#and what about all the other defunct websites like

[bugeyedfreaks]

me and my completely normal late night thoughts about old ppg fan works

[homosexualworkaccount]

Jason Todd’s “Replacement” nickname for Tim Drake, Origins and Popularisation

So, making a 2500-word essay on how a fanon nickname that only me and like two other people care about is not how I expected to spend my time in between exams.

A lot of Batfam fans are very, very much aware of the fanon “Replacement” nickname Jason has for Tim, and a lot of us very, very much hate it due to the connotations of fanon characterisation that it has. I don’t personally, I think it’s an alright enough one that fits into the established canon ones – but to be fair, I haven’t read the comics in a hot minute, so my memory could be screwy.

I got curious one day on where the nickname came from when a user on TikTok mentioned that it might’ve originated from a Batfam incest fic (They weren’t too sure and told me to take it with a grain of salt) – so shout out to them for starting me down this rabbit hole! I looked over on here and saw that notion repeated, though no one could pinpoint me to a specific fic beyond “It was popularised from a Batfam incest fic.”. I also saw a few people say that it was derived from canon, which piqued my interest further so I decided to go down a rabbit hole of fandom history purely for some fun.

The aim of this essay is just to clear up some misconceptions around the origin of the name, all fun and no harm. Don’t send harassment to people referenced in this either over a silly nickname, it's been well over a decade since they wrote the works used here.

Preface

Alright, first things first – all sources are going to be ones that were published after August 2005, the official date the first issue of Batman: Under the Red Hood was published, where Jason was established to be alive again.

While there could be a chance that the nickname was derived from a website/fanfiction before 2005, it’s highly unlikely due to the fact it was only popularised in the early 2010’s, and well, because Jason was dead and no one gave a shit about him. Also good to remember that most websites that ran before 2005 are defunct and purged from the internet now, particularly fanfiction websites (such as Quidzillia) due to various issues (taboo, copyright, costs to run ect).

Small note to make again – the Batfam fandom was fairly small at the time, the more fandom-y part of the DC community usually sticking to their own websites like Quotev, Quidzilla (again, defunct now), AO3, Fanfiction.net, LiveJournal and independent websites (again, defunct) while the rest stuck to discussion sites, so the entire fandom functioned more as a insular community from what I could tell. I will be working with the assumption that the nickname was created on one of the larger platforms, as any other platform didn’t have large enough influence to popularise the nickname.

The nicknames that I specifically looked for was simply Jason calling Tim Replacement in place of his actual name. Something like “Replacement Robin” was on very thin ice, but still counted as an offshoot. Anything else was off bets.

This whole thing will be split into a few sections to make some things for myself easier. Preface, Sources, Pre-cursor Fanfiction, Fandom Opinion and Language, First usage, Popularisation, Conclusion, Questions, Final Notes.

Sources

Fanfic.net – Created 1998, was and remains one of the larger fanfiction sites. Note; Fanfiction.net had various periods of time where there were large scale purges of fanfictions that held more mature content. Most notable instances were in 2002 and 2012.

Archive Of Our Own – The holy grail for my research. Created in 2008. For the information I got from there I used the search filter Date Updated, tagged Jason’s and Tim’s individual tags and followed from there.

Live Journal – Created 1999 and was used as one of the larger sites for fandom and fanfiction. Was used by DC fandom goers regularly so I used it to get an idea of the fandom at the time.

Tumblr – Created 2007. Theres various people on here who have compilations on DC timelines and comic sourcing that helped me correlate fandom growth with specific comic releases (Shout out to @ectonurites for their meta posts and timeline posts, they were a major source for this!). Dogshit filtering system, so I couldn’t find posts pre 2012 about DC.

Note; Quotev and Wattpad weren’t used in this as their filtering systems don’t account for searching for older fanfictions, so sadly had to be discarded as most fanfictions between 2006-2010 on those websites are now very difficult to find.

Pre-Cursor FanFiction

So, before we get to the actual first proper use I could find of “Replacement”, I first want to mention a fanfiction that had something very similar that I think would be important purely for archiving reasons around how the nickname came to be. And also because it fits the nickname criteria I mentioned earlier.

Published on the 29th of November 2006, last updated on the 28th of November 2007, was the fanfiction My-Enemy-My-Brother on Fanfiction.net by user theunknownvoice – featuring the first use of Jason referring to Tim with a nickname including replacement, Replacement Robin. Kudos to theunknownvoice, they created the very first nickname that would kickstart the rest.

While Jason doesn’t explicitly refer to Tim as Replacement – the main subject of this essay, it comes very damn close, so I wanted to include it. There is a part where Jason repeats replacement in his head multiple times, and I think he’s supposed to be referring to Tim, but the sentence isn’t very clear on that part, so I won’t count it, but it is important to acknowledge.

Though this isn’t the fanfiction that influenced the development of Replacement. This fic had barely enough reach to influence any future works years later. I couldn’t find any connection with this work and later works that officially did just have Jason call Tim “Replacement”

Fandom Opinion and Language at the time

I promise this is important and that I’m not a pretentious linguistic, English isn’t even my first language.

I like to think we all know how fandom discussion just seeps into fanfiction (See; the nickname green bean for Deku from MHA leaking into fanfiction) so I just want to quickly point this out.

Discussion around the two blew up after Jasons return in late 2005, people going “What does this mean” and “What does that mean for Tim”. Through the few posts I could dig up from this time and up to 2011, it seems people came to the conclusion that Tim was Jason’s replacement, and that their dynamic was Jason dealing with the fact that he had one. You can definitely see that in some of the posts and fanfiction written at the time that usually had Jason dealing with Tim being his replacement.

(Just a few examples from LiveJournal but more like this are still floating around, if they aren’t deleted anyway)

It’s very likely that the authors themselves engaged in similar discussions/had independent thoughts that ended in the same conclusions, seeping into the fanfiction itself later. In the comics pre-New 52 I couldn’t find any major instance of Jason explicitly referring to Tim as his replacement (only implied through speech), so this was mostly contained in fandom discussions from what I can tell. (Note, this was probably similar on comic discussion websites, but I couldn’t find any that still exist pre-2007, so I’m going to assume literacy skills are not any better on those sites. See; Batman dick riders)

The fact that Tim is explicitly described as having replaced Jason, and sometimes as “Being the Replacement” on posts/fanfiction definitely had a hand in the creation and popularisation of the nickname, influencing the fan content made around the two.

First usage of Replacement

Cain! Cain! Is the first use of the nickname Replacement really from a Batfam incest fanfiction?

Nope, thank God.

After filtering their character tags together on AO3, going to the oldest page and clicking through over 10 pages, reading every single fanfiction on each one (yes, even the weird ones, I was dedicated) I found the first instance where Jason explicitly refers to Tim as Replacement, that still exists today anyway.

Published on the 24th of January, 2009 by user shiny_glor_chan, is the fanfiction Four Calling Birds, a fanfiction detailing Stephenie Brown returning from faking her death (a whole headache from the comics that I can't be arsed to explain) and getting to meet Jason and Dick for the first time. Genuinely sweet, and a corner stone of fandom history, officially. Hip hip Hooray! Congratulations shiny_glor_chan.

I tried tracing to see if this person had any other accounts that I could find to see where they got the nickname from, but it seems it’s mostly a nickname they thought up out of the fact that they had consistently wrote Jason explicitly stating that Tim was his replacement

And reading through several more pages of fanfiction again, feeling like I want to bleach my eyes out, I found the second instance of the nickname being used. Published on the 26th of May, 2010 by user axiel-neesan, is the fanfiction The Only Piece You Get, where Jason basically acts as Tim’s cabbie and bonds with him. Another corner stone of fandom history, hooray.

These two authors are completely unrelated and have no connections to each other besides both frequenting LiveJournal, having taken prompts and having friends from that website, despite having no accounts I could find. I personally think they had a similar train of thought of “Huh, that would be a sick ass nickname.”. Chances are that axiel-neesan saw shiny_glor_chans fic and got inspired as the fandom was dead small on AO3 at the time – around 20 pages worth of fanfiction from 2008-2010 (And thats being generous if we’re counting now deleted ones)

These two fanfictions are immensely important because it’s the only early instances I could find of the nickname being used, and for about two years after the nickname pops up occasionally – but by no means was it popular, or even regularly used, I had to look for the fanfictions that used it.

Props to shiny_glor_chan and axiel-neesan! I pray that you two don’t see what the fandom thinks of that nickname now.

Popularisation

Early 2012 saw the proper explosion of fandom for the Batfam, and by extension the nickname.

