom. I try to always capitalize it because the name is lulzy and bizarre to me unless it’s a proper noun for a specific historical thing. It was coined as a rude term for “mass media” fandom aka dumb people who like, ughhhh, Star Trek, ughhh, instead of books. This is a very ancient slapfight from the type of fandom you find at Worldcon, often called “SF fandom” or plain “fandom”.

(Yes, this leads to mega confusion on the part of some old dudes when they find Fanlore and fail to understand that “fandom” there refers to what these people would call “Media Fandom”. They think only they get the unmarked form. But I digress…)

Media Fandom is a specific flavor of fandom. It’s where the slash zines were. It’s where the fans of live action US TV shows were. It’s the history that acafans have laid out well and that tends to get used to defend the idea of a female subculture writing transgressive and transformative fanfic. On the video side, Media Fandom is where Kandy Fong invented vidding by making Star Trek slideshows.

(Kandy’s still around, BTW. She’s usually at Escapade in L.A. Ask her to tell you about the dancing penises sketch in person. She’s hilarious.)

Astolat and friends had been going to slash cons for years. They founded Vividcon. And Yuletide. That meant that when astolat said “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” we all jumped to help. This is a lady who gets things done.

From a Worldcon perspective, or even from an older Media Fandom perspective, this group was comparatively young, hip, and welcoming. Their fandom interests were comparatively broad. Just look at Yuletide!

In fact, yes, let us look at Yuletide… [ominous music]

I.b. Yuletide sucks at anime

From the very first year (2003), Yuletide mods have asked for help with anime fandoms, been confused about anime fandoms, or made bad judgment calls about anime fandoms. They’ve fucked up on Superhero comics and plenty of other things over the years, but anime has been the most consistent (well, and JRPGs, but there’s so much overlap in those fic fandoms).

There was already bad feeling about this. There were years of bad feeling about this.

I.c. Where are the historians?

Academic study of fanficcy things pretty much got started with Textual Poachers and Enterprising Women. Other acafans who are well known to LJ and later Tumblr are people like Francesca Coppa who wrote a very nice summary of the history of Media Fandom. These are not the only academics who exist, these academics themselves have written about many other things, and by now, OTW’s own journal has covered a lot of other territory, but to this day I see complaints on Tumblr that “acafans” only care about K/S and oldschool slash fandom.

There were years of bad feeling about this as well.

I.d. What kind of fan was I?

Now, by the time OTW got started, I’d moseyed over to not only a lot of live action US TV but a lot of old-as-fuck US TV that is squarely in the Media Fandom camp. But once upon a time, I was a weeaboo hanging out with my weeaboo friends in college. I learned Japanese (sort of). I moved to Japan. Livin’ the weeaboo dream!

More importantly, I used to be a member of a lot of anime mailing lists back in the Yahoo Groups days. I didn’t realize what a cultural gap that would cause until the original works issue came up on AO3.

I.e. Anime Fandom, German-language Fandom, Original M/M

Once upon a time–namely in that Yahoo Groups era–there was an archive called Boys in Chains. It was where you found The Good Stuff™. Heavy kink and power exchange galore! It was extremely well known in the parts of fandom I was in, even if you weren’t on the associated mailing list. It contained lots of fic, but it also had lots of original work.

Around that same era, I was on a critique list called Crimson Ink, which was mixed fic and original. The “original slash” and “original yaoi” crowds mixed freely and were in fanfic spaces. Remember, this is like 2003. You’re never going to get your gay fantasy novel published in English in the US. A couple of fangirl presses started around then, but they died an ignominious death after their first print run.

Fanfiction.net used to allow original work before it spun that off into FictionPress. We forget this today, but if you were an early FFN person, the separation wasn’t so great either.

Meanwhile, German-language fandom was hanging out on sites like Animexx.de, a big-ass fic archive that prominently mentions also including original work. I have the impression that Spanish-language fandom was similar too.

Shousetsu Bang*Bang was founded in 2005. It was a webzine for original m/m, but it was entirely populated by fanfic fandom types.

