This thread at Captain Awkward has a bunch of useful info and strategies for curbing monologuing in conversation. I need to go through and copy out the best ones for future reference.
An idea to occured to me as I was reading that I’d like to experiment with: using breath to limit my conversational turns. You see, my form of ADHD makes the split attention needed for self-monitoring very hard. So something like the three sentence rule won’t do so well. (How many sentences have I already uttered? Plus I’m perfectly capable of constructing a grammatically-correct page-long sentence on the fly, just like a 19th century novelist.) I’m better off with natural rewards — where doing the thing is a necessary condition for getting the reward and can’t be skipped.
In the same vein, I bet limiting my conversational turns to 1 breath might work better, because it’s a natural limit on how much I can talk at all at once. Learning to notice when I’m running out of breath won’t be easy, but maybe it’d be possible.
For longer talks I could count breaths on my fingers and once my hand was all open, then end the turn — though that’s the kind of infodump you’d want to get consent for first. And I could regulate stuff further by the size of breath I take. Then I don’t have to think while I’m talking, only before.
Here’s a perspective on the Ukraine war that has haunted me for three years, but I’ve never seen anyone else really discuss. In this essay I will…
For the record, filibuster in the US Senate sense was adapted from filibuster in the original, which as a private military expedition, usually organized by Southerners before the Civil War hoping to expand slavery to Central America. They basically all failed, except for Texas.
Was Texas a filibuster? Well, maybe Sam Austin didn’t think so, but on the other hand, they did revolt against Mexico in part because Mexico didn’t allow slavery. And the US government wasn’t involved, although they sourced equipment from here. I haven’t looked up whether they had significant private support from wealthy Southerners in high positions (probably did). So it does check the boxes.
The main difference from a regular filibuster is that the Anglophone Texans had immigrated first and integrated with wealthy Trianon somewhat. (Step 1 that Putin forgot. Active-duty Girkin emphatically does not count).
Step 2 is that the immigrants convinced their Tejano neighbors that independence was a good idea. The Russians completely skipped this step, pulling their leaders from a failed politician, a former Father-Frost-for-Hire, a guy who still lived with his mother, etc.
Step 3 is to acquire military equipment and maybe train a bit. In the 19th century US, militias were still a thing. Some of the Texans probably had served in the US or Mexican Army, but I didn’t look that up. In any case, less specialized equipment was needed: mainly cannons, which civilians could buy. Nowadays war, as opposed to a protracted insurgency, requires tons of heavy equipment—tanks, APCs, MANPADs, howitzers, and their ammo—which would tax the funding of even the richest crowd, if any government would even let civilians or NGOs buy them.
Come to think of it, Putin failed even in Step 0: pick somewhere hard to get to. Ukraine has a good rail network and a full highway network. Even when the central government was still convulsed by the aftermath of revolution, volunteers could flood the Donbass for the price of a ticket or a gas-tank. (And flood they did: volunteers who had been organizing themselves into centuries to train self-defense during Euromaidan). Not like pre-rail, mostly pre-steamboat Texas, on the other side of the desert from Mexico City, governed by generals over an unmobilized populace.
So in short, if Putin wanted the Donbass, he completely failed to filibuster it properly. Good thing, too, because Ukraine deserves a better future than kleptocracy.
“I am experiencing this hearing and I am struggling whether I respond or launch into this question as a legislator or from the perspective of a woman of faith because I cannot--it is very difficult to sit here and listen to arguments in the long history of this country of using Scripture and weaponizing and abusing Scripture to justify bigotry.
White supremacists have done it. Those who justified slavery did it. Those who fought against integration did it, and we are seeing it today.
Sometimes, especially in this body, I feel as though if Christ himself walked through these doors and said what he said thousands of years ago, that we should love our neighbor and our enemy, that we should welcome the stranger, fight for the least of us, that it is easier for a rich man--it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into a kingdom of Heaven, he would be maligned as a radical and rejected from these doors.
I know, and it is part of my faith, that all people are holy, and all people are sacred, unconditionally, and that is what makes faith sometimes--that is what prompts us to transform because it is unconditional.
It is not about that it is up to us to love parts of people. We love all people. There is nothing holy about rejecting medical care of people, no matter who they are, on the grounds of what their identity is.
There is nothing holy about turning someone away from a hospital. There is nothing holy about rejecting a child from a family. There is nothing holy about writing discrimination into the law and I am tired of communities being of faith being weaponized and being mischaracterized because the only time religious freedom is invoked is in the name of bigotry and discrimination.
