i feel so bad for nikola tesla like imagine spending years beefing with a guy who has conned the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and you end up dying broke and starving and alone and then 100 years later another guy cons the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and he's doing it all IN YOUR NAME. he must be rolling in his grave like a fucking rotisserie chicken

His ghost is setting those cars on fire actually

I hadn’t really considered “the agnostic demigod of electromagnetism is the reason Musk’s companies fail” before, but I like the concept. 

Let’s help him out. Likes charge, reblogs cast

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A kitten sandwich

(via)

Look at this poor inbread cat

I'm begging you, please stop italicising te reo Māori words in your fics.

There's a really excellent article by Khairani Barokka on why italicising non-English words in general is not a great idea. (tl;dr: it's very othering)

For te reo there's an additional reason, which is that most of us in Aotearoa stopped italicising te reo decades ago and now when we see it it looks fucking weird. It feels like you're holding the word with tongs; like you're saying "hey I found this weird foreign word and I don't really know what to do with it!"

Which is a pity, because there's some really good fics out there exploring Ed's Māori identity, and the italicising makes them look less good than they are. (I'm planning a specific recs post, but want it to be 100% positive, also there's stuff I haven't read yet.)

I don't want this to be a call out post, because I hate that shit, and I know that everyone's coming from a good place. If you've been italicising te reo words, you're probably doing what you were taught was the right thing, and I genuinely don't want you to feel bad about it. This is just a learning experience; go forth and use italics as they should be used in fan fiction:

"Oh. Oh."

PS I can't write about italicisation and te reo without mentioning the brilliant Alice Te Punga Somerville and the especially her poem Kupu rere kē.

if you say anything homophobic in June this truck comes out of nowhere and crushes you like that bus crushed Regina George

it’s optimus pride

keep seeing Temu ads on here so just to share cause idk if people are widely aware

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing (so devoted the lines blur)

Vader

I am staring down at the contents of my mortar and pestle

and I fear I have made a terrible mistake

it's beautiful!

it won't solidify

I FOUND SOME SALT

...it's from the anti-vampire bottle bombs, but whatever, it's fine

look at this beautiful fuckface

Salt was used to vaguely solidify European soap (the stuff made with potash instead of soda ash). But how much did they use? How solid did that soap actually get?

...I don't want to add arrowroot, but

*stares at clock*

*stares at mortar*

*stares at depths of soul, considers life, considers choices*

holy shit

the salt I have is coarse sea salt (listen, it's big and visible and freaks out the undead, we all know this, keep up), which I was putting in whole--

but a second ago I decided to maybe grind it up smaller in one of my other mortars (yes I have multiple now, we are doing important nonsense here)--

and when I added the finer salt--

this motherfucker finally started solidifying

hey SO ANYWAY, check out these fancy as fuck, sweet as hell wash-balls of neroly, from the 1696 English translation of Simon Barbe's The French Perfumer

and, at least for now, and fucking finally...

if Stede used these soaps

he would not smell like cookies

.

.

.

he'd smell like a goddamn field of fucking flowers

Figure ?. Local dread pirate mesmerized, helpless in the face of sweaty white guy's apparently life-changing scent profile.

It's been half a minute since I checked on these last (11 days since I made them, and, uh... about 10 or so days since I checked them), and these wee fucks have changed a bit:

Figure 1. ...Balls.

However, I should also say that the scent has... developed.

A field of flowers is, I believe, no longer accurate.

What we have now is... and I can't believe this is my fucking luck...

Mother.

Fucking.

Candy.

Not like candy we're used to, maybe! But definitely sugary and sweet and rich and weird and jesus fucking christ Stede Bonnet can you not.

#oooh you have no idea how much I love this #and how much I want to smell the smells you are describing #hey do you think as a kid raised in poverty ed would sometimes like walk by patisserie shops & stand there just hoping to catch a whiff of #whatever they were preparing in there #of course never able to actually afford any candy but still imagining what it would be like to just walk in and then out again #with a sweet smelling package wrapped in colourful paper #do you think his mum snuck him something from her work once. do you think ed took that caramel or whatever & was almost afraid to eat it #but couldn't keep it either for fear of his dad finding out & let it melt in his mouth & it lasted only a moment but it was the most #perfect one in his 7 years of life #and do you think he maybe imagined the place people lived for whom this was a regular occurrence #maybe his mum even took him to an estate one day #and *of course* he wasn't allowed in any of the family's rooms but still saw it that fairy tale palace all the riches and beautiful things #(& maybe that's also when he saw how these people treated his mum; treated *him*; & that fairy tale shattered like glass) #(& of course many things have happened since then grandiose and terrible things & ed isn't that 7yo boy anymore #transfixed and mesmerized by things he could never have) #do you think breathing in the air in stede's cabin (the wood and fabrics soaps and creams; sweet earthy spicy) unlocked a core memory in ed #anyway. thank you for your service.

FUCK MAN, OKAY @bookshelfdreams, BE THAT WAY, I WASN'T PLANNING TO HAVE FEELINGS ALL OVER MY SOAP BALLS THIS EVENING BUT I GUESS THAT'S WHAT'S GOTTA HAPPEN NOW

This.

I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.

I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.

I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.

Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.

When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.

More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.

[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]

"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.

Iris van Herpen | Fall/Winter 2022

tv appreciation week 2022 📺 favorite tv villain feral lil vampire guy

So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom

It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education

602-771-3500 or empower @ azed .gov 🤡

and for the love of god, don’t just spam it with memes or le funny shrek jokes or whatever, they’ll just hang up

make plausible-sounding reports for things that don’t actually exist, so that they actually have to waste time/resources investigating false leads - the goal is to waste time they would otherwise be using to do their jobs, not to get tumblr clout for being an epic troll

So apparently the internet article said the superintendent wouldn't be deterred by the prank calls because they would 'taper off eventually'. It'd be a real shame if this post stayed in circulation via queues so they get a consistent list of prank calls to filter through. 😇

spread the word everyone

Update: They've moved the hotline to a form on their website in an attempt to stem the flow.

The form doesn’t require your name, but it does require the name of both school and principal. Troll responsibly to keep innocents out of the crossfire.