Art by Ovega on Instagram
(Posted with artist's permission)
Reblog to help forward the cause of science or something, honestly I'm just curious to know how old everyone is.
oh. Oh no. You're all babies.
Come on fellow middle-agers
next transformers continuity i want the autobots to accidentally out themselves to earth when they realize the probe they just shook the dust off of has cameras and one day NASA wakes up to find that opportunity rover's back online and the first thing it recorded was a giant robot saying "well, fuck"
I want this to be Ironhide. But alternatively
Optimus
Gentle Dad Bot just wanted to wipe off that poor abandoned rover. The first thing humanity sees of Optimus is this bigass robot lightly patting Opportunity and saying "There you go, all clean. Oh, it started working? Ratchet look, he's alive! :D"
this is so cute ówò
Optimus becomes a meme long before he ever reaches earth.
The leaked video becomes widely known as Metal Jesus welcomes Oppy to robot heaven or something similar.
If there is a Decepticon attack and Oppy is damaged, Megatron will be globally known as Metal Satan, and the millennials and gen Z's will be mobilized against him before he ever sets foot on the planet.
ALTERNATELY
The Autobots bring Oppy onto their ship to help take care of him. He's a curious little guy! Always rolling around and picking up random objects to examine.
He quickly captures everyone's sparks.
Meanwhile the techs back at NASA are freaking out because they get to virtually explore an alien spaceship and EVERYTHING IS AMAZING!
I'm love this
"Metal Jesus" - there has never been a better description of Optimus ever
@theotherguysride
The little rover is so fragile, to a being who is used to the cold void of space, to the hostile radiations and dust clouds and ice storms between worlds. What’s curious about this little machine is that it’s *built*. A civilization prodding gently at the secrets of their own solar system. Optimus is *charmed and delighted* by the little thing, sending all it’s data back. Curious and gentle and it’s not really a *pet* so much as a companion. He speaks to it in its language all the time, as if it *is* a pet yes, but also. Optimus Prime is a politician and a master of diplomacy. He’s absolutely gleefully monitoring all the internet data traffic that he can get his servos on, about this little robot and the joy of the people who built it. This is his chance to be soft, and gentle with a fledgling species. To learn about them and their great history, no more than a single blink of Primus’ eye. The Autobots tend to think that Optimus is kind of strange sometimes, but they do indulge him because more often than not, he’s *correct* in his strange actions. And when they do make contact with Earth. It’s via that little robot and its friends, the ones they’ve plucked out of the dirt and ice, to be gently restored to functionality, their power sources rebuilt and their instruments retuned and their data transmission clearer than ever. And they sing the little robot happy birthday, because it’s tradition and because this little ambassador deserves to be honored. Hello, Earth, Optimus says, his voice deep and gentle as he kneels before the little thing. “We’re the Autobots, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.” (It’s not gentle, there’s plenty of bullshit in politics, but Optimus understands the politics and the people and how the two are not the same. The politicians are offered cool professionalism. The public is offered their honesty and personality and joy.) Nasa, collectively, loses its shit. And Opportunity sings itself Happy Birthday to a deep chorus of voices raised in the same kind of giddy exploratory love as the people who built the little drone. (Someday, Opportunity and Curiosity will wobble their shaky way to their feet, beeping and squeaking and figuring out their voices, to say “I love you” to the people who have loved them first.)
Excuse me while I quietly implode from the wholesome
as youre very both old school fandom and also someone who works to preserve old fandom content, what do you think is the best way to print off and preserve fanfics? I've been wanting to start to move my many many many archived pdfs into actual physical copies but ive been way too intimidated to really look deep into it so I was wondering if you had a preference
Okay, so.
My preference is "yes." Yes, I want you to archive them. Yes, I want you to save them. I've worked to preserve 1960s teen pulp mags, for fuck's sake, it can't get much worse than that, and I'm grateful to have them.
