Stop Telling Yourself That The Grass Is Greener On The Other Side, Because It’s Not. It Is Greener

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

I think one of the most profound forms of love is "I'll try that, for you. I may not like it, but I'll try it."

It's a confused middle-aged man in a pottery class, whose daughter is helping him with his clay's plasticity. It's a kid scrunching up their brow while listening to their mom's favorite music, trying to figure out why she likes it. It's a girlfriend who says "Yes, I'll go with you" and her girlfriend cheering and buying a second ticket for a con. It's a friend half dragging another friend through an aquarium, the one being dragged laughing and calling out "Wait, wait, I know we're here for the exhibit, but I haven't been here! Slow down!"

It's being willing to spend some of your time trying something new because it makes someone you love happy.

Wait, so, after being chosen as the fourth TriWizard Champion, Harry was immediately asked if he had an older student put his name in for him. So, like, was it actually that easy? Because if it was, you can’t tell me that some broke-ass Slytherin seventh-year didn’t immediately realize this and start raking in the cash. Like damn, they don’t want to be a part of this Insane Danger Stunt Show themselves, but they’ll put basically any scrap of paper you want into that stupid cup for a sickle.

You’re a first-year who can’t cast Wingardium Leviosa yet? Whatever, sure, just pay up. There’s no way you’re going to be chosen against Angelina “Can Probably Crush You With Her Thighs” Johnson, but at least you can tell all your eleven-year-old buddies that you Did A Cool Thing.

You wanna forcibly enter your friend without their consent? Hell no, get that shit out of here. I’m a Slytherin, not a complete bastard. If I’ve hear about you trying this shit again, I’mma curse your butt into the Lake and report you to Flitwick. You might think that’s funny because he’s short, but you will learn, young padawan. You will fear the Flitwick.

You’re a third-year who thinks that becoming the Hogwarts Champion will impress your crush? Okay, into the fiery cup. But also lmfao, have you even seen Cedric “Hottie McDreamy the Hufflepuff” Diggory? Like, hot damn. 

You wanna enter your owl? Your cat? Your toad? Go for it, man, that’d be effing hilarious. I would actually pay to see that Tournament.

You’re a fifth-year who genuinely wants to enter the Tournament? Well, okay, but man, I am roomies with Cassius “Wake Up Before Noon At Your Own Risk” Warrington and he’d be grinding you into the floor under the heel of his handmade, Italian, dragon-hide shoes before you even knew what hit you.

You wanna enter… McGonagall? No, no, nonononono. That’s how people effing die, man. Like, she would destroy the competition and it would be glorious to behold and I would cry tears of awe at the sheer beauty of her wrath… but also, I am too young and beautiful to die. She would find us and we would die. Best scenario is she keeps us as pet mice forever.

So after the Weasley twins get their Age Potion issues fixed, a tiny Slytherin first-year girl sidles up to them in the halls and whispers, “You wanna enter the Tournament? Phil can hook you up. But you didn’t hear it from me!” And so the Weasley twins go find Phil, and Phil tells them straight up, “One slip for a sickle, three for two, five for three, and ten for four.”

Fred’s like, “Does entering your name more than once actually do anything?”

Phil, “Don’t know, don’t care.” (It doesn’t, Phil’s checked. He’d charge more if it did.)

And how does Phil get away with entering all these names? He tells all the supervising professors that he’s entering his own name - again and again and again - for a better chance at being selected. Professor Sprout informs him gently that this won’t make a difference and Phil tells her with the wide-eyed innocence of someone running a major scam operation that “Might as well try, Professor! Maybe diligence with pay off in the long run!”

Sprout’s heart melts, and everyone in the know facepalms. Everyone not in the know looks at him with “cheating Slytherin!” expressions and Phil dgaf because he’s got a giant pile of money now, suckers. [Snape noticed something was up, but didn’t care enough to stop it. Moody also noticed, but didn’t do anything. (Barty approves.)]

