an illustration study, work as free phone wallpaper too!

im calling out everyone who says “this cleared my skin and watered my crops” when responding to images they like

i know you dont have crops

and i know you dont have skin

stop lying for a “joke”, this is a serious website for people to make posts on their blogs about their life experiences, not about making a ruckus and acting like fools

im so sorry

cuddling spots near Luz is very popular

And you're why we don't do these anymore

when you work your ass off to lead rebellion but your friend brings along her girlfriend from the Emperor’s coven

ITS APRIL 13 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

FETCH ME NEIL

🔮 like to charge 🔮

🔥 reblog to cast 🔥

🌎 for good news on earth day 🌍

ik we were on a boycott buuut

what would you do if that was you?

The end!

alxjalxksldksjskc the END

@jared-wormsboy i am crying uncontrollably

I reference this in conversation sometimes assuming everyone knows about the Owl Attack Sex Playlist and i look fucking unhinged

@revolutionnaire-e

#JusticeforDaunteWright

It’s going up in the city tonight and I won’t be on here but before I leave for the night here are a list of local resources to share.

Direct Donations/Financial Help for Daunte’s Family

If sending via money transferring apps please put “For Daunte Jr.” in the subject line so the funds can be properly allocated!

Community Donations for Protesters and Protective Equipment

DocumentingMN: local community member run organization providing plywood for Black owned business in the cities and well as hot meals and safety gear

Freedom Street Health: community medic organization, apart of Twin Cities Workers Defense Alliance. Providing first aid supplies for on the ground medics

Brooklyn Center School District: urgent need for food and essentials for the community

Rebuild Brooklyn Center Shops Gofundme: mutual aid to help rebuild businesses that were looted/destroyed on Sunday April 11th

Minnesota Freedom Fund: bail relief fund

The Bail Project: bail relief fund

George Floyd Square: community led and guarded autonomous zone on 38th and Chicago that provides community space and organizations to gather

Community Members to Follow for Updates and Information

Unicorn Riot: livestreaming broadcasts

MNUprising

MN Teen Activists

H.P Rogers, Ben Hovland, and Daviss: photojournalists

video game companies really think hyperreality somehow makes games better… it does not! it just makes them hyper realistic lol and it sure doesn’t make my console feel any better either… instead of putting hours of effort into making a character’s arm hair look realistic how about u put some effort into something that matters like idk the plot maybe

I’m just saying, everybody loved Spyro and it didn’t even have basic water physics

spyro looked like someone duct taped together triangles and op is still right

how do ao3 fans rationalize the fact that in spite of them consistently making 5x their goal every donation drive, the site is virtually unchanged since its inception and has been in beta for 12 fucking years

ao3 doesn’t make money off of ads which are what pay for 90% of other websites. you don’t want ads on ao3. ads mean the sponsor gets to dictate what kind of content they want their ads paired with, and who they want to see their ads. this is why youtube, for instance, is so heavily censored, and why facebook can collect so much data on you as a user

their donation drive earnings are pennies compared to what it costs to run other websites with a comparable amount of users. their latest drive is sitting at 220k which is NOTHING when you’re talking about cloud data servers. facebook spends 3.2 billion *in a single quarter* on servers

they also have an entire post with a breakdown of their budget here if you’re curious

ao3 has a very refined search system that has been tweaked and modified over the years. posting and searching for fanfiction back in the fanfiction.net/livejournal days was very much the wild west. you can now easily find a well-tagged fic for any pairing or fandom you want in under five minutes. you don’t have to worry that it’s going to get removed because the platform has suddenly decided to ban all adult content.

i’m not an ‘ao3 fan’ because being a fan of a website is weird, but i remember what it was like before. this is better

OP im sure you don’t need me to tell you you’re a moron, im sure you get told that all the time

i can think of like five major changes AO3 has made of the top of my head notably

this shit WAS NOT THERE twelve years ago. it wasn’t even there five years ago. maybe you didn’t notice since this obviously isn’t a feature you know how to utilize, but it was an absolute coup for the rest of us

[image id: screenshot of an AO3 works page with the Exclude part of the search bar circled in red]

Even if no major changes had been made to the site’s architecture (which is not true, as largishcat pointed out) OP has obviously no freaking clue how much effort goes into basic maintenance to keep a large website running and up to date, and also, how much money goes to server costs when you have as much data to store and as much traffic as AO3 does.

Let’s take server costs. In 2020, the AO3 needed some new servers due to increased demand. Those servers cost $132,000. Plus another $77,000 just for hosting. That’s over $200,000 just for keeping the archive on the web and accessible. Needing more servers is a regular expense, because a) the archive keeps growing and b) eventually old servers wear out and need to be replaced.

And then let’s look at basic maintenance of the website. See, the thing is, you may have noticed that over time the internet has changed. Websites can do more things than they used to do. Flash stopped being supported. Vulnerabilities were found and holes patched. There is a continual change, not just in the capacity of the servers and physical architecture, but in the underlying program structure. This means that you can’t just put up a website and never touch it again. Not if you want it to stay secure and be able to update it so you can add features. In five years, things that were state of the art and solid when you put them in become outdated and insecure and incompatible with current programming languages. If your website is small and/or doesn’t change, this doesn’t matter. If it’s large and you want the capacity to ever update it … this is a huge deal.

In order for a website to stay current and secure, you have to be constantly replacing old code with new code that is more powerful, stable, and secure. I’m pretty sure that the AO3 uses Ruby on Rails as its web application framework, and Ruby on Rails has at least minor updates every year. Which means that every single year they have to update the archive and make sure that everything works with the new framework. (This is the sort of boring-but-necessary work that they tend to hire contractors to do, so that the volunteers can focus on things like deciding on how the block/mute functions they are currently developing will work.)

Also, as someone with some experience in non-profit work, regularly exceeding their donation goals is a GOOD thing. For one thing, it allows them to put some money aside for a rainy day. Lots of nonprofits do not have this luxury, which means that when they face a major problem (either a temporary downturn in giving or an emergency of some sort) they collapse and die because they don’t have the resources to get themselves through the crisis. So getting enough money that they can have a fund for emergencies is awesome. Second, overshooting your regular fund drives means you don’t have to have special fund drives in addition to them. In most charities, when there’s a big expense, they have to have a special fundraiser. But with AO3, last year when the archive traffic increased dramatically due to lockdown and they needed more servers, they didn’t have to do a special donation. They had the money in hand, they could just go out and solve the problem.

Third, a nonprofit having more money than expected mostly means that they can do more things without worrying, and do them more quickly. For another example, if you had been paying attention to AO3′s news posts (which you can find here) you would know that they are in the process of planning out a new feature that has been hotly requested: the ability to block and/or mute people. Right now it’s still in the planning stages, and they’re figuring out exactly what they want that to look like and how it should work in all particulars. But as soon as they get it planned, it will happen fairly quickly, because (thanks to the generosity of AO3′s donors) they don’t have to rely on volunteers to code this massive and complex feature in their spare time; they can hire a contractor to work full-time on the project and simply get it done. And they didn’t need to have a special fundraiser to do it.

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.

This.

!!!!!

what it feels like to play pokemon ruby and sapphire on max volume

I will never not reblog this

Beta!Luz: So this "rain"...is it poisonous?

Beta!Amity: You serious?

requested by  certifiednegansi

original thread by @pukicho and several other users

I always love seeing this comic because it interprets Tumblr as a gigantic theater ruled by absolute chaos where sometimes somebody just stands up on their chair and shouts and we all pay attention

this post is from THIS YEAR

had to fact check and holy shit 2020 really has been 3 years long.

Happy one year anniversary little thread