
shark vs the universe

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Acquired Stardust
Sade Olutola

Discoholic đȘ©
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Claire Keane

ç„æ„ / Permanent Vacation
we're not kids anymore.
d e v o n
Jules of Nature
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
wallacepolsom
trying on a metaphor

romaâ

@theartofmadeline
hello vonnie
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@accursed-tower
just learned that magnolias are so old that theyâre pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees
They existed *before beetles*
Why is this sad? Why am I sad?
https://xkcd.com/1259/
Bee Orchid
This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.
(my own photos)
Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.
Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.
You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:
Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world.
ïżŒ
First quote from the linked article. Found it poetic.
Fuck Around and Find Out
youâre hearing it more and more
Spotify Premium ad: âImagine playing music without interruptions! Infinite skipping! Replay the song you want! And even do it offline? No ads! Whatever songs you want! For a small monthly payme-â Me: *nods, turns off Spotify and turns on my MP3 player and does all the things they offer, but for free and with songs they donât even have*
For those of you who might not know how to do any of this:
To convert CD audio into mp3s, you just follow the steps here
To play mp3 files, you download an mp3 player like Winamp here and away you go
On mobile? There are plenty of free mp3 players for your phone available, too, so check them out
You donât need to be tethered to an online streaming service for your music. Be free.
You can also rip audio files from youtube and find files all over the internet. It is far easier to come across great and lesser known music if you dont limit yourself to spotify.
Hereâs a tutorial on how to get the music and playlists you like with unlimited listening/downloads. This is a free way to do it that I believe is a balance between cost, time, and pros & cons:
If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with their metadata attached, but there could be risks associated (I would worry more about viruses than lawsuits these days, though). Deciding a method for acquiring music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.
1. Find the song on Youtube. YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming service.
This is great if you already listen to music on Youtube, but there might be a better method for going direct from Spotify, though this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to the whole thing to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.
2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free. Itâs probably against the YT terms of service, but youâre not going to get sued.
I like y2mate for downloading YT videos (or their audio in mp3s) because itâs a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes itâs laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. For easy file management, download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the âsong nameâ.mp3.
3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album, track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.
iTunes is free and and logical if you have an iPhone, but limited in its capabilities. I do all my management/listening in MusicBee (free for Windows) because of its playlist and management features, as well as having a very customizable interface. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library, or do so manually. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire albumâs metadata at once easily with Auto-Tagging. Auto-Tag can fetch the details from the internet and fill in artist, tracks, album artwork, etc and save that information to the mp3 file. You can edit this manually if needed too. Drag and drop the edited songs to any other player you may want to add them to so it can find the files.
4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.
MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and dynamic features. You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on other computers with MusicBee installed. I think the playlist features on MusicBee are better than what is on streaming services. You can create an auto-playlist of your recently-added music so you can easily find the ones that are new and might need need editing, adding to other playlists, etc. I have custom tags for music by LGBT artists, sapphic love songs, and more. I also drag-and-drop these playlists directly into iTunes so I have them on my phone too (you can do this to make a new playlist or just edit/add songs to a current one).
There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming, though they usually have fees for that feature. Because you arenât streaming the music and rather storing it, youâll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but memory is cheap these days.
You can buy a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so having to store the songs isnât much of a downside. Plus, the song will never âleave the serviceâ, you can listen to it offline, etc.
I do encourage people to pay for art, especially from small, independent artists. You have to pay for art if you want to keep it alive, but there is debate over if streaming services are really âpaying the artistâ. Alternatives include buying and ripping CDs, purchasing merch or tour tickets (where artists make a lot of their money), etc to support them with something other than streaming views.
ID. a tweet from Don Hughes @/getfiscal dated Feb 18 21. it reads, âStarted imagining paying for Spotify for the next thirty or so years and got a bit dizzy, cancelled a bunch of subscriptions, installed Linux on my computer and then pulled out my old CDs to rip. Going caveman.â End ID.
