#this is me searching for a writers forum

[writingway-in-writinghell]

I am growing weary of EVERY SINGLE online community having rules like “free speech important uwu” or “don’t be rude we value peace” because you just KNOW it’s a euphemism for “we let bigotry slide and then act surprised when the thread escalates because people have been targeted in their literal unchanging identity” like

What’s not clicking??? If these sites want ~peace~ just include a no-bigotry rule and you’re done. It’s not hard, you’re all just cowards.

[draconicace]

cuno i'm grateful you told me all this. getting shot in the shoulder blade is not fucking lucky, logic

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Unpersoned

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Unpersoned." It's about the implications of putting critical infrastructure into the private, unaccountable hands of tech giants:

https://locusmag.com/2024/07/cory-doctorow-unpersoned/

The column opens with the story of romance writer K Renee, as reported by Madeline Ashby for Wired:

https://www.wired.com/story/what-happens-when-a-romance-author-gets-locked-out-of-google-docs/

Renee is a prolific writer who used Google Docs to compose her books, and share them among early readers for feedback and revisions. Last March, Renee's Google account was locked, and she was no longer able to access ten manuscripts for her unfinished books, totaling over 220,000 words. Google's famously opaque customer service – a mix of indifferently monitored forums, AI chatbots, and buck-passing subcontractors – would not explain to her what rule she had violated, merely that her work had been deemed "inappropriate."

Renee discovered that she wasn't being singled out. Many of her peers had also seen their accounts frozen and their documents locked, and none of them were able to get an explanation out of Google. Renee and her similarly situated victims of Google lockouts were reduced to developing folk-theories of what they had done to be expelled from Google's walled garden; Renee came to believe that she had tripped an anti-spam system by inviting her community of early readers to access the books she was working on.

There's a normal way that these stories resolve themselves: a reporter like Ashby, writing for a widely read publication like Wired, contacts the company and triggers a review by one of the vanishingly small number of people with the authority to undo the determinations of the Kafka-as-a-service systems that underpin the big platforms. The system's victim gets their data back and the company mouths a few empty phrases about how they take something-or-other "very seriously" and so forth.

But in this case, Google broke the script. When Ashby contacted Google about Renee's situation, Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson insisted that the policies for Google accounts were "clear": "we may review and take action on any content that violates our policies." If Renee believed that she'd been wrongly flagged, she could "request an appeal."

But Renee didn't even know what policy she was meant to have broken, and the "appeals" went nowhere.

This is an underappreciated aspect of "software as a service" and "the cloud." As companies from Microsoft to Adobe to Google withdraw the option to use software that runs on your own computer to create files that live on that computer, control over our own lives is quietly slipping away. Sure, it's great to have all your legal documents scanned, encrypted and hosted on GDrive, where they can't be burned up in a house-fire. But if a Google subcontractor decides you've broken some unwritten rule, you can lose access to those docs forever, without appeal or recourse.

That's what happened to "Mark," a San Francisco tech workers whose toddler developed a UTI during the early covid lockdowns. The pediatrician's office told Mark to take a picture of his son's infected penis and transmit it to the practice using a secure medical app. However, Mark's phone was also set up to synch all his pictures to Google Photos (this is a default setting), and when the picture of Mark's son's penis hit Google's cloud, it was automatically scanned and flagged as Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, better known as "child porn"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

Without contacting Mark, Google sent a copy of all of his data – searches, emails, photos, cloud files, location history and more – to the SFPD, and then terminated his account. Mark lost his phone number (he was a Google Fi customer), his email archives, all the household and professional files he kept on GDrive, his stored passwords, his two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator, and every photo he'd ever taken of his young son.

The SFPD concluded that Mark hadn't done anything wrong, but it was too late. Google had permanently deleted all of Mark's data. The SFPD had to mail a physical letter to Mark telling him he wasn't in trouble, because he had no email and no phone.

Mark's not the only person this happened to. Writing about Mark for the New York Times, Kashmir Hill described other parents, like a Houston father identified as "Cassio," who also lost their accounts and found themselves blocked from fundamental participation in modern life:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

Note that in none of these cases did the problem arise from the fact that Google services are advertising-supported, and because these people weren't paying for the product, they were the product. Buying a $800 Pixel phone or paying more than $100/year for a Google Drive account means that you're definitely paying for the product, and you're still the product.

What do we do about this? One answer would be to force the platforms to provide service to users who, in their judgment, might be engaged in fraud, or trafficking in CSAM, or arranging terrorist attacks. This is not my preferred solution, for reasons that I hope are obvious!

We can try to improve the decision-making processes at these giant platforms so that they catch fewer dolphins in their tuna-nets. The "first wave" of content moderation appeals focused on the establishment of oversight and review boards that wronged users could appeal their cases to. The idea was to establish these "paradigm cases" that would clarify the tricky aspects of content moderation decisions, like whether uploading a Nazi atrocity video in order to criticize it violated a rule against showing gore, Nazi paraphernalia, etc.

This hasn't worked very well. A proposal for "second wave" moderation oversight based on arms-length semi-employees at the platforms who gather and report statistics on moderation calls and complaints hasn't gelled either:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/12/move-slow-and-fix-things/#second-wave

Both the EU and California have privacy rules that allow users to demand their data back from platforms, but neither has proven very useful (yet) in situations where users have their accounts terminated because they are accused of committing gross violations of platform policy. You can see why this would be: if someone is accused of trafficking in child porn or running a pig-butchering scam, it would be perverse to shut down their account but give them all the data they need to go one committing these crimes elsewhere.

