Sweetbriar15 - Sweetbriar15 - Tumblr Blog

This is a really good thread.

I love my students with all my heart.

And I don’t want to die for them.

These truths can both exist.

The duality of man is thinking “children cannot help themselves and we all need to be patient with them as they explore what it means to be human in public” and also “damn, I wish this crying baby was not on the plane rn :/“

There is nothing that touches the heart the same way that emails from former students do. Just opening my work computer tabs to a little gem of an email is enough validation/confirmation that I Did Something Right.

I save every single one.

And I turn to them, and the notes, and the beautiful art I have saved, to bolster myself through the hostile/homophobic/sexist/racist parent interactions.

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

Fandom PSAs

Dont’ Like, Don’t Read

or DL; DR

You are responsible for curating your own online experience.

If something upsets you, makes you angry or queasy or triggers you, stop reading/looking at it. Avoid things that might make you feel that way.

Learn to use the Sort and Filter function on AO3, especially the Exclude tools.

On social media, block and mute accounts / tags / words when necessary.

If you hated something, you don’t need to tell that to the creator or start pointing fingers at them publicly.

The Back button is free. Use it.

Addendum:

Yes, for this to work, creators need to tag their works accordingly, so that people know what sort of content they are about to engage with and can nope out if necessary.

I will probably make another PSA about the importance of proper tagging later.

Ship And Let Ship

or SALS

You are allowed to ship whatever you want.

Everyone else is also allowed to ship whatever they want.

You are entitled to dislike or even hate a ship. If you want to do this online, in public, don’t use the ship tags for hate posts.

If you see someone posting about a ship they like and you don’t, there is no need for you to start arguing with them in their replies / comments / QRTs / reblogs. Don’t throw your hate in their face.

Do not harass fan creators or fans for shipping something you disapprove.

All of this also applies to liking / disliking an individual character.

Addendum:

”I agree with this, except when…”

No, then you are NOT agreeing with this.

Let me make this VERY clear. There are NO exceptions. None.

You don’t EVER harass real people over pixels.

If you disagree with this, kindly block and move on.

Your Kink Is Not My Kink

or YKINMK / YKINMKATO

The longer version is ”Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That’s Okay”.

People have different tastes. Not everything is for everybody.

Even if you don’t like a specific kink, other people are still allowed to use it in their creations.

You are entitled to dislike kinky content and think that it’s ”weird”.

Don’t kink shame or judge people based on their kinks.

This goes both ways: your kink is not someone else’s kink, so don’t push it onto those who are not into it.

Be Kind

or Don’t Be An Asshole

Focus on the things you like instead of the things you hate.

Create and unite instead of destroying and dividing.

Don’t harass real people over fictional things.

Stop stirring up petty drama just to get some attention on social media.

Stop trying to ”win”. Fandom is not a competition.

Remember that your own experiences aren’t universally shared. Your perception of things can differ from someone else’s, but that doesn’t mean either of you is necessarily wrong.

recently watched the new descendants movie with my little cousins and it brought me back to your series on ao3. genuinely some of my favourite writing on the site & i enjoy it more each time i revisit it!

My work being re-readable and enjoyed so much as to have people keep coming back to it is just such a beautiful compliment. 💗 I am so glad that you can re-experience the joy and keep coming back!

I saw the new movie too! The callbacks to Brandy’s “Cinderella” was truly my main reason for watching it, though I was curious to see how much it would not match up with my own AU. Sure enough, it was quite divergent! The plot was a bit nonsensical to me, but there were some fun songs and I liked the cast.

Love it when I’m on a long solo car drive, the right song just happens to come up on shuffle, and for the next hour I can script an entire series of conversations and scene snippets in my head. Because then I can replay that magical song on repeat.

In other news, I finished writing something instead of sticking a snippet in my files! This only happens during winter and summer breaks. All my energies turn toward teaching at every other season of the year.

There also needs to be a button for “this is the 5000th time I’ve read your fic because I’m having a horrible day and this is the only thing in the world that always brings me happiness.”

You won't get media with messier, more nuanced, more realistic queer characters if you keep flying off the handle the second a fictional character has sex, does drugs, swears too much, or acts vaguely like an asshole.

You won't get more diverse queer media with wider stories if you can't handle it when queer artists make art that is raunchy, crude, edgy, and gross.

You won't get more diverse queer media if you shut everything down the second it does something you, personally, get squicked out by.

You will never get more diverse queer media if you contribute to the way queer media is picked apart, raked over the coals, and held to unreasonably high standards.

You will never get what you want if you keep tearing queer artists down for their weird experimental art instead of learning how to say, "this isn't for me, that's fine, and I'll be over here in my own space."

This user supports AO3

This user is anti-censorship

This user believes in “don’t like, don’t read”

This user believes in “ship and let ship”

This user believes that fiction tastes and preferences do not dictate moral character

"I live in a red state my vote doesn't ma-"

If your vote didn't matter they wouldn't try so hard to make it harder to vote in red states. Voting in red states can turn them into swing states like Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona. And voting in blue states can keep them from becoming swing states.

