Historically, I suck at at figuring out where other people’s boundaries are on this website. My boundaries are relatively minimal, so I don’t have a good point of comparison. I’ll try to do better, and I’ll fuck off if you tell me to.
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.
I got the same comment a few days ago, also on an old Loki x reader fic. Same comment, same phrasing, same "we are big fans of Loki." Please don't buy into this bullshit, and please stay safe out there friends
A lot of people find the lush green plains and forests in some games beautiful and welcoming but to me they just feel kind of bland and uninteresting. It's like "adventuring" through a golf course or something.
I prefer more palpably dangerous and unusual terrain, personally.
@dragonschnitzel said:
I honestly think this is due to most art direction not being able to capture the actual feel of that kind of environment. Forests can obviously be scary and intense. Most of the lush, pretty grassland you see in places like Ireland (which feels like the inspiration for the aesthetic) is not actually natural but just forest that got cut down a few centuries ago max for grazing. It feels like a golf course because it's about as artificial
Yeah, I love it when forests are actually dark and menacing. A lot of games just make them tranquil and generically pretty instead but it really is an entirely different experience when there's a real sense of danger.
The kinds of environments I absolutely love to explore are more like...
The Tower of Latria in Demon's Souls, the Village of the Albinaurics in Elden Ring, Caelid (also in Elden Ring), or the locations portrayed in the art of Beksinski or Vergvoktre.
This is where it's at as far as my taste is concerned.
Xenoblade Chronicles has Makna Forest, a giant tropical jungle filled with giant high level dinosaur enemies occasionally dotting the map - on your first visit at least, you have to scan the horizon to make sure they won't interrupt your fights with smaller, more reasonable mobs.
Dinosaur jungles are cool as well! Definitely much more adventurous and interesting than a generic forest!
I felt like the foggy, wet forest in the DLC for Fallout 4 was more interesting than . . . well, every other outdoor location in Fallout 4.
In plant biology, Vavilovian mimicry (also crop mimicry or weed mimicry[1][a]) is a form of mimicry in plants where a weed evolves to share one or more characteristics with a domesticated plant through generations of artificial selection.[2] It is named after Nikolai Vavilov, a prominent Russian plant geneticist.[2] Selection against the weed may occur by killing a young or adult weed, separating its seeds from those of the crop (winnowing), or both. This has been done manually since Neolithic times, and in more recent years by agricultural machinery.
Vavilovian mimicry is a good illustration of unintentional selection by humans. Although the human selective agents might be conscious of their impact on the local weed gene pool, such effects go against the goals of those growing crops. Weeders do not want to select for weeds that are increasingly similar to the cultivated plant, yet the only other option is to let the weeds grow and compete with crops for sunlight and nutrients. Similar situations include antibiotic resistance and, also in agricultural crops, herbicide resistance. Having acquired many desirable qualities by being subjected to similar selective pressures, Vavilovian mimics may eventually be domesticated themselves. Vavilov called these weeds-become-crops secondary crops.
…
Another example is rye (Secale cereale), a grass which is derived from wild rye (Secale montanum), a widely distributed Mediterranean species. Rye was originally just a weed growing with wheat and barley, but came under similar selective pressures to the crops. Like wheat, it came to have larger seeds and more rigid spindles to which the seeds are attached. However, wheat is an annual plant, while wild rye is a perennial. At the end of each growing season wheat produces seeds, while wild rye does not and is thus destroyed as the post-harvest soil is tilled. However, there are occasional mutants that do set seed. These have been protected from destruction, and rye has thus evolved to become an annual plant.[5]
Rye is a hardier plant than wheat, surviving in harsher conditions. Having become preadapted as a crop through wheat mimicry, rye was then positioned to become a cultivated plant in areas where soil and climatic conditions favored its production, such as mountainous terrain.[4]
This fate is shared by oats (Avena sativa and Avena byzantina), which also tolerate poorer conditions, and like rye, grow as a weed alongside wheat and barley. Derived from a wild species (Avena sterilis), it has thus come to be a crop in its own right. Once again paralleling wheat, rye and other cereals, oats have developed tough spindles which prevent seeds from easily dropping off, and other characteristics which also help in natural dispersal have become vestigial, including the awns which allow them to self bury.[4]
Huh, I never considered that. Evolution wins yet again
This is what the porn bots are currently in the process of doing
It's crazy being reminded that there's a whole generation of people who weren't alive when this aired on prime time tv and was watched by millions of unsuspecting people. I remember watching this episode with my mom. Like, let's watch the new episode of CSI and then bam! Furries. No warning whatsoever.
