I'mAMess

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten. 

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it. 

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

Happy Pride 2025. This post is 5 years old, and I’m in equal parts proud of it, and annoyed by how chaotic and tacky it is. So I’ve decided to make a new version: one where all the additions are in a single reblog, and with integrated image descriptions (thank you @oddler14 for providing most of these back then!). I would love it if people reblogged this version instead, even if I understand the previous version is much more widespread on Tumblr.

I am one of the people who, for a long time, didn’t feel queer enough. Specifically, as a nonbinary person, I struggled for a long time to believe I was trans enough to even deserve to label myself as trans. This post was the start of my journey unlearning that shame and guilt, which was caused in part by the gatekeepy rhetoric that was predominant in many online spaces. Today, I am confident and joyous in my trans, nonbinary, queer body and mind.

To my 20-year-old self, and to anyone else who might need to hear this: you are queer enough. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And always, always remember:

Of course you do, they’re fantastic. They come in two models, one with tan head stripes and one with white head stripes. But the gene that controls stripe color also has a bunch of other effects! It’s a supergene!

To briefly sum up a grueling amount of fieldwork by people who were probably not getting paid nearly enough, basically the tan-stripes are nurturers and the white-stripes are fighters, across both males and females. White-stripes chase away intruders more, tan-stripes bring more food to the nest. Tan-stripe females bring more bugs to their chicks than white-stripes, white-stripe females are more aggressive and sing more.

There is a reason Jordan Peterson picked lobsters, not sparrows, to get all MRA about, because the sparrow ladies are ALL about the tan-striped males. Sexy nurturing tan-stripe males are immediately grabbed up by the more aggressive white-stripe females (who are also dead sexy if you’re a sparrow.) Then the remaining birds pair off, so you get tan and white couples reproducing in virtually all cases—nurturing male with aggressive female, hyper-aggressive male with hyper-nurturing female.*

And this is good!** Because it turns out that they can have a tough time if they don’t mate across stripes—white x white sparrows often come out undersized if they come out at all. There was some cool recent genetic sequencing and one particular chromosome is way funky, inverted, and scrambled in the white-stripes. So now every white-stripe has a funky chromosome and a normal one, and every tan-stripe has two normal ones.***

This is all really unique and means that white-throated sparrows effectively have four sexes, because they now only reproduce with a member of the opposite stripe and sex chromosome, and their offspring may be any one of the four sexes. The stripes have essentially become a second sex chromosome.

The geneticists involved think the funky chromosome probably showed up as a weird import from somebody gettin’ jiggy with another sparrow species. Presumably this created a hypersexy female whose white head stripes brought all the boys to the yard, and very unusually, that bred true.

Is that cool or what?!

*No word on whether there is a resulting sparrow tradwife media genre.

**Leaving aside the impact on the emotional health of the non-sexy sparrows.

First of all, look at it.

That’s a male ruff, specifically. You can see how they get their name. The females don’t have that fancy collar. They just look like sandpipers, which is what they are.

Like other sandpipers, these are wading birds, but they live in wet meadows and marshes instead of by the seashore. During the breeding season they gather together and the males hold territories, called leks, in which they display to attract females.

At least, some of them do.

Some male ruffs do not display in leks. They have plainer, often white, neck ruffs, and they sort of wander around the display grounds courting the females wherever. The interesting thing is that the territorial males tolerate this. Research suggests it’s because females are more interested in a display ground that has both kinds of males. The ladies like variety, it seems.

But it gets even more complicated. In 2006, a third male form was discovered. This form is extremely rare, and doesn’t have male display plumage at all. It looks just like a female ruff in the field. The other birds, however, can tell the difference, judging by their behavior. These female mimics travel with other males when the sexes split for the winter, and during homosexual mountings (which are common, as they are in many other animals), they often top.

What’s really interesting about these ‘cryptic males’, or faeders, is that they are apparently super sexy. Seriously. Females and males both prefer mating with them. And it’s believed that, like the satellite males, the presence of a faeder attracts more females to the area, which benefits all three forms.

i was just about to give him my most scathing disgruntled glare when he took out his ticket and, after realizing they had no common language, started gesticulating wildly in front of the french girl left behind. he pointed at the ticket, then at her, and very seriously said: “on three, we go.” she nodded, and after he counted to three, holding up his fingers so there could be no confusion, they sprinted through the gate together, giggling profusely afterwards as if they had just pulled off the heist of the century,

I was placed in the women's line, where a female security agent was directing a long line of women dressed in every style from me in my jeans to long, formal-looking gowns to veils, hijabs, niquabs, and saris were directed to put their shoes and bags into the X-ray machine and step through a metal detector. (I felt very out of place in my trousers and short-sleeved shirt, like I had arrived to the company christmas party in lingerie.) Once through, she would pat us down through our clothes before allowing us to meet with the men's line.

Whilr I was waiting, the line slowed and then stopped. A women who had already passed through had placed her shoes on the rolling belt without a bin, and the shoe had jammed the machine.

Thr reason I suspect she didn't use a bin was likely because there was no clear signage indicating where to put a bin or get a bin- just sort of a halfhazaed pile next to the intake area.

And like- you get nervous in unfamiliar places, right? But nobody in uniform was doing anything about it, and an old woman in a wheelchair was crying with her family, and so a few of us- complete strangers, mind you- just started collectively helping each other sort things out.

I fixed the shoes jammed in the conveyor and began stacking bins. The lady in front of me with the great big long skirt started passing empty bins back down the line. The person behind me showed another woman where to put her things- and then the line started moving again. My turn to pass through came, I got pat-down, and we all continued to our next location without a single word.

And I feel like it was such a beautiful moment, like OP's experience, because like... here we all were, a big group of 'women' (ostensibly- here I was) just... seeing a problem, and fixing it. A bit of meaningful eye contact, some sheepish and amused smiles, some genuine laughter, and a mutual goal to divide up the problem and help each other.

I was nervous to be there with my short hair on display and my pants and bare arms surrounded by strangers in modest fashion, traditional or religious clothing, worried about being judged, maybe, or doing something wrong, or being disrespectful by accident- but it didn't happen.

You can tell yourself we're all just people, and feel like you understand it, and believe it to be true. But there's a difference between knowing something and experiencing something, and being surrounded by people you can't speak with, who you look nothing like, from a whole different world that you don't understand, and sharing a weary, good-natured, universal look of, "Oh lord, here we go now" is just. Really, really special

Experiences like this, where nobody really talks but everyone still gets it, and has a laugh- it makes the world feel smaller and less frightening, doesn't it?

Makes you care more.

Hurt more, too, but that feels equally important.