Seconding MusicBee! Also, you can use a library subscription to access Freegal, which allows (depending on your library system) up to five free downloads a week. Completely free, actually legal, yours to keep, no DRM or any crap like that.
For indie producers, always check if they have something like Bandcamp! Bandcamp lets you download as well, and has significantly higher royalties going to the actual artists (Spotify pays them⊠very little).
Jsyk, winamp rips cds natively. You can set whatever bitrate you like. Been doing *that* since last century.Â
GUESS WHAT DAY IT IS
seems that Chrome has around 60-65% market share, so itâs not totally dominating the market yet but itâs worrying that weâre basically reliant on Apple and Microsoft to hold the line.
Does Firefox not count for anything?
about 10% and falling, but perhaps that can change, I just donât see how.
Chrome edging towards 70% on desktop, Microsoft has thrown in the towel, Safari obviously rules iOS, Firefox exists only as insurance for Chrome.
Please, please Iâm begging you, use firefox.
PLEASE install firefox as a mobile browser and then run adblock on your mobile browser itâs so good I promise.
Look.
Look.
I know Iâm a total grind about open source stuff but browsers are the PERFECT place to learn to love open source software and for so long FireFox was a major part of the browser market and sometimes if you want to see what kind of fuckery google is up to it helps to see the kinds of things they block in firefox and just
Thereâs an organization that makes free, excellent, safe software that doesnât collect and market your data but for some reason two thirds of the world uses a google product and most of the leftover population uses apple and just
I promise, firefox is so good - the extensions are incredible look - I can use lightbeam to see what sites I use and how they connect to other sites (bottom right should give you an idea how much time I spend on tumblr)
or I can look at ublock origin and see that itâs blocked over 2 million requests since I installed it or I can run the facebook container extension and stop facebook from tracking me and you know what I bet you can do a lot of that on chrome too but youâre doing that while chrome itself is tracking you and gobbling up your activity for google and
firefox is so fuckin great and itâs such a great ambassador for other open source projects please be a big old fuckin nerd with me and use firefox and run a bunch of funky extensions and customize the fuck out of your web experience.
Wanna be a hacker? Firefox.
Wanna use instagram on desktop? Firefox.
Wanna be a killer researcher? Firefox.
Wanna properly credit artists? Firefox.
Wanna read a whole shitload of books? Firefox.
Wanna make video responses to shitlord youtubers?
Wanna shoot cat lasers at bugs?
Wanna use youtube as a music streaming service?
FIREFOX.
I just love firefox okay.
#does firefox have a mobile app #bc ive been using firefox religiously my whole life but the lack of an app back when i first got my phone is what led to my using chrome
It does! It does and itâs great! Iâve got Ublock Origin on my FF mobile app but Iâd also like to point out that you can create a FF account and basically sync everything across platforms if you want to so if you want all your bookmarks and extensions and stuff in your mobile browser and on three computers you just have to log in and sync.
Mobile Firefox is AMAZING. Seriously, how could anyone go without ad blockers on their phone?
@staff Not exactly the âwelcome back to the app storeâ you were expecting huh
THIS is the kind of protest that tumblr will care about sooner or later. Leave bad ratings and reviews on apple or in the google play store. Lower their rating so hard that it damages their userbase.
Logging off for a single day isnât of interest to tumblr. Iâm not saying yâall shouldnât protest in any way you can or want, but logging off the site for just one day isnât going to bother tumblr because tumblr doesnât CARE about your symbolic protest. Tumblr has proven time and again that it doesnât CARE about its userbase. Weâre still using the site and we wonât stop using the site any time soon because thereâs no alternative. But thatâs what weâd have to do to hopefully force tumblr to change anything. And they still wonât do it because their policy change isnât about family values or what the userbase allegedly wants. Itâs about money.