In all of those kinds of spaces, there was a lot of “original” work that was kind of slash or BL-ish and seen as fannish if it was posted in the fannish space. These weren’t anime-only spaces. They were multifandom spaces where it was seen as obvious and normal that a couple of huge fandoms like Harry Potter would dominate but that everything else big would naturally be anime.

While fans from every background are everywhere, I found that the concentration of EFL fans living in Continental Europe, South America, and Asia was much higher in this kind of space, even the exclusively English language part of it, than in my US TV fandoms.

II. AO3 Early Adopters

AO3 went into closed beta in 2009. In 2010, it was open to the general public (albeit with the invitation queue it still has). But not everyone was interested yet. Just like fandom is loath to leave the dying, shambling mess of Tumblr, fandom was loath to leave dwindling LJ/DW circles or was happy enough on Fanfiction.net. I used to see a lot of posts like “Why are you guys trying to STEAL fanfic from the original! FFN is enough!”

I literally could not give away the invitations I had. No one wanted them.

So who was on AO3? Obviously enough, it was all of us who built it and our friends. So that means a bunch of oldschool Livejournal slashers coming from fandoms like Due South or Stargate Atlantis.

The queue was open. Anyone could make an account. Everyone was welcome. In theory…

But more and more, there started to be these posts about how “AO3 Hates Anime Fandom” and “FFN is for anime. AO3 is for Western fandoms.” and “If you guys actually wanted anime fandom on there, you’d invite us better and make us more welcome.”

At the time, I found these posts obnoxious. People aren’t purely in one sort of fandom or the other. No one was stopping anime fandom from making accounts. No one was banning anime fandom. If there wasn’t much from old fandoms, that was because old fandoms seldom move.

Things began to change. Trolls on FFN forced the Twilight porn writers out, creating enough fuss and brouhaha to mobilize people who would rather have stayed put. AO3 got big enough that randos found it by accident. Original work started to pop up, posted by people who’d never looked at the rules and had no idea it was not allowed.

III. History of AO3’s Policy

I had argued for allowing “original work” during the initial discussions about the ToS. On one side of this issue was me. On the other, everyone else on the committee.

I was overruled.

Open Door started importing old archives to save them. Boys in Chains was hugely important to fandom history from my point of view. It was slated to be imported… maybe. Except that Boys in Chains is half original. AO3 was happy to grandfather in those stories, but the final archive owner felt, quite rightly, that it would be unfair to tell half of the authors they were welcome in the new space while spitting on the other half.

I was pissed. I had been pissed since being overruled the first time. To me, the fact that it should be allowed was so blatantly obvious that it was hard to even explain why.

(To be honest, this difficulty in explaining why and the even greater difficulty in figuring out the source of that difficulty is what held the discussion back for so long. When every assumption on either side is completely opposite, it’s hard to communicate.)

I felt betrayed. It would be like if you helped build something, and everyone was suddenly like “Well, obviously, we can’t allow m/m. It’s not normal fanfic.”

So we discussed it again and, again, it was me vs. literally everyone else. And still the “AO3 is only for Western slash fandom” bitching rose in volume and more and more people complained of feeling excluded from the new fandom hub. Finally, the committee agreed to open the issue up for public comment and get some more input. I was a fool and neither wrote nor proofread the post. It went out phrasing the question as allowing “non fannish” work or something of that sort.

I was furious. The entire point of the whole debate was that I saw some original work, the original work that belongs on AO3, as inherently fannish. And now this had been presented to the AO3 audience as something completely different. Think pieces were popping up in the journals of everyone I knew about diluting AO3’s mission and how we needed to save AO3 from encroachment. Public opinion was very negative. That’s both because of how the post was phrased and because OTW die hards at the time were mostly from the same fannish background. This tidal wave of negativity meant that there was virtually no chance of changing this poisonous rule. And if the rule didn’t change, the people who wanted the rule change were never going to show up to explain why it mattered.

If you’ve been reading my tumblr, I think you can guess what happened next.

I posted a long post to my Dreamwidth. It was a masterwork of passive aggression. In it, I wrung my hands about how simply tragic it would be if AO3 had to delete all of the original work… like anthropomorfic.

Now, I think anthropomorfic counts as fanfic as much as anything else, but I also knew that it fails most rigorous “based on a canon” type definitions of fic and, more importantly, it’s a favorite Yuletide fandom of many of the people on the side that wanted to ban original work.

