hot off the meat truck!

I have not posted in a fuckin' year! Lol so much for "I GOTTA START USING DREAMWIDTH AGAIN", whoopsie-doodle. I've just been having fun in CBS Ghosts fandom. Wow, my last post about an episode was S2? Guys, the show is in S4 now and it is so unhinged.

Also, re: CBS Ghosts, if you enjoy Old Timey Pairings and are okay with your ship not being Opposites Attract, Nisaac (Isaac/Nigel) might be up your alley? One's a pompous Revolutionary War soldier who accidentally shot and killed his crush, an also-pompous British soldier. They have had their ups and downs. Both are into polite decorum yet are also both catty bitches. Isaac is cowardly and selfish but is trying to be less so. He's also very horny and very repressed. Nigel seems equally repressed and comes off as less horny, but in fact is a secret slut. It's interesting, it's definitely not the dynamic that seems to bring the m/m shippers out in droves (I'm a basic Bert/Ernie bitch myself), but I would be remiss if I didn't try to waft it in front of you guys and see if the scent provokes a ripple of interest.

(Isaac is in the icon, Nigel is not. The pantsless dude is Trevor.)

Also, if you are a lot like me and are like, "A sitcom that's popular with my coworkers who like Young Sheldon and Yellowstone? Gross!" I would say... don't be like me and give it a try because it's surprisingly dirty and the humor is broad but clever. We definitely have WWDITS-likers in our fandom, so it's not an either/or thing, taste-wise.

I would love to see what vidders around my age and older think about the vidding style we're used to vs TikTok edits and the similarities and differences between those two lineages but since I was only ever adjacent to and not actually "in" that community (I make vids but never finish them lol), I don't know where to find those discussions, if they are occurring? Help?

ETA: Also, the youth have turned me onto Capcut (it's made by Bytedance, the company who makes TikTok, so if you're worried about that... welp), and dude.

1) it's free

2) it has all the functionality of Premiere and FCP (or at least all the functionality I was aware of and used?) only it's free. And hella easy to use if you're used to those. AND you can easily turn off the magnetic timeline. [ETA2: There's a version for mobile and for desktop. They're separate and don't sync with one another, which is a shame, but they're both great. Though desktop's version is better for higher-quality clip usage (since, how the hell are you important high-quality shit on mobile? It's all gonna be screen-recorded stuff from pirate sites. Can still look quite good, though!) and precision.]

In terms of clipping, I use Quicktime since Ventura doesn't let you use MPeg Streamclip anymore (which is a pity) and I remux with freeware called... Remux, which is useful for when QT decides to freak out about the file. Just remux it and that usually fixes the issue.

This link has been going around: a Redditor and their friends "suspected that Sudowrites as well as other AI-Writing Assistants using GPT-3 might be scraping using AO3 as a 'learning dataset' as it is one of the largest and most accessible text archives."

( some rambling )

So I've seen people joking around about writing the dirtiest a/b/o fic they can because then SudoWrites will "learn" to write that.

Except: a) SudoWrites already did that (see link above) and b) all that will do is make SudoWrites better at writing porn. It will only make SudoWrites more convincing as a writer and as an intelligence.

But. What if we write stories ALL IN CAPS? With weird grammar? Write from the POV of the Hulk! Or Cookie Monster! Or Doctor Doom! (wotwotleigh are actually doing this right now.) [ETA: We did it!]

What if we write stories backwards? Not just structured backwards, but with every sentence or word in reverse chronological order?

What if we write stories disemvowelled?

I get it, you don't want a bunch of trollfic clogging up your tags, but if you tag it "sudowrites", people can easily exclude that tag from searches.

This is trolling for the greater good. Join me, comrades.

I'm digging Mastodon. I think federation could be a good thing for fandom -- or, at least, it could be good for fans like me.

In the mid-1990s, the internet was a place I could go as a safe haven to escape from IRL bullies and whatnot. Now, everybody is on the internet. Everybody. And we've got a lot more people in fandom who are, I guess, less weird? So I think it makes sense to split off into areas that serve as escapes again, and I'm really enjoying Discord, but I'm glad there's a non-chatroom option as well. I do miss "a bunch of fans discussing panfandom issues in a longform way" ala mailing lists or LJ comms or usenet (the only place that's really happening is FFA or I guess Reddit), and I hope more people come back to Dreamwidth for that, but I like the Mastodon model so far.

( more rambling )

So I'm hearing some people are leaving Twitter due to Elon Musk and checking Dreamwidth out again? Maybe? Anyway, hi!

Guys, what fandoms are you in right now, if any? Feel free to comment. It'd be cool to get a sense of what people are into. As for me, it's a CBS Ghosts world, 24/7.

This is a tiny fandom and these recs don't represent everything I've enjoyed. Also, obviously these recs will be Trevor-centric because he's my fave. Most fic is actually Isaac/Nigel. Which is great! They are super cute and I'm rooting for them. <3

( some recs )

There's a lot more very cute fic in the AO3 tag (and in my bookmarks), as well as on ff.net. However, this fandom, for whatever reason, skews very young, so the one thing that we're unfortunately pretty low on is... PORNOGRAPHY! So if you're an adult and you like to write or draw stuff that's horny, please join in and share it! But if you want to keep it G and gen, you are also totally welcome.