But even where you can invoke the EU's GDPR or California's CCPA to get your data, the platforms deliver that data in the most useless, complex blobs imaginable. For example, I recently used the CCPA to force Mailchimp to give me all the data they held on me. Mailchimp – a division of the monopolist and serial fraudster Intuit – is a favored platform for spammers, and I have been added to thousands of Mailchimp lists that bombard me with unsolicited press pitches and come-ons for scam products.

Mailchimp has spent a decade ignoring calls to allow users to see what mailing lists they've been added to, as a prelude to mass unsubscribing from those lists (for Mailchimp, the fact that spammers can pay it to send spam that users can't easily opt out of is a feature, not a bug). I thought that the CCPA might finally let me see the lists I'm on, but instead, Mailchimp sent me more than 5900 files, scattered through which were the internal serial numbers of the lists my name had been added to – but without the names of those lists any contact information for their owners. I can see that I'm on more than 1,000 mailing lists, but I can't do anything about it.

Mailchimp shows how a rule requiring platforms to furnish data-dumps can be easily subverted, and its conduct goes a long way to explaining why a decade of EU policy requiring these dumps has failed to make a dent in the market power of the Big Tech platforms.

The EU has a new solution to this problem. With its 2024 Digital Markets Act, the EU is requiring platforms to furnish APIs – programmatic ways for rivals to connect to their services. With the DMA, we might finally get something parallel to the cellular industry's "number portability" for other kinds of platforms.

If you've ever changed cellular platforms, you know how smooth this can be. When you get sick of your carrier, you set up an account with a new one and get a one-time code. Then you call your old carrier, endure their pathetic begging not to switch, give them that number and within a short time (sometimes only minutes), your phone is now on the new carrier's network, with your old phone-number intact.

This is a much better answer than forcing platforms to provide service to users whom they judge to be criminals or otherwise undesirable, but the platforms hate it. They say they hate it because it makes them complicit in crimes ("if we have to let an accused fraudster transfer their address book to a rival service, we abet the fraud"), but it's obvious that their objection is really about being forced to reduce the pain of switching to a rival.

There's a superficial reasonableness to the platforms' position, but only until you think about Mark, or K Renee, or the other people who've been "unpersonned" by the platforms with no explanation or appeal.

The platforms have rigged things so that you must have an account with them in order to function, but they also want to have the unilateral right to kick people off their systems. The combination of these demands represents more power than any company should have, and Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated its unfitness to wield this kind of power.

This week, I lost an argument with my accountants about this. They provide me with my tax forms as links to a Microsoft Cloud file, and I need to have a Microsoft login in order to retrieve these files. This policy – and a prohibition on sending customer files as email attachments – came from their IT team, and it was in response to a requirement imposed by their insurer.

The problem here isn't merely that I must now enter into a contractual arrangement with Microsoft in order to do my taxes. It isn't just that Microsoft's terms of service are ghastly. It's not even that they could change those terms at any time, for example, to ingest my sensitive tax documents in order to train a large language model.

It's that Microsoft – like Google, Apple, Facebook and the other giants – routinely disconnects users for reasons it refuses to explain, and offers no meaningful appeal. Microsoft tells its business customers, "force your clients to get a Microsoft account in order to maintain communications security" but also reserves the right to unilaterally ban those clients from having a Microsoft account.

There are examples of this all over. Google recently flipped a switch so that you can't complete a Google Form without being logged into a Google account. Now, my ability to purse all kinds of matters both consequential and trivial turn on Google's good graces, which can change suddenly and arbitrarily. If I was like Mark, permanently banned from Google, I wouldn't have been able to complete Google Forms this week telling a conference organizer what sized t-shirt I wear, but also telling a friend that I could attend their wedding.

Now, perhaps some people really should be locked out of digital life. Maybe people who traffick in CSAM should be locked out of the cloud. But the entity that should make that determination is a court, not a Big Tech content moderator. It's fine for a platform to decide it doesn't want your business – but it shouldn't be up to the platform to decide that no one should be able to provide you with service.

This is especially salient in light of the chaos caused by Crowdstrike's catastrophic software update last week. Crowdstrike demonstrated what happens to users when a cloud provider accidentally terminates their account, but while we're thinking about reducing the likelihood of such accidents, we should really be thinking about what happens when you get Crowdstruck on purpose.

The wholesale chaos that Windows users and their clients, employees, users and stakeholders underwent last week could have been pieced out retail. It could have come as a court order (either by a US court or a foreign court) to disconnect a user and/or brick their computer. It could have come as an insider attack, undertaken by a vengeful employee, or one who was on the take from criminals or a foreign government. The ability to give anyone in the world a Blue Screen of Death could be a feature and not a bug.

It's not that companies are sadistic. When they mistreat us, it's nothing personal. They've just calculated that it would cost them more to run a good process than our business is worth to them. If they know we can't leave for a competitor, if they know we can't sue them, if they know that a tech rival can't give us a tool to get our data out of their silos, then the expected cost of mistreating us goes down. That makes it economically rational to seek out ever-more trivial sources of income that impose ever-more miserable conditions on us. When we can't leave without paying a very steep price, there's practically a fiduciary duty to find ways to upcharge, downgrade, scam, screw and enshittify us, right up to the point where we're so pissed that we quit.

Google could pay competent decision-makers to review every complaint about an account disconnection, but the cost of employing that large, skilled workforce vastly exceeds their expected lifetime revenue from a user like Mark. The fact that this results in the ruination of Mark's life isn't Google's problem – it's Mark's problem.

The cloud is many things, but most of all, it's a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don't control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for.

Google's defenstration of K Renee, Mark and Cassio may have been accidental, but Google's capacity to defenstrate all of us, and the enormous cost we all bear if Google does so, has been carefully engineered into the system. Same goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and anyone else who traps us in their silos. The lesson of the Crowdstrike catastrophe isn't merely that our IT systems are brittle and riddled with single points of failure: it's that these failure-points can be tripped deliberately, and that doing so could be in a company's best interests, no matter how devastating it would be to you or me.

