“Yusuf,” whispered Nicolo. “Yusuf, are you awake?”

Yusuf whined unhappily. “Sadly, yes.”

Nicolo said nothing.

Yusuf let out a long, slow breath. “What is it?”

Nicolo, sitting cross-legged beside their campfire, shifted as though uncomfortable. “I fear I am ill.”

“Ill?” Yusuf pushed himself up from his bed roll to sit and look at Nicolo better.

Nicolo nodded.

Their camp was undisturbed – there was no acrid smell of vomit, no stench of emptied bowels, and Nicolo did not look feverish. He was perhaps pale, but it was hard to tell given his usual countenance and the effect of firelight on his face.  “Ill,” Yusuf repeated.

“Something has been wrong for a long time,” Nicolo offered. “I have not said anything for fear of worrying you, but… “ He lifted his hand to his chest, flexing his fingers over the spot where, no doubt, his heart beat quickly.

“Nico. We do not get sick.”

“This is not true.”

“We may experience a purging of something that would do us harm, we have demonstrated this in vivid fashion all too often,” Yusuf said, scrubbing his hands over his face. “But true sickness? In all these years we have not suffered, despite walking through plague.”

“It is not the plague,” Nicolo said firmly.

“Then what is it?” Yusuf asked.

Nicolo looked over toward him. “My stomach is constantly unsettled and spoils my appetite,” he said at last. “My heart beats wildly for no reason – there is no danger, and yet it will not cease its clatter.”

“Oh?” Yusuf offered.

“My palms –” And Nicolo held up one hand as if to demonstrate, “—sweat, and my skin prickles. I cannot catch my breath. Sometimes …”  He shook his head mournfully. “I tremble.”

Yusuf felt his own heart pick up its pace, hope unfurling inside his chest like first sunlight. “Is there … do you feel this all the time?”

“No.” Nicolo shook his head. “It comes and goes; it steals upon me in the night on watch; it seizes me when I follow you along these overgrown paths; I wake from dreams and … “ He stopped, swallowed, and his cheeks pinked.

“Nico.”  Yusuf pushed off his blanket and moved to sit at Nicolo’s side. “This does not sound like illness.”

“No?”

“No.” Yusuf gathered up all the courage inside him and reached out to touch Nicolo’s face. “Or if it is, I too am sick.”

Nicolo looked suddenly alarmed, his hand coming up to wrap around Yusuf’s wrist.

Yusuf smiled at him. “Do not worry. I may know a cure.”

Nicolo frowned, looking as serious as Yusuf had ever seen him, and Yusuf had only a moment to watch that expression change as he leaned in and pressed his lips to Nicolo’s own. It was a soft kiss, short, and as Yusuf pulled away Nicolo protested, humming, his free hand grabbing Yusuf’s elbow. “Wait,” he whispered.

Yusuf did so, watching Nicolo as his gaze drifted between Yusuf’s eyes and his mouth.  “Yes?”

Nicolo pulled in a breath and leaned forward, kissing Yusuf gracelessly until Yusuf tilted his head and their lips slid together. It was far from the best kiss in which Yusuf had participated, but no kiss could compare in summoning such joy to Yusuf’s heart that he thought it might burst.

“I am embarrassed to realize that I … that we – all this time? It was this?” Nicolo asked as they parted, and Yusuf laughed out loud.

“My best beloved,” he said simply, and Nicolo smiled hesitantly, hopefully, and they kissed again.

انا أحبك

look at your phone lock screen. that's your reason to keep goin

[x]

You have a statue in Godhome, what are you the god of?

(Click the link inside the brackets and write the first word that comes up)

The ____ (word 1) god of ____ (word 2)

Happy Pride!

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.

Official: Luca's bald phase began.

For @sheafrotherdon

Nicky spotted it on his way from the train station: a red hut on the side of the road, a hand-lettered sign propped next to it that said “Wexford Strawberries. New Potatoes.” The day was fine and the walk was easy, and so Nicky stopped to buy two punnets of strawberries. He placed them carefully into his bag, on top of the books for Joe and the whetstone for Andy and some other things, innocuously wrapped in newspaper, whose existence Copley even now was erasing from several databases.

“That’ll be a tenner, yeah,” said the bored-looking teenager whose phone was far more interesting than a tired-looking man buying fruit, and Nicky handed over the money and thanked them with a smile because that was the polite thing to do, and because he was twenty minutes away from his Joe after three weeks apart. After the red hut was a small housing estate, and after that it was just fields and sky, the grass verge beneath Nicky’s feet and the hedgerows growing tall and green next to him.

Party…

Luca Marinelli will finally get free of THAT hair style. I guess he will have no hair for a while, to get rid of that bald spot. Hopefully it will grow fast, his hair is too damn beautiful, love it.

Tan line themed nicky pinup. Please don’t ask, I haven’t drawn purely for fun in ages so we are going with whatever the heart wants it wants. Sorry.

Yusuf might be falling in love…

Crappy doodle done to get myself to doodle more

i am so in love with you.

Luca Marinelli al 75° Festival di Cannes a Cannes, Francia

Luca Marinelli al 75° Festival di Cannes a Cannes, Francia

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.