concussed silence

[lezbianz]

being a humanities major who’s friends with stem majors is so funny because you’ll ask your friends what they’re doing today and they’re like “UGH it’s so stressful i have to stabilize the reactor core for my nuclear power midterm and then i have to build the supercomputer from i have no mouth yet i must scream for my electrical engineering homework :/ what about you” and you’re like “oh well i have to read a fun little book and write an essay about gender.” and they still think you have it worse

[freakinflipflop]

Being a stem major who's friends with humanities majors is ALSO funny bc you ask what's goin on with them and they're like "oh yeah my day's pretty good! I only have to read 50 pages for this one class today and half a book for another one. It's much better than last week where I read three books and wrote a 10 page paper about their overlapping motifs for one class while also researching a niche period of time that our library doesn't have any resources on. How's it been for you?" and you're like "oh I have a lil packet of fun math puzzles due tomorrow." and they look at you like you're carrying the weight of the universe on your back

[tesria]

This is your reminder that just because something falls within the skillset you've practiced, so you can do it and you don't find it particularly hard or stressful relative to other things, it doesn't mean it isn't actually hard work you should be proud of yourself for accomplishing!

[3amfanfiction]

this applies to writing and art, too

[lovenaiu]

DC version of AO3 is called Tales of Our Own??

WHY DC MAKING ALTERNATIVE VERSION OF AO3

(Far Sector: Green Lantern)

[heraldic-thunderbolt]

I am a huge fan of retiring to my quarters

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

In this economy you'll be lucky to retire to your nickels

[quinnception]

[sioltach]

Switching between these every day

[olderthannetfic]

*cackling*

If OTW weren’t around, this wouldn’t be “scaremongering”: It would be the inescapable status quo.

[lanninglurksnomore]

The people who believe this crap are the anti-vaxxers of fandom.

[olderthannetfic]

Oh god. They kind of are, aren’t they?

[athingofvikings]

I’d go bigger and just say that they’re the conservatives/reactionaries of fandom–or, to frame it differently, this is how conservative and authoritarian ideologies express themselves in the context of Fandom.

[kimberlyeab]

my opinion on AO3 is that it’s an important asset but i still find it scummy that they’ll ask for money but when their users try to ask for money they slam them with their non-monetization rules. Like Anne Rice is dead and this isn’t the 90s anymore, people are making money from fandom please catch up with the times.

[olderthannetfic]

I think you’ve misunderstood:

AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.

It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.

People who want to do fandom differently, including making money, are welcome to go build their own site with their own money or their own donated labor.

[elfwreck]

AO3 does not forbid commercial links because they think fans making money from fanworks is immoral but them making money (to run the damn site) is fine.

AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.

They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.

In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”

The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.

The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.

…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)

But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.

The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.

If you are not a copyright lawyer, your opinion about the situation is not going to be considered.

[thebibliosphere]

Also, it wasn’t just Anne Rice coming after fandom in the 90s as though this is some relic holdover terror from ancient history.

Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)

And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.

I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)

It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.

Ao3 at its core was and is built by fandom. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine, but to even suggest that the volunteers are lounging around eating peeled grapes and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills making bank through fraud while fanfic authors are left out in the cold is beyond the scope of laughable.

[magsgotswags]

It’s cute how people think that Anne Rice was the only one who did this. Look at what Disney does to people who they think are making money off fanworks (lightning Mcqueen dude on tiktok, for example). (now what really would be fun is if they found a way to claim that people who make money from their 50 minute long youtube vids about their Marvel predicitons (which IS FANFIC it’s just that it’s mostly dudes) are making money from thier IP. Because they are.)

[ambular-d]

IIRC, Anne McCaffrey,  J. Michael Straczynski, George R.R. Martin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, among others, have also thrown hissy fits over fanworks (MZB possibly with some rational grounds for it, since I seem to recall she actually did get caught up in a legal snafu involving a fan who claimed she’d stolen their ideas.)

[olderthannetfic]

The MZB situation is… uh… complex, to say the least. Nobody agrees what happened, but it appears MZB’s people approached a fan about using her stuff in exchange for a thank you, and the fan wanted money and actual credit as a writer. (According to the fan, they then threatened her to shut her up, which makes some sense in the context of MZB being post stroke and hiding it at the time.) Basically, it was some kind of clusterfuck that probably involved covering up that MZB was no longer able to write.

[hellabutts]

Ngl the people who hate on AO3 *specifically* for the fact that they do fundraising and claim that they all must be rolling in money? They come off to me like the Fox News of Fandom.

Also we go through this *every year* and at this point it just feels like willful and malicious ignorance.

[beaniebaneenie]

Also, Ao3 is one of the highest-visited sites in the WORLD.

AO3 experiences millions of page views daily, with peak days reaching close to 70 million page views, particularly on weekends.

JSTOR gets about 150,000 a month.

Ao3 has millions per day.

It has a tagging/metadata system and code that is the envy of databases worldwide, including academic databases.

They keep all those fics and podfic audio files and uploaded art on their server space, as well as which pieces are held in copyright to which author pennames, and ensure the security of this data to some of the highest standards in cybersecurity.

All of that requires a truly massive amount of server space. Server space is fucking expensive.

They also keep some very excellent lawyers on retainer in case anyone ever decides that they want to take this game of chicken to court. By hosting your fic, the OTW says, “we will go to bat FOR YOU and pay for the legal shit ourselves, it will not cost you a single dime to defend your work, even if you end up facing off against one of the creative giants like the fucking Walt Disney Company. We still have your back.”

