Let’s go.

I basically do this with my Author’s Commentary, but if anyone has a specific passage, chapter, or element they’re curious about then feel free to ask.

yall, let’s do this!!!!! i’ll reblog my masterlist right after this so it will be easier for you guys to find :-)

[Transcript: pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in my ask/fan mail. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what’s going on in the character’s headway I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track. /end]

Go for it my loves

I keep using my girlfriend with unusual work hours to get out of coworker interactions and happy hours and hanging out.

But now the company holiday party is upon us.

And I’ve been lying about the girlfriend.

I suddenly really empathise with the characters in Hallmark Christmas movies.

I like that people have two reactions to this post.

Reasonable: “just say she couldn’t make it!”

Chaotic: FAKE DATING AU

Well, which one is it going to be?

And so it begins

having the DMV area Craigslist bookmarked has never come in handy before but now

Update, Craigslist has flagged my post as inappropriate.

Apparently you can’t solicit a date as a “gig”

I now see my mistake

Update: a date has been acquired. This is true lesbian solidarity in action.

My wife has now read this and wonders how baby gays are even meeting and mating

Can confirm I am meeting and mating just fine 😂

By the way I’m in a relationship with this woman now

This is the feedback I’ve been looking for

world heritage post

I stole this from Twitter but I’m Curious

Aw yeah y'all provide me feed back in my ask box so I know what to do more of in the two I'm writing now.

As a followup to my previous post, here is a greasemonkey script that lets you add paragraph breaks to a fic. This one is FANCIER though because it has options.

If you want to click a button whenever you run across a fic that is made of sad line breaks instead of rad paragraphs, that's cool, I got a button for ya. But if you want to just automatically apply this to every fic you load? You can tick that tickybox and make that happen!

Even better, sometimes those terrible line breaks are actual stylistic choices. Which, like, ok u do u, but I'll be over here having both paragraphs and a little extra space between sections. What do I mean?

I mean instead

of things looking like this which is kind of terrible to read

and all that jazz what if it looked instead like this:

ok well tumblr won't let me do cool formatting things eff you tumblr so you all will just have to imagine it because

I'd make a screenshot but tbh I'm lazy and also Frodo is getting beat up by a troll right now so I should be paying more attention to that than to this.

Parting words:

Never used greasemonkey before but super interested in how to do it? Have a link to AO3's page that links to the various script extensions: How can I use userscripts with the Archive?

(Essentially: install the relevant extension for your browser, go to a script on greasyfork and click "Install this script". Super simple!)

(@cyprinella @boppinrobin y'all asked and y'all received)

Hello fellow internet folks. Have you ever been hella annoyed by attempting to read a fic only to discover there are huge empty paragraphs between every actual paragraph?

Be annoyed no more! This greasemonkey script will take those empty paragraphs and whisk them away to the land where ugly things go to die.

Never used greasemonkey before but super interested in how to do it? Have a link to AO3's page that links to the various script extensions: How can I use userscripts with the Archive?

(Essentially: install the relevant extension, go to a script on greasyfork and click "Install this script". Super simple!)

theres too many i cant name just two

[image description: a picture of a plate of plain white rice with the caption

“You can only add 2 things to this plate of simple rice

• Name them” /end image description]

more rice, no even more keep going

Just looked at my history page on ao3 and I have 588 pages of history lmao

alright ladies theydies and gents let’s play a game called reblog this with the number of pages your ao3 history has in the tags so i know whether I need 2 seek help:-)

Whumptober 2021

Welcome to Whumptober 2021! May the Whump be with you :)

To all of you who participated last year - we have changed a few of the rules, but overall things have stayed the same. To everyone new: WELCOME!

Please make sure to read the Event Info carefully, most of your questions will be answered there already. For everything else you are welcome to come to our ask box or ask questions in our Discord server here.

This year’s AO3 Collection can be found here.

With that being said, we’re very excited to see the community come together once more and be a wild, chaotic bunch of creators and consumers of whump. We wish you all the fun!

