Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it…and the solution became obvious to me:
Archive of Our Own, aka AO3.
“What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??”
No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included – no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?”
The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters? The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks?
All of those are fannish nonfiction!
Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” – ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons – to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans.
Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!):
First, the Very Broad:
– “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it.
– while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters). The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them – something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.
– I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms’ media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans’ fanworks (such as how a given AU’s worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn’t fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers.
Basically, if it’s an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag.
– You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right?
If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc.
Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add:
– “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know)
– “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them. In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it, helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally.
Overall, you should be as specific and clear as possible, but those tags/tag formats should prove useful in tagging it correctly should you choose to put fannish essays and articles up on AO3 🙂
Oh, and protip sidebar for those posting, especially works that are more than plain text: you can make archiving things quicker and easier for yourself, but remember to plan ahead for tumblr’s potential demise/disabling/service interruptions.
The good news: You can literally copy and paste the ENTIRE text of a tumblr post from say, an “edit” window, on tumblr, straight into AO3′s Rich Text Format editor, and it will preserve pretty much all or almost all of the formatting – such as bold, italics, embedded links, etc!
But the bad news: keep in mind that while AO3 allows for embedded images and it WILL transfer those embedded images with a quick copy-paste like that, AO3 itself doesn’t host the images for embedding; those are still external images. This means that whether or not they continue to load/display for users, depends entirely on whether the file is still on the original external server! As I quickly discovered, in the case of posts copied from the Edit window of a tumblr post, the images will still point to the copies of the images ON tumblr’s servers.
What this means is that you should back up (save copies elsewhere of) any embedded images that you consider vital to such posts, in case you need to upload them elsewhere and fiddle with where the external image is being pulled from, later.
Personally, I’m doing that AND adding image descriptions underneath them, just to be on the safe side (and in fairness, this makes it more accessible to people who cannot view the images anyway, such as sight-impaired people who use screen readers or people who have images set to not automatically display on their browser, so it’s win-win)
but really porn is just the canary in the coal mine that our supposed general purpose computing devices are tightly controlled by a duopoly that makes Microsoft in the ‘90s look relaxed and open minded: Apple doesn’t want porn apps on its phones, so there are no porn apps on its phones; other apps can stay if they tithe 30%, but they’re on thin fucking ice.
you can leave Tumblr and go to another social network, but if that gets sufficiently popular it will face the same threat, there is no escape.
the last bastion of freedom is the open web, and I anticipate the day when mobile Safari blocks access to sites that aren’t signed by Apple, for security reasons.
the right to install whatever software you want on your own computer is a vital one, and we should be fighting for it.
I have had 3 mineral posts flagged as adult content today. They contained a tourmaline, a muscovite, and a galena. On Friday I had 3 fossil posts flagged as adult content, including a fossil fish, a fossil tooth from a mastodon, and a Tyrannosaur vertebrae. I’ve submitted appeals for each. This has been getting worse over the past month, apparently most of geology content is now only for adults.
Apparently you can’t get your rocks off on Tumblr anymore.
i am contractually obligated to congratulate you on this reply
I realize this is a cast iron gate but I’m choosing to believe it’s a magic protection ritual
It IS a magic protection ritual, and it summons an iron gate to protect you from intruders.
You have to enchant the iron so it protects against the fae.
This would work great in a visualization during the creation of wards, or protection magic.
i am so tempted to give people unsolicited metallurgy lesson
counter point, please give me metallurgy lessons?
im going to hazzard that either this isnt actually ‘iron’ iron, or if it is this will be one brittle fence
as theyre pouring it as a liquid and its actually -flowing- iron would have to be around 3,000 degrees F, or around 1,600 C. normal ‘cast iron’ is rather brittle, which is why most iron fences were ‘wrought iron’ as in they were extruded and hammered into bars and then hammered into shape.
