SMFirefly

“The Archive of Our Own has none of these problems. It uses a third tagging system, one that blends the best elements of both styles. On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want (autocomplete is there to help, but they don’t have to use it). Then, behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. Wrangling means that you don’t need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. And you definitely don’t need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you. AO3’s trick is that it involves humans by design—around 350 volunteer tag wranglers in 2019, up from 160 people in 2012—who each spend a few hours a week deciding whether new tags should be treated as synonyms or subsets of existing tags, or simply left alone. AO3’s Tag Wrangling Chairs estimate that the group is on track to wrangle over 2 million never-before-used tags in 2019, up from around 1.5 million in 2018. Laissez-faire and rigid tagging systems both fail because they assume too much—that users can create order from a completely open system, or that a predefined taxonomy can encompass every kind of tag a person might ever want. When these assumptions don’t pan out, it always seems to be the user’s fault. AO3’s beliefs about human nature are more pragmatic, like an architect designing pathways where pedestrians have begun wearing down the grass, recognizing how variation and standardization can fit together. The wrangler system is one where ordinary user behavior can be successful, a system which accepts that users periodically need help from someone with a bird’s-eye view of the larger picture. Users appreciate this help. According to Tag Wrangling Chair briar_pipe, “We sometimes get users who come from Instagram or Tumblr or another unmoderated site. We can tell that they’re new to AO3 because they tag with every variation of a concept—abbreviations, different word order, all of it. I love how excited people get when they realize they don’t have to do that here.””

Me: Oh, she used a kinda wireframe thing to do the sculpture.

aw man I sure hope nobody learns to do that

gosh i love fan fic authors

Friend: Wanna hang out tomorrow?

Doc: Nothing in life is free.

why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like… 

I KNOW!! I did a report on filming locations in Star Wars last year and just made a list of places that looked so surreal they could make a convincing other planet. You covered some on my list but if I could just add a couple more:

#damn earth is cool#also shit this hit 6k?#and for all the comments going “but this would destroy the ecosystem”#a) cgi b) cgi has advanced since the prequels and used in moderation could be cool c) this is just pointing out that earth is badass#yet lucasfilms keeps using the same 3 flavors of planet#the prequels were almost all cg and some places were entirely computer created giving that unnatural feel#if you cg in an actual place once in a while you can still get it to look cool without destroying an ecosystem (via @wearethesparkk)

WE ONLY GET ONE SET OF ADULT TEETH THAT ARE DESIGNED TO LAST MAYBE HALF OUR EXPECTED LIFESPAN