your local space ghost cryptid

torture getting reliable information out of people

knocking someone out to harmlessly incapacitate them for like an hour

jumping into water from staggering heights and surviving the fall completely intact

calling the police to deescalate a situation

rafting your way off a desert island

correctly profiling total strangers based on vibes

effectively operating every computer by typing and nothing else

ripping an IV out of your arm without consequences

but, the thing is

even polyester fabric was higher quality in the past

yes, not all of it, but, still, a noticeable amount of older polyester was...nicer.

yeah, it would still get picks and hold on to every bit of underarm odor, and that's on top of no-one knowing about microplastic shedding

the BLINDING difference in clothing quality between even the 1990s and the mid-2000s...not even going in to the decline in quality of clothing made in natural fibers (jeans with elastane, i'm looking at you), I've got faux-leather trousers from 1980s that are in near-mint condition, even after being hired and worn repeatedly for the past 40 years. we get donations of clothing that shows and films have bought online for contemporary shows that are disintegrating after being used on one show, for like....10 days, max.

don't even get me started on the seam allowances we used to get in clothes, because the assumption was you'd alter it at some point...

Tags passing peer review, gonna share.

This is a man who is VIOLENTLY aware that when it comes to conservatives, he is a Muslim first, a Brown Man second, an Immigrant third, a Socialist fourth, and a human a very distant fifth, if considered at all. He was also a young adult during the Obama Years and will have seen Republicans rip Obama to shreds for wearing a tan suit instead of a dark one and use literally ANY excuse they could to try and degrade his image.

the Four Simple Tools Which Have Most Improved My AO3 Experience (on the computer, at least):

FIRST, for writers: the AO3 posting script google doc.

if you take nothing else from this post, let it be this. let the blessed light of the ao3 posting doc shine upon you.

okay so you know how if you copy your doc into the rich text editor on AO3, it will fuck up your formatting? just a little. like, if a word is italicized at the end of a sentence, but the full stop isn't italicized, there'll be a space between them and it looks weird? or it'll insert extra line breaks between paragraphs?

that's because the rich text editor takes what's copied into it and converts it to HTML, and I guess weird stuff can happen in that process, e.g. the rich text editor interpreting every line break as a new paragraph, including blank ones, thus the weird extra line breaks.

thankfully, there's a way to convert your doc directly to HTML that doesn't run into all those problems! it's the AO3 posting script. you make a copy of that google doc for yourself, so you have editing privileges. then you copy your fic into it, hit "post to AO3" -> "prepare for pasting into HTML editor" and boom, it will do the damn thing for you. it has saved me so much time and energy and annoyance. lots of people know about this, but every time I bring it up I find someone I know has not yet heard the good news, so: now you know!

okay, for the rest of these you need a userscript manager for your browser, like greasemonkey or tampermonkey. a userscript manager is a browser extension that lets you run a userscript (a little program, usually written in JavaScript) to modify particular webpages. I use firefox, so I use the greasemonkey browser extension linked above, but there are others out there! they should have their own installation instructions.

SECOND, for readers: the floating comment box.

wish you could write up comments while you read instead of waiting until you get to the end of the fic/chapter? this script creates a way a, well, floating comment box that you can access while you read! you access it by clicking this little "O" button in the upper left-hand corner of the brower.

when you do that, a floating box pops up, into which you can type your thoughts in as you read! you can also highlight text and click "insert selection," and that text will show up in the box, italicized, for you to tell the author what your favorite lines were!

hitting "add to comment box" will make the contents of the comment box at the bottom of the page match the contents of the floating box.

THIRD, for readers: ao3 savior and ao3 savior config.

is there shit you just never want to see again? say, for instance, you'd love to never see a harry potter fanfiction again. ao3 savior can help!

the way this one works is that you install the 'ao3 savior' script and the 'ao3 savior config' script separately. then when you want to add something to your blocklist, you go to your userscript manager extension (e.g. greasemonkey), go to the ao3 savior config script, and hit edit.

there are some default/example tags included to show the various ways to blacklist or whitelist works, but, for instance, here I've added "Harry Potter*" to the list of tags to exclude. (the * is a wildcard, so it will include "Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling" AND "Harry Potter - Fandom" AND any other tags that start with "Harry Potter".)

now, if I'm looking through fics and there's a Harry Potter crossover in the list, it will be hidden, and I'll be able to see why! and if I look at the tag itself...

ah! what bliss.

and FOURTH, for readers: ao3 tweak formatting.

finally: say there's a fic posted by someone who has not yet seen the blessed light of the ao3 posting script doc, and you want to read it, but the extra paragraph breaks really annoy you. or they learned to type in 1931 and so they double-space between sentences. or... various other common typing quirks! this script creates a handly little dropdown that will remove those quirks, just after the notes, after the beginning notes and before the chapter title.

click on "remove line breaks" or whatever, and poof! the extra line breaks are gone.

it's like magic.

I know installing scripts might seem a little daunting if you've never done it before! but it's actually really easy and handy. I know there are other, more in-depth tutorials for installing/using these scripts out there, too, if this is confusing. and probably there are other great tools out there that I don't even know about! I'm just writing this up quickly while I was thinking about it, so I can go to dinner.

Most importantly, stay hydrated. Even if all you drink is caffeinated soda, it's still better than not drinking anything at all. Pretty much anything other than alcohol and energy drinks like Monster and such are fair game for hydration (this coming multiple doctors I see who have said this to me, the caffeine in a can of coke isn't going to make you pee more fluid than you're taking in).

Coordinated Universal Time.

The system by which every computer in existence now keeps count of the passing seconds.

And I mean that literally. To a computer system "now" is a number that represents the total number ov seconds that have passed since midnight on the 1st of January, 1960.

1960/01/01 00:00:01 is literally the beginning of time as far as a computer is concerned.