There is always a fandom discourse about how fandom is too much about shipping and romantic love, but my beef is actually with people being too fond of the idea of a family as the purest form of love and the strongest unit.
Starting from pople tending to turn every story about siblings who are not besties into this huge tragedy instead of awknowledging that maybe, sometimes, people are not close with their siblings. Or that people are so weird about mothers.
But what irks me even more is the tendency to decide that two people who are close in canon have a "sibling coded relationship" which suddenly also means that shipping them together is wrong. Or if a character has an older person in their life whom they look up to - well that is their parent now!!!! They can't fuck their parent!!!!
There is this underlying idea that elevating characters into a familial bond is above such concepts as romantic love or sex. Which sucks because that is not what the concept found family means - it was meant to describe the queer experience of finding your people and community from outside of your blood relatives, and it was never meant to say that there can't also be romantic relationships within that community.
And it is not even always about the fact that I want to ship my blorbo with everyone who comes near him (although I absolutely do), but I think that sometimes there can be meaningful dynamics that are not about family. I want my blorbo to have friends, lovers, partners, mentors, neighbours, a trusted older person who they can call to but is not their parent.
Maybe some of this rises from the fact that family for me is something complicated and sore and not as important as my friends and community. But also the idea of a nuclear family as the pillar of society is such a conservative talking point and it is weird that people keep throwing a fit about romance and dating as societal standard but don't seem to notice this one.
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Hiii i recently read drawing lines and oh my god i loved it. Can i get a little behind the scenes perhaps? And/or which of your (patho) fics should i read next?? Yr prose is delightful, thank you for the food :]
Hello! Oh my gosh yes absolutely! I am so happy to share behind the scenes, especially for this fic, which was such a pleasure to write!
So I wrote this fic for my friend and cowriter neonregrowth (@wrenfemme), after we had spent a magical summer writing Pathologic fic together. (As to the answer of what you should read next, it's Not Shy of Fatal and its sequels, which was our Patho debut and great joy of a collaboration.) We started talking about this story because I'd gotten the idea of Artemy using Daniil as a spite hookup and we'd both been very intrigued by the dialogue options in P2 that allow Artemy to be much more reluctant/dismissive of his role in the town. We had pondered trying to write it together, but it was one of those things where the idea just takes one of you and they run, and that ended up happening with me.
The only reason that happened, though, was that we both ended up (at different times) seeing an exhibit of Jamie Wyeth's art, much of which was sooooo Patho-like that we were just exploding about it, and learning that the way he learned to sketch anatomy was through sketching in a morgue. We both instantly thought, Daniil. And then we realized that artist Daniil could actually be a throughline of the story we had been talking about, and that was what gave rise to the idea of the revelation of their feelings!
Another little fun fact is that the working title for this story was "desecrate me, daddy," because of our agreement that Artemy specifically wanted to degrade himself/his sacred purpose by being with Daniil, only to be accidentally adored. Oops! :)
Thank you so much for asking, and for your kind words! This is general backstory for the fic, but if there's any moment in particular you're curious about, feel free to ask!
❓No dumb questions amnesty - can you explain this [line/dialogue/moment from the story]?
🏴☠️ Were there any points in which your characters tried (or succeeded) to commit mutiny against your planned plot? Where did they most want to rebel?
🥇 What scene were you most excited to write? Did it end up being the one you enjoyed writing the most?
🙏 Was there anything your character(s) really really really wanted to do? Did you let them?
🍆 What scene do you think was the hottest? What scene do you think your readers thought was the hottest? Are they the same?
🔮Have you imagined what happens to [character(s)] in the future? Or does the story only exist to you as a moment in time?
🔎 What detail(s) in the story are you particularly captivated with? Is there any behind the scenes info or backstory?
🧭 What was the key choice or decision you had to make for this story? If you had chosen differently, what would the story have turned into?
📖 Could the story have been a different length? What would you have included/removed?
🫂How would the story have changed if you wrote it for [this pairing] instead?
💭 If you could wish into creation a transformative piece for your story, made by a real human who isn’t you, what would it be? Art, video, sequel, podfic, etc.
📋What was your main goal for the story and/or writing experience? Do you think that you achieved it?
🎤 Do you think the story was written in your typical voice? Why or why not?
👉👈What two stories have you written that are most similar? Why?
👈👉What two stories have you written that are most different? Why?
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watching sinners with an inflation calculator open in a second tab so i can understand just what kinda money the smokestack twins are throwing around. nerdiest possible movie experience i think.
Okay coming out of lurking for this because among the many great features of Sinners is you don't actually have to go outside of the movie to understand what kind of money they're throwing around. The movie tells you itself.
In the scene where Smoke teaches the young girl how to negotiate, they're standing in front of of a cafe. The shot of them negotiating is framed so that you see a sign in the cafe window advertising a Ham and Eggs breakfast - in other words, a full meal - for 25 cents. The editing makes sure to put that sign back into frame whenever the question of the value of money arises in their discussion.
Smoke offers her 10 cents a minute and asks if that works for her. She says yes. He says no, it does not and tells her to negotiate higher. The 25 cent sign is framed in the shot when he tells her no, reminding us *why* it's not a good value.
She comes back with 50 cents - which the sign has informed us is the cost of *two* meals. Smoke tells her that's too much and counters with 20, which is just under a full meal but we now know that's a fairly respectable price because we just got the high/low contrast of 10 being too little and 50 being too much.
