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@hearteyespierce / hearteyespierce.tumblr.com

r | they/he | early 30s | free palestine πŸ‡΅πŸ‡Έ | my stuff
making art and writing fics with arguable (in)efficiency

Aloy WIP

once it's ready, I will be riso printing this illustration!! if you want one and are planning on grabbing tickets for Rose City ComicCon, stay tuned for more information πŸ‘€

This piece is now fully prepped for printing! I'll be doing the initial batch tomorrow.

the blue and yellow layers are done but unfortunately they were out of red ink so I need to wait a week or two for it to be restocked :(

I'm going to have to say this multiple times, but you do not have to use Generative AI to create background characters, locations, or plot ideas. There are hundreds of writing generators out there lovingly crafted for free by folks who want nothing more than to give you tools for writing. Please just search for them.

You do not have to use the Unethical Thieving Machine That Burns Down A Rainforest to help you write. There are so many resources out there that will strengthen your writing, not weaken it. You owe it to yourself to do better.

Had a fever dream that Brennan Lee Mulligan had a handful of throwing knives and was trembling and sweating while the camera kept cutting to a teary-eyed Jacob Wysocki begging him not to, and as he pleaded Brennan kept sobbing, "I need the points, everything will be okay, just don't move, just don't move."

Then there was a cutaway, and when it came back Brennan, hands empty and clasped over his mouth, and Sam were just staring horrified at something off camera, there was a silence, and then Sam spoke up: "I didn't say Sam sa-"

And Brennan began howling like a beast being pulled out of reality and that's when I woke up.

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musashigouda-deactivated2019032

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

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blooming-wilting

You know it legally isΒ a charity, right?

If x charity aims for Β£10, but gets Β£15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into theΒ β€œrainy 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 bareΒ minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t justΒ β€œpocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs someΒ β€œrainy day” cash to function.Β 

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

It needs what it gets to function and improve.Β 

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t β€œpocket” 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.) Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β 

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 β€œmore 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 AO3β€²s 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 is the most functionally-successful and cost-effective website in the history of EVER. By a wide margin.

its just embarrassing when you make a fandom related post and it doesnt get any notes like okay. so no one want to play tuoys with me. no one wants to play with our little guys together. okay thats fine. yeah its cool... puts my hands in my jacket pockets. kicks a beer can that was on the side of the road a little

I’m starting to sound like a nutcase at work because upper management keeps trying to implement AI programs and AI assistants and Chat GPT and my middle-of-the-road, don’t-infodump, don’t-engage response has been β€œI don’t like AI”, β€œI prefer to remain in control of my own tasks”, β€œI’d rather make my own mistakes”, and β€œI don’t trust any machine smarter than a toaster”

My honest opinion: β€œGenerative Artificial Intelligence” is a purposefully misleading liar’s name we gave to a labour-stealing company’s proprietary algorithm so they could market it to businesses who would rather see simple work done badly at the expense of the consumer than contribute to the community it is profiting off by offering even a single human being in that population the barest minimum honest wage to learn and do it properly, simultaneously robbing the working class while grifting both the client and the customer, and we’re buying into it because we’re a superstitious social species of codependent apes would could pack bond with a rock if we spent enough time around it existing in the most extreme state of social disconnection and parasocial reliance humanity has ever known, like a dying man in the ocean drinking saltwater

What I have to keep saying to avoid being classified as β€œthe conspiracy theorist”: Haha yeah I guess I’m a bit of technophobe lol

god I could be so wealthy if I had no ethics. that's so fucking frustrating. I'm living paycheck to paycheck because I'm not grifting vulnerable idiots on TikTok. I feel like I have the ability to very easily scam people. I could make a killing with AI. but god. I have morals and ethics and so I get to be poor as shit. I hate this fucking world

I could have made a killing as a psychic, but noooo I have to feel bad about lying to people ugh

I think abt this all the time because the thing is, evil rich people truly believe that they’re geniuses who have discovered a way to make money that the rest of us dummies haven’t…but the truth is that they are just willing to do evil shit that everyone else would prefer to not to because we have standards

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transgang-deactivated20201105

you know even if a homeless person or a starving person is in that position because of their own "bad decisions" i don't care. it doesn't matter. no supposed financial misstep is enough to condemn someone to homelessness or poverty.

Search and rescue teams do not ask if a hiker was properly equipped and prepared before they go out to look for them. EMTs do not ask if a driver checked their mirrors before they take them to the hospital. Lifeguards do not ask if a swimmer made a mistake by going into a riptide before they dive in after them. Judgement doesn't help anyone, including you, the person doing the judging. Just help people. Just shut the fuck up and help people.

Part of what Cory Booker is doing with this filibuster is reading things into the record. Sometimes when people do a filibuster, they just say shit. I think one time Ted Cruz read "Green Eggs and Ham" into the record. Another dude sang the Mets theme song or whatever the shit.

If you actually have substantial things to say, you don't have to do that. I mean, not for nothing, but what we're watching here is a man doing the job he was elected to do. Our public officials work for us, the people. It's nice to see some of them take that obligation seriously.

Booker is standing there with a binder that he's not even halfway through reading. *Over 42k people are watching it just on YouTube. I haven't watched the news yet today, but I've got the live feed of this open on my computer.

I hope he has a catheter and/or a diaper on. He said he'd continue as long as he's physically able. Probably he's been on a liquid diet for a day or so. I would plan ahead for this.

If Republicans are going to refuse to do the work, if they're going to refuse to take up serious business and would like instead to fuck shit up... Well, we've got a choice to make, don't we? I don't know what the long-term solution looks like. But we can and should talk about it. We can and should take steps to make sure the public record reflects reality to the extent possible.

Really, if we want to come back from this, we have to talk about it. And we know that the official records during this time especially will be, shall we say, less than reliable. So there is value in speaking the truth into the public record.

I'm not in love with the Democratic party as an institution. But this can also be energizing and inspiring for people. He's setting an example, and hopefully his example will shame others into growing a backbone. Hopefully.

I really don't have any hope for Schumer. But Booker, along with folks like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and Jasmine Crockett, are doing what they can do, and I respect it.

This is definitely a coordinated thing, though. Finally, Dems are showing that they have some strategic ability. Booker is the main speaker, but other Dems are asking questions, while allowing him to retain the floor. In this way, it's clear that they're working together, and several people in the room have jobs to do in support of Booker's efforts. They're expanding on his points and doing a call-and-response thing, which is an effective tactic in more ways than one, and it allows him to rest his voice for a few moments at a time.

So I'm not becoming a cheerleader for anybody yet. But what he's doing is important, even if it doesn't change anything directly.

Miss me with bipartisanship talk though. I really can't see that as a viable option at this point. Unless something radical changes, I wouldn't trust that at all. So anytime somebody like Schumer talks about Republicans coming to the table, I can't be bothered to listen. They have repeatedly shown us that they have no intention of doing that and that they further do not care about right and wrong at all. Or if they do, they think their actions are right, and I'm not sure which is worse, but in both cases, I would not call them trustworthy. Their priority is being in lockstep with Trump and the prescribed agenda of the party, not the American people.

At least Booker is trying to do something. Shit.

* When I started typing this, the number of viewers was just over 42k. Now it's over 45k and climbing.

46,326 watching at 14:16 4/1/25

About 52k on Senator Booker's official YouTube channel, as well!

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