Broke and Joyfully in Denial

As of June 15th, 2018, PayPal has changed their user policy with little to no fanfare at all in ways that could literally destroy your business. I’m going to say this as plainly as possible:

DO NOT USE PAYPAL AT ALL IF POSSIBLE.

I know this is a lot to ask, especially since PayPal is the most globally accepted digital tender, but unless you want to lose access to your funds for six months and PayPal possibly forever, you need to read this.

PayPal Business accounts are now being flagged, locked, and completely shut down if:

1. If you haven’t shipping anything within 21 days of your first transaction

2. You’ve received more than 200 orders

and/or

3. You’ve made an excess of $20,000 (USD)

If this happens to you, you will not be able to access your money for up to six months. PayPal is NOT willing to work with you, all they will say is there’s nothing they can do, they’re cutting business ties, and offer you the MAILING address of their legal department. That’s right, you can’t even get a direct line to these people, they’re just going to tank your business by dicking around with your money for six months. Your only options are to:

1. Wait six months and frustrate customers, and by-proxy tarnish your reputation.

2. Refund everyone, possibly lose their business, and tarnish your reputation.

3. Pursue the matter legally, which will likely take longer than six months anyway, not to mention cost money out of pocket.

Thankfully most of my stuff is filtered through other sites first but fucking here we go again.

It used to be you could get around this by marking your stuff as digital goods that dont need shipment notification but I dunno if that’ll work anymore. All I know is paypal has been making it increasingly difficult for a lot of artists and creators lately and it’s a logistical nightmare for a lot of us.

It started out with “you can’t use a stage name unless you have a business account”. Which means you get a chunk of your money taken as a processing fee, but get to use a “business” name instead of your real name AND LOCATION, cause that’s a thing they were forcing you to post too unless you upgraded.

People used to tell me all the time when they put a tip in my tip jar that it was telling them my real name and the city I lived in, so eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded to avoid that. (Which is why ko-fi was/is so great, because it’s essentially a paypal wrapper that lets you use the service while not revealing your identity and location.)

But they’ve been making it increasingly harder and harder to run an online business for anyone who doesn’t ship physical items that can be tracked. Like part of it is likely to ensure that customers are getting what they paid for, but when it comes so quickly on the heels of numerous policy updates regarding sex work and adult content, it is undoubtedly linked to making it more difficult for those people to use their services.

Patreon might be doing my head in with their site constantly breaking, and they fuck up on communication issues a lot, but this is largely why they changed who they do their payment processing with, to avoid paypals “no naughty business” policies. They still use paypal and Stripe, but they moved their handler to other countries with less draconian laws, and broadened to other payment processors because of this kind of thing.

I don’t know if this works at all, but better be safe than sorry.

Imagine telling your therapist you have intrusive thoughts that you can’t stop having them and your so scared and your managing them the best you can and imagine that therapist telling you your a fucked up individual who belongs in a psych ward for having INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS.

Imagine telling them you wrote about your experiences and posted it on your private blog, tagged so that anyone with those triggers can avoid it, and imagine that therapist tells you your as bad as your fucking rapist.

Now imagine after you leave that therapist because you can’t take being verbally and emotionally abused and then you find out they called your parents to tell them what you told them in confidence in their office. Then the cops show up at your house because they said you were a predator and didn’t mention they reached that diagnosis because you ship Sheith.

(X)

They are literally capable of causing more damage than good in the real world, with victims and the mentally ill.

Loud yet charming 

Rough fighter but still a ranger 

Heavy drinker but still eats their vegetables 

Loves meat but still befriends animals

Bearded but stylish 

Thick accent with strange colloquialisms 

like, Medusa protecting women’s shelters and turning abusers to stone? Empowering as hell

The Slit-Mouthed Woman targeting beauty industry mogels that profit off of women’s destructive poor body image? good

a ghostly three-headed dog going after people who run dog-fighting rings? hell yeah

Grapefruit ain’t that good.

But your health is.

I remember all the times I as a female character was flirted with by a female miqo’te. I had to put up with their advances and flirtations because of the age old thing of “LESBIANS ARE GREAT!”, “Lesbians can’t be creepy!”.Yet when the option for Haurchefant to display the same traits that these females did? Nah. Too much. The players might be offended.

No.

I see this get thrown around a lot, but I never have actually seen any actual written proof of this anywhere - just people’s assumptions.

This is not to say I don’t think it’s possibly true.  The English Localisation team has made a lot of strange or outright poor decisions in the past. I could see them and the French/German teams getting spooked by the idea of straight dudes getting all riled up by being hit on by a major MSQ character constantly

However, I’m going to point out that all the times our female characters have been flirted at by female miqo’te - they tend to be minor characters like the NPC sex workers or minor event NPCs that are at equal standing with us, easily ignored, and not figures we repeatedly interact with over and over again.

Haurchefant was a major male figure in a position of power over our characters, giving us errands we had to perform if we wanted his favor.   I know more than a few female friends who have stated they would’ve found Haruchefant as written in the Japanese version triggering to them.

No letter is pronunced the way it should.

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well…