#that went down a rabbit hole

[themirokai]

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

[sketchy-noodles]

For context, me and a few of my fellow crows on Phil’s Discord had this idea of “What if there were Minecraft crows that were specialized and adapted to live in different realms/biomes?”

And now we have End Crows 💜

Transcript & closeups below:

END CROWS

A guide by Philza Minecraft

PHYSICAL ADAPTATIONS:

Largest of all crow variants

Thinner with longer legs (LANKY)

Wings & feathers adapted for silent flight

Sharp serrated beak for eating chorus fruit

BEHAVIORAL ADAPTATIONS:

Social! Seem to flock in large groups

Allergic to water (like an enderman)

Enjoy taking dust baths!

Hoarders of shiny things (have a weird obsession with spoons for some reason?)

Prefer dark environments

Nest in End cities/trees

OTHER NOTES:

Purple glowing eyes

Feathers have an iridescent purple tint

Surrounded by particles

DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT!

Tattered fringe feathers

Longer legs

Velvety down feathers on legs & wings absorb sound frequencies!

Serrated beak!

DIET: omnivorous

Chorus Fruit

Endermites

Etc.

[pokeberry5]

girl experiences gender euphoria and is immediately slammed by grief

for @litttlittt <3. this was supposed to be a portrait of caroline hill, but litta mentioned tim looking like janet when dressed as caroline and identity issues and angst and things spiraled

something about tim not knowing if he's his mother's child or bruce's or neither's.

figuring out the looks:

i wanted janet to have that poofy 70s hair

[covvboytears]

Agnès Varda: ‘I am still alive, I am still curious. I am not a piece of rotting flesh’

[kagooleo]

even the biggest beasts need a little love and care when they've evolved (watch your head!)

[mindie-arts]

“𝑰𝒕’𝒔 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒖𝒄𝒌 𝑰 𝒏𝒆𝒆𝒅𝒆𝒅” 🤍🔮

[punnifullife]

I always thought Mar’i would be best friends with Lian Harper and Irey West if DC let them exist in the same timeline. Ugh! Another missed opportunity 😔

Yess!! I think they would make great friends as kids. The possibilities with these 3, especially if they end up taking after their fathers... ohh boy. but there would be age gaps. Lian, of course, was an accident and even a secret for awhile. Irey (and Jai) came next and then of course Mar'i! She's the youngest, but as she grows older, she'd be the one getting the other two out of sticky situations.

Bonus: Young Lian meeting Mar'i for the first time

[nyaa]

Moe personification of Siberian anticyclone Weather Girls 気象・天気, 2010

[sfordaisy]

[ganxiously]

911 Fic Writing Resource: Shift Timings

Okay, so initially I was going to add this to my last post but the topic was completely different so I decided to make a new one. @capsbooty7 and @rutathenurse pointed out that since Tommy was working at the same time as Buck and the rest of the gang, he most likely worked the A shift and thus had his work time completely synced with Buck's. The concept was intriguing enough that I took a look into it.

Like many others, I had previously thought that each house had its own rota, and the timing and length of the shifts varied accordingly. However, that appears to not be the case. Firefighters, in the LAFD at least, work in 3 shifts - A, B and C and each of these shifts are 24 hours long. They don't do the 24/48 or the 48/96 but instead follow what I am given to believe is called the California Swing Shift or a Kelly schedule. Here, they essentially work every other day for 5 days and then have 4 days off. So the schedule is - On - Off - On - Off - On - Off - Off - Off - Off. This means they are usually working 72 hours per rotation but they can also trade in shifts or work overtime if they want to.

From what I found out, you can take more shifts or reduce it according to your convenience by trading with others so technically you can still do 48 hours and then even pull in overtime but the limit for a continuous shift is 60 hours after which you have to take a mandatory 12 hours off [this information was a bit outdated so I am not sure if this rule still stands]. Trade almost always happens for 12 or 24 hours but it isn't unheard of to do an 18 hour trade. Overtime usually happens in 12 hour shifts and you get paid overtime rates only when you have crossed 56 hours in a working week.

As for vacation days, you get 16 days after one year of service and 24 days after 10 years (so Tommy is getting 24 while Buck is getting 16 but Bobby, however, might be getting 25 since I'm guessing he's been a firefighter for at least 31 years). There are also 13 paid floating leave days allotted each year - 1 every 4 weeks.

Shift times are the same for every firehouse and the work day starts at 8am officially but you are expected to make 'face-to-face relief' at 6:30 am.

I am also including the January 2024 schedule here: [follow a colour to understand how the shifts work and where you can sneak in lengthy shifts]

If you have more information or would like to correct me on something, feel free to let me know.