The negotiation ends with her getting 20 cents per minute and we now know 1) 25 cents is the cost of a filling meal in this environment 2) This girl only needs to do five minutes of work to be able to feed herself for a over day (20 cents per minute times five is a dollar, which is four meals) 3) Smoke has the kind of money to throw around that over a day's worth of food for someone can be to him - as it is to our modern eyes - mere pocket change and 4) Smoke's the kind of person who can both be a violent gangster but also care about teaching this girl how to look out for herself so that one day maybe she too can throw over a day's worth of food around like pocket change.
Combined with 5) you can now use that 25 cents = a meal to do the math every other time money gets mentioned in the movie to understand just how much cash the Smoke Stack boys are dealing with.
And that's just ONE detail which, thanks to props (Hannah Beachler), editing (Michael P Shawver), and cinematography (Autumn Durald Arkapaw), told you almost everything you needed to know about how finances work in this environment. This movie is unfair to all other films in how fucking good it is.
They've put my thesis in the institutional repository
Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Guys. This is so exciting. I am a ball of hype.
Okay – so – ahem. There is this academic field called fan studies. I've just finished a master's degree and my final thesis was in that field. (Technically, my field is LIS, library and information science. Don't worry, it overlaps.) Today, my university uploaded my thesis to the institutional repository, so now everyone can read it! It's right there! Look! LOOK AT IT I'm so proud!
TL;DR:
This study looks into a group of Good Omens fans' opinions about AO3's search and tagging systems, and also talks about their thoughts about fandom overall. Specifically, I wanted to figure out whether things like amount of time using AO3, experience using other fanfiction sites, level of comfort with AO3's tagging system, or experience in LIS/librarianship or IT make any difference to a person's opinions about search and tagging on AO3. (There were no strong correlations in my data, but there were plenty of interesting qualitative observations to talk about.) I also looked at how, exactly, people go about searching AO3 in practice, what features they like to use, what things trip them up, and so on, using a fun method from the computer science field of human–computer interaction.
If you're a long-time user of AO3, the results of this study might not surprise you, but you might still be interested in the background and previous research chapters (a bit of background on the field of fan studies, a little AO3 history, what's so special about AO3's tagging system, and a tiny little bit of nitty-gritty about how its search and browse features work, for example). There's also a section in the discussion chapter about the social and community aspects of fandom (section 6.6), which I find pretty heart-warming.
By the way: All the data collection – the survey and interviews this study is based on – was done before the Good Omens finale came out. There is absolutely nothing in here about the finale. You are safe from that debate.
Abstract for the academics:
Several studies within the field of fan studies have examined fans’ attitudes to the curated folksonomy (tagging system) and search features of fanfiction archive Archive of Our Own (AO3). However, factors affecting these attitudes have not been studied extensively, and despite the conceptual proximity to the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), existing research employing HCI methods in fan studies is limited.
Using a mixed-methods approach, this exploratory study collects its data from a survey, two interviews, and three condensed contextual inquiry sessions. The survey uses a modified end-user satisfaction instrument to determine attitudes to AO3 search, comparing this to certain types of academic, professional, and fandom-related experience. Weak correlations are found between search satisfaction and familiarity with the tagging system, search satisfaction and experience using other fanwork platforms, and academic or professional experience in IT or LIS and confidence using the tagging system. Contextual and qualitative content analysis suggest fans both appreciate and are confused by AO3’s interface and that AO3 performs well on exploratory searches but falls short on specific lookups. Previous findings on fans’ attitudes to AO3’s tagging system and its effects on search are also corroborated.
This study adds to the literature about attitudes to searching and tagging on AO3 and demonstrates how HCI methods can benefit the fan studies field. Future research might use contextual inquiry or the search satisfaction scale developed here to study AO3 usage, or consider the meaning of these findings for questions in LIS more broadly.
Keywords: Information practices, fan studies, folksonomies, information retrieval, surveys, condensed contextual inquiry, end-user satisfaction, Archive of Our Own
(Can I tag @transformativeworks here? Is that okay? Hello OTW! This is (kind of) research about you! You can look at it if you like!)
"omg i LOVE it when love between characters is so strong it overrides the boundaries of flesh and selfhood, merging them into some sort of (un)holy chimera" — person who's uncomfortable with the idea of permanently sharing a bedroom with someone else
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my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.
an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.
instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.
the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.
probably would've been quicker and easier to just photoshop them in but no, this student took a refreshingly creative, arts-and-crafts approach to getting an academic misconduct case
To all trans youth out there: I see you, I love you, I am proud of you being who you are in this extremely difficult time. I'm so sorry so many adults either want to attack you or have failed to protect you from those attacks.
You deserve a better world and we won't stop fighting until we make a better one.
stuff they actually let happen on Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Godzilla tried to eat Chancellor Palpatine
Darth Maul came back from the dead as a crime boss with robot legs and had a giant angry brother named Savage
Jabba the Hutt’s uncle was an offensive gay stereotype
Palpatine had a gigantic forehead for literally no reason
Zombie episode
They named a Jedi “I’m Gonna Die” and then killed him
Some senator had a sex robot
All the Twi’leks had French accents
Ahsoka got hunted for sport
Anakin had to do elaborate BDSM roleplay with an evil cat lady
Dooku was almost murdered by the Macbeth witches
Hondo Ohnaka
Yoda made contact with Qui-Gon Jinn’s ghost but the other Jedi just thought he had dementia
0.07 seconds after leaving the Jedi Order, Ahsoka crashed her motorcycle, got a girlfriend, and ended up smuggling drugs for the mob
Anakin and Obi-Wan met the physical incarnations of the Dark and Light Sides of the Force and they looked like a goth drama queen and his cottagecore sister and both of them were furries
Ahsoka got bit by an evil rat which made her evil for awhile
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