Cimorene

OTW racism
Woke up and read the new posts on synonymous: jaw-dropping as usual and all that, but this time I actually laughed! I can't remember the last time something in this trashfire was ridiculous enough to laugh at without also being too worrying for the laugh to get through.

Watching (Good Omens)
I haven't used Twitter for months and I don't see ads on Tumblr, which I've been opening about once a week tops since I never get time at my desktop computer now thanks to this cat divorce. As a result, I haven't seen any spoilers about Good Omens yet. waxjism has to work today and she's going to probably be exhausted because she's doing Ticketmaster support and there are two festivals in Finland today. 😬 So we can't start watching it until Sunday and we might not finish it until next week. We haven't watched the new season of Ted Lasso, either, because Wax is feeling stressed and not 'in the mood' for comedy. When she needs something soothing she can only watch bad crime drama. I find that the opposite of soothing (often upsetting enough that I have to leave), but I do read badfic for the same purpose.

House
My painting projects keep getting delayed because it rains. You can't paint the lovely linseed-containing Uula paint at higher than 80% humidity. And in other painting news, I'm using acrylics for the mirror frame upstairs - it doesn't need a breathable surface and I have a ton of old acrylic to use up - but omg, it's been such a long time that I forgot not only how awful acrylic smells, but how persistent the smell is! The mirror is right by the balcony door that's nearly always open, but it's still stinking up the whole upstairs for days after each bit is dry to the touch! I'm probably not going to buy more acrylic after this. I'm interested to explore traditional homemade paints for future decorative furniture painting - the paints that would've traditionally been used for those projects: tempera and glue paint.

That post just came by on my Tumblr dash about how the X-Men is the only superhero teamup that accurately portrays how activist organizations operate and we were agreeing and laughing about it.

That reminded me of this news which I saw go by on Twitter recently, and I'm sure plenty of people don't follow the OTW on Twitter even though they have an interest in AO3 and specifically inclusivity and antiracism efforts wrt AO3:

April 2022 Newsletter, Volume 167 | Organization for Transformative Works

The Board of Directors is pleased to announce that it has appointed a Diversity Consultant Research Officer to help the OTW formulate its next steps towards hiring a diversity consultant or firm. The role remains open for internal recruitment as the Board would ideally like it to be held by two people for the sake of redundancy and sharing out the workload.

When the public debate that gave rise to the appointment mentioned in this newsletter occurred a few years ago, I fully expected it to take years to come to fruition because of committees and meetings and debates having to happen in between. And some time last year - was it six months ago? - a new round of debates occurred, with many people assuming that nothing had been done, or was going to be.

Of course frustration is understandable, and I'm sure it's felt by all the activists in volunteer and activist organizations, and probably by every member of the X-Men! (Volunteer attrition from burnout is a well-known feature of all these groups' operations.) But I knew at once that the conclusions came from unrealistic expectations: that is to say, lack of experience with organizations like this.

Anyone who had enough experience with the OTW or, say, the Girl Scouts of America's governance, or the National Organization for Women's meetings and conferences, or the committees that run Unitarian Universalist congregations and probably many other kinds of churches would have been prepared for the timeline.

Anyway, this is a first step worth cheering. I hope the process goes smoothly and possibly even picks up some speed along the way.

The term "AO3ple" is pretty terrific, at least, and I hope it becomes as popular as it deserves. If it does, this wank will have a positive legacy after all!

synecdochic posted: they really should have known the one thing we know is how to bring receipts

File 770 site owner refusing to let through synecdochic's cited comments debunking that copyright lawyer guy's willful misrepresentation of copyright law and sharing an email conversation with her on the subject with his friend who was busy attacking in defence of the Hugo's honor all over said comment section.

Oh, okay.

elf posted: One-Millionth of a Hugo

But, says JJ at File 770: If the members of AO3 get to call themselves official Hugo Award Winners, then so do all of the commenters at File 770, and so do all of the people who’ve had works published in Uncanny Magazine — and at that point, the official term “Hugo Award Winner” has lost all meaning.

Does File 770 tell its commenters, "you are wanted; you are an essential part of this blog site; it was created so you would have a place to make these comments?" Does it say, "we have created tools that let you post and edit and seek out comments like yours; please send us feedback on how to improve the comment threading?"

Do the authors who are published in Uncanny, choose what they get to publish there? Are they welcome to join a committee and shape the rules for what Uncanny will publish? Does Uncanny say, "Please send your creative works to us; we want them all; this magazine exists to showcase as much of your work as you are willing to share?"

Neither File 770 nor Uncanny was created to support all of the people involved in it equally. Neither of them allows random people to become contributors to searchable, front-page content. Neither of them says: "Your works are welcome here, even the ones that are antisocial, even the ones we personally don't like, because this is your home if you want it to be."

AO3 is not a curated collection; it's a community.

I am done with listening to gatekeeping men who want to put lines around our creativity, who want to declare that while yes, two authors can both win for "best novella" and a team of 6 can win a "best fanzine" or "best podcast" award, a team of a million can't possibly win the "best related work" award.

Fuck that.

The WSFS doesn't get to tell us how AO3 works. That's the whole point of AO3. This is our archive and we make the rules here.

fail_fandomanon posted: FFA DW Post 1115

Nope, I think the problem is that if they exclude the book tag, it will also now filter out every show fic tagged with "All media types", because the all media tag is synned to the book tag.

And as stated elsewhere, a lot of people seem to be assuming that the "Good Omens - NG & TP" tag is a top-level tag.

There are 3633 Works in Good Omens (TV)
2564 are also tagged with Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett because no one actually seems to know that said tag is the book tag.

