Hitching Post

A hitching post for 2025:

~ Archival costs for Broadway productions (and some info on archiving theatrical productions generally): [post covering what I mentioned in the linked Dreamwidth comment].

~yourlibrarian shared a survey on eating lunch at work: [PF post].

~ The Fancy Rats mood theme for Dreamwidth went live: [comment touches on learning about rats for fanfic and the actor playing Siegfried Farnon having rat experience]. (It seems a little silly, but this is not about only having Serious Topics.)

Click to read a copy of the comment.

I don't consider myself a rat person; I've never owned a pet rat, I've never met one in person, and I don't have any plans to own a rat in the future. However, I went through a small phase of research and following some Ratblr (that is, rat Tumblr) accounts when I wanted to touch on rats and rat ownership in some fanfic a while back. I'm pretty sure it's mostly in drafts, but I think I would say that I appreciate rats more than I used to.

Seeing the 'rat dad' tags for the actor who plays Siegfried Farnon, who has rat owning experience himself, is nice, though. (I think there's some other interview people have been linking to, but I turned up this one after season one: "I kept mice when I was small, and then rats. We are, sadly, without a cat at the moment, and my older daughter was saying only just now that she thought she wanted a rat.")

~ghostprism carved a nice jack-o-lantern: [post is view-locked to logged-in PF users].

~ In January 2025, the reality of a second Trump presidency was sinking in. I have a private post where I started to answer the points in How You Can Protect Democracy, but I was so focused on filling in my own answers and getting specific about where I live that I didn't think to do a public post.

~akesi-monsuta shared a link to 'Detransition Is Gender Liberation, Too'.

~ I usually don't bother with sharing anything I've put into the Fandom Calendar community (due to trying to post there so often), but I re-found the event where there was a jokey illegal bit just due to the memorability: [post and comments where I explain the joke].

You can read a copy of the explanation here.

This event is based on a prior one and has inherited some jokey illegal and/or crime phrasing. For example, one can participate in organized crime by working with other participants to bid as a team on auctions or wordcount laundering schemes means winning an auction to retroactively legitimize an illegal treat.

A part of me feels like a killjoy for pointing out the jokey illegal and crime phrasing, but running into something like 'posting a treat for someone when you didn't win the bid is illegal' doesn't come across as a fun inside joke when you don't know there's a bit being committed to.

~Lagging_Ghost asked about places to post writing: [comment where I mention Royal Road and Ream].

Click to read a copy of the comment.

Considering Wattpad or something else probably depends on what you want to post. If you want to post more fanworks than original fiction, I'm more aware of AO3 being recommended. (Some fandoms still have an active presence on FanFiction.net, but I'm not really in those fandoms so I can't speak to how FF.net is these days.) I have mostly heard of original fiction going on Wattpad, but I haven't heard about that site in a few years. I never tried it myself, in part, because I was mostly given the impression it was popular with fandoms I wasn't in.

If you want a place where you can share original writing and fanfiction, I've heard of Royal Road. If you want to focus on original writing, I've heard of Ream. I haven't tried either out myself, but I think Ream is the one that I've heard can allow for having more than one writing persona linked to your account (so if you want to write X under a certain pen name and Y under a different pen name, it's easier to do that).

[...] (I know some people choose multiple of these to compare reader engagement or post different genres, so it's not like you must choose one and only one site to use.)

Also, ~jackbird has talked about his experiences with Ream here, if you want an idea of what using it is like. It has the ability to have monthly donations and tiers like Patreon, if that's of interest. As far as I know, Royal Road allows you to link to Ko-Fi/PayPal/etc. offsite places for donations but doesn't handle payments onsite.

~Jak shared a link to an interactive art exhibition based on the game Telephone: [PF post and direct art info link].

~Bunns made a Small Web Hitching Post, and I remembered FenRecs and Geminispace.

~PC shared snake artwork for the Year of the Snake from ~Toradh and ~elemei.

~dulcis liked some fannish events that promote commenting: [comment that lists events].

Click to read a copy of the comment.