By this point there were so many fanfictions that I couldn’t read them all, so I started picking random ones that tagged Jason and Tims relationship, platonic or not. Pre-April-ish of 2012 the nickname popped up every other page or so, but sometime after mid-2012 the nickname was in almost every fanfiction that I skimmed through – so that’s its official growth period.

Why though? Several factors probably.

The New-52 was in full swing by this time, DC massively promoting the reboot to get new fans interested, so people picked up comics from there. Young Justice – the more mainstream exposure of DC to surface level fans aired its second season in April of 2012, introducing people to Tim Drake and his story and getting them interested. Fanfiction and fandom as a whole was becoming less taboo and more accepted in fan spaces, so encouragement to write it was much better than it was in the early years of the internet (Example; Teen Wolf’s production team)

As for a specific catalyst for the growth of popularity for the nickname? There might be something worth pointing to.

Kudos for @ectonurites for helping me on this (Hi Sam! I was anon!) and giving me a publishing date on Tim’s and Jason’s first New 52 interaction – Red Hood and the Outlaws #8, published on the 18th of April, 2012. It features an instance of Jason and Tim interacting in a very friendly and familial way, Jason explicitly calling Bruce their Dad. Compared to their last major previous interaction of Jason leaving Tim for dead, fans of the two who enjoyed the more familial potential (and tragically, romantic potential) took it and ran with it.

All of these combined in some way to contribute to the popularity of the nickname in mid to late 2012, and lead to it’s infamy in DC fanfiction.

Conclusion

In conclusion, how do I think the nickname came to be?

I think it’s a combination of factors that led to it’s creation. As already established people very much did see Tim as Jasons replacement at the time, and the language could have shortened down from “Tim replaced Jason” to “Tim is Jason’s replacement” to “Tim is the replacement” which I think could be the train of thought the 2006 author went down to create the nickname Replacement Robin.

This definitely influenced the AO3 writers as shiny_glor_chan was present on LiveJournal at the time (where this language was very prominent), so they were already down the line of thinking this and probably went “Huh, replacement is kinda a funny nickname” and added it. As already stated, I think axiel-neesan probably had a very similar train of thought or may have seen shiny_glor_chan’s fic and was inspired.

And from there people saw it, used it in their own works, getting leaked over onto LiveJournal, which was the main website for prompt sharing, getting used a decent amount there before the explosion of fandom in mid-2012 that lead to it’s regular usage in fan works.

Questions

So, is the nickname from a Batcest fic?

Nope! The nickname mostly makes an appearance in platonic fics between Jason and Tim, it’s actually a chore to find it in their romantic ones, as in I think I found one instance of it being used somewhere in late 2010 but I can't think of it in a fanfiction that predates that. All early uses of the nickname were in platonic fics between the two.

I think this rumour is based around three fanfictions specifically on Ao3 that people are pointing to, I think, no one seems to be wanting to name names. They’re the ones that pop up when you search Replacement in the word search after tagging Tim Drake and Jason Todd together.

Wings to Fly. Published October of 2012. Jason Refers to Tim as Replacement. Jason/Tim

Replacement. Published 2009. The title implies it’s referring to Tim, but Jason never explicitly nicknames Tim replacement, the narrator only calling Tim “His replacement”, him being Jason. Jason/Tim. Non-con

The Replacement. Published 2011. Can't figure out if the title is supposed to refer to Tim or is simply just titled that for the sake of it. Jason talks a few times about Tim being his replacement, but the nickname never makes an appearance. Jason/Tim

Does the nickname have any bases in Canon?

From what I can tell, no. I haven’t read all the Batfamily comics Pre-New 52, or from after Batman: Under The Red Hood, I mostly stray towards Hal Jordans comics lol. I don’t think theres any major instance where Jason talks about Tim replacing him by specifically using replacement or replacing (It can be inferred from his speech sometimes, but Jason’s relationship with Tim was much more complex than that. I’d recommend reading @ectonurites metas about the two to get a better idea) Theres a few instances in 2015 post-New 52 reboot where Jason says explicitly that Tim replaced him, but that was way after the nickname was popularised.

Red Hood and Arsenal #7 (2015)

Final Notes

That’s about it! That’s the result of my month long dive into almost twenty years worth of DC fandom history as a fun side project. Please don’t harass anyone linked here, this was just project to pass the time and not a call out post for anyone that did contribute to the popularisation of the nickname.

Feel free to ask me anything else about this or any other DC fandom history and I’ll try to research it!! This was genuinely a fun thing to do to pass the time and work out my research muscles.

[gacha-incels]

I hope no one is falling for the same horseshit Korean misogynist men try to barf up when they want “logical” westerners to be on their side regarding 🤏. The thing that always strikes me when they fear-monger about the defunct megalia website is this: if these women writing “cruel” things online and engaging in mirroring techniques is enough to brand them man-haters and have them become some eternal boogeywomen, why aren’t the men stabbing, killing, raping, witch-hunting, sexually trafficking and beating women - because they are women - branded as extreme women-haters in turn? Surely these targeted attacks that have happened, and continue to happen frequently, are enough to label these men extremist misogynists whose actions and texts are dangerous to Korean society? But instead, as we have seen recently, their deranged misogynist thoughts are carefully listened to and their delusions are catered to by major companies.

Secondly, these guys like to portray the women they go after as having dangerous opinions by saying, oh the pinched fingers means they’re megal and therefore it’s a secret signal for all these “hateful” thoughts. However the “radical, hateful thoughts” the men trawl through these women’s social medias to find have always ended up being basic women’s rights: the right to have an abortion, being against sex trafficking, being against molka, condemning misogynist hiring practices, etc. These extremely basic tenets of feminism are what these men consider radical and dangerous to society. When they try to pull the wool over your eyes by saying “feminism is different in korea it’s extreme and evil” THESE are the things they mean. Saying “it’s a megal symbol for crazy female supremacy” is a smokescreen for misogynist men to punish women who want basic human rights. The smaller group of women engaging in 4B there try to live their lives in a female-centered way, away from men. These are the women that misogynist men revile so much that simply existing as a woman with short hair is enough for them to violently attack you with a knife. So how does this make sense? The women branded as evil misandrists live their lives avoiding men and uplifting other women. The men who hate women do the complete opposite: they go out of their way to physically and sexually assault women and get them fired from their jobs. The misogynists in that group who witch hunt women are not labeled extremists, but rather catered to by companies like Nexon. Don’t fall for their shit.

[renthony]

Hi! Could you talk about what it’s like being an independent media researcher and how you became one? Did you go to school for communications or media studies? How do you make money?

I’m about to graduate college and I really want to go into the media studies field but I haven’t really figured out what the best way for me to do that is. I have a lot of similar research interests as you (animation, censorship, media analysis, queer media) and I’m disabled so I’ve been worried about not having the energy for a traditional 9 to 5 sort of job, so I’d love to hear more about how you’re able to do the research you’re passionate about!

Honestly, I got here by accident, and I'm still figuring things out as I go. I don't make much money and right now I feel like my work is in a period of transition. I have plans, but some days it feels like I'm barely making baby steps.

I started writing when I was pretty young, and I read every single "how to write" guide I could get my hands on via the library or bookstore. I wrote constantly. Short stories, various false starts at baby's first novel, even newsletters for school activities and community clubs. I was most focused on fiction at first, but I learned a lot about nonfiction as well.

I got involved in online writing communities back when forums were still a big deal, and I joined Twitter back in 2009 when it was still new and there was a massive author and freelancer community. (Anyone else remember before retweets were a thing? We had to copy, paste, and manually type out "RT @[user]" like barbarians.) I learned an absolute fuckton about the craft and the industry by talking directly with other writers, literary agents, editors, and various other people in the field. From the time I was like 14, I was interacting with professional writers, sharing my work for feedback, and racking up rejection letters from magazines and literary agents (which was a badge of honor in the communities I was hanging out in, because it meant you were working hard and refusing to quit). When I was 17, my best friend even scraped together money from their shitty fast food job to pay for us to attend a major writing conference in Denver, where we participated in all kinds of classes and panels with industry professionals.

My mother was also writing at the time, and I got a lot of support from her. She had a blog that got a decent amount of interaction, because this was right around the rise of the Mommy Blogger and my mom wrote from the perspective of a socially-isolated tattooed punk mom who never planned to have kids (which was unusual in a landscape of perfect housewives with perfect photogenic babies with weirdly-spelled Mormon names they chose when they were kids). Eventually my mom started writing for a website owned by Yahoo, to supplement the household income while staying home to care for my little siblings. When I decided I wanted to take a whack at freelancing, she gave me a lot of advice on how to get started. I also had a writing class at school taught by a teacher who made it a class project to submit to magazines, so I basically got a head-start on freelance life. I wrote a lot of random articles for a website that's since gone defunct, and I submitted a lot of short stories to contests and magazines. Didn't really make a lot of money, but I learned a ton and got a lot of experience.

