Latest Posts by alwayswritingfanfiction - Page 6

I really love this AU if you couldn't tell

hi im new here whats up

keeping watch

Original Character Asks

tinkering around with an abelisaur-esque fictional creature!

A horse trotting

My attempt at animating trot using pencil, black calligraphy ink, and a bit of white gouache. The horse is moving away from the viewer at a bit of an angle so it was more difficult than my other attempts. I'm still very new to this so please don't judge it too harshly.

more how to train your dragon

1- 2 - 3 - 4

👏🏾Education 👏🏾is 👏🏾a 👏🏾right,👏🏾 not👏🏾 a👏🏾 service 👏🏾

Pass along and use the shit out of them

reblog and put in the tags how many bookmarks you have on ao3 and what rating/category/ship/fandom/additional/character tag dominates the most of it.

I don’t know which of my fellow media-studies academics, or cultural critics, or amateur statisticians, or anyone else doing statistical analysis of fandom needs to hear this.... but you cannot use AO3 stats in order to make assumptions about the broad popularity of this or that character or ship or attitude in a fandom. Because AO3 is not remotely representative of fandom as a whole!

This is for several reasons, but three big reasons:

Fanfiction writers and readers are a (tiny) minority of fandom

AO3's content biases relative to other fanfiction websites

AO3's recency bias

Let's get into these in more detail under the cut, including some examples that illustrate how each of these factors will bias your results if you are exclusively looking at AO3:

1. Not all, or even necessarily most, fandom is focused on fanfic, or even shipping. I know it may seem that way on Tumblr, but Tumblr is just one website that has its own demographic bias toward the types of fans who tend to write fanfiction. Especially in fandoms where the canon doesn't focus much on romance, and/or where there are a lot of cis dudes (who largely don't write fanfic), the majority of fandom activity may not have anything to do with fanfiction or shipping. And in those cases, there can be vast gaps in which characters or discussion points or relationships are the most popular. (Sometimes it can be the exact reverse: for instance, Julian Bashir is the most popular Star Trek: DS9 character on AO3 by a significant margin, but one of the least popular mains outside of fanfic fandom. Whereas Benjamin Sisko and Quark seem to be most popular in broader DS9 fandom, but are only the 6th and 5th most popular of the 10 main cast members on AO3. There's a ton of discourse about especially Sisko's popularity that doesn't seem to recognize this disparity at all.) Fanfiction has a notable bias toward "which characters have relationship potential" and, in canons that are "complete" (e.g. shows that have finished their runs as opposed to ongoing shows), toward non-canon relationships or those with unsatisfactory endings, since the biggest bias of fanfiction is toward "things that didn't happen in canon that the writers wish had happened." Canon ships tend to be more popular during a series run since fans don't know the ending yet, but once it's over, a subtextual ship, a canonical ship that was underexplored, or a canonical ship where one or both were killed off, etc. is always going to be more popular than an endgame canon ship that was fully explored where fans are largely fine with how it ended (which is another mark against a character like Ben Sisko, especially in contrast to one like Bashir who is both one half of a juggernaut non-canon M/M ship and had an endgame canon relationship that fans largely dislike).

2. AO3 is neither the only fanfiction website nor is it the most popular, and it has some notable biases the other big sites don’t have — particularly toward M/M (which makes up the largest group of fics on AO3), and toward queer content more broadly (there’s also significantly more F/F on AO3 than on the other major fanfic websites), thanks to the fact that it was founded partly in response to censorship of queer fanworks by other websites. When someone crunched the numbers on the big three websites in Anglophone fanfiction fandom (AO3, FF.net, Wattpad) they found that overall, F/M outnumbered both M/M and F/F combined, and gen was about as common as M/M. Even if you're looking specifically at fanfiction fandom, AO3 stats alone are going to miss out on a lot, unless you're looking at the fanfiction writers in a fandom that is predominantly M/M and/or F/F with little in the way of F/M or gen -- but you're still probably going to have to look at FF.net, Wattpad, etc. to know if that's even true in the first place! And even some fandoms that are like that might have their own archives that are more useful: e.g. you'll probably find more useful stats on the F/F-heavy MLP:FIM fandom by looking at FIMFiction than AO3. (Look, I dated a brony a decade ago and y'all know my memory for fandom nonsense is way too good, don't judge me for knowing this)

