#how long is this queue...?

[aerospace-agenda]

people really are being like “covid is gaias vengeance on humanity for the exploitation, humanity is the real disease! look at how much cleaner venice is!” when like...

...there’s still about the same number of people. it’s the machinery of capitalism that’s been shutting down mostly and making things look cleaner or whatever.

[aerospace-agenda]

i just... like.

i get that, if it’s taken someone a lot of time and effort to realise, or grow comfortable, or whatever, with how they identify, that seeing someone else look at it and go “oh, neat, i’m gonna go with that!” can sting.

but... like, ultimately, is that not part of the end goal? is not the preferable scenario one in which you don’t have to struggle and fight in order to figure out what you are?

the goal should be to build an environment in which people feel comfortable experimenting, without strings attached, with their identity. without the pressure of stereotypes, or blame for getting it wrong, or pressure over having to keep an identity forever once chosen or decided or whatever.

telling people theyre basically “doing an identity wrong” because they haven’t “thought about it enough” is just... good grief. this is... like, the insistence on non-normative identities as things you need to think hard and deep on, like... i do not agree with that, at all.

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Ok, so, just... since the “ao3 is bad for asking for donations” bs is going around again, theres a bit of new stuff mixed in, but it seems to largely be the same “why dont they pay the authors” type stuff, with the usual insinuations of the people running the site just pocketing the money and doing nothing.

they made a bit over $700k in donations last year, but let’s bump that up to $750k for estimation purposes.

As of several years ago, they were running with about 750 volunteers, on ao3 alone.

there’s also 18 committees that they run, which are headed by a total of about 30 people, and let’s say there are 3 or 4 other people on each committee on average.

on top of that, they’re one of the most visited and active sites in the world, with almost 6 million fics stored there, and they regularly hit in the region of 250,000,000 distinct visitors a month. these numbers are very significant, because to operate smoothly servers need to be able to quickly access the data for a page, and then pass that data to you. 

lets say there are... hm. about 60kb of data that they need to pass to you in order to generate a page. at 250 million visitors, if each person loads a single page and does nothing else, that’s 15TB a month, easily, since i’m taking that estimate from directly loading a single short chapter, no searching or browsing or visiting different author pages or looking through bookmarks. which most people will probably do to some degree each time they visit, each of which is another system that needs to be queried, and is reliable and fast about it.

for reference, i can’t get an estimate on how much this must cost, because i havent been able to find any hosts to compare against that even have hosting schemes that allow numbers as high as ao3 delivers reliably and efficiently.

i work with databases for my job, and i frankly have no idea how the fuck ao3 manages to be what it is on the budget that it gets, im half-convinced there are fucking wizards back there or something.

purchasing the kinds of servers that they need to be using must be costing them well into the tens of thousands on the up-front price, server maintanence costs can run well into the thousands per month, and their reliability must mean they have sufficient redudancy to take them out of commission on the regular.

anyway. let’s say that the hosting, maintanence, and replacement costs for all this only cost them $150k a year. based on everything i know, this is an absolutely absurd underestimate to the extent that it’s frankly laughable.

anyway, that then leaves $600k. 

no matter where you assume that goes into the pockets of people behind the scenes, this would require complete complicity of everyone behind the scenes to keep under cover, as well as passing their false financial statements through audits and such. by and large, conspiracies like this don’t work very well!

so, that $600k should go to the people who “actually” bring value to ao3, the writers, then?

does everyone just get an even share of it? in that case, as there are about 2.6 million accounts- everybody gets about 23 cents a year. sound worth it? 

no? ok then, what about for each fic someone writes, they get an even share of it? after all, there were “only” about a million fics published in 2019. that’s about 60, maybe 70 cents per fic, doesn’t that sound good to you?

im guessing you think that’s still a bit low. in that case, should it be based on "quality” of fics? how should that quality be determined? kudos, hits, reader interaction? should that be an ongoing thing, or assessed at a particular time since publication? what about very long-running fics, how should that be assessed? should people just get paid a flat amount per chapter?

if the metrics to determine how much a fic is “worth” are transparent, then they’ll be abused- how should that be be determined? poor language quality? short chapter length? if they’re not transparent, how do you justify to authors why they aren’t paid more?

what about disputes regarding fanfics being “stolen”? right now, i dont think many people care much about if someone else writes a very similar fic to theirs. but would they feel the same way if someone else writes something inspired by, or with the same premise, or generally similar, to one of yours? what about if someone writes a story and incorporates someone elses OC? should the person who created that OC get a cut? 

if you want to increase funds to pay authors, how should you approach that? ask for donations? if payment metrics are transparent, then that means that anybody who performs well on them are likely to actively drive away donors. make it a subscription site? would you pay a monthly subscription fee just to access the site?

and so on, and so on. and that’s before any issues with backlog and such should be resolved. tbh, there are so many precedents that’d need to be set and potential issues that this would raise that even if ao3 responded with “fuck you” to every person who currently aren’t happy with the system, it would still probably be less unpopular than literally any change to allow them to pay authors.

honestly, at the end of the day, most people who are actually interested in financial support and who write fanfic? generally have a blog with a donation button. or a patreon. or something similar, along those lines. and there’s nothing stopping you from just going and doing that directly if you’re actually interested in supporting them.

it’s worth noting that there’s also a legal aspect to this, which im not particularly familiar with, but, for starters- a commercial aspect to works can make a big difference in whether or not something is considered “fair use”. whether or not something is, indeed, fair use, can also be pretty subjective. do you want to toss that litigational coin? and do you have the money and lawyers to press the issue? 

[aerospace-agenda]

“i might not be the sharpest knife in the ceaser-”

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look, im only going to say this once

there are only three genders:

male, female, and email.

[aerospace-agenda]

me: "the ani- ...the peo- ......the furries of animal crossing..."

@a-polite-melody: “............”

[aerospace-agenda]

so, the tories have in quick succession: 

refused to release a report on russian interference in the last election and the referendum before this election (x) while continuing to take pretty significant donations from russian donors.

impersonated an independent fact check org on twitter during a live debate (x)

posted an edited video of a labour politician answering a question on brexit, from giving a fairly detailed answer, to being speechless and unable to answer (x)

edited a bbc headline in a screenshot that they posted on twitter (x)

made an extremely dodgy costing analysis of a labour government (x)

misrepresented the labour tax plan (which increases taxes for people who earn over £80k/year) as “costing £2.4k to the average taxpayer”, as though it would be a flat tax increase for everybody; there’s actually a calculator to show how much extra you would pay with the labour plan, and it doesnt hit £2.4k/year unless you’re making almost £120k. (x)

(both of the above while postponing any kind of manifesto release of their own, and any costings thereof)

created a website at “labourmanifesto.co.uk” at which they spread misinfo like the above

and thats not even getting into the more individual things that boris has done, like the thing regarding the changes to the NI threshold and how much that will save taxpayers- the IFS claims claim £85, the tories press release claims £100. boris? claims £500.

yeah, im really feeling the trustworthiness here. this is totally the behaviour id want to see from a government.

totally.