tigger8900

[tigger8900]

I think that one of the biggest problems that we have on fandoms is consistenly the loss of fandom and fanfiction etiquette. I started my stay on fandoms while I was 13 years old on 2005, and in those times people was more aware of "when in Rome do what Romans does" kind of thing.

I say this because with this whole Wattpad migration (as well with the Twitter/X migration), people instead of take a minute to learn how do we do things in AO3, they go with "screw it, I will make it as I know how to do it". When we used to use forums, there was always a post remarking the etiquette of the site in question, along with the usual etiquette like always tag propperly, put the corresponding warnings, etc. But every site has its own way to do it!!!

AO3 has their guidelines very clear on what does means every icon, how to use the site and everything. And is not that hard!!! Why do we, the people who had to read before the guidelines and see how the site worked by ourselves, take time on our lives (because we are adults now) to teach the Wattpad refugees how to use a site that shows you how to use it by itself?

We learned how to use it seeing others using it, we read the rules and everything, we spoke to people who was regulars, why can't they do the same? Why are they so entitled?

--

[tigger8900]

Lmao how is this real, "the ambient sounds of the world were wrong, sir"

[tigger8900]

I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17

It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.

All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.

[tigger8900]

Mimi's Tales of Terror, by Junji Ito

⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

Whether you call them urban myths, creepypasta, contemporary legends, or something else entirely, there's power in the stories that might have happened to a friend of a friend. This volume retells nine such stories (plus one bonus) from an earlier Japanese collection — Shin Mimibukuro, by Hirokatsu Kihara and Ichiro Nakayama — adapting them for manga through the eyes of Mimi, a student who can't seem to stop stumbling headfirst into horror. In these pages, she will encounter everything from spooky shadows and leaping monsters to corpses that stalk lethal waters and spirits that watch from beyond the grave. Just remember: everything told here really happened. Honest.

When we sit down to enjoy a horror story, there's a certain comfort in the agreed-upon fact that it's fictional. Stepping out of that safety zone into the realm of things that could have happened, that maybe did to someone just a few small degrees away from us, adds a particular thrill to the horror. I've long been a fan of the sub-genre, devouring Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark (all three volumes!) as a child, and in adulthood discovering the carefully-curated suspension of disbelief of the /r/nosleep community on reddit. So I was excited when I heard about this re-issue of a collection of such stories from Junji Ito.

I found them to be satisfying, but nothing to write home about. There's a good mix of shorter scares and long tales with elaborate set-up. But they never quite hit that "this really happened to a guy my cousin knows!" spot that I associate with a good urban legend, I suspect due to the use of Mimi as a protagonist. I could never get away from the feeling that I was reading a fictional story, because the recurring protagonist was getting in the way of true immersion.

That said, the stories themselves weren't bad by any stretch of the imagination. I think I would have minded less if it had been billed as a collection of short spooky manga adapted by Junji Ito rather than the marketing specifying that these were meant to be read as "true" urban legends. My favorites were Just the Two of Us, Sign in the Field, and the bonus story Monster Prop, but there were none that I particularly disliked. Junji Ito's art is, as always, on point. I'd recommend it to fans of his work, or spooky manga in general, but not to people who are looking for urban legends in particular.

#books #book review #mimi's tales of terror #junji ito #jocelyne allen #manga #horror manga #urban legends #shin mimibukuro #hirokatsu kihara #ichiro nakayama

[tigger8900]

The House of Hidden Meanings, by RuPaul

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

Known today as one of the most famous drag queens in the world, RuPaul had always been told he was destined for stardom. In this memoir, he traces his life from his tumultuous upbringing in the 60s through his years of party and hustle in the 70s and 80s, all the way to his meteoric rise in the 90s.

RuPaul is no doubt a complicated figure. While I wouldn't call myself a fan, not just due to his behavior but also his artistic genre being Not My Thing, I acknowledge his position as one of the most influential LGBTQ people today. I also think it's important to hear what our queer elders have to say, even if they don't always do things we agree with. Still, not being a particular fan of Drag Race myself, I wasn't sure if this memoir would have much of anything for me. I was happy to be proven wrong.

The story picks up in his early childhood back in the '60s, with his parents' divorce. As he traces his life through his teenage years and into his 20s, he reflects on the double-edged sword of his independence and drive, values instilled in him by his mother. I was satisfied with how well this narrative held true from chapter to chapter, driving straight from his childhood through to his troubled adult relationships. It felt like a memoir that had something specific to say, rather than merely being a collection of related anecdotes from someone's life.

While each chapter centers around a specific place or theme, he mostly keeps it linear, avoiding a lot of the jumping from childhood to adulthood and back again that tends to happen in queer memoir. That said, I did sometimes struggle to grasp how much time was passing. I knew roughly where I was in relation to other things, but at times I couldn't have told you if RuPaul was 20 or 25, 25 or 30. The ending in particular surprised me, as I'd failed to realize just how far into the 90s we'd gotten. Part of this might be my age, as I don't necessarily have the innate knowledge of when the various cultural touchstones were current and I wasn't looking them up as fastidiously as I could have been.

