"Because I'm Fucking Curious"

read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that i’ve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law that’s linked in-thread.

If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I don’t necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like… maybe just maybe it’s something that should be taught????

Just another reminder, because this always drives me crazy, but even if monetizing your fic was 100% unambiguously legal and protected, AO3 would still not let you do it because AO3 was founded and is supported by people like me who want a fandom community that is completely divested from making money off of fic.

If you want to make money off your fics, you can instead post them somewhere like royal Road. “Oh, but Royal Road’s culture is so much more negative and stressful and lacks the supportive norms of AO3!” Yeah, because people are trying to make money there. Half the userbase is treating it as a storefront and hustling is the natural social consequence of that. AO3’s culture can only exist because it’s not commercial.

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.

It seems like we're just feeding characters to Miss Piggy at this point

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices

#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies

one of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard (for myself, at least) is that if you're in a terrible mood and NOTHING is helping, then start doing the chores/responsibilities/job stuff/etc that you've been putting off. Will it put you in an even worse mood temporarily? Probably, but you're already pissed off, so you might as well double up on it at that point 😭 there's no loss. It's not like finally getting around to cleaning the house and scheduling appointments is going to ruin the good day that you aren't currently having to begin with 💀 And then, when the bad mood passes, you'll have gotten shit done and you'll feel a lot better later, even if in the moment you're having The Worst Time Ever about it.

The way she loses it too is proof she didn’t anticipate exactly what she would sound like.

She might just be cracking up because she got Ryan to break, which is notoriously hard to do

I want to say both

i have a lot of thoughts on the matter but i will say that fandom moving from semi-private blogs and communities to extremely public and algorithm-driven social media was a huge mistake that has changed fandom culture for the worse

my controversial opinion is I don’t think Zuko was confused by “my first girlfriend turned into the moon”

he was there during siege of the North. he infiltrated the spirit oasis. he has an uncle who studies spirits and the spirit world. he watched the sky go dark then the moon suddenly reappear like everyone else in the entire world did. and most importantly he watched zhao get eaten by a giant godzilla fish spirit.

his entire life since he saw that beam of blue-white light in the south pole has been ‘this day has already been so goddamn weird’

The only really new information was that that was Sokka’s girlfriend

Also, Iroh was there? He literally watched Sokka make out with the moon spirit. And you want to tell me that a romantic sap like him would not have immediately told Zuko about this romantic tragedy? Please, Zuko has known about this for ages, he just knows that this is not an acceptable situation in which to say “yeah, I know.”

[image: tags by samwisethebold: #it’s not that he doesn’t get what sokka means #it’s that how on earth do you respond to that]

When you put it like that, this is actually a legendary display of tact on Zuko’s part

The reason you can't be the next J R R Tolkien isn't because you don't have the talent, but because you're not the right kind of unwell. Tolkien wasn't bent for fantasy worldbuilding; he was bent for constructed languages, and got into fantasy worldbuilding in order to provide a material context in which to ground the notional evolution of the languages he invented. If you want to be the next Tolkien, you can't start with the worldbuilding; you've gotta find something extremely specific to fixate on, and develop it in such depth that inventing a world to contain it is genuinely the most logical next step.