I’m not saying it’s right, but I understand (x)

I’m saying “it’s right”

All of us are saying “it’s right.”

It’s right

It’s right.

Right

right as fuck

This man committed no wrong and anyone who says otherwise is wrong and devoid of morals

It’s right

I've found out about emoji kitchen and everyone will suffer as a result!

emojis for when you. awoo

how to have a healthier relationship with your stats page

1. Understand what stats can tell you - and what they can’t

AO3 stats tell you whether or not another user clicked something. That’s it. Hits tell you whether a user clicked the title of your fic. Kudos tell you that a user clicked the little ❤ at the bottom of the page. Comments tell you that a user typed something into a box and then hit the comment button. 

Stats do not tell you why a person did any of those things. They also don’t tell you why a person didn’t do them. You know why you do those things yourself, but there are many types of people in the world and we all have our reasons why we do things. You can’t assume that every other user of AO3 uses the site the same way you do. 

Stats are not a reliable way to find out if you’re good at writing. They’re not a way to tell if you are loved. They have nothing to do with the quality of your work or your worth as a person.

2. Don’t compare yourself to others - or yourself

Because stats are not a reliable way to judge quality or skill or the effort you put into a story, comparing your stats against another author will also not tell you which of you is the “better” author or which of you has a “better” story. They can tell you which story was more popular, but popularity itself has very little to do with skill or quality. 

This is also true of your own work. Chances are very real that the story you’re most proud of is not the story with the best stats. Don’t let one story’s relative success or failure affect how you feel about another’s. 

3. Focus on things you can control instead of things you can’t

Once you’ve posted your story, the reaction to it is out of your control. It will get however many hits, kudos, and comments other people decide to give it and you can’t do much about that at all. 

What you can control, however, is the work you put into the story before you post it. Celebrate statistics like word count or time spent writing or the number of WIP you’ve managed to finish. Those are all numbers that are in your control, that you have the power to alter and affect. 

Find something in every story that makes you happy. It doesn’t have to be the whole fic. It could be one particular characterization, a scene, or a line. Maybe you wrote a particularly funny joke or a really moving description or a hot love scene. 

Highlighting positive emotions and being proud of your own work will make you less reliant on the opinions of other people. You’ll develop more confidence, and that will help you avoid the stats spiral in the future. Finding motivations inside of yourself is much more reliable than getting motivation from people who might or might not continue to provide it.

4. If you can’t ignore stats, avoid them

The first time I had an unhealthy relationship with my stats page, I ended up quitting fic entirely for about a year. I still wrote, I just didn’t post anything on AO3. I couldn’t trust myself not to focus on the numbers and make myself crazy, and so I didn’t allow myself to look at them at all. 

The second time I found myself starting down the stats spiral, I knew the signs and I was able to pull myself out of it. I stopped looking at my stats page, but I was able to continue posting work. I still refreshed the page for the first day to see the hits/kudos/comments but after that first day I only returned to the fic in order to post a new chapter or answer another comment. 

There are tools you can use to help you avoid stats. This AO3 skin hides stats entirely. This code hides hits. Here’s one for hiding kudos with additional instructions on how to hide any stats you choose. 

5. Be your own cheerleader

When it comes right down to it, the reason why we focus in on stats is because we’re looking for reassurance. We want to know for sure whether we’re a good writer or not. Unfortunately, our stats are never going to tell us that. 

A lot of us are also told by others that being proud of something we’ve done or liking something that we’ve created is boastful or bragging or other negative personality traits. But there’s a difference between bragging about how good you are and acknowledging your own skills. 

Give yourself permission to like your own work. You might never get that permission from someone else, so you need to take that on yourself. 

Start talking to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend of yours who was working on a fic or a piece of art or doing anything else that requires time and skill. You wouldn’t tear them down, so don’t tear yourself down. Build yourself up. That positive self-talk can be difficult at first, but it’s a habit that pays off over time. 