I am tired of it. My faith commands me to treat Mr. Minton as holy because he is sacred. Because his life is sacred. Because you are not to be denied anything that I am entitled to. That we are equal in the eyes of the law and we are equal in my faith in the eyes of the world.
So, I just have to get that out ahead of time because it is deeply disturbing, not just what is happening here but what this administration is advancing is the idea that religion and faith is about exclusion.
It is not up to us. It is not up to us to deny medical care. It is up to us to feed the hungry, to clothe the poor, to protect children, and to love all people as ourselves.”
If you’re genuinely interested in learning more about settler colonialism and answering questions like “wait what does land back look like?” “What can I do?” and “What are the contexts informing this and why do Indigenous people reject being part of the US/Canada?” there are free syllabi online which can answer these questions (they will not answer it directly, the point is to get you to think for yourself and ask more questions that can lead you to thinking more deeply about this and how you can personally take action towards better practices of solidarity)
These are limited resources that mainly deal with North America and English-speaking countries, because that’s the context I am coming from. If you have resources from other regions and other languages, I welcome them here, or anything from your local context.
Hey Sam! Since it's currently AO3 donation time, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it? I'm asking because you've written RPF and it's one of many "anti-AO3/anti-AO3 donations" people's favourite things to bring up when they're complaining about AO3 getting so many donations that it continuously obtains an excess of its donation goal whenever donation time rolls around? (Wow, how many times can I say "donation" in an ask?)
Sorry if this question bothers you! I don't mean to offend or annoy.
Hey anon! Sorry it took a while to get to this, I don't even know if the drive is still going on, but the question came in while I was traveling and I didn't really have the time for stuff that wasn't travel-related. In any case, let's dig in! (I am not offended, no worries.)
So really there are two issues here and as much as some people who are critical of AO3 want to conflate them, they are different. While some criticism of AO3 may be valid, rhetoric against AO3 tends to misinterpret both in separate ways.
First there's the issue of what AO3 hosts -- RPF, yes, but more broadly, varied content that some people find distasteful or think should be illegal, which is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the archive and more broadly a dangerous attitude towards the concept of freedom of expression.
Second, there's the issue of AO3 generally outpacing its fundraising goals while not allowing monetization, which is a misunderstanding of the legal status of AO3 and to an extent a misunderstanding of philanthropy as a whole.
The longer I watch debates about content go on, the more I come to the conclusion that I was fortunate to have a teacher who really wanted to instill in us an understanding of free speech not as a policy but as an ongoing dialogue. It's not only that freedom of expression "protects you from the government, not the Justin" as the meme goes, but also that freedom of expression is not a static thing. It's an ongoing process of identifying what we find harmful in society and what we want to do about it.
Should the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater be restricted? Should the freedom to yell slurs at drag performers? Should the freedom to teach prepubescent kids about gender, sexuality, and/or safe sex? Should the freedom to wear a leather puppy hood at Pride? Who gets to say, and why?
I was nine when my teacher did a unit on freedom of speech and the intersection of "harm prevention" and "censorship", which is (and should be) a discussion, not a set of ironclad rules. This ambiguity has thus been with me for over thirty years, and I'm comfortable with the ambiguity, with the process; I'm not sure a lot of people critical of AO3's content truly are. Perhaps some can't be, especially those affected by hate speech, but RPF is not hate speech. It's just fiction. Or is fiction "just fiction"? This is a question society as a whole is grappling with, although fandom seems to be a little out ahead of society in terms of how explicitly we discuss it.
The idea that prose can incite violence or cause harm is both valid to examine (witness the rise of fascism on the radio in the 20s, on Facebook and Twitter in the past ten years; they're very similar processes) and a very slippery slope. Because again: who decides what harm is, and what causes it, and what we do about it? Our values align us with certain beliefs, but those are only our values, not universal truths. So AO3 is part of the ongoing question of harm and benefit both to society and individuals.
AO3 itself, however, has a fairly defined policy that it is not meant to police content; it is an archive, not a bookstore or a school board. AO3 refines its TOS and policies as necessary, but the goal is always open access and as much freedom of expression as possible, and if that's uncomfortable for some people then that's a discussion we have to have; ignoring it won't make it go away. But it has to be a discussion, it can't be a unilateral change to the archive's TOS or a series of snaps and clapbacks, and I don't see a lot of people ready to move beyond flinging insults. Perhaps because they were taught a much more binary view of freedom of expression than I was.
