Random Personal Record Keeping

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[disast3rtransp0rt]

As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

1. Are you okay?
2. That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.
3. Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?
4. This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

1. What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.
2. Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.
3. Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?
4. If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.
5. I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

TLDR: It's much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren't expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don't get angry, get spitefully polite! :)

[krystal-prisms]

My favourite one is "Do you think that this is a normal/acceptable thing to say/do?"

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[toskarin]

it's poor form to air your petty grievances with someone when it comes out they did something actually bad. save that for companies, like when you learn duolingo removed kanji from its beginner's japanese courses as part of their collab with crunchy roll

[halfmoon-horse]

duolingo is shit for japanese imo*, here are some apps i reccommend:

Hey Japan - comes with a cute shiba inu bc fuck that aggressive owl. its basically duolingo made specifically for japanese and much better at teaching you HOW the language works.

Kanji Study - its the grey one, made by one person. it covers the first 80 kanji plus the main radicals that make kanji up, PLUS hiragana and katakana FOR FREE. you can practice by drawing, flash cards, multiple choice, and you can decide whether you read or select the romanji/character/meaning. i learned hiragana in 5 days using this. the upgraded version (one time payment) with higher level kanji goes on sale a few times a year, consider supporting the app if you find it useful

Todai - more advanced but good for reading comprehension. japanese news in... japanese. highlights which JLPT level words are and gives percentages of each level for each article. has inbuilt dictionary to check words you dont know.

Takoboto - my preferred japanese dictionary but there are loads out there. i like it bc i can search in english, romanji, kana, or kanji and it breaks down kanji compounds into individual characters. it also shows different conjugations eg: to eat, eating, ate, to be able to eat, etc

those are just the phone apps i use, there are so many other resources out there that are free and not pulling bullshit like skipping one of the 3 'alphabets' of a language

*to be clear the reason i think duolingo is shit for japanese is that it doesnt follow the JLPT pathway. which... you dont NEED exactly, but i think the country that had to make a new, easier language profiency test bc not enough people were passing the existing one will know how to build courses that teach their language. plus duolingo is doing *gestures* whatever shit that is up top.

if you seriously want to learn japanese, memorise your kana (drop romanji asap or youll forever struggle and I'll come to kick your shins) and find the ebook of genki 1 that someone uploaded, or some other JLPT N5 course. but NOT duolingo.

Edit: just realised that duolingo may be your only real option if your first language isnt english (too easy for me to forget, sorry). in that case, make sure you supplement duolingo with your own kanji study!!!

[gaysamurai]

Link to all the Genki exercises that let’s you do them in different ways (writing, matchups, multiple choice etc)

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[ilikeit-art]

[leahplease]

Okay fuck so for like the entire first part I thought this person was like... Using one of those 3d pens to replace lace in this curtain somehow

Then the next couple I was like "wait are they just like painting the curtains a different color? Were the lace threads just black or something on that other one?"

Then finally it clicked and I freaked the fuck out

[hazel2468]

EXCUSE ME

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[lyridmeteorshower]

Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

• Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
• Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.

• Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
• Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:

• Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

• Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.
• The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
• You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.
• Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up
• You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff

• You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.

holy shit it's a poll

cool!

ooh clicky clicky button!! i wanna press it!! lemme press it!

you can add up to 10 options btw

See Results

• Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

• Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog
• Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
• If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
• You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"
• Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.
• Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
• We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
• Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

• Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
• Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
• Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
• You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.
• Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.
• Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit
• You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.
• Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.
• Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.
• If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
• Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

• Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension
• In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.
• You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
• Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
• Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!

[isa-ghost]

Also get the add-on Tumblr Savior if your browser has it! It has advanced filtering and customization options for your dash and other things that works amazing.

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[looney-mooney]

Actors and Animators should go on strike next tbh. Especially cgi animators. Put the fear back into Hollywood

[everettkross]

Animators? Yes. Actors? If youre talking ppl like RDJ or Jamie Lee Curtis or what have you. They have more than enough fucking money. Take a look at one production cost and see how much these people are paid.

[looney-mooney]

My dad is an actor/playwrite. He has to constantly search for new gigs to make ends meet, and even then ends up doing retail or lyft or doordash a lot of the time between gigs.