With that said, pick any or all of the following options to make your physical printouts last longer: --select acid-free paper --bind by sewing, not stapling --store in archival sleeves, like the ones you use for old comic books And now, pick any or all of the following options to make my life easier as a historian (or, you know, the lives of the historians who come after me): --include the title --include the author's name --include the fandom name --include which version of the canon, if relevant (e.g. the OG Transformers show vs the Michael Bay movies) --include the date, or at least year, of publication --include the summary --include the site of origin, including the URL All of these things are called provenance and help not only to identify a specific work, but to place it within its cultural context. As an amusing example: I recently got into James Bond, and decided to go through every fic in the main pairing tag, in chronological order. There came a point where suddenly, out of nowhere, there were like two solid pages of nothing but A/B/O, which I previously had not seen at all. I had a suspicion, so I looked it up, and sure enough--those two pages appeared within just a couple of weeks of the corresponding Supernatural episode. Having publication dates let me determine that. If I were a historian trying to piece together a long-ago puzzle instead of going "lol I live on the hellsite, I bet I know exactly where this came from," that would be a huge datapoint. I could probably find a similar sudden explosion in other fandoms, as well--and if we're going far enough in the future, if Supernatural were to just vanish off the face of the planet along with its entire fandom, historians could still trace that it existed and even determine some of its events based on when certain tropes begin to appear in other fandoms. And further, the fact that its tropes and major events appear in so many other fandoms would allow those historians to say "this must have been a very, very popular story." (This isn't just me making shit up to sound important, by the way. This is literally how we have records of a lot of things throughout antiquity and even into the Renaissance. The more copies there are of something, or the more references that are made to a thing in other things, the more likely it is for at least part of it to survive. This is literally how we know about Shakespeare's two lost plays--he was a popular enough playwright that quartos of his plays were advertised for sale.) Whew! Now let's get into stuff you could do that would make me, as a historian, scream with delight if I were to open your folder full of labeled, acid-free fanfiction fifty years from now: --write a little something about why you picked this particular fic to preserve in hard copy when doing so is bulky and time-consuming compared to the easy instant storage of the internet, yes, even if your reason is "I'm trying not to use my phone in bed because the screen keeps me awake but this story is soothing to reread" --write a little something about who you are, even if it's just "my name is X, my age is Y, I live in Z, I printed this out in 2022" And last but not least: Marginalia. Marginalia. Marginalia, my beloved. That's when you write your thoughts in the columns on the sides, underline stuff, circle it, and so on. Having marginalia means I actually get a window into your thoughts as you read--your perspective, stuff that stuck out to you, places the story made you feel some kind of serious emotion. And yes, this goes for everything. Villain A kills Hero B and you write "YOU MOTHERFUCKER" in the margin, that tells Future Historian Me that you really loved Hero B, you were invested in seeing her succeed, and that this scene really resonated with you. One of my most treasured possessions in the fandom museum is a copy of the novelization of the Help! movie the Beatles did. This particular copy is very worn--unsurprising, it was a cheap paperback even when it was printed--but also, its original owner apparently took it to the movie theatre and
wrote notes in the margins indicating all the things happening onscreen that weren't in the book. What does this tell me? WELL. Let's go ahead and take a look: 1) the written ink doesn't look any newer than the book, so I'm guessing a little when I say this was the original owner and in the theatre, but I have an actual datapoint I'm basing that on 2) based on handwriting and the main demographic of the Beatles audience at the time, this was a young woman, probably a teenager. 3) she went to see the movie more than once (some notes are in pencil, some in ink, but the handwriting is all the same) 4) she was dedicated to making sure every moment of the movie was preserved. This was an era before home video players, so once the movie left theatres, she had no guarantee of seeing it again. 5) while the book is worn, it's not beaten all to shit. It was read a lot, but there's no evidence it was mistreated, so it was probably a prized or at least respected possession.
