Obi at #2021 @obionaywas - Tumblr Blog

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Some greater BC stuff I did a while back. I know I haven’t posted in a while, I’ve been having some pretty big mental health issues and have had to decrease my work load by a lot. I have quit SBC and will only be taking on a couple BCs a week from now on (after I finished my current list which is very late, so I’m sorry about that ;w;)

#aywas

My teos finally got uploaded to the box. :D I really hope people like them! ;w;

#aywas #teo hell #the semi-unique has been sold already

Some choice bcs, blind dates and sbcs from of late. I also have a teo set coming, whenever I colour the last 2 needed. :P

#aywas

Tagged by no one, I just feel like doing it. o/

RULES : Tag 5 aywas people you want to know better @pestilos @aboxoflunch @nhotemau

NEWEST CUSTOM:This snoodle I grabbed from the box a little while back.

FAVORITE PROMPT / COLORS : Natural colours, so like, greys (fav), brown, yellows, etc. As for markings I do enjoy doing tiger stripes. FAVORITE ADVENTURE LOCATION: I-- I uh, I don’t really adventure at all. FAVORITE EVENT : Aymassssssss :D BEST FRIEND : Can’t pick a single one. My wife (who doesn’t play), Pathos, Lunch my LP, Kari. <3333 SOMETHING YOU WANT : Don’t really know. Something in aywas, I assume. Uhhh, ALL the BCs and all the artist tickets so I can ticket my favourite artists. That’d be nice. Other than that, for there not to be anymore drama because jfc, exhausting even just to read. BEST MUSIC TO LISTEN TO WHILE ON AYWAS : I just listen to my currently favourite shit, currently that’s Placebo, Staind, IAMX (thanks Pathos o/) and random Final Fantasy OST (various) songs. WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH 5000GP : Buy BCs and commissions from my fav artists, then go look at everyone’s wishlists and gift bomb them! :3 FAVORITE ARTIST : PATHOS, Drei, Cocobeef... and many others. WHO PM’D YOU LAST : J.A.K #15 about Mayday teos. :P TEAM KAIYO OR TEAM VAMPI : No idea? I don’t know what this is about. ONE OTHER THING WE MIGHT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT YOU : I... have no idea, I’m not amazing at this lol.

#aywas #bandwagon #aye

Blind dates and sketch breeding coin list. Yah I’m doing SBC now too!

#RIP my free time #aywas

Finally can upload this! Was fun to do (had to redo the orbweaver but I really like this new outcome sooo...)

#aywas #onto the new list

latest blind dates

#aywas #grind on

BC list~ o/

#aywas #all alidaes now #;wwww;;;;

houndpets

thoughts…...

Slash disappears for 8 days. this means breeding queues that depend on him are stuck; this means artists (who rely on this paycheck) are out of pay, and he owes them this money.

if someone who owed Slash money held out for this amount of time, how would he react? here is an example. here you can see i had three days to get back to him. what if i just didn’t log in, let alone pay him, for 8 days? (another example, if you remember, are two users who were banned for not paying their commission panel fees. is this really fair, considering how long it often takes Slash to pay people…?)

because queues are stuck, we (as breeding artists) cannot get our next breedings in to do our new jobs. so we are in a perpetual limbo without pay.

it’s a regular occurrence for artists to wait weeks to possibly months to be paid for submitting site pets. you’re actually told ‘you’ll be paid at Slash’s convenience’. what if we told him that about commission panel fees? ‘you’ll be paid at my convenience’???

i hate to bring PBC’s up again, but yes. it’s a recurring issue because it’s something that relies on artists and yet the site just won’t listen to artists, for example when we say ‘why not just put the coin in the usd shop year-round??????’ no. let’s not. let’s just ignore suggestions that make sense so you don’t get fair pay. (ftr, this was suggested in two places - once in the thread Hikaru made suggesting PBC’s be moved to USD shop in the first place, where it was ignored, and once in the new transparency thread, where i was told it was the wrong place to suggest this. :V)

although paintbrushes are now removed (and lol it took at least a week since the announcement and someone mentioning it on the transparency thread for them to actually be removed from the shop, good job), it’s a recurring event for people to wait weeks-months to be paid for their paintbrushes. them being removed from the shop doesn’t affect this either, since people still have plenty of em.

