cherry valley forever
Not today Justin
Peter Solarz
NASA
we're not kids anymore.
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Three Goblin Art
tannertan36
No title available
wallacepolsom
Janaina Medeiros
hello vonnie
blake kathryn
🪼
Today's Document
sheepfilms
Jules of Nature
Cosmic Funnies
ellievsbear
oozey mess
seen from Brazil
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seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
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@00biscuit
LOL [source]
From the thumbnnail I thought that it was just a jacket thrown over a box that the kitty had made himself comfortable on. I was NOT expecting the tiny little defeated voice to emerge.
The slight hand raised in surrender at the end
"It may not be high art but everyone's having too much fun to care" Cinematic Universe
The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns
Men in Black
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Kingsman: The Secret Service and Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Pacific Rim
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Feel free to add your own. Please note this is not just "any" fun blockbuster, it's a certain subset where it's a bit of a romp, everyone in the cast is having fun and it's just a joy to watch.
Princess Bride
might I submit Moulin Rouge!
Blues Brothers
from concernedape's 10 year anniversary post on steam
then vs. now
so the cah pride pack has options for buying it “with glitter" and “without glitter” and knowing cards against humanity they just tip like 3 tablespoons of fucking glitter into the pack of cards and send it out
this is absolutely what they’ve done
I did it to myself so you don’t have to
send help
thank you for your sacrifice
I love cards against humanity
everyone shut the FUCK UP and say happy 10th birthday to Stardew Valley immediately
We have come full circle
--
Hah.
I mean, if people want to go back to oldschool zines instead of glossy artbooks that are dickwaving contests, I'm cool with that.
1) AO3 does not need $130,000 every three months to operate. It needs a lot of money (I haven't checked the numbers) to operate quickly. Remove the money, and they lose bandwidth capacity and the site slows to a crawl. They own the servers; they won't lose data. Just speed. If AO3 doesn't get money, it'll run slower than the wayback machine.
(AO3 currently gets plenty of money; if you are short on funds, don't bother donating. If you're only a little tight for cash and want to be involved, donate the $10/year to get a membership. AO3 needs money, but AO3 does not specifically need your money. Do not feel guilty if you can't comfortably donate.)
2) AO3 does not have a "legal defense fund." The OTW, of which AO3 is only one project (...okay, it's the BIG project) has a legal team, which operates entirely pro bono - for free. However, their financial reports include info on how much that legal work would cost, if they paid for it, because of lawyer-taxes reasons. No money actually changed hands. AO3's lawyers support AO3 because they believe in its goals, not because they're getting paid.
3) Ads mean ad-company corporate interference, which is exactly what AO3 was created to get away from. Part of what happened on LJ, is when people couldn't get fanfic removed for being "disgusting, offensive, and perverse" (which wasn't against the TOS), they screencapped fanfic pages with ads on them, and sent notes to the ad companies saying, "Here is YOUR PRODUCT showing up next to EXPLICIT INCEST!!!!" And those companies complained to LJ, and suddenly there was a policy change.
4) AO3 does have paid memberships, or rather, the OTW does. They just don't get you any extra features on the Archive - just the right to vote in the elections. (Would those minimal-cost memberships cover the operating costs of the archive? Hell no. Are you, OP, ready to fork over an annual fee based on how many fics you post or read on the Archive? If not, shut up. There are already people covering your usage costs, and they do it by donating.)
5) They will indeed "stop receiving donations" when they have enough money. Enough money to cover their bandwidth costs forever. Enough money to hire a staff of full-time coders instead of relying entirely on volunteers. Enough money to hire an administration staff, again, instead of the all-volunteer system. Many nonprofits--most, actually--have some paid staff members, and the OTW would love to do that.
There's even ways to do so for ongoing costs like server fees--by having enough starting money to invest it, and get dividends/returns that cover the ongoing expenses, and still gains enough to cover occasional one-time expenses like server upgrades.
How much money is that?
Tens of millions to start. On top of "a couple of years operating costs." They don't have it. They don't expect to have it anytime soon. If you know an easy, no-strings-attached source of tens of millions of dollars (that doesn't involve, oh, a pyramid scam like NFTs or environmental destruction like cryptocurrency), feel free to suggest it.
Convince some nice billionaire to donate $50,000,000 to AO3 and they can stop the twice-a-year donation drive, and just have a small "donate/buy a membership" button somewhere on the main page, for the people who want to donate enough to get merch.
I think we are going to spend about $300k on servers this year as its a database refresh year and those are always expensive ones ( And yes with paid staff we could think harder about that and delay longer or maybe be more efficiant but one persons cost for two years makes that 300k look cheap ).
