Victory Crown

I feel like people struggle to understand that my life as an aorace person is not centered around an absence of relationships. There is no romance shaped void that I am trying to live with, or live around, or which my life's purpose is to fill somehow.

I go to university and I go to work and I volunteer in my community and in the in-between moments I drink tea with my friends and I plant tomatoes on my balcony and there is no need for anything else. There is no room for anything else anyway.

When I am asked how I deal with 'the hole in my life' or what I do with 'all my free time', I know these questions are not about me at all. They are a reflection of the person asking.

it’s fun that Mormonism is based off pseudo-archeology and Scientology is based off pseudo-psychiatry. By that logic the big American New Religious Movement of the 21st century is gonna be based on… pseudo-computer science?

Also re the Murderbot casting, I agree that on a meta level it would have been preferable to cast a nonbinary person in the role for various reasons but can we remember that none of those reasons are bcos a cis man doesn't 'look' right for the part

Like Im gonna be honest it seems like some ppl are saying 'they should have cast a nonbinary actor' when what they mean is 'they should have cast an androgynous looking AFAB nonbinary person'

Yes we all want queer shows that also provide work for queer actors but I don't understand how you can look at the murderbot cast and say "this is bad because the nonbinary actor isn't the one playing the nonbinary character" like ok. I'm sure Sabrina Wu has the acting chops to play a she/her character. Let's give Skarsgård a shot to mismatch gender too if he wants. And let's not say it's different, let's not equate nonbinary with woman lite. Wu is not more in line with their character gender wise than Skarsgård is with his. Wu is not a woman and looking any particular way gender wise is not a requirement for being nonbinary or playing a nonbinary character. You don't get to say "mb is nonbinary and that means it should look (like a woman)(like Wu)(like any gendered expectation)(any specific way)" there are! Nonbinary! People! Who! Look! Like! Skarsgård!

These folks are putting their money where their mouth is casting Wu. We have a nonbinary actor. We have a nonbinary character. I don't see how it matters whether they line up in the cast list.

Absolutely amazing how AO3 is a part of the internet that doesn't sneak in any ads and doesn't have an algorithm and doesn't watch you or record how much time you spend looking at each fic or whatever. It's just right there to use for free. Legend

The internet was like this. This was the normal.

this is because it's a non-profit! Remember this next time you bitch about ao3 asking for donations.

Re: littlecofiegirl's comment — actually, the internet was never like this.

"YouTube used to be free." Youtube used to be funded by venture capitalists. It operated at a loss for many years, until it grew a dedicated enough customer base to start stage 2 of the enshittification process.

It's the same business model as Amazon or Uber. Venture capitalists pour money into a business, allowing it to operate at a loss and undersell its competition until all the competition dies out and it becomes a monopoly. Once that happens, the business can hike up prices as high as it wants, secure in the knowledge that customers have nowhere else to go.

These websites were never free. They were always accruing debt, with the intention of eventually coercing the public into paying off that debt a hundredfold.

AO3 is not a relic of the old internet. It is a new kind of website created specifically in reaction to the enshittification of the corporate internet, by a community of people who believed that creative works deserved to flourish on the internet, on a platform that was not subject to the whims of corporate oversight, so much so that they were willing to donate money and labor to create such a platform.

If you want to compare AO3 to something, compare it to a website like Bluesky, which was created in reaction to the enshittification of Twitter X.

Do not glorify "the good old days" that never existed. You don't make the internet or the world better by going back to the way things were. You do it by building something new.

I should be able to both read for 8hrs a night and sleep for 8hrs a night. That I cannot is very rude and, frankly, poor design.

This is nothing against the anon, but posts like this make me so sad. Like people really have no idea

1. how much it costs to store their gif sets and serve web traffic and push notification and w/e

2. how much Zuck and others have been making from brutally harvesting and exploiting your private information

3. that maintaining a social network like this is a full time job for MANY highly skilled people, and that running datacenters is expensive, and using cloud services is more expensive

4. Like seriously, how is your mind not blown every day that you can still view some gifs uploaded in 2007. That's 10 megabytes that's been viewed (downloaded) a million times. Perhaps some were viewed 100 million times. That's 1'000 terabytes (1PB) of traffic just for one popular gif. It had to be on several hard drives, safely, all that time. You've been lied to if you think that costs nothing.

