Months after a viral haka was performed in New Zealand parliament, the controversial bill that sparked it has now been defeated. The Treaty Principles bill sought to redefine the which is New Zealand's founding document. The bill was brought by ACT Party leader David Seymour, who believed the current interpretation of the treaty gave more rights to Māori people than non-Māori New Zealanders. After two years of debate and nationwide protest, the bill was voted down by all but one party.

ABC News Australia

Reblog daily for health and prosperity

Some cleansing positive energy for your timeline

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. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

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.

This.

Also friendly reminder that this drive to defund AO3 comes directly from censorship and purity culture bullshit. AO3 does good, important work, and I can’t believe that the people who should want to see it supported are the people trying to bring it down.

yesterday I saw someone’s post with thousands of likes where person asked not to donate to ao3, because they have a lot of money and don’t now what to do with them.. but did we all forget what happened 6 months ago, where hackers tried to hack the site and how hard these volunteers worked? SO PLEASE don’t discourage people. ao3 is literally pure gold site. on this page we love ao3

Guess I’ll start reblogging this every time the donations pop up

In honor of 'They Very Much Did Kill Jesus' Day, if you mark the day, please consider giving to the Innocence Project.

Barabbas got to go home because he won the people's choice award! We can put some resources toward freeing people who didn't actually do the thing for which they're in prison. (Especially people with capital convictions, but the death penalty is not the only way that prison kills people.)

thrilled to be voicing the audiobook for jk rowling’s crossdresser crime novel! here’s a lil sneak peek :)

How is this real

say what you will about the reserve bank of india these are some cracking coins

important to state for the record that the British Supreme Court are idiots

they sound very scary when you describe them as The Supreme Court but remember, these are five dusty old cishets, one of whom is a weirdo who used to write homophobic documents for the Church of Scotland. I've seen so much commentary, even from pro-trans british journalists, about how the ruling is "forensic" and "balanced" and "rational" - no it isn't, it's clearly the work of people who don't know what they're talking about. You know how I know? They accidentally defined all bi women as lesbians. They said that the legal test for a lesbian is being an AFAB person attracted to another AFAB person, and at no point did anyone go, "Hang on a second, what about bi people?" Congratulations to terfs I guess, you were so excited to get rid of the T you got rid of the B!

This ruling is exactly what you'd expect from locking five old straight people in a room and asking them to set rules for queer life without speaking to any queer people. Their judgement is silly legal word games and it has no relation to real people's actual lives - if you wanna use lawyerspeak they've "undermined public confidence in the legal system." It's not even "the emperor has no clothes," it's "the emperor is naked and covered in shit."

i can kinda understand that politicians need to make a show of respect in their tone, like okay, probably a good thing that politicians don't get into the habit of publicly undermining judges. But any journalist who treats this ruling as remotely sensible is daft - only a straight person could make that kind of mistake

These judges are idiots - I use the word in the classical greek sense of someone who is not connected to and does not understand the life of the public, of the people. Their judgement is laughable and we don't have to respect them

Im gonna be so real can yall actually talk about ways we can support trans women in the UK instead of giving all the attention to fucking JKR. I already know that Harry Poter sucks, I wanna know how to actually HELP people. Something something you have to love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor

trans actual uk - trans led and run advocacy, education and empowerment organisation

fiveforfive - collective fund for trans women and girls and transfem causes

gendered intelligence - trans led advocacy org

mermaids - supports trans youth

akt - lgbtq youth homelessness charity

loving me - domestic abuse service for trans people in england

not a phase - for trans adults

i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake

fabulous 

i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.

#HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY

A friend and I were discussing what we're like when we're sick and we decided people usually fall into one of these five 'sick modes': *Everyone is probably multiple of these at different times depending on how sick they are and with what but we think most people have a mode they default to and become more often than the others*

Delicate Consumptive Victorian: you feel tragic and mournful but also beautiful in a sad way, you are in bed, sipping hot tea, others should quietly whisper about how you are too good for this world, too beautiful, too tragic... And bring you more tea

Sick Dog: you are curled up in a ball, you don't want anything, you don't need anything, but it would be nice if others could still ask you if you need anything

Sickly Child Emperor: you are dying and it's everyone else's problem, you need pillows, no! you need soup, no! You need absolute silence or you will not be the first one to die today

Plague Pit: you are curled up probably on the floor, no one touch you, no one look at you, this is between you and God and you already know He has no mercy left for you

Warrior General: you are not sick. You are in perfect health and you don't know why anyone would think otherwise. Illness is an enemy that can be intimidated and you must remain strong for your men! (You are going to pass out at the most inconvenient moment possible)

ALT

fuckin based and also really fuckin funny, thank you FBG