#and i also found out that someone took my headers (and other writers' headers too) and put them as headers for their fics

[chuluoyi]

Wait you have copycats? I never knew :0 I mean, actually thinking about it, its not very suprising since youre an amazing writer

i have found a fic that is too similar with the whole plot of my fic curiosity. like i know it’s a general trope, but the setting, order of the scenes and some of the dialogues are literally the same. if that’s not copying, i don’t know what that is😐

tropes are not owned by anyone—different writers can write about the same trope and that’s perfectly okay, but if plot points, sequences and lines are the same then i still consider it as copying :’)

and nonnie you’re too nice i’m not amazing honestly *sobs* but thank you sm🥹

[samspenandsword]

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love 💙🤭

Aww, Julie!!! 💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

Honestly part of my brain is like "YOU MAKE SAM CHOOSE BETWEEN HER BABIES??????" and the other part of my brain is going "Literally all of them are garbage and even they know it" lololol so doing this was really hard for me. But I've chosen and I'm posting this before I can think too much about it and change my mind.

Kheresankh - I know I haven't exactly published much of anything for this story, so I linked the prologue of the first installment, but my OC Danai has been in the works for so long and I am honestly just so proud of what I have written for her. I can't wait for you all to go on this journey with her, all through the Clone Wars, to her meeting Rex, and everything that comes after. Also, my headers for this story slap 💅

Just This Once - This was the first smut piece I had ever published. In all my years of fanfic writing, this was the first smut piece I was truly confident enough in to publish. As someone who identifies as asexual, I truly wasn't ever sure if my smut writing was very good, just cause I have no personal experience with that sort of thing. What reads as "sexy" to me might be really weird to others. But, I'm a total whore for Cody, like, legitimately, so I went for it, and the response was just so much more than I could've ever hoped for. This piece genuinely does just hold such a special place in my heart and I'm very proud of it.

Welcome to the Faire - Okay this one only has a hint of a pairing to it (with Thrawn; I am unfortunately, unspeakably attracted to him 😔) but honestly, I'm proud of it. It's very narrative heavy, and I know that isn't for everyone. But I've been thinking about this piece lately cause I went to the Renaissance Festival again last weekend (where I spent a truly obscene amount of money and regret absolutely nothing), and the Ren Faire was the original inspiration for this piece. But people also told me that they felt I really captured Thrawn's voice in this, and honestly, there are fewer compliments better to receive than this one as a fanfic writer.

Midnight - My newest piece! This Boba smut fic really took me out of my comfort zone as a writer, because I just don't really have much insight into the d/s scene and brat-taming. But I still tried to do it and Boba justice while adding in some fun and feelings to the piece. It's new, I literally posted it last night, so there's not much feedback yet, but I'm still quite proud of it. It also ended up being longer than I intended, and I love giving you guys long fics to read!

The Coffee House - And of course, how can I not list the story that completely helped my blog take off. In a way I never expected or could've hoped for. Commander Fox was always underrated in my opinion, and I wanted to explore him a little bit more, but then I found @amikoroyaiart and her art of Fox is just so fantastic. I became obsessed. And I started wanting to write my own coffee shop story for him. Thus, The Coffee House was born, and six parts later, there's a plan for at least six more. It's kind of slow going, but I love this story with all my heart and I'm so glad to share some fluffy, coffee shop goodness with you all.

Thank you so sending me this, Julie!! Ily 💜💜💜

For more of my stories, as well as my moodboards and dividers, please proceed to my Masterlist! And don't worry, my Kinktober 2022 is going to becoming Kinktober 2022/23 lol.

For some of my favorite Star Wars art, my tag is #sam's favorites

For some of my favorite Star Wars fics, my tag is #sam's recs

[thattimdrakeguy]

Weirdly enough Red Robin is the series I’d be most scared to review, because for obvious reasons I imagine more than any other character it’s the Tim fan base (I won’t say fandom, because I feel like that gives a different connotation nowadays. and it’s a bunch of chill, un-interactive but very passionate, chaps) that follow me.

And I’d just get sooo many people giving me nit-picks, and telling me stuff I already know.

Cause I can say anything against Teen Titans 2003, New 52, Rebirth, and Wonder Comics stuff cause that’s the generally agreed upon stuff that you can complain against for Tim. Cause like, to not play dumb to it, this whole Bat-Family fandom acts like there’s freaking laws to abide by if you don’t want a bunch of batty (not a pun, not even saying not a pun in sarcasm lol) fans and stans down your neck. Normally involving certain characterizations or comics that, honestly, aren’t even usually the more accurate ones, but the contradicting ones that don’t make a lick of sense, and that’s not even talking about the straight up fanon ones.

Not to say I wouldn’t get why it’s the Red Robin series that’d get people to give me crap out of all the Tim stuff, because I do. It’s a lot of peoples entry to Tim, and it’s pretty heavy implications of suicidal ideation, and more so obvious mental breakdown journey across continents means a lot to people. I can get why, and if it wasn’t those characters in it, I’d think it was great too.

Also I know for a fact people would act like I’m just bias for 90s Tim, and point out Timmy’s in a teddy bear hoodie in my header. Cause it’s the most weakest defense someone could possibly make cause they’re lacking an actual point. Like they know everything a fucking ‘bout me, when they don’t, I’m just allowed to think my own stuff, and I’m allowed my dang comfort art, so blah blah blah. I’ve proved myself enough. I don’t need some random dismissive guys random approval or not, but man can it be annoying when someone thinks they’re smart about it.

Like basically put, it would be very exhausting to go through the many different series and years of comic book content to explain why I think the way I do, when all the other person has to say is “I like this series a lot, and it means a lot to me, it’s story about depression, and plus it’s Tim being at the button of his sanity so-- And I think this person is stuck on 90s Tim” cause like I freaking get it, and acting like cause I prefer a different Tim comic means my opinion isn’t valid, is the most childish thing ya can really do. Like I love 90s Tim the most for a reason, and I started reading Tim as Red Robin first, ya ninny.

But to just be honest, it is an incredibly flawed series that has overall, in the long game, soiled the character of Tim Drake, and directly influenced the New 52 and beyond depiction of him. Not to give Lobdell an excuse, I just find it really odd that people getting praising it as the peak of Tim content when it’s even caused some really freaking toxic fandom beliefs.

When some of the most important scenes in the series are so botched that it has genuinely made people despise other characters when I don’t even think they were portrayed well for that to make sense. The messy inconsistent writing as it went between two different writers causing some absolutely terrible characterization for Tim that isn’t even always consistent within the series itself because FabNic is just awful, and how forgettable most stuff after the first story is.

That first story I can understand the love for it. But people treating the whole series as a whole like it’s a great journey of long-term story development just feels like a real bad describer for it. Because to me by the end of it’s run it caused Tim to be put in the terrible spot that he’s only now escaping from little under a decade later. As well as only really starting cause people in the company didn’t like Tim and the characters around them as much as you’d hope.

In total, I honestly feel like if it wasn’t released during a time were the common tastes were very edgy and emo-esque, as well as around the time the online fandom spaces were only really then being formed in a way that was practical for casual interaction and discussion, and being the only series titled “Red Robin” therefore people seem to think it’s Tim’s variation of “Nightwing”, when it’s honestly not, it wouldn’t be a series that highly regarded.

I’m not saying the whole thing is a pile of shit, cause it’s also frankly not. There’s some powerful stuff in there, and some moments that really do hit super hard in ways that don’t feel superficial. Cause another thing people don’t seem to understand that when I say his characterization isn’t good in it, does not equal me saying “He is not the same exact character he was 15 years before the series came out”, it legitimately just means I feel they took the character to places that felt more forced than genuine, or just had him stuff that goes against what he’d do for the sake of just being edgy as if it’s deep, even during his circumstances and it created people having a false understanding of who Tim is at his heart, that made it incredibly difficult for Tim to get a good story for basically a freaking decade.

It’s a series I want to review because I have genuine things to say about it, but when ever I do say anything about it I feel like I see several sub-posts that are almost undeniably about me (hasn’t happened for a while cause I don’t really bother talking about stuff I don’t like anymore, cause life's hard enough, and I’ve seen the worst end of a lot of people from it) trying to downplay me, because they got defensive about it, rather than actually trying to process what I meant by things instead of just assuming it cause it’s touchy for them.

Like I’ve openly shit on Damian’s most popular series’, and accepted fandom malarkey, because I legitimately think they’re overhyped as could be, not that great, and only have the popularity they do through bandwagoning and going along with things. And I did that while knowing how defensive the Damian fandom is, and how quick they are to just leak out nasty assumptions or outright suicide bait you (yes I remember someone tried to defend me by suicide baiting someone else, but fuck them too, I never defended them or asked them to. idgaf which fandom does it. i’m clearly not on anyone's team. this isn’t a fucking sports game).

I’ve even straight up shit on pretty much every single Jason story except Under the Red Hood, while defending some Robin Jason stories, and I haven’t even got crap on me for that, which is honestly strange. Surprisingly just got told “Ya know what. Fair point. I can accept that. I don’t agree, but I can accept it.”. Which given what I have been shown of the Jason fandom I expected much worse, but they’ve honestly been really chill with me. Me and the Jason fandom has been actually some of the most pleasant interactions I’ve had outside my own bubble.

The majority of Steph’s existence as a character I’ve criticized and gotten crap on it, but honestly I found the response of countless anons going “YEAH MAN I AGREE WITH YOU” and going way harder on her than I ever did to be pretty dang annoying, and even more annoying cause people kept thinking I said stuff I freaking didn’t out of it. So every now and again people will just straight up lie about me to my face. Like you try to talk to someone that’s been preparing to talk to you by fighting an imaginary version of yourself. It’s pretty difficult if I had to be honest. Talking ‘bout bias’s like I didn’t write TimSteph fan fictions before I realized they weren’t that great and didn’t work, while realizing that I honestly didn’t think Tim was into girls in-general.

But, to get back on topic, with the Tim fandom it’s less like, open faced attempts to make you feel like a garbage human being, and more just straight up rudely dismissive as quite often the ones I’ve seen do it try to portray themselves as some calm knowledgeable unbias source of Tim knowledge.

And there’s a different sensation of annoyance at that.

Like what is the point of trying to pretend to be some source of knowledge and for a few comradery, while also being a dismissive person that first has to make others seem lesser.

And there’s some that I’ve seen do it that I don’t even think are dicks honestly, and have no problem with it, cause it’s just so innocently “I just really like the series and still think it’s good”. That I’d be confused why people would think I have a vendetta against everyone else. I’ve never been like, straight up offended more than once over the specific topic of Red Robin. But it is a thing that makes me like “I’ll get so many people giving me crap over having a different opinion for this won’t I”. And get some people trying to validate just being a bit of a fucker to me for no good reason.

So like, may or may not write a Red Robin review, but I might not cause despite quite a few people in the Tim fandom being quite chill about it, there’s quite a lot of people that are low-key toxic about it, and a lot of bad fandom things came out of it as well.

