diversity win! those two men watching you suffer endless torment are dating!

genuinely one of my favourite details about Bram Stokers Dracula that isn't really transferred to the pop culture is that vampires have irridescent eyes, they appear brown at a glance, however when light is reflected on them they seem to go red!

another thing that pop culture latched onto is this idea that you might use a wreath of garlic bulbs to ward off a vampire, however, in the book there is a popular use of garlic blossoms rather than the bulbs. i think these are a lot prettier and way more versatile for stylisation! you could have a garlic flower crown.

also like the cowboy part can we please stop omitting the fact that there is a real ass cowboy in Bram Stokers Dracula and hes from real ass Texas and he has a fucking gun and he tries to fucking shoot Dracula

[ID:

We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee by Redbone plays in the background of the Tik Tok.

White text starts at the top of the screen, displaying information. “The song you are hearing was not allowed to be played on U.S radio stations in 1970’s”.

The dancer makes hoops go from Eagle to Earth form.

“It created by a popular Native American band called Redbone and it hit number 1 charts all over Europe.”

“The song raised awareness about what happened at Wounded Knee”

They finish the Earth form, centering themself. “Let’s get it trending”.

Screen switches to the Tik Toker’s name and username, James Jones / @notoriouscree

END]

No one’s reblogged this video with versions of the whole song yet, so here’s a spotify link and the youtube video.

people will be like “fanfiction writers!!! are everything”

and then turn around and say a website that doesnt pay the writers they make their traction and money off of is a saint that would do no wrong.

im just saying. ao3 gets their money

those writers dont. lmao.

so whyre you making it about the writers when they could post pretty much anywhere huh? 😂 and youre only paying a website.

u ever consider they do it this way on purpose so the only people making money on their poorly designed website are the owners

Have YOU ever considered it’s a volunteer-run website that’s a nonprofit and is incredibly transparent about where its money goes?

Have you ever learned, like, a SINGLE THING about the legality of fanfiction?

Or are you just being an asshole?

“poorly designed”

You mean that ultra-lean, fast-loading site with maybe the world’s best data sorting and tagging that is open source so you can set up your own archive if you wanna try to run something that big without ever asking for money or if you wanna try to make it prettier or something?

That is free to host fiction on as well as free to read fiction on and is a site with an incredible amount of traffic that runs exactly zero ads aside from occasional funding drives?

As a person with a law degree, can I just tell you how vitally fought and precariously won the ability to even HAVE Ao3 is!? And how a lot of that balance rides on it being a non profit that no one makes money off of? And how very much Ao3 does with how little $$$? (To the point where I mentioned the site traffic to a web developer friend and he honestly couldn't see how the site could even exist because in his world to make it would cost so much and require so much work that it blew his mind that Ao3 even existed with the functionality, traffic, and utter lack of budget compared to what he usually worked with!)

Some days you kids today make your dearest rum aunty wanna beat her head against the wall. I swear to dog.

Fanfiction has to be free to survive.

It’s not a matter of “Oh, without that dastardly AO3, fanfic authors would be free to make money off of other people’s intellectual property″ and framing it that way is disingenuous.

The way copyright law and Fair Use work right now - the way legal precedent stands in the US, at this time - the only thing stopping Disney from swooping in and suing someone for writing Steve/Bucky fanfiction is that nobody is making any money off of it.

Is it fair that it works like that? Possibly not, but that’s not actually the argument at hand! That’s the way that copyright law works right now. And before AO3, anyone who wrote or hosted fanfic online was in danger of randomly getting a C&D one day - and most people don’t have the money or resources to fight that.

It happened. A lot.

And it wasn’t just porn! I know the anti-AO3 people like to frame it that way, but it has also happened to stories without any smut at all, just because the person or company holding the IP felt like it.

Nobody is making money on the site. Not the people who founded it, not the people who coded it, not the people who wrangle tags for it. Notice that there's not a SINGLE add on the site. Money isn't being made every time someone loads a page or hits the "next" button, unlike many other sites out there. There's no fee to read, let alone a tiered structure to entice you to hand over a higher amount of money per month. If AO3 wanted to make money... well, then it would be shut down because the only reason it *legally* gets to exist is because nobody is profiting from it on any level. But if that wasn't the case and AO3 really wanted to make money, there's so many better ways they could do so than by a completely-option donation request a couple times a year?

I don't know how you could spend any time at all in fandom and not know these things about AO3. Or miss the fact that they show EXACTLY where every dollar that comes in from their fundraisers goes to.

