Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way,
you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction
in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”
What the ever loving fuck is with “creative” writing professors who think that speculative fiction of any stripe ISN’T CREATIVE?
I still remember my own creative writing teacher telling me this because he saw the Terry Pratchett book on my desk and got this smug smirk on his face like “aha, gotcha”. He had the nerve to pick it up and call it “popularist fiction”, like somehow being popular and easily accessible made it less inherent in intellectual value.
I had it in my back pack because I did my final thesis on the evolution of mythology and folk tails into fantasy and sci-fi and the societal importance of telling stories (before anyone asks, no I don’t have it, I lost it when I moved continents), and I used Terry Pratchett because there wasn’t a single humanitarian issue the man did not touch on.
Which I told him. And then he kind of floundered and went “ah, well but, it’s…well I mean it’s not exactly high brow”, like neither the fuck was Shakespeare or Dickens you self-important turnip. Dickens was literally selling his stories by the chapter. He was the popular author of his time. Shakespeare was too, he fucking made up words and phrases all the time because the language he needed to express himself didn’t exist in the way he needed it too.
Intellectual elitism is nothing more than a hold over from class warfare and the belief that only certain people should get to be truly educated. And it needs to be smashed.
Mass Effect trilogy is a wormhole. You beat first game, then second, then third and repeat it again with same or new Shepard because you just can’t live without seeing your dork space family…
I think I am stuck in this loop for rest of my life…
…and I am not that mad about it…
and then you start writing about it, and talking about it, and drawing and making edits and you’re never getting away from your Mass Effect obsession.
you do meet up some lovely people who are stuck in the same loop though!
Every year, multiple times a year, they convince ppl to fork out thousands of dollars and….literally nothing changes. There’s no doubt in my mind they’re pocketing most of this money lol
Yep
That’s what’s so wild to me. They’ve made exactly 0 changes other than adding the ‘Exclude’ tags and that def doesn’t take 130k.
You know if any of you actually bothered to click the link it’ll take you to their budget update and break down exactly what the spend the money on, over 70% of which is spent on server expenses, monitoring tools and system licences.
They also spent a good amount of the rest of the 30% budget on significant server overhaul costs.
AO3 is literally a service you get for free and the audacity you’d have to not bother reading the very open budget plan they have, but to then bitch and whine about people donating to keep the site running is wild.
hosts millions and millions of fanfiction at no cost to site users
hosts millions and millions user accounts at no cost to site users
is an extremely high traffic site that rarely, if ever, experiences crashes
is an extremely high traffic site that could profit immensely off ads, but keeps the entire site free of ads
maintains a consistent and elaborate tagging system that allows users easy navigation through fanworks
maintains a simple layout structure so the entire site is easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to understand making it highly accessible to users – especially disabled users
maintains and updates the budget for users to know exactly where their donations are going to be used in the future and have been used in the past
works with the legal aspects of fanworks in order to keep their site and their users completely legal, and therefore not at risk of being shut down, or sued, or manipulated by large media/companies
works with users when it comes to decision making, includes members in voting processes, etc.
literally hosts millions of fanfiction at no cost whatsoever and doesn’t subject you to ads, honestly those are the only two points you need but the other ones are there to show how much they’re doing
y’all need to appreciate that – donations are completely optional and if you don’t want to donate then don’t, but spreading posts about how Archive doesn’t do anything for anyone and doesn’t do anything with all this money they’re getting is completely unnecessary and outright false.
Captain-Radioactive-Mentality 