Dog, queer, potato

there’s a very good encouraging post (cannot currently find it) about how ao3 kudos don’t correspond to writing quality, which is true.

but if you don’t know WHY that is, it sounds like meaningless pat-on-the-back “keep your chin up, champ!” stuff.

it’s not.

kudos on ao3 are a marketing game.  i’m gonna use my own ao3 works to make my case bc that’s a lot easier (and Significantly Less Asshole-ish) than analyzing the marketability of other people’s ao3 fic

my two main fandoms over the past 8 years are homestuck and the raven cycle/dreamer trilogy verse.

my most popular homestuck fanfiction is vacation.  it’s a johndave fic i wrote when i was 16, and as of writing this post, it has 2,974 kudos.

by comparison, there’s breathe on the ashes.  this is an ancestor fic similar in length and chapter count to vacation.  it has 268 kudos - an encouraging readership for sure, but less than 1/10th of the engagement of vacation.  it has less than 1/20th the amount of hits.

quality-wise, breathe on the ashes is SIGNIFICANTLY better than vacation (though there’s a LOT about it i’d do differently if i wrote it today).  i wrote it when i was 19.  it has better characterization, more thoughtful character arcs, more compelling plotting, better twists, and a significantly more fulfilling resolution.

so why is vacation so much more popular?

a great deal of it is luck - it was the first (i believe?) mainstream mermaid AU in the homestuck fandom, and it inspired a LOT of fanart that brought readers in.  it was written in 2012-2013, at the height of the homestuck fandom’s engagement w/ fanworks

it also combines a popular AU concept with the most popular fandom ship at the time.  i have multiple very short, badly written johndave oneshots from 2012 that ALSO have significantly more kudos than breathe on the ashes.

breathe on the ashes, by comparison, is about the homestuck ancestors, who get almost no screen time in canon and have no canon personalities.  it’s plot-heavy rather than ship-heavy.  it’s dense, and at some times very dark.

much of its readership is tumblr mutuals and people who started following my writing for johndave.  but also, a significant part of its readership is people reading for the tagged relationships and the promised adventure story. that’s why it has over 200 kudos instead of, like, 10.

now let’s compare two series i’ve written for the raven cycle/dreamer trilogy fandom: the most self-indulgent vampire AU of all time and unbecoming jordan hennessy.

unbecoming jordan hennessy is my newest series, so it hasn’t had years to gain a readership.  but none of the fics have more than 70 hits, which is unusual for my profile.  in fact, only the first fic has more than 10 kudos.  by comparison, the vampire AU has 73 series bookmarks, 3,500 hits on the first installment, and nearly 450 kudos on the first installment.

that’s because i knew the jordan hennessy series had little potential readership going in and made no effort to mitigate that.  it’s an extremely dark dead dove series that has basically every available content warning and then some.  it focuses on a dreamer trilogy character (so, already a smaller fandom than the raven cycle) who gets very little fandom attention, and character spinoffs who get even LESS attention.  most didn’t even have ao3 tags of their own until i wrote them.  it’s all genfic, and it’s all gruesome and gutwrenching and awful.

meanwhile i DID take steps to encourage vampire AU readership, even as i continued writing what i want.  the main characters are in a polycule, but poly fic is rarely interacted with in this fandom.  so several installments focus chiefly on the main fandom pairing (pynch) with the polyamory as a background.  that way there was already a readership when i started exploring adansey, bronan, etc.

i wrote the vampire AU with fan-favorite tropes (i mean…. it’s a vampire AU).  i wrote it to be self-indulgent and fun.  i wrote it ENTIRELY as a series where I Do What I Want, but i also marketed it in ways that drive reader engagement.  i used tags that people often search on ao3.  i used popular & humorous title formats.  i used short, snappy summaries that told people what to expect from the fic.

both of these series are undeniably good.  i’m a good writer.  but only one was written With The Consumption Of Others In Mind, and it’s reflected 100% in the stats.  in fact, if i didn’t have tumblr mutuals who’d shared jordan hennessy, NO ONE would have read it.  

i’m not sore about people not reading jordan hennessy.  i wrote it for myself, like most of my writing is for myself, and i published it for maybe 3 or 4 mutuals who care about the content as much as i do.  i knew it wasn’t going to be mass devoured by the fandom.