And my parents don't live in a huge house in New York or LA, it's a tiny townhouse in a really small city. My mom's the one who really pays the mortgage with her events organizer and house manager jobs at local theatres, and even then they struggle to afford living expenses. They used food stamps when I was a kid - not every month, but enough that I see it as a normal thing to do.

And when he does get gigs, especially like big tv gigs, working conditions are CRAP. He nearly got severe hypothermia once for having to jump in a freezing cold river in early winter from 11pm-3am, repeatedly, for a shot they didn't even end up USING.

Scheduling is abysmal, overtime is never properly compensated for, the jobs are DANGEROUS (mostly on a physical fatigue level), and work is contractual by nature. Are there some contracts that are ridiculously good? Yes, that's how contract-based work tends to happen for a lucky few.

But getting a contract like that is like winning the lottery, and even then they can be really exploitative if you don't have a kickass agent and/or a really good entertainment lawyer. There aren't really steady 9-5 full time acting jobs with benefits the way there are with other jobs. It's difficult to get any gigs in the first place, I cannot emphasize enough how much it is a constant job search.

And that's not even getting into the horrendous conditions and disrespect for voice actors. Actors should ABSOLUTELY go on strike

[dakregor]

[zekedms]

I fucking hope RDJ and Will Smith and everyone on top strike too. You want a real impact? Let's see what happens when top names refuse to work until the people on the bottom are compensated fairly too.

Being able to pretend it's just some uppity character actors or commercial actors lets studios distract. When there's no star for the best blockbuster to be, they can't ignore the demands.

[crazyneutral]

The top-paid members of an industry strike in support of better working conditions for their coworkers, not for more money. Neil Gaiman and George RR Martin aren't striking because they want or expect to be paid more, they're striking to support the entire rest of their industry because they care about it.

[bundibird]

Not to mention, even the big names are often treated like absolute shit.

Kate Winslet nearly got hypothermia on multiple occasions whilst filming titanic because, despite the fact that the whole thing was happening on a carefully controlled set and thus could have the water at whatever temperature he wanted, James Cameron wanted to take the "acting" out of acting and he had the water set to be as cold as possible without it being frozen. He called it method acting. He didn't bother to see if Kate could ACT as though the water was one-degree above freezing; he just called it right from the go and was like, hey, what if I make my lead actress spend several days getting in and out of BORDERLINE FREEZING WATER, so that it will look realistic.

Her chattering teeth and whole body tremors? Yeah, not acting. That was her body on the edge of actual real life hypothermia.

And look at the way they treat men these days with making them fast and dehydrate to the point of collapse, just so the director can get two seconds worth of a shot where their muscles and veins are all bulging unnaturally.

When he was filming Logan (I think it was Logan) Hugh Jackman literally DID collapse. One of the scenes of him all bare-chested and muscly and roaring angrily? Is a much shorter scene than it was supposed to be, because that's all they managed to get out of him before he LITERALLY PASSED OUT.

And these are the big name lead actors who are getting treated like this. If THEY are being treated so appallingly, what hope in hell do the smaller actors have of not being worked into the ground?

YES, the actors should go on strike. Yes, including the biggest-name stars who've never been mistreated and who get the cushiest most comfortable jobs. They should go on strike too because they support the improved conditions and pay for all those in their industry who ARENT treated well. Which is most of them.

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[a-dream-seeking-light]

medusa sketch by james jean (2022)

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[nosnexus]

Come to the foot of the bed, raise up the axe and split my skull. When I am dead, eat of my flesh and you will be strong enough to wander the woods on your own and return home.

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[electriccarousels]

Oh but you were too good for the "donkey" dogs, huh?

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[spockandawe]

Here we go! I have some smaller books to share as well, but I've been absolutely VIBRATING with excitement to share a BIG one, and I'm going to indulge myself and post that today, then figure out words for the rest. Because I bound a new cnovel. Check it out, guys, I bound jwqs/clear and muddy loss of love :D

Let me indulge myself and backtrack a little! First, these are quarto books, so they're short. But I think these average a little under 500 pages each, and jwqs is a LONG book (my beloved), and this adds up to a total eleven inches of lesbians. More like twelve once they're in their cases. It's over a million characters in Chinese and I think the English translation comes in somewhere around 890k, it's HUGE

