#Good old Livejournal days

[nomaptomyowntreasure]

3rd batch of pre hiatus peterick pics unearthed from livejournal

[transmascutena]

oh and here i was thinking it had something to do with akio being a groomer and a rapist. and perhaps also the whole fucking her mom behind her back thing. clearly i don't understand the show as well as i thought

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

.

[vamp-ress]

heyy, some 2 days ago you made a post recommending the fic The Fall, by Idrilia, on live journal, but I've only ever used ao3 so idk exactly how to use this one, because every time I try to to read it, it asks for my login, I created one, and then it just says that my access is denied.. do you know why that'd be? if you don't that's alright, it's just cause it happened before once or twice and I still don't know what happened...

Since AO3 is going down for maintenance today, it's probably a good time to answer this. So all of you who mainly hang around on AO3 have a little project to tide you over.

AO3 was founded in 2008. The basic idea behind AO3 (apart from being an all-inclusive archive) was to provide a safe fandom space free from companies and ad revenues. That there are users today who apparently cannot navigate a fanfic space apart from AO3 should be sign enough that AO3 is succeeding at its goal, giving enough fans enough access to everything they might want to read and more.

But: Of course, (internet)fandom existed before AO3. When I started reading fanfic in 1998/1999 most of it was hosted as static html on Geocities or Angelfire sites. If fans really meant business they bought their own webspace (I still have mine, though you can't access it). When I became enamoured with LOTR (and subsequently LOTRPS fandom) fanfiction communities were fragmented, small and were catering to different tastes. You could go to ff.net, to several specialized automated archives or Yahoogroups/Egroups (please read this article by @dawnfelagund if you'd like a deep dive into the history of archives). A lot of the adult parts of fandom happened on journaling sites like Livejournal and Dreamwidth. They were easy to set up and you could "police" who accessed your journal.

Why is this still relevant today? A lot of fannish spaces have vanished over the years - because the people inhabiting them moved on or because the space itself ceased to exist. Some fannish spaces (I'm now talking about LOTR and LOTRPS) have moved to AO3, like LOM or HASA. However, a lot of fannish spaces have disappeared (like Mirrormere) or they sit abandoned where no one will find them, because no one coming to the fandom now knows about them.

Two of those spaces are LJ and Dreamwidth. Livejournal was where you usually did your reading when you were into LOTRPS. After strikethrough in 2007, many fans moved to Dreamdwidth. Both sites use the same code, they work essentially in the same way. What you need to know:

These are journaling sites! Basically, they are blogs. "Normal" people would use them as a blog, chronicling their life or writing about their hobby. Fandom, though, always was a big part of Livejournal. Fans would post their fanfiction there, because they could decide who was allowed to read those stories.

Friending The profile of any given journal will show this journal's friendslist. Mine looks like this (my journal is completely public, though, there is no friends-only content):

These people will see my new posts in their journal. It works like it always does on social media. They subscribe to me, thye friend me, they become my mutual - whatever you like to call it. These are also the people who will see content that I post only for this circle of friends. This is what that looks like on DW:

Since a lot of (especially adult) fanfiction on LJ/DW is friendslocked, the owner of the journal needs to add you to there friendslist. Usually, by going to someone's journal with friendslocked content, you will only see a sticky post asking you to comment to be added. It might look something like this:

(From Silvan Lady's DW)

(Form Akasha Elfwitch's fic journal)

Sometimes, a user is extra-nice and gives you the info you need already on the profile page.

(From Chaosmanor's profile page on DW)

How to get added: First, you need a Livejournal and/or Dreamwidth account. Theoretically, you could access both with OpenID, but I'm not sure whether anyone still uses those. So, if in doubt, sign up with the service where the journal you want to read is hosted. After that, go to the journal in question and find the friends-only post. Comment on that post. It usually helps to tell the journal owner why you want to be added ("I want to read the fic!" or "I''ve heard about your fic, please add me"). And then you wait.

Caveat: Many of these people have moved on. Many of these journals are not in use anymore. Some people cannot access their journals anymore, which means that it's quite possible no one will answer and you won't be added. It's a gamble. But I've managed to get added to some LJs only last year, so it's not totally impossible. And I tell you, it's worth it! Especially when we're talking Viggorli, you're seeing only a marginal amount of what this ship was about on AO3. Of all the private journals and all the many comms, the only one that was transferred to AO3 (to my knowledge) was the Viggorli Secret Santa. You will definitely want to try and get access to some of those old journals! And who knows, maybe the writer in question will be totally thrilled that someone wants to read their fic so many years later. Stranger things have happened.

