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here’s the synopsis for first wives club 2:

disgruntled first wives take their ex-husbands’ new lovers under their wing.

sounds great, right? awesome viewing material for a precocious 11-year-old.

so i buy this movie, and like, three minutes into it i’m starting to feel suspicious?? like it’s really low quality and my girls are nowhere in sight?? how come none of the first wives are the same?? how come they’re alone in a bedroom with mood lighting?? why is she taking off her shirt?? why are they both taking off their shirts?? WHY ARE THEY—

here’s what i did not know about first wives club 2:

it is a lesbian porno of no relation to the beloved 1996 classic.

so of course i, horrified that i’ve accidentally bought porn on my family’s account (and in that state of panic that kids work themselves into whenever anything regarding sex is mentioned), quickly shut off the TV and go upstairs and watch an episode of veggie tales to like, cleanse my soul and apologize to jesus, and that’s that.

EXCEPT, OF COURSE:

you have to pay for pay per view.

so the end of the month comes and i have completely put this incident out of my mind, haha, i accidentally bought porn, how funny, TELL NO ONE. right? and i’m sitting at a nice dinner with my mother, my stepfather, and my very religious aunt deb, and we’re just talking about farm things, whatever, when suddenly my mother puts her fork down and says, “okay, there’s something we need to discuss. as a family.”

AS A FAMILY.

and i’m like, running through a list of people i know who could conceivably be dead, and fantasizing about my mother announcing that she’s going to buy me My Own Computer Just Because U Earned It Kiddo, and she pulls out a piece of paper that says DIRECTV across the top. and i’m like: OH NO.

“i received the tv bill today,” my mother said, and i was like, shoveling potatoes into my mouth as fast as i could because i knew that when i went to PORN PRISON they weren’t going to feed me this kind of quality starch. “does anybody want to tell me who purchased the pornography?”

as a reminder, a quick table survey:

my mother, surprised and disappointed by the porn bill (innocent)

my stepfather, a grumbly old cowboy who just wants to sing along to kenny chesney and watch the hunt for red october (innocent)

my aunt deb, a super religious catholic whose best friend is a nun named Sister Placid (innocent)

me, the 11-year-old with a mouthful of potatoes who definitely purchased the lesbian pornography

silence.

my mother said, “i’m not going to ask again.”

silence.

my aunt looked at my stepdad. my stepdad looked at my aunt. NOBODY LOOKED AT ME, THE 11-YEAR-OLD WITH A MOUTHFUL OF POTATOES WHO DEFINITELY PURCHASED THE LESBIAN PORNOGRAPHY.

my mother shook her head and put the bill down. “this was incredibly inappropriate,” she said. “skip, deb, whoever. buy that shit on your own time. i’m not paying for it. what if molly had seen it?”

WHAT IF MOLLY HAD SEEN IT?

“don’t expose my kid to that crap.”

DON’T

EXPOSE

MY KID

TO THAT CRAP

“if you want to watch porn, fine, but do it in private and don’t expect me to pay for it. i can’t believe one of you did that in the living room.”

I CAN’T BELIEVE ONE OF YOU DID THAT

IN THE LIVING ROOM

but molly, why didn’t you own up to it and explain that it was an accident?

are you fucking kidding

i did not want to go to porn prison

the fun conclusion to this story is that i never owned up to it, which means that there are 3 people in the world who have not solved the mystery of the lesbian porn. a quick survey:

my mother, who lives every day wondering whose porn she paid for

my stepfather, who probably wishes he knew less about his wife’s sister’s porn preferences

my aunt, who probably wishes she knew less about her sister’s husband’s porn preferences

but molly, why don’t you own up to it now, with the safety of time and distance and the knowledge that porn prison isn’t real?

are you fucking kidding

So you’ve discovered some old 90’s show and damn, you so want to read the fic for that, but you can’t find it. It’s from The Olden Days before Tumblr, before AO3, and in some cases, even before Livejournal and fanfiction.net. It was in the days of Geocities. It was NOT in the days of yahoo groups because even I don’t know how to take you back in time that far. But I did recently go and dig up all the old Star Trek: Voyager fic so let me show you how to proceed. Here be dragons, of course. Also vampire slayers. Warrior princesses. The smoking dude from the X-Files, whatever his name. And lots and lots and lots of Star Trek. 