If you'd like an e ssay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[my-castles-crumbling]

HAPPY PRIDE MY LOVES!

In an effort to help those of you who are in unsafe areas or who are still closeted (or who might not be able to attend pride events for other reasons) still celebrate, I created this post of some resources I found!

VIRTUAL PRIDE has a huge list of online events for pride, including Book Clubs, Writer's Groups, and Support Groups!

THE TREVOR PROJECT offers a safe online forum for young people to interact

VIRTUAL DRAG BINGO

A list of free online pride events (I just searched on eventbrite, so I haven't vetted every event)

A list of paid online pride events (I just searched on eventbrite, so I haven't vetted every event)

Here are a couple etsy shops with subtle pride merch: one, two, three, four, five

AAAAND for those of you who are able to attend, an international calendar of Pride events!

Please let me know if you know of more online events, I'd love to add them. Also, please reblog to reach more people!

[vaspider]

youve got a lot of really great thoughts on a transphobia and homophobia, tbh more critical thinking than most people on here, and i was wondering how much you knew about the theory of rapid onset gender dysphoria/if youd be comfortable sharing your thoughts on the ridiculous idea

It was explicitly invented by transphobes as a means of delegitimizing trans identity, and that invention was backed up by a "study" in which the person running the study never spoke to any trans people or to any professionals providing care for trans people, only spoke to the parents of trans minors, and those parents were specifically recruited from forums for anti-trans parents.

The paper which supposedly coined ROGD was taken down for a while and corrected. Further studies have found no basis for ROGD.

What's really interesting is in the cache of emails which became public earlier this year from a former detransitioner there's a paper trail which pretty clearly indicates that the term was actually created on a very heinous website called 4th/wave/now (forgive my anti-search slashes, these people are awful) well prior to the study.

Hey, you want to guess where the parents for this study were recruited from? If you guessed "the one where the term was invented," you're right!

But wait, there's more!

It appears from the journalistic work done by Mother Jones, Jude Doyle, and Julia Serano, that this term was created by an anti-trans activist who works extensively with right-wing think tanks and who went to great lengths to hide that she invented the term.

Jude Doyle:

Finding anti-trans narratives that would “sell” to the general public was a constant concern for this crowd, and Shupe says it didn’t much matter if the narratives were based in fact or not. Marchiano, for instance, eagerly watched the spread of the ROGD theory — “[transfeminist writer and researcher Julia] Serano has already written a takedown,” she exulted in one August 2018 email. Shupe suspects Marchiano’s role is larger than the public knows: “Marchiano never explicitly said she is the inventor of ROGD, but the evidence points to her, and she’s listed as a contributor to the [Lisa Littman] study on PLOS One,” she writes to me. “My ‘opinion’ is that Marchiano and the 4thWaveNow folks are behind the ROGD study, and Littman merely fronted it for them to make it appear unbiased.”

Jude Doyle again:

On July 2, Shupe sent Marchiano a link to Jones’ blog post telling her “you’ve upset Zinnia again.” (Shupe had a tendency to send Marchiano news of ROGD, and to attribute the theory to “you” — that is, to Marchiano — whether Marchiano was explicitly named or not. In the communications I’ve reviewed, Marchiano does not reject the attribution.) Marchiano responded by saying that Jones had done something to “make her nervous” — namely, she’d dug up a blog post about ROGD that Marchiano had written under her own name.

Julia Serano:

If all of this is true — that Marchiano ran YCTP and invented ROGD — then it would follow that Marchiano was also likely skepticaltherapist, the supposed parent of a trans child who invented the idea of “transgender social contagion” in the first place.

Julia Serano again:

Also on March 15, 2016, at 6:07am (so very early in the day, likely before the aforementioned YTCP piece is published), skepticaltherapist posts her final comment on 4thwavenow before mysteriously disappearing. In a reply to someone named Starrymessenger, skepticaltherapist says: 'I wanted to mention that this month’s Psychotherapy Networker is focusing on trans youth issues, and the tone of each article is uncritically celebratory — lots of mentions of “courage,” and “bravery.” You may need a subscription or at least an account to comment, but I have so far.'

At the time of this comment, "Lisa" is the *only* person to have posted a comment on this particular Psychotherapy Networker article, as the 2nd comment doesn't appear until later that evening (7:30:15 PM on March 15th; both 4thwavenow & Psychotherapy Networker appear to be based in the U.S., so the should be only a few hours apart, if at all). Therefore, "Lisa" and skepticaltherapist must be the same person.

Did you catch all of that?

This is a fraudulent "diagnosis" explicitly invented by an anti-trans psychologist who at times has used sockpuppets to manipulate online conversations, claimed at times to be the mother of a trans child, or maybe it was her friend who had the trans child, or maybe she just knew somebody who just randomly decided he was a trans boy after going on tumblr. (Boy, does Lisa Marchiano hate Tumblr, lol.)

After inventing this diagnosis and pushing it on a forum for parents who don't like that they have trans kids, Marchiano then approaches a different researcher and uses this other researcher to launder this term, launching it into the verbal stratosphere, while explicitly working with right-wing groups who used this "evidence" to manufacture anti-trans bills. This list of right-wing groups and individuals includes the Alliance Defending Freedom, the "American College of Pediatricians," -- not to be confused with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the legitimate organization, ACPeds is a fringe right-wing group.

They literally made all of this up, this idea that transmasculine people specifically are being "infected" by online sources, and then they laundered it through a shitty study and tried to hide the laundering they did, so that shit like this can happen:

The president of the American Principles Project, a member of the coalition, recently told the New York Times that his group’s goal is to eliminate all transition care, starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.”

