It is 14 Nov 2024.

Start the party, the AO3 is turning 15 today!

Join our anniversary celebrations with our 15 day Trivia Game and Prompts challenge. Who knows – you might end up winning a cool prize!

How well do you really know AO3? It’s more than just a place for your favorite fanworks with its rich history, unique features and its commitment to preserve fan culture. Ready to test your AO3 knowledge? Join our 15-day AO3 Trivia Game!

Trivia Game – How It Works Starting today, we’ll post one trivia question a day for the next 15 days. Collect your answers and submit to the google form for that day — we’ll do a random draw from the highest scorers, and winners will get exclusive AO3 merch!

Prompts Challenge for Creators We’ve got something for all the creators, too! Every day, we’ll post a new prompt as part of the AO3 Prompts Challenge.

You don’t have to complete every prompt – just pick the ones that inspire you. When you’re ready, share your creations and add them to our AO3 anniversary collection and join the party!

Whether you’re here for the trivia, the prompts, or neither — thank you for being with us on our fifteenth anniversary. Happy 15th!

Celebrating AO3's 15th Anniversary

Start the party, AO3 is turning 15 today! Join our anniversary celebrations by participating in our 15-day Trivia Game and Prompt Challenge. Who knows – you might win a cool prize! https://otw-news.org/2p8bn9cr

I love funky wildlife services. I aspire to be as funky and know as much about wildlife

Full Newsletter from Global Tetrahedron Here

This machine kills AI

Just saying 🤷‍♀️

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

and we need that! keeps us humble. 

Then I'm just like WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE AN ADULT

It goes the other way, too, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A CHILD?!!

I'm 16, that's like, barely a child

I'm in my 30s. You are baby

I'm older than both of you in a trenchcoat.

honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.

I love picturing posts made by kins/therians/voidpunks (and sometimes furries) as being typed out by their actual perception of self versus my own idea of them.

Like. That post you just reblogged? A cat typed it out. With its funny little paws. A cat took the time out of its day to type out that post you reblogged

That “person” you’re dming? You’re chatting with an angel, actually. They’re typing with their graceful, beautiful hands, chatting with you

That guy who draws the comics you like? He’s a big purple crocodile. He said so himself. Look, it’s in his profile picture!

Like wow! We’re all so different and unique! That’s super cool!

I’ve been bewitched by the old man

I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:

On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.

On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?

well, come to think of it, we’re at the top of the food chain but we almost exclusively hunt and kill prey out in the country. 

raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.  

anyway like, we’re masters of our environment, we make weird shit happen all the time, we have lots of great food and sometimes we share, and we almost never eat someone. it makes sense for urban animals, over the last century or so, to just keep an eye out for opportunities to use us, and to pass the habit on to their kids. 

It really is a weird, funny thing. Like yeah, technically they’re predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???

I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.

(Which brings me to an interesting thought about the ubiquitous rule about never eating the faery food lest you find yourself forever unsatisfied with anything in the human world - and the potential parallels to the dangers of feeding wildlife human food lest they become addicted and too tame and dependent to be safe for either themselves or us. Hmm.)

Okay, but that last bit with the Fae…makes almost perfect sense.

Of the stories I’ve read, the food of the Fae, its origins and effects, are often strange and/or obscure.- Just like our food to most animals.

The Fae are strange beings that seem to know weird things that give them power or an edge over us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae work and live by strange rules also often nonsensical or obscure to us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae can easily obtain vast amounts of things we consider rare/precious/desireable, and have no problem with dishing it out wantonly for no other reason than amusement.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae sometimes are amused by having us around, but only on their terms and IF it amuses/intrigues them.- Just like us to animals.

GUYS, I SENSE A PATTERN….

-they have arcane social conventions and the punishment for not paying the correct respects right is banishment, if you’re lucky, and death if you’re not.

-they have wild and unexpected parties where you’d least expect to find them, but if you’re bold enough to entertain them they’ll feed you and caress you and play with you all night.

-time runs strangely in their realm. their homes are summerlands: warm and bright, no matter the season. there is always fruit on their tables. but not everyone who comes in from the cold is let back out again.  

-their games are cruel and complex and unfair, but if you can beat them by their own rules you will access riches beyond imagining.

-sometimes they just fucking fuck with you, the fuckheads.

-they will absolutely steal your children away. when your children return— if they ever do— they will come back strange. they will have magic earrings or necklaces or bracelets. they will know things they shouldn’t. they won’t know things that they should. your strange children might survive, might even prosper, might take wives and husbands and have children of their own. but they will always be marked by their time away from your world.

-the price for pissing them off is always death. sometimes just you. sometimes your whole community. 

-if you are very good, and very smart, and very brave, they will grant your wish.

This actually provides a good explanation for why you have such inconsistency about whether their wish granting is benign or perversely twisted. They can’t fully understand you or your attempts to communicate either. They grant wishes the way you would grant a squirrel’s wishes: with lots of guesswork, assumptions, and projection.

And like that trope where they grant a wish perversely and then get mad at you or punish you for being ungrateful? Looks a lot less like utterly asinine unreceptivity to criticism and a lot more like how you might react if you try to help a wild animal and it bites or claws you.

do androids dream of WD-40

*white knuckling the bathroom sink* do NOT infodump ppl about the fact that the first spn fic was a wincest one and that it was posted mere hours after the pilot and that the founder of ao3 was a wincestie and that the first fic on ao3 was wincest too and that the omegaverse as we know it was created by wincest shippers for jared/jensen fics *pointing at myself in the mirror with a shaky hand* ppl will think you're weird and off-putting you need to control yourself–

it's fundamental fandom history 😤 and honestly the amount of people who think wincest is an aberration in spn fandom and those that think ao3 shouldn't allow "problematic" content and be fully censored should know these things so they can be aware of where these cultural juggernauts started.

not them asking naomi novik AKA ASTOLAT if she was okay with incest fics of her characters when she was the one in the trenches writing wincest fics and founding ao3 so people could have a place to post their works without censorship. that's absolutely hilarious I have to find that post

YES my brother in christ she WROTE THE PROPOSAL !

May. 17th, 2007

An Archive of One's Own

AO3 was created out of collective effort, and she was the one who started it all. It's incredible to see how many of her ideas in this proposal ended up actually happening. So many things we now take for granted were crazy dreams at first

We must become the queer elders that we had taken from us. We are here because of pride and proud we will remain.