Pocket is shutting down (link). For those who don’t know, Pocket was a read-it-later service that let you save links to articles and other text pages on your account, and allowed you have offline reading access to the content. It didn’t work perfectly on all websites, but there were a couple situations that I used it, where it was extremely helpful.

I used to save news articles and opinion pieces that were longer than a quick 5-minute-read for later reading on my e-reader (the obvious, intended way to use the service). I also used it to, funnily enough, read fanfiction. While browsing AO3 or some other website, it was easy to add short fanfics while browsing a single search, and read them comfortably all at once. Pocket’s tagging system made it easy to tag fandoms, ships, etc.

Pocket also had a neat feature where it would use text-to-speech to turn an article into an audiobook. It was really convenient for hands-free consuming.

I would say that my usage of the service was about 90% fanfiction (I never used TTS for this), and 10% news articles and blog posts. I’ve even used it on reddit to read original fiction from some of the writing subreddits.

The integration of Pocket with Kobo was one of key highlights for the device for me. No longer was I reading fanfic on my phone or tablet, which would keep me up into the late hours from the blue light. Instead, I was reading on my ereader, and getting a (probably) better night’s sleep.

In the past few months, AO3 has actually been blocking scrapers (including Pocket) due to not having enough server bandwidth to handle the traffic. They’ve been facing increasing costs from both growing human traffic, and AI language models abusing the vast collection of written works by real people. I haven’t been able to use Pocket like I normally do, even before this unfortunate announcement.

I hope Kobo will implement the same functionality with another service (It’s literally one of the main reasons I bought the device), but until then, my only workaround has been to download epubs from AO3 and use KoboFileServer to covert to kepub and transfer them onto the device. I wrote a guide on how to set this up.

For those of you who aren’t keen on technical solutions like KoboFileServer, another option is to use Send to Kobo/Kindle by Djazz. It’s a service operated by a single person, but it works fairly well. The only issue is that it may go down occasionally since it seems Djazz hosts it on their personal home server, meaning they’re still susceptible to internet and power outages.

I don’t know if I’ll figure anything else out, it’s just annoying to transfer multiple epubs for smaller fanfics, so I’ve been reading them on my phone. I’m honestly praying that Kobo is working on an alternative. I’ve also been looking into 3rd-party solutions like Wallabag. I would prefer not to pay for another service, since I already pay for Kobo VIP, so make it happen Kobo!!

I previously wrote a blog post about how I've got my current setup with dreamwidth. I liked DW's tag structure, but I hated how SSGs made you write posts in Markdown.

After getting over that hurdle (I still find it kind of annoying), the next biggest problem was finding a blog theme that I liked. I've checked out a bunch of themes from Hugo, Jekyll, Hexo, etc. but I couldn't really find anything that was simple AND attractive, until now.

I found this absolutely gorgeous Fuwari theme from Saicaca.

After cloning the github repo, I found that editing the config file isn't too hard. Most of the code is readable, and everything is preloaded. I'm already pretty happy with how everything looks, so I've decided to finally commit to this blog instead of forwarding http://blog.pomnavi.net to my dreamwidth archive.

I still don't like having to write in markdown, but at least the blog is nice to look at now. All my posts will still be archived on DW because I don't trust myself not to screw something up, like the test run I had with 11ty and Hugo.

I hate the experience I had with SSGs so far (especially with trying to hook-up a 3rd party CMS), but I'm going to try straight markdown for now. If I need rich text conversions, I'll probably look up another tool online.

This has been a really annoying saga, but I'm gonna keep sticking with this until it breaks.

This isn’t really a rant per se, but I just wanted to get my thoughts out there since I’ve been seeing a lot of this kind of discourse on my dashboard and timelines recently while doing research into printing fanfics.

I think a lot of the negativity towards fanfiction writers who want to have a physical representation of their work, and maybe sell at a marginal cost (i.e. cost getting something printed and shipped, plus like a dollar or two extra for their efforts), is unwarranted.

Yes, AO3 is correct, people should not be monetizing their fics, and doing that so openly on a site that is the last bastion of legal defense against copyright holders is not good! (Do not mention or link to donations/payments/stores on AO3). According to copyright law, it is illegal to violate the intellectual property rights of registered works. The Fair Use defense only works if a work is transformative, and for non-commercial purposes.

But there are thousands of zines and doujinshi created by fanartists, that sell for real money! Again, most of it is for marginal costs, to cover the cost of printing and distributing, plus a little extra for the artists. Those zines/doujinshi are violating the same laws that a fanfic zine would. Those artists are making profit! Some of those fanart zines have print runs up to 1000 copies.

Yet people go out of their way to harass any fanfic writers that dare sell their works on the down-low (again, not on AO3) wanting the same thing. These are works that are selling maybe 5-20 physical copies maximum!!

I really think Japanese doujinshi culture is correct on this point. Both fanartists and fanfiction writers are selling their works in low quantities, and sites like Pixiv Factory make it really easy to set up your work for print on-demand. Obviously, if rights-holders object, it gets taken down. But guess what? There’s very few chances of them objecting, if you keep it small.

The older zine culture from back in the Star Trek slash days understood this. Some people made some money, but 99% of it was within hobby levels.

I just want the same thing! I wanna see my works in a physical form!

Above is a collection of Pumpkin Scissors doujinshi, along with my own fanfic doujin at the bottom right.

Guess how many copies I sold of my doujin? Three! One of which is my own. I hardly even made enough money to cover the cost of my own copy, never mind shipping from Japan. Which is fine! I appreciated people liking it enough to order it to begin with.

Fanfic writers shouldn’t be harassed about wanting to get their doujins/zines printed. Rather than forcing readers to format the book themselves, and go through the tedious process of bookbinding each individual book, it would be better if the author could just offer the formatted file, or an actual copy, for sale. Fanbinding is super cool, but it’s too high of a bar (and cost prohibitive) for someone who just wants a nice, printed copy of their stuff.