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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CYRT

I don't think fandom was necessarily smaller (in terms of volume) 15 or 20 years ago. I was just younger and had much more spare time and willingness to compromise. And there was also a lot of... trial and error? I remember I holed myself up for two days and read 100-150 fics and there was usually at least 20 or so that I liked, but that also meant I spent a lot of time reading fic I didn't enjoy. I just don't have the patience and energy for that anymore. (And I agree with the other coalie that tagging is a part of it, as in it helps me make a preselection I couldn't make on the old Yuletide archive.)

Fandom was definitely smaller then. There were just fewer people who knew about it and could access it. And what existed was way less connected- the largest archives in 2004 had tens of thousands of fic (maybe a couple hundred thousand for Gossamer and FA and ff.net which were way larger than the rest.) AO3 has 12 million.

In terms of Yuletide though - it was also more... Cohesive? Like in yt 2004 or 2005 I probably knew about half the nominated fandoms and was interested in half the rest; they were all from a similar culture (and the same kinds of fandoms that get rec'd a lot on the yt comm today.) YT is lately probably at least half fandoms that are really not coming out of that general fandom cultural space that still gets all the recs on the DW comm. (This is, let me establish, not a bad thing. Unless you wrote for one and are wondering where all your kudos are.)

As a data point, a story I published on ff.net in 2004 is numerically over two million. The last thing I published there was in 2020 and is numerically over thirteen million.

13 million what?

The stories are archived numerically like on AO3. Ex: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12345678. The newest fic is numbered over 14 million which means over 14 million fics have been posted to ff.net.

DA

I'm not sure what that kind of data proves? Especially since AFAIK the numbers are unique, so if a fic gets deleted, the number won't be reused.

CYRT

I was replying to:

"the largest archives in 2004 had tens of thousands of fic (maybe a couple hundred thousand for Gossamer and FA and ff.net"

FF.net was much bigger than the coalie seemed to think. The data points are that even in 2004, there were millions of fics archived there.

AYRT

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood the point you were making!

AO3's work numbers don't count up directly anymore - they use a randomizing function that makes the work numbers about 4-5x as high as the total number of works. (It would have over 50,000,000 if we went by work numbers.)

It looks like ff.net, at least in the early days, did just count up? But the work number was still significantly higher than the number of works. The only stats on # of works on fanfiction.net I could find were from 2010 (when the site was pretty much at its peak of relevance) and showed that the number of works could be approximated to about 60% of the highest work number. So if you had a work at around 2 mill in 2004, there were probably something less than 1.5 millions works available. Still a lot higher than my estimate! Still about 1/10 of what's currently available just on AO3 (ff.net is currently at about 14 million in work numbers, and Wattpad makes stats even harder to get but it's within the same range as those two.) So I think it's still valid to say that there's something like 10x as much fic available as there was in 2004, and it's much easier to find.

I think "it's easier to find" only applies to people who aren't already into fandom and fic culture.

In the days of eGroups / YahooGroups, I didn't have to *find* fic, I got it all emailed right to my inbox. Today, I largely know where to look for it (though people are often posting exclusively to Tumblr/Discord/Patreon, so it's becoming less centralised and harder to find than it was 5-10 years ago), but it involves several more steps than I had to take then.

Is that a thing that people are really doing? Exclusively tumblr/discord/patreon fanfiction? Is it good? I guess, that fic that I've seen on tumblr has been...not great. (Kind of how I view wattpad fic, although I think that's a step above tumblr fic). I think that the best and brightest fandom fic writers are on ao3. Although, I'm really only on ao3, so maybe I'm missing out.

It is, especially with really young fans who just haven't found ao3 or other centralized fic-specific sites yet and mainly do fandom through discord and youtube.

CYRT I had a really unnecessarily mean comment typed out but there's really no reason for it. I guess that wherever people are happiest posting is great to have.

I get the impression that a lot of very young fic writers think AO3 is only for the "real" writers and they aren't good enough yet. (tbf I thought the same about mailing lists when I started in fandom.)

CYRT

I can't tell you what Patreon fic is like because I don't have extra money for fandom. Discord fic and Tumblr fic depends highly on the author. There's a lot of crap in the tags, but when my favorite authors take prompts and write fic for them, it's just as good as their AO3 fic.

And don't forget deviantart!

I know someone in a smallish but very anti-infected fandom, and nearly all the fic her circle is posting is exclusively on their locked discord, for each other. (I think a lot of the antis are doing the same in their discords, for fear unclean eyes might see it.)

Yikes. What fandom?

Yeah, first you had to a) know that fanfic was a thing other people did and b) find the mailing list.

I learned about fanfic from a Star Trek book and about my first fic mailing list from a friend at summer camp. These days all you have to do to know that fanfic exists is like. Also exist. And then if you want to read some, you can google 'fanfic + character name'. Google is getting worse but at least it's there now.

I won't try to argue that finding good fic is easier, but finding online fic fandom at all definitely is.

Ah the formative fanfic summer camp experience. I too got introduced by a camp friend (who explained fanfic to me as essentially a cool life hack to get more stories about my favorite characters).

Mine was autistic and hyperfixated and I was the only person around willing to sit still and let her explain Crowley/Aziraphale to them (worked out well for me though!)

But first you had to find the mailing list.

cyrt

Fandom was less public back then and more scattered, yes, with lots of smaller single-fandom and media type archives, but it's not like I had less fic to pick from in 1999 or 2004 and than I have in 2023. Though I suppose that depends on what kind of fandoms you're in.

Like in yt 2004 or 2005 I probably knew about half the nominated fandoms and was interested in half the rest

I think for me, the number of fandoms I knew stayed the same over the years. When I go through the fandom list, I still see lots of movies and books and some theatre and RPF where I have the same initial "oh, I'm familiar with that" reaction. The difference - and this is clearly very subjective - is that in 2004, this reaction was followed by "I'll check the fic out!" whereas now it's usually followed by "... but I don't feel fannish about it" and I scroll further. Mid-2000s me was committed reading everything in an exchange where I vaguely knew the canon. 2023 me doesn't have the time and energy anymore for anything that I don't already have a strong fannish investment in (fandoms, as well as ships and tropes).

I would say I definitely have more fic to pick from. Of course it does depend on fandoms a lot. Small fandoms are still small fandoms (there's just a lot more of them active now) and if you've been only in Highlander fandom the whole time things haven't changed much.

But the biggest fandoms these days routinely get hundreds of works posted a day, and the only thing that came close to that in ~2004 era was *maybe* HP on FA, but I think even then there's more HP fics posted on just AO3 (not even counting Wattpad and fanfiction.net) per day than there was per week on FictionAlley. (I was one of the pre-posting editors for a little while and we definitely weren't getting hundreds a day.)

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Morbane's coal

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