Also, just FYI, some pals created an 18+ Discord server for the fandom here. (The two most active servers are all ages, and they're a lot of fun, but we figured it'd be nice to carve out a space just for grown-ups.) No ship-shaming, no kink-shaming. NSFW chat & fanworks about under-18s isn't allowed, per the rules and preferences of my co-mods (they created the server, they wrote the rules. I promise, no one's an anti.) It is super duper quiet in there, but if you come hang out, it'll be less quiet, right? :D?

Well, between Ukraine, Roe, guns, Johnny Depp being an absolute piece of shit, misogyny, more guns and climate change, sometimes you just need to escape into the American remake of a sitcom about a bunch of ghosts and ship a big thousand-years-dead Viking with a late-1990s finance bro.



Also, in 1x04 ("Dinner Party"), Thorfinn bounced Trevor and Flower out of the party and yelled this at him:



Come on, guys. I mean. Just.

I have questions. Did Vikings have farms? Does Thor have fantasies about nubile male farmhands? Okay, I guess those are my only questions, but they're good ones.

I've been trying to post to DW more and go on Twitter less, because I'm starting to feel like, in terms of fandom and the internet in general... that you can be where the action is, or you can have sanity, but you can't have both. There's simply too many of us. That's why dogpiles and pretty much everything else is worse, right? Because it's not five or ten or even twenty people yelling at you, it's hundreds or even thousands. Our brains simply weren't built to handle this.

It's been an adjustment, trying to actually write posts again here, whereas on Twitter I could just shart out any thought I was having (usually negative ones) with zero effort. Writing a post is harder, so I'm doing it less... and maybe that's... good? Idk. I know I used to post a lot more when DW/LJ weren't de facto dead and it was the only way to engage (at least in my fandom neck of the woods).

I admit I am enjoying Tumblr post-porn-ban... the porn ban was terrible, and I hate it, but my dash was always too overwhelming in the Before Times. I think it also took me this long to realize that I basically only want my current obsessions on my dash, for the most part, instead of a firehose of everything, so yeah, a decade in and I finally have a mostly-my-current-fandom (Critical Role, at the moment) Tumblr dash experience. I wish you could have a side-dash along when you made a side-blog? I guess that's what tags are, and honestly that's how I generally use the site, especially before -- ignore my dash and just look at the fandom tags.

It's tough, I miss the LJ/DW heyday, it was my preferred mode of fannish engagement and it's been gone for about a decade or more now. I'm kind of hoping that, for those of us Olds that do miss it, if we just kind of... come back here? And let our friends know that we're back here? Than maybe we can cobble together an experience that we enjoy. Like, use Tumblr for reblogging pretty art and pictures, use DW for text-based non-real-time threaded conversations and kink memes and rec lists (remember those?) and community, use Discord for real-time chat (that's where everybody is now anyway), ditch Twitter completely? Since it's... terrible? (This obviously doesn't work if you're an artist. I got no ideas for you, guys, I'm sorry. Unfettered free unlimited image and video uploads are the name of the game now, and it's also kind of killing us, because only for-profit companies can afford that kind of thing, which means we're always in thrall to them, which is bad for fandom, and life.)

This doesn't even touch on the Weird Puritan Thing that's eaten fandom over the past decade or so. Allegedly the pendulum is already swinging back to Yay Edgy Shit on Tumblr, though I'm not sure in what fandoms. Bullying is never going away, it's always been with us and maybe always will... it's just extra aggravating to a lot of us to see the language taken from our values twisted in this way, plus "lol you simply don't know how to read canon correctly, clearly Harry/Hermione is superior" is a lot less hurtful than "lol you're a pedophile".

I just feel like... I mean, there's nothing wrong with Olds like me making secret discord servers that are impossible to find in order to dodge the Junior Anti-Sex League, but... maybe we can also... hang out... here?

I recently saw the argument, and I think I agree with it, that all fandom fights, whether they have a faux-progressive-actually-regressive gloss on them or not, have always been about actual material goods. Kind of like most fights irl, I guess. That interpretation of the source material you hate gets a toehold? The fanon from it spreads and there's less fanfic for you to read that you enjoy. That interpretation of the ship that you hate? Same thing. That video game OC is more popular than yours? It's getting more fanart than you. It was startling to me, because this is the internet, right? It's boundless. You can always be the change, you can always write the fic you want to write or draw the art you want to draw, right? But not all of us are comfortable in our writing or drawing abilities, being the change can be exhausting and... idk, I think the anonymous person who said that was onto something. All of this is just paraphrasing them, btw, none of it is original to me.

Anyway, this has been really incoherent, good night and good luck.

I don't really have anything of substance to say, but I guess I'll still put it behind a cut since spoilers (including some big ones).

( spoilers )