Fanfiction Piracy Masterpost

🪷 Wu Xie's official birthday illustration for DMBJ×气球暖暖星 Collaboration in February-March 2025 (Childhood Series)

🪷 Artist: -椿梦记-

🪷 Source: 气球暖暖星 (Weibo) or (xhs)

Note: 气球暖暖星 set their Weibo posts to be visible for only half a year.

They're wanting to change the definition of water to see which water would qualify under the Clean Water Act...I wish I was making this up.

What this means, in layman's terms, is that not all water or wetlands would be under environmental protections, so some could legally be dumped in, scraped out of, or otherwise harmed.

The comment period for this is pretty short (just a few days left!) so please submit comments asking for ALL water to be protected.

I talked a lot about wetlands in my comment, because I live in an area with a lot of small ones and each one has unique conditions, and also because I live in an area prone to flooding and wetlands are key in mitigating flooding. If you feel passionately about the water near you, that's the sort of thing lawmakers need to hear.

This is one that really needs comments, guys. It only has 33.

Try starting with something like "I am commenting to oppose the proposed change." and then explain why you think protecting water is important.

Normalize leaving unhinged comments on ao3 fics you like. I'm tired of being the only one brave enough to write "I am chewing on this fic" in the comment section. Be weird. Authors will love you for it

If I didn't want readers to chew on it, I wouldn't have spent all that time on the mouthfeel

Non-writers also free to weigh in.

There is a correct answer here by the way. I am a drabble purist but I want to know what other people think about this beloved format.

The thing is there is a technical 'right' answer but people who think that this used to be common knowledge that's now lost are confusing "my personal online social circle agreed on what a drabble was" with "everyone used to agree on what a drabble was" because trust me, this is a thing people have always argued over.

I can still remember the fucking drama over the definition of the term drabble that ended up with @copperbadge creating flopsy fest* (and the word flopsy) to cater to a group of people who didn't want to abide by the 'correct' definition but also were tired of fighting with people about what the word drabble meant. And while I don't know that flopsy fest was first created a FULL 20 years ago I do know 15 years ago Sam was archiving multiple years worth of flopsy fests fics on dreamwidth and I can say for sure that people were DEFINITELY fighting about what a drabble was 20 years ago.

*in my memory Sam created flopsy fest BUT as a caveat this was all many many years ago and most of the livejournals that would have been invovled are long gone and it's entirely possible he was just promoting it and somebody else invented it. If anyone has any clearer memories of this feel free to correct me.

EDIT: further perusal suggests that flopsy fest probably was started in 2005 because the drama over what exactly counts as a drabble happened in 2004. I realized there was more details about this in the 2010 dreamwidth post I missed because it was in tiny font.

Yeah, there's a reason I have "drabble" blacklisted on Tumblr.

2004 sounds about right. I believe a reader actually suggested 'flopsy' but it was created on my Livejournal and it was definitely in response to this debate.

The originating event was that I had promised to write a drabble, which by some common definitions at the time was simply a short fanfic, in exchange for each donation to a charity my readers documented. Someone got aggressive about a drabble being 100 words exactly and went through all the comments, word counted every drabble in order to post the Not Exactly 100 Words count of them, and berated me about writing 20+ fanfics for charity. So that was cool.

If you want the exact date of that, it did make fandom_wank on the original LJ community, which you may be able to search, idk if it's still around. The other person got most of the ridicule but not all of it, and being held up for public commentary over it was even more awesome than getting yelled at on my own journal for it, let me tell you. Great week to be me.

In any case, I've given up fighting about both the current and historical use of it -- life's too short, and the people who vocally insist "is and always was universally 100 words" tend to be unpleasant about it on multiple axes. There's not even really a live-and-let-live situation because people assert that the looser definition devalues the more rigid one, since in their view writing 100 words exactly is a unique and difficult thing to achieve. The less said by me about that the better, perhaps, but quod erat demonstratum the debate goes on with or without me, and has for many years.

I apologize for bringing up bad memories! Honestly my memories of the 2004 drabble wank are much fuzzier than the resulting fallout, I wouldn't have tagged you if I'd remembered how awful the whole thing was. It just drives me crazy how much gen x/millennial age fans tend to mythologize LJ era fandom. There are parts I miss a lot but like... a lot of it was not any different from how things are now, people have just memory hole'd the bad stuff.

Oh gosh no -- no worries, I was being sardonic because I wanted to make a point about the length of the debate to back up your post, not because I'm still smarting over it. I can look back now and laugh -- yes it was awful at the time but that was fandom then, not you bringing it up now.

And it's experiences in fandom like that which helped give me a sense of perspective about certain things -- not even "the definition of a drabble", more like "how to interact with fandom when your experiences in it are outlier". We're good :)

Perhaps it is the historian in me, but I am very curious when the 100-word definition came into being. I was active in several online fandoms from the mid-90s (on dialup, lol) to early 2000s, when drabble was just used to mean a very short fic, often without meaningful structure (no Aristotelian plot diagram could be drawn). Then I was away from online fandoms for a few years starting in early 2003, because I moved and didn’t have good internet access at my new house. When I returned to fandom spaces several years later, there was a whole cutthroat debate about the definition of drabble, and I had literally never heard of the 100-word-fic definition. Does anyone know when or where that started?

I suspect it was a LiveJournal thing, as I was never really active in fanfiction communities there (kinda missed LJ’s heyday) and insofar as I am aware, the debate had not existed on FFN/FF.net or the fandom-specific archives I tended to hang around before it existed. I’m sure there was a fixed starting point, but the word itself goes back a long way in fandom, and a lot of that early internet content has been lost.

Some word use changes can be tracked to specific sites or events (I credit the Cheezburger Network for corrupting the spelling of “whoa,” a word in use in the same form for 300+ years, to “woah,” and I still cringe every time I see it), but I didn’t experience the drabble change in real time and much of LJ has been purged or deleted, so it’s harder to document. I just think there’s value in preserving the way language and social “rules” change over time, especially in subcultures.

MISS CONGENIALITY (2000) dir. Donald Petrie

Li Lianhua • Lotus Li's Lotus Hairpins

interesting. I had not noticed this detail of various lotus hairpins.

MDZS JP AUDIO DRAMA x VILLAGE VANGUARD

dualities

This scene is so funny. The three of them are saying different things, I don't even know who says what, and the sub only appears for like 0.5 secs 🤣🤣

The umbrella dilemma. Zhu YiLong says they “should get a bigger one for the three of them.” Wu Lei agrees. Staff suggests separate ones for everyone, and NiNi says “no! we will not separate, we must huddle up together for warmth.”

Magical Spot on the River

Tom Hiddleston attends The Olivier Awards at The Royal Albert Hall on April 6, 2025

Are y'all seeing all these protests?

The people are clearly tired of billionaires trying to buy our democracy.

Here's just one shot from Chicago. Boston and DC crowds are insane. They're in PA, they're in OR, they're in MI--this is amazing!

ATLANTA:

WISCONSIN:

NEBRASKA:

WASHINGTON:

D.C.:

MINNESOTA:

People around the world are with us.

Salt Lake City

DENVER: