the life of @hawkrives

Bloggity blog blog blog! hawken. skimmer of many topics. Enjoys swimming, hiking. Pokes at computers. Blog!

[shadow-manor]

The rest of the thread is here.

tl;dr: Don’t monetize AO3, kids.  You won’t like what happens next.

[ratherembarrassing]

read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that i’ve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law that’s linked in-thread.

[billybluboy]

AHDHXHEBSG TWITTER WRITERS DID WHAT NOW???? AND PEOPLE PAID THEM????

[prof-grace-aspen]

If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I don’t necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like… maybe just maybe it’s something that should be taught????

[antifa-stray]

[mercurywells]

Just another reminder, because this always drives me crazy, but even if monetizing your fic was 100% unambiguously legal and protected, AO3 would still not let you do it because AO3 was founded and is supported by people like me who want a fandom community that is completely divested from making money off of fic.

[naryrising]

Yes, this. Lots of fanworks on AO3 are unambiguously legal. Fics based on Shakespeare plays and fairy tales and Greek mythology and The Great Gatsby and your original character from your D&D game are not violations of copyright, because no copyright applies to those things.

AO3 still doesn’t let you monetize those things on the site, because we don’t want the site to be commercial! Because that’s not what it’s for!

It’s not there for you (generic you) to make money off the efforts of the people who build and maintain the site for free! We aren’t getting paid for the work we do to give you a nice site to use, just like you aren’t getting paid for the work you do to create whatever art you share there. Because fandom is supposed to be a community where we share with each other, and therefore we all benefit.

The deal is, we give you a free, stable, safe platform to host your works. In exchange, you get a site that isn’t covered in ads and tip jars and links to gofundme and “read the next chapter at my patreon”. You get one goddamn place on the internet that isn’t trying to make money off you. And we will defend that space and keep it non-commercial.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

If you want to make money off your fics, you can instead post them somewhere like royal Road. “Oh, but Royal Road’s culture is so much more negative and stressful and lacks the supportive norms of AO3!” Yeah, because people are trying to make money there. Half the userbase is treating it as a storefront and hustling is the natural social consequence of that. AO3’s culture can only exist because it’s not commercial.

[elexuscal]

"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

[vamp1rebees-deactivated20241104]

this inage is always on my mind . we bave fuckign lost

[hasya226]

Lollipop, lollipop oh lolli lolli lolli

Lollipop, lollipop oh lolli lolli lolli

[porterdavis]

To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats

Scientists at Purdue have created a white paint that, when applied, can reduce the surface temperature on a roof and cool the building benea

This is cool. (See what I did there?)

[tachyon-at-rest]

The non-obvious bit is that our atmosphere doesn't block all infrared; there are gaps in the spectrum that allow nearly all of the heat to pass into space and never return.

The slick thing that happens with this coating/paint is that it preferentially emits heat in the infrared bands that pass through our atmosphere to never return.

Colored and paintable bilayer coatings with high solar-infrared reflectance for efficient cooling (science.org)

(looking for unnaturally high heat emissivity from the atmospheres of distant planets in the atmospheric infrared spectrum windows might be a good indication of advanced intelligent life on the planet.)

[milfy-moved-deactivated20250902]

Only 13 percent of video games are readily playable and accessible. No other form of media is as endangered as video games. There is no legal path to preserve or archive video games. You can go to libraries and archives for books years out of print. You can rent a movie or download a pdf. There is no legal equivalent for video games. Games companies do not double as archival organisations and they never will. They have never been about preserving. They are about selling. Which is not inherently evil compared to anyone else but they along with the law are directly preventing archivers and preservationists from doing their job and allowing this entire medium to be experienced in the future.

87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games | Video Game History Foundation

New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable

[milfy-moved-deactivated20250902]

Think of some of the most influential video games of all time. How many of them can you play right now. Without piracy. How many of these could your not very technology literate friend play. How do you think this is affecting not only the wider industry now but also people in the future. And for completely arbitrary meaningless reasons.

[shinosarna]

Actually I'm curious.

When we DO include romsites and so on, when we do include piracy - how much does this percentage jump up?

I know a lot of games are lost media, but rom enthusiasts have archivist-like zeal to find anything possible. People dump games that don't officially exist, like bootlegs (though 99% of bootlegs aren't actual real games and just minimally changed pirated romhacks, people still dump them for the few diamonds in the rough that are genuine original games)

[foone]

so the thing is: it's a bunch, but it's nowhere near 100%. I don't have numbers, but I've been keeping an eye on a lot of efforts in this area, especially involving the most at-risk games collections, like Apple II games (they were on floppy disks: floppy disks die way faster than cartridges or CD/DVD-ROMs).

The problem is that piracy is generally focused on the popular games. You're gonna have a lot of people lining up to figure out how to pirate the new Mario game or the newest AAA shooter, but the smaller more niche games don't get the same attention. It doesn't take much copy protection for those to not get preserved, just because no sufficiently skilled hacker took the time to focus on cracking them.

