there is a new scourge on AO3 that I discovered recently...

that scourge is "Placeholder fics". This is thing, where someone posts a "fic" on AO3 with a summary and tags (and sometimes even a complete tag), but when you click on the "fic" the content of the "fic" is something like:

"coming soon" or "in progress" or "an idea I'll write someday"

This is a scourge on AO3 tags that directly violates TOS Section IV, as it is spam (sect B) and inappropriate content (sect H) (not, strictly speaking a fanwork).

If you see these "placeholder fics" on AO3 REPORT THEM. It is easy to do.

Link the fic in report and in the description, you can write something like this:

(This, btw is the actual thing that I wrote to report one of these a few weeks ago)

If you want to get jazzy you can even mention that you believe the "fic" violates TOS IV.H (which is what the AO3 mod told me in the email response to my report) or TOS IV.B.

You can report anonymously if you want afaik. Once you submit a report the AO3 moderators will get back to you at some point to update you on that report and action taken.

This is a simple way that YOU can make AO3 better today. If you see a "fic" that violates TOS in any way, REPORT IT. There are literally millions of fics on AO3 and the moderators can't possibly go through all of them without YOUR help.

I suspect that the people who are posting these "placeholder fics" are probably very young people who are very new to fandom and fanfiction and do not know better. If you are reading this post, and you are one of these people, know that I don't hate you, I just want you to know that what you are doing is a violation of the AO3 TOS and that it fills AO3 tags with spam, preventing readers from finding actual fic to read. There can be (and certainly are) MANY fics on AO3 with the SAME names, if that's what is motivating this.

AO3 isn't a social media site, it's an ARCHIVE for fanfiction. If you want to communicate with your following that you are planning on writing a new fic, use your tumblr, your reddit, your dreamwidth, your substack, your pillowfort, your livejournal, your bird site or whatever the fuck you have to do this. Link your socials in your bio on AO3 if you must. Mention it in the author's notes on your latest work. IDK, just don't post empty "fics" on the ARCHIVE.

Neuralink is going to be eugenics by the way.

It's focused on "curing" disabled people.

There are implants that work for some. But he is expicitly trying to "solve" autism and schizophrenia. He does not want disabled people to exist.

Musk is not a friend to disabled people or animals.

It is going to be eugenics and marketed as cures for disabled people.

I want to expand a little bit:

It is eugenics if it works, and if it does not work.

As it stands, so many animals did not survive animal testing. It is nowhere near ready to be used on people. The FDA fucked up big time and people will probably die, especially those that doctors do not give a shit about and are getting desperate for help. It's not going to be just cryptobros and Elon's bootlickers.

You want to know how I know?

If it wasn't done by Elon Musk, I may have considered it for my photosensitivity. The website for the company has no mention of Elon. Neither does their twitter. LinkedIn might have it, but this is important to know because of his direction with Twitter and Spacex (Remember? Rocket fucking exploded?). People will be put off by his name being associated, and they know that.

Let's say it worked by a miracle, for argument's sake.

Disabled people would be pressured to get a surgery they may not even want. It will be sold as a "cure" for any disability. Anyone who rejects it will be seen as wanting to be disabled.

It can be taken advantage of really easily. Shit goes wrong in IT all the time. I work on an IT helpdesk for a huge company for fuck's sake. Who is going to afford the chips? Who can they be serviced by? It's another bid for a monopoly from Musk because I will promise you that they will come out of it like Apple with intentionally hostile design. You are handing control of the most crucial organ in your body to a company- and even that organ is not fully understood and can unexpected things happen. There's no fucking IT helpdesk for brains.

Do not get it. Discourage anyone from getting it. Encourage people to look into self-advocacy or self-diagnosis to keep anyone from this quack doctor.

Nobody should even try to touch it.

How many prosthesis startups had gone under in the last few years? Who will be supporting people whose Second Sight retinal implants have gone dark? Who will upgrade the firmware when an arm or a leg refuses to work?

I would not trust anything that EM has left his fingerprints on even to implant in a dead rat.

