If something brings you happiness (and it isn’t hurting anyone) never let the opinion of someone else put a damper on it.
tearing somebody else down to raise yourself up is a shitty thing to do. Also, it is entirely possible for grown-ups to hold different opinions and views and still actually be friends! SHOCKING I know.
when male academics constantly refer to men by their surnames and women by their first names
like you’d never go to a lecture expecting shakespeare to be referred to as “william” but it’s not at all uncommon to sit through an entire lecture in which jane austen is referred to constantly as “jane”
it’s such a petty thing but it just really rubs me the wrong way, like it has a real suggestion of respect and admiration/lack thereof
kind of like how during the 2016 election everything was Trump vs Hillary
did y’all, perhaps, forget there was a whole other Clinton in office before and that maybe they used her first name to avoid confusion, lol?
We’ve had two President Roosevelts, no one refers to them as Roosevelt and Franklin. Even newspaper headlines from the times called them simply Roosevelt
We recently had two President Bushes. Bush Sr. was still alive when Bush Jr. was running and in office, and news agencies still referred to him as Bush
America was able to read this headline and hundreds like it and know which Bush it was talking about. When the news mentioned a Bush vs Gore debate we all knew that it wouldn’t be the ex-president debating
There was even a Bush running against Trump in the primaries and no one said Jeb vs Trump
How CNN manipulates its audience/narrative by cropping images.
Bitch the government is literally putting kids in cages nobody gives two dicks if these prisons put Ferdinand on in the background to disguise the fact that these children are going through hell.
those kids could be in a fucking mansion and it would still be horrible because they’ve been stolen from their fucking parents you jackass if someone lures your kid into a van with candy it doesn’t fucking matter if it’s really good candy or a very well-maintained van it’s still kidnapping
“it isn’t as bad as it feasibly could be” or “they’re not locked in a torture dungeon on a skull-shaped volcano island” shouldn’t be your standard here
You are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s it. Aces aren’t LGBT.
I mean for one your forgetting a bit of that. Like the Q+.
Mod Bethany
The full acronym is LGBT.
I love me some ahistorical bullshit
The “full” acronym at one point was “GL”, after lesbians fought against male homosexuality being the “face” of the movement (i.e., the Alliance for Gay Artists (AGA), founded in 1982, was renamed the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists shortly thereafter; and the Gay Activists Alliance never included “Lesbian” in their title).
The “full” acronym at another point was “LGB”, only after bisexual activists campaigned fiercely to be included, and is often still not even included in acronyms
The “full” acronym at yet another point was “LGBT”, only after trans activists campaigned fiercely to be included
Queer was added to the acronym after it was reclaimed and re-politicized by ACT UP off-shoot Queer Nation in the early 1990s. LGBTQ has been a thing since the 90s.
ONE Archives, which is the largest repository of LGBTQIA+ materials in the world and was founded by some of the principle members of the early (1950s-60s) homophile movement, which led to the gay rights movement post-Stonewall, uses the full acronym LGBTQ on their website and also freely uses the word “Queer” interchangeably.
As of 2014, NOW (National Organization for Women) agreed to switch to use of the full LGBTQIA acronym, and it likely isn’t the only large social rights organization to have done so
Many LGBTQ+ magazines use LGBTQ, including One (which has existed in some form since the 1950s) and The Advocate, use LGBTQ or LGBTQIA as the full acronym and regularly use “queer” as a phrase (and, in fact, some articles have welcomed asexual people and their narratives as part of the queer experience).
The acronym is constantly evolving. It’s not static. To claim otherwise is blatant ignorance. The modern-day LGBTQ+ community is a result of decades of political activism, social inclusion, and community outreach. It’s not a rigid structure that operates by a strict set of rules about who can and cannot join.
The full acronym is LGBT. Cishets don’t belong in the community. Aces aren’t inherently lgbt. We don’t want our oppressors in our community.
“we don’t want our oppressors in our community”
as if trans people don’t already have to deal with their oppressors (cis people) being in their community
as if LGBTQIA+ people of color don’t have to deal with LGBTQIA+ white people in the community
as if LBTQIA+ women don’t have to deal with GBTQIA+ men in the community
as if disabled LGBTQIA+ people don’t have to deal with able-bodied LGBTQIA+ people in the community
the LGBTQIA+ community is huge and consists of people with multiply-overlapping identities and privileges. we all (unless you’re a cis, able-bodied, wealthy, white gay man) have to deal with a member of our oppressing class in the LGBTQIA+ community
ETA: “Straightness” is a position of power. Ace people, even if they are in heterosexual relationships, do not necessarily perform “straightness” in ways that are acceptable to the Straight class.
Reblogging because osirisjones is completely hitting the nail on the head.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
wait, what does the “i” stand for? i’ve never seen it in the acronym before?
The names of American shopping malls are a carefully calculated combination of bland and grandiose. Even the plainest of strip malls will have a faded sign somewhere proclaiming it to be the “Westbrook Manor Shoppes at Town Center Mall” or something of that nature. What happens if a machine learning algorithm tries to imitate this?
