#who are these newer folk?

[windsweptskies]

girlies i miss rping

[uselessmonsterboy]

Hey thanks for being like the most patient people ever? I am fr just existing in workplace hell BUT I now have a new tablet so I can quit one of my jobs and take on comms again (after finishing the queue of people who accepted that they would be waiting however long until i could afford another) and that will give me time to like.. actually exist and create again

I will be working on the transitional chapter into Kamino Ward Arc but I definitely have changed in my writing style a bit over the break so if it feels different uhhhhh thats just what episodic hobby writing be like lmfao

Anyways! Good vibes and kind times, loves

[r0semultiverse]

You know what feature we need to bother staff for next? Other people’s posts getting flagged as counting towards “strikes” on our blogs.

[nevermoorsource]

Silverborn has been delayed again...

But only a month this time! According to Hachette, it will now be released on in Australia on September 25th, 2024. I don't know yet if the release dates for the US and UK will change as well, but I will keep an eye out for any updates.

[sainz100]

2024 Singapore GP | x

[cetaceanhandiwork]

Self Insert Week 2023

Seven years ago, Tumblr user @the-alligator-queen-blog​ began an annual tradition called Self Insert Week: a weeklong challenge/jam/etc where participants are encouraged to make fanworks with themselves as the main character.

This year, this storied Tumblr festival will begin on Sunday, May 7th, and last through Saturday, May 13th.

Why participate? Well, in its founder’s own words, it’s “a fun reason to make ourselves into the awesome characters we daydream up while going about our normal lives”.

But it’s also, in my view, a strike back at the common tendency to see fanwork – and creative work more generally – as such Serious Business that it’s not allowed to be openly self-indulgent. People worry so much, these days, about whether their artistic endeavors are “good enough”, or are a credit to their Brand, or whatever. I think that’s sad. Maybe even a little unhealthy, if we do it all the time. What’s the harm, really, if not everything we write is Serious Literature? Who said it had to be? Why can’t we embrace the cringe every now and again, so long as it sparks joy?

So this event is an excuse – carte blanche and imprimatur – to indulge in all the silly fandom escapism you’ve been holding in. Go smooch that guy you like from the D&D movie in Photoshop. Tell us about the wacky adventures you got tangled up in when you got isekai’d into post-Soviet Naples. Go wild! There’s no sign-up to participate, no masterpost, nothing like that. Just write, draw, and post your stuff under #self insert week 2023 so that we can all cheer each other on. :)

[diathadevil]

There's something charming about being on tumblr and seeing people abroad be fans of our local balkan Eurovision artists from this year (Luke Black, Joker Out, Let 3, etc.)

I'm glad y'all like their songs! It really makes me happy when others like our popsynth and altrock bands as well. I'll recommend some artists/bands in the tags if y'all want some other balkan pop/rock/synth bands to listen to.

[creepyscritches]

Several older colleagues took turns talking about how much they love us and told the newer hires how much they trust us to assuage any fears that people bring in (rightfully so) from prev employers and I'm

You're right!!! We do care!!! We mean it!!!! We are a team of professionals who HAVE seen the sweatshop conditions firsthand and we worked to our current positions to protect our own teams from ever dealing with that from us!!! We mean it! We've all been kicked as hard as you and we're finally implementing the better way we always knew was possible!!!! The grass really is that green!!! Because we are always watering it for you!!!!!!

[coppermouth]

i haven't been here long and i don't have a horse in this race, but i also don't think the content/flavor of hrpf has changed as much as some people think it has. here's my perspective as someone who did a kind of accidental chronological speed-run of the last 15 years of hockey fandom:

i started reading kane/toews fic before i knew anything about what happened in 2015—before i knew anything about either of them or any other player in real life vs their common fanon depictions—and all the most popular stuff on ao3 (that's still up) is quite fluffy. imagine my surprise to learn about pkane the actual human after reading about this weird little goofball twink for months. i was really under the impression when i first entered this fandom that the majority of fic was very edges-sanded-down escapism, not unlike the billion-and-one ofic m/m hockey novels that romance readers eat up.

if anything, my personal understanding of how hrpf fandom has shifted over the years is that authors have started to grapple more with the reality of hockey culture because of what happened with kane. his ship dominated as this fandom was coalescing, before any major drama, so there was maybe a certain willful ignorance that we could all participate in. but when the rug got pulled, the people who stayed had to think about how to balance reality with fantasy probably harder than they'd ever had before.

now that i've caught up with the times and have branched out into reading more recent fic, i see a pretty solid mixture of hockey-romance-softness and "realism," and it seems to depend on the author and the ship more than saying something about the broader culture, but it's true that a lot of fic from the 1988 era is wiped from the face of the internet and i don't have access to much of what was being hosted on lj vs ao3, so i am missing some context.

but! there's A LOT of hrpf now; the fandom is only getting bigger and producing more content. i think it's just as ikely that what we're seeing is more a result of the circles we float in coupled with the nature of fanfiction as an escape rather than a categorical shift. the stuff that gets popular generally tends to be on the fluffier side. and because there's simply more fic now than ever before, maybe it takes a little more digging than it used to to find the darker/more nuanced/morally gray content.

but it's definitely still there. because i'm reading it!

