angel loving vintage car enjoyer

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me

this post was inflicted upon me so now i’m inflicting it on all of you

even in my city, growing up i could pick out the constellations i learned in my sixth grade science class

and only a few weeks ago i looked up on a clear moonless night and tried not to cry because i could pick out orion’s belt, the big dipper, and nothing more because no other stars were visible

I think this idea of an animal struggling to survive in its native environment, moving somewhere else and really thriving, is an idea that goes beyond just biology.

Look at me.

Look at me right now.

AO3 protects you.

AO3 protects you and your works. 

It protects your works from copyright strikes and DCMA takedowns.

It protects your work from advertisers.

It protects your work from overzealous legal challenges.

It protects your right to post adult content.

AO3 is non-profit and AO3 will never try to use you or your work to make a profit for themselves and AO3 will go to bat for you if someone tries to legally challenge you or your works.

Mastercard has no reason to mess with AO3. Visa doesn't. PayPal doesn't. Stripe doesn't. There's no compensation-for-porn exchange happening. By design. BY DESIGN.

AO3's founders knew that AO3 needed to be set up to protect us from any and all avenues of attack on fanworks. They've managed it quite successfully.

Ao3 isn't asking for donations so they can pay their staff. They aren't asking for donations so their staff can buy food. They aren't asking for donations so their staff can pay rent. They are asking for donations that they are legally required to use directly and solely for operating their organization and they are very closely watched to ensure that they do exactly that.

Almost like they're a nonprofit organization or something.

It's not hypocritical at all if you're not going out of your way to ignore context so you can interpret things in bad faith. The Ao3 staff doesn't see a single cent more of those donations than any author using their website. So you wanna know what the actual hypocrisy is? Demanding that you be allowed to make money off Ao3 while the people who actually built, maintain, and moderate the website don't (and legally can't) see a single penny.

I've seen people make their whole income from selling merch and monetizing videos based around their Ben 10 fancomics. I've seen people collaborate with the creators of Transformers Animated to sell an unofficial comic. I've seen third party companies sell upgrade kits for toys when Hasbro cheapens out on the product. I've seen youtubers sell their commentary videos of movies they watch. And I love that shit.

I don't have beef with Ao3, but I am also a small artist trying to survive off the work I actually put effort in making. Isn't Tumblr the "make everything public domain" site? Isn't this the "be gay, do crimes" site?

You'e acting like fanfiction writers wanting to monetize their work makes them the spawn of Satan for some reason.

Also, you are conflating things. Patreon isn't allowed on Youtube BECAUSE Youtube doesn't protect it's users from copyright trolls, Youtubers turned to Patreon because their videos were being demonetized. Patreon is allowed on Youtube because right now there isn't a pressure from it's investors to forbid it, as linking your Patreon occupies this grey legal area, since you're not paying for a single video with copyrighted content, you're paying for access to someone's website.

You absolutely can get targetted for copyright infringement on Patreon, it's not a one size fits all fix, but the reason people are safer on Patreon is because it doesn't have the automated reporting that Youtube has. It's not just that Youtube doesn't protect it's creators against copyright infringement, Youtube is actively trying to appease the copyright owners because it wants their money from commercials. Meanwhile, because your Patreon is behind a paywall that often discourages companies from pursuing legal action, because they'd need to spend money to actually see your website and prove you used their content.

Also, Ao3 refusing artists to monetize their work isn't just about protecting themselves from legal issues, the point of the website is to serve as an archive of free to read media, so it would be against their philosphy to allow creators to paywall their works, and in a perfect socialist world that would be the perfect website, but we don't live in that world, so I would like a way for authors I like to be able to ask for help if they're in need. If you understand that Ao3 isn't evil for asking your money so they can keep their website alive, you understand it's not evil for authors to ask for money so they can keep the author alive to live to write another chapter.

And we're mad at that because...?? Also it's not like AO3 forbids you from monetizing your work (in genaral) in or even has a means to do it. From what I understand they just ask you not to do it on/via their site.

Nothing is stopping anyone from having a means of monetizing their work. AO3 acknowledges people monetize their art and asks not to involve them in any part of the money-making process you might have. The site is free and much like a charity is donation based, yes? Why are we mad we can't promote our money-making means on a site suported by donations?

We don't live in a perfect world. In a perfect world maybe you would be able to link directly form AO3 to your Tip Jar, but as it is you can't. You can't even directly say you have a Tip Jar or how to find it, but you can direct people to Other Places they may find You.

number one rule is get stainless steel shit. stainless steel water bottle stainless steel straw, you dont want that rubber plastic etc shit it grows mold like a mf. turns out that was the main culprit of what happened to me, my reusable water bottle was plastic and it didn't matter how much i let it soak or cleaned it out.

get this either if you can or can't afford the stainless steel stuff and just be really on cleaning it; staw cleaner looks like this:

and get one its mammas the bottle cleaner for your cup:

You put that tablet in the bottle, add hot water, let it fizz and soak for a bit and hey presto, any stains or discolouration or weird little crevices are suddenly removed of their hidden nasty bits.

My niece kept saying her water bottle tasted weird, and she washed it and washed it, and then me and my mum were like GIVE IT HERE and we put a denture tablet in it and added the straw to it and it started fizzing up the straw and all this black gunk started coming out the weird curvy bits of the fitted straw like a Coke-mentos experiment.

It’ll taste slightly minty unless you rinse rinse rinse rinse rinse rinse but that’s not a terrible thing, and let’s face it, denture tablets are for cleaning dentures so, you know, designed to clean things that go in mouths.

“This game lets you do anything!”

NIH 3D Library (Free)

Embodi3D (Free and Paid)

MorphoSource (Free, database of fossils)

Scans can also be found by searching on general-purpose 3D sites like Thingiverse, Cults3D, MakerWorld, Sketchfab

The glow in the dark filament I used