#it could be an rss feed...

[robustcornhusk]

i said that slaw was going to have to start making reservations after this week, just so i would make enough food, and then the other two people in attendance asked if they could subscribe too

[sol-flo]

social media exodus, rss feeds and you

whenever a social media platform hacks and coughs we see the same fucking scramble of leaving to different platforms, and not everyone is gonna go to the same place and so on and so forth and it's a pain. if only there was a platform-agnostic way to keep track of people on the internet...

enter the humble rss feed.

note: candied reptile's rss resources page is very comprehensive and a recommended read. i'm mostly summarizing things so i can sell you on the idea. all the actual how-tos can be found over there!

reading

there's 1 william feed readers out there. there are services to sync your feeds between devices if you want to read on your phone but you don't need any of that to start reading, and migrating is very easy because you can export / import your urls as opml files. you can start anywhere to get a feel for it.

and you can read basically anything! my url list includes blogs, personal websites, webcomics and newsletters. i follow sortition social, which shows me a random indie web feed per day. i've followed bsky accounts through rss before, you can use it for youtube channels, there's probably a bunch of other uses i haven't even considered before. i use a firefox extension called feed preview to better find rss/atom feeds while browsing the web.

writing

writing to a rss feed is very easy (you can copy-paste entry templates or use generators online), and so is hosting. you just need to be able to link to the file and you're golden. mine is hosted on neocities (free) since that's where my website is. there's also nekoweb and bearblog and if you really want to use it just for basic updates so people don't lose track of you as you figure out where to go or something you can use status.cafe. you have a ton of hosting options.

and well. you can write whatever you'd like. i use my feed for linking website updates, the typical use-case, but you can very well use it for text-posting, it doesn't have to be a big deal (a concept called rosting that i'm not sure exists outside ex cohost users vocab — russhdown is meant to generate feeds for this). feeds are versatile.

this is not a one stop solution

feeds are not social media. a personal website (the natural second step here, basically the only way to have an online presence that's less reliant on platforms like tunglr and shit) are not social media. i love them both dearly but as i've written before, i won't pretend losing a social media platform doesn't suck, because these are low-interaction forms of posting. i'm a big fan of email but let's be real, we're not really emailing each other short comments on silly things, even if maybe we should.

my feed advocacy comes more from a place of seeking stability. i believe it's a lot easier to keep calm during social media decay if you know you have a stable place to communicate from, and a way to keep track of others, regardless of whether they're moving to a different platform than you or not. start getting familiar with feeds now so you don't have to rush later, is what i think.

[masterwords]

are you seriously recommending a fic based on the telegram rape groupchat with 70,000 men in it on your hotchgan blog?? i get that "fiction is fiction" and people will read and write about anything, but to use a very real and very horrifying situation like that as a plot point in an a/b/o fic is disgusting and tasteless. tag your shit with the appropriate trigger warnings or keep it out of the tags period.

I am not recommending anything that comes across that blog.

It is an automated RSS feed that pulls directly from AO3 when fics are posted using the Hotch/Morgan tag, not personal recs from me. Cool your jets.

I don't live online, and I only check that blog once or twice per week to make sure nothing skeevy is flowing through, it isn't exactly a highly active tag. A simple mention to check the feed and delete the post or change the tags would suffice.

Done and done, by the way.

For the record: no, I don't rec that fic. In fact I personally wouldn't rec half of the fics posted there based on what I like to read & write, but fiction is fiction so I started that feed so people wouldn't miss fics they might want to see regardless of my personal taste.

Coming for my jugular without actually understanding how the blog works is pretty wild, dude. You don't even know me. You could have just asked nicely.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I understand that rss is not popular because it's kind of techy, requires more active curation than a normal social networking site, and the best uis for a reader that I've seen can at best be described as "clunky".

but I think that a lot of people actually want a rss reader.

"I just want a website that shows the content of the creators that I choose to follow" -> that's an rss reader

"I don't want the website to mess with my timeline. just show me all posts in chronological order" -> rss readers do that. in fact you can choose to see posts in normal chronological order, reverse chronological order, pick to see only unread posts and you can even save interesting posts to read them later

"I don't want to see posts from people I don't follow" -> as far as the reader is concerned, the only creators that exist are those you follow

"I saw a post that looked interesting but then the site updated and now I've lost it!" -> never will happen on a rss reader. it'll keep all the posts on its queue as long as it has space on it left (afterwards it will start discarding the older posts to make room for the new ones)

just give rss readers a go. they're often ugly and require you to be active about managing the creators you follow, but isn't that a good thing after all?

