Why are people still up in arms about AO3 needing donations to run? Their budget is publicly available. You can go onto the website, right now, and read it. If you donate more than a certain amount (pretty sure it’s more than $10), you can vote in their elections, because you’re considered a member, and that’s how memberships work.
It’s a free site to use, but not to run or to maintain, especially not with all these net neutrality battles.
Y’all gotta understand that it’s not just fanworks, there’s a lot more that goes into archiving.
Signal boosting this because it’s important af. OTW is a nonprofit organization, specifically a public charity as classified by the US tax code. That means they file a 990 tax report each year that lets you see all of their finances – what they’re spending money on, where their money comes from, etc. You can see their 2016 990 here if you’re so inclined.
And if you’re not sure about how OTW is using their donations? Ask questions. Get involved. Even if you’re not comfortable with or not in a position to donate, there are lots of opportunities to give your time; it’s an all-volunteer organization that recruits regularly. I know for a fact that I get more value out of what OTW provides than most, if not all, my other paid services combined, so $10 to be a member is more than worth it.
ao3 is routinely used as an example of an excellent digital archive in library and information schools – they’re not just a fansite; they’re held in high regard by people across the industry. they run initiatives to preserve old fansites and groups, in addition to the day to day work of hosting all of our work ad-free to ensure maximum creative freedom. ao3 is not just a place to post your fic; it catalogues and preserves our history and culture.
Every year, multiple times a year, they convince ppl to fork out thousands of dollars and….literally nothing changes. There’s no doubt in my mind they’re pocketing most of this money lol
Yep
That’s what’s so wild to me. They’ve made exactly 0 changes other than adding the ‘Exclude’ tags and that def doesn’t take 130k.
You know if any of you actually bothered to click the link it’ll take you to their budget update and break down exactly what the spend the money on, over 70% of which is spent on server expenses, monitoring tools and system licences.
They also spent a good amount of the rest of the 30% budget on significant server overhaul costs.
AO3 is literally a service you get for free and the audacity you’d have to not bother reading the very open budget plan they have, but to then bitch and whine about people donating to keep the site running is wild.
Also, re: Wendig’s firing. Can the social justice crowd in the SW fandom stop fighting about shipping and character stanning and in-universe morality questions and all that other self-indulgent diegetic crap and focus on this? I personally love Wendig’s work but it’s also just completely fucked up that he got fired for, primarily, defending queer representation and standing up to– I didn’t actually know the level of harassment, this is a quote from his blog:
“I also started receiving TONS of harassment – harassment that has gone on for years, harassment that has required me to contact local police and warn them of SWATting attempts, harassment across all corners of the Internet, here, FB, Reddit, YouTube. Some of it was bot stuff, obviously, or sock puppets, but some of it was pretty creepy, and very personal. I didn’t call a lot of it out or even highlight, but it was there, a sort of… constant background noise. (Christ, for an extra special treat go search for my name and check out the YouTube videos if you want an eye-opening glimpse.)“ (x)
Like. Holy shit. This was over gay characters in a series of Star Wars novels.
I was so disappointed in the SW fandom for immediately factionalizing when the matter of Tran Loan’s harassment came up. But in some ways this is even more disturbing, because it’s not just harassment, it’s a creative being fired for having progressive politics and for refusing to take harassment lying down.
If you care about representation in Star Wars, this is where you take your fight. When writers explicitly are thrown under the bus for writing rep and voicing progressive politics. Because honestly, if people let this slide – and I truly expect that, I am being extremely optimistic to even ask anything of this rotten fandom – how can people expect to get any representation, ever? How can you expect you’ll be able to pressure the writers (that’s who the sj crowd is always trying to pressure!) when they might lose their jobs and be targeted by terrifying threats over giving you what you want?
Honestly stop blaming the creative team, in light of all this I think Wendig is a man of exceptional conviction and courage. He faced a gauntlet of shit and no support from his bosses for putting what a lot of people on this site consider a bare minimum of progressive politics in his work. For all we know, a lot of people would love to do more but they’re scared.