Entering more names doesn’t help because it’s not a lottery, the Goblet actually chooses, so a person can only really be entered once. It’s probably actually a good thing that Cedric “Tried to have a won Quidditch match made invalid out of fairness” Diggory and Harry “I am confused and I don’t want to be here” Potter were chosen. Because if fourth-year Ravenclaw Travis Collins had been chosen, the Goblet would have spat out all one-hundred and eighty-three scraps of paper with his name on it.

“Kids these days have too much pocket-money,” Phil comments as he comforts his boyfriend, Cassius Warrington, for being passed over in favor of Cedric “Made of Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice” Diggory, and counts the massive pile of money he’s collected. “Kinda wish the fiery cup had picked that kid’s Kneazle, though. That would’ve been awesome.”

[-Inspired by this post by @accio-shitpost-]

Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.

Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.

Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.

Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:

Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.

The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top

You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.

Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up

You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff

You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.

Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog

Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.

If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.

You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"

Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.

Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.

We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.

Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.

Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.

Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it

You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.

Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.

Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit

You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.

Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.

Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.

If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal

Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension

In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.

You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!

Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs

Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!

idk if this is a young fan thing or new fandom culture but some of yall think fics are abandoned way too quickly. a few months or a year or two is not unusual to go without a fic update. sometimes fics take longer to write, other times writers have rl events, or maybe there's multiple fics and one gets more priority. there are tons of reasons for fics not to be updated every week or every month. it also isn't uncommon for people to come back and update fics after a number of years—ive read updates that took five, or ten years. people's lives change, but they still want to tell their stories. personally, i never consider a fic abandoned unless the author has said so; though if it's been a few years i manage my expectations. but a last update being a year ago is... generally not a sign that a writer has abandoned their fic

Had a silly idea that I thought you might enjoy so! Tobirama meets Kurama at some point, probably pretty young, learns Kurama's name. And well, since Kurama has RAMA in his name he may as well be one of them right? So something something Kurama ends up being Tobirama's big brother, and Kurama recognizes Asura in Hashirama, so Hashi is kinda HIS big brother. Maybe even takes a human form. And if this eventually leads to getting MadaIndra a person well....

Tobirama was too young to be out alone he knew, mother was going to be angry when she heard but it would take a while – if it wouldn’t have then Tobirama would never be out here to begin with! (Tobirama was very, very glad that he wasn’t a woman, nothing seemed as scary to Tobira as pregnancy after watching his mother labor to bring his brother into the world and the subsequent losses in the birthing since. Not that Tobirama was supposed to know that he might have had a sister, it wasn’t like anyone told them but Tobirama could feel it; just like he could feel that mother wasn’t strong enough to carry the child, not after Ita’s birth. Ita was only one and it was far too soon but Father hadn’t cared and mother wanted a girl and the healers were ignored – Tobira could have told them that was a bad idea.) It…hurt to feel the small chakra fade, but Tobirama had known she would; had felt the way that the chakra hadn’t fully taken hold and he had known it wasn’t time for his sister to be born one way or another – but knowing that didn’t make mother’s pain and wavering health and Father’s turmoil any easier too bare and for once Tobira just wanted some time to himslef.

 ….But, um, maybe, maybe, he hadn’t really intended to end up here, the child thought as he looked up and up and up at the huge red being in front of him; the blazing chakra signature so strong Tobirama could taste it and it blotted out everything else even when the chakra person got a little smaller and a red eye as big as he was looked intently at him, scanning Tobira like he was something interesting and possibly tasty. Which, Tobira should probably warn him, “I don’t taste good” the child chirped gravely “’m all funny and odd and covered in spiky things.” He paused, thought and added “And I bite back.” there was a deep rumbling sound in front of him, like a landslide in the spring, and it took Tobira a moment to realize that the being was laughing. Which, fair, it was very big and he was still very small, his biting wouldn’t mean much to a creature like this; but still, Tobira very much meant his threat and set his small hand on his hips as he lowered the red eye with his sharpest glare. “Now that’s not nice! I may be little but someday I will be bigger and my teeth are very sharp!” he snapped, trying his best to copy mothers sharp snarls that made even Father set back on his heels.

