SOME OF MY FAVOURITE SHOTS FROM THE CAPTAIN MARVEL TRAILER!

If you (somehow) haven’t seen it yet, check it out here:

A character can still be a great character without being a good person.

In fact, some of the best characters are terrible people.

Because a character’s worth should be based on how complex and interesting they are, not their morality if they were real.

A Tumblr User’s Guide to Dreamwidth

I’m sure by now, some of you may have heard of the site Dreamwidth when some people talk about Livejournal and old sites they wish they had. Maybe you’ve become a bit curious about how this place works or why people are so interested in it anyway. To answer that, I’m going to give you a little primer on Dreamwidth and what you need to know when converting from Tumblr!

So what is Dreamwidth?

Dreamwidth is a Livejournal code fork and like Livejournal it is an old social networking blog. How is that different from Tumblr? Well to clarify, Tumblr is a content aggregation site, not a content creation site. This means that Tumblr’s purpose is to spread things for other people to see, and these things do not even have to be something you made. It is not intended for feedback and communication, it is only intended to be looked at. That’s why any comment and communication features are so lackluster, the creators genuinely did not want it to work like a blog, and they continue to fight that.

Dreamwidth is a blog with features centered around content and comment management. How you use it is up to you, but it is a more or less static site with each post self contained, no reblogs or sharing apart from manually linking to the post themselves and the only things you see on your feed are the blogs and communities you’ve personally added to your watch. While the format is well suited for medium to long-posts, you’re never obligated to post at any specific length. Post as little or as much as you want with as little or as much content as you want. Comments are threaded which makes them easy to keep up with, and easy to read and it’s possible to edit your comments.

Dreamwidth is, above all else, a site dedicated to freedom of expression and is one of the few places left that genuinely cares about that.

Dreamwidth Terms You Should Know

Cutting You’ll see this term used a lot, and it’s a really huge important feature of the blog. Cutting is like the ‘read more’ feature you can find on tumblr. The difference is that you can choose exactly which portion of the entry is behind a cut and which one isn’t. You can also have more than one cut if you like! This is especially useful for long, informative posts to help people jump to the exact spot they want.

Cuts can also have their own titles, so you can inform people briefly of what’s behind the cut in the link itself. Good knowledge of how cuts work is super important and super helpful! https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=88

Access Filters A term you’ll see show up when composing an entry is what access filter is applied to the post you’re about to make, (sometimes this is referred to as ‘locking’ the post). When you create a post you are given the choice to either make the entry public, make it available to only those who have general access to your blog or choose a specific access filter which you have a pre-determined group of people on a list that are the only ones permitted to see those posts. You can set up as many access filters as you want and change them at any time, and none of the members are notified of these changes so you don’t need to worry about that when making changes. You can even make a post entirely private so that only you can see it, and you can modify the access settings on any entry at any time. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=21 https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=22

Paid Accounts Unlike tumblr, Dreamwidth does have paid accounts. The entire site is ad-free and they support themselves entirely on those people that purchase paid accounts. The free accounts give you more than you need to enjoy and interact with the site, but paid accounts give you extra features such as the ability to add custom mood icons, journal customization options and more user pics. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=4

Sticky Posts You can sticky an entry on your Dreamwidth, this can be useful to use as a means of introducing people to your journal and what to expect. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=199

General Dreamwidth Etiquette

Tags You will find that on Dreamwidth no one ‘talks in tags’. This is because each journal keeps a record of every single tag used on a page both yourself and everyone else can see and has a limit to the total amount of tags you can use. Tags in Dreamwidth are seen as a means of organization, not as a means of subtext, you’ll have to add the subtext in text formatting separately. You can of course, edit and delete any of the tags in the list at any time so you’re never stuck with the tags you’ve used if you ever change your mind.

Images While this is a holdover from the old days when bandwidth was not as accessible as it is now, generally speaking, images posted are kept around 800px in width if posted without a cut. This is to prevent stretching and just general friends page tidy-ness. Similarly, when posting several images, they are either done by way of small thumbnails, or they are posted behind a cut.