6. Know that I’m proud of you

It takes courage and strength and determination to have an idea and then to act on it. It’s easy to think. It’s a lot harder to write things down. No matter whether you post your story online or you keep it to yourself. No matter whether you get a thousand hits or a dozen. You’re still amazing, and I’m so glad you took that leap ❤

we need to talk about Rahaeli

This is slightly tangential to the dumpster fire that is OTW, but it is something I think is important to also take into consideration.

If you're following the comments on the OTW announcement posts, you may have seen reference to Rahaeli (Twitter) aka synedochic (DW) aka Denise. She is a co-founder of Dreamwidth, where FFA is hosted.

Denise is a Fandom Elder, in both the descriptive and derogatory senses of the term. She's been around forever, since the pre-Livejournal days. She has no hesitations about throwing around that Fandom Elder status, in the same way somebody like Franzeska or astolat or anybody else in the clique that founded OTW would.

Perspective from older fans is absolutely valuable, I want to emphasize. You want people who were there to explain why we are concerned about restrictions on explicit/queer/legal but "morally objectionable" fanwork, or how younger fans embrace purity rhetoric. But it's different the way Fandom Elders wield it, the implicit assumption that because they are older and have Seen Some Shit, they automatically have some sort of wisdom to transmit to the young'uns.

Denise knows a great deal about social media moderation, anti-harassment measures, and the legal obligations surrounding the discovery of CSEM/CSAM* on sites you're responsible for administrating. That expertise is extremely valuable when explaining to people why/how everything with OTW is very very concerning.

She also knows fandom very well, and exactly how to calibrate her words to push buttons. I remember her meltdown about Cohost, another social media site that looked like a viable competitor to Dreamwidth at the time. Here is a summary of it I wrote at the time.

I'd like to get into criticism of the part of that Twitter thread where she throws a random non-sequitur into an already extremely long thread. (I know this is already a long post, please bear with me.)

At this point, she's gone on about OTW, their gross neglect of volunteers, Rebecca Tushnet, and a bunch of other stuff for like three or four screens. They are all things we should rightly be appalled by, so we're on her side for saying things that need to be said. We are probably also getting a little tired and not reading things as closely as we should. I think this is absolutely deliberate.

She then pivots the thread to EndOTWRacism (hereafter EOR) with what seems like an offhand comment about how she doesn't agree with their goals. She wrongly characterizes the end goal of EOR's campaign as a desire to moderate fic on AO3. This is patently false and is explicitly stated on their call for action under What Do We Want. They want AO3 to come up with anti-harassment policies and content policies for abusive and racist fics (what some people would characterize as troll fics), which are clearly written to degrade and harm fans of color**. We are not talking about fics with bigoted stereotypes or racist characterization.

EOR links heavily to work by Stitchmediamix, a well-known and outspoken Black anti-racist advocate in fandom. They write a column about race and fandom for Teen Vogue, and have been the target of incredible amounts of harassment. Denise thinks it's biased and kinda weird EOR does this.

The reason EOR relies so heavily on Stitch's work (and that of Dr. Rukhmini Pande) is because very few people actually write about this stuff. It's horrible, thankless work that doesn't get you good attention but needs to be discussed anyways. (Acafandom, such as that which gets published in OTW's journal Transformative Works and Cultures, is racist as fuck, but that's a whole other topic.)

Here we see yet another impossible standard white fans are never held to, the one where non-white (but especially Black) fans must be ideologically pure with no lapses in temper or frustration. Whomst among us would be able to respond with perfect grace every single time they were set upon by racist mobs?

We depart from the Twitter thread here because Denise has made a statement on Dreamwidth about why she included all the stuff about Stitch when she was making a critique of EOR. The summary of the post is basically "A bunch of people told me stuff, I saw screenshots, but I won't even share redacted ones, so just trust me OK?"

