I did this last year and inexplicably turned out to be eligible for Medicaid in WV, which I STILL have. Absolute and total lifechanger that’s letting me go to school instead of having to work full time.
Copying @xfreischutz‘s tags because it was a really good point. The dates for now are the same as last year. Get out there and get you your health insurance!
(Personal note: I qualified for Medicaid in Pennsylvania last year and I wasn’t expecting it. It really does help if you do it.)
NOTE – the Trump administration has allowed the sale of short term and catastrophic coverage plans. DO NOT BUY THESE. THEY WILL NOT HELP YOU. THEY ARE PREDATORY.
Make sure, if you qualify for ACA coverage, that you are purchasing a plan that is at least Silver tier!
replying is how you make friends! reply to anything you want and be friendly. don’t make rude jokes if you’re not friends already though!
quote retweeting is a no-no. when you “retweet with a comment” it’s not liked by content creators because it makes a new tweet out of their tweet and they don’t get the likes and retweets they would get if you’d just retweeted it straight up. if you want to comment on a retweet, reply to it or post a new tweet starting with “LRT” which stands for “last retweet” (it’s fine to quote retweet dumb memes and so on.)
you can make your tweets private. this means no one but your followers will be able to see what you post and no one will be able to retweet your content. you can switch back and forth between private and public at will. some people make a separate private account to tweet personal stuff and let mutuals follow it only. it’s a good way to keep things separate.
what is privatter? privatter is a third party web app that content creators can allow to be attached to their twitter. it lets them tweet content that they can make exclusive to logged in users, followers, mutuals, or a specific list of users. as long as you are logged in to twitter and fall into the intended category, you’ll be able to see it.
you can mute people you follow. (and those you don’t, ofc.) you can also mute words and phrases and entire conversations. if you mute someone you follow and they reply to you, that reply will still show up in your notifications. it’s a good way to keep the peace!
you can limit notifications to people who follow you or to mutuals. (notifications from people you follow will still show up regardless of which option you’ve selected.)
miscellaneous tips and warnings: if you accidentally unfollow and refollow someone, it won’t show up in their notifications as long as it’s within a couple minutes. no more accidental stuff. everyone can see who everyone follows so watch out. people will know if you unfollow. if you want to report someone and want them gone forever, report a tweet where they used a curse word. screenshotting tweets for harassment is a no-no and can get you banned. don’t be lame. don’t be a dick. vaguing others is generally really bad form and so is complaining about content within a fandom you’re in. use the mute tools at your disposal and don’t be a spoiler. you won’t come back from a rep like that and everyone sees everything.
that’s it! happy tweeting!!
how do i keep all my content together on twitter?
threads are your best friend!! you make a tweet with your commission info and links and so on and pin it to the top of your page. then reply to that tweet with a copy and pasted link to the tweet where you posted the art/fic/etc you want to not lose. reply to that new tweet with the next piece of artwork and so on. you can also make a unique hashtag for your content to use when you post, so that when you search that hashtag later you’re able to see just your art. good luck!
2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 – FFN forums deleted
2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 – Quizilla shuts down
2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
2010 ish (?) – deviantART purges adult fanfiction (I only very vaguely remember this one, because I’ve never been a dA user and it happened during my fannish hiatus, but there is some incomplete info on Fanlore. If you remember more about what happened, please help edit that page!)
Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).
If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.
This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.
2017-2018: wattpad removes a huge host of LGBT+ Warrior Cats content at the behest of angry parenting groups. The HawkIvy pairing and TallJake pairing are almost exclusively targeted
Whoa! I hadn’t heard about that! Do you have any links to people talking about it? I’m not surprised, but I rarely hear anything about Wattpad, so I was totally unaware of this going on.
This is why we should move our blogs to Dreamwidth. It was born out of Strikethrough, it is owned and operated by fans, it doesn’t sell ads or personal information, and it already proved it would stand up for its users even to the point of getting hit in the pocketbook. Stable > shiny
Current Dreamwidth sale if you want the extra bells and whistles beyond the free blog level, or if you just want to support a fan-run project.
The HR manager tried to convince me that the offer was competitive. She told me that she couldn’t offer more because it would be unfair to
other paralegals. She said that if we did not agree to a salary that
day, then she would have to suspend me because I would be working past
the allowed temp phase. I insisted that she look into a higher offer and
she agreed that we could meet again later. Before I left, she had
something to add.
