the picklest pickle

ngl this was the most fun i had and the happiest ive been with a fic in a While

[AO3]

“You!”Yuuri shouts, pointing his finger accusingly, voice definitely too loud forsuch a quiet street.

Listen,here’s the thing. Yuuri isn’t a confrontational person. Really, he isn’t. Hehas enough anxiety that just thinkingabout confrontation sends him running for the hills.

“Yes, you!Gorgeous man with the cute dog!”

Yuuri isn’ta loud person, either. He promiseshe’s not. No, really! You can ask anyone who has known him for any period oftime. He’s quiet and non-confrontational and a mess with gorgeous people.

“Come here,and fight me, coward!”

And Yuuriisn’t even violent. In the slightest.His parents have raised him to solve his conflicts by talking, with compassion,and critical thinking. He swears they did! And he’s not aggressive. He hasn’teven thrown a single punch in his entire twenty-three years of life.

“Get yourobjectively perfect ass in here!”

Here’s whatYuuri is right now: drunk on too many beers and upset that Yuuko’s restaurantgot a bad review by an important food critic.

Should hebe doing this? No. Can we stop himself now that he has stomped his way in frontof Victor Nikiforov? Also no. This is out of his hands now. Drunk Yuuri isdriving this car, and Sober Yuuri will have to deal with the wreck when he comesaround.

Hi everyone- it’s been a while, but unfortunately I have a very busy and tiring job and haven’t had much time or inspiration for writing recently. However, I have something pretty important to talk about! This is an idea that I’ve been sitting on for a while, but after recent events in Pittsburgh I feel like it’s something meaningful that I can do to make a difference right now.

I am going to do a print run of Blackbird, with 100% of all profits going to support Jewish charities- the Community Security Trust here in the UK, and Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, in Israel.

Yes, I do mean actual, physical, printed copies- I’ve had so many commenters say, ‘I wish I could have a copy of this fic like a real book’, so this is your chance! I am still researching the best options so I can’t confirm price right now, but it’ll be via an online self-publishing and sale platform which should be able to handle international delivery.

I’ll also be looking for an artist to commission to do the cover- nothing super fancy, but if you have commissions open right now and would be interested in working together on this, hit me up!

🌈 We are pleased to announce that our store is now OPEN!!🌈

Preorder your very own copies from MUJIGAE ON TICTAIL.

And for Philippine orders, please click here!

It has been such a long time coming but we are truly happy, excited and honored to have taken this journey with all our creators, consultants, and of course friends whose support, patience, and creativity have helped formed this truly wonderful project to what it is at this very moment. This is by us, for you.

“Mujigae” is a fan project dedicated to Seung Gil Lee. So little of him is shown in the series but this project aims to fill in those gaps — put color into a canvas that many often overlook. This is a collection of his life (his alternate lives); his dreams, his goals, even his relationships, told through the colors of the rainbow - the very concept that his (in)famous costume has given rise to.

The book has two parts: the main section being all about Seung Gil, and a second where his “ships” come into focus. Whether you’re a fan of one or both, we certainly have something in there for you.

You can find more about this project in our About page, who our Contributors are, and perhaps find more answers in our FAQs.

I reopened shop!!! will be open until Oct. 31!! c: 

also holding a twitter giveaway for art.exe enamel pin!

Stunning is simply an understatement.

The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:

“I think this is needed and long past needed.

There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.

And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.

I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“

“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”

I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:

–

Amen. I want a site like that. I’d pay money for an archive like that, and I’d invest time and effort to make sure it’s as great as it can be. […] But then I hit the realism switch in my brain and it goes ‘splodey. Because sadly it’s not a very realistic concept.

And this:

–

In a perfect world it could be an amazing thing and a great way to “rally the troops” so to speak and provide a sort-of one-stop shop for fan-fiction readers and writers. I see a couple potential problems, though.

Or this:

–

Oh god. I like what you’re saying, I really do, but I think it’s actually impossible to achieve.

and all the various comments that start with

“It sounds like a cool idea…but”

or words to that effect.

Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of

this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:

“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.

And here are some notes:

Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.

All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.

Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.

Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”

And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.

And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”

Because, damn it, why shouldn't we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn't we go out there and get it?”

I am so pleased to have been proved correct. 

(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)

I want to pull this out for a second because I have in fact generally spent much of my life aiming for big unrealistic goals, very few of which I’ve actually achieved, and many of which I didn’t actually want by the time I got close to them. 

The thing about aiming for “unrealistic” goals is that the work you do to achieve those goals doesn’t disappear even if you don’t achieve the goal. We still haven’t accomplished everything on our giant AO3 wishlist. There remains plenty of work to be done (and the OTW and the amazing current team working on the AO3 can always use more help, as Cesperanza says!) 

Good morning Wei Ying~

twitter

extra:

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.