[little-butterfly-writes]

Mystic Messenger CMC Layla Lee

This is completely unedited and I may change some things around <3

Name: Layla Lee

Pronouns: She/Her

Birthday: June 14

Age: 23

Eyes: Hazel

Hair: Curly, clavicle-length black hair

Occupation: Freelance Writer

*No photo of Layla herself at this moment, however there is a photo of Layla and Jaehee as my header by @/luxielle

Likes: Naps, baking, creative writing, playing violin, cats, sewing, video games

Personality: Layla looks cold, but is usually sweet towards others. She gets more playful and warm to people after getting to know them a bit. Layla is bitter when she’s upset with someone or something.

Common Wardrobe: Closet consists of mostly monochrome clothes with a few colorful dresses, but she bought more colorful items after Saeyoung said she looks like she’s going to a funeral.

Background

Layla was born in Seoul. Her family moved around a lot due to her father’s work. Layla’s father is Chinese and her mother is American. Layla spent most of her younger years living in the US. Her teenage years were spent in her hometown in South Korea.

Layla was never too close with her parents. They were always working or busy when they had a day off. Even then, she felt like a second priority whenever they did spend time with her. Layla’s older sister, Mina, had most of the attention. 

Layla often used the extra time to herself for writing and sewing. It carried on through her teenage years. Unfortunately, Layla developed depression and anxiety during those years. Her parents refused to put her in therapy as they believed she was faking it for attention. And when Mina told their parents that Layla was bisexual, they berated her alongside her sister. Layla thankfully received private therapy lessons with the school counselor until she graduated. 

In college, she studied literature. Layla didn't talk to her parents as much and completely cut off her sister. It was in college where she started dating. It was three small relationships with a few men and one serious relationship with a woman. It sadly ended a few months after Layla got her diploma.

An app downloaded itself onto her phone while she was working in her apartment. Curious, Layla checked it out only to be given directions to an address. Layla made sure to bring her taser and pepper spray before going to the apartment. When she made it to the apartment, it was covered in dust. Layla decided to not stay at the apartment since she had bad dreams of this specific place a few days back. 

The unknown man from the app had disappeared and a new messenger had opened up there. She befriended members of the R.F.A. quickly due to her charisma. They asked to hold a charity party and Layla couldn't resist joining.

One person did stick out to Layla more, Jaehee Kang. Layla found her to be very attractive and was amazed with her passion when it came to coffee. Their relationship was rocky in the beginning, but enough coffees and lunches from Layla quickly fixed that. A lot of people assumed Layla was after Jumin, but it was really his chief assistant she was after.

Which came to fruition. Layla and Jaehee were best friends by the time of the party. Jaehee had left her job at C&R and considered Layla as her best friend. The development of the cafe also developed the love between them. Their confession took longer than Layla thought, but it was worth the wait to be with the lady of her dreams.

Relationships

Yoosung: Layla finds Yoosung adorable and understands his troubles completely. She sees him as a little brother and can't help but tease sometimes. They play LOLOL together on the weekends every now and then.

Zen: Layla admires Zen greatly. She loves seeing his musicals and hearing him sing. He's kinda like an older brother to her, or maybe even mother hen. Though whenever she sees him, she can't help but wonder if he'd let her braid his hair.

Jaehee: The woman of Layla’s dreams. Layla feels safe and loved with Jaehee and wouldn't wish to be with someone else. Layla has great respect for her.

Seven: Layla finds him a bit weird, but sometimes likes to play along. She's a lot more comfortable with him after learning his story.

Jumin: Layla holds a small grudge with Jumin after overworking and mistreating Jaehee, but eventually forgives him. She thinks he's good after breaking down his walls.

Jihyun: Layla quite likes Jihyun. She loves his photography and paintings and wants to write an article to boost his name. How he keeps issues to himself irritates her even though she does the same.

Saeran: Layla is pretty comfortable with Saeran. They both love ice cream and the quiet. Layla hopes Saeran will someday teach her about flower languages.

[greekgrad07]

favorite things about your mutuals? its positivity hour, go!

it would be a fucking honor 😭 i tried to get all my mutuals this time but i’m sure i forgot people. i’m sorry if i did pls don’t hate me 🥺

this is in no particular order btw

marisa (@skaterbeth): my fellow short asthmatic <3 i love you bruh 😭 i remember being nervous to message you at first bc i thought you would find me annoying. now look at us 😌 i can message you without fear bc i know you find me annoying 🤍you’re so talented and beautiful and incredible. i love your enthusiasm and you’re so funny. every time i get a notification that you’ve sent me a meme on instagram i get excited (and idk how but there’s one almost every morning when i wake up. i’m not complaining though)

erica (@skateryue): MY TWIN ILY 🤍🤍🤍 i forgot to tell you this but i took a which female atla character are you quiz and i got yue and thought of you <3 you’re so sweet and supportive and deserve all the love! i’m glad our mutual love of the parent trap, our mbti types, and how we’re both jeff goldblum brought us together lol. the vibes are immaculate 😌

adi (@bitcheusjackson): adi you are so smart. THE TAGS I LEAVE FOR YOU ARE WELL DESERVED! you’re such a good writer and your love of musicals is so cute! i also love getting to be an annabeth simp with you (as we all should). you’re also a talented artist! i know you don’t post a lot of your art but when you do i’m always blown away <3<3<3

fátima (@deepestempathllamalawyer): my adopted child 😌 i love you sm 🥺 you’re so sweet- like seriously, i appreciate every self help posted you tag me in and every cute animals post as well. i absolutely love seeing you in my notifications! you’re also the reason i became a malconnor shipper to thank you 😭🤍 (also i still have no idea wtf your url means but at this point i’m too afraid to ask)

ashna (@silenabeth): fun fact, you were the first “big” pjo blog that followed me and i absolutely lost my shit so there’s that <3 you’re such a talented writer and editor bruh i don’t tell you that enough. also, the queen who brought us connabeth i will forever stan 🤩 you’re so funny and one of the most supportive people ever <3<3<3 (also love all of your call out posts about marisa 😌)

sarah (@perseusjackkson): i told you that you were too cool to be following me and i stand by that. you’re so chill and funny, i vibe with you sm. really, your blog is full of so many different fandom and i vibe with almost all of it. you really made your blog for the people <3 i love reading your tags on the things you repost bc they are usually hilarious. also, i couldn’t be more supportive of your engagement to my twin 🤍

regina (@bisexualzia): regina you’re so sweet and genuine and funny and the fact that you associate me with cookies still makes me 🥰 and idk why. your tag has 🔥 by it and i told you it’s bc of ouat. idk if you get that but it’s my favorite show and one of my favorite characters is named regina so <3 also i’m glad there is someone else that can agree suki is superior 😌

zitz (@four-names): another reason why i ship malconnor <3 lol you send the most random asks and they always make my day! and your tags are everything btw stop hiding them 😂 you’re not afraid to speak your mind and you’re a very genuine person :)

drew (@cubanpercyj): you are so caring and passionate! i love your replies and tags to my posts and i’m glad we agree that percy can’t swim lol. you’re super chill and i vibe with you very much. and i’m sure you’ve heard this a lot but i love your aesthetic. the water header is so pretty <3

kayra (@awkwardteenwriter): you are so sweet! and YES ofc you have a tag bruh. i remember when i first tagged you in a post and you said that it made you happy aljdkhagf i tag you in like everything now i’m sure it gets annoying. you’re one of the most caring people ever though! one of our first interactions was you sending me a virtual hug during a hard time for me and i’ll always be thankful for that 🥺🤍

jaina (@jainadurron): you are so nice. every interaction we’ve had has been nothing but absolutely lovely and i’m glad that you joined the pjo fandom! you like almost all of my posts and i love seeing you in my notifications. also! i forgot to tell you your new avatar is so cute 🥺

haania (@padfootno): i love you and i’m sorry the fic isn’t out yet pls don’t hate me 😭 you’re literally the sweetest and most helpful person ever! i’m so thankful for your help on writing hijabi silena and ever since you’ve been so nice! i also love when you tag me in posts :)

@perca-beths: you give me such good vibes idek how to describe it. also, you’re insanely talented! i found your fic on a03 and when i realized it was you who wrote it i was blown away. anyways you’re awesome and i can’t wait for your next update :)

@percabethica: again, YES you have a tag 😂 you’re so nice! i remember i asked to be on your taglist for your fic and you were so kind. speaking of your fic, i loved it i loved it i loved it! you’re incredibly talented. i always end up seeing your reblogs from me on my dash before seeing it in my notifications and there’s always a second after i notice it where i’m like “omg that’s me. i posted/reblogged something she liked.” also your aesthetic is so pretty, i love it

gray (@bbyannabeth): idk why you’re following me. what do i have to offer? when i tell you i binged your masterlist after you posted it i’m not kidding. you’re so talented and seem so chill. also i just saw that you posted a new fic and bruh, i’m about to create a reblog that has so many tags

@ohmydamgods: i’m not above admitting that i’ve stalked your instagram. your posts are so fucking funny and so are you! i also see people posting your textposts on instagram and i’m always like “*gasp* does she know?” and then i see you’ve commented and it’s all good 😂 also you’re so nice :)

@mydramaticflare: YOU ARE SO TALENTED! when you comment on my fic there’s no time to unpack all of that i lost my shit bc your fic Quiet Moments inspired me to write a percabeth sleepover fic in the first place. also you seem so sweet and you show up in my notifications a lot :)

brin (@skatersuki): first of all, suki supremacy <3, secondly, you’re so smart like wtf. every time you go off about photokinesis and all that i’m like 😐😣😐 also every time i see the book circe by madeline miller i think of you bc you’re the first person who i have seen recommend it

teriza (@wasithard): we haven’t really interacted but we have a lot of the same mutuals so i know you’re cool. lol fr though you do seem very nice and fun and chaotic in the very best way, plus you’re blog is awesome

kayla (@eggplant-avenger): hi kayla :) we met through the connabeth agenda and you are super chill. also i hope that you know whenever i read your tag i hear chris mccarrell’s voice singing ‘being a half-blood, it’s scary, it mostly gets you killed in very nasty ways’

charlotte (@sonofsallyjackson): you are the most supportive person ever. every time i read one of your comments on my fics, my heart swells. you’re too kind for this world <3

taylor (@saltyypercy): another one of my connabeth friends 🤩 speaking of connabeth, your memes are everything! you’re hilarious and your content is awesome

@getwokescullyy: you are such a talented writer!! and you’re so nice and supportive! :) we also have a lot of the same hc’s for post canon percabeth 😌 super excited for your next update btw!

olivia (@thegraystreaks): you are so talented idk why you’re following me. it had to of been a mistake. if, so pls don’t leave 🥺 you’re such a supportive person and seeing you and liz interact is so funny. fr i love your writing sm and i’m obsessed with your url 🤩

aya (@percasbeths): again, WHY ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME? seriously i have some of the most talented writers following me and idk why but i’m not complaining. all of your au’s are beautiful and i’m always blown away <3

@judoflipped: you introduced me to Apartment 305 so i’m pretty sure i owe you a kidney or something now lol. fr though you were so nice to me during our first interaction <3 you’re so sweet and you seem super chill

emma (@jasongrape): first a foremost, a superior url. you’re posts are hilarious, especially the ones of you and ash going back and forth lol.