“Make sure you don’t talk about your salary with anyone,” she said
sweetly, as if she was giving advice to her own son. “It causes conflict
and people can be let go for doing it.” (This is to the best of my
recollection, not verbatim.)
It wasn’t all that surprising to hear this from a corporate HR manager. What was surprising was the déjà vu.
Just three months earlier, some of my coworkers at the coffee shop
told me that our bosses, who worked in the office on salaries, and even
the owner, got a higher cut of the tips than we did. One barista told me
that when she complained about it, the managers reduced her hours.
When you make minimum wage and have to fight for more than 30 hours
per week, tips are pretty important, so I sat down with my managers to
discuss the controversy. That’s when they told me not to talk about it
with the other baristas. The owner “hates it when people talk about
money,” my manager added, and “would fire people for it if he could.” I
sulked back to the espresso machine, making my lattes at half speed and
failing to do side work.
In both workplaces, my bosses were breaking the law.
Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), all workers
have the right to engage “concerted activity for mutual aid or
protection” and “organize a union to negotiate with [their] employer
concerning [their] wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of
employment.” In six states, including my home state of Illinois, the law even more explicitly protects the rights of workers to discuss their pay.
This is true whether the employers make their threats verbally or on
paper and whether the consequences are firing or merely some sort of
cold shoulder from management. My managers at the coffee
shop seemed to understand that they weren’t allowed to fire me solely
for talking about pay, but they may not have known that it is also
illegal to discourage employees from discussing their pay with each
other. As NYU law professor Cynthia Estlund explained to NPR,
the law “means that you and your co-workers get to talk together about
things that matter to you at work.” Even “a nudge from the boss saying
‘we don’t do that around here’ … is also unlawful under the National
Labor Relations Act,” Estlund added.
And yet, gag rules thrive in workplaces across the country. In a
report updated this year, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research
found that about half of American employees in all sectors are
either explicitly prohibited or strongly discouraged from discussing
pay with their coworkers. In the private sector, the number is higher,
at 61 percent.
Damn managers have definitely told me this before
Always reblog
adding to this on the subject of medical/family leave:
a coworker of mine (and integral part of a voluntary team he and I are the sole members of) had to have foot surgery and was told he’d need six weeks to recuperate. when he went to HR they told him his best option was to resign and then reapply for his same job after his 6 week recovery time.
he originally asked them if he could take those weeks as unpaid time off, and was about to take their “quit and come back” offer because they made it sound like the only option. this would have cancelled the very same healthcare he was using to pay for the treatment in the first place.
this is a fairly common tactic HR managers will try to use to scare workers out of taking any leave at all, or force you to reduce the amount of time you are “unproductive.”
you are entitled to twelve full weeks of (unpaid) time off to care for a family member or to recuperate from medical conditions. the explicit qualifying scenarios are listed on the website above.
you are entitled to keep your job and return to your position on completion. any repercussion/dismissal from your company is illegal. do not get bullied out of your job for medical treatments you or a family member needs. if you are in a situation where you are being forced to quit for a situation that qualifies under FMLA you should contact a lawyer.
TO REITERATE:
IT IS ILLEGAL TO BE FIRED FOR DISCUSSING PAY WITH FELLOW EMPLOYEES. IT IS A TYPE OF WORKER/UNION SUPPRESSION.
From someone who’s survived MySpace, livejournal, deviantart, and fanfiction.nets’ content purges and bad policy updates, here’s some advice on how to get through tumblr’s recent bullshit:
– don’t knee jerk delete. I know it’s tempting to peace out immediately but hang on and do the other steps first. Out right ghosting and erasing everything is how fandoms die.
– archive everything on your blog you want to keep
– tell your followers how they can archive and keep your work too. A lot of fic and art were only saved from ff.net and lj because other people saved it first. If you’re cool with other people saving your work for them to personally keep, let them know this. You can absolutely discourage reposting but I really do highly recommend you allow people to personally save fic and art they like and are worried will disappear forever. Digital Dark Ages are a real thing.
– tell people where you’re jumping ship to. Give links. Keep that info up, even if you’ve left the site.
– go through who you follow and find out where else you can follow them. Save their work if they’ll allow it. It’s tedious as hell but if you want to keep up with people on here clicking on their page to check in is the best way to do it.
– support places like ao3. This is exactly why ao3 asks for donations a few times a year. They are a 100% anti-purging, judgement free, ad free non profit run by an elected board and protected by lawyers. Places like ao3 literally save fandom so please continue to support them and other similar archives. This is exactly why ao3 is so important.
Chartreuse Abstruseness Export 