@daydreamerdisease / daydreamerdisease.tumblr.com
How am I only just learning this!?
[ID: a cropped screenshot of the AO3 Exclude filter section, reading "Other tags to exclude". "*/reader" and "*/you" have been selected. End ID.]
[ID: cropped screenshot of the ao3 include filter, reading "Other tags to include:" with "*/James "Bucky" Barnes" selected. /end ID]
Is this new???? I've been wanting wildcard relationship search for YEARS 😍😍😍
My multishipping ass is about to go ham...
helpful info for those who need it
Lil sketches to cheer @metalomagnetic to write it cause it now live rent free in my head xD
The Ketamine King Musk has shutdown the IRS's Free Tax Filing system.
Of all the things a government could off, a way to Freely calculate and file your taxes seems like a good one. But the richest man in the world thinks we shouldn't have that.
President Trump’s “special government employee,” Elon Musk, announced on Monday that he had dissolved the Internal Revenue Service’s free file program—suggesting that he effectively fired the staff who worked on the popular program.
The billionaire revealed that he “deleted” the group of individuals who oversaw the system that allows Americans to easily file their taxes for free on the IRS website. The IRS-run free and simplified tax filing option had 76% approval from registered voters based on a 2023 poll by Navigator. [...]
If you have the time to burn, and a bit of financial cushion -
File your taxes by hand. Fill out the forms with a pen. Overpay by about $50. (You will eventually get that back. It is likely to take several months.)
It will take longer to get any refund you're due. But I promise you the entire federal bureaucracy has been cutting as many corners as they can for as many years as they can, and the current set is going to cut even more corners, and...
they don't have the staff on hand to process a huge number of paper claims anymore. They expect everything that came in digitally last year, to continue to be filed digitally. And they expect more digital filings every year. They've planned for that. They've staffed for that.
One of the only acts of protest we have available is "comply, but slowly."
File on paper if you can.
If you have the software to file digitally because doing the math & forms is such a nightmare for you?
If you're up for it: Print the final form, and then fill out a new blank form by hand. With your lousy handwriting. Send it in the post, by mail.
Does that stop them? No, but every bit of sand we can throw in the gears slows them down and pulls resources away from the other horrific rights violations they're trying to codify into law.
While Direct File is an IRS-hosted program, there is also Free File, which is government-subsidized and hosted by third parties:
You need to use THESE SPECIFIC LINKS in order to access the Free File programs, fyi - they are hosted by tax preparers who also often order paid services which may have deceptive names like "TurboTax Free" that make them sound like they don't cost anything, so be sure to only use the IRS links. Don't just Google them, you will not find what you're looking for.
Here's an archive link in case they take down the Free File page. (You may have to manually cut out the web.archive.org part of the URL to use the links.)
It is not possible for Elon Musk to access these programs directly because they are not hosted on government servers. You are eligible for Free File for your federal taxes if you make less than $84k, as well as for your state taxes if you make less than $48k, as well as some other situations such as if you are active-duty military or if you live in certain states (for your state return).
If you want to throw sand into the works and file these as paper forms instead of e-filing, you absolutely can do that by printing them out after completing the program, but PLEASE do not pay a tax preparer if you are eligible for Free File!!! It's a ripoff!!!!!!!!
Direct File is a great program that saves the government money (they do not have to pay third parties if they keep the program in-house) and helps protect taxpayer data security, but you DO NOT need to pay an accountant or risk filling out your return incorrectly just because it goes down.
Naughty Valentines Day Card
for @macrocest bingo winter 2024
(My first ever fanart posted online! Please be kind!)
Spin the wheel and let it randomly assign you a gender identity.
Dear Lorde, please protect the UHC CEO Shooter from the True Crime™ girlies and may anyone who was in the area deny seeing anything, knowing anything, or otherwise volunteering information to the Pigs. May this "apparently politically motivated" assassination go down in history as a nameless violent act that sent a message down the spine of every capitalist piece of shit that you don't get to put profit over people's lives.
May he never be caught and may he be the legend that finally unites us
So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.
Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.
Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.
Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.
Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.
how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.
What happened with her lawyers.
History became legend. Legend became myth…. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.
One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.
all of this
Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers.
Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.
I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.
I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!
Fandom history is important.
Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories!
Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.
It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here.
