magpie hoarder

He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.

Like, look at this stuff????

It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!

Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.

And then there's this one:

The Fantasy

For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.

The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.

But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.

Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.

This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.

"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.

"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.

Almost made me cry right now.

“You'e weak! And I’ve outgrown you.”

My brother called me yesterday with a stunning revelation he’d had about this scene: intentional or not, this is a perfect commentary on the superhero genre of today, and about one of its greatest weaknesses.

He’s calling Mr. Incredible weak here because the man refused to do one thing–and that was to kill someone. And because he sees him as being unable to kill, he sees him as weak–and childish. “I’ve outgrown you.” Now he is in the realm of “mature” superheroes, where Superman has to snap a man’s neck and Catwoman has to shoot Bane, where the purity of a woman forged by clay is unrelatable and marriage is nonconducive to an interesting story. His is a world where superheroes die to make villains seem impressive, a world where a dark and gritty realism is more important than a fun and adventurous fantasy. 

In the end of this movie, though, the Omnidroid isn’t beaten by Mr. Incredible finding Syndrome and beating an explanation out of him to stop the robot; they solve it through brainwork, audacity, and a fun and creative action sequence. Syndrome dies in the end, yes, but that’s primarily because he keeps trying to push his view, and ends up destroying himself.

But this is Syndrome being Zack Snyder or Frank Miller, and believing that the fun adventures of yesteryear are childish fantasies that need to be left behind: ours is a world where to relate to a superhero, we have to see that superhero be unable to accomplish his task completely, where he has to settle and accept a compromise in order to preserve the greater good. We can’t admire them for being able to do what we cannot–we have to grow up and see that they’re just like us, they’re nothing special. Not really. And that is what true maturity is. A truly mature Avatar would kill the Firelord, a truly mature Superman would have no choice but to fight in the middle of a city, and video games need to be about cover-based shooting and military combat in the real world. With quick-time-events!

You might have noticed that when you include more than one item in your AO3 filters, the number of results drops drastically. When you include more than one item, you're telling the filter to find fics that have tag A as well as tag B, and the more items you include, the more things you're requiring a fic to have in order to show up in your results.

You're telling AO3 that you only want fics that have all of the things. You're not telling AO3 that you want fics that have any of the things.

This is because the filters use something called Boolean operators. The Boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT. You need to use caps for these terms in order for them to function as an operator and not just another word in a phrase.

AND (the one used by include filters) means you want both (or all) of the things

OR means you want any of them or any combination of them

NOT (the one used by exclude filters) means that you want none of them, either alone or in combination

So if Include = AND and Exclude = NOT, then how do you use OR? Use the Search Within Results box. It's near the bottom of the filter menu, right above where you can choose which language you want to read and below where you can choose word count range and completion status etc.

In this box, type the name of the first tag you're interested in, then the name of the second tag and put an OR in the middle. Keep adding OR in between them, and you can stack as many tags as you want - until you get to whatever the character limit is (character, in this case, meaning letter, number, or symbol).

If a tag is just one word, then your filter would look like this:

angst OR fluff

If a tag is more than one word, then your filter would look like this:

"no beta we die like men" OR "I wrote this instead of sleeping"

You need the quotation marks around multiple words to let the filter know that those words belong together, in that order

If you want to do an OR search for ships, it gets a bit more complicated because of the symbols used in ship tags. For ships, instead of using the name of the tag, it's better to use the tag ID number.

To find the tag ID, tap/click on the ship tag to go that tag's results page (I'm using Frodo/Sam in this example). On that results page, tap on the button labelled RSS feed. That will either open up a new page full of code or download a text file of code. Near the top of that code, you'll see something that looks like:

The tag ID number is the number that appears after /tags/

In this case, the tag ID number for Frodo/Sam is 13674. When I repeat the same process for Frodo & Sam, I get the tag ID number 716913. Then I just need to set up my OR statement and let it know that the tag number I'm providing is a relationship ID:

relationship_ids: 13674 OR relationship_ids:716913

Put that in the Search Within Results box, and I'll get fics with either one of those ships tagged, and I'll also get results with both ships tagged.

Instead of quotation marks you could also use brackets and instead of NOT you can you a dash. (Boolean Operators have alternative characters/symbols that can be used instead of typing the entire operator but this also depends on where you are typing them. If you type them on a site that doesn't recognize the character/symbol, you might not get the results for what you want.)

