Glad it looks like a good fit! It’s a really cool event, hope you can come check it out next time! :)

Fandom, but video game & niche focused: VGM Con is coming up in April. It’s in the Minneapolis area, and caters to indie game composers & fan music projects. A lot of good, but smalltime talent involved and hugely community-focused. Most of the event is live performance sets, some technical panels and workshops. :)

As a kid, it was the local oldies station for a while, then swapped to this long-form recording of ocean surf my parents had on CD.

These days a fan is fine, though I’ll put on rain or surf white noise, or ambient music, with headphones if I’m travelling somewhere & it’s noisy.

Haha, yeah it’s a neverending process. There’s a bunch of volunteer positions behind the scenes; tags are managed by ‘tag wranglers’, so it can take a while for some of the odder ones to get classified as it’s human people doing the classifying. It’s a tricky balance of functionality & maintaining the community culture/flavor. I think they do alright, but I’ve also been using the site for years, so definitely biased.

Ehh, I’d say it depends on what you’re looking for. I definitely get it being overwhelming starting out.

Tagging quality varies a lot, but most weird tags that are fandom, character, or content get consolidated under a broader parent tag. If you’re looking for a specific trope or vibe, it might be easier to view works under that parent tag, then filter down by fandom/characters/ship, etc. Also helps to sort by bookmarks or kudos (likes); there’s usually a pretty good overlap of popularity & quality.

But I’m a browser & pretty content to just see what comes up, so YMMV. For more specific stuff, the advanced search is also very robust, especially using search operators. There’s guides out there on how to get the most out of it.

There’s also bookmarks and collections, if you’re wanting stuff vetted by another person. I tend to figure if someone wrote fics I like, they probably read other fics I’d like, so it’s usually worth a look.

There’s a long history of wider fandom spaces becoming profit driven and then purging “problematic” content in order to appeal to advertisers. Someone can write a story with rape because they think it’s hot, and someone else can write a story with rape as a way to help process personal trauma, but both are removed because the content restrictions boil down to “all rape stories are bad.” This type of policy also tends to affect stuff with queer themes disproportionately.

Sounds like Wattpad has just gone the way of LiveJournal, FF.net, & others by implementing sweeping content policies.

AO3 was created by a fan-run non-profit to be a written works archive with very minimal restrictions on content, but younger folks coming from these algorithm-based platforms aren’t used to having to curate their own experiences via filtering tags & warnings. It’s the old have your cake and eat it, too problem.

It sounded pretty definite in interviews that they aren’t planning DLC for this one, but we can still hope :)

Daily- I put my rings in it when I take them off to cook or whatever.

We accidentally made our cat yell when we point at her. Not even sure how it happened tbh; some combo of squirt-bottle-get-off-the-counter and very half-assed start to clicker training. At least we have a goofy party trick when we have people over I guess?