Making these books was SO FUN, I hadn't read jwqs and still haven't, and will probably read on my phone when I do. I don't have any exciting photos of the typesetting, but I knew this was an imperial succession story, and that made me nervous, those stories don't always click for me. Well, the process of typesetting and adding footnotes for this beast definitely confirmed that I'm going to have a good time with this thing when I have the time to read it, but there was also so much going on that only the vaguest of spoilers sank in. I went into an absolute FRENZY of typesetting, and after I printed, cut and folded it, well. That was one afternoon of sewing. You're looking at the reason I'm scrambling to make up a few hours of missed work, hahaha

After that, I needed cases. At the very beginning of march, I received a shipment of some FASCINATING bookcloth. It's called Duo, and it's made by layering a thin gauzy fabric of one color over paper of a different color. Depending on the combos, you get a really cool range of color-shifting effects. And they've gone out of production! But I was part of a group order to get some of the goods, and hadn't yet finished a new project. Reader, I went for it.

That purple and green is bananas!!!! It's so hard to photograph, this midnight picture of a few cases is one of my most successful attempts to capture the full range up close. Originally I'd been thinking of trying to evoke imperial gold, but I figured this was still the kind of drama and luxury suited the book, and also something something the hidden colors suited Qi Yan's character. I tied it back a little to the imperial gold with the endpapers, then titled them in silver foil, since the endpapers had silver in them.

But once the books were made, I felt like it wanted something... more. Something like a BOX!

And me, I chase novelty. A set this large would be tricky for anything clamshell, but a slipcase for all seven would leave books tipping all over if it was wide open, but putting walls between slots would be demanding in terms of precision and would risk similarly-sized books getting stuck in the wrong slots. Then I remembered learning about slipcases where you could put in a little insert to support the weight of the text block, and the concept SNAPPED into place.

Colors aren't going to photograph well at midnight, but I made the supports using the scraps and off-cuts from my endpapers, to tie it back into the bindings. The back of the case is lined in more of the duo, and the walls are lined with a faux leather bookcloth I like a lot, it feels buttery smooth and seemed like a good neutral material to tie the papers and bookcloth together. I listened to some of the DEEPEST layers from the nine-hour conspiracy theory iceberg video while I was working on this, haha, it was a TRIP.

And in the end, each of the supports is sized to comfortably sit in the smallest of the volumes, and evenly spaced, so I believe it will take the books in any order with no problems. It's easy to grab the books without having to cut notches into the walls to grab them from. And even though weight is less of an issue for quarto sizing, the books in here have their weight supported no matter what angle the box is at! I'm so, so pleased with how this concept worked out and definitely plan to do more with it in the future.

So there we are! Jing Wei Qing Shang! I had such a fabulous time with this project, and I'm so excited to get to share it with all of you. The story was fun to work with, the bindings and box were fun to make, and everything here came together just as well as I could possibly have hoped. I'm so proud of this, and incredibly, incredibly excited to show it to you!

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

How to recover fic deleted from AO3 that’s NOT on the Wayback machine

[futureevilscientist]

Sharing this because I just found out about this and it blew my mind.

The short version of it is: The Wayback Machine is not the only backup/archive of AO3 content out there. It’s just the most user-friendly and immediately browsable.

THIS database on Archive.org contains most AO3 fics as text files, including plenty that are not Waybacked: https://archive.org/details/AO3_final_location

What you’ll need: A browser for .sqlite3 files such as DB Browser for SQLite, an archive manager (e.g. WinRar or 7zip), good internet download speeds, and potentially a LOT of free GBs in storage space.

Not needed but heavily recommended: A download manager such as HTTP Downloader (so you don’t lose the entire download the second your internet stutters).

1. Click here to get to the archive’s files. It’s going to look something like this:

ao3_current.sqlite3 and ao3_old_files.sqlite3 are metadata files. The .zip files contain fic, most of them in simple .txt format. The metadata files tell you which fic is in which zip.

The “current” metadata file is recent backups. The “old” metadata file seems to be fics archived until 2020ish.

2. First, download either ao3_current.sqlite3 or ao3_old_files.sqlite3. Now launch DB Browser for SQlite, then File > Open Database Read-Only > open the sqlite3 file. Now click on the Browse Data tab.

3. It’s going to look like this.

4. The “Filter in any column” field can be used for keyword searches in, well, any column of this table. Be warned, it takes a while to update, give it time, it’s indexing.

5. Here I searched for all fic which gets a hit for the “Avengers” keyword (usually fandom). You can also search for a specific title, author, description, etc.

