JUST AS A HEADS-UP

fox-bright:

…since I see some terfs have been reblogging some of my stuff:

Terfs can fuck entirely off, right now and forever.  You give us cis women a shitty, shitty name. You are the reason that friends have been scared to come out to me.  You are the reason that my cis-but-tall-and-slim little sister was physically attacked when she went to use the bathroom.  You are the reason that a friend’s kid has had to leave the martial art she ADORES. You.

Either grow up, knock it off and make recompense for your sins, or kindly remove yourselves from every possible place or method by which you could ever be in contact with another sapient being, I don’t give a single-ply fuck which.  Get my words out of your mouth.

(And while I’m at it, racists, biphobes, homophobes, fat-shamers, slut-shamers, swerfs, anti-muslims anti-immigrants and the darling anti-semites being so very, very bold these days can also go fuck themselves, sideways, with last-season’s Jimmy Choos. With an artisanal Dave’s Insanity Sauce/aftershave lube blend.

Just so we’re clear, I’m a multiracial bisexual with friends, lovers, relatives and comrades of many shapes, orientations, religious beliefs and life circumstances, and whether or not I belong to a group under attack, I’m gonna stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. My grandparents’ marriage was illegal in almost every state of the union until my mother was seven years old. My existence would have been illegal, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, which covered Filipinos as an afterthought.  People who believe, and fight for, this insane bullshit, are on the wrong side of history, and may they be smashed flat by it.)

And if any of yall got to her posts by way of me, i invite you to fuck off away from me too.

fox-bright:

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine got the flu.  Someone publicly recommended to her that she take Oscillococcinum for it.  Oscillococcinum is a homeopathic remedy; it’s sugar pills, into which duck liver has supposedly been dissolved.

The thing about this “medicine,” though, is that it’s diluted to 200c, which is according to Wikipedia a
a ratio of one part duck guts to 10400 parts water.  To have a pill with ONE MOLECULE of the duck guts left in it would require more molecules of pill than the number of total molecules of ANYTHING in the entire universe.

The homeopath’s explanation for this is that the solvent “remembers” the duck guts. That it takes on some measure of duck-gutness, and that ghost of duck offal is what heals you when you’re sick.

Somehow, the water doesn’t remember being used to brush teeth, flush toilets, wash garbage down the gutter.  Somehow it’s supposed to know what specifically to remember. Because we want it to, or some other similar woo.

Basically, homeopathy is complete bullshit.

So I warned my friend off.  I said, don’t go to the pharmacy, maybe getting someone else sick with this flu or picking up a new illness yourself.  Stay home, rest, keep warm, drink lots of clear fluids.

And then, as the flu was just starting to go around, I went to my own FB profile and I mad a quick little post, linking to the Wikipedia page on Oscillococcinum and warning people that it’s not medicine, and that depending on it is useless.

And I clicked submit and I forgot about it.  Weeks passed.

And then last night, I get a comment on that weeks-old post from a complete stranger, who shares no mutual friends with me. I’m not even sure how she found it. And she starts in like that, that’s her first comment on this wall of someone she’s never met.

Before she deleted, she suggested that I should “read some articles” and educate myself, and keep an open mind, and here’s what I have to say about that.

I was raised by a homeopath. My mother was obsessed with herbal cures, and our bathroom closet was stuffed
with sugar pills of fifty varieties, for nausea and sore throat, for
headaches, for muscle aches, for fever and cold, and I grew up being
told “raise your tongue!” so she could drop a couple of globules of
chalky powdered sugar in my mouth, under the tongue, where they’d
dissolve and make my teeth feel weird for twenty minutes.

I was raised by a woman who, when my brother went into anaphylactic shock after an insect bite, called her chiropractor.

