alyndra

:el-dritch: adjective - eerie, strange or unnatural, especially in a way that inspires fear.

Give us your horror tropes, Lovecraftian monsters, and Gothic scenes. Whatever scares you most, this is the place to write and art about it! Writers must produce a horror-themed fic of at least 5k words. Artists will then claim stories and produce one piece of art (or more, for the 15k track) for that story.

Full disclosure: I co-mod this challenge and am not at all unbiased, but it is also objectively awesome. (True fact.) Writer and artist sign-ups are open, but writer sign-ups close soon, on June 30th. Artist sign-ups will stay open until July 21st.

This is our second round after a great first year. We run equally on spneldritchbang and spneldritchbang , and also interact on spneldritchbang, our new Discord, and here on spneldritchbang. Nobody's required to be on any one platform to participate. Please review the 2019 schedule and our FAQ and rules, and then:

Sign up on this form

You should receive an email confirming your sign-up within a day or so.

Thanks to sketchydean for her amazing banner art ♥♥♥

I’ve been pondering the AO3 discourse pretty seriously today. Antis and purity culture don’t think offensive material should exist, or at least not where its easy for kids to stumble over. And I have no time for that argument. But I do think as AO3 continues to get bigger and more publicly known, there are a few things that would make a huge difference to 13yos signing up for their first account, or people of any age trying to avoid being grossed out or triggered while searching for fics.

The single biggest problem, the thing that’s going to create antis out of people just stumbling in, is that there isn’t any rating or content guideline for summaries and tags. You can easily see XXX material on an AO3 search without clicking on a single fic. It’s the situation in place and it’s not going to change, even if people agreed it should, because it would be nearly impossible to make any changes retroactive. But it does mean that AO3 is not 13yo-friendly, even though 13yos can sign up for accounts.

What would make a huge difference to users who aren’t looking for porn, or who are looking for porn but maybe not at full-force-of-AO3 levels, would be to have account settings for Please Don’t Ever Show Me Fics Rated Higher Than _ _ _. The option to never see whichever of the four Archive Warnings are particular Do Not Wants would be a close second in terms of usefulness, and maybe even, if this is a wishlist unconstrained by server practicalities, the ability to blacklist other common tags. This would solve the fundamental problem that as wonderful as the new “Exclude” function is, it’s still very much a two-step process: enter a term in the search bar, then filter, or click on a tag, then filter. Casual users are inevitably going to try scrolling down the results before deciding to filter, so an option which would actually keep adult content summaries from those who don’t want to see them seems like it should be right in line with AO3‘s philosophy.

I don’t know if there’s any ongoing discussion about this or not, but it does seem like one worth having. How much work, technically, would it be to implement? How much would it increase server load? I don’t have any idea! Where would I even suggest it to AO3? A support ticket? I don’t know that either! I just know that it’s going to get to a point in the not-too-distant future where it has to decide if it’s a website by and for adults, or if it’s going to genuinely be welcoming to non-pornseekers who currently inhabit FanFiction.Net and Wattpad: not, I suspect, because their interfaces are better, but because they don’t want to deal with or see all the porn on AO3. AO3, Wattpad, and FF.net all say users can sign up if they are 13 or older, but in practice, the differences are enormous.

In honor of some delightful fics being posted in the past few days by some excellent people, which I have actually had time to read for once, I have concatenated a rec list, brought to you by how I only just now noticed the “Share” button on AO3 fics. I haven’t gotten around to doing a sticky ‘about me’ type post, so for now I’ll just say that I enjoy both gen and kinky fics, and anything NSFW (which this post will be) gets access-locked—I’ll start it out public and then flock it after a few days. Feel free to ask if you’d like access!

Gen: Supernatural

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Mostly Wincest

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Other Fandoms: Miraculous Ladybug, Road to El Dorado, Ballad of Tam Lin

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Okay, I assume I'm more or less preaching to the choir by crossposting this here, but I wrote it and I'd be upset if it disappeared forever into tumblr's abyss, so here it is for posterity:

nightpool:
[A tumblr post about Pillowfort's technical issues which concludes with] writing for-profit social media and selling it as “by fans for fans” in 2018 is still evil, and making it closed source is just stupid.

deusvulture:
how do you feel about dreamwidth?

nightpool:
open source and nominally for profit, which means, I suppose, that they’re evil and not stupid. in practice my understanding is that they’re reasonably transparent about Money stuff and they’ve earned a lot of trust from the community. (but i’m not very close to the situation, maybe someone else can speak in their defense)
pillowfort … has not particularly earned anyone’s trust money wise, over the past 5 years
And, of course, open source here means (like it did with livejournal) that “leave and go somewhere else” is a much more viable option then it would be otherwise.

me:

*raises hand* Okay, I’ll speak in their defense, since you’re throwing the word “evil” around so casually. 

“writing for-profit social media and selling it as ‘by fans for fans’ in 2018 is still evil” I must be missing a lot of background here. But as someone who was around for Strikethrough and the formation of OTW and Dreamwidth that came out of it, wow, NO. Fanworks should be not-for-profit because it’s important to the legal definition of Fair Use. A social media website is not a fanwork. Disney is not going to try to take down all of Dreamwidth, the social media blogging platform, for being a copyright-infringing Thing.