It’s tone policing.
He was harassed.
He became negative and uncivil as a result of being harassed.
He was fired for being negative and uncivil.
Honestly I don’t even want to use that language.
He’s actually a super positive and upbeat guy. He didn’t become negative and uncivil, it’s not like he was this fountain of invective and rage. People have literally mocked his tweets for being too energetically, goofily supportive. So much of what he posts is this over the top sincere encouragement.
He responded to individual cases of harassment by not taking shit, and he posted political opinions.
People have ALREADY started pretending he was this awful raging angry guy, and have already made bullshit attacks about him being a fake ally, so I don’t want to play into that.
In the book, Sophie possess a certain kind of magical power – she makes things real by saying them. She can lay spells just by saying them. When she made hats, and she told a hat that it would make a rich young man fall in love with it, a rich young man fell in love with the woman who bought it. When she told a hat it would make some woman look beautiful, everyone knew the mayor’s wife looked positively radiant in it. It’s what drew the Witch to her hat shop in the first place. When she cursed out a bucket of plant food, it turned to potent weed killer. When she told herself she might as well be an old woman, when she told herself she was doomed to fail, when she told herself she was plain and boring and no one would ever notice her, no one did.
When Howl tried to break the spell on Sophie, and he tried many times, he always failed. Not because his magic was less powerful than the Witch’s, but because it was less powerful than Sophie’s.
Y’all need to have a greater degree of 1- healthy suspicion in Alexa and corporate surveillance devices personal assistants, and 2- understanding of how dangerous this kind of algorithm is in the hands of a multinational company (and anyone for that matter.)
To begin with, that data is both available for sale and able to be subpoenaed by the government. Alexa’s records and recordings have already been used in criminal trials. In the US, a digital record of your emotional patterns can be used to deny you housing, jobs, and to rule on your ability to exercise your basic rights. Consider that psychiatric stigma and misdiagnosis can already be wielded against you in legal disputes and the notion of a listening device capable of identifying signs of distress for the purpose of marketing to you should be made more clearly concerning.
Moreover we have already seen the use of algorithms like this on Facebook and other “self-reporting” (read: user input) sites capable of identifying the onset of a manic episode [1][2][3], which have been subsequently been linked to identifying vulnerable (high-spending) periods to target ads at these users, perhaps most famously in selling tickets to Vegas (identified in a TedTalk by techno-sociological scholar Zeynep Tufekci where she more generally discusses algorithms and how they shape our online experiences to suggest and reinforce biases).
The notes on this post are super concerning- we are being marketed to under the guise of having our emotional needs attended to by the same people who inflicted that emptiness on us, and everyone is just memeing.
i love how edward elric dresses like the typical anime protag (all black, red cloak w/ huge emblem, tight leather pants, always puts skulls or spikes on everything, huge belt with a chain on it, etc. etc.) but literally everyone else dresses like normal fucking people so he just constantly gets berated for his Shit Awful Taste
cf also everything he makes with alchemy.
me at first: “Wow this magic sure has a kind of gothic sensibility with all the dragons and spikes and shit that comes out”
me another few volumes in, “Oh, no, Ed’s just… Like That”
Probably the most 12 year old kid thing about Ed the entire series
Cave woman would have not known about the menopause until the life expectancy increased. Maybe there is another human hormonal change that we are not aware of as we have not reached the particular age it happens.
Totally incorrect! Actually, the fact that human females live past their reproductive life span is responsible for a great deal of human evolution, especially the ways in which we differ from our close ape relatives. This is called the Grandmother hypothesis.
Let me explain.
So the idea that human life expectancy has increased due to modern advancements is a myth. The average life span has certainly increased, however this is not because humans live longer (we have always lived to around 70-90yrs), but because infant mortality has decreased. In other words, modern medicine and abundant access to resources have decreased how how many children die, therefore increasing the average years humans live past birth.
So, Humans have known about menopause since the beginning, and it’s actually a huge part of our evolutionary history. Other apes do not live past their reproductive life span, as their bodies degrade shortly after ceasing to be fertile- evolution is all about how many offspring can be produce after all. Its generally a waste of resources to continue feeding adults who cannot reproduce when fertile adults and children are competing for those same resources.