So while consoles like the NES or Genesis might have nearly 100% of their games preserved (and it's only "nearly" because there's so many weird bootlegs out there), a system like the Apple II or DOS PC will have literally hundreds or thousands of games that have slipped through the cracks (no pun intended, I promise).

There's also the problem for newer system that piracy is not preservation: See, newer games are not as one-and-done as older games, where you get a disc/cart and you put it in the console and it plays, and that's the full experience. It's now super super common for the game on the disc to require a bunch of updates downloaded to it to bring it up to a more functional version, because the version that went to manufacturing still had a bunch of bugs that they needed to fix, and they fixed them between release-to-manufacturing and when the game actually hit store shelves. We can argue about how games "shouldn't" do this, but the fact of the matter is: they do. A lot.

And here's where piracy is not preservation: These consoles have complicated anti-copying systems built in. The mod chips and softmods hack around that, and convince the console you have a legitimate copy, right?

You know what they don't do? INCLUDE THE UPDATES. The console now thinks you have the game legitimately, so they can go get the updates from the normal, legitimate source: the console's servers.

So what happens a few years down the road when those servers get discontinued? Well, legitimate users will still have the discs, and you can always download pirated copies of the game onto a modded console... but the updates are now gone. Pirates don't have a reason to preserve the updates, that's not a required part of piracy. But it means that piracy won't save the game, not 100%. We'll still have a playable copy of the game (hopefully, unless it shipped literally broken) but it'll be limited to the launch-day version of it, minus all the fixes they applied later. Depending on how much they patched the game after launch, that could be anything from a minor difference (a few bugs that speedrunners take advantage of) or a game that's nearly unbeatable due to crashes and glitches.

So yeah. Even with piracy we're still doing kinda abysmally.

Also, a key point from the article is the "readily playable" part. So even with piracy an NES game is arguably "readily playable". 30 seconds to find a ROM, a couple minutes to install an emulator, and bam, playable.

OKAY, what about a PC game from 1997? How readily playable is that?

Because right now there's a huge gap in PC gaming. "relatively recent" games, meaning like ~2005 and onward, are playable natively on windows, usually without major problems. Really old games, like DOS stuff (so like, 1981-1996), is readily playable in DOSBox.

That still leaves a gap of nearly a decade where it can be very difficult to get anything to work. Games made specifically for Windows 9x may not even install on a modern windows (They used 16-bit installers, which 64bit windows refuses to support), and those that do may not handle running on an NT-based OS. Let alone if they want older 3D acceleration like 3DFX cards, or other deprecated APIs.

Most of the playable games from that KINDA IMPORTANT PERIOD IN GAMING HISTORY (you know, from when Fallout 1-2, Half-Life, Starcraft, Unreal, Age of Empires 2, System Shock 2, RollerCoaster Tycoon, The Sims, Deus Ex, Counter Strike, Max Payne, Warcraft III, & Doom 3 came out?) are that way because they either got official updates long after release, they got HD remakes, or they got lots of fan-patches. Which is great, except not all games get that. If your favorite game when you were a kid was Microforum's SoulTrap, you're probably in trouble.

And believe me, I say that as someone who has virtual machines for days and a pile of old computers on hand! I can (and have) literally put together a Windows 98 machine for fun, and it's STILL hard to play a lot of games from this era. You may be able to pirate them, but can you actually play them? Like, you know how I have porn tapes I can't watch? They certainly aren't preserved, not in that format at least. I can "have them" all day, but if there's no way to play them, they aren't terribly well preserved.

So yeah. tl;dr: piracy helps (and piracy has always been an important part of game preservation, don't get me wrong), but it doesn't really alleviate the problem.

[12u3ie]

I just went on a rant about plungers, how’s your day going?

[12u3ie]

“go off bestie”? Okay, I will.

This is a plunger.

Classic red cup with a wooden stick. We all know it, love it, and have seen a cartoon character using it to unclog a toilet. Right?

WRONG.

The image above is actually a drain plunger, used on sinks, showers, and baths. Not on toilets.

These are a toilet plungers.

Take note of the variations. Each of them have a flange of sorts at the bottom, either connected via a cup or more accordion-like tube. These are designed to actually get down into the toilet bowl where it flushes down, giving it more space and leverage to unclog blockages. See the example below:

Notice how the flange allows it to go deeper into the toilet to provide more power to the plunge. Sink/drain plungers are far less efficient and effective at the task.

Sink plungers can also have an accordion shape to help with power in plunging, but crucially do not have or need the flange that toilet plungers do.

To recap: cup plungers are for sinks, showers, bathtubs, and other drains. Flange and accordion plungers are for toilets. Notably, accordion plungers are slightly harder to use, but are more powerful when used correctly than their flange counterparts.

So the next time you see a cartoon, video game, or stock art depicting a cup plunger being used on a toilet, you can feel the same levels of anger and emotion that I do!

[12u3ie]

why does this have nearly 100 notes

[callmebliss]

Because with this level of passion, containment is futile 

[absurdly-useful]

The real question is why does this not have a million notes? This is information that will very likely, at some point, be incredibly useful to anyone who has indoor plumbing. Which is, you know, probably, 99.99% of this website's user base. (I'm sure there's someone out there using Tumblr who lives in a house built in 1850 which never got upgraded and they still have an outhouse rather than toilet.)