apparently a suggestion to add BC to the USD shop year-round was accepted and never implemented.

predicts also haven’t been checked in a while, and artists for those need to get their pay too.

speaking of, the whole SCC thing - i know the most recent one i did, i had to wait a few months to get paid for it. (great incentive when you’re trying to lure new SCC artists.)

which brings me to site staff not being paid. it’s inevitable that the site is going to fail when it’s run by volunteers who have off-site jobs, and the only paid worker (Slash) takes random weeks off without telling anyone. it’s also just totally immoral, imo, to not pay your workers, especially Eri, who is now technically running the whole site??

this…. brings me to my point. artists (and staff, sometimes) have no power on this site. considering the site is run by artists/volunteers, that is very unfair. if Slash just decides to not pay artists who have given him art, there’s nothing we can do about it but wait. is that how it should work? shouldn’t we have a voice??

there have been a lot of situations where i have felt wronged and very powerless to change the situation, because the person i would report the wrongdoing to, my ‘boss’, is the one screwing me over. and my only other option is to quit.

remember last year, the whole chargeback issue, when everyone banded together to save the site and donate money and buy pets through auctions, because of how much we love aywas??? and it just feels, maybe this is just me here, but it really feels like Slash just doesn’t. like he just doesn’t care. we spend so much time and money on this site and he just up and disappears. doesn’t pay his artists. this isn’t right.

so, maybe this sounds extreme, but i feel like the actual only solution we have to get our voices heard is to start a union. so we can all have our voices heard as one, because individually, we’re being ignored. if that sounds too extreme for you, i get that! but the other choice is doing nothing and then this just keeps happening over and over again? i can fully see this happening again and again because no one is held responsible.

ok this got really really long and there’s other stuff i’d like to add but it’s just too long already so. just imagine all the other stuff you’d like to add and that’s the stuff i would’ve added if i could shrink the text or something. :\

evelyn-gloria-archive

To begin with, I’m not going to sit here and lie to you and go “HEY everything is 100% okay *thumbs up*” but I’m also not gonna hand out ass pats either - because there’s a lot of valid points, and frankly a lot of bollocks here too.

1. Slash didn’t disappear. He’s been in contact with staff at least every other day during this whole supposed “disappearing act” he’s done according to some people. He hasn’t been in a position where he could safely and securely do some work because he was unable to access a secure wifi, or was only able to use his phone (which for some things is just inadequate), but beside that he is not “gone”. As far as I know he processed lists last week, and there are no lists that need to be processed as of this moment. I may be incorrect in this, but this is what I’ve heard from multiple artists that work under him.

2. Slash generally forgets that people owe him money for weeks at a time. Is this a problem? Yes, he should be asking for commission payments regularly and on a schedule. That said, it’s the artists’ responsibility to know how much they owe and keep that aside for when it’s asked for - it isn’t their money, and they should treat it as such. All users that have been banned for not paying fees owed a large amount, didn’t pay, ignored requests for payment (usually multiple times) and then were banned with the guarantee that they would be unbanned when the fee was paid. After all, why should we continue allowing the user to access clientèle if they have no intention of paying their dues?

3. Main Queues are not stuck. A lot of them were inherited in a whirlwind of mess and bullshit that out of respect for people we have kept our mouths shut over. To put it bluntly, everything that was important was purposefully withheld, deleted, and then anyone who needed that information was subsequently blocked and ignored. The fact that despite this the main queues have remained running proves that we have a couple of amazing people doing some stellar work that people don’t appreciate because they have no idea just what shit they had to wade through to make it look like they were just “lagging behind”.

