Tag: psa

tamenow:

heads up: posts are officially out of order on our dashes by default even though we didn’t get notice. the most popular are at the top, meaning posts that aren’t already spread everywhere and/or aren’t from bloggers we don’t interact with most often aren’t gonna be the first we see.

however, we can also officially turn this off now that it’s here. to do so, go to settings (gear icon) > global settings > dashboard preferences and turn off “best stuff first”

note: this is for mobile. doesn’t appear to be on web-view… yet

twistedingenue:

anais-ninja-blog:

twistedingenue:

anais-ninja-blog:

twistedingenue:

anais-ninja-blog:

punkfather:

Just a PSA for those who may also be worried about losing anything.

okay, but can we also appreciate that this came from Florida’s own ambulance chaser? who also campaigned heavily for legalizing medical marijuana? Morgan & Morgan: actually kinda for the people.

also, extremely good advice. make sure to include furniture and appliances.

It’s sound advice, but goes against my experience actually working for an insurance company in contents.

You know what would drag your contents payout down? The lack of specificity.

Take a mixer. Standard kitchen fair. You have a insurance thing and you write in your contents inventory: Mixer.

It got to me, who would look at that and assign it to be replaced or valued as a hand mixer, maybe $20.

But it wasn’t a hand mixer, it was a stand mixer. That’s $50.

But it was actually a Kitchenaid Stand Mixer, So I’d put it in at $200, which is on the lower side for one.

But then you come back with a photo or receipt showing it’s a Kitchenaid Pro600 6 Quart lift stand mixer – and that’s $600 right there.

So based on the level of detail, one single item in your home went from $20 to $600.

so, if you can’t make a detailed list between now and the storm arriving, would it be good to take close-ups of labels and serial numbers if you can find them?

This is always a good idea, particularly of the more expensive stuff.

Another good idea is to take a video inventory. Upload it to the cloud. Proof of ownership will go a long way.

awesome. so:

•pics–whole room, whole items, most detailed label you can find

•vids–same as above, with your face and commentary

•upload to the cloud/file share site (Dropbox, etc)

that sound right?

In a pinch, yeah, that works great. At the very least, watching it can help trigger your memory about details.

Also, it may not be too late, I don’t think moratoriums have started yet for Florida. Make sure your policy language says “Replacement Coverage” and not Actual Cash Value for contents.

ACV is replacement cost minus depreciation. Replacement cost is just that, the amount it would cost to replace the item with something of like, kind, and quality.

Basically its “I had a kitchen aid Classic Stand Mixer in white”

Replacement Cost: Great, here’s $200 to replace it with another one.

ACV: Great! Here’s $100 because it’s 10 years old.

odinsblog:

resistdrumpf:

Enrollment for 2018 Affordable Care Act (ACA / Obamacare) starts November 1 and ends December 15. Trump (what an asshole) reduced the ADVERTISING funds by 90% to announce when people can enroll. Spread the word.

And to make registration even more difficult, Trump will also be shutting down the ACA registration website on Sundays “for maintenance” during peak registration times. Plan ahead. Get registered.

important PSA about when your car is smoking

alicatchrist:

mama-green:

like literally smoking from the engine

white and you smell pancakes?
it’s the coolant. panic and pull over, but you’ll live

a slight blue tinge?
it’s the oil. panic and pull over, but you’ll live

grey, looks like fire smoke?
gasoline; the most combustable and dangerous. pull over and leave the vehicle, pray.

sharing because i didn’t know this when my car started smoking white yesterday and i was so afraid for my life.

Reblogging because a dear friend of my Moms with mechanic experience told me the same thing when I got my license.

jhaernyl:

akamine-chan:

bnprime:

rickandmorty-some-things:

strawberry-smiggles:

madeinhellism:

grimfaust:

ponyking:

naughtyjester:

your-bud-crud:

popstick:

silascaptor:

coffeeandcuteboys:

girldoesnothing:

adu101:

piranhapunk:

languidness:

joyouscatus:

You remember that post about the homestuck t-shirt design contest collaborating with hot topic? And how Hot Topic are the biggest art thieves?  This is recent.  As you can see above, I stumbled upon Hot Topic’s website and they are selling a very popular fan art put on a t-shirt, and did not ask permission from the original artist (rismo).

