A Small PSA To All Those New To Dealing With The Porn Bots That Tumblr Now Has A Fresh Wave Of I Understand

A small PSA to all those new to dealing with the porn bots that Tumblr now has a fresh wave of – I understand that when you go to report them, you want to report them as "[containing] sexually explicit material", but don't do that. Report them as spam instead.

These are spam bots flooding tags and the website in general with spam links. They often do not have anything sexually explicit on their blog (although they often have implicit material). Plus, these two reports get very different results. Reporting explicit material gets the bot slapped behind an 18+ wall, so minors can't check if they're a bot or not. Reporting spam gets the bot taken down.

Remember, folks: when dealing with a bot, report spam, not smut!

also just a general rule of thumb: when nationalized/public service industries are striking, they ARE striking for YOUR benefit, ultimately. bus drivers are the ones who fight against capitalist upper management trying to shut down bus routes that "don't generate enough profits" or trying to generally set up a worse (public!) service for the sake of """"efficiency""""" and """"""cost optimization""""""" (read: pay less people and overwork them to give YOU, the public, a much worse service or commodity).

it's like this in schools, hospitals, public transportation, literally everywhere. the striking workers care for the public' needs more than the bosses will ever do. sure they want better work conditions which is (should be) enough of a reason to support strikes in general, but by supporting striking workers, you ultimately support your own quality of life. it's all intertwined

woke up and someone spilled vanilla extract all over my dash, so as punishment you strange little beasties are getting all the VANILLA FACTS i know:

vanilla is the 2nd most expensive spice in the world (2nd to saffron)

which is why more than 99% of what we call "vanilla extract" is actually vanillin (vanilla's dominant flavor compound) and is not extracted from real vanilla.

luckily, even professionals struggle to tell the difference when it comes to things like baked goods. but there is a distinct difference in non-heat treated products like vanilla ice cream. real vanilla has a more complex, individualized flavor profile.

why is vanilla so expensive? because it is a ridiculously delicate & demanding crop. complete primadonna.

vanilla beans come from vanilla orchids. these crazy flowers bloom for A SINGLE DAY and have to be HAND-POLLINATED in a process that is exhausting, delicate, and requires specialist knowledge passed down over generations.

then, if you're lucky, you get vanilla beans.

which then require months of further specialized treatment.

the entire process takes about a year and can go wrong at any stage

vanilla has been cultivated for over 800 years (possibly much longer). the first known cultivators are the Totonac, an indigenous people of Mexico.

the Aztecs used it as a sweetener to balance out the bitter taste of cocoa. it was popular in a drink called xocolatl--the precursor to modern hot chocolate!

it is only pollinated by a very specific orchid bee!!!

which is why no fruit could be grown outside of Mexico until the 1800s

Edmond Albius, born into slavery, invented the pollination method we still use today--launching a global industry when he was just 12 years old.

today, the majority of the world's vanilla is grown in Madagascar

if you want real vanilla, read the labels carefully--it's harder to find than you think!

in conclusion, those tiny black specks you see in fancy vanilla ice cream? those are vanilla bean seeds! itty bitty orchid seeds!!! they are delicious and also a PRISSY BITCH!

(src)

Fanfiction Authors: HEADS UP

(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)

An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:

(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)

I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:

IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.

You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:

HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:

First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.

Select the radio buttons/dropdown options (shown below) to indicate that you are the legal Rights Owner, you have a copyright concern, and it is about a pirated product.

Enter the name of your story in the Name of Brand field.

In the Link to the Copyrighted Work box, enter a link to the story on AO3 or whatever site your work is posted on.

In the Additional Information box, explain that you are the author of the work and it is being sold without your permission. That's all you really need. If you want, you can include additional information that might be helpful in establishing the validity of your claim, but you don't have to go into great detail. You can simply write something like this:

I am the author of this work, which is being sold by [publisher] without my permission. I originally published this story in [date/year] on [name of site], and have provided a link to the original above. On request, I can provide documentation proving that I am the owner of the account that originally posted this story.