I don't know Stitch (we have corresponded exactly once) or follow their work***, but I feel like if there were actual evidence they send harassment towards other fans surely it would have come up on FFA by now. The nonnies don't like them over there, and I suspect anything that proves they have actually done anything of the sort would be like throwing chum to piranhas.

Probably the most galling bit of Denise's post is this:

She knows exactly what she's doing. It's like dangling a steak in front of a hungry dog and telling it "Please don't lunge towards it because I'm telling you not to."

The second most galling bit is the way she, a white woman with a great deal of institutional power, justfies pointing even more racist harassment towards a Black fan known for continued anti-racist activism even though it makes their life hell and calls it solidarity.

Fuck that noise. As Dr. Pande says, there are many ways to discuss incidents like this without identifying individuals. Denise could have posted a person's account, in their own words, of their harassment experience. Even in an attempt to demonstrate faux solidarity she denies POC fans a voice.

I am glad Denise can contribute her technical and legal expertise to explaining precisely how the OTW has been negligent in their responsibilities to their volunteers and how they are noncompliant with important laws regarding extremely harmful material. I regret she has undermined this important work with unnecessary detours into racism and incitement of harassment.

I am extremely angry about having to make this post. It's another pile of shit on top of an already giant dumpster fire. But apparently upholding racism and white supremacy is still something people in fandom are going to do, even as an important organization within it burns down around our ears.

--

*There is a difference (cw: duh) between the terms! I did not know this until yesterday.

**I'm not getting into definitions or hair-splitting about this because it's not the point of this post.

***If you are interested in actually reading Stitch's work, here is a great place to start.

reblogging to add stopthatimp's tags (bold emphasis by me)

#yep.#all of this#based on what i've seen there are people who likely do have reason to be pissed w stitch#but i don't see how you can claim 'solidarity' while mobilizing the same tactics#which people have used as evidence that stitch is a serial harasser#i am also profoundly suspicious of the narrative that stitch matters at all in this quite frankly#afaik they are completely locked down#their teen vogue column has limited reach#they do not have power. they just don't#turning this into an audit on stitch does a disservice to everyone#including eotwr AND the volunteer abuse stuff#anyway hilariously this kind of heinous personality back and forth is exactly how we got an entire decade of dumb grifters like shanley#the more things change etc.#me at all these people: girl FOCUS!#but they won't bc it's about racism more than it's about stopping a bully

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i never expected them to be as affordable as they are, so i've ordered myself a set thank you!!

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Just bought one! Honestly, this is the first time in a long time that I've just seen something and been like, “I MUST OWN THIS!” Beautiful work!

Gorgeous 😍 

The focus should really be on people learning how to consume a wide range of media in a healthy way, and that includes being able to process feelings of disgust, rage, and discomfort in cases where the narrative absolutely is intending you to feel that way!

It feels like we're witnessing a lot of people now grow too comfortable with what they are familiar with that they project their inability to process negative feelings on others and blame the content itself.

For instance, I am aware that I cannot handle very explicit and violent scenes of SA, and had no warning when I first watched The Flowers of War movie. I remember being so affected, I was haunted by those scenes for days. But I don't condemn the movie for existing just because it contains a subject and content that makes me uncomfortable and upset. Especially for what was a war movie.

Ugly things deserve to exist. The critical focus should be on the execution and narrative intent, and even if those end up being bad, people are allowed to make bad things! People can suck at writing! They exist!

We cannot be wishy washy when it comes to creative freedom, especially when you try to commit what is "morally good" to paper under such a subjective perspective.