So, unless you stop using the site and app permanently, or for a long period of time, this isnât going to matter to tumblr. And when you do, you need to do it in big numbers.
Leaving them bad reviews in the apple app store or on google play (where itâll be harder because the current average rating is 4.4 stars and you need to edit or leave a LOT of bad reviews to drastically lower that), is going to do more to damage their reputation and thus do more to compromise their profit.
Guess what I just did.
guess what iâm doing
Putting this on my to do list for today
Merry Critmiss, Tumblr.
Hi tumblr, @staff &Â @support specifically,
Over the last year or so youâve made some changes. (best stuff first, safe mode, banning NSFW content..) and while Iâm sure you had great intentions they quite frankly suck for content creators.Â
My friend @dennybitte, many of my followers may know him for his beautiful vibrant landscape photography, has had far too many of his posts flagged as explicit (previously NSFW). Now, anyone who knows Denny or has seen his posts knows he follows the guidelines. He in no way, shape, or form, has ever posted anything that would be even slightly considered NSFW.Â
TL;DRÂ
@dennybitte has been wrongly flagged as explicit and weâre trying to spread awareness of staffâs inability to determine sexual images from landscape photography. Please consider checking out his blog if you like these types of posts, youâll be supporting a very selfless deserving photographer. If you feel like helping spread awareness feel free to reblog this, and if you have a similar story go ahead and leave it in the replies to let him know heâs not alone.
Do you see any female-presenting nipples, genitals, or sexual acts among his archive? (Iâm honestly surprised that picture of a hand didnât get flagged) Iâll spare you from posting a million screenshots, but there are at least 8 flagged posts remaining scattered throughout his archive that I can see. A few months ago when he first notified me of this problem he had around 30 flagged posts. That is absolutely ridiculous for it to be just an accidental flag. Iâm not sure if his posts are being flagged maliciously or if their bot is just really that bad.Â
Yes he did appeal the posts, yes he has sent staff countless messages and they havenât cared (surprising huh?) Many of his posts that he filed an appeal for are still marked, they still have the yellow banner across saying theyâre being reviewed. Thereâs a lot of miscellaneous details I could include in this post but I donât want to bore you. Staff replies to my messages, they quickly fix my wrongly marked posts in 24 hrs and send an automated message saying itâs been fixed. So why are they ignoring him? I tried to send a message for him and of course I only got an automated response saying âweâll respond as soon as weâre ableâ itâs been 12 days. Denny sent a message (plenty of them) weeks before I did with still no response other than an automated message saying theyâve received his request..Â
His blog seems to be hidden from search results on both tumblr and google. His blog settings donât show that he has selected these options. And according to this website his blog has been marked as explicit.. Apparently his avatar (a photo of himself) and his header (the same photo) are too NSFW and need to be blurred as well. Now I donât know how accurate this website is, my blog as well as many of my mutuals show up as SFW.Â
Denny has been on here for years and has built quite the following which encourages him to continue to go out and take these pictures. When his posts are being hidden and are constantly being mismarked it takes away that drive to continue sharing his passion. This is the only platform heâs been actively posting on for the last 6 years and to have all of that lost because of a mistake on tumblrâs part is really shitty. Heâs one of the most selfless, appreciative, and kind people Iâve (n)ever met and it really hurts my heart that @support isnât helping him out. I donât know what else do to besides spread awareness and try to help get his posts seen again.
I know I am just one out of thousands, tens of thousands - whatever giant number, complaining about this change, and Iâm positive heâs not the only one in this situation. But if Iâm able to help out a friend, Iâm going to speak up and do so.
If you enjoy the types of posts I post, I highly encourage you to check out Dennyâs blog. Everything he posts is his own, Iâve had the pleasure of seeing his photography adventures behind the scenes. Talking to him through very early bike rides to catch the sunrise or exploring different countries. Iâve seen the countless hours behind his editing process. Many of you just see a cool picture and hit reblog and think nothing more of it. There is so much more that goes into it as many of you in this photography community on here are well aware of.Â
This is very long, I know, Iâm sorry. Iâm just trying to help out a friend and get his blog the attention it deserves.
