main

if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.

if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to

PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply

so couple of clarifications. comments are disabled as default for primary blogs that have their likes disabled. they are seemingly enabled for all other blogs that have replied to posts

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) | Directed by Robert Wiene

Körkarlen (1921) | Directed by Victor Sjöström

Häxan (1922) | Directed by Benjamin Christensen

Safety Last! (1923) | Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor

Sherlock Jr. (1924) | Directed by Buster Keaton

The Gold Rush (1925) | Directed by Charlie Chaplin

FAUST (1926) | Directed by F. W. Murnau

Metropolis (1927) | Directed by Fritz Lang

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) | Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) | Directed by Dziga Vertov

L'Age d'Or (1930) | Directed by Luis Buñuel

M (1931) | Directed by Fritz Lang

Freaks (1932) | Directed by Tod Browning

The Invisible Man (1933) | Directed by James Whale

It Happened One Night (1934) | Directed by Frank Capra

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) | Directed by James Whale

Modern Times (1936) | Directed by Charlie Chaplin

La Grande Illusion (1937) | Directed by Jean Renoir

Bringing Up Baby (1938) | Directed by Howard Hawks

The Wizard of Oz (1939) | Directed by Victor Fleming

Rebecca (1940) | Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Citizen Kane (1941) | Directed by Orson Welles

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) | Directed by William A. Wellman

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) | Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid

Double Indemnity (1944) | Directed by Billy Wilder

Brief Encounter (1945) | Directed by David Lean

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Directed by William Wyler

Fireworks (1947) | Directed by Kenneth Anger

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) | Directed by John Huston

The Barefoot Contessa (1954) is the life story of a poor Spanish woman who rises up to become one of the most famous actresses in the world. The movie does not bother to give her character traits beyond that she loves to have sex and also that she loves to run around barefoot (the fetishistic connotations are inescapable). She falls in love with a count and ultimately marries him. The big twist at the end of the movie is that her new husband had his dick blown off in the war and so they can't have sex (because, tragically, he never learned how to do hand stuff). Then he murders her for having an affair.

In 1978, Ina Garten bought a specialty food store that, for some unfathomable reason, someone had already named The Barefoot Contessa after this movie, which in 1999 became the title of her bestselling cookbook, which was then followed by a popular Food Network show. Now all of us need to deal with there being a TV cooking show called The Barefoot Contessa as part of the background radiation of our lives.

tags by @miscelium

Anthologies of short fics on AO3 cause huge obnoxious hurdles for anyone wanting to find or avoid works like yours, and also muck up the numbers for anyone doing a stats dive.

Anything real that someone might try to accomplish with an anthology can be better accomplished with a series or with tags.

Teal deer: I want to read your promptober fics. Post them as fics and not as fake chapters so I can find them and read them.

--

Here's the nitty gritty.

Anthologized works cannot be filtered for word or chapter counts:

I like to read fic under 5k, so I do this:

Someone else likes longfic, so they do this:

Only people who do NOT want to see oneshots will see your oneshots.

--

All tags on anthologies cannot be trusted and must be assumed to be inaccurate:

This is true of literally every tag on an anthology, including fandoms, ships, categories (m/m, f/f, etc.), and archive warnings. I want to read Cleric Beast/Hunter vivisection fic. Someone else wants to read Cleric Beast/Hunter fic and is squicked out by vivisection. Your anthology features a Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop date fic and a Sam/Dean vivisection fic, and therefore carries both tags. I find a coffee shop fic I don't care to read, and the other person never finds the Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop date fic of their dreams because they're filtering out vivisection. Mad lib that example with literally any combination of tags and it's the same. Only people who do not want to read the anthologized fics will find them. (PS the tag for Cleric Beast/Hunter doesn't exist, I should get on that)

--

Anthologies throw false positives for crossovers:

According to AO3's search filter, a crossover is any work which carries tags for more than one distinct fandom. In our example above, Bloodborne and SPN fics were anthologized together. Neither fic is a crossover, but the anthology will be removed from searches that exclude crossovers, and will spam the search results of anyone looking specifically for Bloodborne or SPN crossovers.

