I know this is a long post – but omg it gave me feels. Can you imagine how intense their love had to be to survive how homophobic it was back then. 😭😭😭
I noticed several scenes where your eyes watered and there was intense emotion – where was that coming from and what was behind that? … You were driving a bus and your eyes watered up almost as though there was a sadness to you. (x)
This was me at 17, drinking blood orange juice in a hotel in Rome while on a school trip with the Latin club.
I’m nearly 26 now, and I’ve just finished Anne Rice’s latest novel “Prince Lestat”. I began reading the Vampire Chronicles when I was 15 or 16, I can’t remember exactly, and they really meant a lot to me. Armand and Daniel were my first OTP.
There wasn’t a real fandom to join since Anne Rice had attacked fandom activity, destroying the archives of fanfiction long before I’d ever pick up one of her books. Furthermore my guardians were leery of the internet and me being welcome in their home depended on staying in their good graces, so I never thought to rebel.
I dreamed of vampires on my own, devouring anything I could get my hands on, wishing I’d come of age in the 80s as “Lestat” described them, wishing these characters were real and would carry me away into their world.
The official Obama portaits unveiled today. President Obama’s portrait was done by Kehinde Wiley, and Michelle Obama’s portrait was done by Amy Sherald, making the two artists the first African-American artists to be commissioned for portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.
“What I was always struck by when I saw his portraits was the degree to which they challenged our ideas of power and privilege,” Obama said.
The juxtaposition of contemporary urban culture with centuries-old postures and wallpaper-like backgrounds make for bold paintings, of which Obama’s is Wiley’s most famous to date.
For her portrait, Michelle Obama chose Baltimore-based artist Amy Sherald. Sherald is another African-American artist known for her unique style, and her portraits also tend to underscore themes of social justice. She often paints black skin tones in gray as a way to take away the assigned “color” of her subjects. Sherald’s work is less about realism in composition and more about shape and color; like Wiley, the choice of Sherald ushers in a new era of presidential portrait … The former first lady said she was thinking about the impact Sherald’s work will have on “girls and girls of color.”
“They will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the walls of this great American institution … And I know the kind of impact that will have on their lives because I was one of those girls,” she said.
I asked my dad if I have ever made him cry in front of me before, because I don’t remember ever seeing him cry. He said, “Once.” He told me that when I was 3 years old, he laid out a pen, a dollar, and a toy of some sort in front of me. He wanted to see which one I would pick. I think that a lot of Chinese people do that… It represents what you’ll value most when you grow up. Like the pen is intelligence, money, is well, money, and the toy is fun. He was just doing it out of curiosity and boredom. It was interesting for him to see which one I’d pick anyway. He said that I just sat there and stared at the items. He sat across from me and waited patiently. According to him, I crawled towards them, he held his breath, and I pushed everything aside and went right into his arms. He didn’t realize that he was one of the choices. And that was the first, and the only time I made him cry.
That thing you wrote that isn’t “good enough” to put up on the AO3. You can put it up there! The AO3 isn’t meant to be The World’s Classiest Showcase. It’s an archive. It exists because most other forms of hosting fannish work eventually degrade or disappear. Accounts get deleted. Websites shut down. The AO3 preserves those things. Ten years from now you’ll be like, “Shit, there was this really great tag essay, but the person changed their Tumblr URL and then Tumblr closed up shop…” (look, even Tumblr will die eventually) and your only hope of finding it will be if the page was cached, or if somebody uploaded it to the AO3.
The AO3 exists to preserve ephemera as much as substantial works. You know how valuable it is for archaeologists to be able to read the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii? The little things, the notes, the headcanons, the notfics, the meta, the back-and-forths, are all important too.
YES YES YES THIS.
Tumblr’s likely to die sooner than you expect, and suddenly – it’s owned by Yahoo. (Anyone remember
del.icio.us, later delicious.com?) Yahoo’s trying really really hard to squeeze money out of tumblr and it’s not working, for all the reasons discussed in synec’s post and because a huge portion of its userbase is 13-18 years old and HAVE NO DIGITAL MONEY so can’t buy things online even if they wanted to.
There is no “worthy to be on AO3.” None. The early fics were often really well-written; it was a high-standards archive – not because “it strove for high standards” but because the only people who knew it existed, who cared about a new multifandom archive, were the ones who’d been around watching archives disappear for years; they were veteran fic writers who wanted a permanent place to share their stories. It took a long time for AO3 to have enough server capacity to allow open invites; in the early days, it was friend-of-a-friend for invite codes. (They wanted more people; they couldn’t handle a flood. So they handed out a few codes at a time)
We even talked about it while setting up the original terms of service – knowing that by saying, our standards are less restrictive than ff.net, less restrictive than LJ, we were going to eventually have HUGE amounts of really bad fic. FF.net got the nickname “pit of voles,” and AO3 was going to outdo that… eventually.
And. We wanted it ALL. All the reader-insert Mary Sue “date with hot dude” fic; all the “quiz to find out which power ranger you would be” fic; all the “band came to my home town and their bus broke down in front of my house and they needed a coffee and…” fic. And later, all the meta: the thinky character analyses; the “who’d be best on a first date” discussions; the “why the new movie sucked rocks and should never have been made because they ruined my favorite sidekick” rants.
ALL. WE WANT IT ALL.
AO3 is not about “the best of fandom;” it’s about “the truth of fandom.” And the truth is, fandom is not comprised of 90% well-written tightly-plotted carefully proofread fic. Fandom is comprised of people who love their favorite shows and books and characters and want to share that love with others.
AO3 are not the fanfic standards police. We’re the ones cheering for the “GLOWING BLUE SKELETON DICKS” tags.
Someday, some fandom archaeologist (and yes, there will be fandom archaeologists, isn’t that awesome?) will sift through the badfic, the quick drabbles, the Mary Sues, and write articles for peer-reviewed journals chronicling the complete collected works of some of the 21st century’s greatest authors and how you can see in THIS self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck the origin of those characterization tactics and flow of prose that make your subsequent masterworks truly shine as beloved classics, and THIS short character drabble gives THAT story arc in your well-known later story an exceptional poignancy and depth if one considers it backstory.
Also that fandom archaeologist’s teenage daughter will think the self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck is the best thing she’s ever read.
I-want-my-IWTV 