[ailurinae]

You know what would be cool? A feed reader app (RSS/Atom) that could do text reading (blogs etc), book reading (epub/pdf) with OPDS catalog support, image/comic reading (cbz etc as well as raw images), and audio (podcasts), and maybe video too while you are at it. Then you just need more places to support RSS, including the comic sites, easy YT RSS access, etc. (Google needs to pay for what they did to RSS and XMPP both.) Then just one app could feed you all the stuff. With filtering for different categories, etc, good management systems in general.

Actually if we were really smart we would probably hook the manga/comic distribution system up to like... bittorrent or something. With RSS over BT or something. Cut out the middlemen sites that try to make a profit, and the few that don't still need money and are... well, not a *single* point of failure, but one of a few that can easily be targeted and shut down. Vs swarms of torrent users.

In general we should make a bit more use of things that are not websites (but built on classic ideas, not modern "app store" culture. Different apps besides the browser, but the app works for more than one entity and is not controlled by the one entity it works with), and protocols that are not HTTPS (1.1/2/3). For example we should create an updated NNTP (Usenet) protocol and use that a bunch. A well done NNTP-like protocol could replace rather clunky mailing lists (thinking discussion lists, not distribution lists/news letters, though maybe them too...), and a lot of forums too. And a well designed system could pretty easily mirror into and out of forums (with the right design) too.

[lunarlicorice]

might do that thing whwre you draw fanart of a bunch of different ppls versions of link because i have so many favorites

[divinekangaroo]

There's those diligent amazing bookmarkers on AO3 that don't write fic and don't even really comment, but they have the most amazingly curated list of bookmarks.

It's like following someone's recc blog but without any of the personality-frame around the bookmarking. It's just pure bookmark. I branch out into other fandoms too because if they have a decent set of bookmarks for one fandom, then they probably do for another fandom, too.

So this is increasingly how I navigate fandoms, especially those with massive ficbases: those people and their diligent bookmarking habits. But, AO3 doesn't have a mechanism for following someone for their bookmarking: seeing every time they update their bookmarks...

[wander-wren]

chapter 2 of Other Lost Things is up! we get more Eira, see what's up with Tyrian, and meet one of my favorite side characters possibly ever

[angeluscore]

honestly, I might enter RSS feed not because of internet imploding and algorithm and alikes but bc I'm lazy and RSS is everything I wanted. just all the reasons I created an account that was to follow one person now it's only in one place

[mekatrio]

im so confused how the images of prev post could be broken that badly... i took a look at the html of the post and there just, isnt any photos hosted in it like how.... where did the images go.....

[sam-keeper]

Hey Look At This Comic: Calvin and Hobbes

I liked the idea of putting some more daily strip comics into my rss reader, and gocomics DOES post old strips in sequence every day (keeping archival materials in lively circulation 👍), and there IS a site that generates an rss feed for gocomics (they don't provide rss feeds themselves because they want you to subscribe 👎) so, I added the current Nancy run to my feed, alongside Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. a few days later it paid off big time with this strip:

I love this strip, but it's a bit weird, isn't it? I'm sure some people read the way you're "supposed to" move panel to panel in a typical comic: left to right across the top strip, then the middle, then the bottom. Easy. I didn't, though. My eyes darted across the page, circled around the upper left hand panels, before zipping to the big point of interest on the page: that big panel of Calvin's teacher as a great pink alien monster! the second panel in strip two, the view through the spaceship porthole of the alien landscape, got orphaned, turned into something I glanced at after the fact as I pieced the sequence back together.

which might just be how comics reading actually goes, in practice. more recent theories of comics, particularly ones coming out of the Franco-Belgian tradition, suggest we take in the page as a whole first before diving in panel by panel. that bottom left corner is also kind of a privileged position on the page, with a beautifully lumpy and toothy monster filling up almost the whole frame. no wonder my eye was drawn there "ahead of sequence"!

is that a mistake? one of my friends, when I posed the question, thought so, that the strip means to build up to that point but the page composition encourages you to read ahead. She also, intriguingly, suggested to me that even though we enter the strip seeing the whole page, we induce a kind of forgetfulness in ourselves so that we don't get spoiled. when we see the monster, do we already know it's there while experiencing it for the first time? (hypnosis, she suggested to me, is "merely a set of circumstances to help the mind do a set of things that it already does every day".)