Let’s try to locate the first fic on the list. Click on the field on the left - row 1, column 1.

On the right you’ll see the full content of that cell. The most important thing here is the start - ao3_01. This means that the fic is located in ao3_old_files_part01.zip.

6. Download ao3_old_files_part01.zip and open it with your archive manager. It’s 5.5 GB. This will take some time.

7. There are multiple ways to find the fic within the zip file. Probably the easiest way is to use your archive manager’s search/find function to locate the fic by keyword - author is a good bet here, or title if it’s unique enough - and extract that. This way you don’t have to extract the entire archive. Be sure to add a wildcard operator (*) on either side of the keyword.

8. Extract the file and you’re done. Note: It will probably be in .txt format, and might be in one giant block of text. Just select-all and paste it to a proper word processor to restore the paragraph formatting.

+ I suppose if you’ve got like a free TB of space you could just skip the metadata step and download all the zip files and unzip them and use a command line search tool for keywords, too. This will work with keywords like title, author and fandom that are part of the file title. The metadata file just contains additional info, like character fields, description, etc.

This isn’t a perfect remedy, there are still fics that got deleted before they could get archived here. But it seems more complete than the stuff on the Wayback Machine on average.

[futureevilscientist]

Important addendum: There’s another way of accessing the .zip files.

You don’t actually have to download the zip files. You can also click on View Contents on the Downloads folder.

It will show you the contents of the zip file in your browser. Like this.

Open one of the files. The URL for the first one on the list here is

https://ia902207.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/11/items/AO3_final_location/ao3_old_files_part01.zip&file=ao3_01%2F%27Allo%20%27Allo_%20-%20Mickleditch%20-%20Lady%20in%20Waiting.txt

Everything after file= is the fic’s unique file path. Remember the file path for a fic we looked up earlier by checking the metadata file? Replace everything in the URL after file= with the path you got from the cell in Step 5 and hit enter. It will now take you to the file of the fic you were looking for.

Happy fic-hunting!

[porcupine-girl]

@destielficarchive relevant to your interests, and @wangxianficfinder I know you’ve had some asks about finding deleted fics recently.

[wangxianficfinder]

Thanks for letting us know! I’ll add a link to the pinned post ^^

- Mod C

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[bonkalore]

Trying to draw buildings

[cynellis]

yo here’s a useful tip from your fellow art ho cynellis… use google sketchup to create a model of the room/building/town you’re trying to draw… then take a screenshot & use it as a reference! It’s simple & fun!

[smachajewski]

Sketchup is incredibly helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.

There’s a 3D model warehouse where you can download all kinds of stuff so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.

[the-quick-one]

reblog to save a life

[bludragongal]

This is an incomplete tutorial, and it drives me crazy every time I see it come around.

We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.

Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:

How do you populate your backgrounds?

Well, here’s the answer:

If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.

The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.

How do you fix this?

Well, here’s the simplest solution:

This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.

From Blacksad(artist: Juanjo Guarnido)

From Hellboy (Mike Mignola)

Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.

Your creations live in a unique world, and it is as much a character as any other member of the cast. Make it as believable as they are.

[shatterstag]

Great comments and tutorials!

I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!

Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!

Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)

The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.

By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!

Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.

We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!

Proper 3d modeling software is immensely powerful, and if you wanted to, you could model a complex environment that occurs regularly in your comic or illustration work (say, a castle interior, or an outdoor forest environment) and populate the scene with as many perspective-grounded characters as you need!

[askoursquad]

reblogging to save a life

[bludragongal]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Look at this amazing addition! This is fantastic!

[xxtc-96xx]

man I haven’t used sketchup in yeeeeeaaaars….

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[olderthannetfic]

Warnings in general weren’t a thing in a lot of these spaces. Sometimes, people would be mad about things that were permanent like character death, but trauma followed by a happy ending just wouldn’t have made that list a lot of the time. I don’t believe romance novels were relevant. The lack of a concept of trigger warnings was. (The actual term seems to hail from the mid 00s, for example, though obviously, warnings existed prior to that.)

The biggest change was the advent of tags existing.

Technologically, they’re not a thing on the old internet, and metadata tends to just be sparser in general. Some fic archives did start to have some filtering, but it was pretty basic and varied a lot by space.

