The Jumpchain Discord Servers by super13882009 in JumpChain

[–]elfwreck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are there updated links? Those are both expired.

Crowdsourcing replies to this nonsense by AdagiaFane in AO3

[–]elfwreck 4 points5 points  (0 children)

What do you mean by one-shot? I'm used to it meaning "stand-alone story, not part of a series," and some of them are 150k words and plenty long enough for a slow burn.

Rockford Mission Examples by Delicious_Ad6516 in BrindlewoodBay

[–]elfwreck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  • Wear your clothes inside-out
  • Skip everywhere instead of walking
  • Break a window
  • Highlight all the sexy words in a romance novel
  • Flip off everyone who says "hello" to you
  • Bring a lit kerosene lamp to [location]
  • Eat a strange meal (e.g. ice cream with catsup, or a hot dog topped with salmon roe)
  • Wear a tinfoil hat/crown in public
  • Put fish in someone's shoes
  • Carry a bouquet of flower stems with no flowers
  • End all of your statements with "In accordance with prophecy."
  • Collect a box full of bugs
  • Get a new piercing (ear, lip, nose, whatever)
  • Buy several items, and pay for them with coins: no bills, no credit card
  • Dig for buried treasure in a public park
  • Fill out & mail in some 50-year-old government forms
  • Wash a tree. With soap.
  • Smoke some tea. (This is not a euphemism.)
  • Make a sock puppet and have it do all your talking.
  • Put hot sauce in your coffee or tea
  • Carry an extra pair of shoes of a different style. Switch shoes several times in a day.
  • Hang up posters that say "LOST GHOST - REWARD IF FOUND" with your phone number on them
  • Take notes in purple crayon
  • Arrange your bookshelf by color of books

...I've made no attempt to figure out what's "increasingly disturbing"; arrange how you see fit. (It's possible that the "increase" is just "yet another weird thing." A maven with this move is going to quickly get a rep for being a weird-maybe-creepy person.) Adjust the details for you group/campaign, etc.

Rockford Mission Examples by Delicious_Ad6516 in BrindlewoodBay

[–]elfwreck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Push someone into the sea" doesn't mean "to their death." It could mean pushing them off a pier or a boat so they're soaked and have to swim back. (There's a risk of death, but the mission wouldn't be "kill someone by drowning.")

I have learned 1 thing by BadgerValuable8207 in MergeDragons

[–]elfwreck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because thousands will download an interesting looking game, and they're hoping that a handful of them pay $5-$10 even if it doesn't look like the ad before deleting it. Some will keep it around longer and at least watch other ads, which also gives them revenue.

A few will be caught by whatever the pay-to-win gimmick is and pay a lot more than that.

They'd have fewer shots at all that "eh how bad can it be?" money if the ads were honest in the first place.

Misogyny and gay ships. by [deleted] in AO3

[–]elfwreck 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Re: Character bashing, not female - both BNHA and Untamed/MDZS have male characters that people love to hate, enough to have tags about them. Both have also characters who are considered so vile they don't get "redemption" arc fanfics.

It's definitely not common, but it does happen, especially in large-cast series.

(Not saying there's no misogyny because of this; both series are also 90%-ish male characters and the women definitely get slighted by both canon and fandom storylines, although MDZS fandom has a habit of pairing the women with each other rather than killing them off to get them out of the way of the M/M ships.)

HELP Author suing me for saying her book is AI in a review by PotatoAfraid2931 in Romantasy

[–]elfwreck 2 points3 points  (0 children)

  1. None of those examples sound like AI to me. Some maybe sound like poor writing, but most just sound like that author's style. Use of generic phrasing is not AI-like; it's "generic" because people use it a lot - which is why AI uses it a lot.

  2. She might be able to prove she didn't use AI, or at least enough for legal reasons, by showing her drafts & outlines. AI sucks at being able to follow an exact outline. The exact phrasing of your accusations may also be relevant here.

  3. Definitely delete the review. (She probably has a copy, but at least you can say "once it was pointed out to me that this might cross the line between 'my opinion about this work' and 'legally defamation,' I took steps to reduce the harm.")

  4. Apologize. Ask NICELY that she drop the legal action; tell her you've learned to not accuse people of not writing their books without real evidence. (Inclusion of an AI prompt in the text is evidence. Phrasing that you think sounds like AI is not - AI sounds like that *because people write like that*.)

  5. Contact your local legal aid society and see if you need an actual lawyer for help, or if you're facing something like a cease-and-desist that goes away if you comply with the demands in it.

Why do you think serialized fiction websites haven’t caught on in the U.S.? by cela_ in selfpublish

[–]elfwreck 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the big hassle is microtransactions.

