throbbing light machine

I'm not about content restriction on AO3, imo it should remain a box that can contain Nasty Things of all types, but OTW is looking a mess with the Heidipologies and libel of volunteers, also. And moderation scaling/support for volunteers dealing with traumatizing material seems like a real issue that needs to be addressed more professionally by the org.

It's a strange thing, watching a small social space grow into something so globe-spanning. Seeing where the stress points show up.

Abbey/orangeblossom did an AMA over at her journal about VB/Andy/thanfiction over the weekend. All of her retrospective writing on Bit of Earth is fascinating to me - I was there, but on the outside. I interacted with all these people without knowing what was going down in meatspace. Some of the stuff about LotR being real came through, but it seemed like pastiche play at the time, taking Tolkien's mock-editorial stance very faux-seriously. Spoiler alert, it was not.

Abbey left me some of my first ever fic reviews, back when I was just getting started, and I will always think fondly of her for it. But it's such a strange experience to be poking around in the back of an old fandom and recognize one of Andy's pseuds. I wouldn't engage with his work now, but ngl some of the old VoyagerBabe stuff in Due South gets me there, mashes the buttons nicely. idek.

One of the things I love about fandom is that double feeling one sometimes gets on reading a fic summary, equal parts "god that is so wrong" and "yasss."

long & interesting ffa thread on the AO3/OTW

Thing is, as a writer, I don't particularly care about having access to uncurated tags. Especially for things like pairing/character/genre, or even for tropes. I can see the benefit of having an uncurated "other stuff" field, but for everything else I would be perfectly happy to select from a dropdown menu or similar, as on ff.n. I try to tag my own work based on autofills, and try to remain within AO3 style, but it's not easy to do, and I don't know how successful I am even then at creating useful metadata for my fics.

As a reader, right now I feel like I would actively PREFER curated tags; I have fond memories of using the old Automated Archive search engine with various inclusions/exclusions, browsing long lists of generated story-links. And I just - I wonder how much this is a THING for people, or if others share my general attitude of not-caring.

Some polls:

Never done one of these before, but what with ... everything, on top of end-of-semester writing woes, I could really use a boost. My thread on allthingsgood's lj-based love meme.

Think of it this way: once ALL of the nonfannish internet sites/structures have betrayed us - kicked fandom off, died, started randomly stripping audio, deleted comms, ect. - and we have, in response, constructed ALL NEW shiny fandom-owned alternatives - then, why then, we shall rule the world.

Ahem. Moving to diigo for now.

eta: what the hell is a diigolet and why will it not respond to click-and-draggage in the way that its parent website says it will?

1. Because I value the emotional freedom fandom has taught me to value my id and the contents thereof.

I love the awareness of my id I've been building in fandom. I look back at my baby fic, and the thing that strikes me most isn't how badly written it is - and it is! - but how tragically unaware that little girl was of what she wanted. My baby stories dance around my id, and sometimes they just miss it altogether, because I had no idea what I was doing. No one had ever talked to me before about the erotic pleasure of (nonsexual as well as sexual) stories. I just knew that some bits of books made me really happy, and I was trying to figure out how to replicate that feeling.

I'm happier for having a name to put to my id. It means I spend less time chasing it, and more time experiencing pleasure. My feminism values women's pleasure pretty highly.

2. Because I love all of your ids, and I love knowing and seeing them.

Even if they're not my own. You read anyone's work for long enough, and you'll end up knowing quite a bit about her. cesare gave the example of narrative emphasis on advanced degrees in a porn story, and that's pretty much exactly what I mean. We're writing to please ourselves here, and if you cross fandoms with somebody you're going to see her reapplying tropes and being attracted to similar stories and yeah, that's going to give you some information about her.

But when I think about the phrase "my id is showing," I think of prowriters who don't know how to approach or harness their ids. There's something very uncomfortable about reading someone's book and both seeing their kinks and knowing that they didn't mean for you to see their kinks. Um. Lots of dudely sff gives me this feeling: Orson Scott Card, (occasionally) Frank Herbert, Stephen Lawhead. It's awkward, because you can tell that they're not doing it on purpose, their ids are just creeping out and they can't get them back in the box. They're not doing anything with that id pleasure, just flailing. In contrast, writers like Tamora Pierce or Baroness Orczy, heck like, Tolkien, who knew how to use the id if ever anyone did - the ones who know what they want and tie the power of their ids to some pretty masterful purposes - I love seeing their ids. Not a problem. Their ids work for my benefit.

And I love seeing fandom's collective ids in particular, because of that thing mentioned above re: women's pleasure. You guys, I think our id vortices are so cool. I think it's so cool that we have language for all this stuff that critical communities don't - woobie? that's our word. Literature's jam-packet with 'em, but academia hasn't been over-arsed to name the phenomenon. I love that we have structures and spaces that let us really get to know our pleasure buttons, and that uncritically celebrate our happy feelings. And, y'know, that whole thing where "good" writing is totally a narrative kink anyway. So.

If your id is showing, it might not gel with my id. I might scroll down or backbutton out. But unless your id is talking about, idk, Indian princesses - Sherlock Holmes kinkmeme, I'm looking at you - I'm not going to have a problem with that. If your kinks are really obvious in your writing, I'm actually pretty likely to think it's cute, and to grin when I see them pop up. I don't feel the need to police either your id or my own.

3. Because I just can't see us resisting all the baggage about ids and good writing bouncing around our culture. telesilla's already been burned. It's inevitably going to be more panopticon than we want it to be, I think.