@clr-stan: we haven’t interacted much but your posts are so good!! and you seem super sweet :) also, you’re right. if the pjo movies weren’t based on the books i would have been invested

@writinglettersaddressedtothefire: i’m pretty sure you’re also a mutual of fátima’s which makes you awesome. plus your writing is so good! also i see that you’re having a great time with taylor’s new album coming out so i’m glad you seem to be doing good 😂

lexi (@multifandom-420): one of the other three malconnor shippers on this cite 😭 you seem so sweet and your posts are top tier

@esistkeinponyhof: you are literally always in my notifications and it’s so fun lol. we’ve never really interacted but i’m glad that you like my blog :) also you’re a fellow directioner which is amazing 😌

@himbolin420: how does it feel to have a canon url? apart of the bolin defense squad and connabeth nation? we have no choice but to stan <3 i remember you kept a count for all of your mutuals when i first followed you and i thought that was absolutely precious lol

@twilight-hours: you’re in my notifications a lot and i'm not complaining. lol you always reblog the funniest stuff and i love seeing it on my dash. i know we haven't really interacted but i know we would vibe 

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Sophia Jirafe

Seven of Sophia Jirafe’s fics are at Gossamer, but more of her X-Files stories are at AO3 (as sophiahelix). I’ve recced some of my favorites of her stories here before, including Stones and Bones. She was active in the fandom during the show’s run and has never strayed far from fandom in general. She co-founded Glass Onion, a great multi-fandom mailing list that now has nearly 1,000 fics from 100 fandoms at AO3. Big thanks to Sophia Jirafe for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

It did initially, but so many old shows are on streaming now and getting discovered by new people, it makes sense.

I did get a comment from someone who said my first story under this name, posted in early 2000 when I was a college freshman, was older than her by a couple of months, and THAT took me aback.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

It was my first fandom, discovered when I was 17 and searching for info about the show on the school library computer, and it really shaped my whole life! I met a lot of people I still know today (mostly in non-fannish venues like FB, though I do still have some connections in fandom), and learned a lot about writing and just life generally, since I was younger than most of fandom at the time.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I started off on a tiny forum at a website called Squirrel’s Nest, but I kept seeing people thanking Scullyfic in fic headers and eventually I was able to join the mailing list (which was capped to 500 members). Scullyfic was everything to me — I made friends, betas, discussed the show, learned about all kinds of things on Off-Topic Fridays, etc. A lot of those friends, I would email with or more often chat on AIM (individual or these sprawling group chats that would go on all day), and then at the end of 2001 we started migrating to Livejournal. I was getting into Buffy more by then, but it was still mostly the same crowd of people I knew from Scullyfic.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

I feel like it started me on a whole life path really — finding that my deep obsession with fiction could be channeled like that and shared with other people, as well as deepening my writing. Online fandom has been a major part of my social life for over 20 years now, and I love the mix of getting excited about things with friends and also the creative outlet.

My corner of X-Files fandom in particular was just very calm and enjoyable for the most part, full of older professional women who were happy to be friends and give me advice about all kinds of things, and it really set the bar for me with my online interactions. Now I’m almost 40 and trying to be that person for my younger friends, as well as having no patience for toxicity and in-fighting in my fandom spaces.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

A combination of the creepy conspiracy angle and just adoring Scully. I remember how mysterious and fascinating the show seemed when I discovered it right before S5, and there was no way to find out more except to keep watching and hoping they explained. Scully was so smart and tough and beautiful and interesting, and as a teen I was just captivated by her (and the UST, though I didn’t care about Mulder as much).

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I ran across it a couple times early on but felt embarrassed by the concept, but then I read the first in Karen Rasch’s Words series and suddenly it clicked for me. After a while I started daydreaming my own conversations between them, very similar to what happens to me now when I’m getting into a new pairing, so after reading tons of recommended fic by big authors, I started writing my own (the 3-4 stories I posted in high school are all wiped from the internet now, though).

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

Good memories, though because it was my senior year of high school and college, I know a lot of it is just tied to that time in my life, and also being in my very first fandom. I will rewatch episodes from time to time, but I basically never revisit former fandoms because they’re kind of like exes, even if I finished on a good note. I also think my taste in fic has changed (and there isn’t the same novelty of “characters I like getting together omg!”)

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

So many! None of them had quite the same combination of excellent central architecture (especially pre-AO3) and a really high level of discussion and friendliness without being enormous, but I’ve loved them all in their own ways. I’ve done fandom on LJ/DW, Tumblr, Discord, and now on Twitter, and I think I miss the mailing list days the most. You didn’t have to repeat yourself so much in multiple conversations, you weren’t character limited, and the discussion was all in one place, with personal stuff more confined to your side conversations. Discord is a little like that, but it moves too fast and there’s too much noise for my taste.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

Heh, after X-Files I went through a whole phase of faves in the Scully vein — Buffy, Aeryn Sun, Kara Thrace, etc. Like many people I’ve shifted primarily into m/m in the last decade (Sherlock, YOI, and recently The Untamed have been my major fictional fandoms, along with a lot of sports RPF), but for non-fannish shows I’m always looking for awesome new female characters, like Elizabeth on the Americans, Peggy on Mad Men, Nadja on What We Do in the Shadows, etc. And I do LOVE Killing Eve and have written a little f/f over there.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I’ll rewatch favorite episodes occasionally, and I keep thinking about a full rewatch but it takes so much time! I never saw the second movie, and I didn’t finish the first of the new seasons because I was hating it, so it’s a little hard for me to think fannishly about them when I disliked basically everything after “Je Souhaite” so much (as far as I’m concerned the show ends there).

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

X-Files no, but yeah I’m still very active in fandoms.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

I lost all my saved fic several computers ago, but I recall loving “Blue Christmas” by Plausible Deniability and “Diamonds and Rust” by MustangSally (obviously everything she wrote was great).

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

Looking at my X-Files fic, I can’t believe how short it is and how comparatively little of it there is (I have lost track of a few ficlets). It felt like such a big deal to finish anything back then! I think my favorite remains Alphabetum, which involved a tricky structure and 5 elements given by people as part of the Scullyfic Improv challenge, where you had a week to write a story around those elements.

My favorite of my recent fic in fictional fandoms is probably the GoT/YOI crossover novel I wrote a couple years ago, for a completely opposite experience to this (and proof you can grow as a writer with a lot of effort!)

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

It’s honestly hard to imagine going back (like I said, I usually don’t), but I guess I could get inspired by something.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I certainly still write, and I do have to give credit to XF fandom and Scullyfic in particular for giving me the start I got, where I really wanted to be writing good fiction. The few things I wrote in high school were just me jamming out romantic cliches, but the people I was lucky to know in XF fandom showed me that “just” fanfic can still aspire to be high quality. I am a much, much better and more disciplined writer than I was back then, but I might never have started on this path without fandom friends encouraging me.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

Usually just daydreaming about emotional dynamics between characters/people, but sometimes something specific in canon or real life (I write a lot of RPF) gets me going, or maybe something I read.

What's the story behind your pen name?

When I wrote for X-Files, I picked “Sophia Jirafe” combining my favorite first name with a fancy spelling for my favorite animal (I was 18! Don’t judge!) Over on Livejournal, my friend Jintian and I initially shared an account with the same name as our website, double_helix, and when she got her own account I changed to sophia_helix, which is now sophiahelix just about everywhere. A little clunky, but I like the continuity (and I do run across old friends who remember the name).

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

The friends I’ve known for a very long time know about it, but we have never talked about it in depth. My husband, who I met not long after getting into fandom, also knows about it, and he’s encouraging and also a writer so we talk all the time. I told my mom in college and she was pretty dismissive, so we haven’t talked about it since (but my younger sister knows and is cool about it).

When I was younger, it was something I shared readily (I bonded with a new friend in law school I saw looking at LJ), but now I don’t really bring it up with new acquaintances.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

I just made a Carrd the other day with all my various fannish addresses (Twitter, locked fannish Twitter, AO3, Tumblr)

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Just that it really was a high quality fandom — so much excellent long casefic, so many cool down to earth people, just generally a great launching place for a young fan. The friendships I made with older people were really important to me, and it makes me sad to see a lot of younger people now getting upset about the idea of anyone over a certain age being in their fandom spaces. I hope someday fandom can get back to appreciating that people of all ages can be the fandom type, and that everyone brings something different to the community.

(Posted by Lilydale on December 1, 2020)

[fiadhaisteach]

About me

Thanks for the tag, @oxygenforthewicked​! 🤗

1: Why did you choose your url?

When I decided to dump @/SiberianSpring (just the url... my City of Heroes main character will always have iterations running around), I went back to an older internet user name I'd abandoned way back when. I grabbed Aisteach on AO3, then found it wasn't available on Tumblr. Oops. 😝 A little Gaeilge wordplay and I ended up with FiadhAisteach.

Fiadh, depending on context, can be a noun or adjective, independent or prefixed and has several meanings, including: deer, wild, wilderness, outsized, large, respect, and esteem.

Aisteach is an adjective meaning strange, weird, queer, surprising, peculiar, odd, and/or wonderful.

2: Any side blogs? if you have them, name them and why you have them.

Just @live-creatively, where I dump “all the creative/crafty/inspiration guides & how-to posts & re-blogs [I find] so I have some hope of finding them again.” Other than that I just dump everything in this one spot... I barely remember to use @live-creatively; I can’t imagine trying to keep up with a host of side blogs.

3: How long have you been on tumblr?

Technically since 2014, but there was a two-year gap in there when I was inactive. Then I resurfaced when I needed to connect with DA fanfic writers & artists, and here we are.

4: Do you have a queue tag?

Yes. rifts in the queue

5: Why did you start your blog in the first place?

I had a few friends from LJ days who popped their heads onto BookFace long enough to direct me to their blogs here.

6: Why did you choose your icon/pfp?

I change it up everyone once in a while, but it’s usually just one of my photographs. Right now it’s a monarch butterfly photo I took, at Monarch Grove Sanctuary, on my honeymoon.

7: Why did you choose your header?

Again, I change it up every few months, and it’s frequently one of my own photos. This one is obviously a spiderweb on a small branch. It’s damp with mist from South Falls at Silver Falls State Park.

8: What’s your post with the most notes?

Grandma Kathy’s Hard Toffee Recipe (I used JetBlackCode.com to find out). *does a little happy chair dance*

9: How many mutuals do you have?

145, if I counted right according to tumblr, though I’m sure some of them aren’t active anymore.

10: How many followers do you have?

264.

11: How many people do you follow?

881. Believe it, or not, I curate my dash quite meticulously. Even so, my dashboard is a wonderful, chaotic mess, & I love it. Many of these are inactive friends that have moved on to other social media sites, but I refuse to “unfriend/unfollow” here or are organization's blogs that I like to follow for their news/updates. I also have 50, or so, blogs that I “Get Notifications” for, so even when I’m distracted by other shinies I don’t miss too much.

12: Have you ever made a shitpost?

Probably... possibly. It depends on your definition of shitpost.

13: How often do you use tumblr each day?

Probably way too much. It’s where I turn when “I’m on hold on the phone, while also waiting for a customer to actually ask a question so I can’t actually get work accomplished,” which happens way more frequently than you might think. I also pop over when I’ve got just a minute before something else is starting and I can’t let myself focus, but I know someone else will be interrupting my “TumblrTime,” so I'm not “wasting time.”

