The Firefly Project

what they expect me to say: “well, no, actually, canon supports it, because if you look back as far as season three, she’s been training for–”

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

I FUCKING KNEW IT.

SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.

AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.

I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.

It doesn’t matter.

Once upon a time - in the era before anyone had heard of google - if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.

GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.

And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on - it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space - but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.

Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history - a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.

(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)

And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…

Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.

And watch as the flames take everything.

Brush the ash from their hands.

Walk away.

Once upon a time - in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” - fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon - or as many years late - as you wanted to.

Because there was a tagging site - del.icio.us - that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.

They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it - many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.

It is like fandom suffered - collectively - a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.

We have never yet recovered.

Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.

I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.

I do not think Yahoo is “bad” - I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.

But they are, historically, bad for US.

And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.

I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark.  It was a real loss.  The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.

But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo.  They weren’t the only ones.  And they won’t be the last.  It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc.  If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.

AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever.  So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories.  Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom - where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever.  Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.

Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away.  Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all - a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).  

So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom.  Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes.  You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are.  If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first.  If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.

Many Flickr users are upset at the changes.  They expected their photos to be archived there forever.  Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay - since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.

I fear that applies to fannish works as well.  Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution.  They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced.  Any commercial service can’t be relied on.

I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.

The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.

Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.

Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.

This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?

Wait what? FREE BOOKS? Holy shit, which book do you mean–

In a bleak, far-northern land, a wandering storyteller is arrested on charges of witchcraft. Though Chant protests his innocence, he is condemned not only as a witch, but a spy. His only chance to save himself rests with the skills he has honed for decades – tell a good story, catch and hold their attention, or die.

But the attention he catches is that of the five elected rulers of the country, and Chant finds himself caught in a tangled, corrupt political game which began long before he ever arrived here. As he’s snatched from one Queen’s grasp to another’s, he realizes that he could either be a pawn for one of them… or a player in his own right. After all, he knows better than anyone how powerful the right story can be: Powerful enough to save a life, certainly. Perhaps even powerful enough to bring a nation to its knees.

(Publisher’s Weekly review) (Goodreads) (The “fanfic tags” for this book)

I’m giving away FIVE SIGNED COPIES of the hardback first edition of this book over the course of the next five weeks, with one winner chosen every week! You can reblog this post as many times as you want, you must be following me to win, and you can be living anywhere in the world. If you win, you will have the option to choose between a pristine copy, or one with extra art hand-drawn by me on the cover beneath the jacket. ;D

The movie starts with the idea that the male god who wronged Te Fiti must be the one to heal her. This seems to make a certain sort of intuitive sense in that I think we all believe that if you do something wrong you should try to make it right. But how does he try to right it? Through more violence. Of course that failed. 

It was only when another woman, Moana, saw past the “demon of earth and fire” that the traumatized Te Fiti had become (what a good metaphor for trauma, right?) and met her with love instead of violence that she was able to heal. Note that they do the forehead press before Moana restores the heart, while Te Fiti is still Te Kā. Moana doesn’t wait for her beautiful island goddess to appear in all her green splendor before greeting and treating her as someone deserving of love.

I know your name They have stolen the heart from inside you But this does not define you

if they wanted to try szechuan sauce they could have just bought it at like, walmart. or made it themselves. but no. they drove miles upon miles to special mcdonalds to get a taste of this meme condiment, because justin roiland made a joke about it in his cartoon show about a man farting in space.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

Moreover, uh, don’t we want them to change? Isn’t that the kind of thing we’re allegedly trying to encourage? Listen, if that’s really what you want, probably the SINGLE WORST MESSAGE YOU CAN SEND IN THAT REGARD is “It doesn’t matter how much you change. It doesn’t matter how much better you get. You’ll always be that shitty person. No progress you ever make will ever mean anything. We will always reject and despise you for being who you were, not for being who you’ve become.”

So, a lot of people on Twitter now are getting “shadowbanned”, and I see many people on my timeline wondering how this works, how you can tell if it happened to you, and just what shadowbanning even is. So here’s a quick guide.

“Shadowbanning” (when referencing Twitter that is) is a term coined to describe a poorly understood aspect of Twitter that sometimes affects accounts, and which is probably related to some anti-spam feature of Twitter. I say “probably” because Twitter is completely silent and unhelpful about this issue, so we’re all just guessing here.

If an account is shadowbanned, then it means some combination of the following three things will be affecting the account.

1) Their tweets won’t show up in searches anymore.

Do you know you can search for tweets from specific users? This is useful for seeing if an account has been shadowbanned. For example, you can type “from:madscientist212″ in the twitter search bar, or simply click this link.

