bluejackals

[bluejackals]

Gentle reminder that very little fandom labor is automated, because I think people forget that a lot.

That blog with a tagging system you love? A person curates those tags by hand.

That rec blog with a great organization scheme and pretty graphics? Someone designed and implemented that organization scheme and made those graphics.

That network that posts a cool variety of stuff? People track down all that variety and queue it by hand, and other people made all the individual pieces.

That post with umpteen links to helpful resources, and information about them? Someone gathered those links, researched the sources, wrote up the information about them.

That graphic about fandom statistics? Someone compiled those statistics, analyzed them, organized them, figured out a useful way to convey the information to others, and made the post.

That event that you think looks neat? Someone wrote the rules, created the blogs and Discords, designed the graphics, did their best to promo the event so it'd succeed.

None of this was done automatically. None of it just appears whole out of the internet ether.

I think everyone realizes that fic writing and fanart creation are work, and at least some folks have got it through their heads that gif creation and graphics and moodboards take effort, and meta is usually respected for the effort that goes into it, at least as far as I've seen, but I feel like a lot of people don't really get how much labor goes into curation, too.

If people are creating resources, curating content, organizing the creations of others, gathering information, and doing other fandom activities that aren't necessarily the direct action of creation, they're doing a lot of fandom labor, and it's often largely unrecognized.

Celebrate fan work!

To folks doing this kind of labor: I see you, and I thank you. You are the backbones of our fandoms and I love you.

[bluejackals]

[12] Mementos

[bluejackals]

save me ryujin kang from hit webtoon hand jumper by sleepacross..save me...

[bluejackals]

re: lrb i have complicated feelings about stuff like rpf being shared on twitter cause on one hand yeah ccs really shouldnt be seeing that shit unprompted but on the other hand i wouldnt exactly call twitter a ''cc space''

to me at least cc spaces consist of their channels, forums, discords, etc. yknow. things that are Directly connected to them

fandom spaces on the other hand consist of tumblr, fanmade forums, fanrun sites and email lists, etc. places where things are organized in such a way where if they find deeply fandom stuff like rpf, yume shit, etc thats basically their own fault (exception being if they have their own account in that space, then whatever account that may be would count as a cc space)

twitter is basically a whole different matter, its a complete mixed bag between both cc and fan and, due to its heavily algorithm-based mode of interaction and most recently the shitty change to its blocking system, its nigh impossible to completely separate the two these days meaning that theres a nonzero chance that ccs will see what they werent meant to see on twitter even if the op tried their best to hide it

the logical thing would be to prevent any and all "overly-fandom" things such as rpf to happen on twitter but thats just not how it works cause to do that would mean having to police the entire fandom and that just never works out well (cmc is the easiest example to give of this but im gonna be so real this kind of thing happens so often if you just know where to look) and no amount of "just block and move on"s will change the fact that twitter has the exact mechanisms (highly algorithm-based, shitty blocking, shitty filtering, limited to short posts that even affect tagging, the fact that tagging is even connected to the character limit in the first place making things Even More difficult to filter out, prevalence of right wingers and grifters making good faith arguments hard to separate from bad faith ones and vice versa, so much more tbh but this is getting too long tldr i hate twitter) where toxicity is inevitable if you dont address the root cause of the conflict between boundary warriors and boundary dgafers which are:

the fact that ccs very much do inhabit the same spaces as fans which means both groups have direct contact with one another

there are genuine concerns and damages that have occured from that direct contact (not even just in streamer spaces, see glee and voltron legendary defender for damages done towards the ccs and literally any famous person that got outed as a predator for damages done towards fans)(add in the fact that a lot of "overly fandom" things can genuinely be upsetting to see for the cc such as sexualization, hcs that hit a little too close to home, etc and you get basically just a bad time for everyone involved)

the fact that a lot of new fandomers came about during the pandemic, a lot of whom either were basically normies who only gave a fuck about fandom when they get on the news (so when bad shit happens mainly with maybe the incredibly rare exceptionally successful charities) and/or are/were young and had no frame of reference for what fandoms used to look like, and since a lot of things that can and have made fandom worse are things aligned to "normative" senses of morality (ex. policing of dead dove and "pedophilic content" resulting in queer fandomers and sex workers getting targetted due to the fact that in mainstream conservative society both of those groups are considered predatory by default) both these groups may end up thinking all of the policing and surveilling is normal and morally good even

the fact that a lot of things chalked up as "pointless fandom discourse" can be either genuine nothingburgers that have gotten ppl harassed or are genuine complaints of bigotry made by marginalized fandomers who are essentially told to just stfu which muddles the line between what to take seriously and what not to by both the ppl involved in it as well as random onlookers

i dont really have a solution myself to address these problems, theres a reason i only have a private twitter nowadays after all, theoretically a catchall tag that ppl can use to filter out "overly fandom" things can maybe help with this assuming that the filters dont suck too hard but lbr theres a nonzero chance that it'll be used by tag hunters to harass ppl rather than filter them out so idk if that'll work really

tldr: we should start engaging in fandom via cryptic texts unknown to anybody but our own selves for others to decipher and nothing else

[bluejackals]

Day wgatever,,, day 4 of unstableversary; trapped < made sure to check this time 😢

^chunkban era or whatever,,, interpret it in any way yiu want

[bluejackals]

day 4 - Trapped, in the void.