--

The ratings on anthologies cannot be trusted:

An anthology must be labeled for the highest rated fic it contains. If you anthologize porn without plot or ultra graphic vivisection in the same work as as tooth rotting fluff, the whole thing will have to be labelled as explicit (or unrated). People looking for explicit work will find the the G rated fluff, people looking for G rated fluff will filter it out because it's erroneously labeled as explicit. Only the people who do not want to read the work will find it. Are we noticing the pattern here?

--

To break the pattern a bit:

Individually posted short works belong on the archive.

Archive of Our Own is aptly named, it's an archive. It is designed to house fanworks, all fanworks, no matter how small, and the search function is designed to make those fanworks easy to find and sort. You are not "spamming" by archiving any quantity of correctly labeled archive materials. If someone clicks on a tag and sees a front page full of your works and decides they hate you, they can just filter out your username or change the sort criteria. But chances are they'll go "sweet, twenty new works for the thing I searched for!"

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Anthologies muck up the statistics.

I do a fair bit of searching AO3 to grab numbers rather than to find fics to read. For these numbers to have any meaning, we have to assume that the fics that show up in the searches are correctly labeled.

If I run two searches like this, I can say that these characters have about the same amount of fic. But anecdotally, Elden Ring oneshots are anthologized more often than Silmarillion oneshots. Perhaps there are actually more Ranni fics on AO3 than Turin fics, and they're lumped together and hidden from the site stats while more of the Turin fics are being counted individually.

If I wanted to dig deeper and crunch some numbers, the problem would intensify. What if I wanted to scrape all the metadata and say there were so many millions of words of Ranni fic? If I wanted that to be accurate, I'd have to manually go through nearly one thousand works to exclude the "chapters" that aren't fics with Ranni in them and have been falsely included in the Ranni tag.

And all this assumes that an anthology tagged "Ranni the Witch (Elden Ring)" even has Ranni in it at all. Overtagging is always an issue, but anthologies are often tagged for future fics the author intends to write and include in the figure; not even trace of nuts tagging or tagging, but literally tagging a fic that does not exist. (I see this with highly specific kink tags on kinktober fill anthologies often enough that it's a personal pet peeve in addition to a data accuracy pet peeve).

From another angle, is the sidebar for the Elden Ring tag that reports 2200 slash fics to 760 femslash fics accurate? Is it safe to assume that slash is anthologized at the same rate as femslash in the Elden Ring fandom? I've seen anthologies with "chapter" counts in the hundreds, how different would the sidebar look if all those fics were accurately labeled?

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But Osterby, what if someone wants to subscribe to my kinktober fills but not my other work?

Put it in a series.

--

What if someone doesn't want to see my coffee shop AU fic while scrolling through my profile which is primarily vivisection kink fic?

Thanks for thinking of me! I'll filter out the coffee shop AU tag, or I'll scroll through your vivisection kink series.

--

How will people know what order to read my loosely connected oneshots in?

That's what a series is for.

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How will someone find all my works with the same OC/setting/kink/trope/fandom?

Series. Or tags. You can give your own OCs and AU settings their own custom tags.

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How will someone subscribe to my kinktober fills if they're not all in the same work?

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What if someone doesn't want to filter and still hates my works?

Skill issue. On their part. Don't prioritize haters over both your intended audience and over people who want to filter out 99% of your work but still want to read that one Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop fic. And also you should block haters, not try grovel to them.

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What if I want to bury a fic between other stuff and make it harder to find?

Try minimal tagging, nonspecific tags, empty or uninformative summary, and archive locking.

--

If you've stuck with me this long, I've probably convinced you to at least look into the series function.

