Salty Sadness

Call me Oakley | 21 | Nonbinary (they/them) | Runs the AO3 of the same name (though very much suck at updating it) | Icon thanks to @prideicons

[whatevenhappening]

I will commission you for RID Swideswipe for 5 dollars. Consider my offer wisely.

5 dollar when

[salty-sadness22]

Glutinous starcream happy pride

Look at this guy (I am very late to answering).

[saninmint]

we made it!

[e-the-village-cryptid]

There’s a particular attitude I often see on the internet that goes something like “If you aren’t part of a particular marginalized group, then you could never understand their experience, so don’t pretend to relate.” And while obviously you’re never going to relate to every aspect of that identity unless you are also of that identity, I feel like this attitude really diminishes opportunities for finding kinship and bonding in similar experiences even if those experiences aren’t exactly the same and/or are the result of different identities.

For example, I’m white and neurodivergent, and I was talking to a Black neurotypical friend about masking, and how I feel like I have to change the entire way I present myself in order to not be considered weird in public. She responded with “Oh, some of that sounds kind of like code-switching— how I have to switch away from using AAVE in white-dominated settings in order to be accepted.” And then we bonded over how frustrating and ridiculous it is that AAVE and stimming are both considered unacceptable in “professional” settings.

Another time, a straight Jewish friend was telling me about a book she had just finished reading, which was written by a Jewish author and had a Jewish main character. She was saying that it was really nice to read a book written by a Jewish author, because even when gentile authors do their research and write a pretty accurate Jewish character, they never quite feel Jewish— you can always tell the author was a gentile. And I said “Oh that sounds kind of like when I read queer characters written by straight authors— you can always tell the author was straight even if they do their research and get things fairly right. So even though I’m happy when any book features queer characters, it’s really especially nice to read queer characters written by queer authors.” And we bonded over this similar experience, and we were both excited that the other understood even if we were coming to this experience from different angles, and then we swapped book recommendations. This conversation is also a great example of when that internet attitude DOES apply— when someone outside of a particular group is trying to understand that group’s entire experience well enough to accurately write the world as seen through their eyes. They’re never quite going to get it right, and that’s ok! It just means it’s important to also have Own Voices authors writing those types of stories also.

Sometimes it seems like people who have been in internet circles exhibiting this attitude for too long are afraid to ever try to relate to the experiences of anyone in any groups other than their own for fear of causing offense, which is honestly pretty counterproductive. Understanding each other and bonding across groups should be the goal! Relating to each other is not a bad thing!

[soul-hammered]

i’d add that these points of what COULD be solidarity are also used AGAINST others by malevolent anti-worker racist forces, and you hate to see it. see: some thumbfaced cop yutz whining about how the irish were slaves* but you don’t see THEM complaining, THEY pulled themselves up and never asked for handouts. :( they could instead be going “hey wow we both got screwed over, and we could have banded together as workers, and yet” *they weren’t but they were discriminated against in other ways i guess

[zephyrzeitgeist]

They certainly were, and that actually adds to the point of this post-

When the Irish were suffering through the potato famine(the English being a major facet to how badly they suffered), the Choctaw sent what they could to help, $170, because they empathized with their plight.

There is a sculpture in Ireland commemorating this, called Kindred Spirits.

And recently Irish donors cited that gesture as they raised $2 million in aid for the Navajo and Hopi tribes for the fight against COVID.

[canadianwheatpirates]

This post is great because goddamn is this a problem in internet social justice stuff, and I wanted to add one of the best takedowns of it that I’ve encountered. It’s from an anthropology paper from the 80s where the author is working through four “pitfalls” of performing materials from a culture other than your own, mostly with an eye to white anthropologists performing materials from nonwhite cultures. One of the “pitfalls” he lays out is exactly this – the refusal to even try and engage with another culture, because you believe you couldn’t possibly understand or relate and so therefore you shouldn’t bother:

Instead of facing up to and struggling with the ethical tensions and moral ambiguities of performing culturally sensitive materials, the skeptic, with chilling aloofness, flatly declares, “I am neither black nor female: I will not perform from The Colour Purple.”

When this strange coupling of naive empiricism and sociobiology – only blacks can understand and perform black literature, only while males John Cheever’s short stories – is deconstructed to expose the absurdity of the major premise, then the “No Trespassing” disclaimer is unmasked as cowardice or imperialism of the worst kind.

[…]

In my view, the “Skeptic’s Cop-Out is the most morally reprehensible corner of the map because it forecloses dialogue. […] The skeptic, however, shuts down the very idea of entering into conversation with the other before the attempt, however problematic, begins.