I don’t normally watch these shows, but I once caught the tail end of King Baby, probably the second most infamous of these kinds of “freaks of the week” episodes. Even with just a few minutes, I could tell it was offensive garbage that degraded both the show and the subculture.
Anonymous asked:
you said that religion is actions and relations, not beliefs- would you be willing to elaborate and/or point to some reading? or like at least defining what "beliefs" means here?
sure. now i'm sure there's some much more recent scholarship on this but everything i think of this is fundamentally drawing on/extrapolating on the german ideology and gramsci's work--but the gist of it is that there is no (let us take an example) 'islam' that exists independent of its practicioners. this is a materialist (as opposed to idealist) stance on religion (& ideology more generally).
so what this means is that--sure, everything that comes under the umbrella of 'islam' does in fact share a few core concepts (the quran, the indivisbility of god, mohammad as a prophet)--but that attempts to make any sweeping generalized statement about the ideological content of islam are bound to fail because ultimately the islam of the iranian state apparatus & the islam of the taliban & the islam of muslim feminists in indonesia & the islam of the PLO & the islam of liberal arab-americans are all fundamentally different ideologically because they are shaped not by some eternal essence of islam but by the social circumstances and communities within which each of these groups is practing.
(want to be super clear that i am just using islam as an example here, the same can be applied to any religion in any place--christianity, for example, is not uniquely genocidal & colonial due to some inherent ideological content, which is why going through the bible to point out violence & slavery and being like 'see, this is what's wrong with christianity' is a futile exercise--christianity has been the religion of a genocidal & colonial ruling class across much of the globe, and so that practice of it of course takes on that character)
hence, for example, there's absolutely no contradiction between, say, the judaism of diaspora reform jews & that of the israeli state--the stark difference makes sense when you realize that they are not both informed ideologically by some inherent essence of judaism but by the historical context of centuries of persecution vs. decades of genocidal state building. no religion has an innate inextricable character--all character that a religion has is given to it when it becomes a social fact, and comes from the people who practice it and their material and power relations.
the idealist view of religion is v. v. popular and leads to a lot of putting the cart before the horse and other nonsensical positions and interpretations of history, even from people who are otherwise 'leftists'. a major one is the idea that the 'protestant work ethic' is somehow responsible for capitalism, as if it did not develop concurrently with the epoch of primitive accumulation, as if it was not informed and conditioned by the development of capitalism itself! or similarly, the idea that christianity is somehow responsible for colonialism rather than an instrument of it--that the kingdoms of europe said 'well, god has willed us to go and do some colonizing' and sent off the conquistadors rather than being in a material position to economically exploit other peoples & developing a rationalization within the frameworks available to them for why doing so was morally permissible
The second post doesn’t follow from the first. Even if an ideology has no Platonic form, people can still do things because of the specific version of the ideology they believe in, even when they don’t benefit from it. This reminds me of that post that was fumbling around for why judges make rulings, and through process of elimination stumbled into the idea that a lot of judges want to make rulings, even without a benefit to the judge.
this order of causation requires the platonic form, though--of course people do things 'because of the version of the ideology they believe in', but where does that ideology come from?
Maybe I’m thinking more in terms of the ideas, and you’re thinking more in terms of the marketplace? Like, I read about this one anti-slavery advocate who was influential for a while, and then he got into full pacifism for his own idiosyncratic reasons, and people ignored him because there wasn’t a market for full pacifism.
https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1660093233181933568?cxt=HHwWgIC2nYCA64kuAAAA
I've always found "Unnecessarily loud motorcycles and 4 wheeler culture" quite charming or fun. Ive tended toward lowkey despising suburban karens making a fuss about it.