This isn't about protecting children or any bullshit like that, and it's not about this fallacious "disorder" because it doesn't exist -- and they know it doesn't exist. They know it doesn't exist because they were the ones who made it up.

Like... what else is there to say? It's like if I made up Purple Big Toe Disease and claimed that all people taller than 5'10" and born on a Tuesday have Purple Big Toe Disease and should not be able to buy aspirin, because it's G-d's plan that people who have Purple Big Toe Disease should not prevent themselves from feeling the pain that G-d has planned for them, and then I asked someone to write a paper about PBTD and pretend I wasn't the one who made it up so I could point at the paper and be like le gasp, PBTD is the number one problem! We need to stop everyone over 5'10" and born on a Tuesday from being able to buy aspirin! And then some dude in South Dakota starts writing up bills in consultation with a bunch of Evangelical lawyers to deny basic health care to people over 5'10" and born on Tuesdays.

If it sounds fucking ridiculous, it's because it is.

[writingquestionsanswered]

im extremely new to writing and i mostly write for myself as a hobby. My issue is I don't feel like I can really be objective ab what I write and I'm not at a point where I'm comfortable sharing it with others but I do wanna get better.. is there a way to be able to objectively pick out the flaws in the way you write (both narratively and writing style)

Improving Writing without Feedback

Here are some things you can do to improve your writing when you're not ready to seek feedback:

1 - Read a lot of the kinds of books you want to write. Being an avid reader is genuinely the best way to learn what works, what doesn't, and learn how to spot flaws in your writing. Read a variety of books, but do also read many of the kinds of books you want to write. For example, if you write YA fantasy, you should read a lot of YA fantasy. The more you read, the more your own writing will improve.

2 - Read craft books and writing advice articles/blogs. Another great way to hone your craft is to read books, articles, and blogs about writing. The more you learn about the process, mechanics, and fundamentals of writing, the more your own writing will improve.

3 - Watch and listen to writing vlogs and podcasts. YouTube is filled to the gills with great writing advice videos, so pretty much any writing-related topic you'd want to learn about, there will be a video talking about it. And there are loads of great writing podcasts, too, focusing on everything from general writing advice to genre specific advice.

4 - Take a writing class, workshop, boot camp, or seminar. There are loads and loads of educational offerings to help writers improve their writing. And the great thing is many of these are available online and for free. Writing forums and general writing blogs/social media pages are a great way to learn about these opportunities when they come up. You can also search Google. Following writers and authors on social media is another great way to learn about these opportunities.

5 - Seek out specific information. Sometimes the best way to learn is to seek out information specific to something you want to learn. If you want to find the flaws in your writing, Google "writing flaws" or "how to find writing flaws" or "ten flaws in your writing" to find blogs, articles, vlogs, etc. that tell you want kinds of things to look out for. Or, say you want to learn to write stronger characters, you can Google "how to write strong characters" and read the most promising articles that pop up.

I hope that helps! ♥

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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[valyrfia]

RE: This ask on fanfic, fandom, and lestappen

(preface with, I love fanfic and fandom, and I've written for very big and small)

I have never experienced such bad fandom etiquette as I have with 1633. I wrote one multi chapter fic for the ship and 99% of ao3 comments I got were people asking when I'd publish the next chapter, which has always been a big no no in fandom. I deleted the fic because it felt bad that people didn't want to engage with what I had written, but, just ask about my update schedule. Also, people changing the date of their published fic to be more recent, so, it appears at the top of the 'recently updated page'! I have never seen this in any fandom before now! AO3 isn't Instagram! If you tag correctly, people will find your fic if they want to read it.

People are pushing 1633 constantly in very public spaces like Twitter, Insta and TikToK, where we know these drivers have accounts and look at comments/posts about them or on their own posts. Just today on Twitter I see Dan Howell (which what a fucking weird intersection of my past and current interests) being asked at a public panel about lestappen, just because he's mentioned liking F1 in the past. I know it gets easy clicks and engagement because it is popular. But, it's so far removed from behaviour that was ever considered acceptable in fandom.

I remember, back in 2013/14 there was a huge backlash to people bringing up fictional ships to actors/writers. There was discourse after every Supernatural or Teen Wolf fan forum/con panel when someone would inevitably ask about Destiel or Sterek. People would argue whether fanon and ships were appropriate to ask the real people behind the show about.

RPF is fine, I have written, currently write and will continue to engage in RPF spaces. But, there are boundaries that you must keep if you are going to engage with it. Tumblr and AO3 have always been considered locked fandom spaces. If a person goes onto these sites and searches themselves out, that's on them. But, it's implied in fandom that you keep to just these spaces or private chats

(personally, I'm sad I just missed out on the livejournal days... I got into fandom when everything was being moved over from there and fanfic.net onto ao3)

I understand younger social media users are used to an algorithm finding content for them. And on sites like Tumblr where the algorithm sucks or ao3, which doesn't have one. You have to search out the content you want yourself. Liking and kudos isn't enough, you actually have to engage in meaningly conversations and comments if you want to make friends. That can be scary! But, it's a soft skill that is slowly getting lost and with it fandom etiquette is going down the drain.

This is like...one of the last big serious ask I want to reply to on this topic because not everyone agrees with me (which, fine), but OP you put a lot of time into typing this up so I will honour that.

I think fandom, much like a lot of other things nowadays, have become less about fun and more about hitting a certain number of likes and interactions. That's why people push Lestappen on other social media even though most of us have explicitly said "can you not, thanks". The changing the date of the fic to push to an 'algorithm' infuriates me and is a personal pet peeve of mine. There's one that's doing that now on the Lestappen tag and I've point-blanked refused to read it literally BECAUSE of the date changing. People will read your fic if they want to, constantly pushing it to the top of the 'Date Updated' list does nothing except piss people off.

