Mirat: "Yeah I Know I Don't Have To. Free Will And All That... But Can I?"

Finished Critical role Ep 53.  I seriously can’t stop drawing pike.  

You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?

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I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.

Warlock: I threw a bra into the summon spell and now there's gonna be a Giant Bra Demon!

DM: Don't worry, it won't be that bad: that's a support class.

when you fail a persuasion attempt in an rpg:

kassandra being my favourite idiot for 67 seconds

Why do porn blogs keep following me. I don’t even post porn.

#relatable

les mis dnd

DM: The cart is crushing Fauchelevent. If it continues much longer, he will die.

Valjean: I want to lift the cart.

DM: … Roll strength.

Valjean: NAT 20. Plus 6.

DM: God. Okay. You start to lift the cart and inspire the townsfolk to help you. He is saved.

Javert: I ROLL INSIGHT -

Vax: OK, what was I tuning out?

Vex: You have to get Gilmore to give us a discount! You’re the one with the silver tongue.

Scanlan: Yeah, go tongue Gilmore.

...I found the “girl falls into middle earth” fic I wrote when I was 11