Like, do you even GO here??

You could run the AO3 frontend off a couple of shitty Thinkcentres networked together for redundancy and haproxy in front of all of it. The site is extraordinarily light and the biggest challenge is load balancing it.  

AO3′s backend is... 

Listen. I work for a $600 million a year company serving DNS and domain names to literally everyone who isn’t shopping at GoDaddy. I help run the most successful MVNO in the US. I don’t want to say I wouldn’t even know where to start to build AO3, but I know exactly where I would stop. And that’s at the tags. Everything else, sure, I could build in a week. DBs, backups, a fuck ton of caching, monitoring and alerting. Give me another couple of weeks and I’d build some basic self healing so I dont have to get up in the night when something as big as AO3 breaks. 

The fucking moment you tell me you want me to index hundreds of millions of tags, I’m fucking out. We do something similar with domain name recommendations and let me tell you that fucking POS system breaks monthly and it is a goddamn nightmare to fix. You would have to pay me, a single person, what AO3 asks for its entire goddamn operation every year. As far as I know their tech people consist of a sysadmin, a DBA and a few front end folk, all of whom are volunteers. 

Which means that $130,000 is all being spent on tech. The fact that that number is below seven figures means they are doing it with all open-source software, zero support contracts and probably hardware that fell off the back of a Supermicro van. And no, they’re not in The Cloud because this shit would cost them an arm and a leg there. I checked. Indexing hundred of millions of tag fuckarightouttahere.

AO3 runs on blood, sweat, tears and some kind of Christmas miracle. So yeah, OP, go cry a fucking river. You’ll only fuel them. 

Insert normal disclaimer about personal opinions and not an official comment :).

The systems team has 5 members right now, we all do different things. I joined the org on the 12th of Jan 2011 as a systems person. In 2013 I became the systems technical lead and became  a core contributor to the code shortly after. I was one of the people on the stage when we collected the hugo on everyone's behalf. My paying job is as the technical lead in a systems group which is responsible for scientific compute at a life science charity ( we are responsible for about 40,000 cores of compute and about 40PB of data).

We take the approach that as we have no paid staff, (either programmers or systems people) that computers cost less than people. And as it takes months to have new hardware delivered we try to have excess capacity both for sudden spikes in load and because hardware does go wrong.

The machines are all supermicro, they are cheap and mostly work :).

The firewalls are a pair of SYS-5018D-FN4T's ( pfsense with ha ) and an older pair that is still the default route out.

We have 4 nginx machines of the same hardware doing full page caching, html optimisation, priority queuing and sending load to the back-end.

We have another pair of SYS-5018D-FN4T's as email servers, on a normal day we send over 1.1 million emails a day.

On the backend for elasticsearch we have a cluster of 5 AS-2113S-WTRT with Eypc 7702P and 512GB of ram and P4610 NVMe

We have a single redis system, SYS-1019P-WTR , Xeon Gold 6244 CPU @ 3.60GHz.

Our mysql servers are fairly large, we have 3 SYS-6019U-TN4R4T each with 2 Xeon Gold 6148 and 1.5TB of RAM, with 4TB of NVMe. They run a percona xtradb cluster with maxscale in front of it. We do have support for mysql as it is the canonical source of all our data and if we had an issue with mysql then it would be a real issue, while various members of systems have experience of mysql, having support for this reduces the stress for all the systems team. Today our mysql cluster sits at about 23,000 queries a second with an average response time of 1 ms.

Actually generating web pages we have machines up to 9 years old ( a machine which was the first database server we bought ) to machines specifically bought to be large workhorse web application servers ( dual processor EPYC 7501 ). We have 13 machines some of which do background work, some of which only handle bots or generate the downloads.

When we buy machines we generally fill them up with as much RAM that is sensible ( 64GB DIMMS right now ) and use the extra as memcached, we currently have about 2.3TB of memcached, doing this also means we have more flexibility if we need to move servers around.

A thought about tagging, when we had the issue last year we redeployed machines which had been database servers in the past and had been redeployed as application servers and that gave us more capacity. We spent quite a lot of time looking into it and made both code changes and other systems changes, and people from elastic reached out to us and gave us advice ( thanks for that :) ).

We ended up working out that the main issue we had was that bookmark searching could eat all of our search capacity so we did some work behind the scenes to ensure that those requests went into a separate queue. That queue was limited to allow only a few of those searched to run at once. Once we did that the cpu load on the elasticsearch which had been hitting 100% started topping out at about 70%.