As for Slash’s queues, again I heard that they were ran recently and are all on time, so I’m not sure which are apparently stuck? Vampi’s queues run based on when artists turn stuff in so, I have absolutely no qualification to speak about that other than to say I know she’s a lovely lady and dedicated to the job she was given - and she was left with so many fuck ups and fuckery in that thanks to the previous admin that I’m in awe of how she’s managed to make it work at all.

4-7. Yep, I’m lumping these together to make one shining point: money is a problem.

Paintbrushes were unanimously loathed by all staff, but it was pushed ahead anyway because it was what users wanted and Slash has the well meaning but often site destroying intention of giving users what they want. Due to their implementation all we’ve done is see massive monetary losses.

You see, when people buy paintbrushes they do so to hoard them - but we still have to pay taxes for those purchases. So the money is literally shoved into artist pockets to try and use as much as we can (which has so often backfired and left us thousands out of pocket as artists don’t turn in lists and sometimes just completely disappear with the money, which is insanely hard to retrieve back), we pay what we can as quickly and thoroughly as possible because if we use it on expenses we don’t have to pay a frankly ridiculous amount of tax.

This wouldn’t be so terrible, but as the user hoards the paintbrushes - so do the artists. At any one time we can have an artist asking for thousands of dollars from paintbrushes. One month we had to find over $10k to pay for paintbrushes that we simply didn’t have because of expenses, taxes, and paintbrushes being the worst damned idea we’ve ever let Slash get away with. And yes, I have said that to his face. Repeatedly.

So you see, we could move all these coins to the USD shop, but the high likelihood is that all it will do is once again put money in our pockets that we have to give the tax man, and then we’re still out of luck and pocket, and all it’s done is incur the wrath of users saying that the site is “pay to play”.

Yes, right now it is. In part that’s our fault for paintbrushes, it’s the world economy’s fault for being shitty enough that people need to rely on a site like Aywas to still be able to eat this week, and partly the fault of artists that will only take USD (and I should stress, I don’t blame any artist that can make money from their craft in the slightest for doing so).

8. All the predict accepters are going, “I’m sorry what?” in polite tones right now because predicts aren’t behind, and if people aren’t getting paid for predict work then they need to talk to their commissioning user, and perhaps staff to compel payments.

9. I will get into that in a moment. Trust me, this one will blow people’s minds.

10. Please stop dragging us into this with absolutely no idea of what we do and assuming we feel cheated by not being paid. Some of us put our time into Aywas because we love it, some because we have nothing else to do and it keeps us occupied, and some of us simply don’t want the hassle of declaring any small amount of payment we might get to the tax man. We all applied knowing it was and is a purely volunteer placement where our only payment is near constant harassment.

What people don’t see is that we literally work all day, every day. And I do mean every day - I work a minimum 12 hour day, 7 days a week. I’m not the only one. We are the ones that know every problem we’re being yelled at for, know every non-problem we’re being yelled at for, and are the ones who are constantly reporting, discussing and otherwise trying to fix shit around site on a constant basis. We’re exhausted - not because we’re forced to be here, but because we feel like we have to be because if we don’t fix it, who will? And even then, as I said, usually our reward is more yelling, harassment, rudeness and a perpetual cycle of “it’s taken us months to finally fix this, but because someone threw a tantrum about it two days before it was finished they’re taking credit for it and yelling at us even more because it "gets results”.“

Don’t get me wrong, there are so many amazing people who are insanely supportive, who are polite and helpful and understanding - but the few loud people who would rather rip into us for doing "nothing” when having literally no understanding of anything… well.

We don’t want payment. We want peace. We want to feel like we don’t have to hide everything that we do that isn’t site work because we’ll be harassed for not working, and we don’t want to be stalked for every scrap of site work we do to be told after a 16 hour day where we’ve averted a major crisis that you will never know about because we made sure everything kept running while we fixed it, that we’re inadequate. We know we’re not perfect, and it would be nice for people to treat each other like human beings instead of just something else to scream at.

And in reference to #9 - you all have the missing member of staff wrong. For all his faults, Slash is still here. He makes mistakes trying to appease users, he has a godawful sense of timing, and lord knows he has a schedule telling him when to do shit but *throws hands in the air* Through all that? He. Is. Here.

