Please don't worry about if you know any of these games. Just pick what sounds the best to you! I did actually start Reuben's route in Gilded Shadows back when it came out, but stopped because I was ill and just haven't picked it up again. Feel free to reblog if you want. In case anyone is wondering what my partner said when I asked him his opinion, his reply was "I think it has to be between the luscious lips and the cute pilot. Though The Bastard of Camelot sounds pretty cool." (In husband speak, 'luscious lips' = Gilded Shadows and 'cute pilot' = Andromeda Six.)

Well, that's an overwhelming win for Andromeda Six! Though I'm not really surprised, I think it's the most popular game of the five. Thanks everyone who voted! And thanks to @bi-stander for letting me know the percentages earlier today! Because of that I actually started A6 since it seemed pretty clear it would win in the end.

Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here

Now, a skirt that’s too long will be harder to work in–skirts brushing the floor may look elegant, but is also a tripping hazard–but that is not a problem with skirts in general, it’s a problem with that particular skirt not being suited to being worked in. Skirts are very practical. You can hike them up if you’re hot or need more freedom to maneuver (this is called “girding your loins”). If you need to carry something, you can lift up your hem and make a pouch just like the person in yellow in the bottom picture above. If you need to handle something hot, a skirt generally has enough material you can hold it out from your body to use as a hot pad. (Tight skirts were only used by people who didn’t need to work/move until the invention of elastic fabric.)

Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both “I’m so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabric” and “I don’t walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.”

Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janet’s tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not below…)

Love this post, and want to add: another example of the “empowerment means shitting on feminity” is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while she’s on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)

Or to quote one of my all favorite posts, “fuck women’s contribution to our survival.”

Historically, skirts have been the garment of choice for almost every culture, gender and class. Breeches, or pants, were created specifically for riding horses.

Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.

*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT

(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldn’t fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)

Ancient Rome

Modern Morocco

Medieval Europe

Traditional Saudi Arabia

16th century Russia

Traditional Papua New Guinea

16th century Turkey

Modern India

i deliver propane.  this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through people’s yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold.  i was the first woman my company ever hired.

and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC.  they told me i’d trip, i’d get stuck, i’d freeze, i’d quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was.  i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me “women didn’t work outside then.  they stayed in the house all the time.”  and that’s when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing women’s history–if you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.

anyway i’ve been doing this job in a skirt for three years now, and all the men should be jealous of my complete range of movement and infinite layering potential.

Feel freel to say how your relationship with your parent(s) is in the tags.

ANTI-CAPITALIST AFFIRMATIONS

I would like to tell you about a time when my mental health was absolutely trash and I developed a sort of code with a few friends, in case anyone else might benefit from it.

There is a type of task which I would call "washing a dragon." There were a variety of specific things that would fall into this category but broadly it meant something like, I need to do this thing and I have been putting it off because it will be hard but the longer I put it off the harder it actually becomes.

Like if I really need to wash a pet dragon, well the dragon doesn't really like to be washed so it's hard to fight with the dragon to get it washed but also the longer I put it off, the dirtier the dragon gets and so the harder the washing and fighting will be once I do it.

And for a real life example, I needed to email a professor whose independent study I was in, to tell him I needed to drop it or find some other solution because it was going to be so hard to catch up because we hadn't met or worked in weeks, but this was a hard email because I was embarrassed and I wasn't sure what the solution was going to be, but obviously the longer I put it off the harder the problem is to solve and the more embarrassing the email was going to be.

Washing a dragon was often something of this form, asking for help on something where the longer I wait the more help I need to ask for and the more embarrassing it is to admit I need it. But there were also other kinds of dragons to wash. And since they often had some amount of embarrassment to them (it's embarrassing to leave the dragon unwashed for so long) it is hard to ask someone to help hold me accountable for finally doing the thing, or to ask them to make me sit with them until I do the thing.

But once I had this code in place I could just be like "hey I need to wash a dragon" and I didn't need to say what the dragon was but a friend could say oh okay I will now pester you about washing the dragon multiple times a day until you do it, or I will make you sit next to me with your laptop until you have washed the dragon, if the dragon washing is a laptop-based task (forms, emails). This was very helpful. I washed a lot more dragons when I could have my friends hold me accountable, and I was more willing to do that if I didn't actually have to tell them what the dragons were.

I need this.

folding frog by 乐迪手工

I wish that ao3 had an option to filter warnings (and tbh certain authors) out like I will never ever want to read it and just seeing it puts me off so much that often I end up closing my browser because that content upsets me so much lmao

There is a way to do this but I can’t recall how to do it. it’s something you type into the box for “other filters” or something, I don’t remember. who knows?? It’s not a great option, and I don’t know if you can sort out authors that way, but it’s better than nothing if someone can reblog this with how to do it!

Alrighty friends! It takes some specificity, but you can do this. Let me show you how!

