Why are people still up in arms about AO3 needing donations to run? Their budget is publicly available. You can go onto the website, right now, and read it. If you donate more than a certain amount (pretty sure it’s more than $10), you can vote in their elections, because you’re considered a member, and that’s how memberships work.
It’s a free site to use, but not to run or to maintain, especially not with all these net neutrality battles.
Y’all gotta understand that it’s not just fanworks, there’s a lot more that goes into archiving.
Signal boosting this because it’s important af. OTW is a nonprofit organization, specifically a public charity as classified by the US tax code. That means they file a 990 tax report each year that lets you see all of their finances – what they’re spending money on, where their money comes from, etc. You can see their 2016 990 here if you’re so inclined.
And if you’re not sure about how OTW is using their donations? Ask questions. Get involved. Even if you’re not comfortable with or not in a position to donate, there are lots of opportunities to give your time; it’s an all-volunteer organization that recruits regularly. I know for a fact that I get more value out of what OTW provides than most, if not all, my other paid services combined, so $10 to be a member is more than worth it.
ao3 is routinely used as an example of an excellent digital archive in library and information schools – they’re not just a fansite; they’re held in high regard by people across the industry. they run initiatives to preserve old fansites and groups, in addition to the day to day work of hosting all of our work ad-free to ensure maximum creative freedom. ao3 is not just a place to post your fic; it catalogues and preserves our history and culture.
$130,000 a year though?
Dude, I don’t know if anyone’s gotten to you yet, but as someone who used to work for a server hosting company, that is NOT a lot of money. It feels like it, especially if you’re a part-time, paid-by-the-hour employee, but when it comes to tech services, that’s incredibly cheap. With the amount of content that AO3 has to host, they’re not dealing with one or two $1000 rackmount servers from Newegg.
Their facilities are going to look closer to this:
Or if they have nice ones, they may have a shelf of these:
They spend about $102,000 a year for server space, I’m rounding down to make the math a little nicer. That’s about $8,500 per month. That’s really, really not a lot.
Now, to be fair, I was on the documentation side of things and mostly wrote instructions on how to perform operations on servers, so I don’t actually know how many servers AO3 needs to house all their data. I also don’t know the exact volume of data AO3 has to handle, but $8,500 a month sounds like an entirely reasonable amount based on what I do know.
I already reblogged a different version of this post, but reblogging this one for some reference to how many server resources go into a project like this. Lots.
Given the sheer tonnage of material they host, I’m surprised their server budget is *only* $8,500 a month.
my new roommate’s best friend literally says “we’ll just go out for one drink” on a weeknight, goes to a club, has ONE drink while everyone else is getting to it, and then tells everyone when it’s time to go home so they can actually make it to class in the morning and I’m genuinely terrified by the amount of self control she has
saying you’ll just have one drink at the club on a school night and then following through and getting up for class the next day demonstrates the exact level of resolve it took to amputate your own arm on an 18th century battlefield
Every true crime podcast on Tattoine has done at least one episode about Luke Skywalker, the mysterious “nephew” of a moisture farmer who showed up with some random hermit in Anchorhead one day, sold his family’s torched farm six separate times, and then left the planet, supposedly in the company of a smuggler and with two droids the Jawas said were totally stolen from them. (They probably said that for the insurance money but who really knows?)
But do they cover who torched the farm? Do they go with the Sand People cover story, claim Luke did it himself somehow, come out and blame the Empire, or very pointedly talk around not blaming the Empire?
When I was 7 years old and at the optometrist, I was what’s known as a Little Shit. I didn’t sit still. I didn’t want to read the letters. I didn’t want to do anything except go home. Eventually, my mom bribed me with a kitten. A PERSIAN kitten, freshly purchased from the extremely shady pet shop directly across the street. It worked like a charm, I’m sad to say, because I’m extremely vulnerable to kittens. tbh, considering the way my mom was looking at those kittens, she would have bought one anyway.
My dad says that she always did have a weakness for dumb animals. “It’s why she married me,” he always says. Anyway, this is a story about a Very Dumb Cat, not Heterosexual Hilarity Hour.
This kitten weighed about a pound and I suspect 75% of that was fluff. She was smokey grey, had a perfect little nose (she was what’s called a doll-faced or traditional Persian. No pug faces here!), and had the IQ of a hammer.
I mean this with all the love in my heart, but you could just look into those eyes and absolutely KNOW that there was nothing going on in there. It wasn’t even a case of ‘no lights on upstairs’. There wasn’t even an upstairs. There wasn’t even a ground floor. There was just NOTHING going on in there.
Kiki didn’t understand some simple concepts—-stairs, for example. She never figured them out, even after 7 years of living in a house with stairs. Her preferred method of locomotion was to cry very loudly until someone carried her where she wanted to go. One could argue that this was, in fact, very clever of her.
Please don’t give her the credit. It was pretty clear that she was simply confused about how stairs could go up AND down at the same time.
TBH, she never figured out how to get onto furniture either. She was fully capable of jumping and playing like any other cat, but it seemed as soon as she had to THINK about something, everything else shut down. Like… one day, I was playing with her and a piece of string. She was delighted and jumping and playing. Just normal kitten stuff. Then she decided she wanted to sit in my lap instead. I mean, i SAY “decided”, but it could’ve just been a passing air mote depositing the idea in her head.
