One of the greatest tweets ever
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"This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”
The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”
“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”
An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas."
I love the Internet Archive. As a crocheter who loves vintage patterns and has found very recent books (2000s+) that are out of print because of the archive, i cannot say enough nice things about it.
But the lawsuit was about the Archive knowing and continuing to scan books that were IN COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES WHERE THE ARCHIVE IS INCORPORATED AS A CHARITY.
Which is very important to remember when seeing tweets like this:
1984 is NOT out of copyright in the United States. Where the Internet Archive is incorporated. And also, what a wild fucking choice to plant a flag in when 1984 is so absolutely and completely not some nearly lost novel that may still technically be in copyright but is out of print and would not be known by anyone if the archive didn't do its work.
All the Archive had to do to not lose a lot of those books was to NOT FUCKING VIOLATE COPYRIGHT ON BOOKS THAT ARE SUPER WELL-KNOWN LIKE FUCKING 1984.
Like, there's a lot of crochet books that aren't technically out of copyright but still scanned and up there because crochet books go out of print pretty easily and it's understood no one's looking to fight over the copyright for a book that's not gonna sell any real amount of "legit" copies, so who gives a shit.
I love the archive. I want it to continue. It's one thing to keep alive websites and resources that will disappear without their help. It's another to pretend like violating a publisher's rights while claiming it's for the greater good. There are legal ways to get these books. Request them at your library. Buy them. Write an email to the author to see if they'll just send you a copy.
Internet Archive shit the bed by willfully and knowingly scanning and sharing a bunch of Hatchett's backlist, and Hatchett had every right to take them to court for it. To see them still milking the "omg copyright holders are so mean!!!" take is really fucking annoying.
And to be clear, "is hosting 1984 for free access immoral?" is a completely irrelevant question. What's important is that the internet archive threatens hosting everything else they host by hosting 1984.
WHUMPTOBER 2026: PROMPTS LIST
Welcome to Whumptober 2026 — Year Nine!
WHUMPTOBER is a month-long, prompt-based creation CHALLENGE (think: Inktober, but whumpier). There are four prompts for each day of the month, giving 124 for you to play with! There is also a list of 15 alternative prompts that can be subbed in for any day to give participants as much creative freedom as possible.
All prompts are meant to serve as inspiration without being taken literally (e.g. you don’t have to include the exact wording of prompts into your work, so if you need to slightly reword a quote, that's absolutely fine). Feel free to run rampant on interpretation. For example, if the prompt is “flame", you could create something with reference to a candle/campfire/fire, your character could have suffered a burn, or the flame could be a reference to an ‘old flame’ - an old relationship. It’s truly down to you!
You can produce work in any media you choose, including but not limited to: writing, visual artwork, photo/video/audio edits, paper crafts and elaborate recommendation lists (not just a list of links). You can participate as much or as little as you want (i.e. you don’t have to do ALL the prompts if you don’t want to) and prompts can be used in any order. They are also free to use even after the event ends.
Please make sure to read the Event Rules and Info and FAQ carefully, as most of your questions will be answered there already. For everything else, you are welcome to come to our ask box or ask questions in our Discord server here.
Information on how to TAG is here.
This year’s AO3 Collection can be found here.
The ‘Anatomy of a Whumptober Prompt’ post can be found here.
As always in the whump community, it goes without saying that these prompts are not intended to glamorize/romanticize real life topics, therefore research is encouraged where needed. Our 'Resources for Writing Sensitive Topics’ post is here.
We’re very excited to see the community come together for yet another year of Whumptober! Go crazy with the prompts, and support your fellow whump creators - we wish you all the best of luck, but most importantly: HAVE FUN!
Happy whumping,
Mods Vanne, Yenn, Kitty and Surro
Text versions of the prompts, including a google doc format, are posted below the cut!
IT STARTS TODAY!!!!!
GET ON UP COMMENT CAMPERS!!!! THE WATER IS FINE AND THE WEATHER IS BEAUTIFUL AND ITS PERFECT FOR LEAVING COMMENTS!!!! GO BACK TO MERMAY AND FIND A FIC TO COMMENT ON!
however stupid you think the average American voter is, you are probably still overestimating them
i like that the maned wolf and the bush dog are each other's closest living relatives. they're like cartoon henchmen
Anyway here's some additions from the Maasai and Kikuyu, two grassy plain-dwelling groups from Eastern Africa that I think count as unfuckwithable
Feel like Poland should be included since we're literally called "people of the fields" according to the etymology of Poland.
Also look at her GO
I’m Métis, here’s some of ours! You’ll notice it looks remarkably similar to the above.
We also have some less intricate clothing (if it looks a bit Victorian to you - that’s pretty much the right era for most of this!)
Can’t believe no one’s done it yet I will be the person to add the cowboys: Latin American focus.
Here is the Chilean huaso:
Gauchos, from primarily Argentina where they’re a large national symbol close to the level of cowboys in the US. Also gauchos are in Uruguay. Their pants are called bombachas and the other garment wrapped around them are called chiripas. They work in grasslands called pampas, known for being really fertile:
While they’re not as dressed up as the others or have as prominent of a culture, for a broader Latin American cowboy context, I feel like also adding llaneros, who are from Colombia and Venezuela, in the llanos region, a type of tropical grassland similar to the pampas, hence the name llanero. Pampas get annual flooding and these guys would go barefoot a lot, and you can see that the stirrup on the horse’s saddle is really different than what you’re probably used to seeing, to accommodate for that, which is what I want to point out as an aspect of plains cultures developing clothing/accessories/tools to suit the environment.
Cowboy culture happened wherever Spanish colonial influence and grassland biomes came together. They differ based on the grasslands having different climates (ex tropical in South America), and the local indigenous influence (ex, backtracking to gauchos, they would use this tool called bolas to catch animals, which were basically two balls tied to a string that you threw and it spun around an animals legs, and were an indigenous invention):
I would love to keep posting cowboy dress lol but will stick to the post’s theme of grassland of course.
Adding to the post, I, hereby, present people of Kalash and Chitral:
Chitral means ‘field’ in the native language Khowar. Both Chitralis and people of Kalash are known to be indigenous people of Asia.
bosstoaster