the way to counter this would be to anneal it by only allowing the temperature to lower slowly over the course of, say for something this size, about three days. i can asess this isnt the case as live humans are present so the temperature of the room as a whole has to be somewhere below the boiling point
these two points are dude to the nature of iron- as all metals it has a crystal latice structure when solid, which gives metal their strength, however moreso then other metals iron and iron based alloys have a wildly different crystal structure and grain size (yes, grain like the grain of wood) which relies on things like max temperature, the rate of cooling, alloy metals, pressure, and so fourth. knowing the hundred bullshit ways to screw with the grain is how we do absolutely bonkers stuff with ferrous compounds
consider history- there was the stone age, the bronze age, and then the iron age. iron is the fourth most common metal on earth (any more common metals were not usable untill the electric arc furnace, such as alluminum) whereas copper is the 26th most common- therefore why was the bronze age before the iron age? because iron was extremely difficult to turn into a usable metal until the development of far better furnaces just to get it red hot and kinda soft, known as ‘bloomery iron’ or ‘tamahaganae’ if you live in japan- iron so impure you have to hammer it for days to remove all the residual crap that was still in the sponge of hot metal.
you may notice in this diagram your iron basically sits dirrectly on top of the charcoal for most of the history of iron, and ‘sponge is the right word.
after much development of bloomery furnaces a hotter method was invented
to make ‘pig iron’; reaching an almost liquid state where it could be
poured into bar molds like honey.
this was not exactly easy as anyone who has seen princess mononoke knows, and still the iron was fairly shit although vastly superior to the bloomery process. only small ammounts could be produced and what you did make was expensive due to the process. in greece for example during the afforementioned ‘bronze age’ iron tools existed, but were considered too valuable to use for weapons or armor which would be broken, lost, or siezed by an enemy. theyd rather make saws and chisels which could be handed down for several generations with what was to them a legendary metal. it wasnt untill the development of the blast furnace where heat retention and bellows were upgraded to actually create fully liquid iron for the first time- iron being fully liquid allows all the impurities stated before to just float off as a surface skum instead of having to be hammered out
this is where we have what we today would actually call ‘iron’ yet it still being unusable in its present form- it would produce fairly brittle bars of mostly pure Fe, with a crystal structure similar to that of a distressed saltine cracker.
because liquid iron that was cooled to room temperature, which is why shit like this in movies
looks fucking cool but would result in a sword that would snap in half when you swing it. not even wait till you hit something, it would snap in midair
and thats currently where the above fence would be- fully liquid cast iron cooled quickly enough it becomes a brittle crystal, you could snap bits off by hitting it with a baseball bat.
ive actually seen people do things like this and it had been an issue for a LONG time that many things were made of cast iron because it was the only way to make things of a certain size and shape, but they broke very easily- for example cast iron ploughs, which would crack when farmers hit a largish stone and then you had to drag your plough to a blacksmith. by replacing a fully cast iron plough with a plough that if the cast iron cracked you could remove and replace that part with a new one, and have the far smaller one repaired while you went back to work
earlier i used the word ‘anneal’, one of the ‘hundred ways to bullshit
with iron’ i mentioned, where by raising the irons temperature and then
cooling it very sloooowly the crystal structure is very minimal,
resulting in a soft metal that is far more impact resistant. which COULD
be an option, provided they lower they temperature of that metal by
less then a hundred degrees every 2-3 hours. typically annealing is done
by just leaving a metal item IN the furnace but turning the heat off
and then going home for the weekend. even leaving the furnace door open
would be cooling too quickly. again im going to say this is not what
theyre doing as live human beings are present so during the gif alone
the temperature fo that metal has dropped at least 500 degrees
so how do you make iron that isnt brittle? you do this
all the earlier ‘impurities’ talk- the sparks flying are the impurities leaving the metal, this his how before actually properly smelted pure iron you actually got to make a usable tool. hammering the still hot metal also changes how the metal is formed on the inside, no not by folding but simply by adding pressure to squeeze everything into alginment. but we today dont have a whole lot of blacksmits because weve instead changed to putting the metal through satans own playdough machine
no, wait, not enough satan
THERE we go
so now with our knowlege of infernal devices just spitting out refined metal, and by quality control of knowing what goes in we can do some dark wizardy in alloy production that would require me a week, overhead projector, and assorted test samples to demonstrate why i have to specifically use the word ‘bullshit’ for what you can do with iron.