“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”
Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.
I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.
I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)
But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?
On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.
Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.
(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)
Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.
My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.
Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.
(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)
Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.
(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)
Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene - and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)
She relaxed a little as time went on, but still.
Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’ is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.
That wasn’t even all that long ago…
fandom history class
To this day, *talking* about writing or reading fanfiction - just acknowledging that it exists - to anyone other than people I know are in fandom as well, feels like a dangerous act. The strict separation I maintained between my real life identity, my online identity, and my fandom identity (yes, they were separate, because some of the most vicious and mocking people were fellow nerds) has broken down a bit these days, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to integrate them as freely as some younger fans do.
Everybody should know that AO3 is just one project of the Organization for Transformative Works. Their mission is much broader than just hosting a (very good) fanfic site. They do all kinds of fandom history archiving and publish an academic journal, but most importantly, they perform legal advocacy to protect the fair use rights of people who make fanfic or fanart.
The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.
I haven’t been involved in fandom stuff all that long, but I find this stuff so fascinating!
whew, i feel old, but that’s mostly bc i was on forums way way waaaaay too young. but this? yes. all the way. people had password protected forums on the weirdest, most unconventional websites. before you could even be approved by the mods they would search your blog, your other accounts, question you, everything, all because we were broke teens and preteens trying to do something for fun and if someone got in who could doxx you or send your work over to a lawyer? that was it, you were OVER. that’s also part of where fandom wars and the defense of fandom came from: quote unquote “enemy” fandoms would infiltrate just to hurt you. @theglintoftherail makes a very good point: ao3 is a goddamn haven. and they’re a great team of lawyers and people dedicated to protecting fanworks! part of the reason it’s so great is because they know there’s no one like them out there. they also go to the ends of the damned earth to protect you and to be inclusive, which is why there’s shit like tentacle porn and underage and dubcon. because they’re dedicated to protecting readers and creators to the death. they don’t advocate for it and they have the extensive rating and tagging system because of that (legit the best tagging system i’ve ever seen) but they don’t know if you’re dealing with trauma or if you need to get something out. do not forget your fandom, kids. jesus
Who else knew nothing about this? A show of hands
I’m just the right age to remember the disclaimers and to have HEARD about the Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, and X-Files fiascos, but I was never in any of those fandoms and I was more or less on the tail end of that. I can’t imagine having to be scared to tell people I write fanfic. So glad we’ve come so far.
Every time I start reading fanfics, I thank all of you people whose neverending resilience and the drive to be creative made it possible for me to consume content freely and without worry 🖤
My older fics have the disclaimers. Heck, my older fanart has disclaimers in the descriptions. FFN and DeviantArt were those times, AO3 and Tumblr era I stopped finally.
In case folks still don’t get why losing AO3 would be so devastating…
Since it’s happening again now, let’s not forget the purity brigades of the late-90s and early-2000s who took it as their duty to roam fan fic sites in their fandoms and report anything they deemed unsuitable. And if they couldn’t get them removed, that’s when the flame comments would start, where they would screech abuse at you in the comments boxes.
Back then, this could include anything from the ship they didn’t like (look up the ship wars from Potter fandom. The feuds were horrendous and hateful) to something as simple as a g-rated slash fic because “this of the children”. Hell, when strikethrough happened on livejournal, it was everything/anything which - sadly - also included a lot of fantastic support communities for queer kids and SA survivors and the like. All because the site decided to crack down on ‘lewd’/‘deviant’ content and didn’t pause to think what else might be tagged under queer and SA content.
A lot of the writers in a lot of the fandoms I was in included content warnings for slash because if people felt spiteful or hostile when they stumbled on it, they could report it to fic hosting sites and have it taken down for any number of excuses. I lost fics on fanfiction.net because some big weirdo deemed them as inappropriate and had their friends all report it at the same time.
This is why Archive of Our Own is so special. If someone doesn’t like what you’ve written, they don’t have the power or right to remove it or erase it because it offends their specific sensibilities. Yes, they can still comment and be a dick, but now we can block and/or report them if they continue to do so.
