“What is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor. That is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary. Now, go and study.”

- Rabbi Hillel

I just want to remind people that it’s 2024 and we didn’t “go thru a pandemic” we are “going thru a pandemic” present tense. It is still happening. People are still get sick, still becoming disabled, and still dying. Covid hasn’t gone away and I beg people to not normalize getting sick with it.

a new vaccine is available right now- covid hasn't gone anywhere. my case worker caught it last week. please keep masking, washing your hands, and social distancing. stay masked especially when in large crowds. i have permanent damage to my lungs from when i caught covid last year. it hasn't gone away. please keep looking out for yourself and other people.

I know that 2016 wasn't yesterday, but even so it seems like our collective memory is shorter with each passing year. The 2016 election and the Internet Research Agency were news a long time ago in media years...and there are bad-faith actors and agents out there who are counting on us forgetting.

As we get closer to Election Day, I encourage everyone to be more cautious of the information that you come across online. Fact check info that you come across in random social media posts, use reputable and reliable sources, get your news from more than one TV channel or website.

Be wary of anyone or anything online designed to manipulate your actions or influence your emotions, whether it's tumblr posts or advertisements or tiktoks. Do not allow propaganda and/or misinformation to sway you into voting against your personal values, your best interests, your personal safety, or the well-being of your neighbors and community in November.

I've already seen things that are concerning online within the past few months, and I expect to see an increase in this the closer we get to November.

Think critically and pay attention.

“Usually, trauma is seen as something that needs to be healed. Something to be “processed” - to be dealt with privately, in therapy or among a circle of close friends, to be addressed as a problem and solved. To be neatly and tidily compartmentalized, separated from oneself, shrunk smaller and smaller until it no longer affects one directly, until it is altogether stored away. “Your trauma should not define you,” clinicians will say.

If an event or circumstance is harmful to or painful for a trauma victim or survivor, it is framed as “triggering.” It couldn’t possibly be that the event or circumstance is in of itself harmful, and that an individual’s trauma has provided them with insight into the event’s harmfulness. No, the issue is that the victim has not dealt with their trauma effectively enough, that their trauma is still affecting them.

In this sense, trauma is framed as a singular and isolated incident, as an exception to the rule. The world is a generally safe, just place, but victims and survivors have been falsely convinced by their traumatic incident that the world is unjust and unsafe. It is not possible that trauma could be an ever-present constant, perpetually occurring in every sphere of life.

Not only are experiences of victimization not seen as expertise, but they are seen as pathology. As something that causes victims to see the world less clearly, to think less rationally.

Yet for me personally, my victimhood has only allowed me to see the world more clearly. I grew up in a fairly conservative, capitalist family and shared and embodied those values for a large part of my life. I had been taught, and so it seemed to me, that the world was a fair place, and people who were economically marginalized (for example) were just not working hard enough. My victimhood fundamentally rattled my trust in the safety or justice of the world, and as a result I increasingly developed empathy for other victimized populations. My victimhood did not cloud my judgment or get in the way of my thinking clearly; rather, it radicalized me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating for victimization or attempting to justify victimizing people because it gives them expertise.

But I wonder how our communities and contexts might change if, instead of always asking people how they plan to treat or heal from their trauma, we gave them more opportunities to share what they have learned about the world, about the human condition, about power structures, about the impact of ongoing and pervasive systemic issues. What if, instead of asking, “What happened to you [as an individual]?” we gave victims more chances to situate their traumatic experiences within a broader framework of systemic injustice and contextual power imbalances that they now have insight into?”

Victimhood as Expertise by Emily S. Cutler

i used to wonder—why do people feel the need to pit horrific suffering against horrific suffering? and then i realized that deep down, they feel that the issue they have chosen to align with is only worthy of care if it’s objectively the Worst Thing Ever. if it isn’t, then it isn’t worthy of care. so they have to downplay and diminish other examples of suffering, or the whole thing falls apart.

about being a loser

“Ephemeral content” is our catch-all term for live reactions, announcement/update posts, journal entries, etc that contain limited analytical or interpretive content and are largely meant to share or capture someone's experiences, impressions, or feelings in the moment. These are all definitely part of the overall fandom experience (just look at all the posts on this blog or elsewhere on Tumblr), but AO3 focuses on hosting fannish stories, art, and analysis.

Whether "breaking down a work" would count as "meta" really depends on how someone goes about it. If it's mostly a summary of canon/real-life events or if the majority of what you added is your impression of the source material and what happened, we'd probably call that a live reaction and say it isn't allowed. There definitely needs to be a good amount of analysis or interpretation beyond just a person's feelings or impressions about the material. If you're familiar with YouTube, something like "CinemaSins" would likely be classified as ephemeral. If it's more like a video essay ("Nerdwriter1" or "every frame a painting"), it's more likely to be considered meta, and allowed.

Oh! Also, people have to be wary of quoting too much of the source material. Our TOS only allows short quotes. Even if someone had detailed analysis or such, including a huge amount of a copyrighted source (such as an episode transcript) would still break our TOS, typically some part of our copyright infringement policies.

— guest mod tealight

If you have a question you’d like answered, you can ask here.