To create a new series, just make up the name for it while posting (or editing) a fic. It's a ticky box under "associations", right above the "this work has multiple chapters" ticky.

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If you go without it you feel unwell in a way that you never usually feel unwell. Sweating, tired, sleepy, headaches, irritable, depressed, etc. For example when I was in opium withdrawal I got incredibly depressed in a way that I’ve never been before or since. When you quit caffeine you might get super bad headaches even if you never usually get any headaches.

Thoughts of it regularly bother you and the thoughts go away once you’ve taken it but only temporarily. Unlike with a food craving which usually stays away once you’ve satisfied it or distracted yourself from it.

You find yourself rationalizing with yourself why you should break your own rules about how much you can take and how often. For example you might only let yourself drink alcohol every four days but start thinking that three days is actually close enough to four days, right? Especially if this happens regularly.

You’re using it so often that you feel the need to lie about how much you use because other people might think it’s concerning

If the substance or activity is nearby it’s genuinely difficult to not consume it or participate in it in a way that’s really frustrating.

You feel bad when you’re not on it and your brain tells you “if you just take the thing you wouldn’t feel this way”

You can only feel “whole” or “normal” when you’re on a substance even though it’s a recreational drug

what that means is that I have a folder on my computer with the name of my url with an index.html file in it, and when i click on that file to open it in a browser I get a simple page with a list of years and months. selecting a specific month will send me to a list of the posts i made or reblogged in that month, similar to tumblr's own archive page. the contents of the post including images are stored locally on your machine.

It can also make a separate index file that organises posts by tag, which is great if you're a consistent tagger, but it will list every single tag you've ever used so it can take a while to find the tag you're looking for in the list if you're a habitual tag commentator. generating the tag archive also takes a while depending on how many posts have to be processed.

you can make it back up any blog as long as it's not set to private. I have backups of both my main and sideblogs and it keeps them in separate folders.

it's had some trouble going all the way back to the start of my main blog in 2012 just by sheer volume of posts, but by making it fetch posts from one month at a time I've been able to go back to 2015 (that's tens of thousands of posts), which was good enough for my purposes.

1. Do not do age verification.

Oh no I dropped my link, what a horrible thing! Sure hope this doesn't get reblogged until it reaches users from the UK and Brazil!

1. ‘Mother Tongue’: a 2000 word short story which is a sidebar to my novel Second Self. You don’t need to have read the book. The story comes directly after a scene between Tain and an early career Garak (he’s about 19 or 20). Mila makes a very small appearance too. The piece was written without any intention of being published, but turned out to be useful for the purposes of this workshop.  

2. Critical commentary: a short piece reflecting on some of the creative and technical choices I made while writing the short story. This is a type of essay that we would set our creative writing students, back when I lectured in creative writing.

3. Writing exercises: a handful of creative writing exercises that I took along for attendees, and one that we devised together in the session, based on the discussions we were having.

1. Scene crafting exercise

2 characters

One starts out more powerful than the other

Have the balance of power shift between them at least twice

Use a ‘prop’ as an external focus for emotions and/or power dynamics

1300 words max

Bonus: Take a look at just about any scene from ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ between Sisko and Garak, and particularly their last one. See how these scenes work, using the points above. (They don’t use many props, although perhaps you can count Andy Robinson’s eyelids.)

2. Five things exercise

Read this story: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16010840 (it’s a Tolkienfic; one day I’ll get round to writing a DS9 story that works for this!)

Try the challenge for yourself

Rest your story for a few days. When you go back to it, can you edit it under 1000 words?

3. Threshold exercise

An impromptu exercise that came up through discussion. We talked about these two sentences from the story and how they revealed character and situation:

“He followed her into the house. Eleven years he’d lived here, and he could count the number of times he’d come through the front door on his fingers.”

Doorways are portals: crossing them can be symbolic, depending on the character and the situation.

Pick a doorway. It could be the way into Quark’s Bar, the doors of the turbolift, the way into someone’s quarters.

