This conversation happened yesterday on twitter that I wanted to respond to, but twitter is a horrible platform for nuanced discussion because of the character limit, so here I am back on the blue hellsite instead.
Well, that don’t work in the scene I’m doing it’s too cute not to draw.
DAWWW SO CUTE :>
they use human chairs but really badly
same
Wait elongated chairs y’all. Eight chair legs instead of one, they can lie down majestically and put their chins on the table like they were always meant to.
The father’s artistic talent is clearly on display here, but I’m actually really impressed with this kid’s wild imagination. Many of his drawings are both conceptually unique and coherent.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes – tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered.
(Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)
I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark. It was a real loss. The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.
But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo. They weren’t the only ones. And they won’t be the last. It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc. If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.
AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever. So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories. Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom – where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever. Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.
Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away. Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all – a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).
So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom. Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes. You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are. If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first. If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.
Many Flickr users are upset at the changes. They expected their photos to be archived there forever. Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay – since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.
I fear that applies to fannish works as well. Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution. They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced. Any commercial service can’t be relied on.
I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said. He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available. Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read. I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines.
A good post to revive!
I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.
The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.
Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.
Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.
This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?
AO3 is distinctive in that it has an entire organization in place to make sure it continues. (So while nothing is forever, AO3 is about as solid as it gets.) But I’d probably trust DW second most, and I’d trust it over many single-owner not-for-profit fannish spaces.
Not to hijack the thread, but this is Walter from Squidge.org. Yes, we’re still out here, though we’re such a small part of fandom now as opposed to the early 90s when we started. Squidge has a future, I think, and I’m looking at replacing several of current sites (Peja’s WWOMB, NCISFiction.com, and a couple more eFiction sites) with a single AO3-based archive.
And as for the future, yes, we’re all getting older. I have a will that bequeaths Squidge.org fandom sites to the OTW (the folks that run AO3). My husband has instructions, and OTW has been told of my wishes.
Great to hear you’re around! I used to read WWOMB so often–and again whenever I get into a new-to-me old fandom. There are so many fics on older archives that aren’t crossposted anywhere else.
High heeled shoes don’t become flats if you break the heels off.
The posts of earrings aren’t sharp.
Nail polish takes a long time to dry and smudges when wet.
You can’t hold in a period like pee.
Inserting a tampon is not arousing or sexual in any way, ever.
Feel free to add your own.
– Bras leave red marks on the skin under and around boobs and it is a magical experience when taken off.
– Make up can take anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes depending on how skilled you are.
– Taking hair out of a ponytail after wearing it for hours does not make it perfectly straight when it comes down.
– Hair when wet sticks to the skin it no longer flows, idiot.
-When women with long hair kiss, turn around, do anything, their hair falls in the way.
– Stockings are itchy and tear like wet paper bags.
– Pantyhose, tights, leggings, and stockings are each different.
– Waxing hurts and leaves red skin for a while afterwards while shaving leaves stubble
– Most can’t run in heels unless they have been VERY worn
– Insecurity in appearance doesn’t mean “buy me a drink”
– EVERYONE HAS DIFFERENT TASTES IN EVERYTHING
-Having large breasts sucks. It sucks beyond belief. If a garment happens to fit your large chest, odds are it won’t fit the rest of you. Underboob sweat is real and terrible. Bending over for extended periods of time will tweak your back out. Running can be painful due to boob turbulence. Bras are hella expensive. Big breasts are not fun.
Putting a tampon in isnt a quick bend-poke-done kinda deal. It involves cubicle yoga, messy hands, numerous curse words as you realise it isnt in correctly and have to take it out and start again with a new one.
Yes to all of this. But also:
If her hair is in an updo, one does not simply remove a hairpin to send her hair cascading down her back. No. If her hair is an updo, it will take at least an hour and an extra set of hands to remove the 137 bobby pins that are holding her hair in place. Furthermore, there’s probably a can’s worth of hairspray in there, intended to withstand category 2 hurricane winds. There’s no cascading happening here – the best you can hope for is a misshapen nest of hair to clump and poof unattractively in the back while it still remains flat against her scalp.
This is one of the funniest posts I’ve seen in a while (especially if you read all the comments), but also really depressing because at 42 I still judge myself as having failed for not matching up to all these mythical stereotypes despite knowing they’re impossible
^^^This though
The odds of a woman having smoothly shaved legs and armpits are directly proportional to the amount of skin her clothing bares and/or the amount of fucks she gives at that particular moment.
