#but drop a comment

[gingerjolover]

okay let’s talk posting schedule because i fear without accountability i will just never post and i have become far too critical of my work since i stopped posting

how can we (i) come up with a posting schedule (that’s sustainable) that lets me post stuff and edit stuff that i’ve already done while also writing all of y’all’s thots, concepts, and whims?

any and all ideas will be considered !

[wonder-and-wildflowers]

Dazai canonically rambling about his loved ones at every possible opportunity is so dear to me.

Mori knew a lot of the things he did about Oda because Dazai told him. Akutagawa also knew about Oda and how important he is to Dazai because of Dazai's ramblings. Random, unnamed PM members know about Oda being very dear to Dazai, because Dazai praises him and talks about how great he is.

Chuuya knew straight away that Dazai had been speaking about him to the ADA. It wasn't something he expressed feeling betrayed or suprised about. It was just an immediate understanding that of all the ways they could probably have known about him and his ability despite it being confidential information in the PM, Dazai's ramblings were most likely the reason.

The way that Dazai speaks about Ranpo to quite literally anyone who will listen. To Fydor, to random cops, to Atsushi.

Dazai canonically brags about the people he cares about in an 'omg omg omg my person my people I love them look how amazing they are' way.

[evermorepeyton]

horrifying email to get at 2 am btw

[ofwolvesandshatteredshields]

yoinked from here. losing my shit, [CROSSED ARMS] is so real

[will-bonna]

another background practise but this time not exactly rain world

[purrassicjet]

Bobby Dawn works in a place with at least four (an argument could be made for five) people who would kill him for what he did to Sandra Lynn that man is NOT safe

[spectra-bear]

Optimistic peak

(1st sketch belongs to @thegunnsara)

[befooremoonrisee]

to me one of grrm's biggest screw-ups is not letting gaemon and jaehaera grow into adulthood, because the dynamics those two could have with aegon lend themselves to so much.

you're aegon iii and you're forced to marry the daughter of the man who killed your mother and your brothers. her only friend is her dragon and you hate dragons because one killed your mother in front of you and two others killed your brothers. she hates you and would kill you if that didn't mean her own demise. your best friend is also a son of aegon ii, but he hates him too, as he is responsible for the death of his mothers, he was a pretender, he is a nice kid who wants to help people just like you. he's the only one that understands you.

you're jaehaera, your father won the war, but you're forced to become the wife of the son of the man who killed your twin, the woman who put a bounty on your other brother's head and who drove your mother to suicide. your grandmother, the only family you have left, is crazy with grief, she wants you to kill aegon. you're just a child. your dragon is a wretched delicate thing, just like you, your husband hates it. he is afraid of it, it makes you happy. your only brother (if he is your brother) doesn't like you, he spends all his time with aegon, you try to bond with him, but he is not jaehaerys. he will never be.

you're gaemon, son of a whore, bastard of a king. you were the hope of the smallfolk, a path for liberation, but the royals came and they killed your moms. now you're their pet, their tool to avoid being poisoned. you love aegon, he shares the same wounds as you, but you resent him, he is using your body, your life, that's what you smallfolk are for the royals, just pawns in their little games. maybe you're tired of it. then viserys comes back and you're discarded, not longer a friend, but just a tool. jaehaera claims she's your sister, but she isn't, aegon is nothing to you, she creeps you out, she understands what being a hostage is.

[wombywoo]

baby blue 💙

[ominous-horse-noises]

anyway i want to reiterate that i hope the rat grinders are tpk'd, revived and uncorrupted solely bc i want them to have to spend senior year together. 'redeemed' doesnt necessarily mean friendly with the bad kids and honestly? its so much funnier if they continue being bitchy to each other but without the trying to end the world stuff. they've built plenty of positive relationships w/ former villains now it's time for the next stage: uneasy alliance buzzing with the tension of both sides trying to hold back the urge to clown on each other

introducing, fantasy high senior year: the group project

[ethosiab]

Holy shit ty guys for 1k followers!!! No idea what you're all doing here but that's amazing!!!

