what's that, smoke man?

-Overboard-

I want only one thing from critical role right now and that’s a fjord backstory/lore drop. travis please i’m begging. i need to know whats up with the water boy

Yasha: First off, no.

Caleb: You ever have one of those days where you’re just like “this might as well happen.”

Nott: I have had a long day. I am very small. And I have no money… So you can imagine the kind of stress that I am under.

Mollymauk: Eat ass, suck a dick, and sell drugs

Beau: “I’ve never climbed a fence that high before!” And then I woke up at home.

Fjord: And I said “no.” You know, like a liar.

Summary: Caleb meets a stranger who suggests a return to the past, sort of. [Or, how Caleb gets back into magic.] Characters: Caleb Widogast & Vax’ildan Words: 1.3K Notes: Don’t even ask me how this would work. Inspired by sketchingsparrow’s art and my own predictability.

The mourning bells have been ringing all day, low and constant across the whole of the tiny, crooked, mud-and-rainwater town. It is enough to give any man a headache, and more than enough to drive just about everyone to the tavern to drink it away. Half the region seems to be pressed into the taproom, and it takes an age and a half to buy a drink with his dwindling coin and find a booth at the back of the room, out of the crowd.

He does not notice the man until he very nearly sits on him.

“Sorry, friend,” says the voice out of the darkness, and Caleb swears in thick Zenmi. “This seat’s taken.”

jester, the only healer: [goes unconscious]

rest of the party:

Setting aside the fact that hits-to-kudos will always skew higher for longfic and serially-posted works for what should be obvious reasons–if we’re serious about more of a return to Don’t Like, Don’t Read culture (which I certainly do see advocated a lot as an alternative to purity wars and callouts), then you’re going to see some hits with no other feedback. Someone landed on a fic, got as far as the tags or the summary or the author’s notes or the first chapter, decided it wasn’t for them and closed the tab. And that’s okay. That’s what we asked for.

As a person who’s occasionally written some pretty dark fic myself, that’s what I ask for. Know your own limits. Know when to close the tab. I will never ask you why you stopped reading or silently judge you for vanishing from the comments.

So I just get real uneasy when I hear “authors get way more views than comments/kudos and this is a problem we need solve.” Should we be supporting and participating in feedback culture as much as can–yes, absolutely. But if we also want a Don’t Like, Don’t Read culture, then we have to accept the consequences of that, which is that a certain number of hits will be readers leaving without finishing, or reading without commenting because they felt ambivalent about the fic or uncomfortable with some aspect of it they couldn’t overlook, and leaving concrit, even alongside praise, is no longer socially acceptable.

companies running advertising campaigns online are generally seeing a 2% click through rate on their ads. that’s just to get somebody to CLICK something. 

audience engagement has always been low, but to get 10% of readers taking some sort of action after landing on your work, especially taking into account the bounce rate anne mentioned, IS AWESOME. 

if you ask me, the dialogue about the level of engagement authors “deserve” for their fic is starting to sound awfully transactional: “i put up my fic, and you leave me comments.” 

writers have grown resentful because this imagined script isn’t being followed.

but that’s not how it goes. it stops at “i put up my fic.”

ao3 is an archive. it’s a gallery of work. kudos and comments shouldn’t be a requisite; we don’t need to strategize new ways to pull them out of people. if folks want to read anonymously and then disappear, there shouldn’t be a stigma attached to that. 

longfics stall because writers attach their self-esteem to the level of engagement they receive. 

but that’s not what the archive was created for. 

it was created to display work. 

This is the best thing I’ve ever made, enjoy