That’s a nice fandom of yours. It would be a pity if something happened to it. 

Yup. Passive aggressive blackmail. Go me. Suddenly, there was a lot of awkward backtracking and confused running in circles in various journals. The committee agreed to table the idea for a while but not rule out the idea of allowing original works in the future. We agreed to halt all deletions of original work. If a fan posted it, the Abuse Committee (which I was also head of at the time) would not delete that work even though it was technically against the rules.

Time passed. The people on the negative side got tired. I wanted off that committee and had wanted off for ages, but I was damned if I was going to leave before ramming through this piece of policy. Grudgematch till I die! (Look, I never said I wasn’t a wanker.)

After a while, some other fans came forward with more types of “original work” as evidence that it should be allowed. These were from parts of fandom none of us on the committee knew a damn thing about.

This new evidence combined with the gradual accretion of original stuff on AO3 without the sky falling eventually led us to quietly rule Original Work a valid fandom. There was never even a big announcement post. I slipped a word to the Boys in Chains mod myself.

IV. What Were They So Afraid Of Anyway?

So why were people so resistant? Seems like a dick move, right?

Not exactly.

I mean, I was enraged and waged a one-woman war to change the rules, but the other side wasn’t nuts. The objections were usually the following:

I just don’t get why it would be allowed. It never was in my fannish spaces.

Most of our members don’t want this.

Most of the examples of things that ought to be included are m/m. We are privileging m/m if we allow it, and AO3 already has a m/m-centric reputation that can feel exclusionary to some fans.

AO3 is a young, shaky platform that can barely handle the load and content we already have. If we open to original work, we’ll be opening the floodgates. The volume of posting will be so high, it will drown out the fic we’re actually here to protect.

Protecting stuff that doesn’t need protection because it’s not an IP issue would dilute OTW’s mission.

If we allow it, idiots will try to turn AO3 into advertising space, posting only the first chapter and a link to where you can pay to read the rest.

If we add another category of text before we add fan art, that’s a slap in the face of the fan artists we are already failing.

These arguments all make perfect sense in context.

Obvously, the issue with the first two is that different fannish communities have different norms. I knew that a very large community disagreed with the then current AO3 policy, but since so few of them were around to comment, it seemed like a tiny fringe minority.

The m/m thing is… complex. M/M content with zero IP issues is at risk. It is always at risk in a way that even f/f is not (though f/f is also always at risk). Asking for m/m to be exactly equivalent to f/f or m/f in numbers, tropes, whatever is ignoring the historical realities. In our current moment of queer activism in the West, we treat all types of queerness as part of one community with one set of goals, but once you get to culture and art or even more specific activism, this forced homogenization is neither useful nor healthy.

OTOH, AO3 really did have PR problems related to the perception that we gave m/m fandom the kid glove treatment. That objection wasn’t coming from nowhere.

AO3 was shaky. It was tiny when I first brought up this argument. Hell, it wasn’t even in closed beta the first time we discussed this. Part of what made the quiet rules change possible was AO3 organically getting much bigger and OTW having to buy many more servers for unrelated reasons.

The “floodgates” thing was put to rest by tacitly allowing original work before the rules change. We had a period to study how fans actually behaved, and as I predicted, only a small amount of original work got posted. It was indeed mostly things like original BL-ish stories or original work that had been part of a mixed original/fic fest, exchange, zine, etc. Currently, the “Original Work” fandom on AO3 only has 76,348 works. That’s pretty big compared to individual fandoms but tiny compared to AO3’s current size.

The commercial argument was spurious because commercial spam had been against the rules from the very beginning. OH THE IRONY that nowadays AO3 has all these idiots trying to post the first chapter of their fanfic and then direct you to where you can buy the rest.

AO3 has plenty of fanfic of public domain works. One of the problems with gatekeeping original work is that any way you try to distinguish it (not based on a specific canon, not an IP issue, etc.) will apply to some set of obviously allowable fandoms.

As for fan art… OTW has failed fan artists. They needed protection as much as or even more than fic writers. Just look at Tumblr! If we had succeeded at making DeviantArt but allowing boners, fan art fandom could have been safe all these years. Or when Tumblr inevitably shat the bed, we could have scooped up all those people instead of them scattering to twitter and god knows where.

