Said this to a dear and much-loved friend today, but I think maybe we all might need to see it:
Long-fic is not the rent you pay to be a part of fandom.
Fic, full-stop, is not the rent you pay to be a part of fandom.
Art is not the rent you pay to be a part of fandom.
Constantly creating is not the rent you pay to be a part of fandom.
Fandom is a community, not a corporation, your productivity is not a payment you have to make to be here.
and delightful as it is to get kudos, comments, reblogs, etc, and as important as those are for encouraging fan creators? those aren’t the rent you pay to be part of fandom either
nothing is
this is a gift economy; fanworks and feedback are gifts
are you a dorky nerd about something? welcome to fandom!
That’s it. That’s all you need. To love something enough to want to talk about it, or hear other people talk about it, or read things about it, or listen to things about it, you are allowed to consume without creating.
You are allowed to just roll around in your love of something like a puppy in a leaf pile without ever going through the tag on Tumblr or setting foot outside your digs.
SUCH IS THE POWER OF FANDOM. admission is free. there is no lifeguard on duty. please remember to drink water, and always tip 20% if you are able.
Every single craft has been paying “The Passion Tax” for generations. This term (coined by author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant) — and backed by scientific research — simply states that the more someone is passionate about their work, the more acceptable it is to take advantage of them. In short, loving what we do makes us easy to exploit.
If the phrase “vocational awe” isn’t part of your lexicon yet, stop scrolling and read Fobazi Ettarh:
Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. This article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed.
I see it in every field I’ve ever worked in: publishing, open source software development, higher education. It describes pretty much every industry that relies on creativity, altruism, or both.
The funny thing is that they have a huge tourism business, and no one will want to visit if their children will be taken away for being “at risk” of being supported. They’re kneecapping a major part of the economy
Forgive the bad underlining, I’m fucking shaking with rage is all
Just me and my petty ass but if you planned a vacation to Disneyworld in Florida I think it’s worth it to:
-Call all your relevant travel coordinators to cancel it and tell them this shit is why.
-Call Florida’s relevant government offices and tell them you have relocated your tourism dollars away from their state and this is why.
-Attempt to reschedule at Disneyland in California if that’s at all feasible for you. Or just go vacation somewhere they aren’t introducing anti-trans bullshit. Minnesota and Michigan are currently top contenders.
Enough people relocate their money to where their children aren’t in danger of being fucking kidnapped by the government, then maybe some of these chucklefucks might get the message.
I’m sorry I can’t read that book you recommended. Yeah, no, it’s just that beginning something new that I don’t know if I’m in the mood for is to me what plastic bags are to horses and if you play 30 seconds of an unfamiliar audiobook I WILL spook and break two of my legs.
I can’t even bring myself to read books I WANT to read, what the fuck makes anyone think they have more power over me than the dopamine-sucking rat inside my own brain? You say a movie is super good and want me to watch it so we can talk about it? No. That’s homework now. My brain selects what is Acceptable based on something between ornithomancy and letting a cat knock over some cups. Nobody understands it. I am ruled by it. Doctors refuse to adequately medicate me for it. I will watch the latest Pixar movie when and only when you prop my corpse in front of the television and the coins fall off my eyes.
I think it needs to become common knowledge that “inability to read social cues” can show up as overcompensating.
You don’t know how much misbehaviour is allowed, so you become the perfect child who never tests rules.
You don’t know if someone is irritated with you, so you’ll be extra generous and self-effacing.
You don’t know how much is expected of you at work so you’ll kill yourself in a minimum-wage job and not notice that nobody else is working like this.
“Hardworking and quiet” should be as much of an autism red flag as “ignores rules and doesn’t know when to stop talking”. Or why don’t we just start using words to communicate so i can stop tracking everybody’s eyebrow twitches, that would be great.
I’ve been thinking about what creates the makeup of an instant fan-favorite series, or at least drastically increases a story’s likelihood of developing a fandom, and these are some of the high level consistencies I’ve found.
These stories often contain:
- An ensemble cast that contains a multitude of personalities - this allows fans to latch onto different characters they feel close to and allows for more expansive narratives as characters are mixed and matched to be leaders of the plot (especially in episodic stories) along with a wider breadth of representation.
