Hello tumblr! I know this isn't typically the type of thing I'd make and post on here (I reblog the topic all the time, though), however! for the past week, I had been working on a school project that allowed me to talk on the topic of gen AI. I'm pretty proud of how it came out, and a couple people asked me to make a full post of it, so here it is!
I spent a lot of time on this, I hope people like it
Plain text under the cut
I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?
If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.
In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.
They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.
And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.
It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.
Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.
And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.
Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences
#WhereIsRey (initial)
#WhereIsRey (ongoing)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was designed to be the opposite of The Last Jedi
You’re all sitting on the hot take of the decade tbh
And yet when they fond out that boys were watching MLP:FIM in droves, they had NO PROBLEM with it.
#SONS OF ANARCHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!#LITERALLY SONS OF ANARCHY IS THE BIGGEST EXAMPLE OF THIS LIKE EVER#kurt sutter wrote that show for MEN and ended up with an overwhelmingly female audience#because he’s actually a good writer and knows how to develop characters well and wrote excellent female characters#but once he realized that his audience was almost entirely women he literally took it out on tara and gemma in the show#but like tara specifically#he resented her character for being a huge draw for female viewers so he tore her development to shreds and killed her#in the most brutal gut wrenching way possible#kurt sutter you will pay for your crimes#i actually wrote a manifesto about this on one of my old blogs i should try to find it sldkjsldfjsdljf#long post (via@m-oonknight)
OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.
The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.
Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”
I think it would be harder for us to find examples of when this DIDNT happen than when it did. It happens all the time.
Doesn’t stop it from boggling the mind
(though it could probably start to make some sense if you follow the money past audience bases to maybe a couple of investors or like a rich patron … 🤔)
Stooooop I just wrote a masters thesis on this shit. Media creation and distribution is a means by which dominant power structures consolidate their hegemony. Dominantly situated creators get upset when the audience they attract isn’t the audience they wanted, because they view the whole creation and sharing of the fiction as an exercise to sustain kyriarchal conditions that benefit themselves. When the audience is Other, they see it as a failure of those efforts and lash out.
Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.
(anyway if anyone wants to read 35k words of philosophy about this, hmu)
I think a lot about an interview I heard with Bo Burnham a few years ago, where he talks about this phenomenon with his own work. He gained a large audience of teenage girls, and people in comedy spaces would look down on him for that or say what a shame it was, but he responded differently:
“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”
Instead of trying to change his comedy, he decided to lean into and celebrate the audience that he actually had by making a movie specifically about the experiences of a teenage girl. It’s fascinating to hear him talk about how he got there, but also to acknowledge how rare that reaction is.
I don’t want to harass the person who’s claiming that 90% of AO3 users came from Wattpad so I’m making my own post about it
AO3 was founded partly in response to a growing trend of fanworks being removed from websites that had previously allowed them. This pattern has been observed numerous times throughout fandom history.
Whenever there are fears about censorship on other sites, AO3 sees an increase in the waitlist for our automatic invitation queue. Regardless of their reasons for joining, we welcome any new user to our site who agrees to abide by our Terms of Service. We will not vet new users for "legitimacy", because AO3 is for everyone.
The OTW has no plans to change the content we allow on AO3, and we stand by our commitment to maximum inclusiveness of fanwork content. We will not remove works unless they violate the AO3 Terms of Service, and we don't make decisions based on how many times something is reported. Users do not need to worry that anyone's works will be taken down due to a baseless report or a mass-reporting campaign, if one were to occur.
Regarding the unverified rumors that reports to the Policy & Abuse committee have greatly increased in the past few days, changes in ticket volume can be due to many different factors (including simple coincidence). If you're interested in learning more about how many and what kinds of reports the Policy & Abuse committee receives, we publish information about the previous month's tickets in our monthly newsletters as well as an annual breakdown of ticket types on the OTW website.
The rest of the thread is here.
tl;dr: Don’t monetize AO3, kids. You won’t like what happens next.
read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that i’ve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law that’s linked in-thread.
AHDHXHEBSG TWITTER WRITERS DID WHAT NOW???? AND PEOPLE PAID THEM????
If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I don’t necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like… maybe just maybe it’s something that should be taught????
Just another reminder, because this always drives me crazy, but even if monetizing your fic was 100% unambiguously legal and protected, AO3 would still not let you do it because AO3 was founded and is supported by people like me who want a fandom community that is completely divested from making money off of fic.
Yes, this. Lots of fanworks on AO3 are unambiguously legal. Fics based on Shakespeare plays and fairy tales and Greek mythology and The Great Gatsby and your original character from your D&D game are not violations of copyright, because no copyright applies to those things.
AO3 still doesn’t let you monetize those things on the site, because we don’t want the site to be commercial! Because that’s not what it’s for!
It’s not there for you (generic you) to make money off the efforts of the people who build and maintain the site for free! We aren’t getting paid for the work we do to give you a nice site to use, just like you aren’t getting paid for the work you do to create whatever art you share there. Because fandom is supposed to be a community where we share with each other, and therefore we all benefit.