For example, if you're searching for Frodo & Sam OR Frodo/Sam but you don't even want a mention of Bilbo, you can write it like this:

(Frodo & Sam) OR (Frodo/Sam) -Bilbo

It will filter out every work that has Bilbo anywhere in the tags (and summary, title, series titles, and if the author's name contains it😅) while giving you the works that you want. It doesn't work for partial words however (I think you would have to use an asterisk (*) which is sometimes called a wildcard, but I haven't tried that yet, I'll update if I do), i.e. poly vs polyamory.

Note that when using the dash there mustn't be a space between it and what you want to filter out, or else you will get a page with zero results (I think it ends up filtering out every work with a space, and that's all works).

Dashes can also be used with brackets, for example: -(character death)

This will filter out Major Character Death, Minor Character Death, Temporary Character Death, Canon Character Death, and so on so forth.

It doesn't have to be a big think piece novel, an elaborate examination of a certain subject or opinion, your poetry doesn't have to have an obvious political angle, but yes, it also absolutely can.

It doesn't have to be light hearted escapism to heal our collective wounds for a while, but it can.

It doesn't have to be anything other than authentic to you.

So, your landlord/parents/home inspector/favorite movie star is dropping by, and your place is a disaster. You don’t have much time to clean it up. You’re in emergency mode. Let’s get started.

Don’t panic. Panic leads to fear, fear leads to procrastination, procrastination leads to the dark side. You can do this, but you have to stay calm.

Unlike maintenance cleaning, we’re not looking to completely unfuck one space at a time. Instead, we want to decrease the overall mess in stages, spread evenly across the whole area that we’re concerned about. If you think your home is at Level 10 filth, we want to bring the whole thing down to a Level 9, and then down from there. One really clean spot in an otherwise messy home is not going to be helpful here.

Get prepared. You’ll want to shut the computer down (or turn the modem off if you need your computer to play music). Trust me. Get your music going. Gather up trash bags, your vacuum and mop, some rags or paper towel, sponges, and other cleaning supplies. Use what you have on hand. Don’t get distracted running to the store and spending an hour browsing cleaning supplies. A multi-purpose cleaning concentrate or a jug of vinegar will be just fine.

Breaks are very important. Depending on your time constraints, work in 20/10s (20 minutes working, 10-minute break) or 45/15s. But take breaks because otherwise you’re marathoning, and marathon cleaning is no one’s friend. Keep hydrated, don’t forget to eat, and check in with yourself frequently to make sure you’re physically doing OK.

Make your bed. This will be your home base if you get overwhelmed or need somewhere clear to take a break.

Start with the garbage. Going from room to room, throw out anything that is obvious trash. Once you fill a bag, take it out. Repeat as many times as necessary.

Move on to dishes. Gather the dishes from all over your house and bring them to the kitchen. If you can, start them soaking in a sink of hot, soapy water or start loading the dishwasher. After the dishes are all in one place, spend one 20/10 getting started getting them under control.

Now it’s time for your flat surfaces. Countertops, tables, dresser tops, etc. Clear them off and wipe them down. Don’t get distracted in too much sorting and organizing. We’re in crisis mode here. There will be time to get in-depth once this is all done. The same applies to cabinets and closets. Unless you have reason to believe people will be opening closed doors, leave these alone for now.

Attack the floordrobe and shoe pile. Get your clothes either put away or in the hamper. Start a load of laundry if you need to, but keep in mind that laundry and dishes have three steps: wash, dry, and put it away, goddammit!

Get random stuff up off the floors. If something is trash-worthy, throw it away now rather than just move it around a bunch of times. Otherwise, put stuff where it belongs.

Take another 20/10 or 45/15 to catch up on more dishes, if needed.

Head into the bathroom. Pour some cleaner in the toilet bowl, fill the sink with hot water and cleaner, and either spray the tub and shower with cleaner, or fill the tub up with some hot water and add cleaner and let it soak. Put everything away that’s out and shouldn’t be, clean the mirror, counters, and toilet seat. Sweep or dry mop the floor. Wipe down the sink and tub/shower, and give the toilet bowl a scrub. Mop the floor.

Sweep and mop the kitchen floor.

Vacuum everything you can, and sweep everything you can’t.

Walk outside of your house (don’t lock yourself out, please). Walk back in and see what catches your eye first. Go and deal with that.

If you’re being inspected or your landlord is coming in for repairs, spend time on whatever area they’ll be focusing on.

Give the whole place one more once-over and pay attention to anything you’ve missed so far.