- Representation, or perceived/projected representation - while it’s possible to generate a popular story by sticking to the “white straight teen male target audience” formula, stories that become mega-hits tend to also have something for everyone in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Many of the mega-hit fandoms got there despite themselves, simply by teasing the possibility of an LGBT+ relationship and keeping the audience hoping for it for years. Unknown actors have been catapulted to stardom for portraying one partner in what becomes a popular fan ship.
- A sense of “community” within the story - whether it’s a starship, a fellowship, a military base, a magical world, or a hotel getaway, fans want to feel a sense of a place they could “go to”, made up of people they want to spend time around.
- An expansive world - Stories where the world is just there to serve the plot feel thin and tend to not generate much for fandoms to work with. Fandom is generated more commonly by stories that are linked to larger works and worlds, as that lends the sense that the characters and settings have a life that goes on before and after the story takes place. This can include characters who have friends/family that never appear or are never relevant to the central plot, stories that borrow from larger canons like a huge fictional universe, history, or even the Bible, or that realistically attach the fictional to “real life” in a way that allows fans to imagine the characters in other scenarios beyond the original story.
- Personality quiz style “fun thing” - Whether it’s subsections of an organization, noble houses, supernatural creatures, schools of magic, fantastical career paths, animal affinity, or a caste system, stories that generate “mega fandom” tend to have a way for the audience to not just project themselves into the story, but find their community within that story in a way that matches to their personality and preferences, ie, you can make a personality quiz around how you match up or where you would be placed to a “fun thing” within the story.
This is an awesome post! I wrote my own thing months ago about what I called “Fandom Potential” in books and id like to add what I can!
Put simply, a book that has “Fandom Potential” is one that causes its readers to carve out space within themselves for it. Its readers make the book and story world part of them, rather than merely reading it. The book persists in their minds after they close the cover. It can continually be engaged with and considered and thought about and applied and re-thought and re-explored. The only other necessity is that these people be numerous enough to find each other and talk about the book.
So, if you wanted to set about writing a book with random potential, these were the things I determined you’d do:
1. Write something accessible. Not to say dumb it down. But it can’t be a book that needs an unusual amount of patience or an interest in a niche subject to enjoy. It has to deal with universal themes and conflicts that are relatable to everyone. Also, representation is a plus.
2. Write something with potential for obsession. There’s a distinction between a good book that lots of people will like, and a book that lots of people will love. It has to stand out enough to be one of the first books that pops to mind at the question, “What’s your favorite book?” Lots of worldbuilding and large casts go a long way toward this.
3. Potential for connection with oneself. Like the OP said. Harry Potter fans sort themselves into houses, Divergent fans into factions, PJO fans into cabins. Would Harry Potter come up as much in conversation if I couldn’t sort myself into House Hufflepuff and put the Hufflepuff crest on my shirt and laptop? Personality test type stuff is fandom food. So are motifs and symbols that can be identified with, made in fanart, and/or put on clothing and bags. The book markets itself at that point.
4. A world with loose ends: Get your readers to imagine themselves in the book. Hint at things that aren’t fully explored in the story. You might put pieces of history that are only hinted at and locations that are just there to flesh out the map. Make your world coherent enough to have gaps readers can fill with their own ideas. And make leads for fan theories as well. Hint at backstories of even minor characters. Tease depth in everything. EVERYTHING. Leave in little Easter eggs and hints that fans can obsess over.
5. Lots of possible ships/pairings: Fandom thrives of shipping, so having shippable characters goes a long way in cultivating a fandom. I’ve been in several niche fandoms that basically developed around ship wars. Ship wars suck, but the discussion they spark can make the ground fertile for more fandom activity. NOT to say that you should intentionally try to create conflict. Just have plenty of shippable characters, basically.
6. This was already covered but: large cast of really awesome characters! Plenty of characters that people of all kinds can see themselves in and identify with! (Seriously, representation is your friend.) Plenty of side characters that the fandom can seize upon and add more backstory to! I would add, lots of grey-morality in characters and sympathetic antagonists or anti-heroes. Fandom LOVES those because they generate so much interest and discussion. Make your characters complex. And give them quirks! Add little details to them that you’d have to really know them to know.