On non-work days & evenings... I’m on & off constantly, between fics and/or chapters of long fics.

14: Did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog once? who won?

No. I try to stay out of drama and I tend to run from fights. Confrontation is challenging for me, even online.... hell, even friendly confrontation is nerve-wracking. Though I do my best, in that case. Life is too short, and we all have better ways of spending our time.

15: How do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts?

Fastest way to get me to NOT repost something. Every once in a very long while I might reblog one, but it’s despite the enjoinder, not because of it.

16: Do you like tag games?

YES. I love tag games. Sometimes I’m bad about doing them in a timely fashion, but I love them.

17: Do you like ask games?

Also yes. Though I’m not great about sending them, I love reading about people’s OCs... and other people!

18.Do you have a crush on a mutual?

I definitely have platonic crushes. I love all of my mutuals and followers, and I’m grateful to have you all around. 🤗💖

I think I’m late to this so... tagging anyone who wants to! (and tag me so I can read your responses!)

[hayjeon]

Tips on creating fun fanfic headers!

i had so much fun writing the fanfic writing tips yesterday and i got a few more questions about header-making, and so i decided to make one more of these! i hope these tips help somebody out there! hope you enjoy :) 

p.s. these tips won’t require any hard editing skills or photoshop skills, nor any expensive tablets/apps! 

typically i spend around ~5-10 min creating one header, and that’s either after i think of/finish a fic. i have so much fun doing it and sharing it with you that i figured i’d share how i do it! 

why headers? 

as I talked about in my fic tips, one of the most eye-catching things about fics are headers. when i’m scrolling through a rec page, my home page, a tag, or even someone’s masterlist, i’m immediately drawn to well-made headers. that’s what captures my attention, and then i’m more drawn in by the content. so, you can say that headers is your own version of an ad for your own fic, or an extension of it (like the cover of a novel!) 

if you were writing your own book, imagine how much time you’d spend figuring out what you wanted your cover to look like. i try to have as much fun and invest as much time making my own headers because it’s just the cherry on top to my finished product :) 

disclaimer: BUT HEADERS ARE NOT NECESSARY/DO OR DIE! if you don’t feel like you want to do this, then keep writing! its ok! this is just a suggestion. i’ve seen plenty of well-written fics without headers at all, so don’t beat yourself up over not having one/not wanting to do one. this is truly just a fun, extra kind of thing, and only keep reading if you want to learn how i do it! :) 

tips for people who don’t want to make headers: if you still want something to make your fic stand out, use gifs! i use them in my drabbles a lot! this will at least give ur fic a lil boost! 

how to find pictures

I typically use unsplash, which is a free website in which photographers upload their HQ pics for free use. the pics are really high quality, typically stock photos, and don’t have any logos on them like other ones on google. unfortunately, you won’t find any pics of the members or anything, but you’ll find beautiful stock photos of typical scenes like “ocean scene” or “desert scene.” I found the stock photo for cut me open (shown below) on that site by just looking up “medical” or “doctor”. 

i used to use google a lot and just use keywords like “desert scene HQ” and edit the search settings to deliver HQ pics, and a minimum # of pixels, but unplash is definitely better in terms of quality, more aesthetic photos, and no logos/watermarks. 

on some occasions, i will screenshot some scenes of youtube videos, turning up the quality to 1080p or 4k and zooming in so that the pixelation is as crisp as possible, and then editing it later to look good (which i’ll explain in a second!) 

the above photo was a scene from the specific characters from the drama, “100 Days My Prince” that I screenshotted from a youtube video that TvN uploaded, recapping the drama. I cropped it just right so that their faces were left out, which i’ll also mention soon! 

things to look for when picking pictures: 

you want the picture to reflect a specific motif/theme from your fic! if its a moody fic, then try to find a moody scene that you can edit with filters/lighting to look even moodier; or if the characters’ jobs are a big portion of the fic (like cut me open/doctor theme) try to look for stock photos with that shown very clearly!

make sure its high quality: tumblr really dumbs down the quality of the photo when uploading it, so try your best to find something with a lot of pixels in it so that when you start editing, you don’t sacrifice too much of the quality already

try to look for something simple/clean: a picture with too much subject (ie. people in the background, or too much detail) may end up taking away from the main point of your header, which is your title. so find pics without too much clutter! 

try to make sure its landscape: which will help during editing to save some of the quality better. 

editing your pictures

now that you have a specific photo you want to use, now its time to edit! I use VSCO CAM (free app) and my own apple photos cropping tool for faster crops. 

crop/adjust: if your picture is too large/wide, crop it to at least a 16:9 ratio. i’d say aim for skinnier if you can, so that you don’t take up too much space (especially if you’re planning to add headers to your masterlist). also crop out any faces, any clutter, any unnecessary details, so you have a nice, clean slate to work on when adding text. 

contrast/sharpen/clarity/white balance/etc.: i’m not gonna give you a lesson on photography, but i’ll tell you I learned like 80% of everything that i know just by fiddling with it on VSCO! So just try it out and play with the app, see what you can make of it. i’d say a rule of thumb to follow is that you want happier fics with a brighter tone, and moodier/angsty fics with a darker tone so that it can reflect the nature of the fic further, without saying anything! 

if you wanna be extra af like me, then go a step further and photoshop your pics. this one is a good example; when i screenshotted this scene from another youtube video for my fic One Year My Love part 2, i was specifically looking for a scene that would showcase the ornate/regal details of their clothing/environment in contrast to part 1′s modest clothing/scene (the first header in this post). 

i found this scene, but actually, this scene portrays the Crown Prince and the Princess, not y/n. So, the actors weren’t smiling at all! They were actually frowning at eachother in this scene, to portray the tension between the two characters and their marriage. 

So, I took the extra step, adjusting the pic with VSCO so that their shoulders/chins were at the same level, cropped off their faces up until their lips, and then used the adobe photoshop free app to photoshop their lips to be SMILING at eachother!!!! subtle, but important! 

call me crazy for taking that much time but i’m so proud of how it turned out and i loved every second of making this one. that way, this scene makes it portray the happy ending for Jungkook and y/n! 

adding text to your header

you can use any app out there, but i really like Font Candy! I actually ended up buying the 2$ version of this and never regretted it, but you can actually find a lot of their basic fonts on the free version; I tend to use the fonts: OSTRICH SANS, BEBAS, TREND, and INTRO the most! these are pretty clean-looking, block letters that look good whenever i put them as my titles. 

I love this app too cause you can easily control the spacing between letters to make them take up more space, add shadows, or even make them contrast their background using the overlay feature; like this one i made for wildest dreams (see how the text changes depending on what part of the photo its on? amazing! it’s literally with a click of a button!!)

And i’ll always add “written by HAYJEON” or “by HAYEJON”, space it out, and add it somewhere underneath as my own branding.

orrrrrr 

if you want to be more creative, you can even go a step further and use whatever you have on hand to enhance whatever you’re trying to portray. 

for this one, i ended up finding this amazing photo on unsplash and i thought it would do a create job of portraying the “movie-set” quality of what wildest dreams is going to be about. this stock photo had someone else’s names on it, so i used my ipad, and used instagram to just erase the existing writing with the color of the background, and then wrote in my own title and url with my own handwriting/apple pen!!! 

i thought this was pretty cool because it’s like wildest dreams is its own movie/has its own movie set, which, once it’s out, you guys will see that it’s supposed to be! 

saving/uploading

this is pretty easy/obvious, but i figured i’d mention it. all the apps i mentioned are available on the appstore, and they will save directly to your photos. after doing that, i’ll just upload them into a special folder i have on my google drive so that when i’m finished writing a fic on tumblr using my laptop, i can easily download the photos without sacrificing quality. easy! 

and that way, i can save them forever; even if i have to delete them from my computer, i can always redownload them! 

side note: making text separators

i just recently started doing this, but ever since tumblr took down their text separators, i’ve just been cropping the bottom like 5-10 pixels of the header to use as my text separators! (with my laptop)

i saw some other writer doing it and thought that it looked better than what i had used previously (a cropped photo of a random line i found on google); i found that doing this tied my fics together a little better and just looked better aesthetically; 

so there it is! hope you enjoyed! :) i would love to see what other tips you guys have been using, feel free to send me an ask or reply to this post; and if you end up using any of my tips, please let me know! I love to hear from you guys all the time <3 

lots of love, especially during these times, 

hay <3 

[kittae]

I really want to post my fanfics and I worked super hard on all of them but I’m scared to do it because I see too many imperfections so I chicken out. Is there any advice you’d give to a new writer. Your works are amazing and accounts like you inspired me to delve into my own creativity so any sort of tip would help. Sorry to bother but I just need a little extra confidence. :)

Hi! How exciting you’ve started to create your own fanfics, that’s awesome! I feel honoured my work could inspire you!! Many years ago I worried about the same thing, but then i basically said “fuck it” and i honestly didn’t care about notes or following, I just wanted a place to dump my 1k smut scribbles lol. Was my work any good back then? hell no lol, but I improved the more I wrote, the more i read other works and took inspiration from different writing styles of the writers i admired until i somehow managed to develop my own! I am still learning and improving every time i write a new piece. Tips under the cut because i have a lot to tell you!

So the best tips i can give you are: Have fun, do it for yourself and don’t care about anything else! Any kind of support or nice feedback is definitely a plus but it can take some time before you’ll see any of that and there will be times you’ll question whether or not you’re good enough because feedback has gone dry quite a lot on this platform, but don’t take it to heart and just enjoy writing! Just post them and maybe log out of the app for a while afterwards if you’re too anxious or worried! You’re creating and sharing your creativity for free and that’s a wonderful thing. 

Another thing when you’re starting out is to keep it manageable for yourself. Don’t try to take on more than you can handle, just take it easy and do what you can, don’t feel pressured to pump out a 10k fic in one sitting lol. I’m still not very good at writing longer fics so i usually just do smaller works so i can actually finish them. But everyone’s different!

It might be a good idea to post your works on other platforms too if that’s something that sounds good to you, each platform comes with its own unique audience and you’ll figure out what feels best for you along the road! Some of those are: archive of our own (ao3), wattpad (very interactive reader base but beware of the immaturity and pressuring for updates from the readers and sometimes toxic environment/plagiarism), Inkitt (mostly original works on there but fanfiction gets some traction as well!).

If you’re someone who can write quite a lot, i recommend putting up a posting schedule so your readers know when they can expect a new chapter/fic from you and it really helps to keep your blog active! I never did that but i did take requests from readers back then, so i just posted small blurbs per request and that also worked really well to build some traction. Don’t feel obligated to do any of those things tho! The more you write, the more you’ll see what works for you and what doesn’t, just try out different things!

If you don’t know what to write, ask the audience! Doing requests or writing games really helped me a lot when i just started out. Make sure to tag your fics according to its content, that’s very important to be found by the right people. The first 5 tags are the most important, so make sure you have things like ‘bts’ ‘bts fanfiction’ ‘jin fanfic’ ‘kim seokjin’ etc in there. Don’t spam your tags with unrelated stuff or groups that are not in the fanfic, that’ll anger people and ruin the tag. 

