Jumping (on the) Ship

It’s time to celebrate everything Laven! Please join us for Laven Week 2023!!!

Create anything you’d like! Fanart, fanvids, fanfiction, edits, headcanons—anything goes! As long as it’s for Laven, it’s allowed!

Laven Week will be held August 7th - August 11th. This year's prompts are based on Time.

Day 1 (Mon 08/07) Dawn Sunrise | Spring | Awakenings | Coffee/Tea | Birdsong

Day 2 (Tues 08/08) Day Summer | Heat/Sweat | Laughter | Promises | Obligations

Day 3 (Wed (08/09) Dusk Sunset | Autumn | Bonfires | Rain/Storms | Death

Day 4 (Thurs 08/10) Night Moon/Stars | Winter | Snow/Cold | Secrets | Intimacy

Day 5 (Fri 08/11) Free day!

Remember to tag your posts #lavenweek2023.

Please don't post until the designated posting dates (but late posts/submissions are more than welcome).

a very wise woman gave me a piece of advice. She told me to start a journal. In the morning, she said, write down the percentage that I felt I was that day. 20% Maggie. 90% Maggie. Then I should write down what I accomplished that day. I thought at this point she was going to tell me to admire how much I'd gotten done each day despite M a being ill. I didn't want that, I didn't need a pep talk. I needed my brain.

But that wasn't what she said. She told me: write down what you've managed to do on a 20% day, what you've managed to do on a 40% day. Eventually you'll have a guide so when you wake up and you're at 20%, you won't try to do the things you do on a 40% day. You'll know you can just go watch a movie or sit with your goats or whatever and not feel guilty, because you were never going to write words you could keep or be able to exercise or whatever.

And that was the right way.

It meant I no longer labored for 12 hours each day, doing nothing but trying to smash my way through a draft. Instead I slowly began to write bits and bobs in on my good days. A funny thing happened then: once I was not spending every second forcing myself to do things I couldn't, I found I had enough energy to actually start to work on myself. To look for patterns in my good and bad days. To research healthcare providers and new studies on what was wrong with me still. Slowly I found I was able to chain more of the 60% days together, then 80% days. Slowly I began to realize that although it was taking months, I was improving overall.

Student: I can’t find any scholarly articles on this subject!

Me: Okay, what’s the subject?

Student: Creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies.

Me: Alright, and what/where have you tried searching?

Student: I searched “creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies” on the library website!

Me:

And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?

Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:

First, zoom out. Start broad. Pick a few phrases or keywords, like “tech companies” and “culture.” See what comes up.

Actually, back up. First, does your library’s website search include articles, or do you have to go into a database? My library’s website searches some of our 200+ databases, but not all. And you’ll need to find (in advance search or adjustable limiters that pop up after your initial search) how to limit your search to scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles.

What other keywords are related or relevant? For the search above, you could use a combination of “silicon valley,” “company/ies” or “organization/s,” “sharing,” “collaborative,” “workplace culture,” “social culture,” “organizational culture,” and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.

Did you find something that looks promising? Great! What kind of subjects/keywords are attached (usually to the abstract, sometimes in the description section of the online listing)? Those can give you more ideas of what to search. Does it cite any articles? Look at those! Some databases (ilu ProQuest) will also show you a selection of related/similar articles.

If you’re researching a very specific topic, you may not find any/many articles specifically about your subject. You may, for example, have to make do with some articles about west-coast tech companies’ work cultures, and different articles about creating sharing/collaborative environments.

Another fanfic binding completed— Wasted Time by @hthar

This fic was only 7k words, but the author wanted a case binding, so the text is much larger than my normal bindings. But imo, I think it looks lovely.

Some moron apparently built a bot to annoy or prank hundreds of authors.

They are now also linking to a site they claim is able to scan works and tell you whether they were AI written or not, and that you should do that before reading a fic.

It should go without saying that you should not, under no circumstances, visit a site advertised in a spam comment.

In this case, I'd say there's even a chance that the "scanning" site is actually used to scrape fics and use them for future AI writing. What it definitely doesn't do is tell you whether something was AI written or not. That's a bullshit claim.

Don't use that site. Don't believe these spam comments, whether you get them on your own works or see them on someone else's.

For my nominations, I’m putting up:

If you eat a chocolate bar a very specific way, you will break physics and get infinite chocolate.

or

It is impossible that you spelled “Berenstain Bears” wrong and is, instead, more likely that the universe fractured into separate, overlapping realities in the last 20 years.

“Bitch, That’s the Tubby Custard Machine” (http://imgur.com/gallery/IObQF)

infinite chocolate hack

berensta/ein bears (mandela effect)

mri scan walking dead gif

train gif brain thinks you died

tubby custard machine

horse dildo

moonmelon (and variations)

alexandria’s genisis

bird chocolate fountain og post

soap shrinks water molecules

we are killing the earth

ham on dog

tequila isnt a depressant

earth is lumpy

joker without makeup

voldemort fetus

two way mirror og post

It is not hard to link to your Tumblr or Twitter with a vague message like, “If you’re looking for my other works or other ways of supporting me, go here: link.” I have had people buy me coffees after enjoying my fic and asking where to support me. I threw up a link to my Tumblr and people cared enough to follow it. They were fully understanding when I explained in the comments that they could not commission me and I could not link them directly to any donation platform, but they could go to xyz link to read more. And they did! Nobody has to put AO3 directly on the firing line.

Go ahead and commission independently. Just do it anywhere else except on AO3. And then don’t come crying to the community when you, personally, get a C&D from a massive corporation.

AO3 is our bullet shield. Tumblr will pull your shit down. Wattpad won’t fucking protect you. LJ and FF.net already sold our asses for one (1) corn chip. AO3 is trying to protect us, you goddamn lemmings.

If you cannot follow the rules that protect fanspaces, you do not belong in our fanspaces.