[apocalypse-bones]

I know this is already a tired post to make and green day was trending on twitter for politics blah blah blah but just to reiterate as if everyone else hadn't already:

Green day talkin shit on Trump isn't new, green day talkin shit on the right isn't new, green days been shitting politics since their conception. Idk how people haven't fuckin picked that up yet lol

[apollosdrunkenmixup]

since sea shanties were such a hit, and with the growing dissent towards authority round here, I think tumblr would enjoy English folk songs.

Similar style to sea shanties, but usually about rebellion or hatred of undeserving authority. Great stuff.

[coquettesamosa]

on the one hand it feels silly to be getting this bent out of shape over the current sc proceedings abt same sex marriage bc it's obv the govt. wasn't ever going to legalize it and let up on what control they do hv on the institution of marriage to keep indian society functioning as they need for their purposes of a 'hindu' rashtra and bc they r guilty of far worse when it comes to other minorities but on the other hand.

[animalfluidz]

Ive also had a shift in friend groups, im like, not in one specifically but I know so many ppl 1 on 1. It's allowed me to be a bit more open with who i am and finding out parts i was afraid of opening up about are some of the features people REALLY love about me.

[hotvampireadjacent]

Racism is alive and well in America

This Juneteenth as we celebrate and reflect on the progress we've made and look to what we can do to improve equal rights for black folks I want to bring attention to an issue far too closet to my heart- environmental racism.

I had a friend who died, far too young. It's been many years so newer tumblr users won't know him. His name was james and he was a popular tumblr user when he was alive @kumagawa . I idolized him like an older brother, and still do. He lived in Flint, Michigan. He was around 27 when he died. He was a healthy man, other than the fact he lived with dirty water in Flint, Michigan.

I'll never fucking forgive the US government for killing my friend, my brother. Why did James die? Because Flint, Michigan is 56% Black. Because it would be expensive to fix the lead pipes that gave my friend lead poisoning and killed him.

As of April 24,2024 the city of Flint, Michigan still hasn't replaced all the lead pipes that are poisoning the people living there.

https://www.aclumich.org/en/press-releases/residents-still-waiting-city-flint-replace-all-lead-pipes-10-year-anniversary-water

If you can help, give money to Mari Copeny's go fund me.

Mari Copeny, better known as Little miss Flint, is now 16 years old and over the past few years has raised nearly a million dollars for her community.

She has a website to links for other ways to support the community

Please reblog this post if you can't give any money... It would mean the world to me if I could use my friend's memory to help promote environmental racism and the issues still facing his community today.

[genderqueerdykes]

i really want to see genderqueer be an identity we talk about in great detail this pride month. genderqueer saw more usage in the 90s and 2000s, with the rise of the term non binary we've seen more people gravitate toward that label as it becomes the more socially accepted term to use given its notoriety. i would like to bring back alternative labels for this experience, since our diversity is what makes us so unique and strong as a community

genderqueer is an identity that has a long history, and a myriad of definitions and folks who express it in different ways. it really can mean whatever the hell you want. it can mean that you're cisgender but express your gender in a queer way. it can mean that you're trans, take hormones, have gotten top and bottom surgery and dress however you want. it can mean that you dress "normal" and pass as cishet but have a queer gender on the inside. it can mean that you combine masculine and feminine aesthetics. it can mean that you strive for gender neutrality. it can mean that you want to be so ambiguously gendered strangers can't tell who you are.

there's no guidelines or rules, genderqueer is an identity meant to embrace the freedom one can have with gender expression. it can mean as much or as little as the person using it wants it to. it's a beautiful term that is just as flexible as non binary, and i do not postulate to replace that term, but rather bring light to another identity that may suit folks slightly better. it's a beautiful identity. it's what I came out as first in 2011 and I'm happy to be back at all these years later.

2024 is a great year to be proud of being genderqueer and to proudly tell people about this part of yourself. let's celebrate ourselves louder and prouder than ever before. there are many ways to exist outside of the binary, and folks deserve to know about older terms that have been used by the community as well as newer ones

[intheholler]

the appalachian murder ballad <3 one of the most interesting elements of americana and american folk, imo!

my wife recently gave me A Look when i had one playing in the car and she was like, "why do all of these old folk songs talk about killing people lmao" and i realized i wanted to Talk About It at length.

nerd shit under the cut, and it's long. y'all been warned

so, as y'all probably know, a lot of appalachian folk music grew its roots in scottish folk (and then was heavily influenced by Black folks once it arrived here, but that's a post for another time).