@itsjustpoopeh mentioned:

and @ironworked pointed out:

@cafe-con-letty sent this ask talking about how Tommy's shift might vary as a helicopter pilot so you can also check this out.

[technofinch]

do you remember how we used to run...

[kiefbowl]

this is going to sound silly but it isn't silly, and I'm seriously saying this. I do think there is a slight feminist concern to alien abduction stories in so far as we can assume that when people, especially women, talk about their abductions and their abilities to communicate with extra terrestrials et cetera, they are someone who is mentally unwell and who has likely experienced something traumatic. alien abduction stories tend to have common elements even if there are details wildly different from each individual. those details are different because they likely didn't happen, but the common elements tend to be things like being taken from home, being violated, being exposed, having things implanted in the body, experiencing pregnancy, having secret knowledge, having a special connection to the extra terrestrials...

you can start putting some pieces together. yes, sometimes these elements are shared because they are what's heard in pop culture. you're more likely to imagine the details of a book you read or a tv show you saw than come up with something so fantastically new and original. you can imagine, for example, if someone is a say a seven year old girl being manipulated into sexual favors by a trusted adult and doesn't understand what's happening to her and has seen alien media and perhaps even has other messaging around her wrt sin, purity, worthiness, karma (what have you), and also perhaps is predisposed to mental illness, it's easier to believe she's a special person being abducted by other worldly creatures who don't truly mean her harm. you can see how a vivid child's imagination could lead to an adult believing memories that never happened.

and so the feminist concern is to not treat these stories as complete jokes and hoaxes and roll our eyes. I'm just reminded today of something I saw years ago. I think it was a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode on aliens, and they had a group of hard core believers talking about their experiences with aliens, and it felt like we were supposed to be laughing at them when at least one of them was a woman who truly believed an alien husband took her way sometimes and forced her to give birth and she had several children she didn't get to see in space, and she was clearly not very well adjusted socially. all I could think was is this a woman who's been raped? is this a woman who has been forced to have abortions? is this a woman who has had multiple miscarriages? is this a woman experiencing domestic abuse from a husband or boyfriend? but the episode wasn't interested in exploring that, and she stuck out as "one of these things is not like the others" when juxtaposed to fake professors trying to sell their weirdo books as a living or whatever else was in the episode.

when we say believe women, that includes "crazy" women. women who say ghosts are trying to kill them, who talk about people living in their walls coming out at night to steal their body parts, women who believe they are married to alien overlords since they were 12 and have birth 50 alien babies. these women are probably telling us something and I think we can say "I believe something has happened to you" rather than make a mockery of them.

[ashes-in-a-jar]

Youtube video titled "hi." that has Elias picking up a ukulele singing in the most upbeat tune 🪕 "hello Jon, apologies for the deception but I wanted to make sure you started-" 🪕

[fictionadventurer]

It's kind of silly that Tolkien and Lewis are constantly positioned as polar opposites when it comes to worldbuilding. Lewis might just throw a bunch of wildly different stuff together and call it a world, but Tolkien's doing the same thing, too--he's making this huge mishmash of tons of different stories he loves. The only difference is that Tolkien puts in a lot of work to weave these into a cohesive history, rather than giving us a lot of little details and letting us imaginations how they all fit together.

Also, it's silly that people compare Narnia and the Lord of the Rings. They're completely different genres written for different audiences. Of course the series written for literal children isn't going to be as complex as a sprawling epic fantasy for adults. The better comparison would be between Narnia and The Hobbit. Or better, between Narnia and Roverandom. Compare the fun stories written for children based on events from real life.

Maybe the real difference between Tolkien and Lewis is that Lewis stories take an ordinary human and send them to a magical world where they confront a bunch of weird things all at once, while Tolkien stories (all three that I've mentioned) take an ordinary non-human guy and send him on a quest that lets him meet all these weird people one at a time.

[bluejeanstrash]

i just feel like seungcheol would be hypersensitive to any changes in your body language while having sex? he’s just so careful with you, making sure that no matter what kind of play you’re indulging in or how far in you both are, you’re safe every step of the way — always in safe hands, always safe in his hands.

he’d pick up on the littlest changes, changes you may not even realise you’re showing, and would stop immediately ‘are you okay?’ ‘what’s wrong?’ ‘should we stop?’ ‘talk to me’

he takes his job very seriously. his job as your partner, your protector, your other half, your friend, and he could never allow himself to fail at it when it comes to you.

[leisi-lilacdreams]

playing around with simple animation and sound effects

their black and red outfits are fun for shadow animations so i might do the others