#answering is courtesy

[robertoperodi]

Domandare è lecito, rispondere è cortesia... ma non serve - Asking is legitimate, answering is courtesy… but it's not necessary

Domandare è lecito, rispondere è cortesia… ma non serve – Asking is legitimate, answering is courtesy… but it’s not necessary

Domandare e attendere la risposta,domandarsi e sprofondare nell’immenso di noi stessi.Sembra questa la strada tracciata da molti… per ritrovarsi.Sembra questa la dinamica della vita, della fede.Sarà. A me non pare. (more…)

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#answering is courtesy #Asking is legitimate #blog #Domandare è lecito rispondere è cortesia #faith #fede #I never give up #life #myself #Non mollo #oggi #pensieri #roberto perodi #self help #thoughts #today #today&039;s gospel #vita

[spearxwind]

Job hunting moodboard

#thunderclap #shitpost #im losing my fucking mind. and its only been a week. i wish it was common courtesy to at least answer back when u message places idk #i feel like ive irreparably damaged my reputation by using peoples contact forms to ask about jobs augh #jobposting

[fiercynn]

on otw's $2.5 million budget surplus: for fuck's sake do something with our money

the recent ddos attack on ao3 illustrated that the otw (@transformativeworks) has amazing volunteers who were able to get things up and running again after a cyberattack. and i’ve seen a bunch of different people urging others to donate to otw in light of the attack.

the problem? not only are the volunteers not going to get any of the money, but the otw likely isn’t going to do anything else with it, because they already have more than $2.5 million in budget surplus that they have not been transparent about with their members, and that they have no plans for.

yup. we’ve known for years that otw had at least $1 million in their “reserves”; they’ve said so at their last two public finance meetings in 2021 and 2022. but a few months ago, @manogirl and i went digging a little deeper because we suspected that there was even more. 

and we were right. from the documentation available, our estimate is that at the beginning of 2023, they had $2,585,841 that was not dedicated to any purpose. this does not include money they had budgeted to spend in 2023 on regular expenses. just extra. (keep reading to see how we got that figure.)

equally appalling? they have all this money and are barely earning any interest on it. satsuma on dreamwidth looked at their 2021 tax returns and found that only ~$10k of their money is held in an interest-bearing savings account, which resulted in them earning only $90 in interest income for 2021. the rest of it is not in interest-bearing accounts. it is just sitting there.

looking at all the crises and dysfunction that have been discussed and uncovered over the past few months - racist harassment and the three-year-old promise to hire a diversity consultant; the mistreatment of volunteers by the otw board both related to last year’s CSEM attacks, and, separately, mistreatment and racism towards chinese and chinese diaspora volunteers both in the past and recently with the closure of the otw’s weibo account; and of course, this latest ddos attack - all of this indicates that there is severe dysfunction within the org. and donors throwing more money at the organization clearly isn’t helping.

the otw board needs to get its shit together and hire people to help with these things. this is not a new idea - there’s been talk for years about hiring paid staff, and in fact, at their july 2021 board meeting, otw said they would be appointing a volunteer who would be known as the “paid staff officer”, to come up with a plan for hiring paid staff. (to be clear, the “paid staff officer” would be an unpaid volunteer.) it’s been two years since that commitment. they have not, to my knowledge, appointed that officer yet.

it’s infuriating, because otw’s “scrappiness” as an organization is constantly used to defend their obstruction of action on things like racism, and this ddos attack will be used to further that agenda as well. but otw doesn’t need to be scrappy. they are well-resourced and could be using that money to set up more sustainable systems, instead of burning out and mistreating their volunteers, and reneging on commitments to address racism and harassment.

at the very least, if they’re not going to do anything with their massive budget surplus, they should stop taking more of people’s money. but we’d rather they did something useful with it.

if you want to see this change, the otw finance commitee holds a public meeting where you can ask questions and give them feedback. last year it was in mid-october. you do not have to be an otw member to attend. i'll definitely be making noise about it once the date is announced, but you can also follow otw's socials.

