“why are pillowfort/ao3 asking for money?? Tumblr and LJ are free!!!”
y’all really don’t get how this works, huh?
Look y’all. Bottom line is large websites/web apps are fucking expensive
It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out
You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.
Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.
“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”
No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.
Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made
Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.
Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.
They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!
That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.
So for the love of God, can we PLEASE stop slandering sites like AO3, Wikipedia, and now Pillowfort for having the audacity to ask for donations, or for having tiered/paid membership options for additional, non-essential features??
Hello everyone, we’re going to be sending out our next batch of registration invites tomorrow. However, we have decided tomorrow’s batch will be the last round we send out for a little while. We’ve gained over 10,000 users in the last two weeks, which will be even more by tomorrow, and the site just isn’t ready to handle such a large community yet– so we’ve decided it would be better for us to close registrations for a little while, to give us time to improve some important things like load balancing and performance, our moderation system, etc. So we’ll be closing our PayPal to new payments tomorrow, Dec. 14th at 12pm EST. (Don’t worry about our expenses, we’ve received so many payments over the last two weeks that we have plenty to keep us going for a while!)
We don’t love having to do this, because of course we’d prefer to be able to welcome everyone who’s going to be leaving Tumblr over the next couple weeks, but we decided it wouldn’t benefit anyone for us to bring more users onto the site when our infrastructure wouldn’t be able to support that large a user base yet. We hope to open registrations as soon as possible and we will keep you all updated as we make progress on our development benchmarks over the next several days.
I thought things couldn’t get more horrifyingly amusing than the woman who wanted people to pay $1000 each to go to her wedding so she could “feel like a Kardashian for a day” and had a Facebook breakdown about it saying she was gonna go backpacking in Peru to “find herself” after being “betrayed” by her friends who didn’t want to partake but here we are
I thought it was the same person ngl.
I’m in the wedding shaming group and saw both this and the Peru post before it went viral. Love it.
THERE’S AN UPDATE
Stephanie is a true hero.
my favorite thing about this update is that the fact that we are even SEEING this means there’s AT LEAST one other snitch in the party that she hasn’t caught yet
Too criminally important not the reblog. It doesn’t matter how “good” at sex you are, if you are an attentive and caring lovemaker you will have amazing experiences.
why is broccoli seen as this universally hated vegetable. broccoli is delicious
bc suburban families all over the world literally just steam/microwave their vegetables and serve them plain to their kids. No wonder kids hate vegetables. They’re taught that veggies are supposed to taste bad. but imagine: veggies with spices. Veggies in curry. veggies that are broiled, soaked, sautéed. aghhhh veggies are so good
Veggies of color (VOC)
People post good veggie recipes!!! Go!
i’m a vegan/vegetarian chef and yeah people generally don’t… season or… actually think about their vegetables at all? like if you treat your meal like “MEAT + unfortunate side dish i don’t want to eat + dessert” no fucking wonder you’re going to be unhappy with your results?? literally everyone should know how to cook vegetables WELL, because they can be fucking DELICIOUS?
it’s not surprising to me that most people don’t actually… KNOW how to cook vegetables, which is really, really sad. so imma help y’all out.
– grill your fucking vegetables? if you have a grill, or even a little dinky george foreman–grill those bitches. brush them with olive oil–or a mix of olive oil and balsalmic vinegar if you’re fancy, grill, salt, pepper, fresh herbs if you want, BAM. delicious. if you don’t, roasting is your next best option. you can also (if you have a gas stove and are ambitious) “grill” on the stove top. many a time i’ve stuck a sweet pepper on the stove and lit that bitch up!
– braise those bitches??? good for leafy greens and vegetables like turnips and radishes. finely chop some garlic, onion, or scallion (or all three if you’re bold) and sautee them in a little oil. once they’re almost cooked, add your veg. keep it moving, don’t let anything burn, and add a capful of white wine, or cooking wine. DELICIOUS.