I will say I think the fictional ship discourse of 2014 was maybe driven in part by the fact that being gay was still seen as something much more 'novel' than even now. If we think about when marriage became legal in the US and all that...I still think though that it shows a level of self-awareness and self-regulation that we've lost in fandom. As my partner and I often to lament to each other, we've become so individualistic that people have lost the concept of shame. It's an idea that YOU are the exception and something should cater to YOU, instead of the other way round. In the case of fandom, this comes out as people acknowledging fandom etiquette in an abstract way, but still logging into their twitter account (WITH THEIR FACES ATTACHED! WHICH! THIS IS A TANGENT BUT IT BAFFLES ME! WHAT HAPPENED TO DIGITAL FOOTPRINT!) and posting about RPF. Fandom is not an abstract entity, fandom IS the people that interact with it–from authors to artists all the way to those who consume the content.

Also, I also JUST missed out on the lj days–the great migration was happening just when I was getting involved in fandom and I can't help but feel like I missed out on something special.

[wings-of-ink]

I also want to start and IF, im already a writer on wattpad and I want to expand my horizons but I have absolutely no clue about coding and stuff

Is it difficult to code?

That is awesome and wonderful! I highly encourage you to take the plunge and try it out. I would not say coding is difficult, but it's not exactly easy either. You're literally learning a new language depending on how deep into it you go. For me, the way I did it was to learn, say, basic phrases ("Where is your bathroom," or "I'd like a glass of water") and grammar for this language. I'm not fluent, but I'm getting by. You don't have to have it mastered before you start.

For a long-winded breakdown, see below!

I knew absolutely zero code when I started this out. I just knew I wanted to do it so badly. There are good resources online to help you as well, especially questions on forums because we are not the only newbies in this with questions. I find the Twine cookbook thing to be a bit of a nightmare to understand, lol. I am more a type of person that needs to see something in action or do something to truly get it. I cannot just read something and understand it at all.

Two things I did that helped me a lot was to start a Twine project and enter all the code I learned into it and I also started a story to test it all out. I made notes to myself in these to remind me of what they do and how they work as well. I still have those and use them when I learn new things or if I find a new macro that I want to use.

If the Twine documents don't work for you, do a simple internet search for what you need. I started to learn the Harlowe code first, and I honestly found that more difficult than Sugarcube. As a side note, when I started this, I didn't even know that there were multiple languages that Twine could use! When you find a guide or a forum post that is useful, save it! Copy/Paste it or bookmark it. Put the code in Twine and test it right away. You'll find that it all starts making more sense to see it in action.

I can't tell you how many times I've Googled "Twine Sugarcube *insert code issue or desired outcome.*"

I also recommend finding a free coding class just to familiarize yourself with the basic function of html. I did one on codeacademy.com. There's also youtube videos out there from people who really know what they're doing.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, so go into it knowing you are going to have really aggravating moments. I had times where I was trying so hard to understand this stuff that ended in a few tears of frustration. I'm a person who believes they can learn to do anything, but it takes pushing through those frustrating moments to get there. Our brains sometimes literally try to get us to quit stuff when it gets hard - we are wired to take the easy way out and when it's not easy, the brain is like - THIS IS PAIN. But I feel that if you push against that anyway, you'll get over that wall and things will start falling into place.

Sorry for rambling and I hope this helps you in some way, Anon! ^_^

I could go on, but for your sake, I'll stop there lol. If you have any other questions, please feel free to drop them in!

[ciscowojciechowski]

My Search for The Last Supper

In 2009, Angus Sampson made a short film. It's about the last supper between Jesus and his disciples. Angus wrote and directed it, and also appears in it as Judas. Of interest is that Angus's good friend and frequent collaborator Leigh Whannell also appears in the film, and if you've been trying to do a full filmography watch of Leigh you might be familiar with the somewhat frustrating story I'm about to recount.

There's a five minute excerpt of the film uploaded to Angus's Vimeo account, and it is seemingly a quite bizarre little film with a strong focus on reality television. But... we don't have the entire short, though! According to IMDb and letterboxd, the entire runtime is 14 minutes, so this is only about a third of it.

The full thing is not, and as far as I can tell has never been, available online. They showed it at at least one film festival in '09, but after that I have no idea. It's a ghost.

Well, now. Angus Sampson is the writer/director/producer/star, he's who uploaded the excerpt to Vimeo, he must have the full thing, right? ....right?

Back in '22 a Twitter user jokingly asked him about it, and (in true Angus fashion), this was his response. What does that mean? Angus, what do you mean by that? Does he NOT have it? If he doesn't, who does???

I've been legitimately considering posting this to, like, the lost media subreddits or the lostmediawiki forums, but they're a little scary to me so I've been mounting this search on my own. I've sent some emails and DMs, with no word back yet, which is... to be expected, honestly! These are busy professionals and I am just some guy looking for a short from 2009 that Angus himself described as "a nothing film."

However... god, I really wanna see it! Especially after getting so very into The Mule (2014), I'm really interested to see Angus Sampson's first crack at writing and directing a film. Plus, another Angus and Leigh collab? We can't miss out on that!

Do you have any leads? Who should I email next? Or should I just sit around and hope that Angus answers my insta DM?

[cerislabnotes]

Ceriden's Species HRT Note List

Here is the chronological order, following Ceri's journey in the labs and journey of self-discovery. (reposted bc Tumblr deleted the old)

Couple notes on my notes:

These are my take on how becoming a chosen species would be.

Written from a bit of a back-end perspective.

I'm writing these with my past experiences, topics I've seen in the forums, and as I see other's own journeys. If I missed crediting your idea, please message me!