3. AO3 was founded in 2008 and went into open beta in 2009, which means it is heavily biased toward fandom from the last 15 years. While some older fic has been uploaded to AO3, the vast majority of it hasn't, and so AO3 isn't very representative of what fandom, including fanfiction fandom, was like before that year. For any fandom which existed in any significant numbers before 2009, AO3 just isn't going to work for studying the fandom at all unless you are specifically looking at more recent stuff. (Star Trek again is a great example here: the "Kelvin Timeline"/J.J. Abrams movie trilogy, known to Trekkies as AOS, has about 16k more fics on AO3 than the Original Series from the 1960s, or TOS. But if you know literally anything about the history of fanfiction, you know the idea that there is overall more AOS fic than TOS fic -- or even just more of it on the Internet -- is completely ludicrous. But AO3 premiered the same year as the first AOS movie, a hit mainstream movie that was a lot of younger fans' introduction to Star Trek, whereas TOS fandom existed for 43 years before AO3 was publicly available!)

AO3 stats work fine if you're looking at a specific subset of fandom that uses AO3. It could be very useful if you're studying, say, English-speaking Yuri!!! on Ice fans, or Destiel shippers, or Clexa shippers -- take your pick. It's obviously useful for campaigns that are specifically focused on AO3 as a community, like the current campaign about racism. But if you're using it to make big, sweeping pronouncements about what broader societal attitudes might be responsible for a character or other thing's overall fan popularity, you cannot just use AO3 stats to gauge that without getting some sense of a) how much whatever you're studying is a Thing in queer fanfiction spaces relative to the rest of fandom and b) if it isn't, if the AO3 stats are representative of the broader fandom outside of it, including both the people who prefer other fanfiction websites and non-fanfiction fandom. Both of which require poking your head out of AO3 into what the rest of fandom is doing. For example, if you want to analyze if racism, misogyny, or homophobia plays a role in the popularity or lack thereof of a particular character: have you looked at what the more het- and gen-heavy corners of fanfic/shipping fandom think? Have you looked at what other corners of fandom think? Do they follow those same patterns or are they different? Because queer fanfiction fandom, for all its many issues with racism, probably isn't more racist than more cis-dude-heavy corners of fandom (who are, after all, the corner whose racist tantrums and harassment campaigns are so massive that they make mainstream news and lead to stuff like POC actors being forced to quit social media for their own safety). It certainly doesn't make sense to conclude that "AO3 users" are more misogynistic and/or homophobic than other corners of fandom given that AO3 users are disproportionately likely to identify as women and/or LGBTQ+ compared to the rest of fandom. So if you have a marginalized character who is more popular with non-AO3 fandom, like Sisko (a black man), that should prooooobably be taken into account before assigning "racial/gender/etc. bias" as the only or primary reason for those AO3 stats!* You can still use AO3 to discuss those patterns, of course, but you have to a) be clear that you're specifically looking at AO3 users and/or b) put those stats in context with the rest of fandom, including how AO3 and its users are different from other fandom. So if a character is significantly more or less popular on AO3 compared to other corners of fandom, and you want to understand why, you might want to start by asking questions like "how do female and queer fans feel about their canon romance?" and "do they have a romantic arc and/or a lot of subtext with a character of the same gender?" before you get into all the other stuff.

You would not believe the amount of otherwise-good analysis, including from academics and from professional media critics reporting on fandom for major news sites, that don't do this. (And before the drama-hounds start trying to extrapolate who I'm talking about here, this really isn't inspired by anyone specific; that's how common this particular mistake is.)

Context is all, my friends. Context is all. And one of the reasons that a lot of fandom studies academics I've talked to discourage studying fandoms where you're deeply invested in the discourse in a particular corner of it is because it's really easy to mistake your personal experiences for being more representative of the whole than they are. If you want to draw conclusions about the whole of a thing, you've gotta actually look at the whole -- or at least, be aware of whatever part you're looking at actually represents the whole. This is the same problem social science researchers run into when they assume that studies done on just "university students in the U.S." can be extrapolated to all of humanity when a) the vast majority of humanity doesn't live in the U.S. and b) even within the U.S. itself, most people don't go to university. The stem, the peel and the flesh all make up parts of an apple, but there's significantly more of one of those three things in the apple than the other two. Make sure you know that the chunk you're looking at is the flesh, not the peel or the stem.

