#type: fanvid

[ormymarius]

— dream of the endless

tried to make this edit have more of a liminal reality feel to it but it ended up more angsty because of well… morpheus

[mycatismyfriend]

If the apocalypse comes, beep me.

[poopoobistro]

I literally laughed so hard making this edit I almost threw up

[luckydicekirby]

based on the best fma fanart of all time which haunts me daily

[go-see-a-starwar]

Anakin: nails, hair, hips, heels

[source: dazednkook on twitter]

[speedwayy]

inspired by the logan roy rolling with the lgbt video but i used born this way for italian pride

[zutara]

For forever and a day (x).

Always 💜

[gwenpoolsaesthetic]

Hey you! Yes, you!

Would you like your creation on display in a museum?

Would you like to help a super awesome PhD candidate complete her dissertation?

Would you like a great excuse to further procrastinate that thing you've been procrastinating?

All of these and more are great reasons to participate in Affirmation/Transformation: Fandom Created, an exhibition at Marquette University's Haggerty Museum of Art. (You do NOT need to be an artist, or even someone who creates art to participate!) Write a story, write a song, design a cosplay, create a fancy manicure, make a meme, make a stop-motion video, choreograph a dance, make a SuperWhoLock gif fic, or anything else your heart can dream up.

Your creation must follow only one rule: It must be inspired by a fusion of 1. any fandom of your choice, and 2. one of the featured Haggerty pieces (click the link to see them!)

Completed works are due July 1, 2024. The exhibition will run August 23rd-December 22nd, 2024, and will be available to view in person and online.

To see the Haggerty pieces, and to sign up to receive email reminders about the fan event, visit https://epublications.marquette.edu/fandom/Affirmationtransformation

[sunsetagain]

WIP of a finished BG3 comic:

Tabula Rasa

recent wip.

first gif was animated from a page in my ongoing comic.

the last one was a failed attempt to simplify my workflow with self 3d modeling. it's much easier to hand draw the chestplates. lol

don't know if video has better quality but i'll just paste it here.

[ezrasimp]

bj hunnicutt | california gurls

[destinationtoast]

1/3 - Hi there! Three (I think) part ask incoming. You're the main person I know of who compiles tons of interesting fandom stats, so I wanted to ask you about it if you have the time to answer. :) I think a lot about how AO3 works great as a fan*fic* archive, but for other fanworks, like images, audio, video, etc., it's only as good as wherever the media is being hosted. With the way hosting sites come and go, or change their TOS to nuke nsfw or queer content, etc., it makes me wonder

how many broken image links litter AO3 at this point. I know it's not considered the primary place to find fanart, but a lot of folks do post images there—for events like Big Bangs, as standalone art, and even as decorative section breaks, etc. My question is: do you think there's a way to look at, say, works tagged with #fanart (of which there are 99,504 atm) and determine what percentage of those are broken links? From what little I understand, one would have to (perhaps with the use of a simple bot?) try to open any link bordered by the <img src> html, and see what portion of those return an error versus what ones actually load? I suppose it could even be something like looking at fanart posted in 2007, 2012, 2017, and 2022 to compare how many older links are broken versus newer links. Anyway, this may be completely unfeasible, but I figured I'd ask about your thoughts! Thanks!

Ooh, thanks for the great question! I took a while to answer because I wasn't initially sure what to recommend and ended up gathering some data to investigate. (If anyone else also has relevant data, please share in the notes!)

I liked your idea of looking at samples different years going back, and I decided to look through 100 AO3 works tagged "Fanart" (or a subtag) that were posted 10 years ago -- as a very fast starting point, I didn't even take a random sample of works, I instead looked at the first 100 multimedia fanworks posted in July 2014. (And August, when necessary; see more notes on methodology at the end.) Please keep in mind that this sample that may not be very representative of AO3 more broadly; to get better estimates, more sampling would be needed. Based on this initial data gathering (and the fact that most fanworks on AO3 were posted within the past 10 years), I would tentatively guess that that most fanart, fanvids, and podfic on AO3 still have accessible multimedia.

Given how many broken links and embeds there are on older webpages, I assumed that a ton of the links from 10 years ago would be broken. But I was pleasantly surprised by the results:

Wow -- 10 years on roughly 90% of the multimedia still works! I was honestly floored; I'd been originally planning to also look at 5 years ago to see how much better that was, but if ~90% are still working 10 years on, 5 years ago doesn't have room to be dramatically better. (However, I'd love to see more follow up sampling across different years to find out.)

