This whole bankruptcy thing was a money making scam by the suits who bought out the company back in the 2000s and ran it into the ground.
Not only is the toy store brand not dead, but 30,000 people are now angry as this scheme blocked them out of severance pay and they are now unemployed and unable to return to work when they start up again.
Many toy companies including Hasbro are raising eyebrows at this, as the initial bankruptcy cost them millions of dollars in sales revenue and their stocks took a nasty hit (Mattel being the worst off from it, as Toys R Us closing compounded with steadily falling sales of their products). Advocates are calling this a “bad PR stunt” since the suits want the company to make sales for the holidays.
Hopefully, this will cause enough of a stink to kill it off for good. I’d rather say goodbye Geoffrey as I knew him than have him come back as a reanimated corpse controlled by greedy hucksters who put thousands of people out of work for no other reason than to line thier own pockets and escape the consequences of their own failings.
TBH I kinda figured something like this would happen. The company makes a big stink about going bankrupt, gives all their execs enormous cuts from the profit, while their entire workforce is royally fucked over with no kind of severance, no aide, nothing. Than, ta daa! The company is magically saved and rebranded. The execs make even MORE money and no one gives two shits about all those lower echelon employees they fucked over for the sake of more money and a lot of good publicity.
To be fair, we abducted members of every new race. Abduct a small percentage of the population, expose them to some galactic prisoners, and we get a good idea of what germs, diseases, and viruses will make the jump between races. Do this over the course of a [roughly equivalent to a century], and you get a good idea of what there is, how quickly it mutates, etc. You also have the time to develop vaccines for any races that might be affected by the new race (including itself- we’re not heartless).
But we underestimated humans.
It was [roughly equivalent to four decades] into our testing of humanity. We picked up a human from his transport and placed him in a containment cell. He had some nutrients with him, and we picked that up too: less we had to feed him later.
But we underestimated the resourcefulness of humans.
Something went wrong- we think it was a door malfunction- and he escaped the cell. He disabled the guards easily (we suspect they were less alert than they should have been) and took their weapons. We locked all hatches, hoping to seal him in the laboratory wing. Unfortunately, he hacked the shipboard computer, gaining control of all systems. He made his way to the bridge, where he took the captain hostage. We offered him riches, technologies beyond human understanding.
But we underestimated the stubbornness of humans.
He was paid us no mind as he wrestled with the controls, as if on some quest. He punched numbers and figures into the console, and mumbled something about ‘being lit on fire’ by a superior. He set the ship down on the other side of the city from where he was picked up and opened the doors. We braced ourselves for a military confrontation, but it seemed like we were outside another human’s abode. He jumped out, carrying the nutrients with him.
We underestimated Domino’s 30-minute or free guarantee.
Male positivity? In my branding? It’s more likely than you think
I love this
Y E S. FINALLY
AXE realized their target demographic are the preteen and teen boys who over-apply their product and decided to do something good for these impressionable youths
People keep asking “How can anyone have a problem with AO3 doing fundraising!”
And I’m just like…. Have people not noticed all the virulent anti-AO3 hate on tumblr propagated by the anti shipping community? Antis have a problem with AO3 raising money because they hate the fact that AO3 won’t allow them to censor content they don’t like and doesn’t tolerate bullying. That’s who is putting out these posts like, “how can this nasty site raise so much money?” Read between the lines.
And for all the people who are just like, “If they don’t want AO3 to to raise money why don’t they just not donate?”
Because antis are incapable of saying “this isn’t for me so I won’t support it but I don’t care if other people support it. They have to actively discourage other people from supporting the thing. At the same time, they also won’t stop using AO3 because 1) they’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites who want readership and that’s where the readers are and 2) they’re too lazy to put together their own archive using AO3′s open source code because that would require doing coding and buying servers and doing all the moderating they want, which is hard, and they just want to engage in empty virtue signalling, which is easy
Anyway, my point is, people need to be aware that these people are out there and they hate AO3 and they want it to go away even though they’re actively using the platform. They’ve even said they want AO3 to fail so something “better” (re, something they control) can take its place. Some of them are blatant about it, calling AO3 a cesspit of pedophilia, and some of them are subtle about it, saying more innocuous things like ‘Does AO3 really need 130K a year?” “Shouldn’t you give your money to individual needy people doing gofundmes for stuff that’s more more important?”
But all of these people have the same end goal, which is the destruction of the archive, and the way they’re going about it right now is to try to discourage people from donating.
So instead of asking, “Why do people object to AO3 raising money?” start telling people “Hey there are people out there who hate AO3 and want to destroy it and we have to protect the archive from them.” And donate, if you can, and signal boost, if you can’t.
Every year, multiple times a year, they convince ppl to fork out thousands of dollars and….literally nothing changes. There’s no doubt in my mind they’re pocketing most of this money lol
Yep
That’s what’s so wild to me. They’ve made exactly 0 changes other than adding the ‘Exclude’ tags and that def doesn’t take 130k.
You know if any of you actually bothered to click the link it’ll take you to their budget update and break down exactly what the spend the money on, over 70% of which is spent on server expenses, monitoring tools and system licences.
They also spent a good amount of the rest of the 30% budget on significant server overhaul costs.
AO3 is literally a service you get for free and the audacity you’d have to not bother reading the very open budget plan they have, but to then bitch and whine about people donating to keep the site running is wild.
hosts millions and millions of fanfiction at no cost to site users
hosts millions and millions user accounts at no cost to site users
is an extremely high traffic site that rarely, if ever, experiences crashes
is an extremely high traffic site that could profit immensely off ads, but keeps the entire site free of ads
maintains a consistent and elaborate tagging system that allows users easy navigation through fanworks
maintains a simple layout structure so the entire site is easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to understand making it highly accessible to users – especially disabled users
maintains and updates the budget for users to know exactly where their donations are going to be used in the future and have been used in the past
works with the legal aspects of fanworks in order to keep their site and their users completely legal, and therefore not at risk of being shut down, or sued, or manipulated by large media/companies
works with users when it comes to decision making, includes members in voting processes, etc.
literally hosts millions of fanfiction at no cost whatsoever and doesn’t subject you to ads, honestly those are the only two points you need but the other ones are there to show how much they’re doing
y’all need to appreciate that – donations are completely optional and if you don’t want to donate then don’t, but spreading posts about how Archive doesn’t do anything for anyone and doesn’t do anything with all this money they’re getting is completely unnecessary and outright false.
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