What can I extrapolate from this, with the understanding that I mean "what theories can I reasonably form but not prove"? Well. She was probably a pretty big fan, since she went to see the movie at least twice and also bought the book. Maybe she wanted to keep the story after the movie was gone. Maybe she was looking for answers for some teen mag contest like "find these things in the Help! movie and win a chance to meet the Beatles." Maybe she had a friend who wasn't allowed to go to the movie. You know what the most tantalizing possibility is to me, although I'll never be able to prove it and actual ethics as a historian mean I can only present it as one among many possibilities? Maybe she did it as a source reference for writing fanfiction. We don't know. We can't know, because I have no idea who the original owner was or if she's even still alive and no way to trace her. But that? In terms of fandom history, that is a fucking gold mine. Pure 24-karat all through. From a strictly historical view, that's worth more than the animation cel I've got in there, and I paid over a hundred bucks for that thing.
So yeah! That was a lot of words to say "just do it." But there's your answer!
Oh this is super helpful I had never even HEARD of acid-free paper before this, and I had no idea how important things like dates and notes in the margins could be! Also gives me an excuse to practice sewing again for the first time in years if stapling isn’t the best idea. I still have plenty of my own research to do because I care deeply about a lot of these stories and I want to do them justice. I’m also just really glad there's people like you who go “Who cares if its a shitty first attempt? I have worse and I love it immensely not just despite of it but in some ways because of it!” it really takes the edge of my anxiety about not being perfect.
LAST TIME, ON “NINA BLOGS FANDOM HISTORY”:
Make me scream in glee by doing these things!
@sailorzeo can confirm she just saw me do just that, when she handed me an old book of printed fanfiction (actual quote upon her finding it: “SQUEEAK!!”). I’m looking through it right now, and when I say whatever you write, WHATEVER you write, provides provenance and context?
This is from 1996. Today it would almost certainly be measured in total word count. But in Ye Olde Days, you had to watch how much content you were putting per part because dial-up was slow and people wanted to read their fic when they were still young; measuring in pages or K/KB (kilobytes, not thousands) was the standard.
This is literally a look at the customs of fandom before broadband or even DSL were widespread. And it’s a single handwritten page. Look at everything there! How Zeo (and the author) chose to organize it; the length compared to modern-day fic; the way it’s segmented. (Looking at the fic itself, the formatting is also way different than modern formatting. Good, but different.)
And at least in theory, via the Wayback Machine or archive.org, I could still go find this fic online, because the name of the webpage is included on the printouts.
WRITE. YOUR. PROVENANCE.
I'm going to add a little bit that will make historians love you even more when you write the provenance down. Add the date you downloaded the fic.
When you are sourcing online information for research papers and the like, you have to put the date you found the info, because it can change on the web page. The information on the reference page is roughly
"Author, title, journal name, volume, number, year, url, date accessed" or
"Author, title, url, date accessed" for something short
Important addition.
.....i have thousands of words worth of comments that Ive left on fic. many that have been replied to and that I still have access to download also......
do....do historians want that too?
YEP.
Just the idea thrills me. Comments are a form of marginalia! They’re sharing your thoughts, but with the author this time. The fact that we can do that so instantly is unmatched in history and it absolutely changes the way people engage with the text.
THE TUMBLR HORSE DERBY
WELCOME TO THE FIRST TUMBLR HORSE DERBY (that i know of, anyway)
HOW TO HORSE: 🐎🐎🐎 - Vote for your FAVOURITE horse to make them go faster! (yknow, like those carnival horse derby games!) MAY THE BEST HORSE WIN
(also sample size reblog yadda yadda yadda HORSE)
You work in a factory that builds intelligent war machines, built and forced to fight in a constant war. Out of either sympathy or habit, you head-pat every machine after every inspection. A seemingly harmless gesture… until men in suits pulled you from work and interrogated you about it.
“I’m sorry. Could you repeat that, please? I must have misheard you.” I was raised to be polite, and I’m not about to stop now (there are so many guns in this room) so I resist adding “because that is the fucking stupidest thing I have ever heard” to the end of the sentence. I may as well have spared myself the trouble. The cold face of the high-ranking military man on the other side of the table only gets, if this is possible, colder. His lips are pressed flat, and I think there might be some sort of undiagnosed blood pressure problem, because he’s turning a very unnatural purple. “Every. Goddamn. One. Of the units that have come through your maintenance line in the last six months are now showing signs of instability. If you can’t identify the problem for me in the next five minutes, you and everyone you know are going to spend the rest of your lives in high-security prison.”
