Various & Sundry

and not just 5e, and not just D&D

and not just books, a few days ago I found an issue of a magazine that was published when I was two years old

I thought there might be a lot of other people who would benefit from reading this, too.

It’s Mother’s Day coming up, so I’m thinking of all the women in my life and all the awesome roles they play (mothers, non-mothers, and never-mothers alike).

playing on the computer, watching movies and tvs, even reading books - these are all great ways to make time pass quickly BUT they are not grounding activities, they are activities that instead make you more prone to getting lost in your head a bit - you look up and it’s 2 in the morning and you don’t know where the day went.

so alternate any activity that involves escapism (text messaging, movies, video games, ect.) with a grounding activity.  otherwise, if you’re like me, you’ll start to feel all weird and floaty and nothing matters and what is time and when was the last time i ate.

obviously, work with what resources you have and keep in mind any issues, physical or otherwise, that might make these suggestions not right for you.  

also, i like to do all of these with my preschooler and toddler, because they benefit from the shared activity and from the grounding themselves as well.  i’m not a board-game mom or a mom that likes to coordinate cute art projects or activities - i just don’t have the focus for that (adhd).  instead i prefer to just share activities with my kids as described below.

suggested grounding activities:

*  cooking a meal.  not microwaving something, preparing a meal that involves chopping vegetables, requires you to stand over a steaming pan stirring constantly.  bake a boxed cake for no reason other than you need a grounding activity.  chop an onion.  make ants-on-a-log.  look at the weird leftover stuff in the pantry and make something equally weird with it.  (my husband likes to do this.)

*  walking (my favorite).  if you can, go outside to walk, if not, even walking around the rooms in your house will help.  take your kids on a walk.  raining? go for a (brief) walk anyway.  my kids LOVE a rainy day walk because they get to splash in muddy puddles.

*  loud, cheerful music that you sing along to.  this is not the time for wistful,  angsty breakup music.  you want abba.  you want cyndi lauper.  you want “you can call me al.”  PLEASE dance along.  PLEASE sing as loud as you can.  kids will love having a dance party.

*  making art.  glue popsickle sticks, paint with watercolors, anything messy or tactile is A+++.  everyone has 500 rolls of toilet paper, use those empty rolls for art projects. playdoh.  molding clay.  my kids’ favorite activity is stringing beads on pipe cleaners.  

*  heavy work.  if you have the resources and a backyard, a good thing to do is to go outside and start moving heavy things.  clear out a spot for a garden.  move bricks.  clean up trash.  if you don’t have outside space, move your furniture around the room.  push and pull and lift, if you can.   alphabetize your book collection, moving your hardbacks from shelf to shelf.  

*  picking a small area or room and cleaning it.  what i mean is: washing a window, wiping a baseboard, scrubbing a tub.  doesn’t have to be the whole room.  just one thing.  what i am NOT suggesting: organizing closets and shelves.  organizing requires making decisions.  you are probably not in the right headspace for descision-making right now.  please chose MINDLESS physical grounding activities.  as an added bonus, cleaning makes you feel productive AND soothes your anxiety over germs.  for example, my kids LOVE to mop.  they beg for that priviledge.  let them mop! make a big wet mess on the floor and then dry it up with towels.  

*  play with toys.  i am literally suggesting pulling out a box of blocks and sitting on the floor with your kids, if you have them, or with your pets, if you don’t.  blocks are great for grounding me (and my kids).  build towers, roads, cities, ect.  it’s tactile, mindless and meditative, and it’s probably something you don’t usually do every day, so it’s novel.  other suggestions: barbies.  matchbox cars.  nothing that requires batteries or makes noise.  no lego sets - an open-ended activity.  don’t try to follow directions.  just get a bunch of foam blocks and make a tower.

*  paint your nails.  paint your kids’ nails.  both my son and daughter love having their nails painted.  it’s tactile, it’s good physical contact, it tickles a little, it’s mindless.  

*  play with a pet.  order a laser pointer for your kitty or get a squeaky ball for the dog.  get on the floor.  

And remember it’s not limited to your area of study. It is perfectly legal for you to do a bit of research into the various textbooks that are most in demand, and those which are most expensive, and find out if you have free access to them. 

Of course it would be illegal for you to remove the DRM and upload it to libgen, despite the fact that it’s a tangible, effective way of extending solidarity and breaking down the absurd barriers that capitalism puts on knowledge. 

So yes, don’t be tempted by this particular illegal action, which costs you nothing, and is the right thing to do.

