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dion killing that (evil) 10 year old with absolutely no hesitation is in like the top 5 most iconic things any final fantasy character has ever done
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my first thought when considering a ff16 dlc was a joshua one obviously but then again a cid one would be great bc i miss him but then again a jill one because i love her but then again a leviathan one would be cool too but then again a gav one because he’s the best but then again a barnabas one could be interesting but then again dion because he’s so great but then again
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Final Fantasy XVI | A Little Adventure
Clive, Jill, and Torgal are just too cute! Who else agrees?
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Ambrosia and Torgal
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Under the new rules, homes that are not occupied for at least six months of the year are subject to a tax of one per cent of the property’s assessed value. The deadline to rent out empty dwellings was July 1.
Fazli said many of the people he has talked to are thinking of renting or selling their properties. He recently met with a woman who owns three empty properties in Vancouver — and says one of them is now listed for rent, another will be listed shortly and she is thinking of selling the third.
“This is a scenario of someone who is kind of in a panic now and needs to rent them out,” he said. […]
amazing
Why were they empty?
they’re meant to be investment properties, bought, left empty, and then sold a year or few later for huge profit as housing values continue to rise. it’s a massive part of the bc housing bubble, and why despite so much new construction it’s still so difficult to find rental housing
the fact that these landlords are panicking because they might have to actually use their housing properties as housing rather than finance capital is deeply funny
It should be more than a 1% tax rate though. I want it to be 100%. Torture them.
Can we get this implemented in this country?
stonecoldfemme reblogged
There's a post on here about one of the organizers of a feminist and/or lesbian activist group at some point stopped taking criticisms from people who never offered any other suggestions about ways to fix the things they had issues with. That she understood where that energy was coming from but also that it was ultimately just a roadblock to actually changing things. That's how I feel about anyone whose only response to End OTW Racism is criticism. If your only contribution to this conversation is criticism without help then you can keep it, because like it or not your on the side of the status quo in fandom here. You can talk about 'protecting the volunteers all you want' but either the organization is accountable to its own promises or its not. And if its not then that's worth talking about.
You can say all day long that 'Making Fans Not Racist'i- not the goal of the campaign none of the suggestions have to do with individual fan behavior- is un-doable (and how sad for you to have invested in living in a world where cruelty is left unchecked because it's hard to stop it) but unless you're also suggesting ways to make these spaces safer for fans of color then you're actively useless.
And if your response is- well no one is willing to do the work to make it better- ask yourself why your base assumptions are that people who care enough to organize around this would not be (and in fact have not already been) willing to volunteer. Why is your assumption that everyone involved in this is an outsider because that's the implication here and it's one of the main issues to begin with.
Are fans of color a part of your community or not? You have to decide that because community is an active thing. You say you don't want people in our community to have things made harder for them, so tell me how does 'making things harder' include protests against racist abuse and exclude racist abuse?
A lovely post, but you are asking the entirely wrong questions:
You say it yourself but don't seem to have grasped it quite yet: You are part of a community. The community has competing needs. Your need to be safe stands in direct opposition to other fans needs to post their work.
We are all grappling with the idea that your freedom to not be racially discriminated against ends where an authors freedom to post whatever they want on AO3 begins.
Just because you are unwilling to acknowledge this fact and instead choose to label it as 'criticism' doesn't make it true and it also does not stop the rest of us from having that discussion. You are absolutely invited.
Obviously you think your rights trump everybody else's rights.
So make that argument.
Then listen to the answer and realize that the majority of fandom is not prepared to endanger AO3 for historical reasons.
Have you studied some of the fandom history that led to the formation of AO3? Do you know why a bunch of normal fans like you and me decided to make An Archive of our Own and why it was necessary? Can you maybe change your perspective enough to understand that Fandom as a community is always the first to suffer when new special interest groups discover that queer people exist all over again? Do you realize that the language of the current anti wave is coming straight from the fascist propaganda playbook?
Mass deletion of fandom content has literally happened several times in the history of fandom. Which is why fans created an archive that would host anything, very little questions asked - for the whole community.
They never said it needed to be the only one.
The AO3 code is online, you already have a movement. Why are you so comfortable walking up to the people who built an archive and demand change when there is no evidence you have joined the effort in any quantifiable way.
What is stopping you from literally building an Archive of Your Own.
