In late 2019, TV, movie, anime, gaming, celebrity, music, and book fans assembled to save Yahoo Groups after Verizon decided to shut down the mailing list service. Approximately 300,000 fandom groups have been saved. The Yahoo Gedden project is working on identifying the fandoms of Italian language mailing lists and can use your help. We need people who can read Italian natively right now to help us identify the Unknown groups. You can work at your own pace and it is a low time commitment. Work is done on Discord, just reading the Italian group description and a few messages and summarizing the messages in English, maybe answering a question of clarification ("is it talking about X or Y?"). No software or other tools needed besides your phone/computer and access to Discord.

Got my shoes on. Got my kitchen timer on. Challenged myself to see how much better I could make the kitchen look in 10 minutes.

I cleared the kitchen island. Put away all the food, got all the dirty dishes into the sink. Started a load of laundry. Made up my third cup of coffee. Washed out some recycling and got it to the bin. Oh, now I can see the acetaminophen which I need to take today.

Do I still have a big mess? Yes I do. I came home from 2-week trip, and I'm still finding stuff I need to put away and laundry I need to do.

But my ADHD ass developed the self-care habits, routines, tips and tricks, originally in the late '90s due to this nice southern lady. She used to send out daily emails encouraging us to take care of ourselves and giving us ideas on how to tackle big home care projects, self-care projects, but mostly home care.

It was a lot of email. And not being Christian, I didn't always appreciate her dropping of God references. But without her structure, without her having figured out that there was tons of us out there, struggling with our lives and managing our shit...

She helped me a lot. The chaos is mostly controlled. (She used to backronym CHAOS as "Can't Have Anybody Over Syndrome" heh)

I'm no longer ashamed of my habitat (and also, thank you, @unfuckyourhabitat for continuing the momentum of this particular way of working).

Gonna finish my coffee ☕ and then set the timer for another 10 minutes. Got a friend coming over for dinner 🍽️ and I can stand to do a bit more tidying up.

TLDR: I’m from old-fandom, decades ago when bullying was not acceptable. Please respect your fellow fandom freaks. Because you're one too.

TMNT fandom used to be an incredibly accepting place. We were all horrible little freaks with a weird and socially-unacceptable habit of day dreaming and writing and drawing and, honestly, obsessing about hidden turtle men in the sewers. 

Social pressure from real life kept us humble and grateful for the existence of others like us online. Because outside of fandom, the world was full of  people who had normal hobbies, like sports or crafting or gardening or volunteering for soup kitchens. Those normal people could talk about their interests in public! Mention their safe pursuits in mixed company! Claim their talents and their results in the social circles at school or at work or at church!

Make-believe man-turtle enthusiasts had nowhere in our real lives where it was okay to admit the depth of our interests without being bullied or shunned or branded as a complete freak. Whether you were a kid or an adult! 

And I have said nothing about shipping or smut or specific versions of our mutants.

If you wrote/drew/enjoyed the tamest, sweetest, most pure turtle content, you were still an IRL freak!

That's why, when us fans found each other online, space was made for all of us. Our only requirement: love the turtles. 

I get that newer fans don't have those extreme social pressures. Times have changed. 'Fandom' is not mainstream, but it's understood to exist for thousands of TV shows and movies and games. Now, the internet is everywhere and it's easier than ever to find people who agree with you. Heck, there's every expectation that there are people who agree with you; you don’t have to wonder if you’re alone.

Loving the TMNT is not an isolating experience anymore.

That's great.

But it also means that current fandom takes its fans for granted. Fans that write the wrong kinds of fiction are bullied. Fans who draw the wrong arrangement of characters are shunned. Fans who enjoy more than one type of story are disposable, worthless, and unwelcome to speak or share with the larger group. 

Fandom is meant to be a refuge for all us freaks.

How did the real world become kinder while fandom got meaner? How does that make sense? Why are the people who have the most in common doing the most damage to each other?

Of course, rate your content, tag your content, respect requests not to discuss certain topics/ships in specific settings or with specific people. Yes, yes, yes. Consideration and respect for each other's boundaries is fundamental in fandom and is how we have been able to co-exist for so long!

But respect and consideration are built on treating each other--all of each other--as if we all have value and worth and dignity. 

Every member of fandom is a real person with feelings. 

Every member of fandom likes a variety of content. 

Every member of fandom deserves to have a safe space where they are not insulted or tormented or excluded for their thoughts or creations.

Another week, another purge… this week, Emily and V take a stroll back to Yahoo! Groups for a crash course on what they were, how they worked, and why they mattered. The episode takes a surprisingly sad turn as they consider how draining it is to constantly report on purges of huge portions of fannish history and what it really means when a company axes a huge repository of people's hard work, creativity, and passion. Then of course it gets a bit silly again at the end. Join us -- group pun! -- won't you?

quizilla, too. yeah, i even miss yahoo answers.

it's fascinating, in a trainwreck sorta way, how these sort of communities develop into complex networks of human experiences and info and output, only to get taken out back and axed when they fail to lay the golden egg, so to speak. even more compelling is how we keep throwing an unfathomable amount of cash, electricity, and server space at AI, trying to get its string puppet body to even emulate these networks.

When I say "we" I mean the "Musketeers" and "Knights". Those who were there years ago would understand.

I remember we all loved Louis some of us had a soft spot for Lestat, and most of us hated Armand. It started going downhill(for me at least) when LegendaireLestat (or whatever the handle was) joined up she stirred up all sorts of 💩💩💩 especially when the QotD film was released (sadly only a few of us there actually like the movie, myself included)

I don't have AMC+ so I'm pondering this:

Unless it's explicitly stated otherwise. What if Rashid is not Armand but the Body Thief from book 4 of the VC. I can see why people think or want to think that he's Armand but I like the possibility that he could be James Raglan (been so long I forget how it's spelled). I know I'm probably wrong but I like that theory.