I just wrote 1600 words.
in the wrong point of view.
OK, I can keep the dialogue as is but if it was just dialogue it would be a script.
β

titsay
ojovivo
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PR's Tumblrdome
Xuebing Du
Misplaced Lens Cap
todays bird
π©΅ avery cochrane π©΅

@theartofmadeline

The Stonewall Inn

Andulka
almost home
TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
Noah Kahan
official daine visual archive
Cosimo Galluzzi

Jar Jar Binks Fan Club

seen from Germany

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@cathrine-rose
I just wrote 1600 words.
in the wrong point of view.
OK, I can keep the dialogue as is but if it was just dialogue it would be a script.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.
Reblog if you're okay with people coming into your DMs with the "you seem really odd and your blog intrigues me, do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters"
I've had occasion to ponder one of life's mysteries and finally thought to ask about it here: A couple of times a year, I'll see a van parked on some ass-random roadside selling Bonsai. It's always a different van, different guy, I've seen several in one day and in many cities from Seattle to Santa Fe.
...What's the deal here? Roadside fruits I get, and roadside honey is a thing out here. But BONSAI?? And these vans are always parked somewhere vaguely sus with almost no foot traffic- Highway off-ramps, parking lots of stores that have been torn down, the fucking emergency pullout on a mountain road. Most of them have like, professionally printed signs and pole-flags too.
I like I don't think its a criminal conspiracy or find the bonsai vans sinister but like? What's the business angle here? Is there a casual bonsai market I don't know about? Why are you parked in THE loneliest corner of the county? What's going on with these guys?
I've always meant to ask but again, they're parked somewhere that's hard to pull over for or walk to, and I only seem to see them when I'm already 20 minutes late for something.
I misread bonsai as Borzoi
W(and I say this with feeling) TF?
The 25th of May is eternal
The demands of the Treacle Mine Road Republic resonate strongly in the Roundworld of today 25/5/25 Truth- The demand that the people should be told the truth by those in power, Kings or Presidents, politicians or journalists. As I was told when I was a small child; What you do isn't as important as the fact you need to tell the truth when you are asked about it Justice- Equal justice under the law, that crimes should be prosecuted with equal justice (and with the corollary of equal mercy) regardless of the background of the accused Freedom- The four freedoms, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion (or association), Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear Reasonably priced love- Service providers are entitled to set a fair wage, and just because you can get a service for free somewhere else does not entitle you to demand that service from someone making their living providing it for a price. Whether it's sex work, emotional labor or art. And a hard-boiled egg-I think of this as similar to Bread and Roses. It's not enough to have the staples but also the small things that get you through the day. "But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg."

