#unless this sort of archive/website does exist and everyone is just keeping it from me...

[restlessresolve]

You know, you don't realize how utterly spoiled the AO3 community is in terms of the website's search engine for categorizing and sorting stories to easily allow you to hunt down any kind of work you desire no matter how obscure the flavour until you go to a book store website and try to do the same thing.

or...like...ANY book search engine... sort by title and author, SURE! hell, they will even show you romances, history, and non-fiction. But god forbid you want a historical gay romance featuring pirates with the enemies to lovers plot line...unless you get lucky with google. And sure, Goodreads and Amazon does an admirable job, but it doesn't give you EVERYTHING. You only get the most well known or newest stories. There is not a bookstore website I have seen that will allow you to find that book, however. They don't even allow you to see ALL the books they have available for purchase, regardless of how long they have been out! How utterly useless! can you imagine if their was a search engine or archive that allowed you to locate ALL books and short stories with the same versatility and nuance as AO3's search engine?

with all the AI out there using the internet to “learn” cough “copy” stories and works of art throughout documented time, you are seriously telling me NO ONE is using AI to create a program where you can type in any kind of description or prompt and it will provide you a LIST of written/created works that include those descriptions! no need for people to waste their time listing everything about their work so others can find it regardless of how they word their request, let the AI do it!

And no. Google cannot do this. I have tried.

[ghoste-catte]

I was curious what advice would you give to someone new to writing fics? I've been wanting to get back into it but haven't seriously written something since high school. I hope this isn't an annoying question or anything!

Not an annoying question at all! I'm just a little worried that I won't have terribly good or useful advice. To be honest, I also sort of stopped writing in earnest right as I finished high school, and didn't pick it back up until my late 20s. It's certainly an adjustment! But I think the few things that really helped me get back into writing fic as a hobby and something I spend quite a bit of time on would be:

Write for yourself first, then find your other motivations. My original inspiration in getting back into fic writing was that there just were not that many fics I liked for my favorite pairing, and I wanted more of them, and I especially wanted more with the tropes and characterizations I wanted to see. I think at the very core of anything you need that internal spark that drives you. At the same time, for me at least, if I just relied on my own drive, I would not get much done; I need some external guardrails. So having people send prompts, or writing for particular events, or writing stuff for friends really helps me to get my ass in gear and finish stuff. That may not be the perfect motivator for you, and that's fine! You just gotta figure out what is.

Be open to inspiration. Anything and everything can be spun out into a story with the right tweaking. Obviously stuff like music is a classic inspiration source, but I've also pulled ideas from poetry, from memes, from Reddit threads, from YouTube videos, from rambling conversations on Discord and from real life to make fics out of. So many times, someone will post a silly Twitter screencap, and I'll think, There's a fic in this. And a lot of the time, there is! Research is a wonderful thing, but so is serendipity. If you're out there actively looking for ideas, eventually one that you like will stumble past you.

Find your community. I can genuinely say I never would have finished more than one fic if I didn't have fandom friends to talk to about even stupid headcanons, to bounce ideas off of, and to encourage me (and to encourage them in turn!). Discord has been a godsend, and some of my closest online friends are people I met in the GaaLee discord server. As I've gotten more comfortable as a writer, I've also joined general writing servers and Reddit communities and have found them immensely helpful on both a motivational level (bingos, sprints, owe-me challenges) and on a craft level (plot workshopping and writing ethics and live grammar help). It's a lot easier to think about fic ideas and hash through problem moments when I have a constant stream of fandom-related chatter coming from the little people who live in my phone! Ao3 is an amazing website, and it's great as, well, an archive, but it isn't social media by design. If you want conversation and human connection and cheerleading, you've gotta forge out and find it.

Make it a habit ... If you want to produce anything longer than a couple hundred words, you really have to set aside time for it. And writing is just like knitting or dirt biking or painting little model figurines: the more you do it, the more easily it comes. When I was first getting back into the proper swing of things, I committed myself to 30 minutes of writing per week. Just 30 minutes. I didn't even hit that goal every week, but there were tons of weeks I got on a roll and went over that amount, and by the end of the year I'd written over 200,000 words. I used to spend an hour laboriously tip-tapping out 200 words, but now I can easily blow through 1k in a 50 minute sprint. It's all about training that muscle.

