Look.

I have made you a chart. A very simple chart.

People say "You have to draw the line somewhere, and Biden has crossed it-" and my response is "Trump has crossed way more lines than Biden".

These categories are based off of actual policy enacted by both of these men while they were in office.

If the ONLY LINE YOU CARE ABOUT is line 12, you have an incredible amount of privilege, AND YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT PALESTINIANS. You obviously have nothing to fear from a Trump presidency, and you do not give a fuck if a ceasefire actually occurs. You are obviously fine if your queer, disabled, and marginalized loved ones are hurt. You clearly don't care about the status of American democracy, which Trump has openly stated he plans to destroy on day 1 he is in office.

if you're cringing at the genre conventions of the genre you are writing in then why the hell are you writing in it. either have something substantial to say about those conventions or shut the hell up! i will not cringe alongside you at superhero powers and spaceship battles and big eldritch worms and bone magic. i came to this story to SEE that shit and I don't appreciate it when an author tries to pretend they're above the very things they're selling themselves on

stop wink wink nudge nudging me about how silly the genre is, asshole. i like that genre. I'm reading your story because I like that genre. your wink wink nudge nudging just tells me you're too unoriginal to deliver an actual critique and too irony-poisoned to unabashedly enjoy the clichés. again I ask: why the hell would you waste both of our times like this

honestly this is true even of genres I don't particularly like! i don't even enjoy romance all that much, but if I'm reading a romance novel, i expect there to BE romance novel trappings in there, and am therefore pretty fine with them existing. there are an awful lot of romance clichés that I hate, but it's still not cute or clever to include them just to laugh at them. why would you disrespect your own genre in such a substanceless way. say something true and beautiful NOW!!!!!

One of the greatest joys in life is using your shitty old car to shut down a legitimately nice car. For any law enforcement folks reading this, I would never endorse street racing. Also, I think I heard someone shoplifting in the other room, and you should go check it out. The best kind of street racing is the street racing the other person doesn't know they're having.

Now, I've had nice cars in the past before. Once, I had a Mercury Cougar XR7 with most of its original paint. Come to think of it, I might still have it somewhere in the backyard. Hard to keep them all apart these days. Anyway, when you drive a nice car, you get this sort of ego boost every time you see a lesser vehicle. How dare you peasants not realize how inferior your base Corollae are? Only a connoisseur can truly appreciate the divine features of this fine automobile.

That kind of mentality is simply not healthy. All of us, each and every one of us, are just a few generations away from being shit-throwing apes. The fact that we managed to make a machine that gets us down the highway quickly is a total miracle, and it's not any more of one because we put a pretty logo on it and charged $20,000 extra to put precision-engineered butt manipulators in the seats. It is this problem that the very fast beater is meant to solve.

When you have a shitbox and that shitbox goes faster than a nice car, whether because of superior driving (not me) or a significant amount of horsepower (not me) or a lack of understanding of your imminent mortality (possibly me) it is a great feeling to shut down those rich folks tooling around in their "good cars." It knocks them down a peg, which keeps them from doing things like going into work and causing another housing crisis. In fact, I'm going to go out and gap some Porsches with an old rusty fire extinguisher filled with nitrous oxide right now. You should come too, so I can get a ride home after the cops bust me for shooting my engine block across four lanes of the highway.

I once smoked some guys at a stoplight in my rusty 86 Buick Regal. Turns out huge engine beats shiny wheels.

professor ancunin... 👉👈

I love how so many people (yes, looking at you) are so sure that ALL of those who still like HP and participate in the fandom are these totally horrible people, that we all must be terfs, racists etc. etc., while a lot of us are exactly the people JKR hates and we don't leave out of fucking spite because she doesn't get to take the fandom away from us. Neither do you.

Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.

I have three modes of reading

I don’t like wading into Ao3 debates, but I want to give my professional opinion on Ao3 with regard to archives vs. libraries.

I am a professional librarian (MSLS) and I have worked in both archives and public libraries and a lot of the confusion and concern I see surrounding Ao3 is a fundamental misunderstanding of How Archives Work.

An archive is a collection related to a subject. That subject often a person but sometimes a field or concept or project. And the purpose of an archive is to keep everything. And I mean everything. I was going to say “short of biohazards” but since I know there’s a sealed R. Crumb Devil Gal chocolate bar in the UNC Chapel Hill archives, we really do mean everything.

When a collection of materials–which are usually unique and original and can be photos, manuscripts, letters, recordings (audio and/or visual), notes and notebooks, objects, published books, whatever–on and/or from the subject arrive at the archive, they are examined, preserved for longevity, accessioned and cataloged (added to the archive’s records), and added to the archive. You measure collections in linear feet. As in, once it’s all preserved and boxed and secure, you note how many feet of shelf space it takes up. And some of y'all on Ao3 have a lot of linear feet to your name (and I’m proud of you).

This is an archive: it is designed to preserve the original materials related to a subject. That is its purpose. Archives are how we have the original scroll manuscript of On the Road, for example, or the Lomax recordings of American folksongs, or Tijuana Bibles, or James Joyce’s loveletters to Nora.

Now you, a member of the public, can access some archives. Some are easier to access than others. The one I worked in was open to the public; good luck getting into the British Archives without a good reason.

So now apply this to Ao3–which is an archive both in name and in purpose. It is intended to preserve fan-created content long term. And this means everything, whether you personally like the materials or not. It is a repository for as much as possible.

And the “whether you personally like the materials or not” is important, hence why I mentioned Jim’s loveletters and Tijuana Bibles in particular. (RIP Jim, you would have loved pegging.)