others corroborated the weird reading orders but suggested it was deliberate. for Sarah, the whole left side of the page draws your eye down compositionally, from Spaceman Spiff's (Calvin's alter ego) gloved hands on the wheel, down to the Z shaped mesa, to the monster. this cuts out almost two thirds of the comic! but for her and a few other friends, that made sense: Calvin is daydreaming in class, and the point where his teacher pops up in front of him to demand his attention is a moment of concrete interest in a hazy sea of nonlinear sensation. another friend drew a diagram of an even weirder reading pattern:

actually, I think this makes some sense. theorist Thierry Groensteen's notion of "braiding" in comics suggests that we're constantly recomposing comics in our brains, not just panel by panel, but over the whole corpus of panels, looking for rhymes and resonances and ways the story relates to itself. it feels a little like panels 2 and 3 rhyme, to me. the frames are long and thin more than any of the others, they both have this prominent horizon line, and they both sit on top of panels 4 and 5. they relate to each other, to the point where I see how you could jump from one to the other, then back up the page and over! if I understand Groensteen right, he's not suggesting we necessarily jump around the page this way, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I do think one of the implications of braiding and of taking in the whole page is that we might get off track and start wandering through time and space... which is exactly what Calvin is doing, after all.

I love that the actual joke of the strip hinges on these two little panels buried at the bottom of the page: the only shot not from Calvin's point of view, of him looking frazzled after Mrs Wormwood's dressing down, and then a little panel of him holding the book. that's braiding too: we understand the previous and future panels because we draw an analogy between all the perspectives we've seen elsewhere of hands (or claws) and get that Calvin is drifting into a daydream again, taking on a new role. the scenario shifts, and the color scheme changes to a complimentary one (red to green), but both daydreams are much more powerful, on the page, than the interruption by reality.

how do you read the page?

you can read more reviews in the Hey Look At This Comic tag and support me on Patreon.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic is five

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SEATTLE TONIGHT (Feb 19) for with DAN SAVAGE, and in TORONTO on SUNDAY (Feb 23) at Another Story Books. More tour dates here.

Five years and two weeks ago, I parted ways with Boing Boing, a website I co-own and wrote for virtually every day for 19 years ago. Two weeks later – five years ago from today – I started my own blog, Pluralistic, which is, therefore, half a decade old, as of today.

I've written an annual rumination on this most years since.

Here's the fourth anniversary post (on blogging as a way to organize thoughts for big, ambitious, synthetic works):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

The third (on writing without analytics):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/drei-drei-drei/#now-we-are-three

The second (on "post own site, share everywhere," AKA "POSSE"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse

I wasn't sure what I would write about today, but I figured it out yesterday, in the car, driving to my book-launch event with Wil Wheaton at LA's Diesel Books (tonight's event is in Seattle, with Dan Savage):

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989

I was listening to the always excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, where the hosts were interviewing Chris Hayes:

https://know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/pay-attention-w-chris-hayes-OA3C8ZMp

The occasion was the publication of Hayes's new book, The Sirens' Call, about the way technology interacts with our attention:

https://sirenscallbook.com

The interview was fascinating, and steered clear of moral panic about computers rotting our brains (shades of Socrates' possibly apocryphal statements that reading, rather than memorizing, was destroying young peoples' critical faculties). Instead, Hayes talked about how empty it feels to read an algorithmic feed, how our attention gets caught up by it, sometimes for longer than we planned, and then afterward, we feel like our attention and time were poorly spent. He talked about how reflective experiences – like reading a book with his kid before school – are shattered by pocket-buzzes as news articles came in. And he talked about how satisfying it was to pay protracted attention to something important, and how hard that was.

Listening to Hayes's description, I realized two things: first, he was absolutely right, those are terrible things; and second, I barely experience them (though, when I do, it makes me feel awful). Both of these are intimately bound up with my blogging and social media habits.

15 years ago, I published "Writing in the Age of Distraction," an article about preserving your attention in a digital world so you could get writing done. We live in a very different world, but the advice still holds up:

https://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html

In particular, I advised readers to turn off all their alerts. This is something I've done since before the smartphone era, tracking down the preferences that kept programs like AIM, Apple Mail and Google Reader from popping up an alert when a new item appeared. This is absolutely fundamental and should be non-negotiable. When I heard Hayes describe how his phone buzzes in his pocket whenever there is breaking news, I was actually shocked. Do people really allow their devices to interrupt them on a random reinforcement schedule? I mean, no wonder the internet makes people go crazy. I'm not a big believer in BF Skinner, but I think it's well established that any stimulus that occurs at random intervals is impossible to get used to, and shocks you anew every time it recurs.