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
hello Iβve been thinking about this a lot lately. The anonymity of tumblr means that I associate my idea/image of you with your icon and sometimes I look at peopleβs icons and Iβm likeΒ βhmmmβ¦.what is that and why?βΒ
so pls reblog this and comment in the tags the meaning behind your icon and why you chose it. this is a social experiment. do it for science pls.
Thinking about how when my oldest brother took Japanese classes his professor was like your pronunciation is really good π but you need to watch movies that aren't about the Yakuza because you sound like a criminal
somewhere in this beautiful world there is a man who sounds like Paulie Walnuts because he learned English by watching the Sopranos
Really in love with some of the notes on this post
Imagine you're meeting the guy who carried out the Russian Revolution. You hear him give a speech in Russian, and then moments later he speaks to you in your own country's accent.
Rathmines was and continues to be a posh area of Dublin. Please note that James Connolly, literally a martyr of Irish independence (though how much *he* wanted to be a martyr as opposed to Pearse wanted the whole Rising to be martyrs I'd be open to debate) was the son of Irish immigrants living in Scotland and all his life spoke with a Scottish accent. He had moved back to Ireland as a socialist organizer. Before a visit of George V to Dublin Connolly stated "We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes."
cop donut stereotype is bad because being fat and eating many donuts : hot. but police officers: not hot. the humble donut, one of the most sexual foods, the reliable donut. we should take this practice and give it to a different more sexy profession, such as electrician, or professor of linguistics
Hmm, what profession is out all night (and so wants coffee and donuts) driving around so they pass donut shops (to stop in get coffee and donuts) and cafes/bakerys want them to come back?
Obviously the only profession really dedicated to cleaning up the streets. Binmen/garbage men
knights can be created by other knights like vampires except instead of biting them they wack them on the shoulders with swords
the honey they produce is chivalrous deeds
DO NOT listen to that tagger. That is a more modern take on knighthood. Nobles could knight knights, knights could knight knights. Before that, any guy with a sword and a horse could just be a knight. Just because the monarchy is holding all the knight rights in England doesnβt mean that is the way it is supposed to be. Knight anarchy.
π‘οΈ If youβre reading this, I have knighted you. Fuck all those chivalric orders that popped up during the Crusades. Knight anarchy. π‘οΈ
In modern times the only way official people will *acknowledge* a knighthood as official is if you are inducted to an Order of Chivalry, the lowest rank of which is knight. This is like getting added into a deceased monarch's "club for all my best pals, max occupancy 15". Back in the day a knighthood was more like getting Mentioned in Dispatches. Your military boss saw you did good and rewarded you. and if you got lucky you got money with the knighthood. Then James I (and IV) needed cash and came up with hey, gimme a small fortune and you and your son and your son's son etc get to be Sir and that is a baronet, which the English stopped doing in the 60s
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasnβt, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although itβs true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided itβs properly warned for, thereβs a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
youβre referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole βnother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJβs act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ainβt into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if itβs fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if Iβm wrong; I donβt think written content about this stuff was banned?) then itβs not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but thatβs what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group whoβd sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted theyβd made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.netβs HTML restrictions were so great that users couldnβt use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didnβt allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe itβs just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - itβs a lot more complicated than you might expect, and thereβs a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I donβt read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics.Β They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross.Β But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying βyeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!β or even βyeah, I wouldnβt do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!βΒ Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it.Β So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you donβt get to write or read that?Β No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it onβsometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes notβis not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality.Β And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Letβs take a closer look at that βAo3 supports pedophilia!β shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse.Β It was not meant to titillate or arouse.Β It was meant to horrify.Β It was seldom explicit.
2) Thereβs a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) Iβve been in fandom for a decade and a half.Β When people start getting upset at βomg pedophilia, think of the children!β the fics they are usually objecting to arenβt actually pedophilia.Β Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex.Β And people donβt like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they donβt like.
Letβs look closer at Strikethrough, shall we?Β I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too.Β But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative βfamily valuesβ group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used βbut think of the children, itβs pedophilia!β to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didnβt like.Β And one time taking down the worst of it wasnβt good enough for them.Β No, this was step one on a moral crusade.Β If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands.Β This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted.Β It starts with anything that can get labelled βpedophiliaβ or βincestβ because thatβs low-hanging fruit.Β But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality.Β Then anything with teen sexuality.Β Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con.Β Then whatever is next on their list.Β It doesnβt stop until theyβve won the point and nothing but suitably βfamily-friendlyβ fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service.Β You canβt break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of βfair useβ and a team of lawyers on call).Β You canβt use AO3 for commercial advertising.Β And you canβt post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positionsβyou know, the stuff that actually hurts kids.Β Other than that?Β Itβs fair game.Β You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge.Β There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
Weβve been down that road.Β It doesnβt lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These βWarriorsβ (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didnβt like.
If youβre carrying out harassment of people right now because theyβre posting works with sexual elements you donβt agree with? (And itβs always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strangeβ¦.) If youβre doing that, youβre also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you donβt like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various βpurgesβ that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: thereβs that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like βpaeodophiliaβ.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Governmentβs attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOSTΒ of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. Iβve been on the site since 2002. They may not haveΒ βofficiallyβ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during βNew Storyβ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.Β
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white βyouβre either all right or all wrongβ thinking, but itβs important to understand what actually happened before going βew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to postβ because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and βall ships are valid UNLESSβ. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and weβve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to justβ¦ not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship youβre advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; itβs an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if youβre a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that arenβt defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOUβRE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. Β I was there. Β Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. Β People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments β a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Β Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Β Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical. Β
LJ was, for many people, central. Β
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time. Β
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandomβs territory just deletedΒ like that, was very very scary. Β People didnβt know who was next. Β Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. Β And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Β Some people even voluntarilyΒ deleted their content as a form of protest. Β It was a bad time.
