"This base is one million meters underground!"

Yugioh - Kazuki Takahashi Message~~~

“If you made a friend through shared interest in Yugioh…”

“Man decays, his corpse is dust. All his kin have perished; But a book makes him remembered through the mouth of its reciter.” - The Immortality of Writers (Papyrus Chester Beatty IV)

By metatext I mean like tagging, summary, and authors notes (especially initial authors notes at the beginning of a fic). The means by which we communicate to our readers what they’re getting into.

Because we kind of all have to learn it by osmosis and there are conventions but nobody’s really taught them at the start, so there’s inconsistencies and misunderstandings or people just not knowing things through no fault of their own.

This ends up breeding frustration and confusion and in the worst cases resentment, hurt, and aggression.

I’m severely tempted to make such a handbook and get it circulating.

Go here for the PDF, or here to view the whole document as a tumblr post.

I recommend the PDF.

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

Well, let me introduce you to the amazing world of ✨ metatags ✨

One of the cool things about AO3′s tagging system is that tags are linked together in a way that if a general metatag is used to filter out works, all the tags housed under that metatag (called subtags) also get filtered out! 

For example, the tag “angst” is a metatag for “heavy angst”, “light angst”, “angst & fluff”, etc., so if someone excludes the “angst” tag from their search, any fics with those subtags will also be filtered out. So, if the author didn’t directly tag the fic with “angst”, but tagged it with “heavy angst”, excluding “angst” will hide the fic from you!

So if you are worried about not being able to tag every single variation of a trigger, check to see if the tags you’re adding are subtags of a tag you’ve already added to your fic. Click the search bar at the top > tags, then enter the tag, click canonical, and go to the page for that tag. Here’s a link to the page for the “fluff” tag as an example, it shows all the subtags that get filtered out if a user excludes “fluff” from their search! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Fluff

Different sites handle their tags differently. The way you tag on twitter isn’t the same as the way you tag on tumblr isn’t the same as the way you tag on AO3. For example, both tumblr and AO3 allow spaces while twitter doesn’t.

So I apologize, but I must take on this task. A new hand must touch the beacon. The knowledge must be passed on. The chain can not be broken.

So.

The Game.

The following are the rules of The Game:

there is no winning The Game

once you know of The Game, you are always playing the game

the point of The Game is to not think about The Game

if you think about The Game, you have lost The Game, and must announce this to those around you - causing them to also lose The Game

A "reset period" of roughly an hour or two before loss announcements is common in colloquial rules to allow yourself and those around you to properly temporarily "forget" about The Game, however that is not an official rule.