... But don't make it a chore. With fanfic, you aren't doing this as a job, and you aren't ultimately doing it for anyone other than you. That means you can take breaks when you need them, you can set deadlines and then fail to meet them, you can write stuff and then decide to never post it. When you start getting burnt out, when the practice loses the joy and energy, stop. There's no 'hustle' here. In our capitalist society we're so trained to push past our limits and keep going even when it hurts us, but the hobby you do for connection and relaxation and whatever else shouldn't be like that.

Ignore metrics. Sometimes stuff isn't gonna get hits, or kudos, or comments. There are some basic 'rules' as to the stuff that does and doesn't get traction, but every time you post something it's a roll of the dice. If you're focused on watching that kudos counter tick up, you will get bummed out fast. And any writer will tell you that the stuff you think is your best work will never be the stuff that gets the most accolades. So you have to find something else to give you a sense of success. For me, it's watching my wordcount go up in my stats and those occasional comments where someone has a lot to say and that one person who always leaves me a <3 emoji (and, shout out to @egregiousderp, having someone to have long one-on-one conversations with about the stuff that never made it to page).

Don't strive for perfection. It's really easy to want your first ever fic to be a complete showstopper, the best fic fandom has ever seen, hitting all the tropes and the ideas and the characterization that you just know fandom is missing and would be everyone's top favorite if only it was written. This is a trap. No one fic can be all things. Most people who want to write an epic as their very first venture will not see the end of that epic, because they haven't put in the practice hours to make something on that scale work. That's not to say you can't start out with a big, sprawling multichap, just don't expect it to be the greatest thing since sliced bread if you're just starting out, and be okay with abandoning it for greener pastures if you get to that point. Think of the first time someone makes a vase out of clay or bakes a loaf of bread. That's never their best vase or their best bread. If they keep up with it, they'll make more and better vases and loaves. Likewise, your first fic is probably not gonna be your best fic. See it for what it is: your launchpad.

You can't edit an empty page, but you can over-edit a full one. This kind of spins off of #7, but if the words aren't there, you can't fix them. Daydreams and headcanons are fantastic (and god, how many times have I wished for a speech-to-text engine that projected my falling asleep thoughts onto a Google doc for later perusal), but they aren't fic. If you want to write fic, you've gotta get comfortable with the idea of sloppy outlines and rough first drafts. You can't build a house without a frame and you can't build a man without a skeleton (I mean, you can, I guess, but he'd be one floppy man). The nice thing about fic is that it doesn't matter if that frame is structurally unsound or the skeleton has 18 too many bones, you can clean that up in the editing process. But you can't start hanging curtains and arranging furniture in something that doesn't even have walls. That's the process. But! Also know when to set down the editor's pen and say, "Okay, this is good enough for government work", and call it done. ("Done" doesn't have to mean "posted", but it does mean, "I'm done picking at this for now, and I'm gonna go write some more stuff".) Over-editing can make stuff seem laborious and forced, and it prevents you from actually improving. To continue belaboring the house metaphor, you can spend your whole life rearranging furniture in just one room, but the end result of that is a pretty narrow existence and a room with a lot of footprints and tracks in the carpet.

Write shit down. When you have ideas, jot them down--in a notebook, in a Google Doc, in the Notes app of your phone, in pen on the back of your hand. You think you will remember that brilliant line of dialogue or sparkling snippet of narration or genius plot that came to you in a dream, but you Will Not. Write it down. Write it down. Write it down! There have been so many times when a fic was completely saved by past!me having written down my shower thoughts about what happens next in the fic, that present!me had completely forgotten about and was floundering over.

Have fun with it! Try different stuff. Try stupid stuff. Try experimental stuff. Do stuff you've never done before that you aren't sure will work. It's important to get comfortable with your niche (for example, I know I'm never going to be the sort of person who writes intricate plots of intrigue or super long 100k epics or detailed battles), but you can't find that niche unless you explore lots of different niches! Figure out what you love and what you absolutely hate, and then keep doing the stuff you love.

Okay, so that was actually TEN things, but ... I hope you still found this helpful. Feel free to send another ask if any of this was confusing or unclear. Good luck with your fic writing and, if you want, send me a link to what you've written once you've written it! I'd love to read it.

