WE HAVE A PROUD TRADITION OF FAILURE TO UPHOLD

I don't even know what this blog is for anymore but here I am.

[the-bar-sinister]

So, the other day, when I was discussing AO3's policy on solicitation, a tumblr user came at me saying that AO3's "no monetization/solicitation" rules were "bullshit" because nexus mods allows fan created mods to get paid.

Look at me.

Look at me right now.

AO3 protects you.

AO3 protects you and your works. 

It protects your works from copyright strikes and DCMA takedowns.

It protects your work from advertisers.

It protects your work from overzealous legal challenges.

It protects your right to post adult content.

AO3 is non-profit and AO3 will never try to use you or your work to make a profit for themselves and AO3 will go to bat for you if someone tries to legally challenge you or your works.

Please respect AO3 and its mission.

[ao3cassandraic]

AO3 protects fandom from payment processors.

Mastercard has no reason to mess with AO3. Visa doesn't. PayPal doesn't. Stripe doesn't. There's no compensation-for-porn exchange happening. By design. BY DESIGN.

AO3's founders knew that AO3 needed to be set up to protect us from any and all avenues of attack on fanworks. They've managed it quite successfully.

All y'all who thought they didn't need to? Sit the fuck down and SHUT THE FUCK UP.

[redacted67459-deactivated202512]

[captainjonnitkessler]

You guys have GOTTA learn to stop seeking absolution from strangers online.

If someone says "haha Americans are so self-centered they don't know anything about other countries", you don't gotta jump in and explain that actually it's not your fault because you had a bad education. Just learn from the post and move on!

If someone says "white people hate rap because they're racist", you don't gotta jump in and start listing all the totally valid reasons you personally don't like it. You don't have to justify your music taste to strangers, just move on!

If someone says "people should be more involved in their local communities" you don't gotta jump in and start listing all the reasons that you personally can't leave your house and so actually the original post is really ableist. Just accept that the post doesn't apply to you and move on!

Stop publicly demanding that the internet absolve you of sins that some random dipshit made up, it is always going to make you look bad and you'll wind up trapped in an anxious cycle of needing external validation for every aspect of your personality. You don't have to justify yourself to randos on the internet.

[eziojensenthe3rd]

Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act

We want the Government to repeal the Online Safety act.

I hate having to post political posts like this nut he we are again. Anybody from the UK wanna sign this. Folks from outside the UK maybe share it?

[corvidkusnos]

PLEASE sign this if you're in the UK

And in the meantime, many have recommended getting a VPN, too.

Non-UK folk, help this get more reach if you can!

[cuunos]

reallllly feel like some of you have to start understanding people are sometimes going to make mistakes and not understand something and not know things and it's going to slot them in a perfect place for you to scoff and call them problematic and evil and they're not even going to know why.

[cuunos]

not everyone is chronically online, or online at all. don't act like everyone who's ever enjoyed harry potter is a cartoon villain, when most of them barely know who jkr is and definitely don't know what she's done, or know what the actual symptoms of schizophrenia are, or understand what a neopronoun is. like, yeah, okay, you can get frustrated when people don't listen or when they willfully ignore you, but don't pretend everyone on earth is supposed to know already. my life advice.

[cuunos]

my friend is a cishet white guy who's entire knowledge of schizophrenia was "yeah that's the thing people have in horror movies that make them kill people." he didn't even know hallucinations were involved. after meeting me, he googled it. like, while we were hanging out, he pulled out his phone, took two minutes to read up on it, and went "oh, so it's like autism, but scarier for you." i told him about neopronouns, and therians, and objectum, and a bunch of other chronically online bullshit, and he nodded along. later he messaged me with a couple questions, which i explained, and he thought it was all very cool. he has a snapchat and an instagram, both of which are exclusively for hunting and fishing friends, he didn't even know why the r slur wasn't okay to say. im not saying you have to educate everyone you meet on the street, but for the love of god, you need to recognize when someone's actually trying to hurt you and when someone is just not really sure what's going on.

[persisting]

I think mostly what young fandom types (and I guess younger people in general) who are very very invested in the idea that “20 is still basically a minor” need to understand is that the feeling of “I’m just a child pretending to be an adult, and everyone else around me is a REAL adult” is DEEPLY universal (and won’t stop, ever, by the way, sorry!) and also is not, like, praxis.

Believe me, I get it, but the self-infantilization needs to stop, especially when you’re trying to engage in conversations about actual children and the harms they can face. Yes, it is scary to wake up and realize you’re 22 and you still feel like you’re 15, but it happens to all of us. You’re an adult. You have to deal with it.

[persisting]

I wonder how many more times I’ll have to say “my career is in anti-child exploitation, I’ve been paid good money for more than half a decade to study, combat, and directly intervene in child exploitation and grooming and I’ve seen more CSAM than you hopefully ever will in your lifetime” to these “WELL THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF GROOMING MEANS ADULTS TOO!!” pedants before they stop flooding this post with the exact issue I’m talking about lmao.

I do not need to “look it up.” It is my job to know that children are groomed and adults are not. This is part of the problem. Again, obviously adults are exploited, manipulated, taken advantage of. But socially speaking, “grooming” as we use it applies only to children. Insisting on the shift to “everyone” dilutes the horror of how powerless children are in these scenarios. I do not insist on this distinction to tell exploited adults to go fuck themselves. I insist to ensure that it is very clear that children are uniquely vulnerable in this arena.

