Never trust a fox

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Stay away from purity culture. Warn your friends away from it too, if you see them starting to fall for it. It’s very easy to get drawn into it

Almost always, it starts with one of three roots, pedophilia, incest and/or abuse. Usually it’s pedophilia. Funnily enough, that’s also what congress usually uses to try to justify passing bills that undermine online privacy & security. Because it’s an easy, extreme target, and when people attempt to argue against it, it’s nice and easy to say “Oh so you like pedophilia” rather then actually engaging with their argument.

The logic goes like this, although there’s many forms of it.

“Pedophilia is bad.” -> Obviously, you agree with this. You’re a reasonable person, and the idea that anyone would do something like that to a child is horrible. This is a normal human reaction.

“Because pedophilia is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.” -> Here you might hesitate, but it adds up, doesn’t it? The thought of pedophilia in any context probably gives you a bad feeling, that makes you inclined to go along with this logic. 

“Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia is also bad.” -> Maybe you pause here, or maybe you don’t. But still, it adds up, it’s a very easy flow. After all, we’ve decided that that is Bad, so why would anyone Good want to create something like that?

“Since people who create content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia are just as bad as people who engage in pedophilia in real life, it’s okay to harm them.” -> Here’s where you might pause again. The argument might not win you over entirely, you might not be willing to do harm yourself, but you may be a lot more willing to turn a blind eye to harm being done to someone. Or to consider it ‘justified’.

The pattern now repeats for anything else that’s considered “morally impure”, and “pedophilia” is expanded and expanded, often to ridiculous points, such as merely shipping two underage characters. “Abuse” becomes any ship that the person pushing doesn’t like, for any reason. And so on and so forth.

This is the foundation of “anti” culture, and it’s important to be aware of it so you can catch this false equivocation. Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity. It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions. 

A very handy trick for when you encounter this sort of argument, is to replace whatever the selected purity term is with murder. After all, we can all agree that murder is bad, but at the same time, we understand that a murder in a book =/= a murder in real life.

Let’s see that argument again, shall we?

“Murder is bad”

“Because murder is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.”

“Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of murder is also bad.”

“Since people who create fictional explorations of murder are just as bad as the people who commit murder in real life, it’s okay to harm them.”

Hopefully, it’s now easy to see why the above argument is fundamentally flawed.

Keep your eye out for purity culture in your fandom spaces, and when you see it, refuse to engage with it. Warn your friends if you see them falling into the same traps, although try to be kind about it; this is a very easy thought pattern to fall into. I don’t recommend trying to argue/debate anti’s. The attention only feeds them. Block them instead. Don’t let people control or shame you for what you create or consume, and don’t control or shame others for what they create or consume.

Also, as a note, let me be clear about something. If you are uncomfortable with any of the above discussed things, or anything in general in fiction (ie, underage ships, murder, incest, abuse, penguins, needles, etc), that’s perfectly fine (it’s also called a squick, for those that haven’t heard that term before). Absolutely control your fandom experience by blocking people, filtering tags, unfollowing, etc. However, just because you are uncomfortable with something, does not give you the right to control other people. Other people have no right to control what content you create or consume, and you have no right to do that to them either. 

You will see people (even well-meaning people) saying things like “Well, it’s okay to create X content if the creator is processing their own trauma/if it happened to them” or similar sentiments (for example, someone saying a rape victim writing about rape “is fine” since the creator could be using fiction as a coping mechanism), and that also is a slippery slope that heads straight into forcing strangers to out their trauma(s) publicly to be allowed to create in peace, without the often brutal harassment creators face from antis participating in purity culture.

We are the Pride Knights, and this is our battle cry No enemy can shake us, as hard as they can try There’s a fire in our eyes that no hatred can kill A passion in our hearts that’s as strong as our will To our fellow queers who fight their battles on their own We promise to fight with you, you are never alone To our fellow queers who have fallen with the pain We thank you for your courage, your fight is not in vain We are defenders of the right to be proud of who you are To love who you love and to accept every scar We are your knights, protectors of our pride Together we stand, together we ride

LIMITED EDITION: The Pride Knights Playing Cards are now officially available for pre-order in our store until June 30, 2023!

Dont’ Like, Don’t Read

or DL; DR

You are responsible for curating your own online experience.

If something upsets you, makes you angry or queasy or triggers you, stop reading/looking at it. Avoid things that might make you feel that way.

Learn to use the Sort and Filter function on AO3, especially the Exclude tools.

On social media, block and mute accounts / tags / words when necessary.

If you hated something, you don’t need to tell that to the creator or start pointing fingers at them publicly.

The Back button is free. Use it.

Addendum:

Yes, for this to work, creators need to tag their works accordingly, so that people know what sort of content they are about to engage with and can nope out if necessary.