And lastly, make your blog easy to navigate. Do some research on HTML coding so you can put links in your bio and make a structured masterlist so your readers can find your fics easily. I’ve also noticed readers are more inclined to read fics with a nice header on top of the post, you can easily make those in the picture editor Canva! I recommend putting your handle on the header as well as some kind of watermark and so people remember your name better.

hope this helped! Feel free to message me anytime if you have some more questions about starting out! I know it can be scary, but it’s really liberating when you can express yourself through your writing! xx

[reach4themoon]

Blog Announcement, Please Read

The time has come, probably not very surprising I know. I started this blog the day of my birthday, after feeling inspired by so many people and talking to so many people. I know I didn’t make a lot of close bonds, but I made a lot of memories and still made a lot of friends. I found myself opening up more and getting excited as I took part in creating works as a fan and improved my abilities in writing and in creating stories (although I know it’s still lacking). I’m grateful for it all, the last 6 months have been wonderful so thank you to everyone who spent it with me.

This is going to be a bit cheesy I know but I want to thank people individually as well since there are many that made a huge impact on me.

@daybreakx was one of the most inspiring for me, Ale has so many amazing works and even helped me create a header for one of my favorite fics. She is the most amazing and sweetest person on this site, I’ll continue to support her no matter what and I hope that she is successful and happy.

@jaemallow...wow, I know I haven’t been using it lately and I am sorry for that as it was the start of this whole blog. She was the start for taeil anon and really helped me as I would send her thoughts and scenarios, she always encouraged me to make them and ultimately helped me make this account. I hope they stay healthy and can inspire others the same way.

@princejoongie1997 it’s not even tagging you but I hope you see this love. Thank you, you were the first person to support this blog and I enjoyed seeing you interact/talk with me. I am so so sorry for not completing the Society, I fear that may have scared you away, I always intended to write it but every draft I had for it seemed wrong and so I kept rewriting the second part but never completed it. I am grateful for you as I probably wouldn’t have continued this blog in the beginning if it weren’t for you.

@lolii-moon another one of my amazing supporters, I never figured out if you had another account that interacted more or not (I was always curious) but I always smiled seeing your notifications. You were one of my silent supporters and I hope you can always be happy and find someone like that for you.

@flirtyhyuck hi bubs, you were another of the few who had taeil anon. I loved being your anon and I loved seeing your writing on my dash. I know you plan on going on hiatus and have talked about leaving so I had planned on writing a Lele fic but was never able to write it. Thank you for being here, your accounts have been a wonderful part of my time here and I’m so glad I came off anon and we started talking.

@/nct-writers and all the lovely members I talked to in the beginning, thank you for the wonderful time. It was the first time for me to join a network and it was so chaotic and draining but so much fun and I’m grateful I talked with all of you.

@neocitybynight hi sunny! I know we haven’t talked a lot but I really admire you, it was really fun to chat with you and I at times viewed you as someone to rely on. You always seemed so laid back and wise it was nice to see your thoughts on topics and also be goofy.

and lastly @yutopiada,,,look I know esp with you that I get sappy so you’re probably growing tired of it but look. I am so so grateful and glad we started talking. I would never have messaged you first nor would I have continued with this account if it weren’t for you. You have been one of the best things for me, the sweetest and most open person on this site and I have loved every message from you. I can still remember the excitement from seeing the first notification from you. May 19, 2020 10:28 AM. 2 weeks after my birthday and a day I shall cherish lol. I still can’t get over the reason you messaged me since it was for Punch but also because you saw Taeil and thought of me <3. I can honestly say that I have told you more things about my life than some of my irl friends and I have no regrets, you truly have become one of my closest friends and I didn’t think I would ever have an online friend that close? Usually I find myself pulling away from people online since I don’t like to talk so openly and in depth about my life but I haven’t once felt that way with you, if anything I adore our chats more than anything. I love how comfortable we have become especially since I have not once been able to do it with anyone else, most of the time I prefer talking directly to someone but I love how we can leave messages for each other and can rant or scream together about anything. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend honestly, I really hope we can continue talking for a long time and maybe one day we can meet. Until then, I hope you are able to be healthy and happy and live your dreams love. Thank you for being here.

I have so many people that have impacted me but I can’t tag all of them so I’m so sorry if you don’t see your name up here but expected it. I held on to this account much longer than I thought I would, honestly this was supposed to be a quarantine hobby uifgejf I had planned on dropping this once school started back up but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Now things have started picking up again, I want to focus more on school and life and honestly I’ve found myself relying too much on this small interest and I’d like to explore more possibilities. I won’t delete anything since I find it too important and I won’t log out since maybe one day I’ll return (probably not though). I have a lot of things in my drafts so I’ll post them for everyone to explore.

So with that, this is goodbye. Thank you for reading this far and for taking the chance to be on this account with me. 

~Eclipse

[chroniclackofselfpreservation]

A New Medium

AUTHOR'S NOTE: THIS FIC IS SUPER META WAS INTENDED TO BE READ ON AO3. IF YOU CAN, I SUGGEST YOU READ IT THERE. HERE'S THE LINK.

Patton, Logan, and Virgil all appeared at Roman’s side, slightly disoriented.

“That should do it!’ Roman announced, looking around with pride. “Welcome to fanfiction!”

Virgil pulled his hood down over his eyes. “This is messing with my head. Can we just go back to the YouTube videos? I’d just gotten used to them.”

“Ooh! Look at the words! Whatever I say shows up!” Patton said with excitement, reading along as the prose lined the page.

Logan cocked an eyebrow. “I wonder what the parameters are. Deoxyribonucleic acid. Antidisestablishmentarianism. Rhodostemonodaphne capixabensis,” he rattled off, surprised to find the author could keep up with him.

Roman smirked at the words on the screen. “Time works differently for her. Whenever she stops typing, our world freezes,” he explained. Indeed, the author had had to look up that last word online before typing it out. Apparently, Logan knew the entire scientific name for an obscure Brazilian tree for some reason.

“So, what, she’s got super powers or something?” Virgil asked, peeking out from under his hood and at last inspecting his surroundings. “What do you mean, at last?” he grumbled, reading the words. “I was getting adjusted. Gimme a break.”

“Her?” Logan wondered. “I’m unaccustomed to being under the creative whims of someone aside from you or Thomas,” he said to Roman. “Have you met this person?”

Roman chuckled. “No. We can’t directly interact with her in this medium. She has a bio, though.”

Patton looked around for this so-called bio, unaware that the Profile tab on the left-hand side would lead him right to it.

“Oh! Thanks, invisible-writer-lady!” he said, skipping over to the bio with the rest of the gang following curiously. Roman watched them with amusement. As a facet of creativity itself, he was always slightly more aware of the mediums he was portrayed in than the other sides. This piece had been specially crafted to give them all perfect awareness of the medium.

“Exactly,” Roman said quietly, so only the author could discern his words. “Speaking of, I don’t appreciate all the angst you’ve been writing me—” he started, but unfortunately the scene had to move on, and Roman was cut off. Rolling his eyes, he joined the group at the profile page.

“Call me Nico, she/her,” Logan read aloud.

“What a pretty name! Hi, Nico!” Patton squealed, waving enthusiastically despite not being able to see the author. Regardless, she found this incredibly endearing.

“A pseudonym, perhaps?” Logan correctly assumed. “Interesting,” he muttered, “she not only describes what’s happening in real time, but also adds her own narrative voice to answer our questions. How peculiar.”

As the author and narrator, Nico was able to interact with the characters through prose. If she were to directly insert herself into the fic, she would become a character, controlled by herself. It hurt her brain to think about. Simply using her name and pronouns already tiptoed across that line—though having narrators as characters in literature wasn’t rare by any means.

“Nice username,” Virgil said, gesturing to the header on the left. “Definitely my speed.”

Patton squinted up at it, mouth moving silently as he deciphered the string of words. “Hey, that—is that true, Nico?”

“A chronic lack of self preservation is troubling, indeed,” Logan added.

Roman quickly explained to them that the username was more of a cynical joke than anything to be seriously worried about. Though, the author’s therapist might have something to say about it. Having discovered everything of note in the profile, the four of them made their way back to the fanfiction itself.

Virgil blinked. “What was that?”

“That was summary,” Roman explained. “It’s where she writes about something that already happened without staying in scene, like we are now.”

“Incredible,” Logan breathed. “I remember your explanation happening, but did not directly experience it. If I may ask, Nico, how much control do you have over us in this format?”

As the author of the fic, Nico had total control. The only reason the three of them were aware of her presence was because she wrote them that way. Roman had a nasty little habit of doing things his own way, despite her outlines. Curse his hyperaware creative streak.

Roman raised his hands innocently. “Hey, I’ve got to flaunt what I’ve got.”

Of course, I could always switch the perspective to first person instead of the sort of distant, omniscient third person I had been using before, but that automatically makes me (the narrator) also a character, since the last perspective had more of an implied ‘I’.

I can change the tense as well. Watch.

“This is super trippy,” Virgil says.

Logan adjusts his glasses. “Fascinating,” he gushes. “The verbs all changed.”

To save Virgil’s mind, the author reverted back to the simple past and third person perspective. That was what she wrote most of her fics in anyway, so it came naturally to her. Another facet of fic writing that she thought they might find interesting was a scene break.

“A scene break?” Patton asked.

Roman smiled. “Just watch.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

Virgil stumbled a bit, Roman steadying him with a hand. “That is such a strange feeling. I hate it.”

Patton pointed above their heads. “Look! A line!”

“It’s used to divide scenes up or signal the passage of time,” Roman explained. He glanced down, noticing the end of the fic approaching. “Before we go, guys, Nico wanted me to introduce you to the reader.”

“The reader?” Logan wondered. “Another omnipotent creator?”

Roman shook his head. “Over there,” he said pointing. Nico withdrew her guiding hand, allowing Roman the figurative wheel. She and the reader were separated by the insurmountable barrier of time and space. It was up to Roman and the others to interact with them.

Patton gasped. “I can see them! Hi, there!!”

“Jeez,” Virgil hissed in surprise, whirling around. “Were they watching us this entire time?”

Logan dipped his head cordially. “Salutations, reader.”

“Aw, they’re smiling,” Patton cooed, beaming. “How adorable.”

“Don’t patronize them, Pat,” Virgil muttered.

“Hush, Dr. Gloom,” Roman chided good-naturedly, nudging Virgil in the ribs. “Let the padre have this moment. Oh,” he said, turning his attention to you, “a pleasure meeting you, my dear.”

Patton frowned. “Is their mouth moving? I can’t hear them.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “CAN YOU HEAR—oh look, capital letters!”

“No, we can’t hear them, Patton, but I could see them blushing from a mile away,” Roman teased.

“Flirt,” Virgil muttered.

“Are you properly hydrated?” Logan asked, peering up at your face. “Have you gone outside today? Do take care of yourself, reader.”

“Aw, Lo, that’s sweet,” Patton said with a grin.

“I am merely looking out for their wellbeing, Patton.”

“Virgil, why don’t you say something?” Roman pressed. “I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.”

Virgil flushed, gripping the sides of his hoodie. He looked up at you warily. “Uh, hey,” he said with a tiny wave.

“Look, they loved it!” Patton said.

“The fic’s ending soon,” Roman said, watching its slow approach. “Everyone say bye.”

