coaltide | 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.

yuletide |

yuletide_admin | App
2023 Collection | Tagset

Flat / Recent | Top-Level (Last) | FAQ | Search

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

dc

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

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.

+1 to everything in the first category, it would be bad enough if they were pretentious about archiving while actually being good/responsible at it, but they are not lmfao.

Absolutely 100% this.

Morbane's coal

Re: Wanker recap

Re: Wanker recap

Re: Wanker recap

Re: Wanker recap

Re: Wanker recap