It’s an old trick, but if your place is a little funky-smelling, put a pan of water on the stove on low heat and add some citrus or cinnamon or vanilla. Don’t leave it unattended or forget about it.

Take a shower, put on something clean, and eat something.

You can do this. It’s overwhelming, yes, but it is not impossible. You just need to do it. You have a list. You have directions. You have a whole bunch of Internet strangers who have been there before and who are cheering you on. You can do this, but you need to get started.

Violence: A Writer’s Guide:  This is not about writing technique. It is an introduction to the world of violence. To the parts that people don’t understand. The parts that books and movies get wrong. Not just the mechanics, but how people who live in a violent world think and feel about what they do and what they see done.

Hurting Your Characters: HURTING YOUR CHARACTERS discusses the immediate effect of trauma on the body, its physiologic response, including the types of nerve fibers and the sensations they convey, and how injuries feel to the character. This book also presents a simplified overview of the expected recovery times for the injuries discussed in young, otherwise healthy individuals.

Body Trauma: A writer’s guide to wounds and injuries. Body Trauma explains what happens to body organs and bones maimed by accident or intent and the small window of opportunity for emergency treatment. Research what happens in a hospital operating room and the personnel who initiate treatment. Use these facts to bring added realism to your stories and novels.

10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die TODAY…and What to Do Instead: Written by a paramedic and writer with a decade of experience, 10 BS Medical Tropes covers exactly that: clichéd and inaccurate tropes that not only ruin books, they have the potential to hurt real people in the real world. 

Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction: Increase Realism. Raise the Stakes. Tell Better Stories. Maim Your Characters is the definitive guide to using wounds and injuries to their greatest effect in your story. Learn not only the six critical parts of an injury plot, but more importantly, how to make sure that the injury you’re inflicting matters. 

1.    don’t stress about unanswered asks. your inbox will gradually become unmanageable. it’s cool/flattering that people want to talk, but you don’t owe anyone responses.

2.    turning anon off lets you answer asks quickly and privately.

3.    people will not read your FAQ, or your Before You Ask rules. instead of replying in annoyance, just quickly delete these messages and move on.

4.    turn off direct messaging for non-mutuals.

5.    turn off submissions (unless you REALLY enjoy them).

6.    block block block block. one strike you’re out. don’t bother speaking to harassers - giving them unfettered access to your inbox is a form of self harm.

7.    at some point if you’re an lgbt+ ally you’ll receive messages disagreeing with your support of a sexuality/gender (trans/nonbinary/ace/bi/queer support is what mostly gets folk angry). DO NOT reply privately, they will 100% screenshot you and post it out of context. either ignore/block or put enough thought into your words that you’re willing to have them broadcasted.

8.    becoming publicly angry with someone will result in harassment being sent their way, so either message the person privately to resolve the issue, or move on. don’t be shitty.

9.    people will be outrageously vile to you. people will threaten you. when this happens, disengage from the online world. talk to friends, hug a dog, eat your favourite snack, and protect your mental health.

10.    people will treat you as an authority on subjects you’re not qualified to discuss. you are NOT an authority. like it or not, you now have the power to widely spread misinformation – either boost the voices of experts instead, or put careful research into your words. if you’re wrong, boost the correction.

12. sometimes victims of sexual assault, violence, and other traumas will come to you because they don’t know who else to go to or they view you as a compassionate adult figure who will know what to do. sometimes those asks will be incredibly hard to read and respond to, but if you’re confident in providing aid (if you’re certain you can handle it and it won’t affect your mental health), do so. if you can’t, that’s completely understandable, and kindly redirecting them to qualified online services is often the best way to go. 

13. you do not have to be an expert on everything for people to keep liking you. you are a person with a set of experiences, and “I don’t know” or “I looked it up and this is what I found” are perfectly valid responses

14. if you’ve gained popularity because you’re a creator, especially in a fandom setting, there’s a chance a number of people will resent you simply for existing. people will hate you because they aren’t getting the same recognition for their own writing/art, because you’re not humble enough, because you’ve ‘bought into your own hype’ simply because you’re polite & respond with thanks to the people who compliment you/your work. there is nothing you can do to change their minds. ignore them if you can, block them, whatever you need to do. it’s not worth sacrificing your mental health over

Self-Confidence

Assertiveness

Determination

These qualities in a protagonist or point-of-view character help move the plot and create characters that people actually want to read about, but they are surprisingly absent in a lot of fiction. Below the cut, I'm going to dive into why I think young writers struggle with writing characters with these qualities and offer what advice I can for how to develop the capacity to write these qualities even if you lack them yourself.