There were a lot of AO3 users in this sample who posted multiple works -- some posted as many as a dozen multimedia works in July 2014. I didn't want the results to be overly skewed by any one fanwork creator, so I also redid the analysis with just one work from each unique creator:

Okay, cool, those results are pretty similar. I also did some further breakdowns on this smaller set of works to look at which hosts creators were using, and how many of the hosts were still working:

The most common fanart host used in this sample was Tumblr, then wixmp -- which I think from some very quick googling might be because Deviantart switched to using Wix for image hosting at some point? (i.e., I think most of those artists may have posted their art on Deviantart, then linked to/embedded the image on AO3, and the image's direct URL was was wixmp.) There were a few other hosts at the time that were used by 5+ different artists in the sample, and then there were a whole lot of hosts were used by just one or a few artists.

Most of the 10-year-old fanart is still up for all of these hosting categories! Photobucket is the least reliable of the most commonly used hosts. In the Other category, 25% of the links are broken, but that's still better than I expected (see full host list here).

This is getting long, so I'm moving the breakdowns for fanvids and podfic beneath the cut:

Fanvids were almost all hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, or both (the above categories are not mutually exclusive). All the Vimeo links still worked, whether they required a password to view or not. Most YouTube links were working, and the few missing ones had almost all been taken down by YouTube for copyright reasons (according to the errors I got -- I'm not rendering judgment about whether they were actually fair use), rather than by the vidder who posted it. And almost a third of vidders also linked to other hosts besides the big two, but many of those links were broken; 59% still worked. (see full host list here)

For podfic, mediafire was a popular solution 10 years ago, though many podficcers used it as a backup rather than the main link that they shared. A lot of podficcers made use of a fandom hosting site that specialized in podfic -- either parakaproductions.com or audiofic.jinjurly.com. Four podficcers used soundcloud (often as a backup). And once again there were a lot of less-frequently used hosts, often used as backup links; 69% of those still worked. (see full host list here)

Some methodology notes and further thoughts:

For fanvids and podfic (but mostly not from fanart), the fanwork creators tended to provide multiple links, and in those cases, I counted the multimedia as working if at least one of the links was still working.

I counted embedded media and links to other sites that host the media all the same way.

I counted the media as broken if I got a 404 when I tried to visit it, or if a site like YouTube had taken it down due to copyright issues, or if I got an Access Denied message for a site like Google Drive.

I counted the media as working if it required a password that was given on the page (common with Vimeo), or if an embed was broken but there were working links to other sites.

How representative is this data? Well, these samples contained most/all of the multimedia fanworks posted in July 2014; that month, there were 70 fanvids, 135 podfic, and 186 pieces of fanart posted that haven't been deleted since. So it's pretty representative of July 2014 specifically. :) But there could have been, say, a fanwork challenge going on in July 2014 that caused unusual uploading patterns then.

The above data gathering and analysis took me several hours over several days. If you want to follow up, you could do more data gathering similar to what I did (I'm happy to elaborate on my process as needed). Or you could write a bot to do something similar; you could have it fetch more AO3 fanworks and try following the links within each work. However, that would be slightly tricky; I ran across more kinds of errors and complicated situations than I expected (e.g., if a YouTube video has been taken down due to copyright, it still has a working YouTube page; sometimes an embed is broken, but if you open the link within the embed in a separate window, it still works fine; many Vimeo links require a password to test, and it could be hard for the bot to reliably find the password in the surrounding text). So you'd have to program your bot to be able to handle a bunch of different special cases.

Regardless of which path you are considering, if you or anyone else does any follow up work here, I encourage you to start by looking through a bunch of fanworks yourself and deciding which scenarios you want count as "working" vs. "not working," and any other things you want to pay attention to.

Hope that helps, and please feel free to DM me with follow up questions. And if you follow up, please share anything else you figure out in this space!

[cuntylestat]

you say change religions, now i spend sundays with you

(youtube)

[bexism]

michael sheen is a chameleon (my favourite form is obvious 😌)

[liesmyth]

“good luck babe but it's ao3 titles” and I cannot stop watching this...

[vampiremotif]

three minutes and seventeen seconds buck x eddie. easy way out [youtube | instagram]

[zutara]

(X)

If this song would've come out back in the 2000s, we would've all collectively lost out minds and would've done twice as many edits as we did with White Flag by Ditto bc NOBODY'S SON, NOBODY'S DAUGHTER?!!!! 😭😭😭😭

#SOBBINGANDTHROWIMGUP