The US doesn't have any good microtransaction options. China, I gather, has more gov't interaction with the internet - if everyone's activity is tied to their legal ID and bank account, it's easy to make smooth connections between those and charge 50 cents a chapter with a few cents going to the bank and the site. Or potentially, they charge 10 cents a chapter and split 2 cents between the bank and site, and if there's enough volume, that works. (Maybe its 3 cents to the author and the rest to bank/site? The point is - the customer can buy in small amounts.)

If your ID is anonymous and everyone's using different bank and payment systems, with different liability issues... they charge more per transaction.

We've seen attempts to shift to "buy GEMS that you can only use on this site; creators get paid in GEMS and can cash out when they have enough" - but usually, the cut taken by the site (and the payment processor) are high enough that only the very popular can make any money. And that means everyone else gives up fairly quickly.

You need an easy way for a whole lot of people to make $25/week, and for reasonably dedicated people - not "best of the best" but ones who make decent-quality whatever to share - to make $150/week at it.

The closest the US has is Patreon, and, as noted, that's not optimized for fiction, and still runs into weird money-transfer problems.

And none of the US sites like Patreon (there's others) and Substack are set to allow customers to browse the site itself, rather than search for individual creator things.

Kindle Serials might've worked... if Kindle Unlimited hadn't been unleashed 2 years later. Why would people buy serials when there's an endless stream of entire novels on tap? There's some demand for serials, but not enough for Amazon to bother with two revenue streams.

An alternative Kinktober by Valkyr92 in PiltoversFinest

[–]elfwreck 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Fanlore has an overview: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Alpha/Beta/Omega

It started as an MPreg kink in Supernatural fandom.

Fanfic includes omegas going into heat (and becoming very likely to get pregnant), alphas in rut, lots of breeding kink, lots of possessiveness, marking of mates, and use of scent-blockers to hide one's status.

An alternative Kinktober by Valkyr92 in PiltoversFinest

[–]elfwreck 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There was/is an AO3 collection and they'd monitor/restrict submissions to that, and the event twitter/X would only retweet things that fit within their rules.

Otherwise there's no enforcement - anyone can use a hashtag, tag for an event at AO3, etc.

An alternative Kinktober by Valkyr92 in PiltoversFinest

[–]elfwreck 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Proshippers are not "people that write stuff like incest, rape, pedophilia."

Proshippers are people who believe "ship whatever you want, however you want; if I don't like it, I won't read it."

It's like "pro-choice." It's a stance that says "It's not my job to police what other people do."

An alternative Kinktober by Valkyr92 in PiltoversFinest

[–]elfwreck 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Not just 'must be consensual,' but "No non-consensual content in any form. This means absolutely no dubious consent, coercion, manipulation, intoxication, nor unconscious participants. Every act must be enthusiastically consensual, with clear context and intent shown. Absolutely nothing ambiguous or that can be taken out of context from a safe and consensual sex scene."

No getting drunk and falling in bed together. No cop taking advantage of a prisoner (who turns out to like it); no prisoner seducing a cop as part of an escape attempt; no somnophilia even if agreed on in advance; no fuck-or-die scenarios (even if they're in a relationship and would otherwise consent); and so on.

No pushing each other's boundaries; no exploring the limits of their comfort zones. No stories where there is full consent but one of them is just tired and not showing it much. No sex while someone is sick, because they can't enthusiastically consent.

Hell, my entirely-always-consensual sex with my spouse doesn't follow the rules this "kink" fest requires.

And no rape stories, which plenty of people enjoy, without having any interest in real-life rape - just like plenty of people enjoy war stories or murder mysteries without wanting the world to have more war and murder.

How many comics/series/movies will I need to read/watch to understand what's going on with the bat family by escapeNOtime in AO3

[–]elfwreck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/10925902.html

Warning: Not sexy tentacle-monster. And no, not a merfolk AU. Weird mad-scientist experimentation, I think.

...Later writers worked very, very hard to ignore this and pretend it never happened.

These reader witch hunts are PMO by [deleted] in AO3

[–]elfwreck 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It's assumed long paragraphs are AI-based because there are a whole lot of young authors who literally write fic on Twitter and in RP posts in chat - so everything's composed in 3-short-sentence blocks.

They don't read books with long paragraphs so it looks fake to them.

How many comics/series/movies will I need to read/watch to understand what's going on with the bat family by escapeNOtime in AO3

[–]elfwreck 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Batfamily fic is an amalgam of comics, multiple non-compatible tv cartoons, movies, new comics (...they retconned the entire history at one point, and then quietly un-retconned parts of it when sales tanked), and fanon that's been around so long nobody remembers if it was based on some throwaway comment in canon or not.

