my mother: don’t go to the supermarket and buy random shit, just buy exactly what’s on the list
the list:
vegetal
an fruit (?)
meat, maybe?
This is exactly what my mum’s lists are like, only she puts “vegetables (NOT BROCCOLI” because I LOVE BROCCOLI and it’s good for her and when I look at the veg in the shop, I see the salad and go “that’s not veg” and I see things like onions and peppers and that and go “those are lies” and then I see broccoli and 😀
Of course now that all of our grocery shopping is online, I whatsapp her from inside the house with a photo of her list going WHAT IS THIS??!?!?!??!?!?!
(Cannot whatsapp from the supermarket, do not have smartphone)
Time to figure out how to make the white paint that arrived all dried out, not dried out so I came paint the bird grey https://instagr.am/p/CDESSFOHirM/
the same reason every other nonprofit org tries to maintain a surplus–in the event of an emergency. those 100s of thousands of dollars will be gone incredibly quickly if they need to replace servers, restore data, or fight a lengthy court case. the investments are so that they can be less reliant on donations in the future. but the archive is just that–an archive. they don’t take free labor from anyone, they provide a platform for fanfic writers. if you want to get mad at a platform -cont-
“for profitting from your labor, you’re using one. tumblr makes money from everything you post, because they sell their memberbase as a product to advertisers. ao3 doesn’t do this, which is why they need donations in the first place. ao3 isn’t actually benefitting from anything–they are an archive. essentially an online library, except they don’t get government funding, so they need donations to survive. -done-”
But tumblr’s honest about the fact that they’re a business and are here for profit. Tumblr is a garbage corporation, but also they’re not trying to make it seem like they’re the poor downtrodden either. They also don’t prevent me from hosting things on their site while trying to get compensated for my time. Also, no one is coming at me on anon on tumblr trying to claim tumblr just desperately needs to do those things to survive. No is coming at me making excuses for tumblr. They are bending over backward to defend AO3 and claim not only that I can’t value my own labor, but that I shouldn’t.
You should value your labor.
But you should also value mine.
And that of every other person who ever worked a 20- or a 40- or a 60-hour work week, unpaid, so that AO3 could be the amazing platform it is. And everyone who ever put in 15 minutes or 15 seconds, for that matter.
We didn’t do all that expecting future pay. We didn’t do that only because the site couldn’t afford to pay people. We worked hard to make a site that was non-commercial. That’s what we donated our labor and our cash for. That’s what we believe in.
So when you look at that and think “Hmm… how can I monetize this?” you’re like FanLib. You’re like an outsider abusing our trust and profiting off of us while destroying our culture.
If it’s not your culture, that’s fine. Your culture can go be somewhere else.
You ask for respect yet disrespect me and every other OTW volunteer and staff member past and present.
There is a serious social cost to fic-for-pay, but the bottom line is that you are coming to a space explicitly built to be not that and then getting mad about the fact.
My suspicion is that AO3 is as popular as it is because it doesn’t allow fic-for-pay. But I could be wrong! There are lots of fans on Tumblr who disrespect and don’t get the values that OTW was founded on or the kind of gift economy and social structure it is trying to protect.
By all means, get some of them together and build some other site where fic writers can post their ko-fis and their patreons. I’m not even sure the corporations will come for you. They might not.
I donated the equivalent of years of a full time job so that AO3 could be what it is, not so that you could make a quick buck and pretend you did it all yourself.
If it were really all about your labor, you could advertise your fic-for-pay on any website you happened to be on. Tumblr. Twitter. Whatever.
You want to do it on AO3 because of my labor.
Our labor.
AO3 was built to be non-commercial, to support the gift economy that inspired so many fanworks creators.
Changing that would be a betrayal of all the people who worked on the site.
Anyone who wants a commercially linked fanfic site, can make one. Or, since that is very overwhelming for one person, can get together with a few dozen other people, find some who know code and some who know business setups and some who know law, and build themselves an archive.
That’s how AO3 did it, after all. It didn’t start with several hundred volunteers and a board of directors. It started with a handful of fans saying “fuck this shit forever; we need to make it ourselves.”
So when we say, “You could make an archive!!!” we’re not being snide. We’re not trying to say “shut up and go away.” We’re saying: “No really, if this matters so much to you, you can make a space with your own rules. It can be done. We did it, with a lot fewer resources than you have today.” (Don’t get me started on the state of filesharing in 2008.) AO3 itself is open source – you can even copy as much of its structure as you like.
What you DON’T get to do, is tell those of us who poured our souls into making the archive site of our dreams, that times have changed and it needs to make other fans happy now.
If you’re not happy with AO3, you don’t need to use it. If it offends you, block the URL and move on.
But you don’t get to use it for a few months, even a few years, and decide that the people who built it somehow overlooked the possibility of income and they need to change it now.
No, we didn’t “forget” to allow for monetization. Money is specifically excluded from motivation to post at AO3. You not only can’t money at AO3; you can’t say “I moneyed for this somewhere else.” Money economy is NOT WELCOME at AO3, and that’s on purpose.
There are a million other websites where you can ask for money for your fanworks. You don’t even have to remove stuff from AO3 to post on those. But you can’t link them.
Money does weird things to people’s brains, warps people’s relationships, has strange and often unpleasant effects on art. We want none of it.
So we said: We’ll make an archive. And we will NOT have advertising, and we will NOT have please-pay-me buttons, and we will ask for donations to run it. And if we don’t get much, it will just… be small. Very tiny. It will be as big as we can afford to make it, with money made by asking “hey how would you like to see an archive of fanworks when there’s no money pressure involved?”
AO3 is working as intended. It’s not broken. It’s not missing modern features. It’s stlil in beta because it’s missing some of the features initially planned for it – including image hosting. But it’s not an oversight that there’s no commercial activity allowed or planned.
I got paid for my labor with AN ARCHIVE FULL OF FICS BY MY FAVORITE AUTHORS. No money could’ve bought that for me.
i don’t know much about filmmaking but i do know this
directors who focus on hands: knows about the tender language of touch, can show you painful emotional distance between two people, can rightfully articulate the true soul-crushing enormity of yearning
directors who focus on bare feet: need to be hunted for sport and shot on sight