I mentioned it before but it is very striking to me that as of the last tumblr update, there are now no (0) ways to open someone's desktop blog from a dashboard post. like you can't access the url dot tumblr dot com page at all now unless you already know it exists. imo this seems like a canary that personal blog pages will be gone very shortly, which would suck, since to me that is one of the only good things this site has going for it

Correction: you can still open the top-level URL.tumblr.com link from someone's avatar on the dashboard (so, someone you follow). Actually, I should specify. Here's a post on the dashboard with seven ways to access a post:

So you can access the custom blog, but not a post on a custom blog, despite the plethora of links. Very annoying.

No, here’s the worst part: you can indeed get the link of the post you are clicking on and view it on the person’s custom blog!

IT’S JUST ON THE FUCKING MEATBALL MENU TIMESTAMP INSTEAD FOR SOME REASON I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS SITE

oh my god

Tumblr is weird because sometimes you go to a mutual's page and like/reblog half their content like you just broke in their house and imediately ate a little piece of all their food, tried out some of their clothes, sat on their sofa, and then just left.

And sometimes the mutual notices and does the same to your house.

And that's encouraged here. I love it.

Ummm!!! Is anyone else getting comments like these? I wouldn't have noticed anything off about the comments themselves, but check out those usernames. And then in that context, those comments are very generic.

What's happening? What's even the point of spam like this? Is it worth reporting or would it just create unnecessary work for volunteers?

( @naryrising tagging for likelihood of you being more in the loop)

Yes, it's just spam. What's the point: spammers presumably trying to build up some 'realistic' comment history so they don't immediately get detected as spam, before they start spamming for real. You can simply mark them as spam, that doesn't cause any work for us at all because it's an automated system, and marking them helps better train that system to recognize this type of spam.

Meanwhile, on Twitter…

…Sound familiar?

Husband = בעל/Ba'al, with a ע

Onion = בצל/Batzal, with a צ

For all my beloved mutuals who might need it

my dad took some ancestry tests and eventually found out who his father was (and that he has 5+ siblings who are also finding all of this out) and honestly it's been pretty bizarre and emotional so far, naturally

but one of the biggest changes for me is no longer having to give the whole spiel of "oh i know i'm racially ambiguos but hey there's a whole story behind it because this that and here's my father's backstory"

like no i... i just have a grandpa from Nigeria now

...that's way less mysterious >:(

edit: my brother has made a tiktok on the whole situation

Ok I've been begging for the prev tags that are relevent to your preving to be copied bare minimum ever since the tiktok girlies decided tumblr was retro and came in here and started that trend, but now that tumblr has murdered it's interface to the point where we can't click to see the prev tags even if we're not blocked can we please fucking start copying tags, holy fucking shit

you can:

a) Steal the prev tags (=copy them into yours)

b) take a screenshot and post it in your reblog

c) Copy the tags and post them as text in your reblog (best imo, for accessibility, ease of reading, and really long tag essays). This doesn't work in the app, but if you're a mobile user, it can still be done, you'll need to copy the link to the post and open it in your browser app.

generally it's polite to @ the person who's tags it is

The thing that bothers me about cyberpunk-themed smut is that it's always like "oh no, cyborg genitals", and every time it's just a scary-looking penis. If I was going to the trouble and expense of having my junk replaced with heavy machinery, I wouldn't settle for what God intended, all right? I'm talking about robotic appendages which enable modalities of intercourse heretofore unknown to science. You know? Members which by their very existence perturb the ontology of fucking.

In the bedroom confused and frustrated: "I think I might be colourblind"

My robot partner: "It's okay, we can try something else"

Me, crying and cussing trying to give my robot partner a handjob, with a video tutorial entitled "How to solve a rubik's cube" pulled up on my phone:

(chuckle) That’s not old. Just sort of vaguely middle-aged.

(I’ve still got one Samsung mini-notebook that runs XP, so that I can run older versions of Corel Photo-Paint on it.)

Babies, I’m not even 40, I do not consider myself middle-aged regardless of how much silver the last seven years have put into my hair, and I started out with Apple IIe. Then I got Win95. This is like, high school.