Eventually the new servers we bought ( 5 servers for under $60k ) were delivered, and the machines which had been redeployed as elastic search machines went back to being application servers and the machines that had been the really old elastic search servers were redeployed as new firewalls or configured as application servers. And now the load on our elasticsearch cluster now rarely goes above 7%.

We also have xen vm servers running the kind of services you would expect: icinga, ansible, gitlab, a complete staging site with clusters of mysql servers and elasticsearch etc, mysql secondaries, fanlore.org :)

We are now looking at how much power budget we have left in our two racks and being a European who expects 30Amps to be drawable on a 30Amp circuit rather than 24 we are probably going to decommission that 9 year old machine and 5 others that are more than 6 years old and get some low power machines which can do the background work and the rendering of downloads etc. Then we can see how much power budget we have left and we can order the new database servers.

Last year we spent about $204k on the Archive directly and total expenditure of $311k most of that either directly or indirectly related. We have budgeted for more this year as our traffic continues to rise.

If environmental activists, both soft and hard line, had any courage, they would promote an effort to discourage any tourism to Idaho. This action is insane.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

While sometimes their population does need to be controlled, 90% is over the top, unnecessary, and cruel. Wolves are a keystone species and important to the environment. They control the population of deer and keep the herds healthy by hunting the sick, weak, and elderly. Moreover, they keep herds moving, which helps ensure the new growth of local flora that provides resources and environments to other animals. If the wolves are really a problem, there are definitely better ways to handle it.

And sign the petition at:

http://chng.it/hKgDG2JmH7

Please please reblog this I live in rural Idaho and the wolves are massively important in maintaining the healthy ecosystem out here! The legislation is not listening to biologists nor farmers who understand the importance of keystone species like wolves!

"He wants us to know he's too big to slurp" did not get the laughter it deserved

@pangur-and-grim

soon may the wellerman come, your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb

Growing Older As Me: Dave. Originally posted by My Genderation on Youtube.

Dave, a 51 year-old trans man, sitting with his partner Donna in their backyard. Excerpts from their interviews.

oh you missed the best part

her twitter is a goldmine

Why am I just finding out that Kamala's father basically disowned her ddfhhddh

FOR BEING A COP LMAOOO

Good for him

https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a28259825/who-is-donald-harris-kamala-harris-father/

His writings on racial capitalism and the Black internal colony are fantastic.

He’s a Marxist economist - close friends (as was Harris’ mother - the physician and researcher) with Cedric Robinson - one of the 20thr century’s greatest Black political economists.

Where did she go wrong??

I think she was mostly raised by her mother

Once when I was really, really little (like, toddler age) my mom was looking around for a daycare for me bc both her and my dad worked most of the day. I went to a few different ones, and one day my mom asks me which one I want to go to.

For context, we live in a primarily poor community with a large population of Black folks. I was the only kid in this local daycare that was white. So when my mom asked me which daycare I wanted to go to, little toddler me went “I WANT TO GO TO THE ONE WITH ALL THE BROWN KIDS!” And I honestly don’t think my mom has ever laughed as hard as she did that day

@dr-sappho this is the video I was talking about

We are not enemies. *do NOT repost to other blogs or websites*

!!!

Webcomics w/ Black Leads

I was wondering how many webcomics there were out there with black protagonists (for my own reference). Then I figured plenty of other folks would love to see a list. So heeeeere we go! (Please reblog and add more!) 

AGENTS OF THE REALM by Mildred Louis

NIBI by Gyimah Gariba

DEMON STREET by Aliza Layne

VIBE by Dan Ciurczak

BALDERDASH by Victoria Goog

STAR TRIP by Gisele Jobateh

SCHOOL SPIRIT (FRESH ROMANCE) by Kate Leth & Arielle Jovellanos

ALL OUR CUTS AND BRUISES by My Sjögren Blücher

STEVE’S STORY (KHAOS KOMICS) by Tab Kimpton

DEMON HUNTER KAIN by Burrell Gill Jr.