The deal is, we give you a free, stable, safe platform to host your works. In exchange, you get a site that isn’t covered in ads and tip jars and links to gofundme and “read the next chapter at my patreon”. You get one goddamn place on the internet that isn’t trying to make money off you. And we will defend that space and keep it non-commercial.
If you want to make money off your fics, you can instead post them somewhere like royal Road. “Oh, but Royal Road’s culture is so much more negative and stressful and lacks the supportive norms of AO3!” Yeah, because people are trying to make money there. Half the userbase is treating it as a storefront and hustling is the natural social consequence of that. AO3’s culture can only exist because it’s not commercial.
Pro-censorship wattpad refugees drama is so funny to me because when I started using ao3 as a kid I was a devout mormon and I thought that reading anything even remotely pornagraphic was a sin and would ruin my life. So when I was 13 and found ao3 I went "oh awesome I found a fanfic website with a filtering system so I won't ever randomly stumble into porn. This is great! I was really worried about seeing something I didn't want to see on the other platforms." I didn't read any smut online until like three years later. If a mormon 13 year old can figure out 'don't like don't read' wattpad users can too cmon you guys i believe in you.
Literally no reason for a guy to be over 5'7". That's just wasteful use of biomass. You had enough material to make four dudes and instead you made three. That thing is blocking an entire isle in the grocery store.
No you got the math the wrong way around. Let's say that you've got four 150 cm dudes. That's a reasonable amount, and a nice round number. Add their heights together, that's 600 cm. The same height could be used to make three 200 cm guys. What are you going to do with three giraffes that you can't fit into a normal-sized car, that you couldn't do with four compact travel-sized guys.
Fun fact: The last time I checked Gandalf's height for a shitpost, one souce stated that he is 167cm/5'6", so my height!!!! The second source I found described Gandalf is "taller than Dwarves and Hobbits, but shorter than Elves and Men."
>:|
In fact this is not only true but also means that Gandalf is A FULL FOOT SHORTER than Aragorn AND Boromir both!
Wait I think we've finally put together why Gandalf liked hanging out with hobbits and dwarves.
I can’t resist drawing lily pads and revisited them for 9 pm in my hours of the day series, really thrilled with how it came out :)
Imagine you meet an alien that's entirely blood and fat. Like all the white blood cells and red blood cells and lipids kept in your body are just out there. That's their entire body, a blob of blood jelly. Even their brain is completely fluid. They constantly forget things and don't seem to notice the connection
They see electricity, the same electricity of your brain. If something is not charged they can't see anything at all, and a room of non-conductive objects would be a complete sensory deprecation chamber. They can see a little bit, but they are nearly blind and only use it to notice sudden changes. If you flash a light at them they scream. Instead they just bring a device that generates a charge everywhere they go. They claim their whole planet is charged, but you have doubts
This apparently allows them to see secrets of the universe. They knew about the big bang through out their entire history, because they can apparently just see the beginning of the universe. They find it beautiful, but not all that interesting. You are jealous
Despite being in space, they have not yet discovered steel or had the industrial revolution. It's basically still alchemists and philosophers, but the alchemy and philosophy works and got them to space. You are no longer jealous
They rely on the temperature being way below 40 degrees Fahrenheit so all the fat stays solid and frozen, and die if it's warm. They consider you burning
They get all their energy from air, like eating, to the point they cannot hold their breath at all. They get other things from food, but refuse to prepare it aside from digestion. They just plop it in basically untouched
They age in dog years, dying a few months after turning 9, and only reach adulthood at age 4. That's an absurd amount of time to spend as a child. The one you met is apparently 5 and considers himself a mature adult. The tantrums say otherwise. Yes, he also has arcane knowledge naturally. You are more surprised they live this long considering everything else about them
They have 4 genders and assigned you one, maybe randomly. Kind of rude, apparently very complex, but they have no idea how to explain it. You aren't asking
You are an Eridian and have just met a human. You must now convince your mate to let you keep them.
A lot of people are ragging on the 'cable diverted to avoid Dobby's grave after Harry Potter fans raise a stink' thing and while I also love ragging on Harry Potter fans being weird, in this case it looks like the story was completely made up.
tl;dr: There's no evidence the interview that this was mentioned in even exists, no evidence the route of the cable has ever changed, and the whole story seems to originate from one dude's podcast.
The story also broke into mainstream via the Daily Mail, who are ... rarely if ever honest or accurate.
While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.
It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.
One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.
Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??
Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?
Why must the future suck SO much?
A good rundown on what each brand of TV is up to and which settings you should turn off.
PSA - Do not buy an LG smart TV. They just added a line to their terms of use that it's the user's responsibility to inform any guests in their house that by entering they consent to be recorded, in order to comply with wiretapping laws. That thing is literally recording you.
You can find tutorials online telling you how to open that thing up and physically remove the mic and wifi module. Frankly I don't trust anything less.
Please watch the Gamers Nexus video on LG Smart TV's and monitors! It's basically malware at this point.