You do notΒ have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Β Tagging is a thing. Β And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. Β It is not rightΒ to expect it to be curated for you. Β And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna sayΒ βthings that donβt harm anyoneβ but I realize you can argue that. Β If you get triggered, thatβs upsetting. Β That could be considered harm. Β And I have sympathy for that. Β I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. Β I have pretty specific triggers, and people donβt always think to warn for them because they arenβt that big a deal for a lot of people. Β Or itβs sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if youβre okay with certain kinds of kink, youβre okay with this. Β So Iβve been blindsided by it before. Β And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately thatβs not an ironclad obligation. Β Itβs a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! Β The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! Β It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasnβt my fault because I didnβt deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. Β My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. Β I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. Β She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That?Β He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckinβ guy. Β (She was lucky to escape. Β I have immense respect for her.) Β And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were investedΒ in it. Β And because this was early 2000β²s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
βYeah, but if sheβs writing it for therapy, she doesnβt have to post it where other people might have to see it!β I hear you say.
But like β¦ what the hell??? βShut up, donβt talk about it, itβs bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!β is something used againstΒ folks with trauma.
βThis isnβt good for me, I canβt talk about this, I canβt be your audience for this,β thatβs fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. Β You should learn to say those things! Β It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. Β Iβve only really been able to openly sayΒ βI was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from itβ for the past couple of years, tops. Β I couldnβtΒ talk about it before that. Β Couldnβt! Β And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you donβt need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. Β I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All yβall fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I donβt like it either!
But that fucked up shit? Β That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. Β You donβt have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesnβt keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. Β It wouldnβt have made me feel safe when I was 16 and didβt want what was going on. Β It doesnβt make me feel safe now. Β I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesnβt make the world safer for people like I was. Β It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you donβt like. Β Itβs a skill, you get better with practice. Β Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing itΒ now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Β Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. Β The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. Β The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. Β A g a i n. Β
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you donβt have to witness harm to imaginaryΒ people. Β The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault. Β (It worked! Β The neighborhood rallied! Β He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didnβt read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Β Pretty sure not having read it didnβt keep him from doing it. βCause he fuckinβ did it. Β And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is notΒ the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Β Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
Iβm a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you donβt want history to repeat itself someday.
Hereβs the thing, also: it doesnβt stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind ofΒ βobjectionable contentβ rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Letβs look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they donβt like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shitβas fandoms doβover the idea ofΒ βreplacingβ Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing listsβone that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be postedβdecided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldnβt have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesnβt happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, thereβs no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and donβt like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3β²s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasnβt primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemyβs work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because itβsΒ βfor girlsβ and thus sucks. Sometimes, itβs one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We canβt force people to like each other. We canβt force people to be nice to each other. But we couldΒ take away fandom bulliesβ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.Β Β
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time donβt see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you donβt have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isnβt even there to be seen. Iβve been through that once. It didnβt help anyone. It didnβt fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Donβt try to force others to do it for you. Thatβs not cool. You arenβt protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Alsoβ¦ maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kidsβ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And itβs still up to this day, though it hasnβt been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess itβs my turn to take a shot at this.
Iβm a nold. Iβm in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called theΒ βfeminist sex warsβ.Β If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Womenβs RightsΒ by Nadine Strossen
A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though itβs not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I havenβt read βDefending Pornographyβ for a while β I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidthβs payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself β but hereβs a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like βThe Joy of Gay Sexβ, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didnβt make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of βobsceneβ material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first?Β βThe Joy of Gay Sexβ and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed β sexually explicit or not β to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores.Β Guess what wasnβt seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.Β
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) youβd go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases.Β Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses werenβt impacted and didnβt have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Hereβs the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar whoβs looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, againstΒ the people who are most vulnerable.Β They wonβt come for actual abusers, theyβll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and whatβs happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, weβve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that givesΒ power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Donβt fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didnβt have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldnβt walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like βyeah no condoms are not a crime,β but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
Itβs been touched on a little before but really itβs hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didnβt know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesnβt really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didnβt have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) Itβs only years later, reading fanfic history posts that Iβve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didnβt even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and youβll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblrβs purity crusade.
If you havenβt been TOSsed you really donβt get it, imo.
If you havenβt spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really donβt get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going βI really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.β
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we donβt remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
Just to add my voice to the historical context here, but I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strike through back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub (hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it).
If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with my post here, and then follow all of the links.
By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the βWarriors for Justice,β a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who basically called anyone they didnβt like βpedos.β Their real main targets were LGBTQA. Pedophilia was really just a handy excuse.
Read and learn, young βuns. Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. Itβs your right to be squicked, itβs your right to be uncomfortable. But itβs also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you donβt like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the βWarriors for Justice.β You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.
And if that doesnβt convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact:Β sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that itβs not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.
It happens every single time. Every. Time.
Now Iβm not saying that Tumblr wasnβt allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.
Itβs the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. Iβve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile,but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing beacuse Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.
At least fanfic writers have AO3 at least. Right now itβs the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.