You’ll probably already have checked out AO3 and come up mostly empty. However, if you’re the kind of person who browses AO3 by filtering for tags or warnings, or by entering complex keyword chains into the search bar, take the following into account: When AO3 first came about, a lot of writers uploaded back-ups of their fic. However, in those days, there was a heated fandom debate on about whether or not you should use warnings – this is the direct origin of AO3’s “Author chose not to use warnings,” as it is. So a lot of people either chose that option or just didn’t tag warnings. Also the AO3 tag pool was still empty. A lot of those fics aren’t tagged at all, or not in the way you would expect. So keep in mind that that perfect fic tailored to your wishes just didn’t show up in your search. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. 

Once done on AO3, you migrate to Livejournal. LJ is hard to navigate if you’ve never used it. But the first place you want to go is crack_van. For years, crack_van was the ultimate multi-fandom fic rec community. Being recced there was a little bit like winning an Emmy. If there’s any olden fic for your fandom at all, you will find it in the tag list on the left. 

tvtropes.org often has fic rec lists for featured fandoms, too, often very good ones. That’s also a great way for discovering new fic in current fandoms, incidentally. 

The further you go back, the more often you will click on fic links and find them dead, the stories long gone. If the link would have led you to a story posted on an LJ blog, but it was deleted, see below. If the link lead you off-site, you can attempt to conjure the story back up by way of the Wayback Machine. Enter the URL in the search bar and the WBM will either directly lead you to an archived copy of the page or show you a selection of all the time stamps when a copy was made. So you can try looking at the page in 2011, 2006 etc. and make your way to what you’re looking for that way. Keep in mind that links on those archived pages don’t always work, you’ll have to save that link and reenter it in the WBM search bar sometimes to reach other sub pages, like the next part of the fic. 

If the WBM fails you or the story linked to a deleted page on a platform like LJ to begin with, search on Google for the fic name and author. It’s very likely you’ll find that the author crossposted the fic to another site at one point. The fic might be in the search results or you might find another rec that linked to the alternative page. If that link is dead, too, again you can go through the WBM. 

Of course when you find an author you like you can check out their other fic and, in some cases, their rec lists to find more of the good stuff. There were a lot more rec lists then. You might also discover old archives centered specifically around a character or a ship. So you can search those. When you do that, you might find that fic terms aren’t used the way you’d assume now. Just yesterday I browsed an archive that used “gen” to refer to straight pairings. The terms just weren’t fully established yet. 

Finally, it always pays to google “fandom + character + fanfic recs” and see what comes up. Don’t bother searching for ships. We didn’t use fandom mush names much (those only became really popular when Tumblr tags couldn’t parse slashes) and pattern searching for slashes (”Tom/Mary”) often doesn’t yield effective results. 

Your last option is always going to fanfiction.net and browsing the fandom there. I’m saying last option because Fanfiction.net has it ALL, the good and the bad and the ugly. Especially the ugly. Or well, that’s not quite true, because as it is, it doesn’t feature any explicit porn. Try AdultFanfiction.org for that. It also is hard to filter. Keep in mind: Standard search doesn’t include erotica (Rated: M, the almost-porn) unless you include it manually. It includes all languages automatically, though, so narrow it down to yours and save yourself the headache – some of those fandoms were really big in languages other than English. Almost all fandoms started out without (complete) character listings, so the early stuff can’t be found that way. Just click on the last page of the fic list and check out whether there are any characters listed on the fics. If no, all you can do is look through those manually. Also the “Complete / In-Progress” tag didn’t exist in the beginning so keep that in mind when you use search filters.

Lastly, remember that fandom was dominated by straight white women for a long time and the earlier you go, the more infuriated you’ll probably be by depictions of POC and queer folk. Keep in mind that a lot of the fic was written while the show or book series was still ongoing, so sometimes big revelations etc. will not be featured. Sometimes, new versions of canon didn’t exist yet - for example, LotR fic was solely book fandom fic before the movies. 

— Francesca Coppa, “Introduction to The Dwarf’s Tale,” The Fanfiction Reader (via francescacoppa)

Pin-up

 December 1978.

The firstthing Sirius did when he came home was kick his bed. He did it with such power that it bumped against the wall, making one of his landlords shout, “Hey!” from the flat below. The dark-haired beauty on the pin-up across the bed threw him an irritated look over her shoulder before lying back down on the beach, presenting her scantily-clad back.