If it’s made by fans and it exists, we should keep it to document the history and progression of fandom. That is the point. We have lost enough materials related to the subject of fans of media and we don’t need to lose any more.

The fact of the matter is that Ao3 is only one facet of the OTW, which preserves other fan-related materials (convention booklets and zines, for example). Somehow Ao3, an archive on the subject of fanfiction, has been divorced from the rest of the project, mostly by way of “purity culture” and panic over “dangerous” fiction.

The fact that you can go through an archive and find interesting information is the other side of archives. No, they shouldn’t be like the banker’s box of old letters stuffed in my closet. Yes, they should be organized and as accessible as is appropriate for the state of the materials.

It’s really, really cool to find stuff in an archive, I’m not even going to lie. I have done it before and I will do it again. And yet there are other items in an archive that I might not want or need or be interested in at all–but they’re still there. That’s the cataloging and accessioning: to keep up with what’s there, to stay “on topic” with collecting, and to be able to find things in that archive. Bless the tag wranglers who are doing the cataloging at Ao3.

The pearl clutching seems to come from 1. the creation of “dangerous” fanworks and 2. public access to those “dangerous” fanworks. These are issues of “purity culture” and opinions on censorship and should not involve Ao3.

Ao3, under the umbrella of the OTW, is a documentation and preservation project first and foremost.

Meanwhile: libraries.

We’re all basically familiar with libraries, right? A collection of materials designed to be used by the people who use the library. That’s the basics.

And that is not the same as an archive.

Library books, especially public library books, age like milk. I cannot tell you what a relief it has been to throw away dirty, smelly, stained, damaged, sand-in-the-covers books when a replacement comes in. I know there’s a Cult of the Book around here, but books are not all that inherently precious. The latest James Patterson novel is not a survivor of the Library of Alexandria (which was more of an archive anyway).

If a book is so rare that it cannot be replaced, it should be in an archive or a rare book collection and not a circulating library.

The first rule of libraries is “know your user population.” To use the example of public libraries, you need to know what books the people want to read (among other things).

Libraries, generally speaking, are more apt to adjust their collection to suit their users. A library in, for example, a prison is likely to have a lot of books on law. A church library will likely have a lot of religious books and, depending on the church, may not have any books by LGBTQ+ authors. These collections reflect their users (and also the controls or limitations placed on those users but I digress). A public library bookmobile taken to childcare centers will have a lot of children’s books. I have packed a bookmobile for that project so trust me on this one.

The news is full of challenges being laid against certain books in libraries–especially school libraries and public libraries. In some cases, the challenge may be valid. In most current cases, it’s really about exterting political and/or religious control over public institutions but couched in concerns about “the children.”

And, quite frankly, that’s what the “concerns” about what Ao3 contains feel like to me.

An archive with open and easy access to the public has been mistaken for a circulating library. A circulating library might adjust its collection to suit the wants, needs, and concerns of its user population. Ao3 is not a library. Ao3, Archive of Our Own, is an archive. It is designed for preservation and you, the user, can make use of its cataloging tools to examine the contents of the archive. It is not a circulating library. Things you don’t like or don’t want are going to be in archives.

To add to this, posting multiple one-shots as chapters of a single fic can also get pretty inconvenient when it comes to filtering depending on how you tag.

Anon didn't specify what the range of their one-shots would be, so I will give different examples here.

If you are doing one-shots for multiple different fandoms:

If you are posting one-shots for the same fandom, but with different ships in different one-shots:

And even if your one-shots are all for the same fandom AND ship, you can still run into filtering issues depending on how broad you are getting with the tone of the one-shots and how you are choosing to tag it. Some examples:

And in the end, even if you have one-shots of the same fandom, ship, and generally in the same tone/setting with similar tropes, you are still gonna run into the issues of wordcount filtering and 'WIP vs Completed' filtering that OP talked about. I just figured pointing out the stuff with the tags might also be useful for those who may not care about the wordcount or completion, but care about the tags when filtering.

Of course, as OP said you are free to do as you wish. But at least you should know what the potential negatives are so you can weigh them against what you consider to be the positives before doing it.

Im gonna reblog to ask because I am planning to write little One-Shots about a silly AU i whipped up and this is very helpful so far.

How exactly does a Series differ from a Collection on AO3? Because up until running across this post I had been planning to post the One-Shots individually and throw them all into a Collection that would nicely group whatever I made for said AU, but now I am also considering making it a series of the one-shots.

So.

Can someone share some insight to me here?

Both a series and a collection will group the works together in a way that's easily accessible for others to be able to view the whole set. However, there are differences.

Because a series is meant for works that are meant to be read together and (generally) in order, there will be a link at the top of each fic that will take the reader back to the series landing page, where all other fics in the series are listed. But there is also a handy link to whichever fic is listed as next in the series. Readers won't have to return to the series page to get to the next fic.

Series also have a subscription feature, which collections don't. That means that a reader can subscribe to receive an email notification every time there is a new work in the series, as well as any time there is a new chapter added to an existing work in the series.

Collections are more often used for works that are meant to be enjoyed separately. A collection landing page doesn't have a subscription button. However, collections may have a list of tags that applies to the collection as a whole. Collection moderators can provide a list of tags to be used and apply various restrictions about how many tags beyond that are allowed.

I started a poll yesterday to see which way people preferred authors to handle this sort of situation, and if you read through the notes you'll find a lot of people who suggest a series for related works within a particular shared universe or that should be read together and a collection when there are multiple fandoms or multiple ships that don't interact from fic to fic. Cases where you're writing for an event with a list of prompts, but you're applying those prompts to several different fandoms, for example.

I'm not immune to those big sad puppy eyes, beautiful smile lines, cute pointy ears, and soft silver curls.