Happy Birthday Keith!

Coincidentally, it’s also MY birthday today :)

In celebration, I’d like to finally share the absolute monster of a VLD fic that I’ve been working on for so long. I’m at almost a 100,000 words and this saga, this epic, this absolutely tower of a project is still a WIP, but y’all? I’m proud of this thing and I’d love for you to take a read.   

“Why now?” I hear you say. “It is… 16 chapters in?? But it is not yet done! It is incomplete! You don’t seem to know when it will end, either. This seems really awkward.”

Friends, I’m posting this today because I’m a troglodyte who doesn’t know anything about how Tumblr works, and it’s kind of insane that I don’t know how tumblr works, so I flopped around on my keyboard to finally make the blog post go. It is awkward.

But also fuck it. It’s my birthday!

BEHOLD

VARIOUS STORMS by MsVox

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21369121/chapters/50901082

Have you been craving something that re-imagines the entire story of Voltron through a Sheith-y perspective? Do you want tons of pre-Kerberos backstory that shows how Keith and Shiro cross paths, become friends, and then save the universe? Do you want all the missing scenes that should have been in canon? Do you want to learn facts about aviation and space and stuff? 

Get some Sheith back in your lives, y’all.

Part 17 is coming soon! More details & stuff below.

…reblogging myself because HEY IT’S 💜🤍🖤 ACE WEEK 🖤🤍💜

And my Keith is a 100% certified demisexual/grey-ace disaster

Come read about his struggles, y’all.

PART 17 IS UP

New stuff here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21369121/chapters/107763843 Whole fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21369121/chapters/50901082

Friends, this thing is officially 100,000+ words now. Holy crap!

Art by Ami Thompson

Sheith Sheith Sheith again. Tender moment #love #fanart #drawing #sheith #voltron I hope you like it. I kinda miss them

Finished sheith commission (a sort of continuation of my Scruffy unshaved Shiro) !

Currently thinking about how Susanna Clarke took 10 years to write Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell while working an editing job and how she just would try to wake up early every day and write what she could and she just would write the scenes that would come to her and stitch it together later because if she tried to make it coherent it would be too big of a task. Like that's fucking inspirational, that's perservation, that's plain hard work and she FINISHED. Like if she can push through and write an incredible novel that made NYT bestseller list and all that then any of us potentially could. It's harder to do it but she did it and there is no reason not to keep trying. She tried to wake up early every day and sometimes she couldn't because she was too tired but the important thing is even when that happened she didn't stop trying to wake up early the next day. like that's fucking iconic. Also can I say she published a handful of short stories in before Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell (2005), her book of short stories (2006), and also Piranesi (2020) and like she takes so long but she persists and each of the three are some of the most creative things I've ever read in myself like she has chronic fatigue she is 63 she will never ever be able to match the output of the prolific household name writers out there and she's also had failures but like my god she just chips away at things and the time she spends absolutely shows in how lovingly crafted each and every one of her published works is. I am so impressed with her.

MOUSE YAOI REAL

So sorry to keep twitter posting but this had me dead

What the fuck is this??????????

Folks: you CANNOT censor trigger tags. When you block a tag, it doesn't block other "spellings" of it. Writing it as "r@pe" or "r4p3" means that someone who has "tw rape" as a blocked tag will still see that post because you didn't wanna say the word rape. You are hurting people. Do not censor words, because people do not have those filtered out.

And honestly if you can't even write the word rape to protect other people then you probably aren't old/mature enough to be on this website.

It’s so fucking infuriatingly frustrating that so many of ao3′s userbase is so adamant that ao3 is nonprofit even though it’s owned by a corporation so that shit is a fucking lie in of itself, like. They invest in stocks and constantly people try and push this stupid as fuck idea that there’s no ads!! :)) it’s free!! when it’s been in beta for literal fucking years with one of the worst filtration and blocking systems I’ve seen to date and rampant disgusting nsfw that’s unregulated and crops up to previews for themes anyways so why do we constantly have to have mile long posts defending such a fundamentally bad website from it’s core instead of actually thinking critically for once I fucking hate all of you.

Normally I ignore this stuff, but the insinuation that AO3 is secretly some manipulative scheme to enrich people is just blatantly false.

Yeah because it is. Look up the Organization for Transformative Works in the IRS database of tax exempt organizations, or GuideStar’s non-profit report listing. EIN 38-3765024, BRIDGE Number 5584273916.

Let’s check out their Form 990 and see how much they paid their staffers:

And it’s a whooping $0.00.

Oh heaven forbid. It’s pretty standard for any moderately-sized nonprofit to make conservative investments, so that their reserves do more than simply accrue interest in a bank account. Nobody is taking a vacation to Comoros on that money.