I will probably make another PSA about the importance of proper tagging later.

Ship And Let Ship

or SALS

You are allowed to ship whatever you want.

Everyone else is also allowed to ship whatever they want.

You are entitled to dislike or even hate a ship. If you want to do this online, in public, don’t use the ship tags for hate posts.

If you see someone posting about a ship they like and you don’t, there is no need for you to start arguing with them in their replies / comments / QRTs / reblogs. Don’t throw your hate in their face.

Do not harass fan creators or fans for shipping something you disapprove.

All of this also applies to liking / disliking an individual character.

Addendum:

”I agree with this, except when…”

No, then you are NOT agreeing with this.

Let me make this VERY clear. There are NO exceptions. None.

You don’t EVER harass real people over pixels.

If you disagree with this, kindly block and move on.

Your Kink Is Not My Kink

or YKINMK / YKINMKATO

The longer version is ”Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That’s Okay”.

People have different tastes. Not everything is for everybody.

Even if you don’t like a specific kink, other people are still allowed to use it in their creations.

You are entitled to dislike kinky content and think that it’s ”weird”.

Don’t kink shame or judge people based on their kinks.

This goes both ways: your kink is not someone else’s kink, so don’t push it onto those who are not into it.

Be Kind

or Don’t Be An Asshole

Focus on the things you like instead of the things you hate.

Create and unite instead of destroying and dividing.

Don’t harass real people over fictional things.

Stop stirring up petty drama just to get some attention on social media.

Stop trying to ”win”. Fandom is not a competition.

I don't agree, but even if I did I would still oppose the reform. Here are some of the reasons why:

We already need 43 full years of work and tax contributions to be able to retire. Which means college-educated people were never going to retire at 64 anyway, let alone 62. This reform is aimed at people who start working early, mostly in low-paying jobs.

There's very little provision made in this law for hard/dangerous/manual labour.

There's no provision made for women who stop working to raise their children (51% of women already retire without a "complete career," which means they only retire on a partial pension, vs. 25% of men).

At 64, 1/3 of the poorest workers will already be dead. In France, between the richest and the poorest men, there's a 13 years gap in life expectancy.

Beyond life expectancy, at that age a lot of people (especially poorer, non-college educated) have too many health-related issues to be able to work. Not only is it cruel to ask them to work longer, if they can't work at all that's two more years to hold on with no pension

Unemployment in France is still fairly high (7%). Young people already have a hard time finding work, and this is going to make things even harder for them

Macron cut taxes on the rich and lost the country around 16 Billions € in tax revenue. Our estimated pension deficit should peak at 12 Billions worst case scenario.

While I'm on wealth redistribution (no, not soviet style, but I think there should be a cap on wealth concentration. Nobody needs to be a billionaire.): some of the massive profits of last year should go to workers and to the state to be redistributed, including to fund pensions. The state subsidized companies and corporations during the pandemic, Macron even said "no matter the cost" and spent 206 Billions € on businesses. Now he's going after the poorest workers in the country for an hypothetical 12 Billions??

Implicit in all of this is the question of systemic racism. French workers from immigrant families are already more likely to have started their careers early, to have low-paying jobs, are less likely to be college-educated, more at risk for disabilities and chronic illnesses, etc., so this is going to disproportionately affect them

This is not even touching on the fact that he didn't let lawmakers vote on it, meaning he knew he wouldn't get a majority of votes in parliament, or that 70% of the population is against this law. Pushing it through anyway is blatant authoritarianism.

TL;DR: This is only tangentially about retirement age. The reform will make life harder for people with low incomes, or with no higher education, for manual workers, for women—mothers especially, for POC, for people with disabilities or chronic conditions, etc. This is about solidarity.

Good morning! I’m salty.

I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.

This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.

You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.

“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.

1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place

2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about

3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU

4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia

5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all

6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.

7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.

8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.

9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.

If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Cooking with flavor bootcamp (used what I learned in this a LOT this year)

Beekeeping 101

Learn Interior Design from the British Academy of Interior Design (free to audit course - just choose the free option when you register)

Video on learning to read music that actually helped me??

How to use and sew with a sewing machine

How to ride a bike (listen. some of us never learned, and that's okay.)

How to cornrow-braid hair (I have it on good authority that this video is a godsend for doing your baby niece's black hair)

Making mead at home (I actually did this last summer and it was SO good)

How to garden

Basics of snowboarding (proceed with caution)

How to draw for people who (think they) suck at art (I know this website looks like a 2003 monstrosity, but the tutorials are excellent)

Pixel art for beginners so you can make the next great indie game

Go (back) to school

Introduction to Astronomy (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Principals of Economics (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Introduction to philosophy (free college course)

Computer science basics (full-semester Harvard course free online)

Learn a language

Japanese for Dummies (link fix from 2022)

Ukrainian

Portuguese (Brazil)

American Sign Language (as somebody who works with Deaf people professionally, I also strongly advise you to read up on Deaf/HoH culture and history!)

