i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

Tools

Non-Games

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.

the average twitter vs tumblr community experience

i hate australian people they need a dumb fucking nickname for every single word. can’t even get in a car accident without some australian asshole coming up to you and saying “oh gotcha self in a carblammy there aintcha mate” kill yourself and go to hell

fuck off are you serious?

oh my god

how do you have 2 silly words for a car crash

normalise being bad at roofs in minecraft. normalise not being able to make an aesthetically pleasing roof to save your life in minecraft.

Normalize just digging into the side of a mountain to avoid making roofs in Minecraft

yall need me to tap the sign?

here’s a roof guide that i use because i used to be shit

i dont remember the source, b/c ive had this for like years, but i suggest messing around with these roofs with different shapes/sizes of buildings

in fact, you can mix and match and have one roof with a side room with a different roof on it

honestly, have fun

I’ve had these saved for a long time and unfortunately don’t know the source either, but here are the other tutorials from this artist if anybody is interested!

Oh! These are super cool!

Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.

Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?

Long collection of resources under the cut.

Keep reading

ALSO you should consider browsing Virtual Pet List and seeing if there are any pet sites you might be interested in playing. There is a whole genre of browser games right under your nose

Another one that I just found recently is this, which is a whole collection of blogs, organized by topic!

Look guys the real internet IS STILL THERE I’m going to cry

Getting off of twitter and onto neocities has really healed me and I am so glad to see it is healing other people too ;u; let’s retreat into the self-made digital woods and away from corporate bs pls, I am so tired

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post

…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment

likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post

Wishing me and everyone best of luck for something good in your life! :D

As the staff post about ad-free tumblr continues to get thousands of notes telling staff to fuck off in the tags, I wanna remind you that this website's days are numbered. Tumblr is still unprofitable and by some modern-day miracle none of its acquiring companies pulled the plug on this money pit. But it will happen if it continues its trajectory.

Whether you like it or not, Tumblr needs to make money off you somehow in order to stay up. It either serves ads or asks for money to use it. This has been a paradigm on the web longer than many of you have been alive. It's Tumblr's job to make money right now because it's well past its grace period of being a black hole for cash. This has actually always been Tumblr's job, since it is a corporation, but that's capitalism for ya.

If you want Tumblr to be here for free and you want to continue to use it, you do yourself a disservice by opposing any changes Tumblr makes in order to pay for its costs. When this site finally goes belly-up then you're gonna be Tumblr-less until whatever startup takes its place and the cycle repeats itself.

If you think it should just ask for donations Wikipedia-style, remember that if and when that happens, there will be users repeating the same tired bullshit about giving Tumblr any money.

just a reminder in case you missed it directly from the current CEO of Tumblr:

I am not speaking up in defense of post plus, which was rolled out in a way that gave us a new illustration of "disingenuous," but Tumblr needs to make money to survive.

If tumblr does not make enough money to pay its bills and make a bit of money for its parent company, tumblr will cease operations. No profit=no tumblr. The current situation is not sustainable for them. Whatever you or I or anyone may think about capitalism, that’s the cold hard reality. If you want tumblr to survive, they have to make money.

There are basically three ways for tumblr to make money:

1) Sponsored shit like post+ where you support a content creator and tumblr skims a bit off the top. Not inherently bad but they did a horrible and untrustworthy rollout of it, and also, while there is a great deal of content I would pay for, I don’t know that shitposts (the tumblr forte for non-fannish stuff) qualify.

2) Ads. Which then makes the ad companies the customer and the userbase the product being sold. Which means that the priority has to be keeping the ad companies happy, and fuck the users. Which means everything has to be sanitized and prettified. Which will do terrible things to this place.

3) Direct monetization. Users pay to use the site, or at least to use it ad-free. The user base is the customer, and it is the user base’s needs that are the priority to the company because if they anger the userbase, the userbase will stop paying them.

Of the three basic models, #3 is the best for the average user. By far. Because it means that they have a hell of a reason to listen to us.

Not everybody can afford $40/year, so it’s good that the “free with ads” bit is staying.

But if you can afford $40/year, think about it this way: how much time do you spend on tumblr in a week? In a month? In a year? Is $40/year a reasonable amount to spend on something you use that much? For me, the answer is yes.

Yeah an ad-free paid option really isn’t a big deal. If that makes money, then pleasing the users (including non-paying users) becomes top priority and they don’t necessarily have to keep scrubbing swathes of content to meet Google’s stricter and stricter demands, either.

i have no beef with tumblr covering costs, and i do agree that by doing a split between subscription and free with ads like Pandora etc actually does help stabilize some of the problems inherent in either system alone. So yeah, a reblog worth thinking about

Translation: Person behind camera; *knock down one card* “Go.” Other person;“Is your character mentally stable?” Person behind Camera; *Looks at card* “Yes” Other person; *Slaps down all but one card* “IT’S MOMO”

I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS.  THERE WERE ONLY A FEW DOZEN NOTES WHEN I SAW IT LAST.