So I started with going to the Sherlock (TV) section of Ao3. On the right we find this lovely section! ((I know I’m going over things you already probably know, but I figure this post may go to new Ao3 users, so bear with me.))

Underneath this, I chose sort by Kudos, because that’s a quick way to find most popular fics, for the sake of this demonstration. 

With those filters on, we end up with this being our first two results: 

As you can see, we have Nature and Nurture by earlgreytea68, and The Internet Is Not Just For Porn by cyerus. So what if I am utterly sick of seeing earlgreytea68 on my list? Let’s pretend I’ve read all their fics, or that I just don’t like her, or whatever. I want this author out. I go to this section on the right: 

In “Search within results” I type earlgreytea68 into the bar, with a minus sign in front. This gives me the following page, upon hitting the sort and filter button:

There goes earlgreytea68! But now I’ve decided that Crack is just not my thing, I’m sick of that, too, for heaven’s sake, I want something reasonable in my gay slash fanfiction about detectives that solve crimes about glowing dogs and irish megalomaniacs. Heaven forbid this get ridiculous.

Well, then I add this to my search:

Which gets rid of everything with that tag. My results are now:

Performance in a Leading Role is now my first result!

You can do this as many times as you want; the biggest problem I have is trying to filter out multi-worded tags. For example, “Secret Relationship” is hard to filter. Better to go with authors you dislike or with words like “DubCon”. 

I hope this helps! Also remember that googling site:archiveofourown.org and then adding search terms will mean google searches Ao3 for you, and sometimes that works far better. 

Good luck!

An excellent in-depth guide! Thank you!!

omg changed my whole ao3 rarepair game

An excellent guide to filtering on AO3!

You can filter out phrases by enclosing them in quotes. For example, if ABO and Hydra Trash Party are not your things, try:

-“alpha/beta/omega dynamics” -”hydra trash party”

I have more advice!

Say, you’re in your random fandom- I went with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since I’ve been reading Iron Man stuff recently. Tony Stark is awesome.

But anyway, you’re on the page, and you see that there are 174,774 works! That is way too many for a casual afternoon’s browsing.

And you see that the first one is Peter Parker/Tony Stark and that is not your jam. It doesn’t work for you, or it squicks you, whatever. Wouldn’t life be easier if you could browse without seeing that pairing (or whatever pairing you don’t like)? You can!

First, click on that pairing tag(You may want to open this in another tab, actually.):

and it’ll take you to the page for that pairing tag. Click this button:

and then look at the address bar! The actual page is unimportant. Copy the numbers located here:

and go back to the original search page! Down on the side, in the same place you can get rid of other tags, type -relationship_ids:”the number you just copied”

Then hit ‘sort and filter’ annnd… magic!

The fics with that pairing are gone! You can also do multiple pairings, get rid of any tags you don’t like, and sort it by date or length or kudos, or whatever.

Enjoy.

I’d just like to add that these sorts of search modifiers ALSO WORK IN GOOGLE AND MOST RESEARCH DATABASES. The more you know.

Just a quick reminder that AO3 uses Lucene as a search and index engine.

That means you can pretty much use all the Lucene Query Syntax in the “Seach within result” field.

I don’t think AO3 indexes the whole fic for searching but definitely it’s meta data. Combined with Lucenes awesome query syntax you can do pretty much every search you heart desires.

Addtional Lucene Query Syntax that has not been mentioned yet and you might find useful:

Wildcard Searches

You can use wildcard searches within single terms. For a single character wildcard search use the “?” symbol. For a multiple character wildcard search use the “*” symbol.

AND/OR

Lucene allows you to combin terms through logic operators. You’re looking for fics that are either “reunion” or “enemies to lovers”?

Just put in >“reunion” OR “enemies to lovers”< into the field

and you end up with all the stories that are either or but not both.

But wait, now you’re looking for fics that are both “reunion” and “enemies to lovers” at the same time? Now worries Lucene got you covered.

Just change it into >“"reunion” AND “enemies to lovers”“<

and you’ll get all the fics that mention both “reunion” and “enemies to lovers” somewhere in their meta data (note: it’s not just tags. It’s also title, summary …)

Boosting

You can also boost specific terms when doing a multi term search.

You can use the “^” Operator followed by a number to boost a specific term.

Say you’re interested in fics that are either “first kiss” or “bed sharing” but you’re much more interested in “bed sharing” fics and feel they are more relevant.

You can use the search >“first kiss” “bed sharing”^5<

to manipulate the order of your results in a matter that the score of every fic that contains beg sharing is multiplied by 5. Therefore all fics containing that term are given priority and shown at the top of the list.

You can also combine all of the above, target specifc fields (that’s what you did with the “relationsship_id:xxx”) and many more things.

For more info about the Lucene query syntax check out Apache’s Lucene Query doc.

