♫

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Happy 7th Anniversary Promare !!

However... as a fandom creator (writer and artist), I sometimes feel like too much pressure is concentrated on creators. I don't know if this is a frustration others share? Not only should we keep making things, but somehow we also end up becoming these central fandom figures who can feel pressured into responding to comments (or else we're called arrogant or ungrateful), making friends (or else we're rude for ignoring well-meaning people who reach out), and being the drivers and pillars of that community (running events, responding to memes, etc. – and everything falls silent if we stop). It's a lot of work!! I don't always have the time and energy to make things for fun and then also engage in all the ways people might sometimes feel entitled to because they enjoy my works.

I really wish that more "non-creating" fans in the community would discover their fandom power!! and not just rely on the visible "producing" creators to be the only people worth engaging with. It takes nothing more than passion to write a meta-post about a character or a plot point, or to create an ask game, or to DM someone else who you see posting funny tags – not just the creator! Maybe your followers have other tips for evening out the balance a little more?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, anon. This is an observation I've seen in many parts of life, not just fandom.

A lot of people feel as though they need permission or an invitation of some sort in order to contribute. That's why I always end my answers by asking people to share their thoughts. I want to make it explicitly clear that I want people to add things into the reblogs (which I can then share out for more people to see) and the replies (which people can at least read even if I can't reblog).

I have heard fans who are readers but don't write fic say that they think they can't get an AO3 account unless they plan to post something. This is incorrect, of course, but a lot of people make that assumption.

I think at least some people (I don't know what kind of percentage) assume that someone who is writing fic or posting art or making podfics and video edits etc. has some sort of expertise that "allows" them to post.

People with less confidence or with less practice etc. sometimes need an extra nudge before they realize that they're welcome to contribute too. If that's the case for you, please allow me to say:

You are welcome to post in your fandom, even if no one invites you to. Even if you think you're not good enough. Even if your idea isn't "popular."

Start a conversation. Share a thought. Talk to folks who reblog cool shit. Be a folk who reblogs cool shit. You don't have to do everything in order to do something.

make a rec list

make a "here's all the fics I've found in this fandom with this one trope/general vibe/very particular setup I just think is Neat" list

make a "welcome to the fandom, here's the fics that people will just assume you've read/know about to get you started" list

Create whumps lists

Create lists of shippy moments

Make screenshot collections

Record and post clips of your show to get more people into your fandom

Make incorrect quote memes

Make silly little TikTok-style edits of your favs

Make character playlists

Figure out the layout of buildings/cities

Recreate those building in the Sims or with an online floor planner or even just draw it out because holy hell writers will be so thankful for that

Make your blorbo in various video game character creations

Build a pokemon team for your blorbo

Make up silly headcanons! What does everyone do at the fair or the beach or during a fire drill?

Outline a fic idea you have — maybe you don’t have the time or energy or you just don’t feel confident enough to create it, but share it anyway!

Create outfits based on your blorbo’s design or outfits they would wear

Collect interviews with the author, producer, director, mangaka etc

Similarly, translate interviews

I remember someone in the haikyuu!! fandom kept a twt thread of every time two characters were in the same panel. Not sure what the tumblr equivalent would be. I guess just a regular old post with lots of additions? (Send help; i'm not sure why my brain is struggling so badly to translate twitter threads to tumblr posts)

Run a quote bot account: I'm not sure of the status of quote bots in a post twitter era, but those were quite fun. Again an example from the hq!! fandom, there was the hq!! bastille bot which would spit out a bastille lyric + a ship. The siken bot would spit out a line of poetry + a ship name. On tumblr maybe the equivalent would be a gimmick blog?

Run a ship/character week. I think these are probably the easiest kind of fandom event to run. it doesn't take more than one person, a blog, and rudimentary graphics skills.

Are socmed AUs still a thing?

Make gifs

Try to figure out the layers to a character's outfit and share your studies with the world. (I'm looking directly at you, Hoyoverse and all you're what-even-is-that how-do-they-even-put-that-on character design. beautiful, but confusing)

Update fandom wikis

Log fandom history on fanlore.org (another project run by the Organization for Transformative Works, aka the parent of ao3)

Some suggestions:

Transcribe episodes for film/audio canons

Podfic! We can always use more podfic, and most people's phones have a voice recorder.

Create bingo sheets (e.g. make a fanwork with five or more of these tropes for a bingo; read/reblog fanworks in five or more of these categories for a bingo)

Be a Your Blorbo expert consultant! If I'm writing about a character I don't have strong feelings about, but I know one of my friends is constantly reblogging and posting about them, even if it's all silly memes and "character <3"-type posting, I'll sometimes reach out to them for advice on if I'm getting Their Blorbo right. It's absolutely invaluable and I appreciate these people so much.

So it doesn’t register that high stress leads to weird behavior, because it’s not highlighted as weird, it’s highlighted as “the truth” in the most bullshit manipulative way I’ve ever seen.