When
my five-year-old sister got bacterial strep, Mom decided to treat it
with sugar pills. The sickness went systemic, and my sister–in the Nineties! In the USA!–got scarlet fever, and very nearly died of it. She tottered
around the house as bent as an old woman, her skin plastered with the
sign of the disease, and my mother, FINALLY having got her some
antibiotics said “We’ll just have to see.” It was touch and go. Because
my mother trusted pseudoscientific idiocy over taking her badly-fevered child to a damn doctor.

When at the
age of eleven I started waking up at night with sharp, sickening stomach
cramps, my mother treated it with strawberry tea, and yes, more sugar
pills. This variety was called “nux vomica,” and if it there were actually
any of the active ingredient left in the pills, it would be labelled
“strychnine.” But of course, it was so diluted that there was no
difference whatsoever between those sugar pills, and the sugar pills she
made us take for muscle aches.  She treated my stomach cramps this way
for two weeks, until abruptly I became delirious with fever and began
projectile vomiting.  Later on, after my emergency appendectomy, I heard
the doctor scolding her; if I’d been so much as twenty minutes later to
the ER, he said, I’d be dead.

There are absolutely
some herbal remedies which are helpful, in conjunction with modern
medicine.  I drink chamomile tea on the hard days, I use Tiger Balm on
my martial-arts-related aches and pains, I might drink marshmallow tea
with honey for a sore throat. 

But the sugar pills are dangerous bullshit, and relying on them gets people killed.

irenkaferalkitty:

possibly-an-obsession:

stucky-ficrecs:

bilqisofsheba:

watsonshoneybee:

sherrinfordeductions:

watsonshoneybee:

johnlockghosts:

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.

probablygobletrpgideas:

inkskinned:

inkskinned:

dear universe;

hello. i am writing to let you know you did good job on the stars, and also on cats.

yours respectfully,
me

dear universe,

in the original post of this, it says “dogs” where it now says “cats”. i do not know when (or how) it got changed, but i am glad that someone loved cats enough to do that, because i love my dog and i also love my cats and i felt bad about not mentioning it that first time. i’m also glad for all the tags where people told me what i should have added (like libraries and waffles and maple syrup) and i am glad for all the comments about how much they love their pets (and some people have such cool pets!)

i kind of think, universe, if we are your children, this is our macaroni art. see, see, see, you gave us a little bit of the stars, and we’ve made our own constellations. we tried to give back to you by making art and music and books and bad poetry and our laughter and our love and our tv dramadies. we took pictures of the night sky and pictures of sunsets and pictures of dew, we fell in love with space and the rivers and the rain. i personally have my desktop background as a picture of one of your nebulas. your hair looked great that day.

i think…. you did a good job, universe, on the stars, and what the stars became, because you put us together and yes, yes, things might be terrible – but good gracious did we make so many things worth loving, worth writing to you about, worth telling you – thank you, i’m taking the spark you put in me and using it to be kind, to be alive, to be wildly fierce about our gardens and gentle about our pets.

so hello. i amend my previous memo. i am writing to let you know you did a good job on the stars, and on my dog and my cats and the lizard i kept illegally in my apartment. and universe, i hope you’re watching, because some of the people you made? they’re great, universe, and they’re full of love, just endlessly capable of loving. and they give me hope.

and through them, universe, that’s you. that’s how the stars sing.

yours respectfully,
me

This is a great post to read at 10 PM

probablyoathofancientsrpgideas:

onion-souls:

kahavave:

bigwordsandsharpedges:

ethereal-insight:

tilthat:

TIL the Han Dynasty was founded by a sheriff who was transporting convicts when several escaped. Knowing the punishment for this was death, he freed the rest and organized many into a rebel band, eventually going on to help overthrow the ruling Qin Dynasty and install himself as Emperor.

via reddit.com

Talk about rolling with it

ultimate cosmic power move

That was a big problem with the Qin dynasty.  So many things were punished by death that not only did officers often find themselves on the run and in minor rebellions, but had many willing recruits because the only other option was execution.

Remember, if it seems like you’ve fucked everything up and have nowhere to go, you can always SEIZE THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN

@wearepaladin

Thought this might be up your alley.