What In The Geek

kangaroo: (sees creature descend from the sky with a single giant multicoloured wing)

kangaroo: oh i am going to absolutely kick the shit out of that.

therapist: tell me about yourself

me:

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.

Can I also add that apart from running a legal team and the best online library around, they also run a free, peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to fan studies called Transformative Works and Cultures.. They incorporate studies of fandoms from all around the world, and are able to follow very closely with fandom trends. Studies found in TWC are leagues better than those cringey ‘I heard about this fan-dom thing from my teenage niece’ essays. 

Just reblogging this to remind everyone that AO3 is fucking incredible and it has singularly transformed fandom.

speaking as someone who works in cloud, I’ve had some variation of this conversation so many times:

boss: that can’t be done. me: AO3 does it, and for 1/100th what you’re suggesting it’d cost. boss: they’re using blood magic. it’s the only explanation.

I remember in my Arabic class we were going over the alphabet and the teacher was like there’s no ‘P’ etc and this white girl was like wait what but my names Paige and my teacher was like lol then we’d pronounce it as beige and she was so offended I’m crying thinking about it

One of my mom’s friends, Hugh, went to France and they had a lot of trouble pronouncing his name because the entire thing was silent.

salut je m'appelle [REDACTED]

LEVI ACKERMAN🌙

for @sapphridite​ HBD!꒰˘̩̩̩⌣˘̩̩̩๑꒱♡

They look exactly like us. They think like us. They know where we are. We need to move and keep moving. They won’t stop until they kill us…or we kill them.  #WatchYourself✂ Us (2019) Directed by Jordan Peele

final chapter and a puppy

I'll do my best.

Iron Man 3 (2013) // Avengers: Endgame (2019)

People do crazy things… when they’re in love.

Hercules (1997) dir. Ron Clements, John Musker.

I’m not crying.

Often times effort matters so much more than the thing itself. Whatever you can do, simply trying to do it at all is often more than enough.

#the devil is a literal child

THE ROAD TO EL DORADO (2000) Dreamworks

It is the Gypsy girl, the witch who sent this flame It’s not my fault if in God’s plan He made the Devil so much stronger than a man

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1996) dir. Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise

Un-make me.