(i have well over a million words of fiction that i’ve written for myself that no one else has ever seen.  unbecoming jordan hennessy is the closest public window into what most of that content looks like.)

so.

here’s how to market a fic to get kudos:

pick a large fandom.  raven cycle is a pretty big YA fandom, homestuck is a giant internet fandom.  if i cared to write for fandoms like the MCU, i could almost definitely surpass vacation’s success

pick the most popular pairing.  or a very popular pairing, if there are several in your fandom.

DO NOT write relationship-less genfic.  even if the fic itself is pretty genficcy, tag it with a popular relationship.  (use & relationship tags if there absolutely is no romance or it’s focused on familial bonding.)

DO NOT go overboard with relationship tags or with general tags.  do not write a summary that’s a million words long.

write a popular AU.  high school, college, supernatural, coffee shop, office workers, soulmates, whatever.

write a popular relationship trope.  fake relationship, enemies to lovers, there was only one bed, and they were roommates etc.

write a popular subgenre.  sickfic, slow burn, married shenanigans, plotless fluff, angst with a happy ending, etc.

write a oneshot or keep chapter lengths somewhere from 2,000 to 4,000 words.

profit.

does any of that have to do with the writing quality? no.  

it has to do with what people are searching for on ao3, what they’re likely to read, and how to reach the largest market possible in your fandom of choice.

but like, actually examining my works through the lense of kudos also shows the other filter besides just novelty: i wrote a huge range of lengths and subjects and pairings and tones, and what actually Became A Hit was pretty much all the Normal Shit. the redrom. the strider manpain. the ornate aus with lovely outfits. the palatable stuff that almost anyone liked.

your best work probably won’t (and probably shouldn’t!) be your most popular, because quality is a function of passion and experience and experimentation and originality. popularity is about working with averages. stuff most people like well enough. there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. but you need to keep that in mind if you want to be an unrepentant freak who writes for the unhinged joy of it.

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful enough and judicious with your actions so that you don't get expelled from the system you wish to fight).

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

The movie ends with the guy watching his zero fighter—the thing he’s been working on for the entire film—succeed. Everyone’s cheering, but he’s lost looking across the countryside of Japanese because he’s just realized he’s lost everything. His wife, his country, his passion. It’s not a victory, it’s a tragedy. The next scene is the bombing of Hiroshima as he walks amongst a graveyard of warplanes; his legacy. He watches his zero fighters fly away and sadly says, “Not a single one returned.”

Also, Japanese nationalists famously hated this movie.

This right here? This is the Temple Menorah:

There's some debate over whether the branches were straight or curved, but here's a few things we do know:

It had seven branches of equal length.

It was made of one solid piece of gold

It was at least five feet tall.

It used pure olive oil.

The Temple Menorah is what people mean when they talk about The Menorah. It's what you'll see on historical or commemorative artifacts such as the Arch of Titus in Rome or Israeli currency:

During the time when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the High Priest lit all seven flames on this Menorah every day (using the aforementioned pure olive oil):

No one lights this on Chanukah.

This is a Chanukah menorah:

There are countless variations, but here are the important things:

It has eight branches of equal length, plus a ninth "helper" branch, known as the shamash, which is set apart from the rest of the branches and used to light the others.

It can be made of any material.

It is usually used with wax candles or oil, but, if necessary, one can use anything that burns.

In Hebrew, this kind of menorah is called a chanukiah.

Some Chanukah menorahs, like the one shown above, have the shamash in the middle. Others have it on the side:

Regardless, this kind of menorah is the one that has been lit by Jews on Chanukah for thousands of years. It's the menorah you'll seen in photographs of Jewish households, including this famous picture taken in Germany in 1931:

(The message written on the back of the photo reads: "Death to Judah"/ So the flag says/ "Judah will live forever"/ So the light answers)

On Chanukah, whoever is lighting the menorah will first light the shamash, then the number of candles corresponding to whichever night of Chanukah it is. The first night, only the rightmost candle is lit, the second night the two rightmost, etc. (The newest candle is always lit first):

Again, a valid Chanukah menorah has eight branches of equal length, along with a shamash. There is no such thing as a Chanukah menorah with six branches of equal length and a longer seventh branch, and no valid Chanukah menorah has eight branches of completely different lengths.