This shows Hot Topic still continues their art thievery.  Hot Topic are still taking art from artists without their permission.  This is disrespectful and appalling.

EXCEPT YOU DID GIVE THEM YOUR PERMISSION.

BY AGREEING TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS ON DEVIANT ART.

THEY SOLD IT TO A THIRD PARTY ROYALTY-FREE.

http://www.deviantart.com/submit/agree

woah oops deleting my deviantart account

*instantly puts logo on my best pictures*

6. Payment Unless otherwise agreed between Artist and deviantART in a writing from deviantART, the license granted to deviantART under this Agreement is royalty-free.

DeviantArt you literal piece of shit

Uh what

That’s not okay

yo okay this is REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT and imma be deleting my DA very soon because of it.

are you fucking for real

Just a heads up for people hosting their designs on DA

Okay. I just read through the “agreement” that DA has implemented, and it is truly heinous. I will not be posting on DA anymore.

———

3. License To Use Artist Materials. As and when Artist Materials are uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s), Artist grants to DeviantArt a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to do the following things during the Term:

a) to prepare and encode Artist Materials or any part of them for digital or analog transmission, manipulation and exhibition in any format and by any means now known or not yet known or invented; (DA  can post them on their website and edit them in any way they see fit)

b) to display, copy, reproduce, exhibit, publicly perform, broadcast, rebroadcast, transmit, retransmit, distribute through any electronic means (including analog and digital) or other means, and electronically or otherwise publish any or all of the Artist Materials, including any part of them, and to include them in compilations for publication, by any and all means and media now known or not yet known or invented ; (They can publish your art in any media, use it to showcase their website or even promote certain groups without your knowledge. For all you know, your art could be promoting the KKK.)

c) to modify, adapt, change or otherwise alter the Artist Materials (e.g., change the size) and use the Artist Materials as described in Section 3(b); and

d) the right to sublicense to any other person or company any of the licensed rights in the Artist Materials, or any part of them, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement. (They can edit, change, or otherwise modify your artwork in any way they want, as well as sublicensing it  to third parties, such as Hot Topic.)

e) Artist acknowledges that Artist will not have any right, title, or interest in any other materials with which Artist Materials may be combined or into which all or any portion of Artist Materials may be incorporated. (By posting on FA, you forfeit your right to dispute any third party profits or copyright infringements upon your art.)

f) During the Term, DeviantArt’s licenses under this Agreement include the right to use any part of the Artist Materials in the promotion, advertising or marketing of the DeviantART Sites. (DeviantArt can use your art to advertise anything they want.)

g) As used in this Agreement, the term “Artist Materials” means any content uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s) which may include without limitation Artist’s name(s) (including professional names), trademarks, trade names, likenesses, photographs, biographical materials, audio-visual materials, artwork, liner notes, and other graphical, textual, video, film or audio materials and any and all “skins,” computer-generated images or other artwork or images that Artist submits to DeviantArt in any medium or format whatsoever. (ANYTHING you submit to DeviantArt belongs to DeviantArt now. Including  your drawings, your photos, videos, your stock materials, your music/audio, your written stories, and your artist name.)

Yes. THEY CAN EVEN USE YOUR ACTUAL ARTIST NAME. THEY OWN IT NOW,  IF YOU ARE PART OF DA.

Fuck DA. 

Burn them to the ground

Pass it around

That’s why I deleted months ago.It’s a terrible website and I hate it

Passing on the PSA. I stopped using that site years ago. If you still use it, it’s not too late! Trash that shit.

what’s the old saying?
if you’re not paying to use a product (the website)
then you ARE the product (that the website is using to make $$$)

I was just going to say something to the effect of tanstaafl, but @bnprime beat me to it.