OTW has failed vidders too, at least in terms of preservation. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this. Other major people from like the first Board and shit have discussed this with me offline. Doing some kind of vidding project, possibly outside of OTW is on a lot of our to-do lists. But at least one of OTW’s biggest victories has been that copyright exemption. OTW has demonstrably done really positive things for vidders that other organizations and sites have not. As a vidder, I never expected to see good hosting for the actual video files, and I’m quite content.

But fan artists… yeah. That argument makes sense at least from a place of frustration.

BTW, for the love of god, if you’re a n00b to OTW stuff, please do not reblog this post excitedly telling me that hosting fan art is on OTW’s road map, so yay, good news. Someone always does that, and it’s so irritating. I haven’t been involved in OTW in years, but I used to be, and I know what is on the roadmap. The couple of you who do heavy lifting on sysadmin and coding and policy things are welcome to weigh in as usual. I know none of us like that we can’t host fan art. It’s not what we intended.

Nonetheless, I found this argument to be the perfect being the enemy of the good. If we can save more text now without losing much of anything, we should do it. The fact that we’re fucking up on the fan art front is not a reason to spread the misery around.

V. Is “Original” the Opposite of “Fanfic”?

Okay, so that tl;dr above is why “BNFs” were on one side and “nobodies” were on the other. BNFs from one cultural background founded OTW. BNFs from the other cultural background weren’t even aware that the debate was going on.

But what was the underlying philosophical problem in even having the conversation?

It took me a long time, but I finally worked it out: We had two completely different ways of categorizing writing, and they were so baked into how we phrased questions that everything ended up being unanswerable to the other side. Here is what I came up with:

Schema 1

Fanfic - based on someone else’s IP

Original Work - the opposite

Schema 2

Non-Fannish Work - School essays, stories you are writing to try to sell to a mainstream publisher

Fannish Work Type 1 - based on other people’s characters directly (i.e. fanfic) Type 2 - based on tropes or whatever (“original slash” and the like)

Now, in the current moment when half of Tumblr just got into Chinese webnovels and the m/m ebook industry is thriving in English, original, tropey, BL-ish work is no longer different from “things I am trying to sell”. But this is how the divide was circa 2005 on fannish websites, and it’s the divide that was driving this internal OTW debate.

VI. Let’s Summarize the Camps One More Time

So, again, the debate makes perfect sense if you understand who was involved.

On the mainstream “But that’s not fanfic? I’m confused?” side:

Big US TV fandoms in English

Fandom historians of K/S–>buddy cop slash–>SGA, etc.

Americans

On the other side:

Anime fandom

“Original slash” fandom that had already been chased off of everywhere

People upset that AO3 wasn’t farther on translating the interface and supporting non-English language fandom.

People upset about US-centrism in fandom

Yes, I am very white, very American, and by now very into old buddy cop shows, but this was basically how the breakdown worked. It meant that something that looked like a minor quibble to one side was really, really not.

[creativitycache]

ngl asking for people who self-identify as "antis" is already biasing your results because the term originated from fans being defensive over getting called out (eg the types who sincerely think fandom culture is ""puritan""). fair number of people started to use the term ironically and it might be evening out but overall the post calling for responses on the survey still comes off as something written in bad faith?

I wrote a rather long and involved response and then tumblr ate it. Goshdarn.

Fair warning, this is a hyperfixation and I’m coming off of a migraine so this may not be very cogent. Please read this in the over excited tones of someone infodumping about emulsifiers, with no animosity intended.

So, tl;dr and with a lot fewer links, I’m incredibly interested by your perspective that “anti” originated as a derogatory term.

As far as I am aware, the etymological history of the word “anti” being used pejoratively is coming from some very new debates.

I’m also noting that you had no feedback regarding the content of the questions themselves, which I would be interested in hearing as I am genuinely coming from a place without censure.

The term “anti” actually is a self-descriptor that arose in the Livejournal days, where you’d tag something as “Anti ___” for other like minded people to find. (For example, my cursory google search pulled up 10 Anti Amy Lee communities on LJ).

