I just want to thank you for your visibility on this. In the discords I'm in, I'm being made to feel

answered, Anonymous

via https://ift.tt/3s0HWYD

hugs I’m so sorry you have to feel this way.

I’m sad too. I’m sad that this is how people seem to have conflicts now. I’m sad that there’s so much eagerness to use anything possible as a bludgeon to knock down anyone who disagrees what they’re saying. (FFS I saw a screenshot of a posting where someone was arguing that it’s too cruel to make people type out their triggers, because that’s making them interact with the problematic material– and so people should just?? assume?? what people’s triggers are??? wtf guys, triggers are real things and are complex and if you cannot muster yourself to interact with them enough to tell people what they are then you should not be interacting with a public fandom space you should be getting help.)

Their metrics for bullying and assholery are that someone disagreed with them, and as I have been puzzling out, it turns out there’s no possible way to disagree without being branded an asshole. I’m not sorry I worked so hard to be as polite and neutral as possible, it just seems not to have mattered to them. It matters to me, though.

I’ve heard rumors that people are sending anon asks flaming the EBB mods and such– I’d be dismayed, except I’ve seen no actual evidence of this. I don’t think this is actually happening; I think people are afraid it might. I hope nobody does! I don’t think this is something it’s worth spreading hate about! I’m not interested in that.

I hope it doesn’t color your enjoyment of the fandom– I’ve found it reassuring, actually, that so many people have reached out to me in support, that so many people have come together to say No, that’s not normal, it shouldn’t be like that. The Fisstech & Succubi https://fisstech-and-succubi.tumblr.com/post/639434858228236288/rules-hello-witcher-friends-and-welcome-to-the event I reblogged is something that was sort of already in the works but has gotten bumped up to be a consolation for people excluded by the EBB, and while I know EBB is trying to paint it as Gross Stuff Only, it’s actually just a general-purpose exchange, and will probably be mostly pretty vanilla. (I know I’m planning to participate if I can figure out any way at all to do it, and I’m going to write precisely what I usually do, which is… stuff similar to canon, only less misogynist usually, LOL.)

And there are any number of other fandom spaces and events that remain welcoming, and won’t turn on you or demand you shut up and walk away. I wish you luck in finding them. (LOL sorry, I don’t really know how to use discord, so I don’t have any good links for nontoxic ones. I wish I did!)

Please don’t let this ruin it. We haven’t even gotten our season 2 yet. Stay with us. Most of us are reasonable and the loud ones are few. (Your picture was not posted)

apparently

via https://ift.tt/2LqPpzG

bomberqueen17 https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/639324787330646016/apparently:

my late father bought me something for Christmas, but none of us is quite sure what it is, Mom just said she searched back thru the credit card statement and there’s a charge on there and presumably whatever it is, is still in the mail. We’ll… find out, or won’t, depending on the Postal Service.

Mom texted this morning that it had arrived– he’d bought me the components of a belt, disassembled, intending to assemble it himself.

Well, I’d been meaning to learn leatherworking. I guess I have a project.

(I’d been intending to ask him to teach me.)

(Very good timing on the text message, I’d just clocked in at work for my first day back. Fortunately I’m early so I have some time to compose myself before anyone else gets in. Dad why)

The other bit of news she sent to the family groupchat is that the locally-owned lumber/hardware store Dad had gone to my whole life, starting with buying the supplies to fix up the junker of a house I was born in (older sister never learned to crawl because there was no floor) and continuing on up through intending to buy the tiny house lumber there and fortunately not getting around to it, just sold out to a larger national chain.

(I theorized that they’d heard about Dad, and knew they couldn’t possibly stay in business without him. Mom thought that was funny. Really it’s probably so the owners, two men Dad’s age, can retire.) (Your picture was not posted)

ao3org:arahir:arahir:arahir:if you can’t get on ao

the truth, oh well!