[gaynfl-moved]

hey sorry not to be an asshole but I saw someone say that a sports team posting about pride month was "pandering" and I need you to log off and touch grass because now more than EVER it's important that large institutions (and especially those that could easily be right wing like sports teams) show the fuck up for queer and trans people. especially trans people. so no it is not "pandering" to take a stand for a marginalized group of people that are currently under attack for trying to play sports. be so fucking for real

[peppermintquartz]

here's a tip about war: Don't fight the people who are on your side

[godlessondheimite]

[fluffmugger]

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

[pennie-dreadful]

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

[doctorbluesmanreturns]

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

[mikkeneko]

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

[three--rings]

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

[lyricwritesprose]

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

[doomtribble73]

[womenarehuman]

We are just hastening our demise at this point.

[forwomenbiwomen]

I don't understand how people who are so "LOL magas don't believe climate change is real!!! How stupid!!!" are so blithely skipping to chatgpt as a search engine at the same time. Like you cannot be "haven't you noticed the lack of bugs this year" and simultaneously "here's how I made my 17 step skincare routine using chatgpt!!!". It beggars belief.

[radgritty]

There's also this.

[duckbunny]

remember kids, the moral of "Irish and Italians weren't even considered White yet!" isn't "because in those times people were so ignorant they didn't think the Irish were white". the moral is "because white is an unreal category created to justify slavery and ongoing hoarding of power and wealth". It's not that you know better about Italians. It's that the boundaries of the higher caste have changed.

[annabelle--cane]

the action this person took is bad because it's directly harmful and exploits and leverages their social capital "also they're cringe" not what I said "adults who like cartoons are always shitty" no they aren't "their artistic tastes reflect their bad morals" I don't believe that is the case "typical tenderqueer" I honestly just think you're being homophobic "mid 30s polyamorous neurospicy kinky asexual picrew icon fanfic writer" do you even care about the bad thing they did or are you just using this as an excuse to make fun of people you don't like

[handsaniti]

I literally saw someone earlier mocking fascists by exposing the (completely legal, in written form) porn they’re into. My brothers in Christ, I don’t think you’re as against fascism as you say you are

[raddagher]

Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever

If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.

[jay-wasreblogging]

Why would utility prices go up because of ai?

(I am not defending the usage of generative AI/ChatGPT/Character.ai etc etc i am very much against it - I am just curious as to the correlation between using it and utility price surge please don't come at me this is a genuine question)

[raddagher]

Happy to help.

ChatGPT uses so much energy that the US is literally reversing course on coal and gas usage to make up for it. In Santa Clara, for example, data centers used 60% of the ENTIRE CITY'S electricity.

ChatGPT uses 1-3 bottles of water for cooling for every query you put into it. This is FRESH WATER, which is evaporated and eventually mostly returns to the ocean, effectively removing a lot of it from our already dwindling fresh water supply on the planet. It also consumes 17 THOUSAND TIMES more electricity than the average American home.

The AI boom wastes so much electricity that we are very immediately risking US cities having to have rolling blackouts just to keep up with the energy demands, as early as NEXT YEAR

Gen AI's water usage is projected to hit 6.6 BILLION meters cubed by 2027

More AI use = more data centers = power drain on local cities = gas, electricity, and water utility prices rise because all of our resources are being funneled into a machine that makes garbage

[miseria-fortes-viros]

“what’s your dream job” im so glad you asked. picture this. i am the lone employee of a strange and mysterious tchotchke/bookshop in the middle of nowhere, full of fun and interesting things that i am allowed to take for the low low price of free of charge. i get one, exceedingly interesting, customer per hour. i work no more than twenty hours a week and am salaried 3 million dollars

[deafeningcrusade-duck]

this is the funniest overlap to me. elsa killed those guys

[hamletthedane]

-

ELSA STRIKES AGAIN

[comedownstairsandsayhello]

something has gone deeply wrong when "focusing pragmatically on issues you can influence and working to make life better for yourself and your community" is considered an unserious distraction while "endlessly exposing yourself to media about distressing situations you can't control" is considered political engagement

[silvermoon424]

[uncahier]

It’s funny because it’s true

[chaos-cube]

[midnight-scrivener]

This post is so right, and also, as an addendum, besides the fact that digital literacy is a learned skill that (at least in the US) schools stopped funding because of the idea that "since kids have computers at home, they don't need to be taught how to use them," gen Z and Gen Alpha are growing up alongside technologies that developers are making increasingly opaque and hard to navigate, exactly because it serves companies better if people can't alter or curate their own experiences online.

So these poor kids are getting the double whammy of "haven't been taught how to use the technology" and "technology is getting worse and harder to use" at the same time. I've been in classrooms with highschool students who are by all accounts very bright! But they have no concept of online safety, checking sources, doing real research. A lot of kids Who Are Otherwise Good Students had to be walked through how to open any program besides a browser window. And this is just stuff I personally saw during my stint as a substitute instructor. It's really disheartening to see how badly they've been hung out to dry.

[aletheyass]

i deal so incredibly well with change!!! my natural reaction to it is just so positive!!!! i really take it in stride!!! i don't even give myself migraines and gastrointestinal issues and night terrors!!!!

[dracothelizard]