I’m a self-confessed old. I was back in fandom before Livejournal, aaaall the way back in the Angelfire days. Webrings children! We had webrings! And guest books for you to sign!

I’m going to take a swing for the fences here Anon, so if I’m wrong please let me know, but I’m going to guess you became active as a fan in the past 5-8 years based of your use of the term puritan.

There’s actually a HUGELY new debate in fandom spaces! Previously, it was assumed that:

a) All fandom spaces are created and used by adults only.

b) If you were seeing something, it’s because you dug for it.

These assumptions were predicated upon what spaces fandoms grew in. First you had Star Trek TOS fandom, which grew in 1970s housewives kitchens. They were all friends irl, and everyone was an adult, and you actively had to reach out to other adults to talk about things. (By the way- a woman lost custody of her children in the divorce when her ex husband brought up to the judge she kept a Kirk/Spock zine under her bed. The judge ruled this as obvious signs of moral deficiency. That was in the 80s! Everyone is still alive and the parents are younger than my coworkers!)

Time: 1967-1980s. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Then, when the internet came about, it was almost exclusively used by adults until The Eternal September. 1993 was the year that changed the internet for good, but even years after that the internet was a majority adult space. Most kids and teens didn’t have unlimited access if their parents even had a home computer in the 90s.

This is the rise of Angelfire, which were fansites all connected to each other in “rings”. You had to hunt for content. If you found something you didn’t like, well, you clicked out and went on with your day because you’d never see it again unless you really dug. This was truly the wild west, tagging did not exist and you could go from fluff to vore in the blink of an eye with nothing warning you before hand. All fannish spaces were marked “here be dragons” and attempts were made to at least adopt the “R/NC-17″ ratings on works to some limited success, depending on webmaster.

Time: 1990-1999. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

In 1999 LiveJournal arose like a leviathan, and here is where the term Anti emerges as a self descriptor. Larger communities began to form, and with them, divisions. Now, you could reach so many fans you could reach a critical mass of them for enough of them to dislike a ship. The phrase “Anti” became a self-used tag, as people tagged their works, communities, and blogs with “anti” (NB: this is at far, far smaller rates than today). Anti was first and foremost a tagging tool used and created by the people who were vehemently against something.

You could find content more easily than in the past, but you still had to put some serious elbow grease into it.

In 2007, Livejournal bans users for art "depicting minors in explicit sexual situations”. The Livejournal community explodes in anger- towards Livejournal staff. The account holders/fans view this as corporate puritanical meddling. The outrage continues as it is revealed these bans were part of a pre-sale operation to SUP Services. SUP Services, upon taking over Livejournal in 2008, proceeds to filter the topics “bisexuality, depression, faeries, girls, boys, and fanfiction”.

The Great LiveJournal Migration begins, as fans leave the site in droves.

Time: 1999-2009. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing, seeking to create communities based off a dislike of something. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Where do fans go? Well, in the last decade, they migrated to Tumblr and Twitter (sorry Pillowfort- you gave it a good try!)

What’s different about all of these sites? Individuals are able to create and access content streams. These are hugely impactful in how communities are formed! Because now:

a) finding content is easier

b) finding content you dislike by accident is easier

c) content you dislike requires active curation to avoid

d) truly anonymous outreach is possible and easy (for example, you anon! Isn’t it much easier to go on anon to bring up awkward or sensitive topics? I’m happy you did by the way, and that’s why I keep my anons open. It’s an important contextual tool in the online communications world!)

Now the term Anti gets sprightly. Previously, if you didn’t like content, there was nothing you could really do about it. For example, I, at the tender age of way-too-young, opened up a page of my favorite Star Trek Deep Space 9 fansite and pixel by pixel with all the loading speed of a stoned turtle a very anatomically incorrect orgy appeared.

I backed out.

1. Who could I contact? There was no “message me here” button, no way to summon any mods on Angelfire sites.

2. If I did manage to find a contact button, I would have had to admit I went onto a site that wasn’t designed to keep me safe. I knew this was a site for adults, I knew there wasn’t a way to stop it from showing something. There was no such thing as tags. I knew all of this before going in. So the assumption was, it was on me for looking. (Some may have argued it was on my parents for not supervising me- all I can say is thank GOD no one else was in the living room and my mom was around the corner in the kitchen.)