Signal boosting for everyone on my dash who might be using DA and is not aware of this yet.

Please, please, please be careful artist friends.

EDIT: This PSA is three years old, but I do not know how much DeviantArt has changed since then and I recommend to everyone to be careful still and check before they agree to any site conditions, DA included.

psa: don’t mention commissions/patreon on AO3

ferventvervet:

aprillikesthings:

prettyarbitrary:

jeremy-rennerd:

ratherembarrassing:

softpunkbucky:

sinningsleepingandshitposting:

whalehuntingboyfriends:

whalehuntingboyfriends:

Hi guys! So I know we all don’t actually read the terms and conditions of things and just hit agree assuming there’s nothing important in there (I do it too oops) but if you take writing commissions or anything involving money, then there’s actually something in the AO3 terms and conditions to be aware of.

Linking to a personal website or blog/social network where you are taking donations, posting commissions or mentioning published works is permitted, but advertising it directly on the Archive is not, nor is using language which one might interpret as requesting financial contributions. For example, you can say something to the effect of “check out my Tumblr if you want to know more about me and my writing” and include the link to the site, but you cannot specifically state anything about donations, commissions or sales on the Archive.

Today someone reported one of my fics as violating this condition – presumably because I’d mentioned my patreon in the author’s note (I wasn’t actively requesting donations either… I’d literally just mentioned that it existed, and that the fic in question was written as a thank-you for hitting one of my goals).

I’ve written to AO3 to check whether just saying ‘thank you to those who support me on patreon’ is fine and I’ll let you guys know when they get back to me, but if it’s still going too far in terms of being a ‘commercial promotion’ then I’ll just avoid mentioning this in the future! :’)

As I said, someone did actually report my fic for this – so there are people out there who are noticing/reporting these situations. Please be aware of this if you take fic commissions, or use patreon or ko-fi, because your account could end up suspended, which of course no one wants!

❤ ❤

UPDATE: AO3 got back to me – you’re not allowed to mention or link to patreon at all, regardless of how it’s phrased. Not sure if it’s the same for ko-fi but it might be better to be safe than sorry!

❤ @kahnah23 relevant to you and possibly some others~

That’s a fucking bullshit rule, I’m sorry. They shouldn’t deny you the opportunity to advertise your own work.

archive of our own is run by the organization for transformative works. ao3 and the other services that otw offers – including legal services for fan creators who get in legal trouble – are nonprofit organizations.

this isn’t just a self-determined descriptor; that’s a legal definition that requires adherence to specific rules and laws regarding income, profit, and donations.

this isn’t a “bullshit rule” just meant to prevent creators from advertising. in op’s post, the contact from ao3 offers a roundabout way to advertise. this rule ensures that ao3 and the organization for transformative works to stay a non-profit organization – this “bullshit rule” is essentially a way so that ao3 and the other services that the organization for transformative works can stay online.

it’s not just about maintaining nonprofit status. (i question if that’s even applicable here, since the profits in question don’t go to the organisation, but i know very little about nonprofit law. just a gut feeling.)

the actual point is, they run a legal services organisation for fans who get into legal trouble. they literally exist for the purpose of helping you not get into legal trouble. profiting from fan fiction very much opens you up to the possibility of getting into legal trouble. they’re not going to let people do things on their website that they know will land them in exactly that trouble.

and to be clear, just because everyone who slaps a patreon button on their tumblr isn’t getting sued, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something for which they could be sued.

let me say it again: profiting from fan fiction very much opens you up to the possibility of getting into legal trouble.

here’s why.

use of other people’s characters is subject to copyright law. the general principle that makes downloading a movie or a song piracy also applies to the use of a character, assuming certain factors such as uniqueness.

how fan fiction has come to scrape by in the past: by not being a commercial enterprise.

in contrast, for use music, video, images incorporated into new works: by being significantly transformative.

