Raining Randomness

Lidded ritual wine container (zun) in the form of a bird. Eastern Zhou dynasty (770 - 221 BCE) [1449 x 2000]

What a great idea!!

“While trimming the trees, my dad found himself with a lot of dead branches, and knowing from experience how hard it can be to find a good stick, and that the new dog park was opening soon, he had the idea that he would save them and put them in some kind of box.”

I set a trap with peanut butter before I left and left it beside the oil in my cabinet. And yet multiple mice decided to... chew through the hard plastic bottle of OIL.... and die?!?! There’s a fucking mass grave of mice in my OIL and the fully-accessible peanut butter is untouched.

Like, I’m REALLY glad that collections exist, and I’ve put my work into some collections when I made those things specifically for those collectuons. Collections are a useful tool for things like bangs, where the stories need to be hidden until the reveal….. but that also means that the person in charge has the ability to hide your works from the public. Like, without you agreeing, because you already “agreed” to that by submitting to the collection. Which means works you previously had available suddenly disappear from where people can find them.

What I’m saying is please stop random requests to random people to be in your random collections. I know you probably don’t have ill intentions, but there’s no way to tell. And if you’re getting requests to be part of random collections, please be aware that if you approve them, you won’t be the only one in control of some elements of your posted stories, including whether or not they “exist” to the average reader. If they mark the collection as “unrevealed,” you story stops being accessible to the public. And they have the option to mark the collection “anonymous” which I’m pretty sure turns the author from being You to being Anonymous.

And I say all of this because I have seen this happen to people. I have had friends whose stories “disappeared” because they approved a random collection invite and the collection owner turned everything “unrevealed” (likely without even knowing or understanding that it would hide it for EVERYONE not just hide the collection so no one would see they had it, it’s not like a private bookmark). And while I haven’t seen anyone do this maliciously (at least none I can prove) I can see where it could be USED maliciously. So please, just be careful out there.

Copy and past the following link, and where it says “yourusernamehere” type in your AO3 pseud.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourusernamehere/collection_items?approved=true

This should take you to a page where your works that have been approved for collections resides. You can remove your works from collections by selecting “rejected” instead from the drop down menus.

want to add a fic you love to that super-specific collection you made for Fics With Werewolves Set In London? bookmark it and add the bookmark to your collection! 

“Autumn Fox”

Spiderman: into the spiderverse came out this year, as did Captain Marvel

Hozier released Wasteland, Baby! in March.

the gamer girl bath water meme AND the shaggy meme were this year.

the last GoT season came out.

Marie Kondo happened to us this year

detective Pikachu happened this year; so did the cats movie trailer and Sonic and lion king live-action.

the area 51 meme happened this year (it feels like it’s been 4 years)

30-50 feral hogs happened this year

France, 1955