Keep in mind that for much of the 90s, the shape of a fic archive was a hard-coded html page or maaaaybe that X-Files FTP site. They looked fundamentally different from the more recent type where you upload things yourself and you can edit in a WYSIWYG interface.

I think the main driver of internet metadata is generally porn, and I don’t mean fandom. I mean commercial porn. This is likely a big driver for being able to sort anything at all by tropes. I couldn’t point you to exact moments that moved tech forward though.

[olderthannetfic]

#it tended to be ‘don’t read if being gay is illegal where you are’#‘I make no profit please don’t sue me’#and if you were unfortunate enough to be in the Sentinel fandom ‘Blair gets his hair cut’

Hahaha. Yes, okay, the notorious “Please warn for hair cutting” thing.

From what I’ve heard, people mostly didn’t actually do this, but it’s actually less nutty than it sounds because it’s actually the equivalent of “not epilogue compliant”.

I gather Blair does actually cut his hair at the very end of the show in preparation for going to the police academy? This is after he ruins his own academic career to protect Jim’s secret.

(The more popular fanon ending is, of course, for his name to get cleared, sentinel stuff to become public, and everyone to grovel. Also for his pretty hair to stay.)

At least, that’s how the background behind the “Warning: hair cutting” was explained to me.

[elfwreck]

Aside from “warnings in general were just less common” and “tags basically didn’t exist before Del.icio.us” (2003, folks… tags are RECENT), there was the issue of “fanfic was a community activity.”

You wrote on a mailing list or a forum or a livejournal community or in paper zines. Or whatever. You wrote for a limited, more-or-less known set of readers. You didn’t know them all personally, but you knew they had specifically come to this place looking for fic.

And you knew what kind of fics people expected. You warned if your fic was outside the normal range… and if the “normal range” included “some fics have rape,” you might not warn.

If the fic archive was large - Noire Sensus, Walking the Plank - the archive itself was likely to have some warnings, something like: Note that some of the fic here deals with dark topics, including [rape, death, drug abuse, incest, underage sexuality], etc. So authors might not feel compelled to warn for each specific fic. Readers had a warning that those topics existed in the archive.

Harry Potter fics in slash communities rarely warned for Fred/George incest. Because the readers were already assuming that was common - not in every fic, but common enough that you didn’t warn for it, any more than you warned for “Dumbledore dies in the war” or “Harry gets severely injured.”

If your pairing-of-choice was Snape/Harry and you went looking for Snarry fic exchanges, you just kind of assumed that a great many fics would involve dubious consent and some would involve no consent whatsoever. If your OTP was Harry/Draco and you hung out in those spaces, you didn’t expect warnings for “underage” because hey, obvs this was teenage boys getting it on.

And so on. You only warned for things that were non-standard in the community where you posted your writing. (Slash communities often warned for het.) (…everywhere warned for polyamory.)

An expectation for warnings for readers from other communities came much, much later.

[askyefic]

I read a lot of fanfic on someone’s website, which I found from a rec list or mailing list or web ring or something like that.

And there wasn’t as much fanfic so if you were reading something on a writers website you knew what they wrote about or the kinds of themes etc they wrote.

With the rec lists or sites it was the same deal..you got a feel for what the person liked and what they would recommend.

There wasn’t a lot of info about whatever the fic wad anyway. Maybe a pairing and a very short summary and a rating (possibly) but that would be it. If you go to older shows on AO3 and then go the earlier fics posted a lot of them will have bare bones info and that is what it was the info we had to go on for the most part.

And in general there weren’t warnings on things. Tv shows didn’t have the “this program is intended for mature audiences ” disclaimer. If it was a Very Special Episode then there would be some advertising about it but that’s it.

If you did run across a fic that had content you didn’t like you hit the back button and made a note to be careful before reading anything by that author.

[olderthannetfic]

Yes, this is all excellent context.

Reading fic in the 90s was often a high-context, high barrier to entry activity. You fundamentally could guess more the same way that you can guess things about a romance novel whether or not it has trigger warnings. You can guess based on the cover art and what decade you bought it in and so on.

Fanfiction.net (founded in 1998) always had a lot more n00bs being suddenly traumatized by not knowing what a “lemon” was, but the earlier you go and the more you’re looking at single fandom archives or mailing lists or whatever, the more this is specific small subcultural communities of a few dozen, few hundred, or few thousand.

