Please help. Any little bit helps me pay off my medical debt.

Pokémon Human Character Tournament: THE FINAL SHOWDOWN

TIESWEEP

Jessie - 49.6%

James - 50.4%

Guys we need them to tie please we must

Blackspotted Puffer (dog face pufferfish)

Here he is inflated

scientists were right that pufferfish can dogface

Super fucked up that I can’t be a master-level expert in knitting AND woodworking AND silversmithing AND embroidery AND soap making AND spinning AND -

“Who would ever want to be immortal? Can you imagine the loneliness, knowing that there’s no one else like you, cursed to outlive -” shut up!! Some of us have shit to do and aren’t cowards!!

Source

Big baby brown eyes…

Handsome handsome man

queers ! I was looking at the tags on the original post of this and it got me curious to see actual numbers

idgaf if y'all "reblog for a bigger sample size" but if you're curious like me, it'd definitely help lol

Juneteenth is about Black people who were officially technically supposed to be freed from enslavement. Nobody else. Nothing else. It's not a POC day. It's not a "freedom for all" day. It's Black folk, Black culture, Black emancipation, SPECIFICALLY. Any other observation for Juneteenth is gentrification.

hey so uhhhhh just a heads up: ao3 may or may not be in deep legal trouble. specifically for mistreatment of volunteers and lax compliance with certain laws, afaict.

i highly recommend you back up any stories you have and any favorite stories/authors you'd miss.

here's how i'm doing it:

notes: it will skip any fics that are locked to archive users only (the ones with a blue padlock next to the author's name in the listing), and you'll have to go back and grab those yourself. if your whole account is under archive lock, i highly recommend unlocking it for the duration of the time it takes to grab and download them (a few minutes to a few hours, depending on whether you have <20 or multiple hundreds like i do lol) before locking them again.

back up everything you love!! back up everything you moderately like!! back up anything you wouldn't like to lose!! even if the ao3 mess pans out to nothing, it's always good to have a "just in case".

link to a twit thread with more details shared by op in the comments:

It's best if you read the thread and come to your own conclusions since there's a lot of information, and I hate that Twitter's character limit makes this obnoxious as fuck to read.

What I'm getting from this is basically AO3s legal team are Copyright Law lawyers, but they don't have any Website lawyers. These are two different branches of laws to know, and the Copyright lawyers are playing a role they're not suited for.

These Copyright lawyers who are not equipped to be Website lawyers are the people the Trust and Safety team have to run all their decisions through. This is why your harassment cases and legitimate complaint forms take forever to process and more often than not they do nothing about it.

OTW who runs AO3 is systemically fucked, and are taking no steps to unfuck the process that allows extremely illegal non-fictional CSAM and racist conduct to grow and be preserved under their watch. And this is with them working with a surplus of donation money they could use to get real Website lawyers.

There's more in the thread I can't/don't feel the need to summarize. All statements are for what's considered feasible legal conduct of the organization and the site and NOT about content policing.

TL:DR- OTW is in a dangerous spot legally due to their own negligence and incompetence for how the site is systemically run. (Conduct, not content!) Nothing will happen until an official investigation is led by some department, and/or a group of volunteers go and lawyer up. If a process for this course of action has already begun or not is currently unknown. Don't panic, but feel free to preserve what you can as things develop and are revealed.

My own note, you can actually download stories locked to Archive Users Only in calibre, if you have an AO3 account, it just takes an extra step to log into AO3 through Calibre:

Go into Fanficfare > Configure Fanficfare > Select the personal.ini tab > edit personal.ini 

Scroll down to the password section (Probably don’t actually have to do this, but I am a neat freak) 

Paste this, replacing the generic with your login and password:

[www.archiveofourown.org]

username:youruserID

password:yourpassword

##default is false

is_adult:true

Click Okay, restart calibre, should be able to access now.

Having read the thread, along with a number of other connected threads, there is no reason the believe AO3 is going to go down

(that's not to say you shouldn't back up your own fics, or save copies of other people's fics for personal use, it's always a good idea to have backups)

the linked thread is discussing institutional problems with OTW's Legal and Policy & Abuse committees (although the latter primarily in the ways the thread's author believes they are being negatively impacted by legal)

It's primarily a conversation about the OTW having structural problems and being slow to react/change when needed, but three accusations of specific breaches of the law which could get the OTW into trouble are made:

None of these could get AO3 taken down, and 2 of them are provably untrue

Systems have confirmed the first point is not true. While works are not retained on the archive for the 90 days, the archive keeps complete back-ups for longer than that, so the work can be restored if needed by the authorities. This is, as rahaeli points out, a pretty inefficient way of handling things, but being inefficient is not a breach of the law

Rahaeli corrects themself in their own thread when they realise that COPPA does not apply to the specific type of non-profit AO3 is, so that's moot

The GDPR point is slightly more complicated. I'm not a lawyer, but I work in the finance industry in the UK handling massive quanities of personal data, so I am required by law to be trained on GDPR.