these two factors, commerciality and transformativity, are considered side by side. the greater the transformativity, the less weight commerciality will be given. if something is highly transformative and non-commercial, then it’s almost certainly fine. down the other end, if it’s not at all transformative and commercial, forget it.

it’s a matter of judgement as to what degree of transformativity there is in the work that will push it over the line to overcome the general prohibition against commercial use. but fan fiction in the truest sense is barely transformative. in fact the goal is to come as close to copying a character as possible.

an analogy with the use of music: a cover band, despite every part of the performance of the song being done by that band, is still playing a song that was created by someone else. you, the fic writer, as covering someone else’s character.

the cover band you see at your local bar? they, or the local bar itself, have paid a fee to obtain permission to play that song. (even if they were playing for free they would still have to obtain permission, because any public performance of copyrighted music is prohibited.) in contrast, use of a line from one song in another another song that uses the line for parody? fine (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994)). let’s call that the AU with the names changed, the location different, and everything about that character’s backstory is gone. they just look like the actor and have a dialogue pattern that matches.

the better you are at writing a character in character, ironically the more likely you are to violate copyright law. and that’s why the commercial factor becomes incredibly relevant.

basically, don’t get paid, keep being cool with the law*.

*this is not an endorsement of the principles of copyright law itself. this is about what that law is and how it works.

People also forget the reason why disclamers on fics became so prevalent.

Please understand that profiting off fanfiction, fanart and all forms of fan-content is direct violation of copyrighted material.

Your commissions to draw popular characters? Direct violation of Copyright.
AO3 works hard to maintain fandom expression protected. You hurt their cause by not adhering to their term of use.

They’re there so you won’t get sued.

On this front, fandom creators in the US may want to batten down the hatches because the Trump administration is pretty much guaranteed to highly favor intellectual property owners–especially groups like the MPAA and RIAA–over fair use and transformative works.

We’ve got a lot more legal precedent than we used to on our side, but this kind of ‘bullshit detail’ has historically been a lever for these people to hang a lawsuit on and no doubt it will be again.

Yeah, afaik fanworks have more legal protection than they used to, but that could go away in an instant.

Anybody else old enough to remember writing at the beginning of each chapter of their fiction “I DO NOT OWN X, I AM NOT MAKING ANY MONEY OFF X, I WRITE ONLY FOR THE LOVE OF A/B. X is the property of Y, please do not sue me I am 13 and you will only get 37 cents” because I am and this is why you don’t fuck around with copyright law. Fanworks have come a long way in respectability and legality. But profiting off it can still get you in trouble. Be careful kiddos.

snakegay:

psychosis–suggestions:

I often talk about reality checking and going along with it when helping someone deal with delusions, but I felt as if I didn’t really make it clear to what I meant when I said it.

Recently I saw a post similar to “how to sneakily give your delusional friend a reality check when they told you not to” and honestly, that’ll just make us lose trust for you. Because we can tell when you do that.

i think its worth saying that “adding to the delusion/trying to send them deeper into the delusion” isnt always as malicious as it sounds, “adding to the delusion” can mean attempting to comfort them but inadvertently creating more layers of it (ie “youll be safe if you keep your door shut” “they cant hurt you because im protecting you”, etc). 

even if your intentions are good and it temporarily makes them feel safer, youre just adding another layer to it, and it will just become more difficult for them to overcome later on

deathtodickens:

al-the-grammar-geek:

pervocracy:

hashtagdion:

Just to expand on this post about calling 911 and asking for a pizza to secretly ask for help:

The post is based on a Super Bowl commercial, which itself was based on a Reddit post that’s never been verified as true. 

There is no actual pizza code with toppings and shit that dispatchers are trained in. If you come across someone who has heard of the commercial, they might understand. If you come across someone who’s never heard of it, they might think it’s a prank call and hang up on you.

A piece of actual advice to help you in this situation is to dial 911, then hang up without speaking, then turn the phone off. 911 will attempt to call you back, and when they’re unable to reach you, they’ll dispatch a unit to your location under the assumption that you need help and your call was interrupted. This will work 100% of the time, whereas the pizza trick will only work if the dispatcher has heard of the commercial/urban legend.