When I made it to college, I studied anthropology and French. I'd planned to study history, but switched my track after a single semester because anthropology suited me better. I took a lot of AP classes in high school and did well on all the standardized testing, so I managed to get a full academic scholarship and skip right past a few of my gen eds. Unfortunately for me, I had a lot of difficult life experiences during that time period, and I started to struggle in pretty much everything that wasn't directly related to my degree. I failed Latin so bad I didn't bother to go to the final exam, because even a perfect grade wouldn't have saved me. I fucked up my algebra grade beyond salvation. Those two classes alone tanked my GPA enough that I lost my academic scholarship, and I wound up dropping out entirely. Grades in my required courses were solid, but the scholarship requirements meant I had to do well across the board or lose my funding.

My mother still has debt from getting loans to pursue a master's degree, and I knew damn well I didn't want that kind of student debt piling up on me, so I opted for dropping out. Sometimes I regret it a little, but I honestly think it was the best option. I was having so much emotional upheaval on top of the academic stress that I needed time away to figure myself out. I graduated high school early, so I was like two years younger than everyone around me, and I didn't have many friends. I lived at home and came to campus just long enough to go to class, so I had nothing in common with my classmates who lived in dorms and participated in campus activities. I missed orientation because I registered late, the administration sent me to the transfer student registration day instead of the new student registration day, and I didn't get any "here's how you navigate university life" support. I didn't know I was supposed to have a one-on-one academic advisor for a year and a half, and when I finally met him, his only comment on the matter was, "wow, I wondered why you hadn't come to see me yet!" without any sort of inquiry into how a fuckup on that scale was allowed to happen in the first place. I wasn't set up for success by university administration, and I burnt out hard. I dropped out.

My wife encouraged me to do what was going to be best for me mentally instead of letting finances dictate my next step. She had a steady job, and even though we were still pretty broke, her support let me drop out of college and focus on recovery. A lot of people gave me shit because their perception was that I was dropping out of college to become "just a housewife," and they couldn't fathom why. From my perspective, I'd been given a lifeline.

I took care of our shitty little one-bedroom apartment. I read a lot of books and played a lot of Minecraft. When I felt up to it, I did some more freelancing. My wife was working unholy hours in a factory and we didn't get to spend much time together. I started doing tarot reading as a side hustle, and we started making vague plans to move somewhere better for us, but saving up was hard.

Things felt stagnant for a long time. I didn't write very much, I wasn't really doing anything related to my studies. I wrote when I had energy, and I kept scraping together extra cash doing tarot readings while my wife started working a new job in a lumber yard. Her support is the only reason I was able to recover and figure myself out, so big shout-out to my beloved working woman wifey. God, I love her.

Eventually we packed up and moved to a different state so we could be closer to my family. I got a job baking for a coffee shop. I wrote whenever I could. When I got laid off from the coffee shop, I realized there was no way in hell I could keep working a regular job without sacrificing my health, so I went back to writing full-time. (The Queen of Cups was written during this period.)

At some point I started getting back into anthropology and history research, just for fun. I didn't have money to finish my degree, but I had enough academic experience to know how to track down and evaluate good sources. I wasn't really trying to do anything for career purposes, I was just incredibly bored and wanted to study something again, so I got really, really into studying local history. Once I read everything I could about that, I jumped to another topic I was interested in, and then another. Media studies became my biggest focus as a natural outgrowth of my interests in speculative fiction, animation, and the history of the entertainment industry. I studied anthropology in school because I loved learning how and why humans do the things we do, and media studies always felt like an obvious facet of that. It's part of why I was always obsessed with cave paintings and paleolithic sculptures--people make art! It's what we do! It's what we've always done!

Anyway, I now live in a university town that has resources available to the public, and I have friends who work in various university libraries or as professors. I started making use of whatever I could get access to. I read a lot of nonfiction books from independent researchers pursuing their own passion projects, I got really into video essays on YouTube, and I had the epiphany that you don't actually have to finish college to study and write about things as long as you put in the quality research and source all your information. At some point I started calling it my "DIY academia," which my university-employed friends found utterly delightful.

Honestly, I credit my formal-academia friends with a lot. They've all been an incredible source of support and reassurance, and have helped me track down quite a few sources I was having trouble getting my hands on. Everyone do yourself a favor and make friends with someone who works in a university library.

I started a Patreon several years ago (in like 2017 I think?), primarily for my fiction writing, but there's plenty of other things that have shown up there over the years (art, cosplay, essays, etc.). As I started getting more into my DIY academia, folks started expressing interest in seeing me write about it. My tumblr posts about media generated a decent amount of attention, I'd managed to build up a platform, and it wasn't hard to say, "okay, screw it: I have freelance experience and I know how to write a paper, does anyone want to pay me for it?"

I haven't been submitting to existing publications like I used to, mostly because I don't have a decent portfolio assembled. My old freelance work in high school and college was for a platform that closed down a decade ago, and no matter how popular they get I can't bring myself to include tumblr posts alongside professional credits. My current plan is to build a portfolio on my website showing off the commissions I've been taking, and then start submitting to magazines and newspapers again between my other work. I'd love to eventually write for something like Polygon or IGN.

It's hard. I love research, I love writing, and I love sharing information with people, but having to DIY everything is really, really hard. I often feel like I'm just throwing nonsense into the void in the hope someone will like it and leave a tip in my Ko-Fi. I don't have formal academic credentials beyond "I was planning my senior thesis about the ethics of investigating ancient burial sites, but then I dropped out." I just have a neurodivergent brain, a handful of special interests, a wife who works the graveyard shift in a lab to pay our bills, and the ability to hyperfixate on research for absurd lengths of time.

The most common advice I used to get about freelancing is that you just have to keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. It's been years since then, but I think the advice still applies. Read a lot, learn a lot, and write about the things you're most interested in. Search around and look for magazines and newspapers and websites that accept unsolicited freelance submissions. Read the other articles they publish to see how your work stacks up. Submit, submit, submit. Rake in rejection letters and keep them as a reminder of how hard you're working. If you're up for it, start a Patreon to post the things you don't submit elsewhere. The worst thing that can happen is that people don't give you money, but maintaining it still helps you lay the groundwork for a portfolio and a reader base.

I deal with a lot of hellacious impostor syndrome. I worry a lot that I'm just a hack who doesn't actually know what they're talking about. Like I said, I got here totally by accident, but whatever I'm doing seems to be working for me. I'm broke, but my work is being read, and opportunities for more work show up when I least expect them. I'm not sure what's next for me, but I'm excited to figure it out. Money's tight, but I keep enduring despite the chaos. I throw things at the wall, I see what sticks, I clean up whatever flops and then try it again later. Wash, rinse, repeat.

It's hard, but so is everything else. I like it better than a lot of other things I could be doing.

[toydrill]

ULTIMATE CBS MASTERPOST

(or, a general hub to answer a few questions that my followers who are here for other things that are not my passion projects might be curious about)

recently i've been really pushing hard into working on this revival project, so i thought it would be helpful to have a nice big post with links to all of my stuff inside it!

"what is care bear stars?"

care bear stars was a 2008-2009 fanime created, drawn, and animated by joshua click (known at the time as jcstars5). here's a general synopsis:

Care Bear Stars follows the story of Terry Rogers, who meets a magical anthropomorphic bear named True Heart Bear. She gives him a magical talisman, and with it, he transforms into Tender Heart Bear. Along with the other Care Bear Stars, they work to protect good feelings and love among humankind and fight the evil Professor Coldheart, alongside a rogues gallery of otherworldly foes.

for those who don't know exactly what a fanime is and what it entails, here's a good definition from TVtropes:

Fanime (a portmanteau of “fan” and “anime”) is a type of Web Animation typically created by young amateur artists that originated on YouTube around 2006, a year after the site's launch. ... In the past, many fanime were animesque cartoons based on pre-existing anime, especially Tokyo Mew Mew and other Magical Girl shows. Tracing was also common. Instead of using animation software, creators would usually draw frames in MS Paint or Photoshop and composite them in Windows Movie Maker. ... As fanime was predominately created by very young artists inexperienced in animation in the beginning, it gained a reputation for being bad. ... Following the mainstream popularity of Nyan~ Neko Sugar Girls, this type of fanime dominated the community for a long time, but creators attempting to create genuine shows still remain and the community has grown increasingly talented and creative throughout the years.

care bear stars was received pretty well for its time for fanime, receiving a decent amount of fanwork and discussions on websites like deviantArt. though it was far from the only fanime at the time with its premise, its generally considered one of the pillars of first generation fanime alongside series like elemental goddess, and stood out for having full TV length episodes (something that was unheard of at the time for fanime).

the project was cancelled in 2009 after the creator received a cease & desist letter from then (now defunct) owners of the care bear stars franchise, cookie jar group.

for a more in depth write up of my knowledge of CBS during its active period, joshua click's thoughts looking back on the series in adulthood, and where many of the VOs in the project are now, you can check out this document i've worked on and off on for 8 years

"why do you gaf?"

autism

i met some really great friends from the fanime community and now i've imprinted on this show in my mind more than any fanime that i'd ever watched

i love care bears

autism again

as a testament to said autism: here's a collection of all the care bears stars fanart i've ever found

"okay so what is care bear stars r?"

exactly what it sounds like. it's just a 1-to-1 remake of the premise, characters, etc with what i could find of the original project + what i would have done if it were me

for an in-depth (but WIP) write up of my revival, CARE BEAR STARS R, you can click here

you can also find all of my art & write-ups here , and all of my friends' fanart here , and all of the references for them here

other resources

my twitter thread that i consistently update

my tumblr tag for posting about care bear stars

the original series in chronological (series) order

thank you so much for reading!