[catchymemes]

[minicy]

[ID. Video of a woman recording an opera performance when her cat, fluffy and with bulging eyes, hops into frame. She stops singing and tries to push the cat slightly out of the way, but on her next cue the cat starts meowing before she can sing. The woman starts laughing as the cat continues meowing to the music, as though it was singing as well. End ID.]

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

More evidence that cats bond with us by mirroring us.

I’ve read accounts here on the Tumblr of a trans man whose cat lowered the pitch of their meow, after he started taking T. So I suspect this woman sings a lot around the house, and her cat is like: “That’s just how we do things in this clowder.”

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m a red-blooded corn-fed AMERICAN MAN and if I wanna get my tits chopped off that’s my god-given right as a tax payer.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Why should the government tell me what my gender is? Back in my day we earned our own genders uphill in a blizzard both ways.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Well I think this post has started reaching people that don’t get the joke. It was nice knowing you all.

[akiwuff]

No but this is hilarious and reminds me of a galaxy-brained shirt I saw the other day

Walk into the nearest Hobby Lobby wearing this and watch people begin to disintegrate

[what-even-is-thiss]

I want that to become my 4th of July shirt. I want to wear that shirt to the family barbecue so bad.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Guess who’s $25 poorer and prepared for July 4th already

[adulthood-is-stupid]

[tachyon-at-rest]

Yes, this amount of PC laziness is just invitation for the DM to be malicious.

[diaryofandnwoman]

#whitewomantears

[tilthat]

TIL “Yankee Doodle” was written by the British to mock americans. “Doodle” is thought to come from the German “dödel”, meaning “fool” or “simpleton” and “macaroni,” a flamboyantly stylish type of dress, painting the Yankees as morons who thought placing a feather in one’s cap made them a “dandy.”

via reddit.com

[toastpotent-deactivated20250619]

so you’re telling me that “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni” would be like saying “wrote a G on his belt and called it gucci”

[beggars-opera]

that’s…a pretty good analogy actually

[ti-bae-rius]

US moron came to town

Hunting for some coochie

Wrote a G up on his belt

And this bitch called it Gucci

[ti-bae-rius]

Seeing my notifications get flooded with this every July 4th is the only thing I respect about America

[escuerzoresucitado]

[thegaymertrainer]

That’s SO cool to see it explained

[singelisilverslippers]

just go see an ob-gyn

[riajade01]

Help me ob-gyn kenobi, you’re my only hope.

[jenroses]

She needed more midwife-clorians. 

[hlahlahlahlahly]

I really hope everyone reblogging this followed the link and read the article, because it’s larger point is really good “Reproductive health and childbirth is a crutch, and Lucas gets away with it because his audience accepts that these things are mysterious and cannot be intervened with the way that that the loss of limbs can be remedied with robot prosthetics, or the way Luke can be rescued from near-death on Hoth by being submerged in a bacta tank. Having babies is worse than being mauled by a wampa ice creature or being chopped up by lightsabers and falling into a river of lava. Lucas can write a world like that, and worse, the audience will accept it. But uteruses aren’t made of malignant magic. Women’s bodies are real physical things that can be studied and understood and when necessary, cured. ”

[jenroses]

IDK about everyone else, but I’ve actually been certified as a doula and childbirth educator and worked in women’s health media for most of a decade.  All points valid, but “Help me OB-GYN Kenobi” broke me. 

[powerbottombrucespringsteen]

HOA freaks are just on a level I can’t even begin to comprehend like what exactly am i supposed to be offended by in this picture I genuinely do not know

[beesmygod]

what is the child annihilating zipline

in 2010, a camp counselor goon logged on to the somethingawful forums asking for help with the zipline he build from scratch, and with no engineering knowledge, that didn’t seem to be working right. when he tested it with a sandbag, it continued to gather speed during the entirety of the 143 foot drop (19 degree slope) until it slammed into the wooden platform at the bottom at a speed of 65mph, presumably creating a child paste that would have to be scraped off to be sent home. there were pictures.

[acridrainshowers]

groverhaus and the child-annihilating zipline are classics of post and we will never forget them

too bad the zipline isn’t as famous. the fucked-up bathroom has even gained more traction than the child-exploding summer camp zipline. there is no justice

[onceiwashere]

i love this but DON’T denigrate the fucked up bathroom that’s a legend

[patrickdiomedes]

fucked up bathroom?

[onceiwashere]

before and after extensive diy renovations 

[themysteriousmurasamecastle]

this looks like a doom wad

[goatplanet]

The extremely good news is that someone DID make it into a doom wad

https://twitter.com/dietinghippo/status/1102879467741966336

[themysteriousmurasamecastle]

this is un fucking believable

[football-in-tuxedos]

I’m sorry, y’all are selling RIPline (The Machine to Kill Children) short, so I need to bring in YouTuber and generally amazing person Dan Olson in to sum this up for me

And some visual aides