If you see either of the above designs (or anything similar) on Chanukah-themed decor, it tells you the creator has absolutely no idea what they're doing and couldn't be bothered to do more than two seconds of research to make sure their product was accurate. Anyone who knows anything about the holiday will laugh at these. (They may buy them anyway, especially if that's all that's available-- my new Chanukah sweater has an invalid menorah pattern, but it's adorable, so I'm still going to wear it. But I am also laughing about it and invite you all to do the same.)

and then that episode hit. an entire episode that has been so hyped up for months, the return of fan favourites, watched by millions, airing on the goddamn BBC of all places in the faces of terfs everywhere, and it said that trans people are here and they are important and they are okay. It gave a trans person a loving and supportive family. It normalised being trans to the point where it became integral to the plot. It saved Donna’s life, it saved the Doctor’s life, it saved the fucking world. it showed that transness has always been part of this national institution, the way that Rose Noble is trans because the Doctor is too. The way that the Doctor has never been defined by gender. The way that the Doctor is male, and female, and nothing and neither and more.

The way that Rose Noble chose her own name, and it was the name of the companion that started it all, the name of the companion that meant everything to the Doctor. Rose Noble is so so so incredibly important and significant and her being trans is part of that. Transphobia is explicitly shown as the bad guy in Doctor Who, the thing that Donna freakin’ Noble is willing to burn down the world just to fight against.

And god. I’ve never felt so positive in my life, so genuinely comforted and accepted and filled with actual hope that all is not lost, because if Doctor Who tells me that being trans is a fucking superpower then goddamn it, I’ll believe them.

And the best part is, this episode wasn’t just watched by a niche group of people, it wasn’t even just for the Doctor Who fans. None of this was ever hinted about in the entire build up to this episode, which means everyone watched this. Doctor Who fans, trans Doctor Who fans who get to feel so seen, transphobic Doctor Who fans who were told outright that they’re not welcome here, terfs who wanted to hate watch this because of Yasmin Finney, children who are just getting into the Whoniverse, children who have always been here, trans kids and cis kids alike, their friends and their families. The whole fucking country.

And if it managed to change just one person’s mind, or made just one trans person feel okay (which it did for me), then it did its fucking job, and I have nothing but respect for Russel T Davies.

It’s okay to start feeling better on a day you’ve called out sick.

You might be in a cycle of guilts, telling yourself it obviously wasn’t that bad if you’re doing better. That you could have gone in after all. That you were blowing it out of proportion.

No. Stop.

If you’re feeling better, it’s not because you made the wrong choice. It’s because you stayed home and rested.

If you want to live a productive life with adhd, forget about your productivity looking like a neurotypical’s. What you need are the brain engine primers, a habit of trusting yourself, and a phone timer. What I mean is, believe that you are capable of finding a way to do what you need to do. Let go of what neurotypical people tell you about life goals and five year plans and figure out what is important to you.

And then figure out what starts your engine. Not just one thing, ten or twenty things. Does a cup of coffee in the morning help your brain get in gear? Do you process better if you go on a walk? Do you feel more present in your body with a regular yoga class? Is there music you can play that gets you hyped?

And then ride the waves of your brain. Take ten or twenty minutes to do whatever is the next thing you need — a phone call or the vacuuming or a report — and then stop. (Unless you’re on a roll you want to ride; keep going then while it still feels good, unless it’s been an hour or two and you need to eat and pee and take a breather.) Put the task down. Set the damn phone timer for ten minutes or twenty. Get one of the calm-down things that puts you back in your body — a cup of tea, or a moment standing outside breathing deep, or a look at tumblr, or a snack.

You're so correct.

Your fancy human brain is very young. It thinks of ideas, yes! But you have in the very core of your being, a billions-of-years-old survival engine that ruthlessly keeps you alive.

Hey so first of all fuck you, thanks.

Second: I love it when you read literature on sleep disorders, especially if it's on sleep disorders among folks with ADHD, and you see time and time again "when allowed to sleep on their preferred schedule subjects maintained healthy, normal, restorative sleep cycles" and "effects were not lasting without ongoing intervention; resetting the sleep schedule is a permanent effort."

Like, if I sleep *great* from 6am to 2pm and I wake up feeling rested and alert with no special help but I need to turn off the lights in my house and shut down all electronics at 8pm and beam a spotlight into my face starting at 5am to wake up at seven and feel exhausted all day, I think perhaps it is not actually my sleep cycle that is wrong it is perhaps society that is wrong.

BELIEVE ME, when I find the job that pays well and has decent insurance that lets me exist as a cheerful nighttime ghoul I am jumping on that with both feet. But until then I literally feel better getting six hours of sleep and occasionally sleeping so hard that i can't hear my alarms because of chronic sleep deprivation than I do turning off all the lights in my house and ceasing all activity two and a half hours after I get off of work.

