The Gaang 🥹

I'm terrified to admit this, but I am very not OK with what's going on in Israel-Palestine right now.

I have several friends actively serving - they could die any minute - and when I come onto Tumblr to escape I find people justifying this war.

To be clear, it is complicated. There is a history of violence and long-seeded tensions. But if your first response to over 1,500 people dying is to signal what side you're on immediately, you're not doing anyone a fucking favor.

If you genuinely think that the appropriate reaction to a war on a scale not seen in the country in decades is to "well actually it's Israel's fault," you are being shitty.

There is no glory in this for anyone. Thousands of people are going to die in the coming weeks, you don't need to make some of them the good guys and some of them the bad guys because you need to validate your progressive credentials.

Solidarity is making sure that your Palestinian and Israeli friends are alive tomorrow.

Multitool item.

[“We’ve supported the table with a landmine 😂”

“Fucking what? What if it fucking blows?”

“We have another one.”]

he's very excited about his first night as a jack o lantern

my boy

I love how its getting closer to that time of year again and ppl starting to reblog my boy again

MOIRAINE DAMODRED in The Wheel of Time Season 2

ghost choir 👻 🎵

I DID NOT THINK ANYTHING COULD TOP GHOST DUET

I WAS WRONG

I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY TO BE WRONG IN ALL MY LIFE

Happy Halloween the 1st!

Hopefully her mood will be better in the morning.

The next morning...

Reblog to make it die faster

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

SPY X FAMILY | SEASON 2 PV 10.07.23

This.

I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.

I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.

I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.

Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.

When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.

More to the point–and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer–it doesn’t matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it’s in AO3’s tagging FAQ.

[id: the “How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?” section of the tagging FAQ here.]

“But Jo,” you may argue, because you’re wrong. “There’s no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that’s really inaccessible!”

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don’t care if you don’t know fandom history. I don’t care if you’ve never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don’t care if you’ve never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn’t matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.

🕯.

🕯. 🕯

🕯 prayer circle 🕯

🕯 for a housing 🕯

🕯 market 🕯

🕯 collapse 🕯

🕯.

the pen testing pads at art stores are the only worthwhile social media platform

I hear my mom shrieking downstairs, shouting up to me about “THE CATS! THE CATS!”

I run downstairs, thinking someone has died or something and see THIS:

I FEEL LIKE I NEED TO PUNCH SOMETHING TO GET OVER THE ADORABLENESS

They look like they’re about to break out in a musical number

hence:

This post got better since I re-blogged it earlier.

This is everything

@maverikloki

… my hand slipped

For those who give a shit about it, this is a staged photo, the woman on the left is a drag queen doing a bit. Here's a few more photos of her taking in the beautiful sights and sounds of the parade:

(by Mervyn L. Fitzhenry)

dozens of news outlets, celebrities, and the president of the most powerful nation in the world have shared this fabricated testimony by a genocidal maniac

biden just admitted he lied. on live television. in front of the whole world

And no one will notice or care because the propaganda machine of news outlets, social media, national leaders and politician statements, and Zionist organizations are bombarding everyone with pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian noise. The white supremacy of colonized nations alone leads to an automatic assumption of inhuman "barbarism" from enemies of Western and Western-backed states, so any rumour becomes solid fact just by confirming these biases, almost immune (or stalwart resistance towards) any open lies or evidence to the contrary.

despicable

the players think so too

JJ in Criminal Minds 16.08