coaltide | Morbane's coal

Morbane's coal

In quantum wankchanics, Morbane's coal is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, of quantum wankerposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical gift may be considered simultaneously both the fic of your dreams (TFOYD) and coal, while it is unread state, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

The Coaltide interpretation implies that, after a while, the gift is simultaneously TFOYD and coal. Yet, when a coalie clicks on their gift, the coalie sees the gift either TFOYD or coal, not both TFOYD and coal. This poses the question of when exactly quantum wankerposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.

Madness Opens: Tuesday 26 December
Author Reveals: Monday 1 January

Yuletide Discord for Hippos & Exchanges After Dark Discords for Namespace ~~drama~~ 18+ discussion. Google Group for PHs.

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aww. that's lucky.

Revenge for *what*?!

Ayrt

I'm not saying you should DNW gen fic. But you could have DNWed a focus on an unrequested character or to have the requested characters not interacting at all. Just like you could have cut your prompts down to the things you want most.

And going to the mod if the same person gave you fic that might not have fulfilled your request (having one of the requested character barely being in the fic) three years might be helpful even if you don't ask for a EPH just so the mods can remind them that requested characters are not optional. I obviously don't know if the mods would have seen it as a violation or not, but I don't see why it wouldn't be worth a try.

You're clearly happy with the way you resolved the situation, and no one here is trying to change your mind. But your instance that "nothing else would have worked" or would have been within the spirit of Yuletide is a bit annoying - you're not the first person to have been in a situation like that and several of us probably have solved it differently. Your way to handle it is a perfectly viable way, but it's not the only way.

Yeah, saiditallbefore I think. They never faced any consequences for that ever. They're still modding. That whole thing was it for me and exchanges.

Oh, that story. It's a sweet idea, but the narrative is very infodumpy, puts too much focus on filler actions than moments that advance plot or reveal character, and honestly the story pretty much boils down to F'lar goes for a swim.

RedCoyote didn't either.

saiditallbefore is an entirely different person. scribblemyname, the MFD main mod, has no exchange collections following the 2021 MFD in which the whole debacle occurred.

NC I knew this but I didn't want to correct them because the mixup was so fucking funny.

Same, but my hits:comments and hits:bookmarks are what I'd expect, also happened last year when I wrote in a related canon, so I think it's the fandom? But it's still a bit deflating to have the same hits:kudos as any random non-exchange fic at this point in the Yuletide cycle

You know nothing, Jon Coal. Truly.

This is misinformation madlibs. Nothing in this comment is accurate.

DC

I always keep mixing them up too! :( It's like the rosefox/rosecake thing.

it seems like ashling isn’t 100% confirmed to have played a part in that (other than being on the mod team and not resigning in disgust as another mod apparently did) but multiple people, including mods of other exchanges, claim that she was telling tall tales about alchemise being a big harrassing wanker in private discords. those people were pretty upset to learn that all they actually did was tag a fandom that included a DNWd character’s name and share their bewilderment at being banned for it, lol.

/coalie who was not around for this but just spent way too long reading through those links

I miss rosecake. She was a procrastinatory person, but she had wonderful taste and lovely comments. I hope she comes back.

+1

She was a wonderful author and recipient! ♥

Are the every yuletide gang still all in it?

Yep:

cjmarlowe - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52343599
Daegaer - https://archiveofourown.org/works/51903100
Franzeska - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52341925
Joanne_c - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52309216
Kass - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52057192
Mosca - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52328905
Nope - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52175239
pollitt - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52337635
sandyk - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52330765
shrift - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52245651
Tiriel - https://archiveofourown.org/works/52334350
twistedchick - https://archiveofourown.org/works/51944740

Yeah, ashling was not involved publicly (iirc MFD had a two-on/two-off modding schedule, and ashling and fencesit* were the "off" mods that round), but by the betrayed way other mods (including her friends) reacted, she was involved behind the scenes and was kind of a dick about the writer. The fact that she's never apologized still sticks in my craw.

*fencesit is the one who resigned in disgust.

fanlore sucks so i feel that tbh

dc

well now i need a wank recap about fanlore! why do people dislike it?

Yeah, she had friends calling her out in public. It was pretty wild.

Wait, pollitt? This proves that being a yuletide regular doesn't mean you know what you're doing. The only reason I recognize Pollitt's name is because they fucked up their sign up two years in a row. This year they only included their letter link on some of their requests but it was to last year's letter which only had one fandom that was a repeat but they fucked up the 2022 signup for that fandom (there were three characters in 2022's tagset for the fandom, the fandom's main pairing of A and B as well as B's sister, they signed up requesting A and B's sister but obviously meant to have signed up for B considering their prompt and what's in the letter). They do have a 2023 letter on their dreamwidth, but even though the app shows they requested the right characters this time, A and B, they just C&Ped the section for that fandom from 2022's so it doesn't match since it's about A and B's sister with no mention of B at all.