Cutting It is seen common etiquette to cut overly-long entries or entries that contain a large number of images, or entries that could contain sensitive information. This was both to keep the friend reading list trim and tidy, as well as warn people before they read potentially triggering material or something just generally distressing (especially in the case of images). Of course it may be worth it to set up an access group if you find yourself talking about a subject some of your audience has conflict with but cuts are always a good choice when you’re not quite sure.

Response Speed As a note, Dreamwidth and other blogging systems are naturally slower than Tumblr. This is not a bad thing! But don’t be surprised if some people don’t comment on an entry till a week later. People on Dreamwidth are far more likely to pay attention to entries and read all their backlog so there isn’t a need to constantly remind or repost the same thing. Dreamwidth generally slower pace can be jarring to some people, but you’ll find it has it’s own benefits even if it doesn’t offer instant gratification.

Comment Subjects You’ll notice when replying to an entry there will be an option to add a subject to your comment, this is not a requirement, only an option. In general, this is rarely used and can sometimes be considered disruptive if it is filled out without serving any specific purpose. Ways it is more often used are for specific community activities, specific content warnings, meta data or something otherwise specific to the format. Be aware that comment subjects work similarly to email subjects in such that replying to any comment with content in the subject line will copy the subject line into your own comment with “re:” prefacing it.

Userpics Many of you have not grown up with the ability to change the icon you can use at any time but it’s something that’s been an essential part of communication with DW and other lj-likes. All accounts get 15 userpics that you can use on your account, they’re 100x100 images and you can choose between any of them when you make a post or comment. They can be used to display mood, expressions, fandoms, events, in-jokes, all sorts of things and can be used to help convey tone or mood in the post/comment you’re trying to make. (a lot of people even made <3 or THIS icons and reply with a blank comment with just the icon to convey a ‘like’ of sorts) It’s not perfect by any means, but thoughtful userpic choices can help a lot in trying to convey what you want when text alone can be difficult to interpret.

Q&A

Can I make multiple journals on the same account? No. While this is a feature many RPers would like, and it has been talked about, there is no system that creates Parent/Child journal accounts. If you want a second journal, you would have to make a whole new account, and log in and log out whenever you want to change.

Can I reblog other people’s entries? No. Everyone’s blog and posts are static, there is no way to share another’s post on your own blog other than manually linking their post.

How can I meet people if I can’t reblog? Meeting people on Dreamwidth does take more work, it’s not as easy to stumble across new blogs casually in the day without putting effort into it. Communities are a large social component of Dreamwidth and there are communities for just about any fandom, hobby, craft type and even small niches, and you can start your own communities at any time. There is also an 'interest’ section in every user profile, which can be used to help find people of similar interests. And then there’s always meeting people through friends of friends in the comments of one’s entires. This post in particular has a much more through break down on socialization and how to find people https://bisexualbaker.tumblr.com/post/147873750806/how-the-heck-do-i-find-cool-stuff-and-people-on

Where can I host my images? This is of course, the biggest pitfall in Dreamwidth. As it stands right now, there is a small image hosting option however it only can store up to 500MB in size. For anything significant you would have to use a service like Imgur, Flickr, Sta.sh, Google Drive, or other storage services. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=248

Hopefully this has provided the base amount of information you may need to start a Dreamwidth account. It’s very different from Tumblr in the way it’s used but it’s not completely different, but it’s not intended to be a 'replacement’, it’s just another service you can use if it fits your needs. Personally, I’m of the opinion that everyone needs at least one quite, static place they can hash out their thoughts on without fear of making a mistake, and Dreamwidth is very good for that kind of thing.

I can now be found over there as papersarkany and this is a Very Useful Guide. I must keep a local copy jic. 😉

In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.

Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.

“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”

“It insists she’s the mafia.”

“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”

“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”

I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.

This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.

There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.

Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.

TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help

TBH, I think training rats to go left vs right for porn vs not porn might just be more effective than bots.

Reunion - Silchas Ruin and Tulas Shorn

done for the Malazan advent calendar 2018

This is an old comic, but the basic principle of it still applies. It’s super relevant to the debate currently going on, so I’m bringing it back.