@staff @support Please hire some more help, preferably humans with common sense. And please, for the love of god, reply to peopleâs messages when they write to you with actual concerns.Â
Oh hey Ashley. Thank you so very much for this post! It is very, very kind of you! <3<3<3Â I would fix it if I did not constantly get the same automated message. They keep writing that they will take care of it and will write back as soon as possible. On 3th of December I wrote the first mail and since then I wrote 6 more e-mails to the support. :/
From a business standpoint, this is just.. embarrassing, but as far as Tumblrâs concerned: unsurprising! I havenât been terribly active either way. Â
If youâd like to keep in touch, give me a poke. If not, I have a feeling this might be my Tumblr goodbye.
QuestionâŠ
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: âWhy do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?â
The serious answer: Hereâs what we really think about Trump supporters - the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who donâtâŠ
That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought âFine.â
That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, âOkay.â
That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, âNo problem.â
That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, âNot an issue.â
That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldnât care, you chirped, âHe sure knows me.â
That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, âThatâs cool!â
That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.
That when you heard him brag that he doesnât read books, you said, âWell, who has time?â
That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didnât commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, âThat makes sense.â
That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, âYes!â
That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a manâs coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, âWhat a great guy!â
That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, âThumbs up!â
That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, âThatâs the way I want my President to be.â
That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries theyâre supposed to be regulating and you have said, âWhat a genius!â
That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, âThatâs smart!â
That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, âThat makes sense.â
That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, âfalling in loveâ with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, âThatâs statesmanship!â
That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas - he explains that theyâre just âanimalsâ - and you say, âwell, ok then.â
That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.
What you donât get, Trump supporters in 2018, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but itâs alsoâŠhear meâŠcharitable.
Because if youâre NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are *less* flattering.
Wait for her to come!
This massive bird is a Stellars Sea eagle. They live in Alaska, Northwestern Canada, and Japan and are the largest eagles in the world. (Source)
The size of this bird is incredible! What a beautiful animal.
if someone does the âfine, youâre right, iâm clearly a terrible person, iâm satan, iâm the worst person alive, i should just dieâ thing in response to criticism of their harmful behavior, they are trying to manipulate ppl and flip the situation around so that they look like a victim
stop tolerating this in 2k17 tbh. like really and truly, if you or your friend thinks this is okay pls call the hotline on the bottom of the screen and learn how to take responsibility for your bad behaviorÂ
The bad thing is I do this on a regular basis. Not because I want to manipulate people, but because thatâs actually how I feel. Iâm bad at receiving concrit. I canât say that everyone who reacts this way feels the same as I do, butâŠnot every case is like that.
have you considered that, regardless of your intentions, reacting in such an exaggerated way would make it very difficult for anyone to criticize you or tell you that youâre harming people with your behavior? iâm not interested in searching out peopleâs motives, i donât really care why someone does or says manipulative things. being unable or unwilling to simply apologize and not make it about themselves is a solid indicator that a person is not interested in being held accountable for their bad behavior, and people, especially the injured parties in question, shouldnât have to tolerate it.
take responsibility for your bad behavior 2k17 tbh
Okay, life lesson time.Â
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I kept getting involved with people who would say, âOh, Iâm a bad personâ any time I brought up ANYTHING that was the least bit of a disagreement.Â
Like, âPlease donât leave my X on the floorâ would get, âOh, Iâm a horrible person!â
HEREâS WHY THIS IS A HUGELY PROBLEMATIC BEHAVIOR, and if you think Iâm calling you out and you think youâre about to shut down, take a breath, remember that this is about learning, and keep reading.
What is important is what happened after. My boyfriend might say, âOh, Iâm just an awful boyfriendâ and instead of him acknowledging the BEHAVIOR and working on fixing it, heâd get me trying to buck him up for the next half hour, telling him he was a good person. The behavior that started it all would not change.