Here’s a fun fact and reminder that I am not gonna stop posting about as long as I keep seeing this bullshit:

Dear Americans, identifying as a communist is just as offensive as being a literal nazi in a very big part of the world. The hammer and sickle is an offensive symbol that is banned in many countries, just like the swastika. Likely more people died under communist oppression than nazism, and there are people still alive who can tell you about it.

And no, don’t come at me with all this “but the core ideology was good!!” or especially “here we do not have this connotation so it’s not offensive!”. Your media, culture and standards are forced on the entirety of the rest of the world, and whatever you post in english is understandable for everyone else, if I am decent enough to care about issues like blackface (that literally have zero history in eg. my entire country which was never a colonizing nation), you should be decent enough and not make a hip cool internet trend about an oppressive ideology whose victims still remember the horrors and still suffer the consequences :)

Thanks and don’t be surprised if you see this reposted by me again, chances are I saw another fucking idiot who thinks communism is cool uwu it was just never done right, Lenin was a bae uwu glitter rainbow hammer and sickle :3

my grandmother fled with her 4 year old and a fistful of jewelry because the communist regime in hungary was literally that bad

“ohhhh but communism is about EVERYONE being able to go to fancy restaurants!” they actually shot a bunch of peaceful student protesters in front of the capital’s university over the living conditions but sure

i don’t have patience for these assholes anymore

The Russian communist party took the entirety of my ethnicity, forced them out of their homes at gunpoint, locked them in unheated train cars in the middle of winter, and forced them to “””resettle””” in Kazakhstan. Between the trip and first few years of starvation and disease, roughly one hundred thousand died, about half of which were children.  

They then let us return to our homeland 12 years later….

and treated us like second class citizens; they took our land, our generational wealth, our culture, our freedom, our families, and future economic and educational opportunities. 

Stalinists/maoists/leninists with hammer & sickle icons read this now.

Also, “Well the core identity…” is not an excuse. The “core identity” doesn’t matter when the actions doesn’t align with the words of an ideology. Actions speak louder than words is a saying for a reason.

If the “core identity” is that everyone has equal rights and access but then other people are treated like second class citizens, guess what? The core identity doesn’t matter to those who don’t have the same rights!! Why? Cause the “core identity” was the excuse, the justification, etc. as to why they had to be treated in that way. 

And if the “core identity” for communism is reached, for it to be good to anyone you’d have to have a fuck ton of resources to just be able to give people whatever they wanted. Otherwise, everyone will have exactly and exclusively what they need, nothing more, nothing less. 

Which basically means the little luxuries that you enjoy having (expensive or even not so expensive hobbies, being able to choose your own place to stay, etc.) will be nonexistent. The only people who will be able to have those luxuries will be people who have government ties… and rest assured it will probably not be you. 

Almost 80% of the time a communist is talking about how great it would be and how “true communism” hasn’t been done yet, they’re either relatively wealthy or at least able to live comfortably or the kind of person that looks down on people who are lower class than they are, citing them as things you can just “get rid of” by either killing them or basically denying them access to things because of perceived wrongdoings like being a bigot… which is troubling when “bigot” (of any kind) ranges between using incorrect/outdated/offensive terminology but ultimately trying to say something good/well intended to genuine hatred for other minorities. The fact that this range exist in which you can be “denied rights” is something that is really only acceptable to people who do not have to fear them being taken away as their usual response is “Well, just don’t be a bigot and you won’t have to worry about it”. However, the true thing is that it should not, under any circumstance, be acceptable to take away someone’s rights. 

A lot of them find abuse justifiable as long as it is towards the “right target” and that’s a dangerous mindset to have

Why hasn’t this been done before?

You know why.

Cause racial health disparities…

I hope this gets published

It is available for download as a pdf from their website. www.blackandbrownskin.co.uk/mindthegap

ATTENTION WRITERS

Google BetaBooks. Do it now. It’s the best damn thing EVER.

You just upload your manuscript, write out some questions for your beta readers to answer in each chapter, and invite readers to check out your book!

It’s SO easy!

You can even track your readers! It tells you when they last read, and what chapter they read!

Your beta readers can even highlight and react to the text!!!

There’s also this thing where you can search the website for available readers best suited for YOUR book!

