Bond. James Fing Bond.

I have been writing ...stuff these last 40 years or so, in many fandoms + some original stuff and a few collaborations. Some are large fandoms, like Star Trek or BBC Sherlock; others were large before being exterminated, like canon Rice Interview with the Vampire; others are smaller, like Brokeback Mountain, or niche, like Hamlet.

All this material is on a private website, including the older and frankly rather cringe bits, because I am still fond of them and of the thrill I felt when the ideas got hold of my pen. The home page is a list of links, ordered by category, so it should be easy enough to locate the fandom of one's interest.

I am planning to post on AO3 sooner or later, but so far time has been lacking.

Now @totallysilvergirl has encouraged me to begin by sharing my website, which is an honour, and a request I cannot deny! So, if any of you feels like having a look, this is the address:

mazaher.org

Chapters: 5/? Fandom: James Bond (Craig Movies) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: James Bond & Q, James Bond/Q Characters: Q (James Bond), James Bond, Eve Moneypenny Additional Tags: Fest Prize, sp00qy, Supernatural Elements Summary:

Thrust into his new role as Quartermaster just as an agent resurrects from the “dead”, Q hasn’t got *time* for mysteries on top of running missions and dealing with mountains of paperwork. Too bad a pair of them have just landed in his lap. At least Bond is being helpful in solving them.

I'm almost there - Just a little more to go - please help!

My Electric wheelchair is sadly now 12 years old and is being held together with gaffer tape and love! I really need a new one and as it is my 50th Birthday I thought I could try to fund-raise and ask folks to please help with buying a replacement chair.

'Just Giving' Wheelchair fund-raiser link Here

About Nixxie - My Wheelchair is my lifeline. I use it inside my flat to get about as my body sadly doesn't work anymore (please read the Just giving page for details on my disabilities). I also use the chair to get out into my garden... and also anytime I need to leave the house - it gets a lot of mileage - hence why it is sadly starting to show its age! About 3 years ago the welding that holds on the arm failed and cannot be repaired - so the arm bracket is held on with gaffer tape and hot-glue. The batteries hardly hold any charge anymore, one of the wheel-arches got plastic fatigue a few years ago and just plain twisted off! Also all the under panels are held on with velcro, tape and hope! (pictures of all this on the donation page).

I originally bought my powerchair in 2012 to go to London as I'd won tickets to visit the Paralympics with a carer... however I don't trust it now to even go a few miles as I'm petrified another bit will fall off!! A while after I bought my chair I went to a Sci-Fi convention and dressed my wheelchair up as the Tardis to match my costume... I liked it so much that my chair has been Tardis cosplaying ever since!

I try my hardest to still live a life worth living - and even though my body needs to recover for ages afterwards I still try to get out every now and then to do something good.

So that's about it - my diagnosis is that I will never get any better (In fact it's likely I'll carry on getting worse as I get older), so I thought to put this page up to get help in the fundraising as wheelchairs cost a huge amount more than people think and sadly there is no way I can afford it alone. So please if you could, donate - Even if it's only a bit - anything towards being able to go out safely would be SO Amazing and I am utterly thankful to you for your aid.

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

AO3 WAS CREATED BY FANS, FOR FANS

AO3 IS RUN BY FANS (VOLUNTEERS, NO LESS)

AO3 IS PART OF THE NON-PROFIT, ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS

AO3 IS NOT OWNED BY ANY COMPANIES AND DOES NOT EARN REVENUE

AO3 OPERATES ON DONATIONS FROM FANS

again:

AO3 deserves every penny I send because it’s been saving my sanity since *checks notes* 2014, and that’s pretty much nothing short of miraculous.

Get an account

There is a process to this- you need to get on a waitlist and then will be sent an email to make an account (at this point in time the wait time is about a week)- but once you have an account you unlock a lot of features that make the whole experience better, such as the marked for later list, turning off the extra acknowledgement for adult content, mute users, and you can see more fics that are only available to people with an account.

2. Use a site skin

This can be as simple as just getting dark mode (the reversi skin), or it can dramatically change the viewing experience. There are premade ones to chose from that require absolutely zero coding. Skins can also just be applied to one platform- for example on mobile devices you can consolidate tags. You can also use skins to hide works or tags you don’t like or that have a lot of fics that clog up search results.

3. Search by things other than fandom

If you love a trope and want to see more of it or love a niche character, click on the tag to search within it. You may get fewer results but it will allow you to scratch that specific itch without having to wade through 100s of pages of results. If you search by a trope, you can then apply a fandom tag on top of that so you see the characters you love.

4. Download fics

AO3 makes downloading fics super easy and you should do it! Whether you know you will be offline, are concerned that a fic could be deleted, you want to read on a e-reader instead, or you just want to be prepared for the next AO3 crash, downloading fics can let you read with no limits. The download button is at the top of each fic and lets you download a bunch of different file formats.

5. Interact with authors

One of the things I love most about reading fanfic as opposed to traditional media is that the people writing the fics are just as into the fandom as you are. So by leaving kudos, commenting, subscribing and checking out any linked social medias, you can get involved or give back to the community. Take this with the warning that authors may not want to interact back with you and have no obligation to, but to some authors a comment on their fic will make their day which is just a good goal to strive for if you liked a fic.

Even if you don’t want to leave a comment or follow an author's socials, a subscription is a nice way to feel a bit included in the writing process. Once you subscribe to a work, series, or author, you get fun emails whenever something updates! It keeps you from wondering if you missed something and makes reading your email a more enjoyable experience.

+1

Don't make it anyone else's problem if you didn’t like a fic

This is a little obvious but it is worth repeating- commenting that you didn’t like a fic changes nothing. If you don't like a fic, you don’t have to finish it! If you did finish it but wish you didn’t, that is what the back button is for. If you keep forgetting you didn’t like a fic and keep clicking on it, you can create a skin that blocks it from view, or mute the author. If you didn’t like the content, filter out the tag describing that thing using "Other Tags to Exclude" within the Sort and Filter menu.  If something is against the AO3 terms of service, you can report it. 

None of those things need to be shared with the author and doing so just makes the internet a less fun place. 

Q paper dolls. Shown as separate drawings below.

but like

every so often i think about all of the deep, nurturing lifelong friendships that only ever happened because one day two internet strangers were like ‘oh hey, we agree on which fictional characters should kiss!’

people who are right now helping each other survive via connections they initially forged by liking the same sailor moon girl or something