^ sharing this because we all love fanfics and @itsmajel is a freaking nerd 👌

Some of these searches can also be achieved via the “exclude” function in the search bar - this offers you for each section (ratings, category, relationships, tags, etc.) the most commonly used metadata for these fics, to check or uncheck (and thus exclude or not) as you please!

we don’t talk abt how stressful buying new glasses frames is. ur shopping for your whole personality there. life on the line. do or die. all for two pieces of glass and some sticks

Please don't worry about if you know any of these games. Just pick what sounds the best to you! I did actually start Reuben's route in Gilded Shadows back when it came out, but stopped because I was ill and just haven't picked it up again. Feel free to reblog if you want. In case anyone is wondering what my partner said when I asked him his opinion, his reply was "I think it has to be between the luscious lips and the cute pilot. Though The Bastard of Camelot sounds pretty cool." (In husband speak, 'luscious lips' = Gilded Shadows and 'cute pilot' = Andromeda Six.)

You find yourself stuck in an elevator with your icon and your username. How happy are you?

Heya

Thanks for checking out my blog- if you wanna support me or , heck of you want me to draw you something dumb/cool/creepy check out my card below!.

You can also just message me here if you prefer but rates are there for the staring at.

Doing a bump of this cos AHHH!

June has decided to be a ffun month at the tail end

not enough money for rent (yey) and also! there is a mouse in my apartment and my landlady said if I want it taken care of by maintenance they'll be using kill traps. ( I like mice I just don't like them in the house and I don't want it dead.)

I am opening lineart commissions! (For the first time akjsjdjdjf) If anyone is interested! I do mostly draw on weekends, but I can work on it much earlier if time let's me.

It is currently 5$!

Example of art below:

Today I learned how fun it is to draw a hyperbolic paraboloid.

Pictured above is one example of it, the graph of the function f : IR² → IR defined by the equation f(x,y) := xy, with some points of the input plane marked and height of the graph indicated in four points. It is drawn only for a square around the origin (that makes it easy to draw), but if you imagine extending it on the edges to make a rounder shape, you might be able to see the (probably) most famous rendition of the hyperbolic paraboloid shape, the Pringles chip:

So why is the hyperbolic paraboloid so fun to draw? Well, a defining property (and according to Wikipedia, one of the oldest definitions) of the shape is that it may be generated by a moving line that is parallel to a fixed plane and crosses two fixed skew lines.

Skew lines are lines that don't cross but are also not parallel.

In the above example, this property is easily explained like this: if you fix either x or y into place (treat it like a constant) in the equation z = xy, you get the points z of the cross-section of the graph of f and the plane corresponding to the equation y = c or x = c, depending on which variable you fixed to the constant c. This is now a linear equation, which represents a straight line.

So, whenever you have two points that you know are in the graph, which also lie in the same plane parallel to either the xz-plane or the yz-plane, we now know that the straight line that contains both of them is also completely contained in the graph. This provides us with a fairly simple way to draw (part of) this beautiful shape:

Technically, in the last step you have to draw infinitely many lines to get the real shape. But then again, technically to get the actual real shape, in the first step you would have to draw an infinitely large square (or connect both of the pairs of opposite lines with infinitely long straight lines, that works too). But the great thing is, your brain will automatically fill in the rest of the shape for you if you have enough segments.

More generally, the definition given above means you can really take any two skew lines, find the plane they are both parallel to, and then connect them with straight lines that lie in planes that cross that plane with a 90 degree angle. I think it's really cool how you can draw such a complicated looking shape with so few and easy instructions, and only using straight lines. In fact, if I understood the Wikipedia arcticle correctly, this property is probably one of the reasons Pringles are even made in this shape, because it makes manufacturing fairly simple.

Oh, and as a bonus here are the two other graphs of real multivariate functions I drew today. Guess what function equations make those!

If you ever tagged me to do one of those tag game thingies and I never did it:

1) Thank you, seriously. Those are fun and being included shows that my followers care enough to want to learn more about me.

2) Very sorry about that, it’s extremely likely that I said to myself “Cool! But I’m busy at the moment, I’ll have to do this later today or tomorrow” before proceeding to just straight-up forget, now it’s too far back in my notifications and/or your blog to find again.

3) My brain is too mushy right now to participate. By the time I could do it either I've forgotten about it (thanks ADHD) or can't find it.

(reblog for sample size, yadda yadda yadda)

knowing that someone actively ENJOYS the things you create.. is an absolutely wild feeling. like, my entire chest is just full of warmth rn because i was able to make someone’s day just a teensy bit better ya know? catch me in the corner, gently crying

can't get any of my friends to agree with me that dueling scars (early 20th century practice among upper class college boys of semi-intentionally getting a minor facial scar from fencing) are fun and flirty despite half of them having had gender affirming surgery and tattoos which are basically the same thing. hell on earth

— Arabelle Sicardi, from “The Year in Ugliness.”