#do your research!

[cy-cyborg]

Americans and anyone else outside Australia, if you're going to talk about Aboriginal people, please, for the love of all that is good, do the bare minimum of research and stop calling them names that have they have deemed offensive for longer than you have been alive. I've seen 4 different videos this week alone calling them either terms that are derogatory or just straight-up slurs.

If you are talking about a specific culture or group, use their name (the Biripi people, the Darkinjung people, The Wiradjuri people etc). If you're talking about indigenous Australians as a whole, it's "Aboriginal" (with a capital A) "Aboriginal and Torrest Straight Islanders," or "First Nations Peoples".

If youre shortening the word Aborigonal to just using the first 3 letters, that's a slur. Also, the word that sounds like the plural of Aboriginal that ends in a "knee" sound, that's also derogatory (I've seen some say its a slur too, and others say it's not but still offensive/outdated. Either way, as a white person, it's not my word to say).

As a general rule of thumb, If you can't do the bare minimum research to make sure you're using the right name for a group you have no business talking about them, let alone "educating people" about them (as 3 of the 4 videos claimed they were doing). Listening to what they want to be called is not even the bare minimum.

[kazz-brekker]

really enjoyed the scene in castlevania nocturne where drolta is like "we vampire are going to conquer everything and create a new world!" and olrox, who is explicitly stated to have been alive during the conquest of the aztec empire by white colonizers, is just like "yeah i've heard that one before"

[vividxp]

.

[kenapiece-main]

Can you believe I'm having to make this meme even after successfully finishing up taxes and applying to job

[reality-detective]

1963 Refrigerator 🤔

[mikufanclub]

whenevr i draw a fish maid usually the reference pic is some middle aged white guy. im forcemaiding them

[stuckinapril]

October 7 still being used as a talking point 7 months into the genocide actually gives me a fucking migraine when several fact-checking articles have come out by now that show Israel was completely aware there would be an escalation that day, that they let it happen because it could then be used as grounds for heightened Israeli terrorism for months to come (not that Israel hasn’t been enacting atrocities on Palestinians for decades now), that a huge portion of Israeli civilian casualty is owed at large to the IOF firing in close quarters at areas where Israeli captives were held, that Israeli helicopters indiscriminately shot at Israelis and Palestinians on that day (bc they don’t actually give a fuck for the civilians, in case you haven’t caught the memo), and that Israeli captives even recounted how the IOF obliterated everyone (including its own hostages it supposedly wanted to rescue) the moment they arrived on the scene. That day Israel murdered hundreds of its own in cold blood.

[tam--lin]

In light of increasing anti-trans and anti-abortion laws in the United States, I am once again humbly requesting you inform yourself about jury nullification, your ability as a juror to vote against convicting people being prosecuted under unjust laws. Nullification was instrumental in legalizing abortion in Canada - it informed jurors can use it to help protect healthcare workers and protesters in the US, too.

[thekidsarentalright]

genuinely horrifying to me how many americans clearly care more about money and their own self interest and power to the point of buying into facism than like. maintaining the bare basics of human rights and caring about other people. and this isn’t just about the presidency, this is about congress and the house being so right leaning, filled with facist rhetoric. this is about americans losing any modicum of what it means to be empathetic or democratic and it’s sick

[acepumpkinpatrick]

Research for Gaza & Sudan

Hello everyone, this is my attempt in helping Raise funds for 3 campaigns that are in dire need and are extremely low on funds.

What I can do:

I am a physics major & have access to neat software such as HyperChem & Gaussian 09 and know how to use both efficiently. I can help build & do the necessary calculations for your modules. I can help you find resources for your research, and I am open to doing math and/or physics homework, as well.

How does this work?

DM me your requirements WITH CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS & a screenshot of your donations and I will start on it as soon as I can.

• For HyperChem & Gaussian 09: you need to donate €25 to each of the two gaza campaigns I have below.

I think this is a more than fair price given that licenses for both softwares range from 50$-2500$ (in the academics alone!)

• For searching resources: you need to donate €10 for the Sudanese campaign below.

• For homework: you need to donate €10 to any of the campaigns below.

NOTE: I am NOT responsible for Your deadlines. If your request needs time to run or I am doing someone else's commission before you, you WILL have to wait.

The campaigns:

Al-Najjar family - vetted here

Abdul Aziz's family - vetted here

ThomaSerena - vetted here & here

Sorry for the tags ♡

@commissions4aid-international @northgazaupdates2 @appsa @magnus-rhymes-with-swagness @wingedalpacacupcake @elksewer @a-shade-of-blue @tortiefrancis @mushroomjar @fromjannah @neechees @irhabiya @ibtisams @lacecap @dykesbat @socalgal @ankle-beez @mahoushojoe @transmutationisms @deepspaceboytoy @greelin @huckleberrycomics @zionistsinfilm @beserkerjewel @babacontainsmultitudes @spacebeyonce @mauesartetc @vakarians-babe @ghostofanonpast @c-u-c-koo-4-40k @ot3 @xinakwans @komsomolka @chilewithcarnage @akamanto0 @feluka @goodguydotmp3 @leotanaka @effen-draws @pkmnbutch @bilal-salah0 @ghostingarden

[vaguely-concerned]

are. are you telling me that if the romanced mage warden dies and alistair is king, he deadass stares greagoir down over her dead body and grants the circle of ferelden its autonomy after ordering it rebuilt somewhere safer. first you have to deliberately leave him behind so he won't die for you and then he does that for you once you're gone, even when you're broken up??? absolute and literal king behaviour of the highest order????? the actions speak louder than words of it all??????? I think I hauve covid

[constantly-deactivated]

Epic answer by Morgan Freeman 🤔

[teaboot]

Acab applies to security guards too.

Okay, so there's two basic kinds of security: public and private

Public security is for government employees like police

Private security is stuff like security guards, bodyguards, and bouncers

As a security guard, you need to pass different licensing exams for different privileges. Someone who might handcuff people needs a license to carry handcuffs- someone who might need to carry a weapon needs a license for that weapon.

I passed my BST exam something like five years ago and stopped there, so I am allowed to carry: A radio

And as private security, again, there are two basic kinds: in-house and contract

Contract security means a company or a person or a location like a park can pay my boss' boss money to send powerless scarecrows in uniforms to walk around and provide what is called "visible presence"

which is, essentially, a life-size cardboard cutout of a guy wearing the classic Spirit Halloween costume, "Black Slacks Law Professional" in size L

So if the entire chain of authority, from a toddler at the mall food court all the way up to whoever happens to have access to the majority of the planet's nukes at this time, you should know that someone like me currently ranks somewhere very slightly above Janitor, but still definitely below Cinnabon Assistant Manager

Which means that if I chose to go rogue and use my powers for evil TOMORROW, I would maybe manage to punch a Cinnabon employee and shoplift half a dozen chocolate bars from the gift shop before I am fired and in jail being sued off my ass with my licenses revoked for life, unable to leave the country or apply for a job at Walmart with my new shiny criminal record

Security guards and mall cops ain't police. We're dressed like police so you don't try and do something illegal in the area, but the vast majority of us can't actually do anything.

Calm down

[reality-detective]

Old Lighters 🤔

[americanmarketplace]

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.