So instead, tell me about your iddiest id fic you haven’t written.

(Note: I know fandom sometimes conflates “iddy” with “kinks you don’t necessarily admit to outside of AO3,” and it can be that if you want, but I really just mean the story of your heart that is emotionally fulfilling on a disproportionate level. IDC if it’s gen, I just want to know the story you tell yourself that makes you happy.)

Mine also follows me from fandom to fandom.  In my head it’s a whole series of unwritten iddy fics entitled, “People who would NEVER fuck, except they fuck.”  I think because my id wants deeply awkward sexual encounters followed by emotional growth.

I’m not explaining this well: https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/why-doesnt-artificial-banana-flavor-taste-bananas

Or just because Laffy Taffy has a really terrible banana flavor?

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. 

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

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.

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.

by Keith Humphreys - May 5, 2014           

When I met my fiance’s African-American stepfather, things did not start well. Stumbling for some way to start a conversation with a man whose life was unlike mine in almost every respect, I asked “So, what do you do for a living?”.

He looked down at his shoes and said quietly “Well, I’m unemployed”.

At the time I cringed inwardly and recognized that I had committed a terrible social gaffe which seemed to scream “Hey prospective in-law, since I am probably going to be a member of your family real soon, I thought I would let you know up front that I am a completely insensitive jackass”. But I felt even worse years later when I came to appreciate the racial dimension of how I had humiliated my stepfather-in-law to be.

For that painful but necessary bit of knowledge I owe a white friend who throughout her childhood attended Chicago schools in a majority Black district. She passed along a marvelous book that helped her make sense of her own inter-racial experiences. It was Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict, and it had a lasting effect on me. One of the many things I learned from this anthropological treasure trove of a book is how race affects the personal questions we feel entitled to ask and the answers we receive in response.

My question to my stepfather was at the level of content a simple conversation starter (albeit a completely failed one). But at the level of process, it was an expression of power. Kochman’s book sensitized me to middle class whites’ tendency to ask personal questions without first considering whether they have a right to know the personal details of someone else’s life. When we ask someone what they do for a living for example, we are also asking for at least partial information on their income, their status in the class hierarchy and their perceived importance in the world. Unbidden, that question can be quite an invasion. The presumption that one is entitled to such information is rarely made explicit, but that doesn’t prevent it from forcing other people to make a painful choice: Disclose something they want to keep secret or flatly refuse to answer (which oddly enough usually makes them, rather than the questioner, look rude).

Kochman’s book taught me a new word, which describes an indirect conversational technique he studied in urban Black communities: “signifying”. He gives the example (as I recall it, 25 years on) of a marriage-minded black woman who is dating a man who pays for everything on their very nice dates. She wonders if he has a good job. But instead of grilling him with “So what do you do for a living?”, she signifies “Whatever oil well you own, I hope it keeps pumping!”.

Her signifying in this way is a sensitive, respectful method to raise the issue she wants to know about because unlike my entitled direct question it keeps the control under the person whose personal information is of interest. Her comment could be reasonably responded to by her date as a funny joke, a bit of flirtation, or a wish for good luck. But of course it also shows that if the man freely chooses to reveal something like “Things look good for me financially: I’m a certified public accountant at a big, stable firm”, he can do so and know she will be interested.

Since reading Kochman’s book, I have never again directly asked anyone what they do for a living. Instead my line is “So how do you spend your time?”. Some people (particularly middle class white people) choose to answer that question in the bog standard way by describing their job. But other people choose to tell me about the compelling novel they are reading, what they enjoy about being a parent, the medical treatment they are getting for their bad back, whatever. Any of those answers flow just as smoothly from the signification in a way they wouldn’t from a direct question about their vocation.

The second author was like, DUDE, fanfic writers invented omegaverse years and years before it ever entered your dumbass head.  Which of course is true.

But remember, herd action is a powerful thing, we aren’t doing this for just you or me or one single person. We’re doing this for the elderly and immunecompromised, we’re doing this for the health care professionals so they don’t get too overwhelmed. We’re doing this for more than just ourselves. This is collective action at work.

And it is the group that lifts that barn when no one person can

it is the group that takes turns talking to the man down during the worst day of his life

it’s the group that gets out the wet wipes and quietly takes down hate symbols

and we don’t do that for ourselves. We do that because there is a love for strangers, a love for people we don’t know, and a dedication to others that is more than just “me” and “survive” and us vs them.