Point two: social media websites cost money to run. Everything with massive amounts of use costs massive amounts of money. We’ve been using Google to search the web for ‘free’ since the 90s, and they make money. They just don’t make money because we pay them to run a search. They make money off of selling ads and collecting our data and figuring out clever money-making things they can do with it. There are lots and lots of companies that run off this model, and what it results in is that at the end of the day, their customers are the companies who want to sell ads and buy data. You, the person, the userbase, are the product. Google wants to keep you reasonably happy so you aren’t too inspired to leap the fence and go use somebody else’s search engine, but when the ad companies say ‘jump,’ say ‘we don’t want our ads next to that icky unpopular stuff,’ they get listened to. 

But wait, there’s another source of money so we can use fancy internet sites for free: venture capital. Venture capital is people with lots of money going out and putting money into small start-ups that they think can make it big. Sometimes lots and lots of money. So the site gets built, the services get offered for free, and somewhere down the line the venture capitalists come back and say, okay, you’ve got a big site now, how can you turn it into profit for our shareholders? And the guys who had a cool idea for a site and took the venture capitalists’ money so they could make it big have to listen. So then it’s ads everywhere, it’s costly, cool, but not core services getting chopped off, and when it turns out that the big cool free site isn’t as good at making money as the suits wanted it to be, it can get sold off for whatever they can get for it, to people who may or may not just shut it down, or deliberately drive off most of the userbase so they can still afford the server costs while making everybody who stays pay.

This pattern is everywhere. Photobucket, Del.ic.ious, LiveJournal, you name it. Tech in general has been seriously bubbled for the last couple decades due to all these venture capitalists thinking everything’s going to be the next Amazon or Ebay.

The people who created Dreamwidth were very, very aware of it. They made decisions at every step that they were never going to take money from ads or venture capitalism for their business, and they’ve stuck to it. But at the same time, they recognized that erecting a paywall around fandom would be antithetical to everything fandom stands for. So they’re entirely user-funded, but at the same time, everybody can use their site for free. This is a careful balance, and what it works out to is that when you buy a paid account, you get extra but nonessential features, and you’re not just supporting Dreamwidth-the-company. The amount you pay ($3 a month) works out to your share of the server-costs you’re using, the extra features that are mostly on the extra features list because they require extra processing power, and the server costs for about nine other users with free accounts. 

We’re subsidizing each other as a fandom when we pay for Dreamwidth to run, and they worked it out this way very, very deliberately. And that’s just one aspect of the philosophy behind Dreamwidth: when Paypal wanted them to establish stricter content guidelines so that Paypal would continue to take payments for them, Dreamwidth said go screw yourself (publicly) and spent three months without taking any electronic payments until they could find a new processor who wouldn’t try to make them censor content (or charge through the roof on those $3 payments).

So yeah. Your lunch isn’t free. Given the fact that we live in a world where things cost money, I’d rather have people who sat down and thought really damn hard about how things should run. Yeah, the fundraising/crowdfunding/nonprofit model is another one, and that works really well for OTW because they’re providing public resources that are otherwise non-monetizable, specifically fanfic and academic scholarship and legal resources for a wide pool of people without a lot of money. But your cat pictures and discourse don’t have the same need for nonprofit protection as fanworks do, and frankly even if they did, people distributing fanzines in ages of yore still charged printing and mailing costs even if they weren’t making a profit.

And Dreamwidth isn’t just “reasonably transparent about Money stuff,” they’re transparent about as much as they possibly can be across the board. What’s bannable and why and if the site might or might not do a thing in the future and why or why not. It’s night and day from the way other sites roll out changes and then shrug at you because they can’t just come out and say, “Our corporate overlords want us to make more money off you.”

A few thoughts on fandom migrations. I love seeing all the renewed Dreamwidth activity, and I'm back here for the long haul now. I hope both Pillowfort and Dreamwidth continue to grow and innovate and do well. (Twitter can die. They're going to have to crack down on nsfw content too because of SESTA/FOSTA, only they're not even going to give the advance warning tumblr did.)

Discord's not done growing its fandom presence by far, and that's exciting, too -- I love using Discord. I only recently got curious enough to go look up how it's run, though. There's good news and bad. (Forgive me if you know all this already.)

Discord was created for gamers to talk to each other in 2015, and it's funded by venture capitalism. Also, despite calling individually modded communities "servers," all the data is still on the company's various server farms, we're not hosting our own.

The good news is that it's not based on ads or selling people's data. They charge a few bucks for a few extras like the ability to bring your own custom emojis with you server to server. This is essentially the same model used by Dreamwidth, Pillowfort, even early LJ. And since the market is primarily gamers and one of the things they charge for is a little suite of exclusive games, it might work out really well in the long term. But it has to work out not just well enough to pay the bills (which for this level of data handling are not cheap), it also has to be enough to keep making the venture capitalists their money back and more. It might, it might not: if we ever start seeing ads on the service, that'll be a pretty good sign it's time to move again.

I don't expect Discord to be our primary fandom home. I expect it to fill the little gap between now and when we can settle into our own space for real.