Suggestions: comment_bingo (sign-ups for the current round are open until April), Just Leave A Comment Fest does themed prompts to encourage commenting throughout the year (*), @/feedthefandomfest has different comment bingo boards (Original Board, Beginner Commenter Board, and others can be found in the pinned post), and you may find previous rounds of events for commenting that you might want to check out in the [PF] Fandom Calendar's comments tag.


(*) There's not an exact schedule. Like there was a week of prompts around Halloween and the last weekend of December had a few prompts for 2024, but in the past, there were a week of prompts in December and nothing around Halloween. It offers less prompts than a bingo board usually does, though, so that might not seem as daunting if you're not sure about a bingo.

~osteophage gathered some perspectives on not having a personal website: [my specific comment on the post].

Click to read a copy of my comment.

I'm definitely feeling the quote Pablo links to from How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner by Annie:

Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!) and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons. I've gotten to work for Company1 doing Shoobaboo-ing code things and that's what led me to the Snarfus. So, let's dive in!

- [The below quotes from Coy's PF post.]

If you don't have a personal site, what would it take to make the prospect more approachable for you?

I don't have a burning desire to recreate the wheel. Why do I need to host a Wafrn when I have more than one Tumblr account? I don't mind not dealing with bots. I'm fine with not trying to self-host a Fediverse instance and wade through legal stuff on my own.

Putting aside that aspect (conflating having a personal website with self-hosting), I'm also not quite sure what I'd use a personal site for. (This may sound familiar from when I stumbled across Geminispace.) What am I going to put on a personal website that I couldn't put on any Tumblr, on WordPress, on Pillowfort, or on Dreamwidth?

Replying to Coy's response.

You definitely have a point that I should ideally not be in the same position as the developer of Bearblog. Some of that section was a reaction to the vibe that doing all sorts of this stuff, including hosting on my own device, is actually easy if I would just try it. I wouldn't say there's a direct statement along those lines in anything you or I linked, but it feels like an impression I've picked up from other places in the past few years.

(Some of it may be that self-hosting does solve certain privacy concerns for some people. Some of it may be that self-hosting is held up as an answer for any complaint about a program or Big Tech site. Like, why do you care that Google Drive has X feature now when you could just self-host Notebook Thingy?)

While there are some things on my personal site that I wouldn't be able to equally replicate here, I also don't think you necessarily need that differentiation. Crossposting and making backups can be a good idea just generally.

You're not wrong. It's more of a feeling that's self-imposed than anything else. Some very specific topics get cross-posted, but then I hit a wall of 'haven't I cross-posted enough?' after a certain number of sites.

~bookscorpion shared a photo of a plant I've never seen before: [PF post of fall-blooming anemone]. It's gone to seed after blooming, so it looks (a bit) like a cotton ball that's been stretched out and sprinkled with black pepper flakes (but in an intriguing way).

~ I returned to a discussion on Yesterweb: [comment well over a year later].

Click to read a copy of the comment.

After a separate mention of Yesterweb organizers/moderators documenting what they think their errors were [under Summary, specifically Significant Errors], I can't help but feel like there wasn't enough agreement on what Yesterweb was going to try to do before starting. Was this a movement that was supposed to sway people to a particular ideology relating to building and maintaining the 'peripheral web' instead of staying in the 'core web'? Was there supposed to be class consciousness, multiple languages, and focusing on international web access/issues as a main feature or a 'hey, people didn't spontaneously do this' reaction? Hobbyists were supposedly a minority of the movement, and yet, advertising business (particularly digital artists and game developers) seemed to be some sort of surprise that went against part of the movement's ideas.

Some of the phrasing also sounds... I'm not sure how to describe the off vibes. Like, is there a phenomena of The Serial Moderator, or is someone holding back from naming names for a specific mod that's haunting this post-mortem? What is going on in that section on lower-class mentality and how selfless and collaborative it is? I feel like there's a chance someone's getting vagued about. "From our time with the Discord refusers it became clear that the vast majority were more concerned about the technology (and, ultimately, themselves) and less concerned about its social implications." Hm.

~ I passed along the news of Sunset Femslash Archive. (This was only shared about five months ago, but that does not mean it's the most up-to-date about Sunset.)