Well, things led to things and I went back home to live for a while, and found that the same exact thing was happening⊠with my mother.
And then I learned about pattern arguments. Pattern arguments are the ones where you keep having the same nonproductive argument over and over again. They donât all follow this pattern, but this is a really common one.
The trick?
BREAK THE PATTERN
First you have to know what the pattern is. In this case: 1. Grievance 2. Self deprecation 3. Ego stroking So, with my mother, we started in on one of these, and she said, âI guess Iâm just a terrible mother.â And instead of reassuring her, instead of derailing the issue and letting it go⊠I said, âWhen you say that, it makes me wonder how terrible a daughter I could be that you would think you were a bad mother. We have this conversation this way over and over, and the problem that I have always gets pushed aside in favor of trying to make you feel better. When youâre willing to have a real conversation about this, Iâm happy to talk to you, but Iâm bored with this argument, so Iâll see you later if you want to really talk.â And I left the room. Now, my mom is a reasonably self-aware person, and does a lot of hard emotional work, and so she got it, very quickly. 10 minutes later she came out and found me, and we had a real conversation about whatever the hell the issue really was, and we have literally NEVER had that particular pattern argument again in 23 years. Boyfriend came to visit. I was upset about something, he started in on the âIâm just a shitty boyfriendâ thing⊠and my response? âYep. You are.â His jaw dropped. He blinked. And I said, âLook, thatâs what you do. You say shit like that and it means you donât have to change your behavior, and Iâm tired of the pattern we have where I tell you something isnât working for me, you tell me youâre terrible, and I spend half an hour making you feel better. Iâm tired of it and Iâm not doing it anymore. If youâre willing to have an actual conversation about this, and not just the same old argument, Iâm game. But this thing we do where you talk yourself down and I butter you up? Is boring. And Iâm over it.â We also did not have that argument again. (The relationship finally ended for real a while after, but it ended in a grown-up way, and not with a ridiculous meaningless fight.) When you knock yourself down, the gut instinct for the people around you is to pick you up. But that means youâre not pulling your weight in the relationship. Youâre making them do the work and youâre not actually hearing them. So that brings us to another point:
How to deal with criticism
Okay, so if youâre not going to knock yourself down when someone says something negative about you, what DO you do? We donât actually train people to take criticism well. But it is an art and a skill and NECESSARY to finding emotional stability in the face of a critical world.
I see it as a flow chart, but since the flow chart I made for it ended up in a book that I donât own the copyright to (not a big deal) Iâll write out the decision tree here instead: 1. Someone offers criticism (constructive or not!)
2. Listen and think about it without immediately trying to defend yourself. You can say, âOkay, I need a moment to take that in and think about it because I want to understand it.â Or something else appropriate to the situation. It is okay to ask for time to think in most circumstances. Most people will appreciate that you are thinking about their words instead of immediately getting defensive or counterattacking. Think about whether what they are saying is valid, might be valid or is not valid.Â
3A. If it is valid, then you have a choice. You can try to fix the behavior or you can acknowledge that it is a valid criticism but decide you arenât likely to fix it. Start by acknowledging the validity of the criticism, and then say what youâre going to do to fix it, or say that itâs valid but it isnât something youâre willing (or possibly able) to change, or say that itâs a valid criticism and youâll need to think about possible solutions. They may have a suggestion. Taking it or not is also a choice.Â
3B. If youâre not sure itâs valid, but it might be, tell them, âI really need to give this some more thought.â or âCan you tell me more about this? Iâm not sure I understand the issue well.â  Or âIf you can point me at some reading material or search terms, Iâd like to study this before I decide what Iâm going to do.âÂ
3C. If you know it is not a valid criticism, STOP a moment, and look at WHY they are making it. This is where Active Listening can be very helpful. âI hear you saying that X is a problem. I donât see it that way right now but Iâd like to understand better why you do.â Or if you think they donât have enough information, âI hear you saying X, but my understanding of the issue is Y. Hereâs what I know about it if youâre ready to listen.â If theyâre just looking for a fight, tell them youâre not interested in fighting, and disentangle yourself.Â
4. If the criticism is something you are going to listen to and take action on, tell them what kind of action youâre going to take. If itâs something youâre hearing and thinking about, tell them that. If itâs not something youâre going to do anything about or itâs just wrong, thank them for their input and move on.