So basically you end up filtering out 70% of the fic.

Thanks to aethel pointing it out in a comment thread on Ithiliana's meta roundup post, this morning I learned that the fandom tag I'd been using to browse Good Omens which I thought was the parent tag to include both book and tv fandoms, "Good Omens - All Media Types", actually... isn't. The parent tag, that is.

There isn't a parent tag currently that includes both but instead "All Media Types" has been made into simply a synonym of the "Good Omens - Gaiman & Pratchett" tag (nominally the book tag, but it doesn't have the word 'book' in it so is being used freely by new fans too), so anybody who has only tagged their fandom as "Good Omens (TV)" wouldn't show up there, and furthermore if you ticked 'exclude crossovers' (as I usually do to eliminate the all-too-common Supernatural crossovers), it will filter out everything that's got both the show tag and the Gaiman & Pratchett/All Media Types tag.

For me this means I need to include crossovers in my search, and though there isn't a meta tag, I usually browse by pairing anyway, and the pairing tags will still include all the fandom tags.

That bug where AO3 force logs you out whenever you open the browser has started happening nearly every time I visit on my phone. So far it seems the only way to fix this is to close all mobile browser windows, clear all the cached stuff from the mobile browser, then close the browser and restart the phone, then open AO3 and it will miraculously recognize my login credentials again. Doing this multiple times in one day, as has happened a couple of times so far, is pretty annoying. I think maybe it doesn't happen if I don't go there on the desktop browser?, but sometimes needs must.

When I started a recs list, everybody's were hand-coded html lists on their websites. Livejournal changed that, and popularized recs lists far more by removing the biggest barriers to participation, the need for webhosting and the need to code html. But livejournal was far from an ideal situation for a recs database, as it didn’t have tags for the greater part of its existence. Many people’s recs journals were simply filled with posts that started with a list of which fandoms were represented within; many didn’t contain a masterlist and were hence not searchable.

Fandom-wide resources Crack Van (where reccers could sign up for a week or month at a time to represent their favorite fandom, pairing, or subgenre with curated recs and introductory blurbs) and Recs Rainbow (a blog that maintained an index of self-submitted fandom reccers and when they were updated with what) also came into existence.

Navigating these resources in search of new recs lists for a new fandom was itself a big task, but they still made everything a great deal easier, because navigating the maze of personal blogs and fic posted directly to topical communities all over the site, + fic posted to smaller archives and personal sites, was still very difficult - arguably more difficult in some fandoms, because finding fic meant performing keyword searches for communities, paging back through their entire catalogs of entries, surfing from person to person.

Delicious.com, with its revolutionary tag sorting that went beyond the individual user account, became the best place to find and search for fic very quickly. Suddenly you could look at the most recent bookmarks from other people in real time for any pairing you could think of - although without standardized tags, they weren’t all the bookmarks for the fandom; for that you had to surf around between different bookmarkers’ accounts using their networks, or find them by clicking on popular stories to see who else had bookmarked them and going to each person’s account. External bookmarking services still rely on the user to fill on all the info, though, so not every bookmark is equally informative - warnings, ratings, summaries, even author names or story lengths, or more importantly, the fact that something was still a work in progress, could easily be missing from the bookmark.

In some ways - like the automatic inclusion of the author's headers - AO3 is already an improvement on Delicious. In others, it’s a pretty drastic step backwards - like the fact that you can’t follow a particular user’s bookmarks, or see whose bookmarks they follow. Right now AO3 is primarily adapted for saving your own bookmarks, for which purpose it’s quite useful; and the archive itself and its search filters already let you discover new fic with much more ease than the previous disconnected systems ever did; but they miss an essential function of recs lists, which is: they weren’t just for finding any fic, they were an aid in narrowing down the field of fic to ones you might be more likely to enjoy: the recommendation part. Simply the fact that someone, or several someones, has recommended a thing before isn’t the same as getting a recommendation from someone whose taste you already know is like yours in some respect. Sorting the search results by number of kudos or bookmarks is only going to give you the Billboard Top Whatever list, while reccers are djs, curators of content.

And as the recent discussion of exposing bookmarker-side tags as a provider of content warnings show - particularly for racism and other issues where the creator may be unaware or not want to tag correctly - AO3 has the potential to create new functionalities with tags that could do things we've never been able to do before. A simple 'hot right now' or 'trending recently' algorithm like the ones used at Ravelry and Pinboard's Recent Fandom Bookmarks page (which doesn't work, because of the fandom exodus away from Pinboard, but was a great idea) could make it much more efficient to check out recent significant developments in a fandom, for example. My present workaround is to use the works search, filter by date for things completed or updated within the last (2 weeks, 6 weeks, 1 year, whatever, depending if/when I last looked at the fandom in question) and then sort by descending bookmarks, kudos, or hits. The ability to follow other bookmarkers could let you surf to see what friends of friends are reading and discover new people with congenial taste, which is the best way to receive recs from outside your own fandoms. And if bookmarker tags were or could be exposed when browsing the archive, a highlight color for someone you already follow could allow you to pick out comments hat are more likely of interest.

Any of that functionality is definitely still in the future, if not a complete pipe dream, and it's quite rightly behind other issues for the people who are coding the archive. A support and feature request person commented on the recent Tumblr discussion that inundating them with duplicate requests would be useless, but someone on the post suggested that using the bookmark tags and bookmark collections functionality more would be the best current step. Of course, I don't know if that person was correct, but I've got nearly 900 bookmarks there, so beginning to tag them strikes me as a fun and exciting (albeit long-term and time-consuming) task.