People keep complaining about certain things not being done or answered and not once has anyone paused to realise that they all have a common thread (one that seems to be continually overlooked in favour of blaming Slash). The reason things are late is because we don’t know if theyr'e actually going to do it, we don’t want to fuck things up by messing with another staff member’s plans - so we sit, wait, and in the end we go “Okay we have to do something”… which is never enough for anyone.

We know people are pissed off. WE are pissed off. You have no otherworldly idea how fucking pissed off we all are on a constant basis right now, to the point years old friendships are coming apart at the seams because we’re so stressed.

So you can unionise but it will solve absolutely nothing. Aywas is not and has never been a viable financial crutch for artists. It’s a pet site for goodness sakes, it’s meant to be fun - but thanks to tantrums, feuds, and general bullshit that manages to just keep happening, along with huge demands to keep increasing artist pay to the point we’ve literally had to sacrifice fixing the site to just keep breedings going, that compounds every other problem we have… I can’t count on even one hand how many people actually still want to damn be here other than to have something to scream about - because frankly that’s the only reason I can think of for people who have gone on hiatus to keep coming back and yelling to anyone who’ll listen about a site they abandoned of their own accord months ago.

I love Aywas, I put my all into it and into trying to keep it going - I know it’s faults. I know it’s problems from a user stand point, I sure as heck know the battles we’re fighting staff side, and I want you to know that this is a grumpy as fuck reply about shit that we know needs to change. Things we’re trying to change. Things that take time to fix. For all my going “omfg wtf are you talking about” on some of the things I know to be different from how people are reporting them, I do see and I do agree with you that there are problems and even on what some of those problems are.

I don’t want an us/them divide - we are all users of a site that at some point we have or even still do love. We’re united by that, and by knowing we need things to buck up in places. All the yelling is just making us all angry and exhausted and it’s going to stop us doing better and getting better and uniting everyone on an amazing site like Aywas could be.

After all, if we all get to the point where logging in feels like a weight on our backs, then how do we save it at all?

obionaywas

Just wanted to reply to this one point:

“ and there are no lists that need to be processed as of this moment. I may be incorrect in this, but this is what I’ve heard from multiple artists that work under him. “

That is not true. I know of at least another 2 artists besides myself who have lists that have been unprocessed for days (5 days, for mine).

#aywas

houndpets

thoughts…...

Slash disappears for 8 days. this means breeding queues that depend on him are stuck; this means artists (who rely on this paycheck) are out of pay, and he owes them this money.

because queues are stuck, we (as breeding artists) cannot get our next breedings in to do our new jobs. so we are in a perpetual limbo without pay.

apparently a suggestion to add BC to the USD shop year-round was accepted and never implemented.

predicts also haven’t been checked in a while, and artists for those need to get their pay too.

speaking of, the whole SCC thing - i know the most recent one i did, i had to wait a few months to get paid for it. (great incentive when you’re trying to lure new SCC artists.)

cirkonia

I am not an artist, but of course am affected by this indirectly as well. I just mentioned how sad it is for me to see the site go downhill constantly and these important things are just not being taken care of. This site has a very poor customer service and obviously very poor “employee service” as well. Something needs to happen and I think a union/council is a good idea. You can’t just run a business like this and it makes me so angry that Slash just won’t hear any of these things. If the way things are right now dont work….this is an AMAZING site with AMAZING people with AMAZING ideas…Slash, just ASK and we all will do our best to help and come up with ideas and whatnot, but stop letting us hang. It’s not fair to all the users who spend time and money to keep this place going….

ellory804

I see a few sides to this.

One, Slash is his own person with rights to do anything he pleases. His time doesn’t have to be spent only on Aywas.