[shi-gut]

Introduction post

hiya to anyone that has stumbled across this page amid the mass exodus from twitter! the names yoshii (a.k.a: shi-gut)! im actually not really new to this place so i don’t need a “welcome” sort of thing. kinda surprised this username wasn’t taken after i deleted my old account lol. this is the same handle ive used before so nothing different than before. for anyone that has ever seen my old blog or was around during that time pre-2018 (or if you’re completely new), back in 2021 i decided to up and delete my account here. reason being is because ever since the whole mess with tumblr being bought in 2018, most of everyone had jumped ship and fled to twitter. things weren’t the same as they once were and i could clearly feel it as the activity i was getting on here after 2018 was almost non-existent. after awhile i decided to also jump ship myself but actually deleted the account after putting it off for 3 years. i thought of keeping it up for the sake of archiving, but like deviantart, that old blog reminds me of nothing but my cringe era during its reign and i’d rather dissociate from that era as much as possible. same for deviantart. funny that now twitter is going through the exact same hell tumblr went through. same situation: gets bought out, new owner fucks over millions of users with drastic changes, and those said changes cause mass exodus to occur as users seek new horizons to expand upon but are stuck with the challenge of trying to recreate what they had before on the old platform (unless you’re a big name or popular enough that it won’t matter). it’s assumed rn that twitter could potentially die off as they are hemorrhaging employees by the gallons and with what little will remain, the site might not function very well if there’s few people to manage it. idk how true it is and im not one to get wrapped up in this sort of thing. ever. the only reason i have to give a damn is because i put art out there and compared to any other social platform ive been on in the past 10 years, nothing compares to twitter. im not a commission/request artist so im not really worried about that, but it’s moreso to just get my name and stuff out there anyways. (especially if/when i do decide to take on commissions). so that sorta thing is kinda important for me, and also for other artists/content creators etc. we are more likely to get hit by this hurricane harder compared to the rest.

because of the uncertainty, im restarting my tumblr account from scratch again. im also restarting my deviantart account as well shortly. i still plan to remain active on twitter despite this whole mess. simply because it’s very important to still throw my work out there even if im throwing it into a barren wasteland with a population of zero. rn im just trying to cover as much base as i can in the event that twitter does end up becoming the new tumblr. i have no idea how or what i plan to do for this blog. maybe start by reuploading some old stuff from my other old social accounts just to get everything up to speed and then focus on the new stuff? prolly might do that. idk if plan to be super active because i just restarted this account. but we shall see in the upcoming days!

my carrd website with more socials! (gotta update it soon)

✨ yoshii / shi-gut

[hellofastestnewsfan]

By the time I moved to Chicago’s North Side, true dive bars had become rare as pearls in a sea of fakes. The wood paneling, fluorescent beer signage, and Spartan restroom facilities of the imitators conjure the working-class homeyness of the American classic, while the prices, clientele, and subsequent atmosphere undermine that nostalgia wholeheartedly. The transformation—from earnest to faux—is, of course, not unique to Chicago’s gentrified North and West Sides, but is a broadly urban phenomenon synonymous with the rise of brunch culture. Nearly two years ago, in Eater, Matthew Sedacca mourned the decline of the “great American dive bar” as it once existed in urban environments, hustled on as neighborhoods get hipper, rents go up, and middle-class patrons care more about a working-class aesthetic than the down-to-earth folks and cheap beer that occupy true dives.

On either side of economic crisis, dive bars traffic in fantasy. The supposed relic of Americana purity still exists in solidly ethnic neighborhoods and across the massive rural swaths of this country. Dive bars are romantic like pickup trucks are romantic, cherished as a symbol for a certain national way of life presumed to be fading. The fakes capitalize on this rosy vision, trotting out yellowed baseball memorabilia and putting American lagers front and center (never mind that that lager will run you $6). In turn, these icons have begun to suggest something different than what they previously stood for. The distinct blue and yellow of an Old Style sign, for example, was once a beacon for a certain kind of chill, affordable, neighborhood establishment, and sometimes still is. But now, it might also hang outside the type of bar where one would only order Old Style ironically, but more likely not at all.

Another increasingly common feature of these establishments threatens to further unravel the dive-bar aesthetic—the digital jukebox. More specifically, the TouchTunes digital jukebox. By no means the only digital commercial jukebox (other brands include AMI Entertainment and NSM Music), TouchTunes made itself a visible front-runner in a jukebox revival of sorts, in part because it allows users to choose music from their phones. In March 2016, the company—which has since merged with PlayNetwork—debuted an overhauled version of its mobile application which now “allows users to be the DJ and take control of TouchTunes’ jukeboxes” in 65,000 locations across North America. Through the app, these locations delegate musical, and therefore atmospheric, control to patrons and profit in the process. For dive imitators, these devices make it harder to maintain their neighborhood-bar veneer, while actual dives start to resemble their faux peers. TouchTunes erodes the premise of quaint regionalism as bars of all kinds transform into Top 40 danceries.

