I don't get it

The library of babel is an old famous thought experiment/short story/philosophical musing/exploration of infinity/metaphor for the search for meaning in life/new and exciting frontier in human torture/etc. that, in simple terms, is this:

Imagine a nearly infinite library, with endless shelves each filled with books. Each book has 410 pages, each filled with a random sequence of the 26 letters of the alphabet, periods, and commas. Since this library is nearly infinite, every single possible permutation of text exists in it.

Every single person’s life story, every single thing you could ever write, everything you could imagine, every scientific discovery that will ever be made, the answers to every question you will ever ask, the exact details of your death, every story ever lost to time, and every possible variation of those filled with errors and misinformation and misleading lies. And of course, the vast, vast, vast, 99.9999% majority of it is all unintelligible nonsensical jumbles of random letters.

This was always just a fantasy and a neat idea for philosophy, but with modern computers and a few clever programming techniques (if it was fully represented in full at all times like most webpages, it would outstrip the size of the rest of the internet by a few dozen orders of magnitude), it has been created and is easily hosted online. It’s a database so large that searching it is only possible if you already know what you are looking for in the most redundant possible way.

So yeah, OP’s fics are somewhere in it. So is everything else they or anyone else could ever write. Considering Bones has been fighting stolen AI reposts of their work for years now, anon sending a link to the library of babel as if they were helpfully reporting someone stealing OP’s work is the joke.

ameircans talking about red note like they have never spoken to anyone from another country ever about anything

A lot of us haven't (or at least don't realize we are when talking to people online if it's not obvious or explicitly stated)

that's embarassing why would you admit that

MISS CONGENIALITY (2000) dir. Donald Petrie

comics your civilian casts…don’t forget about your civilian casts 💔

I get you’ve made all the heroes best friends and shoved them all on the same teams and/or families but you gotta let them hang out with regular people once in a while so they remember the avenge civilian can’t lift a bus

you can tell me they care about their cities all you want but unless you show them being a part of said city I’m just going to assume you mean the buildings because the people in that city are slowly just looking like statistics on a screen, get down from your tower

it feels like when people picture a trans man who's transitioned they see a ""cis-passing"" stone masc man, and when they picture a trans man who Hasn't transitioned they picture a ""stealth"" feminine presenting person who has he/him in bio

it's like it never occurs to people that trans men can be Visibly trans, that some trans men are visibly trans for the entirety of their life through all of its stages.

it never occurs to people that being visibly trans can be Desirable, that it's what a lot of people want even despite the personal risk.

just once I want to see a good post critiquing makeup culture that doesn’t turn out to be made by some janky radfem blog

oh hey!! I’m not a janky radfem I can do it myself!

makeup culture is wack and normalizes a ludicrously high bar as the bare minimum women can do. I saw a “lazy"makeup tutorial the other day that listed 22 separate goddamn products. you’re supposed to buy and know how to use 22 different things on your face just for the privilege of being considered lazy and that’s uuuuuuh what’s the word? bullshit.

Really, five products could work, even 3. Just frame the face, eyes, lips, and you’re done.

0 products also works great

because I’m gonna be real here, the idea that 22 products is a minimum sucks but it’s really upsetting that any amount of makeup is the bare minimum at all

I would really just suggest some powder foundation, concealer, mascara and lipgloss/lipstick, or tbh just mascara works too, but that’s up to you

I’m sorry if I didn’t express this clearly enough in the original post but I’m not really looking for more concise makeup regiments. my intention was to point out how it’s Bad that makeup is considered a bare minimum at all, regardless of individual feelings on the matter

no face should be “required” to have “a minimum” of makeup. makeup has no health benefits and does nothing but fill the pockets of companies that prey on women and our insecurities.

makeup should not be seen as hygiene because it isnt. get that shit out of your head.

this post: makeup culture is ridiculous and 22 products should not be considered a minimum requirement for someones face. no one should have to do that

the notes: so like……. what youre saying is……. we need to make the minimum about 5 or 6 instead… i gotcha

Really the only makeup you need is eyeliner but that’s just my personal opinion

okay

where did we lose you

why are people like this

#nobody survived this post

oh hey, OP here. the Taylor Swift post was also mine lmao

i like it when trans women exist. i think there should be more trans women

trans women i love you. never forget this

Culture is so obsessed with the idea of lone geniuses that it doesn't really appreciate that most of the progress of science (and likely every other discipline) occurs collaboratively, in babysteps, and usually through a lot very tedious, utterly unsexy, work.