And again, not saying this about anon and not judging anyone but like. Statistically, over 99.9% of you don't want to pay for Tumblr Premium. How many of you would suddenly want to pay for Open Source Tumblr. How would you talk to the New Staff. How would you react if you disagree on any UI changes they make. If people send death threats to staff over a free social network, how much more entitled do you think people will be if they actually have to pay for it. What if you see some CSAM or revenge porn or something. Who will review it. Who will delete it. Who will be in charge of banning those users. Who will read bug reports. Who will validate complaints about inappropriate DMs. There literally is enough work for hundreds of people every month even with a financial sinkhole as Tumblr is right now. How do you think it would get managed as a community project. Who will keep track of 200 volunteers. Who will replace them when they burn out. Who will make sure there aren't power hungry cliques abusing their power. Who will make sure it's not hijacked by political parties or corporations to push their propaganda and oppress or data mine a minority and sell the data to ICE. Who will make sure a creepy mod isn't just reading all your DMs. Who will carry the legal responsibility if Nintendo sues the site for copyright infringement. Who will do audits. Who will represent it in court. Who will respond to DMCA takedowns. Who will wake up at 3am to mitigate a DDoS. Who will take legal responsibility when the database gets hacked and email addresses get leaked. Who will make sure the database admin isn't actually working for NSA and that's why he can afford to volunteer for free.

Running an ethical, large-scale, rich-content (with images over a few kilobytes large) social network is just incredibly complex. And by complex I mean impossible.

the Cow Lore is definitely worth a read

every time i see trad gender roles people being weird about fibercraft i wanna tell them

-medieval and early modern knitting guilds were full of men learning and perfecting fancy knitting techniques to impress rich clients

-in cold, wet climates like the scottish highlands knitting was done by the whole family, in fact it was the perfect activity to do while a man was out on a fishing boat or in the pasture with his sheep and cattle

-men who were away from women for a long time had to know how to knit and sew at least well enough to mend their own clothes. soldiers knitted. sailors knitted. cowboys and frontiersmen knitted. vikings probably knitted (actually they would have been doing a kind of proto knitting called nalbinding, but that's beside the point). all those guys the far right love to treat as ultra masculine heroes were sitting around their barracks and campfires at night darning their socks and knitting themselves little hats

Roman soldiers literally spun as they walked using kickspindles

every merchant marine I know can knit a rope hammock on broomsticks in a couple hours tops.

We have literal photo evidence of shepherd men knitting on stilt stools while watching their grazing flocks. Because knitting or spinning yarn was relatively easy and portable, kept them occupied enough to avoid boredom but also left them enough attention to make sure their flocks remained safe, and resulted in something they could sell to supplement their income from the fleeces, milk, cheeses and meat of their flock.

Once the knitting guilds dissolved as economic powers (partially due to the advent of semi-mechanised knitting machines, which outsourced knitting to "unskilled" croft and cottage-dwelling families rather than restricting the industry to select trained guildsmen), knitting throughout Europe was more likely to be an activity relegated to socio-economic classes than to gender roles, especially prior to the mid-19th century when it was slowly embraced as a leisure activity by wealthy women (in much the same way that embroidery had been embraced in earlier centuries).

And sure, there's an entire conversation to be had about how patriarchal structures have forced women to be more economically vulnerable than men throughout Western history, which therefore meant that once knitting was spread beyond the guilds' tight regulation, a lot of women began knitting because they were poor and it was a relatively portable form of work to earn an income.

Just as there's a conversation to be had about why various occupations and activities are devalued once enough women begin practising them - and especially once the activities are practised by "ladies of leisure", who were seen as being especially frivolous - and why we then collectively develop amnesia about the respect our society held for that occupation or activity just a few generations earlier (think also about teaching, nursing, secretarial and administrative occupations - all previously male-dominated careers that were paid well and seen as respectable, but have been steadily devalued as more women entered the field).

But if that conversation ignores the fact that men are punished and constrained by patriarchal and socio-economic demands, that men have just as much place in the history of fibrecrafts as women, but have been erased from that history by people whose ideology demands that they never have taken part in "feminine" duties... then that conversation will be disingenuous and only half of the true conversation.

Love the exposure! Also, men have been - and still often are!, predominant figures in other crafts like weaving and embroidery in many places outside the western sphere. Realise the world is vast and we really did constrain such rigid gender roles upon ourselves (very recently)!

I have an opinion about the Switch 2 price but y’all aren’t gonna like it bc it’s more nuanced than just Nintendo bad greedy

Since someone actually asked

Like corporations are bad, but there’s a bigger reason that games cost so much. I’m actually okay with mainstream games getting more expensive bc it helps raise the floor on indie game prices (which should all be higher, Stardew Valley being $15 is actually bad for indie devs everywhere bc everyone compares your indie game to SV and is like why can’t you have this much content and be this cheap. SV should be like $40-50.) bc then me an indie dev might get paid more and not be starving.

The nuance is that twin evils are at work here: 1. video game costs have kept up with inflation (as they should to pay for the higher fidelity gamers demand and to pay the bigger and bigger teams) but wages have not. Ppl should be asking why isn’t our minimum high enough I can afford a game with a few hours of work (the equivalent of less than half an extra shift if you wanted to take it once a month)?

