Whoops i got followers now what do

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

tags courtesy of @postarcadian

yeah, exactly! and I wanna expand on this just a little. the "doing humanities in an informal para-academic setting" is something that one gets used to when they're in academia. There are posts on here that I read in the manner in which I treat the conversations had with phd candidates over coffee (weed or w/e vice of choice, i've certainly posted about my subjects of study while high), in that these conversations can be both highly informative and highly generative. I've had informal convos both irl and online turn into papers. While we aren't going to treat these conversations as the same level of authority as we might a peer reviewed paper or a book, we recognize that they can be genuinely productive scholarship. (Which is part of the fun of following other academics on here. Besides that so many of them are delightful, intelligent, and pleasant to be around; but im digressing)

But for someone without the experience, that difference between expertise and someone faking expertise is often not legible. And so we have some folks blithely spouting absolute nonsense that gets treated with the same or greater authority than folks who've spent 8 years in intensive study. And while I'm not yet 8 years along in my studies, I'm enough of an expert in some subjects to be occasionally pulling my hair out in the same way an astronomer will at youtube videos about black holes or in the same way epidemiologists have been driven bald since the start of 2020.

Chickens are omnivores. They eat meat, they eat eat all sorts of fruits and vegetables.

Actual piranhas don’t act like Hollywood piranhas.

You are not a court of law. You are not required to hear them out, argue, nor give them a second chance. Block them. Nothing bad will happen to them without you! It's fine! Goodbye forever! Prevention is better than cure.