the-old-man-has-the-phonebox - Tumblr blog

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WATCHER APOLOGY VIDEO?!?

finals update!

• slept 3 hours to finish my shit

• finished with just enough time to get dressed and run out the door

• wing the presentation. I don’t have a lot of stuff done so I didn’t do the portfolio. I cite where the assignment said to do it like a show/film pitch and I just word vomit the lore of my story

• get really positive feedback, professor seems to be impressed bc I haven’t been in class since February

• I’m pleased, leave to go home and shower and sleep a bit. I’m nowhere near out of the woods with character design, but this is a great outcome thus far, so I’ll map and get to work

• the university has a Kona Ice truck giving out free shaved ice

• I get like 6 different flavors, only one or two are meh

• playing Float On by Modest Mouse on repeat

tl;dr my life when the universe lets me have a little serotonin as a treat:

[the-old-man-has-the-phonebox]

finals update!

• slept 3 hours to finish my shit

• finished with just enough time to get dressed and run out the door

• wing the presentation. I don’t have a lot of stuff done so I didn’t do the portfolio. I cite where the assignment said to do it like a show/film pitch and I just word vomit the lore of my story

• get really positive feedback, professor seems to be impressed bc I haven’t been in class since February

• I’m pleased, leave to go home and shower and sleep a bit. I’m nowhere near out of the woods with character design, but this is a great outcome thus far, so I’ll map and get to work

• the university has a Kona Ice truck giving out free shaved ice

• I get like 6 different flavors, only one or two are meh

• playing Float On by Modest Mouse on repeat

tl;dr my life when the universe lets me have a little serotonin as a treat:

[the-old-man-has-the-phonebox]

finals update!

• slept 3 hours to finish my shit

• finished with just enough time to get dressed and run out the door

• wing the presentation. I don’t have a lot of stuff done so I didn’t do the portfolio. I cite where the assignment said to do it like a show/film pitch and I just word vomit the lore of my story

• get really positive feedback, professor seems to be impressed bc I haven’t been in class since February

• I’m pleased, leave to go home and shower and sleep a bit. I’m nowhere near out of the woods with character design, but this is a great outcome thus far, so I’ll map and get to work

• the university has a Kona Ice truck giving out free shaved ice

• I get like 6 different flavors, only one or two are meh

• playing Float On by Modest Mouse on repeat

tl;dr my life when the universe lets me have a little serotonin as a treat:

[the-old-man-has-the-phonebox]

Lmao we had an earthquake

Good morning besties I got 3 hours of sleep and I have to get so much done before 11

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Wait hold on I just learned that not only did Watcher announced probably the worst decision they made in their lives, but they're literally going on a WORLD WIDE LIVE TOUR immediately after it? Wow I've never heard of anyone travelling to the angry mobs instead of running from them but there's a first in history for everything i guess?

Imagine packing your bags to go on a tour to meet hundreds of thousands of extremely angry people and you can't back out of it?

Folks at Watcher now probably:

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really never thought i’d see ryan and shane being talked about by youtube drama channels on how they’ve possibly killed their channel/careers but here we are

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i never watched Watcher but these comments are so fucking funny

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I am just. So weirdly tickled by this Watcher situation. Like yes, initially I was very disappointed and upset but honestly now I just think it's funny. I can't remember the last time a creator or group of creators misread the room this hard. Like they really thought they were cooking with this one. They had a countdown to this. They announced their paywalled streaming service with their whole chests and expected rapturous applause. Instead, there has been a non-stop chorus of boos and thrown tomatoes for days now. They would have probably gotten a better reaction if they had posted a video where they sprayed a dog in the eyes with soapy water.

It's all so pleasantly... low-stakes. The consequences are nonexistent. It's not like the Ned Fulmer situation, where a friend group is destroyed, real life relationships are ended, and young children are potentially subjected to the trauma of divorce. Nah, all that's happening here is three idiots will be making a lot less money than they wanted. Maybe they'll learn something, maybe they won't. Either way, they brought it entirely upon themselves, and that makes it okay to laugh at in my books. So I will!

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Good morning besties I got 3 hours of sleep and I have to get so much done before 11

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About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

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I watched Charlie MoistCritikal’s video on the Watcher drama and he definitely has some good insight considering he runs a company that helps creators get sponsorships, and finding out that with their subscriber & view counts they probably get $15,000-$30,000 per ad read was like the final nail in the coffin for me. So they make $100k a month on patreon + an ad read a week + ad revenue + merch sales? Maybe slow down on making new shows. Cultivate what you have. Maybe remaking worth it… isn’t worth it.

(Charlie’s video is good if you want some deeper insight into the creator economy)

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It’s so sad that the ghoul boys died on a ghost hunt, from ghosts

And that’s why they won’t post YouTube videos anymore, because they are dead, from ghost hunting ):

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Shane “share the passwords” Madej you’ve got some explaining to do!