Multiple things can exists at once, and in this case it's also the fact people are getting too comfortable with the thought of normalizing certain topics and not in a media literacy type of way, but more of a

"Fiction doesn't equal reality!" Or more disturbingly "So long as they only do it behind close doors and doesn't effect me I don't see the problem"

No one has any issues with horror, or disturbing media, and before anyone says anything I say this as an English literature teacher who focuses on Post war literature so you can IMAGINE the things I have to teach and share understanding with

To word as simply and crudely as possible look below

And not to demonize, but if you are watching say Lolita, and rather than understanding that this is from the POV of a predator and has layer of layers to the story, and instead ingredients IDOLIZING and making this sad story out to be sexy, chic, or god forbid, romantic, then you need to stop and question why and see if you have any further issues adding to it

And as much as people hate to acknowledge this, authors DO infact need to be watched and criticized when needed. It's incredibly easy to make CP, romantic violence, bigotry, and hate filled works, and simply slap a genre label on it and then cry "THE ANTIS A RUNING EVERYTHING AND TRYING TO CANCEL ME 😭😭😭😭"

Splatterpunk ESPECIALLY has this issue and is happening with more frequency this last few years

To simply call someone an anti without even stopping to think why and to ignore the same critical thinking you demand others to use is sad at best and bitterly pathetic most of the time

Perhaps you're not getting the point of the original post, so I'm going to back up a bit. You may not have been in fandom spaces for long enough to know that "proshipping" is a term created by antis so they could carve out an "us vs. them" space in fandom.

Proshipping was the default. "Live and let live" was the motto most fans lived by, at least when I first got into fanfiction in the 90s. This is how I (and a lot of people) define it.

I know exactly why antis think they way they do. I was Mormon once. You don't get more pro-censorship, thought-policing than that. So, yes, I have years of personal history and critical thinking when it comes to considering the media I consume. Don't worry about me, I'm doing just fine.

What I worry about are young people growing up in this environment where fantasies aren't only considered sinful, they're considered harmful, and they're being told to purge them from their thoughts if they want to be a good person. I can't even begin to describe how harmful that is to children and adults alike.

Tl;dr: as someone who's been in a creative slump TWICE as a result of this, EXTREMELY harmful. Because it tells me that I'm a terrible person because because I like characters in danger, that essentially being mean to Sims negates my reaction to actual people suffering

I’ve said this multiple times on here, so some people who follow me will have heard this rant already, but:

My mom is a college professor whose special subject is media criticism and the effects of media on children. Therefore, my parents were extremely focused on moderating our media consumption. We had four TV channels and two of them were PBS. I have never in my life played a video game all the way through. I read the books my mom assigned to her students for fun (“Consuming Kids” was my favorite). My job as I got older was to screen stuff for content considered inappropriate for my younger siblings or other people’s kids. Even when we watched movies or TV or commercials, my parents would analyze them in front of us and encourage us to analyze them ourselves. What techniques are they using in this commercial to get you to buy it? What's the subtext in this scene? What message is this scene trying to convey?

So when I say that antis are Not Doing It Right, I’ve got textbooks and almost 30 years of lived experience backing me up.

There are three major problems with how antis approach media criticism.

#1: Ignoring the concept of individual analysis and multiple lenses.

A key concept in media criticism is that there is no one way to interpret a work. Certainly there's how the author might want you to interpret it, but part of communication (which is what media is) is the effect on the audience member. How I interpret a particular work is going to be influenced by my personal experiences; someone else may interpret the exact same thing differently.

And what you're specifically looking for in a work is also important. The point of analyzing something through different lenses – a queer lens, a feminist lens, a post-colonial lens, whatever – is to look at the same thing from different angles. And even then, two different people might have two different perspectives even within the same framework, looking for the same things. Consider the argument about whether specific Disney movies are feminist or not - they're looking at the same material, but coming to different conclusions based on their interpretation of it.

So you can't unequivocally say "this glorifies violence" or "this promotes misogyny" outside of very, very specific examples (I'm thinking about shit like The Turner Diaries, here). You can certainly make that as an argument, and back it up using evidence, but ultimately, that is your interpretation, not objective fact.

#2: Failing to understand what media criticism is trying to solve.

Whenever someone points out that fiction is not reality, someone always responds that it affects reality, and then will point to something like The Jaws Effect as an example of how media affects real-life things. I'm pretty sure that's what @sweetlavenderdarling is referencing.