The being laughed again and lifted its lips, showing Tobira a sharp white tooth as it rumbled “And mine as sharper – and as tall as you are, little cub.” But Tobira was distracted, eyes fixed on the sharp teeth the same shape as his and mother’s and Kawa’s (even Ita’s were a little sharper than normal), this being had his teeth and red eyes like him and his chakra felt even brighter and sharper than Hashi’s with the same echo that Hashi had. Tobira didn’t know what this being was but he stepped carefully on to something red and soft to get close enough to see the big tooth clearly, firing off question after question at the being and slowly forming a hypothesis in his head until the bemused sounding being answered that its name was “Kurama” and everything clicked into place. Tobirama straightened and his eyes got very big, “Kurama? Rama? Like Hashirama? Or Tobirama? Or Kawarama? Or Itama?” the being seemed to hesitate and Tobirama went on “You have our name and teeth and Hashi’s chakra, so you must be mine, right? You’re a rama!” something stunned resonated out of the being, Tobirama’s oldest brother.

 There was a long pause as the big red eye stared at him incredulously – not that Tobirama noticed, too busy trying to figure out why he had never realized before that he had another sibling and why Father had let them out of the compound. “Did Father yell at you?” the tiny speck of white asked Kurama, deeply serious, “Is that why you left and haven’t been around?” ‘cuse he would get that, Tobirama wished he could run away when Father started yelling and if he was big enough he would have, no question. There was a long, long pause and then his big sibling spoke, “You – you do realize that I’m not human don’t you?” Kurama seemed oddly hesitant about asking that, and also a little like he was concerned about Tobirama’s brain which was a bit mean. The tiny child pout up at the giant being, small lip pushed out and tiny hands on his hips, “Of course.”The idiot was heavily implied “But neither is Akane-nee or Akira-hime or Ingolf-nii but they are as much family as those of use stupid enough not to have fur!” Because honestly, he might have only just gotten his summons recently but he had lived with his mother’s maned wolf summons long enough to know better than to think that they were anything other than pack – and they didn’t even have -rama names!There was a long pause as the huge red eye stared at him and Tobirama turned the problem over in his head, “I guess you are a bit big to fit in the compound so maybe that’s why you left, but you have nine tails so you should be able to fit yourself in now!” then a thought occurred to him about the stories o-baa-sama told him and Hashi and his eyes got big “Wait, you have nine tails! That means you can turn into a pretty lady right? So mother does have a daughter already! She’s just forgotten! So this way she can stop trying for a girl and getting sick!” it might have been a trick of perspective, but Tobirama would have sworn that the big red eye softened and then suddenly his big-sibling snorted all at once, blowing some trees over as he did and in a great woosh! He was suddenly a lot smaller and she-er, abruptly a pretty girl of early puberty with hair as white as Tobirama’s and straight as Hashi’s in a long princess cut, though her eyes were purple-red in her pretty pale face and one long tail swished under her robes. “Well” said his new nee-sama, brushing her long nailed hands over her pale robes and looking amused “lets go see the rest of the family then, hm?”

