Honestly if your anxiety is so bad that you can’t read like… something in the horror genre that I wrote (and tagged correctly) without tagging the post I made with “this literally made me have an anxiety attack i’m panicking omg my dereality is acting up” maybe you SHOULDN’T INTERACT WITH ME, because I’m a horror fan, I’m very open about being a horror fan, and I don’t like being guilt tripped over and over about a harmless piece of “creepy” writing I made!!

I’m talking about this kind of… growing group I see on this site and other sites who blames horror content creators for their anxiety issues that the creators have no control over? 

For example, Adam Ellis drew a pretty good horror comic about the ghost of a creepy nurse (it was not graphic in any way, and was fairly tame) and posted this DM he received about it on his Twitter:

For any concerned, Adam Ellis put absolutely no id’ing info on this post, so the person who sent it is safely anonymous. But I honestly hate this so much. If you are THIS afraid of a drawing of a creepy ghost, you should not engage with media that is LABELLED AS A HORROR COMIC! Many people with anxiety (including myself) create horror as an outlet for our own fears–Ellis even discussed the fact that his comic was tied to his very real fears of doxxing and harassment by certain fans/enemies online. Do you have any idea how genuinely horrible it feels to be told “this thing you created for fun/to vent caused me direct and terrible mental damage?” 

In short, stop being a manipulative, guilt-tripping asshole to horror creators. Stop engaging with horror media if you are so, so viscerally distressed by it that you send genuinely cruel things to people in an attempt to force them to apologize to you. A lot of horror creators use horror as an outlet to vent THEIR anxiety, and you are an asshole for trying to increase their anxiety by telling them that they “hurt you” by writing horror. G’night.

This also, imo, routes back to the entire idea that if you know you are triggered by a certain kind of content, do not engage with that content.

Of course, people owe you the common decency to not intentionally expose you to triggering or otherwise upsetting content if you have stated it’s upsetting to you and they should apologize if they do so unintentionally, but when consuming content, there is a certain level at which it’s on you and not the creators.

If you know a certain person posts a lot of content that upsets you, don’t follow them—block them, even, if you need to. If a certain character is a trigger for you, block the character tag and block the character name.

It’s not on the creator if you engage with their content and are upset by it after they’ve already appropriately tagged it, it’s on you for viewing it despite knowing the kind of content they create, or no one if you didn’t realize it would contain upsetting material.

You can’t touch a red hot burner then blame the stove when you get burned.

people will be like “fanfiction writers!!! are everything”

and then turn around and say a website that doesnt pay the writers they make their traction and money off of is a saint that would do no wrong.

im just saying. ao3 gets their money

those writers dont. lmao.

so whyre you making it about the writers when they could post pretty much anywhere huh? 😂 and youre only paying a website.

u ever consider they do it this way on purpose so the only people making money on their poorly designed website are the owners

Have YOU ever considered it’s a volunteer-run website that’s a nonprofit and is incredibly transparent about where its money goes?

Have you ever learned, like, a SINGLE THING about the legality of fanfiction?

Or are you just being an asshole?

“poorly designed”

You mean that ultra-lean, fast-loading site with maybe the world’s best data sorting and tagging that is open source so you can set up your own archive if you wanna try to run something that big without ever asking for money or if you wanna try to make it prettier or something?

That is free to host fiction on as well as free to read fiction on and is a site with an incredible amount of traffic that runs exactly zero ads aside from occasional funding drives?

this post refers to “the owners” but like... no one owns AO3. there is no AO3 CEO who gets a raise, there are no shareholders who get paid a portion of its profits in dividends, there are no profits to begin with. if the basic equation of capitalism is [cost of good] - [cost of labor] = profit, AO3′s equation is 0 - 0 = 0. for something to be exploitative, you need someone who’s gaining something as the result of your labor! but no one (other than whomever they buy servers from and the people they hire to help them do their taxes, I guess) is making any money, so no matter how much AO3 gets in donations, none of that goes to anything other than the collective itself.

and unlike even worker-owned corporations and co-ops, where your voting power is directly tied to how much you have invested in the organization (if I bought 5 shares in a co-op and my neighbor has 2, then I have more than twice the voting power as my neighbor), everyone who donates to AO3 has exactly one vote, regardless of whether you donate $10 or $100,000.

and I realize that tumblr user zerocapitalism’s real problem is that AO3 has pledged to invest some of their funds rather than put it under a mattress somewhere, but “a low-risk, conservative investment portfolio” just means they want to not lose the money they have in the bank to inflation. unions and co-ops do this all the time. unions actually typically go further and outright invest in the stock of union-employing companies, which is riskier than just investing in bonds but lets them use their shares to influence the companies (because remember that, under capitalism, how much you invest literally determines your voting power). 