AO3 is no more one single community than facebook is. It’s a very different level of implicit knowledge. And even now, you probably wouldn’t warn for very mild dubcon in a/b/o unless it was a big focus. You assume readers have some clue what prototypical a/b/o looks like.

Perhaps part of the shift to more extensive warnings is due to fandom becoming a much less context rich hobby with far more n00bs and far more long time fic fans from different communities with different norms. Warning by implication and genre awareness becomes harder. Concrete and explicit warnings become more desirable.

[alexseanchai]

[image: tumblr reply: “Question from a Young People: why would dubcon, and even rape, be frequently unwarned for in the 90s? Were people not aware that rape could be disturbing/triggering to many people (I feel like it’s a more obvious trigger than character death…)? Was it perhaps linked to the culture of e.g. romance novels of the time so frequently featuring a ‘she says no no no but she really means yes’ type scene? What sparked the shift in views?”]

.

what I’m hearing is, AO3 establishing Rape/Non-Con as a mandatory archive warning sparked the shift in views

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

iliveamongthestars asked:

Please don't hate on CGI - we're artists too.

neil-gaiman answered:

I’m not hating on CGI. I love our CGI teams, and I love and admire the miracles and the art that they make. I thought putting Milk’s Good Omens showreel up, and explaining that there are over 1500 CGI shots in Season 2 would make it clear how indebted we are to them.

A lot of the best effects in Seasons 1 and 2 are practical effects enhanced by CGI, like the burning bookshop in Season 1, or invisible effects, like making a set of Soho into the real place.

Neil Gaiman

Hello mr. gaiman, how much of what we'll see on GO2 is cgi compared to the first season? -sincerely, a practical effects fan There's an en

Tumblr

[redarmyscreaming]

Fine, but they do not hire prop makers, because CGI is cheaper.
They do not use animals in scenes, because CGI is cheaper
Do not build scenes, because CGI is cheaper.

[neil-gaiman]

We absolutely hire prop makers, and I don't know anyone who doesn't. Props are props. It's a lot cheaper to buy a book, or make a gun, than it is to CGI it. (On the other hand, if any gus are fired now in our shows, that's always going to be CGI. No real bullets, not even blanks.)

We use animals in scenes. Occasionally, as with the Crowley snake, we'll animate something fully because we couldn't train a snake to do what we needed. But you'll see Lions and goats and white mice and so many other animals in Good Omens Season 1 and all of those animals existed. We filmed them. (Even the Unicorns, if you don't count us adding a CGI horn.) Harry the rabbit would have cost tens of thousands to make in CGI.

Originally posted by ineffableplan

But we used CGI to make Dog's eyes grow red. And we used it to film the cat separately from Dog so we didn't risk something bad happening to the cat (or to Dog) when he was swiped across the nose.

And of course we use scenes -- in Season 1, a grand total of 1 location -- the Heavenly viewing platform -- was completely CGI. In Season 2 there's that location and two or three others. But CGIing a complete environment isn't cheaper -- for a scene we needed to CGI a lot of, we spent about a third of our budget for the episode on a six minute sequence.

Much of my life over the last year has been spent dealing with CGI costs and the ramifications thereof, for Good Omens and Anansi Boys, which is astonishingly important but not very interesting when you would rather be writing. Still, I can promise that anyone who thinks that old-fashioned film-making is a thing of the past because CGI is somehow cheaper has not understood why and how CGI works in filmmaking.

If you're making a lower budget film, the first thing you're going to be looking at to keep your costs down, is keeping the CGI minimal.

(No offense to the reposter I'm disagreeing with. But honestly, none of those crafts have been eaten by CGI. And the cheapness of good CGI is a myth. Trust me.)

And watch this again to see some of the things we used CGI for in Season 1.

[dduane]

The realities of production: (a) all the could-have-been-spent-doing-creative-work time that gets diverted into figuring-out-how-to-cut-costs scutwork: (b) learning that CGI is not the automatic way to make things cost less. :/

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[math-memes]

[missbaphomet]

He should have a parenthesis around the 230-220 or else in the order of operations would default to 220x0.5, thus making the equation 230-110=120

[funkyness]

that's the joke actually!

"5!" with the exclamation point is a factorial, so 5!=5x4x3x2x1=120

[retroactivebakeries]

#ah. you are mother fucker?