A character is going to cross that threshold. In three sentences max., using third person limited, convey what crossing that threshold means to them.

For example: Rom going into the bar after he’s set up the union; Jake going into the bar the first time he can legally buy alcohol; Garak going into the bar to get Quark to source the biotech for him to fix the wire.

Listen, here's the thing: Dreamwidth is not slick. It is not fancy. Its base code was originally put together some two decades ago or more, and it looks like it. It can't do much with images and definitely not with video—like, I think there's some way to embed video, but I have no idea how to do it, and hosting it on Dreamwidth is, uh...

The point is! Dreamwidth is a lot different from Tumblr. It's closer to Tumblr than it is to Facebook or Instagram, but it's a lot more old-school internet than Tumblr is. And that means that, for anyone who wasn't on the internet some ten, fifteen years ago, there's probably going to be a steep learning curve. It can take more effort to post things there, and more effort to find your people, its image hosting capacity can charitably be described as both "limited" and "poorly organized", and overall it may still never be the kind of website where you, personally, will want to spend a lot of time or do a lot of things. Dreamwidth does not and will never have an app, for pretty much the same reasons as AO3.

Dreamwidth is predominantly text. Your feed will not be as visual as on Tumblr. -> You can embed videos from e.g. YouTube, and you can post your own images/video, but Dreamwidth itself cannot host the images/video (like Tumblr can), so you will need to host them somewhere else, like imgur, and upload via link in the New Post editor.

Dreamwidth's New Post editor is very similar to Tumblr's. You can work in Rich Text (click buttons to do all the formatting), or HTML (code all formatting manually).

Your feed is similar to Tumblr's. You see the posts from the people and communities you follow, most recent first, and only those. -> When reading, you can filter your feed (Reading page) and see only posts from people, or only posts from Communities.

No reblogging. Everything you post on your blog stays on your blog. It will be seen by fewer people -- this is a pro and a con. It will never spread wildly out of your control, and nobody can add anything to your posts.

Multiple levels of privacy. You can set your entries viewable to everyone, just friends, or just you, on an entry-by-entry basis. It can be changed after posting. Within "just friends", you can create more defined filters, and e.g. show an entry only to your Severance fan friends and not to your 911 fan friends. Or whatever.

There are comment sections under each post! You can delete comments on your entries. (You can also write very long comments. Up to 16k characters.)

First, Dreamwidth does have its own image hosting, it's just non-intuitive for anyone used to Tumblr or Facebook or Instagram or what-have-you. Free users get 500 MB, which is not a lot for artists; paid users get 1.5 GB, and premium paid users get 3 GB. You can only embed images uploaded to Dreamwidth on Dreamwidth. Find out more about Dreamwidth's image hosting at this link. Again, this isn't really a lot of space for artists, and to the best of my knowledge there currently isn't a way to buy more storage space; your best bet may be to set up an account at squidge.org to host images instead.

Second, there's no native reblogging feature. It is technically possible to do with the use of a third party script, but it's not something that's built into Dreamwidth. You can find out how to reblog things on Dreamwidth at this link. What it effectively does is copy the post to share on your own account, without informing the original poster, so it's not quite the same as a Tumblr reblog, but if reblogging is something you rely heavily on, you may like this workaround.

Third is something really cool about Dreamwidth's cut tags (the native "read more" feature): You can close them. You know how on Tumblr, the second you add a Read More, everything you put after that is under the Read More? Not so on Dreamwidth! If you close the cut tag, you can have more stuff that's visible outside it. You can even have multiple cut tags in a single entry! (And that's not getting into things like nested cut tags 👀)

Nonfiction

The Price of The Ticket (borrow from IA)

The Fire Next Time (pdf download)

Notes of A Native Son (pdf download)

Nothing Personal (read on IA - not great quality sorry)

The Last Interview (pdf download) (only 10 pages!)

