U N T I T L E D - another thing on the pile of "I want to Complete"

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17 November 2025 @ 11:52 pm

another thing on the pile of "I want to Complete"

(second time trying to post this, so it's not as organized and well thought out like the first time - stupid internet crashing)

Anyway first things first, new header over at harpiewriting - Originally made for a challenge for seasons_of_fandom but I ended up missing the deadline because I was puttering around trying to write something for it instead of graphics... Yeah should've just stuck with the graphics so yes, new header featuring the Scarlet Witch (I'm kinda obsessed with her right now if you can't tell...)

So over the weekend, which also distracted me a bit (okay more than a bit) from probably important things I should be doing (definitely) I added at least 75 older works to AO3. I did backdate those to the correct dates/years, with usually only a minor edit here and there plus adding tags/collections when possible and only editing the other works already there for the collections/tag corrections. I don't know about anyone else, but I feel weird using tags there for my older works even though I know they are very helpful and I use them all the time to find stuff I want right now. Now the current total of works at AO3 is 237, and the total I get on my fic journal is 657. Now some of the really old works (pre-2004 & other unfinished works) are probably not going to be added unless heavy editing is done, and some drabbles got combined under a single header/fic/series title thing so I think that just means I might only have like 400-ish left to go?

Now so far the fandoms I have left to really add are the following (plus the # tags at my fic journal): BTVS/ATS (31 tags), DC Comics (45 tags), ~~Drake & Josh (2 tags),~~ Glee (16 tags), H2O Just Add Water (13 tags), Harry Potter (67 tags), Heroes (53 tags), High School Musical (15 tags), House MD (10 tags), ~~HIMYM (2 tags),~~ ~~JONAS (1 tag)~~, ~~Life With Derek (9 tags)~~, ~~Medium (5 tags),~~ Mythology (4 tags), ~~Past Life (1 tag),~~ Smallville (167 tags), Supernatural (54 tags), Twilight (61 tags), WOWP (35 tags), and X-Men (92 tags).

Now I got basically all the smaller tagged fandoms added to AO3 already (minus a few of them above that apparently I missed plus several of those tags should technically be knocked down because I do have a bunch at AO3) so I think I will keep doing whatever has less tags and go up from there simply because I know I have a lot of crossovers that reach into those fandoms and thus kick numbers down faster (I'm looking at you Smallville!).

So while adding the works to AO3, and honestly even before that I had noticed several LiveJournal communities have been deleted, namely batfic100 (which between that and

twilight100 probably spawned my love for these types of communities) and dyno_drabbles (I want to say this was a Harry/Pansy fic challenge community but might have been a HP rarepair one? IDK and Fanlore gives me nothing and I just have the participation banner from that & my Harry/Pansy works which I completely forgot I wrote). Now these two are only examples and I've noticed even several prompt table type communities got deleted as well, which makes me sad and probably over precaution since I just added THIS list of previous prompts from

comicdrabbles and THIS list of previous prompts from

tv_100/

tv_100 and they are probably not going to be the only ones. Definitely ~~going to do one~~ done one [located HERE] for

avengers100 (although that has less prompts & so not as overwhelming, plus I know I already participated in some) I want to add URLs to works I did for all the challenges. I don't know if I'm going to work on that anytime soon but that's on the pile of "I want to Complete".

Nostalgia is so real right now guys...

Now while also making banners/prompts this weekend for

xmen100 &

mcu100 (which brand new prompt up as of yesterday!), I was thinking of maybe doing Character and/or Pairing bonus Monthly Challenge to try to encourage more activity? I don't know if that'll add to or hinder the comms, but I'm hoping for more activity. But I also figured that might be better than being stuck with a character/pairing/prompt that apparently no one wants to write for or lack of ideas.