I’m sure if we lived in a society with zero inflation and no relentless need for growth, this wouldn’t be an issue, but we don’t. Insert that Matt Bors comic here.

Stuff kids on tumblr better relearn

1. You are responsible for your own media experience. 

2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you - but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.

3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.

4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves - you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine - but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.

5. Do not give people on tumblr or /any/ website the responsibility for your emotional well-being. Because these people do not even know you so no, you have no right to ask them to take care of you.

6. Content creators are not your parents and owe you nothing, not even a breakdown on why their content isn’t problematic. You don’t get to demand a dissertation denouncing any and everything unhealthy in a piece you don’t like. Move on.

7. Tagging is a nicety but not an obligation. You can message people, politely, and ask them to tag things, and many people will, but understand that it’s their blog and they aren’t obliged to say yes. Unfollow and block when you need to. Circling back to number 1, you are responsible for curating your own experience.

8. Don’t be a jerk. Remember at the end of the day, there are actual living, breathing people behind each screen name. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face in real life. 

This feels important and maybe it’s something we should talk about more. I’ve seen some cis lesbians talking about it and I’ve seen more than a few young women proudly calling themselves “ex-libfems” (although nobody seriously identifies as a libfem) but no comprehensive accounts.

My own experience is that when radfems don’t know you are cis they will assume they are trans and start throwing abuse at you. When they know you are cis, that’s when the private messages asking for a “debate” and claiming to be interested in your viewpoint begin.

(Obviously it’d be cool if people add their own experiences)

(Image shows tweet by JN Wiedle that reads “there’s a lot of great discussion and focus on how white supremacists and MRAs prey on isolated/insecure boys/men on Reddit/4ch; I wish there was similar discussion & focus on how TERFs prey on isolated/insecure girls/women on tumblr”)

Self-reblog for wider audience.

they’re using ace exclusionary stuff as an entry point for recruiting too, esp for recruiting young lesbians

Also they equate terf with lesbian so they accuse anti terf stuff of homophobia, I saw this on a polygon live chat just yesterday, some people started saying trans positive stuff and someone said no terfs allowed or something like that and a handful of transphobes came out to start arguing and the two main things they said were that people were being homophobic and that terfs aren’t a real thing, blah blah blah, so if someone starts saying that stuff that’s a red flag

most terfs don’t like being called terfs tbh, so they’ll act like the word itself is some meaningless strawman, or they’ll claim the word is homophobic towards lesbians, and instead go by dogwhistles like gender critical

They’ll also take advantage of newly out trans men (while erasing their gender identity and treating them as just confused lesbians, so using the same tactics they would on cis women), which is why you end up with a lot of trans men spouting terf-y rhetoric. I wrote a more in-depth post about that here

Not trying to make this all about trans men but more saying that I’ve experienced terfs use these tactics and it’s obvious they use the same tactics on cis women, so here’s some things to watch out for

And before anyone attacks @scatterdarknessscattersilence, this is an actual legitimate thing they’ve been doing.

@scatterdarknessscattersilence and @socialjusticeichigo are so damn right like I’ve legit seen like 4 teen mutuals of mine who used to be trans and ace inclusive when they were questioning their sexuality and after they discovered that they were a lesbian and started to follow and reblog from many “lesbian positivity blogs” and blogs which gave advice to lesbians whose mods were TERFs; they first started sprouting and believing in ace exclusionary and aphobic notions which made me unfollow them but when i checked their blogs few time ago i discovered that they had turned into TERFs/transmisogynists . This is something which has been happening on here for a long while but is brushed off because it is started by using ace exclusionary tactics n arguments which are considered totally normal for LGBT people to do.

@young/questioning lesbians PLEASE be careful of who you are following or turning towards for advice on how to navigate through your sexuality and experiences.Those blogs which get hoards of anons from lesbians talking about how the girl they have crushes on might like them too or blogs who make posts like “its okay to be a girl n not be into dicks” or “why date boys when you can date girls”  or “chicks before dicks” can seem cute or empowering but many of these posts are carefully worded posts against trans women and furthering bigotry against them.

Im not implying that lesbians can be as much or more transphobic than straight women but im just pointing out how many of such blogs or “Lesbian elders” are using the guise of being “experienced” to feeding TERF/transmisogynist views to young people.

this is insane what the fuck

Important note: yes, this is terrible and makes me want to throw up– directly onto everyone who donated to the gofundme. But instead of doing that (too much research involved), let’s do this: DONATE TO THE COALITION ON HOMELESSNESS TO SPITE THESE ASSHOLES AND SUPPORT THE NAVIGATION CENTER  (Good news: so far, funds raised for the COH on this gofundme almost double those raised to stop the homeless shelter.)

also, if you’re near SF, show up to the SAFE center community meeting this Wednesday, April 3, to show community support for the shelter. 6pm at Delancey Street 600 Embarcadero.