(If any of the oldies want to add something, please do! Though, I've purposefully not digged into the whole LJ-issue or why people left LJ to begin with. That's fodder for a different post. If anyone has questions, shoot!)

[nostalgia-tblr]

hey remember that old livejournal meme where you were to write a "commentary" for one of your own fics and someone would inevitably request one for something you wrote a few years previously and when you read it over again you're like "I have literally no memory of writing any of this" and you were like oh no do I just make shit up that sounds good or do I turn in many italicised lines of "I don't know what this bit means. Or this bit. That joke's quite good but I have no idea how I thought of it"?

[paperedking]

with ao3 down i've gotten so many little things i've been meaning to do done but i was in the middle of a 200k murder mystery and i know the otw volunteers are working on it but can i please download this fic

[oldinterneticons]

You know any old nostalgic social medias that still exist? The only ones I've found so far are hi5 and Xat

Huh I didn't know hi5 was still around. Let me do some digging:

MySpace: still around (barely - looks like the front page hasn't been updated since early last year), but nothing like it was back in the day. Two clone sites that work and look the same was as old-school MySpace, SpaceHey and Friend Project exist.

LiveJournal is still up and some fan communities are still active there. It was bought by a Russian company years ago and there are some concerns about that, but it still works in the same way it used to. Still popular as a social site in Cyrillic-language countries. LJ's software was open source so there were a lot of clone sites of it. Dreamwidth is the main one in use, but DeadJournal and InsaneJournal are also still around.

Obviously DeviantArt is very much still popular for posting art, though looks very different than it used to.

Open Diary and Diaryland are still hanging in there! These ones were some of my favourites way back but not many seem to remember them, they were very early (pre-LJ, I think!) blog sites. Open Diary doesn't look nostalgic anymore but Diaryland does. I also know a lot of people from OD migrated to Prosebox, which is another neat little diary site (but looks quite modern).

Gaia Online still looks fairly active and the layout is largely stuck in the late 2000s!

ChickenSmoothie, a virtual pet site

Neopets is still going, though since so much of it was built on Flash lots of the old games etc are gone :(

Never used Quotev myself so idk how it used to be, but looks like now they are part quiz, part Wattpad-like site?

Honestly UQuiz is a nice little spiritual successor to Quizilla imo.

Still lots of old-school forums out there if you look for them, certainly not for as broad of a range of topics as there used to be but here are some directories to get started.

Looks like some country and language-specific sites that people mentioned in the notes like Skyrock, Metroflog (there's 3 of these if you Google??), Animexx and Kaskus are still active or trying to come back

MyYearbook became Meet Me

Vampire Freaks lives on as a store only

Bzoink, an old survey/quiz/forum site, is still around.

Of course, if you just want to look at old sites, the Internet Archive and Archiveteam's wiki are good places to start.

[transman-badass]

So this is a stupid thing to be thinking about while I'm trying to work but I'm thinking about that one post...

You can, 100%, have stews in your fantasy fiction. The issue older readers have with it is not the stews themselves, it's where the stews are eaten.

See, back in the 90s - 00's, I don't remember which, there was a biiiiig high fantasy boom. Some of these books were good. Some were bad. Most were just mediocre. A lot of these books were written by, I'm assuming, men who didn't do much cooking. They'd have their adventurers out traveling the world, then when night fell they'd make a campfire and sit down to 'a hearty bowl of stew'.

If you're familiar with cooking, thing about that for a moment, and see if you can see the problem.

Give up?

Stews are meant to make tough meat edible and tender. It takes hours to cook a stew, even with modern day equipment like slow cookers. There's also the issues about the equipment needed to cook the stew. Your stereotypical chosen one is probably going to choose a sword or more healing potions rather than a big ass cooking pot.

Stews are a sign of civilization, like spices and fabric. They are something your weary ragtag team is looking forward to at a tavern rather than something they'd cook on the road.

(Travelers also probably aren't shooting a lot of deer on their trip because the meat would go bad or be wasted in other ways [unless you make the deer tiny in your story.] Like, deer are a lot bigger than you think. But that's a whooooole other thing.)

I might be fuzzy on some of the details - I'm not an Olde, I'm only 31, remembering the many livejournal pages I read in my youth. If there's someone who could expand on this, I would love to read it. It'd be a pleasant blast of nostalgia. And to everyone else: there's at least three lessons to be learned here. I don't know what they are but I hope you find them.

Okay rant over back to my writing.

[gffa]

The amount of quality fandom interactions and fics on Livejournal (and other fandom specific sites) that has been lost to time is obscene.