Also haven't officially posted this anywhere yet beside the sidebar of

harpieicons but I've made an icon website, mostly because I originally just needed somewhere to host my new icons since photobucket went paid and the other photo storage options were meh? So it's a little old-fashioned in this day an age but I present to you Muse-Insanity.org/Icons and yeah I didn't think of a name for it but meh I don't think it needs one (I've only stumbled upon like 2 other people with icon websites, but both seem static and not active, one actually had some sort of sorting program? system? but that just leads to a dead download URL sadly). Should've probably used the original domain as it, but maybe I'll eventually add my fics to that instead? Idk, probably not. Not all the pages work so if you happen to visit and stumble upon a deadlink I apologize. Most of the newer icons for the various challenges I've done are there and only a handful old ones have been added. I did manage to resave all my old ones when I did the import from LJ to dreamwidth since photobucket let me see them at dreamwidth (but yet not all LiveJournal? That still doesn't make sense unless it has something to do with LJ/Russia.), but I apparently had NO structure on how to name the icons so they are all over the place so that's when I'm more focused & motivated aka that's another thing on the pile of "I want to Complete".

Moving all the old

galorechallenge prompts from its yolasite to it's new home galore.muse-insanity.org (DON'T MIND THE OLD GRAPHIC AS THE HEADER) mostly slow-going (and thus another thing on the pile of "I want to Complete")... mainly because I get easily distracted by everything else, but it is coming back.

I do need to update Capes & Crusaders, but I've been kinda focused on everything else, it's kinda on my back burner even though I'm still randomly saving pictures for it.

I nearly started every paragraph with "Anyway" and "Now" and "So" and "Also".

Also (lmao) my icon right now is from Harley Quinn the Animated series and the latest season (& that particular episode[s]? in particular) made me ship Bruce/Lois/Joker for the first time ever and I never freaking expected that to show up. I mean yes, Bruce/Lois I've shipped, but Joker isn't really a character I ship anyone with normally? But I think that character kinda went though a character growth that I liked? I don't know it's been X amount of months since I watched it and I'm still shocked. I also looked for anything on AO3 for the pairing and found nothing. Bruce/Lois works yes, Bruce/Joker yes, Bruce/Lois/Joker no. I did discover I really like Bruce/Clark/Lois though so there's that?

Oh and I signed up for

fandomtrees this year... I completely spaced on the

fandomgiftbasket. I always seem to forget to hit the Track button on the comms but I'm doing better on that.

Tags: community, community: galorechallenge, community: mcu100, community: xmen100, fanfiction, fannish 50, graphics

17 comments | Leave a comment

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maevedarcy on November 18th, 2025 04:34 pm (UTC)

omg so many things!!! I love seeing more people make and update fannish websites. I love the Wanda icons!

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flareonfury on November 19th, 2025 02:59 am (UTC)

I miss the fansites and other fannish websites too ♥ Hopefully more people make more. And thank you! ♥ The Wanda ones I'm pretty proud of. I could probably make like a 100 more for her.

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maevedarcy on November 19th, 2025 05:48 pm (UTC)

I think that with the current state of social media, a lot more people are running back to the small web. I keep seeing many neocities/nekoweb interest groups pop up here and there, so I think there's still hope for the indie internet

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flareonfury on November 22nd, 2025 02:11 am (UTC)

*Fingerscrossed* I hope so! ♥

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meridian_rose on November 19th, 2025 09:04 am (UTC)

I miss fansites too! You'd have a show or an actor and the site would be full of info like a wiki but with so many great screencaps and then fanworks like fic and icons!

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maevedarcy on November 19th, 2025 05:52 pm (UTC)

I think it's time we take matters into our own hands and start making fansites for everything. The more, the better. We need to take the internet back.

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meridian_rose on November 20th, 2025 09:13 am (UTC)

I think webspace cost is the main barrier. You used to get a decent amount with your ISP provider at one point. Now space is more limited. An things like Wordpress don't work the same :/ But yes, I'd love to see a resurgence of fansites :D

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maevedarcy on November 20th, 2025 09:24 am (UTC)

Definitely! Cost is a factor we cannot ignore.