The truth is that horses see what they think are nether beings, I guess. They have a perfect storm of sensory perception that, useful for prey beings, marks false positives on mortal danger all the time. Which is advantageous to a flight-based prey species: running from danger when you’re super fast is much ‘cheaper’ than fighting, so you waste almost nothing from running from a threat that’s not there. Versus, you blow everything if you don’t see a threat that is there.

Horses also have their eyes positioned on the sides of their heads, which gives them an incredible range of peripheral vision almost around their entire body with only a few blind spots you can sneak up on them in. But this comes at the cost of binocular vision; they can only judge distance for things straight ahead of them. Super useful for preventing predators sneaking up from the sides or behind, but useless for recognizing familiar shapes with the precision we can.

Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety its going to get attacked at any second, that can see almost everything, but mostly only out of the corner of its eye. It has a few blind spots and anything that suddenly appears out of them is terrifying to it. Combine that with that it actually has far superior low-light vision than us, and that its ears can swivel in any directions like radar dishes, and you’ve basically given a nervous wreck a highly accurate but imprecise danger-dar.

To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.

This means that you could approach it in a flapping poncho and if it can’t recognize your shape as human, they mistake you for SATAN… or you could pass this one broken down tractor you’ve passed 100 times on a trail ride, but today is the day it will ATTACK… or your horse could feel a horsefly bite from its blind spot and MAMA, I’VE BEEN HIT!!!… or you could both approach a fallen log in the woods but in the low light your horse is going to see the tree rings as THE EYE OF MORDOR.

However, they actually have kind of a cool compensation for this– they are social animals, and instinctively look towards leadership. In the wild or out at pasture, this is their most willful, pushy, decisive leader horse who decides where to go and where it’s safe. But humans often take this role both as riders and on the ground. They are always watching and feeling for human reactions to things. This is why moving in a calm, decisive way and always giving clear commands is key to working with this kind of animal. Confusing commands, screaming, panic, visible distress, and chaos will signal to a horse that you, brave leader are freaked out… so it should freak out too!

On one hand, you’ll get horses that will decide that they are the leader and you are not, so getting them to listen to you can be tough– requiring patience and skill more than force. On the other hand, a good enough rider and a well-trained horse (or a horse with specialized training) can venture into dangerous situations, loud and scary environments, etc. calmly and confidently.

So you’ve discovered some old 90’s show and damn, you so want to read the fic for that, but you can’t find it. It’s from The Olden Days before Tumblr, before AO3, and in some cases, even before Livejournal and fanfiction.net. It was in the days of Geocities. It was NOT in the days of yahoo groups because even I don’t know how to take you back in time that far. But I did recently go and dig up all the old Star Trek: Voyager fic so let me show you how to proceed. Here be dragons, of course. Also vampire slayers. Warrior princesses. The smoking dude from the X-Files, whatever his name. And lots and lots and lots of Star Trek. 

You’ll probably already have checked out AO3 and come up mostly empty. However, if you’re the kind of person who browses AO3 by filtering for tags or warnings, or by entering complex keyword chains into the search bar, take the following into account: When AO3 first came about, a lot of writers uploaded back-ups of their fic. However, in those days, there was a heated fandom debate on about whether or not you should use warnings – this is the direct origin of AO3’s “Author chose not to use warnings,” as it is. So a lot of people either chose that option or just didn’t tag warnings. Also the AO3 tag pool was still empty. A lot of those fics aren’t tagged at all, or not in the way you would expect. So keep in mind that that perfect fic tailored to your wishes just didn’t show up in your search. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. 

Once done on AO3, you migrate to Livejournal. LJ is hard to navigate if you’ve never used it. But the first place you want to go is crack_van. For years, crack_van was the ultimate multi-fandom fic rec community. Being recced there was a little bit like winning an Emmy. If there’s any olden fic for your fandom at all, you will find it in the tag list on the left. 

tvtropes.org often has fic rec lists for featured fandoms, too, often very good ones. That’s also a great way for discovering new fic in current fandoms, incidentally. 

The further you go back, the more often you will click on fic links and find them dead, the stories long gone. If the link would have led you to a story posted on an LJ blog, but it was deleted, see below. If the link lead you off-site, you can attempt to conjure the story back up by way of the Wayback Machine. Enter the URL in the search bar and the WBM will either directly lead you to an archived copy of the page or show you a selection of all the time stamps when a copy was made. So you can try looking at the page in 2011, 2006 etc. and make your way to what you’re looking for that way. Keep in mind that links on those archived pages don’t always work, you’ll have to save that link and reenter it in the WBM search bar sometimes to reach other sub pages, like the next part of the fic. 