I mean. It did focus on a requested character. And the requested characters did interact. They just didn't, you know, interact in a well-written way that actually said anything about their relationship with each other. I mean, maybe my quickly made-up example gave the wrong impression of how much character 2 appeared in the story, but I've said several times that it was enough to pretty clearly be within the rules. And you can't DNW poorly-written and stilted interactions and trying to DNW around the other would have basically been a gen ban even if I said friendship was ok, and unenforceable anyway.

I'm glad other methods might have worked for people in related situations, I'm just equally baffled by your insistence that surely there must have been a way to force someone to fill that prompt the way I wanted it to be filled if I tried hard enough. Sometimes the exact story you want just isn't going to happen in an exchange and that's ok actually? If people went to the mods every time they were mildly disappointed by getting fics that technically follow the rules, the mods wouldn't have time to do anything else.

wank occasionally comes around because they have very few editors and basically no oversight in terms of standards of what they put up, which means people's personal posts (up to stuff they locked for personal safety) will end up there and then they refuse to take it down because it's for "archival purposes". in my personal experience stuff i have been part of has also been summarized with really obvious bias. which is just kind of whatever, if i cared that much i could "correct" it, but the project as a whole is just a wank wikipedia with a veneer of respectability. so seeing people get their shit preserved forever when there was no expectation they'd want or need that, and where in some cases it can present a real risk to privacy, is offensive imo. (it's probably obvious, i work in privacy irl)

There are multiple reasons.

The reason I, and many other people, dislike it is that probably about 85% of the content at this point is verbatim reposts of complete fanworks made by other people, reposted without permission, in ways that would absolutely have everybody down their throats if they did it with fic. But because it's "just" meta and fanart, and because it's "important to the record", they get away with it. And they usually then cite it to an (also without permission) offsite backup service, so if you want the reposts gone you have to edit the fanlore entry, convince a fanlore "gardener" to remove it from the edit history (which they will almost never do because this is basically fanlore SOP at this point and most of the people who do it are gardeners) and send the offsite backup a takedown notice. If there was a site that regularly did that with fic fandom would have collectively burned it down, but I guess it doesn't matter with other fanworks.

Anyway other people dislike it because:

---relatedly, they will repost stuff that was clearly intended to be personal posts or ephemeral comments and that have absolutely no wider relevance; I knew some people who were having every single DW comment they made copy-pasted to Fanlore, even if it was stuff like "my cat knocked my coffee mug off the table", until they totally locked down. They will argue that archiving is a flat good and there's no need to be selective because everything is history. Other people will argue that they are being creepy as shit. Sometimes it's true cluelessness backed up with moral certainty, sometimes it clearly gets used as a deniable method of stalking.
---relatedly, they frequently post wayback links to fic that was deliberately deleted, because history (with deliberately deleted meta, of course, they repost *and* wayback link.) If you takedown on wayback they will find some more obscure backup service that still has it (or put it there.)
---relatedly, they claim to care about never doxxing/outing people but will totally make exceptions and allow it if it's, say, something that predates the Internet, or something that happened in spaces they don't consider fandom spaces, or if it's really historically important (aka wanky). (however if it's somebody they like/know you'll supposedly get banned for even hinting that there's something to doxx)

Mostly unrelated complaints:

---people keep posting true things about them on it that they don't want to be recorded because it makes them look bad
---people keep editing their OTP's website to point out that it's not canon and will never be canon even though it totally! is! (larries especially have been mad about this)
---various similar things that are basically people have posted facts or opinions on there that other people don't agree with
---OTW is racist and abusive and bad
---this other fan history site they are trying to make is better

(I suspect Imp's issues were mostly in this category, because they sure haven't joined in the complaining about point 1 that I've seen anywhere.)

And generally:
---most of what's up there is just shit? like my fanlore page is clearly somebody who searched my username on fanlore and then posted the summary of every page that came up, which makes it look like my main fandom is (X) because somebody whose (X) fic I rec'd in a rec set fifteen years ago went through and put all their reviews up on their own fanlore pages so their fics looked important, and then to make it less egotistical did the same thing for every other fic rec'd with them, so my reviews show up on pages for about fifteen (X) fic and that's now the main thing on my fanlore entry. (Even just looking up my AO3 profile would have made it very clear I was never in that fandom, and very easy to give a better summary of what I do, but I guess that was too much research work for the person who made my page.)

Some people have done some really good work, especially with zine fandom and some of the classic old slash fandoms, but unless you are a well-known bnf or wanker, or you've been editing your own page, that's about the general quality you will get. Even a lot of like fannish vocab if you look it up the entry will be either misleading or flat wrong. (And a lot of the people who were previously occasionally stepping in to fix small things that were outright wrong are now boycotting because of point #1)

Also I understand there's been wank and bad blood among and with the mod team, that I don't know the details on, but gets brought up whenever anyone suggests fixing any of the above via going to the leadership.

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Morbane's coal

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