But now? On Tumblr? On Twitter? In a decade in which tagging is so easy and ubiquitous it’s expected?

Now people who describe themselves as antis start to have actual tools and social conventions to utilize.

Which leads to immediate backlash! Content creators are confused and upset- fandom spaces have been the wild west for decades, and there’s still no sherriff in town. So the immediate go-to argument is that these people who are messaging them are “puritans”.

And that’s actually an interesting argument! A huge factor in shaping the internet’s social mores in the latest decades is cleanliness for stockbrokers. Websites can become toxic to investors and to sales if they contain sexual content. Over time, corporations perfected a mechanism for “cleaning” a site for sale.

Please note there is no personal opinion or judgement in this next list, it is simply a description of corporate strategies you can read during the minute meetings of shareholders for Tumblr, Twitter, Paypal, Venmo, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Answers, and Livejournal.

1. Remove sex workers. Ban any sex work of any kind, deplatform, keep any money you may have been holding.

2. Remove pedophilia. This is where the jump begins between content depicting real people vs content depicting fictional characters begins.

3. Remove all sexual image content, including artwork of fictional characters.

4. Remove all sexual content, including written works. If needed, loop back to step 2 as a justification, and claim you do not have the moderators to prevent written works depicting children.

I would like to reiterate these are actual gameplans, so much so that they’ve made their way into business textbooks. (Or at least they did for my Modern Marketing & App Design classes back in the early 2010s. Venmo, of course, wasn’t mentioned, but I did read the shareholder’s speeches when they banned sex workers from the platform so I added them in the list above because it seems they’re following the same pattern.)

So you have two groups who are actively seeking to remove NSFW content from the site.

A) Corporate shareholders

B) People are upset they’re seeing NSFW content they didn’t seek out and squicks them

Now, why does this matter for the debates using the term “puritan” as an insult? 

Because the reasons corporate shareholders hate NSFW material is founded in American puritanism. It’s a really interesting conflation of private sector values! And if Wall Street were in another cultural context, it would be a completely different discussion which I find fascinating!

But here’s the rub- that second group? They're not doing this for money. If there are any puritanical drives, it’s personal, not a widespread cohesive ideology driving them. HOWEVER! The section of that group that spent the early 2010s on tumblr did pick up some of the same rhetoric as puritanical talking points (which is an entirely separate discussion involving radfems, 4chan raids, fourth wave feminism, and a huge very nuanced set of influences I would love to talk about at a later time!)

These are largely fans who have “grown up” in the modern sites- no matter how old they actually are, their fandom habits and expectations have been shaped by the algorithms of these modern sites.

Now HERE‘s the fascinating bit that’s new to me! This is the interpretation of the data I’m getting, and so I’m out on a limb but I think this is a valid premise!

The major conflict in fandom at this time is a struggle over personal space online.

Content creators are getting messages telling them to stop, degrading them, following them from platform to platform.

They say “Hey! What gives- we were here first. The cardinal rule of fandom is don’t like, don’t read. Fandom space has always been understood to be adult- it’s been this way for decades! To find our content, you had to come to us! This is our space! This is my space, this is my blog! If you don’t like it, you’re not obligated to look!”

Meanwhile, at the exact same time, antis are saying “Hey! What gives- this content is appearing on my screen! That’s my space!  I didn’t agree to this, I don’t like this! I want it to be as far away from me as possible! I will actively drive it away.”

This is a major cultural shift! This is a huge change and a huge source of friction! And I directly credit it to the concept of “content stream” and algorithms driving similar-content to users despite them not wanting it!

Curating your online space used to be much simpler, because there wasn’t much of it! Now with millions of users spread out over a wide age range, all feeding in to the same 4-5 websites, we are seeing people be cramped in a technically limitless space!

Now people feel that they have to go on the offense to defend themselves against content they don’t like, which is predicated upon not only the algorithms of modern websites but ALSO talking points fed from the top down of what is and what is not acceptable on various platforms.

Time: 2010-2020. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing,and people using it to describe others. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? Depends!