[desertdollranch]

Dolls brands I never thought I'd own, part 4: Global PenPals

Meet Amity Anderson!

This doll was a tough cookie to track down. I first stumbled across her last year while searching for a completely different doll on eBay. I thought she was adorable, but priced way too high, so I let someone else have her. When I saw her come up again recently for a lot cheaper, I lost the bidding war. When she popped up unexpectedly a third time, I managed to snap her up right away.

The first time I saw her, I was curious about her origin, since the listing said nothing about the brand, Global PenPals. I figured it was someone's small business, because it's an unfortunate truth that many, many 18 inch doll companies produce beautiful and quality dolls for a few short years and then go out of business. Because she certainly didn't look poorly made or low quality; she obviously had a lot of love put into her production. I could tell she had a really nice wig and a carefully sculpted, realistic face mold. She was meant to be more than just a toy, but a little friend as well. That's what I liked about her. She was special, rare, obscure, and unique. And as much as I love my American Girl dolls, I also love the rare and obscure 18 inch dolls that have fallen into my lap over the years through pure luck. That has turned me into a connoisseur of obscure dolls. The rarer, the better.

So for that reason I couldn't get her off my mind. I became very fixated on finding one. I did a Google search that brought up nothing but the listing for her, plus a few dolls with similar brand names, or sites for finding an actual human pen pal. But I noticed the listing photo included a picture of her box, which had the URL of the brand's website. It was defunct, so I plugged into the Wayback Machine at archive.org to see what I could find.

Keep reading for a deep dive into The Global PenPals.

(Hello to anyone in the future who might be doing a web search about this doll! I'm sure you've found little to no information. I've put everything right here for your convenience!)

...

The site's first snapshot was taken in February 2011. It has a very short intro:

"This site is dedicated to children everywhere. Autumn Woods and Amity Anderson will begin pen pal corresponding with children in other parts of the world. They will learn about different living conditions and diverse cultural traditions. Will they discover that children are the same worldwide? Come along with us and see!"

None of the links on the sidebar were archived by the Wayback machine, so I looked at the next three snapshots, taken in July 2013, January 2014, and December 2014 (the final snapshot).

Now this snapshot displays a lot more content, although once again most of the site didn't get archived. The intro is more or less the same. But now we can see illustrations of the two main characters, Autumn Woods and Amity Anderson.

Clicking through the "Meet and learn more about Autumn" graphic linked to a page that had biographies for both characters.

Autumn Woods introduces herself first. She was born in October, hence her name, but she loves Christmas more. She lives in Kennewick, Washington with her parents and younger sister, and likes her school. She's athletic and loves to do cartwheels. Her best friend Amity lives in Basin City, near the farm where her grandparents live. She doesn't know a whole lot about the world outside of Kennewick, so she's looking forward to making pen pals all around the world.

Amity Anderson introduces herself next. She loves living on a farm in Basin City, and most of the other kids at her school are also from farming families, or live in the area seasonally, which has made her curious about the lives of other children of different background. Her family grows cherries, and sometimes the crops fail due to weather conditions. They also have lots of animals including dogs, cats, and cows. She has a secret hideout in the hay loft.

The next page linked at the top contains all of the pen pal letters to and from Autumn and Amity.

There are 10 pages of these letters. The first letter is dated June 11th of 2011, and the final one is dated August 14th of 2013.

Next link is Marcia's Dolls.

To sum it up, Global PenPals was started by Marcia Elovich in 2010. She had always sewn doll clothes for her granddaughter, and her husband built doll furniture. She used dolls to help schoolchildren learn more about the lives and perspectives of children all over the world. She modeled the dolls' faces on her granddaughter and niece, and hopes to introduce more dolls to the brand.

The next link is to the shop.

Only the Amity doll is being sold here. All the images are broken, but I can see that Amity cost $59.00.

The next tab, Media, is pretty much empty.

That's all that I can access with the Wayback Machine, but I didn't stop there.

I Googled Marcia Elovich and found the three Global PenPals books she has published.

These are current, no need to use the Wayback Machine. Here's the link to the list if you're curious about the books. You can click through and read summaries of each.

"About the Author" on the second and third books:

Marcia Harvey Elovich has enjoyed interacting with children in family, at school and other community settings. When she began looking forward to retirement from the local school district, she set up a website around two fictional characters, Amity Anderson and Autumn Woods, using her granddaughter and her niece as visual models for the character images she draws. Through the website, Marcia continues to story-tell to youngsters and adults alike. Amity lives on the farm in Basin City where, in fact, Marcia was raised, and she pursues many of the same interests and activities Marcia did while growing up with her best friend Linda. Autumn lives in town and attends Amistad Elementary School, where Marcia formerly worked as a para-eductor, and earlier as a nurse in the Kennewick School District. This was the birthplace of her peaked interest in interacting with children and later-in-life interest in education. Marcia has recently begun manufacturing of the character dolls and is now converting the website stories into children's books. Also within the framework of her stories, Marcia has interactions from her personal pen pals with whom she is communicating around the globe. Through contrast and compare, she can better present awareness of how alike we are from country to country, culture to culture, religion to religion. "Perhaps the next generation will be more compassionate, not merely tolerating diversity but embracing it!" she adds. In their retirement, Marcia works with her husband and sidekick Bob, marketing her dolls and his woodworked doll furniture. She has one young adult son living at home and an older son living within the community. Her daughter and grandchildren live out of state, so she has to love them long-distance. Through Bob, she has acquired a second daughter who lives in the area and a step-son living out of state. Marcia specifically wants to thank her mother and father, Bob and Kay Harvey, for providing a childhood almost as colorful as the fictional one of which she writes. They gave to her, her three brothers and many childhood friends their mentoring in an era when the village actually did help raise the children.

I also found Marcia's Pinterest profile. She has pinned exactly four images.

The first two are the illustrations seen on the website. The other two are pictures of the dolls.

This picture's caption:

"Amity Anderson if one of the first two characters at www.theglobalpenpals.com and the first to be manufactured as a doll. She is vinyl with soft body and has beautiful peach complexion, with perfect detail down to tiny doll- scale freckles across her nose. She comes in clothes as seen, turquoise tennis shoes, and the matching elastic headband on her long, tangle-free auburn hair. I designed the doll after my own granddaughter. Lovely presentation box designed solely for The Global PenPals."

This confirms that the doll I have is indeed Amity, not Autumn as I had sort of guessed. Amity is illustrated with bangs, but it seems that changed at some point in the doll's design.

I guess that's Autumn on the left? I see no indication on the site or elsewhere that she was ever sold, so it's possible she never made it past the prototype stage.

There's very little else out there about the dolls. A few pictures on Worthpoint with captions stating what I've already put here.

Amity seems to be one of those ultra-rare dolls that only a few collectors know about. After losing out on two other listings, I know that at least two other people do have one and know what Amity is worth. But I have no idea exactly how many dolls were ever produced and sold before the brand disappeared, which probably happened within three years of their debut.

I wonder if their failure may have been due to the price point, $59, which seems very low for a doll with such a nice wig, sleep eyes, a cloth body, a beautifully designed box, and proprietary clothing.

[fraudulent-cheese]

For the ramble prompts, 1. And 7

You're very lucky as i actually have access to my computer currently!!!

I'll pick 7, as i've already seen some people point out the differences between the twins but NO Staci analysis posts!

