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[redrikki]

Somethin' I'm Good At - Alec Hardison

Watch it on Youtube

Oh my gosh it's finally done!! I've been obsessing over this video for a few days now and ahhh I'm so excited that it's finished and I can share it with people!!

And of course I know Hardison is insanely competent at anything and everything, but this song just fit his personality so perfectly, I had to make the video! No insult towards him, just a fun and silly video that I can't stop dancing along with. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

[redrikki]

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[redrikki]

What do you think about the ideas of '2-cakes', or the idea that more fic with similar tropes is a good thing? I've seen some popular writers in my fandom claiming it promotes fic plagiarism and now I'm not so sure if the fic I want to write would be welcome since there's already fic in my fandom with a similar premise. Im not copying anyone directly, at least I don't think so, but I'm worried about upsetting someone and being accused of plagiarizing. Is this something I should really be worried about?

The two cakes idea (from this comic over here) is 100% valid, and those authors in your fandom might be confused about what plagiarism is. 

Plagiarism occurs when someone copies the exact words of another author and then claims that they wrote those words themselves. 

Plagiarism is not using the same plot as someone else, using the same headcanon as someone else, it’s not even using someone else’s OC (although if that character belongs to a fellow fan instead of a professional writer you really should ask permission first, to be polite).

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Those authors should be proud that they were able to inspire someone else. A second story using the same plot device or the same trope doesn’t take anything away from the first story. It doesn’t “steal readers” or anything else they might be saying because a reader who enjoyed story 1 will very likely decide to read story 2 as well. 

Make your own interpretation. Write your own words. Even if the core idea is the same, the stories will be different. And they will both be loved. 

[redrikki]

Must admit that one thing that changed the way I see fandom discourse is realizing that a lot of fandom is just… playing with dolls. We're playing with dolls. Shipping? Playing with dolls. AUs? Dolls. Darkfic? Dolls.

Lotta people very agitated about the other kids playing with dolls wrong.

[redrikki]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Ned Stark & Sansa Stark Characters: Sansa Stark, Ned Stark Additional Tags: Grief/Mourning, Ghosts, False Identity, Loss of Identity, Time Travel Summary:

Alayne finds a strange boy crying along in the heart of the the Eyrie's garden. There are no gods in the godswood. Just Ned.

[redrikki]

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

[redrikki]

one of the important cornerstones of fandom is understanding that your headcanon is not everyone else's headcanon, and i'm not sure when people stopped understanding this

[redrikki]

i want 60 thousand votes by next thursday

[redrikki]

fandom tumblr was another casualty of streaming services. we used to be on here posting about the episodes that were coming out weekly and posting gifs and writing insane shit about the tv shows we liked. now a new season of a show will drop and we’ll talk about it for a week. two weeks tops. and then that show will leave collectively conscious for 1+ year till the next season drops. there’s a reason succession sundays was a blast on here

we used to have real television

[redrikki]

Photographers all know about polarizing filters. They remove reflections off the surfaces of objects. We use them to see into water or windows that are obscured by those reflections. But anything with an even slightly glossy surface has a layer of reflection on top. So if you have a shiny green plant, it can remove the shiny and reveal a very saturated green underneath. Polarizers also remove a lot of scattered and reflected light from the sky. Which reveals a deep blue color you didn't even know was there.

Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.

And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.

The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.

But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.

Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.

I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 7 f-stops more light. That is 128 times or 12,700% more light.

A partial Pringle eclipse cut the sun's light by 99.2% and somehow our eyes adjusted to make it seem like a normal sunny day (with weird ass saturated colors).

[redrikki]

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

[redrikki]

I love AO3 notifications that are just, like, one person leaving kudos on all your work.

Like, thank you for binge-reading my silly little stories.

[redrikki]

It's always

"When will fanfic writers update their stories?"

And never

"Does this fanfic writer have adequate enrichment to engage in writing behaviours?"

Fanfiction writers (Scriptor fictus) are intelligent animals who need plenty of enrichment as well as encouragement! If they're stuck in poor conditions (e.g. have studies, work, have to actually write to have something written) then they require the proper enrichment to engage in more healthy behaviours, like writing. Remember, due to poor breeding and socialisation, over half of all fanfic writers suffer from low self confidence and executive dysfunction so take care of them!

Give your fanfic writers proper care. Fanfiction writers are a life long commitment.

[redrikki]

Reblog if you think a woman can be complete without children

Y’ALL HAVE TIME TO REBLOG THIS. IT TAKES LESS THAN FIVE SECONDS.

[redrikki]

If posting fic online has taught me anything, it’s that I have no idea how the reader will react to anything. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Not the faintest clue.

Fics that I think I scribbled off just to get them out there get the kindest, most rapturous feedback. Fics I slaved over, agonized over, bled my soul into get a couple tepid replies. Fics I thought were me revealing the darkness and weird kink that lives in my brain, scared to even post it for fear of judgement, get, “Aaaw that’s so sweet!” replies. Baffling.

My conclusion? You just never know. You really just can’t know. When I did a workshop with 20 other writers I would try to guess what their critique of my story would be and I was right maybe 1 in 20 times. Only one other writer would have the same critique for my story that I had. And it wasn’t even always the same person.

The encouraging part about this is, if self recrimination, the fear that you know what people won’t like about your story, is holding you back, just say fuck it! You’re almost certainly wrong! All you can do is make it the best story you can for the energy you have. And yeah, sometimes that means scribbling it out in an evening and kicking it out to the void of the internet before you can change your mind or worry about editing it more than once because then you’ll never post it.

It’s all chaos, man. You don’t get to decide what the audience thinks. All you can do is create it and put it out there for them to decide.

[redrikki]