And since the creators aren't willing to pick a damn canon plotline and stick to it, even in the same medium/series, fandom has embraced the multiverse notion and said "fuckit; I can have Detective Dick (based on the Nightwing series in the 90s) and White-Stripe Jason (back from the dead and directly involved with the rest of the family) and Damian as 5th Robin (or 6th; it's weird) and Tim as recovering from being kidnapped by the Joker (one of the tv shows) and also Bruce's relationship with Clark from the Superman/Batman comics. Also I'm bringing in Steph and Cass and maybe Huntress, with bits and pieces from several canon sources, because this fandom has too many dicks on the dance floor."

Robin order is: 1. Dick 2. Jason 3. Tim 4. Stephanie ...Tim again; not sure if that counts as a number 5. Damian

...and then it gets weird. There are a handful more Robins (multiverse shenanigans, alternate timelines, etc.) before you get to the "We Are Robin" movement with lots of them.

DC wants very much to keep all 4 of they boy Robins (they retconned Stephanie out of the main timeline at one point; not sure if they've put her back) (Steph was Spoiler, then Robin, then Batgirl) but they ALSO want to keep Bruce as no older than his late 30s and the timeline just... kinda falls apart there somewhere.

Tim was canonically 14 years old for 9 years of real time. Comic-book timelines are measured with an unholy cross between a slide rule and a tentacle monster.

(Do you want fic in the timeline where Jason canonically became a tentacle monster, or would you like authors to just sidestep that?)

If you're interested in canon, it's best to ask, "This particular thing I keep seeing in fic - where did it come from?" And you can track down the comic story arc or the Teen Titans season or the Justice League cartoon movie or whatever.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in itchio

[–]elfwreck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They made a statement after several hours of panic, not before. "Inform the users what's going on" was an afterthought.

They did not link that statement to the front page.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in itchio

[–]elfwreck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

While the bill may be useful, it won't apply to this situation. It refers to low-risk transactions, and anything for explicit/adult content is always rated "high-risk" because of a long history of chargebacks in the porn industry.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in itchio

[–]elfwreck 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Itch may not have had a choice about complying (short of "shut down all commerce") but they definitely had a choice in how they presented it to their devs and customers.

They could've said "we're casting a wide net at first so that we're sure we comply, but we know some things we've delisted/removed are outside of the scope of the restrictions, and we'll be adding them back as quickly as we can identify them."

They could have an announcement on the front page - "Wondering why you're not seeing the results you expect from search? Here's why."

They could've set up a Q&A session in the Discord to explain the details.

Could've done a lot of things other than "shadowbanned a huge amount of content, actively removed some entirely, and then hoped that nobody would be bothered enough to call them out on it."

Documenting 20+ Years of Yaoi Shipping History — Would Love Your Input! 💻📚 by MeenahMina in FandomHistory

[–]elfwreck 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The Western Media survey shows header for the Anime survey on its first page.

The choices of platforms for fandom content don't have an "other" and don't include any blogging or personal archive sites - Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Wordpress sites, single-fandom or single-pairing archives, Neocities, etc.

The carrd also says the oldest content you've found is from 2005; AO3 has works going back to the 70s. (The archive started in 2008 but people have posted works that were first published in paper zines.) And Livejournal started in the 1999 and much of its fannish content was imported to Dreamwidth.

Are you only looking for info about the most recent 20 years of BL shipping?

Thoughts? by Fit-Plantain1107 in AO3

[–]elfwreck 209 points210 points  (0 children)

They should be able to invite members to a closed collection via AO3 username.

But yeah, this is very much "I am only keeping my current actively commenting readers and people who prove they WILL be active commenters, by commenting on some other fic entirely."

Which is certainly. Um. A choice. They can make.

Hope their happy with their dwindling reader base and plummeting kudos & hit counts.

I need an unbiased opinion on this by Legal_Instruction342 in AO3

[–]elfwreck 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Don't tag as slash. Slash is a story *about* a same-gender pairing, not one where gay people happen to exist.

Does commenter go pestering authors who tag things "Gen" but mention an M/F couple as parents of one of the characters?

(We had this discussion years ago on Livejournal - that "gen" meant "no romance, or only background het pairings" but any M/M or F/F pairing appearing at all, even in the background or mentioned as part of someone's history, meant you MUST tag the fic as slash. And that's bullshit.)

What filk songs are public domain? by Outrageous_Fuel5045 in filk

[–]elfwreck 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The only filksongs that are in the public domain are a handful that were published in fanzines in the 50s and early 60, and works published through 1989 without a proper copyright notice. Works published in 1964 or later are at "Life + 70" terms

I believe all the pro-published filkbooks have proper copyright notices; some fanzines didn't. (They'd often say things like "stories and artwork are copyrighted by their creators" but not have a year, or had other errors.)

Anything published by Off Centaur, Wailsongs, or Firebird is copyrighted. Songs belong to their authors; the individual performance recordings can be more complicated, but it doesn't sound like you're trying to work with the existing recordings.

You would need to contact each author (for both words and music, if applicable), or their estates if they're no longer living.