Which: sure! I won't dispute that! The issue is failing to understand how and why media affects real-life things.

The first thing is that, barring a few exceptions, the majority of media's influence is in the aggregate. Watching one period drama with a majority-white cast is not going to make you think that all of European history only involves white people. What can make you think that the past was whites-only is if every single period drama you ever watch has an all-white or majority-white cast. Watching one action movie is not going to make you violent. What can make you violent is if the main way you see problems being handled is through violence (regardless of whether the tone is "this is a horrible thing but we have no choice" or "it's totally cool to murder people").

The second thing is that, just as we cannot claim our single opinion is objective fact, we can't claim a 1:1 cause-and-effect thing between "X is in media" and "person believes X," because different people can interpret the same thing differently. There's a difference between me watching, say, an Alex Jones broadcast vs. a longtime fan of Alex Jones listening to the same thing: I'm not going to become a conservative conspiracy theorist solely from listening to it because my perspective on it and preexisting beliefs are very different from those of than a true believer.

And we can actually see this in an example antis love to trot out: Finding Nemo. Antis love to pull out Finding Nemo as an example of people's behaviors changing (i.e. a spike in owning clownfish and blue tangs as pets) based on it being in a popular work. Here's the problem with that argument: the entire point of Finding Nemo is that keeping tropical fish as pets is a bad thing. THAT'S WHY THEY NEED TO FIND NEMO.

The scene where Nemo gets caught is treated like a human child getting dragged into a white van in front of their parents. Home aquariums are portrayed as jails where longtime residents go insane. The little girl with the braces is a terrifying eldritch murderer from the fish's perspective because she shakes them to death. Finding Nemo can't be more obvious in how it treats owning tropical fish as pets: it's not romanticized, and in fact is universally portrayed throughout the film as a very bad thing that no one should do.

And a shitload of people either didn't pick up that message or did but ignored it. Because there's no 1:1 transfer of message to audience.

#3: Failing to provide an actual solution/ignoring the next steps.

Okay, so you've identified a problematic element of a work. And you're concerned that it's going to affect your thinking or other people's thinking! Cool! Awesome! Now what?

A short list of things that you can possibly do to mitigate its effects:

What doesn't help literally at all:

I realize that this is a very long response but I am Sick and Tired of antis pretending that their ship wars are somehow a force for moral good or completely ignoring their own biases to focus on stuff they personally don't like.

Reblogging for excellent points by @wolveria and @bemusedlybespectacled

Listen, if you interrupt me with a new task while I’m midway through another, you aren’t allowed to be mad when I switch to the new task immediately. You clearly thought the new task was important enough to interrupt me with it!

I am just a little pikmin! You’re the one with the whistle!!

‘You need to learn to prioritise’ no YOU do! You’re the one dishing out tasks!! All I need to do is take things back to the onion!

Also, I have the ADHD! If you stop me while I'm doing X and ask me to do Y, I will immediately switch to doing Y because THAT IS THE ONLY WAY IT IS GETTING DONE. I do not have the option of finishing X and then getting around to Y, I will 100% forget and I know this about myself from years and years of experience of living in my brain.

You ask an ADHD person to do something, you're getting it RIGHT NOW or NEVER. Those are the only two times.

Welcome to time blindness, enjoy your visit, I live here.

i love sunny days and hate cops. reblog if you love bisexuals

i love rainy days and hate landlords. reblog if you love lesbians

i love thunderstorms and hate capitalist pigs. reblog if you love transgenders.

I remember just staring blankly at the screen when you told us this. Just. Genuine abject blue screen of death

Then a lot of swearing

My family did ivermectin before it was cool! And for the actual intended purpose!

I also knew freegans in California at the hippie art school that was part of my university. I also knew a girl who thought solid food was bad for the environment, and she subsisted entirely on smoothies for most of a year.

Fascinating.

