@skiamachy

Although the downsides imo are 1) the majority of Discord servers tend to be more insular, private, and difficult to access except thru word of mouth--you usually can't just google '[niche craft/interest]' and find the community you're looking for these days.

and 2) Discord tends to promote more chatty/temporary/in real time communication and less of the carefully constructed, thoughtful essays that (...occasionally) pop up on forums or (more frequently) on blogs, for example.

Tumblr has a decent mix of both in terms of post content.

(Not that all of the above platforms can't descend rapidly into flame wars, obviously. But I do think faster-moving conversations tend to get more impulsive--and sometimes more catty--responses.)

The other thing is that platforms like tumblr and twitter put some of the focus on 'curating' both your own follow list and your public page/profile.

Whereas messaging servers don't have a personal page people can view to decide whether or not to follow you (or in some minds--particularly teenagers'--whether or not they like/respect you.)

And I do think the purpose of DNI lists for at least some percentage of users is a peer pressure effect, to show your peers that your values are Good and Righteous. The whole moralizing of media shtick going on right now.

And so platforms that aren't 'social media' (if we consider platforms where users have a curateable public profile to be social media) aren't useful for their purposes.

Title: The Apokalypsis of (Flobber-) Wurm Author/Artist: @halcyonnon Prompt: # 26 Pairing(s): Harry Potter/Theodore Nott/Luna Lovegood Word Count/Art Medium: 6745 Rating:  T Summary: It’s raining flobberworms across Britain.

Hello, love! Yes, of course!

😍 What is your favourite fic trope? Oh I have several, but lately I've read so much sad stuff. I blame the Kill Your Darlings fest but my gosh, I've read some heavy MCD and sometimes it's just time for sadness and angst, y'know? So, right now, love stories with unhappy endings is my obsession.

🏆 What do you wish more authors in your fandom would write about? So many things have already been written, but I would like to read more fics that incorporate mental illness and different kinds of disabilities. I know that there are some out there that are good, but there could be more.

🤷 What thing that your fandom loves do you just not “get”? I don't mean this in a bad way, but one thing that seems to be on the up that I don't get is Jegulus. Like. I don't dislike it. I have read it. I just...don't get it. It doesn't do anything for me. Which is bizarre because I love James and I love Regulus but, just, together? No.

I love Jegulus, but with the latest popularity wave it gained I've almost stopped reading it altogether except for a few specific authors i like, and some old fics that i keep going back to.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the characterisations of them because usually it’s the way James is written that just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t recognise the James I read, he feels so different from the James I love or the James I see in wolfstar, for example. Because, yes, I come from wolfstar and the way I read him there is just…different from what I see in Jegulus.

voici mon secret by @secretpersona8 i have long beautiful very incoherent ramblings about how much i love this fic all over both hpfc and the wolfstar server, i can dig em up for you if interested! canon-setting but au, amazing characterizations, fantastic rep, LOVED how their relationship played out in this one.

something better by @vdoshu. my favorite jegulus are ones where sirius is right in the middle of it. not there but Very There.

along those lines @thistlecatfics has Impact (double drabble) and Duty (regulus character study with very minor jegulus) and they're short but... enough to see the appeal of this pairing. (or not, that's valid too!)

Week Two Round Up.

[PODFIC]

Podfics for drizzle 2022 are not anonymous Title: Lovely Weather for a Sleigh Ride (Together With You) READ BY: roseszain | Author of Fic: Drarrelie Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Summary: The snow is glittering in the sun and the Eighth Years can’t resist heading out to savour it, revisions and essays be damned. Only question is, can Harry coax his roommate to join them?

[ART+ FIC]

Title: Under the weather Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Summary: Harry Potter arrives on a Friday afternoon. Spring is beautiful this year, Draco thinks, and yet, there’s a dark grey cloud, rumbling ominously and leaving a big puddle right in the middle of the staffroom. The cloud appears to be right above Harry Potter’s head.

[ART]

Title: Mustelid Marauding Pairing: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy Summary: Hermione helps Draco speed up the animagus process, to join her in mustelid marauding.

[FIC]

One of the ironies of this trial, industry magazine Publishers Weekly noted early on, was that “the government’s case relies in part on making publishers look extraordinarily savvy about the market in which they operate, in addition to benefiting from their sheer size.” For publishers to rebut that case, they in turn had to present themselves as essentially incompetent gamblers, risking the company’s money in an industry no one could predict, all for the sheer love of literature.

“Everything is random in publishing,” Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle told the court during his testimony. “Success is random. Bestsellers are random. That is why we are the Random House!” He went on to describe the editors and publishers of PRH as “angel investors in our authors and their dreams, their stories.”

Throughout the trial, publishers depicted the industry as one of chaos and romance in equal measure, a hazy and lovely space in which publishers routinely hand out large sums of money for great works of literature, unable to either predict or care whether they would ever make their money back. Within this space, publishers argued, the narrow slice of publishing that the government was focused on — books with an advance of $250,000 and above — was meaningless. There was no true correlation, they said, between the books that they paid high advances for and the actual sales figures of those books.

The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.

If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?