The point is, she abruptly forgot how to jump onto furniture. She forgot how to JUMP. She just kinda sat there and stared at me for a few seconds before starting to cry. She was actually pretty distressed by it and didn’t stop until I picked her up for a cuddle. Thankfully, she seemed to forget it pretty quickly. No room for anything besides the moment, I guess.
She also never grew very much. Even as an adult, she barely pushed 3 pounds. She also had a serious dental issue. Her canines stuck straight out horizontally. They weren’t very big so they didn’t push past her lips or anything, but it was the most baffling thing her vet had ever seen.
I loved that dumb animal. She was a very good girl and I miss her.
Hot take: Crowley has black wings bc they are crow’s wings, and symbolize curiosity, innovation, adaptability, and a compulsive need for shiny things in his weird pseudo-human nest. Aziraphale has white wings because they are swan’s and These Wings Are Made For Hitting And That’s Just What They’ll Do
the left just wants mass amounts of illegal immigrants to live in the usa so that nice straight white boys like me are the only ones signed up for selective service and that way the next time there’s a big war we get exterminated so women and minorities can take over the country once we’re gone
this is the best post on this entire website
i do want this specifically
you’d think this attitude would translate to anti-war activism but noooo
i’d be really interested in actual numbers on the lethality of “being draftable during a big war” as opposed to things like “being subject to harassment by law enforcement and denied medical care”. my intuition is that it’s actually not all that dangerous, statistically, and that “being exterminated” is unlikely to happen to whatever population.
also, the only person i personally knew who died as a result of being a soldier in the US army was black, so I think OP is missing key points about who gets drafted and/or sent to war.
… y’know, when I was in high school, we were discussing the draft in Social Studies, and this group of guys was being super loud about how the draft only applied to men, and it wasn’t fair that women had it so easy, since they wouldn’t be called into war if it happened,
and this loose coalition of other students was setting up a counter-offensive- a few of the more outspoken ladies, couple of the Class Intellectuals, (the ven diagram of these having some overlap, said overlap technically including me, except I wasn’t Helping yet)
and I couldn’t quite get the shape of the defensive argument, because the various strains of opposition were disparate enough that the only thing filtering past the sheer VOLUME of these Angry Proud Young Men was something vague and shaped like “Nuh-UUUH!”
So then I raised my hand- which was actually kind of an Event because it was common knowledge that I Mostly Didn’t Talk,
so it was nice and quiet by the time I went,
”I don’t think anyone should be drafted, but I think if they have to, we should have to too.”
And y’know, everyone in the class started fuckin’ yelling at me?
… I’m actually still pretty proud of that.
honestly it’s sorta silly, we haven’t actually drafted people in years, and the lethality of being drafted was under 5% even when we did have the draft, so basically OP’s position is pretty much a joke.
that said, i think the biggest problem with the draft as it exists right now is that it’s so easy for rich people to opt out, meaning that there’s a huge disparity between “risk of losing your kids” and “ability to decide that someone should be losing their kids”.
I love old JRPGs because in Dragon Quest III when you retrieve a king’s stolen crown he asks you if you want to keep it and be king/queen instead, and if you say yes the game literally makes you the king/queen and gives you a fancy robe and you can walk around town and speak with your citizens and help out with their problems while everyone compliments you on what an amazing ruler you are. Except they won’t let you leave the city and all your party members/items are gone, so if you want to continue the game you have to sneak into the illegal gambling ring and find the old king and beg him to take the throne back.
And then when you get all your stuff back you can talk to the prime minister and he’s like “oh yeah, I’ve been made king like 5 times now… you can come back and be king/queen whenever you feel like it. You were way better than the actual king tbh.”
So then every time you go back to the city and talk to the king he gives you the option to be king/queen again as long as you want. And modern games would never be able to do something this absolutely ridiculous because the city would have a complicated backstory and the whole thing would tie into all the lore and worldbuilding and it just wouldn’t work. And that’s why I love old JRPGs.
I’m still annoyed about antis so let’s do a thing.
I’ll write 100 words of fic (prolly in the same fic) for every time this gets REBLOGGED until the donation drive ends.
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AO3 is a fantastic non profit that gives so many of us a fandom home and could use whatever support you can offer! Even $2 helps!!
If you can’t donate monetarily, please consider spreading the word!
You can donate HERE and learn more about AO3 & OTW HERE!
That moronic post made flames come out of my ears, and I already donated as much as I can rn (and am gonna put those stickers everywhere, oh yeah) EVERYONE DONATE have fun writing OP!
I think that post did more good than bad! It reminded me of how much I love AO3 and I went and donated immediately!
yeah, pretty much. i wouldn’t be surprised if it was intentionally-misleading in just the way that pisses off people who’ve actually thought about the issue, because there’s gonna be a correlation between “has ever thought about a thing” and “has disposable income”.
??? I have very little disposable income but I promise Ive put thought into things. Im assuming this is a phrasing issue?
it’s maybe not a very strong correlation. there are lots of exceptions, for a lot of reasons, but there’s a general correlation. thinking about things is advantageous, in general. doesn’t always make up for the world being sort of sucky sometimes.
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