235 FAVORITE SHIPS OF ALL TIME (ranked by my followers) 11. karolina dean and nico minoru - runaways
Mel Medarda 02/??
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.
This is the most functionally-successful and cost-effective website in the history of EVER. By a wide margin.
"Grok is undressing anyone, including minors"
Grok is the tool. X users are doing this. X users are requesting this and Grok engineers facilitated this. Both are liable for this.
Yes, precisely.
hope this is okay to share: independent journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote about this is her email newsletter--
Over the past week, one of the primary uses of Elon Musk’s Grok AI has been to create potential CSAM by stripping children’s clothes off in photos, covering them with "donut glaze”, and putting them in sexual positions. It’s also being used to remove women’s clothes and do the same thing.
[...] The only official response from Musk’s xAI, which manages Grok, is an automatic reply sent to all press emails that reads, “Legacy media lies.” No one at the company has spoken out and no one has issued any sort of statement.
As the media has reported on this atrocious series of events, however, many news outlets are centering their coverage on explanations that “Grok apologized.”
“Musk’s AI chatbot Grok apologizes after generating sexualized image of young girls,” one local NBC affiliate headline read. CBS news local affiliates published headlines with similar phrasing including, “Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok apologized.” The Hill, Newsweek, The Guardian, Ars Technica, Yahoo News, and a slew of other outlets have similarly quoted Grok as apologizing. Reuters ran the headline, “Grok says safeguard lapses led to images of ‘minors in minimal clothing’ on X.”
I think it’s crucial to note that Grok cannot apologize. Grok itself is an LLM. Chatbots don’t think, feel, regret things, or take responsibility. They are software tools that generate text based on patterns and inputs. They are not conscious beings making decisions.
-Taylor Lorenz, January 6 2026 newsletter titled "Is anyone going to take accountability for this?"
she later specifies that any "apologies" from grok were user-prompted responses, aka not actually written by humans
CATE BLANCHETT as Lou in Ocean’s 8
maybe i like my tech a little bit inconvenient
maybe i like pulling out my debit card instead of using apple pay. maybe i like untangling my wired headphones. maybe i like typing something into the search bar instead of using siri or whatever. maybe i like curating my own social media feeds over an algorithm. i just don’t think everything has to be perfectly streamlined and efficient i like it when things feel tethered to the real world.
i will never be against piracy ever but i also need physical media to remain
the average blockbuster carried about 3x as many films than that that are streaming on Netflix or any other streaming service, physical media along with piracy is more important than ever.
I thought this wasn’t true, because how could it be true? How could one small store have more movies than an online database? So I googled it.
I am surprised and depressed to learn it’s 100% true, according to google. A Blockbuster store was required to have a minimum of 7000 titles, but most averaged about 10,000. Netflix has 4000 movies. (And 1800 tv shows if you want to count those, but even included, it’s still less)
Now I’m even more depressed about the collapse of physical rental stores.
BONUS: They weren't beholden to Who Owns What IP Right Now. They got videos from everyone. You didn't have to pay separately for the rights to rent from the Disney Shelves and the WB Shelves and bler bler bler, and they only STOPPED having those movies when the tapes broke or someone never returned 'em.
friendly reminder that your local library will have lots of physical media and if they don't have what you're looking for you can most likely ask them to purchase it or order it from another library through interlibrary loan
Shoutout to Scarecrow Video- they have over 148,000 titles, most of which you can rent by mail. Rentals have been down in the last few years so they're asking for support!
Vouching for Scarecrow. Support those guys!