"Your need to be safe stands in direct opposition to other fans needs to post their work.” and “your freedom to not be racially discriminated against ends where an authors freedom to post whatever they want on AO3 begins.” not only directly ignores the actual demands of End OTW Racism which is targeting harassment in meta, but is also literally the most ghoulish fucking response I will ever read in my life. The lack of empathy or understanding of the scale and violence of intentional racist harassment is vomit inducing.
The people who have been in support of this movement have worked PAC, have been there for AO3 and OTW since the beginning. We understand the history AO3 is coming from. We also recognize that AO3 is explicitly against harassment of it’s users, and thus it’s the only aspect of TOS that directly employs moderation. Said harassment clause has actually been used to target racist harassment, but it is still inconsistent and often a gray area in the TOS.
When people get bullied in a moderated space (see section G of TOS), do you then walk up to the victims and go, “That’s their freedom to say what they want to you. Your rights end where theirs begin. I know that bullying is against the rules, but since you are loud about it I will pretend like it isn’t.”?
I mean, I can start finding every instance of a white person talking about harassment they’ve received on AO3 and go “Do you deserve to be on AO3? That’s really a fun debate topic. Do you deserve to be safe? I mean you’re in MY SPACE so you really don’t!” which is the most basic claim you have been making here. I can guarantee that this treatment would send people like this into a tizzy.
Protecting myself and others from harassment is not our collective right? And that collective right is equivalent to our own abusers on the site? That is not how any proper community works. That’s never been how AO3 works either. Harassment is against the TOS, racist harassment should be no different. AO3 is a moderated space, whether or not you want to believe it. The small TOS is still a TOS, the policy/abuse team still does remove fic for the things we have outlined but it is not explicit nor written within the TOS.
If the safety of the users from targeted harassment is secondary to the content posted on the site, then why aren’t you protesting for section G of the TOS to be removed? I mean, section G is against the obvious “needs” that some random grifter has on the site.
Going:
Harassment :)
Racist Harassment :(
Is the biggest case of “It doesn’t affect me so it doesn’t matter. All lives matter even though we aren’t treated the same and there’s clear inequality regarding who gets attacked the most and in what manner.”
It’s always white people’s freedom of speech first, white people’s need to not get harassed first. But if people of color say they’re being harassed or that their freedom of speech is being silenced everyone wants to act as if we’re being controlling. This “bullies are using free speech” discussion never happens when white fans get on their soapboxes about harassment on AO3, it’s always only us. “Harassment in comments and tags are bad” is only a hottake when you put the words, “to black people” at the end of it. Explain to me in detail why this outrage isn’t wildly disproportionate to the tens of anti-harassment movements that call for better harassment moderation on AO3?
This isn’t a debate because I’m not willing to debate whether or not something that AO3 already moderates should be moderated or not. “Should harassment be moderated?” the answer is, “it’s been this way since the beginning of the TOS. Do you wish to tear down the very foundation of fandom for a gotcha?”.
I’m also not willing to debate how my existence is antithetical to your freedom of speech, nor am I willing to debate on how harassment against a POC is okay if it’s based on their race, but harassing a white creator in that space isn’t okay because of a thin TOS loophole.
Seallioning about AO3, talking about “Go create an entire website and come back to us!” is hilarious since most supporters are currently OTW members and some are volunteers. These people ARE AO3. The people who said they were going to change their TOS was OTW in 2020, and then since then went radio silent on enacting said change. You are fighting your own shadow here. If anything you are fighting against OTW’s own work towards a better space. You are fighting OTW’s agreed changes like a bucket against the sea. You are never going to get OTW to agree that the harassment TOS should be lessened and to walk back their promise to look over inequities that the current section G of the TOS creates. Because simplifying your point down to:
“AO3 users should not be protected from harassment because that’s against freedom to harass” is ghoulish and nobody in a 40 mile radius involved in OTW would ever agree to that point when you go mask off and stop obfuscating the point. You let the mask slip off for just a moment, and it shows a lot.
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If you’ve ever wondered: this is what it sounds like in my head all the time.
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embroidery from peacocksandpinecones my friends and I have been losing our minds over all morning.
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pvtridhxlos
civic and moral duty to save and repost this image <3
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Tina Turner was one of the first of many black women in the public eye who were victims of horrific abuse that had their brutalization turned into pop culture references and jokes. Everyone who profited, die. Everyone who furthers the normalization of our brutality, die.
