Bits n Bobs

1. Yes this person did port most of their fic to AO3. But this fic is a sequel to one a friend of theirs wrote and that one didn’t make the jump.

2. This fic is supposed to have art but wherever they were hosting the images went under years ago.

3. One of the big fandom classics made it here but there was apparently at one point more content in the LJ comments. The link is broken.

4. Everyone keeps referencing a particular ship manifesto/influential meta. They’re referring to it by an acronym with no links. It may still be out there but it is unfindable

High: the person who wrote this fic is now the [redacted] award winning, New York Times bestselling author of [redacted] and it shows in the quality.

Low: otherwise fascinating AU ruined by inexplicable sidelining and/or bashing of the female characters. Author is not only explicitly aware of this bias but unrepentant.

High: the library is huge, and almost everything is complete. And if it’s not complete you can go in accepting the knowledge that it never will be completed and appreciate it for what it is

Low: “gay for you” and “I’ve never been with a man before” way more prevalent than you get now (these days people can be gay or bi without crazy hoops to jump through)

High: bookmarks and collection rec lists galore. Many of them very well curated.

Ancient Sea Creature Diorama - Anomalocaris (Cambrian Period).

古代海洋生物ジオラマ - アノマロカリス (カンブリア紀)。

The print is available on my Etsy shop.

What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don't, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward "will people actually do this"?

Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70's.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there's a lot of social pressure to do it -- but the social pressure wouldn't exist if it wasn't easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn't recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don't recycle.

@alarajrogers what did you mean by this?

A small thing. If you want to support trans and nonbinary people, then on government forms, if they require gender and you can't get around it, allow "other"; better still, don't require gender. If you're building a medical system, and the patient's gender is M, do not gray out all the "female" problems he might be presenting with on the grounds that a man can't possibly have menstrual problems, be pregnant, or have issues with his uterus; likewise if the patient presents as F, don't make it impossible to enter a diagnosis of prostate cancer for her.

Don't set up validation rules that prevent someone with gender M from having a husband. Better yet, let "husband" and "wife" both be covered by the term "spouse", because that is inclusive of non-binary spouses as well.

Because I'm in IT, I think in terms of IT systems. But there are government systems and insurance systems and financial systems and all sorts of systems out there, that should be set up so that a gay person will be able to navigate it as easily as a straight person, and a straight person will see that the available options don't privilege them at the expense of everyone else... a subtle reminder that no, you're not the center of the universe and gay people exist. Why do you think the right wing fights so hard against there being Spanish on forms that are also in English? You'd think, it doesn't harm anyone using the form for there to be both Spanish and English. But they know, the presence of Spanish reminds English speakers that the world doesn't center around what works for them; other options exist. That's what they want to get rid of, the subtle reminder that someone besides them is important too.

This is a discussion about how to make systems work in some way other than If People Would Just, making them easier to promote the result you want, so I'm not sure how you even got "the onus is on gay people to be more palatable", and I get the feeling you don't understand the context of the discussion. I am not even sure how you could devise a system that incorporates "gay people should make themselves more palatable" because that sounds exactly like a thing that People Should Just... meaning, you're relying on humans to behave in the exact specific way you need them to for your system to work, and the whole point of this conversation is that doing that dooms your system to fail. Gay people will never Just Make Themselves More Palatable To Straights, as a cohort, so if your system for getting gay people to be better accepted relies on If Gay People Would Just, your system will fail.

Pronouns

An accent

/pr = pressuring you

/m = mad at you

/f = forcing you to do this at gunpoint