Art At Random

So I’ve been reading a bunch of awesome batfamily fics recently and something that I don’t see nearly enough of is Jason and Tim’s canonical hatred of Alfred’s pancakes. It’s one of my favorite things that they’ve bonded over.

crasybirdlady:

nuttersinc:

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.

This.

When I read that AO3 had raised more money then the goole. I just figured they would use the “extra” to do stuff that the budget was normally too tight for, or you know save the money for unexpected things.

As a librarian I love AO3 and want it to continue.

Especially because it’s a place where fans can explore some things that other sites won’t allow.

But at the same time it encourages people to tag so you know what kind of story you are starting.Love that!

It’s one of the reasons I prefer AO3 to fanfiction.com. I hate the lack of tags.

One other great thing is the possibility to download stories.

What I’m trying to say: Good on AO3 for getting more money than asked for. Hope they had a small party celebrating. They certainly deserve it!

kgraces:

When asked which batkid scares them the most:

Dick: Tim, because once I asked him how he was doing and his only response was to look me dead in the eyes as he drank coffee straight from the pot.

Jason: Tim, because one time I saw him take down a criminal while reciting the guy’s social security number at him for intimidation.

Tim: I haven’t felt an emotion other than tired in about eight months. Ask me once I can feel fear again.

Damian: Drake doesn’t sleep and yet somehow maintains an adequate standard of work. It’s unnatural.

Steph: I’ve been convinced Tim isn’t human ever since I asked him what his plans for the day were and he replied with “contemplating the futility of existence.”

Cass: I worry Tim isn’t eating or sleeping enough. Does that mean he scares me most?

Bruce: My children are all frightening creatures but none of them compare to Alfred.

This made me laugh so hard I cried!

spookydamianwayne:

reblog this with your favourite robin and your hogwarts house in the tags i wanna see if they have any relation

lokii-d:

ONLY BECAUSE LOKI.

FOREVER LOKI.

homestuckresources:

Hopefully AO3 has been around long enough for people to know what it is, but archiveofourown is an amazing ‘new’ place to post fanfiction. It’s seriously so much better than fanfiction.net for a number of reasons, and the ability to format your writing it one I’ll be making a guide for today. We were actually asked to do this a while ago, but I totally forgot. Here’s to you anon!

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