“Bye! See you later!” Patton called, entirely too loud, waving both hands in the air as if sending off a ship. “I love you! Be safe! Listen to what Logan said!!”

“Farewell,” Logan said, a faint smile playing at his lips.

“See ya, I guess,” Virgil said, trying to hide his steadily reddening face.

The three of them began retreating back where they came from, leaving Roman in the foreground with the reader. “You know, you can always come back here and see us again,” he said. “I’m sure they’d love it.”

Roman glanced down “Ah, look. There it is. The end. “

A marvelous white cape appeared on his shoulders, his prince outfit gleaming. Roman took an elegant, sweeping bow, chancing one last glance up at you.

He winked, a playful smile spreading across his face.

“That’s all folks.”

[gwentoryfics]

so you wanna start a writeblr...

i’m no pro, but here are some tips i have for anyone who’s interested in posting written content on tumblr! this is primarily relevant to kpop fanfic blogs, but some of the more general tips could certainly apply to other writers.

Pick Your URL

if you don’t have an account yet, making one is the first step! think hard about what you want your url to be. as you can see, mine includes the word ‘fics’ to make it clear that this is a fanfic blog, but that’s not a very common tactic. if you’re writing about a particular fandom, i’d recommend tailoring your url to that fandom. and i also recommend sticking with your url once you’ve picked it - i personally always forget who people are when they change their urls. it’s confusing for your followers so unless you have a really good reason to change it, just don’t.

Find a Theme

honestly, this is one thing i still struggle with lol. i think a lot of people probably access tumblr on their phones instead of computers, in which case this step isn’t really that important, but it’s always good to have a desktop layout that looks nice! you can poke around through the free themes that tumblr offers, or search for your own. personally, i just check out the blogs of people i follow from time to time. if they have a theme that i like, there’s usually a link somewhere on the page back to the theme creator’s blog, and then i’ll scroll through that blog looking for something that might work for me. probably the most important thing is to make sure your theme is text post friendly. you want your text posts to take up a lot of space on your screen so that they’re more easily readable - that means any theme that has more than one column is a no-go.

Build Your Bio

your bio should share some very basic info about you, such as your name (or a penname/persona), pronouns (if you’re comfortable sharing that info), and a link to your masterlist. if you don’t know how to add links in your bio, check out these steps. you might also want to include a “most recent” link so that your followers can easily locate the most recent thing you’ve written. and of course, feel free to include anything else that you want to be easily findable for your readers.

Post When Tumblr is Active

this might vary a little bit for everyone, and you’ll get more of a sense for this the more active you are on tumblr, but i’ve found that tumblr is usually most active around 7pm/8pm in my time zone (CST). that could totally be different for you. but try to get a feel for when people seem to be most active on tumblr, and take advantage of that by posting during the high times.

Format Your Posts

there are a few things you can do to make your posts look nice. one thing i highly recommend is creating a custom header image for your fic. canva is an easy and free resource that i like to use - just make a free account and then use their free templates and stock images to throw something together. if you choose to use something created by someone else, like a gif of an idol, make sure that you credit that person.

after your header image, definitely include info about what the reader should expect from this fic. this info helps readers decide if they’re actually going to read your work, so it’s very important that you’re clear. definitely feel free to steal my formatting - i always include genre, character pairing, word count, summary, warnings, links to other parts of the fic, an author’s note, and tags. although my summary is usually a full-fic summary, my warnings are specific to the part they’re posted in. you can indent this info to keep it separate from the body of the fic.

please, for the love of god, use a Keep reading break if your fic is more than a few hundred words. if you don’t use a Keep reading break, then everyone will have to scroll through the thousands of words you’ve written, and that’s SUPER annoying to people who aren’t actually interested in reading it (even if they plan on returning to it later). i’ve very intentionally decided to avoid someone’s writing because they didn’t use a Keep reading break, and having to scroll through it was such an inconvenience to me that i deemed their fics not worth reading. be considerate and use the break - bonus points if you keep all smutty content after the break!

last thing: figure out how you want to break between scenes. tumblr used to have a really simple line that you could insert between scenes to create a visual break between scenes, but it didn’t hide content the way the Keep reading break does. unfortunately, they took it away, so now we have to get creative. i’ve seen some writers just use a single asterisk (*) between scenes. i ended up creating my own scene break image in canva and i just insert it after every scene. this is what mine looks like:

whatever you end up using, just make sure it’s simple so it doesn’t draw too much attention.

Be Smart About Tags

figure out what tags are used for your fandom, and be sure to use them every time you post! i think the first five tags are the most important - i’m pretty sure those are the ones that your post can appear in when someone searches that tag. 

for example, my main fic is a smutty fic that features a few members of the kpop group pentagon. so depending on what happens in the part i’m posting, i’ll usually include tags such as: hongseok smut, wooseok smut, kino angst, hyunggu angst, hongseok scenario, hongseok fic, wooseok scenario, wooseok fic, kino scenario, kino fic, hyunggu scenario, hyunggu fic. 

Join a Network

this tip is a bit more kpop fanfic specific - i’m not sure what kinds of networks are out there for other writers.

networks are a great way to share your works with a wider audience, and they’re also a great way to meet other writers that are interested in the same things you are!

one of the best networks that i’ve joined is @ksmutclub. they have a big following, and they do a really good job of staying on top of reblogs. keep an eye on their blog to see when applications are open. i should also mention that, because it’s a smut network, they’ll only reblog smutty content. this network is also open to all kpop fandoms!

there are also other networks, like @uni-network​, which don’t actually require an application. if you create content for pentagon, tag it with #uninet and it’ll get reblogged. the only caveat is that they don’t reblog smutty content because they want the blog to be open to all ages. you are still welcome to use the tag, though - just keep your smut under the cut!

i’m also a member of @universenet​, but i don’t think they’re active anymore...

Follow Other Writers

this one might be hard to do depending on the size of your fandom, but if you can find other content creators, give them a follow! and if you enjoy their work, reblog it! your blog will benefit from you sharing content that’s not your own (as long as you’re reblogging, not reposting. you always want to give credit to the original creator). plus, you want people to interact with your blog, so do your part and interact with others, too!

that’s all i’ve got for right now, but i’ll add to this post again if i think of anything else! and of course, please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about starting a writeblr! i’m happy to help.

[thephantomporg84]

[REDACTED] be complaining reg. the reactions of having "placed the cultist island Fortuna off the coast of Florida" while having the gall of "It’s the story & the way it’s told that should fucking matter" & "Who cares? It’s fictional geography, you idiots." Feels a bit like failing World-Building 101. I mean, Red Grave based on London would also be a callback to Dante's early concept of being a Brit.

Someone already sent me the whole post of hers that I’m pretty sure you’re referring to lmao. I’m in a particularly cunty but pleasant mood rn, and analysis is kind of my thing, so lets’s break it down, shall we?

Maybe someone can send this her way and… learn that tiny little brain of hers a thing. 😉

It’s fictional geography called world building, you idiots Karen after the cut:

‘I love how a number of shitheels have screeched amongst themselves on this hellsite about how I had placed the cultist island Fortuna off the coast of Florida or somewhere around the Gulf US states (re: the fanfic & project link in my header), whining that it should’ve been in Europe, namely Italy.’

An admission to stalking profiles is not exactly the best way to start a self-righteous rant or advertise your… magnum opus, but go off, I guess.

‘Not only that, but they whined about “plotholes and inconsistencies” without elaborating on what the latter are. The asshole who made the rant was annoyed when I used a poem as a spell in the story (“if I heard that, I’d turn off my PS4.”), but I’m sure she didn’t bitch about the cutscene before the last Agnus boss fight in DMC4.’

Like the movie The Room (2003), it’s just easier to say “all of it” is bad because “all of it” contains plotholes and is inconsistent in tone, has terrible half-baked ideas and plot threads that remain unresolved and/or do nothing to further the plot, is rife with poor + inconsistent characterization, has a lack of any knowledge how the medium it exists in is made, and in general makes me wonder how much pottery enamel you’ve been huffing to think any of this was a good idea. Howeverrrr, in contrast to you, Tommy Wiseau is kind of odd and weirdly charming both in general and about his terrible movie — he’s found glory and success in its terribleness. You, in contrast, remain a miserable cunt with delusions of grandeur.

Dante and Agnus’ Shakespeare bit is actually a pretty well known trope called Ham-to-Ham Combat. Dante and Agnus are both ridiculous Large Hams in DMC4, and when two Large Hams meet, in general, they are likely gonna try to ‘out-over dramatic’ each other. This can lead to a scene becoming either really funny or really corny (or both) really fast. If things go too far — and they do, in this case — the scene can become a Hormel Event Horizon.

‘…but they LOVE the plotholes & inconsistencies if Capcom makes the latter, and writes a terrible story! And Crapcom’s canon for DMC is as straight as a paperclip or a dog’s hind leg. Hypocritical pricks.’

Subjective opinion is not, and never will be, objective fact. People are, as of when I checked again in the last ~5 minutes or so, absolutely able to enjoy whatever media they want regardless of what the general consensus on the quality of that media is.

As an example, I enjoy The Room (2003) despite its terribleness and it never fails to make me laugh, while your magnum opus makes me want to huff pottery enamel so the pain will stop despite you thinking it is the work of an idiot savant.

‘They were also mad that I wrote Dante as a wiseguy who is a little more low-key about it due to the circumstances— instead of being a pathetic manchild airhead that tries too hard.’

You didn’t write Dante.

You wrote Reboot!Donte — a fucking terribly out of character version of him, at that.

‘I was primarily concerned about moving the story along. I didn’t care about where a fictional island is supposed to go.’

You literally had one (1) job, Karen.

‘…Meanwhile, not a single character in DMC4 had an Italian accent, so uh, why should I give a flying fuck where I put it?’

Haven’t you been like… shitting on the DMC staff… for terrible writing… this enti— You know what? You’re obvs way too dumb to notice that contradiction, so I’ll let it slide.

Just… a word of advice, if I may? Don’t ever watch dub TV shows. That last brain cell would fuckin’ just burst all over your carpet.

(Actually, don’t watch subtitled shows either. An extremely popular anime that was set in Italy just wrapped and all the characters — le gasp! — spoke fucking Japanese. You would shit.)

‘I wasn’t paid to write any of what I wrote, but be my guest & send a PM if you want to throw money at me. By all means, do that.’

Oh, thank fuck, because they would have been ripped off, big time.

[ btw, you sound p. jealous of people that write/do creative work/commissions for ko-fi/payment tho. Not a good look tbbh. If it’s any consolation, though, I don’t get paid for making fun of you and/or analyzing your dumb bullshit, either. :( ]

‘The pricks at Capcom didn’t even bother giving us a proper DMC4 and it was a half-assed game, with the latter half being hasty filler material. The “special edition” they coughed up in 2015 was just glorified overpriced DLC.’

Ya know, you gotta be pretty far up your own ass to think this much of your opinion. And I’m saying this as a person that’s pretty far up her own ass like 85% of the time.

‘And another thing, Redgrave City in DMC5 seems to be in England, yet no survivors speak with English accents or slang/dialects.’

Pretty sure no survivors had speaking roles.

If you played the game you’d know this.