So, self-evidently, I support AO3 and I don't have a problem with RPF. Whether other people do is something we're going to have to get to grips with, and that's likely to be a process that is still going on when most of us are dust. I'd rather have a century of ambiguity than a wrong answer tomorrow, anyway.
But whether AO3 hosts RPF is truly a separate issue from its donation drives, because it's a criticism some people level at the site which exists whether it's fundraising or not. So people can criticize AO3's open policy and they can give it as a reason not to support the site, but it's just one aspect of the archive and the fundraising as a whole should be examined separately.
I think AO3's fundraisers are deeply misunderstood (sometimes on purpose) because even people who are anticapitalist get a little crazy when money gets involved, and this is, to fandom, a lot of money -- a few hundred thousand, reliably, every fundraiser. To me, a fundraiser that pulls in three hundred grand is almost quaint; my current nonprofit pulls in better than ten million a year and my previous employer had an endowment of several billion dollars. At my old job I didn't even bother researching people who couldn't give us a hundred grand.
On the other hand, AO3 is an extreme and astounding outlier in the nonprofit world, because basically it's the only one of its kind to work the way it does. It is entirely volunteer-run on the operational side (ie: tag wranglers, coders, lawyers, etc) and has no fundraising staff (gift officers, researchers, outreach officers) as far as I'm aware. To pull in three hundred grand from individual one-time donations, without any paid staff and without even a volunteer fundraising officer? That's insane. That doesn't happen. Except at AO3.
What people misunderstand, however, is the basic status of a nonprofit, which is a legal status, not simply a social one. (I'm adding in some corrections here since it gets complicated and the terminology can be important!) The Organization for Transformative Works, the parent of AO3, is a nonprofit, which indicates how it was incorporated as an organization; additionally it is registered federally as tax-exempt, which carries certain perks, like not paying sales tax, and certain duties, like making their financials transparent to a certain extent. (Religious nonprofits are exempt from the transparency requirement.) If you're interested in more about nonprofits and tax-exempt status a reader dropped a great article here.
Nonprofits, unlike for-profit companies, cannot pay a share of their income to stakeholders. Nonprofits don't have financial stakeholders, only donors. They can have employees and pay them a salary -- that's me, for example -- but if a nonprofit pulls in $10M in donations, my salary is paid from that, I don't get a percentage and nobody else does either. That's what it means to be a nonprofit -- the money above operational costs goes back into the organization. The donations we (and AO3) receive must be plowed under and used for outreach, server maintenance, further fundraising, services expansion, et cetera. You can see this in the 990 forms on Guidestar or ProPublica, or in their more accessible breakdowns on Charity Navigator. Nonprofits that do not put the majority of their income towards service provision tend to get audited and lose their nonprofit status. So nobody's getting paid from all that money, and the overage that isn't spent goes into what is basically a savings account in the name of the nonprofit. (I'm vastly simplifying but that's the gist.) Using that money for personal purposes is illegal. It's called "private inurement" and there's a good article here about it. The money belongs to the OTW as a concept, not to anyone in or of the OTW.
So the biggest misunderstanding that I see in people who are mad at AO3 fundraisers is that "they" are getting all this money (who "they" are is never clearly stated but I'm pretty sure people think @astolat has a special wifi router that runs on burning hundred dollar bills) while "we" can't monetize our fanfic. But "they" get nothing -- nobody even earns a salary from AO3 -- and you can easily prove that by looking at the 990 forms they file with the government, which are required to be made public. You can see the most recently available 990, from 2020, here at Guidestar. Page seven will show you the "highest compensated" employees, all of whom are earning zero dollars or nonmonetary perks (that's the three columns on the right).
Either AO3 is entirely volunteer-run or someone's Doing A Real Fraud. The money the OTW spends is documented (that's page 10 and 11 primarily) and while they may pay for, say, the travel and lodging expenses of a lawyer going to DC to defend a freedom-of-expression case, they don't pay the lawyer for their time, or give them a cut of the income.
Despite what you've read, the reason "we" can't monetize our fanfics on AO3 has nothing to do with the site being the product of volunteer handiwork or AO3 having it in their terms of service or it being considered gauche by some to do so; it's because
IT'S ILLEGAL.
I cannot say this loudly enough: It is against the law for a nonprofit to be used by its staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries to earn direct profit from the services provided by the nonprofit.
You can be paid to work at one, but you cannot side-hustle by selling your handmade friendship bracelets for personal gain on the nonprofit's website. If the nonprofit knowingly allows monetization of its services, it can lose nonprofit status, be fined, be hit with back taxes, and a lot of other unpleasant bullshit can go down, including prosecution of those involved for fraud. If you put a ko-fi link on your fanfic, you are breaking the law, and if AO3 allows it, they are too.