So. Staci. What the fuck is up with her. Why did she think lying about her family on a consistent basis and not helping in challenges would work? How exactly did that make her think it was the best she could do, to the point she thought she "was doing so well" (quoting her at her own elimination) after that first day?

I think Staci's goal while on the show was to win via social game - or at least, make friends on the show. Her lying could be due to either 1. wanting attention from them, so she started making shit up to make herself look more important or 2. she actually believes what she says and just wants to impress people with her family history. I don't think i can conclusively say which one canon's leaning into? Realistically, her exaggerating her family's achievements is the more likely option, but her actually believing them would be more tragic.

HOWEVER. Just looking at her one episode of content + her audition tape isn't enough. We need to look at her contestant biography.

YEAH IM GOING THERE! If you weren't aware, for the first 5 (6?) seasons of TD as well as TDRR, there were official biographies for every contestant depending on the season, all of which were available on the official (now defunct) Total Drama Website. I'd consider the information featured in all but two of these biographies canon, as they either came from the official website (ROTI + WT), the Teletoon site (TDAS + TDPI) or from Total Drama: Totally Interactive! Im unsure about the canonicity of the Action bios and the TDRR blurbs (because yeah. they're just blurbs. sad.) as they were released only on Cartoon Network's site and the Action bios have... inconsistencies with other sources, let's say.

Thankfully, Staci was lucky enough to be a gen 2 contestant, so she gets the most detailed contestant answers biography model, so i can get alooot more info out of them.

I'll get the smaller observations out first:

In her last answer, she mentions her great-great-aunt Mildred and how she "told the first lie." I could look into how this could be Staci's least favorite relative (as she does seem to value truth/honesty), but also what if that's Blaineley? Her legal name's Mildred after all! It would be really funny! We need more "Staci and her great aunt Mildred" content STAT

She seems to really like pop music

The only answer not related to lying or to her family is the First Job question, instead it's foreshadowing to her elimination

Now, for a larger one: She barely talks about herself in these answers. Sure, she answers the questions, but she spends the vast majority of her time talking about her family instead. She manages to link the fucking Favorite Color and Food question to them! Her love of her family is made very clear here. Knowing about them is literally what she picks out as her Best Quality!

...but only her distant relatives. No mention of closer grandparents, sisters, nephews/nieces, aunts/uncles, and only a single indirect mention of a mother. Only distant, mostly older family members and cousins. And she had to have met some of them! Her Craziest Dream answer describes a dream where her great-great-uncle Charlie was telling her lies, implying they've met and talked before! So where's the mention of her closer family members?

I'd say it's because if those family members are further away, or if they're dead, it's harder to fact-check what she's saying so her peers wouldn't find out it's at best an exaggeration and at worst an outright lie.

I think the answers that show this the most well are the Best Memory and Most Embarrassing School Moment, her presentation on an older family member and realizing the topic was a lie.

This feels like something that would happen earlier in life to me? Maybe primary school level, or even earlier. If she made her entire class project on it, she had to believe in it, right? Despite how absurd that notion is! This indicates to me that Staci was/is very naive, and her love for her family started in childhood. She seems very interested in her own family's history, to the point of exaggerating their accomplishments; maybe her great-great-aunt Lois created a plate design patent or her Great-great-uncle Jason simply looked into the history of the letter E, so either Staci exaggerated them to seem more interesting, or her family members would exaggerate these achievements at family reunions as jokes or something and little Staci just believed them.

Im also unsure on her family being good or not... her Dream Date answer is apparently Richard Nixon because she'd want to learn more about his life, specifically citing that he "reminds [her] of [her] third cousin once removed, Andrew." If you know anything about recent US political history, that is not a good thing. This also shows she has some interest in politics/recent history/other people's lives! This girl does have interests!!!

And this is where i bring up the Favorite Movie answer. The movie it's based on, according to the wiki, is "The Invention of Lying", a 2009 movie. skimming the Wikipedia article, it's a romantic comedy film about a guy with the ability to lie in a world where people can only tell the truth. He first abuses this power for selfish gain but in the romantic resolution decides to not lie to benefit himself and lets his love interest actually choose to be with him.

I think the reason why Staci likes this movie so much is the romantic resolution; this is what she'd want to happen if/when she'd reveal how her family's achievements are either fake or exaggerated to her friends, and they would stay. That she'd get people interested in her with those lies, before actually being honest with them when they're closer... But it never happened with anyone on the show.

TLDR, i need this girl to realise she doesn't need to lie so much about her family for others to like her, as hiding behind masks won't get you any real friends. Something that applies to the majority of the roti girls, actually.

[3d-bear]

My main internet hangouts in my early internet days were oekaki image boards, deviant art chat rooms, and the Doodle page on the now defunct Bennetonplay website. That last one I am feeling very nostalgic for in the moment. It was such a specific thing in a specifc time that hasn't really been recreated.

Benntonplay was an online game website that was made by the fashion brand as an experimental protosocial gaming space. They had a variety of games, that they called toys, that invovled collaborative creation in some form.

The one I spent my time on was simply called "Doodle" How it worked is that you were given a square to draw in and small smattering of colors to use. Once you finished your drawing you would send it and it would go into a big chronological image board along with other people's drawings. You could copy someone else's drawing to edit or add to it. Here is a very old video of it in action.

It was intended as a form of exquisite corpse but it became something else entirely for a small group of people, of which I was included. For about 2 years it became a sort of drawing based online chatroom. You would have an OC that represented you. You would draw them with speech bubbles of text to communicate. You would copy someone else's drawing and add your OC to it so you could interact with other OCs. It was all pretty innocent and mostly us talking about movies, comics, TV shows, that kind of thing. Here we're my OC's -- I don't have any art of them from the time so I redrew them.

It was a bit rude of us to monopolize this space like that -- since there were no other "rooms." There was only one Doodle. Some people would come in and leave once they realized it was being dominated by middle schoolers RPing with their OCs. Sometimes though people would see what was going on, make their own OCs, and join in.

However, eventually some of us moved on. A few would say official say goodbyes, but mostly we stopped showing up one by one. Sometimes a few of us would check on Doodle and see if anyone was around, sometimes two or three of us would check in at the same time and catch up. Eventually though, we all stopped coming back for good. Then the site was closed down.

That is really not much else to say about it. It was a fun time I am remember fondly. Just wanted to wax nostlagic!

[k2ntwo]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

A bunch of writers that I follow have already been tagged and responded @helloliriels @khorazir @7-percent @discordantwords @totallysilvergirl to name just a few. Now I have a few new things to read that I somehow missed the first time around as well as a bunch of old favorites to go and re-read. So much good fic is out there by so many talented writers!

In the spirit of adding to folk’s ever growing MFL list I’ll just pile onto the bandwagon with my answers as well.

 1.  How many works to you have on AO3?

56 although there are several collections of snippets that technically could be counted separately. On AO3 I'm KtwoNtwo.

2.  What’s your total AO3 word count?

496,860

3.  What fandoms do you write for?

Primarily Sherlock Holmes (most all iterations from ACD to Sherlock) and James Bond.  However, I dabble in a good number of other fandoms upon occasion.

4.  What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Metamorphosis

Conversations from Q-Branch

50 Reasons (The Q-Branch Edition)

A Rare Breed

Brothers Three

5.  Do you respond to comments?

Yes, even if its just a “I’m glad you liked it.”  The only ones I don’t respond to are the generic solicitations to join some random contest or fic publishing website.  Those get blocked and reported.

6.  What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Well, I don’t really write major angst but The Four Riders has got a bit as does the poem Gun in the Drawer though they both end on a hopeful note.

7.  What’s the Fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Most of my fics have happy endings but probably A Toast to the Science of Deduction resolves the happiest of the lot.

8.  Do you get hate on fics.

Nope.  Only got one anonymous troll alleging trademark infringement due to a title.  I fired back a factual rebuttal: basically "there is no book by that name by that author, there is no lawyer by that name, you didn’t provide contact information and btw trademark doesn’t work the way you allege" then added a set of quotation marks to the title.  Never heard anything more about it.

9.  Do you write smut?

I have but I’m not terribly good at it.  Most of the time the characters look at me then politely, or not so politely, shut the bedroom door in my face.

10.  Do you write crossovers?

Oh God Yes!  Technically I think I write fusions, where both fandoms end up in the same universe, as opposed to crossovers but I’m rather unclear on the difference between same so I tend to just call 'em crossovers and leave it at that. 

11.  Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I could find or prove.  I did have a couple of strange search results pop up with my use name and some fic titles attached but the websites all seem to be defunct now.

12.  Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not to my knowledge.

13.  Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No.

14.  What’s your favorite ship?

Sherlock Holmes/John Watson

15.  What’s the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

There’s a fic based on a song by Abney Park that I’ve got an outline for but it never seems to go anywhere.