For all the mockery that's been leveled at male writers fixating on the sexiness of female characters with lines like, "she titted boobily down the stairs," (deriding how male authors have POV female characters thinking about their own boobs an absurd amount) I think it's worth noting that female* writers often do the same for male characters, just not for physical traits, but rather for emotional openness, humility, and vulnerability.

(*There's going to be a lot of sweeping generalizations in this essay, but the gender nomenclature is being used as shorthand and is intended inclusively. Likewise, any mention of "cultural norms" is from a US/Anglosphere perspective and not intended or expected to speak to all experiences.)

Men in female-written fanworks often cry a lot more than their canon counterparts. They're emotionally available and vulnerable a lot more often, especially with their romantic partner. They're more permissive about letting another person tell them what to do or letting someone else see them in an emotionally or physically vulnerable state.

This is not a criticism of works that do this. Oftentimes, what fic is specifically addressing is a desire to see something that isn't in canon, or isn't in canon as much as the writer would like, and that often includes a character opening up in an emotionally vulnerable way, especially to their lover.

But, if you've ever wondered why a male character in fic sometimes don't feel quite right, please feel free to read on. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, mostly to address OOCness in my own works, and I wanted to share my thoughts with those who might have puzzled over this question as a reader or as a writer.

(Some fandoms mentioned below the cut: Our Flag Means Death, Captain America, and Punisher.)

🫶🏽

Bonus:

as an indication that Hawks is motivated by his laziness and/or that he cares more about an easy life for heroes than protecting civilians. And these conclusions crush my soul a little because I interpret this panel very differently, and this panel is actually foundational to my understanding of the fact that—no matter how sketchy he acts—Hawks is good. He has so many layers of good, and it’s all summed up here in this one line cleverly delivered in a way that is still consistent with Hawks’ shallow portrayal up until this point. 

Listen, y’all, a world where heroes have more free time than they know what to do with is a world free of conflict. That is what Hawks wants.

At first it seems like a no-brainer—who wouldn’t want a peaceful world, right?— but I don’t think that a single other hero in this story, not even the students who represent the most progressive cast, has expressed such a goal. The youngsters dream of becoming top heroes and defeating evil while missing the irony of the fact that the continued need for a hero profession indicates something perpetually wrong with the world they live in. Hawks, however, has noticed the irony (likely due to his unconventional hero education showing him that the hero profession is nowhere near the hero ideal), and essentially what he’s saying to Endeavor here is “hey… i don’t want to pass my problems to the next generation of pros. i want to make the world so safe that the profession dies out.”

It’s a ridiculously ambitious dream and surprisingly naive for someone portrayed so calculating and rational, but it’s so sincere. He has a dream and he is willing to dedicate his life to it, even if he has to do it all himself.

Deep down, he probably wants an easy life too, and he could if he just cared less. But he cares too much and thus would never enjoy the luxury of an easy life until he’s secured it for others. This is why he moves so fast. This is where his conviction comes from.

Anyway! I fully agree with everything said here. And I love how pure Hawks’ goal is? It’s so different from everyone else and tells you so much about Hawks - his actual personality, how much he understands the world and circumstances around himself but also, how much he must have gone through to have reached this understanding and thus, developed his goal.

When one or the other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we are looking for. As a result, we increase the number of unnecessary possessions, burying ourselves both physically and mentally in superfluous things. 

The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees are no longer necessary. All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly. The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.

 Many times when confronting my past during the tidying process I have been so ashamed. My collection of scented erasers from primary school, the animation-related goods that I collected in junior high school, clothes I bought in high school when I was trying to act grown up but which didn’t suit me at all, handbags I bought even though I didn’t need them just because I liked the look of them in the shop. 

The things we own are real. They exist here and now as a result of choices made in the past by no one other than ourselves. It is wrong to ignore them or to discard them indiscriminately as if denying the choices we made. This is why I am against both letting things pile up and dumping things without proper consideration. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them. 

There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions. Face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us. 

When a woman who is very anxious about the future chooses a partner, for example, she is less likely to select someone purely because she likes and enjoys being with him. She might choose someone she doesn’t really like simply because the relationship seems advantageous to her or because she is afraid that if she doesn’t choose him, she may not find anyone else. When it comes to career choices, the same type of person is more likely to choose a job with a large company because it will give her more choices in the future or to work toward certain qualifications as a guarantee rather than because she actually likes the work and wants to do it.