starmewpower - Tumblr blog

[starmewpower]

i hate the way that “female characters are just not as well written as male characters” persists even after years and years of people pointing out that is simply a bad excuse, that people will rehabilitate a poorly written man and flatten a well written woman time and time again. i hate the way that no one can take this criticism, this simple truth that they are biased against women, and work to slowly dismantle this part of themselves. instead it’s just, there are no good women

[starmewpower]

Bioware Boycott

Maybe it's time to boycott Bioware (and to an extent EA) as well in return for the recent layoffs and cutting ties with a unionized third party testing company to save money. I don't care what you think about their writing(but writers weren't the only ones let go! I know at least one senior programmer was too), but letting go senior staff members just to save a buck??? Fuck that shit. We can't let that pay off with good sales.

[starmewpower]

Sumerian Veteran: *has severe PTSD but doesn't know it because the term won't be invented for another 5000 years* I fight the same battle in my dreams every night and my relationship with my family has fallen apart.

Sumerian Healer: *saw hundreds of veterans with the exact same affliction before* You're cursed by desert demons.

[starmewpower]

I had an amazing idea. Ready to bake bread dough in the shape of a roach so when you buy it it is pale and soft like a teneral roach but then when you bake it the crust will harden and brown like a roach sclerotizing. Then you can grasp it in your forearms taking one bite at a time like a mantis.

[starmewpower]

Yes, Superman saving cats from trees

ABSOLUTELY NAILED IT

[starmewpower]

"Another group experienced severe discrimination in America"

"So you hate Black people and are denying they suffered the worst"

Is what the person you're replying to sounds like

Loud Irish-Americans who have maybe one grandparent born in Ireland and no tangible link to anything Irish, including toxic Catholicism, are some of the most annoying people around. What's so great about excessive alcohol consumption being a hallmark of a diasporic national(ist) celebration? I say this as a person born in Eastern Europe with alcoholics in the family who deeply resents that stereotype about us. Only the Irish could afford to be proud of something so antisocial because they are very comfortably white and have been for a long time. It reminds me of that Columbo episode from the 1970s where he nails the singing, limerick-spewing American IRA terrorist because of a whiskey bottle left on the murder scene. That guy was extremely unlikeable and I liked seeing him go to jail.

--

[starmewpower]

hmm I wonder if because they're enforcing censoring mentions of the blackout- could these be actual employees? Is reddit actually paying moderators? Not for all the other shit they do, but to try and control public perception?

ruh roh, it gets worse

[starmewpower]

Even as someone who has more f/f ships than m/f or even m/m ones, I avoid the f/f fandoms like a plague, aside from occasionally making and posting a fanwork, and then instantly dipping. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a level of toxicity in these fandoms that's of a different kind and makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. Probably because its very rarely called out, because tumblr.com likes to treat f/f ships and their fandoms like they're really pure and good and above criticism.

--

"We're all nice and perfect here" is a good way to make everyone feel like they're being watched at all times.

[starmewpower]

Lunch of Suffering. (X)

[starmewpower]

This is totally how it all happened 💗

[starmewpower]

Love the universe need of all babies human and animal to just lay on adults

[starmewpower]

The way I've already seen uncountable "Netflix is hiring!" Ads. They're really just gonna hire scabs and pretend the WGA strike isn't happening....

[starmewpower]

there’s been a big uptick in posts calling ukraine a nazi country. don’t fall for it. russia is trying to distract us both from their deliberate blowing of the kakhovka dam and what appears to be major breakthroughs from the ukrainian counteroffensive.

russia keeps going back to the neonazi angle because its the only tactic they have left. they can’t credibly claim warcrimes because the world has seen what they’ve done in ukraine and every other country invaded by russia has leapt at the chance to prove what russia did to their people. their threats of escalation and nukes have fallen flat because russia simply can’t retaliate without biting off more than they can chew. that leaves the neonazi angle which despite being a very small minority in ukraine, russia knows they can leverage that against the west…

…provided the west doesn’t look at russia.

russia has multiple neonazi volunteer corps and mercenary armies because of a policy called managed nationalism. they took all the far right elements that could have been a threat to the putin government and paid them to violently oppress immigrants, the lgbt and reporters. if you ever see russia accuse a country of something, look to see if russia is doing that thing.

[starmewpower]

This won’t make your blog look ugly. How could you not reblog this? REBLOGGING THIS COULD SAVE A LIFE!!!

[starmewpower]

End OTW Racism: A Call To Action

A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization

This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies

AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)

As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.

We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.

On AO3

Change the title of ten (or more!) of your most recent or most popular fanworks to include ‘End Racism in the OTW’ in the beginning, and provide a link to this post in your summary or first/top creator’s note

Post a new fanwork any time between May 17th to 31st with “End Racism in the OTW” either as the title or at the beginning of the title. The fanwork does not have to be long - it can be a 100-word fic, a quick sketch, a podfic of a ficlet, a 20-second vid/edit, a short piece of meta, etc. In the summary or first/top creator’s note, provide a link to this post

If updating any WIPs with a new chapter, add ‘End Racism in the OTW’ to the title and provide a link back to this post in your summary or first/top author’s note

Update your AO3 icon using the profile pic graphic in our Social Media Toolkit

Plan to maintain these changes until May 31, 2023, or longer if you wish

Send a message to the OTW asking for an update on their 2020 commitments!

For Readers: leave encouraging comments on fanworks with the "End Racism in the OTW" title to show your support of this initiative.

On tumblr

Reblog this Call to Action with the tag #End OTW Racism

Update your profile pics and banners using the graphics in our Social Media Toolkit

Follow this account for updates and signal boost our posts

On Twitter

Follow @/EndOTWRacism (remove the backslash) and signal boost our pinned tweet

Update your profile pics and banners using our graphics, and change your display name to include #EndOTWRacism

Use sample tweets and graphics from our Social Media Toolkit to tweet about your fanworks, and use the hashtag #EndOTWRacism

Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!

What Do We Want?

Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:

Harassment policies that can be regularly updated to address both on-site harassment and off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users, with updated protocols for the Policy & Abuse Team to ensure consistent and informed resolutions of abuse claims

A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content; by abusive, we are talking about fanworks that are intentionally used to spread hate and harassment, not those that accidentally invoke racist or other bigoted stereotypes

These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.

OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:

Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months

Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings

Why Are We Doing This?

16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.

In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.

Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:

Improving admin tools for the Policy & Abuse team

Reassessing the current mandatory archive warnings with the possibility of implementing others

And, most importantly, reviewing the Terms of Service (TOS) to allow the Policy & Abuse team to address harassment that is currently not covered by the existing TOS

By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.

Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.

It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.

This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.

We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.