I'm using Ceri (myself) as a character, to make it more personal. I'm not a great writer... This is a very loose written art. :3

searching #Nuclenetic HRT will find all my stories too

Nuclenetic Process description brochure (Background Info/Lore Bible)

TheraSMD 335 Providers Informational Report

Research Notes:

Research Note 10 - Transition

Research Note 15: Disbelief

Research Note 45: Inner Collapse

Research Note 83: Accidents 1 (Back)

Research Note 101: Learning

Research Note 112: Procedures

Research Note 156: Nightmare at 20,000 Rads

Researchers note 221: 5 Patients

Research Note 229: Plurality, Panic, and Persistence

Research Note 251: Lines West

Researchers Note 271: Journey's End

Researchers Note 311: 15 Minutes

Research Note 351: Consultation Conflicts

Researchers note 365: Erianwhere

Personal Notes:

Personal Note 1: Aliens

Personal Note 2: Jury Draggy

[spanishskulduggery]

hi I can’t state enough how helpful your posts have been to me! if you happen to know of any, could you give us some places online to read/write/socialise in Spanish, maybe forums and whatnot? where do you most often see Spanish speakers online? thank you! :)

As far as forums I recommend checking reddit and WordReference

WordReference tends to be more academic in nature and you can see where speakers are from, but reddit threads for learning Spanish are very frequently added to and you get lots of people there

Spanish-speakers are usually everywhere you'd think they'd be, but I see a lot of activity on reddit or twitter; some of them are in their own Spanish-speaking bubbles, and some know enough English to get by and it can be hard to figure it out

But again, WordReference is language learning based. And reddit has MANY threads that operate in different languages and on different subjects, so you can wander around and find fandoms in Spanish or just stick to the language learning ones

With fandoms, it's important to note that a lot of the artists and writers tend to feel like they have to operate in English to get the most traction

(This is also a random shot in the dark but if you're on social media and you search some words in Spanish you might find people posting in Spanish to follow - but this is very random and obviously you'll want to curate who you follow)

Followers what do you suggest?

[nqueso-emergency]

Same anon again. Sorry for bothering you can you please post my whole ask this time, so the people that needs to see this post don't see this as an attack and stalking their behavior, but as an attempt to protect the fic writers and multi shippers. Sorry for bothering you again.

The only reason I’m sending you this link is I know for a fact these people are spying on your blog and if they see this, they will delete it. (If you post screenshots of it, please hide the fanfic writers’ names.)

Multi shippers have been getting shit on for months now, and now these people are making a potential hit-list in a public forum. We saw how far some of the most deranged stans could go this past month, imagine what they could do with a targeted small list.

All it took for me to find this convo was writing on of the fic writer’s name on the reddit search bar and go to the comments, I wasn’t even on the fucking subreddit, and this was the first comment I saw.

If you want to laugh at how you manage to pull some writers from ���the death star” and make them delete their fics, keep it in the fucking group chat.

Fic writers doesn’t owe you shit! They can stan whatever the fuck they want! Stop making them targets and utilize the mute/block button if you don’t want to hear their takes.

Sorry for going on a rant.   

No problem! This is in relation to my post of the reddit

[andalasia]

hellos. dusting off my old sideblog to throw up this request bc that feels like a good idea. i've responded to a couple other searches, so i'm realistically not looking to take on too many more. little bit about me, i'm a 29 man, live in the central timezone [ i think technically it's cdt bc it's currently july... but don't quote me on that ], used to consider myself a reader reader but me and the books have been beefing these past few months so that isn't occurring as frequently. maybe because i've been giving rp more attention. i've been rping since at least 2009, but most of that has was on forums like proboards/invisionfree/jcink. i have only recently really been a discord rp girlie

really only looking for m/m plots at this time. mayhaps one day i will go back to doing hetero ships, but for the time being that's not really something that interests me. i don't have a robust collection of muses that i pull out of rotation, that's just never been how i rp... if you see a guy on my main blog [ blakegallo ] the odds are that i would use them as a face. because i cut my teeth on forums i do typically only use actors, musicians, and the occasional model as faces; i typically steer clear of people who social media people. it's really just a matter of personal preference. i am willing to consider a fandom based rp, but would prefer something that is more oc x oc.

as far as preferences go i do write in the third person past tense. i don't really have any interest in breaking the discord message character limit for replies. i would never do a one liner, but a nice well developed paragraph or two is usually good enough for me. i like there to be something to respond to and get a nice back and forth going. i've seen a lot in my decade plus in the rp community and i've definitely done responses that are what the girlies call novella length now and that's just not something i'm super invested in returning to at this time. i don't have any interest in rping in dms, i think that things are just more organized in a private server. i also prefer for new threads to be individual channels just because i find that easier to scroll back through than one general channel, but that's me. i am a tupperbox girlie... and so i do have a slight preference for using them. it's not a requirement by any means, i have more 1x1s that don't use them currently than do, but just throwing that out there. i also find that doing something mumu is just easier for me with the tupperbot, but we can make it work if you aren't for it.

as a sidenote, i also do really love text threads. in my time perusing the the tags i'm not sure if this common because so many of the requests i see are for the novella level girlies. but sometimes i might have time for some quick banter between our characters. i also find that characters texting leads to where a next thread should go. as a vibes girlie i just like letting the characters sort things out sometimes than us as muns going back and forth figuring out where the plot should take them next.

plotting for me tends to be more organic. i really don't like to get too far ahead of ourselves. to me it's like writing a romance novel, we know these characters are eventually going to get together, but the journey to that destination can be whatever we make for it. so the ups and downs and angst along the way is what makes it fun. obviously i'm all for tossing ideas back and forth about how we think we should handle something or where we should go next, but i don't really have any interest in outlining the whole journey and then just hitting the beats.

so please be 21+, 25+ honestly would be even better and like this if you're interested. i might read the occasional high fantasy book, but that's not a thing i am all that interested in. i might be up for something vaguely paranormal, but i'm really more a regular person writer. give me the lives and the rich and famous or mess happening in suburbia... i'll reach out from my main blog in tumblr dms and we can go from there if we think it could be a good fit.