[bluejackals]

trapped in the void

[bluejackals]

Day wgatever,,, day 4 of unstableversary; trapped < made sure to check this time 😢

^chunkban era or whatever,,, interpret it in any way yiu want

[bluejackals]

day 1 - secret (plan)

(i forgot to post this here )

[bluejackals]

DAY 3 - CIVILIZATION

[bluejackals]

day 3: civilization

words: somewhere between 500 and 1000

characters: Spoke

Pull, pull, pull, pull. Plant, plant, plant, plant. Simple, numbing, repeatitive. It gets too boring after you go through two rows; there's nothing new and exciting in this routine, but it sort of rewards you: numbers of carrots in his inventory grows with insane speed, and when he finishes, there are few full stucks. He goes to a little storage building nearby and puts them into chest; there's wooden walls, flickering light from lanterns that swing from side to side from wind coming in and out, and chest, rows and rows of chests with stucks and stucks of carrots. Insane amounts of carrots. Much more carrots than a normal minecraft player would need to keep. They do need them, tho: disappearance of almost all villagers from the server created a nice business opportunity to sell people food that is not that easy to get now. Like golden carrots. The thing they are specifically making.

Well, Spoke admits, they are going a little overboard with it, because this "carrot civilization" bit is still funny to them. Or maybe it's not even a bit anymore. Can a thing be called a bit when it becomes a center of your entire life?

Yes, they got a little too excited when saw carrots in some random village when flying away from Ash's house in Far Lands. ("Were the villagers already gone back then?" - Spoke asks himself and couldn't remember.) But how did it lead to them building entire civilization with their own hands, theme centered around carrots and only them, he still has no idea. Everything around him is orange - they went to search a few hundreds of blocks away just to collect orange wood for building, with green roofs (some of them - purely emeralds, since they are completely useless now, but still as shiny and pretty as ever) and signs everywhere naming every single house (maybe a habit from mafia time), which makes entire village to look ripped straight from some cartoon.

It also looks like a normal minecraft gameplay, nothing like massive grandiose builds on mafia territory, or Wanders from much, much time ago, or obvious intimidating prisons, or opposition bases. It's weirdly comforting. Spoke always thought he's the one to like bigger things, giant castles made specifically for him, with details and patterns and delicate interior, bigger ambitions, like ruling the world, but now he thinks that waking up to a scenery of one more castle rising up behind his window would make him throw up, and ruling the world reminds so much of Ash that it makes him feel more of fear and much less of desire.

There's something nice about simplicity of carrot fields and wooden houses, something warm and familiar, reminding of hanging out with Rose's family or urgently making the most incompetent team on the server. It's nice to go narrow roads between houses and see "Planet's house! :D" or "Mapicc" on signs, see flowers planted in rows and decorative pots put near doors. It's nice to see faces and not invis particles; it's nice to feel taste of steak or stew or apple on his tongue and not the same sickening taste of the same potion over and over. It's nice to close his eyes and not having to be scared of anything other that burning zombie at his door in the morning; it's nice to be called Spoke and not Fish Bucket.

[bluejackals]

For @bluejackals Unstableversary

[bluejackals]

day 2: puzzle

characters: Clown, background Zam and Wemmbu

words: around 500

ao3 link

Clown looks down, at bright colourful dots running and jumping, moving almost chaotically, Brownian motion, but within their own logic and behavioural patterns. It's interesting, watching them. It's intriguing, making hypothesis after hypothesis, seeing if it would be proven right or wrong, searching for explanations.

Zam and Wemmbu - he can hear them talking too - crash into each other, their personalities clashing, like oil and water that will never be together, that will forever be distinct from each other no matter how much you try to mix them. They are like interesting bugs you find on the road and decide to slowly kill with your foot for fun; colourful bugs that shine under the hot summer sun as you hold them between your fingers, moving their little legs, struggling, but unable to escape your hold. Little walking puzzles, waiting to be solved, waiting to be caught and stripped and tied to the surgeon table and cut open so he could see what's hidden inside. Little rats in a rat paradise where they can have almost everything available in the game except for freedom, except for the privilege of being see as human (would everything turn into chaos, violence and death just like it did in Universe 25?); little monkeys with doll mothers, with scientist on the other side of a glass watching them bite and punch and injure each other.

He can't call it an experiment, not really; he controls the situation, but not as much as he'd prefer to. Maybe he should make some changes in the future. It is more of "put them in the box and see what happens"; "strip them of their resources and control and authorities and see what happens".

What happens is a big change in behaviour, and he's stuck before his monitors, documenting every word, every tremble in voices, every little movement, every conflict, how it begins and how it ends. He does film all of this, he prepared for this moment, but there's something special at seeing it right in the moment, on air. He'll add all the details he missed later, but now... now he's having the time of his life. Prince Zam, ever so powerful and fearless emperor, stripped of his carefully gained and tightly held control, is truly a view to behold: paranoid, aggressive, with his usual manipulations and masking of real emotions failing again and again; Wemmbu, on the other hand, doesn't seem to change that much. Which might already be saying something, Clown thinks.

[bluejackals]

Day 2 puzzle

[bluejackals]

[4] Trapped

[bluejackals]

everybody ever should read Hand Jumper by sleepacross it is PEAK everything about it is PEAK

Go forth unhinged protagonist…Sayeon Lee you will always be famous

also Ryujin. I love Ryujin one of the characters ever

[bluejackals]

if i had to set boundaries this is the shit i’d type up:

no nsfw

shipping is only ok if it’s rpf, please do not ship the character

do not draw me taller than 5’5