Overall this is an awesome post and awesome thing to discuss
You know those aesthetic image posts that float around tumblr? I’m … starting to see a lot on my dash that are obviously ai-generated. Are non-artists having trouble telling the difference between AI images and real photos, or are people starting to stop care about the stolen art that gets fed into those programs?
I have no actual art training, so I want it known that if I ever DO reblog some ai stuff please let me know. It was unintentional and I would like to know. Thanks~
Yeah, I figure this is the case for most people. I’m going to put up a guide to spotting AI images after work!
I think people know by now how to tell if an image of a person is AI-generated. Count the fingers, count the knuckles, check the pupils, yadda yadda. I’ve seen several posts circulating about what to look for. However, I think people are a LOT less educated about backgrounds, and about the specific distinctions between human error and AI error. So that’s what I’m going to cover.
Now, don’t feel bad if you’ve reblogged or liked any of the images I’m about to show you guys. This is just what’s crossed my blog, so it’s what I have to work with. (Actually, thanks for providing the examples!)
I also generated a few images from crAIyon purely for demonstrational purposes, because I didn’t have anything on-hand to show my thoughts.
Firstly — Keep in mind that AI has a difficult time replicating “simple” styles. Think colorless line-drawings, cartoony pieces with thick lines, and pixel art.
Looks unsettling, right?
Why is this? Well, when a human makes art, we’re more prone to under-detailing by mistake than over-detailing, because adding detail in the first place place is more effort. A skilled artist should be good able to capture an idea with minimal, evocative shape language.
But when an AI makes art, it is the opposite. An AI doesn’t understand what it’s looking at, not in the way that you or I do. All it can do is search for and replicate patterns in the noise of pixels. As a result, it is prone to mushing together features in ways that a human artist … wouldn’t intentionally think to do.
It also over-details, replicating what it knows over and over again because it doesn’t know when it’s supposed to stop. Blank spaces can confuse it! It likes having detail to work with! Detail Is Data!
Again, this is why we count fingers.
These general principles still apply when we’re looking at styles that an AI is better equipped to imitate. So …
Secondly — AI’s tendency to over-render details makes it easier for it to pick up heavily detailed styles, especially if the style will still hold up when certain details are indistinct or merge together unexpectedly.
Scrutinize images that utilize a painterly, heavily-rendered, or photo-realistic style. Such as this one.
Thirdly — An AI piece that looks pretty good from a distance falls apart up close.
The above image looks almost like a photograph, but there is architecture here that you wouldn’t find in a real room, and mistakes that you wouldn’t find in the work of an artist that is THIS good at rendering. Or most beginner artists, even.
Can you see what falls apart here? Hint; we’re counting fingers again.
Check the window panes. Isn’t the angle that they all meet up at a little off? Why are the panes sized so inconsistently? Why doesn’t the view outside of them all line up into a cohesive background?
Count the furniture legs. Why does the farther-back case have a third leg? Why does the leg on the closer case vanish so strangely behind the flowery details?
Examine the curtain(?) fabric at the top of the window. What on earth IS that frilly stuff?
Another mistake that AI will make is drawing lines and merging details that a human artist would never think of as connected. See the lines crawling up the walls? See how some of the flower petals glop together at hard angles in some places? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.
You can see more strange architecture in the outdoor setting of this image.
A lot of the AI’s mistakes are almost art nouveau! We recognize that buildings are consistently angular, for stability reasons. An AI does not. (Also look at the trees in the background, and how they tend to warp and distort around the outline of the treehouse. They kinda melt into each other at some points. It’s wild.)
Fourthly — An AI will replicate any carelessness that was introduced into its original data set.
Obviously, this means that AIs will make fake watermarks, but everybody already knows that. What I need you guys to look out for is something else. It’s called artifacting.
Artifacting is defined as “the introduction of a visible or audible anomaly during the processing or transmission of digital data.” To put it in layman’s terms, you know how an image gets crunchy and pixelated if you save it as a jpg? Yeah. That. An AI with lots of crusty, crunchy jpgs fed into it will produce crunchy images.
Look at the floor at the bottom of our original example image;
See the speckles all along the glass panels, table legs, and flowers in shadow? Artifacted to hell and back! This shit is crunchier than my spine after spending half a day hunched over my laptop.