And this type of narrative is very, very useful for Calvinist branches of Christianity, Puritanism, evangelism, baptism, etc. because they believe in predestination, (whether they know that or not) and therefore have metrics of “this person does X and is a Good Person, that person does Y, and are a Bad Person, and these things are fundamentally unchangable because that is Gods Will” which means that even if you were acting “good”, if you ever so much as do one thing “bad”, it’s an indication that you were lying about being good the whole time, because that’s what Bad People do, and since you did a Bad Thing (or even had a Bad Thought) it’s proof you are Bad, because God would not have made you to act that way if you were not.

Predestination is a weird, paradoxical concept that simultaneously posits that humans do and do not have free will, as you can probably tell. But that is why that “the worst of you is always the real you” narrative is SO prevalent in the US especially.

And I know this because while the concept does appear in other countries and cultures, it’s more of a “huh, guess you never know a guy” and less of a pearl clutching hysterical reaction of “oh no! They were bad people all along! Everyone lynch them!” You see in the US.

And it has consequences, the least of which is the inability to understand that stress does weird things to people and that they are genuinely not themselves when under the influence of stress, alcohol, drugs, or mental health disasters.

It’s not as bad as it used to be in regard to the latter, but for some reason we don’t tend to think of stress as causing those disasters in the first place.

Selections from a 1999 Target newspaper insert (1999)

Lots of kitschy Groovival, mixed with a style of colorful, playful 90s-00s contemporary interiors we've been calling Gen-X Home - I could see that style coming back, its so fun!

A BAC content of 0.4% is defined as "the lethal dose" in most medical textbooks. That's the dose where half the people that reach it do not survive, the LD50. You take 20 people off the street, make them drink til their BAC is 0.4%, and odds are good you'll kill 10 of them.

For most people, that takes something like 13 back to back shots, equivalent to 20 oz total, or 600 mL.

If this woman weighed 200 lbs (90 kg) and just straight chugged those bottles in under an hour, her BAC would've peaked around 1.6, which is 4 times the level that would kill most people outright. It would take her 85 hours after stopping drinking to "sober up" to merely the lethal level.

If she were to space it over a 24 hour bender, that would still result in a peak BAC of "merely" 1.4%, still over three times the lethal dose, with an estimated three days to return to "merely lethal" levels of sobriety.

Several thoughts on this.

That fact that this person is not dead is, by itself, impressive.

The fact that they were able to travel somewhere and pull a prank in that state is legitimately incredible. The LD50 for falls is 50 feet. In my head, I am putting this on the same level as a woman falling out of a 5 story window, staggering away, only to get apprehended later gluing googly eyes to random objects.

There was a drinking game some of my friends played in college while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail that we always wound up cheating at, because every time we attempted it we got blitzed. We did a fully sober watch of it one time while tallying, and that drinking game would've required us to take 55 shots in order to make it through honestly. We all agreed that was ridiculous, but I am only now processing that it was ridiculous in a way that could actually get people killed. If you're making drinking games, please try to give yourself a 9 shot budget, tops.

This woman consumed the equivalent of 65 shots. Which means that she alone could pass the Monty Python drinking game.

Made this guy from my favorite Gerard Donelan comic

These are season 0 designs, I will make DM versions in the future.

Yugi/Yami: Hedgehogs, because the spikey hair lmao, also hedgehogs are hella cute. Why they are different species of hedgehog and why Yami doesnt really look like a desert hedgehog is cuz... well... You'll see when I make Atem's design properly, now hes just copying Yugi's image.

Anzu: Blue crane, I wanted her to be an animal that is associated with dancing and most bird species do dance! Blue cranes also look very graceful and their dance requires quite the footwork!

Miho: Lilac rabbit, her nickname is ribbon and I immediately thought of rabbit. Who could have thought there was a lilac one in real life, tehee!

Katsuya: Carolina dog, I didn't realize how much Seto and Ryuji humiliated Katsyua in the anime with dog-themed insults I JUST THOUGHT HE WAS DOG-CODED, now I feel kinda bad...

Hiroto: Wolverine, I know he could have been a monkey instead based on that filler arc in the anime, but I'm basing most of these characterizations from the manga. Hiroto was certainly the hardest to assign a certain animal too, I tried with something that associates with his name more but ehhh. Wolverine works with his color palette, also they kinda cool, lanky but strong

The Kaiba bros: Puma, I definetly wanted to make Seto some kind of feline and I choose Puma because of their eyes, mostly their glare. It fits them so much hehehe. Mokuba was more an afterthought but puma works for him too

Ryuo/Yami Bakura: Japanese raccoon dog (tanuki), at first I wanted to make them normal raccoons but I also wanted to settle for something more regional in Japan, which is why I choose tanuki. While Ryuo isn't a theif, his counterpart certainty is

Shadi: African golden wolf, I wanted him to be whatever animal Anubis is and apparently it is not a jackal (common misconception lmao). Anubis is actually an african golden wolf that where historically misidentified as Egyptian jackal. Tho the ears aren't similar to Anubis at all, I still wanted to keep Anubis likeness in Shadi

Dark magician/Mahado: Pharao hound, well I think this one is pretty obvious, with Mahado being Atem's ever loyal servant and protector