Okay, that was a sidebar, but in some ways not, because it gets to the heart of the real complaints about AO3 fundraising, which is that people in fandom are sick or unhoused or in some form of need and other people in fandom are giving to AO3, a fan site that is financially stable, instead of giving to peoples' gofundmes or dropping money in their Ko-Fi or Paypal. And while it is a legitimate grievance that there are people who are in such desperate need while we live in an era of unprecedented abundance, that's not AO3's fault. AO3 doesn't solicit actively, there's no unasked-for mailings or calls from a gift officer. They just put a banner up on their website, and people give. (Again, this is incredibly outlier behavior in the nonprofit world, I'd do a case study on it but the conclusion would just be "shit's real, yo.") You might as well be mad that people give to their local food bank instead of someone's ko-fi.
You cannot lay at AO3's feet the fact that people want to give to AO3 instead of to your fundraiser. That's a choice individuals have made, and while you can engage with them in terms of why they made the philanthropic choices they did, to blame an organization they supported rather than the person who made the choice to give is not only incorrect but futile, and unlikely to win anyone over to supporting you. We know from research that guilt is not a tremendous motivator of philanthropy.
It is also not necessarily a binary choice; just because AO3 gets a hundred grand in $5 donations doesn't mean most of the people giving don't also give $5 elsewhere. I support the OTW on occasion, and I also fundraise for UNICEF and the Chicago Parks Foundation and BAGLY and others, in addition to giving monthly to several nonprofits that I have longterm relationships with -- my alma mater, the animal rescue where I got the Cryptids, my shul. And I give, occasionally and anonymously, to fundraisers that pass through Radio Free Monday, which are mainly individuals in need, because I was once in need and now I pay it forward. These are the choices I have made. Nobody twisted my arm. I respond poorly to someone making the attempt to do so by attacking places I've given.
I think the upshot is, after all of this that I've written, that we cannot begin to come to grips with questions of institutional inequality in philanthropy, or freedom of expression and censorship, until people actually understand what's going on, and too few do. So all I can do is try and explain, and hopefully create a forum for people to learn and grow when it comes to charitable giving.
Archive Of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works are products of our community and as that community changes, we will necessarily continue to re-evaluate what aspects of it mean and how AO3/OTW express the community sentiment. I hope that the ongoing discussion of support for AO3 also leads to people learning more about their philanthropic options. But criticizing AO3 for fundraising by attacking it for fulfilling one of its stated purposes is silly, and attempting to guilt people into giving in the ways one thinks they should give rather than how they do give is just going to make one extremely unlikable.
As members of this community, we have to be a part of the push and pull, but it's difficult to do that competently in ignorance. So, I do my best to be knowledgeable and to educate my readers, and I hope others will do the same.
“Despite what you’ve read, the reason “we” can’t monetize our fanfics on AO3 has nothing to do with the site being the product of volunteer handiwork or AO3 having it in their terms of service or it being considered gauche by some to do so; it’s because
IT’S ILLEGAL.
I cannot say this loudly enough: It is against the law for a nonprofit to be used by its staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries to earn direct profit from the services provided by the nonprofit.
You can be paid to work at one, but you cannot side-hustle by selling your handmade friendship bracelets for personal gain on the nonprofit’s website. If the nonprofit knowingly allows monetization of its services, it can lose nonprofit status, be fined, be hit with back taxes, and a lot of other unpleasant bullshit can go down, including prosecution of those involved for fraud. If you put a ko-fi link on your fanfic, you are breaking the law, and if AO3 allows it, they are too.”
With all due respect, I cross-checked your references with Kakashi from accounting, and the error in your fics was statistically significant. Every fic published in our “Enemies to Lovers” tag after the most recent episode’s air date needs to be updated and reviewed due to new policies issued by the author.
Please re-aquaint yourself with the source material before next week’s meeting and prepare to discuss the changes.
I understand that you and your team would prefer project AO3 to adhere to your specific set of standards. However, this particular space is targeting a well-defined, well-identified segment and I'm afraid your requirements are out of scope at the moment.
I'm more than happy to provide a POC for you and your team to start writing userstories, so you can draft a separate project that specifically caters to your needs. It should be easy work to get it up and running, considering that, by the tone of your last communication, I assume you've secured funding and prioritization for this item.
All the best, let me know if you need anything else!