Rather than letting myself get pocket-buzzed by the news, I have an RSS reader. You should use an RSS reader, seriously:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

I periodically check in with my reader to see what stories have been posted. The experience of choosing to look at the news is profoundly different from having the news blasted at you. I still don't always choose wisely – I'm as guilty of scrolling my phone when I could be doing something more ultimately satisfying as anyone else – but the affect of being in charge of when and how I consume current events is the opposite of the feeling of being at the beck-and-call of any fool headline writer who hits "publish."

This is even more important in the age of smartphones. Whenever you install an app, turn off its notifications. If you forget and an app pushes you an update ("Hi, this is the app you used to pay your parking meter that one time! We're having a 2% off sale on parking spots in a different city from the one you're in now and we wanted to make sure you stopped whatever you were doing and found out about it RIGHT NOW!") then turn off notifications for that app. Consider deleting it. Your phone should buzz when you're expecting a call, or an important message.

Note I said important message. I also turn off notifications for most of the apps I use that have a direct-messaging function. I check in with my group chats periodically, but I never get interrupted by friends across town or across the world posting photos of lunch or kvetching about the guy who farted next to them on the subway. I look at those chats when I'm taking a break, not when I'm trying to get stuff done. It's really nice to stay on top of your friends' lives without feeling low-grade resentment for how they interrupted your creative fog with a ganked Tiktok video of a zoomer making fun of a boomer for getting mad at a millennial for quoting Osama bin Laden. There's times when it makes sense to turn on group-chat notifications – like when you're on a group outing and trying to locate one another – but the rest of the time, turn it off.

Now, there are people I need to hear from urgently, who do get to buzz my pockets when something important comes up – people I'm working on a project with, say, or my wife and kid. But I also have all those people trained to send me emails unless it's urgent. You know the norm we have about calling someone out of the blue being kind of gross and rude? That's how you should feel about making someone's pocket buzz, unless it's important. Send those people emails.

I visit my email in between other tasks and clear out my inbox. If that sounds impossible, I have some suggestions for how to manage it:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/dec/21/keeping-email-address-secret-spambots

Tldr? Get you some mail rules:

add everyone you correspond with to an address book called "people I know"

filter emails from anyone in the "people I know" address book into a high priority inbox, which you just treat as your regular inbox

look at the unfiltered inbox (full of people you've never corresponded with) every day or two and reply to messages that need replying (and those people will thereafter be filtered into the "people I know" inbox)

filter any message containing the world "unsubscribe" into a folder called "mailing lists"

if you're subscribed to mailing lists that you feel you can't leave because it would be impolite, filter them into a folder called "mailing lists" unless the message contains your name (so you can reply promptly if someone mentions you on the list)

The point here is to manage your attention. You decide when you want to get non-urgent communications, and mail-app automation automatically flags the stuff that you are most likely to want to see. For extra credit: adopt a "suspense file" that lets you manage other peoples' emails to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

Now, let's talk about algorithmic feeds. Lots of phosphors have been spilled on this subject, and critics of The Algorithm have an unfortunately propensity to buy into the self aggrandizement of soi-dissant evil sorcerer tech bros who claim they can "hack your dopamine loops" by programming an algorithmic feed. I think this is bullshit. Mind-control rays are nonsense, whether they are being promoted by Rasputin or a repentant Prodigal Tech Bro:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

But I hate algorithmic feeds. To explain why, I should explain how much I love non-algorithmic feeds. I follow a lot of people on several social media services, and I almost never feel the need to look at trending topics, suggested posts, or anything resembling the "For You" feed. Sure, there's times when I want to turn on the ole social TV and see what's on – the digital equivalent of leaving the TV on in a hotel room while I unpack and iron my suit – but those times are rare.

Mostly what I get is a feed of the things that my friends think are noteworthy enough to share. Some of that stuff is "OC" (material they've posted themselves), but the majority of it is stuff they're boosting from the feeds of their friends. Now, I say friend but I don't know the majority of the people I follow. I have a parasocial relationship (these get an undeserved bad rap) with them.