WordPress not being the same as it used to be has put off many people from pursuing a fansite. But also, I think streaming has made it more difficult to access a lot of media that back in the day would have been ripe for fan content. Also screenshots are harder to get or much more "heavy" because of Ultra HD formats that people end up without much space to do other things on their web spaces. There's also the muddy waters of copyright to fight. No one wants to dedicate time and perhaps money to a website that will be taken down by the big companies at any moment

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meridian_rose on November 20th, 2025 11:11 am (UTC)

Yes, streaming! Easier to watch, harder to download and take screencaps of!
I'm so thankful for AO3 and their fair use stance because most sites like Youtube are ridiculous about 'copyright'. I wish the copyright holders would understand that seeing a fanvid can encourage someone to check out a show or movie they otherwise wouldn't have looked at.
The size is also an issue I agree for images and videos. People want AO3 to be able to host fanvids but it's just not feasible because of the server space you'd need for a vidding site committed to fair use.

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maevedarcy on November 20th, 2025 07:30 pm (UTC)

and AO3 hosts so much content already! I wonder if people realize how difficult it is to maintain a text-only archive. Imagine a video sharing platform! It would be insane!

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flareonfury on November 22nd, 2025 02:32 am (UTC)

Both of you had good points, I also think maybe lack of interest may have taken part - lack of fan donations such of icons, fics or fic recs, or fanart mainly. The gallery was a pain in the butt - but usually so worth it.

Getting hit with all the spam/robots stuff sucks.

Also lack of resources for layouts/css codes - I know two of my favorites punk-rose.com & the-seduction.net are offline and they had great ones. I only have a couple websites still saved to my computer - I wish I had thought to download more of codes years ago I haven't really found any newer ones that I liked that were free - most often are pay only and/or looks like something like tumblr or just scroll city which I get is better for phones but still...

I love seeing unique layouts - where everyone actually has their own marks on the internet - even if the layouts are simple - I love it when they are all different though. I mean a few might have been bad or hurt your eyes a bit but everyone has different tastes. One of my favorite designs was if the header changed every time you refreshed.

"There's also the muddy waters of copyright to fight. No one wants to dedicate time and perhaps money to a website that will be taken down by the big companies at any moment" meridian_rose

DEFINITELY probably a huge factor.

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meridian_rose on November 18th, 2025 05:08 pm (UTC)

That header looks amazing :D

Well done on archiving so many older fics! It is worth the tagging but I hear you on wondering about the extra effort for older works.

It is so sad when you try to revisit a comm and it's just gone :/ It has become worth saving to your own storage in some way any fic you enjoyed reading and any prompt tables from a community.

I think if the character/pairing bonus was just a bonus, an optional extra it wouldn't hinder the comm. Maybe both so people get the prompt and the choice of a bonus by using the character specified and/or the pairing (if you included both or chose character bonus for one round, and pairing bonus another?)

The icon hosting sounds like a lot of work, great job on that.

Good luck with fandomtrees! :D

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flareonfury on November 19th, 2025 03:33 am (UTC)

Awe thank you! I was little iffy on it because I couldn't get Wanda's lighting quite the way I wanted it, but overall mostly in love with it ♥

Thank you! Hopefully if I add in batches, I'll finish faster... Likely it's mostly just copying what I have at my fic community to AO3 and minor edits such as the notes/tagging system. I know tagging is important, and I appreciate it so much when I'm trying to find stuff I want to read, but it's like a little weirder doing the tagging myself? Maybe that's what it is. Or it's just awkward. IDK. I haven't been rereading my works for the most part because that would make it take longer.

You would think I learned my lesson of that over the years, but honestly I haven't downloaded fics (or really I think at that point I just printed them to read at school) since the early to mid-2000s. Hell, until recently I hadn't really thought to bookmark things at AO3. I just feel weird downloading them, plus I've delt with several computer crashes. I think the last time I downloaded anything may have been when I got access to a dropbox with the original Roswell show fics from an old fic archive that went down. I should probably check to see if I still have access to that... Now I have TONS AND TONS of LJ icons saved to my computer plus so many screencaps and random fandom photos as well. One of the worse losses I had was realizing just how much I posted to Photobucket for my various fansites and graphics of old without keeping on MY computer.

