*weeps uncontrollably at 9 o'clock in the morning*

God, I love randos on the internet who just want to be kind.

my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who's my best friend in the world and recently he was like "you're too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!" and I was like "a niece might be more up my alley" and he just got more excited and said "ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful"

OP the tags!!

I fucking LOVE the way people act when they love a sport and watch a beginner succeed at it. It reminds me of the first time I went surfing, I'd been trying for an hour to get my balance and when I finally managed to stand up and ride a wave in literally every surfer on the beach was like

Sometimes you need nights like this to remind you of why you fell in love with figure skating to begin with.

I love otter

Dianne DeWitt @ Jean-Louis Scherrer Spring/Summer, 1988 Haute Couture

why is he standing up

i dont know if this is a safe place

Safe place to what?

Harkness test for the uninitiated:

It's essentially used to determine if a non-human or alien character could be considered an acceptable sexual partner.

Here's the famous visual reference:

Scooby-Doo passes the Harkness test, by these standards.

All that said - would.

there's always some bullshit happening on reddit

my humor 2016

happy 3 year anniversary of wheeze man

Finally, the original has crossed my dash.

@strangezeroz welcome to tumblr where the app decides when you can be gifted with the sight of og memes, you cannot look for these yourself via the search engine, you won’t find them, you have to wait to be gifted them

For those of you who might be new here, Tumblr has no algorithm, legendary memes are brought to your dash by mutuals like pet cats bringing you dead birds.

You know how kids are supposed to be exposed to some level of dirt and grime as they grow up so their immune systems can learn what's a deadly disease and what just causes some slight irritation? And if a kid grows up in a too clean environment they're likely to develop severe allergies or a hyper immune disorder?

I think the over sanitation of the internet is doing similar things to people's psyche.

No that ship with an age gap isn't the same as pedophilia, you're just having the moral equivalent to hay-fever.

my phone isn’t charging even though i plugged her innnnn dramatic ass bitch. YOUR PUSSY IS FILLED! WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT

Can you stop bouncing and moaning on it 😐 please for the love of god

i see now that i shouldn’t have made this post on tumblr. specifically.

When the author deletes your favorite fanfic:

Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)

Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there. 

But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history. 

I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing. 

Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it?? 

It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic. 

But it’s not dead.

Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy. 

Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away. 

Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work. 

You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me. 

Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone

PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)

It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia. 

(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)

Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it! authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.

This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture - “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.

@jambonsama thought you would like that

Thanks, I do !

If someone could tag that person who did the gorgeous binding of @senlinyu‘s magnificent Manacled… I mean the book is awesome, and the book binding ? Gives it justice. Also I think that the person who did the binding  has made / is making other bindings? Maybe? I can’t quite remember?

@armoredsuperheavy might be an interesting read for you

I feel so vindicated in seeing this post, and knowing I’m not the only one who has “probably-the-only-extant-copy” fanfics from the late 90s in binders.

I took probably the most ridiculous and difficult route, hand bookbinding. Here’s an example of an earlier-era fic I’ve bound for archival purposes.

And some Bookbinding resources if anyone wants to join in the efforts!  Rock on, fanfic hamsters!

as an archivist (a real one!) and a fanfic author, this post speaks so hard to me. SAVE YOUR STUFF, AUTHORS

In high school my best friend and I were known as the book printers. At the time neither of us had access to the internet beyond school so we did the only thing that made sense, printed everything. We would spend as much time as we could after school, usually on fridays, huddled around the library computers printing fics we wanted to read. The librarians didn’t mind, one of them actually thought it was charming and christened us her book printers.

I owe so much to authors, the early ones who showed me that it was ok to think up grand worlds and fill them with my favorite characters as well as characters of my own creation, and especially the new authors who quickly became my found family and have taught me that finding yourself through your writing is perfectly acceptable, and losing yourself to an indulgent plot line is fine too.

If I’ve learned anything in the decades since I offered to pay the school for the gross amount of paper we used, it’s that you should never forget your roots, and always remember you might just be the one creating fertile grounds for others to put down roots of their own.

If you ever have the chance, do it, print the pages and bind them. The story already holds a special place in your heart, isn’t it only fair that you hold it close as well?

i’ve been contacted a few times by people who have bound my fanfic into print: it never stops being a delight and an honor to see that some stuff i wrote for online consumption meant enough to someone that they wanted to keep it in their actual home, on their actual bookshelf.

Hey, if you guys are trying to digitize fics from printouts, don’t type them by hand! Use a program like FreeOCR, it can read the pages if you scan them and make them into PDFs. All you have to do is lightly edit it for typos. It’s free and safe!

1928 c. Uranium glass. From Art Deco and Art Nouveau, FB.

Truth oozing out of her bath to irradiate mankind

Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like "I'm not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it." Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.

I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.

Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won't let you copy and paste:

today at work a little girl WHIPPED a packaged cookie at me with all her little toddler strength before it fell to the ground where it broke into several pieces and when i handed it back to her i said "I think you dropped this ma'am" which really tickled her mother who looked exhausted and stressed. but then the girl starting having an absolute tantrum, demanding another cookie, because that one was now broken. and her mother, so so calmly, said "well baby, today you learn about consequences" and that shit fucking ROCKED my world

10 January 1969

Today in 1969, George Harrison rehearsed until lunch time.