its always "what are your plans for the future, you should really be planning for the future" and never "wow that character you're obsessed with sounds so cool can you explain them to me. im sure you get them more than anyone else"

gallifrey’s main exports are temporal imperialism and supervillains who look like this

IN A DISTANT and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part . . .

See . . .

"GNU Sir Terry Pratchett" - L-Space Wiki / Ursula K. LeGuin / "Terry Pratchett" - Wikipedia / "GNU" - Urban Dictionary / Going Postal by Terry Pratchett / Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett / Brandon Sanderson / Paul Kidby / The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

End OTW Racism: A Call To Action

A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization

This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies

AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)

As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.

We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.

On AO3

On tumblr

On Twitter

Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!

What Do We Want?

Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:

These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.

OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:

Why Are We Doing This?

16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.

In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.

Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:

By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.

Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.

It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.

This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.

We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.

Good Omens and the greatest trick the devil ever played on me personally

I packed off to college in 1998, before many of you were twinkles in anyone’s eyes. Back then, internet piracy was just really taking off, and it was accomplished by means of FTP server. These servers had “ratios,” meaning that their owners expected you to upload a certain amount of data in certain file formats before you could download a certain amount of data in that format. Most servers were 1:2 (Simplified, I upload 1 .mp3, and I’m allowed to download 2 .mp3s) or 1:3. There was a lot of trash to sort through, but you found your treasures eventually

I took to this internet piracy like most other freshmen took to drinking at frat parties. I stayed in Friday nights downloading music and movies. I had everything my 18-year-old heart could desire - these were the Wild West days of the internet, when the dorms had ethernet, but the universities hadn’t bothered to set any kind of codes of conduct. You could download and upload whatever you wanted, and no one was going to stop you.

One evening, when my roommate was out of the room having a healthy social life or some damn thing, I was on yet another FTP site - a really good one this time, full of stuff I wanted. It was a 1:1 server, an unforgiving ratio, but I had spotted goodomens.mp3, and I had set my lights on trading for that audiobook. I’d read the novel in high school, see, and I wanted to hear if the narrator did any funny voices.

We had ethernet, sure, but you have to understand what speeds were like back then. It took me half the night to upload that many tracks of Third Eye Blind and Goo Goo Dolls and whatever the hell else I had lying around my hard drive in 1998 to reach the ratio, and it probably took the other half to download the audiobook. But eventually I had my prize, and I booted up Winamp (It was a music player; ask your parents.) to listen.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality

It was Queen. More than a gig of Queen tracks strung together and labeled as the Good Omens audiobook. I’d been, as they say, played for a sucker.

Now, there are one of two conclusions you can draw from this little misadventure:

1) Good Omens fandom has had a wicked sense of humor since the very beginning,

or

2) Anthony J. Crowley had the File Transfer Protocol figured out at least as early as 1998, and he was prepared to take advantage of that knowledge.

I know which one I believe.

or

3) Crowley was who uploaded the original mp3, and as with his cassette tapes, after two weeks it just turned into Queen

Wine is exactly like omegaverse fanfiction

I was GOING to say. That when you read a wine menu and see something like "notes of leather and wet stone" you think "did an insane person write this its grapes" but after youve read about wine and growing regions and the effect of oak barrels on aging and tasted a bunch of stuff and given it some thought you find yourself taking a sip of french syrah and thinking "mmm little bit of leather on the finish there" and all of a sudden that shits not crazy anymore. Youve been cooked in the soup. Youve been living in the monkey house.

With omegaverse fanfic. You -

You get the idea. Do the work for me. Please

Sorry tanuki fucker 91. I will be clearer. You get coated in the slick

i am jiggling a credit card in the door crack. life is a rich tapestry come take my hand we will weave it together.

I wanted to add two things! OTW does have fundraising volunteers. The team is called Development & Membership. Here's the description for them on the OTW website:

Essentially, it looks like fundraising organization is under the team in charge of increasing OTW membership, since donation is a factor in determining membership.

The OTW used to send out emails to all AO3 users during drives. However, they've stopped. It's been years since they send out emails to all AO3. I believe during the pandemic they stopped and never started again. They may still send them to previous donators or current members, but I don't recall off the top of my head. I assume this is because the org now has a healthy reserve. (edit to clarify my statements)

Adding context! Especially since I even knew there was a Development department and had just....forgotten somehow. 

I will say I’ve never had an email from AO3 about fundraising that I recall, but my OTW membership waxes and wanes depending on how well I remember to renew it. :D

I’m very pleased about the reserve; it means eventually OTW can perhaps establish an endowment, which while not eliminating fundraisers can provide a lot of stability, and allow a nonprofit to expand its offerings in various and sometimes experimental ways. 

“Let’s not say goodbye…”

(After a very - very - long hiatus I’m gonna try posting my artwork again, starting with this little tribute to 13’s era)

watching someone else watch the dw movie for the first time is sooooo…. here’s my favorite thing…. please keep your expectations so incredibly low….

the take that “enemies to lovers doesn’t have to involve violence!!!” is so boring. knives to the throat or don’t bother

Exactly!

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.

in my experience it goes something like..

HUGE fan of the enemies forced to work together trope. not even in an enemies to lovers way just 2 ppl who absolutely despise each other being forced to tolerate the others presence and being like once we’re done with this i won’t fucking hesitate. top 10 tropes of all time

Is this anything

superimposing the destiel ending onto straight characters is a very fun thing to do i do recommend it. doomsday but rose just doesn’t really come up after that and the bbc aggressively insists the doctor was going to say “i wish you the best my very good pal.” han says “i love you” to leia instead before he gets frozen in carbonite. she doesn’t say anything back and they just don’t bother to rescue him and he’s not really an important character after that. mulder confesses his love to scully, then gets immediately abducted by aliens, followed by two episodes where scully solves the plot problems, eats ice cream, and then dies for unrelated reasons. that’s the ending.

2012-13 AO3 was a beautiful fever dream.

this is objectively the best dr who tiktok ive ever seen

doctor who heritage post