“Once nonprofits get larger, however, some are able to start thinking for the future. Taking money and putting it toward longer-term goals like capital spending or a permanent endowment requires prudent investment. In order to take initial seed money and grow it into a substantial nest egg for use toward those longer-term charitable purposes, nonprofits are allowed to invest in stocks, bonds, funds, and other typical investments.”

https://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/can-a-nonprofit-organization-invest-in-stock.aspx

Yes, AO3 is part of the Organization for Transformative Works, which is indeed incorporated. Again, pretty standard for a charity. Let’s review the OTW’s Certificate of Incorporation:

Finally… who cares? Gmail was in beta for five years, and that was with all the resources of Google behind it and 100 million people already using it.

“the label is just a way for Google to signal users that they’re still tweaking the e-mail service and adding new features”

Same thing for AO3. The reason AO3 is in beta is because it doesn’t have a finalized codebase and it’s too unstable to make an API out of. They could put out a post tomorrow saying ‘we’re out of beta’ and nobody would bat an eye. The website isn’t perfect, but it’s more than functional. And yes, there are a lot of features that can’t be added without overtaxing the existing hardware resources, so why not try a GreasyFork userscript?

tl;dr - I have to write this every year, but AO3 is still not a scam. It is a non-profit. None of the staffers even get paid. It exists solely for a charitable purpose, a purpose which has been acknowledged and validated by the Internal Revenue Service.

I’m sorry but OP’s “one of the worst filtration and blocking systems“ has me in stitches as if the tagging system on Ao3 wasn’t the envy of libraries, school and universities WORLD-WIDE just because OP has to select the tags to exclude THEMSELF oh no, the horror

For those who didn’t know:

Most non-profits in the US are corporations. 501©3 corporations are non-profits for religious, charitable or educational purposes. That’s what the OTW is; they created and run AO3, along with several other projects. 

AO3 is the core of OTW and the reason it exists. They didn’t decide on a swarm of projects and bring them together under the OTW umbrella; they said “let’s make an archive! …and what else do we need for that?” (Legal advocacy team to address copyright challenges for fanworks; Open Doors to preserve at-risk archives; academic journal to analyze and celebrate the cultural value of fanworks, a wiki for a different focus of the same subjects, etc.)

501©4 corporations are nonprofit tax-exempt social welfare groups; their requirements are different. 

There are other kinds of nonprofit orgs, but those are the most common and well-known.

501©3 orgs don’t need to be corporations. WSFS, the group that runs Worldcon, is an “unincorporated literary society.” And some churches don’t incorporate. But mostly: in order to get the tax-exempt status, a group is strongly encouraged to incorporate, that is, to make a corporation, and the IRS is not happy with loose affiliations of people with limited record-keeping claiming nonprofit status. 

And most nonprofits, when they get past a certain size (and by size I mean money), invest in stocks or something like it. Right now, OTW hasn’t invested: all their income comes from donation drives.

That means they can’t hire anyone long-term, because they can’t be sure that next drive will have enough money to pay anyone. And if they’re saving money for big new upgrades - like, new server setup that might cost half a million dollars and take several years to arrange - in the meantime, their money is sitting in a bank doing nothing. It could be invested and growing, and after they spend the big bundle, they’d have something left over. 

Some stocks are risky, so they’re not rushing to invest in whatever looks good right now. But long-term investments mean stability, mean they can plan for future expenses other than “I hope we get X dollars next donation drive.”  

And of course, as a nonprofit, their financial records are public. 

RB for the largest sample size this site has ever seen

PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate

Happy Disability Pride Month!

For those of you who don't know, July is Disability Pride Month.

July marks the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The picture included here is the visually safe and inclusive version of the Disability Pride Flag, designed by Ann Magill, as the original wasn't safe for those that suffer from migraines and visually triggered seizures. The color changes made from the original design also makes it more accessible to those with color blindness.

From the Disability Pride Flag section of the Disability Pride Month Wikipedia Page:

We need to go back to using sailing ships full time like immediately. Yes it would take longer to get places but the Aesthetic is unmatched

Like there is nothing sexier hthan this

Can’t wait for OP to get scurvy

Are you under the impression that the ships themselves are what caused scurvy

Once again. Do you think this is the fault of the ships themselves

I swear, even if you haven't seen FMA, I think you might appreciate the fucking talent! 🤩

The hotdogs taped together with what looks like scotch tape really makes this for me

Wild Dogs see a Domesticated Dog

African wild dogs are one of my favorite animals. Those huge round circle ears and tricolored coats. I love you African wild dogs

HEY. HEY. HOW DID YOU GET OUT??? HEY-