It would suck ass if observation or data caused me to start thinking that noise pollution is importantly antisocial.
Sometimes I just hate evidence and would prefer to calculate my beliefs from vibes, right.
If it’s at your home instead of a factory, you don’t necessarily need to be “productive.”
One of the many problems (by no means the only or even biggest one, but an important one anyway) I noticed in Library Studies academia is the way in which the discipline’s heads are desperate to assert its relevance in what a lot people perceive to be the “post-truth” age of misinformation/”fake news” - libraries can help! They have information! We, as the custodians of that information, have a duty to citizens to help keep them informed properly and not misled by media sensationalism, rhetoric and lies! - …but at the same time, there is an absolute refusal to recognize that what qualifies as “misinformation” is an increasingly politically partisan issue, one that librarians would have to take a stance on to say anything meaningful about. Instead, there is a vast humming-and-plugging-of-ears whenever anything even slightly politically controversial comes up and a quick deferral to the usual “We need to offer coverage of both sides!” that makes librarians coming from this angle not much different from the media they criticize and offer themselves as an alternative to. This is probably because said heads of the discipline still see themselves as liberal free-speech advocates (the only political stance many of them will commit to, though if asked they might not want to acknowledge it as such, pretending it as “objectivity” instead) and partly because they are actually deeply politically divided amongst themselves in ways they don’t want to acknowledge, so they see this kind of waffling as the best compromise. And that’s how you get public libraries offering large displays of trans-inclusive materials during pride month while also welcoming known TERFs as speakers at events and ignoring public protests against hosting them. So the actual “relevance in the post-truth age” part is largely bullshit.
…actually, come to think of it, the shorter summary of all this is that this is all part of a bigger problem with Library Studies in general, which is to say that it’s a marketing gimmick and nothing more cast out to the public by an institution deeply afraid of being left behind in a political world whose interests are increasingly at odds with the kinds of values libraries used to represent.
It seems like a legitimately hard problem to fix.
You can’t be partisan, both because you need to serve the whole public and because objectivity actually is an important virtue to strive for. A public library can’t function properly if everyone correctly sees it as an appendage of a certain political platform.
But on the other hand, one “side” really is absolutely full of it on every level. Simply refusing to lie qualifies as left-wing activism on trans issues, on global warming, on vaccination, on electoral integrity, on the law, on history, on evolution, and on all sorts of other things.
So you can’t do your job without being partisan, but once you’re partisan you’ll probably lose the public’s trust and become useless and get defunded. I have no idea what you’re supposed to do in a situation like that.
I always get a kind of… reality shock, you could say, from things like this. Because most of the discussion of racism I see is about stuff like a fan artist drawing a dark-skinned character with not-dark-enough skin.
And then I take a look at the real world and I see people entrusted by society with the power to destroy lives, blatantly using that power to punish anyone who dares to be born the wrong ethnicity.
everyone talks about choking on big dicks but no one appreciates the small dicks you can fit in your mouth at once balls and all like a fun size snickers
Anonymous asked:
you said that religion is actions and relations, not beliefs- would you be willing to elaborate and/or point to some reading? or like at least defining what "beliefs" means here?
sure. now i'm sure there's some much more recent scholarship on this but everything i think of this is fundamentally drawing on/extrapolating on the german ideology and gramsci's work--but the gist of it is that there is no (let us take an example) 'islam' that exists independent of its practicioners. this is a materialist (as opposed to idealist) stance on religion (& ideology more generally).
so what this means is that--sure, everything that comes under the umbrella of 'islam' does in fact share a few core concepts (the quran, the indivisbility of god, mohammad as a prophet)--but that attempts to make any sweeping generalized statement about the ideological content of islam are bound to fail because ultimately the islam of the iranian state apparatus & the islam of the taliban & the islam of muslim feminists in indonesia & the islam of the PLO & the islam of liberal arab-americans are all fundamentally different ideologically because they are shaped not by some eternal essence of islam but by the social circumstances and communities within which each of these groups is practing.