We're "friends" in the sense that I think they have interesting taste. There's people I've followed for more than a decade without exchanging a single explicit communication. I think they're cool, and I repost the cool stuff they post, so the people who follow me can see it. Reposting is a way of collaborating with other people who've opted into sharing their attention-management with you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/27/probably/

Reposting with a comment? Even better – you're telling people why to pay attention to that thing, or, more importantly, why they can safely ignore it if it's not their thing (what Bruce Sterling memorably calls an "attention conservation notice"). This is why Mastodon's decision not to implement quote-tweeting (over a misplaced squeamishness about "dunk culture") was such a catastrophic own-goal. If you're building a social network without an algorithmic suggestion feed (yay), you absolutely can't afford to block a feature that lets people annotate the material they boost into other people's timelines:

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-104/

Remember how I said the affect of going to read the news is totally different (and infinitely superior) to the affect of having the news pushed to you? Same goes for the difference between getting a feed of things boosted and written by people you've chosen to follow, and getting a feed of things chosen by an algorithm. This is for reasons far more profound than the mere fact that algorithms use poor signals to choose those posts (e.g. "do a lot of people seem to be arguing about this post?").

For me, the problem with algorithmic feeds is the same as the problem with AI art. The point of art is to communicate something, and art consists of thousands of micro-decisions made by someone intending to communicate something, which gives it a richness and a texture that can make art arresting and profound. Prompting an AI to draw you a picture consists of just a few decisions, orders of magnitude fewer communicative acts than are embodied in a human-drawn illustration, even if you refine the image through many subsequent prompts. What you get is something "soulless" – a thing that seems to involve many decisions, but almost all of them were made by a machine that had no communicative intent.

This is the definition of "uncanniness," which is "the seeming of intention without intending anything." Most of the "meaning" in an AI illustration is "meaning that does not stem from organizing intention":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

The same is true of an algorithmic feed. When someone you follow – a person – posts or boosts something into their feed, there is a human intention. It is a communicative act. It can be very communicative, even if it's just a boost, provided the person adds some context with their own commentary or quoting. It can be just a little communicative, too – a momentary thumbpress on the boost button. But either way, to read a feed populated by people, rather than machines, is to be showered with the communicative intent of people whom you have chosen to hear from. Perhaps you chose unwisely and followed someone whose communications are banal or offensive or repetitious. Unfollow them.

Most importantly, follow the people who are followed by the people you follow. If someone whose taste you like pleases or interests you time and again by promoting something by a stranger to your attention, then bring that stranger closer by making them someone you follow, too. Do this, again and again, and build a constellation of people who make you smile or make you think. Just the act of boosting and virtually handling the things those people make and boost gets that stuff into your skin and your thoughts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

This is the good kind of filter bubble – the bubble of "people who interest me." I'm not saying that it's a sin to read an algorithmic feed, but relying on algorithmic feeds is a recipe for feeling empty, and regretful of your misspent attention. This is true even when the algorithm is good at its job, as with Tiktok, whose whole appeal is to take your hands off the wheel and give total control over to the autopilot. Even when an algorithm makes many good guesses about what you'll like, seeing something you like isn't as nice, as pleasing, as useful, as seeing that same thing as the result of someone else's intention.

And, of course, once you let the app drive, you become a soft target for the cupidity and deceptions of the app's makers. Tiktok, for example, uses its "heating tool" to selectively boost things into your feed – not because they think you'll like it, but because they want to trick the person whose content they're boosting into thinking that Tiktok is a good place to distribute their work through:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The value of an algorithmic feed – of an intermediated feed – is to help you build your disintermediated, human feed. Find people you like through the algorithm, follow them, then stop letting the algorithm drive.

And the human feed you consume is input for the human feed you create, the stream of communicative acts you commit in order to say to the world, "This is what feels good to spend my attention on. If this makes you feel good, too, then please follow me, and you will sit downstream of my communicative acts, as I sit downstream of the communicative acts of so many others."

The more communicative the feeds you emit are, the more reward you will reap. First, because interrogating your own attention – "why was this thing interesting?" – is a clarifying and mnemonic act, that lets you get more back from the attention you pay. And second, because the more you communicate about those attentive insights, the more people you will find who are truly Your People, a community that goes beyond "I follow this stranger" and gets into the realm of "this stranger and I are on the same side in a world of great peril and worry":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Which brings me back to this blog and my fifth bloggaversary. Because a blog is a feed, but one that is far heavier on communications than a stream of boosted posts. Five years into this iteration of my blogging life (and 24 years into my blogging life overall), blogging remains one of the most powerful, clarifying and uplifting parts of my day.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/19/gimme-five/#jeffty

[ao3commentoftheday]

if you hit the limit on the number of filters you apply and you don't mind a nerdy solution

Last week sometime, I reblogged a post about AO3 filters and added on a bit about where you could find them (if you use AO3 by searching, you won't see the filtering - two different processes)

Anyway, in that post, I said:

You can add a theoretically unlimited number of tags to your exclude [filter] list, but I think it’s possible to have a list that breaks things eventually. I’ve never personally hit it? But I bet someone out there has.