Hang on gotta go see if I can run this one down. See if it was just some wild conclusion she came to personally, or if there's actually a group who claim that.

I knew a freegan in Durango that almost got mauled to death because he was dumpster diving in the Sonic Dumpster that everyone and their dog knew belonged to the local Alpha Black Bear Boar.

Kyle only broke his leg and escaped into the sonic with his friend who had been hotboxing the sonic kitchen with weed he was definitely not old enough to be smoking, which caused him to slip on kitchen grease and stab himself on some kind of kicthen impliment. I got called by them at 12:03 AM, terminally high and panicking because of the weed and the bear circling the sonic, because the Kush-Kabob guy was in my husband's D&D group and Husbeast and I were the only adult-adults he knew.

...Which is how I ended up having to chase a 400lb black bear away from the back door of a sonic so I could drive two of the stupidest people I ever met to the hospital. Whatever vibe I have that makes horses wanna murder me apparently makes bears shit themselves and run tho.

What is a freegan?!?!

it seems to be people who either don't buy any food or don't buy animal products, but still eat them by getting them for free. I... don't really understand this. Is it supposed to give you empathy for the poor? Wikipedia seems to think it's an anti-capitalist thing, since buying food is participation in capitalism.

I mean it would be cool if paired with understanding that food ultimately comes from The Earth rather than Dumpster

Foraging is cool, I like people trying to popularize that.

Ala Ebtekar, Thirty-Six Views of the Moon (from the San Jose Museum of Art)

Cyanotype prints on found book pages exposed to moonlight.

"thats a terrible thing to think about your friend/loved one" is a strong deterrent against the specific anxiety spiral that comes from thinking too hard about the state of your friendships and if your friends are on mad at you island

And here you can see, the displaced redditor, roaming the wilderness of Tumblr. An invasive species, but one that is nonetheless welcome after decades of deforestation drove off the natural predators of the ecosystem, and allowed the wild pornbot to thrive and wreak havoc on the local plant life.

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

I was working with an item today that just utterly flabbergasted a part of me (the other was deeply frustrated with the catalogue record AS SOMEONE APPARENTLY THOUGHT IT WAS PRINTED ON SILK, coming back to that in a minute) … but ANYWAYS … said item is a replica of a medieval manuscript prayer book THAT IS ENTIRELY WOVEN out of grey and black silk … WOVEN … text, images, intricate grey scale, WOVEN … NOT PRINTED …

And it’s flabbergasting because it’s from 1888, Jacquard machine, IT USED PUNCH CARDS to weave these intricate pages … something like 400 weft per near square inch … IT looks like a page of textured paper, but it’s not, it’s entirely SILK … F*CK …

Anyways …

OKS I’ve since calmed down and found out that the reason they used “printed” is because it is essentially printed by a computer … in a weird way; when I import the record, I’m just gonna take that note out …

BUT this is the item btw

WOVEN! WOVEN ON A LOOM using f*ckin’ punch cards!

Anyway reblog to make sure all the investors know that, according to u/spez AKA Steve Huffman, the CEO of the fucking company, Reddit is, and I quote, "not profitable." Their IPO is supposedly planned for later this year. Have fun with that, Steve!

I tried to blaze this and Tumblr gave me an error code and refused to do it (after charging my CC) y'all better fuckin gimme an Organic All Natural Blaze lmao

edit: nvm it's marked pending but still

wouldnt it be fun. wouldnt it be really cool. if the haiku bot

once you hit adulthood a day will come when you’re suddenly like VEGETABLES 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 and it never goes away

stop saying "gen z brought back bush-era purity politics" i grew up in the bush era and even then people weren't saying that you're a sex addict for having boring marital sexual congress in the same house as your children. this is just plain unhinged

Literally almost every millennial I know has a memory of accidentally walking in on their parents or hearing their parents having sex. It's fucking normal. Human beings have sex. Your parents fuck. Get over it. Being weird about it isn't healthy.

I really loved Robert Evans’s response to this