16.  What are your writing strengths?

I can merge and/or crossover all sorts of different fandoms. 

17.  What are your writing weaknesses?

Typos and punctuation.  Being slightly dyslexic I can’t spot the former and I never know if I’m using commas correctly or not.

18.  Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

I actively avoid doing so because I’d butcher it badly.

19.  First fandom you wrote for?

Emperor’s Edge by Lindsay Buroker.  I will admit that I wrote in my head, but never got around to put on paper, a number of Star Trek stories when I was significantly younger.

20.  Favorite fic you’ve ever written?

I like all of them for different reasons.  The one I’m most proud of however is The Emerald Falls my Study in Emerald inspired ACD Fic.

I'd love to have some of the artists/podcasters respond to this with whatever modifications are necessary to fit the medium involved. Hours of podcast or number of artworks as opposed to number of words for example. @podfixx @bluebellofbakerstreet if you haven't responded to this thing already and I just missed it.

[pochqmqri]

When I saw this video drop in my recommended, I knew it was going to disappoint me as someone who has done personal nuzlocke runs before, used to be an active member of the forums, and even still is friends with people from there. And I was right. Look under the read more for my gripes.

To start off, he makes a rather big mistake by stating that the original Ruby Hard Mode run ended in a win, when it definitely did not, and was the basis for the Ruby character going to Kanto to start the FireRed Hard Mode run. That one isn’t one I think is too bad compared to the others, but it’s still something you could easily research on your own. 

He’s also a little wrong about ShiroInu being the earliest person to post a nuzlocke comic on the forums, but I can also forgive him for that. In general, he spends only a small portion of the video on the Nuzlocke Forums before branching out to videos, and I feel that was a misstep. For one, he completely glossed over screenshot runs, which were just as important as comics and written logs in the formation of Nuzlocking’s early years. A lot of people at the time couldn’t afford recording set ups for let’s plays, and screenshotting on VBA was as easy as pie, making Nuzlockes accessible to most people especially those that didn’t want to draw.

I also think it’s a bit peculiar that Kynim wasn’t mentioned at all, when he discussed Nuzlocke comics. Myths of Unova is probably the most popular Nuzlocke comic outside of the original, especially so for one with actual effort put into the art and narrative. We can go on all day and week about other popular comics too like Petty Nuzlocke Challenge, It’s A Hard Life, FireRed Kick-Ass Mode, Double Nuzlocke Series, etc. That not much time is dedicated to the narrative aspect of Nuzlocking in favor of the more technical and challenge-oriented ones is such a shame especially since a lot of history was made on the now-defunct Smackjeeves website. Like, in the video, fucking Emerald Kaizo got its own section while the forums, comics, etc. don’t even get that much respect. Towards the end of that video it was basically summarizing specific Nuzlocke runs from popular YouTubers/streamers, rather than an overall look. 

Moving onto recorded Nuzlockes, it’s really baffling that Marriland wasn’t given an explicit shout out. While he wasn’t one of the first to do a recorded Nuzlocke on YouTube (October 27, 2012), he was one of the first people to upload Let’s Play content on YouTube period, and he was also one of the important figures in Nuzlocking since he invented the Wedlocke challenge. Granted, the Wedlocke was mentioned briefly in a list of variants and his videos were shown in a screenshot of Google, but that’s not enough respect I feel.

Also, I think it’s funny that PokemonChallenges is attributed as the founder of the Hardcore Nuzlocke, that is, a Nuzlocke with the added rules of “no item use in battle” and “no overlevelling against important trainers’ strongest Pokemon.” The video claims Jan invented that in 2016 for his streams, when in fact, people have been using those extra rules well before he did. I also want to note that I don’t really blame Wolfey for this misinformation, since he said in the video that the research was primarily done by pChal and some guy named Drew, which, yeah, makes sense with how biased it is. 

No disrespect to Jaiden, even if I don’t find her content entertaining, but I feel she got a lot of undeserved credit in this video too. Like, obviously the thumbnail having her in the “Then” portion is just clickbait, but to go on in the video and say that “the way that [original Nuzlocke comic creator] and Jaiden share their nuzlockes might be what caused Nuzlocking to take off” is plain wrong in the case of the latter. Like, yes, Jaiden’s 87mil+ video definitely brought it out of the general Pokemon fandom, so that people like Alpharad and Ludwig started doing them, but Nuzlocking took off well before she made the video. In fact, Griffin McElroy made a rather popular Nuzlocke video back in 2016 on Polygon’s YouTube channel.

The video also misattributes certain tricks and strategies to that Drew guy’s Renegade Platinum run, saying that it would “define the meta.” Stuff like the repel trick to manipulate encounters, which is not true at all, since the repel trick has been documented on Bulbapedia since 2010, well before that ROM hack.

Overall, I don’t want to gatekeep the Nuzlocke from anyone, but it’s just sad how it has primarily evolved to just adding on challenge after challenge and treating your Pokemon as pawns (i.e. sending them out to die), as well as optimizing the gameplay to reduce the amount of failure such as by hacking in rare candies to save time grinding (when that basically cheeses the periods between important fights and removes the possibility of something bad happening during grinding), and manipulating encounters (esp. in newer games without grass) to your biggest benefit. If you want to play it that way, that’s fine. The storytelling part of Nuzlocking was such a huge boon in how the challenge got popularized, also the concepts of using Pokemon and strategies you’d have never thought to have try before, so it’s disappointing that it gets overlooked especially in a retrospective like this.

[doublydaring]

okay so at the chicago fob show i saw a couple people wearing shirts that said MIKE CARDEN'S SOLO FOLK ALBUM & naturally i looked into this. the academy's wikipedia article says mike has a solo folk album from like 2002 in the same sentence as remember maine, however its source for that sentence is a sisky interview that only mentions remember maine. supposedly this solo folk album was released on LLR Recordings which would make sense however i looked on LLR'S old website and i didnt see it there and i'm now wondering if this solo folk album is a fandom injoke that i missed?? you're the biggest mike fan i know so i figured i'd ask you :) sorry for the long ask 😭

can we talk about mikes solo folk album ive been dying to talk about mikes solo folk album. lots of sources will make vague reference to this album. it is hilarious to imagine what a solo folk album by a 16 year old mike carden would look like but it is my personal belief that no such album exists. I have no idea where the myth of this album originates, it could be from someone simply mixing up bill and mike and thinking remember, maine was mike's thing or it could have started as a joke. it just doesn't really make sense. we have it on good authority (little mike) that mike was in the very real band Jodie before his tenure with the academy is... and Jodie seems to have been a pretty established band at the time. i assume he was in Jodie for at least a year and given his age i doubt he was seriously involved in any other project preceding Jodie. The Academy Is... was a ridiculously young band that I don't think would have managed to get any backing without their association with older more reliable acts like FOB. basically in what world is 16 year old barely moderately musically talented but infuriatingly ambitious Mike Carden writing a solo folk album good enough to be even semi-professionally recorded. at this point its basically an inside joke as ive heard that is was officially debunked on some now defunct twitter though the debunking itself may need to be debunked. all of this is to say. THERE IS NO MIKE CARDEN SOLO FOLK ALBUM!

[batsplat]

I just read your post about the motogp community and I wanted to ask: what are the things that interests you more about the sport?

oof that's a big question... got hooked on the racing itself, stuck around for the fraught interpersonal relationships. I got into the sport in a slightly odd, roundabout way, but it was something fun and new and just 'for me' (again, not a mainstream sport around here) at a time when I was going through a major life change. a lot of what I enjoy about watching sports is the research that goes into fully understanding what I'm watching. motogp is slightly odd in that regard (as I suppose are motorsports I got into more recently in similar fashion), because my technical understanding of the sport will always remain fairly limited. plus, you just understand a sport differently if you've had the chance to compete in it yourself, and obviously I have never raced on a motorbike before. so, for the sport I grew up with that I play myself and have a coaching license for, when I watch a lot of my thoughts and notes concern quite precise details about techniques and tactics and all that stuff. in concrete terms, that is a sport I feel like I could be a commentator for with a little practise... but with motogp, I couldn't do that. it's always going to be a sport I consider myself an outsider to

