INACTIVE

Terminally ill patients can sign up to be part of pre FDA approval trials for treatments which might potentially cure them. As these treatments are experimental, untested, not guaranteed to get results, and intended to provide profit to the medical provider in the long run, patients cannot be charged for these experimental treatments. As it should be. It’d be pretty unethical to get people to pay you to be your guinea pig for treatments which may not even help them.

This “right to try” law changes that. It makes it legal for terminally ill patients to be charged for experimental treatments. Furthermore, it removes FDA testing restrictions from the process. Currently a company which tries an ‘experimental’ treatment they know won’t work will get the hammer dropped on them by the FDA. But under this new process, medical providers would be legally allowed to provide ‘treatments’ they know won’t work, without oversight. This would legalize medical predation on terminally ill patients.

Labeling this bill ‘right to try’ makes it seem like terminally ill patients aren’t allowed to seek out experimental treatments right now. But they are! All this bill does is make a terminally ill patients more financially burdened and more vulnerable to predation.

So a while ago I asked staff at AO3 why it was that I could post a work, update it with chapters, and have it appear no higher than tenth, ever, even with new chapters, on a busy fandom. I finally got an explanation. 

“If, however, your work is appearing below works that were already visible, it’s possible you’re running into an issue that occurs when a work is posted between 12:00 AM and 5 AM UTC - works posted during this time frame cause the system to believe the work has had a posting date set manually. (Normally you would do this by ticking “Set a different publication date” in the posting form.) This also applies to works that were initially saved as a draft on a date previous to the day they are posted. Works that have been backdated are assigned a default time of day, which may be earlier than the actual time you posted the work.”

So don’t post during that time. It just HAPPENS to be between 5 pm and 10 pm Pacific time so posting things after dinner is RIGHT OUT if you happen to live on the west coast of the US. That’s between 8 pm and 1 am east coast time.

So until they fix this (and it’s been going on a LONG time, they’re working on it but it’s a massive code overhaul, apparently) I’ll be posting fics OTHER times.  This means if you’re posting a long, multichapter work, posting the first chapter in the evening can screw up the entire rest of your posting. Posting a draft before posting for reals will also keep you from being at the top of the list. And this probably explains why some of my fics have done better than others.  What does this look like? Someone posts at, say, 4 in the afternoon my time. I come along and post around 8 pm, which is pretty typical for me, but it gets marked as “set manually” and given a time much earlier in the day, and thus appears behind everything posted that day. So it’s never on top, people start reading down the list, think they’ve seen everything that’s at the top, and don’t poke any farther.  So for writers, DO NOT POST BETWEEN  12:00 AM and 5 AM UTC. Google will translate, just plug in 12 am UTC and it will pop up your local time in most places.  For readers, realize this exists and that you’re probably missing something. Scroll back if it’s between those hours, and after those hours. 

FUCKER?

Say hi to your

Mom

Dr. Olivia Octavius

Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.

This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.

A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.

Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.

One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.

Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.

Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.

Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.

First things first - I dont regularly use or donate to AO3 but I have made an account to see what the fuss was about. Fanfiction just isnt my thing but I see why people like it.

AO3 is a 501©(3) organization. What that means - No Profit for owners or investors. What that does NOT mean - no cash at year end or not paying employees a livable wage/salary. If you’re contrivance with a non-profit is that they allow their employees to survive under capitalism, then you need to rethink your priorities.

That being said, AO3 has no employees. All work is volunteer based. ABSOLUTELY ZERO people are making money from this site. (Outside of contractors and professionals who are vendors and not affiliated with AO3.)

I’m going to break down the 2019 Audited Financials because that’s the most recent. And compare them to the budget and notes:

The auditor’s opinion is “unmodified.” That means these are as accurate as they get.

Their assets: $1.3M in cash. $197k in the value of the servers. (That’s the price they bought the servers minus depreciation. Depreciation is a tool we use to slowly devalue fixed assets over time. Without it, companies would recognize huge losses at year end when they sell old assets. That’s not reliable information when you’re trying to analyze the financials.) Why would a non-profit need a million dollars in cash? Partly to fund the next year’s work - it looks like they’re trying to bring on new servers which can cost upwards of $400k each time. They also have a history of protecting fans from people like Anne Rice who wants to sue them into debt and oblivion. We’ll talk about the legal stuff later. But in the case they would lose an expensive case, they need funds on hand to pay that out.

Revenues - this is the money in. They received $733k in donations and the like. Their expenses are about 37% of these. Which tells me, they are focused on managing their cash balance, and doing well. Again. No organization would survive if they had no cash at year end.

You might see the “In-Kind Revenue” and not know what that means. $190k is a big amount. But if you look at their expense statement on page (4) you’ll see “In-Kind Expenses” for the same $190k. In-kind means services in kind of cash. Or services instead of cash. So they had $190k of pro-bono (donated) legal work in 2019. They mention it in the budget and later in the audit footnotes. There are other “professional fees” for about $28k. That’s also legal/audit work but they had to pay cash for. It wasn’t donated.

Cash expenses:

Server fees = $79k (these are higher than 2018 because they installed a new server.)

Transaction fees = $27k (these are charges from your banks/credit cards/paypal to process donations. They are roughly 3% of donations which is about correct.)

Contractor fees = $15k (the budget noted they paid for a security test - this is actually a pretty low cost for something like this.)

Supplies = $14k (I couldn’t find notes on this but it’s similar to 2018, so it’s probably just normal business things.)

Postage = $12k (This is high compared to 2018, but I hazard a guess it’s related to sending out promotional items for donations.)

Advertising = $10k (looks like a new cost this year, but is related to fundraising efforts. And might be related to those promo items.)

Other non-cash expenses:

In-kind = $190k (those donated lawyer fees we talked about earlier.)

Depreciation = $74k (again this is an accounting process that every company with fixed assets does.)

The cash flows statement just confirms which expenses were and weren’t cash. And it shows us that they have $1.3M available for the next year. Glancing at the 2020 budget they planned on spending a third of that to upgrade servers. And they have another $400k budgeted for 2021. Honestly to me, the cash looks low considering some years (2018 in particular,) their legal work was valued at half a million. There is a risk that they would have to pay that amount out of pocket the same year they plan to bring on a new server upgrade.

After quite a while, I finally managed to adapt these fun shark anatomy illustrations to Redbubble products! Many asked me to make posters or art prints available for sale and it is now possible in my little store! This is my store’s profile! ✨

I tried to adapt these arts to other products, but I think they were very ugly, so focus on looking for poster, art print or stickers options! I hope you like it and that the price offered by Redbubble is affordable! 

Actual quotes from the Apollo 11 mission:

Tortoise beetle, Microctenochira diffinis, Chrysomelidae. Found in South America.

Photographed in French Guiana by Frank Canon // Instagram