The Isle of Air

I love you. I love you more than I love myself. I know it doesn’t say a lot but you’re the only thing I love this much.

If you're someone who wants to be able to find (or avoid) ships while reading on AO3, odds are good that a fan coder out there has created a user script that could help you out.

User scripts are similar to extensions. You add them to your browser to automatically adjust web pages for you. User scripts allow you the opportunity to personalize them, however, which is wonderful for things like AO3 filters.

Here are a few that might be worth a look:

AO3 multishipper saviour - if you want to read about a particular character in a relationship without specifying any other person. The relationships can be specified to be romantic or platonic or both.

AO3: Reorder Ship Tags - Automatically reorders relationship tags on work blurbs so romantic ships (/) always appear before platonic ships (&).

AO3 Relationship/Character Highlighter - highlights the ship/character you’re looking for if they appear in the first two relationship/character tags.

AO3 romantic relationship savior - hides all romantic relationships in sort & filter page that has "/"

AO3 First Relationship Tag Filter - toggle on the script if you're browsing a relationship tag and all the works that don't have that tag as their first tag will be hidden. Works on both romantic (/) and platonic (&) relationships.

AO3 relationship savior - hides works that have too many relationships in them.

AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing - will hide fics that don't have the designated pairing listed first in the tags.

AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing (Auto) - The difference between this and Neeve's script is that it automatically detects the primary pairing, little to no configuration needed.

AO3 Show every pairing except THAT one - Remove relationship tags from script which you do not want to read.

If you do the same search/filter every time, just bookmark the results page with your browser. The URL contains all of your filters, so every time to visit that URL, you'll get the pre-filtered, updated results.

I'm not crying you're crying 😭 My little Sobble chocolates with big feelings for Pokémon GO Community Day 💦✨

My meme-ish poster about executive dysfunction, or "The Sits" as we call it in our house. This is to share my experiences with exec. dysfunction, everyone's a little different ☺️

I feel like you get a lot of asks that amount to “I’m having feelings about racism and/or activism and I don’t quite know what to do about that.” In my experience, and I think you’ve also mentioned this, one of the first things you need to do to be an effective activist is figure out how to deal with your feelings on your own. So this is for anyone finding themselves in that position because otherwise you’re going to keep asking a Black woman to sooth your emotions about racism.

Here’s what I would suggest doing instead of defaulting to the ask box:

If you’re experiencing an emotion you don’t know what to do with, there are two things you need to do: process the emotion, and decide on a course of action.

Processing emotions: Take the time to sit with and experience the emotion within yourself. No one can do this for you, you need to actually sit with your feelings until you’re familiar with them. Even if they’re bad or scary. If you’re worried about having a “wrong” feeling that makes sense, but you’re still experiencing it. The best way to keep from hurting someone with your feelings is to process them, and you can’t do that if you’re too busy being scared of them. Don’t cheat on this part. Being familiar with a feeling means that you understand its shape and you’re not afraid of it anymore, even if its not right or not fair. Once you’re familiar with a feeling you can figure out why you feel that way. If you were taught to, if you picked it up through societal messaging, if someone made you feel that way, if its connected to any other feelings or events from your past. I find that many emotions resolve on their own during these two steps, if they’ve been doing correctly*. If your emotion hasn’t resolved at this point, it likely means something needs to change or that you need to change. Guilt is a good example here: guilt over true wrong doing should not go away just by understanding why you feel guilty.

Course of action: If, once you understand your emotions, they are still present you need to decide on a course of action. To continue with the guilt example, this might involve apologizing, educating yourself and others, or taking action to make a difference in your community. Do keep in mind that you are not owed forgiveness for harm you have caused. Additionally, you don’t have to “confess your sins” while you’re doing this. If you caused harm you should acknowledge it and why what you did was wrong, but there’s a difference between accountability and self flagellation or confessing because you want someone to tell you that what you did or thought “wasn’t that bad.”

That last one is why you should process your emotions first. As has been said a million times, the focus should be on the people who are being harmed, regardless of whether you were the person who caused that harm. I think a lot of you are running into problems with how to do that. The answer is that you can’t if you’re letting your own emotions get in the way. So learn how to process them, and learn how to use them as fuel to continue fighting. But don’t make them the problem of the people you’re trying to help.

*There are quite a number of types of nuerodivergence and mental illness that make this more complicated. Having one of those will make this harder, but you are still capable of learning how to process and manage your own emotions, even if you need different supports or help from others in your life. The bottom line remains the same.

“Sitting with your emotions” and processing your emotions looks like, to me, in concrete steps:

Ask myself “what am I feeling?” Put a name to the feeling I have. Am I feeling attacked? Defensive? Misunderstood? Is something about the way I understand myself being challenged? What does that make me feel? Name it! “Angry” and “hurt” and “frustrated” are the first steps, but what feelings are underneath those? Once you name it, you can let yourself say, “yes, I am feeling [emotion].”

Ask myself “why am I feeling this way?” The above post goes over this part well, but the answer for me often comes down to: when I feel defensive, quite a lot of the time it’s because there’s some truth to what the person said, and I don’t like that and would prefer it to not be true! Ask myself, is that the case now? Am I resisting acknowledging that they have a point? Why am I doing that?

Assess “Does the criticism of my actions have merit?” And you CAN’T just say “no” and leave it at that. Look at it from their angle. Ask why they would say that. Why they feel the way they do.

And crucial to me, literally sitting makes this way harder and worse. Walking or exercising with my emotions makes it way easier. If sitting with your emotions isn’t working, try walking with them. Go outside, walk around the block, and ask yourself these questions. What am I feeling? Name it and say “yes, I am feeling X.” Why am I feeling this way? Is somebody else making me feel this way? Do they have a point and that’s why I feel bad?

These are the concrete steps of the “process your emotions” stage and every time I act without doing this I wish I had waited and gone through this process first. Because agreeing with OP: a lot of the time my feelings resolve themselves during this process. The power to say “yes, this tumblr post about XYZ social issue is making me feel bad, and here’s why,” doesn’t… actually require reaching out for absolution from someone else.

Sometimes resolving your own feelings is enough. Sometimes the next step of “determine a course of action” really is just not making it someone else’s problem: it looks like “I’ll rethink my OC’s backstory” or “I’ll google a list of Black artists in my favorite genre and try their work” or “I’ll look at what Black bloggers in my fandom are posting, and do this process over again about their posts” or “I will not make a post about how my dislike of rap music is morally pure and forgivable actually and instead keep that thought to myself.” Sometimes it’s just letting someone who is clearly hurt by systemic injustice be passive-aggressive online without picking a fight and escalating. And then yeah sometimes it’s a more external action as described above! Everyone has to decide that on their own.

These bills have nothing to do with keeping young people from doing certain things or protecting the children or whatever. Their point is and always has been one thing: If your operating system knows who you are it is impossible to have any real form of privacy on the computer.