which does make a difference to me! of course, there's also something fun to that... it's all a bit more new and exciting and less personal. I don't really mind as much if motogp ends up developing in ways I don't approve with, because it's not a sport I feel like is mine to lose. motogp doesn't quite have the capacity to hurt me in that way. I'm just passing through, taking what I can get, and I also accept there are a lot of people out there who understand a hell of a lot more than I do. I have to take experts and the riders themselves at their word more than I would for a sport where... not to sound arrogant, but I kinda believe I know more than a lot of the equivalent people there. but, the thing is, motogp has clearly been able to sustain my interest because it's given me so much that I enjoy researching - and here a lot of it isn't necessarily super technical (though obviously I always want to understand more about those aspects). at the end of the day, motogp provides a lot of the kind of drama I'd kill for in other sports. all of the aliens are absolute gifts in this regard... it's like you're being slapped in the face with one banger of a rivalry after the other, the kind of thing you really really need to dig for in other sports. it's the difference between me having to scrape together an athlete's 2003 blog posts on defunct websites to figure out how she's publicly managing perception of the rivalry with her erstwhile friend and... okay, I mean, essentially I do the same thing in motogp, but there's also the more recent stuff to enjoy. not all other sports can claim the same is all I'll say. plus it's just so bonkers like genuinely where else do you get this sort of thing

for me, sports is all about narrative, and narrative is all about conflict. the joy is in figuring out how the competition makes athletes express themselves - it's a sort of language, in a way, where competing is a kind of constant back-and-forth that's informed by the image of the self and the image of the other and the image of the other's image of the self and so on. it's something I'm a lot lot lot worse at interpreting in motogp... at the end of the day, when I'm talking about riding styles or ways of winning races or mind games or whatever, I'm essentially poking in the dark. I don't know what I'm talking about. which also impacts the level of psychological insight you can get, because having a detailed technical understanding makes it way easier to understand the mental calculus that underlies each action an athlete is taking. but! motogp gives me so much to work with because all the drama is so insane and over the top... it might be poking in the dark - but also they're constantly setting things on fire! so there's plenty that even the layperson can see. it means I follow motogp a bit more for the actual athletes themselves than I do in other sports, though I think it's still quite balanced

but yeah, for me following motogp is primarily about a) watching races and understand as well as possible what I'm watching, and b) going down research rabbit holes, which hopefully also helps (a). with anything I'm a fan of, I'm fairly wary of how I interact with fan spaces. which in motogp terms means there's a lot of things I am extremely disinterested in arguing about, especially if it's stuff I was already sick of seeing seven years ago. I enjoy my fair share of sports discourse, but I find goat debates quite possibly the most tedious thing in the universe in any sport. I love numbers, I have many many spreadsheets dedicated to sports stats for some of the most obscure shit under this sun, but if it's just a dick measuring contest over comparing athletes' achievements, then again, goot bye. mainly I just want to have fun and I'm not going to interact with this sport in a way that doesn't spark joy... I already have a sport I'll never escape from, one is quite enough for anyone. if there comes the point where a specific fan space or even the sport as a whole is no longer fun, I'm out

[dj-of-the-coven]

Hit me with your favorite defunct website

You will regret this.

Have you ever felt isolated by the modern internet, or nostalgic for the way that you can vaguely--but not entirely--remember experiencing as a child? Well I can't speak for everyone, but the past few years certainly have left me feeling that way. Certain nostalgia posts made circa 2021 got my brain churning in that direction, dredging up ancient memories of reading personal blogs and spending hours on flash game websites that were more or less entirely nuked from the internet by my adulthood. The more I remembered, the more distressed I felt by their absence, even though it'd been years since I even remembered most of that stuff existed...

Aside from Animal Jam, I wasn't sure if anything I knew from my mid 2000s-early 2010s childhood experience was out there on the web somewhere--so, I did as any normal teenager would and I started doing copious amounts of research into a subject that basically didn't exist. I discovered the internet archive entirely on accident; spent days examining the layout of early youtube and any other sites I could remember, navigating by year and trying to figure out when everything took a turn for the worst. I started browsing through webcore tags on tumblr just to get close to what I wanted, because "old internet" yielded few results at the time, and google's input was less than useless. Only a few blogs on tumblr had the kind of content I was looking for, but eventually I struck gold when one of them pointed me in a brand new direction of hope.

This is when I discovered neocities.

Of course, I was already familiar with the webhosting platform of geocities from the old days. Geocities was one of the primary hosting platforms that I remembered without the help of research, but you may already have guessed by the lack of a link that it's dead--and you'd be right. It actually shut down back in 2009, which I learned through the same post that advertised its independent successor. For some reason, I'd always associated the memory with the time I was in kindergarten, but the date of shutdown actually confirmed that I must've known about it earlier, making the platform one of my first memories! It's been gone for a while, but not the impression of it that I had as a core pillar in my early web experience. And then there was neocities. What was that? I immediately went to investigate.

Of course, I was mostly doing this in between two late-night bussing jobs to afford my shitty apartment, aside from being in my final year of high school, so progress was slow. At the starbucks next to my school, I was always holed up in the corner during my short window of off-time with a coffee and my computer setup. It took some time, but I began browsing through the top pages one-by-one, following links and cataloguing where they led to. I took stock of which sites linked to one another. Eventually, I noticed a pattern: a lot of them linked back to a website called sadgrl.online, a purple and black neon haven of internet culture run by a webmaster known as Sadness. Everyone say hello to our defunct website of the hour!

At the time, the thing was absolutely bustling. Almost all of the most popular sites on neocities were linked to Sadness' site somehow, usually through her button collection. My own personal site, which I started building around that time, also contained one of her web buttons. She has several, but her most popular one looks like this. (I apologize if you're on mobile. It will NOT look good.)

I was intrigued! In a community so removed from the usual mainstays of the internet, there existed a blog that hundreds of neocities users were visiting every day, and I very quickly became one of them once I finished looking through her thought-provoking essays on programming and web culture. Her site went through a number of layout changes while I was a regular visitor--the vast majority of them are catalogued on the site itself if not also on the internet archive. It was a blog dedicated to the exact thing that I was interested in; what I had been searching for since the modern web started rubbing me the wrong way in my burgeoning adulthood. Her page prominently featured an essay on the faults of centralized internet and her journey to foster a space more accepting of individuality, information, and creativity without thought of profit. I was totally enamored, especially with the appealing gothic graphics that surrounded the lengthy text!

(here's a capture from August 2022)

Aside from Sadness, several other active community members had formed an alliance of websites dedicated to the preservation of old internet culture and the cultivation of unique online spaces. These people called themselves the Yesterweb. The yesterweb was run mainly by webmasters known as Auzzie Jay, Madness, Tsvety, Grafo, Cinni, Vincent, Iris, and Sadness herself, but webmaster Melon (of MelonLand fame) also ran a forum that was parallel to the movement. The yesterweb was a massive project that included an online newspaper, a web radio station, several introductory programming manuals, a forum, web-themed essays from neocities users, button makers, layout creators, and terms and definitions for people new to the decentralized experience. It was easy to get lost in it all... for a time, the rabbit hole felt endless and exciting.

Every day, I returned to check updates on Sadness' various projects while I began work on my own website. She had totally convinced me of my own convictions--I bought the dream hook, line, and sinker. My only goal for a while was for my site to eventually be included in the yesterweb webring alongside all these amazing programmers. I wanted to contribute to the world of creativity that I could only dream of when HTML was still just meaningless jargon to me! But I was too slow learning the languages necessary, and the yesterweb was just growing too fast to be contained. I dipped for a few months to focus on my move to a new city, and by the time I returned, the whole yesterweb had disappeared scorched-earth style.

Okay, so what the fuck happened?

Currently, on the front page of what used to be a hopeful and inspiring collection of internet resources, there's a long essay made by the webmasters who founded the project, detailing burnout and massive stress due to the community growing faster than they could moderate it. It is certainly not poorly-intentioned. However, the discovery was absolutely devastating to me. My dream had gone up in smoke before I could even try to reach it, and I was apparently a part of the problem by caring so much about it. The radio station is gone. The webring was deleted. The forums shut down. My favorite webmasters' sites were no longer being updated. I felt awful for the people who had been affected by all this stress and pressure, but after so long of working to join the movement, I felt betrayed by their abandonment. The yesterweb disappeared in almost exactly the same way the old web did the first time--ripped from my fingers before I was able and ready to participate. And I can only wonder... what happened to the goal of turning the internet back into a place for us? How did it get to the point of ruining these people's lives within the span of maybe two years? I'm really not sure. There's a lot about this story I still don't know, and there's not really a way to access the drama that happened in a discord server that I never joined. The information published on the yesterweb's page is the only reliable source I'm currently aware of.

Still, in spite of it all, Sadness' website has remained one of my major inspirations in programming and web philosophy. I may be in mourning about a dream that died before it could truly live, but whenever I think about the months that I spent eagerly browsing her site for updates, I remember that spark that initially inspired me to begin researching the net in the first place. She was a major player in the game--not the only one. The website that she created was my favorite while it was active, and now it is my favorite website that is currently defunct.

Thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

[megaweapon]

The current situation with Wizards is yet another reminder of why I think it’s good for the hobby that people explore other kinds of tabletop games. There’s no one end-all be-all game that fits every player, every group, or every scenario. There’s a wide variety out there designed to do everything from play a funny one-shot to organize a whole campaign.

Spend an evening with your friends playing a round of Fiasco. Get up to some action-movie nonsense with a night of Wu Shu. Play a night of Dread, a game whose primary mechanic is a Jenga tower. Try one of the many PBTA-framework games out there--City of Mist! Scum and Villainy! Monster of the Week! Make up your own with the framework, if you like.

Fall in love (as I did) with the storytelling potential of the Genesys system, which can be adapted to all manner of genre (most famously in the fantastic FFG Star Wars series of tabletop games). Again, you can build your own world off of this system, and there are conversion rules to get around the biggest stumbling block, which is their proprietary dice (and free resources to replace physical dice like skyjedi in-browser and RPG Sessions on discord).

Explore (one of my personal favorite) sci-fi settings in Eclipse Phase, a game that’s distributed under Creative Commons, so you can get all the source material you need free and legally. ...I wanna recommend Shadowrun because I do like some of the stuff it has going for it (less so others) but god I’m still recovering from 5th ed. Hopefully the new edition is better. I haven’t played the new edition of Traveller but I remember it as being a delightfully weird but very fun experience.

If you want something a little scarier, there’s always Call of Cthulhu (my personal first TTRPG ever and what got me into the hobby), the newer more action-packed Pulp Cthulhu, or the 20th-century cosmic horror explorations of Delta Green. World of Darkness’s latest edition has done some interesting stuff if you like classic monsters, and the WoD LARP scene is still going pretty strong if you want an “extended cast with a vague murder mystery parlor vibe” kind of experience.

There’s a ton of stuff out there to suit all manner of sensibilities and play-styles.  At the end of the day, it’s all about telling a story, whether that story is happy, horrifying, intrepid, or silly as hell. There’s more than one way to tell it.

I’ll wrap this rant up with my own personal experiences. Technically, the game series I’ve been playing the longest, continuously, is Exile Studio’s Hollow Earth Expedition. Me and my pals have, at this point, about a decade’s worth of storytelling, worldbuilding, and (most importantly) inside jokes from the several campaigns we’ve run from it.

It’s a defunct system now, and we’ve adapted our latest campaign for the Genesys system. We never got the third sourcebook we were wanting, so we’re making it on a WorldAnvil with our group. As a system, it was imperfect, and clearly not designed for the long campaigns we preferred. As a setting, it was compelling but definitely needed some tweaking and brushing up from players. HEX itself was a mere blip, and Exile Studios doesn’t even have a website anymore. Pretty sure they got snatched up by Studio2. Despite all that, though, it was the one that worked, somehow, for all of us.

You genuinely never really know which system is going to be the one that clicks in a way that lasts. Don’t hold yourself back from trying something new.

[forcebookish]

thank you for tagging me, @ariadnekurosaki!!!

1 . How did you get into writing fanfiction?

uhh, when i was twelve i wrote horrendously bad self-insert inuyasha (and bleach?) fanfic on a now-defunct website that doesn't exist anymore lol since then i've bopped in and out of fandoms under different usernames across many platforms. often, i'll lose the muse in 2-3 year chunks, but get sucked back in for new fandoms.

except bleach. i always come back to bleach 😩

2. How many fandoms have you written in?

oh god, if we count dc, marvel, k-pop, and thai dramas (+rpf) as all their own respective fandoms (ie. not distinguishing between arrow, the flash, young justice, etc.), it's twelve - if we don't, it's almost thirty. a lot of my exo fanfics only reference other groups/solo artists, so i think that's too generous. the point is, it's a lot lol

3. How many years have you been writing fanfiction?

on and off since i was twelve (although when i was five i wrote a picture book about the disney princesses hanging out with me), but probably a total of 8 years actually active?

4. Do you read or write more fanfiction?

write more. i rarely read fanfiction unfortunately D:

5. What is one way you’ve improved as a writer?

i'm less verbose and my voice is cleaner.

6. What’s the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

quebecois sacres.

7. What’s your favorite type of comment to receive on your work?

when i make someone cry 😈 nah i really love detailed ones with quotations, ones that pinpoint exactly what parts hit them or meant the most to them. but tbh i love short keymashes too!

8. What’s the most fringe trope/topic you write about?

hmmm🤔 i don't think i write anything that out there... yet. i guess i like to write about psychic connections and niche super powers.

9. What is the hardest type of story for you to write?

ones with a lot of worldbuilding. and porn lol

10. What is the easiest type?

ones with a lot dialogue and character introspection.

11. Where do you do your writing? What platform? When?

my office, the tv room, my bed, sometimes outside. i used to write in coffee shops, at the library, work (especially when i worked at the library lol) before the pandemic and i became a hermit. in gdocs, because i write on my pc, chromebook, and phone. all hours.

12. What is something you’ve been too nervous/intimidated to write, but would love to write one day?

there's this one prompt from the bleach kink meme that i've been thinking about for ten years that has the potential to be really gross or really hot. or both. i might write it for the >5k au event in august idk

13. What made you choose your username?

lapmonster: my twitter username for a while before i decided to start posting on ao3 so i made my ao3 to match; it's a pun on rap monster. kairumption: when i started writing exo fic this was my livejournal url; another pun, it's kai + kyrumption (from angel). it's also where my nickname rum comes from. farewellswords: my twitter username changed from lapmonster in 2019 or 2020 because bts got too popular and army were accusing me of being a namjoon anti lmao; it's a chapter title from bleach.

probably should have kept kairumption as all of them, but i like farewellswords 🤷‍♀️ tbh it would have been my url here if an inactive acc didn't already have it. because, i mean, come on.

COME ON

okaaaay let's tag: @pomslices @retiredficwriter @komari-maxx @ellasaru12 @athousandbyeol @bytheforcebook and anyone else who wants to participate! :D sorry if i forgot you!

[runwayrunway]

No. 19 - Wizz Air

Wizz Air, whose name I regret to inform you is not short for Wizard Air, is an extremely successful low-cost carrier based in Hungary with subsidiary branches in Abu Dhabi, Malta, and the UK, and two former branches based in Ukraine and Bulgaria which are both now defunct. Their planes are a common sight at airports across Europe and beyond, so they should at least have the decency to make them look nice. 

How did they do?

I do think it goes without saying that there’s a reason I’m doing Wizz Air at this specific time. While not a pride livery, these planes are...pretty undeniably bisexual pride flag colors. In fact, here is the bisexual flag color-picked from Wizz Air planes. Guess which is which!

Well, also, I got a request after I had already written most of the post. It would feel a bit rude to not mention that. 

That is...beside the point of my actual assessment. How well designed are these planes?

The various Wizzes Air use this livery. They’re nice and colorful, standing out from what’s around them. You almost never see this sort of pink used on an airplane. The painted winglets are classy and the overall shapes are plenty alright. I always find the use of a website on an airline’s livery to be somewhat tacky, but, well...they are a low-cost carrier, I suppose. Anyway, they’re at least less prominent than on the old livery: 

And, to be perfectly honest, I really like the old livery too. There are still some planes flying around wearing it and I think the two designs are both better for the existence of the other. They feel like two parts of a whole and I love that about them. They very cleanly cover half the plane each, all the way up to the current one painting the ventral fairing while the old one leaves it white, and it feels very complete, like they’re inversions of each other. Even the logo is filled in on the old one and outlined on the new one. It’s just...it’s good! I like it! I really like these planes!

Wizz Air Abu Dhabi adds the extra bit of logo to the tail. I think it looks...completely fine and does not impact my opinion at all, which is a good thing in this case, because I like the thing it’s based on. 

image: Wizz Air Twitter

The interiors are apparently also matching Wizz Air color! It’s a small detail but it really goes a long way for establishing a mood, and it feels like something fairly often overlooked. Even other strongly-branded planes often have plain black seats. 

And the overall impression is really the thing here. All the individual parts are irrelevant compared to the holistic vibe of Wizz Air, which is undeniably pretty fun. The snappy name, the nicely composed text logo with the exclamation point, and the multiple bright colors lend these jets an exciting, bubbly feel. I’ve never flown with Wizz, so I’m not sure if they’re as fun as their planes make them look or as joyless as their direct competitor Ryanair, but these planes are some of the few which feel to me as if they’re following in the footsteps of PSA, at least visually - fundamentally upbeat, in emphatic defiance of the pasteurized nature of mass air travel. 

Grade: A

(I still wish it was short for Wizard Air though.)