‘Meanwhile, Dante and Vergil had lived there when they were kids (until age 8), but they both have ordinary American or Canadian accents. Furthermore, how did the twins make it to the USA or Canada? According to the little booklet in the DMC1 game case, Dante’s office is in modern America.’

You know that invoking the imagery of a specific place without naming your location is normal and standard practice, right? Overwatch even does this (For Ex: Byōdō-in (平等院), Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan is the inspiration for Hanamura, Château de Duingt, Duingt, France for Château Guillard, etc.)

Furthermore, you know the original DMC was a rejected first draft of Resident Evil 4, right? This is what retcon is for. You at least know what retcon is, right?

‘…That information isn’t very important, but I’m bringing it up to illustrate a point that being a fucking pedant about geography in a fantasy game is idiotic, even if the setting is akin to modern Earth.’

So is freaking the fuck out and sending death threats over a fantasy game but you didn’t let that stop you either lmfao.

It’s actually super important to establish your scenery and the way your world operates, especially in a written work in which readers are dependent on your vision and your descriptions, and if you were a decent writer, you’d know this.

‘It’s the story & the way it’s told that should fucking matter.’

YOU HAD ONE (1) JOB, KAREN.

‘What US states are the Arklay Mountains located in?’

General description puts them in the U.S. Midwest. Raccoon City itself is stated to have a population of ~100,000 at the time of outbreak, and the only city in the Midwest that matches that population in 1998 is Springfield, Missouri, with a pop. of ~110,000.

Springfield is on the Springfield Plateau of the Ozarks region of SW Missouri. So they’re part of the Ozark Mountains.

This all took less than ~3 minutes to google, btw.

‘Where is “Zanzibar Land?”’

I actually just wrote a comprehensive answer to an ask a few weeks ago about this. It’s actually stated to be in Tselinoyarsk (Целиноярск), the (fictional) area of the former USSR in which Big Boss carried out the Virtuous Mission/Operation Snake Eater in 1964. Tselinoyarsk itself is heavily implied to consist of parts of Kyrgyzstan and/or Tajikistan. If you played MGS3 you’d know how important the setting and the varied environments/climates are to the game mechan-

oh yeah wait you believe in segregation of story and gameplay mechanics. I forget you’re completely tone deaf sometimes lmao.

How far is ‘Salem’s Lot or Derry from Bangor? Who cares?’

Stephen King does, quite a bit. He even has a map on his website of ‘his’ fictional version of Maine:

My disappointment is immeasurable, Karen.

[bangtansmutcentral]

[Please Read]

We would like to start off by apologising to our members and followers for making you have to witness this. It is in our opinion totally unnecessary, but since we’re getting these asks we need to address them.

We would like to say that whoever is sending these could have acted like an adult and contacted us privately and expressed their concerns. We were never hostile or unapproachable so we don’t understand why hide behind an anonymous ask. Either way, it is done.  

Since I (admin sue) started working on the network alone, before inviting my friends to join, I’ll be speaking for the 3 of us. 

After getting theses asks we didn’t know what to make of them, because we literally didn’t know what they were talking about, but after going to said network to see if something was going on, we saw a post, that didn’t mention any networks, talking about stealing content, not having their own ideas, taking advantage of what they’ve worked so hard to accomplish and we did NOT think it was about us, since we NEVER stole anything. But it is obvious, after getting these asks, that they are talking about us.

For what I understand, ---net, is a writers network that work and share smut content. Our network was made to gather and share ALL KINDS of posts. You can see that if you go on our application form and find the following: 

We never intended to be a writers only net. We have writers of course and it is a big part of what we share but we are definitely not a writers network and as we grow, we hope to make the net even more diverse. 

I’m from the side of tumblr that is more visual, and I saw most pages I followed close due to the policy changes on tumblr and because of that, what is left in smut is mostly writing. That is why we have more writers than other creators, but we are not a writers club or writers network. We will hopefully encourage people to get out of their comfort zone and try new things and express themselves in different ways, other than writing, while of course keeping and giving the deserved space writing has.

I’ve been blogging for 2 years now and my personal blog has over 26k followers. I’m not saying this to brag, that is definitely the last thing I want to do, but I want to show you that I’m not after a following or attention at any cost. Of course we want to see whatever we create succeeding, but we’re not in this to steal anything from anyone, generate hate or compete.

The network was made because I wanted a new project that would bring all smut content to one place. I miss having this diversity of content on my feed and wanted to create something I would enjoy as well as help other people come together since nowadays it’s harder to do that here. Plus, having my friends join me on this made it a very special and fun idea. 

We never owned any networks, or were a part of them in any way. My page for example is more visual contente than written, so I didn’t even know of these writers networks. To see how this is true, I went on my blog and asked smut creators to get in touch with me for a new project, then searched for some smut blogs and messaged them one by one asking if they would be up for a net because I didn’t even know if anyone would be interested, let alone, think that there was already one! Even though we know all the networks for sharing pics and gifs, smut networks were something we never knew existed (and now, seeing that they do exist, I think that there is space for all of us, in our own way). Here is how I went about it:

I even messaged one of the ----net admins, as a creator (without knowing that she had a net), asking if she wanted to join us, and that’s when we found out they existed! She even told us that they already used ‘---’ and I apologised and changed our visual identity completely so there wouldn’t be any misunderstandings. I changed our #, header, icon, everything. I just didn’t change the name because we would have to create a blog from scratch and we already had started promoting the page everywhere. The name was created randomly, if we knew there was a net with a similar name of course we would want something completely different because we don’t need to feed off of other blogs success or image. We are just not that kind of people. We want to start small and slowly learn about our members, our followers and what content is best and how to navigate the net. At the time I didn’t even give it much importance since it was just a name… for me personally it wasn’t something worthy of a fight. But apologised and changed everything else as soon as I could. Is that me being unfriendly and rude? Is that the behaviour of someone that wants to steal something from anyone? ‘

When I started setting up the blog (after changing the items), I din’t know the first thing about a net, or anyone that I could ask about it, so I just went around all networks I could find (---net included) to see how a network works basically. I found out that the rules are basically the same, the application forms as well and the aim of all of them is to share creators content. We didn’t think we were stealing anything by making similar rules to everyone. I personally wouldn’t mind if someone took inspiration from my page or even copy-pasted word by word of my rules pages for ex. For me, it is not stealing content, it’s just rules... I wouldn’t mind at all, but of course that is personal. 

The 3 of us are finishing our masters degree, so we see tumblr as a hobby. We have the utmost respect for everyone and everyone’s work but it is just our hobby. One of us is in her exam period, the other finishing her thesis, I’m having my mom over for summer so we wouldn’t have time to keep the blog running if we didn’t queue posts, and since we’re 3 admins, 3 posts are ideal (one for each) and of course alphabetically through our members because that’s common sense.

This was mostly so in this busy month the blog wouldn’t die. We didn’t think that that would cause such a problem.  If this net is really talking about us, they could have reached us and talked to us in private without causing such a commotion. We were never hostile to anyone, never offended anyone in anyway so we don’t understand why they did things the way they did, but then again we are all different people. If what bothers you anon, (and assuming you’re associated with the net some way) is that our acceptance post has similar rules (because that’s the only thing we’ve put out so far, so you must be talking about that… we’re a few days old… we literally have done nothing yet), you could have reached us and said so and we would have gladly changed it. It would however remain very similar, since we share mostly the same kind of content and every network has pretty much the same acceptance rules. Also a members page, a navi page, a tag system.. how did we copy you on that? That’s how all the networks I saw work! And how did all nets start? Didn’t they start by looking at other nets to see how this ’network thing’ works and basically start the same as them, since the rules are all the same, and then find their own place and change things over time? Someone said that it is disheartening to see others gain from what they’ve worked hard to create. What have we gained? How have we used their creations to gain anything? Because we’re queuing posts? We can change the way we worded that, but we will keep queuing from our members because we don’t have time at the moment to keep the blog going otherwise.

The disclaimers are similar? But of course they are! We hope people have common sense but some things are triggering and must be advised against. I myself for example, have some triggers that I don’t want in my net!

We really don’t believe that this is aimed at us, it really can’t be, because we have an acceptance post out so far and nothing else. The rest is just the normal things every net has as I said before, so if this is all a misunderstanding and since no one from the net reached us, we would like to apologise if their post was directed at someone else.

Lastly I’d like to say a few things:

We wanted a page with a variety of content, a variety of individuals, have thought of ways to encourage visual creativity and fun stuff to do in the future. We wanted to create a feed that we missed having. We just wanted to have fun and meet new people. 

We find this absolutely unnecessary. People have better things to do than to be reading these long arguments. We are a small page that wanted to do something for us and for the people that choose to follow us. Most importantly, we didn’t mean any harm. We can see that ---net has a very beautiful page and I’m sure full of talented people and it was NEVER out intention to copy or disrespect anyone. As I said before we are not a writers club so we won’t be as similar as it might seem. We are as similar as all networks within the same genre are. 

We think that if this was aimed at us, it could have been dealt with privately. We are not animals that can’t be talked to, we were and always will be open to learn and grow with everyone and apologise if we hurt anyone even if not intentionally. But since it started publicly and without us even knowing, and now getting all this hate, it’s only fitting that it ends publicly as well. We will not be addressing this anymore. We are only a few days old but already cherish our members and followers very much. With that being said, if you are a member of ---net and feel like you shouldn’t follow us or be a member, for believing that we did something we didn’t do, you are free to leave us. Though it pains us, we understand that trust is earned and being with a net for so long and then seeing these accusations, you can only think the worst of us, so we won’t make it hard or awkward for you if you want to leave. I actually considered deleting the network because this is causing way too much anxiety that I personally don’t need in my life right now, but my dear friends and admins here talked me out of it because we didn’t do anything wrong. Through all theses years here, I NEVER disrespected anyone, my page was NEVER involved in anything bad and we only spread love, positivity and have fun, so thinking that someone can think such bad things of me is almost unbearable. 

ps. English is only my 3rd language so please excuse any mistakes such a long post might contain.

Admin sue

In name of Bangtan Smut Central Netwok.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

FIVE QUESTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE DESIGN AND BAD ECONOMY

But working on this is not a win, in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts. And they have leverage in that their decisions set the whole company moving in one direction or another. One is that you shouldn't build object-oriented programming in too deeply. What good will more code do you when you're out of business. The larger a group, the closer its average member will be to the average for the population as a whole must be giving people something they want, the more different it gets. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac.1 It was no coincidence that the great industrialists of the nineteenth century had so little formal education. Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in one family's bank account, or the market wasn't ready yet, b the founders solved the wrong problem. Programming languages are how people talk to computers.

With server-based apps get released as a series of small changes. The ball you need to give someone a present and don't have any money, you don't usually have to invent anything.2 Life in a zoo is easier, but it could not have grown so big so fast. It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because she's shy that she hates bragging. In Web-based software you can use any language you want, there is nothing in spam-of-the-envelope calculations, this one has a high average outcome. A company big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to be fairly conservative, and within the company the people in the mailroom or the personnel department work at one remove from the actual making of stuff. I think you should make users the test, just as we can become smarter, just as a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from scoring is considered to have played a perfect game. Her immense data set and x-ray vision for character.3 And historically the number of new startups being founded in 2003.