Disclaimer: I’m speaking for myself and not behalf of AO3 or PAC. I can only answer general questions. I cannot tell you if a specific work or user is breaking the rules. If you want to file a report or otherwise need an official PAC response, you can find PAC’s contact form by clicking on the “Policy Questions & Abuse Reports” link on any AO3 page.

put spikes on your wheelchair's handles. wrap barbed wire around your cane or crutch so it'll hurt like a motherfucker if someone kicks or grabs it from under your hand. wear a personal alarm and pull the pin every time someone moves you without your consent, leans on your chair, takes a seat on your rollator, taps your hearing aid, steals your AAC device. scream for help when you're abducted. wail like you're in agony when people trip you up or knock into you. take pepper spray to the grocery store. take a knife to the club. leave cards that say "fuck you" under the wipers of inconsiderately parked cars and scratch access codes for bathrooms on the outside of the door. we are not begging for mercy, we're fighting dirty. we have to.

someone grabbed my wheelchair today and then shouted "ouch! there's spikes!"

YEAH!! GET FUCKED !!!!!!

I witnesses someone trying to shove a wheelchair user because they felt the wheelchair wasn't going fast enough, I guess. Not even a second later, this asshole is screaming in pain because the handles had razor wire on them the back of the wheelchair had a sign saying "do not touch."

NGL, I was laughing and gave the wheelchair user a nod. They just kept on going after a nod and wink at me. Fucking amazing.

When I was in hs, I had to use crutches a few times. Classmates though it was funny to kick them while I'm standing. Soooo I glues nails on the bottom 18 inches or so. Two students screaming and yelling resulted in no one kicking them again.

Do not fuck with mobility devices. They are an extension of our body. If you decide to violate our boundaries, be prepared for retaliation, much like if someone shoved or pushed you. Keep yourself to yourself.

After (unfortunately) being on Reddit for many years I've come to the conclusion that a lot of Redditors believe that the worst thing that can happen to you is someone cheating on you, especially a woman. Like sometimes Redditors judge others more harshly for cheating than they do for sexually assaulting or physically abusing someone.

And then someone will call them out or ask them to be more rational and they'll be like "well CLEARLY you've never had your heart shattered by a woman!!!!!!!" and then you're like "oh, yeah, this person has never experienced anything worse than the heartache caused by cheating."

Obviously I'm not defending cheating, it's a really horrible, scummy thing to do, I'm just saying that the intense attitude Redditors have towards it is so weird. Like I've seen people unironically suggest that cheating should be punishable by law. Like my man, I'm sorry Amy cheated on you, but it's time to move on. You deserve better.

the thing about the "um excuse me if you're as poor as you say you are why don't you just sell all your most treasured possessions" thing that people love to trot out as some kind of "gotcha" is that they do not acknowledge how fucking soul-crushing it is to be in a situation that is already destroying your mental health and then be forced to sell one of the few things in your life that still bring you joy

So, I've been stumbling over a J-drama on Netflix called "PendingTrain". It had ten episodes, I barely made it to episode 9, because I've been dying several times over.

Without spoiling too much in case y'all want to check it out yourself (because I HIGHLY recommend doing so):

Tl;dr: This is probably the closest I will ever get to a sequel to the Digimon Adventure Tri stageplay.

So, it seems like multigender people are now slowly becoming the focus of hate from exclusionist groups, which I can only assume happened because these groups felt forced to have to respect multigender people for a few months as the website's opinion of them was that they were cool, and now these bigots are finding each other and, claiming that it is in order to "protect other trans people", are shitting on the "fagdykes" around.

What I want to say is this: for the love of everything that is good, if you find a post that is claiming that one specific kind of generic trans person is hurting another kind of generic trans person, actually think critically about said post.

Stay strong out there everyone. We gotta stick together.

Tumblr is doing some stupid AI shit so go to blog settings > Visibility > Prevent third-party sharing.

law idea: products that are not currently and will not be purchasable from the parent company for the foreseeable future are not counted as "copywritten" in regard to the sharing, reproduction, and other "piracy" claims in court of law.

if you aren't selling them your customer doesn't have to buy

this is in regards to all copyright, if someone starts a factory producing clones of iPhone and iMac chips for the purpose of repairing devices, that's not copyright infringement, because apple does not sell those chips :)

if they want to keep their copyright they can put their repair chips on the public market, continue matinance of old products, etc

Nintendo will hate this law the most I'm sure.

widows is surprisingly robust to this law as you can actually buy every copy of windows ever produced right now on windows website, albeit you might have a hard time finding it because they'd PERfer you didn't.

streaming companies dropping original content from their service for tax purposes can expect to find it on YouTube the next day for free no ads

I think you all will be able to see how this will have a hotting effect on the market, where as now copyright holders have the power to delete content from the legal sphere, under this law they cannot do that. they can sell it themselves or they can give it away for free.

no more manufactured scarcity for the sake of inflating already inflated prices

From what I've read, in book publishing before print-on-demand and ebooks got big, there used to be clauses in the license agreements between authors and publishers that if a book went out of print for a certain amount of time, the license would lapse and the author would get the copyright back.

So the idea isn't fully unprecedented in copyright law. You might have to give the companies a window, say five or ten years, before the copyright lapses, but it's an idea I've always thought had merit.

Hell, in the United States before 1978, when copyright was extended from 56 years to 75 years, creators would have to file documents to renew their copyrights on their work in the 28th year, or else the protection would lapse.

According to Wikipedia, a study from the time found that while most Hollywood movies got their renewals, only 15% of all copyrights ended up renewed.