California used to be Red. Texas was Blue long ago. Florida was once a swing state. Obama took Indiana but it's gone redder since. Ten years ago Arizona and Georgia going blue was unthinkable.

Things change and we can make them change.

And that's before getting into more local elections. Turning cities blue, the state legislature.

Red states have flipped blue in recent years at those levels too.

Because people vote, and if we vote in high enough numbers we can turn a tight election into a walk in the park. If we vote in high enough numbers, we can turn a loss into a win. So many good things have happened in states where someone won by like 100 votes. (arizona is one)

I don’t like wading into Ao3 debates, but I want to give my professional opinion on Ao3 with regard to archives vs. libraries.

I am a professional librarian (MSLS) and I have worked in both archives and public libraries and a lot of the confusion and concern I see surrounding Ao3 is a fundamental misunderstanding of How Archives Work.

An archive is a collection related to a subject. That subject often a person but sometimes a field or concept or project. And the purpose of an archive is to keep everything. And I mean everything. I was going to say “short of biohazards” but since I know there’s a sealed R. Crumb Devil Gal chocolate bar in the UNC Chapel Hill archives, we really do mean everything.

When a collection of materials–which are usually unique and original and can be photos, manuscripts, letters, recordings (audio and/or visual), notes and notebooks, objects, published books, whatever–on and/or from the subject arrive at the archive, they are examined, preserved for longevity, accessioned and cataloged (added to the archive’s records), and added to the archive. You measure collections in linear feet. As in, once it’s all preserved and boxed and secure, you note how many feet of shelf space it takes up. And some of y'all on Ao3 have a lot of linear feet to your name (and I’m proud of you).

This is an archive: it is designed to preserve the original materials related to a subject. That is its purpose. Archives are how we have the original scroll manuscript of On the Road, for example, or the Lomax recordings of American folksongs, or Tijuana Bibles, or James Joyce’s loveletters to Nora.

Now you, a member of the public, can access some archives. Some are easier to access than others. The one I worked in was open to the public; good luck getting into the British Archives without a good reason.

So now apply this to Ao3–which is an archive both in name and in purpose. It is intended to preserve fan-created content long term. And this means everything, whether you personally like the materials or not. It is a repository for as much as possible.

And the “whether you personally like the materials or not” is important, hence why I mentioned Jim’s loveletters and Tijuana Bibles in particular. (RIP Jim, you would have loved pegging.)

If it’s made by fans and it exists, we should keep it to document the history and progression of fandom. That is the point. We have lost enough materials related to the subject of fans of media and we don’t need to lose any more.

The fact of the matter is that Ao3 is only one facet of the OTW, which preserves other fan-related materials (convention booklets and zines, for example). Somehow Ao3, an archive on the subject of fanfiction, has been divorced from the rest of the project, mostly by way of “purity culture” and panic over “dangerous” fiction.

The fact that you can go through an archive and find interesting information is the other side of archives. No, they shouldn’t be like the banker’s box of old letters stuffed in my closet. Yes, they should be organized and as accessible as is appropriate for the state of the materials.

It’s really, really cool to find stuff in an archive, I’m not even going to lie. I have done it before and I will do it again. And yet there are other items in an archive that I might not want or need or be interested in at all–but they’re still there. That’s the cataloging and accessioning: to keep up with what’s there, to stay “on topic” with collecting, and to be able to find things in that archive. Bless the tag wranglers who are doing the cataloging at Ao3.

The pearl clutching seems to come from 1. the creation of “dangerous” fanworks and 2. public access to those “dangerous” fanworks. These are issues of “purity culture” and opinions on censorship and should not involve Ao3.

Ao3, under the umbrella of the OTW, is a documentation and preservation project first and foremost.

a lot of people on here are young. some of you are eligible to vote in the us election this year for the first time. im going to try to say this in a way that i would have been willing to hear, when i was your age.

there will never be a candidate for president that you agree with on everything, unless you personally run.

there will always be things you think they are on the wrong side of. always. 100% of the time.

this isnt because its the nature of politics or because of the way the process works to keep far left viewpoints out of the debate, although there is truth to both of those things.

its because candidates are individual human beings and so are you and you are not going to find another human being who agrees with you on everything.

you have to pick the candidate that comes closest to agreeing with you on the majority of the important things, who you believe you can trust to engage in good faith on the rest.

Yes, Aldrea knows what a melon is (and that’s a good thing).

An unrelated post just took me back to an ask from ~4 years ago complaining about the “continuity error” in Hork-Baijr Chronicles where Aldrea mentions the existence of melons.  Anon was annoyed that “an andalite who’s never visited Earth knows about melons… seems pretty sus.”  (I paraphrase.)

HOWEVER, here’s the context in which the mention of melons occurs:

For the most part it looked more like some dead moon than a living planet. Much of the surface was dark gray, sterile rock. I knew from our briefing that there was only a very thin atmosphere…

But around the equator of the planet was a strange sight: huge, deep rifts, interwoven, interconnected. It looked as if someone had stepped on the planet, squashing it like a ripe ooka melon so that the sides had burst open.

