There's A LOT going on. Things that OTW has messed up:
- The org's initial response to the protests around George Floyd's death (i.e., none)
- The org's lack of progress on any features to protect people from racial harassment, except blocking and muting, which were already in the works
- The org's lack of transparency as to what steps they were taking towards those goals
- The timeline for these steps, since at one point they said they planned to hire a Diversity Consultant "within the next five years"
- The chair of Legal gave an interview a couple of months ago in which she said that AO3 would host AI-generated fanworks, since they see their mandate as archiving all fanworks
- When people freaked out about the AI thing, the org put out a weasely statement saying that something "a volunteer" said didn't reflect the org's position
- The failure to respond to a two-week action called End OTW Racism, which was meant to bring the issue to people's notice and had a pretty clear and reasonable list of requests
- The generalized bitching boiled over when more people kept coming forward to talk about how AO3 burned out volunteers, failed to protect them from exposure to CSEM, seems to have targeted one volunteer as the culprit without providing any evidence
Ok that is a lot of work they need to do to fix things.
Yikes again! However is there anywhere to find fic right now? I am desperate because that is what I do for three hours a day on the bus! I think I might still have a binder with some Spike/Buffy and Pacey/Joey…
Sophia, AO3 is up for me right now -- maybe you might be able to log in and download some fic to read on the bus?
Yay! I snagged the one I was in the middle of reading when AO3 went down. It seems a little dangerous to me know that the community as a whole has all of its eggs in this one basket. It is a great basket, but between the problems with the board response and this attack it seems like we could potentially lose a whole bunch of fic!
Here’s one of the Anonymous Sudan/AO3 fics that someone wrote in response to the DDOS attack (please note the warning tags, nsfw among other things). [link]
I still struggle to explain fanfiction to my IRL male friend cousin. He just does not understand the impulse to create work that isn’t for publishing. He is a DEEP fan of things, and knows so much about really obscure things like the Blondie comic strip,as well as the general Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.
Like, he understands the impulse to transform something (like, say additional Sherlock Holmes or Wide Sargasso Sea). He understands the impulse to write original fiction for your own pleasure never to be published. He has utter bafflement at the idea of good fanfic, or really funny weird fanfic, or what anyone could possibly get out of writing or reading it.
I showed him this and he is just baffled that someone who is a good writer would spend time on something like this…
If I had to summarize, I'd say mine is like doing impressions, except in writing. Imitations are very much a part of what writers do starting out anyway.
