Anonymous asked: Do you have any advice for being an older woman in fandom? I'm almost 27 and I feel disgusting for still being in fandom and liking fanfiction (especially mrated fic which I know I'm way too old for) but at the same time I don't want/don't know how to just leave.

naamahdarling:

evilkillerpoptarts:

walburgablack:

amuseoffyre:

rocket-pool:

snowyowlee:

athenadark:

fiction-is-not-reality2:

hellolovelyscientist:

earlgreytea68:

purplesherlock:

vulgarweed:

fiction-is-not-reality2:

Anon, from the bottom of my heart: breathe. It kind of breaks my soul reading you torture yourself like this, for something that makes absolutely no sense. 

Disgusting for being in fandom? Too old for M rated fics? You think you should leave? 

Whoever put these thoughts in your head, please, stop listening to them, because they don’t have the slightest idea of what they’re talking about, and I don’t know why you’re giving it any credit when to even remotely entertain the idea that you cannot participate in fandom past the age of 20 you need to ignore the entire history of Fandom. Like, completely erase it all even while you live in it.  

Who do you think pays for Ao3 domain and server? Who’s the majority that has the economical independence to support it every year? Who organizes conventions? Hosts panels? Who writes the vast majority of explicit fics? Who writes the canon every fandom is built upon? 

I’ll save you the trouble of guessing the answer: it’s not minors. 

I’ve received enough messages about people complaining about ageism in fandom, but it’s the first time I’ve read about someone who’s really buying into this absurd idea that is so entirely drenched in misogyny. Don’t let it get to you, please. Who have you interacted with till now? I cannot count the sheer amount of incredible fandom peeps over the age of 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 I have met without even looking for them, because they’re everywhere. They’re the backbone and legs and arms and head of Fandom as a whole, I don’t know how you could have missed them. 

And you know the greatest thing about being an adult? 
That so long as you’re not breaking any law, you can do whatever you want and no one can say nor do anything about it. And if they don’t like it, they can die mad about it.
I think you might be forgetting this little detail.   

Honestly, as an ‘older woman’, I’m perfectly fine and content here and I’m not going anywhere for as long as I’ll find fandom fun. You have all the freedom and the means to stay as well, provided that you stop sabotaging yourself like this. 

OMG this is so fucking sad. Too old for adult rated fic at TWENTY-SIX? Two old how? To write fic? To have sexual story ideas and share them? Most cis women don’t come close to reaching their sexual peak (highest period of interest in it and enjoyment of it) until their 30s.

And if minors (which some people seem to define as up to 21 for some reason) shouldn’t enjoy explicit fanfic, and if women over 26 shouldn’t enjoy it either, then that leaves, what, a 5-year-window? Give it some rational thought, and you can see how completely absurd and ridiculous that is.

Anyway, I’m 49, I didn’t start writing fanfic until I was 30 (I wrote other things before that and still do in addition to it) and I’m not going anywhere as long as I’m still having fun with it, which I am. And I can say from experience, the best thing about getting older is that as time goes by, you care less and less about what judgy mcjudgyface twits think about you and your harmless pleasures. You’re born with all the fucks to give about that you will ever have, and by my age, you have virtually none left. I wish you many decades to come (heh) of enjoying fandom and fanfic, and life gets so much better after fuck-o-pause.

@vulgarweed I whole heartedly agree with you about life getting better after the fuck o pause…..

I found fandom at 21, wrote my first fic at 26, and am 38 now. 

My personal experience of fandom has been that there are tons and tons and tons of non-teenagers in it. All of my closest friends came out of fandom and they’re all around my age. The perception that fandom is entirely kids is so perplexing to me, since it’s so the opposite of my experience. Do I know fans younger than me? Of course. Do I *expect* everyone to be younger than me? Not at all. 

And I guess if kids think I’m too old for fandom, well, they don’t know yet how fast you get to be the old ones lol

I found fandom at 53, wrote my first fic at 55, and am 67 now. Not that I didn’t have things I loved, but no-one else I knew thought Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin were boyfriends, or thought Spock and Kirk were in love, or any of the other possibilities of my childhood and young adulthood, so I just put it all aside until the internet brought me all of you. For which I will be eternally grateful.

The notes on this post make me incredibly happy.

I’m a second generation fangirl, and will be forty this jan, my mother is thirty years older and whilst she only reads het she LOVES fanfic, she was first in line to see Bumblebee and Fantastic Beasts two, she went just yesterday to see aquaman with two little girls and told them everything you need to know about dc when they asked, and was more excited about the movie than they were. She named me for Apollo in Battlestar Galactica, you don’t grow out of fandom, you just get more grey hairs

you don’t grow out of fandom, you just get more grey hairs

This!

I started reading fanfiction when I was 35. Wrote my first fanfic when I was 38. I am almost 49 now, and yes, fandom has given me some more grey hairs :-) But I don’t see any growing out of fandom in the forseeable future!

Cosigning my support. I came to fandom a bit younger, but didn’t get truly involved with fandom until like 25. My friends and mentors there have been some of the best people I’ve ever met, and most were 30 or much older at the time. They helped me grow my writing, kept me sane during hard times, and most of my invitees to my wedding were from this wonderful group of people.

Anon, I don’t know your life circumstances. I don’t know why you think something like fandom is supposed to be taboo for you.

What I can say is that it took me a long time to understand that you need to embrace joy in your life. If it isn’t ethically wrong (legal or otherwise) embrace what offers you joy, because life is too short to spend it making yourself miserable.

Fandom doesn’t come with an age-limit, especially not for women, and yet the misogyny and ageism in many fandoms will make you think otherwise. Fandom was cultivated by women. It was nourished and nurtured and the flames were fanned by women, many of whom were not wee young uns. Back in the day, women were responsible for the zines and the analogue mailing lists . As time went on and the internet showed up, the scale expanded to multi-national epic fandoms and even bigger conventions.

