in light of Trump's inauguration speech declaring multiple national emergencies that require him to take god-knows-what executive actions immediately, I'd like to remember this chapter of "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder:
Fanfic is a free hobby.
It's one of the last few things we can have as a society that's free. You can engage, for free. People give you things (art, stories, etc), for free.
Don't buy into the consummerism just because it's everywhere else.
You don't have to consume everything you interact with. You don't have to use things, just because they exist.
You're allowed (still, for now), to have things that are enjoyable for free.
Do you realise how insane the world is? We don't have many places where we can just be, for free anymore, but ao3 is. Did you notice we don't have ads in ao3? We don't have pop ups? Where ELSE do we not have that?
Where else can you just go and not have to wait for a commercial to be over or for ads to be on the sidelines?
I don't think the younger people understand, but the whole of internet used to be like this. YouTubers would do Youtube for free, just because. You couldn't monetise your internet presence before.
Ao3 is like a little preserved corner of the internet where the old internet used to be, and it's being attacked by people who do not understand that free things are allowed to exist without judgment.
Please don't ruin this for us.
Some of us need it.
had a dream that someone suggested the best gender neutral form of address would be Mþ (pronounced Myth) and i immediately said "mith me with that gay shit HEYOOO" and woke up at 4:30am hanging sideways off of my bed
Humans being the first. Not the strongest or the smartest or the weirdest or the most violent. Just the first.
We called out into the dark over and over. We sent out messages in hopes. We searched every planet we could reach, in hopes of any sign of life. Any at all.
We thought, hoped we were the last, because we couldn’t bear the idea of being the one ones this awake and alive in a world as vast as this.
And we died alone.
When the others are born, many many years later, they find us, everything we left for them.
They recover The Golden Record and look at it a million times over, they dig up our fossils and put us in museums, they study us for years and years, loving us as we love our ancestors’ painted hands on cave walls.
In a lot of their languages, the word they use for us has the same root for “mother”.
this hit me like a truck
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