(Kurama thought it would be amusing to play with the humans and- honestly- he was….interested in this little kit that was so brave and so aching and so insistent that they were family- how long had it been since anyone called him that?-. She didn’t anticipate meeting Asura-nii in this small, blurred form, his soul oddly fuzzy and strange in a way that worried Kurama. She didn’t anticipate caring about the siblings, all four of them, and respecting their mother as much as she disliked their father- not that Butsuma could do shit with a kitsune watching him- and hadn’t intended to get invested in them and their training. She certainly didn’t anticipate Asura-nii meeting Indra-nii who’s soul was fractured and aching as Asura-nii’s was blurred and blind; she never foresaw the way Tobirama tripped and fell head first in love with Indra-nii but she couldn’t think it was a bad thing and something very old and tired in Kurama perked up at the thought of finally finding Indra-nii his person after all these centuries. Now, how to follow through and get Indra-nii’s attention on Tobirama as well as fixing both her erstwhile brother’s mutilated souls and figure out how they had gotten that way; luckily fixing the war was easier, as soon as his brothers took control of their clans she could just wander into every skirmish and lay down in the middle until the clans got the message. No one would be dumb enough to fight on a bijuu – well, no one other than Tobirama but he was….a little unhinged, and Kurama meant that as lovingly as possible ((after all, Tobirama was the space between doors and liminal places were never quite…right, beautiful, beautiful and terrible, but not quite…stable)).)

AO3 Etiquette

It would seem a whole new kind of AO3 reader/writer is emerging and it is becoming clear not everyone quite understands how the website community works. Here is some basic guidance on how most people expect you to go about using AO3 to keep this a fun community archive that funtions correctly:

Kudos is for when the story was interesting enough to make you finish reading. If it sucked or was badly written, you probably left. If you finished - you kudos.

If you liked it, you should comment. It can be long and detailed or a literal keysmash. Writers don't care, we just love comments.

No critisism unless the author has specifically asked or agreed to hear it. Even constructive critisism is a no-no unless an author note tells you it's okay. Many people write as a fun hobby or a way to cope with, among other things, insecurity. Don't ruin that for them.

Do not comment to ask the author to write/update something else. It's tacky and off-putting and will probably have the opposite effect than the one you want.

There is no algorithm, it's an archive. Use the search and filter function to add/remove the pairings/characters/tropes etc. you want to read about and it will find you the fics that fit the bill.

For this to work, writers must tag and rate stories. This avoids readers finding the wrong things and missing the stuff they want. I don't care how cringy that trope is in your eyes - it gets tagged.

Character A/Character B means a ROMANTIC or SEXUAL relationship of some kind. Character A&Character B is PLANTONIC, like friendship or family.

Nothing is banned. This is an implicit rule because banning one thing is a slipperly slope to banning another and another, until nothing is allowed anymore. Do not expect anyone to censor for you. Because of the tags system, you are responsible for your own reading experience.

People can create new chapters and sequels/fic series any time after they "complete" a story. So it's considered perfectly normal to subscribe, even to a finished story. You can even subscribe to the author instead just to cover your bases.

Do not repost stories or change the publishing date without an extremely good reason (like a complete top to bottom rewrite). It's an archive, not social media. No one cares what's the most recent, only what fits their tag needs.

Avoid deleting a story you wrote if you hate it - orphan it so others can still enjoy it, without it being connected to you anymore.

This is a creative fanfiction archive. No essays on your insights or theories please. There are other places for that.

I KNOW there's plenty more I missed but I'm trying to cover most of the basics that people seem to be struggling with.

I invite anyone to add to this, but please explain, don't berate.

But what if the princess was in the tower because she was the dragon?

Like the queen gives birth and oops it’s this adorable little scaley lizard with tiny wings that she can never quite seem to fold right

None of the King’s advisors or doctors can explain it, no one can remember anyone who might have cursed the royal family, plus sire she’s clearly yours still I mean look at those eyes

They just kind of accept it and keep her in a tower so no one tries to slay her

The queen or castle servants reading bedtime stories to the toddler princess, who’s made a nest of her favorite toys and some jewelery she stole off her mother, and when she laughs little puffs of smoke come out of her mouth

The king being so proud when she flies across the room for the first time

And once the princess comes of age, confused knights breaking into the tower to find a twenty foot long dragon sitting at the vanity getting her horns polished by her handmaidens

You learn something new everyday.

ten inch dick aka longer than my forearm