Write down your url only using songs from your Top Songs of 2024 playlist on Spotify (or equivalent) and tag as many people as the letters in your url! 🎶🕺
Thank you to @goldenbi for tagging me :3
D - Don't Forget Me by Imagine Dragons
A - Addict by Silvia Hound, Michael Kovach, & Chi-Chi
Y - Young Volcanoes by Fall Out Boy
D - Dream A Little Dream of Me by The Mamas and the Papas
R - Raise Your Glass by P!nk
E - End of It by Friday Pilots Club
A - All I Want by Kodaline
M - Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson
E - Even Though Our Love is Doomed by Garbage
R - Ryder by Madison Beer
D - Do I Want to Know? by the Arctic Monkeys
I - Invisible Wounds by AURORA
S - Shake it Out by the Florence + The Machine
E - Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode
A - AMERICAN HORROR SHOW by Snow Wife
S - Stargazing by the The Neighbourhood
E - (Everything I Do) I Do It For You by Bryan Adams
Figured I'd do one of these for once. I'm really surprised I managed to have all these although E and R were close ones! It also took me too long to verify I spelled it correctly lmao.
Okay...sorry if you've already been tagged because this is a lot of people to tag but...
let's play a game.
Biological Essentialism/Determinism can be summed up as, in the most simplified way, "what you are born as intrinsically determines your behavior and destiny".
"Gender Essentialism" uses the exact same framework but with a thin veneer of "trans inclusivity" slapped on top, to say that while your biology does not determine who you are, your gender identity does. Even before you realize you are trans or come out of the closet.
Under the framework of "Gender Essentialism" you're viewed as being X gender and somehow getting all of those 'benefits' from society even before you realize or come out as X gender.
So, some examples:
This is inspired both by the wave of trans inclusive radical feminists who say that
"because trans men are of course men, that means they are inherently evil and oppressive and part of the patriarchy that seeks to tear trans women down."
and also because I've seen too many fantasy and scifi series way too comfortable with making Ontologically Evil Species and strictly enforced Caste Systems where everything is fine and dandy and everyone's happy with their lot in life as long as the ones with a caste system are the
"Beautiful, Pure and Good Elves, because as we all know, Happy Slaves aren't really Slaves, right? And if the Ruler has the Divine Right of Kings and all the little people think that's good, that makes it good, right?" (sarcasm).
If you've ever considering giving your fantasy or scifi race as 'caste' system that determins who does what based on their lineage or their body type and its apparently 'good and natural and everyone loves being their caste and wouldn't have it any other way'
....have you considered that Caste Systems have always been used as tools of oppression and discrimination and this is something real people face, and that we should not be writing "good caste systems" from the comfort of Western Society and perhaps consider the harm in romanticing these very real frameworks of systemic oppression?
Anyways, both in literature and real life:
do you agree that Biological Essentialism, Biological Determinism, and yes, "Trans-Inslusive Gender Essentialism" are ever correct and a good framework for viewing other people?
Or do you agree that this is an absolutely bullshit way to view individuals and that all it does is uphold systems of oppression, especially when it comes to queer people, people of color, disabled people, intersex people and more?
anyways just gonna leave you with this gif.
[ID: a gif from Pokemon the Movie 2000, showing Mew and Mewtwo floating over a battlefield, with Mewtwo having the realization "I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are." End ID]
Adding on: the assumption that an intersex individual must be a non-binary androgyne is biological essentialism.
The vast majority of intersex individuals have binary genders. They might have complicated relationships to their binary genders thanks to forced medical or social transitions.
While non-binary intersex people do exist, it feels a wholly disproportionate amount of characters created by perisex authors are non-binary out of an biological essentialism assumption that this is what intersex inherently is.
I use this drawing as my banner here in tumbler, but I wanted to make a proper post of it.
every holocaust memorial day, i always ask people to keep romani people in their thoughts, but this year i’d like to clear up some misconceptions that i see every year w/ a psa
we’re the largest ethnic minority in europe, and yet have almost no political power, no land ownership power (in some places, we’re forbidden from owning land entirely), etc. with very few reputable charities- a lot of us reject charity by principle, as well as there being a general lack of education about us- the best thing you can do to help romani people is to just spread information, and help individuals when you can.
[ID: three photos of Brennan Lee Mulligan sitting at a desk with earbuds in talking to the camera. The captions read, “Self-loathing has never motivated anyone to do anything other than loath themselves. You will not hate yourself into being industrious.” / end ID]