I'd love to take art requests or something to celebrate, but I'm currently swamped with a lot of work on top of having like 27 reqs already sitting in my inbox. So take this other slabtek doodle, and maybe I'll be able to do something more in a few months ^_^

[thestalkerbunny]

So I will be taking no comments and no critiques but

I watched the latest episode of Helluva and I noticed something fasinating.

So Fizz's nickname is 'Froggie' which honestly correlates with the fact that biblically the animal associated with greed is a Frog; because of it's ability to live on both land and water making it flexible (and greedy in the eyes of others rather than settling for just one environment.)

Meanwhile we look at Mammon in his final stage 3rd Form Boss mode

He is a Spider. (which tbh I thought he was a grub at first, cause a money grubber. get it?) Which makes sense given how Spiders work.

They cast out a large web to catch as much as they can with as little effort as possible. (much like a sleezy manager) They are viewed as manipulators, making things work for them.

But what I think is fun is that-

Frogs and Spiders have a real-world symbiosis.

Tarantulas will keep small frogs as PETS to protect their nest and eggs from other invading bugs.

Which I feel like reflects on Mammon and Fizz's relationship not as a father figure/manager and son/talent-but as an owner and their pet.

[cirrus-grey]

Since there are Archives doppelgangers in the Protocol world, that means there were probably Protocol doppelgangers in the Archives world as well.

I want Colin to have been the IT guy at the Magnus Institute who had to deal with all of Not!Sasha's verification errors in S2.

[copperbadge]

Hey Sam! Since it's currently AO3 donation time, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it? I'm asking because you've written RPF and it's one of many "anti-AO3/anti-AO3 donations" people's favourite things to bring up when they're complaining about AO3 getting so many donations that it continuously obtains an excess of its donation goal whenever donation time rolls around? (Wow, how many times can I say "donation" in an ask?) Sorry if this question bothers you! I don't mean to offend or annoy.

Hey anon! Sorry it took a while to get to this, I don't even know if the drive is still going on, but the question came in while I was traveling and I didn't really have the time for stuff that wasn't travel-related. In any case, let's dig in! (I am not offended, no worries.)

So really there are two issues here and as much as some people who are critical of AO3 want to conflate them, they are different. While some criticism of AO3 may be valid, rhetoric against AO3 tends to misinterpret both in separate ways.

First there's the issue of what AO3 hosts -- RPF, yes, but more broadly, varied content that some people find distasteful or think should be illegal, which is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the archive and more broadly a dangerous attitude towards the concept of freedom of expression.

Second, there's the issue of AO3 generally outpacing its fundraising goals while not allowing monetization, which is a misunderstanding of the legal status of AO3 and to an extent a misunderstanding of philanthropy as a whole.

The longer I watch debates about content go on, the more I come to the conclusion that I was fortunate to have a teacher who really wanted to instill in us an understanding of free speech not as a policy but as an ongoing dialogue. It's not only that freedom of expression "protects you from the government, not the Justin" as the meme goes, but also that freedom of expression is not a static thing. It's an ongoing process of identifying what we find harmful in society and what we want to do about it.

Should the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater be restricted? Should the freedom to yell slurs at drag performers? Should the freedom to teach prepubescent kids about gender, sexuality, and/or safe sex? Should the freedom to wear a leather puppy hood at Pride? Who gets to say, and why?

I was nine when my teacher did a unit on freedom of speech and the intersection of "harm prevention" and "censorship", which is (and should be) a discussion, not a set of ironclad rules. This ambiguity has thus been with me for over thirty years, and I'm comfortable with the ambiguity, with the process; I'm not sure a lot of people critical of AO3's content truly are. Perhaps some can't be, especially those affected by hate speech, but RPF is not hate speech. It's just fiction. Or is fiction "just fiction"? This is a question society as a whole is grappling with, although fandom seems to be a little out ahead of society in terms of how explicitly we discuss it.

The idea that prose can incite violence or cause harm is both valid to examine (witness the rise of fascism on the radio in the 20s, on Facebook and Twitter in the past ten years; they're very similar processes) and a very slippery slope. Because again: who decides what harm is, and what causes it, and what we do about it? Our values align us with certain beliefs, but those are only our values, not universal truths. So AO3 is part of the ongoing question of harm and benefit both to society and individuals.