SAFE HAVENS by Bill Holbrook

THE SUBSTITUTES by Myisha Haynes

VALOROUS TALES by Dashawn Mahone

M.F.K. by Nilah Magruder

THE IMMORTAL NADIA GREENE by Jamal Campbell

PRINCESS LOVE PON by Shauna J. Grant

AS THE CROW FLIES by Melanie Gillman

SHADOWEYES by Sophie Campbell

CAN’T LOOK BACK by Sophie Campbell

STREETCROWS by Dieselhands

ORDER OF THE STICK by Rich Burlew

DOLLHOUSE by Ray Nadine

BASEMENT DWELLERS by Leland Goodman

SNAKES AND LADDERS by BriAnna Haley

ARCHIVAL QUALITY by Ivy and Steenz

NAMESAKE by Isabelle Melançon and Megan Lavey-Heaton

MAHOU JOSEI CHIMAKA by KaiJu

MISSING MONDAY by Elle Skinner

CRASH AND BURN by Finnaeus

OLYMPUS OVERDRIVE by Milky and JoJo

TODD ALLISON & THE PETUNIA VIOLET by Nozmo

GLOOMVERSE by L.O.P.

PRETTY HEART BOUQUET by E Hetrick Jackson

RANDOM BATTLES by J.D. Benefield

BAJO-MANO by Talula Bertram

FASCIST FRIENDS by Erin Lux

Mosscreek Divide by Jake Myler

GALAXYS FOR HIRE by Shawn DePasquale, Sherard Jackson, Whitney Cook

OUTGROUP by Maddie Chaffer

MONSTER LANDS by James Nelson

BOUNCE by Chuck Collins

SEVEN by Davis Ketterer

RUTH & ANNABEL RUIN EVERYTHING by Chelsea McAlarney

Deak Sledge by Mike Williams

DICEBOX by Jenn Manley Lee

ENDLING by Jonathan Larsen and Cecilia Latella

LOVE! LOVE! FIGHTING! by Sharean Morishita

RESCUE ME by Sharean Morishita

THE WYVERNS by Dragon Bros Media

GODSLAVE by Meaghan Carter

ERSTWHILE by Various Creators

ROCK AND RIOT by  Chelsey Furedi

SCARFS by Mike Kirby

ANIMOSITY SONATA by Olivia Smith

KAMIKAZE by Alan Tupper, Carrie Tupper, Havana Nguyen

Reblogging again for the extended list!

I want to help update this list. 

Give me a holler about more Black-character-led (preferably created by Black/African-American/African diaspora creators)

Brother Bear Appreciation Week

LET ME TELL YOU WHY THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT, UNDERRATED DISNEY FILMS OF ALL TIME OKAY:

1. It teaches kids that we should never judge others by their appearance or what we’ve seen on the surface.

2. It teaches kids that despite if we’ve been taught to be afraid of or hate something or someone that looks/acts differently than us, we should learn and try to understand them before we judge them.

3. It teaches that two sides that may hate each other don’t always have to stay that way - they can learn and grown from each other’s mistakes.

4. It teaches that hatred is not always the answer; to listen, to step back, and see through someone else’s eyes. It teaches patience, understanding, and wisdom.

5. IT TEACHES CHILDREN THAT PEOPLE CAN BE FORGIVEN AND DO BETTER.

6. It teaches children that even if you make a mistake, you can learn and grow from it like Kenai.

Seriously I just love this movie to pieces it is so important to me and I wish more people knew/watched it because wtf it’s AMAZING.

NOT TO MENTION THE ENTIRE CAST IS POC AND CULTURE WISE IT IS RESPECTFUL AND IT IS JUST A GREAT MOVIE OKAY

And… it’s the second Disney movie with a Phil Collins soundtrack. Everyone loves Tarzan, no one appreciates Brother Bear.

Brother bear and brother bear two made my tiny child self so happy like I played it until the dvd broke it was and will always be my favorite movie

So there’s this huge dudebro in my class, who, yesterday, sat next to me. And I’m sitting there sweating because like… I’m wearing my shirt with the lesbian flag on it, and he’s the most popular jock in school, and always has this look on his face that say ‘I can and will kill you’. He looks me up and down, stares at me for a minute and then goes, “So. Girls in skirts and long socks, am I right?”

To which I nodded solemnly, both out of agreement, surprise and also a healthy amount of awkward fear. He nodded and went, “You get it.”

I said, “Yep.” He fistbumped me, and on went our lives.

Oh! I forgot to mention! I saw him at lunch the same day, and he ran up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, pointed at this super sweet girl who comes to GSA and asked if she’s gay. I told him he should ask her because that’s not my place and he said he would.

I thought that would be the end of it.

Except ten minutes later he came back and told me he found out (she’s bi) and that both of us have a shot. I said “You more than me.” because he’s attractive and popular. 

But this wholesome dumbass looked really confused and asked, “Because I’m tall?’

I love him oh my God what an ally