also found on ao3 as stormyseasons Avid member of the ZhongXiao manor discord. fic snippets can be found via searching my blog with the 'my fic' tag. or 'fic snippet', or 'zhongxiao', 'genshin fic' etc.
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Strike Support Declining - Here’s how you can continue to support the writers
Since the WGA strike started on May 2, the public has shown immense support for the writers—sending food, snacks, drinks, and encouragement from across the world all the way to Los Angeles, New York, and other picketing locations.
But loud and vocal strike support—in the news and in public spaces—is notably declining the longer the strike goes on. So we’re bringing you a few ways to show writers, studios, and fellow fans: we’re still here, and we still stand with the WGA.
1. Post on Twitter (and other social media sites)
You might think social media noise won’t be noticed by the studios, but it CAN encourage individual WGA members—and slowly but surely put pressure on the studios to make a fair deal.
If you follow WGA members such as Adam Conover (Adam Ruins Everything), John Rogers (Leverage, Librarians), Gennifer Hutchison (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul), Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Lost, The Witcher) [and many many more you can find through their following lists], tell them you support them! Hashtag #IStandWithTheWGA #DoTheWriteThing and tell them that you and your fandom are prepared to support them as long as the strike lasts; that they deserve to have their demands met and you’re with them all the way. Boost morale however and whenever you can!
Remember you can always link to Adam Conover’s excellent explanation of WGA demands versus studio refusals, tweeted here.
2. Donate or boost fundraisers
You might be surprised to learn that the picketing locations are not always parties! Sometimes themed pickets are fun, and fandoms and celebrities occasionally are able to fundraise for a food truck or ice cream truck at picketing locations. However, that is the EXCEPTION and not the norm. Writers are asking for food & drinks at many locations.
There are many funds to donate to, and it can be overwhelming to pick one! But one that could use your support RIGHT NOW is the CBS Radford picket line:
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-If you’re in LA, you can bring food and snacks directly to that picket line (or get food deliveries sent there, with instructions to be given to the strike captain on duty.) Strike locations are available on the WGA West website and are updated there.
-Or there’s a pizza fund for the strike locations (unfortunately Venmo is a US-only donation option)
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-If you’re not in LA, donate to the Entertainment Community Fund to support TV and film workers affected by the strike.
-Lots of fandoms are organizing donations on their own, for instance the Our Flag Means Death fundraiser on Paypal (available internationally). Check to see if your fandom has started a fundraiser… or start one yourself to show your support! We’re happy to give tips on organizing your fandom!
As always, please boost this post and any and all well-sourced information that comes from the WGA or its members. We’re happy to fact-check anything you send our way too.
web 2.0 companies that try to frame people using adblockers as greedy freedloaders always conveniently turn their heads when those same “greedy freeloaders” tell them that advertisers are paying to put malicious and predatory ads on their playforms and adblock users are, by in large, using adblockers to protect themselves
the first time i ever saw an adblocker recommended was for people with photosensitive epilepsy getting barraged with “congrats! you won!” style popups nonstop
the first time i ever personally used an adblocker was when deviantart’s excessive ad placement slowed down my household’s shared computer to the point it was unusable and my mom told me to stop using deviantart. so instead i installed an adblocker
and nowadays on Youtube and Facebook you get ads for casinos and alcohol targeted toward addicts and people with bipolar disorder, quack medicine targeted to people with chronic medical conditions, hate speech targeted toward the victims of said hate speech, and horror movie ads with flashing lights targeted toward…everyone.
and of course Google, who serves a majority of these ads, doesn’t actually care to remove any of the dangerous bullshit it shoves in your eyes but will expect you to pay them for it. sorry, i’d just rather not use youtube at that point. you had your chance.
Tumblr, buddy, listen to me. This is an unprecedented opportunity. You can snap up all of the pie here, and become defacto internet goodguy easy. All you gotta do is… drop the nsfw ban. Unambiguously. Announce that dicks are back on the menu. You want people subscribed the blogs? You want people to actually use your Post+ function? Porn. Let us use it for porn. The youngins aren’t joining this site anyway, you’re not competing with tiktok. The vaguely horny 20-40 demographic though? You can have that. You can have all of that. Think about it.
Do you know how many pinup artists alone are itching to come back to tumblr, but dont because of the unclear, seemingly arbitrary application of your nsfw policy? These are insanely talented people who are practically begging to give you content. For free. But you gotta change the policy. We can’t keep dancing around this. Just think of publicity. The drama. A complete 180. You’d kill it tumblr. You could make it happen. Please.
It’s time! for! 2ha!!!!!!! I’ve had ‘the husky and his white cat shizun’ on my radar as a bookbinding project basically from the very start, back when I thought it was impossible that any of these danmei novels would ever be licensed for english translations. But this book is so long, and besides, the translation wasn’t complete, so it went onto the backest of back burners. Until now! So, the book has been licensed. It’s started releasing! As usual, please support these authors, they have a passionate english-speaking fanbase, and I very much want them to enjoy that success in a practical sense and not just an abstract one. And I also want more of these novels translated, haha. But the nature of licensing means I’ve also gotten a lot more interested in preserving prior translations in formats that can’t casually be yoinked from the internet.
Now, this is a big novel. This was 1.1 million words. The stack of pressed text quarto blocks was over 15 inches, and once I added covers (very thick, for reasons I’m about to cover) and boxes, this thing was 22 inches long. Oh my god. This sustained effort naturally overlapped with an international trip and two crucially Important work presentations. I almost died. I had to split it into multiple boxes because I wasn’t sure I could laminate boards thick enough to support so much weight at so much length and still cut it with any precision, lmao
And those covers? I took inspiration from notebooks I’ve sent with cover flaps like these, and also decided to see if I could incorporate the strip magnets I bought for peller box experiments and barely used. The downside that didn’t make itself apparent until late in the construction process was that laminating boards to match this depth made the covers REAL thick, and difficult to cover with a crisp finish. Duo bookcloth can get wrinkly and fragile when it’s wet, so it didn’t entirely take me by surprise, but it’s something I’ll be accounting for next time I try this construction!
I tried to stick to a black and blue and silver color scheme, because it matches the book, but I also accepted some gold highlights on the endpapers. The duo bookcloth tends to photograph with a bit more brown in the color shift than I see in person, but I think it plays out well in person or in photos! The endpapers make for a nice striking pop when the book opens and don’t blend into the color fabric, which was something I definitely wanted to avoid.
And, speaking of thematically appropriate, I found this image for chapter headers that was almost perfect, but the wrong kind of flowers. So I did change those to haitang blosoms, haha. That happened early in the typesetting process, but I did also have that on my mind as I worked out decorations for the boxes! Mostly, I just titled what book of the novel it was on the top and left it there, but the very last detail I added was a pair of foil flowers done in pink and silver, on the outside edges of the boxes for book 1 and the extras. I finished that last night and then went to bed SO excited to take pictures in the morning. I really had an incredible time with this book, and the whole adventure reminded me just how much I love 2ha. I’m so happy I did this, I really had just an incredible time!!!!!
The above examples have been provided with the authors’ permission to demonstrate what these look like.
Basic rundown:
They are all 3 sentences long
Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation
Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever
No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story
The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post
Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly
There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate
Just when you thought the OTW revelations couldn’t get any more troubling.
So That’s part of what was going on back in 2015. I think I’ve changed my mind. It’s not that OTW needs a new board, although they probably could use one.
It’s that they’ve got a terrible case of Founder’s Syndrome, and lots of people busy playing ducking internal politics and resisting any and all movement to grow or improve or change.
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