If the WBM fails you or the story linked to a deleted page on a platform like LJ to begin with, search on Google for the fic name and author. It’s very likely you’ll find that the author crossposted the fic to another site at one point. The fic might be in the search results or you might find another rec that linked to the alternative page. If that link is dead, too, again you can go through the WBM. 

Of course when you find an author you like you can check out their other fic and, in some cases, their rec lists to find more of the good stuff. There were a lot more rec lists then. You might also discover old archives centered specifically around a character or a ship. So you can search those. When you do that, you might find that fic terms aren’t used the way you’d assume now. Just yesterday I browsed an archive that used “gen” to refer to straight pairings. The terms just weren’t fully established yet. 

Finally, it always pays to google “fandom + character + fanfic recs” and see what comes up. Don’t bother searching for ships. We didn’t use fandom mush names much (those only became really popular when Tumblr tags couldn’t parse slashes) and pattern searching for slashes (”Tom/Mary”) often doesn’t yield effective results. 

Your last option is always going to fanfiction.net and browsing the fandom there. I’m saying last option because Fanfiction.net has it ALL, the good and the bad and the ugly. Especially the ugly. Or well, that’s not quite true, because as it is, it doesn’t feature any explicit porn. Try AdultFanfiction.org for that. It also is hard to filter. Keep in mind: Standard search doesn’t include erotica (Rated: M, the almost-porn) unless you include it manually. It includes all languages automatically, though, so narrow it down to yours and save yourself the headache – some of those fandoms were really big in languages other than English. Almost all fandoms started out without (complete) character listings, so the early stuff can’t be found that way. Just click on the last page of the fic list and check out whether there are any characters listed on the fics. If no, all you can do is look through those manually. Also the “Complete / In-Progress” tag didn’t exist in the beginning so keep that in mind when you use search filters.

Lastly, remember that fandom was dominated by straight white women for a long time and the earlier you go, the more infuriated you’ll probably be by depictions of POC and queer folk. Keep in mind that a lot of the fic was written while the show or book series was still ongoing, so sometimes big revelations etc. will not be featured. Sometimes, new versions of canon didn’t exist yet - for example, LotR fic was solely book fandom fic before the movies. 

Pin-up

 December 1978.

The firstthing Sirius did when he came home was kick his bed. He did it with such power that it bumped against the wall, making one of his landlords shout, “Hey!” from the flat below. The dark-haired beauty on the pin-up across the bed threw him an irritated look over her shoulder before lying back down on the beach, presenting her scantily-clad back.

The first time Annie lays eyes on Finnick Odair, she’s twelve years old and it’s her first Reaping Day. She knows she doesn’t have to be afraid; a female volunteer will step up, all of Greenbeach has been whispering about it, and Annie will be safe. But she still finds herself trembling like a leaf; people call her delicate. 

Annie isn’t reaped. Landa Molere steps up for the fifteen-year-old who is. Meanwhile nobody steps up for the boy, who’s from the Middletown square, not from hers, and who’s fourteen, a fishermen’s brat, tall and ocean-weathered skin, climbing the stairs to the stage up on the screen. Annie stares at him. He’s pretty, no acne scars, but that won’t help him in there, because fourteen-year-olds don’t win.

His close-up hovering above them bigger than life, Finnick Odair glances at the camera although he should have learned in Games school that you shouldn’t, scared, moribund, licking his lips. Then he waves, tentatively, not at the camera but at the crowd, and a second later, Middletown’s applause is ringing through the speakers. Another second later, everybody around Annie, in Greenbeach has joined in. He’s dead but he’s theirs, and he’s asked. 

Annie might be delicate but all the women in her family are tall, and she’ll hit a growth spurt when she’s older, everybody says. Her back will get stronger, from swimming classes at Games school, and so will her arms; eventually she’ll stand a chance. But that will be then, and she wonders if the boy on the screen would have grown even taller than he is now, if he’d have considered volunteering at eighteen, what he’d have looked like as an adult man.

It shouldn’t matter, because he’ll be back to Four in a coffin, and Annie is safe for a year.