So I watched Marie Kondo with my mom and this is what she thought about it:

I’ll start by saying that we are from Latin America and I believe that holding onto things is almost a cultural rule here.

My mom has a huge amount of things that she’s emotionally attached to. For example, she has paper from candies I gave her 20+ years ago. She has socks her father gave her when she was in college, and that was almost 30 years ago. My mom holds onto things really deeply.

So of course I had to put her to watch Tidying up with Marie Kondo. I really wanted to see her reaction, even more because I’ve seen a huge fuzz about her on the internet.

To my surprise, my mom loved her. She’s looking forward to buy Marie Kondo’s books and she’s very excited to buy boxes to organize her stuff.

I asked her the reason why she liked Miss Marie so much, because she usually gets really mad with tidying up kind of shows, like hoarders and stuff… And mom said that the reason she liked Miss Marie so much was because Miss Marie was gentle and respectful.

The thing my mom loved the most was that Miss Marie was being very human with her clients, being by changing the order of her rules or giving a special place to a sippy cup. Miss Marie was treating the clients and the clients’ belongings with respect and making sure that the main point was the client’s happiness.

My mom said that she didn’t feel good watching other tidying up shows because the people on those shows always want to throw everything away without even considering the emotional weight those things might have to the owner. And that always made her very uneasy. She said “they work with so much violence that it makes me feel bad”.

But that wasn’t the case with Miss Marie. My mom was in love with the “greeting your house” part, because for her that meant that Miss Marie was showing respect for the house, the owners and their feelings, and that put my mom at ease. She said “I wouldn’t mind her helping me because I don’t think she would make me throw away what is important to me”. And I think that’s the thing people aren’t understanding…

Marie Kondo would never kick your door and tell you to throw everything you love away. That’s not her aim. That’s not how she acts.

Miss Marie is a very kind and respectful person and her methods aim to help you to live better with the things you love, discharging things that “doesn’t bring you joy” so your living space can be as happy as possible. And no, that doesn’t mean throwing your 200+ books collection away.

And if a 50yo Brazilian mom with huge attachment issues can understand where Miss Marie’s methods are coming from and going to, your millennial ass has no excuses to pretend to be dumb.

Also, even if you disagree with her, that’s no excuse for your racist ass to open your mouth and puke BS all over the internet. Stop that.

Like yeah I know I’m hyperfixating on Marie Kondo in terms of the media she put out but it’s nice having an Asian person express gentle and soft advice on a wider platform that can benefit other people’s lives and it’s absolutely a fucking shitshow having to see white people having no issue on tearing this Asian woman down based on hearsay and memes because they based their entire identity on how many books they can fucking hoard instead of being able to use critical thought about their own biases and prejudices let alone impulse control

This is what dumb bitch disorder ACTUALLY looks like

conservatives every time it snows:

global warming, fake, libs, owned 😎

I didn’t know this myself until a few years ago but the fact is, snow has a temperature range. It snows so hard nowadays because it’s not getting too cold for snow like it used to.

^^^^ Yep. The biggest snows in DC when I was a kid always came from the south, when a warm moist stream from there clashed with a cold front over us.

As someone who’s reported alt-right harassment and rhetoric on various social media sites and been told “there’s nothing here that violates our TOS,” seeing what RPGnet is doing is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Please, more social media sites need to do this.

She took up acting because the malnutrition she suffered under the nazis permanently damaged her health and prevented her from pursuing her dream to be a ballerina. During the war, she danced to raise money for the resistance - even though she was literally starving, she used what strength she had to make sure more nazis got shot. 

She and her mom also denounced their royal heritage because of the Nazis in their family

Also Audrey was a humanitarian until her death, though ill with cancer, she continued her work for UNICEF, travelling to Somalia, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and the United States.

These are things I literally never would have known about. I’m tired of women being painted as just being pretty.

I’M SO HAPPY TO SEE HER AT AN OLDER AGE I SWEAR!

Here’s another nice one.

For the longest time I assumed she had died really young because I never saw any pictures of her at an older age. She was an amazing woman.

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.

Do you think die-hard fans are going to be okay with Steve & Sharon, because of her relationship with Peggy?

Fandom, I’ll personally fight you if you’re rude to people who are doing their jobs *glares*

If you send hate to an actress for playing the part she has been hired to play you’ve basically become the internet version of the soccer mom with a can-I-speak-to-the-manager haircut who curses out a retail worker for not having something in stock or not taking your expired coupon.