they existed, as most folk music does, to deliver a narrative--to pass on a story orally, especially in communities where literacy was not widespread. their whole purpose was to get the news out there about current events, and everyone loves a good murder mystery!

as an aside, i saw someone liken the murder ballad to a ye olde true crime podcast and tbh, yeah lol.

the "original" murder ballads started back across the pond as news stories printed on broadsheets and penned in such a way that it was easy to put to melody.

they were meant to be passed on and keep the people informed about the goings-on in town. i imagine that because these songs were left up to their original orators to get them going, this would be why we have sooo many variations of old folk songs.

naturally then, almost always, they were based on real events, either sung from an outside perspective, from the killer's perspective and in some cases, from the victim's. of course, like most things from days of yore, they reek of social dogshit. the particular flavor of dogshit of the OG murder ballad was misogyny.

so, the murder ballad came over when the english and scots-irish settlers did. in fact, a lot of the current murder ballads are still telling stories from centuries ago, and, as is the way of folk, getting rewritten and given new names and melodies and evolving into the modern recordings we hear today.

305 such scottish and english ballads were noted and collected into what is famously known as the Child Ballads collected by a professor named francis james child in the 19th century. they have been reshaped and covered and recorded a million and one times, as is the folk way.

while newer ones continued to largely fit the formula of retelling real events and murder trials (such as one of my favorite ones, little sadie, about a murderer getting chased through the carolinas to have justice handed down), they also evolved into sometimes fictional, (often unfortunately misogynistic) cautionary tales.

perhaps the most famous examples of these are omie wise and pretty polly where the woman's death almost feels justified as if it's her fault (big shocker).

but i digress. in this way, the evolution of the murder ballad came to serve a similar purpose as the spooky legends of appalachia did/do now.

(why do we have those urban legends and oral traditions warning yall out of the woods? to keep babies from gettin lost n dying in them. i know it's a fun tiktok trend rn to tell tale of spooky scary woods like there's really more haints out here than there are anywhere else, but that's a rant for another time too ain't it)

so, the aforementioned little sadie (also known as "bad lee brown" in some cases) was first recorded in the 1920s. i'm also plugging my favorite female-vocaist cover of it there because it's superior when a woman does it, sorry.

it is a pretty straightforward murder ballad in its content--in the original version, the guy kills a woman, a stranger or his girlfriend sometimes depending on who is covering it.

but instead of it being a cautionary 'be careful and don't get pregnant or it's your fault' tale like omie wise and pretty polly, the guy doesn't get away with it, and he's not portrayed as sympathetic like the murderer is in so many ballads.

a few decades after, women started saying fuck you and writing their own murder ballads.

in the 40s, the femme fatale trope was in full swing with women flipping the script and killing their male lovers for slights against them instead.

men began to enter the "find out" phase in these songs and paid up for being abusive partners. women regained their agency and humanity by actually giving themselves an active voice instead of just being essentially 'fridged in the ballads of old.

her majesty dolly parton even covered plenty of old ballads herself but then went on to write the bridge, telling the pregnant-woman-in-the-murder-ballad's side of things for once. love her.

as a listener, i realized that i personally prefer these modern covers of appalachian murder ballads sung by women-led acts like dolly and gillian welch and even the super-recent crooked still especially, because there is a sense of reclamation, subverting its roots by giving it a woman's voice instead.

meaning that, like a lot else from the problematic past, the appalachian murder ballad is something to be enjoyed with critical ears. violence against women is an evergreen issue, of course, and you're going to encounter a lot of that in this branch of historical music.

but with folk songs, and especially the murder ballad, being such a foundational element of appalachian history and culture and fitting squarely into the appalachian gothic, i still find them important and so, so interesting

i do feel it's worth mentioning that there are "tamer" ones. with traditional and modern murder ballads alike, some of them are just for "fun," like a murder mystery novel is enjoyable to read; not all have a message or retell a historical trial.

(for instance, i'd even argue ultra-modern, popular americana songs like hell's comin' with me is a contemporary americana murder ballad--being sung by a male vocalist and having evolved from being at the expense of a woman to instead being directed at a harmful and corrupt church. that kind of thing)

in short: it continues to evolve, and i continue to eat that shit up.

anyway, to leave off, lemme share with yall my personal favorite murder ballad which fits squarely into murder mystery/horror novel territory imo.

it's the 10th child ballad and was originally known as "the twa sisters." it's been covered to hell n back and named and renamed.

but! if you listen to any flavor of americana, chances are high you already know it; popular names are "the dreadful wind and rain" and sometimes just "wind and rain."

in it, a jealous older sister pushes her other sister into a river (or stream, or sea, depending on who's covering it) over a dumbass man. the little sister's body floats away and a fiddle maker come upon her and took parts of her body to make a fiddle of his own. the only song the new fiddle plays is the tale about how it came to be, and it is the same song you have been listening to until then.

how's that for genuinely spooky-scary appalachia, y'all?