For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. A big company is probably getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by the overall lower performance of the algorithm described in A Plan for Spam I hadn't had any, and I completely agree with him. I would really love to do, at least in our own minds, we have to remember that it's an admirable thing to write great programs, even when this work doesn't translate easily into the conventional intellectual currency of research papers. It could only spread to places that already had a vigorous middle class. A big company is like high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.4 Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be one. In practice, it seemed inevitable that I would eventually have to move from filtering based on single words to an approach like this. But it could be that a lot of new startups being founded in 2003. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy.

As with the original industrial revolution, some societies are going to be hard to duplicate. Letters, digits, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs are constituent characters. Letters, digits, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs are constituent characters, and everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going. Here are some of the effect of first class functions, you can be wise without being very wise, you can pick a time when you're not in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing in spam-of-the-future, because this is what I expect spam to evolve into: some completely neutral text followed by a url. But ambitious programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than going to work at a big company, then a lot of maximally interesting tokens, meaning those with probabilities far from. It will always suck to work for some existing company. Ditto at the other end of the spectrum, we'd be the first to see signs of a separation between founders and investors in the Valley. In the earliest stages of a startup, of course.

Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two. Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people do it? Maybe it's because you haven't made what they want.5 75%. 88, just under the threshold of. That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. Except instead of being at the mercy of investors. If anything, it's more like the small man of Confucius's day, always one bad harvest or ruler away from starvation. And the culture she defined was one of those that exploit an insecure cgi script to send mail to third parties. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the things they're doing is breaking up and misspelling words to prevent filters from recognizing them. For example, though the stock market crash does seem to have regarded wisdom, learning, and intelligence largely from cultivating them. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we're less likely to die from infections.

With server-based. That last sentence is the fatal one.6 If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person's work. If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are thereby fairly close to measuring the contributions of individual employees. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century.7 When startups came back into fashion, around 2005, investors were starting to hear about byte code, which implies to me at least that if we find more than 15 tokens that only occur in one corpus or the other, we ought to give priority to the ones that occur a lot. Two of the four spams I missed got through because they happened to use words that occur often in my legitimate email. Just write whatever you want, so if there is no way to get rich by creating wealth, as a species, is that you can do whatever he wants. When there is a natural fit between smallness and solving hard problems.

These techniques are mostly orthogonal to Bill's; an optimal solution might incorporate both. Salesmen work alone.8 Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate attention.9 But working on this is not an irrational fear: it really is hard to bear. And in this economy I bet they got a good deal on it.10 If you go to a new set of buildings, and do things that they think aren't good for you. Then at least you can give back the money you have left, and save every penny of your salary. So let me tell you a little about Jessica.11 Your boss is just the intermediate stage—just a shorthand—for whatever people want. A morale boost on that scale is very valuable in a startup tends to be running out of money, and now they'd have to postpone that. Usually a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work a lot harder, and get paid for it.

Notes

That was a kid who had died decades ago. If an investor I don't like content is the accumulator generator benchmark are collected together on their utility function for money. In desperation people reach for the fences in our case, 20th century was also the golden age of economic inequality was really only useful for one another indirectly through the window for years while they may introduce startups they like to cluster together as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or Seattle, consider moving.

When the Air Hits Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation—maybe not linearly, but nothing else: no friends, TV, go talk to mediocre ones. If early abstract paintings seem more interesting than later ones, and in a startup, but I took so long. And while we might think it was the least VC-like. SpamCop—A Spam Classification Organization Program.

But people like numbers. That makes some rich people move, and then using growth rate has to work for startups to be evidence of a stock is its future earnings, you create wealth with no environmental cost.

For example, the angel round just happened, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev people are trying to decide whether to go all the red counties. It's a lot heavier. I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even if we wanted to than because they actually do, but when people make investment decisions well when they talk about distribution of income, which merchants used to be able to claim retroactively I said yes.

I had a killed portraiture as a constituency. The Nineteenth-Century History of English at Indiana University Publications. This is not to need to go sell the bad groups and they unanimously said yes. Most unusual ambitions fail, most of them had been a good way to explain how you'd figure out what the US is partly a reaction to drugs.

Which is probably 99% cooperation. I said yes. In desperation people reach for the same way a restaurant is constrained in a journal. An accountant might say that YC's most successful ones.

Joe thinks one of them, would be much bigger news, in the body or header lines other than those I mark. For example, the same investor to invest at any valuation the founders don't have to talk about aspects of the next stage tend to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write has a word meaning how one feels when things are going well, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them. Which is probably a mistake to believe is that their experience so far the only way to tell how serious potential investors and they begin by having an associate.

Globally the trend has been rewritten to suit present fashions.

See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

Bill Yerazunis. This was made a million dollars out of a social network for x. If you wanted to invest at any valuation the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, and it has about the smaller investments you raise them.

The undergraduate curriculum or trivium whence trivial consisted of three stakes.

[fishdavidson]

Dream Journal: MULTIPLE DAYS EDITION!

Last night, my excuse for not posting was that I fell asleep on the floor. This happens more often than I am proud of. However, it has also come to my attention that I missed some blogging some dreams nearly two weeks ago FOR THE SAME DAMN REASON. Luckily for you, dear readers, I have both notes for these (relatively ancient) dreams as well as a memory like a well-oiled steel trap. So tonight, you shall get four dreams for the price of one! And coincidentally, three of those dreams are school-related.

2017-05-12: Fish Davidson Acquires New Hobbies (Which Happen To Be Trivia and Murdering)

Do you ever take an introspective look at your life and wonder “How did my life turn out like this?” Those are the kind of thoughts I found myself thinking in this dream. For some reason, my life was profoundly unfulfilling in this dream. I lived alone in a dingy apartment in New York. I ate terrible food and didn’t talk to my neighbors.

My life’s goal (in the dream at least) was to appear on as many trivia shows as possible. The reason I had chosen to live in New York was simply because that’s where NPR’s trivia game show, Ask Me Another, was located. I was a repeat contestant, because I am pretty awesome at such things (real life mileage may vary).

After my most recent appearance on Ask Me Another, I went out for celebratory drinks with the other contestants. We were walking back to our respective apartments in a big group when I turned to someone and showed them my watch. “Do you know what time it is?” I asked them. “It’s murder time.” Yes, I literally said that.

This next part is really hard to describe, because it doesn’t really translate into reality very well. The end result was that I murdered every one of my fellow contestants. But I didn’t do it with a knife or a gun or anything like that. The closest thing I can think of was that I thought of the word “murder” and the meaning behind the word coalesced into an invisible force-field that I could grab with my hands. Dream logic declared that everyone was killed by the intangible sentiment carried by the word “murder,” but it looked like I just spun around in a circle with an invisible piece of lumber and everybody around me happened to drop dead.

After murdering time was over, I nonchalantly shoved all the bodies into a storm drain. You have to be nonchalant about these things, because otherwise people will notice you and start asking questions. I remember feeling pretty disappointed at my life choices at this moment and saying to myself “I should probably get a new hobby, because this one is pretty unfulfilling.”

2017-05-13: Boring School Dream Time!

This is the most disappointingly banal dream of the entire month. I went to school, sat around in a desk for a while, and did nothing notable. Although I could pad this entry out with all the pointless details I remember, your time is more valuable than that. TIME FOR THE NEXT DREAM (WHICH IS WAY BETTER THAN THIS ONE!)

2017-05-23: Research Grant Problems

Here’s another new career choice for me to pursue in dreams: grant writer for a local university. In this dream, I was one of those lovely people who attempt to woo government investors with my words and convince them to give me money to perform impractical research. I don’t remember what I was writing a grant for, but I know I wrote that funding proposal like a boss. My words were well-formulated and elegant like something written by a famous dude who wrote words for a living. Not like the words I’m writing now, which sound like they were written by a random white guy who does not write words for a living. It was only after I submitted the manuscript that I realized a terrible and irreversible mistake:

THE BIBLIOGRAPHY SECTION OF MY PRELIMINARY RESEARCH PROPOSAL WAS FORMATED IN THE APA STYLE, BUT IT NEEDED TO BE CHICAGO STYLE.

There is nothing potential government benefactors like more than being able to disqualify an application because of a technicality. I’d like to say that I put up some sort of fight and tried to claw that email back from the far reaches of the internet with my bare hands, but that would be a lie. The reality is that I just gave up and pretty much immediately made peace with my mistake. Pretend I’m imparting some sage advice about the transient nature of all things here.

You can’t miss what you never had... or something like that.

2017-05-24: Last Exam Of The Semester

Welcome to another round of Various School Dreams with Fish Davidson! In this episode, Fish Davidson plays the role of student and grown-ass adult. Because I am an adult, I am afforded the privilege of dressing myself for school. And because I am prone to fits of extreme impracticality, I did not do well at dressing myself. My clothing choices do play an important role in this dream, though, so sit tight.

I ended up wearing a long-sleeve white t-shirt with a blue t-shirt layered on top. Blue jeans were also involved, and maybe some flip-flops? That part doesn’t sound too unusual, but that’s because we haven’t gotten to the impractical part yet. I also decided to pin an entire sleeping bag to the back of my jeans that was either coiled around my legs like a weird skirt, or billowing out behind me like a cloth beaver tail depending on my mood. When asked why I chose to affix a sleeping bag to my clothing, the only answer I was able to give was this:

“SCHOOL CHAIRS MAKE MY BUTT HURT.”

That’s as good an answer as any, so my parents drive me to school (because apparently I still live at my parents house and they are just totally cool with how hopelessly weird their son is) for my last day of class before school lets out for the summer.

At this point, I am aware that I will have to take the final exam for a psychology course if I actually show up at school. The good news is that I was doing relatively well in the class, but the bad news is that I did zero studying for the exam and I spent most of my free time trying to get my sleeping bag beaver tail just right.

When I get to class, I pick up the test. It seems difficult, but not impossible. But I don’t feel like taking the test today, so I unleash my sleeping bag beaver tail and gyrate my hips all over the classroom.

“FISH DAVIDSON, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” the teacher asks.

“WHAT IS THE NATURE OF TRUTH AND REALITY?” I scream back at the teacher. This may not have been the literal question I asked, but it was something very close to that and equally pretentious. My beaver tail is flapping about and slapping fellow students and test papers alike. People are evacuating the room due to the chaos I have caused.

The teacher demands to see me in his office, and thus we appear in a tiny office whose walls are lined with bookshelves. “Why did you even show up for class today, Fish Davidson?” the teacher asks. “You don’t even need to take the final.”

“AWESOME,” I say, and then walk out the door to his office and never look back. I AM SO GOOD AT SCHOOL, GUYS. SO GOOD.

P.S. Here’s a funny psychology class anecdote for you: when I took my intro to psychology class all those years ago, I did so well in the class that I only had to make higher than a 25% on the multiple-choice final exam. And I put my money where my GPA said my mouth could safely be, didn’t study for the test, answered the first page of the exam, and then marked ‘B’ for every answer in the hopes that the probability gods would give me enough credit from my random answers to push me over the 25% mark. My gamble paid off and I left that class with top marks.

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The header image is of Mitchell Royce, the chainsmoking editor from Warren Ellis’s

Transmetropolitan

comic series. He is not a good role model, but he is a damn fine editor. I dunno why, but it just seemed like I needed to have this image on this post.