GLASSES ARE NOT COSMETIC. If we whip them off, we do not become gorgeous fashion models. We become squinty.
-most women wear bras. Yes, even when they are trying to dress sexy. Because bras make boobs look perkier and rounder, which is something men apparently find sexy, so being a seductress or femme fatale is not an automatic reason for a female character to not be wearing a bra.
-a good bra will hide headlights, or at the very least drastically reduce their noticeability. A women with enough pointy nipple issues will opt for a padded or molded bra to hide them.
-women’s nipples do not automatically become hard pyramids visible through any and all layers of clothing the second they become even slightly aroused. They are not the female equivalent of boners. And even if their nipples do get hard, the bras they are almost certainly wearing (because even a goddamn succubus with big, honkin’ knockers for seducing men is gonna have those painful puppies in some kind of boob sling) should keep those pointy nipples from being visible to every other character in the scene, JIM BUTCHER. YES, EVEN LARA RAITH WOULD WEAR A BRA ONCE IN A GODDAMN WHILE.
if you’re being tied up and tortured in a freezing underground dungeon, then you probably have more important things to pay attention to than how hard somebody’s nipples are, jim butcher
– Wearing a bra that doesn’t fit HURTS. It’s not sexy to wear a bra that’s “two sizes too small”, it’d make your clothes hang oddly and you’d have a weird, uncomfortable “quad-boob” effect and your back would hurt, BEN AARONOVITCH.
Also, after removing a too small bra, there’s gonne be angry red lines on the boobs and ribs and the lady is not going to want them to be touched by anyone for a good long while
-Not all women wear heels. Those things hurt and are hard to balance in. They can also mess up your feet and back pretty bad.
-Lips aren’t just naturally red “as if she’d been drinking wine but they were just like that without makeup cause she’s so perfect,” my dear little Kvothe from ‘Name of the Wind’. Also, girls do not naturally smell like fruit or flowers, it’s either perfume or something she’d been eating recently.
I’ve been appreciating this post but now it’s back very specifically calling out my problematic faves and I don’t think those male authors realize how much it totally takes me out of the story for a moment when they commit these errors. It does nothing useful for the plot and is annoying for half of the audience
Is it weird that I’m female and wasn’t aware of a solid third of these?
I mean, all writes take note. I basically live in man land when it comes to protagonists so I don’t know half these things despite being a woman
(Most) Women do not look at themselves in the mirror and compare their breasts to fruit. Any sort of fruit. Especially melons. Please save us from the melons.
Also we are not aware of our breasts at all times. I do not walk down a flight of stairs and think “oh golly my breasts are bouncing so much right now”. They are as much as natural part of our bodies as arms. Do you constantly think about how your arms are moving? Sure you may be aware of them, but paying full attention? Doubtful.
Also: women working out are almost never sexy. They’re not glowing or glistening or (kill me) *sparkling*. They are red and sweaty and gross just like all the dudebros doing their time with the dumbbells. Stop ogling fictional women at the gym, TOM WOLFE.
Also worth noting: large-breasted women, if forced to run or descend a flight of stairs at speed, may cradle their bosom like a small child to stop it bouncing around and hurting like hell
As a university student whose course load is heavily math-based, I’ve had my fair share of encounters with math problems that seem unsolvable, and notes that make absolutely no sense. Fortunately, I’ve also come across a lot of useful resources that I thought I would share with my fellow math comrades! So here is my list of “life-saving” math resources that will hopefully make your math life a little bit easier.
Definitely the most used resource when I am doing math homework. It’s capable of solving basically any math problem. You have to pay to see the step-by-step solution, and I have a shared account with my friend, so that’s an option if you want to pay a little bit less!
Similar to Wolfram Alpha, but free! You can see the step-by-step solutions without paying, so that’s great. However, the downside is that if your math problem is quite complicated, it may not have the solution (i.e. crazy integrals)
This website has notes on algebra to multivariable calculus, with plenty of examples and explanations.
This is an actual life saver for my friends who are doing advanced/university level math. Especially if your professor has atrocious writing but can’t seem to stray away from hand written notes.
Has video lessons on elementary to university level math. Great for visual learners, since the lessons include a lot of graphs and diagrams. Not to mention this website offers video lessons on a variety of subjects!