This is what’s so faulty with our short sighted coverage of scientific discoveries. You hear politicians question why we spend money on science studying insect wings and then decades later that research gets used by NASA for the most efficient way to fold/unfold solar panels on spacecraft. All of science is connected and useful because it enhances our understanding of the universe

When lasers were discovered they were called “a solution without a problem”, noone had any idea what to use them for. Since then they’re revolutionised communications and SO many parts of technology. CDs, DVDs, printing, fast internet, laser etching for making computer chips, laser eye surgery, spectroscopy, LIDAR measurements of weather patterns, barcode scanners, cooling atomic clocks, nuclear fusion, microscopy, LED technology and materials research. I’m probably not even scratching the surface here. Fund theory and fundamental science research.

It's actually kind of heartening, lasers; because before they were invented, their only real antecedents in science fiction were things like rayguns and heatrays and what not. But it actually turns out that their usefulness as a weapon is extremely limited, whereas their usefulness for just about everything else is incredible. It's one of the occasions where we flipped the "Dual Use" coin and it landed very solidly on the good side.

At least do the sky puppies right.

This!!!

Also, agave nectar as a sweetner is absolutely trashing the ecosystem where the plants grow, throwing other plant species, mammals and insects out of whack in order to meet rising demands.

If you are trying to cut sugar or go vegan to help the environment, stay away from agave, it's a disaster.

Honey, actual farmed honey, from honey bees, is more eco-friendly than agave, sugar beet, or sugar cane. And, contrary to popular belief, properly managed hives don't actually change the bees' lives from what they would be doing in the wild anyway.

Please be kind to our mouse dragons, we need them so much (and they are so fucking cute).

This is Mamadou Ndiaye! You might also have seen his vocally anti dolphin videos under the name Casual Geographic

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

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 is the most functionally-successful and cost-effective website in the history of EVER. By a wide margin.

Plus it’s an ARCHIVE. It’s whole purpose is to indefinitely keep a record of what is uploaded to it.

If fanfic suddenly became wildly less popular and no one was writing/reading it anymore, AO3 is supposed to keep running. The website itself is supposed to house all of these fics indefinitely – not only for the next 12 months. If interest (and thus donations) suddenly plummet then they need a pool of funds to draw on to back them up for as long as possible.

And of course it doesn’t look like fanfic will die any time soon. But in its heyday, no one thought MySpace would ever become obsolete either. Interests come and go - and though I would put money on fanfic having the staying power to keep being relevant/beloved/in use/etc, there’s no predicting whether that will actually be the case.

So if AO3 goes over on donations, they’re not wasted. 100% of donations go back into the running of the site - they are completely transparent about where the money goes and how it’s used.

If you really are morally opposed to AO3 running donations drives then, genuinely, I think you should stop using the site. They’re not MAKING users donate; the site is and will remain completely free to use, and donations are 100% voluntary. And if you have an issue with that, then i mean it with my full chest when I say: leave. Go get your fics elsewhere. The site needs money to keep existing, they are transparent about their spending of it, its entirely voluntary to donate, and there are no ads or algorithm or trackers. If you don’t like it, leave.

[johnny bravo voice] puppy dog

some people asked to see what babie looks like so here she is 🐶

OMG she is babie

Nothing drives this society more crazy than a woman who doesn't hate herself

One Year Review of the OTW 2023-26 Strategic Plan

OTW Strategic Planning has released an update on the progress of the OTW's 2023-26 Strategic Plan goals as of one year in! Learn more about what's been done: https://otw-news.org/39rhm9me

One Year Review of the OTW 2023-26 Strategic Plan

OTW Strategic Planning has released an update on the progress of the OTW's 2023-26 Strategic Plan goals as of one year in! Learn more about what's been done: https://otw-news.org/39rhm9me

sickens me to my stomach. how dare this guy get to live my dream.

Some clarifications and an update