[…]

The skeptic, detached and estranged, with no sense of the other, sits alone in an echo chamber of his own making, with only the sound of his own scoffing laughter ringing in his ears.

– Dwight Conquergood, Performance As A Moral Act (1985)

(I would also generally recommend this paper for anyone who’s trying to talk to anxious white liberals, because I think the framework is really useful for people who’ve never had to think about intercultural communication before and are worried about fucking up. Showing them the major ways of fucking up, including that refusing to try is fucking up, means that they can direct that anxiety to looking for whether they’re falling into the pitfalls.)

[aevios]

[ID= sculpture of multiple large metal feathers /end ID]

[aqueerkettleofish]

The thing, though, is a lot of “you wouldn’t understand” gets used as a weapon to silence debate. It’s just another form of the Oppression Olympics where the team that wins the gold gets to control the debate, and the team that wins the silver… is just another villain.

It’s a particular favorite tactic of TERFs where you’ll hear them say shit like “Well, I’m a lesbian, so you shouldn’t be arguing with me about the use of the word ‘butch’”.

You’ll see this sort of thing in the extreme fringes of all sorts of movements, and it’s a wonderful way to get people to insulate themselves from “the enemy”, which is really everyone who’s not specifically of the same identity… and of course, those people of the same identity who are willing to interact with “the enemy”.

[roach-works]

you also see this weaponized to fragment and nitpick to death the Own Voices movement in writing– rather than pressuring established publishing houses to pay and promote marginalized writers the same as normative writers when they’re writing stories of their own kinds of people, individual authors are scrutinized over whether they’re ‘authentic’ enough to write the characters they have. can a bisexual REALLY write a lesbian? is a biracial black woman authorized to write a latina?? if someone writes a trans romance, are they nonbinary enough for that to be okay?

it’s a deeply fucked up crab bucket way of policing identity and authenticity, to take as a foregone conclusion that every identity exists in its own impenetrable silo, and no outsider could manage to write good enough to ‘pass’.

[edgebug]

i hate seeing people drink the openai/chatgpt koolaid 😭😭😭 genuinely feels like watching someone get seduced by scientology or qanon or something. like girl help it's not intelligent it's Big Autocomplete it's crunching numbers it's not understanding things i fuckign promise you. like ohhh my god the marketing hype fuckign GOT you

[musashigouda-deactivated2019032]

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

[blooming-wilting]

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” 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 … 

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 don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

[fangasmagorical]

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t “pocket” 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.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t 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. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s 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.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s 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 that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s 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.

[kyraneko]

This is the most functionally-successful and cost-effective website in the history of EVER. By a wide margin.

[skulldog]

Shout out to anyone that ever made a character that’s a ‘Secret Government experiment’ that escapes the lab and is now wanted and misunderstood. That’s top tier character design, thank you.

[insufficiently-advanced]

[busket]

"im tired of living through major historical events" is now "dear lord please let me witness a high profile political assassination in the next 1-2 years. amen"

[johnwaynegayscene]

[espanolbot2]

Trump Wants Snitches to Report on DEI. There’s Just One Problem.

Donald Trump wants people to expose diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the federal government. The idea is already flopping.

The threat was loud and clear: Report your so-called “DEI” employees or else. What exactly “DEIA or similar ideologies” means is up in the air, but the message was out there. And so was the email address of the DEIA snitching hotline. Fake emails quickly started to roll in. ‘I don’t care, fuck these McCarthyite bastards,” one BlueSky user said, with an screenshot attached of an email to the hotline where he ironically reported Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records.” “Anyone have a script to fire off a billion e-mails an hour??” another user asked in the replies. “Anyone can email anything of any size even if it crashes the site,” one X user noted. The scope and effectiveness of this latest phase of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade remains to be seen.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

FLOOD THIS :D

MAKE IT UTTERLY UNUSABLE :D

[genderaffirmingslurs]

The email is [email protected] btw

[theygender]

Don't just spam it today. Keep spamming it until they shut it down. Spam it for weeks, months, however long it takes. Queue this post to reblog periodically to remind other people. Set reminders on your phone or calendar to send Trump bullshit. Treat this like a challenge and win it

Don't let the momentum die down. Don't allow the tipline to become useable in a few weeks when this post stops spreading. Don't allow them to harm vulnerable people on your watch

[infectiouspiss]

borders between countries aren't real btw we just made them up. there's no such thing as an "immigrant" we're all just people moving around on the same planet that we've always moved around on

[teaboot]

I feel like pirating media that isn’t sold or offered anywhere legally anymore shouldn’t be called piracy. Girl thats archaeology

[teaboot]

Pirating abandonware is cyberarchaeology Preservation powered by a modern methodology Bury shit and find it later under public property Or offer an alternative to profit economically

[wizardarchetypes]

i took my friend to Hocking Hills state park yesterday and on our hike I talked all about the (now retired) park naturalist who mentored me years ago, along with the professor who also mentored me and how they got me my first job in my field after college, like I went on and on about my memories of them and the time I spent with them in the park, and then we got to a cave and they were both inside. I hadn’t seen either of then since I moved away seven years ago and then I went back to the state park for the first time since and they were just there. in a cave. they went to the cave together. one of them saw me and said “oh hi! what are you doing here?” like hey fancy us all being here in this cave together huh.