one brief aside: at the time of posting, a lot of these links are not working because the otw's website is still down. i copied these links from a twitter thread i made in the past and they should all be correct, so you just may have to wait until the site is back up to look at them.

now, to debunk some common excuses that people (not otw representatives, mind you, but just people on the internet who have decided to defend the org) give when confronted with how much money otw has:

MYTH: otw needs to keep $2.5 million in cash reserves in case of an emergency or unexpected revenue shortfall. REALITY: it’s true that nonprofits do need SOME cash reserves for those cases. typical practice is to have 3-6 months’ worth of operating expenses. otw’s current operating expenses are ~$520,000/year, so 6 months would be $260,000. (and, in fact, when i was told by an otw finance committee member that they had $1 million, they were intending 25% of that to be for emergencies, around $250,000). if you were being REALLY cautious, you could have reserves up to one to two years. but $2.5 million is enough for almost FIVE YEARS OF OPERATING EXPENSES. that is an absurd amount to be hoarding, especially when otw’s history of fundraising is that they always exceed their goals, and always make more money in donations than they need for their expenses within a given year. MYTH: they need this money for legal costs if they get sued. REALITY: otw gets most of their legal expenses donated, which is also not listed in their budget, but is in their audited financial statements. in 2021, the most recent financial statement we have, you can see on page 10 that they received just over $230k in donated legal expenses. they do budget some minor legal expenses yearly: in 2023 they’ve budgeted a little over $5k for “registration fees for conferences and hearings and funds set aside for legal filings if necessary, as well as an allocated share of newly adopted OTW-wide productivity tools”. however they do not have a history of even spending that much: in 2022, they had budgeted $4k for legal expenses and only spent $244 (see cell C29 of the budget spreadsheet). they have never been sued, and they do not appear to budget for litigation costs. and when, in the past, they’ve been asked about what their reserves are for (back in fall 2022 when the finance committee told me they had $1 million in reserves, even though this was patently false given their tax documents for 2021), litigation costs were not brought up.  MYTH: they just haven’t had enough time to figure out investment options. REALITY: they clearly have at least one savings account set up to generate interest, which only has $10k in it. even if they haven’t figured out a full investment portfolio, why wouldn’t they put more money in that account? in the u.s., the federal deposit insurance corporation (FDIC) insures bank accounts up to $250,000, so they should have at least that much in there. absurd. also, they have had plenty of time even for a larger portfolio. if you search “investment” on their site, you’ll see that they’ve been talking for YEARS about investing their reserves. more specifically, at both their 2021 and 2022 finance meetings, they said that they needed more time to research investment options. as usual, they have had far more time than they need.  MYTH: they need this money for new servers. REALITY: otw does in fact include expenses for new servers and server maintenance in their yearly budget reports. you can see this in their 2023 budget spreadsheet if you go to the sheet “program expenses” - under “archive of our own”, you’ll see server expenses. the $2.5 million is money that is EXTRA to their listed expenses and revenue in that spreadsheet.

finally, see below where we’ve given more context on otw’s budgeting and showed our work in coming up with these numbers.

showing our work

firstly, i should note for the record that i sent a message to the otw finance committee through the contact us form on the otw website on may 11, 2023 to ask them to state the amount in their reserves.

it has been two months and i have still not received a response (which i find funny, because at the last otw board meeting in early july, the board specifically said to use that form to contact the finance commitee if we had questions about the 2023 budget), so @manogirl and i were forced to do our own math. we've had this work checked by a number of people, but of course we were only able to work with the information the otw has made publicly available.

a few things you need to know about the otw’s budgeting:

they release yearly budget reports on their website (here’s their most recent one, which shows what they project for 2023 and their “actuals” for 2022), but they do not include their surplus in this report - they only include the revenue and expenses for each year

they also provide both their yearly audited financial statements and their yearly tax returns (form 990s) on their reports & governing documents page, but currently, the most recent statements we have are from 2021

otw typically raises more money in donations than they need within a year, so their surplus is always growing 

they have used the term “reserves” in the past to talk about money, but we don’t know exactly what they mean by “reserves” - is there a dedicated account that they consider their reserves?