via https://ift.tt/3q885mX

ao3org https://ao3org.tumblr.com/post/639575110883409920:

arahir https://arahir.tumblr.com/post/639488266125606912:

arahir https://arahir.tumblr.com/post/639456539843985408:

arahir https://arahir.tumblr.com/post/639455334707134464:

if you can’t get on ao3 tonight it’s because a minecraft streamer rpf fic just updated and all 41k of the authors twitter followers tried to read it at once and yes if reading this confused you it means you’re officially old

you all honest to god have no idea but minecraft rpf IS the biggest fandom right now. most of these people and certainly the people this story is about had no or very little engagement before last year but suddenly millions of american children who 1) love minecraft, 2) are growing up on streaming, 3) have never heard of fandom before, had nothing to do for a full year but sit at home and watch these guys stream. dream, who is a 21 year old streamer who has never shown his face, gained 15 million subs this year. fans of this genre are avid, skew very young, and, as mentioned, have probably never read another fic. the author’s twitter replies are full of young teens explaining to each other what ao3 is and how to make an account there just to read this fic. we have wild times ahead. anyway, if this post really confused you, that’s what’s going on.

Not to begrudge anyone their fun, but we work really hard on making sure our servers don’t keel over even during stressful times, and it would be a pretty bad sign if a single fandom, let alone a single work, managed to bring the whole website to its knees. Luckily, it didn’t!

(We even said so at the time https://twitter.com/AO3_Status/status/1346323527188754432, even though a screenshot of that tweet didn’t make it into the post above.)

To give you a sense of how much traffic the AO3 servers can handle, we saw a total of 65.6 million page views on Sunday, January 3rd, which was a new record. That’s an average of 2.73 million pages served every hour (more at peak times, less when a majority of users are asleep), or 45,555 pages per minute, or 759 pages per second. This level of fannish activity did not crash our volunteer-maintained servers, and we’re actually kind of proud of that accomplishment!

The day of the downtime, we had a total of 62 million page views, which was still a bit more than we saw over the December holidays. And while a new chapter on a popular fic did not manage to kill the Archive for three hours, we are still working on optimizing things to prevent an unlucky repeat of that downtime in the future. Please help us out by not spreading admittedly funny rumors, if you’d be so kind!

I was telling this as a funny joke to my dude, a software developer for a financial services company, and I was like “so you’ll never guess why AO3 was down!” and he said “uh was it because of the widespread network outages throughout the country yesterday?” and I was like… oh. (Your picture was not posted)

Beyond Good & Letho

witcher, fic snippet, not my writing, phenomenal

via https://ift.tt/3omshAV

2nico https://2nico.tumblr.com/post/639581505994293248/beyond-good-letho:

“So we’re just not gonna address the fact that Letho is evil?” Eskel asks.

“I keep telling you he isn’t evil, he just does evil,” Lambert cuts in impatiently. “A phlegmatic morality will always eventually trend towards evil, but the underpinnings of it are benign by nature and only inevitably malignant by circumstance. You know, like anacyclosis.”

“You can’t apply the doctrine of anacyclosis to Letho’s moral character,” Eskel returns, dosed heavy with skepticism. “One man is not a society t'himself.”

Keep reading https://2nico.tumblr.com/post/639581505994293248/beyond-good-letho (Your picture was not posted)

unashamedly-enthusiastic:unashamedly-enthusiastic:Oh she found her 2020 goals from...

cried, this is so fucking funny, and sad, and funny

via https://ift.tt/3956B5X

unashamedly-enthusiastic https://unashamedly-enthusiastic.tumblr.com/post/635770417499471872:

unashamedly-enthusiastic https://unashamedly-enthusiastic.tumblr.com/post/635757296982556672:

Oh she found her 2020 goals from December

@robynschallcomic https://www.tiktok.com/@robynschallcomic/video/6894450853323853062?sender_device=mobile&sender_web_id=6899025741317637637&is_from_webapp=1

“Okay [chuckles] excuse my looks, I’m, just you know, ah (pours wine) you know, in the middle of hitting rock bottom BUT I fooound my goal list that I made in December for my goals for 2020 [giggles] okay, tell me if this is not hilarious, alright

• Goal 1: Make more money

[giggles] I, you know, been unemployed since March

• Travel more [giggles]
• Loose weight [chuckles]
• Be more social [laughing]

[laughing] I wrote ‘cry less’ CRY LESS, cry less. I’ve cried every single day of this whole pandemic

Umm spend more time [laughing] oh it’s not funny, but i wrote [wheezing] I wrote spend more time with grandma and she died [silent laughing crying] Oh ho ho hoooooo” (Your picture was not posted)

chapter update on dusty corridors

via https://ift.tt/3bh8XRQ

Chapter 4, on AO3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/28276716/chapters/70091700

Listen there’s a lot going on so here, have a chapter update. We all need the distraction.

