as a kid i had one of those “there’s a monster under my bed” moments except real.
every night i would cry about a ghost or something trying to scare me by knocking on my bedroom windows and walls. like, really loudly, every hour or so, every night. only at night. so my dad was like “heh okay kiddo let’s check it out :) ah see? there’s nothing here :)” and left.
until years later he admitted to me that he did in fact hear the unexplainable knocking when he slept in that room one night, and it kept him awake with fear. and suddenly felt awful for not believing little kid me.
imagine your kid being like “daddy there’s a demon in my closet” and you being like ok son lemme just check that for you :). and you open the door and there’s a demon in the closet
[ID: Screenshot of post from hausofdecline that says “Goth Misogynist: you’d be prettier if you smiled less.” Followed by a screenshot of two comments. First comment from bluedusksandpinkdawns says "Mr Darcy about Jane Bennet”. Second comment from emmyeed says “how does it feel to be the funniest person alive?” /End ID]
Hey, hot take, but if a company decides they no longer want to distribute a piece of media they own the rights to, then they should be legally required to sign the rights back over to the creator.
They shouldn’t be allowed to just sit on the IP for the rest of time, especially if they have no intention of ever releasing it again.
You know what, that’s also a valid take, let’s add that to the post
In computer gaming there’s a concept called Abandonware that runs on this premise. That if the company isn’t making it and selling it anymore, it’s acceptable to copy/download/pirate it.
Applied in a wider sense, if there’s no way for you to access it legally, then illegally is fuckin’ fine.
But yes, if the owner isn’t using it they ought to be obligated to make it available to someone who will.
Something I never hear anyone talk about in the ‘why are Young Adults (late teens to early 30s) reading so much Young Adult (teens) fiction These Days’ discussion is how surprisingly difficult it can be to transition from kids books to adult fiction.
And I don’t mean in terms of content. Forget themes, characters, plots, etc. I’m talking pure practicality.
As a kid, most of the books you read are calibrated to you exactly. Your local library likely has a 'children’s’ section, and that section is likely split into smaller sub-sections based on age group. 0-5, 5-8, 8-12, teen. A lot of your interests and experiences are pretty easy to guess at based on average developmental stages (eg. most 16-18 year olds will relate to Coming Of Age stories), so it’s probably pretty easy for you to walk into a bookshop or library and find a book aimed at you specifically.
But get to 18 (or younger) and start straying into the 'adult’ section, and suddenly nothing is calibrated anymore. When people complain that all 'grownup fiction’ is about white middle class heterosexual couples going through angsty divorces in their mid-forties, this is what they’re complaining about. They can’t find books they can personally relate to, or that are about topics that they are interested in.
And yeah, sure, books shouldn’t have to be relatable to be good or enjoyable. But there’s also nothing wrong with wanting to read a book about young people, when you’re young. Or queer people, if you’re queer. Or people from your particular culture, religion, or ethnicity.
Even if we ignore the relatability aspect entirely, there’s also nothing wrong with wanting to read a fantasy book that isn’t just 'Tolkien but drearier’ or a sci-fi that wasn’t written by some guy in the 1960s who thought that women were just another kind of alien.
The problem is, fundamentally, that finding the books you like amid the haystack is a skill that most people are not being taught.
As a result, when they get past YA and try using the old tricks of just picking up whatever is on the bestseller list at the moment, or whatever their local library is currently touting as their 'book of the week’, they frequently end up with something that isn’t suited to their tastes.
And maybe they love it and it opens up a whole new genre that they’d never considered, but more often they hate it but feel obliged to slog through because this is a 'grownup book’ and they have decided they want to be a 'grownup reader’.
A few times being burned like this, and they come to the conclusion that all adult fiction is boring, and that the people who read it are all either mature geniuses of the type they could only hope to be, or slogging through like they were and only pretending to like it.
Thus they run back to the familiarity of YA—which is fine, to be clear, there’s nothing actually wrong with reading YA as an adult— but there’s every chance that somewhere on the bookshelves is a potential favourite author of theirs that they will now never know because they were never taught how to find them.
So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.
Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.
One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.
All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.
So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.
And Mr. Hargrove loved it.
It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.
Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”
And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.
Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.
One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.
That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.
And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.
And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)
So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.
Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.
“Why can’t the freaks on AO3 just go and make a site for all the gross stuff and leave AO3 alone.”
Because AO3 is that site. Because AO3 was that site long before you decided AO3 was better than the sites you bullied us off of before, and I can promise you if someone somehow comes up with a fanfic site you like better specifically for the ‘gross stuff’ you’ll try to bully us off that too so you can benefit from it.
AO3’s specific core purpose is to preserve fanfiction, yes, but it was also instigated as a host site for the fanfiction that kept getting yeeted off other platforms like Wattpad. Its designed to preserve all fanfiction, not just the fanfiction you, personally, think is 'allowed’ to be written.
AO3 is the site for all the gross stuff the freaks make. We’ve been there just as long as you. We’ve been funding it just as long as you have. AO3 has specifically said you have a place here. The timeline was literally:
Wattpad/FF.net/LiveJournal purge fanfics > AO3 is born > The people who’s fics got purged moved over to AO3 > AO3 gains popularity as the best functioning site > The people who pushed for the fics to be purged off Wattpad move to AO3 > The same people try to push for AO3 to purge fics.
AO3’s source coding is open-access. You go make a polished, strict, rigid site where nothing 'icky’ is allowed. You go make a site where you can control what is hosted. We already have our space.
hate to say it but the key to having things solved by big company customer service is you just gotta stretch the truth with them. or straight up lie. actually. was on the phone for 3 hours because they sent something to the wrong address and spoke to 10 different departments trying to figure out if anyone could go fucking get it and they’re like “uhhh but can you go get it” bitch I’m 8 hours away by car, I don’t live in the house where you sent it.
took a moment to think, called back and was just like. Hi. My package was stolen off the porch!!! Saw the cunt steal it myself!! Anyway can you please send new things to this other address for free since that’s your policy for stolen goods thank you~☆ ! and it was immediately solved.
actually my tags are too good not to include
follow me for more customer service tips and tricks
Hey guys? Stop doing this please and thanks. There’s no need to put your rating system in a public bookmark where the author can see it. I don’t care if it’s a good or a bad rating just stop it and keep that shit to yourself.
you can keep it to yourself by making the bookmark private:
but it’s so damn easy to do so that i know yall are just being rude on purpose
kids were roleplaying with minecraft figurines and one of them had their figure go up to the other and say “i’m in love with you” and the other one replied “sword slash to the chest. and you’re on fire”
ALT