Some smart people have been discussing this for a long time, much longer than just the past few days. This is a good starter post with links to talk about fandom and federated systems.

"...so far the best is Hubzilla, which I'm sort of poking around now. It's interoperable with Mastodon, and it works - I'm just figuring out this language myself - on a hub system where you join a hub and the hubs link up, so nobody is dependent on any one hub and different hubs can have different rules and are interoperable, and if you don't like one or have a fight with the mod or get interested in wanting to be on another hub, you just take all your stuff and move; they call this a nomadic identity."

This one will really start making sense of it.

"The new platform must allow photo/text/video sharing as well as conversations; the new platform must allow NSFW content and have robust filtering; the new platform must be resistant to the kind of profit-driven vicissitudinous behavior most tech companies embrace.

I agree with all of this. I also agree with the problem statement, which I've seen repeated again and again, that fandom should be more distributed - that no single (especially not corporate-owned) social network should be the point of failure.

So. Let's talk about server federation."

THIS. This is the future, this is Web 3.0, this is where fandom can and should go. It has everything we need, ticks all the boxes, except some of us need to spend some time figuring out how to connect all the widgets in a nice user-friendly package, and then work out how it all goes and write user guides for everybody who’s not into learning tech wizardry. But that’s all really, really doable! So it’s maybe not quite ready for all of fandom *yet* - we can hang out on other platforms, Discord, Pillowfort, I love Dreamwidth - but in a year or so? Hubzilla, or some new branch of it, is going to be the place to BE.

And in the meantime, if you’re inspired and you want to come play in this cool new sandbox, come check out the discord for it! https://discord.gg/c3E72cT

This is exciting because I am just kinda casually emailing a post in for the first time ever. Yes, posting on Dreamwidth is now as easy as sending an email! (Assuming you are seeing this, which means I did it right.)

Also, highly recommended reading is melannen’s post forecasting what spaces fandom might or might not be on a couple years into many the future. I’ve definitely been thinking very similar thoughts to this.

A larger collection of links is here!

I’ve been really loving the paid account network page, to the extent it’s consuming way way too much of my time! I’ve been going around subscribing to names I haven’t seen for years, it’s oddly thrilling to see so many people that I used to follow or read their fic or just hear about how awesome they were from other people I followed. It’s like I thought the whole Fandom Of Old community was gone and they were all still here the whole time.

If you’re new to Dreamwidth or trying to figure out how to find people you want to subscribe to, a good tip is to find one person you like and then look at their profile for who they’re subscribed to and/or click on their Reading page and read through until you see some posts you like, and check out their journals from there. This is something that Tumblr and Pillowfort don’t allow, to my knowledge, and I really miss being able to find new people and communities this way!

ETA: Here’s a post with another neat tip for finding more people once you’ve subscribed to a few: look at the popular subscriptions of your circle!

It's been a while since my original post describing in words what I was doing with my giant list of Big Bang-style challenges in the Supernatural fandom. So here's a whole bunch more stuff I have to tell the world about organizing SPN fanworks challenges into a bunch of little data cells. Since my post over a year ago, I added another tab for all the rest of the fic challenges that are still In Supernatural fandom. This did not happen all at once because it's a big-ass project, and while I'm fairly sure that the list of bangs is fairly complete (I might be missing one or two, <I>maybe</I>) there are so many more other challenges in such a wide variety out there, I really may never get them all. So by all means, come tell me what I'm missing: you can comment directly into the spreadsheet itself, reply here, look me up on any other social media site you spot me on, it's all good and I don't bite. If there's a reason it wasn't included, at least I can tell you what it is.

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I also want to shoutout to wetsammy for helping me out with this project a lot, telling me about new bangs and helping organize the ones I had. And thanks also to Superwiki who not only runs the best damn wiki, but also encouraged me to put my collected knowledge into a wiki page all about the Big Bang, and for telling all of Twitter to come check it out!

Finally, welcome to Dreamwidth, everyone discovering or rediscovering it due to Tumblr's recent meltdown. Best of luck and I hope you enjoy finding your way around!

ZOMG. You know me, the one who can't hit a deadline to save her life and procrastinates like it's a religious calling?

NOT ANYMORE.

I have turned over a new leaf. ( Read more... ) Wish me luck!

ETA: I did it, I signed up for Holly Polly, and now I'm eyeing the Gencest Bang and Holiday Mixtape — someone stop me this is getting out of hand! LOL, but here's my list of upcoming dates.

This should have gone up MONTHS AGO but attention everybody: RUN DO NOT WALK to check out the glorious SPN/Firefly crossover that tifaching wrote me for spn_j2_xmas!

Title: Big Damn Heroes
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Genre: Crossover with the series Firefly
Rating: PG 13
Word count: 7283
Summary: There's some difference of opinion on whether Sam and Dean are heroes. The crew of the Firefly comes to think they are.

This is an entirely delightful meeting of awesome characters across space and time, everybody gets to shine, and the voices are everything Firefly. It made me so happy to read, and then I was out of the country for a month and got back and life swamped me, or I'd've recced it long since, but do yourself a favor and check it out!