well, it changes everyday, you see

Thanks!! Jily is my total OTP but I haven’t done nearly enough fanart of them so here you go :D 

the captain of the city watch doesn’t even have to enter the tavern to know something terrible has happened. necromancy has always given her hives, and she’s already itching ten feet from the door.

a party of adventurers plunges into the Unknowable Forest completely confident that they’ll be able to avoid all the magical traps by simply taking whichever path makes their swordswoman sneeze the least. 

so sirius is this famous musician

he posts covers and original songs on youtube, and a few of his songs are on spotify

he films all of his videos on this little enclosed balcony that he’s decked out in fairy lights, and he always sits on the floor with his ukulele, guitar or his keyboard (it actually hurts his legs to have his keyboard in his lap but schh nobody needs to know)

then one day he finds this really small youtube channel with this bloke who calls himself moony who sings as well, and both moony and his songs are fucking beautiful and sirius just turned a thousand times gayer

so sirius watches one video

and then all of moony’s videos because he can’t get enough of his voice

and being the obnoxious guy he is, sirius decides to message moony

moony doesn’t write back for almost three days, but then he does and sirius is ecstatic

they continue to message back and forth for over a month

sirius finds out that moony’s name is actually remus, he’s 21, just like sirius, and he lives in london (sirius squealed when he realized that they lived in the same town), and he’s bisexual and jewish but not practicing and he has his nose wing pierced but he only wears this small stud so it doesn’t show up very well in videos

he’s pretty much perfect in sirius’ opinion

one day they decide to meet, just an awkward first date where they eat fish and chips and stroll around a park

they go on even more dates after that, and sirius finds himself falling for remus, hard and fast and unable to stop

they try to keep their dates off the internet, but sirius has over two million followers and remus is catching up and it’s getting harder to hide

so they start to hang around at their flats instead

they watch movies together, cuddle, eat dinner together. sometimes they just talk, bearing their souls to each other at three am, laughing and kissing away bad dreams

one evening, they’re sitting on sirius’ enclosed balcony, eating crisps and chocolate and sipping on cheap wine

the balcony is lit by the fairy lights and they’re feeding each other pieces of chocolate and sharing sweet kisses

and sirius decides that this is the moment

so he runs inside and grabs his uke, and then he sits down opposite of remus again

he starts recording and just waves away remus’ questions

and then starts singing and playing

“wise men say, only fools rush in…”

“take my hand, take my whole life too, because i can’t help…”

they sing the last line together

“falling in love with you.”

he posts the video two days later, and it’s beautiful. remus was grinning the entire time and sirius was blushing. you can see their wine glasses and the bag of crisps and it just had a domestic feel to it.

the video cuts off with a watery kiss and then fades to black, bold letters lighting up the screen

“fiona shaw and her wife… that’s what i want”

- @bethecowboys 

“Fiona Shaw is an Irish actress and theatre and opera director, known for her role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter film series and her role as Marnie Stonebrook in season four of the HBO series True Blood (2011). She has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, twice winning the Olivier Award for Best Actress.

Shaw is openly lesbian and was previously in a relationship with actress Saffron Burrows. 

She is married to the economist Sonali Deraniyagala.” 

Person on A03 who’s writing for fun:

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.

“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.”

I co-founded a startup a few years ago (rhinobird.tv) that was for creating a collaborative video platform (live video streaming + multi-device HTML5 video conversion + P2P networking + AWS hosting among other things) and our yearly costs during initial development were right up there (just with our tiny team and handful of useability testers). We didn’t even have users at that point.

Hosting is expensive. Design and development are expensive. Adding a new, or expanding an existing features is expensive.

Like AO3′s tagging?

That seems simple, but it’s not. Each time that feature is tweaked or expanded, it requires changes to the database, which could involve completely restructuring it, or moving to a different kind of database architecture. It involves changes to the search engine because there are different kinds of search methodologies that interact differently with different kinds of databases, and languages used.

Meanwhile, the technology and methodologies behind systems architecture, hosting, databases, and search are constantly evolving.

Which means that if your whole Thing is about providing: 

Hosting that can withstand hundreds of thousands of requests per hour;

A database that can work with unstructured and semi-structured and highly-structured data which may have one-to-one relationships with other data, or may be non-relational and multi-dimensional.

A database that can handle the importation of data from other databases (e.g. FF.net, Tumblr, etc) whose schema, controlled vocabularies, taxonomy, and metadata can widely differ.

A database and backend that can normalize all of that data coming in (so you know, the Thing actually works).

A robust search that has to be intelligent enough to include and exclude across a variety of boolean or natural language options and understand the difference between tags and content (and presumably other categories within the taxonomy).

AND DO ALL OF THIS QUICKLY.

Then you’ll need people who must continuously improve their skills and knowledge to implement these evolving technologies and methodologies or else the thing you’ve built will die on the vine.

That is neither cheap nor easy.

Not even getting into the costs of maintenance and security. Or the front end development whose features can be broken by browser updates. Like that Rich Text Editor? Try supporting that feature cross-platform, browser and device agnostic.

If people want to question the cost of Things On The Internet, then direct thy gaze at JSTOR which profits from paywalls to research that is not always privately funded (e.g. public university funded studies). But again, JSTOR provides a service, and that service is not cheap to expand and maintain.

“Hang on, there’s a P.S. …”

I thought your friend Ron might like to keep this owl, as it’s my fault he no longer has a rat.

Ron’s eyes widened. The minute owl was still hooting excitedly.

“Keep him?” he said uncertainly. He looked closely at the owl for a moment; then, to Harry’s and Hermione’s great surprise, he held him out for Crookshanks to sniff.

“What do’you reckon?” Ron asked the cat. “Definitely an owl?”

Crookshanks purred.

“That’s good enough for me,” said Ron happily. “He’s mine.”

Here’s the thing.

I read a lot of scripts.  A lot.  From professionals to aspiring writers to complete newbies.  Features and pilots.  Specs and treatments.

And 8 times out of 10 the fan fic that I’ve read over the last, oh, 15 years is leagues better than this stuff.  It’s more inspired.  It’s more compelling.  It’s genre bending and creative and heartfelt.  It’s well-paced and intense and funny and sexy and meaningful.  It’s smart and thoughtful and good.  It’s novel-quality.  Better than, sometimes.

Rare is the script I don’t want to put down, but how often have we stayed up until 3am to get to the last chapter of a 100k fic? And it’s not even a fan fic author’s day job.  This is what they do on the side.  In their spare time.  For free.

So my point is, fan fic authors, you’re good.  You’re good writers and great storytellers.  I know it doesn’t always feel like it, especially if you’re one of the authors who’s not a BNF and doesn’t get the notes/hits that a few do.  And  because some people still view fic as “not real writing.” You guys know the shit that gets made into movies.  You’re better than that.  So be better than that.  If writing is what you think want to do, then just know you’re already doing it.   You’ve already started.