Truly one of the things I lament the most. 😢

I know technically Livejournal is still around and a lot of it is still there, but trying to find anything these days, between all the deleted or banned accounts or locked accounts where the owner no longer checks if you're asking for access, and no real way to find people there unless via sheer luck, makes it feel like it's just gone. And it's really hard to emphasize just how much authors weren't posting everything to AO3 or Fanfiction.Net, even if they used them a lot of authors only posted their "bigger" fics there. And I love that AO3 has the Open Doors project, but let me tell you, every time I get the urge to go back through old Highlander fics, I have to deal with this all over again, because so many people used to upload to the webspace AOL gave them or their local ISP gave them, and some of them just aren't findable anymore, even with the Wayback Machine. It helps a lot, but so much is still just gone, especially if it was a smaller anime/manga archive. Or all the fic that I used to read on the Bludhaven mailing list, so much of which also never got put up on Fanfiction.Net, like coming back to Batfandom after having left so long ago, it's been amazing to see just how much things have exploded since then, now that AO3 is the default place to read fic and most people actually use it and it's been wonderful, but there's a lot that I don't know if I'll ever see it again because I read it on non-centralized fic places. I love Tumblr, it's got that batshit quality that I have come to fully embrace, but I still really miss Livejournal, I made the best friends there, I had the best discussions there, I read the best fic there, you guys don't know how good of a platform it was in its heyday unless you were there, too. (Tbf, it's not for everyone, that's fine, but if you vibed with it, LJ was incredible--100 ICONS and MOOD THEMES and THREADED COMMENTS, god, we didn't know how good we had it at the time.)

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

Feeling really nostalgic about July 17-18, 2008, the last time I believed in Joss Whedon

It was just cool, you know? Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog dropped in three separate pieces over the course of the week. We'd get 15 minutes of story, and then two days to froth over the whys and wherefores in Livejournal comments before the next piece came out. And those days were so good.

Buffy fans are so fucking smart, y'all. They could combine academic rigor with unselfconscious fangirl squee. Squee was a hermeneutical method, a mode of interrogating the text--one we often dismiss and diminish, because if there's anything grosser than teenage girls getting goopy over a vampire they like, it's 30 or 50 or 70-year-old women getting goopy over a vampire they like. But it's similar to what I've seen called a "redemptive reading". You approach a piece of media specifically looking for its best parts, the pieces you love the best, and you allow yourself to fully embody the joy of liking something and caroling your joy to other people who like it too. In a perpetually burned-out time, squee can be like a desert oasis.

So the people who liked Buffy and Angel and Firefly watched Doctor Horrible in a manner both squeeful and intersectionally feminist, and saw all the amazing interesting things it was doing, showing how insecure geek masculinity fundamentally self-sabotages the main character, Billy, because the relationship he wants has been there in reach for months, and it's his own perception that he needs to be an alpha male warrior that has kept him from it. It interrogated the entire genre of costumed heroes, with two men thumping their chests and comparing their dick sizes, and none of them doing anything as direct and helpful for their society as Penny, the woman who stands on sidewalks collecting signatures to help a homeless shelter.

Part II came out on July 17, and the series would end with Part III on July 19. So on July 18, I spent most of the day reading Livejournal comments about it. There were all these theories: Maybe Penny was secretly Bad Horse, the archvillain whose approval Billy has craved since the beginning. Maybe she will collapse the love triangle with Billy's rival, Captain Hammer, by acting on her clearly-demonstrated discomfort and dumping him. Maybe Billy will learn that relationships are based on intimacy, not being The Best. Maybe Penny will become a superhero and replace Captain Hammer as Billy's nemesis. Maybe Billy will succeed and rule the world and give Penny Australia.

And then... none of those things happened. Joss Whedon ended the series in a way less progressive, less imaginative, less cool, than even the most half-baked fan theory out there. The story opened up possibilities to break out of an old, tired, toxic set of stories around men and women and sex and heroics, and then hid under a rock rather than change a single one of them.

July 19 was the day I concluded that while Joss Whedon might have his own baggage to work through about toxic masculinity, and artists have the right to make work meaningful to them, he wasn't making art that was meaningful to me. And I basically stopped expecting anything of him.

And then, for years, Buffy fans, educated and squeeful feminists and sharp pop culture critics, got told they were crazy histrionic SJWs for thinking Whedon didn't shit solid gold. For years. (I recently saw a video essay that included the line, "If you have the phrase 'mewling quim' branded onto your memory, you probably need some Metamucil" and, ouch, rude.)

There was so much excitement! A lot of us actually believed in the guy (although even then, there was enough evidence for many people to suspect what we now know to be 100% true about him.)