Textbook solutions!!! You can probably find the solutions to most of the calculus textbooks used in universities. Really great for those who like to study by doing a bunch of practice questions.
For those with professors who prefer digital submissions of assignments: turn your phone camera into a scanner without the bulk. The best scanner app I’ve come across – it will make your papers look like they’ve actually been scanned, even if you take the photo in bad lighting.
We all love disaster movies! The cool special effects, the underdog stories, the underlying themes of hope. As cool as they are, they do tend to use misconceptions about natural disasters. This normally wouldn’t be an issue since Hollywood will always embellish but it’s important to know the true science behind these phenomena should you ever encounter them.
1) Pyroclastic flows will kill you almost instantly, you cannot survive a direct hit
Movies guilty of this: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Dante’s Peak
Pyroclastic flows exceed 100km/h and reach temperatures over 1,000°C. You definitely cannot outrun it in either car or on foot. The boiling hot toxic gas, ash, and lava in the flow will kill you instantly and pummel your smoking corpse into oblivion. Sorry, Chris Pratt.
2) Tsunamis do not crest, they are more like a sudden flood than a wave
Movies guilty of this: Literally any movie with a tsunami ever
Tsunamis are massive and sudden floods caused by the displacement of ocean water due to earthquakes or massive landslides. They’re not tidal waves and thus do not crest. It’s poetic, but inaccurate.
3) Hail is always spherical and doesn’t fall in big cinder blocks of ice
Movies guilty of this:The Day After Tomorrow
Hail can get quite large and can definitely be fatal, but they are exclusively spherical. Hail is formed by water droplets cycling through the updrafts of a thunderstorm and the rotational movements make the resulting hail a ball.
Looks more like a stage hand is throwing the remains of an ice swan than a hail storm
4) You cannot freeze instantaneously. Not even in space.
Movies guilty of this: The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm, The Cloverfield Paradox, Sunshine
Space, and certain places on Earth, can get exceedingly cold. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was −89.2 °C. That’s damn cold. But you still wouldn’t flash freeze into a peoplesicle within mere seconds. Intense cold can kill you quickly if you’re completely exposed but it would still take time before your body would be a thoroughly frozen chunk of meat. As for space, it can get quite cold, but it’s also an empty vacuum. There’s nothing around you but empty void, which means there’s also nothing to transfer your body heat away from you. Without convection, your body heat would be lost via radiation and that can take a long time.
5) Earthquakes over 10 on the Richter scale are physically impossible on Earth.
Movies guilty of this: 10.5
You would need a massive fault line to carry that sort of energy. Something on the scale of going through the earth’s core. Which does not exist . Even then, if such an earthquake would occur, the planet would literally explode.A 15 magnitude earthquake would release energy on the magnitude of 1×10^32 joules. That, coincidentally, is the same amount of energy contained in the gravitational binding of the Earth. Simply put, anything greater than 9.9 on the Richter scale is impossible and would cause the Earth to explode.
6) California will and can not sink into the Pacific like a big slab, and it can’t break away from the rest of the US.
Movies guilty of this: 2012, 10.5
Most movies cite the San Andreas fault as the reason for the cleavage, but even this isn’t enough. The San Andreas fault is a transform fault, meaning the North American plate and the Pacific Plate are slowly horizontally grinding past each other, not pushing away. As California is a part of the greater Pacific plate, it literally could not snap free from it to “sink into the sea”. Because if the entire tectonic plate underneath California where to flip over and sink then the entire ocean would drain away into the mantle.
7) You can’t sink in lava. You also can’t stand near it without being burned.
Movies guilty of this: Volcano, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Lava is molten rock, and is incredibly dense. In fact, it’s three times as dense as humans, who are mostly water. If you were to cannonball into a lava pit, you would dip in a bit before bouncing to the top and floating. You would also burn up and die super quickly. Because fresh lava can exceed 1,200°C! Even standing a couple feet away from a lava flow, you would feel the intense heat radiation. You would lose your eyebrows and probably the top layer of your skin if you stood too close. There’s a reason why volcanologists wear protective suits. Sam and Frodo would have been roasted.
Can we make one of this but with Anatomy, biology and microbiology facts against Horror and Slasher movies?? Some mistakes are funny to watch but they’re so common that they became annoying.
the bigger hailstones get, the less round they are, though you’re right that they’re not square.
the really big ones are spiky like a koosh ball of death, because they’re basically an icicle that grew in a wind tunnel.
artherra 