Also, I'm just saying, do you know what you need in order to "print out fanfiction and mail it to each other in binders"?
MONEY.
You need to pay for paper. You need to pay for ink. You need to pay someone to bind it, OR you need to pay for staples and a stapler and do it yourself*. And then you have to pay for postage! And, incidentally, you have to hope the zine you receive has stories you like in it.
So let's see. Let's say you and four of your fandom friends print a zine, and five other people want it. It doesn't qualify for media mail (I checked), so you have to pay for a manila envelope size. I'm going to assume you already own a printer (you will not be able to print this much material at the library), and that each of you wrote a story averaging 1500 words. I happen to have a WIP open in another tab, so I looked at my word count and page count and did the math, and you're looking at about 500 words per page if you single-space (which is hard to read, but hey! this costs money!). So that's fifteen pages, for a total of 150 pages if you and your friends also want to keep copies of the zine. So let's look at the cost of your print run, shall we? ONE REAM OF PRINTER PAPER: $10.79 PACK OF STAPLES: $2.18 PACK OF ENVELOPES: $5.28 LARGE ENVELOPE SHIPPING WITHIN THE US: $2.16 each
(that's a total of $10.80 for shipping by the way) And you're paying for all this. Keep that in mind. This is you paying a fee so other people can read your work. For this single zine, you've spent $29.05...or the cost of being a member of the OTW for three years. Now, I'll grant you some of these costs would be spread out. That pack of staples will still be mostly full by the time you say "fuck it." The cheapest pack of envelopes I could find came 25 to a pack. You can print two and a half zines out of that ream of paper. But even so, the shipping alone costs more than an OTW subscription and you're only getting five stories out of it.
I'll leave you with this. It's from an actual zine called The Displaced, that I own, that was published in 1978. Today we'd call it a longfic; back then they called it a novel. It was published by a woman named Lois Welling, and here's part of what she wrote in the dedication: "To Ruth Newman, who is neither a Science Fiction nor a Trek fan; but ended up with over two years of listening to, reading, correcting, proofing and finally typing some of "The Displaced."
To Melissa Bayard; without her excited interest and 'volunteering' to print it, "The Displaced" would not be a reality. Thanks Melissa. To my parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Tomse; who were supportive enough to advance some real cash money to the project. And my brothers, Jack and Jim; who would have--and did give lots of encouragement."
[Image ID: the above-mentioned dedication page from The Displaced. In addition to the relevant quoted dedications, there are additional dedications to several of the author's friends, her husband, and her children. The entire page is typewritten except for the signature at the bottom, which is hand-written. End ID.]
So as a reminder: this woman was not young. I've actually traced her online to see if I could send her a postcard and be like "hey! I found your zine! Thank you for writing it!" (I can, if I read it fast enough, she's old) and she would have been in her late thirties to early 40s when she published The Displaced. She was married. She had kids. She had to borrow money from her parents to make this zine. You kids sure you want to go back to that? Just asking.
*we're assuming standard old-school zine format, not getting fancy with needle and thread.
I started writing fanfic when there were still a few paper fanzines.
I belonged to one for years. Our “editor” used the fact that she paid for printing to play tiny dictator. She cut our stories mercilessly, because every page cost money. She charged us for subscriptions (which was fair, and reasonable), and then refused to tell us where the money went. I had some art get lost in the mail and she never forgave me.
AO3 is better. It costs me less to be a member of infinite fanzines and stories than it did to belong to one paper publication, and no one tells me what to do.
I understand.
You found paradise in AO3, you had a good trade, you made a good living.
The website protected you and there were courts of law.
And you didn't need a physical zine.
But uh, now you come out and you say - 'Why is AO3 asking for money?'
But you don't ask with respect.
You don't offer friendship.
You don't even think to thank them for all they do.
Instead, you come into my house on this day of the Lord, and you ask AO3 not to ask for money.
This is right up there with “I was there, gandalf” and “Ceci n'est pas une pipe“ in discourse memes, and I laugh every time.
raises hand
I’ve made paper zines. Relatively recently, at least relative to the 1970s.
In 2014, I made minizines for a bunch of different fandoms. I did everything I could to keep costs down — half-size, black and white, mostly fanart, no text longer than 1000 words. I think the Les Mis zine (to no one’s surprise) came out longest, at 32 pages and requiring 8 sheets of paper. The others mostly needed 5 or 6.
Holy shit, but it was a ton of work. Wrangling contributors, proofreading, editing, getting everything formatted and printed. I went to a local print shop instead of trying to do it myself (which I could only do because all of my zines were G-rated) and I only took them to local zinefests and cons, so no mailing except for contributor’s copies. It still took a couple of years just to break even on my printing and postage costs. It was fun, but I don’t think I’d do it again.