[wizardarchetypes]

i can’t express how much this felt like a video game cutscene encounter. i established the lore for two hours about these specific two Guys and then they appeared, like, in their map.

[wizardarchetypes]

it was this professor btw

[ghost-phish]

ao3 who is hurting you babygirl put your shields down :(

[forsapphics]

New York City, 1970s

[incorrectbatfam]

Ways to be a nuisance in our year of 2025

(from personal experience)

Get a small box. Write "take as you need" on the side. Fill it with period products. Put them in public bathrooms, including men's rooms.

Find a pothole. Paint a dick on it. Either your town will fix it or the public will enjoy your masterpiece.

Apps like No Thanks, Boycat, and Boycott X (my personal fave) let you scan items for boycotting shit. Money talks.

Red Cards contains all the rights that everyone, citizen or not, is entitled to in this country. They come in a bunch of different languages. Print them, give them out, leave them in places that need it, etc.

Don't be a snitch. Know someone undocumented? Someone traveling for reproductive or gender-affirming care? No the fuck you do not.

If someone asks your help doing #5, be their cover. If you live where they're fleeing from: no you don't know where they went, no they didn't tell you anything. If you live somewhere people are going to: that is now your cousin, friend from high school, camping buddy, etc.

Here is a fake person generator including phone, email, and address. Here is a free VPN for desktop and mobile. Spam the shit out of those ICE tiplines, trans bathroom reporting forms, etc. Here is a thing that lets you flood an email. Make their system useless.

If you're white, you have way more freedom when it comes to interacting with cops. Distract and divert.

See Nazi shit? Tear it up, kick it down, paint it over. See a Nazi? Rip into them. If you can't, record them, post it, send it to folks connected to them. Do not let them know peace.

If you protest: nondescript outfit with a change of clothes, cover scars and tattoos, leave behind devices that can track you, and either don't drive or park far away. Masks, goggles, and helmets highly suggested. Heavy duty gloves or tennis rackets for lobbing gas cans back. Fresh water or saline solution for tear gas and pepper spray. Have an exit route but also be prepared to hunker down or get arrested.

Nonprofit orgs are always looking for donations and volunteers, especially smaller local ones. There's a role for everyone, including admin stuff for folks who can't leave home. Reach out to them and ask what help they need. The people who aren't seen are just as important as the ones who are.

If you're taking someone to get an abortion, especially a place like Planned Parenthood that might have picketers, put something under your shirt and pretend you are the one who's pregnant to divert attention. Guys can do this too. Be their secret mpreg fantasy.

Cis folks: if your trans friend asks you to accompany them to a bathroom or locker room, do it. And if someone comes poking their nose in your business, pretend you're the one who's trans—again, taking the attention away from your friend.

It takes just a dozen emails or a few people showing up at local town hall or school board meetings to disrupt everything and steer the discussion.

If you have a job in the government or something adjacent, gum up the works. Let calls go to voicemail and don't return them for hours. Leave emails unanswered for a day or few. Don't work through lunch breaks even if it's busy. Take your PTO in its entirety, and leave something only you can do incomplete. Rearrange your priorities ("Sorry Janet, I can't look into who's hiring illegal immigrants, I gotta fix this printer first"). Create excuses to delay things—it needs to be double checked, it didn't pass inspection, it didn't contain some insignificant detail.

Gather some food or prep some meals for your local homeless folks. Make a portion for yourself too. That way if someone asks, you're simply sharing a meal with an old friend who happens to be down on their luck.

Get some Pride stickers/flags/posters and sprayable Gorilla Glue. Slap them on everything, including cars and businesses owned by conservatives. Make our presence constantly known.

[charlesoberonn]

The reason Trump won is largely the same reason nearly all incumbent governments in the developed world lost. They happened to be in power when inflation was high, even if the inflation had nothing to do with them and there wasn't much they could do to reverse it.

The US actually had the best results in combating inflation out of all developed economies. But it didn't matter. Prices were high and that was enough to swing the election.

[charlesoberonn]

That's exactly it.

[pfaugh]