The bats have left the bell tower
the comfort this cast gives me is unmatched
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Shizun, would you still love me if I was a wyrm?
(Yes. Absolutely. Are you kidding?? So cool!!!)
My piece for the Bingqiu Reverse Minibang, featuring a dragon transformation for Binghe!
<3
Colorado used to be the Weed State. It used to be the only place in America you could get weed, and everyone wanted a piece of the Colarado Pie. But then weed got legalized everywhere. Now Colorado's only claims to fame are its Perfect Squareness and the fact that South Park takes place there, both fates that I would not wish upon my worst enemy
blucifer erasure
also, hot take, but speaking as someone who has volunteered to work on big projects tackling difficult issues out of community love in the past, I am just. is the otw probably a really toxic place to volunteer and work right now? Sure is, probably! Is public pressure that doesn't come with an influx of new people volunteering to do the messy work of figuring out what a better policy is, how to create anti harassment safeguards, and otherwise fixing the problem actually useful? Fuck no it is definitely not!
like I will be 1000% honest, I have in fact been asked personally to volunteer to help a community transition on a much smaller scale to fix problems of this magnitude to encourage a much smaller scale organization to work and perform a community service. and I took that job with a strong sense of "ye gods this is going to suck and I'm going to piss people off by doing things wildly imperfectly, but if I don't help provide my work it might not get done because this is fucking hard and no one is paying."
and I did it and I stopped as quickly as humanly possible. now that shit is someone else's volunteer problem and I'm delighted, because let us be real I'm a disabled middle aged lady with a day job and I don't have full time professional effort to dedicate to stuff I do in my spare time for free. that's one of the fun things about disability actually, it constricts the total store of focused labor hours available to me to put in, especially on landmine topics like extending the scope of my archiving projects to create a farsighted anti harassment policy that can't be weaponized.
so like. the work needs doing. anything anyone does is going to be imperfect and problematic and bad, because it is being done on an almost purely volunteer basis by people who are for whatever reason willing to donate high level professional skills and labor for free and don't need to do stuff for actual money and support instead. like sure the budget is enormous for servers but none of that goes to labor.
Outrage is going to do jack shit unless people volunteer to roll up their sleeves and start doing the work to donate a better policy, or better management. This shit is fucking difficult, exhausting, and impossible to do without pissing people off. I am damn sure not getting involved right now, and that's why I have not been commenting. Public pressure is not going to do jack shit if it didn't come with support.
If this is an issue that is important to you, you have to back up your outrage with resources. Since the AO3 does not exchange money for labor, that means showing up to offer to help build something different. as I said, I am a middle aged disabled lady who finds fandom and archive repositories to be important and helpful and I don't have any labor left to donate, so I have been reserving comment on complaint. If this is a thing that matters to you, congratulations! Public pressure is only useful insofar as it can be used to make the org let you help. It's up to you to actually help.
I tried all that and the org publicly accused me of felonies over it this week.
I don't even go here. I just use this account to look at gifs. I don't want to shit on people still in the org who are trying to reform it. But trying to use the toxic work environment of the OTW to pressure people to JOIN UP makes me want to puke. "This is a terrible working environment run by people who will viciously retaliate if you're critical of them! Jump in yourself and find out! You owe it to fandom!"
You don't have to stick your hand in the meat grinder to confirm that it is in fact a machine for grinding meat. You can just look at the hamburger coming out the end.
Y'all do what you need to do, but do not tell other people they're failing for not throwing themselves into a toxic system to try to save it.
Chapters:
1/5
Fandom:
Game of Thrones (TV), A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Rating:
Explicit
Warnings:
No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships:
Jaime Lannister/Robb Stark, Jaime Lannister & Tyrion Lannister, Tyrion Lannister & Robb Stark, Jaime Lannister & Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister/Original Female Character(s), Jon Snow & Robb Stark
Characters:
Robb Stark, Jaime Lannister, Tyrion Lannister, Catelyn Stark, Ned Stark, Jon Snow, Tywin Lannister, Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags:
Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soul Bond, Robb Stark Lives, References to Past Jaime/Cersei, The Old Gods (A Song of Ice and Fire), Visions, references to canon-typical violence and rape, the Lannisters and Starks solve each other’s problems rather than cause them, eventually, Plotty, Politics, the Northern gods are real and they are BUSY
Summary:
f the gods were going to take him away from Cersei and everything he’d known, bind him to a boy half his age, Jaime almost would have preferred it if Robb Stark had been a fool, had been as dull and self-righteous as his father. Seven hells, he could at least have been ugly.
not to be pedantic but it annoys me so much when people talk abt how chatgpt is "lying" or "making things up". or esp when people say it "refuses to admit" to lying. like girl that is a toaster oven
star-the-honeybun asked:
what... should we do about this?! should we just set Ao3 down, find a way to choke down such fucking feelings that we should have been used to by now, and go use squidgeworld or somethin until it too goes down that route or whatever? there isn't any hope, is there? how do we cope with this?!
pearwaldorf answered:
I mean this in the most loving way possible and I’m not picking on you specifically, to be clear. The easiest way to make something hopeless or inevitable is to treat it as a foregone conclusion.
There is a Jewish precept called tikkun olam. Roughly translated it means “world repair”, which modern Jews have taken to mean an obligation to practice tzedakah (justice/righteousness) and participate in efforts to make the world better. I’m not Jewish, but it is a thing I strongly believe in.
Nowhere in these teachings is stuff about whether or not it will change things. Of course it is a hope you will, but none of that is guaranteed. There are things you do not because you think you will succeed, but because it is the right thing.
You’re not wrong that trying to hold the OTW Board accountable is difficult. It is indeed hard to get it through people’s heads that this organization that has done so much for fandom is also deeply dysfunctional in a way that is probably not reformable, especially in a climate where people are prone to “everything has to be entirely good/bad” and other such black and white thinking.
If we see something is wrong and we don’t speak out, what does that say to azarias and other OTW volunteers? That their abuse and traumatization is an acceptable price to pay for keeping AO3/OTW running? That we are willing to sacrifice our fellow fans’ humanity on the altar of the non-profit industrialization complex? (And make no mistake, a non-profit is capable of just as much abuse as any money-making business.)
I don’t have a next steps Powerpoint or anything, but I think a reasonable action to take is to contact OTW and express your displeasure at how things have been handled. (I think Communications is probably the most appropriate dropdown, but if anybody has a better suggestion please let me know.)
Be polite, and list your affiliations with AO3/OTW if you have any (member/former member/donor, AO3 user, volunteer/former volunteer, etc). Make clear (if) you are part of the community this organization claims to represent.
Demand the resignation of the Legal Committee and the Board of Directors. Insist upon the creation of a new policy to protect volunteers from this sort of abuse and endangerment and a timeline for when it will be developed and implemented.
I don’t know what kind of response you’ll get, but I would not be surprised if it’s extremely generic.
I anticipate there will be more opportunities to make your opinion known in the future. This is an issue that should not be swept aside.
