On Desire, On Needs. November/december.

The holy trinity of WSJ mentor figures.

So I just found out that there are more people making works on AO3 with a million tags on them in protest to AO3 not removing that one fic (you know the one). I would just like to state my own personal opinion about that right up front: if you’re trolling AO3, no matter your reason for doing so, you’re the asshole.

I know we all call it AO3, but the a stands for Archive. It’s a site built on the premise that fanworks deserve to exist and shouldn’t be taken down, unless the author is making that decision for themselves. 

This means that there are lots of works on AO3 that I think suck. There are works that are poorly written or boring or morally reprehensible. And guess what? All of that is protected because it’s not about a single work, it’s about fanworks in general and all of us having a place we can rely on to have our backs. 

The whole point of AO3 is not deleting works just because someone complains about them. The work needs to violate the Terms of Service and if it doesn’t, then it shouldn’t be removed. The rules that protect me protect those other works too. 

The volunteers at AO3 take the site’s goals and premise very seriously. They aren’t going to make snap judgements about a work, not even a work with a million tags. They also aren’t going to make snap judgements about implementing a limit on tags when there hasn’t been one before. 

They need to talk things out and discuss the short and long term ramifications. They need to talk about where to draw the line, and how can they explain why they decided to draw the line there? Will this decision affect works that already exist on the Archive? What do we do about them? Those authors posted before this new rule came into being, so you can’t punish them for a rule that didn’t exist at the time. 

Creating more works with the same issue just means that volunteer tag wranglers have even more work to do. Mass reporting a work that has already been reported just means that Policy & Abuse volunteers have even more work to do. If you fill up their lives with nonsense tags or repeat reports, you know what they can’t do? The thing that everyone (including them) wants them to be doing. 

People who volunteer for AO3 also read on AO3. They are as annoyed about these works as you are. But making more work for them to do isn’t the answer. Being patient is. It’s going to take time for them to make decisions about things like tag limits. It’s going to take time for them to code the limit into the site. It’s going to take time for them to test the code and make sure it doesn’t break anything. And in the meantime:

Filter out the author and bookmark your filter in your browser so you don’t have to enter it every time.

Add the work-blocking code to your site skin so you never need to see that work again, as long as you’re logged in.

There are tools you can use to avoid the things you don’t want to see. Creating a bigger problem isn’t the solution. It’s just a dick move.

seriously I had some little TikTok teenybopper burst out laughing on my tour because I said that a historical figure was “most likely what we’d now call gay”

like

listen

you’re free to take a ouija board out to the cemetery and try to explain the dizzying array of current queer terms and get a solid answer as to how he identifies within that framework but 

until then, I’m going to continue NOT definitively assigning someone identity terms they didn’t self-identify with, and might not have even known, when I’m responsible for representing them faithfully and they’re not here to correct me. even more so when they’re part of my own community

I mean, you know, as long as that’s okay with you. Bestie.

Hero Rats

Meme idea

Photoshop the goose from untitled goose game into the background of a photo of a place where something bad happens, but it’s a photo of before the bad thing happening, so it’s implied that the goose caused it

daqing: *chuckles* im in danger

Are You Getting Queerbaited Or Are You Being Misled By Your Internet Echo Chamber

the most insane double casting i’ve heard of is ophelia and horatio being played by the same actress. the implications of that drive me crazy

i think anne magills paintings and Edward hoppers are like .. exact opposites. hoppers has the distinct clarity to it, a sharpness in the lines and the angles that contributes to an overwhelming sense of loneliness in almost every one of his paintings. even in his paintings that dont portray isolation there is a feeling of separation

loneliness vs. aloneness

magill, on the other hand, has this haziness to her paintings that emanates a warmth even when the subjects in her paintings are alone.

both paintings feel so comforting, and even in the second one where the girl is alone she is still in the presence of the visceral world around her - there’s a familiarity in magills painting that she captures nicely.

i guess i just think it’s interesting because hopper and magill are two of my favorite artists and they paint similar scenes with very different tones -

I’ve always thought that hoppers paintings are a snapshot of urban loneliness - the distinctness of it, the use of cool colors, the stark contrast between the people and their settings - whereas magills paintings seem almost like memories - their use of haziness and blurriness is exactly how someone wild remember something, indistinct, full of feeling and lacking detail