:fond: Remember how ANGRY we were about the interface changes? I went and found out how to make WinXP look like Win95 because I hated it so much.

I give you Mac OS 7:

Though honestly it is kind of interesting how much of the interface, location of icons and buttons, and menu options haven’t really changed a whole lot from then to now.

Interface? What even is interface? :)

(later we had an IBM PC with two 5.25'' floppy drives, one for the system and the other for data...)

this was one of my contributions to the Wiggle On Zine! really pleased to be able to participate alongside so many stellar contributors and i also wanna just boop that hellsnake snoot.

One thing I love about Tumblr that wasn't a thing on Reddit is that I can just write whatever the fuck text post I want. No titles. No putting text on images. No algorithms or karma. Just fuckin splatter your mind onto the screen and people will see it. Like god intended.

It’s one of the best things.

My Post: haha in a fleeeeb beepo bingus kinda mood rn

Senior tumblrists:

@sardonic-the-writer original tags

It has unironically been great for my mental health. It’s like the opposite of doomscrolling. Coomscrolling? Idk

Mood I've felt marginally better past 2 days than I have in how long???

Speaking as a longtime Tumblr user

It’s doing me good to see you all here. Like we’ve had some pretty sus UX changes lately (although nowhere near on the level of what Reddit’s doing—mostly it’s been months since they introduced Tumblr Live and we’re all still mad about it), and seeing y’all come stumbling in like “oh this is COOL” is letting me take a fresh look at the site and really appreciate why I love it here.

Love that they put “a sense of impending doom” as one of the symptoms of a heart attack, like girl, that’s just how it is to be alive these days, you’re gonna have to be more specific

This made me chuckle but after scrolling away I felt the need to come back to it.

Because as someone who has felt this I can not stress how different it actually is from anxiety. Which is saying a lot because I have a massive anxiety disorder.

I've only felt this twice in my life - once when I was going into kidney failure due to an infection and again when my body was going into shock due to dehydration and malnourishment due to GI issues - and I can not stress how much it saved my life. It's hard to even put it into words. It's not like a panic attack, or anxiety. It is a horrific gut turning feeling of absolute dread.

Especially if you have anxiety you'll know the difference honestly. It's so much worse. It's every cell in your body and your brain screaming that there's something horribly wrong in a way you've never felt. It's your brain screaming out that you are going to die in a way no panic attack has ever done before.

I can not stress how important it is to get yourself to the ER if you feel this way. Especially if your having other physical symptoms.

This is amazing and incredibly helpful, oh my god. Thank you.

Seconding the above : I was going into shock from internal bleeding, and that sense of “something is gravely wrong” was entirely different from my day-to-day whirlwind of anxiety.

For me, it was very quiet. For me, there was a deep sense that I could just lie down on the floor and not have to ever get up again, no effort required.

That combined wrongness/relief was so weird and so unsettling that I drove myself to the ER.

The “impending” part is really key to that symptom, I think, based on my experience. It’s not the existential dread of late-stage capitalism grinding the world into nurdles. It’s a ghost crow on your shoulder whispering “it’s here, it’s now.”

Impending doom is also a feature of anaphylaxis, something I’m intimately familiar with as someone with mast cell dysfunction.

For me, its the overwhelming, near calm certainty of doom that distinguishes it from the jittery panic of “but something could go wrong.”

There’s no “what if?” There’s no room to question it. It just IS. And it’s very different from the “calm” of disassociation too. I’m not disassociated from myself when it happens. I’m probably actually the most present ever.

I’ve turned to doctors and told them calmly and with utter certainty “I am going to die” and the reaction that calm certainty gets is immediate intervention because doctors also recognize that stillness as the body not bothering to waste any time on fight or flight and just going straight to “death is imminent due to some internal failing, act accordingly.”

And when a patient says something to the effect of “having the fear” it is... it’s different from anxiety. And there’s a *LOOK* that you just know is Doom.

As a doctor, you have VERY little time to take action.

Since, in true Celtic fashion, I’m gonna start saying “it’s too hot” today, here’s the perfect poll…

Reblog & put your answers in the tags because I’m curious and need to know I’m not suffering alone