So while I really enjoyed this comic by ModMad, the ending was killing me because it was just so darn depressing. Doodled this to make me feel a bit better and also because I love Grenda and her canon freakish strength.
@hatebitxx redraw this with Dipper, Mabel, and Waddles
This was a great idea thank you but also fuck you for putting it in my head and making me draw it. I’m already so behind on inktober and kintober and I also have 3 classes to teach in the morning.
hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
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.
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.
The number of people on this blue hellsite who apparently do not understand how nonprofits work is mind-boggling (pro tip: by definition, THEY DON’T MAKE A PROFIT), as is the number of people with no idea about the cost of running something that gets that much traffic.
A part of this has to do with the fact that a vast portion of the people on this site don’t remember a time before OTW and AO3. They don’t remember fandom communities getting banned on LJ or whole archives just flat disappearing behind Cease and Desist walls. They don’t remember having to be super sneaky about selling fanwork or all the drama that could come about if you were found to be making ANY money from fanfic.
If you’re relatively new to fandom, and I mean if you’ve been in online fandom for a little less time than my 10yo has been alive, you have no fucking clue why OTW, AO3, and all that money they raise is so fucking important.
All this freedom fandom has now to openly operate? That’s because of OTW and AO3. Creators openly acknowledging and even ENCOURAGING fanworks? Lol that was not a thing a decade ago. Like, shit, JKRowling’s lawyers and Ann Rice had us so scared we had fucking disclaimers on everything we made.
But, sure, lets complain about OTW and AO3 needing to ask for money every so often.
an underage person on tumblr, emphatically: IT’S BAD AND WRONG FOR ADULTS TO WRITE SEXUAL CONTENT ABOUT TEENAGERS OR STORIES WHERE DARK THINGS HAPPEN IN ROMANTIC/SEXUAL CONTEXTS OR FICS WHERE THE CHARACTERS ARE ENEMIES IN CANON BECAUSE THINK OF THE CHILDREN, IF YOU DO YOU’RE A PAEDOPHILE WHO CONDONES ABUSE me, in an imploring whisper: you are literally underage. if all adults were fully committed to the same reductive, simplistic morality you’re using to demonise narrative concepts outside your current emotional framework, you would be banned from this conversation entirely, because you are underage. the idea that only those aged between 14-17 can write romantic or sexual content about characters in that age bracket (because it would be Wrong and paedophilic for anyone older to do so) means you’re effectively arguing that teens aren’t old enough to have any true sexual agency. as you’ve likewise decided that writing about a sexual act is morally equivalent to committing that act, by your own logic, you aren’t old enough or adult enough or sexually mature enough to be writing about sexual anything in the first place – in which case, nobody should be allowed to write such stories. I absolutely want you to be able to set boundaries around your sexual experiences and to engage safely with your developing sexual identity on your own terms while still remaining informed, but you also need to acknowledge that sexual development is part of becoming an adult, not an exciting new facet of childhood; and as such, venturing publicly into this arena via fandom, ficwriting or other narrative/public avenues means you are going to encounter adults. if you are not ready to take this step, that’s fine! go always at your own pace! but please, for the sake of everyone, learn to tell the difference between your immediate personal comfort levels with particular adult concepts and actual moral or criminal transgressions made by adults. your discomfort with a particular concept is valid without the concept itself being Wrong.
Panpacificpines 