hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
You know it legally is a charity, right?
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.
It’s
absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW
defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that
actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and
the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we
love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.
I am honestly reaching levels of “take the toys away from the children” irritation. I mean, obviously that would never happen, nor would I advocate for it, but jesus fucking christ on a rowboat.
Fandom in 1998, when I got started: Hey, the preview for this show I just saw sounds interesting. It’s already in its second season. I’ll see what information the internet (which has been available to me for about four years) has about this show. (I will later get copies of the show by paying for someone to send me VHS copies of the aired episodes.)
Oh, this site is interesting. I can read episode summaries for the episodes I’ve missed. Huh, there’s a webring thing at the bottom. I will click on some of these other links.
Oh, right, fanfiction. I’ve sort of seen that around. It gets posted on this message board, which wasn’t designed for fiction posting, so people who post here have developed a system for what they put in the subject line of a post, which is usually just a title, and maybe a rating. Meaning the kind of rating the U.S. movie system uses, which may or may not mean anything to non-U.S. posters.
Shit, I just read a romance story with the show’s big pairing, and at the end the hero DIES TRAGICALLY. I wasn’t prepared for this! Oh, man, an author I really like posted a story where two men have sex, but this fandom doesn’t even know what slash is and some homophobic posters are really upset that they “had” to read it, and now it’s a giant kerfuffle.
Oh, now the message board provider is putting ads on everything. Now they’re shutting down because the ads don’t make enough money. Some people didn’t save copies of things they wrote. But it’s okay, because one single fan has put in the work and the money to archive everything that was posted to an archive she set up. Including all 239 shitty stories by an author I hate, but who has tons of fans. And luckily, she didn’t refuse to archive deathfic or slash or torture or rape or anything else that might have bothered her.
Except, whoops, now she’s out of touch. The website stays running for a while, but eventually the hosting expires and the domain registration expires, and now links to that site take you to whoever is now squatting there.
So those roughly 2500 stories are gone. Poof. The only reason anything got saved is because I dug up a tool that would crawl the Wayback Machine and downloaded what was available. It’s most of everything. What’s missing? Hell if I know. And I can’t even get it into AO3 through Open Doors, because the original archivist is MIA.
Purity wank is one thing. One stupid thing, but still. But bitching about financials for a 501c3 with a budget and an annual report and federal reporting requirements? A site with over, what, four MILLION stories, ad-free, with the search and download features it’s got? Run by volunteers? And you’re bitching about $38k, which I’m pretty sure that AO3 didn’t compel anyone to donate? That extra twenty percent is going to help keep the fucking lights on.
(Of course this isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference, because we live in a world where facts don’t matter anymore, so thank fucking god I can download fic from AO3 to put on my Kindle and avoid engaging with reality.)
And lest the young folk think the bad old days are past, I used to post my Anita Blake fic to a site called Pomme de Sang for years starting in 2005. Then a couple years ago the entire site vanished. There was no warning and nobody I’ve spoken with knows what happened to it. One day it was just gone, and so was every single piece of fic published there, which was easily numbering in the thousands.
I was lucky; I had saved everything I posted on that site
(only because I have a paranoid streak tbh), including one fic that had over 80 chapters. But I’ll bet many of the other writers who posted their fic only or mainly on that site weren’t so paranoid lucky and lost some or all of what they had posted there, because after the site being online for well over a decade nobody expected it to just vanish. Until it did.
Guess where I’m now republishing all my old fic, where I can be confident it won’t vanish again like PdS did only a scant few years ago?
Nobody should be complaining about AO3. It’s a godsend to fandom.
Wow. I haven’t been in that fandom since obsidian butterfly. I had no idea there had been such a catastrophic archive closure. How awful.
One of the biggest Sailor Moon fic archives in the early aughts was A Sailor Moon Romance. Had a forum and automatic posting and a very basic search function. It was taken down by the people who ran it in the late aughts and I was never 100% sure why. Someone started a project to restore the old archives based on site backups done by paranoid fans who didn’t technically have access to the code but who made tools to do that. It didn’t save everything. and the restoration stalled out maybe a quarter of the way through.
While I cross-posted some of my work to ff.net, most of my sailor moon fic from my first days in fandom was lost when ASMR went down.
AO3 is amazing and an invaluable resource for fandom and anyone who says otherwise is either misled, lying, or a fucking idiot.
let’s be real, we all know who’s threatened by women and minorities having their own artistic spaces.
This is the man you must fight at the gates of Valhalla to prove you’re worthy of that mighty hall
It somehow gets crazier. this teenager trained for months. he staged fights in his parents’ swimming pool to train for this epic match. he choose halloween night for the final showdown. and it was for a school project. he could have chosen any seafood, but he decided on, in his own words, “that big fucking octopus.” magnificent bastard.
Y’all missed the part where he dragged it ashore and divers saw him, got upset and sent some pretty rough stuff to his family. Then, at the Washington Fish and Wildlife meeting, he showed up and was like “yeah, it should be protected.”
Except that the giant pacific octopus is nowhere near extinct and actually doing just fine.
So not only did he wrestle, kill, and eat a giant octopus– he got it protected from hunting in several locations even though the species doesn’t need protecting.
Fucking legendary indeed.
So the only person they need protection from is this guy.
…what sort of school project requires you to wrestle sea life?
That’s just how Washington is
to be clear, the school project was to “draw something from nature.” nobody asked him to wrestle an octopus.
…now, I have misunderstood the spirit of a lot of art projects before but
…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.
I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.
Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.
…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.
This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”
Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….
Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.
What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.
Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.
It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.
It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.
I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.
It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any
researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
mentality has got to stop.
You’re absolutely right.
I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.
Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.
That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.
Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.
TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).
Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?
All of this.
I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.
And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.
It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.
I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.
also yeah, the key thing that’s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it.
Jesus Christ all of this
i think a lot of kids of tumblr have this vague grudge against ‘straightwashing academics’ that they actually picked up from their highschool curriculum, which is kind of a completely different thing. like, it’s not ‘academics’ that’s the problem when it comes to american teenagers being fed an extremely white, straight, patriarchical version of history; it’s your fucking government.
I can’t let go of the idea of an older!Todoroki who towers over Midoriya.
Like, hear me out, okay? He’s a year younger than Midoriya and already 10 cm taller. What if he hasn’t reached his peak growth spurt yet? Just look at his titan dad. This kid is gonna get so tall and HFGH Midoriya’s no midget but that height difference thooo
just moving along like everyone else 