[Random Personal Record Keeping]

[destielficarchive]

The Wayback Machine and the Quest for Deleted Fics

What is the Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine is the time machine used by Peabody and Sherman in "Rocky and Bullwinkle." It's also the nickname of The Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org/) which, since the late '90s, has crawled the internet and just. Archived everything it finds. (You can read their history here). People now can enter pages they want to save (I used it to preserve some censored Chinese gay books, for example, entering all the URLs myself to be sure that Wayback captured them), and I don't even know how else it finds stuff, but it's pretty amazing. How amazing?

This is their capture of my Tripod anime webpage from when I was in college. Some of the graphics are missing, yeah, but like. I made this website in fricken 1999, and stopped maintaining it in 2001 or 2002. Back then my e-mail address was still "unforth@penpen.com" and webrings were a thing and I was well known for creating Winamp skins in Jasc. That it's there at all is pretty fucking incredible.

Who cares about your old anime page?

Other than me? No one. BUT. Wayback's "catch all, save all, store all" approach to archiving means it's an invaluable tool for finding deleted fic. For example, here's their capture of "Rock Salt and Feathers," which was (as far as I know) the first Destiel-specific fic archive made on the internet, and many of the earliest Destiel fics were posted there or x-posted there from LJ.

The owner deleted it in 2010, taking all the fics with it, but many can still be accessed - and saved by my project, and read by anyone who wants to - because they're in Wayback.

Okay, that's way more interesting. How do I use Wayback to find stuff like that?

The key to using the Wayback Machine to find old and/or deleted fics is that you need the original url. Thus, teaching someone how to use Wayback to find deleted fics ends up mostly being about teaching someone tricks for finding ancient urls for fics that have been deleted (and occasionally when you find the url you actually discover the fic isn't deleted at all, which is always nice!). Once you have the URL, the "how to use" part is easy, you just go to web.archive.org and enter the url in the search box.

The bar graph of years shows every time Wayback Machine "captured" (archived) the specific page at that url. Often, each of these captures will be different, especially for websites that update regularly (like an archive or an author's works page). When you click on a year, you'll get a calendar, and then you just pick the date and time you want (I highlighted April 18th, 2009, as an example, and because it was my dad's 68th birthday so why not? It's also about a month before I personally started watching SPN, ah, memories...). Once you've picked the capture you want, it'll load the next page and show you a capture of it - so here's a (different than above) capture of Rock Salt and Feathers, dating to within a week of when the website was first founded! The same bar graph is now up top, and you can click on the bar you want to jump to that date and see how the website changed over time - so this capture on April 18th, 2009, is pretty bare bones; by the time of the May capture I screen capped above, things have moved along!

Further, once you're in an archive of a deleted webpage you can (or at least, you can try) to navigate it as normal, just...all within Wayback's interface. So like, on this page, I can access their list of new works (and find different ones by trying the different captures)...

...and I can even read them!

Uh oh, better watch out for those 4.20 spoilers. Anyway, the point is - if you've got the original URL, you can use it to load a deleted page into Wayback, and then navigate that website as normal...at least up until you try a link that Wayback didn't archive, and then you'll hit a "sorry, we don't have that one" page (I'm not gonna screen cap cause at this rate I'll hit Tumblr's image limit in about 2 more minutes). Not everything will be there, ever. Rock Salt and Feathers is unusually well-preserved; when I did a deep-dive and spent three days trying to find things there, I was able to preserve nearly 90% of all the fic I know of that was posted there, and some of the rest I was able to find by tracking down alts for the people who posted there - many (though not all!) had x-posted their works to LJ, and later some ALSO x-posted to AO3, once AO3 existed (Rock Salt and Feathers predates the existence of AO3 by about 6 months).

So, as you can see - using Wayback is the easy part (at least until it isn't - more on that later...it's easy on a simple page like Rock Salt and Feathers, hence my using it for examples, but it can get hella complicated for more modern, dynamic websites like AO3). The hard part?

(cutting to a read more...I hate using them cause then people don't read but this post is just. so long.)

Keep reading

[duckprintspress]

This week's blog post! It's my alt, writing a tutorial on what the Wayback Machine is and how it can be used for finding deleted pages. I wrote it from the point of view of deleted fanfiction specifically, but a lot of the things I discuss are applicable in other circumstances too.