In the ASIN/ISBN-10 field, copy and paste the ID number from the pirated copy's URL. You'll find this ten-digit number in the Amazon URL after the word "product," as in the screenshot below. (If the URL extends beyond this number, you can ignore everything from the question mark on.) Once this number has been added, Amazon will pull the product information automatically and add it to the complaint form, so you can check the listing title and make sure it's correct.

Finally, add your contact information to the relevant fields, check the "I have read and accept the statements" box, and then click Submit. You should receive an email confirmation that Amazon has received the form.

Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!

NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!

there's an au in my head where vader shows up at jabba's palace before luke but after leia's capture on a tip call from boba fett. leia, captive on jabba's throne, senses his arrival well before she sees him; watching his descent into the throne room, she regrets conjuring the spectre of "powerful friends" to scare jabba. vader has strangled several guards by this point; jabba doesn't care; he receives vader as though they were old business partners, without a translator. vader interrupts jabba in the middle of a self-congratulatory overture - jabba is harboring the leader of the rebel alliance, he says, pointing at leia, and must surrender her immediately. this escalates; jabba offers han instead, vader counters that jabba will relinquish the princess or die, jabba reaches for the controls to his rancor pit, leia averts her eyes, unwilling to key vader into the trapdoor beneath his feet, and suddenly vader is gone and she and the whole throne retinue are sliding, lurching, falling; they're the ones in the pit, and when she looks up, she sees vader staring down at them with an ignited lightsaber, surrounded by poorly aimed blaster fire. she looks away just as he begins to deflect it.

vader has decided to pay boba and lure luke and punish jabba all at once; he leapt over the throne and pushed its occupants with the force, pickled frogs and leia included, into the rancor pit. he still fully intends that leia be made his prisoner - he doesn't want to kill his best line to luke - he simply assumes that since she's survived him, she can survive anything. as it happens, leia does escape the rancor because it feasts on the stunned jabba first, breaking the chain that connected her to him; dodging the panicking attendants, who also end up eaten or mauled, she finds the pit entrance and secures herself by bringing down the threshold gate. if vader's right about leia, though, he's wrong here about luke, who isn't provoked into appearing. becoming impatient - having slaughtered every guard who hasn't fled - vader deprives artoo of luke's hidden saber and decides to draw luke to him where he cannot fail to appear. stuck between gates in the dungeon, leia shrieks and missteps, slicing open her boot and her foot on a misplaced axe; vader has materialized silently, like a shadow that shouldn't be in the desert. he's in a foul mood; ignoring her limp, he pulls her out by the chain still attached to her neck (because he's petty and hasn't forgotten her comment about his 'leash') all the way to his private ship (the nubian j-type that symbolizes and effected his removal from tatooine, the ship he has in the comics). with usual bumbling luck (let's say his restraining bolt no longer works because jabba is dead), threepio trails them and ends up boarding too, commenting blithely about the ship's royal trappings.

well aware luke is on tatooine, vader doesn't leave the planet; flying in a way that leia first thinks is just intended to keep her off-balance, he heads for the lars homestead. lashed to the co-pilot's seat and without a sense of their direction, leia looks at featureless sand and can't help but call up the map in her mind to where obi-wan would have lived. it's popular fanon that vader can't read leia's mind owing to natural mental shields; I could see exploring an alternative where he can sense her strong emotions, where he does swoop in and catch the fish swimming right at the surface - only that what he catches is what she's chosen to sacrifice, or what she sees no reason to hide. what to him is a prize is to her an acceptable loss. so maybe in this au, there's this history between them: on the death star, she'd given up that obi-wan was part of her mission, anticipating that he'd be on alderaan and out of reach, while protecting the location of the rebel base; maybe that's why she survived her interrogation, because vader had gone so distracted with the bait that he'd lost interest in the fish. point being, vader is well aware that she's thinking about obi-wan right at this moment, and leia is chilled to realize, just from the quality of his silence, that she knows that he knows.

