Are the AO3 antis actually a threat to our beloved archive?

This:

astolat:

Short answer: no. 

Long answer: 

As far as I could tell (I do have a well-curated dash), the discussion was roughly 1% sincere antis, 4% wankers, and 95% people talking at length about why the antis were wrong or liking those responses. The posts boosted the drive if anything (and made me personally verklempt to read all the lovely posts talking about how much the AO3 has made people happy. :’) 

Anyway, the board, the volunteers, and the members & donors of the OTW are the ones who actually keep the AO3 up, and they are all choosing to give their time and money to support the mission of the org. Antis can’t stop them doing that no matter how loud they yell. 

Even if the AO3 stopped being popular, that wouldn’t make it go away. The OTW is not trying to make a big score going public or have a super flashy site. We never wanted to build the one and only archive for fanfic. For-profit companies want monopolies to have the power to squeeze customers. We have no such incentive. We’re eager to have as much fic as possible on the AO3, because that lets us do whatever we can to preserve it, but we don’t want it to be the only place where fic exists. That would make the AO3 a single point of failure for fandom. And a wonderful part of fandom has always been its decentralized nature. 

The AO3 isn’t perfect, either in absolute terms or for every user, and never will be. There’s lots that could be improved (and many awesome people actively working on improving it – I highly encourage anyone who can to please make the effort to volunteer). 

But what does make the AO3 special is that it cares a lot about fannish history and its preservation and preserving your access to it, and not at all about generating hits or profits or harvesting your personal data, and central to that is maximal inclusiveness of content. It is fundamental to the entire project. It’s literally the first line in the Terms of Service that you agree to when you get your account. 

If someone sincerely cannot accept that policy, then they shouldn’t agree to the TOS (which on the AO3 unlike most sites is human-readable), and they shouldn’t use the AO3. 

For everyone else, even if you don’t like using the AO3 for your everyday reading for whatever reason, do consider cross-posting your stories there. Because if nothing else, it means that when the site you do like goes away, or becomes inhospitable, you’ll have a backup site with all your stories on it where you can download copies easily to be imported.   

But what does make the AO3 special is that it cares a lot about fannish history and its preservation and preserving your access to it,

I have another fandom home (Silmarillion Writers Guild). But I cross-post everything to AO3 also and use it for all of my secondary fandom needs. I love the OTW ’s preservation of fandom history, and rescue efforts, and its defining and defending of fan culture. I was hoping that the antis’ whining and complaining would boost the fund drive.

undercat-overdog:

Turgon is an
interesting figure. I think in some ways he’s the most like Feanor
out of their entire family.

Love not too well the work of thy hands.

That’s
not something said to Feanor: it’s what Ulmo says to Turgon.
Turgon makes exactly
the same choice that Feanor did: Feanor refused to destroy the
Silmarils at the urging of the Valar, and Turgon refuses to forsake
Gondolin. Turgon is an artist,
and he loves the city he built.

 Feanor went a bit crazy when Morgoth killed
Finwe and stole the Silmarils, and Turgon doesn’t seem much saner
when he dies (“Great is the might of the Noldolie,” he shouts as his city is burning, right before death by architecture.)

Turgon
is also, I think, the most acutely aware of all his family, save
Feanor, of the possibility of loss. Feanor
was driven by a deep seated fear that things could be taken from him.
It’s ultimately what drives his feud with Fingolfin (you would
take my father’s love from me?). And it seems to drive Turgon too (yes, let’s make a hidden city where I can keep everyone safe!). In
Feanor’s case, it was triggered by the death of his mother and the
remarriage of his father (I can be replaced);
in Turgon’s by Elenwe’s death and then Aredhel’s.

Anyways,
I need to think about this more.

I like this analysis a lot.

countryff4171:

house-of-gnar:

Kazakh eagle hunters | Mongolia

The Kazakhs are the descendants of Turkic, Mongolic and Indo-Iranian tribes and Huns that populated the territory between Siberia and the Black Sea. They are a semi-nomadic people and have roamed the mountains and valleys of western Mongolia with their herds since the 19th century.The ancient art of eagle hunting is one of many traditions and skills that the Kazakhs have been able to hold on to for the last decades. They rely on their clan and herds, believing in pre-Islamic cults of the sky, the ancestors, fire and the supernatural forces of good and evil spirits.

I think this is so beautiful