Source: xkcd

— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Captain Marvel Trailer 2

Backup Your Blog NOW

Backup tools: 

Use at least one. Trying all four is not a bad idea.Use them even if your blog has NO ADULT CONTENT WHATSOEVER, because they won’t be looking at blogs - they’ll be running algorithms to decide what “adult” content is. If you’re not familiar with that game, be aware that it’s going to catch a whole lot of queer content, and a whole lot of “wtf who thinks this is adult” content.

Backup your likes:

Have not tried them yet, but as I have a massive collection of likes (much bigger than my actual blog), I will be trying them shortly.

Shout-out to my fellow Fandom Olds who lived through Strikethrough/Boldthrough on LJ and knew this day would eventually come here on Tumblr.com also

Especial shout-out to the heroes at AO3 who designed their whole operation knowing that every other platform fandom used would pull this bullshit sooner or later

LJ and FFNet pulled this. We been knew. Donate to Ao3/otw y'all.

Backup Your Blog NOW

Backup tools: 

Use at least one. Trying all four is not a bad idea.Use them even if your blog has NO ADULT CONTENT WHATSOEVER, because they won’t be looking at blogs - they’ll be running algorithms to decide what “adult” content is. If you’re not familiar with that game, be aware that it’s going to catch a whole lot of queer content, and a whole lot of “wtf who thinks this is adult” content.

New official Captain Marvel poster.

Reasons to survive the holidays:

I FUCKING KNEW IT.

SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.

AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.

I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.

It doesn’t matter.

Once upon a time - in the era before anyone had heard of google - if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.

GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.

And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on - it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space - but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.

Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history - a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.

(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)

And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…

Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.

And watch as the flames take everything.

Brush the ash from their hands.

Walk away.

Once upon a time - in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” - fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon - or as many years late - as you wanted to.

Because there was a tagging site - del.icio.us - that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.

They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it - many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.

It is like fandom suffered - collectively - a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.

We have never yet recovered.

Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.

I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.

I do not think Yahoo is “bad” - I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.

But they are, historically, bad for US.

And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.

…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.

i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes - tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered. (Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)

The current brouhaha reminded me of this post.

I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark.  It was a real loss.  The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.

But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo.  They weren’t the only ones.  And they won’t be the last.  It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc.  If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.

AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever.  So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories.  Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom - where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever.  Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.

Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away.  Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all - a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).  

So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom.  Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes.  You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are.  If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first.  If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.

Many Flickr users are upset at the changes.  They expected their photos to be archived there forever.  Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay - since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.

I fear that applies to fannish works as well.  Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution.  They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced.  Any commercial service can’t be relied on.

I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said.  He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available.  Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read.  I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines.  :-/

ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR WORK, KIDS! I learned that lesson in the dark ages of the internet, back in the pre Y2K days when little fans like myself hung out on AOL (via dial-up modem!) and RPed with each other via chat room and message board. I met my husband on those boards, so it was a very formative experience for me! My friends and I had thousands of posts worth of stories and chat logs and artwork on those boards. We used them every day, until one day they were just gone. Completely erased, unsalvageable, with no warning given. All I have left is scraps that we had on our tiny, tiny hard drives or actual printed pages. AOL did it because the company was sliding and they wanted to cut some useless fat. But that useless fat was our collective dreams, and it hurt so much! Ever since then, I’ve been nearly obsessive about making sure to have multiple backups of anything I can’t bear to lose. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.

I had a similar thing happen on jcink, a free message board hosting site where you can build a message board for discussion, RP, etc. They decided to arbitrarily delete a number of old or inactive boards without warning or notification. However, I had two boards deleted that were archives for my friends and I - threads of role play, skins, graphics, conversations. Many people had the same thing happen. There was no way to restore them. They were gone forever. The admins did post an apology / explanation. Something like it was a one-time purge to free up server space for an emergency maintenance situation. But, yeah. Nothing is reliable. I try to keep multiple back ups. I used to rely on my external hardrive, however, recently I got a laptop that - for the first time in my computer owning experience - did not come with Microsoft Word, which is what I’ve written absolutely everything in since I was taught to do so in school when I was 11. This meant all my saved stuff was inaccessible to me until I was able to get a discount on what is now a pricey software bundle rather than the basic word processing software that comes standard with most PC’s. This computer also did not have Wordpad. All it had was Notepad.