TouchTunes began simply as a more convenient version of a pay-for-play jukebox. Launching its first prototype in 1993, by the late ’90s TouchTunes distinguished itself as a leader in digital jukeboxes, anticipating the MP3 as the next wave in music storage and playback. “We at TouchTunes envision a world in which the hassles of operating a jukebox become a thing of the past,” said the company on a 1999 version of its website, “where operators effectively manage their jukebox and use that information and free time to really do business, to watch it grow, sit back, and enjoy music once again.” Compared to the CD disc-changer standard, with selections limited by available space, TouchTunes jukeboxes allowed businesses to download and store hundreds of songs for a lower cost. “You guessed it—THERE ARE NO CDs,” TouchTunes enthused in 1999, “(that is what we mean by digital).”

Decades later, the jukebox remains a visible feature of the brand, upgraded and multiplied across a range of fluorescent-lit products, which sometimes include additional features like a photo booth or karaoke, or perhaps the thing that most sets the company apart—integration with its app.

The TouchTunes app, working in conjunction with its jukeboxes, allows users to pay-for-play from the comfort of their barstools. Users “check in” at an establishment with the assistance of a Foursquare property called Pilgrim SDK that’s integrated into the app. Pilgrim SDK is a sophisticated approach to location intelligence more precise than just GPS that uses time stamps and foot traffic to determine a user’s likely location. Pilgrim SDK also allows TouchTunes to send alerts to users in range if the app’s location services remain enabled when the app is not in use (“There’s no wait! Play your songs now and see what’s hot at Generic Tavern!”). The check-in requirement forbids users from, say, fiddling with a jukebox several states away. (Not that anyone would want to do such a thing ...) From there, patrons interact with the playlist much the same way they would with a physical jukebox, purchasing credits and using them to add songs to the queue. Credits can be purchased in $5 (12 credits), $10 (24 credits), or $20 (48 credits) increments via credit card, PayPal, or Apple Pay. Song prices (in credits) are set by the venue and credits purchased are limited to that venue. (So if you purchase $20 worth of credits and your group decides to hop over to the next bar, you’re out of luck until the next time you visit the first bar.)

Like so many apps, there’s an obvious convenience to doing a seamless transaction via device that once would have required cash or a card swipe as well as actually standing up. Aside from in-app control, “I also like the anonymity of requesting a song on your phone,” Jessica Slavik, a 26-year-old account manager living in Lincoln Park, told me via email, instead of “walking up to a jukebox where everyone can see exactly which songs you’re requesting.” However, the anonymity works better in theory than in practice, I’ve found. (It’s hard to remain anonymous when you’re the only table belting the lyrics to Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is,” to use a hypothetical example.) The app does consolidate the time otherwise spent flipping through the catalog, or waiting for someone else to finish their turn. Many customers can have the app open at once, purchasing credits and adding to the queue when it suits them.

Other in-app exclusives include bonus credits rewarded to frequent users and foresight into upcoming songs in the rotation. Slavik, at “Emerging Artist” status (achieved after playing 100 songs through the app), can see the next five songs queued at a given venue and considers this her favorite feature. “I am a Headliner,” a frequent user of the app, Patrick Murphy, a 27-year-old accountant who also lives on Chicago’s North Side, told me via email. “Is that good?” At his current status he can see the next six songs. (An “Opening Act” like myself, meanwhile, can only see the next three. Users begin as “Debut Artists” only able to see the next song in the queue.) This is a useful superpower to have, as anyone who’s ever been stuck in the bathroom just as a certified jam began to play can imagine. Users can avoid jostling the vibe by interrupting a series of soft-rock anthems with something from the party-rock family (or vice versa). It also helps avoid a close-quartered set of repeats, in the case of users who might otherwise request the same song. “Sometimes if I like the songs I won’t have to actually buy my own credits,” says Slavik. The curatorial responsibility becomes an exercise in communal playlist management, not unlike the jukebox of old.