because of these uncertainties, the goal for @manogirl and i was was to figure out how much of a budget surplus OTW had at the beginning of 2023, and because we don’t know how they define “reserves”, we defined it as how much they had in liquid assets that were not being dedicated for a specific purpose in their budget. (liquid assets are anything that can be converted into cash quickly – e.g. not equipment like their servers, nor anything that would be held in a long-term investment account, etc)

the first document we looked at was their 2021 audited financial statement. the key number is on page 11, under the section on liquidity, where it lists their end-of-year liquid assets as $2,315,841.

so at the end of 2021, they had over $2.3 million in liquid assets.

but since their 2022 audited financial statement isn’t up, we had to turn to their 2023 budget, and specifically, to their 2023 budget spreadsheet, where they show the “actuals” (what they actually raised & spent in each line item) for 2022 in column C. as i mentioned, they don’t list their reserves in this spreadsheet - only the revenue generated & expenses paid within that year, not anything carrying over from the previous year unless clearly outlined.

so at the bottom you’ll see that their net income (revenue minus expenses) in 2022 was $493,564.94, and that they then transferred $400,000 of that to the reserves sometime in 2022.

and the remaining $93,564.94, their adjusted net income for 2022, presumably carries over to help pay initial expenses in 2023 before they started earning more revenue. they also transferred $130,000 of their reserves BACK to help with that at the start of 2023.

so now we have the numbers we need to calculate the surplus (including reserves) at the start of 2023:

$2,315,841 (liquid assets at end of 2021) + $400,000 (transferred to reserve in 2022) - $130,000 (transferred from reserve in 2023) = $2,585,841 USD at the start of 2023

so that’s our math. otw had $2.5 million at the beginning of this year in surplus, in addition to around $223k (last year’s $93.5k in income and the $130k they transferred back from the reserves at the beginning 2023) to fund their expenses for the first half of this year. this does not even include the hundreds of thousands they raised in april 2023 during their fundraising drive.

okay the main part of our documentation is done, but if you want to read a little bit more about what @manogirl and i learned from doing this deep dive, here are a few additional thoughts/nuggets:

first of all, OTW is incorporated in the u.s. state of delaware, which is interesting because as @manogirl researched, delaware is a tax haven where 501c3 nonprofits don’t have to pay any business tax. plus, in many u.s. states, nonprofits have a limit on the amount of money they can keep without spending, but this too is not the case in delaware. of course, incorporating in delaware to take advantage of those benefits is not illegal! but it is very savvy, a characteristic that seems to have not continued with their financial management past their original incorporation lol

next, some more detail on their finances from their 2023 budget spreadsheet. let’s start with revenue.

the most interesting thing to me here is that while their spring and fall membership drive donations bring in the most, non-drive donations are also substantial. also their “total unrestricted net revenue received” is $975,638.36 in cell C16. however, for some reason, when they calculate their net income for the year, they use cell 12, “total unrestricted revenue” ($1,012,543.42) instead. the difference between those two cells is that cell 12 is the amount before their transaction fees are subtracted. but i have no idea why the transaction fees would be ignored when calculating their net income. is this an error?

next, their expenses, which came out to $518,978.48. not too much surprised me here except how low their legal advocacy spending still is, plus  the fact that they’d given francesca coppa a grant for her book on the history of fanvidding, lol. (i’ve written more about this; so has wistfuljane on dreamwidth if you scroll down a bit from here).

it’s also interesting to look at what they’ve budgeted (both the revenue & expenses they’ve expected going into the year) for 2022. in every revenue category, they have exceeded their goal, except for $50 in “other income”. and in most of their expenses categories they have overestimated their needs, except for going over about $700 in the transformative works & cultures, & about $500 for development. this just shows how much they are able to meet their yearly expenses (overestimated) with the revenue generated each year (underestimated), & still have substantial amounts left over (almost half of revenue transferred to reserves)

so that’s what we’ve found. if anyone else notices weird things in their budgeting, please let us know!