[madamlaydebug]

On this day in 2021...

R.I.P.

Go well … you have fulfilled your purpose 💕https://www.patreon.com/RunokoRashidi

RUNOKO RASHIDI

Runoko Rashidi is an anthropologist and historian with a major focus on what he calls the Global African Presence--that is, Africans outside of Africa before and after enslavement. He is the author or editor of twenty-two books, the most recent of which are My Global Journeys in Search of the African Presence, Assata-Garvey and Me: A Global African Journey for Children in 2017 and The Black Image in Antiquityin 2019. His other works include Black Star: The African Presence in Early Europe, published by Books of Africa in London in November 2011 and African Star over Asia: The Black Presence in the East, published by Books of Africa in London in November 2012 and revised and reprinted in April 2013, Uncovering the African Past: The Ivan Van Sertima Papers, published by Books of Africa in 2015. His other works include the African Presence in Early Asia, co-edited by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima. Four of Runoko's works have been published in French.

As a traveler and researcher Dr. Rashidi has visited 124countries. As a lecturer and presenter, he has spoken insixty-sevencountries.

Runoko has worked with and under some of the most distinguished scholars of the past half-century, including Ivan Van Sertima, John Henrik Clarke, Asa G. Hilliard, Edward Scobie, John G. Jackson, Jan Carew and Yosef ben-Jochannan.

In October 1987 Rashidi inaugurated the First All-India Dalit Writer's Conference in Hyderabad, India.

In 1999 he was the major keynote speaker at the International Reunion of the African Family in Latin America in Barlovento, Venezuela.

In 2005 Rashidi was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree, his first, by the Amen-Ra Theological Seminary in Los Angeles.

In August 2010 he was first keynote speaker at the First Global Black Nationalities Conference in Osogbo, Nigeria.

In December 2010 he was President and first speaker at the Diaspora Forum at the FESMAN Conference in Dakar, Senegal.

In 2018 he was named Traveling Ambassador to the Universal Negro Improvement Association & African Communities League RC 2020.

In 2020 he was named to the Curatorial and Academic boards of the Pan-African Heritage Museum.

He is currently doing major research on the African presence in the museums of the world.

As a tour leader he has taken groups to India, Australia, Fiji, Turkey, Jordan, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Togo, Benin, France, Belgium, England, Cote d'Ivoire, Namibia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Peru, Cuba, Luxembourg, Germany, Cameroon, the Netherlands, Spain, Morocco, Senegal, the Gambia,Guinea-Bissau,Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar.

Runoko Rashidi's major mission in life is the uplift of African people, those at home and those abroad.

For more information write to Runoko@hotmail.com or call (323) 803-8663.

His website is www.drrunoko.com

[putterpen]

""Fanart"" based on a picture I saw on @robotnik-mun's account, A terrifyingly beautiful concept art of Tommy Turtle where he looks like an elderly underfed Dragonball Z alien. Where did this even come from? A book? I can't find it online.

I have a weird admission to make. I’ve had a low key obsession with this character for a couple of months now. Mostly because I didn’t finish reading Archie until years after it ended. The pre-boot anyway. (Probably won’t ever finish reboot…) But years upon years ago I remember reading on forums how much people hated Tommy but I didn’t understand why. I was like “who the heck is this guy to be hated so much?” I read the comic and was like “okay he is kinda….very boring. But he doesn’t take up that much space.” Then I read Archie Sonic review blogs and it made more sense. I flew by Tommy Turtle but in the past readers suffered with him slowly. Because of this, I obsessed a bit on how to make him better. I’ve daydreamed about working on Sonic projects and this character has made me think about how to not introduce your OC into the franchise.

First of all if not most important….Tommy isn’t a cute girl Sonic OC so he was doomed by about 50% just from that. Second of all, his design in the comic was bad. Archie really really really struggled with Sonic’s design philosophy and just made a lot of furries. Tommy looks like he belonged on a Nick Jr cartoon.

Then I actually watched an episode of Franklin and I take it back. Franklin looks more like a Sonic character than Tommy does. All this to say I think some of the hatred MIGHT have been curved if Tommy looked more sonic-y and not like a generic American cartoon turtle. I tried, not saying my design is the best, but a quick google search got me 1 singular redesign so I decided to try as well.

I have mulled over how to actually rewrite Tommy but I’m no writer. I’ll probably draw him some more though.

[mariacallous]

The internet sucks now. Once a playground fueled by experimentation and freedom and connection, it’s a flimsy husk of what it was, all merriment and serendipity leached from our screens by vile capitalist forces. Everything is too commercialized. We commodified the self, then we commodified robots to impersonate the self, and now they’re taking our damn jobs. We live in diminished and degrading times. I miss when memes were funny. I miss Vine. I miss Gawker. I miss old Twitter. Blogs—those were the days!

Stop me if these gripes sound familiar. In 2023, the idea that the internet isn’t fun anymore is conventional wisdom. This year, after Elon Musk renamed Twitter “X” and instituted a series of berserk changes that made it substantially less functional, complaints about the demise of the good internet popped up like mushrooms sprouting in dirt tossed over a fresh grave. Some people even complained on the very platforms they were mourning. Type “internet sucks now” into X’s search bar, you’ll see.

The New Yorker published an essay by writer Kyle Chayka on the subject, calling the decline of X a “bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be.” People loved it. (Sample comments from X: “Relatable.” “Exactly right.”) Chayka claims that it’s now harder to find new memes, websites, and browser games than it was a decade ago. He also argues that the rising crop of platforms popular with young people—Twitch, TikTok—are inferior, enjoyment-wise, to the social web of the 2010s.