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Buddie Fanfic idea
So, for reasons that don't need explaining at this point, I've stumbled into 911/Buddie.
And now I want to write a fanfic where Probationary Firefighter Diaz joins Station 118 and instantly has a mutual hatred with Firefighter Buckley who goes by Buck.
I'd try and write it as they have obvious history with each other and let the reader assume that this is an Exes to Enemies to Lovers thing.
Until I plot twist at the end of Act 1 and "Buck" is Daniel Buckley.
okay hang onhang ON this whole plot hinges on an Eclipse and ive been thinking solar eclipse but theyre talking about totality after 8pm so im like ah okay mustve misremembered! its a lunar eclipse! but they just said the moons going to pass in front of the sun??????? at 8pm????????
im not an eclipse expert but uh. HUH???????
dinner can sometimes mean midday meal, but thats neither 8 am nor 8pm!!!!! so!!!!!! HUH!!!!!!????
well, since you asked,
Historically, often! And randomly! Among the working class! But more recently, from mine own grandma!
My grandmother was the cook at a nursing home my entire life and I'd often go in and help her with things like setting tables, writing the menus, bussing the tables, dishwashing, simple things that a kid who didn't know what ServeSafe was could do lol
Meals were Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper. I did ask her once why she called dinner lunch and she said because dinner wasnt a time, but a Big Meal, and midday was better to have a Big Meal because it fuels you for the rest ofnyour work day!
She was from London so it being a britishism or even a european thing (since it comes from old french) makes sense and while Foxglove King didn't have a clear setting, given the genre assuming Vague European Court with Britishisms seemed fair.
Regardless, it doesn't matter because I don't think that much thought went into the book at all. It was just a carboard backdrop to get the main character and the love interest to kiss lol
My grandparents also call a big midday meal dinner! They frequently tease about the use of the word lunch!
They are from Southern USA, Tennessee and Georgia.
Undoubtedly you put more thought into this post than the author did into that book.
Can confirm dinner as midday and supper as evening meal in use by all my grandparents (irish american massachusetts, irish american missouri, georgia, more massachusetts, boston-turned-miami jewish)
Cinio in Welsh means dinner and is used to mean either lunch or tea depending on context
Irish here, Sunday dinner is definitely done by 4-ish (unless you got the roast in the oven late).
Historically, working class people would have a big meal in the middle of the day to keep them going. The upper class esp in the social Season would rise late and party late so dinner was gradually moved to later in the day. This sometimes is seen as a contributor to the rise of afternoon tea, as the Duchess generally credited with making a light afternoon snack fashionable found she had a "sinking feeling" around 4 p.m.waiting for her main meal
superior breakfast sandwich vessel
biscuit
bagel
english muffin
croissant
tortilla
I hate breakfast sandwiches
results/I'm bald/what's wrong w americans/etc
This is thick-sliced grilled bread erasure
*squints* I can't seem to see the option for Baguette.
How else to I vote for a breakfast roll
what if we all became terrorists and bombed automakers administrative buildings all over the world?
i think we should uninstall the ford apps on the phones of whoever came up with this
Continuing list of stuff from the 1920's I didn't ask to repeat: car makers trying to increase sales by victim-blaming pedestrians. (cf:invention of jaywalking)
Time to get to work.
Before anything else, we need spreadsheets. This is quite the endeavor, so if you want to help, I'd be much appreciative! (Please don't just start a sheet on your own. There's a method I've got going.)
The plan is to give each genre its own spreadsheet document--so anime will have one, books will have one, TV shows will have one, and so on and so forth. Within these, each genre will have 28 tabs: one for each letter of the alphabet, one for titles beginning with a number or punctuation mark, and one for fandoms over 100 works long. Why 100? Because that's about the point I estimate we'll have to start breaking a fandom down into chunks for people to save. Obviously you can save as many as you want, but you'll be limited to claiming chunks of 100 at a time.
Here's why I'm asking for help with this part of the project: in the anime/manga section, the letter A alone has easily 100 titles. And that's just one letter, in just one section. The letter S looks to be three times that. You can imagine having to do this for nine separate genres. So if a couple of people could help me, I can grant access to the master sheets and get examples filled in. All you'd have to do is copy the template and start copy/pasting titles. It's time-consuming, but easy.
Please respond TO THIS POST by 21 September 2022 if you're interested in helping with this stage of the project! I'd like to be able to start collecting an actual archive of saved material by 30 September, and the more hands onboard the less we all have to do to make that happen. Please do not indicate your interest by DM or asks--while I appreciate the people who've reached out to me that way to get started, it's really hard to keep track of.
Let's get moving!
I'll do a save down. Has it been decided how that will be done? are we just saving works or also comments? any preferences for software/format

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I donβt think so, but my parents had me pretty late in life. My mom was 40 when I was born, so if any of my great-grandmas were still alive by then, I have no memory of them.
Not only did I meet my great grandmother (and know her as well as a 10 year old can know a 80 year old) my I have documented proof that my great grand father (same parent, different grand parent) met and knew and lived in the same house as his grandmother.
Direct byproduct of being neurodivergent and growing up isolated from your peergroup is having no idea when it's appropriate to define someone as your friend
Is this person I met yesterday my friend? What about this person I've been talking to every day for three months? What about this person I've known since middle school? Is friend a title I have to earn? What are the limits of friendship? Is it a static state, make-or-break, or is it some endless dance-dance-revolution style cavalcade of prompts and challenges and social cues I have to hit perfectly to keep it up? Does it bend? Does it break? I don't fucking know man I just work here.