*There can still be discrepancies between fanfiction fandom and other fandoms that are based on these divides: for instance, societal standards for what makes someone "sexually attractive" are obviously influenced by things like race, traditional gender roles, etc. and so that might be a reason a character is less popular in shipping fandom than general fandom. But along with that not every fanfic writer's preferences are 1:1 with what they personally find sexually attractive (take it from a lesbian who mostly reads and writes M/M), those patterns would hold just as true for het fanfic as slash and femslash, if not more (given the greater amount of direct self-insertion involved). So you've still got to take the het shippers into account, too, which looking purely at AO3 doesn't. And I've seen people use AO3 stats for broader questions than that, like "whether white fans find this COC relatable" or "whether fans think this gnc character is too gnc for fandom," in which case then yes, the non-fanfic-writers need to be factored in as well, especially if the character in question is a cis man (or one most fans will read as a cis man).

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

family

all ao3 jokes aside, let’s all give thanks to the wonderful volunteers that are working hard to get the site back up and running so that homebodies like us don’t become stir crazy.

PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

They are all 3 sentences long

Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation

Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever

No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story

The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate

just because it’s a short film doesn’t mean it’s incomplete and should have a full-length movie adaptation

just because it’s an amazing movie that did really well doesn’t mean it needs a sequel

just because it’s a well loved classic tv show doesn’t mean it needs to be remade anew

let stories be exactly the length they are, they don’t need to be extended and drawn out and added onto and redone until they’re not good anymore. if your story is short but it works that way then it’s done. you don’t need to add more. knowing when to stop is so important

Just a bunch of Useful websites - Updated for 2023

Removed/checked all links to make sure everything is working (03/03/23). Hope they help!

Sejda - Free online PDF editor.

Supercook - Have ingredients but no idea what to make? Put them in here and it’ll give you recipe ideas.

Still Tasty - Trying the above but unsure about whether that sauce in the fridge is still edible? Check here first.

Archive.ph - Paywall bypass. Like 12ft below but appears to work far better and across more sites in my testing. I’d recommend trying this one first as I had more success with it.

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

Where Is This - Want to know where a picture was taken, this site can help.

TOS/DR - Terms of service, didn’t read. Gives you a summary of terms of service plus gives each site a privacy rating.

OneLook - Reverse dictionary for when you know the description of the word but can’t for the life of you remember the actual word.

My Abandonware - Brilliant site for free, legal games. Has games from 1978 up to present day across pc and console. You’ll be surprised by some of the games on there, some absolute gems.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

PatchMyPC - Alternative to ninite with over 300 app options to keep upto date. Free for home users.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

I Have No TV - A collection of documentaries for you to while away the time. Completely free.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Just Beam It - Peer to peer file transfer. Drop the file in on one end, click create link and send to whoever. Leave your pc on that page while they download. Because of how it works there are no file limits. It’s genuinely amazing. Best file transfer system I have ever used.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.

For even more useful sites, there is an expanded list that can be found here.

ICYMI, there was fear that companies were scraping public AO3 fics to train their AI without the consent of AO3 or its users. That fear has been confirmed.

AO3 has written about what they’re doing (and what they’re not able to do), and they recommend restricting your work to AO3 registered users only. [Instructions here]

This gross misuse of the archive by techbros is why I’ve locked down my fics for the foreseeable future. I recommend the rest of you do the same.

They look so sily 🫠

sasuke vs itachi

2D pamdemic animation doodles reel (2020-2021)

basically all of the finished and perpetually unfinished animation i did since the beginning of 2020 through 2021

// tw for alucard transformation between [00:23, 00:26), also flashing images during and immediately following this.

i felt like i hadnt done much of anything since finishing school, but i guess ive at least not done nothing :) its cool seeing some improvement!

used: clip studio paint EX, wacom intuos pro, every last ounce of willpower ;u; (took me so long to even start putting this together)

soo

the stsg hitting again ???

⁽⁽ଘ( ˊᵕˋ )ଓ⁾⁾

Lu Guang, tweeting - I just walked into this party and someone yelled dibs Cheng Xiaoshi, also tweeting - GUYS HELP IM DRUNK AND THIS GORGEOUS GUY WALKED IN AND I YELLED DIBS

i just

i love this

(TGCF chapter 207) just like newlyweds~