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"oh, did you make the font bigger and more legible?"

"no we're just doing the next edition in D&D5e"

"we're making our video game more accessible!"

"oh did you add an option to remap the controls?"

Hey.

The fascists don’t like NASA.

They don’t want stuff like this to happen.

They want to give NASA’s budget to the already bloated military.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine to celebrate a massive peaceful scientific achievement that’s a collaboration between the US and Canada space programs during a time when there’s so much bad news elsewhere.

but DO techbros like nasa? a lot of techbros i see are super into the idea of privatized space travel industry and colonizing mars, the first of which nasa is directly opposed to, and the second which nasa isn't really focused on.

The Artemis Accords are one of the first large-scale civil policies about space and related activities to come about since the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. NASA wants to hold people (at least a little) accountable for the junk they're leaving in our orbit, and not enough people talked about this shit back when it got signed, so I wanna talk about it now

Happy International Kiss Day!

Have a photo of the Sicilian actor Giovanni Grasso kissing the Catalan playwright and poet Àngel Guimerà (1845-1924).

Grasso played the main character in the Sicilian version of Guimerà's world-famous play Terra Baixa (translated to English as Martha of the Lowlands). The Sicilian language tour became a big hit especially in Argentina (there was a large number of Sicilian immigrants in Argentina). Some letters between the two have been preserved, showing the very close and sweet relation between Guimerà and Grasso.

Guimerà was most likely homosexual from what we can tell by his letters, life, and his exploration of the inability to have biological children in his play The Spider (L'aranya). He is buried in the same tomb as the journalist and pro-Catalan politician Pere Aldavert. Guimerà and Aldavert lived together for half of their life and gave each other mutual powers in front of a notary on Saint Valentine's Day of the year 1910.

If you would like to learn more about Àngel Guimerà and how he was candidate for the Nobel Literature Prize 17 years in a row but blocked as part of Spain's discrimination against the Catalan language, you'll find it in my previous post linked here.

Nowadays, he remains one of the most respected and loved theatre authors in the whole history of Catalan literature.

Nope, it was Aang

Blood quantum is a nightmare concept. It is essentially how much 'native blood' you 'legally' have according to the government.

It is not traditional, it is not cultural, it is not something Indigenous nations ever used to measure belonging.

It was created by colonizers as a tool of erasure. It literally exists so the government could mathematically subtract us out of existence over time.

Think of it like this;

instead of letting Indigenous communities define ourselves, the U.S. government came in and said, “Your Indigeneity is only valid if we can quantify it like livestock breeding papers.” It was meant to break apart families, stop us from passing on identity and land rights, and eventually reach a point where they could say, “See, there are no real Indigenous people left! So we don't need to think about them!"

It weaponizes nebulous and often finicky genetics against culture, community, lived experience, etc.

It ignores the fact that Indigenous identity is about kinship, belonging, survival, language, tradition, and responsibility to our people.

Blood quantum turns those things into a number. A number designed to shrink until there is nothing left.

Many nations are still stuck dealing with blood quantum rules because of federal pressure and resource control, not because we chose it or approve of it.

And it harms us every single generation. It pits relatives against each other, creates disenrollment fights, and tells half of Indigenous kids they are somehow less real than their siblings because of paperwork.

It also lets the government give a 'good reason' for why we shouldn't have mixed race marriages or 'interbreed' with other races, because then the blood quantum 'goes down' and we may legally not be considered indigenous under the government anymore, which means they can deny us things like certain assistance programs, medical care, etc.

It's literally government mandated eugenics.

The Sir David Attenborough That Lives In My Brain: Being smaller-than-average presents an added challenge to foraging ... but necessity is the mother of invention. A little creativity turns a baguette into a tool, and voilà--

(paper towel roll falls on my face)

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten. 

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it. 

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

"Do you think AO3 should ban AI generated works?"

Well, in theory, it may sound ideal. But in reality? No.

I am not a fan of AI, but "do you think AO3 should ban" never actually solves a problem. Because how can you tell what's AI and what's human made? It is extremely hard to tell, and going around accusing authors of using AI — just because you suspect they do — does more harm than good. Chances are that you're accusing real writer of being AI and ruining their day at best, making them quit writing at worst.

And the act of banning never stops something from existing. It only makes it more difficult to find or avoid. Tumblr bans porn, but you can still find porn on Tumblr. The only difference is that they're no longer tagged as porn, which means you're more likely to stumble upon them because blocking the tags no longer works when they are not tagged as porn.

The same applies to AI generated works on AO3. For now they are tagged as "AI generated". You can avoid them if you don't want them.

Once they're banned, people will no longer tag them as AI, which means you have more chance of unknowingly reading and leaving kudos on AI.

Also, no, unless an author says "this was written by AI" you cannot tell for sure if something was written by AI. Em dashes aren't evidence of AI. Long and overly described paragraphs aren't evidence of AI. Real human writers do write like this and AI was trained to mimic real humans' works.