We wanted it to be good. We wanted to enjoy it.

I miss that feeling.

[gerardpilled]

every time i see one of those really cringey tiktoks of an up and coming band trying to promote their music (usually a variation of “um guys did i just write the next emo anthem?!?!?”) i can’t help but wonder like if mcr were a new band in 2024, would they still be able to get as popular as they were 20 years ago?? like would they be forced to advertise their music in the same way as a lot of these bands are which kind of removes any mystery or authenticity around a band imo. idk i just cringe at the current trends of trying to get your music out there via making really annoying tiktoks or social media posts, but then on the other hand how ARE people supposed to promote their music these days. would like to hear you thoughts on this!

I know EXACTLY what you’re talking about lol. I obviously dont know what mcr would be doing if they were a new band now (and I think its worth trying to think about how mcr themselves might have inadvertently lead to this form of advertising to begin with but that’s a whole other can of worms) but I do think the fact they heavily advertised the band and music via MySpace and livejournal is worth noting. At one point in time that was probably seen as desperate and crass by real old school guys, but I do think mcr put in the leg work irl to show for it.

I agree that advertising your band and putting yourself out there these days is incredibly hard. I don’t have a band but I’ve talked to people in small local bands who have described needing to schedule posts to ensure the maximum algorithm exposure of their song and whatnot. I also find the type of videos you’re describing to be kinda pathetic. Yes it’s hard but if you make good music and become an active part of your community, I feel like there are ways to get yourself out there that are not begging for views on tiktok. It’s kinda like how 20 years ago everyone would clown on bands who sent out copies of their EPs saying they sounded just like the Strokes. Just kinda immediately cheapens your whole identity as an artist whether it’s warranted or not

[nomaptomyowntreasure]

4th batch of pre hiatus peterick pics unearthed from livejournal

[earlycuntsets]

LAST ONE

pt. 4 (parts 1 & 2 & 3)

earlycuntsets.org sourced - where I got all my mcr pictures

first of a series. due to tumblr limits on how many links you can post. this full idea will be continued on future posts. here is 2007-2010. this is pictures. will make a separate post for youtube/recordings.

been needing to fully source my website so here we go! wanted to share with other kool mcr fans.

livejournals:

10/02/2011 sacramento ca - wideawaketonight

old fansites/website appearances:

09/07/2011 st paul mn - startribune

09/11/2011 89x birthday bash meet and greet - mcrmykilljoysecuador

09/24/2011 tampa fl - ishotyourband.com

10/05/2011 mountain view ca - live105

10/06/2011 - daniel knighton

1/22/2012 big day out gold coast australia - tony mott, lifemusicmedia & inthemix

flickrs:

09/04/2011 denver co - brandon marshall & michael fajardo

09/07/2011 st paul mn - mcnallysmith

09/09/2011 kansas city mo - ian mcfarland & scott spychalski

09/17/2011 camden nj - alicia brown

09/18/2011 virginia beach va - lindsey carter

09/20/2011 charlotte nc - dianna augustine

09/26/2011 - emily torres

10/01/2011 anaheim - christy milner

10/05/2011 mountain view ca - david price

10/06/2011 - ruby rodriguez

10/07/2011 san diego ca - vonnubi, emily matview

1/22/2012 big day out gold coast australia - livemusicmedia

1/26/2012 big day out sydney australia - soundstagereview

1/29/2012 big day out melbourne - rebecca houlden

5/19/2012 bamboozle asbury park nj - chickphila

the end pictures. making one for good youtubes next.

earlycuntsets.org

[dadvans]

hm.

i think this is coming up because longmont potion castle came into conversation recently. the last time i saw you, really saw you where it was just the two of us, we spent the night on the couch in your condo listening to longmont potion castle tapes. "rope" was my favorite.

i saw you again, later, with your soon-to-be wife, who was wonderful. i still hadn't progressed to taking hormones, but you introduced me easily, just like you had with your roommate within weeks of me leaving my ex and deciding to transition. no faltering. you always got me.

i'll always remember you making me stop my car, saying, "psp psp psp kitty, first pets are free," and making new cat friends.

you would have been so much better at being in your thirties than i am. i suck at this. you would have been so good. you would know what to do in this stubborn world.

we started a tumblr for our radio show in 2010. i updated it every week but struggled, because it was so much different from livejournal. i still have that account attached to mine, because there's a picture of us as the icon, and despite how i've changed, i'm not ready to let go of your (occasionally terrible, joanna newsom and titus andronicus, really?) music taste, or the picture of us together in my old kitchen, back when we used to have vodka and pickle parties to watch new episodes of jersey shore.