I had the same thing happen with anything I’d ever made in Photoshop. I’m not talking about the finished piece. Those are jpegs or pngs or gifs. I’m talking about the Photoshop files containing the layers and basically the cheat sheet for how something was made. I bought a copy of Photoshop PS ages ago, and normally I’d been able to simply use the boot disc to reinstall it, but it became incompatible with newer versions of Windows. I found a student discount for a newer version (which at the time had become a pricey software bundle), but that came in a digital version with no boot disc. So when my laptop died and I had to reinstall it, I had to deal with customer service, who ultimately told me I needed to buy a new copy for the new computer (there was also a compatibility issue with the previous version of Photoshop and my new version of Windows). Now Photoshop is a paid fucking subscription and I couldn’t find just old run of the mill, unbundled Photoshop.

So, even though I have those files saved, it did me no good when Photoshop got scammy.

Now I still back up on my hardrive, but I also back up in Google docs. But because I’m now paranoid that will go away or get sold to a company that decides to steal all my content, I also back up in notebooks. I type up my drafts and edit them in Word or Docs, back them up in Word or Docs (whichever I didn’t use), then write it neatly on paper to be stored. I used to print stuff out until our printer conked out. Once a month or so I also back everything up on an external hardrive.

Do not trust the Internet, or the computer to keep your work safe. They do their best, but they’re nothing compared to a sentimental human with an emotional attachment to the work who has a genuine desire to keep it safe and preserved. They’re machines ruled by capitalism at the end of the day.

@dingoes8myrp in particular, in case it helps one day, but also as a general PSA:

Microsoft do let you view and edit Word and Excel files for free through your browser if you make use of OneDrive or their free Outlook email. Also, they had a (now discontinued) free program called WordViewer which you may be able to find with a bit of searching. There was also ExcelViewer. Finally, MS has apps for Android and iOS, which also handle every Word and Excel file I've thrown at them.

There is also the free and open source LibreOffice which CAN open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It doesn't handle complex formatting perfectly but it is very unlikely to be a problem for the average person. And even in the worst case I saw, the results were still readable - just not pretty! I personally use LibreOffice 99.9% of the time now, and it hasn't had a problem with any of my old Microsoft Word or Excel files and I promise it really is a usable alternative.

For images, check if the free and open source Gimp can open them - if you archive them in a format it can handle, you should be ok.

Similarly, if you're compressing (zipping) files for archiving, check and triple check that you're using and open file format. It might not be as efficient but archives you can no longer open are a sad thing.

*imagines a story with an enchanted door mat that changes what it says according to which person steps on it.*

you know what actually pisses me off? when I finally start to feel a smidge of confidence in my writing ability and then some JERK POSTS A SINGLE LINE FROM A TERRY PRATCHETT NOVEL AND IT’S BETTER THAN ANYTHING I WILL EVER WRITE NO MATTER HOW MANY MILLENNIA I SPEND TRYING!

Terry was a professional writer from the age of 17. He worked as a journalist which meant that he had to learn to research, write and edit his own work very quickly or else he’d lose his job.

He was 23 when his first novel was published. After six years of writing professionally every single day. The Carpet People was a lovely novel, from a lovely writer, but almost all of Terry’s iconic truth bomb lines come from Discworld.

The Colour of Magic, the first ever Discworld novel was published in 1983. Terry was 35 years old. He had been writing professionally for 18 years. His career was old enough to vote, get married and drink. We now know that at 35 he was, tragically, over half way through his life. And do you know what us devoted, adoring Discworld fans say about The Colour of Magic? “Don’t start with Colour of Magic.”

It is the only reading order rule we ever give people. Because it’s not that great. Don’t get me wrong, very good book, although I’ll be honest I’ve never been able to finish it, but it’s nowhere near his later stuff. Compare it to Guards Guards, The Fifth Elephant, the utterly iconic Nightwatch and it pales in comparison because even after nearly 20 years of writing, half a lifetime of loving books and storytelling Terry was still learning.

He was a man with a wonderful natural talent, yes. But more importantly he worked and worked and worked to be a better writer. He was writing up until days before he died.  He spent 49 years learning and growing as a writer, taking so much joy in storytelling that not even Alzheimer’s could steal it from him. He wouldn’t want that joy stolen from you too.

