This one's a doozy 👀

Reading

As always, I suck at reading. Mostly because I've been writing. But to encourage me to read a little more I've added a page for Fic Recs to the site, so hopefully I make the effort to consume more fic so I've got some content.

Writing

Did some work on another instalment of Something You Like. Because fucking Ryan. Not sure at this stage whether I'll post it as an additional chapter or part of a series, leaning toward series, though.

I seem to be consistently hitting about 300 words a day at this point, which is fantastic, because consistently. No, I definitely won't be doing NaNoWriMo LOL but there's forward motion, and that's fucking awesome.

Watching

I'm not happy that the first season of House of the Dragon is over already. It didn't seem long enough, though when I realise that I watched the entire Game of Thrones series during this first season I guess, yeah, maybe?

Urgh. I need more already.

Events

The Bro Bone Bang has announced the Bone Bro Bang in honour of a day I've never celebrated before but absolutely will be henceforth because I'm calling it Monsterfucker Day.

The Bone Bro Bang is a seasonal variant on the Bro Bone Bang, a SPN fandom event which welcomes all creations for all ships, as long as the ship is comprised of Sam and Dean Winchester (or iterations thereof) and as long as the creation features them boning throughout.
Like its big sibling the Bone Bro Bang is a prompt meme. Prompts should take the form of A MONSTER (or other supernatural creature).

Oh, HELL YEAH. This is right in my wheelhouse.

Social Media

A twitter user dropped the link to a tumblr post regarding a thesis on antishippers someone wrote.

A screenshot from the beginning of the thesis on antishippers.

This thing is fucking interesting. I highly recommend giving it a read.

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A twitter user posted about a fic on AO3 in Old English, which I think is fucking cool. Also, it's Kirk/Spock, which makes it cooler.

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I'm making a concerted effort to spend less time on twitter by spending more time on Mastodon. For my health 🤣 You can find my Mastodon profile here.

I'm in need of more fandom or fandom-adjacent people to follow on masto because currently my timeline is a little quiet. I'm looking to busy it up some, to help keep me there instead of drifting back to twitter.

So if you're on Mastodon, hit me up!

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Speaking of Mastodon, Elon Musk officially purchased Twitter this week. He's already started firing staff and it's rumoured that he'll be getting rid of a large chunk of the moderation team.

This could definitely be a detriment to Fandom in that less moderation equals more abuse and toxicity.

There is already talk of an exodus and users are asking 'where to next?'

We have options. Platforms like Dreamwidth and Pillowfort are NSFW-friendly and ready for us, and Mastodon is basically a drop-in twitter replacement once you get your head around the whole federation thing.

Where fandom goes is important, but what is most important is how to stay in touch with our fandoms and our friends.

Everyone should have a carrd or similar with all their links linked or pinned on their twitter profile. Everyone should regularly tweet their links so those with those sites can quickly click and follow. Even if they're not using those sites yet, in the event they need to, they'll already have connections.

Twitter isn't going to disappear, fandom can move gradually, and the biggest loss we're facing during an exodus of this kind is the loss of connection with other fans.

(of course, if you keep your fanworks on twitter, you should have backups, twitter is not a safe archive)

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Okay so this is fucking huge. This week there appeared on twitter the archive and screenshots of a month-old reddit post in which the mother of a 14yo child discovered that her kid had been groomed into an anti cult on discord by a 'safe adult'.

Mom seemed horrified, and I'm not surprised. I would be too if suddenly my kid began calling her classmate a paedophile for shipping 18 and 21 yo cartoon characters, and intentionally drove the other kid to a suicide attempt 👀 then turned around and accused her own parents of being paedophile apologists for disagreeing with her.

Not to mention the grooming that went on in the private discord server and included the sharing of pornography and sex talk TO CHILDREN. There's indications in the text that the FBI will be involved, so here's hoping that 'safe adult' gets what's coming to them.

So, yeah, I'm with the kids mother in being horrified, but to be quite honest I'm not remotely surprised. These kids don't come up with this shit on their own, it's being fed to them, perhaps mostly by their peers, but I'll wager there's A LOT of these discords run by adult antis with their cult followers. This is a serious danger, not only to the kids the cult members are being sent to 'punish', but to the cult members themselves. That's going to fuck those kids up FOR A LONG TIME.

Website Updates

The Links page has been updated, and I've added a page for Fic Recs.

I'm collecting some of the static site layouts I've made over the years and am looking at either putting them on the site here or shoving them up on GitHub. 'Course, if I put them on GitHub I have to write proper readme files 🤣