Several people in the notes on that post have indicated that they've hit the limit. If you're one of those people, there might be a way to un-break things?

So basically, my understanding of the issue* is that things break because the URL gets too long. Every filter you add makes the URL longer. And filters are based on fandom names, character names, etc. So when you're filtering a lot of tags and a lot of them are really long tags, well... Things break.

How do you get shorter URLs? Use shorter versions of the tags. How do you do that? Use the tag ID number instead of the text. Lemme give you an example!

Let's say you want to filter in/out works from the My Hero Academia fandom. Well, that fandom's full text tag is:

僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga)

Instead of choosing that from the dropdown or typing it into the Search Within Results box, you could use fandom_ids: 87784924 - a much shorter way of typing in the same tag.

AO3 has fandom_ids and relationship_ids and character_ids, and you can find them all in the same place: the RSS feed button.

When you click on that button, your browser will either open up a new tab or download a file. When you look at it, you'll see a whole bunch of code, but all you need is the part of the third line:

<id>tag:archiveofourown.org,2005:/tags/87784924/feed</id>

The number after /tags/ in that line is the ID number of that specific tag on the Archive. If you clicked the RSS feed button for a fandom tag, then it's a fandom_ids number. If you clicked it on a relationship, then it's a relationship_ids number, and if you clicked it on a character, then it's a character_ids number.

There aren't any RSS feeds for additional tags.

Once you have the IDs you want, you can combine them using AND, OR, and NOT (the all-caps here is important). Joining two tags with AND means that you want to include them both. Joining two tags with OR means that you want either one of the tags or both of them together. Joining them with a NOT means that you want the first tag but not the second tag - so you're including the first and excluding the second.

You can find out more about filtering this way in this newspost from 2013 (please note: things have changed since then, that's why my instructions for finding the ID numbers look different from those ones)

Not every fandom/relationship/character has an RSS feed but this is useful for those that do! And the best part is, you can also subscribe to the feed if you want a push notification every time that tag gets a new or updated work.

*based on a half-remembered conversation from 3-4 years ago, so I could be wrong on this one

[clinical-space-podcast]

Okay here it is. The moment that zero of you have been waiting for: My infodump about framing devices and modern audio fiction.

If you're a newer fiction podcast listener, you may have asked, "Why do so many shows pretend to be some real thing?" And if you're a newer fiction podcast creator (as I am), you may have asked, "Do I have to use a framing device?"

Short Answer: It's never been a requirement, but it is fun for some creators, it is useful for some stories, and the tradition of it dates back farther than you might think.

(Extremely) Long Answer:

I would say that the tradition's lineage can be traced back in two directions, separately: horror and radio.

Horror.

This one goes way back. Way way back. Dracula, Frankenstein, etc etc... There really is something about what we would now call "found footage" that creates a workable balance between believable and unbelievable - make it seem like it could have actually happened, however impossible the story is, and (if done right) the horror aspects hit deeper. Combine that with the automatic sense of the unkown that comes from only reading snippets from a few characters' personal perspectives; horror thrives on the unknown.

[Tangent] The podcast Re:Dracula, which I feel should be mentioned here, is a very interesting representation of all this - as a direct adaptation, it maintains the framing device of the novel Dracula: the letters. Its extension of the device is brought not in the audio format but in the RSS feed format. No attempt is made to explain why we're hearing the voices of the characters, as many fiction podcasts default to, rather the immersion comes in experiencing the sense of time between the missives. [End Tangent]

Moving into film, found footage actually took a while to make it onto the scene, but once it did, oh my god did it change everything. Okay, Blair Witch was technically not the first found footage horror film, but we're not going down that rabbit hole. Most would call it the first good one, or at least the first successful one. Which is interesting because at this point we've had plenty of films based on books with framing devices, most of which entirely do away with the framing in the adaptation. So why was 1999 the year film was ripe for framing devices to enter the horror film genre in a big way? I would say it's plausibility. Personal-sized video cameras were now (relatively) affordable, and had been around long enough that people who made and watched films were familiar with them. So it's now a believable thing to be able to cobble together a documentary from clips found on a camcorder, and so they do and now the horror market is changed forever. Next comes copycats, and movies that take the concept and make it their own (like Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity), and movies that parody the now-ubiquitous trope (like Grave Enounters).

