Everyone excited to stop aging and stop dying and stop being born in April

when JUICE starts talking about his special interests and starts using perfect grammar.... I felt that

I forgot about thiissss 17776 you will always be famous

Just got Outer Wilds, will post updates

Not even an hour in, died trying to climb a tree

I will not try that agin

Updating my rule to say don't try to climb things at all cuz I just did it. Again. This time on a rockface

I'm sorry did the sun just explode.

Aaand I drowned

Buddy needs to work on their lung capacity, couldn't even walk across a river without drowning

What do you mean I can't sleep for a full 24 hours :(

Oh. The sun just exploded again. Is that why I can't sleep for a full 24 hours.

Giant's Deep is. Huh

Having many mixed thougts

Oh. I can just. Fly into the sun. On total accident

Huh.

What is happening inside of Dark Bramble??

I've decided to treat the harmonica like a siren's call.

By that I mean go far, far away from it any time you hear it because it will get you killed if you go near it

I think I like Giant's Deep

Pretty :] (< certified ocean lover)

I clipped through the floor and got stuck.

I've decided I Do Not Like the flight mechanics (just died in space cuz couldn't get to ship)

Wh

Why are there two harmonicas

"I'm making good progress!"

And then.

Ooo

White hole station looks cool

Haven't explored it yet but it looks cool

Loving the fact that they have different sound effects for eating marshmallows at different roast levels

Eghhh..

I don't the fish fossil

WHY ARE THERE FISH IN MY PLANET??

I DO NOT LIKE YHE FISH

I think me and the anglerfish are gonna have more problems than me and the Reaper Leviathans atp

I'm not even playing Outer Wilds rn but it's a relevant thought so.

Why are the planets so tiny??

Y'know what they say, slow and steady doesn't get eaten by a giant space fish

Never mind slow and steady regrets ever coming here

I've discovered I can explore Dark Bramble in my ship and am now determined to find the harmonica.

I FOUND FELDSPAR.

I don't think I've ever heard a song that is both so beautiful and so annoying to here

End Times makes me sad :((

I mean it's annoying to hear when I just go somewhere new but. It makes me sad :(((

OH EW

I just realized the sound effect for the death where you get stuck between a cave roof and the sand on ember twin ends with squishing noises..

Hey I have new information! Time to go to Brittle Hollow

The cruel and forgiving Hollow's Lantern:

I didn't even last five minutes before getting taken out by ghost matter

Why did nobody tell me Chert has special dialogue for when the sun is about to explode

Oh so you can. You can just brute force your way through the current

Okay

Guess which genius just got into the core of Giant's Deep!

It took me. An embarrassingly long time. To realize that I could just.

Go under.

Statue island.

Oh. So is all of this the fault of the Nomai or.

Okay nvm I explored more

I just hIT TEKTITE WITH NY SHIP IM SO SORRY-

Oh I'm walkin on the walls..

Not he gravity ones even just. Regular cliff walls on ember twin I think broke smth

Oh yeah I broke smth

My gravity is sideways

Okay update did some testing, it seems I've been doomed to orbit the dying sun

Currently sitting with Chert while the sun goes out and imagining some scenario where we can actually convince them it's a time loop.

I know it wouldn't matter cuz. Time loop. But it'd be nice to be believed by somebody outside the loop

I'm in the anglerfish fossil cave reading the rules to the game and it sounds like these kids just mixed red light green light and tag

Is. Is that what they did

HOW IS THERE STILL STUFF TO EXPLORE IN SUNLESS CITY??? IVE BREN EXPLORING FOR NEARLY AN HOUR

Okay I'm moving on to the Hanging City/Old Settlement, I am. So tired of the Sunless City.

Side note, it is. Very annoying. That the most lore-heavy places both slowly degrade over time and making it harder to traverse

I'm so done with this stupid black hole

I get that it's for lore or a puzzle or whatever but it's getting really annoying when I'm just trying to navigate a place that is actively falling apart around me

Can I PLEASE go one loop without falling into the Orb of Despair? I'm trying to get to the more interesting lore.

Wh. When was I supposed to realize that eating marshmallows heals you

Was I supposed to assume eating a sugar cylinder would fix my blunt force trauma

Ykw the supernova is actually kind of pretty when you get to watch it from the white hole station

Hah. I think this universe might genuinely be against me :D

First time I tried getting into the black hole forge, supernova

Second time, I fell. Couldn't get back cuz of time.

This time? CEASHED. BEFOR EI COULD EVEN GET INTO THE PLANET, I DIDED ON IMPACT

I'm going to commit a felony /nsrs

Getting somewhere shouldn't take this long

I've had fiVE LOOPS NOW. I SHOUDK T VE. STRUGGLING HTUS NUCH

Make that six. It was the reactor this time.

Oh btw I finally got into the Black hole forge

The Hanging City has officially been explored

Okay I really really Do Not Like the Old Settlement

I've exploded for nearly three loops now and I've found all of 0 new things, how much more is there to explore??

1. It was the murals. Apparently I wasn't close enough for it to register as found

2. COME ON, I WAS SO CLOSE TO THE END! I just figured out the Quantum Moon puzzle, why did the sun have to explode

Aww, I really like Solanum

I mean. She doesn't talk (at least not out loud) and I can't even see her face, but she gives me Cute Vibes

Oh. Oh that corpse. That was Solanum. Huh.

I probably should've figured that out sooner

Ooo, I am Getting Places

Hooooo boy, I think I'm about to do something really dumb

That something is shutting down the ATP if any were wondering

Okay well nevermind I guess

Was gonna shut it off, then decided to mess around with the signalscope first and got teleported to. Somewhere

I'm covered in sand. Send help

With the power of Little Scout Photo Mode and a lot of jumping, I have freed myself from my sandy prison!

1. I got the warp core, now moving to Dark Bramble to find the Vessel

2. W. Why is End Times playing. The sun Should Not be about to explode yet should I be scared

Okay y'know what, aside from forcing me to going stupidly slow, the Anglerfish aren't so bad

Not related to the playthrough, I might've broken smth with that last reblog cuz when I try to edit to add tags it just. Closes Tumblr. I think I made the site mad

Oh dear void I just escaped getting chased by two different anglers

I think I just had a whole heart attack there

IM DOING VERY GOOD(?) THINGS RN

This feels. Concerning

FISHSTICK NO

I just finished it and this game makes me sad now :(

welcome to the club ::,)

made this emoji for a discord I'm in, please feel free to borrow it for all your Packing Your Little Bindle And Leaving needs

"There is nothing wrong with adults living with their parents for any reason and it's actually the norm in huge parts of the world."

and

"People should be able to afford to live independently if that's what they want."

are statements that NEED to coexist.

u know whats crazy its 2026 and phone in bed is still the only way to survive. they never made a way around this

i'm afraid the character limit in the former bird app is destroying my potential

two sentence horror story

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!

january is one of those months where you experience every feeling on the human spectrum and you just have to go about your day like that isn't happening

had to show you guys. he looks so unbelievably bad. for context he always gets shit crusted in his fur because he doesn’t maintain it so my mom decided to give him a haircut and wanted to even it out

they greebled him

My oc should meet your oc, like a playdate

trying to make friends online like hey. do you wanna torture this guy with me?

one time i told a group of lesbian and bi women that i have never watched wicked and they were shocked, gagged, gooped, “but you’re queer. you like pussy. how have you not seen wicked?” yeah. well. i like pussy, not musicals?

i’m this exact post. all this just to fuck women.

“are you going to the lucy dacus concert?” no. i listen to gucci mane.