Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.

one time in my last job a woman came up to the register explaining that when she bought stuff a day prior the clerk forgot to scan a pair of socks worth less than €2 and it was only right for her to bring it back to the store and pay for it proper. unfortunately my manager was directly next to me at the time and took over the register to handle this serious issue. the receipt she had brought with her said which register performed the previous transaction that forgot the socks and the manager could find out who was running that till on that day. poor dude had a manager yell at him for a half hour about how much of an incompetent fuck up he was, he left the job immediately after but i couldnt tell you if he quit or was fired

i think about this moment a lot. the customer seemed like a sweet woman with only good intentions and when she paid for the socks she had a look on her face that said "i feel good because i did the right thing". and a guy lost his job because of a pair of socks. if shit like this ever happens to you and a clerk forgets to scan an item just think of it as a small blessing or that you had good luck or something. keep it.

🚨⚠️ATTENTION FELLOW WRITERS⚠️🚨

If you use Google Docs for your writing, I highly encourage you to download your work, delete it from Google Docs, and transfer it to a different program/site, unless you want AI to start leeching off your hard work!!!

I personally have switched to Libre Office, but there are many different options. I recommend checking out r/degoogle for options.

Please reblog to spread the word!!

catholic priest running late to mass with the sacramental bread in his mouth

petition

we need to bring back anon kink memes in a big way. no one is horny enough anymore. the other night i found a fic on an old kink meme from 2009 that was so well-written and also so raunchy and foul (affectionate) it could have stripped paint off my car. there is something about truly unapologetic filth that can be transcendent and tender and marrow deep and maybe if we all leaned into being anonymous depraved little weirdos again we'd learn how to have more fun.

When censoring information out of pictures, do NOT use the marker tool. Block it out with a full filled in square, or use a mosiac filter. Marker tools are not fully opaque and are slightly off from black, which makes it possible to alter the levels and reveal the information underneath.

Whenever people try to tell me to ship "moral ships" I like to think about how inherently immoral it is to flirt with service workers at coffee shops where they're obliged to be nice to you so... many coffee shop AUs are like. Immoral. But given that they are a fantasy where this is instant romance without the fear of trapping a service worker in an uncomfortable situation that's tantamount to workplace sexual harassment, I enjoy the cutesy coffee shop AUs immensely.

And that's basically my attitude towards all fantasy. There's lots of things I enjoy in fantasy that wouldn't work IRL. Enemies to lovers. Sudden kisses. Miscommunications in relationships. Codependency. Fight sluts who physically assault each other while emotionally connecting.

Once you start ascribing your morals to the fiction you consume, you tend to miss the issues in even the most innocuous, innocent seeming scenarios. It's easy to judge other people's fictional enjoyment until someone points out your innocent coffee shop AU is romanticised workplace harassment.

But it's all fiction. It's a fantasy. That's why it's fine.

A lack of education around things like consent, healthy relationships, self respect and respect of others, bodily autonomy, etc, has made people think they can rely only on fiction to tell them what right - but that's dangerous. And unsustainable.

Do you write music with the view of being politically active and delivering a message or does it just happen and the rest follows? 

1989 Nissan Snail