As of the time I’m writing this, I am not shadowbanned, so you should see something like this:

On the other hand, if an account has been shadowbanned, the results will be something like this:

Interestingly enough, there are some accounts that don’t seem to show up in searches, but which have none of the other aspects of a shadowban. I do not know why this is the case. These accounts seem pretty rare though, so if you don’t show up in searches, there’s a very good chance you have other aspects of being shadowbanned as well.

Speaking of other aspects of being shadowbanned…

2) Tweets will not show up in Notifications, even the Notifications of a mutual.

This is probably the worst aspect of being shadowbanned. No one will see any mentions or other notifications from such an account.

Now, when I say they won’t “see” them, I mean that they won’t show up on the notification tab, and there won’t be any number indicator added to the notification bell showing that there’s a new notification.

But, if you follow someone who has been shadowbanned, you’ll still see their tweets on your main timeline. So if they @ you, then you might still see the tweet there. You just won’t ever be notified about it, so if you miss the tweet on your main timeline, then you’ll never know.

Which is extremely frustrating. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, and I know I’m not the only one. Tons of tweets go by my timeline every day that I never see. I rely on the Notification tab and notice to see who is trying to talk to me. If that gets taken away, communication breaks down.

And if you’re shadowbanned and you don’t know it, you might be wondering just why everyone is ignoring you and not responding to anything you say. It’s nothing personal. They just aren’t seeing it.

Testing this aspect is a bit tougher than the first. You need to get your followers to help you out, and see if they can see you in their notifications. Of course, if they CAN’T see you in their notifications, getting their attention in the first place is gonna be a lot harder.

Also, this is apparently sometimes inconsistent, so you might have some accounts getting notifications from you, and some not. Joy of joys!

There’s one other aspect of being shadowbanned, which a lot of the recent accounts suffering from this don’t actually seem to have. Again, no idea why.

3) Tweets will not thread properly. Tweets threads will break down, and replies will appear to be replies to nothing.

As I said, a lot of the accounts I’m seeing shadowbanned today don’t have this aspect. In the past though, this seemed to be the case for every shadowbanned account.

It also seems inconsistent right now. In one case, someone who was shadowbanned had her tweets show up as replies properly for me and herself, but NOT for someone else.

I’d say that to test this is easy, all you have to do is click on one of your individual tweets that’s a reply and see if it shows what it’s a response to, like so:

But since it’s inconsistent, actually, that doesn’t matter. If I was shadowbanned, I might look at this tweet and have it show up like this, but someone else might look at it, and be unable to see Jake’s tweet, making it seem like I replied to a deleted tweet or something.

So that’s it. That’s what it means to be shadowbanned. Some further info:

So why the hell is Twitter doing this?

No idea. The best guess, based on the fact that a lot of the early accounts noticed to be shadowbanned were bot accounts, is that this is some sort of anti-spam feature. But it seems to be affecting a ton of accounts now, including accounts that seem unlikely to trigger some anti-spam algorithm, and which are also unlikely to have somehow gotten a pissed off mob falsely reporting them for spam.

It would be helpful if Twitter actually explained anything about this, but this is Twitter we’re talking about.

How long has this been happening?

Don’t know, but for quite a while actually. I first noticed a shadowban affecting an anime picture bot account back in March 2016. I had never encountered anything like it before, and was incredibly baffled by it. When I tweeted at the bot owner, they said it happened a lot, and there was nothing they could do about it. It was best to just wait a while for it to wear off again.

They didn’t say how long it had been happening, but I got the impression for a while, so I’d say there’s a good chance Twitter has been doing this for at least a couple years.

However, at first, it seemed to be a fairly rare thing, mostly affecting bot accounts that tweeted often and which automatically replied to certain tweets. Now, though, that’s not the case. If this is the result of some anti-spam algorithm, then clearly Twitter has been making adjustments to it, and as now completely borked it.

The religion of Jesus’s people has no concept of a permanent hell and instructed its priests on how to induce miscarriages.  Jesus explicitly rejected the concept of disability as a divine punishment.  He spoke out against religious hypocrites.  He had enough respect for women to let his mother choose the time of his first miracle.  He blessed a same sex couple.  He told a rich man that he must give up his wealth to get to heaven, and also told a parable about a rich man suffering in agony in presumably Gehinnom (basically Purgatory) just to hammer the point home.  He told people to pay their taxes.  He declared “love your neighbor” to be one of the two commandments on which all laws hang.  He commanded his followers to help the poor.  He commanded them to help the sick and the needy.  He spent time with social outcasts.  He healed the servant of a high priest during his arrest rather than fighting back.  He was put to death by the occupying government because he was a political radical.