Everything random

One of my favorite facts about the history of Malvinas Islands is that a group of indigenous Charrua people led by a Gaucho (think badass, brown cowboys with leather whips instead of firearms) tried to take back the islands from the English in 1833... and succeeded.

They captured everyone they didn't kill and took down the British flags. Then, English reinforcements arrived and captured them.

But the funny thing is: when el Gaucho Rivero and the Charruas were taken to England to be prosecuted, the court determined they were innocent, since the crimes they'd committed happened outside of British jurisdiction. So they were set free and returned safely to their homeland.

And I just think that's neat.

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

I pulled this data for a different post, but I think it might also be useful on its own.

Do you know how much money it takes to host images, as opposed to text? Well, you've probably heard the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words", right?

Depending on size and resolution, hosting a picture can cost a hell of a lot more than hosting a thousand words. Even a hundred thousand words.

For example, a 15k fic I downloaded as an an ePub from AO3 is around 44 KB. A 692x368 pixel gif I just downloaded that loops in a handful of seconds is 4 MB, almost 100 times that size. And that's for a few seconds that takes up maybe the area of your phone screen!

Data is expensive, and that's why Tumblr keeps trying to make money: Because Tumblr's image and gif and audio hosting is effectively a money pit. It's why AO3 still doesn't host images, even with how much money they raise every year. It's why Dreamwidth doesn't allow hotlinking image to other sites, and why, even though it used to, Discord shut that down.

The core of Livejournal expression was the userpic - a 100x100 pixel square, not allowed to be bigger than 40kb. (They're now allowed to be 100kb at LJ.)

This is 33kb, a bit less than the limit. Tiny image. Not much compared to modern gifsets.

You can put over 9000 words of text in the same amount of disc space.

That gif is worth 9000 words. A 40kb image would allow for over 10k words.

So much of the modern internet - the social media craze - is founded on free image uploading. Before Tumblr, before Twitter allowed images, before every social site allowed image hosting - it was a huge hassle to find a place that let you upload images for less than $5 a month.

LJ had free icons, just a handful for free accounts. More for paid accounts, but... you could always make new free accounts. And there were people who chopped their artwork into 100x100 pixel squares and uploaded them as userpics and used that as their image hosting.

AO3 would like to host images. But

Image hosting is expensive, and

Image hosting comes with legal hassles that text hosting doesn't.

In the US, there are no laws about what kinds of text you can share with minors. An 8-year-old can go to the library and read 50 Shades of Grey. But there are laws about what kinds of pictures you can share with minors - so if AO3 hosted images, they'd have to start paying attention to people's ages. Right now, they have a disclaimer: Don't Look If This Is Bad For You, including if it's illegal for you. But they're not required to restrict mature text from young readers; they're just being polite.

(Note: Australia and probably some other places have laws about what kinds of text minors can see. But AO3 is not hosted in Australia.)

If AO3 hosted images, they'd have to find more solid ways to restrict them. And they'd have to deal with increased hosting & access costs. There may be ways to do this, but they're not simple and easy to implement, especially for a site dedicated to user privacy.

Any site you see that has free, unlimited image hosting - it desperately needs to make enough money to cover that, and all the social sites are constantly trying to find new ways to make someone pay for all those pictures and soundbits and videos. Subscriptions, advertising, blockchain wtfery, API costs... anything.

Any time you see a site with "free" picture hosting, ask yourself who's paying for it. Ask what they're getting for their money.

On the one hand: Disc space is a hell of a lot cheaper than it was 20 years ago. And the internet is faster. Image hosting costs less now than it did in the Livejournal era.

On the other: Images are often bigger now. And people expect free unlimited image hosting.

Text hosting is so very, very cheap by comparison.

IT'S LITERALLY ON FIRE.

yeah, the seller sets it on fire after making it, and you fold and pop it into your mouth while it's still aflame. no, it doesn't burn your palate because it extinguishes once it's inside your mouth. and no, i haven't had the fortune of personally trying it, despite it being a popular and thrilling street food here.

(tags by @simplykaren)

✨jhal muri✨

it's another south asian street food, but this time, specifically from the eastern part of south asia. jhal, means spicy and muri, means puffed rice! it's not very "flake-y" but it is crunchy and spicy and tangy and delicious!!

it's even sold in the same way lmao