I might be turning a funny color now myself.
Anthropology major answer: “There absolutely was such a time! Modern humans and our ancestors shared territory numerous times over prehistory with cousin species like homo neanderthalensis, homo floresiensis, and many, many others!”
Folklore student answer: “Also, almost all cultures have something like djinn, faeries, hulder, fox spirits, and other similar creatures who can appear at least human and are very, very dangerous to humans!”
Both of these things are true, and may be connected both to the above and to each other. :D
Biology majors: it’s dead bodies guys. Corpses.
Listen I hate this take on the uncanny valley so fucking much because many subpsecies of homonids lived in the same areas but some of them got along well enough to coexist and neandertals had enough desirable genetic traits to the point where human women (see here for a blanket on female vs male choosiness) would often pass up incel homosepian for the chad neandertal.
Genetics aside, various hominid species didn’t start visually looking all that different until 50,000 years ago, while under the skin changes began as early as 89,000 years ago (ie the development of the Y chromosome but I might be oversimplifying at this point) Point being, even our non-human cousins didn’t. look. that. different. from. us. Especially comparing the diversifying of humans themselves crossing trans continental as it was. And even then neandertals still had advantagious traits for living in the Eurasian hemisphere.
Also I digress, regardless of it being intentional, and with few perserved records from that chapter in our species’ history, I don’t like the implication that the uncanny valley effect stems from humans being inherently racist (for lack of a word for hatred of non-human intelligences). I know that sounds off the wall but prejudice and sense of superiority by birthright is vastly different than othering by means of the sucess of social groups and the need to compete for territory or resources. Racism is entirely a Eurpean fabrication and it’s been proven time and time again to be a cultural outlier and purposfully designed to further the agenda of corroded theocratical religious divinity (here, here, here) and the financial benifits of the exploitation of colonism that otherwise has not been replicated by other cultures to the same degree. (this is the only example off the top of my head but I’m know there’s more.)
You know what’s older than racism?
You know what’s more flesh crawling than neandertals?
You know what LOOKS like a human but doesn’t ACT human ENOUGH? Do you know what might bite you and get you sick or turn you into something that also moves about in a non human way? Brain parasites that give you painful headaches and intensifies agression and confusion.
Say you’re a monkey and one member of your troop gets bitten by something. Later he starts twitching and swaying about. He keeps stumbling out of trees but barely feels anything when he hits the ground. He won’t eat sleep or drink. He makes guttural noises that keep alerting predators and he’s in obvious writhing agony. Suddenly he’s not your friend anymore. He doesn’t recognize you and he attempts to bite and claw at anything that moves.
Up until preventitive oral medications and vaccines were developed in the 1970s there was NOTHING stopping rabies and it still prevails today and kills hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries with limited medical resources a year. There’s no cure for rabies once youve got it and the only reliable diagnostic is a brain autopsy.
Rabies. TB. Leoprosy. Syphilis. Meningitis. Toxoplasmosis. Anthrax. Mercury Poisoning. Prion disease. These are all bad and in different varying degrees can cause limps, sores, agression, confusion or dazed trances, ambled pacing, convulsions or uncharacteristic behavior in humans.
Basically everything that people are terrified of when it comes to zombies. Vampires bite. Werewolves rip people apart. Demonic possesion? Easy. Changlings take the place of your loved ones.
Also I don’t think that it’s a conicidence that the things we find uncomfortable with the uncanny valley also just happen to line up with predatory behavior, smiling too wide or staring you down, blinking too slowly or moving towards you with a slow steady speed. It’s just a danger signal to keep other monkeys in a troop from getting bitten by an infected monkey. Simple as that.
