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snowflake challenge #11
Jan. 27th, 2020 10:33 pmChallenge #11: In your own space, recommend a fannish or creative resource. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
ao3commentoftheday is a tumblr blog that's the closest thing the dw/ao3/tumblr nexus of fannish space has to a water cooler (i say this because god only knows what they're doing over at wattpad, twitter is an omnishambles and discord is the wild west). it's so insanely in demand that the mods can only afford to turn on the askbox for brief blips of time, elsewise they'd be drowned in asks. there's a lot of SUPER niche asks that i scroll past, of course, but the idea that there's a place where we can hash out our disagreements on matters of commenting etiquette, tagging protocols, stuff like that? very appealing. or at least to have these discussions out in the open, since ao3 as a platform was not built to support the "community" aspect of fandom interaction, just the "archive" aspect. the mods deserve all the cookies in the world for their infinite patience, and the benefit of a blog with such a huge following is they can crowdsource any questions the mods don't feel up to answering. while the meta-fandom angle is the meat-and-potatoes, the blog is also like 5% signalboosting, 10% positivity (there's an entire tumblr genre of people screenshotting outrageous ao3 tags and the screenshots going viral on tumblr, and they reblog those regularly), and maybe 10% themoreyouknow.jpg? for instance, i learned that you can leave kudos as many times as you want on a fic! i know it says "You have already left kudos here :)" but you can do it again, and it will count towards the stats, and in the morning the author will receive a notification! i also learned that if you enter "otp:true" into the "Search within results" box and filter your hits that way, you can exclude any stories that contain any other pairings whatsoever. Magic! What an invaluable resource.
The Rec Center is a weekly newsletter that recs fic/art/meta, run by Elizabeth Minkel and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, and its appeal for me--as with ao3commentoftheday--is less the specific content they link to and more that they've got their finger on the collective fandom pulse. Or the corner of fandom I care about, anyway. They'll do batches of themed reclists like "royalty AUs" or "kidfic" or "femslash february"; they'll do primers for either whole canons like Good Omens or ships like Jaime/Brienne. It's the closest one can get, in this day in age, to the curated gateway experience of![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
crack_van , god rest its soul. The Rec Center is the main way I stumble on a lot of takes from people adjacent to transformative fandom but not of it, if you know what I mean--people who publish in io9, or Uncanny Magazine, or The Mary Sue, or somewhere I'd never have gone looking if someone hadn't linked me. The newsletter is worth subscribing to just for the twitter threads they embed every week, which are always hashtag relatable. I keep meaning to submit a one-off rec or two, as a way of giving back to the community--they do solicit the vast majority of their recs from the readership, as two people could not possibly keep up with the volume of recs a weekly newsletter demands--but I have thus far been defeated by my own laziness.
ao3commentoftheday is a tumblr blog that's the closest thing the dw/ao3/tumblr nexus of fannish space has to a water cooler (i say this because god only knows what they're doing over at wattpad, twitter is an omnishambles and discord is the wild west). it's so insanely in demand that the mods can only afford to turn on the askbox for brief blips of time, elsewise they'd be drowned in asks. there's a lot of SUPER niche asks that i scroll past, of course, but the idea that there's a place where we can hash out our disagreements on matters of commenting etiquette, tagging protocols, stuff like that? very appealing. or at least to have these discussions out in the open, since ao3 as a platform was not built to support the "community" aspect of fandom interaction, just the "archive" aspect. the mods deserve all the cookies in the world for their infinite patience, and the benefit of a blog with such a huge following is they can crowdsource any questions the mods don't feel up to answering. while the meta-fandom angle is the meat-and-potatoes, the blog is also like 5% signalboosting, 10% positivity (there's an entire tumblr genre of people screenshotting outrageous ao3 tags and the screenshots going viral on tumblr, and they reblog those regularly), and maybe 10% themoreyouknow.jpg? for instance, i learned that you can leave kudos as many times as you want on a fic! i know it says "You have already left kudos here :)" but you can do it again, and it will count towards the stats, and in the morning the author will receive a notification! i also learned that if you enter "otp:true" into the "Search within results" box and filter your hits that way, you can exclude any stories that contain any other pairings whatsoever. Magic! What an invaluable resource.
The Rec Center is a weekly newsletter that recs fic/art/meta, run by Elizabeth Minkel and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, and its appeal for me--as with ao3commentoftheday--is less the specific content they link to and more that they've got their finger on the collective fandom pulse. Or the corner of fandom I care about, anyway. They'll do batches of themed reclists like "royalty AUs" or "kidfic" or "femslash february"; they'll do primers for either whole canons like Good Omens or ships like Jaime/Brienne. It's the closest one can get, in this day in age, to the curated gateway experience of
crack_van , god rest its soul. The Rec Center is the main way I stumble on a lot of takes from people adjacent to transformative fandom but not of it, if you know what I mean--people who publish in io9, or Uncanny Magazine, or The Mary Sue, or somewhere I'd never have gone looking if someone hadn't linked me. The newsletter is worth subscribing to just for the twitter threads they embed every week, which are always hashtag relatable. I keep meaning to submit a one-off rec or two, as a way of giving back to the community--they do solicit the vast majority of their recs from the readership, as two people could not possibly keep up with the volume of recs a weekly newsletter demands--but I have thus far been defeated by my own laziness. 