#if you're going to argue with this please do me and manogirl the courtesy of reading the whole thing first #we've probably already thought of some of your questions or arguments and answered them #organization for transformative works #otw #archive of our own #end otw racism #fandom racism #ao3 #otw finances

[wombywoo]

How is my favourite most talented artist doing????

Hope you may stumble upon mountains of chocolate 🎀❤️.

-🌺 anon

#asks #robalove image courtesy of ira <333 #he is the moment 💅 #to answer your question #I'm doing ok :) <3

[alientoastt]

hey are you a mechanisms enjoyer or perhaps a fan of the new albion tetralogy

have you ever wanted to hear R L Hughes' full vocal range as she plays two characters often in the same song as one another? Tim Ledsam as a morally repugnant but slightly sexy priest? an exploration of religious guilt around sex and where a sex worker gets a happy ending that doesn't involve no longer having sex? heavy fucking themes and jazzy instrumentals? you should listen to Lolina: Origins.

With a mish-mash of jazz, rock, classical and electronic music this concept EP tells the story of our heroine Lolina as she is taken from the brothels of dystopian Mars to the wastelands of post-apocalyptic Earth and beyond...

Vocals Lolina and Mariella: Rachel Hughes The Patriarch: Tim Ledsam OrganaTech Doctor: Jessica Law Backing Vocals: Jessica Law, Ben Below, Rachel Hughes Spoken Vocals: Tim Ledsam, Ben Below, Rachel Hughes

Instruments Piano and E-Piano: Rachel Hughes Violin and Electric Violin: Marius von Raum [sic.; released in 2017 and Kofi Young was credited as MvR until... I want to say 2020?] Fretless Bass, Electric Guitars, Banjo, Saxophone, Ewi, Electric Drums, Synths: Ben Below

content warnings under the cut this album is a lot. but its very good

religious guilt / extremism / kidnapping / forced conversion yeah quite a lot of it is about the whole uh. this congregation treats its women like shit and especially Lolina. I think it's handled well and there's an added layer of removal in the fact that it's like. on Mars. if that helps

a character kills herself because she realizes she has feelings for another woman and has been made to feel unclean for this. this is pretty much entirely contained in "Mariella's Lament", but is like. pretty integral to the story at play

hospital noises in Hospital Bed + medical malpractice. which isn't quite the right word for the deal with healthcare in this album but it's the best i can do without just Describing What Happens In The Album. general cyberpunk "you don't own parts of your body" type medical malpractice?

#some time i will sit down and do an honest to god review of this and pick it apart because i love it and when i love a media that means #i can pick out about 200 things wrong with every minute. but thats enriching and Part Of Enjoying It. its a courtesy that i want extended #to the things i make as well! to have someone say ''huh this is a bit strange. lets break down why you did that'' #and sometimes the answer is because the expected thing to have done would have been worse.I DIGRESS LISTEN TO THE ALBUM #babble #Lolina: Origins #Bandcamp

[larsnicklas]

JT MILLER ✧ 240101 [Goals have been tough to come by of late, part of that's Brock scoring a lot —] Yeah, I'm fishing them out of the net. [That's your role now?] Yeah. [Do you worry about goal scoring at all?] No, no. As long as Brock is.

#jt miller #vancouver canucks #canucks #nhl #hockey #meg.nucks #meg.gif #meg.all #are you guys GETTING it..... #like.... look at him......... #he usually keeps his hair under a hat out of courtesy bc he knows it makes my brain short out. #also i LOVE when he practically scoffs as he answers 'no' to some question. like top right.