And the only reason they can do this is because NO ONE IS MAKING MONEY on their archive. (You wanna make money elsewhere? A ko-fi, a patreon, selling fanart at cons, writing a fic and scrubbing off the serial numbers and then publishing? Ao3 has no problem with that, because at that juncture, the risk is on YOU. While it’s on their archive, the risk is on THEM, and they are not willing to risk the entire archive because you wanted to put up a link.)

That’s where the money goes.

Servers and lawyers.

The OTW is a volunteer organization. No one gets paid.

If you don’t like it, absolutely no one is forcing you to use it or read anything on it. But those of us who have been around a while remember how scary it was in fandom before the Archive, and not a day goes by that I’m not grateful for it.

[malfiora]

Hang in there, everyone. You have to live long enough to see Beyond the Spiderverse (2027) and Dynamic Duo (2028)

[garpen]

Oh my goodness you're absolutely right

[dancingpumpkinlobotomy]

Sometimes I think about my bones and go oh no, why do they do that? And then I remember, it was the pirates.

[dancingpumpkinlobotomy]

the trees know too much.

[queersona]

therapist: cunt dracula is not real and cannot fuck you.

cunt dracula:

[queersona]

[jojo pose] count dracula. [different jojo pose] nice to meet you. [jojo walk cycle] alexa, turn down the music! [the obnoxious music doesn't change volume] mr harker

[virtualgirladvance]

Cuntula

[mysticalalleycat]

[dancingpumpkinlobotomy]

uh oh

[dancingpumpkinlobotomy]

but what if the sheep can hear us?

[shymagnolia]

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

[shymagnolia]

okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post

[flagellant]

…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment

likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post

[coffee-or-hot-cocoa]

i need all the help i can get for finals

[finnglas]

Hey so

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

This might be the real one, y’all.

[ladyadrasteia666]

Reblogging to spread the luck and the good fortune

[thebreakfastgenie]

I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.

[sprinkledsalt]

My mom was telling me about this YouTube video she watched (I can't remember the name, sorry) where the person shared a screenshot of some MAGA voter from Florida asking for help, because his wife had been hired for a nursing job with the VA in Texas, so they sold their house and were preparing to move. But they rescinded her job offer after Trump's executive order. The post from the guy was basically like "I already contacted Senator Ted Cruz's office, and they said they couldn't do anything about this. Please help me get this story to President Trump, we love him! We voted for him 3 times! And we know this was just a mistake and he'd help us!"

Just.................a part of me laughs, and another part of me thinks about how cult followers genuinely believe that the cult leader cares about them

[kalessinsdaughter]

This is the part about believing in universal human rights that can be a bit difficult: they're universal, and should never be denied anyone, no matter who they are or what they have done.

You can be – you should be – furious with people who voted for Trump, for wilfully trying to sabotage those rights and make them conditional, a privilege for the "deserving", a privilege they can deny the "wrong" kind of people.

And when the MAGA crowd are hit by the consequences of their actions, and denied basic human rights because it turns out their Great Leader doesn't actually include his followers among the privileged, it's tempting to say that they deserve to be denied those rights, because that's what they wanted to do to others.

But if you do that, you don't truly believe that those rights should be universal; you just have a different idea than the MAGA crowd about who should be included among the privileged.

You can still tell the MAGA who's crying that the leopards ate their face that you're angry with them for letting the face-eating leopards loose. But you shouldn't be fine with their face being eaten.

[delvinanaris]

The key here, IMO, is the distinction between your emotional reaction to hearing about it and how you consciously believe people should be treated.

Having a positive emotional reaction, enjoying the schadenfreude or whatever, doesn’t mean you’re bad and isn’t something you need to suppress. You just need to also be able to say, “but that shouldn’t happen, not to them, not to anyone.”

[thebreakfastgenie]

This is a good articulation! I'm going to reblog this addition because I think it might be helpful for some people who are sorting out their feelings to see this stated so plainly!

[emptinesstomelodyao3-deactivate]

It’s always

“When will fanfic writers update their stories?”

And never

“Does this fanfic writer have adequate enrichment to engage in writing behaviours?”

Fanfiction writers (Scriptor fictus) are intelligent animals who need plenty of enrichment as well as encouragement! If they’re stuck in poor conditions (e.g. have studies, work, have to actually write to have something written) then they require the proper enrichment to engage in more healthy behaviours, like writing. Remember, due to poor breeding and socialisation, over half of all fanfic writers suffer from low self confidence and executive dysfunction so take care of them!

Give your fanfic writers proper care. Fanfiction writers are a life long commitment.

[writingnotes520]

If William Shakespeare knew what neopronouns were he’d be unstoppable

[dancingpumpkinlobotomy]

trying to find this old marvel fanfic and absolutely failing, it was about peter parker being forced to make weapons for maybe one of the iron man villains idk and i’m pretty sure its a series and peter was apart of the first avengers fight.

if someone knows what i mean please give me a name or link 🙏

[frownyalfred]

I know we give Bruce Wayne a lot of shit for perpetuating his own cycle of grief/trauma/not healing, but have you seen what the DC universe keeps putting him through? They’re gonna be giving him Situations and dead kids until they go bankrupt.

[goethefaustworld]

It's also canon that masturbation doesn't exist in DC

[frownyalfred]

yeah you’re right that would put a damper on the self-actualization too

[chasm-side]

Wait hold up @goethefaustworld please would you be kind enough to elaborate on this? Where do I find it in canon?

[goethefaustworld]

They did, in Sandman 14. (“Neil, you can’t use the word masturbate. Nobody masturbates in the D.C. Universe.” “Well, I suppose that explains

I think this answers the question