In fact, that’s exactly what had happened. Millions of years earlier, a massive asteroid had hit… It had opened massive valleys that cut deep, deep into the planet’s surface.

— Hork-Bajir Chronicles, p. 22

That’s where Aldrea first sees the hork-bajir world from space.  And she compares it to “a ripe ooka melon” that has been stepped on “so that the sides had burst open.”

And I don’t see why this comparison is an issue.

First of all, there’s the fact that it’s not that bizarre to assume the andalite homeworld has melons, or melon approximations.  It’s established in Andalite Chronicles that they have flowering plants, so presumably they have fruit.  It’s also been established that andalite physiology is similar enough to humans’ that humans can eat andalite plants and vice versa. You can either explain this as convergent evolution or as Ellimist Meddling.  But regardless, Aldrea could totally be from a place that has melons.  Just oosha melons instead of canary melons.  Why not?

Second, the melon is a simile, one that gets key information across.  Aldrea conveys the bizarre (and nifty) shape of the planet through saying it’s “like a ripe ooka melon” that split open.  I’ve never personally stepped on a ripe cantaloupe, but I can easily picture what would happen if I did, and thus I can easily picture this planet.  Since the intended audience for Hork-Bajir Chronicles is 8-to-12-year-old humans, it’s safe to assume that most readers will be in the same position.

And knowing the shape of the planet is important.  It informs a lot of hork-bajir culture.  It helps to explain why the yeerks’ spacecraft give them such a massive advantage, because the yeerks can hop from valley to valley.  It sets up for the arn’s decision to engineer the hork-bajir into existence.  We need that information to appreciate the plot.  K.A. Applegate could spend another 10,000 words on a more literal description without ever conveying with the same clarity that “the planet is a split melon and the skin is uninhabitable.”

Third… let’s see what happens when we take out the melon and replace it with a more “realistic” comparison that doesn’t coincidentally align with an Earth fruit.  So instead of the planet being “like a ripe ooka melon,” the planet is “like a ripe version of the Derrishoul fruit. Please note that the Derrishoul fruit is spherical, and approximately the size of an andalite head. (By the way, an andalite head is similar in size to a human head. I specifically know the relative sizes of human and andalite heads because this information was covered in a xenobiology textbook I read in school.) Anyway, the Derrishoul fruit has a semi-rigid skin that softens as the fruit ripens, and can be split with the application of pressure as from a stepping andalite hoof or perhaps a hard fall…”

I’ve fixed the hole — Aldrea’s narration no longer has arguably-inappropriate knowledge of Earth flora — but at the expense of getting the point across.

Orson Scott Card says that at some point the sci fi writer has got to lean on ordinary readers’ knowledge to build out a fictional world.  If your world is full of lizard people and mammals don’t exist, at some point you have got to simply tell your (presumably mammalian) readers that these are lizard people who don’t know mammals.  Otherwise you run the risk of a) the whole book being nothing but exposition, or b) your readers missing the point entirely.

So yeah, Aldrea mentions a melon.  And the melon gets the point across, using readers’ existing knowledge.  There are times and places when importing the authors’ own culture over to fictional lands is distracting or unrealistic, but “the planet is like a split melon” has never struck me as being one of them.

*white knuckling the bathroom sink* do NOT infodump ppl about the fact that the first spn fic was a wincest one and that it was posted mere hours after the pilot and that the founder of ao3 was a wincestie and that the first fic on ao3 was wincest too and that the omegaverse as we know it was created by wincest shippers for jared/jensen fics *pointing at myself in the mirror with a shaky hand* ppl will think you're weird and off-putting you need to control yourself–

Wait, you were actually born in the 1900's? Thats so cool

i am going to eat my own entire skin

people think they shouldn't vote as a protest or whatever because they've been raised on boycotts. which do sometimes work.

boycotts deprive the target of money.

not voting does not deprive the government of money.

it does, however, deprive you of power.

it's not like a boycott.

The UK did it.

France just did it.

Come on, USA. We can do it too. Check your registration. Get out and vote in November. Get your family and friends and neighbors to vote. Kick every shitty far right fascist out of office. Kill Project 2025 dead at the ballot box. Kick them out everywhere, at every level. Local, county, state, and national. Neutralize the immediate threat so we can spend the next two years dragging our political culture further to the left instead of fighting for our lives.

We CAN do it. I'm begging.

Find it funny that out of all things that probably happened to him in the apocalypse, five decided he should tell ppl about the expired twinky he ate. Like. Nonono lets not talk about the amount of times he probably almost starved to death/died of dehydration, lets talk about this one time he ate an expired twinkie. Like pls. "Bad twinkie...." Is that the most crazy thing he can recall. Why did it stick to the walls of his brain so hard. 😭

possibly my favorite cassie scene in the entire series