Bored now...

Xoxo

-Designer

-

aka possessions which are just possessions, but which have noticeably improved my quality of life: for when people ask you “what do you want for your birthday/Christmas/graduation” and you instantly transform into St Francis and pledge fealty to Lady Poverty because your mind went blank

nice. new. sheets. I cannot emphasize this one enough. if you’re still using the same sheets you had in college, you should probably get new ones. get yourself some 100% bamboo rayon sheets—they’re silky and perfect for summer and great for sensitive skin! or, if you’re cold all the time, flannel sheets!

kitchen knives. or even just one really good kitchen knife.

new curtains—blackout if you are a creature of the night like I am

fleece lined anything, but especially sweatpants and hoodies. wool lined socks are also good. if you don’t have the option of coming home after work and putting on an entire outfit that is loose and fuzzy, you should change that, because you deserve that option.

cookie sheets with a layer of air between the top and the bottom. the bottoms of your cookies will never burn again.

kitchen scale!!! no more leveling off flour with a knife and getting it all over the table!! now all your measuring is just shoveling stuff in and out of bowls like you’re at the beach. baking is both more accurate and also way more fun.

coffee bean grinder. if you want to upgrade your coffee experience, this is a great one-time purchase. just-ground beans have a much better flavor than pre-ground.

Good luggage. Whether it’s a suitcase or a duffel bag or even just packing cubes, it’s all helpful!

Good art. If it’s someone you trust, you can ask them to surprise you with a piece they like, otherwise you can have a few back up suggestions of ideas (I saw a framed piece of just the hands from Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Man and have not forgot about it since)

Good good pillows or fluffy blankets to go along with those nice new sheets from above

Office supplies. Pens, markers, sharpies. All the sharpies.

Coffee travel mugs (can one have too many?). If they say they still want more ideas, also ask for a bag of their favorite beans/tea

Tumblr staff understands its fucking userbase in a way Elon Musk will never understand Twitter.

Beating a dead horse into the ground is a supernatural reference.

Oh my god.

It's so fucking good.

This is just good.

This is speaking the language fluently.

Twitter is not fucking prepared.

I love and hate you all.

because, like… i write a LOT of stuff i have no interest in doing IRL. scary stuff, kinky stuff, a lot of super mundane stuff, too. my physical sex life doesn’t resemble the smut i write at all, even a little because my boundary between real life and fiction is solid. and it’s not like a “oooh i’m so good at resisting temptation” thing, i mean like, i write a lot of oral sex scenes and have zero interest in sucking a dick IRL. i write a lot of dark subject matter and unhealthy relationships, and i’m living in a happy, pretty boring marriage that i wouldn’t change for anything.

but someone who goes hard on “you like (noncon/incest fic/idk fucking teacher/student storyllines), you must want to (assault someone/fuck your sibling/bone down with your teacher or student)” stuff, it makes me think that person has a shaky boundary and they’re not very safe to be around. i become deeply worried about their impulse control and their ability to contextualize.

--

I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn't is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ--when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.

(The ads you'll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site--not the most important reasons by a long shot as you'll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)

We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not "content creators," and people who didn't write fanfiction were not "the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent." We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting "online" friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.

If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else's LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.

Normally when you delete a post, it’s gone, but not gone gone. Just deleted from public never to be seen again. The database entry is still there, just inaccessible.

This post, however, the root post is just gone. Gone gone. Gone forever. Everything attached to it is still there, but since the root post is hard deleted, it’s got nothing to add to. When the note counter tries to add notes to nothing, it goes nowhere.

So it throws every new note into the void. Goodbye forever, notes.

1. Terrible secret: There’s a really awkward thing that happens to all writers (and artists/creatives/makers).

They get good enough that it becomes hard enough to write anything.

As your skill increases, so do your standards. So everything you write feels mediocre.

2. The weird part is that this “mediocre” writing is far better than what you were writing before.

You have just moved the goalposts on yourself as you improved.

So you have to learn to give yourself permission to write anything. Even if you think it’s bad.

3. What usually happens at that point is that you either:

A) end up not writing badly at all and surprising yourself with what you manage to produce

OR

B) create something that has issues but is easily editable later on into something that meets your standards

4. But wow, is it a gnarly adjustment to ignore that emotional reflex of “this sucks, I suck” and press on anyway.

5. And no, this doesn’t just happen with writing. It happens with every kind of artist and craftsperson.

People tend to quit just as they’re getting good, because their standards have raised along with their skills.

6. I do find myself frequently wondering how many writers reach this awkward phase, believing wrongly that they suck, and never write again — just at the point when they’re starting to get good!

…