Mages could read minds, Aiden knew that, so he narrowed his eyes and thought Hey, fuck you, as hard as he could.

She didn’t seem to notice; she only had eyes for Lambert, who had reached over and kicked the bottom of her chair leg. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you failing to empty that bowl,” he said. “I didn’t make that special for you and then put such a reasonable amount into that bowl for you not to eat it.”

“I ate a lot,” she protested. “I don’t have your metabolism, Lambert. Aretuza gave me tits, not a hollow leg.”

Aiden was distracted from his attempts to psychically insult her by attempting to parse that sentence. “Aretuza… gave you… tits,” he mused, and then screwed up his face and said, “What, like, as souvenirs?”

“Why do you think all sorceresses have more or less the same rack?” the mage asked, poking herself in the side of one breast to jostle it. It moved as though it were in a supportive undergarment of some kind instead of more or less suspended in midair behind an embroidered panel that only half-covered it. “There’s a fellow whose job it is to give us the Look at the end of our schooling, and he has very conventional tastes. I didn’t grow these myself, like some sort of peasant.” (Your picture was not posted)

egowave:egowave:i really want to emphasize that if anything, this is the beginning of a fascist...

via https://ift.tt/3bcBW9v

egowave https://egowave.tumblr.com/post/639615403387142144/i-really-want-to-emphasize-that-if-anything-this :

egowave https://egowave.tumblr.com/post/639594733284605952/i-really-want-to-emphasize-that-if-anything-this :

i really want to emphasize that if anything, this is the beginning of a fascist movement in the united states and not the end of one. people often look at what fascists did once in state power in order to define what fascism is. this a flawed approach and ignores the characteristics of the fascist movements in their infancy, which is far more analogous to our current situation. both the italian fascist party and nazi party were formed in opposition to liberal democracy and parliamentarian politics. they were necessarily against the existing state and drew a great deal of support from this, because people were frustrated with capitalist liberal democracy and felt that it was inert, corrupt, and ineffective. once in power both italian fascists and nazis never actually destroyed the capitalist state and instead molded it to their own interests while working with capitalists, but the opposition to traditional politics and establishment politicians is a key aspect of the early ideology of fascist movements.

some people in the notes are mad that i didnt mention white supremacy. white supremacy is inextricable from fascism- but this is a post not a dissertation, and its a post about only one characteristic of fascism which is frequently overlooked and should be paid attention to because its happening in front of our eyes. this is a serious development in american right-wing thought that mirrors the historical development of european fascism even before they had totally consolidated their racial politics. look at what right wingers are saying. this is an actual shift from general reactionary and white nationalist politics to fascist politics

theres a lot of talk about forming a new party– again, a significant development that points to a more organized and pointed fascist movement. the nazi party was a new party formed against the other political parties of the weimar republic. of course the republican party is racist (so were the 20th german conservatives) but theyre still bound by general rules of political respectability and at the end of the day, their interests are the interests of the state and they dont want radical right-wing change that would destabilize the state. just look at the reactions from republican politicians about DC right now. a new party would be able to be as openly white supremacist as theyd like, and while im sure theyd be just as supportive of capitalism as the GOP, they would not have to conform to the usual trappings of american politics

some people also took issue with me saying that this is the beginning. i say this for specific reasons about the history of fascism and not to diminish the right wingers that already exist or the history of american racial and colonial violence. the united states is a reactionary country founded on violence, but fascism did not exist until the 20th century and i dont think the united states should be retroactively categorized as fascist. however, there is a cyclical relation between the violence committed under liberal democracies and the violence enacted by fascists. american colonialism, slavery, and imperialism influences american right wing movements today in the same way that italian and german colonialism influenced italian and german fascism. and in the same way, i would not characterize german colonialism as fascism, even though they used the same tactics in their colonies as they did in concentration camps. (the first german concentration camps were actually in africa, not europe) i mean that this is the beginning because it demonstrates specific ideological characteristics of fascism that were not as prevalent before. this is the eruption of a growing american fascist (or whatever youd like to call it because maybe fascism isnt the exactly right term for the united states) consciousness, much greater than small groups of disorganized reactionaries and racists (Your picture was not posted)