#books #book review #the house of hidden meanings #rupaul #rupaul charles #memoir #lgbtq #gay

[tigger8900]

#furry hate is such a useful flag though #because it demonstrates exactly how that person will treat anyone who is “too weird” #often counter to their stated philosophy of acceptance #if they come at furries they'll also come at people who celebrate polyamory or who are too genderfucky #whatever is too “freakish” for their particular tastes

[tigger8900]

*SIGHS*

Another AO3 app that's pretending to be official when it's not (or at least isn't making it clear its unofficial.) They're using AO3's name and logo, and embedding ads.

There is no official AO3 app

Someone else is gathering your data, potentially your log in information etc and making use of it how they please. (They say they're not but their privacy policy says otherwise)

They are making money from the ads without the fic writer's consent.

They've also rated it Pegi 3 (which is ludicrous)

Please, even if you care about nothing else, for the safety of your data, please don't use this app. Certainly don't give it your AO3 log in details.

I've told AO3 that it's infringing on its copyright. I will be requesting they remove access of my work as I do not consent to my creative content being used to generate ad revenue for them.

I will be reporting it as incorrectly rated.

The only email address I can find is [email protected] which is included in their privacy policy, and [email protected] as their developer.

[tigger8900]

girl help I'm getting they/them'd by well-meaning people who don't know what a tomboy is

[tigger8900]

Hey teenagers.

You aren't slick. We adults know you look at our smut. We know no amount of minors DNI is gonna stop you from looking at our smut. We were teenagers once too, you know?

But please. Don't interact with people about sexual things online. Reading somebodies adult fic is fine. I don't like it, but you're gonna do it. Commenting on that smutfic, or joining a discord server for it, puts everyone in a really dangerous situation. Thats an entirely different level of risk. Not even with people your own age, since you can never know for sure.

[tigger8900]

It makes me angry how so many people act like anti-indigenous actions(separating children from their families, slow genocide of communities through things like blood quantum requirements, spoiling of land, etc) are something that stopped happening at some point in the past, like we know better now. They're still happening today. In Canada, in Australia, in the US...

Do people think that the atrocities in 1890 (or whenever) were done by some obvious mustache-twirling villain? No. It was some guy enforcing laws passed to "save the ignorant from themselves" and telling anyone who objected to do the 19th century equivalent of coming back tomorrow to sort it out.

I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

[tigger8900]

smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud

[tigger8900]

Asking my mom earlier if she wanted me to drop off my copy of Salman Rushdie's memoir so she could read it before it had to go back to the library. Went like this:

Me: "You know Salman Rushdie, right?" Mom: "Yes, of course." Me: *doubting, based on past experience* "Author, got stabbed a year or two ago?" Mom: "Yeah, yeah. Got cut up into a bunch of pieces, right?" Me: 😲 Mom: "And then they had to dispose of him in the ocean?" Me: "...no. He survived. He's still alive. He wrote a book." Mom: "Oh. I'll have to read that."

I have no fucking idea who she was thinking of. I'm not sure I even want to know. I can't remember anything like that happening in the past few years!

[tigger8900]

[tigger8900]

Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.

This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…

Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of  Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint. 

S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf. 

Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.” 

Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well. 

The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons. 

Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:

Witchmark by C.L. Polk

A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Day Before by Liana Brooks

A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell

Shri, a book blogger at Sun and Chai

Vanessa, a writer and blogger at The Wolf and Books

TLDR: Women who write adult fantasy, especially women of color, are presumed to be writing young adult, which is problematic in that it internalizes diversity, dismisses the need and presence of diversity in adult fantasy, and plays into sexist assumptions of women writers. 

[tigger8900]

*Sees someone on twitter arguing that DoorDash is necessary for the disabled because microwave food is too much to handle.*

...What. That seems absurdly specific.

There are a lot of reasons someone might not be able to microwave food. "I literally cannot get out of bed", "i need nutrients you can't just microwave", "my dumb brain has put up 18 billion barriers to try and stop me from eating and this is the loophole I have" "the microwave in this apartment is out of reach/not labeled properly/not ADA friendly in another way" "for x or y reason microwave food is a one way ticket to severe burns", etc. I found a lot of reasons someone might need DoorDash and I also found this cool article about food sharing in the disabled community and how the author had to rely on an abusive partner once because she was either in bed or barely able to crawl and they were among the few people bringing food.

Just saying, there's a reason disabled people have higher chances of food insecurity and there's a reason meal trains, meals on wheels, and other programs focus on bringing food to people in need and not just assuming "they have a microwave and money, why bother?". Sometimes you don't have a family or friends or mutual aid group to bring you meals when you can't even pop something in the microwave.

[tigger8900]

"But then how is anyone supposed to be able to tell that I've performatively disliked that "filth"? And how will the writer know that they've done a Bad Thing and should feel bad about it?"

"AO3 doesn't need a "dislike" button"

Um, actually, it already has one. Depending on your specs, it might look a little different but over all it looks kinda like this:

You can find it at the corner of your screen, which corner is dependent on your layout.

Anyway, if you dislike a fic, you can hit this Dislike Button until the fic goes away. It really is pretty amazing actually.

#/s #in case it wasn't clear

[tigger8900]

rick riordan off the shits