just keep surviving

Yahoo bought Tumblr as the site was competing with other media platforms and slowly becoming obsolete. Asking why people don’t flock here anymore is like asking why people don’t use MySpace any more. There was a shift to different forms of media.

What made Tumblr an L was not the existence of an insufferable user base, but the loss of its user base.

Twitter? Twitter will never be an L for Musk. First, there is no cultural disconnect between him and the platform. Musk is the epitome of Twitter culture. Capitalistic. Reductive. “Edgy.” Cringe. Thinking he’s the smartest person in the room; a true intellectual. Offensively pseudo-ironic. Literally Twitter.

You want Twitter to be Musk’s L? Deactivate.

Deactivate your Twitter.

What will lose him money is a loss of users. It’s already a site optimized for ads and outrage and tailored content. It’s already a site tailored to his type of personality.

You want him to lose money?

Deactivate.

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.

Happy Halloween!

Here is a comic about the great attractor!

PLEASE DO NOT THINK FOR EVEN A SECOND THAT YOUR VOICE WILL NOT HAVE AN IMPACT THIS IS LITERALLY THE BARE MINIMUM

Deaf people can have subtitles and captions without having to argue with theater managers about it.

Wheelchair users can where they damn well please instead of in the spot next to the trashcan. Yes, that’s usually the only spot for a wheelchair, and often there’s only one.

Epileptics can have the lights on, which is a fuck no in theaters. The lights help diminish the strobe effects created by watching things in dark rooms.

Folks with sensory input issues (ADHD and autism are good examples) can control the volume, put subtitles up, adjust the lighting, etc.

Immunocompromised folks can watch a film with virtually zero worry about catching illnesses.

Folks with allergies don’t need to worry about some random person exposing them to an allergy (some folks can’t even be in the same room as peanuts).

Many of us require frequent bathroom breaks. Many of us are on medicated or specialized diets. Many of us need a break (or a few) to help ground ourselves in reality, process things, burn off built-up anxiety (I need to bounce after intense scenes so i can focus), and a multitude of other reasons.

If release day streaming remains a thing, there are gonna be millions of happy people. I cried the first time I watched a streaming release day film. Ten minutes of ugly crying because it was the first time in a decade that I could watch a film without waiting six to eight months to rent it.

This Side of the Blue by @notlucy 

Important update as we hit paper 70. 

- “juicy” is not a very scholarly word.

- It’s true and you should say it.

- lol. You had me in the first half, I’m not gunna lie.

- I think “dicelexea” is the most interesting spelling I’ve seen for “dyslexia” maybe ever.

- “shot off into oblivion” is not a very scholarly phrase

- NO

- why are you shouting at me

- I like it. But it’s a run-on sentence.

- Why would you hurt me like this. MLA format, please!

- How would you feel about becoming an English major?

- this is dangerously close to “throughout history”…but I will allow it.

- The song was actually written by Tim Nichols and Craig Wiseman, who both had close family/friends who were diagnosed with fatal illnesses. McGraw heard it demo […]

- I’ll try not to take that personally.

- It’s true and you should say it. But perhaps say it in the active voice next time.

- yes cap

- no cap

- I know I tell y'all not to strive for perfection, but you have obtained it nonetheless with this, the most beautiful Works Cited I have ever had the privilege to behold.

- If you chose to use Shakespeare as a way of ingratiating yourself to me/my love of the bard…your devious plan is working.

- your proper use of semicolons is a beacon of hope in these trying times

- Othello is a play, not a novel.

- I also like to use periods for emphasis. In an academic paper, however, try to use punctuation for its intended stylistic purpose.

- NICE

- please excuse me while I cry