this isn't an anniversary of your death, it isn't even close. it's just a random day i'm remembering you again. your wife wouldn't let me see your ashes the last time i asked, because she was still grieving and lost, and i respect that, but i really just wanted to read you italian elon musk tweets. you would have fucking loved italian elon musk twitter. you would have been an answer to a lot of things happening now that we don't have. you were so fucking smart, and funny. someone uploaded your one-time standup show when we were college students to youtube, and i've watched it more than once.

if anyone ever deserved to be alive, it would be you, and i'm so mad that you aren't. life was taken from you in the ugliest way. it was taken from you and you were taken from us, and no one had a say, and every now and then (today) i get real fucking angry about it.

i still drive past your old house sometimes and expect to see your franksteined together car. i remember how soft your hands were. your stupid mountain unicycle. the way you made us all listen to drake but also the first press the smiths album afterward like a balm, only to chase that with fucking drake like he was the second coming. you laughed like jimmy carr getting punched in the solar plexus. i miss you so much. i can't remember how long it's been.

[ammyamarant]

There are so many arguments against AO3 that I know are coming from people who haven't seen a huge fanfic purge in their fandom lifetime. I say this because they're all pearl clutching hysteria that has and still is being used to censor and suppress LGBT people and content.

I'm not kidding. These arguments historically were used both on fanfiction.net and on livejournal to purge LGBT fanfic. Saying it is the pedophilia website? Hey, did you know that's been used against gay men as long as I've been alive, is still being used against the same demographic, and has added trans people to that? Did you know if you manage to get that taken off of AO3, these homophobes and transphobes will do what they've done in the past and lobby for all LGBT content to be removed? This isn't a slippery slope. This has happened. This has worked. And it's currently working. This argument against the LGBT community is working on this hellsite. People just talking about being trans are getting the mature warning slapped on their posts.

Incest? Oh boy same argument. And have you seen the ships called incestuous? How many of them have characters nowhere near being family? I saw the breakout pairing of this, Sheith, getting this. Shiro was a mentor and a friend. They were nowhere near being siblings. And I'm old enough to have seen it used against real life gay people. Gay people have been told it's only because they were molested as a child, even if they had a good childhood, and that they'll do the same if they have children.

None of this is a slippery slope.

This has happened.

This is CURRENTLY HAPPENING.

This will continue to happen.

Stop pressuring AO3 to bow to this.

And the argument they don't need to do a donation drive? They have enough money? I understand even what we call middle class now has to live paycheck to paycheck. I understand having money put aside in case something goes wrong is not something the people saying this have been able to do. AO3, because people always donate even after the goal is met, have this rainy day fund in case they suddenly need to spend a lot of money on the site. They wouldn't need to do an emergency donation drive to afford this. I understand a lot of you aren't used to having money you can just hold on to in case you get a sudden massive bill. But don't say anyone who can manage that should stop getting money. That money is not meant to be used just to keep the site up.

AO3 also doesn't have advertisers harvesting your data and selling it. That's why the donation drives. They don't want to do this. For the "use Firefox it is safe and doesn't sell your data" website you're very insistent to make AO3 sell your data to stay afloat.

Stop attacking AO3. If it's really something you can't abide by, make your own. That's what we did. That's the "of our own" part of AO3. We made our own because we weren't welcome on ff.net and on livejournal. You can do the same. You can make an archive of your own.

And stop using arguments that have historically and are currently being used to censor all LGBT content. For fuck's sake.

[conundrumoftime]

Was discussing the pre-AO3 days of fandom earlier today, mostly in the context of dead archives and creators sending C&D letters to fan sites (funnnn times). And I went to look at my old fanfiction.net stories to see the kind of disclaimers I put on fic, and… I made that in 2005. 2005! It’s 19 years old! Goodness.

I mostly lurked and read in Tolkien fandom back then although I have a couple of stories from ff.net and LJ from 2004/5. I remember it being an intimidating fandom, or it felt like it to me; I remember we were all very worked up over Mary Sues (why? WHY did we care?) and I remember endless discussions about whether slash should be rated higher than het on ff.net’s new rating system (sigh); I remember the citrus scale.

But I also remember it as being such fun, as being the first fandom that took something I had loved since I was a child and said “hey, you can look at it this other way too”. I remember the delight of actually getting to read what other people thought happened on the Helcaraxë. I remember some of the absolute crackfic LiveJournal RP, too. And the people I met then, and the character songlists we swapped.

I hope you’re doing okay out there, fellow early-mid 2000s fandom people! And never assume you’re out for good - I had an 18-year gap in writing Tolkien fics but the elves have pulled me back in once again :)