[justfriendsbestthings]

Bet he’s looking at Simon

#but what is Simon doing #wrong answers only #I vote yoga #just wilmon things #yr s3 stuff #yr s3 spoilers #also that little girl the boys are cheering on is Vincent’s sister I have decided #Vincent’s sister courtesy of Zee

[thetwelfthcrow]

you forgot the 4433 crumbs at the fia gala 23

oui oui i made a post of all their podiums, love! i also didn't include their vegas shenanigans :)

but here, the fia handshake!

#zhalia's lil' answer chat #Anonymous #4433 #courtesy of user lestappenfiles i love u #otp: not god and his angel #max verstappen #lewis hamilton #fia gala 2023

[absurdumsid]

this is the closest we're getting to a face reveal. /will never actually face Rev

heres my face reveal !! (sarcastic. i will never face reveal✨)

#courtesy of my biology assignment lmao #dont look at the edgy text #sid answers

[yashley]

“Are you sure it wasn’t intentional?” / “Do you think she might be working for the bad guys?”

#critical role #imogen x fearne #the way they tread with the other is so fascinating to me I know it's only to me so that must mean I'm crazy but like #fearne has this delicacy in her boundless courtesies she really just asks questions others would shy away from but like #the way she asks them the way she words them this reckless fey really is weighing her words and feeling enough to ask even if she’s alone #and there's like this bridge that keeps flickering between imogen and fearne between their moralities and relationship with fate* #that fearne says Well Bad Can Be Good and imogen No I Didn't Choose That If It's Bad and they both have a lot of friction with that it's So #fearne whispers to imogen in the language she Believes imogen Knows but imogen Committed to her goodness pretends she Doesn't and it's Like #the way imogen words that it's like what is She looking for in that answer in fearne but she's Looking with a subtle recognition in that #The Faintest Faintest Nod fearne gives imogen when she says It Just Happened like that's a distinction without difference my dear #but fearne so gently ebbs from further questioning imogen's relationship with Those powers it gets me man #and then you have imogen's Concept of Bad n Good that it's really clearly messing with fearne's own perception Questioning morri #if the ep screenshot isn't ashley and laura quietly side eyeing eachother then thats fine that doesn’t bother me at all #ygifs

[vivalaplxto]

wet cat Mind

#courtesy of a discussion in the qotd answers channel of the cjfs #Doodles #Cccc #chonny jash #chonnys charming chaos compendium #chonny's charming chaos compendium #cj mind #chonny jash mind #the mind electric

[slippery-domjot-balls]

For your Consideration.......

The breast is yet to come! The correct answer is obvious.

Please reblog this so we can collect a large sample size for the most accurate representation.

Thank you.

#important polls seeking answers #memory alpha does not cover this #please reblog for data collection #pictures courtesy of trekcore.com

[pandaemoanium]

employers stop ghosting me challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

#at least have the courtesy to give me an answer #even a short 'lol no' would be fine gksjgjdjg #instead im left here refreshing my inbox every 5 seconds like a poor teenager getting left on read by his first crush #personal

[shadowbrightshine]

The only things you need to tag on ao3 are applicable archive warnings (graphic violence, major character death, underage, non-con) or "choose not to use archive warnings" (assuming archive warnings apply, if none apply then choose "no archive warnings apply"). That's it. You can have a fic with no tags other than the fandom and the archive warnings. You don't even have to rate your fic, in fact if the fic has an inappropriate rating and gets reported, it'll get changed to unrated.

I mean in terms of "required" that's true.

But doing that is a dick move. And you'll probably be reported for it.

If you're writing something that requires a few of those warnings you should include why you added them so people can filter it out without trouble. Or search for it. If you don't want hate from people who don't want to see it, let them filter it out and there is no issue.

You can't really don't like don't read from the start if you don't know what you're reading and plenty of people will not just leave the fic. They'll get mad.

And yes you can choose not to use the archive warnings but if you do you should probably tag things anyways.

Like I've chosen not to use the warnings because they didn't actually fit what was happening. Then I used tags to say what it actually was. Because it was still something a lot of people might be uncomfortable with.

It's courtesy. And you should tag your fics.

That's one of the biggest draws of ao3.