– FRESH. HERBS. ARE. YOUR. FRIENDS? if you cannot get fresh (admittedly, i live on a farm, so i’m never short on things like dill, parsley, thyme, scallion, or cilantro) but they’re amazing on fresh veggies. sauteed in them in a pan? add some herbs. roasted them in the oven? add some herbs (and brown sugar if you want a savory sweet vibe)
– roast them in the oven if you don’t have time (or spoons) to stand up next to a hot ass stove for 5-20 minutes! vegetables that are good for roasting are typically ones that take a long time to cook, eggplants, potatoes, carrots, pumpkin, etc. of course, you can roast any veggie you like!
– MARINATE THOSE BITCHES??? literally you can make delicious marinades out of items most of you already have in your homes: honey/brown sugar, salt, soy sauce, sesame oil, etc.
– FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK STOP ADDING EVERYTHING TO THE PAN AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME. time out your veggies when sauteeing them for anything. if you’re doing a bunch of different ones, add the veggies to the pan first that take the longest. Making stir fry? put those motherfucking carrots in first, because they take FOREVER. onions, carrots, potatoes? put those in first. corn, broccoli, sweet pepper, zucchini? closer to the end, my dude, because they cook FAST.
– ginger and scallion go excellently in stir fry btw. if when you make your stir fry it tastes like it’s “missing something”, that’s what you’re missing. add that shit.
– you do NOT FUCKING NEED CHICKEN/BEEF STOCK FOR YOUR GODDAMN SOUP IF IT DOESN’T HAVE MEAT IN IT! sautee your veggies first, and you can use either powdered or canned coconut milk as the body. it makes for deliciously creamy soup. don’t worry about the coconut taste–it’s pretty much gone by the time your soup/stew is done cooking. coconut milk (especially powdered, and soy milk works for this too, no vanilla flavoring obviously) makes an excellent base for sauces for veggies, even if you eat meat!
lastly, give it the ol’ ratatouille. smell your herbs and spices together. if they seem like they go well, odds are, they’ll taste bangin’ once you combine them. experiment. everything you make will not be good, but you’ll get more comfortable cooking. i’ve been a chef for like two years and i burned some bread today, so it’s okay. you’ll make mistakes. that’s how you learn. don’t be afraid to cut or burn yourself–the more afraid you are, the more likely it is to happen.
you’re welcome, signed your local angry vegetarian chef who wants people to eat more vegetables
This is all very good advice for if you want/need to get more vegetables in your diet but haven’t cared for them in the past. A couple extra pointers form my expirience:
-If you’re subbing coconut milk for a meat-based stock you’ll probably want to add more salt than the original recipe calls for. And some garlic
-Actually, everything needs more garlic.
-The Ratatouille Method Works. It works best when you’re feeling indescisive about what to make for dinner, so you go snack on whatever herbs/veg/sauce you have around and think about the flavors.
-Don’t be afraid to do this with fruit too! Even if you’re a meat person like me, fruit goes great with lots of things and can benefit from many of the above cooking methods. The main difference is that fruit tends to cook REALLY SUPER FAST so add it in at the last minute, or even last second.
-Looking Up Traditional Recipies. Not eating enough plants is a very recent problem, and nearly every culture on earth has got some great veg recipies. Look up basic things like “French Carrots and Leeks Recipes” or find multicultural food blogs or heck, Actually Call Your Grandma* and ask what she did for vegetables.
*Caveat: If your grandma is like mine and all her recipies are from Her Grandmother from Industrial Liverpool and she lived through the Great Depression you might get a very detailed example of What Not To Do, which will at least be informative if also slightly terrifying.
Oh gods, don’t take the ‘boil it into submission’ approach, that’s why I hated Brussels sprouts for like 30 years straight, they turned into sad sacks of faintly cabbage flavoured soggy bitter yuk done like that. Blanched for 2 minutes and then fried with bacon and paprika? Oh yes, gimme.
My mother suffers from migraines that are often triggered by scent. This can range anywhere from cleaning products, scented garbage bags, cologne/perfume and so on. As such, she’s had to ask for accommodations in the facility she works. This has included wearing surgical masks, industrial respirators, and having a perfume/cologne free work environment.
