The absolutely funniest thing about shepherd dogs is that the way to distinguish a well-trained professional herding dog from a random untrained one is that a well-trained shepherd doesn’t start herding before being given permission, and stops when ordered to do so. An untrained herding dog is still going to herd. It’s just not up to you what, when, and where.
My favorite genre of fiction is “the vibes here are somehow horrifying and warm and cozy at the same time”. Like, yeah we’re gonna fight the cosmic horror but in matching sweaters one of our teammates made type of vibe.
How To Make Your Own Fanfiction Archive, In Just Ten Easy Steps
As the go-to “person who knows about AO3” for quite a few people who read fanfic but aren’t really linked-in to wider fandom culture, I’ve fielded a lot of questions about how to do certain things on AO3 to which my best answer is “you should really start your own archive!” I think, in general, more fans starting their own small archives would be a net good for fandom. AO3 was never meant to be the only archive for all fandom, or even the main archive, and the more spread out and backed up we are the more resilient we are.
But of course I have to be reminded that a lot of fans these days don’t really have any idea how little “you should start your own archive!” really involves. (Also, that I should practice what I preach.) So I am now making my own fanfiction archive, and writing up this post as I do it to tell people how to make theirs!
Go to https://neocities.org/ and sign up for an account. It only needs a username (which will also be your website address), password, and email. Pick a username that will be related to your archive’s title!
Choose the free account option (if you ever need more than what the free account offers for a text-only archive, you should probably look into graduating from neocities.) This should take you to a menu of “how to make a website” tutorials. You should do them! They’re useful skills. But let’s get your archive running first.
Hit the big red Edit Site button, or open the menu under your username and select “Edit Site”.
Select the “Index.html” file to edit. You’re now in an HTML Editor. Congrats, you’re a web developer c. 1999!
Find where it has text between the < title> tags. Delete the filler text, and put in the title of your new archive. This text will be what shows on the tab when people go to your archive.
Find where it has text between the < h1 > tags. This will be big header text at the top of your page. Put the title of your archive here again. If you have no experience with HTML, you should read over the other sample text. It covers the basic basics very well! Once you’ve done that, you can delete everything else between the < /h1> tag and the < /body> tag. Save your index.html file.
Get an HTML file for a fanfic you would like to add to your archive. If it’s on AO3, you can use the html download option built into AO3. If you have it as a word processor/google docs file, you should have the option to save as an html file. Save that html file to your computer.
Go back to Edit Site on Neocities and go to “upload”. Find the html file you saved and upload it. (You can also drag and drop files to upload.)
The file you uploaded should now be showing with your other neocities files. Right-click on the title and select “copy link”.
Go in to edit index.html again. Under where you put your header text, type < br> < a href=“ . Then paste in the link you copied. Then type ”> Then put in the title of the fic. Then type < /a> . Then save the index page again when you’re done. You can do this for every fanfic you have.
Congratulations! You now have your very own personal private fanfiction archive that you are 100% in charge of and make all the rules for. It’s at least as good as half the ones I was reading on when I started reading fanfiction and will serve its function well as a way to let people read your fic. You can link to it from anywhere you want! (Including your AO3 profile.)
(I am honestly way more disproportionately proud of finally making that than I expected to be. It’s nice to have your own archive.)
If you make one, share it here ! I want to see!
Oh, this guide is great!
People following this blog probably know I use the free/base Neocities plan for my fansite. I host a more than just plaintext there (some .pdfs, graphics, all sorts), and I have not come close to running up against the 1GB limit yet; if you’re plaintext posting fic, it is more than enough to host anything you could possibly want. You don’t have to pay a penny, as I’ve seen some people wonder. Trust me. You will never get close to that 1GB.
If you have any fic that is illustrated, it’s also gonna cover those still images, unless you have truly enormous amounts of fanart in like, .raw format or something, LMAO. You’re good.
Anyway, I want to add a few tips:
If you have new fic you want to post and which you therefore can’t immediately download as HTML from AO3, or for any reason you want to post a fic to your site and not AO3, you can run it through this Google Docs script. It formats it for you; I often use it, in fact, if I have a bunch of text I need to quickly add basic HTML to for the site. It’s also obviously useful for formatting to post to AO3 as originally intended, haha. This naturally won’t give you the tags, rating info, etc that AO3 lets you download and include, but the fic itself will now post with all your line breaks etc included!
To upload and embed images, first you upload the image file to Neocities. This will automatically assign it a URL for where it is hosted. Then, wherever you want it in your fic, you embed it using: “< img src=”[URL HERE]“ >. (Remove the spaces!) Yep, that simple. Here’s an example of what uploading a picture as its own file looks like in Neocities:
So that bottom image has a URL- "https://autothots.neocities.org/images/G2AutobotInsigniaAlternate.png”. I would copy that URL into the tags as above and presto! It would show up on my page. I host all my images on Neocities itself, and it works great. So no need to worry about finding a host.
If anyone wants any resources for stuff relating to this, do feel free to ask, I’ve accumulated all sorts over the course of mashing my site together with half-remembered HTML knowledge from 2005, haha.
all the frothing-at-the-mouth posts about how “don’t you dare put a fic writer’s work into chatGPT or an artist’s work into stable diffusion” are. frustrating
that isn’t how big models are made. it takes an absurd amount of compute power and coordination between many GPUs to re-train a model with billions of parameters. they are not dynamically crunching up anything you put into a web interface.
chances are, if you have something published on a fanfic site, or your art is on deviantart or any publicly available repository, it’s already in the enormous datasets that they are using to train. and if it isn’t in now, it will be in future: the increases in performance from GPT 2 to 3 to 4 were not gained through novel machine-learning architectures or anything but by ramping up the amount of data they used to train by orders of magnitude. if it can be scraped, just assume it will be. you can prevent your stuff from being used with Glaze, if you’re an artist, but for the written word there’s nothing you can do.
not to be cynical but the genie is already far more out of the bottle than most anti-AI people realize, i think. there is nothing you can do to stop these models from being made and getting more powerful. only the organizing power of labor has a shot at mitigating some of the effects we’re all worried about
this post had over 10k notes and lots of people in replies getting very angry and panicky and threatening imaginary bad actors and begging people not to put their fics into chatgpt. the reply is authoritatively saying “anything that is given to AI it can use it later to draw from.” no source! like - i don’t know if they save your prompts. they probably do for some other nefarious purposes. but:
these are the size of the training sets used to train gpt-3. as a rule of thumb in natural language processing, one word is on average two tokens. the common crawl dataset alone is around 205 billion words; for gpt-3 they don’t even manage to use all of it. this is the scale of the data they need. they are not re-training their model with the little prompts you put in, and even if they did, it’s like… a drop of water in the ocean. it’s not gonna have an effect on how the model behaves.
i think people are, on a gut level, still understanding these models as “collage machines.” they’re not. they are not borg-assimilating all your best ideas from your fics to frankenstein them back together. they are statistical models. they are compressing gargantuan amounts of data down into smaller (still huge, but much smaller) models of that data by looking at trends and likelihoods and repetitions. i’m not saying you’re a great person if you use gpt to autocomplete old fics but even if they were for some reason adding your prompts to their datasets, it’s not gonna have an effect.
the culture on here about anti-ai stuff has approached, like, mythology - making up shit about what they can do, talking about how scary they are, ghost stories, moral panic. this wild overstatement about what they can do only benefits the companies selling them, and those trying to use them as pretense to undermine labor.