That said, if you own a business, you do owe it and your customers some time and care. Sometimes it feels we as a userbase are more invested in this site than Slash. I can’t claim to know this, because it’s just a feeling, and I’m trying to word this in a way that’s not offensive….but it really feels like the site isn’t cared about as much on some end. Everything is late. Things are broken, low priority, and still we as users spend money. I used a small part of my tax refund on USD items, and I wish I knew where that money was going now that it seems like nothing is high priority and everything is broken.

I thought someone was hired as a co-owner of Aywas, but obviously unless owning the site pays well, people will have other ways to spend their time.

I wish Slash would look into another co-owner. Someone with a passion for the site and for seeing it grow beyond where it is now. Treat it like a business but also like what so many of us have come to love. The magic is gone for me, for so many aspects of the site. It just feels broken and uncared for.

So I don’t know. Slash doesn’t owe all his time to the site, but if he’s not as happy with caring for the site, someone else should be able to step in. I don’t want to lose this site :( I still really love it! It’s got so much potential! It just needs someone who reaaaallly cares and can commit time to working on it….

Like…. shoot if we users could have more of a say in what our USD goes to (aka if we could vote on something every now and then, and the voters were people paying real USD, for ways to spend Aywas’ extra cash after bills) this site would be imporved big time I think. Adventure revamp, more games, paying artists better….

idk hah but no hating on anyone here, everyone is entitled to their own life with their own decision for how they spend their time.

obionaywas

I agree with you in that Slash can do what he wants with his time and if he’s not invested on Aywas, he’s not invested on Aywas.

However, what we’re talking about here (I believe) is that there is work that has been DONE ALREADY. And has been left unpaid for over a week now, with no word to the artists or otherwise as far as I can tell. And that just isn’t right. :/ Like I said, I don’t mind waiting (even tho, yeah I’m struggling for money right now since it’s end of the month) as long as Slash mentions that he’s gonna be away.

I’ve got two lists delivered within the deadline (I’m doing 2 5 breeding lists in 7 days and maybe that’s kinda masochistic of me but well, there’s a reason for it and $$$ is it -- I also love doing the babies, ofc) and... haven’t been paid yet. Again, that’s okay and week isn’t all that much, right? But it just keeps, growing, that time. :/

Btw, unrelated, but one of the breedings (blind date) is yours, lol.

#aywas

houndpets

thoughts…...

Slash disappears for 8 days. this means breeding queues that depend on him are stuck; this means artists (who rely on this paycheck) are out of pay, and he owes them this money.

because queues are stuck, we (as breeding artists) cannot get our next breedings in to do our new jobs. so we are in a perpetual limbo without pay.

apparently a suggestion to add BC to the USD shop year-round was accepted and never implemented.

predicts also haven’t been checked in a while, and artists for those need to get their pay too.

speaking of, the whole SCC thing - i know the most recent one i did, i had to wait a few months to get paid for it. (great incentive when you’re trying to lure new SCC artists.)

obionaywas

I agree with all of this, and just wanted to add (since I haven't seen it mentioned? Please kick me pathos if you already said it!) that if there's something up with Slash or he isn't able to be online for whatever reason, I (and I imagine other breeding artists) won't mind waiting as long as necessary, granted, there's some warning. Just a little 'look I'll be away for X and then I'll be back'. Not even a reason needed, just, yeah.

#aywas

Finished colouring my snoodle set. :3 All natural moth colours (altho I forget what’s what, right now. The first one is a rosy maple, and the last is a Madagascan sunset moth...)

Right, so, the second one is a Cecropia Moth, the 3rd is a Gallium sphinx moth and the 4th is a Lime-Hawk Moth

#aywas

Selling both of these (Founders) + rights for the species HERE

#Aywas #just haven't done anything with them in forever #I'm sure someone could do so much more lwl

mooarts-blog

So that stardew valley is a crackin’ good game, ey?

obionaywas

I can’t stop playing it. HELP.

#30 hours in and I haven't even made it to fall yet lol

I... may be contributing to my own problem lmao. Anyway, just submitted this earlier today. Crystal Egg Ticket (Drei) + Greater Fert + Cursed Waters and ofc, a HGK for Velox...es? Veloxi? I have no idea!

#aywas