everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

Hnngh. The Audible "hack" is making the rounds again, with people claiming you can use your Audible credit to listen to a book and then return it "for free." While I am the first among many to say "fuck Amazon and we should gullotine Jeff Bezos," I need you all to know it's not Amazon refunding you.

It's the authors.

They take that out of our royalties. And that's after they take 80% of our royalties on sales we do make.

(Note: Also, do not assume that your credit is worth the price listing that Amazon shows. Amazon does not pay us the cost of the listing. ((WHICH THEY PICK, we cannot set our own prices on audiobooks and then that forces us to use the Amazon price for the rest of the market!!)) What we get is 20% of the credit's value, so my book might appear on Audible for $20-30. However, if you received an Amazon credit for one of those $4.99 deals, I'd get 20% of $4.99. Yes, it's fucked, it's all fucked. Yes, other audio retailers do the exact same thing. This is one of the reasons authors don't make half as much money as people think they do.)

This became such a big issue that they had to make it impossible to return books after a certain point without talking to a customer service representative, because people were using Kindle/Audible and Amazon's return policy "like a library," and some authors (myself included) were getting royalty checks that showed negative income.

At this point, I don't even know if the Audible "hack" still works (Amazon has made changes to protect authors from this kind of thing at a glacial pace), but I need you to know it's not Amazon that's refunding you. This isn't a fun little "fuck Amazon" thing. The way Amazon has it set up, it's directly fucking the authors over.

So, yeah. Obviously, if you download something and can't get into it, or if something pops up on the author's side that makes you not want to support them anymore, yeah, process that return. Yeet the bitch. But please don't use it "like a library."

It's really harrowing to see your predicted income based on sales and then find out you're getting one-tenth of that because of refunds. And it's not even because people didn't like your book. They're just using the wrong place like a library and fucking over your algorithm as well, because once you get too many returns, you stop getting promoted.

Try using a library. You can access places like @queerliblib for FREE provided you have a US library account that you've hooked up to Libby. It's a little bit of work, but once you've got a card number, you're golden.

Just, y'know, throwing it out there because I don't think people realize this is how it works. You're not taking something back to Walmart, and Walmart is eating the refund before dumping the item in the garbage. Amazon takes the refund, turns to the author, and takes it off our plates.

Note: this does not affect Kindle Unlimited. Flip through the end pages to give the author maximum pages read, and then return that bad boy so the author can get paid. But also, please, maybe think about switching to a Kobo+ account instead. It offers the same subscription-based membership without demanding exclusivity, so authors aren't locked into just Amazon the way they are with KU. (Royalty rates are roughly the same, but it's a better deal in terms of allowing broader market access.)

This has been a rambling and exhausted PSA from your local peddler of weres.

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

The anti-trans hysteria du jour on perfidious Albion is that a retail employee who was trans asked a mother and child shopping at her store if they needed any help

That’s it

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

some people are afraid to be cheesy. I live my whole life on the charcuterie board

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

Okay so bad news for everyone on YouTube right now

Starting the 13th, we will have an AI determine if we are children or not and if you are a child, than you are forced to send your ID, send a selfie or a credit card

This has the obvious cons of having your privacy being revoked from you and and in case there is a security breach, major identity thefts.

So what do we do in this scenario?

Well right now I have real idea as this is relativity new to me, but I do have two plans

Plan 1. Bug the shit out of them, send letters and send emails about how much of bad idea this is.

Include why the AI will mess up and target adults who watch cartoons, include privacy issues, censorship issues, anything you can think of that relates to this. I want you guys to bug the hell out of YouTube until they reverse this idea

Here their address for letters

Send a mass amount of letters on the 5th of August and than another mass amount on the 8th

Plan 2. Blackout.

Since the thing is coming out on the 13th.

The plan will be to completely avoid YouTube at all cost for that day (and beyond), no watching, no sharing, no uploading, no nothing.

Download videos before things go down, watch Netflix. Whatever you do, don’t touch YouTube.

That’s all I can say right now, I also want you guys to let YouTubers know of this situation cause if it’s important for everyone on the website to talk about this immediately

Spread this stuff around, let people know of YouTube’s upcoming policy and how it’ll hurt everyone

Edit: I have taken into consideration and I am going to agree that the blackout should be until the decision is reversed, this is so we are not out at risk as users and so YouTube doesn’t just ignore the original black out

I might have a more detailed plan posted later today, but it depends on everything goes

Another edit: just to remind yall to send in letters and emails about this to google to force their hands to reverse this decision

There is also the law itself, though I can’t speak much on it other than finding lawing bodies that can force YouTube to reverse this decision. If anyone can find a place to file or call for this, that will be greatly appreciated! (I heard maybe the FTC and or the California Consumer privacy right can be considered, but that needs more research)

BIGGER UPDATE: we have a new plan in motion, here is the updated plan for you all to see

and also here's a petition to stop the law that would help support this into becoming a thing

and also a tumblr post about it and how you can help further prevent this from being allowed in office

Don’t forget to send this fellow people outside of tumblr

YouTubers, Twitter users, send it through out and make sure you are heard

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

Bill Braun creates paintings that look like construction paper!

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

i feel like a lot of discourse around identities could just be boiled down to “you could not pay me to care about this”

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

I'm noticing some interesting choices with regards to pronouns in Laura Pohl's translation of All Systems Red. See, in Portuguese we don't have object pronouns like "it/its" and neutral neopronouns like "elu/delu" are considered more analogous to the English "they/them", so gendering Murderbot the way that it is gendered in the original was always going to be tricky. There's also the other difficulty that adjectives are gendered in Portuguese, so whenever Murderbot describes itself or it's emotional state or anything, necessarily it was going to gender itself grammatically in some way. What this translation does at first is that the Murderbot's internal dialogue it genders itself in the masculine which I assumed to be just sort of defaulting Murderbot to be a masculine character, but in reflection of a different detail, I think it's just defaulting to this formal almost archaic notion of the masculine as neutral. Now, the detail that made me rethink this is this line that I just came upon of Dr Mensah's:

"UniSeg, preciso que você fique parada aí até eu chegar."

[SecUnit, I need you to stay still (female form) until I arrive]

The reason that Mensah is referring to Murderbot in the feminine in this case is that it's referring to it as a security unit, right, and the word Unidade, Unit, in Portuguese, is a feminine word. So I just went back now and I found one other previous instance in which characters refer to Murderbot in the third person and, Ratthi, he calls Murderbot by masculine pronouns but that's when it's being referred to as a robô, robot, which in Portuguese is a masculine word. So I guess the way that Pohl found to express Murderbot's object pronouns is by just using whatever pronouns are in agreement with the word being used to describe it. Which to be fair makes a lot of sense for treating objects in Portuguese. If you call something a cadeira, chair, you're going to refer to it with feminine pronouns, but if you call the exact same object a sofá, sofa, you will be using the masculine pronouns.

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

if you kill either Penn or Teller the survivor will absorb the powers of his fallen brother to destroy you

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

Every single comment was about how they just prefer the interpretation that her Peter was a trans boy For Some Reason

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

i think of this ProZD video constantly its always so fucking funny

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

K

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

creating a book series called "big fear shakespeare" where i expect you to know every reference and definition and instead there are comments in the margins saying things like "what kind of idiot wouldn't know this?"

[everyonehasbeatenmetotheusername]

fantasy lesbians. enjoy

prints available in my store now! ✨