Your web-browser is very outdated, and as such, this website may not display properly. Please consider upgrading to a modern, faster and more secure browser. Click here to do so.
2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 - FFN forums deleted
2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 - Quizilla shuts down
2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 - Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 - Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
2010 ish (?) - deviantART purges adult fanfiction (I only very vaguely remember this one, because I’ve never been a dA user and it happened during my fannish hiatus, but there is some incomplete info on Fanlore. If you remember more about what happened, please help edit that page!)
Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).
If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.
This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.
Like. I’m a firm believer that porn online shouldn’t be within kids reach (those “are you 18” checkboxes for life) but. Like. Ok first of all, just ban cp? It’s not hard? Cp is what got you into this mess just ban it. Second of all, you could increase the age of sign-up from 13 to 18. Third of all, you could do what deviantart does and just. Require birthdays at sign-up. If your blog is flagged as nsfw, you can’t interact with minors. You want to follow an nsfw blog? Prove you’re an adult. You’re an adult but don’t want to see nsfw content? Safe search (that actually works).
It’s not hard to make a functioning website, but staff doesn’t seem to want to do that.
Story of my life people. You know what’s real ? The struggle.
Happy Pride Month ♥
this right here is why ‘queer’ is an identity, not a slur
being yourself… doesn’t change a history of oppressive language… how are you this thick
Hey did you know…..people have been trying to reclaim this word for /Decades/….and calling queer a slur after YEARS of attempts at reclaiming is basically throwing all that work away. you dont have the right to call people thick when you obviously have your head so far up your own ass
woke: insisting that a female character who has an obvious canon male love interest is canonically a lesbian and then getting pissed at the writers when they have your precious canon lesbian fall in love with a filthy male
woke brain 2: insisting a female character is a lesbian despite having a obvious canon male love interest so she won’t get in the way of your precious soft mlm ship and then getting pissed your sj disguised ship war doesn’t go the way you want it to
woke brain 3: Insisting that a female character with a canonical male interest is lesbian then get mad and call artists “filthy heteros” for drawing fanart of the canon couple and demanding that they stop “erasing her sexuality” or giving them a cookie with fucking needles in it.
Woke brain 4: Insisting that a female character that is canonical married and happy with male interest is a lesbian. And ignored/shaming others that say, said female character can be bisexual. Followed by yelling at anyone that doesn’t see female character ONLY as a lesbian
Woke brain 5: insisting that a female character is a lesbian despite having had past canon relationships with males just because now her love interest is female and then getting pissed when her next relationship is with a male again because it’s lesbophobic or something.
ScienceVet is a Ph.D in Biochemistry and has published in the fields of endocrinology and sexual differentiation. His Ph.D. is in Biomedical Sciences - Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmocology.
A brief history of fandom, for those on here who somehow think tumblr invented fandom:
1960s: with the advent of Star Trek, fandom moves into the public sphere for the first time with a television in almost every home, creating a large group of people all excited about one thing. Beforehand, fans mostly had relationships with the author, not with each other. Obviously there were groups and conventions prior to Star Trek, but many pop culture scholars agree that Star Trek was the beginning of an independent, interactive, saturated fandom culture centered on one show, and set many precedents for how many modern fandoms act.
This means in the coming years: conventions, mailing groups (both public and private), fan magazines, and fanfiction presses.
Yeah this pretty much remains the deal until the internet gets put into every home in the 90s.
EXAMPLES OF BIG FUCKING DEAL FANDOMS, 90s EDITION: X-Files, Xena, Star Trek, Star Wars, ASoIaF, The West Wing, Buffy
So with the internet, this really cool thing happened: Geocities. And then Yahoo groups. Early fanfiction archives. Back in the day, fandoms had to create their own private spaces. This made fandoms on the internet smaller and less accessible than fanzine operated ones. However, since fans on the internet didn’t have to pass through an editorial board to publish their fic, it was the beginning of the democratization of fandom.
USENET. Which will probably be confusing to anyone who wasn’t actually on Usenet during it’s height, but feel free to Google.
