My Characters Roll Their Eyes So Often, I Think Everyone Being Perpetually Dizzy Is Secretly Canon.

The manual would be the first thing Zimmie would look at after buying something, even over playing with the new thing. She is such a precious little nerd

Is your character the type that would read the owner’s manual to new items they receive/purchase?

You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?

--

I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.

might flop but….. rb with ur sign & what kind of drunk you are

It's a trap!

everytime

- Big cinnamon roll… Little menace. 

I bet this man smiles whenever he looks at dandelions.

From the series: Bakugou Katsuki falls asleep on people he likes. I’m a sucker for the “some things never change” trope.

Edit: Please go read the cutest baku-family fic to ever grace AO3 by the lovely @sex-cymbal, I’m still in tears… happy tears. Don’t send me help.

60 Word Challenge

If you want an actual challenge, fill one a day for two months or fill two a day for 30 days. Or! Just use this as inspiration or an askbox meme.

1. Collapse 2. Browse 3. Institution 4. Database 5. Society 6. The cost 7. Isolated 8. Severest 9. Dice 10. Syndrome 11. Sensory 12. Hallucination 13. Schedule 14. Genesis 15. 46 16. Beneficial 17. Markedly 18. Auditory 19. Extensively 20. Compelled 21. Infiltrated 22. Not_____ 23. Stage 24. Cells 25. Polar 26. Spread 27. Absorption 28. Intervention 29. Fatal 30. Clot 31. Production 32. Brain 33. Blind 34. Pressure 35. Maturation 36. Trade-off 37. Impact 38. Fever 39. Tolerance 40. Predicted 41. Dependence 42. Anxiety 43. Case 44. Radiate 45. Reduction 46. Euphoria 47. Designer 48. Lecture 49. Infant 50. Construct 51. Stressor  52. Layer 53. Bare 54. Toxic 55. Domestic 56. Sheepish 57. Arrow 58. Coma 59. Stroke 60. Impairment

I’m pretty sure the monster manual explicitly states that goblinoids are super kinky. 

>:(

The 3 important B’s

your poor little meow meow fucking bit me