Fiction

Giovanni's Room (pdf download)

If Beale Street Could Talk (pdf download)

BONUS

Little Man Little Man (read or pdf download on scribd) (Baldwin's only children's book)

Go Tell It On The Mountain (pdf download)

Another Country (pdf and epub download)

Sonny's Blues (pdf download)

honest - insensitive

persuasive - manipulative

caring - overprotective

confidence - arrogance

fearless - cocky

loyalty - an excuse

devotion - obsession

agreeable - lazy

perfectionism - insatisfaction

reserved - aloof

cautious - skeptical

self loved - selfish

available - distractible

emotional - dramatic

humble - attention-seeking

diligent - imposing

dutiful - submissive

assertive - bossy

strategic - calculated

• independent – isolated/commitment issues

• nurturing – smothering

• intuitive – paranoid

• protective – controlling

• curious – intrusive

• driven – obsessive

• patient and lets you decide – passive

• spontaneous – reckless

• self-aware – uses it as an excuse

• visionary – unrealistic

• stoic – emotionally numb

• charismatic – fake and performative

have made some pose blanks with thin/fat variations! ive noticed that those handy artist renditions of poses typically dont have a lot of bodytype variation and i thought these might be helpful :)

a) get a personal site with your own domain you own. now. not a carrd or third party squarespace. not next week. now. get it online with ugly-ass html but get your links there.

b) if you have the money: join one or multiple of eff.org / cbldf.org / freespeechcoalition.com

partly because they're actively fighting this, partly because they have members-only Lawyers You Might Need. Hint. Hint. Canary.

c) Write Down Those Lawyer Contact Numbers in meatspace. phone number of a real human being especially on paper, On You.

I have been in contact with lawyers for a few months now as my doujin circle knows. this should be telling you Many Things.

d) www.ecrater.com is where i'm going to be tentatively testing a shop because i like the fact you can *not* have payment processes and order digital/physical products via purely mail order.

(... be prepared for this to fall through too in the next 1-6 months.)

e) friends and followers of nsfw artists who earn most of their income through it: now's the time to support them. they're going to need the grace and financial flexibility especially mental health wise. domain/shop transfer/refund/therapy bills ain't free.

check in on them, and often.

f) get a VPN, use it daily to acclimatize, have them on your hard drive, several VPN's preferable. this is for the age verification laws coming. Start reading up on secure, privacy-focused infrastructure (prioritize email > website > shop in that order).

eff.org has a *ton* of resources.

g) prepare for discord and tumblr to be hit in the next wave. have alternatives *and actively start using them* if they're mission critical platforms for you.

I've played with matrix though I quite fancy IRC. if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I say these things not to fearmonger but to give yourself the maximum amount of time to prepare. the pendulum *will* swing back. it did with the 80's moral panic. it will for this too.

By metatext I mean like tagging, summary, and authors notes (especially initial authors notes at the beginning of a fic). The means by which we communicate to our readers what they’re getting into.

Because we kind of all have to learn it by osmosis and there are conventions but nobody’s really taught them at the start, so there’s inconsistencies and misunderstandings or people just not knowing things through no fault of their own.

This ends up breeding frustration and confusion and in the worst cases resentment, hurt, and aggression.

I’m severely tempted to make such a handbook and get it circulating.

Go here for the PDF, or here to view the whole document as a tumblr post.

I recommend the PDF.

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

A guide to designing wheelchair using characters!

1. Standard Chairs: Standard chairs are easy to obtain, cheaper chairs which come in standard sizes, so usually don’t perfectly fit the user. Consider how your character might customise their wheelchair. These chairs are usually dark colours, so think about easy personalisations such as stickers, and spoke skins. [Line drawing of a standard chair with blue text labelling it as a ‘transit chair’ and saying, ‘someone else would push this.’ Separate text emphasises the high handles of the chair.] [Coloured drawing showing a dark-skinned person sitting in the chair, with text that says, ‘Self Propel: This chair can be moved independently, but is often bulky and therefore hard to move.’] [Coloured drawing of one edge of the chair, which has a sticker that says, ‘Cripple punk’ as well as a strawberry sticker and a heart sticker, with descriptive text that says, ‘Wheelchairs can match your OC’s vibe!’]