Thanks to Keith Wezwick I had a dataset of 1,106 existing shopping malls – a smallish dataset but one with enough consistency that I thought a neural net might be able to get the hang of it. I gave the dataset to char-rnn, a type of character-level recurrent neural network. Unlike some other neural networks I’ve used, this one starts from scratch – when it has its first look at the dataset, its neurons are connected randomly, with no built-in knowledge of any other datasets or even of English.
After a few passes through the dataset, it has learned to use letters and spaces, and even has learned some of the most common words. You can probably tell these are supposed to be shopping centers. You can also probably tell that there’s something terribly wrong with them.
Rre Gostge Toreson Shoppiol Trape Center The Shopp Mall Preen Center CoKies Mall Shoppin Stophend 8!oon Center Wastfield Stopas Center Lieemsoo ah Tre Stops Mall Woller Vallery Baspoon Towne Center Cowpe Toeoe Center Lrnme Cherry Center Warleros Oewves Mall
But after more training, the mall-naming algorithm got… a bit better. By the time it had looked through the list of malls about 13 times, it was reproducing some malls word-for-word. I didn’t really intend for it to plagiarize malls verbatim from its input data, but the problem is I had told it to produce more malls like the ones it saw, and as far as it’s concerned, a perfect solution is to copy them. (This problem is called overfitting, and shows up in all sorts of annoying ways in machine learning research.) It did produce original malls too, though, and its original malls were definitely noticeable as neural net creations.
Bointy Mall Fall of Lruin Mall Princer Mall Gollfop Mall East Bointy Mall North Drain Mall Town Center at Citylands Galleria Shrps at Santa Mariatun Outlets of the Source Mall Peachdate Mall Willowser Pork Mall Mall of testland Mall
So the mall-generating neural net never quite got out of the “definitely not a real mall” territory. Could they get even more unsettling? The answer is, delightfully, yes. Here’s the output from a neural net (textgenrnn, this time), that was trained on the shopping mall dataset, but only after it was trained on transcripts from the spooky podcast Welcome to Night Vale. In Night Vale, every conspiracy theory is true, and deadly figures haunting the dog park, or mysterious glowing clouds, are just part of everyday life. Night Vale has a mall. It’s called “Night Vale Mall.” Seeing as it has in the past suffered outbreaks of deadly poison gas, even deadlier Valentine’s Day cards, and some kind of screaming vortex in the food court (and we don’t even know why East Night Vale Mall is now disused), it is just possible that Night Vale may be needing to name a new mall sometime in the near future. Perhaps one of these names will be suitable.
Burning Park Mall Person Shell The Shape All Owl Mall Place Square Mall Complete store of Mall The What is Mall Mall Many Head Mall Mall Glow Place Chanting Place South Unit Presence This is Center Mall Goodnight Mall Mall Pill Press Office Blood Park Mall Carlous Preferse was all danger the Shoppendatoland Burning Shaper Mall
For more unsettling shopping malls (including one adults-only mall), as well as bonus material each time I post, enter your email here. It’s perfectly safe. Probably. Just stay away from the South Unit Presence.
They also have a blog…. with generic parenting-related topics
most of these articles are posted multiple times with different titles
These posts seem suspiciously too competent for the usual phrasing on this website, and are from the pespective of parents. careful googling reveals that they’re actually from a mommy blog, here , whose content was just wholesale stolen.
…..okay
on another note, they have a character page with… this guy
…… i hate it
anyways, at the bottom of the page, there’s a link to the hosting company they use.
They’re a 3d animation company in India pretending to be a media/web hosting company for a youtube channel based in the UAE? ?? what is happening??? also btw they’re hiring!
This website also has a privacy policy page
An note.
The website also has the same layout as the first website… but with a buuunch of broken links.
….except for these, which all link to the main website instead of their profile. okay
In conclusion: What the fuck ?
So, I’ve been dealing with these videos for years now at work, and the simple answer is that they’re ad revenue generators.
Make enough of them that are similar enough and pass kid-safe standards (which they all do because they’re brightly colored and nonviolent, two of the major standards), and you can get the YouTube autoplay algorithm to put your videos on basically infinitely, until someone actually changes the channel. The next recommended video, based on content and audience similarity, will just be another one of your “lullaby educational kids song 3 hours” monstrosities, indefinitely.
A kid, babysitter, or exhausted parent clicks on one of them. It plays. Ads appear every 7 minutes (the maximum amount before additional screening for spam kicks in). The kid wanders off without turning off the console or computer, just the screen. Now you get ad revenue every 7 minutes until that machine turns off or gets used again, probably overnight or maybe even a full day, because every next autoplay is another of your videos. And every video that plays further locks in the autoplay.
Channels set up these nested shell companies so their channel can become verified as an official business channel, which automatically reduces the amount of screening you undergo, too.
They tend to be based in India because there’s a sufficiently skilled talent base and resource base to produce the hundreds of hours of just distinct enough visuals. In many cases, titles are generated algorithmically based on what pulled the most revenue the week before and to search terms for the last few days. Videos are then created to match the algorithmic titles, hence the bizarre combinations of topics.
