The Untamed As Richard Siken Quotes

Since there's been a lot of fandom history on my dash tonight, I want to tell you about something I've referenced before, and which always gets funny notes in my inbox whenever I do:

The day fandom collectively lost its shit after logging into Delicious and finding it was like, a horrible mix between MySpace and Reddit.

Like AO3, it's a story of fandom using a space that wasn't intended for fandom, and then being utterly destroyed when that space decided to adopt hostile policies.

Delicious was a social bookmarking site, which was basically a way for users to save content from around the web. This was during a time when browsers were notoriously awful, and saving bookmarks locally was guaranteed to end in you losing everything because Firefox updated and did something weird, or Internet Explorer just randomly shat the bed and reinstalled itself when you weren't looking. And it was superior to browser bookmarks, because it had tags and organisational structures that were set by each, individual user.

And it happened to be perfect for fandom, because at the time we were primarily using LiveJournal, another site that didn't want us, and was actively trying to push us out. Delicious was used in two primary ways:

Readers of fic would use it to save the ones they liked, often using their account to curate reclists.

Community owners would use it to organise posts to the community.

Free LJ accounts only allowed so many tags, and even paid accounts often didn't have enough for large communities. Roleplay was huge on LJ, and users would often want tags for all their characters so they could find old threads. Some megafandoms with huge ensemble casts would very quickly run out of tags on their communities, especially if they tagged for content creators, tropes, kinks, etc. With Delicious' tag system, it was a perfect site for both of these purposes.

And then one day, without warning, we all logged in to do our thing, and it was a completely different site. Tale as old as time, Yahoo! bought it, decided it wasn't profitable enough, and decided to rebuild it from the ground up without any warning. They got rid of the tag system entirely, and I don't think anyone ever truly figured out how the new site was meant to be used.

But fandom was utterly and truly in a mass panic, because this backbone of how so many things were run just evaporated. Ever wonder why AO3 has the tag system it does? It was built by the same people who used Delicious. Before AO3, fandom had collectively decided that the information AO3 displays on fic headers was what should always be displayed. People would have to build their own headers, but they always included the same general gist of fandom, characters, pairing, rating, word count, warnings, kinks, and summary. You could browse a stranger's Delicious account, and would have a reasonable certainty of seeing these same, or very similar prefixes in their tag system.

So. Fandom is panicking. Entire communities are un-searchable, reclists are broken, people have lost years of bookmarked fic, and we were all scrambling to find something that worked like Delicious, or build something like it, but it had happened so abruptly that there wans't time to really coordinate.

Then, from the shadows came Maciej Cegłowski, aka Pinboard Guy. (Not to be confused with Pinterest.) Pinboard Guy had heard that Delicious had shat the bed, because fandom wasn't the only group that used the site, and weren't the only people who lost their bookmarks, but we were certainly being very loud and obnoxious about it. Pinboard Guy reached out to fandom on the whole, with a glorious gift. He had his own Delicious clone, that he built from the ground up and maintained for better privacy and security, and he sold accounts. At the time, it was around a $5 one-time fee, with a structure that increased the fee by a fractional amount for each new account. Basically, as server load increased, so did server costs, and this is how he managed to keep up with that.

He also understood that by its nature, fandom is very social, where his site was very asocial.

So he asked, what does fandom need? And someone opened up a Gdoc, and a lot of people put together a very well-written and organised (and enormous) list of ways in which fandom used social bookmarking. How we needed prefixes, and bundles, and a way to discover other accounts, along with detailled explanations of why. A lot of work was put into this, which was basically a fandom manifesto explaining to an outsider everything he would need to know to rebuild Delicious. For a lot of us, we didn't expect anything, but just being humoured was validating.

And then this man implemented these features for us. When you go into your account, you can tick a box that says you're part of fandom, and it will open up an entirely separate part of the site, that he built, just for us. He didn't have to do this. But he did it anyway. He's changed the pricing model since then, and it's now a yearly fee instead of one-time, because Pinboard is still run by Pinboard Guy, and no one else. No ads, no sponsors. Just Maciej Cegłowski and his ancient-ass code that still looks like the internet did in 2009.

And then, a few years down the line, like the fucking baller he is, Cegłowski bought Delicious and shut it down. Just killed it dead.

Not a lot of people within use Pinboard anymore, because AO3 also serves the first reason people used it: bookmarking fic. Allowing for external bookmarks meant that the reclist people didn't need to rely on a service that might not always be friendly to us. And then, well. LiveJournal kicked fandom out through a series of hostile policy changes, and Dreamwidth failed to take off, so we no longer really needed that community archive aspect.

