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gonna grow you a place safer than this

@burningcomputerpersona

Currently obsessed with american pop punk band The Wonder Years. This blog is mostly just a collection of things that I'm interested in at the moment, whether it's music or a new fandom or just queer memes in general. I'll probably appear once in a while to reblog a bunch of posts about a new obsession that you didn't follow me for and then vanish off into the unknown again. Current interests include: the wonder years, spanish love songs, hot mulligan, against me, doctor who, etc.
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skies-diary

Cancel your Disney+ subscription, then call their support line and tell them you’re cancelling because of their financial support of Flordia House Bill 1557, the Dont Say Gay bill. Be respectful, but tell them you no longer feel comfortable giving money to a company that uses that money to fund human rights abuses that violate the first amendment.

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Allow me to try and word this again for those of you confused.

I do not care that a website isn’t very open or transparent about how they spend their funds, it does not matter to me because I do not have much control over it.

The singular thing that annoys me is when people repeatedly say something like AO3 is transparent with their funds, and is in danger of not making their fundraising amounts.

These things are not true. 

AO3, if you actually look, has made $303,399.23, out of their $130,000 goal, which is to say they made over 2.3 times their actual goal.

I am not saying what I think about this, only that it is clearly not struggling to reach donations unlike you know most people who have lost their jobs and are content creators online driving the traffic to websites like this using the virus in their website email to drive sympathy for a larger donation grab, again, I’m not saying my opinion on this, just that it is so.

furthermore, as @bulbassist​ points out here 

If any of you actually read the budget you would learn 

Their total expenses from 2019, as told by their table they have on their website that i’ve linked to, was 310k, despite them actually raising $693,786.16, they then go on to say, after they explained the expenses of the 310k that they

invest in stocks. it’s right there. “investment portfolio by the end of 2019″

So, lets think about that, even if they have more expenses this year due to more use, they are making more money, given they have again, only used 310k out of the 693k used, that excess would technically be enough for the budget paired with what they’ve already raised, 

but now they have an added 303k on top of the excess from last year when they only spent 11k this year as of february

and in their fundraiser, that they used this year, milking the fear over corona in their email,

they also say:

surprise surprise, that they are in fact, investing in a stock portfolio, they don’t really show this in the expenses in the table provided on the website, but it could, in fact, account for you know… the missing expenditures of last year not really accounted for… 

again, like i said I don’t … care websites do this all the time, it is the nature of capitalism,

however, you cannot deny that they have milked the corona epidemic, which is impacting the poorest of people, … to invest in stocks. as it literally says so on their website that that’s what they’re doing.

chill.

TL;DR ao3 milked the corona epidemic to invest in stocks, as it says so on their website.

@ao3commentoftheday what’s your response to this? I honestly can’t comment- I don’t know enough about AO3’s situation to do so but I can’t imagine that the opinion laid out here is the truth of the the case- particularly given the cost of legal defences, if necessary, and maintaining large online archives.

I don’t have the inside scoop or anything. This is just a fan account. But speaking as an adult with a job and bills, if AO3 only asked for money when they had none that would make budgeting impossible. Having savings in the bank is something I think everyone can agree is useful for unexpected expenses. I for one don’t want a server to go down and not be replaced, just as one example.

Also, the fundraising goal is their minimum operating costs. Anything they receive over and above that goes towards server upgrades or site improvements. Last year they were able to clear out the queue of people waiting for accounts and send out millions of invites we could all share. Before that, it was adding emoji capabilities to works and comments. Those are two big ones I noticed but there are many more in the news feed all the time.

AO3 was created so that workers (fan creators) could seize the means of production (own the servers and retain control of their own works). Seems pretty anti capitalist to me?

As for ‘milking the pandemic’ I… did you read the post at all? Even if you only read the banner it clearly says “if you are able to.” I don’t see how a fundraiser that happens at the same time every year and was very clearly phrased “don’t worry if you can’t donate. We’ll be okay” is milking anything at all.

So people do know that if you leave money in a bank it decreases in value right? Bc the annual rate of inflation is 2% ?

So even if you want your money to stay functionally the same it has to increase year to year. And for vast amounts of money the easiest way to do that is invest in the stock market.

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Allow me to try and word this again for those of you confused.

I do not care that a website isn’t very open or transparent about how they spend their funds, it does not matter to me because I do not have much control over it.

The singular thing that annoys me is when people repeatedly say something like AO3 is transparent with their funds, and is in danger of not making their fundraising amounts.

These things are not true. 

AO3, if you actually look, has made $303,399.23, out of their $130,000 goal, which is to say they made over 2.3 times their actual goal.