Essentially: please gain class consciousness, bite every billionaire, demand minimum wage and thus all other wages be raised to keep up with inflation and suddenly you will have money for games and consoles, and game devs will be able to make quality products that allow them to feed their families.

Evil #2, (this evil is also why AI has gotten so big) is that art has been even further reduced to things that are solely meant to be consumed, spit out and then immediately forgotten for the next item of consumption. This conflating of art (and video games are art!) with products and consumption is the other half of the nuance here. It’s not wrong for people to ask, hell even to demand they get paid well for making good art. They should be getting paid well for it.

Either that or gamers need to lower their impossible standards.

Anyways. Corporations are evil and not your friend, that includes Nintendo, but please consider using this anger to gain class consciousness and realize that the real thing to be mad about is not that games and consoles are more expensive, but that you are not getting paid enough, are being exploited, capitalism is a failed system and all billionaires are evil and need to be forcibly divested of their money.

one more year until people stop dying

Experience: Learning the right way to connect the dots.

This is the best representation of something I have been trying to explain to people for years!!!! Saving this to my phone so I can routinely pull it out when I need. 

So if you look in the lower right-hand corner of that last panel with the unicorn, you’ll see that it looks like something was erased or pasted over. Know why? Because this isn’t the original version of the cartoon.

This is:

Yeah, that’s right. This entire strip is a comment on antisemtism and y’all changed it to be more “fun” and deleted the artist’s signature in the process. So anyway, this isn’t just some helpful infographic or a silly meme, it’s a commentary on how Jews have been getting blamed for world’s ills for 2,000 years, and whoever erased that panel can fuck right off for eternity.

So I’ve seen this post a lot and when I first saw that it had originally been about antisemitism and that had been erased, I was shocked and angry. But then I noticed just how off the artist’s signature seemed to the rest of the image. It’s in a completely different resolution, in fact you can see slight discoloration behind the logo. So that’s odd. What’s also odd, is how the first picture has an artist’s handle, @gapingvoid and this new handle was completely different. It’s… JNRAGY? I think? Very different from the first handle. 

So I reverse image searched both images, the one commenting on antisemiticism and the unicorn one and I could not find the source for either of them. All I could find were other people posting reuploads of the art, not the artist. So I looked back at the images and actually, it turns out neither are the original. Because the original said nothing about Conspiracy theories. As the previous person said, if you look at the unicorn you can see something partially photoshopped out. On the other hand the lines making up the star are more pixelated than the other parts of the art piece and the dots are slightly blurry. It’s a lower resolution than the rest of the picture. The earliest post I can find with the antisemitism commentary was August 5th of this year. The unicorn 

So I go back to the first artist’s handle, gapingvoid. And it’s a whole website selling prints of artworks with similar art styles. This looks promising. Looking up ‘Data Information Knowledge’ lead me to find this.

It was from 5 year ago. This was the original. The two conspiracy theory versions have started being shared a lot this year, in the past few months honestly.

I think it’s worth always remembering to double check the veracity of claims. However, I do think that the edit of the comic to critique antisemitism is very good and is a very worthwhile piece of art in its own right. Adapting other’s work is an important part of art but it was not the original artist’s intent.

This uniquely illustrates the point of the conspiracy theory panel. People just changed the information. And they did it twice so that the first layer of falsehood only revealed the second underneath.

The earliest use of the original I can find is from 2019, indeed on the gapingvoid site

The original first image was also first published there

The concept is probably inspired by the Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Pyrimad

It’s ironic that a piece that originally illustrated the importance of data vs knowledge and the way that experience and comprehension change and enrich that data has been distorted, manipulated, and used as disinformation. This is why it’s important to always check sources, to do research, to question everything. You are not immune to propaganda, and there is a world of bad actors manipulating information to deceive you, for clicks, for clout, or for more nefarious purposes.

Hitomi Murakami aka 村上仁美 aka Murakami Hitomi aka Hiiceramica (Japanese, b. 1990, Osaka Prefecture, Japan) - 明るい絶望 (Bright Despair), Sculptures: Ceramic

The thing is I would be a lot less upset about paying $80 dollars for a video game if

A. The money actually went to the laborers and developers who made the game in the first place.

B. Prices for most console games were more flexible, and actually went down over time, rather than selling a years-old game from the last generation at a markup from it's original MSRP.

C. The price was adjusted for places where buying a video game can cost several month's paycheck.

Like games as a medium, especially big AAA titles, take an absurd amount of labor hours to make. In a just world, maybe GTA VI or whatever should be $100 dollars, given how many people probably bled for probably a decade to make it! Unfortunately that money will not, in this industry, go back to the developers, the coders, the artists who made the damn thing. They'll be worked to death, paid peanuts, and fired as soon as the game releases.

(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)