Literally never is it going to be helpful to say, âOh, Iâm just a terrible person.â Thatâs very much like a nonapology-apology in terms of how unhelpful it is to any conversation. Itâs kind of worse because it actually expects emotional labor from someone who is already having to bring up something unpleasant with you. Think about what they say Decide whether youâre going to do something about it Do the thing, or tell them youâre not going to do the thing. Donât demand emotional labor from other people when you were the one who messed up.Â
Apologize if appropriate. This is all predicated on the notion that youâre talking to someone who actually wants to communicate and isnât just an asshole on the attack. Because seriously, the whole âIâm a terrible personâ thing? Boring as fuck. Knock that shit off. Maybe you are. Maybe you arenât. But take responsibility and have a little self-respect and donât make others pick your emotional dirty towels off the metaphorical bathroom floor.Â
Iâm at 5 what about you?
8 hehehe
Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa? Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because Iâm sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now?Â
On one hand, itâs a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or notâweâre going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteauâs daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because itâs a desert and thereâs only salt water all around, but weâre contributing to pollution and all of these thingsâŠ
And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of âactivist guilt.â I couldnât remember the exact words, but, it was the first time Iâd heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.
We do what we can. Itâs so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we canât do it perfectly. It doesnât benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. Iâd just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than Iâd ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.
As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.
I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use thoseâŠ), itâs exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, itâs what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isnât going to change the whole system from the ground-up.
⊠it went on about how âmoney talksâ and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesnât mean everyone else isnât. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.
Of course, Iâd still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and Iâll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now itâs not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.
This is the same reason that moral purity âyou canât enjoy [x] because itâs Problematic âąâ is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. Thereâs something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies weâve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, donât beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.
No one can. Youâll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or youâll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You canât make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.
Have a related article with self-care tips for activists.
hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this monthâs funds drive to charity
You know it legally is a charity, right?
If x charity aims for ÂŁ10, but gets ÂŁ15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the ârainy dayâ fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code âŠÂ
The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they donât just âpocketâ the rest (as people claim). Itâs not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some ârainy dayâ cash to function.Â
You canât ask a charity to give money to another charity.Â
It needs what it gets to function and improve.Â
kiena-tesedale replied to this post
They donât âpocketâ excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.) Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
In my experience, people who donât work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. Iâm talking âmore than the library of congressâ crazy. The only reason it doesnât require Netflix levels of data serving is that itâs text based rather than video.
AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.
Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.
It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.
JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.
Itâs 18 ranks below AO3âČs traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But letâs say you think thatâs an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?
Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.
Care to guess its budget?
Double that of AO3.
AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And thatâs just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTWâs legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
Itâs absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.
did i ever tell you guys about that time i gave my sister 2000 nickels for her birthday
special ordered them from the bank
nice to know that in a world full of change, tumblr still has no idea how numbers work
thatsâŠthats $100, right?Â
@ you weebs
2,000/10=200
Two hundred dollar power move
#Math is literally the only thing i have going for me  #Itâs my bragging right  #Even Gaud canât take that away
You divided by 10. 10 is for dimes
Y'all. 2,000 nickels is $400. 2,000Ă·5. It equals $400.
iâm crying. no, no it doesnât
the answers keep getting worse better
Guys itâs 50$.
what the hell.
honey no
This post is getting progressively worse and I love it with a passionÂ