But 2009 was a rough year for fandom, because it was the year fandom pretty much everything changed. While we gained a huge, centralised archive that wasn't the Pit of Voles that FFN is, we lost that centralisation when fandom fled LiveJournal for this fucking hellsite. Some of us vainly tried to make Dreamwidth happen, and clung to it in the desperate hope that Tumblr would fail and people would miss journals and communities, but it never happened.

And I'm telling you. When this Post+ thing finally drives fandom off this site, I'm gonna be torn between sitting back and laughing because it's the same shit all over again, and collapsing into utter despair because I am too goddamn old to learn how to use another site that isn't built for the way fandom likes to shove square pegs into round holes to make sites suit our needs.

sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really. 

top 5 hanfu outfits hanyi 💓 - xiaosean

*SCREAMING* I jumped straight into Taobao to grab pictures for this ask I AM SO EXCITED TO REPLY IT

disclaimer: oncoming picture spam which I just couldn’t bear to hide beneath a cut

not really a specific look, but more in terms of my top 5 (listed “chronologically”) favourite hanfu styles

1. 圆领袍 (yuan2 ling3 pao2)

Literally means “round-collared robe”

Originally for men

But became popular among women in the Tang dynasty

Some people also wear the collar unbuttoned so it ends up looking like this double lapel thing which is still damned cool

Sources:

如梦霓裳

寻景记汉服

织羽集

流烟昔泠

2. 飞鱼服 (fei1 yu2 fu2)

Literally means “flying fish clothing”

Type of clothing given from the emperor to eunuchs/ guards (e.g. the Embroidered Uniform Guard) during the Ming dynasty

帅气 x100000 although I’ll never be able to pull this cool look off

Sources: 

如梦霓裳 [1] [2] [3]

3. 道袍 (dao4 pao2), bonus if it’s paired with a 披风 (pi1 feng1)

Literally means “Taoist robe” but was not restricted to only Taoists

Common full-length single robe that was worn by men in the Ming dynasty 

Sometimes with a ma mian qun (will talk about this later) underneath it!

LOOK AT THAT PI FENG AHHH 仙 x100000

4. 马面裙 (ma3 mian4 qun2)

I LOVE THESE OMG

Literally means “horse face skirt”

Common pleated skirt worn in the Ming dynasty

Can be traditionally worn as part of the 袄裙 (ao3 qun2), which consists of the skirt and a top worn over the skirt

But I reaaaally love the ma mian qun because it’s so damn versatile and can be paired with modern classy looks like this

(I’m getting this top and skirt on 11.11 hoho)

An even more modern look like this (I have this particular skirt hoho)

AND EVEN MODERN BADASS LIKE THIS (also getting this skirt during 11.11 hoho)

Sources:

如梦霓裳

七巧坊

拟梦汉服

华裳九州

池夏

5. 交领襦裙 (jiao1 ling3 ru2 qun2), bonus if it’s paired with a 大袖衫 (da4 xiu4 shan1) or 褙子 (bei4 zi3)

Okay I’m a bit hazy on when this started becoming popular/ commonly worn so I’ve put it right at the end instead of fitting it “chronologically” like the rest above

Some styles are from the Wei-Jin period, some are from the Song dynasty, and a lot of styles on Taobao these days don’t really stick to particular period of what a jiao ling ru qun looks like

Literally means “cross-collared short coat and skirt”, as opposed to the 齐胸襦裙 (qi2 xiong1 ru2 qun2) which is something like what jiang yanli in donghua wears 

I prefer the cross-collared styles more hehe

Tho speaking of cross-collared styles, my major pet peeve is when people accidentally draw the collars crossed the wrong way (right over left instead of left over right)… because that’s usually meant for the deceased

Sources:

如梦霓裳 [1] [2]

出社

重回汉唐 [1] [2]

okay end of spam I think I might have gone a little over on this whoooopss (〃ー〃)

answering “top 5″s!! ✩°｡⋆⸜(ू｡•ω•｡) (altho I admit to being terrible with fanfics so please avoid those *nervous cough*)

how do you people deal with your emotions? I can't even apologize properly without panicking

Legitimate *pro bono legal services* don’t exist without a good reason. In a few of the exmormon groups I’m in you’ll see regular posts saying stuff like “Look what my lawyer sent me today!” with a pic of their resignation confirmation letter from the church.

You know. Just stuff that a normal average church that is definitely not actually a cult would do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🙄

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(Source)

polish government has opened a website for ukrainians seeking safety and trying to cross the ukrainian-polish border:

ua.gov.pl

as of 13:10 polish time, it has been said as many people as possible will be let through the borders. they are also supposed to let through children who do not have passports, as to not divide families.

and yet the world is silent…