Involuntary participant of the Catch-22 Library AU

The thing about the No Money On Ao3 thing is also not just the legal questions attached to it, for me it's also the part where it's kinda like rocking up to the neighbourhood's solidarity no-charge bring-what-you-can cookout with your 30 bucks-a-snack micro-cuisine food truck because it's 'where the crowd's at'. It doesn't matter how good your strawberry foam fries are when you're standing next to the free vegan Gulaschkanone, that shit's picture book villain behaviour.

And like. I think we can all agree that none of us would have a problem with local restaurants showing up to the solidarity cookout, as long as the stick to the two rules of 'no making anyone pay anything at the solidarity cookout' and 'no overly aggressive advertising'. Like!!! You're welcome to come! You're even allowed to put up a little 'btw on thursdays I'm at the craft market :)' sign. You just can't demand payment and you can't put up your regular menu. Is that so hard.

I think that part of what irks me about AI being used even for "small" stuff like meme graphics (aside from all the larger problems obviously) is like.... the time spent on it was part of the humor. "this is a silly inconsequential joke but I had to stop everything and spend 5 minutes making it" was, at least for me, part of the joke. Someone really took time out of their day to make me look at something silly they took time out of their day to make. Now it's like someone took time out of my day to make me look at something no one even made. Stop wasting my time if you aren't wasting yours too.

learn to associate cleaning with pride instead of shame and your quality of life will improve in ways you can't even imagine btw

like I'm sympathetic, it's hard work, it takes some degree of mental organisation and physical capacity that is not equally accessible to every human being on earth. I know. but regardless of how much you can do and how often, you will get better results across the board if you can frame it as positive effort towards a better situation instead of perpetually self flagellating for having the sin of being a solid thing in physical space that steadily accumulates dirt no matter what just like everything else on earth