(want to be super clear that i am just using islam as an example here, the same can be applied to any religion in any place--christianity, for example, is not uniquely genocidal & colonial due to some inherent ideological content, which is why going through the bible to point out violence & slavery and being like 'see, this is what's wrong with christianity' is a futile exercise--christianity has been the religion of a genocidal & colonial ruling class across much of the globe, and so that practice of it of course takes on that character)
hence, for example, there's absolutely no contradiction between, say, the judaism of diaspora reform jews & that of the israeli state--the stark difference makes sense when you realize that they are not both informed ideologically by some inherent essence of judaism but by the historical context of centuries of persecution vs. decades of genocidal state building. no religion has an innate inextricable character--all character that a religion has is given to it when it becomes a social fact, and comes from the people who practice it and their material and power relations.
the idealist view of religion is v. v. popular and leads to a lot of putting the cart before the horse and other nonsensical positions and interpretations of history, even from people who are otherwise 'leftists'. a major one is the idea that the 'protestant work ethic' is somehow responsible for capitalism, as if it did not develop concurrently with the epoch of primitive accumulation, as if it was not informed and conditioned by the development of capitalism itself! or similarly, the idea that christianity is somehow responsible for colonialism rather than an instrument of it--that the kingdoms of europe said 'well, god has willed us to go and do some colonizing' and sent off the conquistadors rather than being in a material position to economically exploit other peoples & developing a rationalization within the frameworks available to them for why doing so was morally permissible
The second post doesn’t follow from the first. Even if an ideology has no Platonic form, people can still do things because of the specific version of the ideology they believe in, even when they don’t benefit from it. This reminds me of that post that was fumbling around for why judges make rulings, and through process of elimination stumbled into the idea that a lot of judges want to make rulings, even without a benefit to the judge.
The most illustrative story she shared, though, was about a 10-year-girl in Delaware who picked up her book when at the library with her mother. Her mother let her check the book out, and when they came home, she showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said, “This is me.” She was being abused by her father, and it was the first time she’d spoken about it.
The father was convicted, and the judge said, “There were heroes in this case. One was the child, and the other was the book.” Harris wrote in to add that the mother was also a hero in this story, for listening to her daughter, and that the librarian who ordered the book and kept it on open shelves also made this possible.
europeans have types of racism i didn't even know existed
you can drive for two hours in europe and pass through 17 different types of racism
You can read the notes on this post and pass through 17 different types of racism.
Looking at the past 10 years of box office Top 10s, it’s far faster to note which movies aren’t based on a pre-existing property: Frozen, Gravity, Inside Out, Zootopia, The Secret Life of Pets, Sing, Onward and Tenet. That's it. Eight movies out of 100. Two of them even let you see a person.
“When you get involved in the startup world,” he says, “you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs with fantastic ideas, and, over time, you watch them get pushed by V.C.s to take too much money, and make bad choices, and grow as fast as possible. And then they blow up. And, eventually, you start to realize: no matter what happens, the V.C.s still end up rich.”
"fanfiction isn't meant to be serious work, it's just silly escapism" "fanfiction can't be written like a novel" "fanfiction doesn't need literary qualities-- it's not meant to have them"
SKILL ISSUE.
“Spiritual eugenics”
“Spiritual eugenics”
There are people on Tumblr right now who think there’s a serious issue with “spiritual eugenics”
Anonymous asked:
i find kazemaru being in this poll so funny, he's probably the most loved character of the inazuma eleven franchise with TONS of fan content. he appears in every season/games (from OG to ares&orion) and his trivia section in the wiki is huge. he played as a defender midfielder AND as forward, he won a lot of contests (best male character, valentine day contest etc) being either 1st or in the top 3,has a personal character song by his VA and is overall loved dearly by the fans (plus all the character development he got and amount of screentime). he's not obscure at all to me and i could go on for ages lmao
Well you see all of you said is dependent on people being in the fandom of (or even just knowing of) inazuma eleven. Which I, and ~91% of my followers have not.
Still, the “most obscure” would probably be someone who appeared once in an Inazuma Eleven drama CD.
(Does Inazuma Eleven get drama CDs? I don’t actually know what those are. I just know there’s sometimes obscure anime trivia that’s sourced to a drama CD only released in Japan.)