So by the time fiction podcasts take off, found footage horror is well established as a beloved reawakening of a beloved literary tradition. And it fits easily in audio horror for much the same reasons as it did in video horror. Think Magnus, Archive 81, probably every SCP podcast, and so on. And within audio fiction, the horror genre is very popular and very much a trendsetter, historically speaking.

Radio.

I could probably get away with just discussing a single event here, and you can probably guess it, but I'll try to go for a broader scope than just the autumn of 1938.

So, honestly, as far as I can tell, old radio shows had a habit of using framing devices just for funsies (or at least for lots of different reasons that I could get lost in exploring but I won't). Importantly though, they largely used different framing devices than books had used up to this point. They were innovative, which is an attitude that certainly transferred into modern audio fiction. Without digging too deep into any of them, here's some notable examples:

Let's start with The Shadow because of course we start with The Goddamn Shadow. This one used a very soft framing device, since it doesn't really explain why the audio broadcast exists, just why it's coming to you in audio format instead of visual: The Shadow has invisibility powers. Yeah I know that's a pretty weak connection, but it's a connection the show attempts to imply: The Shadow often manifests as a disembodied voice, and that ties in to it being a radio show. 🤷🏻

Sherlock Holmes (the one with Basil Rathbone) used a somewhat stricter framing device in pretending to be conversations between Holmes, Watson and an interviewer, in which they describe the events of solving the mystery after the fact - pretty similar to the framing of the original books, but adapted well to audio.

Dragnet framed itself as police reports, I think.

Dimension X and X Minus One both, to varying degrees, frame themselves as tales coming to the listener from the actual future and from an actual alternate universe, respectively. (If you ask me, they should have traded names.) Of course, this doesn't make much use of the audio format specifically, but it illustrates that by this point framing devices in audio were a tradition and not unusual at all.

~We now return you to the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.

Yeah okay here it is. We have to go here.

October 30, 1938 was a day that changed science fiction, audio drama, FCC regulations, and probably the entirety of scripted performance art, forever.

Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds was so flawlessly framed as breaking news that it famously caused something of a mass panic. While the extent of the panic was slightly exaggerated, it's true that the show was so well done that many people who missed the beginning (or didn't pay attention to it) thought the nation was actually being invaded.

The story that they wanted to tell relied heavily on the device of being a purported news broadcast, and there's no doubt that its impact stems from that device - we're still talking about it 90 years later, and not because of the plot of the story.

I'll leave the parallels and differences between the legacy of War of the Worlds and that of The Black Tapes to be explored by someone else.

Modern Audio Fiction Carries On the Tradition.

Broadcasts.

I've already mentioned TMA, Re:Drac, and Black Tapes.

I haven't mentioned Welcome to Night Vale, which (love it or hate it) was without a doubt one of the biggest catalysts of the audio drama renaissance in podcast form. We all know people who have only ever listened to one fiction podcast, almost invariably either TMA or WtNV. And Night Vale came first and got popular first. Its format as a small-town news radio broadcast has been imitated, innovated, responded to, and intentionally avoided more times than I can count. Very much worth mentioning is that Night Vale popularized the idea of using a framing device not as a way to add plausibility to its stories (nothing could, it's peak absurdism after all), but to add structure. The author knows what to write where, the listener knows what to expect when. Another appeal of framing devices, and another reason why they're so widespread.

Tapes.

Ah yes the tapes. Horror podcasts and their tapes. Drowning in tapes (/lh). It works so well because (a) it's an easy fit for found footage audio, (b) it adds a "spooky" analog horror vibe, and (c) it's fun and fairly easy to design, and forgives a lot in terms of recording quality and editing skill - good for creators at all levels of proficiency. Voicemail and voice memos have similar benefits but without the well-loved "spooky analog" aspect.

Limitations.

The Bright Sessions, Moonbase Theta Out, Wolf 359, and quite a few others all have something in common: they eventually gave up their framing devices. In my opinion, the shows' improvements after doing so is not by any means a reflection on framing as a concept, but instead a demonstration of a show's need to adapt as it grows. Sometimes Episode 149 follows the same form and format as Episode 1, sometimes it doesn't, and a creator's ability to accurately assess whether the format fits the story they want to tell leads to decisions like this (which can be really difficult decisions to make), but ultimately, doing what's best for the story itself always pays off.