Chinese (Simplified)

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

and just. what an amazing thought, you know? in a world where we're all struggling to get by, recognising this beautiful thing we have created, knowing that we're all sharing in taking some sort of pleasure/lesson/comfort etc from reading and/or writing it?

Don’t imagine that the likes of you get to tell us where that line is, youngling. Or attempt to cite the Old Fandom Magic to us. We were there when it was written. In fact, some of us wrote it.

…Let’s stay inside the 20th century for the moment (though it would be possible to take this further back). I come of the generation of fans who invented media fandom. I remember the laboriously printed fanzines piled up on convention dealers’ tables (and the fanzines that were kept out of sight under those tables… the source of the descriptor “slash”). I remember the letter campaign that first saved Star Trek. (And am proud to say that Bjo and John Trimble were fandom-neighbors of mine.)

I remember the great New York Trek conventions where the power of that fandom first began to reveal itself: the conventions where big center-city hotels got so oversubscribed that the fire marshals had to intervene. I remember the legendary Trek con at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan where the ladies who normally worked a nearby brothel bought memberships and started working convention registration because they saw us having so much fun with our fandom. I was twenty feet away when Bill Shatner got hit with that pie during his GoH speech (and I know who paid for it to happen). I was there the time a guy dressed as the Starship Enterprise and another one dressed as a Klingon battle cruiser got into a (staged) fistfight during a costume competition and fell off the runway onto the guests.

I was at the Sunday morning con-committee breakfast when somebody came up with a note Nichelle Nichols had pushed under the con suite door (while plastered, she later told us), asking for champagne and eggs Benedict for breakfast. I saw the distraught expressions among the concom—and some other guests: seriously, what was Fred Pohl doing there?—since unfortunately there was no room service in the hotel on Sunday. And then, among the groans, heard the unexpected response (since the first McDonald’s in Manhattan had just opened across the road): “I know. Let’s get her an Egg McMuffin and a Colt 45.”*

But under all this light-hearted stuff lay a lot of hard work and commitment to sharing the fun with others. With my contemporaries, a majority of whom were female, I watched the fandom we’d built start to grow and thrive and spread to other shows, other media, building on the blueprints we’d drawn. I watched other Trek fans turn into professional writers and editors and even a few showrunners (some of them even writing for Trek, which gave a lot of us the chuckles). I’ve seen mass-media fandom as a whole become a worldwide phenomenon, now taken for granted everywhere, and treated like something that’s always existed. Except—before us—it didn’t.

More to the point: the ever-increasing attendance at such public events, and then the sheer size and undiminished drive of online fandom when it finally got started, had the effect of emboldening the studios that would eventually start making even more shows that would leverage the power of that fandom, and the advertisers who would indirectly help pay for them. Meanwhile, the fellowship built among fans of all ages during that growth has remained, and it too has grown and spread.

So my coevals and I assert the inalienable right to keep on being part of what we helped make. We’re in our fifties and sixties and even sometimes our seventies, now, this founder-generation of fans and its immediate descendants. We built this superstructure of passion. We continue to participate in it because we’ve made lifelong friendships in it, and because we haven’t stopped finding enjoyment in the characters and media we came to love as younger people. We welcome the influx of new fans (in their twenties, or thirties, or forties, or whatever) into old fandoms… as long as they don’t start acting like they think they have the right to dictate who else will be there, on the basis of some utterly specious premise like being “too old” to have “Young People Fun” any more.

Youth is not about how many years you’ve been on the planet. Joy is not about being young. If you honestly think it is, you’d better find out who lied to you, and get yourselves sorted out—before a horrible dry joyless age of, like thirty or forty, descends upon you, and you find yourself stuck in it forever, trapped in your own ageism with no way out.

Meanwhile, if you imagine we’re going to be run off a whole half-century old way of life by a crowd of humorless, self-important, overentitled babes in arms who think people (especially women over twenty) shouldn’t be allowed to continue having whatever kind of fun they choose to in their (soi-disant) “old age”…?

Think again. We’re not going anywhere. And as for you, with your pouting and whining that we should go home and make our spouses sandwiches or something, and abandon what we founded?

Not gonna happen.

Make no mistake. We’re not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with us. Don’t like it? (points) The fire escape doors are thataway, leading into other platforms you may find less threatening. As for us, we’re keeping this one. (We’ve just barely got the decorating the way we want it…!) Here we will stay and continue to celebrate the fandoms we love. We have a right to exist, and to be part of the phenomena we helped create. We’ll welcome you as you grow up enough to appreciate it.

…Assuming you can.