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.
Why are people having so much issue with the article, I agreed with it? The title isn’t the most eloquent thing ever but the article wasn’t encouraging cheating, where you go behind your partners back, but instead looking at the issue of cheating as a not black-and-white thing where there’s one horribly evil person who just wanted to have fun/get laid with one traumatized-for-life victim. Instead, like most- nah, let me say with ANYTHING in real life beyond fiction, the article sees the grays in cheating and why the person cheated in the first place. Not to say that cheating isn’t a horrible thing to do, but I feel like people need to understand that there are reasons people do the things they do. People who cheat are human beings. They could feel horrible about it, they could be trapped in a marriage or relationship that they don’t feel they can escape, they can feel insecure and unloved. Again, not to say it’s something you should ever do, but dehumanizing someone over a mistake is just as bad in my opinion. There’s nowhere where they can talk about their experiences, and it’s likely we know a lot of people who have cheated in our lives even if they haven’t (or were too scared) to tell us about it.
I said i was gonna do a giveaway ages ago and here it is..finally..the giveaway… REBLOG TO ENTER idc how many times u rb just dont get too crazy. Remember to follow me? I still gotta find out how i can randomly pick winners but luckily i got until the end of February to figure that out! I will only draw humans and humanoids for these. (no mecha or complicated furries sorry)
My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.
You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.
I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.
Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.
We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these - to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.
Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.
By Clarissa Pinkola Estes
American poet, post-trauma specialist and Jungian psychoanalyst, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves.
U know what’s a fuckin obnoxious trend that needs to die
When people who don’t like a character can’t be content with just not liking them, they have to prove they’re morally right in that dislike. Like… It’s not that serious kids. Not every opinion you hold needs to be about Justice and Moral Righteousness. It’s ok to just… Not like some characters. You don’t actually need to justify it.