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heavy rain my beloved pt. 2
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Another month, another OTW newsletter that makes no mention of what the org is doing to fight racist harassment on its platforms.
You know what else it doesn't mention? That the minutes for the March 27th Board Meeting have finally been posted. This was the meeting with the first ever update on the OTW’s diversity work.
Why not send the OTW a note requesting they add a regular section to future newsletters for updates on their diversity, equity, and inclusion work? You can send it to Communications or the OTW Board. If you've already sent them a note, send another. I did.
Here's what I wrote:
It's been almost a year since the OTW published its vision statement pledging greater transparency and I am once again writing to ask that you add a dedicated section to the monthly OTW newsletters to provide updates on the organization's anti-racist work. Making this a regular part of your newsletters will show this work is a priority for the org and that there is progress being made, even if it's incremental. For example, April's newsletter missed an opportunity to join the conversation about racism in fannish spaces when it didn't even mention that the minutes from the March 27th Board Meeting have been posted, a meeting that included the first ever update on the OTW's diversity work. A summary of this update would have been an excellent addition to the newsletter. After all, fans can't read this information if they don't know it's out there!
You’re welcome to borrow or adapt my letter. If you write your own, considering sharing it to encourage others, and please, spread the word.
And, now, a little fact-finding poll:
Update: The OTW has apparently edited the April Newsletter to add a link to the March board meeting minutes (the Wayback Machine has my back on this), but did not, apparently, deem the diversity update given in the meeting important enough to mention.
I haven't heard back from the OTW on this yet. In fact, I'm still waiting for a reply to the last letter I sent them on this subject. That's why I'm glad to see increased transparency included in @end-otw-racism's list of demands:
Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings.
At the moment, with two notable exceptions—those being the June 2020 Statement from the OTW Board of Directors, Chairs, & Leads and the July 2022 OTW Vision Statement—the OTW's diversity work is only discussed in Board meetings, and until the March meeting what little information was given on the subject was largely due to fans showing up and asking questions.
The Board has finally added a diversity update to its regular agenda, but these meetings are not the best platform to share these updates and in no way should they be the only place they're discussed. OTW Board meetings are announced on Twitter, generally with only a week's notice, and aren't promoted across OTW's social media accounts. The informal poll above shows 13% of respondents didn't even know the Board had meetings. That's 10 people out of 76.
AO3 has 5.8 million registered users. The OTW has 6,450 members. No more than 40 people were at the last Board meeting, and that includes me.
Board meetings are currently the only place the OTW has set to provide regular updates on its anti-racist work. That update is then only shared in the meeting minutes. Not, as we have been asking, in the monthly OTW Newsletters or in a dedicated announcement of its own.
The minutes, once they're posted—often a full month, or more, after the meeting itself—are terse documents that do not always accurately reflect the extent of conversations had during the meeting and will sometimes summarize a guest's question(s) or a Board member's answer(s) in a way that's misleading.
Of course, once the minutes are posted, you may have to find them yourself because the OTW doesn't share them with the same energy as it does the monthly newsletters, OTW Signal, Guest Posts, 5 Things an OTW Volunteer Said, Open Doors imports, or its membership and recruitment drives.
Back to my poll: Only 12% of respondents—and that includes myself—reported that they regularly read the meeting minutes. More people were surprised to hear there were Board meetings at all.
As you can see from my earlier posts, a link to the minutes for the March meeting didn't even originally make it into the April Newsletter, which, as is the custom, was posted the following month, in May. This was the first meeting with the first ever Diversity Update and there has been no coverage of the information shared in that update anywhere on the OTW's social media accounts. They had two months where they could have said something, but instead, once again, they have chosen to say nothing.
For all these reasons, it's crucial these updates are shared somewhere beyond the sparsely attended Board meetings and the poorly read minutes. The OTW must make good on its promises to be more transparent and that means putting more effort into sharing this information and taking advantage of its reach in order to do so.
Please take a moment to write the OTW Board of Directors and demand that they provide detailed quarterly updates on the organization's anti-racist work in a timely and highly visible way. We have to know what they're building in there.
[ Standard disclaimer: As part of our efforts in this movement, we are rebloging posts we think would be helpful to consider as fandom engages in the necessary conversations about these issues. ]
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Why? See our Call to Action and FAQs for more information!
[Image description: Bold text with a background exclamation mark: Change your work titles to ‘End Racism in the OTW’ today!]