Here’s the thing, since receiving the accommodations, my mother has gone to the hospital more than six times for perfume exposure. Why? Because her co-workers deliberately wear excess amounts of perfume or cologne to trigger her migraines because they believe their right to wear perfume outweighs her right to live. This is not an exaggeration, my mother’s doctors have repeatedly stated that any one of these incidents could actually kill her.
Oh, and let me be clear, these are deliberate incidents. These are documented grievances with witnesses. Witnesses who saw co-workers put on perfume before interacting with my mother or workers deliberately crossing in my mother’s work area despite not even working in the area. Workers who have admitted to exposing her on purpose. Even worse, some of those who’ve exposed her are supervisors.
People don’t believe my mother when she says her migraines are triggered by scent. Because they can’t see it, they don’t think it can possibly be that bad. It has taken her literally being hauled off in ambulance for some people to understand the severity of her condition.
Illnesses or disabilities, whether visible or not, are not jokes. Don’t play with someone else’s health or well being. It’s fucked up.
When I was in training for my current job, there was a girl in my class who was ALWAYS putting on body sprays and scented lotions, despite the fact that there’s a rule against that on the site. Whatever, it wasn’t enough to bother me.
Until one day it was, and I had an asthma attack in the morning (thank the lord for people willing to share their inhaler with a broke kid with no scrip) and felt a second one coming in later and had to leave early despite some pretty strict attendance rules. (In fairness my trainer basically just didn’t report it so I didn’t get penalized for it for which I am eternally grateful.)
She was spoken to privately and the whole class was reminded about the rule and for 2 days she didn’t wear any. Day 3, she’s back at it again. So hey, I thought, maybe she just doesn’t get there are ACTUAL health issues happening. So on a break, after she’d started chatting with me and a couple other people, I asked: “hey, I’m not trying to be a pain but could you maybe not wear your body spray and scented lotion while we’re in the training room? It’s just a really enclosed space and I actually had an asthma attack the other day because the scents were triggering it.”
She rolled her eyes as if I’d asked for her to sit on the fucking moon or something. “Well I only put body spray on before I leave the house” not true “and my hands get dry so I have to use lotion.”
“Okay,” I said. “But like… maybe just not for the rest of the week? And then we’ll be out of training.”
“…but my hands will get dry.”
And then I might’ve given her a disgusted look and said “they make unscented lotion” and walked away.
But yeah. DONT BE THAT PERSON. I had a LITERAL GODDAMN ASTHMA ATTACK and her response was basically “who cares?”
Don’t be that person.
Here’s another fun one:
At my old job as a telephone captionist, there were really strict rules in place regarding what you can and cannot have or do at your cubicle, because we’re dealing with people’s private conversations and any interference can be seen as a legal breech of callers’ basic rights under American law.
One of these restrictions is “no doing your makeup or attending to hygiene, not even while you’re not on a call.” Because it’s a distraction for the captionist, it’s a distraction for the people around the captionist, and just seriously who does that at their desk?! Anyway, this includes everything from using toothpicks to applying lipstick to nail clipping (yes people did it) to brushing your hair. Anything that makes noise, mess, or smell is a no.
Part of my job was to train people, and sometimes that involved supervising captionists who had failed a review recently to see if I could figure out what was going on. I was assigned to do this one night and we were having a perfectly normal session, captionist said they were getting headaches sometimes and thought maybe they were just getting tired because it’s third shift. Captionist wasn’t having any issues while I was with them… Until we were suddenly both becoming aware of an oncoming powerful headache. And I smelled something.
Sure enough, one aisle over, someone was painting their damn nails at their desk. I reported them, and found out that they had been warned about this more than once.
Even if you’re not dealing with someone who’s allergic, be aware of the chemicals you’re putting on yourself and how aggressive they can be. This chick’s nail polish was causing two people to get painful headaches from 20 feet away in a relatively open area.
Frankenuff’s Castle 