When you choose a framing format, you sort of lock in how you're going to write the show and what it's going to sound like. This can be very useful. Like in writing poetry, some of us work better under constraints - it causes us to flex our creativity. It also, as explained above, creates a framework, a formula, which can make it easier to outline an episode.

But it doesn't work for every story. Some shows hold on to their framing devices too long, the plot filling and stretching the format until the frame is bursting at the seams. Conversely, though, I say a series shouldn't abandon a device if it doesn't need the new narrative freedom to further the story - something to fill the absence of the episode format as a player itself in the work.

Form as Storytelling.

This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest (and too often untapped) strengths of framing devices in any medium. I LOVE IT when a piece of art uses its medium as part of the art itself. What part of your story can you only tell because of the medium you're using? What unique part of your medium can you use to enhance the story?

Some absolute favorite examples of this idea from other media, in no particular order: the ending of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the very end of Zelda TotK, Shakespeare's frequent use of play-within-a-play, the Thor fight in God of War, tons of bits of Series of Unfortunate Events (the books), the twist and out-of-game-play in DDLC, all of WandaVision, the elephant scene from It Takes Two, Asteroid City...

It's something I kind of want to see more of in audio fiction: powerful moments in using the medium of audio as a tool to tell the story rather than only a limitation to be written around. Framing devices help with this, but there are a lot of opportunities in other tools too. I find it in horror and comedy series, and few other places.

Conclusion.

This went on way longer than I expected. I have too many thoughts about it. To sum up:

Why are there so many shows pretending to be some real thing? Because there is a very strong tradition of it in audio fiction, because it provides a lot of structure and benefits especially to newer creators, because it allows for the medium to be part of the art form in a way, and of course because it's fun!

Should I use a framing device in my fiction podcast? My dear, nobody can answer that but you! Ask youself if it would improve your story, if it would improve your writing ability, if it sounds fun to you, and if it would create a show that you would want to listen to (I always say that you should be your own target audience; if you would want the thing to exist, odds are someone else will enjoy its existence). If you use one, you're in good company; if you don't, you're in good company. If you start with one and drop it for season 3, or if you start without one and pick it up partway through, you're in good company. You can do a full-cast immersive found-footage show with sound effects, you can do an audiobook as a podcast, and you can do anything in between!

Feel free to add corrections, context, and additional notes to any of the above. I'm not a history expert, I'm just a nerd with internet access.

Peace and love on every planet, y'all.

[horseonvhs]

i'm starting an email newsletter as an alternative to social media/RSS feeds for updates and announcements for Nothing Doing. it's called DIRECT TO VIDEO and you can subscribe here. more details after the break!!

i will be real - part of the reason i'm doing this is that i keep worrying my RSS feed is going to break and i won't know how to fix it. in the wake of cohost shutting down, i know a fair amount of people are looking to move on from social media as a whole and become True RSS Freaks (affectionate), and i'd hate for any readers to lose track of what's going on with the comic because i saved a file wrong or something. if you are sick of social media and you want to keep up with my work, this might be a "the move!"

that said, i also just think there's something novel and fun about newsletters. i don't know yet what i might like to do with it; maybe it'll be a fun way to preview other projects or share little secrets about the comic. anything is possible (though i will say that every edition will have at least one comic in it -- that's the "horse's promise")!

for the first four weeks, there will be twice-weekly updates on Tuesdays and Thursdays containing five strips from the Nothing Doing archive each. once all the strips are archived, it will be updated whenever there is a new comic slash whenever i have something important to announce. it simply would not be a project of mine if it had a more coherent schedule lol

all that to say: comics! directly to your email!! literally what in this world could be better than that!!! subscribe today!!!!!

[versegm]

Already mentioned it in another post two days ago, but it bears repeating: if you use social media primarily as a way to write out your ideas to the world, maybe making your own website on neocities could be your thing.

But I don't know how to code!

Here are two templates you can basically copy/paste and use directly as is. Personally I started with Zonelets and learned html+css from cannibalizing bits of its code & improving upon it.

But I don't know what I can put on it!

Frankly you can just make it your personal blog and post stuff like "ate spaghetti today :)" but if you're here for fandom stuff I really recommend this zine as a list of fansites you can do, from ship shrine to meta analysis to fanlistings.

But how can people keep up with what I post?

Add an rss feed. That way, people will get notified when you post new shit.

But will people be able to interact with me?

Sure! You can add a guestbook for that. Or an askbox. Or just chuck in a duplicate email you made.

I swear it's easier than you think! Just give it a try, what do you have to lose? :)