Now for the character/pairing bonus, I was thinking it as an optional extra where if you write something for the prompt along with the character/pairing you'd get double the points, but love your idea where it's optional - where it doesn't matter if they used the prompt or not so maybe they'd still end up writing something for the community & for the character/pairing? I was originally thinking maybe doing one month character, one month a pairing but there are so many characters and pairings in both fandoms that well, maybe adding both options won't hurt.

Icon hosting isn't too bad really once you get your pages set up the way you want them and not having to backtrack and re-edit/format everything if something isn't working which why I don't have a lot of the pages available - I wanted to start off small and then go from there. It's probably more manual than people want nowadays so I guess it could be a lot of work but it also usually turns out pretty? (or I maybe I just love my Wanda layout so much) I'll probably end up using that format when I post them to harpieicons since as much as I Iike the icon tables generators available, it's just causing me double or triple the work sometimes and I'm already doing the HTML coding there.

And thank you! Hopefully it'll inspire some new stuff :D

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meridian_rose on November 19th, 2025 09:02 am (UTC)

I don't feel weird about downloading since I have seen fics deleted but I have also added ao3 saver a chrome extension to my browser. I haven't had chance to see how well it works but it archives off fics you visit to a server that a fan has set up to store them. It's not official by ao3 but it just sits in the background and comes up with a green 'archived' tick when it's done.

I also use Tampermonkey script with AO3 Floating Comment Box to help with comments and AO3: Kudosed and seen history - helpful when you can't remember if you read something as this will tell you :)

The photobucket debacle was awful. And now I've got the Imgur problem unless I turn on VPN /sigh/

I don't think I explained well. I meant like ten points for the prompt, a bonus 5 if you used the character prompt as well? But yes, ignoring the prompt and just using the specified character (Or pairing) might get more fics written :) It's annoying you need paid time for polls because it's something you could do with asking the community users what they would prefer!

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flareonfury on November 22nd, 2025 02:54 am (UTC)

Can you believe I've never used any extensions although I mainly use Microsoft Edge anyway, or scripts? I think the most I've done & only lately was download the Glowy Purple Dark Mode skin by ao3commentoftheday @ tumblr. I'll have to check out the scripts you mentioned - they sound great.

Usually it just goes "can't leave kudos again" message, and I'm like damn. and then I'm like I knew this sounded familiar, LOL. I've been trying to bookmark things more often just in case and trying to leave comments (sometimes even again).

Yeah I started seasons_of_fandom going to use Imgur or one of the other ones and they just kept deleting even after putting No Delete option and I'd have to reupload for several people their sigs. I said no more after that & started using my domain which I had pre-bought for 3 years and I wasn't sure what else to do with the domain anyway so I figured why not on the Icon website. Now plan is remake several of my fansites for various ships I've had.

You did! (on explaining the points/prompts) I just I had it in my head maybe a little differently & it grew from there (also I like even numbers, so I'd probably do increments of 10points probably which I already do for the normal prompts.). I do have the option to make a poll, but I made one for the Bi-Weekly option instead of weekly, which the poll went well & people voted quickly - except still only a couple people of participated (besides me and I feel weird being the only one) since we've gone bi-weekly. But I will put it up for a vote on both communities and check out what wins out, that was a good idea.

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meridian_rose on November 22nd, 2025 12:58 pm (UTC)

Usually it just goes "can't leave kudos again" message, and I'm like damn. and then I'm like I knew this sounded familiar, LOL. I've been trying to bookmark things more often just in case and trying to leave comments (sometimes even again). I have read a fic and gone to leave and comment, only to find I already left a comment a year or more ago! Leaves me feeling like the Gandalf gif

Glad the brainstorming re points helps - and yes, even numbers for the win! Except for 3 ;)

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flareonfury on November 22nd, 2025 04:15 pm (UTC)

LMAO! I'd say it's a 50/50 chance I'll remember the fic, usually 'cause I tend to look for similar things I guess so with the AO3 filters I tend to find the same fics, or in certain cases reading all the ship works if it's rare enough (thus often re-reading them later on). I've had a few people comment again on some of my works namely my Supergirl rarepair series and I appreciate them so much. Makes me want to write more even if I can't think of anything.

3 is a good number ;D

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