So the fact that human females live for upwards of 30yrs past fertility was considered an evolutionary paradox. The key is that humans are really smart (sort of). We require a very long time to develop our brains, and so our infants are completely useless- unable to evan walk for a year, much less feed or protect themselves until middle childhood. They require a lot of attention and caring for, constant vigilence, not to mention hours spent teaching them basic survival tasks.
As a result, humans developed cooperative childraising systems, in which members outside of the child’s immediate family are responsible for caring for the young. However, if all the adults are busy raising their own children, no one would ever care for anyone else’s, except the older, not-yet-fertile children (who do assume childrearing roles, but are still developing and therefore are not good at it.) As a result, the females who stayed alive past their reproductive life span, no longer responsible for their own children, were able to care for the children of their children, allowing for their genes to be passed down more successfully. This creates a positive feedback system in which females lifespan progressively increases, since the older the grandmother, the more children the mother is able to have, and the more successfully they will be raised to adulthood, passing on the genes for long life to their children in turn.
This effect however decreased with subsequent generations: it’s less economical to have a grandmother AND a great grandmother taking care of the young. The payoffs aren’t high enough to push our lifespans even higher.
Tldr; humans have always had unusually long lifespans BECAUSE menopause occurs, and this is an integral aspect of our evolution, causing us to be as intelligent and adaptive as we are.
Even better, one of the ways we know about the grandmother effect is because you also see it in orcas! They can live to 80, but generally stop breeding in their 30s. There are three known species that have this kind of menapause– us, orcas and the Short-Finned Pilot Whale (also another very social species).
There’s a really nice explanation on this article:
So a few years ago I was working with a nutrition project in Mali targeting child malnutrition. A lot of these kinds of programs target young mothers for nutrition education, because women are the ones who cook, mothers feed their kids, makes sense.
Actually, these folks found that it was most effective to target not mothers, but grandmothers. Because in the big extended families most Malians live in, the grandmothers have more influence, so they can negotiate a better distribution of food. Usually, everyone in the family eats out of one big bowl (or a handful of big bowls, because sometimes families are 50+ people). The men always eat first, then the women and kids, so the men get all the good bits of meat that were in the stew. Because “they’re working in the fields more so they need more food.” This is a tricky thing to change, and young women have very little influence over intra-family dynamics. Older women, though, can organize their sons, can talk to their husbands, often control meal planning and budgeting, so if you help them understand that actually, kids need more nutritionally dense foods because their stomachs are smaller, so giving them the leftovers all the time isn’t good enough… then you’re more likely to see actual change in kids’ diets and health.
the thing I really like about The Good Place is that it thematically revolves around ethics and what makes a person good or bad (both in the sense of– how do we define good and bad, and in the sense of–what aspects of someone’s formative environment and social group influence how they will treat other people).
and the conclusion that the show comes to over and over is both that it is possible to become a better person, and because it’s possible we owe it to each other to keep trying to be better– for all eternity if we must.
there’s no end to it, and (should I make a prediction) no real “good place” where you’ve gotten to the finish line and “won” at being a good person. it’s an eternal commitment to other people.
you create your own good place, because whether you’re in a good place or a bad place is defined by how people treat each other. when your community has collectively learned to respect, value, and help each other, you experience the peace and support that you might have once imagined in the abstract being awarded to the truly “good”
In collaboration with the Quileute Tribe, this site seeks to inform Twilight fans, parents, teachers, and others about the real Quileute culture, which indeed has a wolf origin story, a historic relationship with the wolf as demonstrated in songs, stories, and various art forms, as well as a modern, multi-dimensional community with a sophisticated governance system. We also hope to offer a counter narrative to The Twilight Saga’s stereotypical representations of race, class, and gender, and offer resources for a more meaningful understanding of Native American life and cultures.
BOOSTING!
This is the most beautiful thing I’ve laid eyes on today
funeral-biscuit 