An app, however, unlike a traditional jukebox, introduces a tension between the cooperative end result and an interface primed to make things personal. Accounts keep a running archive of prior check-ins, plays, and favorited songs, organized in the proprietary folder “My Music.” The app can also sync with users’ Spotify and iTunes accounts. These “personalization features,” says TouchTunes, are intended to “combine each user’s play preferences with the venue’s vibe to help users discover the music they have in common with each location.” The admixture makes itself known in a folder called “Hot Songs You Like Too,” popular songs at a given venue that a user has also favorited. But for the most part, users’ personal tastes outrank whatever “vibe” they’ve checked in to. Below the “Now Playing” queue, a hierarchy of scrolling rows sort activity into sections like “My Recent Plays” and “My Top Plays,” with “Hot At [Whatever Venue]” third in the list. Unless user and bar are already a match made in heaven, it takes real effort to attenuate one’s inclinations to match the location at hand—though what incentive is there to subsume your preferences to a greater vibe when you’re paying for the playlist?

With the older jukebox model, selection was necessarily limited but in tune with the character of a place. “No matter how much work was put into choosing a bar’s jukebox music, it was a selection. Certain music fit in certain bars,” Philadelphia magazine’s Dan McQuade lamented in 2012, after his favorite watering hole fell to the TouchTunes revolution. “Every bar’s jukebox is becoming the same.”

In an October 2009 column, The Bollard’s Chris Busby had a similar gripe: “TouchTunes dictates and homogenizes the experience of listening to music,” much like commercial radio.

But something about the nature of Busby and McQuade’s complaints smacks of rock-ist romanticism. Music is never a neutral topic and the staunch protection of a certain way of doing things resists cultural evolution and can amount to a subtle form of discrimination. The songs played on jukeboxes, be they radio hits or dad-music antiques, are selected by real people. But even with TouchTunes installed, some bars have found ways to protect their vibes—or seen another way, filter out certain clientele—with the targeted exclusion of certain genres. Last year, Gina Heeb of the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s The Daily Cardinal found that over a dozen popular rap artists—such as Drake, Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar, and Kanye West—had been deleted from the TouchTunes listings of prominent, campus-adjacent bars. One owner didn’t want “gangster hip-hop” at his establishment, which was, as he told Heeb, a “safety-driven” decision—a not-so-subtle implication that black music, which attracts black patrons, means danger. Not all vibes are good vibes.

But if there’s a happy collaboration between past and present, old and new regulars, I’m still not sure TouchTunes is it. The very features that make the app feel liberatory transform it into an un-fun experience for the bar at large as selfishness takes over the deeper into the night you go. Murphy admits he likes to “feel like the bar is at my mercy” when using the app, and while Slavik will defer the playlist when the songs align with her interests, “on the other hand, if I hate the songs, I’ll often spend extra credits to jump the queue and have my songs played first”—a feature called a “fast pass.” On a slow night, this places the song up next, but as the queue grows longer and these fast passes accumulate, you might still have to wait a while, even if you pay extra. “It does get annoying when so many people are also fast-passing that you get added to a 15-song fast-pass queue, which defeats the purpose of spending the extra money,” says Slavik. Fellow bar-goers can turn to adversaries, each one trying to get their songs played first. Sometimes a fast pass is the only way to ensure a song will be played before closing time.

While it’s a comfort to know that you will not be at the mercy of one bartender’s iPod, playing DJ isn’t all TouchTunes promises it to be. The app replaces the predictable rhythms of a local bar environment with the possibility of something choppier, if or when someone decides to supersede the sonic lay of the land. The classic contract between bar and patron is dated, but practical. You provide liquor and ambiance, I offer legal tender and agree to not make a mess. But while TouchTunes undermines that agreement, the most disruptive force is enabling people’s own desires. The age of social media and customized entertainment primes users to expect their tech to adjust to their habits and preferences. Just as auto-fill in web browsers intuits our favorite websites and Netflix adjusts to our tastes, TouchTunes most simply makes the personal more immediate.

Unlike its peers, however, TouchTunes projects the personal into a physical space, a synecdoche for the ongoing instability of what it means for a space to be “private” or “public.” Private enterprise is enfolding many once-public spaces—schools, transportation, and public-works projects, for example. Meanwhile, many private businesses, while not exactly making themselves more accessible, foster choice in a way that at least suggests an individualized experience—letting a public made of walking personal brands assert their tastes in privately owned places. But the ability to “build your own” sub sandwich or playlist comes with a surcharge. It seems many are willing to pay it. A new contract is at work here. They who fill the space control the vibe.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2HXILOI