Terry was a wonderful, kind, compassionate, genius of a writer. And all of this was in spite of many many people telling him he wasn’t good enough. At the age of five his headmaster told him that he would never amount to anything. He died a knight of the realm and one of the most beloved writers ever to have lived in a country with a vast and rich literary tradition. He wouldn’t let anyone tell him that he wasn’t good enough. And he wouldn’t want you to think you aren’t good enough. He especially wouldn’t want to be the reason why you think you aren’t good enough. 

You’re not Terry Pratchett. 

You are you.

And Terry would love that. 

I only ever had a chance to talk to Terry Pratchett once, and that was in an autograph line.  I’d bought a copy of The Carpet People, which was his very first book, and he looked at it with a faint air of concern.  “You realise that I wrote that when I was very young,” he said, in warning.

“Yes,” I said.  “But I like seeing how authors grow.”

He brightened and reached for his pen.  “That’s all right then,” he said, and signed.

stop putting fish in bowls 2k18!!

If you want a fish in a bowl, get one of these:

(they're blown glass, you can get really beautiful ones and they're almost as resilient as the old pet rock. You can also get them with a glass float bubble so they don't have to sit on the bottom of the bowl.)

I FUCKING KNEW IT.

SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.

AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.

I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.

It doesn’t matter.

Once upon a time - in the era before anyone had heard of google - if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.

GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.

And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on - it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space - but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.

Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history - a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.

(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)

And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…

Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.

And watch as the flames take everything.

Brush the ash from their hands.

Walk away.

Once upon a time - in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” - fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon - or as many years late - as you wanted to.

Because there was a tagging site - del.icio.us - that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.

They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it - many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.

It is like fandom suffered - collectively - a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.

We have never yet recovered.

Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.

I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.

I do not think Yahoo is “bad” - I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.

But they are, historically, bad for US.

And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.

…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.

i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes - tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered. (Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)

The current brouhaha reminded me of this post.

I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark.  It was a real loss.  The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.

But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo.  They weren’t the only ones.  And they won’t be the last.  It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc.  If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.

AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever.  So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories.  Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom - where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever.  Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.

Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away.  Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all - a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).  

So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom.  Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes.  You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are.  If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first.  If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.

Many Flickr users are upset at the changes.  They expected their photos to be archived there forever.  Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay - since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.

I fear that applies to fannish works as well.  Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution.  They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced.  Any commercial service can’t be relied on.

I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said.  He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available.  Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read.  I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines.  :-/

A good post to revive!

I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.

The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.

Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.

Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.

This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?

AO3 is distinctive in that it has an entire organization in place to make sure it continues. (So while nothing is forever, AO3 is about as solid as it gets.) But I’d probably trust DW second most, and I’d trust it over many single-owner not-for-profit fannish spaces.

Nothing on the internet is guaranteed to be forever. It can't be. It's dependent on physical machines which don't run forever; they break, they wear out and they need power. Digital storage mediums don't last forever. Magnetic tape ages and disintegrates. Magnetic drives fail. Flash? Optical disks? They fail too. Servers to access that data storage wear old, fail and become obsolete.

Those physical machines are not free. For them to be renewed and data to be preserved, someone has to pay for it. We don't know which pieces of data will vulnerable or when but none of them has a 100% guarantee.

I worked in IT. The cloud is great. But if something is important to you personally, keep your own copies in an archive you personally control. And for the not-so-personal data, support the work of digital archives like The Way Back Machine and An Archive Of Our Own. They may never intend to to go dark but they too need to pay to keep the lights on.

Alan Dean Foster has written a lot of stories set in their Humanx Commonwealth universe. Nor Crystal Tears is one of my favourites, along with several of the Flinx stories, which are set centuries later with the Commonwealth well established.

All highly recommended. The stories vary a lot, so maybe not all of them will appeal but I do think anyone might (should!) appreciate Pip.

A baby green tree python made its way into Dr Anne Fawcett’s hair and acted like an impromptu hair tie

@sister-forget-me-not

I want to paint wings onto this picture and call it a portrait of Scrap, the Alaspinian minidrag and their pet human, Clarity Held. (From the Flinx novels by Alan Dean Foster.)