@everyone who reads a multichapter fic and comments on each individual chapter (rather than commenting just once at the end) so the author can see you read through to individual events with changing thoughts and reactions: i would kill a man for you.
I just watched The Conjuring 2, and while it’s on my mind in a similar vein to this post, I also want to spread some appreciation for Javier Botet because GOD DAMN LOOK AT THIS SHIT
He has Marfan Syndrome, which is a rare connective tissue condition that gives him bizarrely elongated limbs and allows him to do unnatural things with his body, and he’s built quite a resume for himself appearing in horror movies
Like Doug Jones, he also appeared as three of the ghosts in Crimson Peak:
But you may have also seen him as The Crooked Man in The Conjuring 2:
Eddie’s leper in IT:
The Nina monster in all three REC movies:
Set, the God of Death in The Mummy (2017):
The titular creature in Mama:
He did motion capture work for the Xenomorph in Alien: Covenant:
And he most recently appeared in Insidious: The Last Key and the Slender Man movie!!
He’s done other more obscure horror movies too but basically this guy is adorable and inspiring and an amazing talent and I adore him 8D
Had the opportunity and fucking owned it
that’s literally the modern day equivalent of a freak show where the hideous disabled people can go because nobody wants to see them as real people but we’re romanticizing that, i guess? he plays horror monsters because that’s the kind of role he gets. he’s seen as disgusting. that’s not a good thing.
So we are encouraging modern freak shows if we hire this guy but if there exists a human being who has the correct morphology to play these fantastic creatures and aliens who obviously wants to work in the industry, would you rather they cast someone who has more traditional proportions and used after effects to create the necessary elongation to realize these creatures? Personally I’d rather someone who wants this work has it.
Every year, multiple times a year, they convince ppl to fork out thousands of dollars and….literally nothing changes. There’s no doubt in my mind they’re pocketing most of this money lol
Yep
That’s what’s so wild to me. They’ve made exactly 0 changes other than adding the ‘Exclude’ tags and that def doesn’t take 130k.
Actually you can see their budget right here, and, yeah, it cost about 100k. (For reference an entry-level, full time web developer makes about 40k a year, not including benefits).
Here’s where they talk about all the changes they actually made.
To understand why any of this matters, here’s what you have to understand:
In computers, time is expensive.
“Putting a strain on the Archive’s servers” basically means slowing down the website, which potentially means paying for and maintaining more servers, which is more expensive.
And that’s just bookmarks. Because everything on ao3 is interconnected, any changes made to the tagging system could completely break the functionality of the entire website. This means if you didn’t notice any changes somebody did their job really well. Somebody tested that code extensively, pushed it to it’s limits, fixed all the problems, and then tested it all over again.
And that’s just the things they’ve actively made changes to; every year there’s more fics added, which means more data they’ve got to store and maintain. They’ve got to back everything up that when they lose data (not if), they’ve got a backup so you don’t lose the 500,000 word fic you spent 2 years working on and isn’t stored anywhere else.
And that’s just what they’re storing. Every time you load a fic, every time you make a search, you’re communicating with a server, which can only send information out to so many computers at once. More and more people use ao3 each year, meaning they have to buy more servers (which cost money).
Now, I’m not an expert. And I haven’t thoroughly looked through their budget to see if they actually have spent their money wisely, or if there are cheaper contracting services they could have used, but I’m pretty sure the people working there have a better idea of how much something costs than a random person looking at a number and saying “that looks like a lot.”
Do you have to donate? No. Obviously not (although it is tax deductible). But I personally don’t consider paying somebody for a service they’ve provided to be them “pocketing my money,” especially when they’re a nonprofit, unlike, say, twitter, facebook, or… TUMBLR.
Maybe it isn’t worth anything to you to keep ao3 up and running, and that’s fine! But I use their service every single day, and it’s worth something to me.
It’s genuinely worrying to me how often white supremacist misogynist dudes have a weird Viking obsession. The Vikings did not agree with you. Stop dragging the Vikings into this.
Right-wingers: We should treat the Muslims like the Vikings did! Me: You mean travel thousands of miles to strike up profitable trade deals with them in their own countries and establish mutually beneficial business arrangements? Right-wingers: Wot?
Speaking as the genetic equivalent of a jar of mayonnaise smeared on plain white bread, I think it’s because unless you’re actual nobility, the Vikings are kind of the only really glorious-sounding white people from Northern Europe we have for the average modern white peasant to want to ethnically associate with. Not a lot of ethnonationalist glory to be found in dressing up like an oppressed serf tbh. Hard to drum up that white supremacy bloodlust when you remember your ancestors spent most of their time looking like the extras in Holy Grail, and only really stopped when they started murdering non-white people abroad instead.
Unfortunately I think a lot of these people take Skyrim as Historical Documents and go from there?? Like there’s a lot of Viking ‘inspired’ popular depictions that have very little resemblance to actual Vikings. And tend to be all white. And can be read to support an alt-right fundamentalist worldview.
People keep asking “How can anyone have a problem with AO3 doing fundraising!”
And I’m just like…. Have people not noticed all the virulent anti-AO3 hate on tumblr propagated by the anti shipping community? Antis have a problem with AO3 raising money because they hate the fact that AO3 won’t allow them to censor content they don’t like and doesn’t tolerate bullying. That’s who is putting out these posts like, “how can this nasty site raise so much money?” Read between the lines.
And for all the people who are just like, “If they don’t want AO3 to to raise money why don’t they just not donate?”
Because antis are incapable of saying “this isn’t for me so I won’t support it but I don’t care if other people support it. They have to actively discourage other people from supporting the thing. At the same time, they also won’t stop using AO3 because 1) they’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites who want readership and that’s where the readers are and 2) they’re too lazy to put together their own archive using AO3′s open source code because that would require doing coding and buying servers and doing all the moderating they want, which is hard, and they just want to engage in empty virtue signalling, which is easy
Anyway, my point is, people need to be aware that these people are out there and they hate AO3 and they want it to go away even though they’re actively using the platform. They’ve even said they want AO3 to fail so something “better” (re, something they control) can take its place. Some of them are blatant about it, calling AO3 a cesspit of pedophilia, and some of them are subtle about it, saying more innocuous things like ‘Does AO3 really need 130K a year?” “Shouldn’t you give your money to individual needy people doing gofundmes for stuff that’s more more important?”
But all of these people have the same end goal, which is the destruction of the archive, and the way they’re going about it right now is to try to discourage people from donating.
So instead of asking, “Why do people object to AO3 raising money?” start telling people “Hey there are people out there who hate AO3 and want to destroy it and we have to protect the archive from them.” And donate, if you can, and signal boost, if you can’t.
HERE THAT CHA-CHING SOUND THAT’S MORE OF MY MONEY GOING INTO THE MONSTROUS COFFERS OF THE OTW EVERYTIME ONE OF YOU IGNORANT SHITS SENDS AO3 NEGATIVITY ACROSS MY DASH
keep in mind this is a MAN-MADE health crisis. they changed the water of a lower-income black community for a reason. 12 people have died so far because of the water and now the women are suffering from miscarriages. this story needs as much attention as possible. a black community is still being poisoned and pro-lifers don’t seem to give a shit
“I visited the
pumpkin patch yesterday and decided to bring home a pumpkin that in
shape appeared to be a penguin. Friends and family were mystified until I
started painting him.“