the future's past

Her arm bled slowly, a red rivulet trailed toward her wrist. He checked it over and found only shallow scrapes at her elbow, until he rotated her arm and found–

“He bit you?” It was a question only because he didn’t believe his eyes were actually seeing two crescents of teeth marks marring her skin.

Rating: Mature | Words: 30k Major Tags: major character death(s), canon typical violence, outbreak day time loop Notes: my one and only contribution to whumptober, see notes on AO3 for more details and CWs

chapter 4 is live 😊

WRITE IT!!! WRITE THAT SELF INDULGENT SHIT!!!

Serious question do you think they still eat mushrooms in the TLOU world?

Tbh I barely trust mushrooms now and I'm not like starved for calories in an apocalypse so I might be projecting a little but I don't think so

the brushes you use for digital art dont Actually matter that much and its more about core art principles and technique or whatever. but maybe this next brush will be the one

sometimes i need to remind myself that i'm writing fanfiction for free and i'm allowed to have a shitty sentence or two

so many of my fics have remained buried in my drafts because i wrote the cool scenes first and then didn’t have “connective tissue”. but i’m freeing myself from that and just adding shitty “and then a week passed” or “they got to their destination” connections and just posting them and it’s so! freeing! try it!

I can't tell you how many times I've agonized over a scene transition, only to fill in the missing space with, like, a sentence.

Write the parts you wanna write and then go in and slap scotch tape over the rest of it.

Sometimes when I’m feeling self conscious I’ll go and pull a book off my shelf to see how whichever author handled time transitions, and it’s really REALLY common that it’s just, like, “October came and went.” And that’s SO freeing. Just fast forward. Just do it.

I swear I'm normal

I'm supposed to just go to work tomorrow like Joel Miller isn't currently fighting for his life in a dusty ass basement with triage stitches probably riddled with tetanus trying not to freeze to death while Ellie fights off religious zealots???

i just heard the phrase “if you wouldn’t trust their advice, don’t trust their criticism” for the first time and i don’t think i’ve ever needed to hear anything more

Real talk: how long do you take posting chapters on fanfic? Cause part of me is like “oh it’ll be fine if I take a couple months cause life- out of all people AO3 understands.”

But then I wonder if I severely overestimate the attention span of current fans in the wake of instant gratification and consumerism.

My fandom brothers! Doth ye still wait years for a fic chapter update? Is there hope for a long winded scribe?

I update anywhere between 2 weeks and 2-3 months and never promise any kind of regular schedule, it really just depends on how life be at the moment and whether the writing corner of my brain is in feast or famine mode. (might be worth noting that for some reason my brain requires that chapters be at least 6k words but more often end up being 9-12k+)

I do feel like I'm very slow with updates at this pace, partially due to the instant gratification and consumerism climate and partially due to the fact that I just want to read my own damn fic but I have to write the thing first (an actual scam).

As a reader, I've subscribed to fics that update every week and fallen behind (because life) only to come back to the fic months after it's finished. I've also subscribed to fics that didn't update for months and/or years and sprinted back to AO3 for that sweet sweet hit of happy brain chemicals.

At the end of the day there will always be people who drop off (life gets busy, interests change, etc.) but there will always, always be people who stick around too.

can i be real? i think ao3 should die for doing a donation pool for themselves with everything going on

and let me say this if it isn't obvious. if youre donating, i think youre a bad person

#i was literally thinking about this today#they have a MASSIVE amount of users and... they decide they need donations. ignore the palestine thing happening theyre more important#apparently#reblog

I understand that you're 22 and corporate internet is all you've ever known, but you need to know that users COST sites money.

The sole case when users do not cost sites money is when 1) users are constantly shown ads, 2) users' private data is being harvested and sold to advertisers.

AO3 does not do either of those things. It was its mission upon being founded to not do either of those things. And thus, we have twice-yearly donation drives. Every year. Yes, every year. Even that year. Even the April and October of the pandemic, even the Aprils and the Octobers of mass BLM movements, even the April after Ukraine was invaded, and yes, even this October. It's not "failing to read the room". It's called maintenance costs and being an ad-free NGO that doesn't monetise its users.

I genuinely hops this helps.

I need young people to realize that when you say "AO3 should just make money like social media sites do rather than running donation drives" what you are actually suggesting is "AO3 should sell detailed and privacy-violating data on the porn consumption habits of its users to ad companies in order to make a quick and easy buck." That's what you're suggesting when you push for that.

This is like if you looked at Wikipedia and said "Why are they asking for donations? They could just charge people and companies money to be able to rewrite their Wikipedia pages to say whatever they want about their brands!"

I mean, yeah? They could sell out their fundamental mission and all of their core userbase in order to squeeze some money out of advertising and general enshittification. They could do that. Do you really want them to? Really? Is the little donation banner (which I assume you never bother to click on anyway) really so annoying to you that you'd rather the site just sucks forever (but without needing donations, I guess)? Call me out of touch, but somehow I doubt that any of you advocating for that sort of thing would actually want the inevitable results.

Posts like this are so blatantly hypocritical. How much money does @stagegore give to Netflix every year? How much does the OP, or anyone agreeing with the OP, spend on movie tickets? On video games? On concert tickets? On books? On music?

Entertainment costs money.

AO3 is a non-profit service that provides entertainment.

Donating money to AO3 will always be 10000x more "ethical" than buying entertainment from any of the evil capitalist billionaire oligarchs that run literally every other popular entertainment service, but you don't see OP aiming their vitriol at people with Hulu subscriptions, do you?

OP's so-called "ethics" amount to nothing more than a hot mess of hypocricy, double standards, and reactionary brainrot.