Category: Uncategorized

jirvaerka:

actualborossoldier:

obi-one-drop:

actualborossoldier:

goblintinkering:

bisexualzuko:

geoducks:

When i was like 13 was allowed to use the internet unrestricted for the first time and i spent a lot of time on Runescape. One of the people i talked to on there was this person who had much higher levels than me in every skill and had, to my perception, a seemingly overflowing amount of game resources. One day i was taking about wishing i could get gold ore to level my smithing and not having access to any and they like “here, you can have this gold that i have” and just gave me this big stack and i was like “i don’t even have anything to offer back”. They told me they didn’t need anything and just wanted to be nice. I said that they didn’t have to and what they told me honestly has stuck with me since, they said “life’s too short to spend it being mean to people” and like it’s such a simple thing to say but combined with their actions and the weight they bore to me at the time was hugely influential on my outlook on life and the way i treat others. I don’t know who that person is but they changed my life that day and I’m so thankful to them.

high level MMO-ers are either the nicest people on earth or the spawn of Satan there is no in between

Runescape was a big part of my formative years for better or worse. Age twelve left me impressionable at best and the free lobster this guy gave me one day just stuck with me. We fished together for days on end and we talked about our parents and stuff. If you’re out there NinjaKirby69 I miss you buddy.

I forgot to type it up yesterday but one of my best experiences didn’t even involve me. It was when my younger sister, Runescape user cooldudetha, crashed the steel market single-handedly out of sheer boredom.

I need to know this story

So if you’re not aware, Runescape has the Grand Exchange, which is basically a global trade market controlled by supply and demand. It’s an incredible system, and deserves a lot of commendation. 

Well one day back in…I think Summer between 2010-2012? my younger sister and I had nothing to do but play Runescape in our free time. I did what all aspiring heroes do, I was happy to go out and commit mass goblin murder. My sister was more creative. At first she went to train Smithing in Al Kharid, which is this desert area with easy access to iron, coal, a player bank, and a smelter. So basically she made craploads of steel for hours on end for like a week. But then she realized she had nothing to do with the steel. She could go find a smith with an anvil and train Smithing further, but that was boring since she’d already been grinding forever. So she went to the Grand Exchange and sold it all. 

Thousands of units of steel ingots. 

And it sold like immediately, since there was always a large amount of people training Smithing at the level they could use steel.

Obviously she became fabulously wealthy and didn’t know what to do with her newfound wealth. But since she spent a lot of time at the Exchange, she knew basically how the market worked. I’m not 100% sure on what the thought process was for her, but she essentially realized a basic economic principle: If she could control the supply and demand for steel she could accelerate her profit margins. 

So like any reasonable 12-14 year old, she bought out about twice as much steel as she sold. Flooding the market had almost halved the price, and she now was both the supply and demand. Of course, as a result of some mystery person buying tons of steel, the price went up again. So she went and sold it at the higher price. She spent about another week or two playing Carnegie before it got old and she retired to Lumbridge with fat stacks of gold and the finest armor money could buy (but she couldn’t wear due to low Defense level). 

I found out from a friend later who was part of one of the big trade guilds that the big market guilds were all pissed that somehow the steel market had crashed, skyrocketed, then crashed in quick succession for no goddamn reason and all of them had lost thousands of coins in the process.

My favorite thing about this is that it validates my entire Master’s Degree. This. This is how games can develop incidental learning and teach kids valuable lessons. This 12 year girl figured out, and manipulated, a free market economy because she was bored. She was able to recognize, understand and utilize a fundamental principal of economics to entertain herself.

quietnighty:

anarfea:

People keep asking “How can anyone have a problem with AO3 doing fundraising!”

And I’m just like…. Have people not noticed all the virulent anti-AO3 hate on tumblr propagated by the anti shipping community? Antis have a problem with AO3 raising money because they hate the fact that AO3 won’t allow them to censor content they don’t like and doesn’t tolerate bullying. That’s who is putting out these posts like, “how can this nasty site raise so much money?” Read between the lines.

And for all the people who are just like, “If they don’t want AO3 to to raise money why don’t they just not donate?”

Because antis are incapable of saying “this isn’t for me so I won’t support it but I don’t care if other people support it. They have to actively discourage other people from supporting the thing. At the same time, they also won’t stop using AO3 because 1) they’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites who want readership and that’s where the readers are and 2) they’re too lazy to put together their own archive using AO3′s open source code because that would require doing coding and buying servers and doing all the moderating they want, which is hard, and they just want to engage in empty virtue signalling, which is easy

Anyway, my point is, people need to be aware that these people are out there and they hate AO3 and they want it to go away even though they’re actively using the platform. They’ve even said they want AO3 to fail so something “better” (re, something they control) can take its place. Some of them are blatant about it, calling AO3 a cesspit of pedophilia, and some of them are subtle about it, saying more innocuous things like ‘Does AO3 really need 130K a year?” “Shouldn’t you give your money to individual needy people doing gofundmes for stuff that’s more more important?”

But all of these people have the same end goal, which is the destruction of the archive, and the way they’re going about it right now is to try to discourage people from donating.

So instead of asking, “Why do people object to AO3 raising money?” start telling people “Hey there are people out there who hate AO3 and want to destroy it and we have to protect the archive from them.” And donate, if you can, and signal boost, if you can’t.

 HERE THAT CHA-CHING SOUND THAT’S MORE OF MY MONEY GOING INTO THE MONSTROUS COFFERS OF THE OTW EVERYTIME ONE OF YOU IGNORANT SHITS SENDS AO3 NEGATIVITY ACROSS MY DASH

miss-ingno:

fangasmagorical:

blooming-wilting:

gladnis:

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a
publicly accessible budget – waaaay more info than most charities, in
fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are
vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much
servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy.
I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason
it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text
based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day.
About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running
searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per
search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s
absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW
defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that
actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and
the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we
love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

All because the antis are pissed they can’t bully people on Ao3. Really makes you think about people’s priorities.