I am not saying what I think about this, only that it is clearly not struggling to reach donations unlike you know most people who have lost their jobs and are content creators online driving the traffic to websites like this using the virus in their website email to drive sympathy for a larger donation grab, again, I’m not saying my opinion on this, just that it is so.

furthermore, as @bulbassist​ points out here 

If any of you actually read the budget you would learn 

Their total expenses from 2019, as told by their table they have on their website that i’ve linked to, was 310k, despite them actually raising $693,786.16, they then go on to say, after they explained the expenses of the 310k that they

invest in stocks. it’s right there. “investment portfolio by the end of 2019″

So, lets think about that, even if they have more expenses this year due to more use, they are making more money, given they have again, only used 310k out of the 693k used, that excess would technically be enough for the budget paired with what they’ve already raised, 

but now they have an added 303k on top of the excess from last year when they only spent 11k this year as of february

and in their fundraiser, that they used this year, milking the fear over corona in their email,

they also say:

surprise surprise, that they are in fact, investing in a stock portfolio, they don’t really show this in the expenses in the table provided on the website, but it could, in fact, account for you know… the missing expenditures of last year not really accounted for… 

again, like i said I don’t … care websites do this all the time, it is the nature of capitalism,

however, you cannot deny that they have milked the corona epidemic, which is impacting the poorest of people, … to invest in stocks. as it literally says so on their website that that’s what they’re doing.

chill.

TL;DR ao3 milked the corona epidemic to invest in stocks, as it says so on their website.

@ao3commentoftheday what’s your response to this? I honestly can’t comment- I don’t know enough about AO3’s situation to do so but I can’t imagine that the opinion laid out here is the truth of the the case- particularly given the cost of legal defences, if necessary, and maintaining large online archives.

I don’t have the inside scoop or anything. This is just a fan account. But speaking as an adult with a job and bills, if AO3 only asked for money when they had none that would make budgeting impossible. Having savings in the bank is something I think everyone can agree is useful for unexpected expenses. I for one don’t want a server to go down and not be replaced, just as one example.

Also, the fundraising goal is their minimum operating costs. Anything they receive over and above that goes towards server upgrades or site improvements. Last year they were able to clear out the queue of people waiting for accounts and send out millions of invites we could all share. Before that, it was adding emoji capabilities to works and comments. Those are two big ones I noticed but there are many more in the news feed all the time.

AO3 was created so that workers (fan creators) could seize the means of production (own the servers and retain control of their own works). Seems pretty anti capitalist to me?

As for ‘milking the pandemic’ I… did you read the post at all? Even if you only read the banner it clearly says “if you are able to.” I don’t see how a fundraiser that happens at the same time every year and was very clearly phrased “don’t worry if you can’t donate. We’ll be okay” is milking anything at all.

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Exactly 20 years ago (give or take a few days) like most French schoolchildren I was given a piggy bank to collect yellow coins (small change). It was a charity campaign called Opération Pièces Jaunes, to help hospitalised children, but my classmates & I were quite indifferent to the charity aspect because all we cared about was the fact that our teacher started giving us a candle in the shape of President Jacques Chirac every time we returned our little box filled with coins. 

We were completely enraptured by those candles and the way the president’s face would start melting hideously if we let them burn long enough. Without any kind of deliberation among ourselves we turned it into a class-wide contest—it was obvious to everyone that the point of the Yellow Coins charity campaign was to win many little Chiracs and melt them to make the face of our president as freakishly deformed as possible. We exchanged them for pogs and marbles. We had recently learnt about the Plague in history class, with great relish, hence one lucky girl who managed to obtain a particularly monstrous half-melted face with a big wax bubble reminiscent of a bubo sold it way above the going rate, for 12 galaxy marbles—a fortune. (I was among the losers of this auction, and commented in my diary, with deep regret, “It’s just what it would look like if the President had the bubonic plague!”) Every day after school we went round town begging passersby for coins with something akin to mania in order to get more Chiracs to burn into ever ghastlier shapes. An old lady we ambushed in front of the church praised us warmly for our charitable spirit.

Eventually our teacher ran out of candles and this odd chapter of my childhood ended as abruptly as it had started. Our class was congratulated in front of the whole school for being by far the most ardently devoted to the cause (we got ~15kg of coins.) I wonder if the principal asked our teacher what her secret was to make us collect a truly astonishing amount of coins compared to the other classes, and how he reacted when she replied that she motivated us with busts of the President. One teacher gave a Carambar for a full box of coins, another believed that helping sick children should be incentive enough, but our teacher, an expert in child psychology, was alone in her conviction that the best way to go about this was to hand out human wax effigies for her students to burn.

Beautiful

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So proud of my mother for doing her own research after I sent her that meme. A sign she hung in her car window.

Stay woke

Is this true?

Not only is it true, it gets worse. The Susan G Komen For The Cure Foundation has actually successfully sued “competing” charities, because (paraphrasing) their “message or branding was infringing.”

You read that correctly: they took money that people had donated to cure cancer, and hired attorneys with it, to sue ANOTHER group of people trying to find a cure for cancer, who, in turn, had to us their donated money to hire their own legal counsel to defend themselves.

Yeah signal boost because not enough people know about this and seriously FUCK SUSAN G. KOMEN THEY ARE THE ACTUAL WORST

Reblog every time I see it. Roughly once a month.

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blockmind

Also please never forget the pink fracking drill bit

that’s right fracking you know, a process using chemicals known to cause cancer that leech into the water supply

It’s that time of year again, please remember Komen is the actual worst

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sofia-ciel

Komen For The Cure is pretty much awful.

My mother died in 1996 from breast cancer. Most cancer charities are scams, in that people throw fancy parties and get rich off them and very little money goes into research or support for patients. Here are some vetted cancer charities that get good scores on Charity Navigator and pay medical expenses or fund research:

Signal boosting this

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emmalily

Reblogging from myself because it’s October now

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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

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

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.

FUCKING THIS!!!!!

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