So I, a fandom ancient, a creaky thing of old HTML codes and broken tags, am watching this transformation and am wildly curious for data.

Also...I uh....I can’t believe this is the short version. My ADHD is how you say “buckwild” tonight.

Anyways...um...if anyone has read to the bottom, give me data?

[alightwhendarknessfell]

I've been a fan since post wretched and divine era and I remember there being so much everything: Twitter, facebook, fanfiction, instagram, tumblr, pinterest... I think they started disappearing around late 2017 because the guys weren't really as active, they also postponed the album release (Jake had said it would be out in September or sth in one of the interviews and then they announced it for January). Also many fanpages I used to follow, turned into kpop 1/2

2/2 or pop punk fan accounts. I'm happy they run pages for whoever they enjoy listening too. It's just sad to see the post hardcore fanbase slowly disappearing because most of those bands have broken up or changed their sound since then and that's fine, people should evolve, but you can't really find many new post hardcore bands and how long can you have "Smile In Your Sleep" on repeat? :(

Reply: I have noticed that, there’s been a decline in post-hardcore/Alt-rock/rock/metal fan bases. I remember around 2012-2015 that stuff was all over social media. But even bands who are still together and putting out music don’t seem to have the same level of fan driven media presence. It’s by no means only Black Veil that has seen a decrease in ‘fan chatter’

I’ve seen the trend too of people (especially the young fans who were behind most of the fan accounts) switching to K-pop bands or pop stars. It’s sad because I miss the ROCK community that used to exist online. I’m hoping that 2021 brings a resurgence of interest in this genre again. Maybe after live shows start back there will be. I think the death of things like MySpace, Warped Tour, rock festivals, and Tumblr (not the same since Yahoo bought it) the fans kind of lost their places to interact. Even Hot Topic has changed from music/band driven merch to comic/fandom shit. Tiktok/IG/Twitter really aren’t showing the alt-rock scene the love that the old sites did.

[trainsinanime]

Red Web Mystery Reviews

Red Web is a podcast by Rooster Teeth featuring two guys from that whole Achievement Hunter thing that I can never tell apart (but you don’t need to know anything about this) about unsolved mysteries that often but not always have something to do with the internet. Let’s review the episodes out so far, because… well, no reason, honestly, I just wanted to.

Lake City Quiet Pills

Based on their information presented here, this whole thing and their explanation for it seem plausible enough. You have to assume that this group of apparently assassins is kind of bad at operational security, but there’s actually a lot of cases where big criminals got exposed because they used the same URL or E-mail address or similar.

Satoshi Nakamoto

I already knew about this beforehand, and I would say they did a good job explaining it. Personally, I think they should have gone into a bit more of how much a shit-show the whole Newsweek Dorian Nakamoto thing was; in short, there was no reason to believe this person had anything to do with Bitcoin, he didn’t even speak good english (which is probably what caused some of the misunderstandings), and it was both a huge embarrassment for Newsweek (at least I hope they felt embarrassed) and they needlessly hounded a completely uninvolved person for this.

But then they get into new evidence, and we see a problem that I think is a bit systematic: They don’t really go into how trustworthy the evidence is. Specifically, they say that the one person who can cast light on this might be… John McAfee. Fucking John McAfee. Seriously, that guy?

For context: John McAfee did indeed create the antivirus company that still bears his name. But he sold it in the 1990s, and thanks to money and drugs, he’s just gotten plain crazy ever since. There was the whole thing where he was implicated in a murder in Belize a couple of years ago; he kept blogging from a jail in Guatemala, later returned to the US, and keeps being part of outlandish schemes (including two presidential runs, though he failed to get the nomination for libertarian candidate both 2016 and 2020), controversies, and supposedly super-awesome tech startups that never go anywhere. It makes perfect sense that he’d claim to be involved in the creation of Bitcoin. It makes no sense whatsoever to believe him. If you’re interested and have way too much time, read what El Reg has to say about him.

Mortis

Oh god. This one makes me both want to laugh and cry. Mostly laugh, to be honest, because it is such an obvious nothing burger, but also weep for the internet that was.

The story is that they found a participant in an early internet warez network who wasn’t that great at OpSec. This is only fully revealed at the end, and they don’t even seem to have noticed that this case is clearly and completely solved.