In 1998, fanfiction.net was launched to compete with the hundreds of independent, fandom-oriented fanfiction archives. More democratization, although fanfiction was marketed on how many reviews one had. You had to, like today, “break into the market.“
In 1999, Livejournal was launched. Fans created communities and their own private journals which was like woah, we have our own places to store our own fic? And can cross-post them places? However, with Livejournal came a new incarnation of the internet-based BNF: big name fan. Since communities had moderators and posts could be friend or community locked, people could easily gain social capital.
On the other hand, authors like George RR Martin get Livejournals.
Around this time was also the rise of forums. Again, moderators had a lot of power, as did certain users who would rise to the position of moderator. People rapidly gained and lost power, causing quick turnover in these parts of fandom.
In 2002, due to legal concerns, fanfiction.net bans NC-17 fanfiction.
Adultfanfiction.net is created to fill the void. For years, 13 year olds would pretend to be 18 to enter. Including myself.
In 2005, fanfiction.net, again due to legal concerns, bans “choose your own adventure” and songfics.
In 2007, Archive of Our Own is launched to further democratize fandom in response to fanfiction.net’s and LJ’s new stringent rules, offering writers a cleaner format, kudos, hit counters, and bookmarks. However, many older fandoms have not made the move.
In 2007, tumblr is launched. It would take until 2010 for it to reach saturation on the internet, meaning that most fandoms which lived and died pre-2010 exist(ed) on Geocities, Yahoo Groups, independent archives, ff.net, etc.
In 2009, Geocities is taken offline. Thousands mourn because they never backed up really old fic that they liked.
In 2012, most major broadcasting companies have caught on to the fact that tumblr has democratized fandom to a degree of anarchy and mob mentality, and utilize it, since tumblr is unmoderated.
And that’s what you missed on FANDOM BEFORE TUMBLR, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
There are a lot of times I feel like just…flipping the vegan script.
It’s not ‘polyester’ it’s plastic
It’s not ‘vegan leather’ it’s plastic
Its not ‘faux fur’ it’s plastic
Plastic is a pollutant and causes far more damage to the environment both now and in the future than leather or wool.
Please stop telling me that the Plastic Lyfe is the only life, it is not. My leather shoes will last a decade where pleather is lucky to last 12 months. Leather (and wool) decompose and are renewable. Plastic is neither of those.
THANK YOUUUUUUU~
A single wash cycle of plastic-based fiber (polyester, poly fleece, faux fur) may release 700,000 pieces of microplastic into our waters. Nasty stuff.
aw dangit
Plastics are also petroleum products, so the impact of their production compounds the impact of their waste!
Especially since non-food-safe plastics are barely subject to regulation as-is & the short product lifespan is considered a feature, not a bug— because it makes people have to go out & buy more new plastic whatevers whenever the old ones wear out or get tossed.
Veganism can absolutely be approached with an environmental angle, but choosing plastic shoes over leather & acrylic socks over wool does about as much to save the world as the last (or next) oil pipeline leak. You’re not a hero because you choose to wear vinyl. You’re just the douche wearing vinyl.
This is the greatest progression of events I have ever read, where’s my historical gay romance novel about this
KING JAMES, CAN YOU CHILL?
Local King Cannot Stop Promoting His Boyfriend
where’s the lush period drama about this series of events?
fun thing about king James, this guy was fairly public about his bf (more public than what was acceptable). He threw lots of extravagant parties with his man on his arm. It pissed off the church obviously so to get them off his back, he’s the one that ordered the third translation of the Bible from Hebrew to English (the King James Version aka the Authorized Version) so the Bible every hot blooded all American Christian reads today was literally just written so a very gay king could fuck his boyfriend in peace.
oh my god this is hilarious
“guys, guys. I know this looks kinda gay, and i promise i have a good explanation for all this, but have you considered… that jesus… is also gay? checkmate, heteros.”
Happy Pride Month Eleanor Roosevelt was queer, the Little Mermaid is a gay love story, James Dean liked men, Emily Dickinson was a lesbian, Nikola Tesla was asexual, Freddie Mercury was bisexual & British Indian, and black trans women pioneered the gay rights movement.
Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, Leonardo da Vinci was gay, Michelangelo too, Jane Austen liked women, Hatshepsut was not cisgender, and Alexander the Great was a power bottom
Freddie Mercury is well known for his attraction to men but was also linked to several women, including Barbara Valentin whom he lived with shortly before he died. Friends have talked about being invited into their bed and walking in on them having sex (documentary Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender)