This helps get these videos to the top of search results for popular kids searches, increasing the chance that the infinite recommendation loop gets started by the largest possible number of people.
I admit, if you haven’t been wading through this shitshow professionally for a few years, it probably looks pretty creepy.
Hi guys! So I know we all don’t actually read the terms and conditions of things and just hit agree assuming there’s nothing important in there (I do it too oops) but if you take writing commissions or anything involving money, then there’s actually something in the AO3 terms and conditions to be aware of.
Linking to a personal website or blog/social network where you are taking donations, posting commissions or mentioning published works is permitted, but advertising it directly on the Archive is not, nor is using language which one might interpret as requesting financial contributions. For example, you can say something to the effect of “check out my Tumblr if you want to know more about me and my writing” and include the link to the site, but you cannot specifically state anything about donations, commissions or sales on the Archive.
Today someone reported one of my fics as violating this condition – presumably because I’d mentioned my patreon in the author’s note (I wasn’t actively requesting donations either… I’d literally just mentioned that it existed, and that the fic in question was written as a thank-you for hitting one of my goals).
I’ve written to AO3 to check whether just saying ‘thank you to those who support me on patreon’ is fine and I’ll let you guys know when they get back to me, but if it’s still going too far in terms of being a ‘commercial promotion’ then I’ll just avoid mentioning this in the future! :’)
As I said, someone did actually report my fic for this – so there are people out there who are noticing/reporting these situations. Please be aware of this if you take fic commissions, or use patreon or ko-fi, because your account could end up suspended, which of course no one wants!
❤ ❤
UPDATE: AO3 got back to me – you’re not allowed to mention or link to patreon at all, regardless of how it’s phrased. Not sure if it’s the same for ko-fi but it might be better to be safe than sorry!
❤ @kahnah23 relevant to you and possibly some others~
That’s a fucking bullshit rule, I’m sorry. They shouldn’t deny you the opportunity to advertise your own work.
this isn’t just a self-determined descriptor; that’s a legal definition that requires adherence to specific rules and laws regarding income, profit, and donations.
this isn’t a “bullshit rule” just meant to prevent creators from advertising. in op’s post, the contact from ao3 offers a roundabout way to advertise. this rule ensures that ao3 and the organization for transformative works to stay a non-profit organization – this “bullshit rule” is essentially a way so that ao3 and the other services that the organization for transformative works can stay online.
it’s not just about maintaining nonprofit status. (i question if that’s even applicable here, since the profits in question don’t go to the organisation, but i know very little about nonprofit law. just a gut feeling.)
the actual point is, they run a legal services organisation for fans who get into legal trouble. they literally exist for the purpose of helping you not get into legal trouble. profiting from fan fiction very much opens you up to the possibility of getting into legal trouble. they’re not going to let people do things on their website that they know will land them in exactly that trouble.
and to be clear, just because everyone who slaps a patreon button on their tumblr isn’t getting sued, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something for which they could be sued.
let me say it again: profiting from fan fiction very much opens you up to the possibility of getting into legal trouble.
here’s why.
use of other people’s characters is subject to copyright law. the general principle that makes downloading a movie or a song piracy also applies to the use of a character, assuming certain factors such as uniqueness.
how fan fiction has come to scrape by in the past: by not being a commercial enterprise.
in contrast, for use music, video, images incorporated into new works: by being significantly transformative.
these two factors, commerciality and transformativity, are considered side by side. the greater the transformativity, the less weight commerciality will be given. if something is highly transformative and non-commercial, then it’s almost certainly fine. down the other end, if it’s not at all transformative and commercial, forget it.
it’s a matter of judgement as to what degree of transformativity there is in the work that will push it over the line to overcome the general prohibition against commercial use. but fan fiction in the truest sense is barely transformative. in fact the goal is to come as close to copying a character as possible.
an analogy with the use of music: a cover band, despite every part of the performance of the song being done by that band, is still playing a song that was created by someone else. you, the fic writer, as covering someone else’s character.
the cover band you see at your local bar? they, or the local bar itself, have paid a fee to obtain permission to play that song. (even if they were playing for free they would still have to obtain permission, because any public performance of copyrighted music is prohibited.) in contrast, use of a line from one song in another another song that uses the line for parody? fine (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994)). let’s call that the AU with the names changed, the location different, and everything about that character’s backstory is gone. they just look like the actor and have a dialogue pattern that matches.
the better you are at writing a character in character, ironically the more likely you are to violate copyright law. and that’s why the commercial factor becomes incredibly relevant.
basically, don’t get paid, keep being cool with the law*.
*this is not an endorsement of the principles of copyright law itself. this is about what that law is and how it works.
People also forget the reason why disclamers on fics became so prevalent.
Please understand that profiting off fanfiction, fanart and all forms of fan-content is direct violation of copyrighted material.
Your commissions to draw popular characters? Direct violation of Copyright. AO3 works hard to maintain fandom expression protected. You hurt their cause by not adhering to their term of use.
takes every instance of romantic feelings being referred to as “more than friends” and replaces them with “something other than friends”, “something else”, “something different”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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