Also: the eight alarms aren't all there to wake me up, it's just that sometimes I *also* sleep through the ones that are supposed to remind me to go sit at my desk and start work. One of the first three usually gets me up, but on a day when I sleep through all three of those I will be sleeping through all eight of them and usually a phone call and someone trying to shake me awake to.

ANYWAY after being treated with melatonin and light therapy and staring listlessly at the ceiling in the dark bored out of my skull with racing thoughts for sleep disorders that I didn't have for like twenty years the single most effective intervention that allowed me to get more sleep as someone with both ADHD and DSPD was to start hanging out and being active in places where it would be easy to fall asleep if the sleep caught me there instead of turning my bedroom into a dark, silent shrine of snoozing. Giving myself permission to fall asleep late instead of laying awake chewing myself up with guilt for not being asleep helped too.

Actually here's some tips for the sleepy bitches in the crowd:

1 - If you're laying down and not falling asleep in half an hour, you're not actually sleepy; read something or get up and do something because you're more likely to get sleepy faster that way than you are staring at the clock going "if I fall asleep now I'll have three hours and forty five minutes of rest when I have to go to work; If I fall asleep now I'll have three hours and twenty minutes of sleep when I have to get up, etc. etc."

2 - Allow yourself to be ambushed by sleep. Fall asleep on your cozy couch. Fall asleep in the comfy chair. Let yourself sleep where you fall asleep instead of dragging yourself to where you're 'supposed' to sleep if doing so will wake you up.

3 - The mythbusters thing. If you just lay down and close your eyes and pretend to rest you will feel more rested when you get up than when you laid down. Laying down to rest is better than nothing, it literally causes cognitive improvements similar to sleep in tests, and knowing that can help take off some of the pressure of not being able to fall asleep and can thus help you fall asleep.

4 - It's okay to "hang out" in the area where you're going to sleep. Read in bed. Play games on your cellphone in bed. If you want to go to sleep put on comfy clothes and bring a chill activity and hang out in your bed to do it so that all you have to do when you start getting sleepy is close your eyes.

5 - It's better to get some sleep than no sleep. Sometimes you look at the clock and it's six AM and whoops, fuck it. Okay, time for bed, don't stress that you're only going to get a few hours, a few hours is better than nothing. Lay down to pretend to rest at least and you'll probably feel okay.

6 - This one sounds silly and might not work for a bunch of people for a bunch of reasons but apparently there's some research suggesting that "well-rested" is a state of mind? I've had a reasonable amount of success with just telling myself "Yeah, I actually feel pretty good," and pushing through the day on a couple of hours of sleep. I don't *recommend* that and you should try to get as much sleep as possible, but yeah the next time you're low on sleep see what happens if you just try to decide to not be tired. It sounded like bullshit to me when I first heard it but I've found some success with it.

I added two hours of sleep to my average night by making one simple intervention that didn't require medication or an enforced zone of darkness and quiet for everyone in the house and that can't be disrupted by a vacation or staying up on New Year's.

Sometimes I feel a little crazy with how badly I want people to understand *THAT IS A HUGE FUCK OFF DEAL*, that is a life-changing improvement with a minimal intervention and that intervention is "feel free to hang out in bed and be ready to fall asleep whenever you start feeling sleepy at bedtime, whether that's on the couch or in your bed or on the floor because if you have to *get up* to put yourself to bed you are going to delay when you are actually able to fall asleep and if you're bad at reading your body signals that might push your sleep back by several hours."

Two hours is, like, the best case scenario goal for a lot of sleep improvement plans, over and above what is typical for most people under the supervision of a doctor. And I managed to pull that off because I stopped hanging out with my laptop in a chair in my garage and started hanging out with my phone in bed.

Fuckin. Self-righteous-ass morning people banging around at 6AM "oh hmmm well I see you fell asleep on the couch again, time to get up and get ready for the day, I don't have to be quiet you should have gone to bed on time and in your room" I am setting you on fire with my mind.

This post gave me secondhand rage.

I do not think enough people realize just how much the internet as it is today was propped up with play money that's suddenly expiring and that's why so much is getting so badly enshittified so fast.

Not every website that needs money to keep the lights on is Xhitter.

This is not to shame people into spending money they don't have on websites they only sorta like, or on premium subscriptions or merchandise they don't actually want, but to make people more aware of the reality that the incredibly stupid lending practices of the now-defunct Silicon Valley Bank shielded many a shitty businessperson - and us - from feeling.