(All 31 Themes + Prompts, Event Information, and FAQs are posted below the cut!)

Keep reading

It's Time

back in my day we didn’t call it “shitposting”, we called it “nightblogging” and blamed the australians

I’ve been on this god forsaken website for too long.

I literally had the sensation of being slammed back in time just now

DEEPLY offended. Shitposting and nightblogging were different things back in my day.

my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.

Younger than 40.

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.

2011

A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall

I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:

I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list: 

Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.

Some documentaries:

Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.

Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.

*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.

They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.

That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.

Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/

As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959

I’ve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isn’t well known. Here are some resources for y'all. Please, take care of one another.

http://www.aidsquilt.org/view-the-quilt/search-the-quilt

Updated link to the quilt

this is so hard to read or even think about but… it’s so important. it’s so important to understand just the …overwhelming SCALE of this. how many people died while the government did NOTHING.

Reblogging for pride

Never forget your fallen. Your people were nearly annihilated in an epidemic. Never forget how lucky we are, never forget how they tried to let us die.

I grew up hearing about the Quilt all the time and this post reminded me how long it’s been since I’ve heard about it. Kids, go out and learn your history.

I’m a trans woman and I’m 38 now. My grandfather was a gay man living in Florida and he died of AIDS in the mid 90’s. He was in his 50’s.

My parents took care of him as he died, but they go to church 5 times a week to this day and though grandpa died saying he had no regrets my parents still insist that he must have “repented” for his “sin” before he died. The thought comforts them, apparently.

Meanwhile I’m in Florida right now for the first time in a decade and I can’t visit grandpa’s grave because I don’t remember where it is and I can’t ask my parents because they disowned me for being trans. 30 odd years after the crisis began and we’re still dealing with the trauma of it. The response to the AIDS crisis was practically genocide against the queer community.

Ask Game for Writing-Wip hoarders

I’m made this when I should be writing

1- What’s the last wip you opened?

2- Do you name your wip before, during, or after writing?

3- Longest word count on an abandon wip

4- Last sentence written?

5- Last sentence on an angst wip

6- Last sentence on a fluff wip

7- When are you most likely to kill a character?

8- Name one wip you’ve revived from death

9- A wip you regret (you can vague this)

10- A wip 12 year old you wrote

11- 1st person or 3rd person?

12- Favourite wip?

13- A wip that’s self indulgent? (you can vague this)

14- Post the last sentence on a wip open in your tabs right now

15- Describe a wip of yours in 20 words

16- Post a plot twist to a wip of your choice, but don’t say what wip it’s in

17- Beta or self-proofer?

18- Have you ever co-written a wip with someone before?

19- Do you still use the words ‘lemon’ or ‘lime’?

20- Are you more likely to write fanfiction or do you prefer original stories?

21- What is a word you use too much?

23- Do you make your own wip covers?

24- What platform do you post your work on, given the chance you finish the work?

25- Oneshots or multi-chapter?

26- Google docs, word doc, or neither?

27- Hardest wip you’ve written?

28- When was the last time you used pen and paper to write down a wip?

29- Music or no music?

30- Have you ever done a self insert?

31- Are you doing this instead of actually working on your wip?

32- Without counting, how many wips do you think you have?

33- Write a 1 paragraph wip and post it

34- How many prompts are in your inbox right now?

35- Are you more likely to make grammatical errors or spelling errors?

36- Have you ever coloured your docs for your wips?

37- Name a series you’ve abandoned writing

38- A wip you did for a friend

39- When you write numbers, do you say ‘3’ or ‘three’?

40- What should you be writing right now that you’re excited about?

@theofficialzivadavid

For those of you participating in WIPBB, a fun ask meme you can reblog to your blog!

let's goooooooooooooooooooooooo

scars in fiction: I got this trying to save my lover from an assassin- but tragically, I was too late. now I carry the mark of my failure with me always, and I can never forget~

scars in real life: so I was trying to open macaroni sauce with a paring knife

This post is driving me nuts every time I see it-every time!!!!!-I spend hours after thinking about *who the fuck calls it macaroni sauce*