Email addresses are not automatically personal data under GDPR. They can be, but only if they contain other personal information. So if your email is brony47@gmail, that's not personal data. If it's john.smith@company it is, because it contains your wallet name and employer. So, while it's fairly unlikely when dealing with AO3 accounts belonging to under 13s, especially as school issued emails are basically never wallet names because they just deal with too many people for that to be sustainable, it is technically possible that retaining this info is a breach of GDPR.

However, even if AO3 was found to have breached GDPR, that would not result in the website being taken down with no warning or fics being purged. That's not how any of this works.

AO3 would face fines (I don't actually know how those fines work for non-profits, since they're usually a % of annual turnover - I assume donations would be treated as turnover for the ICO's purposes, but I may be wrong about that).

It's possible that fine could be steep enough that the archive couldn't meet server costs and would ultimately need to shut down, but the ICO do not possess the ability to shut the site down, and AO3 owns its own servers so if the worst happened and the archive shut down, they would have plenty of time to warn people. It would not just vanish, that's not what the ICO does.

(The specific affected account would be need to be deleted, but since it would already be suspended and invisible to users, that would not affect any end-users)

(Also the entire process of it going through the ICO and being debated to get to the point of the fine would probably take at least a year, this is a massive pan-european beauracratic body, it is not famous for its efficiency)

None of this is me saying rahaeli doesn't have valid points, or that reform isn't needed, generally I agree that it is, and I think rahaeli's suggestions about what to change sound reasonable, although I'm not an expert and not on either of the affect teams, so that's just some rando's opinion.

But the this post is not about that, this post is about people worrying about the archive being taken down, and again, that is not what is going on here!

TLDR; back up fics if you want, but AO3 is not in legal trouble, and even if it was, the type of legal trouble being discussed would not result in the entire archive just going down without prior warning

best bi rep <3

OM NOM?

yes :3

KING SHIT. OK BI RIGHTS 💗💜💙

NO ONE TALK TO ME

Source 

THE BEGINNINGS OF KAWAII

No, no, you have no idea. It actually IS the beginning of the whole so-called “kawaii culture”. And it started because girls started using mechanical pencils, which provided fine handwriting. After being banished (more precisely, during the 80s), this kind of writing started being used in products like magazines and make-up. And, during this time, icons we usually associate with the whole kawaii industry (like the characters from Sanrio) came to life too.

And what many people don’t realize is that this subculture was born as a way for young girls to express themselves in their own way. And it was also used as something against the adult life and the traditional culture, often seen as dull and boring and oppressive. By embracing cuteness, these young girls (and adult women, after a while) were showing non-conformation with the current standards.

So yep. Kawaii is important, and it all started with cute, simple handwritting a few hearts and cat faces in some girls’ school notebooks <3

!!!!!

NO OK THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!

This is also how the kawaii fashions started! Girls began dressing in cute and off beat styles for themsleves, they were criticized by adult figures telling them “you’ll never find a husband if you dress that way!” to which they began to reply “Good!”

All the Japanese subcultures and fashions that evolved out of this became a rebellion to tradition and the starch gender roles and expectations the adults were forcing on the younger generations. As early as the 70s and still to this day you’ll see an emphasis on child-like fashion and themes in more kawaii styles and the dismissal of the male gaze with styles like lolita (a lot of western people assume lolita is somehow sexual due to the name of the fashion, but ask any Japanese lolita and they will tell you that men hate the style and find it unattractive which is sometimes a large reason they gravitate towards the style - they can express their femininity and individuality while remaining independent and without the pressure to appeal to men)

Its so so so important to understand the hyper cute and ‘odd’ fashions of Japanese girls carry such a huge message of feminism and reclaiming of their own lives.   

so are you telling me that Japan’s punk phase was really the kawaii phase

Kawaii is so goth

Metal heads Stan for our sisters in lace

I did not know this but I love this form of feminism! 

-FemaleWarrior, She/They 

Which is why you get bands like BABYMETAL, which toured with Judas Priest for a while, looking like this:

Metal heads Stan for our sisters in lace

looks at you

looks at you

@bettsplendens i'd just like you to know that this is my favorite comment on this post and i'd like it to be memorialized

can't relate because my beams are powerful. get well soon

you're part of the problem

babe are you ok?? you’ve barely used your red dead redemption 2 oven

CLADISTICS ruined my life

yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification

The choice is this: 

Birds are reptiles 

Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT 

That’s it, that’s the choice 

What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing

Nope 

Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds) 

So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles 

birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily. 

But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles? I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.

It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification. 

And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals. 

So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing. 

don’t throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them.

Basically, unless we’re maybe talking massive horizontal gene transfer, everything is still part of the group that came before it. 

You are technically a fish.

IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all

hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed

Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like this 

The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators. 

This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.

I’m just hung up on the humans evolving from fish comment.

Like, we evolved from tiny tree-climbing squirrels. To the best of our knowledge.

…which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles

…which evolved from amphibians

…which evolved from fish.

*runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken* BEHOLD A LIZARD

you could have left the feathers on this time tbh

It was already plucked. They just STOLE IT from philosophy 101.

Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.

May I recommend the book “why fish don’t exist” by Lulu Miller

May I recommend

the book “why fish don’t exist”

by Lulu Miller

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

mitakuye oyasin—we are all related