Reading Vlog #1 - Holy Shit...

Feedback culture is dead, long live feedback culture!

AO3, fanfiction, and comments: the system isn’t working. 

Fic authors have a problem with feedback – or rather, with the lack of it. Fanfiction has a notoriously low ratio of comments to hits, and many of us have expressed our frustration that we can get a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand views on our stories, but only a handful of readers will leave kudos, let alone comments.   

Unfortunately, this only gets worse for long, multi-chapter stories (aka, the longfics we know, love, and would sell our souls in a second if it meant an update), which also happen to be the stories that authors need the most support to continue and complete. Law of diminishing returns, y’all, and it sucks. 

We’re not here to guilt you into leaving comments. We want to address the problem by changing the format, and we need your help to do it. 

The goal is to increase the amount of feedback authors get from readers, especially on stories with multiple chapters, and to make it easier for everyone to show how much we love fics. We’re opening a discussion with ao3 to figure out how/if any of these options can be implemented, but first we need options to present! 

Some of our current ideas: 

Ability to leave a form of kudos on every chapter, instead of only once on the entire story: this lets authors know that you’re here and you’re reading their updates, so their hard work isn’t getting tossed into the internet void. 

Comment templates: suggested comments that can be customized or posted as-is. Many of us draw a blank or get nervous when we try to think of a comment, so having pre-made options will both increase the total level of feedback and serve as practice, making it easier to leave more in-depth comments in the future. 

Upvoting/leaving kudos on comments themselves: positive reinforcement makes giving feedback more fun and rewarding, and it lets the author know that readers are present and agreeing with other comments, even if they don’t leave one themselves. 

We’ll contact AO3 to discuss the possibility of adding any of these as native features, and if that won’t work, we’re looking into creating and sharing a user script. 

 What you can do to help: 

 As a reader, what would you like to have? What would you be most likely to use? New ideas, opinions on ideas that are listed here, they’re all good. 

As a creator, how would you feel about each of these options? Can you think of other ways of receiving or encouraging feedback? 

Pros and cons of these (note: our thoughts on this are discussed in this google doc) 

GET THE WORD OUT! Reblog this post, send it to your friends, link to it from your stories. We need as much input and support as possible to get this off the ground. 

Feedback makes for happy authors. Happy authors make for more stories. Let’s keep this part of fandom alive! 

More details about our thoughts, discussions, and ideas can be found in this google doc.

Literally no one:

Not a single soul:

Male authors:

DC/Marvel crossovers by Vasco Georgiev 

Hey Ubisoft is it just me or does Mr. Spartan McHottie here actually look smitten

I love how many Golden Age “World’s Finest” covers are basically just Superman and Batman taking their adopted son Robin out for fun activities like good supportive parents (though not above a little harmless fun at each other’s expense).

Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost

The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction

The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity

We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either

Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender

The gods didn’t actually have animal heads

Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)

The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous

Noses (and ears, and arms) broke off statues and reliefs for a variety of reasons, none of which are “there is a widespread archaeological conspiracy to hide the Egyptian ethnicity”

The Southern Raiders were never looking for Katara

This is one of my favorite theories behind atla and I wanted to share my own breakdown of it. 

SO the raids on the SWT began in 40 AG. They continued until each and every waterbender from the Southern Water Tribe had been captured. (Note: captured) 

Worth noting is that Hama refers to herself as the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe. 

Here’s where the conspiracy gets juicy. Hama was the only one who managed to escape. She created bloodbending to get out of the prison. And she says herself that she’s the only one who escaped. This could be for one of two reasons: 

All of the other prisoners had already succumb to the conditions or been killed 

The remaining waterbender prisoners were murdered after Hama’s escape

The second option is more plausible. Hama displayed a dangerous, powerful, unknown form of waterbending and overtook a Fire Nation guard’s body. She had him unlock her cell and fled. If there were remaining waterbenders in the prison they would have been killed out of fear once Hama escaped. 

They Fire Nation couldn’t risk anyone else in their prison possessing this power. So they were all murdered because of Hama’s escape. 

Look at Hama’s reaction to hearing that the raids continued. A kind of casual “oh, you poor things.” Hama knew that the raids continued because she escaped. All of the waterbenders had already been caught! The only waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe that was known at that time to be free or alive was Hama. 

And she knew better than to return to her home, where they were sure to come looking for her. She stayed and hid right under their noses because she knew they were going to tear the world apart trying to track her down. She was too dangerous. 

When Yon Rha comes to the Southern Water Tribe in 94 AG Katara is still a child. Their tribe has been in shambles for years at this point. Katara is the tribe’s last hope and they’re a tiny tribe at that point in time. Do you honestly think that word of a child waterbender would have made way to the Fire Nation? 

Do you think that the Water Tribe would ever release that information willingly? I don’t. I think that the Southern Raiders had no idea that another waterbender had been born into the Southern Water Tribe. 

Why else would Yon Rha have accepted that an adult was the waterbender he was looking for? The intel didn’t say that a new waterbender was born, the intel said that there’s one waterbender left. The Fire Nation already knows about the last waterbender of the SWT. She escaped. And they’re still trying to find her. 

The Fire Nation is adamant about finding the last waterbender because they’re looking for Hama. Hama, who can control people’s bodies. Hama, who managed to escape a high-security Fire Nation prison without any water. Hama, the only waterbender to best the Fire Nation. And the only one left. 

Kya offers herself up as prisoner to Yon Rha. Because she knows that the past raids meant that the Southern Raiders took the waterbenders prisoner. But that has changed. 

Why would their procedure have changed? Why did they stop taking waterbenders as prisoners? Because of Hama. They stopped taking waterbenders prisoner after Hama’s escape. 

Tl;dr the Southern Raiders were never looking for Katara, they were looking for Hama. 

Topical Legstagram I did last month and never posted. For some reason I find it really soothing to make fake chats!

Gandalf has had the gc on mute for a year.

Red Avadat, Red Munia or strawberry finch. 🐦🍓

The weirdest guy I ever met in a church was this boy who referred to “Buzz Aldrin and his husband” going to the moon. I was completely baffled, and when I asked if he’d misspoken, he got really angry and accused me of being deliberately ignorant of the facts. It turned out that he was somehow comvinced that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were married. It took five Wikipedia articles to convince him otherwise.