Seriously guys, BetaBooks is the most useful website in the whole world when it comes to beta reading, and… IT’S FREE.

HEY! BECAUSE OF OP, THEY CREATED A SPECIAL WELCOME IF YOUR FOUND THEM THRU A TUMBLR WELCOME, ITS A YOUTUBE VIDEO.

They also sent me this; which was super cool

*slams reblog button*

@findingtallahassee holy shit! This is cool!

“Authors retain all rights to works posted on BetaBooks, and can add or remove content at their discretion. BetaBooks makes no claim to any of the work posted on the site.”

Incase anyone was wondering

Thank you for sharing! Especially about the copyright protection

This is fantastic! I’ve shared it with all my writer friends and hope that they have a ton of success!

we’re going to have to call smut ‘lemons’ again, aren’t we? 

LEMONS!? WHEN THE FUCK WAS THIS?!

oh you sweet summer child 

I actually made this a button last convention

Gaud I remember when it was lemons, I feel old now

explain pls

No

What are lemons??

I don’t own the copyright to this, others own the show. All I have is this saaaad little computer and a sketch pad. ^-^ Please don’t sue! I don’t need anymore stress!

Please R&R!!!!!!!

No flames. >///<

lol this story contains slash! Don’t like don’t read. Rated M. AragornxLegolas. lemon. Lololol ^-^ NO FLAMES OR I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY STABBITY SPORK OF Death! -__-

#this post made me age ten thousand years.

A/N: Things are probably going to be very OOC but who cares, It’s my fic, I do what I want! MUAHAHAHA!

Things story is lime but it might get a little lemony in later chapters ^.^ R&R no flaming!!! I don’t own the characters

The ghost of citrus past…🤣

WAIT PEOPLE DONT CALL THEM LEMONS ANYMORE??

did you think AO3 was the first of its kind

my children, there was another before it, older and untagged

i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!

although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.

you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.

this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.

but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.

eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.

THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.

AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.

LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.

IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.

I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics.  They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross.  But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!”  Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it.  So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that?  No.

In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.

Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality.  And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.

Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?

1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse.  It was not meant to titillate or arouse.  It was meant to horrify.  It was seldom explicit.

2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.

3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half.  When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia.  Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex.  And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.

Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we?  I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too.  But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:

1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.

2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.

3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).

Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like.  And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them.  No, this was step one on a moral crusade.  If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands.  This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted.  It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit.  But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality.  Then anything with teen sexuality.  Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con.  Then whatever is next on their list.  It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.

Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service.  You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call).  You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising.  And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids.  Other than that?  It’s fair game.  You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge.  There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.

We’ve been down that road.  It doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.

During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.

If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.

reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.

AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.

This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.

^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary

Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received. 

tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.

This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.

And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).

You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!

I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!

People were terrified during Strikethrough.  I was there.  Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down.  People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ.  Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread.  Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.  

LJ was, for many people, central.  

It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.  

Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary.  People didn’t know who was next.  Every day, the list of stricken journals grew.  And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content.  Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest.  It was a bad time.

You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable.  Tagging is a thing.  And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience.  It is not right to expect it to be curated for you.  And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.

I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that.  If you get triggered, that’s upsetting.  That could be considered harm.  And I have sympathy for that.  I do.

I have run across fic that triggered me.  I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people.  Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this.  So I’ve been blindsided by it before.  And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.

That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation.  It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.

That was not the fault of the site!  The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.

That was not even my fault!  It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.

When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.

Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit.  My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship.  I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate.  She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That?  He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy.  (She was lucky to escape.  I have immense respect for her.)  And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it.  And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.

“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.

But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.

“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves.  You should learn to say those things!  It will help you!

But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.

And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected.  I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops.  I couldn’t talk about it before that.  Couldn’t!  And it was over 20 years ago!

I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic.  I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.

All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.

Fine, I don’t like it either!

But that fucked up shit?  That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today.  You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe.  It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on.  It doesn’t make me feel safe now.  I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was.  It actually makes it worse.

Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like.  It’s a skill, you get better with practice.  Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.

Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it.  Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids.  The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims.  The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim.  A g a i n.  

The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people.  The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.   (It worked!  The neighborhood rallied!  He was arrested for violating parole!)

Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being.  Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it.  And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.

I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.

An author is not a perpetrator.  Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.

I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.

Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.

If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.

Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.

When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.

Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.

How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.

Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.

And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.

At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.

Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.

One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.

I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.

Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.

So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.

I like this last addition.

When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)

We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.

So we did.

Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.  

WAIT DO AMERICANS HAVE THESE?

I'VE SEEN SO MANY AMERICANS BE CONFUSED BY A CHEESE SLICER GODDAMN