After all what’s scarier? A dead body, or moving body that will MAKE you dead?
I’m not going to be a hypocrite by pointing out racism being excused as a stemmed human behavior without claiming that the deep seated primal fear of disease doesn’t make a good excuse for ableism as well. I mean we use othering to discern friend from foe, and then at some point decided that was a good enough excuse for racism. Theres legitimate proof that ancient homonids could and would be hospitible to the disabled out of compassion. The point of having these initial fears is to guage saftey measures first, but once someone or something is proven to be harmless that normally should be the end of it. I mean if an adult wild silverback gorrilla can look at a spycam and decide it’s chill after a moment of inspection then there’s really no excuse for any of us.
Healthy othering =/= newly invented racism.
healthy fear of infectious diseases =/= excuse to hate disabled people.
But yeah rabies is more likely the reason for the uncanny valley effect thanks for coming to my goddamn ted talk.
Reblogging this version bc of sources and I personally think this makes for much more interesting (and terrifying) lore than any other post in this thread.
Holy shit. I never thought of the “zombie virus” to be this take. It makes total fuckin sense. Shit
FanFiction.net is not gone.
Right now it's a victim of DNS (Domain Name Service) spoofing. This means that a malicious party is trying to steal traffic from FFn by purchasing a very similar domain.
So if you want to read fanfiction and not see leaves, you have have to type out "www.fanfiction.net".
Please share so people stop panicking.
bonus: say in the tags how old u were in the tags + what's your legal drinking age or, if u never drunk before, feel free to say your age too + why, if you have a reason why you don't drink!
this leaves out the most crucial tip you'll ever need:
-site:pinterest.*
excludes the entirety of pinterest's evil domainverse from image search
Reblogging for the Pinterest addition
Hello everyone!
This time I bequeath apon you more sketchy transformer warm-ups!
These were inspired by a universe crossover thing I started writing a while ago. I rewatched the movies recently, and boy was that...
a time.
Anyway, the Bay transformers were my muses as a younger lass, so these were a nice return to form.
(I just really enjoy the idea of tfp Optimus looking at a version of himself that snapped and realizing that same thing could be disconcerningly prevalent within himself. Also, you cannot tell me the Bay Op would not absolutely rock tfp Megatron's shit apon their first meeting. Sure- he would be prepared for head ripping later, but not the first time.)
I enjoy the would-be chaos of it all.
I enjoy it when Optimus runs into people in his vehicle mode idk it's just so satisfying
Transformers x Warframe AU
Soundwave frame !
Random idea I had this week, I thought "I can draw both transformers and warframe, I'm in both fandoms. Why not combine them." And ended up making Soundwave a warframe lmao
I think his ability would be similar to Banshee's and that he can summon his kids. I still need ideas on his overall abilities as a warframe tbh I don't know 😭😭😭 I need to design Rumble and Frenzy next. Mini warframes !
If you like BNHA and haven't read Null and Void you SHOULD and YES this is a THREAT 👁️👁️👁️ R E A D I T
What people think why i became a bookbinder: Oh she wants to explore her artistic horizon with those pretty leather bound books of hers. She even gives them out as gifts to her friends. It most likely helps her with anxiety or maybe she just wanted a more special costume made notebook.
Why I actually became a bookbinder: I just illegally downloaded and printed out several of my favourite fanfics and books and started binding them into books cuz I love reading them but looking at screens for too long gives me headaches.
op youre fucking big brained oh my god
If you want to i can send you a link to some of the Tutorial videos i started binding my fanfic books.
PLEASE SEND ME THE LINK I WANT TO DO THIS SO BAD
PLEASE SEND LINKS OP PLEASE I BEG YOU
@laughuntilourribsgettough @starduststyx upon request: A tutorial playlist for my personal favourite bookbinding methods
- Longstitch binding
2)Japanese Binding
3) Belgian Binding
4) Coptic stitch binding
5) Case Bookbinding
this is the tutorial set I use for bookbinding! I've yet to try Secret Belgian, but it looks really cool.