how ive seen wrought iron fences made- you aquire some of the iron billets produced by the machinery, cut them to lengths, heat untill glowing, and make like a fire god shaping hard candy. theres even tools specifically for this
it is however entirely possible that the fence they poured wasnt made out of actual iron (or is but it is in fact stupid brittle), or perhaps some alloy that will not become brittile or explode by doing it that way. im leaning more towards this but then it raises more questions as to what material they chose. if i could see the finished product i could probably answer that, but at that point you could just ask someone what they did
Well obviously. I mean. I live for these moments. You know me!
Now, there are a lot of directions we can go in here:
Canonverse: Parker didn’t just teach herself to be a thief remember. There’s Archie. And Archie is creating the perfect thief, remember. So he signs her up for ballet and gymnastics because they complement each other. Presumably with less-than-legitimate teachers because a girl like Parker would stick out even among the little devils in dance classes. But here’s the truth about the Russian school of dance in the past decade – it was the kind of thing people jumped out of windows to escape. There were, quite literally, ballet defectors. There’s a reason that the best ballet companies in the country, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre were both started by Russians. They wanted out of the soviet union. And let’s be honest. Some of the people who got out of the soviet union ended up doing. Let’s say ‘unsavory’ things. Well, Archie finds Parker one who had the training but ended up in their sort of work, and two years later, with that and the gymnastics training Parker can make it through any laser grid Archie can devise. And, well. Ballet is good training, and so one day Hardison comes home to find her in a leotard and tights and POINTE SHOES WHAT EVEN PARKER HOW DID WE NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS??? WHAT IS HAPPENING IS THIS FOR A JOB I DON’T GET IT??? but actually she’s just doing it b/c it’s good to stay in shape.
Ballet company AU: Eliot doesn’t get up on stage these days okay. But he *was* a child prodigy and he’s an incredible choreographer. Like. He was good before he spent a few years working with Nate Ford (yes that Nate Ford, the one whose son was so promising before he got sick, whose messy divorce left his wife with his old dance company while he tried to pick up the pieces and mostly just drank a lot until a new team came together.) and after. Well. Let’s just say that he didn’t waste those years and when Nate retired with the famous Sophie Devereaux who took forever to ‘make it’ because she kept trying to do her own choreography and she’s the most expressive dancer you’ve ever seen except when she’s doing her own work (look they can’t all do choreo ok) he takes the company in fascinating directions that involve productions that include martial artists (don’t fight me, my company did them too, it happens) and for that, for the fusion dance he sometimes does get up on the stage (and then there was the one time an audience member who was mad about not making the company tried to get up on the stage and hurt parker and hardison during a pas de trois and eliot like. hit him??? and he went down? and no one asks questions so you shouldn’t either). And then there’s hardison, who is super excited about shows that use tech in cool ways, but who is also classically trained in ballet, and he and parker are a golden pair. People come from all over the world to see them perform together. You should see them dance Romeo and Juliet. It’s just. Well. WELL. Especially with Eliot’s choreography of the fight dances which everyone all over the world agrees is groundbreaking.
So You Think You Can Dance AU: Nate is producer/judge Nigel Lythgoe, Sophie is the other judge who is always there, and the guest judges include various clients from Leverage b/c why not. Eliot is the host. His clothes are always questionable. Hardison is a hip hop dancer and Parker is the Ballerina with an heartbreaking backstory. They’re the last two dancers standing and they both cry at the end when Hardison wins because he deserved it so much and Parker is so happy for him, because he really grew so much during the competition and he cries because he already loves her so much and he sort of wanted her to win even though he also really wanted it. They’re married two years later and Eliot is their best man and no one is allowed to ask why he follows them when they leave at the end because no one asked your opinion thanks. It’s not long after that they show up as choreographers on the show. It’s great.
blackash26 