Most of the humour for me comes from the fact that they’re rediscovering the old pre-social web, and are convinced that it’s all weird and nefarious. Why would one person register websites for their interests, and then never do anything with them? Because that’s what the internet was like back then in the late 1990s and early 2000s! Hey, look, here’s my ugly special-interest website from that era that hasn’t been updated in years and isn’t going to be updated any time soon either. That’s just what was normal back then. Same with a website for every person, or trying to do your own garage sales via your website. That was the thing to do back then. And yes, obviously it sucked and didn’t work very well.

They even realise that this is what „might“ have been going on, and theorise about this hypothetical early web. „Maybe if there was some website that linked all these together and allowed you to search“ - yeah, those existed. Digg and Technorati and Del.icio.us, remember those? All bought by Yahoo and promptly forgotten. And to be fair, they never worked as well as real social networks did.

But back then we had this glorious freedom. No sudden porn bans like here on Tumblr; no need to match any predefined template for what posts are, no user tracking by Facebook, nobody telling you that you’re tagging your posts wrong…

It’s understandable why we lost that web. Linking together is much easier if all content is owned and controlled by like four companies. It also makes it much easier to set up a new account; setting up a new website is just a lot of pain and knowledge you have to have that you don’t necessarily want to have.

But now we live in our monocultures and must live with whatever content decisions our corporate overlords make and then sell us as „community standards“, and the wild and weird web that we used to have is only a memory. And sometimes not even that; sometimes these new young kids treat it as a „weird nefarious mystery“. Actually, I just looked it up, and Alfredo and Trevor are both around 30, just a few years younger than I am. They were alive for at least the tail end if this. These guys could have known this shit!

So, yeah, the story here is not the mystery; it’s a lament for the web we lost.

D.B. Cooper

Again one I already knew, and I think they gave a good overview. Personally I’m in the camp of people who assume that he failed to make a safe landing.

Happy Valley Dream Survey

This seems vaguely interesting. One thing that kind of annoys me about this podcast is that they (well mostly Alfredo) generally assume that everything strange is necessarily nefarious, without any evidence. The whole thing here leads nowhere, after all.

Lead Masks Case

Again, I’m not sure how much weight to put on the other evidence they listed, especially that whole supposed UFO sighting. Yes, that one woman may have been very respected in her community and/or had a high social status, whatever that means. But the thing is that rich people who are super-involved in their church community or whatever can still (through no fault of their own) be unreliable witnesses and invent things that weren’t there, or not the way they were described.

Cicada 3301 (parts 1 and 2)

Personally I find this one less interesting because it’s not a mystery, it’s a riddle, and that’s way less fun. Much of the circumstances are weird enough, I guess.

What confuses me the most about this is how it’s supposed to be a recruitment tool, but it doesn’t seem to be very good at that. A lot of the steps don’t really seem to be that difficult and require just some fairly standard hacker skills. This is similar to the Satashi Nakamoto case, where one hint was „knows C++ programming“. Lots of people know that, and it’s something you can totally teach yourself. And if the people who were recruited through this were really supposed to program software, well… why did no part of this test whether they could do so? That’s a whole different skill. My conclusion is that this Cicada group is either a long con or a group that is nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is.

One thing to note here: They just casually assume that the FBI and NSA and so on are monitoring the whole internet, in real time, all the time. Which is true, we know that thanks to Edward Snowden. Isn’t that much more nefarious than any of the other mysteries here put together? How did we get to a place where Americans both think „this is the country that has all the freedom“ and „if you say or search for the wrong things you’ll get put on a government watchlist that’s just normal“ at the same time? Pervasive monitoring of a population is pretty much the exact opposite of freedom, but apparently we all in the western world just take it in stride anyway. That’s nothing to do with this podcast, though.

Conclusion

Generally okay podcast. The hosts are good storytellers, even if the stories are sometimes a bit shaky. It is at least at no point overly gross or insultingly stupid (unlike the official Rooster Teeth Podcast, which is both). So I think I can recommend it if you need something, anything to fill the quiet, and you’re already out of episodes of Black Box Down.

[howtoearnmoneyonline102]

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