In other words: You’re trash. And you need to stop.

^^^^ This. Entirely this. Regardless of what you think of Sharon Carter, behind her is an actress playing a role. It’s her job. She doesn’t deserve hate or disdain for playing that role. STOP. IT. Be better than that.

Reblogging for commentary.

here’s a fun new way of responding to anon hate, just post this pic

8) haha cool somebody pledged $100 on patreon, stayed that way for a week or so including a vip livestream, then edited their pledge down to $7. I even wrote them a big long thank you message and shit. In other words just kidding about that milestone!!

fucking robbery lmfao

Wait, did you get the money though? I don’t understand patreon

No I did not get that money, patreon only charges you at the beginning of each month, yet you get access to the patreon page the MOMENT you pledge. so lots of people use this loophole to pop in, enjoy some perks, then ollie out before they can get charged. It’s literally straight up scamming.

A common work around that I’ve been seeing (and it has been hella useful) has been the timed restriction of patrons. Many artists will not post the month’s content until after the 2nd, that way patrons are absolutely charged before they get the content. (So March content wouldn’t be available until April, for example). This allows you to work on a pay in advance system, and also gives you a month’s time to prepare all the content instead of doing it month of.

Another format I’ve seen is timed links. When the month has been charged, the artist posts up a timed link available only to patrons who have already been charged that expires in 15-30 days. Afterwards, the link is no longer functional. In order to get content older than when you started, you’re required to pay the pledge amount for those months. That way you’ll only receive the newest month (and only after you’ve paid).

Thirdly, it’s relatively easy to shoot Patreon a message with the email and information of the users who are actively abusing the system. They can and will ban the person from being able to pledge period in the future. I’ve even seen one case where someone’s ‘owed’ pledges were forcibly charged as they did in fact agree to the terms and conditions of pledging.

thanks for the advice. Im definitely going to have to change how I do things on patreon to prevent further theft. pretty disappointing that creators have to go to these lengths just to keep from getting scammed in the first place :(

Leaving this here for reference, it’s awful that people do this shit. It’s making me quite reluctant to get one in the future :(

Duely noted, if I start a Paetron I’ll make sure to only dole out the prizes the following month.

And to anyone pledging who thinks they can use the excuse of ‘I paid what I thought the content i saw was worth in the end’.

No. Fuck you. You’re a piece of shit. Don’t you dare do that EVER.

for any one using patreon

@trackalaka since you’re makin’ the move

I felt like this was necessary.

Hard crush. 

Why would you be glorifying this?

Not saying you’re ugly I’m saying you’re exposing yourself to health risks.

I’m gonna shit it a paper bag and light it on fire and put it on your doorstep.

Have to agree with melttigers. How is making obesity into a good thing positive for society? The health risks are astronomical and we shouldn’t “glorify” those in any way. Preach acceptance but not encouragement of something that most people can contol.

I’m all for the body positive movement but there is a big difference between that and glorifying obesity.

it got better

Obesity is not beautiful, it is not something to be proud of, it is a serious medical condition, stop telling each other that you are beautiful and perfect the way you are, because in reality, you are killing yourself, and encouraging others to kill themselves.

You’re saying obesity is beautiful but I’m pretty sure you don’t enjoy not being able to do things an average weighted person can do and i can bet 1 mil you cry to yourself every night about your weight

“you can’t enjoy your life because i don’t want you to”

**crying**

omg ily so much

Let fat people live, you sad sacks of shit. 😂

I would just like to point out that after all that sass talk she deactivated her account. That’s not standing firm in your beliefs and despite adversity that’s your mouth writing checks your (quite considerable) ass can’t cash and running crying when the fight you picked goes against you.

And make no mistake about it she was picking a fight, using intentionally provocative language and responding to trolls (you broke rule 14 didn’t you)

Also she’s a class act with that whole “paper bag” comment…

I FUCKING LOVE YOU

My hero!

The comments are especially frustrating because I’m actually considered obese, which is fucking insane

Yep, the current generation is pretty impressive…

year orf our lorde 1066:

men of the age of 18 would sacrificth thy lives to serve in thee holy crusade clad in the finest heavy metals to certain death

year ouf our lorde 1944:

 thy feet becomth lazy from thine horseless carriages to carry thee 

Also, the fuck is with the implication that American 18 year olds going to war is a thing of the past? That’s happening literally right this second. The middle east is full of colllege-aged American kids accumulating injuries, shitty pay, and PTSD for our country.

And if they’re fortunate enough to make it home, they might really benefit from ‘safe places’ where they can voice their problems without judgement and get support from their peers.