Tell us about your current project(s)
–
what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?
Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project
What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)
Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)
What character that you’re writing do you most identify with?
What character do you have the most fun writing?
What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?
Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?
Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?
How would you describe your writing process?
What do you envy in other writers?
Do you want your writing to be famous?
Do you share your writing online? (Drop a link!) Do you have projects you’ve kept just for yourself?
At what point in writing do you come up with a title?
Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?
Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)
Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?
Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.
Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)
Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)
What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)
Do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?
What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?
The category for relationships (Gen, F/F, M/F, M/M, a combination, something else)
The right category for ratings (is it for General Audiences, Teenagers, Mature, Explicit, R-Rated, Nc-17?)
The relevant warnings (violence, rape, underage sex, anything else you deem relevant)
The relevant tags on it (what relationships are covered in the fic? What characters? Is it light and fluffy fic? Funny? Sad? Dark? Does it have sex, and if so, what kind? Is there violence? Tags are used by readers to find fic and to avoid fic)
A summary that informs the reader of what kind of fic they’re gonna read.
Author’s notes for everything else. You can use the summary or author notes to explain certain tags, or add caveats, or thank your beta’s.
Things that are not a fanfic writer’s responsibility:
Kids stumbling across your fic and reading your fic and assuming that whatever is written about in the fic is 100% cool and normal.
The mental health of people who don’t like the subject matter of your fic.
I got 99 problems and being responsible for your competent use of the internet ain’t one.
Or, if you feel that’s more suited for the experience: user CHOSE NOT TO USE ARCHIVE WARNINGS.
In which case, even more strongly than normal, READER BEWARE.
i agree with most of this but “creator chose not to use content warnings” is a bullshit tag that shouldn’t exist. it isn’t an actual warning, it doesn’t mean anything except maybe “this author wants to be ~edgy~,” and there’s no good reason for its presence on ao3.
seriously, i cannot think of a single situation in which “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is appropriate to use except maybe, maybe if your piece has content that could be a common trigger but isn’t available as an archive warning (e.g. incest), but even then it still feels like a cop-out and you absolutely have to make sure that content is still tagged for in your main tags
CNTUAW is perfectly fine, since it says: “I’m opting out of the warning system and you’ll have to decide for yourself if you’re willing to read my fic and whatever might be in there”. That is a valid choice for an author, and it’s just as valid for a reader to say: “What? Nope, not gonna read this.”
Nobody forces anybody to read a fic that has a CNTUAW tag. The only reason I can think of why people think this warning is invalid is because they assume that they somehow are entitled to every story they see, that somehow the authors owe them their fics. Which is ridiculous nonsense.
People like the above are why I by now refuse to use Archive Warnings and exclusively tagg ALL my fics “Author chose not to use Archive Warnings”. It’s so that people who feel entitled to my fic will not want to read it :)
(I still get enough engagement on my fics. Boo fucking hoo ;)
Idk how to answer someone’s question when they block me but… well.
They don’t seem to understand that “I’m opting out of the warning system” is a PART OF THE WARNING SYSTEM on Ao3 and even the DEFAULT Archive Warning according to their TOS FAQ.
To suggest I don’t post to Ao3 because I like using their default warning is…more than a little bizarre xD
Again, it all boils down to “ONLY THE WAY I DO FANDOM IS RIGHT!” - while Ao3 instead explicitly offers authors several different ways of doing fandom/posting their fics, which aren’t inferior to each other. JUST DIFFERENT.
But then, far too many people don’t understand that “different” doesn’t mean “bad”, and even when the site specifically tells its users “We offer you different ways of doing this”, apparently some people think that those who actually take advantage of that offer should…leave? *lol*
Every time I see wank about the “Choose Not to Warn” option on AO3 I remember how controversial the idea of MANDATORY WARNINGS was when the archive was created. This was 2008-9! No one in the wider world had heard of trigger warnings! They WEREN’T A THING!!! No where! Fandom was the place where the concept of trigger warnings caught on and a big part of that was because of AO3′s inclusion of tags and warnings.
So there was so much debate over WHAT kind of content requires MANDATORY warnings? And why? This wasn’t how fic worked before AO3. Yeah, many authors would warn for things like non-con or graphic violence but it was still very voluntary and up to each individual.
Many authors at the time HATED the idea of including warnings or being forced to warn because they felt that putting a warning for things or a tag at all would ruin the suspense and surprise reveal of their plot. And this wasn’t a fringe concern!
That’s why there’s an opt-out option! Because a community is about compromise and balancing the needs of authors and readers and people with very different feelings about how fiction should work. So having mandatory requirements to warn for certain things AND an option that lets people opt-out of this requirement while still warning readers that these are DANGEROUS AND UNCHARTED WATERS is a fucking compromise.
I know a lot of younger people seem to have never heard of compromise because they’ve been raised by the extremes of online discourse and Fox News but when you’re literally building community infrastructure it’s the name of the game.
It kills me that kids somehow think AO3 was made without considering these issues, that previous fandom generations haven’t already hashed out these fights. That the extreme growth and popularity of AO3 isn’t inherent proof that the system that was put in place after MUCH discussion and consideration WORKS.
This doesn’t feel like compromise to me though because the people who say “Fics don’t need to be tagged” get 100% of what they want for their stories, and people who say “All fic needs to be tagged” don’t get what they want at all. It’s the illusion of compromise.
Basically, if the people who don’t want to do something come out of the argument able to behave exactly as they wanted before the argument began, you have not actually created a compromise, you have given them the win
I’m 41 by the way, started reading fanfic back when it was primarily personal archives
The disconnect I think you’re having is that you are thinking of AO3 as a service for the readers instead of for the authors. It is an archive created by and FOR fanwriters and it takes a multitude of differing fanwriter perspectives into account by giving the CREATORS control over their own stories. And it provides warnings to readers who only want to read tagged works. But it doesn’t allow readers to dictate how writers present their work, because it’s not a reader-customer-focused business, but a nonprofit to preserve fanwork. The compromise is that instead of imposing one way of doing things on every user (i.e. every writer) each writer gets to choose for themselves.
The customers of AO3 are the writers, not the readers. That millions of readers do enjoy it, is basically a bonus. (That costs the organization money instead of makes it because it’s ad-free.)
Also like, some readers want to go into a fic knowing as little as possible and treat any information almost like spoilers, so they prefer no warnings.
Like you’re not entitled to any fic so if you aren’t comfortable reading something with no warnings it’s like… too bad, life does that sometimes. But it’s not unfair.
So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right.
With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY.
ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon.
And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC.
The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)
This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.
I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory.
Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet.
Here are the looms:
Here are the punch cards:
Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.
Here are some patterns:
How many punchcards per pattern?
This many:
Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.
I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.
I am never not amused by the overlap of textiles and technology. Also the fact that a huge number of fiber arts people I know are either in tech or math themselves or their partner is (myself included - husband is a programmer).