Also, the toppings thing was a complete and total fabrication and whoever wrote that should be ashamed of themselves, tbh.

It’s possible that the toppings thing was something that a clever dispatcher thought of on the spot, but it’s certainly not some standard code.

Write-up at Snopes.com. Status: Legend, not fact

@deathtodickens this is your professional field, correct?

Yes, I am a 911 dispatcher and this is not great advice at all. It will not work 100% of the time. It probably won’t even work 10% of the time.

(1) Every agency handles 911 hang up calls from cellular phones differently and because we receive thousands of them every month, we do not always respond to them. My agency, for instance, does not respond to 911 hang up calls from cellular phones with no disturbances heard. We call back twice and if there is no answer, we leave a message and we put in advised calls. WE DO NOT RESPOND. We are not a large agency and I can almost guarantee you that larger cities probably have a similar policy.

(2) Even if we hear a disturbance, there is no guarantee that we know where you are. Never believe that your GPS information is readily available to dispatchers – this isn’t CSI – it’s not that easy. Sometimes all we get is a very generic location (usually more than a 1000 meter radius of the cell phone tower your phone pinged off of). We can ping phones but that doesn’t always work ESPECIALLY IF YOUR PHONE IS TURNED OFF. Some cell phone companies do not provide historical location data. Many will not give us information if there is no obvious sign of an emergency. At most, they might have your subscriber information and hopefully you keeps yours up-to-date.

(3) If you’ve called 911 before or had police respond to your residence before, there’s a chance we can look in our own CAD systems and find your location based on prior calls. But, like I said, we won’t do that if there’s no obvious signs of an emergency. Also, A LOT of domestic violence victims have non-working phones with no actual cell service attached that still have the ability to dial 911. In those cases, we don’t get an actual phone number on our screens. We only receive a generic 911-area code that can’t be called back or traced and 80% of the time, they don’t have good location data.

(4) Any time you call 911 – START WITH YOUR LOCATION/ADDRESS and LISTEN to the dispatcher. If you want us to come to you and FIND you, we need to know where you are. Agencies are more likely to respond to you if you call 911 and say your address and hang up than if you say absolutely nothing at all, hang up, and turn off your phone. I cannot even stress to you how appalled I am at this advice.

PLEASE do not do that.

(5) We trust our guts more than we trust your voiceless 911 hang up call. We talk to domestic violence victims every day, some days every hour. We know when something is wrong. If someone calls in on 911 and starts insistently ordering a pizza (yes, it has happened), rambling on as if speaking to a friend, or barely talking at all, we’re not just going to hang up on you. We’re going to start asking yes or no questions because we answer thousands of 911 calls and we know when something sounds suspicious. We know when something sounds very wrong. We know when you’re in a tight spot and you can’t say more than what you’re giving us.

(6) I obviously cannot speak for every center and every dispatcher. There are bad batches everywhere. I know because I’m the one who has to write them up when they fail to do their jobs or see the urgency/importance of the jobs that they are doing. So will this always work? No. Nothing about calling 911 will always work. It will never be 100%. Law enforcement agencies are underfunded, our equipment/tech is miles below subpar to what you see on TV. Cellular phone companies don’t make it any easier for us and guess what – that little section of your phone bill that says “911 tax”? That money doesn’t come to us.

So no, it’s not always going to work but I can guarantee you that what I’ve written here will work better than calling 911, hanging up without saying anything, and turning off your phone. 

There is no universal 911 policy.

Every agency is different.

For the love of God please do not tell victims of abuse to call in voiceless 911 hang ups. If you can stay on the phone, stay on the phone. If you can leave an open line, leave the phone on and put it somewhere close. If you have a home VOIP phone, keep your address updated if you move. If you have a cell phone, keep your subscriber information current.

And the absolute safest way to call 911 and pretty much guarantee that we’ll know where you are and respond, is by calling from an old-fashioned landline or payphone.