C.R.E.A.M

[coalcube]

Coal ruins exchanges around me - spitey spitey fic y'all. 

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Comments

Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Based on recent wank, what would you say is must-know history for Yuletide?

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Wank:
- Gay-bashing dragons
- Untherius dewclaws
- Beatrice_Otter's "ship ran over by an ambulance" fic
- The Gwen Stacy wank
- That time the person anonfailed on coal while suicide-baiting themselves

More generally:
- The year mods wanted all noms to be nominated by TWO people in order to go into the tagset. This got rolled back before noms even started.
- The year mods treated FPF characters like they treat RPF characters now (ie a character couldn't appear in a rare fandom if that same character tag had too many fics in a popular fandom, for example Clint Barton in the Hawkeye comic)
- The time some rando walked in off the street with improved matching code and Yuletide matching times went from days to hours
- Yuletide was a rare ship exchange its first year
- Yuletide was started by Jewish people who wanted something fun on Christmas
- The entire AO3 exchange apparatus was largely motivated by Yuletide

Not exhaustive, obviously.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

I have been around for a while but I didn't know that it was a rare ship exchange!

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

The time some rando walked in off the street with improved matching code and Yuletide matching times went from days to hours

rofl at the way this is phrased

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

where is the lie, coalie

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

This is 100% what happened, though!

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting, I didn’t know that about ao3 exchange apparatus and Yuletide

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

AO3 and Yuletide were both astolat projects, so it makes sense. It just seems wild in retrospect, when AO3 is SO HUGE now. Yuletide's annual signup numbers aren't even a drop in the bucket.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

The relationship between AO3 and Yuletide is complicated. At the time of the exchange moving to AO3 astolat was running the board and doing most of the coding, and was also running Yuletide. However right from the start they kept emphasising that Yuletide remained a separate entity and was not a official AO3 project.

However the first year on AO3 saw the wranglers being asked to drop all their usual work and wrangle all the yuletide fandoms just before Xmas. Then there was the year the new skins went live. Astolat had coded the new tagset features to be compatible with the new skins, which meant the skins got pulled out of testing so that they could be deployed alongside the tagsets in time for yuletide. And that caused massive issues over them not being accessible and not working right for people Compounded by the fact that one coder had worked on them alone, so feedback had been limited. Then their accessible version got changed before launch because people hadn't liked how it looked. https://archiveofourown.org/comments/497247%20:

There was quite a bit of ongoing resentment about diverting AO3 resources to benefit yuletide when astolat and the other mods were adamant that yuletide wasn't an AO3 project. From a dev point of view using yuletide as a test for exchange developement nakes sense as it's the biggest exchange, and so they know if a new feature works for yuletide it'll probably work for all exchanges. But for some people who weren't into yuletide but were supporters of the archive it felt like astolat was playing favourites by peioritising things by what would help yuletide rather than the archive as a whole

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Nova_mist.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Agree, definitely NovaMist.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Who was the code-improving rando?

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

tickinginstant. They still work on the code.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Additional wank: ars_belli and their nazi love

Not wank, but still infamous (notorious? just famous? idk): the bdsm care bear fic

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Fun fact: Slave Bear of Care-a-Lot was written by Tamsyn Muir, later the author of The Locked Tomb series. Also, it was explicitly requested by the recip, so not coal in the dewclaws sense at all.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

And the recip was Rosefox.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Oh man, I forgot that! That is right. And yes, the slave bear fic was not coal, but definitely one of the things that I heard about Yuletide prior to doing it the first time. Yuletide? Isn't that the exchange where someone wrote bdsm care bear fic?

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

I'd add:
- Shayheyred's deathfic
- kittydesade
- Origin of dentist, bears, hippos, (did socks start in YT?)
- Ghost Soup

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

I remember the term "sockpuppet" being in use on the internet thirty years ago, so no.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Ghost Soup....I hadn't thought about Ghost Soup in the longest time until a coalie said they were all aboard Ghost Soup Space Mountain re the whole Winterblumensaat thing.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

Oh boy! I remember all of these except ghost soup.
/old as balls coalie with failing memory

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

put it all here

https://coaltide.dreamwidth.org/4159.html

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

I am LIVING for all this old fandom history/wank

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

I'm just glad I was around the first time NovaMist signed up with ten socks designed to match to each other and got outed because she lazily linked sock A's letter in sock B's prompts.

Re: Yuletide history

[(Anonymous)]

I really miss having the brainstorming post and then the nominations post and then the fandom promo post.