AO3 itself, however, has a fairly defined policy that it is not meant to police content; it is an archive, not a bookstore or a school board. AO3 refines its TOS and policies as necessary, but the goal is always open access and as much freedom of expression as possible, and if that's uncomfortable for some people then that's a discussion we have to have; ignoring it won't make it go away. But it has to be a discussion, it can't be a unilateral change to the archive's TOS or a series of snaps and clapbacks, and I don't see a lot of people ready to move beyond flinging insults. Perhaps because they were taught a much more binary view of freedom of expression than I was.

So, self-evidently, I support AO3 and I don't have a problem with RPF. Whether other people do is something we're going to have to get to grips with, and that's likely to be a process that is still going on when most of us are dust. I'd rather have a century of ambiguity than a wrong answer tomorrow, anyway.

But whether AO3 hosts RPF is truly a separate issue from its donation drives, because it's a criticism some people level at the site which exists whether it's fundraising or not. So people can criticize AO3's open policy and they can give it as a reason not to support the site, but it's just one aspect of the archive and the fundraising as a whole should be examined separately.

I think AO3's fundraisers are deeply misunderstood (sometimes on purpose) because even people who are anticapitalist get a little crazy when money gets involved, and this is, to fandom, a lot of money -- a few hundred thousand, reliably, every fundraiser. To me, a fundraiser that pulls in three hundred grand is almost quaint; my current nonprofit pulls in better than ten million a year and my previous employer had an endowment of several billion dollars. At my old job I didn't even bother researching people who couldn't give us a hundred grand.

On the other hand, AO3 is an extreme and astounding outlier in the nonprofit world, because basically it's the only one of its kind to work the way it does. It is entirely volunteer-run on the operational side (ie: tag wranglers, coders, lawyers, etc) and has no fundraising staff (gift officers, researchers, outreach officers) as far as I'm aware. To pull in three hundred grand from individual one-time donations, without any paid staff and without even a volunteer fundraising officer? That's insane. That doesn't happen. Except at AO3.

What people misunderstand, however, is the basic status of a nonprofit, which is a legal status, not simply a social one. (I'm adding in some corrections here since it gets complicated and the terminology can be important!) The Organization for Transformative Works, the parent of AO3, is a nonprofit, which indicates how it was incorporated as an organization; additionally it is registered federally as tax-exempt, which carries certain perks, like not paying sales tax, and certain duties, like making their financials transparent to a certain extent. (Religious nonprofits are exempt from the transparency requirement.) If you're interested in more about nonprofits and tax-exempt status a reader dropped a great article here.

Nonprofits, unlike for-profit companies, cannot pay a share of their income to stakeholders. Nonprofits don't have financial stakeholders, only donors. They can have employees and pay them a salary -- that's me, for example -- but if a nonprofit pulls in $10M in donations, my salary is paid from that, I don't get a percentage and nobody else does either. That's what it means to be a nonprofit -- the money above operational costs goes back into the organization. The donations we (and AO3) receive must be plowed under and used for outreach, server maintenance, further fundraising, services expansion, et cetera. You can see this in the 990 forms on Guidestar or ProPublica, or in their more accessible breakdowns on Charity Navigator. Nonprofits that do not put the majority of their income towards service provision tend to get audited and lose their nonprofit status. So nobody's getting paid from all that money, and the overage that isn't spent goes into what is basically a savings account in the name of the nonprofit. (I'm vastly simplifying but that's the gist.) Using that money for personal purposes is illegal. It's called "private inurement" and there's a good article here about it. The money belongs to the OTW as a concept, not to anyone in or of the OTW.

So the biggest misunderstanding that I see in people who are mad at AO3 fundraisers is that "they" are getting all this money (who "they" are is never clearly stated but I'm pretty sure people think @astolat has a special wifi router that runs on burning hundred dollar bills) while "we" can't monetize our fanfic. But "they" get nothing -- nobody even earns a salary from AO3 -- and you can easily prove that by looking at the 990 forms they file with the government, which are required to be made public. You can see the most recently available 990, from 2020, here at Guidestar. Page seven will show you the "highest compensated" employees, all of whom are earning zero dollars or nonmonetary perks (that's the three columns on the right).