Again, legitimate art and photography may have artifacting too just because of file formatting reasons. But most artists don’t intentionally artifact their own images, and furthermore, the artifacting will not be baked into the very composition of the image itself. The speckles will instead gather most notably on flat colors at the border of different color patches and/or outlines.
Cronchy memes; funny. Cronchy AI art; shitty jpg art theft caught red-handed.
That’s probably all the lessons I can impart in one post. Class dismissed! As homework a bonus, consider these two sister images to our original flower room. Can you spot any signs of AI generation?
Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol
a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:
NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.
Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off.
Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.
YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.
DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the
responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side
of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.
SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.
YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.
As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.
(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)
bring the healthy fun back to fandom!
If ever a time comes when I don’t reblog this when it appears on my dash, assume I’m dead
So, this week I ordered a new couch pillow because I had a husband pillow full of shredded memory foam, and the thing needs to be opened and shifted around about once a week with the way I use it so it doesn’t shape up weird and actually fuck up my back when I bought it to NOT fuck up my back.
I now have a wedge pillow, made of one piece of foam. And I ordered a book cushion from etsy, and I just wanna say to anyone who has thought “that adaptive thing seems like it would be useful, but I’m not disabled, so maybe it’s not for me?”
It’s for you. Trust me. My back hurt because I was slouching weird on the couch. I got a husband pillow. It helped a lot. But, it turns out, what I need is one giant piece of memory foam, not a bunch of tiny bits.
And the book cushion? Books are heavy sometimes. Being able to rest it higher in my lap so it’s easier to read and hold? Better for my body.
Also, do you wake up with pain in the mornings? Try a contour pillow and a knee pillow.
Get those extra-strong treaded soles to wear with your heels because you wobble otherwise.
Wear compression gloves when you type. Get those orthopedic shoes because you can walk longer distances in more comfort. Buy the bra that actually supports the weight of your boobs. Get a lapdesk for your computer. Use a neck pillow even at home to keep your neck straight. Wear socks to bed. Listen to audiobooks. Read large print books.
You see something that you think will work for you and improve how you feel? Use it! Let’s fucking normalize adaptative shit for everyone!
Also, don’t think “Oh but I’m taking this from a disabled person”
The more people who use assistive devices, and show demand for assistive devices, THE MORE THEY MAKE AND THE BETTER THEY GET.
The best example of this I can think of is canes. When I started using a cane 10 years ago, they were either one color, or old lady patterns. There were all of two grip designs, and they honestly kinda sucked.
Now, as more and more people have realized they need them, and have gotten them earlier in their lives for a variety of problems, canes are SO DOPE NOW.
You can get them in Galaxy print! Neon colors! Different ergonomic grips! You can even get what I have, which is angle-adjustable arm crutches!!
Overcome your internal ableism, and let yourself use the thing that prevents pain or makes your life easier. This disabled person can tell you it’s 100% worth it.
every now and again i think “surely it can’t be that weird for a child to sort things, it has to be something every child does”
and then i remember that my mother finally had an allistic child after two autistic kids in a row and was baffled and annoyed to find out she couldn’t just keep him occupied by sticking a box of unsorted buttons in front of him and let him sort them
like my mother thought, exactly like i do sometimes, that surely every child must just sit there and sort whatever is in front of them but no, actually, most of my non autistic peers didn’t do this and thought i was a fucking weirdo for doing it
anyway i still struggle to believe that most people don’t find deep enjoyment in sitting there and arbitrarily sorting shit. what do they even do if they need to do data entry? do they just suffer? weirdos.
Dracula voice: I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for my lawyer, his wife, his wife’s girlfriend, his wife’s girlfriend’s fiancé and their extra boyfriends the Cowboy and the doctor and the doctor’s thesis advisor who knows how to kill vampires for some reason!
Love that this post has broken Dracula Daily containment and I keep seeing tags like “THAT’S what happens in Dracula?!?!?”
the neurodivergent urge to use vaguely nonhuman body language in place of words. i love being like “i don’t really talk to this person but today i’ll sit around them longer than usual as a symbol of trust”
ALT