Both of these arguments are baffling. Memes fresher in the past? Yes, it’s tiresome to see Tim Robinson in a hot dog costume for the 500th time, but c’mon. In the early 2010s—the years Chayka longs for—the internet was all doge and doggos. It was the era of reaction GIF Tumblrs, the Harlem Shake, the Ice Bucket Challenge. Give me literally any still from I Think You Should Leave over “You Had One Job” epic fail image macros. Only glasses of the rosiest tint could recast the 2013 internet as a shitposting paradise lost.

The argument that the 2010s social web was superior amusement to the platforms now popular with Gen Z is even stranger. TikTok has major issues, but being unfun is not one of them. It’s been a springboard for some genuinely talented people, from comic Brian Jordan Alvarez to writer Rayne Fisher-Quann to chef Tabitha Brown. Binging Twitch streams certainly isn’t my thing, but people aren’t being held at gunpoint and forced to watch seven straight hours of Pokimane. They like it! They’re having fun! And how can one say with a straight face that gaming got worse? Roblox alone is a gleeful world unto itself; to pretend it doesn’t exist and isn’t a vibrant digital hangout is goofy and obtuse.

Corrosion of specific platforms on the internet—X, to pluck the most obvious example—is an observable phenomenon. (I, too, mourn old Twitter.) Musk’s changes to how X operates have made it harder to surface and verify information; his antics have driven away both advertisers and power users and allowed the cryptogrifter class to spam inboxes with invitations to NFT drops and meme coins, resulting in a digital space that feels abandoned and crowded at once. Other platforms, though, are flourishing.

Look at Discord, for instance. Its siloed structure is a throwback to the pre-Facebook internet era, when socializing online often meant logging on to specific forums. The disintegration of the Big Tech-dominated 2010s internet is creating a more balkanized social web experience, what Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler calls the “dark forest” theory, where people turn away from big, open mega-platforms in favor of more private or niche digital spaces, from nonpublic Slack channels to invite-only WeChat groups or special-interest podcasts. While some people might find that boring and hard to navigate, it’s not universally boring, or inherently difficult to navigate.

There are serious problems with the internet right now. Platform decay—“enshittification”—is real, and it’s not limited to X. Search is in shambles. Plus, the flood of AI spam has just begun. But there were serious problems with the internet 10 years ago too. Arguing that the decline of certain corners of a previous version of the internet means that the entire internet isn’t entertaining anymore is a preposterous leap.

The impulse to describe the internet as being in a dire existential crisis is an understandable one, especially if you love going online—it’s easier to get people to pay attention to emergencies, isn’t it? All sorts of decidedly not-dead things get declared dead periodically, from literary criticism to monogamy to Berlin. “My favorite platforms are faltering and I don’t like the new ones” isn’t as compelling a pitch as “The basic experience of goofing off online is on the brink of extinction!!!”

But the basic experience of goofing off and being creative online is not on the brink of extinction. Ten years from now, there will be writers—even if they’re AI chumbots churning out shitty prose on SubstaXitch, the demonic merged iteration of Twitch, Substack, and X our poor children will use—earnestly reminiscing about the good old days of 2023, when that affable menswear guy showed up on everybody’s feeds, and TikTok wasn’t banned in the US. I know this. I know it because during the era that Chayka is now nostalgic for, people were also complaining that they missed the old, good internet. (Real headline from 2015: “The Modern Internet Sucks. Bring Back Geocities.”)

This brings me to my theory about the internet. To understand how people feel about being online, look at how they feel about the long-running sketch comedy television show Saturday Night Live.

Bitching about how SNL is so much worse than it used to be is a time-honored tradition. It has been declared “Saturday Night Dead” regularly since it debuted in 1975, nearly 50 years ago. In 1995, for instance, a New York magazine writer bemoaned the “slow, woozy fall of a treasured pop-culture institution.” The cast at the time included Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, Norm Macdonald, and Molly Shannon, all widely considered comedy legends in the present day. In 2017, in fact, New York ranked that cast’s run as the third-best era of SNL, ever, describing it like this: “At its peak, it’s hard to argue the show was ever better.” Quite the reassessment!

In 2014, writer Liz Shannon Miller examined the impulse people have to favor whatever era of Saturday Night Live they grew up with and watched during their formative years. “It’s a generational problem that leads to parents and kids just not being able to agree on the talents of John Belushi versus Will Ferrell,” Miller wrote for IndieWire.

A similar sort of generational problem is playing out right now about what it’s like to spend time online. Millennials grew up logging on in the 2000s and 2010s, maturing alongside Facebook. The internet from this era is the internet of our salad days. Of course watching it get eclipsed by a different iteration hurts. Of course some of us look at TikTok and wish it was Twitter—it’s the same impulse that propels family squabbles about whether the Lonely Island guys were funnier than the Please Don’t Destroy boys. Saturday Night Live has always been wildly uneven. Every era now heralded as golden was once pilloried as corny dreck.

To insist that the fun is over is to adopt an overly nostalgic stance, and one that rests on a pathetic fallacy: Just because you aren’t having fun on the internet doesn’t mean the internet itself is broken. It’s what it always has been, a flawed mirror of the cultural moment. It’s fine not to like it. But don’t pretend there aren’t young people alive right now who are having the most fun they’ll ever have online, just as there are young people alive right now who will be raving to their kids about how hilarious Bowen Yang was on SNL—especially compared to the synthetic clones of Gilda Radner and Jimmy Fallon the AI programmed to imitate Lorne Michaels cast in the 2061 season. We don’t need to make the present sound worse than it is. The future will come, soon enough.