Either AO3 is entirely volunteer-run or someone's Doing A Real Fraud. The money the OTW spends is documented (that's page 10 and 11 primarily) and while they may pay for, say, the travel and lodging expenses of a lawyer going to DC to defend a freedom-of-expression case, they don't pay the lawyer for their time, or give them a cut of the income.

Despite what you've read, the reason "we" can't monetize our fanfics on AO3 has nothing to do with the site being the product of volunteer handiwork or AO3 having it in their terms of service or it being considered gauche by some to do so; it's because

IT'S ILLEGAL.

I cannot say this loudly enough: It is against the law for a nonprofit to be used by its staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries to earn direct profit from the services provided by the nonprofit.

You can be paid to work at one, but you cannot side-hustle by selling your handmade friendship bracelets for personal gain on the nonprofit's website. If the nonprofit knowingly allows monetization of its services, it can lose nonprofit status, be fined, be hit with back taxes, and a lot of other unpleasant bullshit can go down, including prosecution of those involved for fraud. If you put a ko-fi link on your fanfic, you are breaking the law, and if AO3 allows it, they are too.

Okay, that was a sidebar, but in some ways not, because it gets to the heart of the real complaints about AO3 fundraising, which is that people in fandom are sick or unhoused or in some form of need and other people in fandom are giving to AO3, a fan site that is financially stable, instead of giving to peoples' gofundmes or dropping money in their Ko-Fi or Paypal. And while it is a legitimate grievance that there are people who are in such desperate need while we live in an era of unprecedented abundance, that's not AO3's fault. AO3 doesn't solicit actively, there's no unasked-for mailings or calls from a gift officer. They just put a banner up on their website, and people give. (Again, this is incredibly outlier behavior in the nonprofit world, I'd do a case study on it but the conclusion would just be "shit's real, yo.") You might as well be mad that people give to their local food bank instead of someone's ko-fi.

You cannot lay at AO3's feet the fact that people want to give to AO3 instead of to your fundraiser. That's a choice individuals have made, and while you can engage with them in terms of why they made the philanthropic choices they did, to blame an organization they supported rather than the person who made the choice to give is not only incorrect but futile, and unlikely to win anyone over to supporting you. We know from research that guilt is not a tremendous motivator of philanthropy.

It is also not necessarily a binary choice; just because AO3 gets a hundred grand in $5 donations doesn't mean most of the people giving don't also give $5 elsewhere. I support the OTW on occasion, and I also fundraise for UNICEF and the Chicago Parks Foundation and BAGLY and others, in addition to giving monthly to several nonprofits that I have longterm relationships with -- my alma mater, the animal rescue where I got the Cryptids, my shul. And I give, occasionally and anonymously, to fundraisers that pass through Radio Free Monday, which are mainly individuals in need, because I was once in need and now I pay it forward. These are the choices I have made. Nobody twisted my arm. I respond poorly to someone making the attempt to do so by attacking places I've given.

I think the upshot is, after all of this that I've written, that we cannot begin to come to grips with questions of institutional inequality in philanthropy, or freedom of expression and censorship, until people actually understand what's going on, and too few do. So all I can do is try and explain, and hopefully create a forum for people to learn and grow when it comes to charitable giving.

Archive Of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works are products of our community and as that community changes, we will necessarily continue to re-evaluate what aspects of it mean and how AO3/OTW express the community sentiment. I hope that the ongoing discussion of support for AO3 also leads to people learning more about their philanthropic options. But criticizing AO3 for fundraising by attacking it for fulfilling one of its stated purposes is silly, and attempting to guilt people into giving in the ways one thinks they should give rather than how they do give is just going to make one extremely unlikable.

As members of this community, we have to be a part of the push and pull, but it's difficult to do that competently in ignorance. So, I do my best to be knowledgeable and to educate my readers, and I hope others will do the same.

[canisalbus]

hello! i've written a short little machete fic, and i wanted to share it with you as thanks for all the incredible art and generous question-answering you've been doing these last few months. i hope that if you give it a look, you enjoy it. <3 keep up all your amazing work! archiveofourown [.] org / works / 50945128

✦ A Voi ✦

[jesterjaxx]

I am once again offering gnc Duncan

ft. me practicing skirts