but this soon doesn't matter, because she realizes they're being pursued by what's left of jabba's guard and the millenium falcon. vader is possibly an even crazier pilot in atmosphere than in space, performing stomach-turning stunts like killing the ship's engines and going into a freefall dive to get each attacker but the more distant falcon to destroy itself; the falcon he shakes off by heading straight into a massive sandstorm. droid-like as he is, leia realizes he doesn't rely on the ship's instruments when the storm causes half of them to fail and they always manage to avoid hitting flying debris. after landing the ship, vader orders leia to put on a flightsuit and helmet before they exit into the storm, lest she take unnecessary further damage. freeing herself of the mask the moment they're in an enclosed part of the homestead - which required passing through a courtyard open to the hostile elements - leia is first surprised by vader's choice of an abandoned hovel, then concerned when threepio reveals where they are. the more details threepio spills (the more the limits of his memory banks are revealed to vader), the more uneasy leia becomes. luke's family died because of the empire. but they'd still be alive, she can't help but think, had she not sent the death star plans to this planet. perhaps enjoying this dark turn to her thoughts, vader doesn't interrupt the flow of commentary. evidently unfazed by his own role in murdering luke's family, he prowls through their home as though it were his own castle. leia can imagine he's designing a trap for luke. silently, she implores him to stay away.

luke doesn't come. a massive piece of farming equipment, left unmaintained for too long and violently unmoored by the storm, smashes into vader's ship, taking out an engine. bounty hunters hired by angry hutts try to finish the job; vader kills them, but not before they've set his ship on fire. and vader starts to go slightly more mad than usual; the tatooine sand in his suit and smoke preventing use of his ship's hyperbaric chamber and luke's refusal to acknowledge his psychic pleading/threats and threepio's obviously mindwiped chatter and leia's scorching presence, her immense grief and scorn, her way of judging without having to speak a word - it all warps, and blurs, as he paces like the suit is cooking him from inside, and touches the wall disjointedly, and makes sudden disappearances to repair his ship with cheap moisturizer parts. for her part, leia is judging. she knows why vader wants her alive, and she's angry to be used again as bait, to say the least. and she's also judging her own chances: she's not eaten, not had access to water, she's lost a good deal of blood, her foot is bandaged with dirty cloth, and luke's lightsaber is hanging from vader's belt, tantalizingly near and far.

she tries to goad vader, to distract him from his ship repairs and the trap he's creating and the second lightsaber on his belt. he's become predictable, and luke won't come. she has no reason to hide her love for luke, so when vader lashes out mentally - jealously pilfering surface impressions of luke from her mind - he can remain blind to her intentions. only vader is paying real attention to her now that he's gotten to taste those memories, she's fed a hunger she hadn't known could devour, and she understands that he's draining her, taking from her, that she's shriveling up from thirst and regret and this connection. he's seeing her value as for the first time and isn't seeing her at all - and when threepio begins crying for help, drawing vader's attention away, leia is certain she is going to die.

vader wants to know when threepio entered her service. threepio is only too glad to answer exactly. leia is too depleted to care about what he shares - better that he spill the secrets of the dead captain antilles than having vader back in her head - she drifts into unconsciousness, and dreams. she's back at the palace in aldera, in the oval garden, where a stone statue of queen amidala had stood watch over beds of white asters. leia had liked to look into the child-queen's solemn face - her mother had often brought her here to tell her stories of amidala's adventures - but in her dream she is facing the statue's back, a meaningless circumstance that somehow chills her. she circles closer and yet can't get around to the front, and the harder she tries the more she details slip from her, until she can't even remember amidala's face. this too, she has lost.

anyway, that's the setup. it escalates from there. vader is paying enough attention to entertain new suspicions about luke's strong feelings for leia, and vice versa; amongst the many other threatening things he does, he finds desert cacti and makes leia drink the nectar. leia, still certain she is dying, commits to saving luke as her final act, which she believes means killing vader. vader repairs his ship; leia ensures the self-destruct goes off while they're both on it. vader absorbs the blast, keeping leia alive while compromising his own life support; suddenly faced with the chance to fulfil her wish, luke's lightsaber in her hands, leia finds herself unable to follow through - because vader tells her to do it.

at last, a figure on the horizon. luke is come.