#shine post #ao3 discourse #ao3 writer #answers #like you should tag things thats just common courtesy #its the good thing to do

[obscenicon]

in all honesty i don't care what you do and can't stop you but. i feel like it would be courteous to say something about that in your pinned or something? for people who want to avoid it? instead of just. discovering that one day

i do agree proship is a stupid name but something. could be nice

you can just unfollow me! any actual art i post that is potentially upsetting will be tagged but this is my blog and i play how i want to and youre always free to leave if u dont like it <3

#i dont particularly care for being'courteous' on this blog #especialy when said attempts at courtesy seem to attract even more anger and outrage #also um #i have to unfollow ppl all the time bcs they turn out to post shit that makes me uncomfortable #over shipping most of all. you dont even know how many ppl jumpscare me with davekat when i never saw it coming #anyways i wont answer any more asks abt this unless theyre funny ^.^ #👻

[saiiboat]

i’d love to hear about your fuga sailing stuff \o/

HII ^_^ awesome. ok. so atm i have one silly racing au that i rotate in my head and one fic in the works which takes place directly after fuga when guaxinim, pac, and mike leave the island together on the boat. this one is heavy on the hurt and lighter on the comfort and is essentially just pac on one massive spiral now that he's starting to process everything that happened in prison and the island. lots of pac feeling guilty about cell's perceived suicide and struggling with his anger at mike for getting them into this mess. he's very much an emotional wreck LOL. hes been through so fucking much man. also going from being enclosed in a prison for a year and a half and then being out on open water and the crazy anxiety of being in such an open space is. well. its really getting to him. i'll leave some snippets of it under the cut 💪💪💪

the racing au is really just silly⛵💪💪🔥🔥🔥the nature of the sailing autism being that i always need to take some guys and throw them on a racing team, all of their insanities included.

when i talked about this au before i said that they sailed j22s but im upgrading them. they now sail Melges 20s. its official. ill put images under the cut. god. gorgeous boats.

the general idea is that JV and cell are two sailors looking for new members for their respective crews. felps is already on cell's crew and guaxinim sails with JV. probably at some point jv was on cell and felp's crew and now they have some kind of crazy beef. anyways. cell is just as weird and gross and intense as he is in fuga and he really wants pac and mike on his crew and having nothing to do with JV. obviously mike is skeeved out by the weird gross guy who looks maybe a bit too hungry sometimes and tries to get pac to join JV's crew with him. unfortunately pac is way too enamored with cell's negative rizz and cell proposes the idea to pac that tazercraft splits ways and mike can join JV's crew on his own. Mike is understandably upset at this but still ends up joining JV and guaxi's crew. the two boats have insane tension and pac is torn between pretending none of this happened at all and ignoring mike/sending worlds saddest eyes back to mike. mike is hurt and pissed off at pac and cell and felps and does his best to pretend that they dont exist at all while also needing to beat them in every regatta ever or he'll DIE because maybe if he wins against them enough times it'll prove something to pac. what will it prove? i dont think even he knows lol.

cell is actively trying to drive a wedge in between pac and mike and JV is doing the same thing on the other side. felps is purposely looking the other way during all of this and guaxinim is watching it all go down with some sick sense of fascination. definitely just hanging around to watch it happen like a long drawn out car crash.

cell in this au is especially fascinating to me. squeezing him like a stressball. he's ten ways fucked in the head and the reason why he started sailing in the first place is because his therapist told him to get a hobby and it was downhill from there. anyways cell tells his therapist about pac and the next time cell sees pac he walks up to him and says "my therapist says that we need to get coffee together and have normal interactions so i stop thinking about eating you" and pac just goes. oh! and its the hottest thing anyones ever said to him

obsessed with them, frankly

^^ sexual images fr

#ty for the ask :333 it was fun to get to talk abt them ^_^ !!! #wsdanon #courtesy of ro #suicide mention #<< pac recounting the end of fuga #our answers #saii.answers #saii.writing