I have been doing fandom stuff since I first got free internet access in 1999 and I’m brushing 40 now. You will have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands before I will give it up.

I was here when I was a lying liar pressing the Above 18 button, I am here a decade later, and I will be here till I die. Fandom has kept me sane, fandom has very nearly kept me alive, fandom has brought me up as a feminist and proud queer.

and as to the other, the stuff I wrote at 13 and 14 was much more violent and explicit than what I write now. You’re never too old for fandom, and you’re never too old for fic of any rating; that’s there as a minimum-age boundary, not to indicate a maximum-age.

you don’t grow out of fandom, you just get more grey hairs

I’m 41. Techically old enough to be your mother. My fandom mothers and grandmothers didn’t build this fandom house, and the fans my age have not maintained it and nurtured it, for the benefit of the young only.

It’s not a school to be graduated from.

It’s not a hostel to shelter you for a little while.

This is a *home*. You are ALWAYS welcome here. You will always BE welcome here.

Babe, you’re just hitting your stride. Come share the stories we tell, and bring your own. We have cookies.

copperbadge:

lololovescheese:

@copperbadge

I can’t decide what I like best, the giant tree or the FANGED CAT. 

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seananmcguire:

thelogicalloganipus:

thelogicalloganipus:

thelogicalloganipus:

Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more. 

You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again. 

We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue. 

 Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole.  There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough. 

You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:

Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind. 

We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.

 If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to. 

You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.

If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise. 

Sincerely, 

The users of your website. 

@staff @support

They flagged this post immediately and I’ve submitted it for review… this is… quite a week.

If you believe these words, reblog it, please. I want this to be right in their face because I couldn’t email them directly. 

j

damondauno:

For the 75th anniversary production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, she loves her and he loves him!

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma! was revived by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with LGBT+ Casting. “This revival made the musical’s primary romantic couple, Laurey and Curly, lesbians. It made the comic sidekick couple, Will Parker and Ado Annie, gay men (with “Annie” renamed “Andy”). It’s not just the two romantic couples in the show who have been reimagined. Laurey’s starchy yet sometimes playful Aunt Eller will be a transgender woman (portrayed by a transgender female performer). Ali Hakim will be a bisexual man who has a great fling with Ado Andy, but winds up married to a young bi woman named Gertie Cummings (who also fell in love with Curly). The director, Bill Rauch, felt Jud needed to stay a troubled straight man who, with no changes to the book, is angry that Laurey prefers a woman instead of him. “We wanted also to make sure that the world was not just LGBTQ-inclusive, but that it was clear that this was a community that was thriving, because there are straight allies. They are choosing in this small rural corner of Oklahoma to make a community that is inclusive and that is loving.””

Major changes to a show must be approved by the copyright holder. "Ted Chapin protects the catalog of Rodgers and Hammerstein with great ferocity, and at the same time, he understands the way great classics remain relevant is through thoughtful expansion and reinvention and experiment. So, I was really, really honored — not only to get the permission in general, but the fact that this is the 75th anniversary of ‘Oklahoma!‘ 

The story of the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning Oklahoma! centers around Laurey and Curly, who are in love but are too stubborn to admit it to one another. A troubled farmhand, Jud, will do everything in his power to make Laurey fall in love with him instead. "I think this casting really excels in the love song ‘People Will Say We’re In Love,’ a beautiful love song that Laurey and Curly share, but their fear that people will say we’re in love takes on a completely different resonance and a completely different depth when it’s sung by two women, and the courage that it takes for these two people then, you know, finally when they sing, ‘Let people say we’re in love.’ The audience just cries and cheers, because it’s an affirmation in a completely different way.

Sources: x / x / x ll Official Production Page

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(Source: justcatposts, via theangriestlittleunicorn)

costumeloverz71:

Drew Barrymore, Ever After (1998) ballgown exhibits… Costume by Jenny Beavan…

msmisfitz:

barelyup:

Oh my god ❤️

Absolutely love this

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bardicknowledgeblogger:

lair-master:

bel-mont-bae:

bel-mont-bae:

Hey DnD Community

How many of you have been banned from playing a bard in campaigns? I need to know for science.

For anyone that might ask- I had to sign a legally binding contract to not play bard characters if I wanted to join a campaign in my old group.

this is an outrage.

here’s what you do:

• be a half-elf. the skill versatility trait is similar to the bard’s starting skill proficiencies
  
• play a warlock. again, similar starting proficiencies. charisma is your spellcasting ability. very bardy
  
• your otherworldly patron is the great old one. or the archfey. except call them your “otherworldly muse” or “otherworldly patron of the arts”
  
• pick spells on the bard spell list, such as minor illusion, mage hand, dissonant whispers, or Tasha’s hideous laughter
• take the entertainer background. much bard. wow.
• choose pact of the blade if you’re a valor bard or pact of the tome if you’re a lore bard. i recommend the latter. pick the vicious mockery cantrip (because bard), as well as guidance and resistance (to emulate bardic inspiration)
• for eldritch invocations, take beguiling influence for more skill proficiencies and book of ancient secrets to ape the bard’s magical secrets feature
• if you miss having expertise, splash in a level or six of rogue, perhaps at fifth level
• voila! you’re a bard in all but name. that’ll show ‘em

Stealth bard-ing

(via only-in-movies)

badassfoodog:

warsmithbryant:

nightbringer24:

krishnath:

paper-tweets:

Little gryphletts I have been selling on my deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/nybird
They are all based on existing birds.

Gwyffin!

@candiceirae

@gemtern MICRO-GRIFFIN

@ignigeno SO CUTE!

(via theangriestlittleunicorn)