And while I did all that, I had a recurring $5 monthly donation to the OTW set to autopay. I still do. They have more than earned every penny.
I think a lot of people have no concept of what it costs to maintain a scalable, functional, interactive website that has as many users and as little downtime as AO3 does. To put it in perspective, I worked for a company running cloud software and managing patient data that about 20 hospitals used. Keep in mind usually only a couple of people from each location were logged on at any time. We used a managed hosting service to offset the costs of operating our own machinery/running a whole ass data center with IT personnel. Do you know how much that was per month? $14k. We had essentially two EC2 instances in AWS and a moderate amount of storage. I don't know if AO3 uses AWS but they probably use similar technology at the very least. If they're not leveraging cloud computing technology, then they have to maintain a physical space and physical servers, which comes with its own array of costs. We had to do it for like 30 people max. They have to do it for MILLIONS. That means multiple servers, backups, software and enterprise OS licenses, and people who know how to create and maintain a site that can handle thousands of users creating, running searches, etc at any given time. This isn't adding Javascript to a blog. They likely have to have people come in as contractors who have expertise in the areas of data caching technologies, understand message queue management, understand distributed database management, etc. Maybe they have some people who want to volunteer for that, but I find it more likely that they have volunteers and bring in contractors for some of the work because that's a full time job for several people....like just the maintenance. So if it's a team of volunteers with full time jobs and they're doing this in their SPARE time, that's even more people. If AO3 is getting volunteers for that, they're probably spending serious money on outreach then. Regardless, I don't think a lot of people understand what the costs of hardware and physical space alone for a site this size would be like.
I find it hilarious how often I see posts of this type. Despite OTW being pretty open about its practices, people just don’t know.
Owning the literal physical servers is a huge cornerstone of the original concept of the project. This is to avoid de facto censorship from hosting companies.
While some contractors have been paid here and there, the vast majority of the work has been purely volunteer. I’m not so sure about outreach either. There’s some, but nothing like many orgs. Oldschool fandom was just highly socially connected and extremely passionate about getting AO3 off the ground. People basically fought to jump on a grenade ahead of everyone else who wanted to.
But the general point stands: most randos on tumblr bitching about websites and money know nothing about how expensive it is.
"I don't know if AO3 uses AWS but they probably use similar technology at the very least. If they're not leveraging cloud computing technology, then they have to maintain a physical space and physical servers" - owning the servers was and is the fundamental point of AO3. "Leveraging cloud computing technology" is being on someone else's servers, which means someone else can decide whether to host your content or not, or what policies you need to follow. That is *the entire point* on which the Archive was founded.
"Maybe they have some people who want to volunteer for that, but I find it more likely that they have volunteers and bring in contractors for some of the work because that's a full time job for several people" - everyone is a volunteer, with a minimal number of exceptions I can count on one hand. You're right, it is a full time job for several people. For the most part, it's spread over more than several people, who do it in their spare time.
"If AO3 is getting volunteers for that, they're probably spending serious money on outreach" - nope. We put up posts saying 'hey please come volunteer!' and usually, people do.
However, the point that people don't know how expensive it is to run a website that is currently within the 100 most used sites on the internet is very true.
God... I still cannot believe how popular AO3 has gotten.
I know and yet my brain cannot comprehend.
I really can’t believe I’ve been on this hell site for 8 years
Impart me in your wisdom of ancient times
one time there was a tumblr user with the url “pizza” and she would just comment on any text post about pizza saying “omg that’s me” and then we found out she had an entire tag dedicated to saying the n word
One time somebody paid $750 for the url ‘hi’ and got deleted in less than a year for promoting weight loss scams
There’s always been something deeply wrong with this place.
and they only charged us $20 for it. not even $25. 7 years of development and so much love care and effort poured into this little bug game that you can spend hundreds of hours exploring and they only charged us $20. and they crashed every single distribution platform they had for hours and Steam literally ran out of digital keys for it because of the sheer number of people rushing to buy it.
It’s such a fucking flex, to be honest. Especially with Nintendo trying to get me to pay $90 for Mario kart nowadays???? I love you team cherry.
Actually, Silksong is cheaper in Latin America costing from $12-15 USD, because Team Cherry used regional pricing, so they took into account local income levels and currency value.
Making the game way more accessible and fair for players outside the U.S, so yeah!!
Huge thanks to Team Cherry for actually caring about this!
i had a dream that tumblr implemented a new feature where you could put physical items in someone's ask box so you could send handwritten letters and notes and stuff, but in practice you ended up needing to clean out your ask box weekly because people would just fill it with stuff like wet leaves and sand and ketchup
kitten
man. what on earth.
ok i flipped it. sorry