2. Some people need more support in a standard chair. Some users need extras on their chairs to support them, such as head rests, and belts. Some users may use ‘tilt in space’ chairs. This is all dependent on factors such as core strength, and seating needs, so consider how your character is effected by their condition when deciding the right chair for them. [Drawing of a light-skinned person in a standard chair with a thick cushion and a head rest, which has been labelled in purple.] Foot propelling: Some users use their feet or toes to help propel themselves, and accomadate this by removing the footplate on their chairs. [Line drawing showing a person from the waist down in their chair. Text has been drawn to label the belt tightened across their thighs and to show that the foot plates have been removed.]

3. Active chairs: Active lightweight wheelchairs are bespoke chairs made to allow the user to propel themselves with as much independence as possible. Due to being totally customised to the user, they are expensive and less accessible than standard chairs. [Coloured drawing of a light-skinned person making a peace sign while sitting in a purple active chair. The chair has a noticeably lower back, sides, and handles than the standard chair.] Gloves: Wheelchair gloves are like marmite: some people love them, some hate them. [Three drawings of hands showing different types of gloves. One covers the thumb and leaves the other four fingers exposed, one covers the entire hand, and the last leaves all the fingertips exposed.] Wheels: There are also different types of wheels for chairs, with different price points and different qualities that people may need or want. [Drawing of two different types of wheels. One has a white rim and three wavy spokes, and the other has a black rim and many straight spokes.]

4. Standard Electric: Standard electric chairs are power chairs that come in preset sizes, so they might not be a perfect fit, but can be less expensive than active chairs, and easier for the user to be independent than a standard manual chair. There are many different variations of standard electric chairs, to fit different needs. [Coloured drawing showing a medium-skinned person in a pale orange headscarf in profile as they sit in a standard electric chair.] Chairs can come in different colours, with different levels of portability, and postural support. Like with all chairs, users can be fulltime, or ambulatory (part time). [Line drawing of a standard electric chair, which has a cushioned seat and back mounted on a base with three sets of wheels and a large flat foot plate.]

5. Bespoke Powerchairs: Similar to self propel wheelchairs, electric/power chairs can be made to the exact measurements to the user, with elements added to aid posture and stability of needed. These chairs tend to be expensive. [Line drawing of a bespoke powerchair. The back and seat have been customised, and the base is slightly smaller with a different foot plate.] Joysticks: Joysticks used to control the chair, can be customised to the style and needs of the user. [Two drawings showing a wide joystick with ‘wings’ on the edges and another that is a round knob on a stick.] [Coloured drawing of a light-skinned person sitting in a bespoke powerchair, shown from the front. Text highlights the arm rests and custom colour, a dark blue.]

6. Ambulatory users: Out of the 1.2 million wheelchair users in the UK, a third are ambulatory users, meaning they are able to walk to some degree/under certain circumstances. It’s totally possible for your character to be a part time wheelchair user, and vary which mobility aids are used. [Three coloured drawings of a medium-skinned person whose right leg is amputated above the knee. They use a red active chair, a pair of crutches, and a prosthetic.]

7. Summary: This isn’t a totally comprehensive guide and there are definitely facts I’ve forgotten. This can be a start for those totally clueless on designing wheelchair users. Research is the best way forward if you have bits you have no idea about. Wheelchair users ‘experiences are the best research! [Line art of an active chair.] However: don’t just go asking wheelchair users and disabled people about your characters or invasive questions for your research. They aren’t here just to give you information. There are loads of already existing information from wheelchair users online. [Line art of a person in sunglasses finger-gunning at the camera.] \End descriptions]