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every three months he'll post and in the author's note there's some shit like "sorry this took a while, i got shot seven times :/" or "i know it's been a minute, i literally got hit by a bus and then stabbed in the leg, but i'm all good!" or sometimes ned would log in and post with a note "hey i'm a friend posting on the author's behalf, they're healing from severe hypothermia but promised an update, so here it is!"

and the fic just gets increasingly more popular for the author notes alone. a good handful of the comments are something along the lines of "i'm not even in the star wars fandom, i'm just here to see if the author is good" or "every update i cheer for another day the author gets to live at this point"

and any reader who is a native new yorker kind of pieces together that holy shit the author might be spider-man because the timeline adds up, and they just fully embrace it. spider-man will stop a robbery and the guy behind the counter will ask when the next chapter will be up. spider-man returns a stolen backpack to a girl and she'll tell him that he "really got poe's voice down so well, it's really impressive."

ned thinks it is hilarious. mj finds out about the fic from twitter, to peter's absolute horror, and changes peter's contact name to "friendly neighborhood ao3 author". but the worst thing to happen is after an avengers battle where peter took a pretty big hit and ends up in med-bay. and during a press conference, when someone asks how spider-man is healing, tony just drops "spidey won't be down for too long. the star wars fic will be updated within the week, probably."

the star wars universe has no official name but in fandom you’ll see it shortened to GFFA for “galaxy far, far away”

glass - transparisteel

metal used in construction - durasteel

very strong space-plastic (used in stormtrooper armor) - duraplast

tablet computer (analogous to a PADD in trek) - datapad

rather than paper, handwriting is usually done with a stylus on flimsiplast (flimsi/flimsy for short)

holos are 3-d videos or videomessages, recorded and played on a holoprojector (these are often seen in small formats, palm-sized - analogous to like. a GoPro.)

we don’t drive cars, we drive landspeeders or speeder bikes

we don’t shoot guns, we shoot blasters

if you didn’t bring a knife to a gun fight, you perhaps brought a vibroblade instead - an edged weapon that, you guessed it, vibrates. little ones could be called vibroshivs or vibroknives. we actually got to see polearm versions of these in The Mandalorian! it was very exciting.

robots in GFFA are, of course, droids. astromech droids (astromechs) are the like. iphones of the droid world - ubiquitous, multipurpose, most with a similar aesthetic. R2-D2 and BB-8 are both astromech droids. human-shaped droids like C-3P0 are protocol droids.

got a papercut? a nasty flesh wound? a missing chunk of your torso, perhaps? slap a bacta-patch on it or take a dip in a bacta tank for a soothing treatment with this all-purpose miracle healing goo. this is what diapered Luke is bobbing around in during the early part of Empire Strikes Back.

you’re supposed to say kriff/kriffing instead of “damn,” “shit,” or “fuck/fucking,” but this is for cowards. let Obi-Wan cuss.

midichlorians - ignore them.

before the Empire comes to power, baby jedi who can’t hack it as knights or are never chosen to be Padawan apprentices become members of the Service Corps, the branches of which are the Agricultural Corps (AgriCorps), Medical Corps (MedCorps), Educational Corps (EduCorps), Exploration Corps (ExplorCorps)

dates are expressed (typically) as [date] Before the Battle of Yavin (BBY) or [date] After the Battle of Yavin (ABY). for instance, the sequel trilogy begins in 34 ABY.

• Basic = English

• Days of the week goes like: · Primeday · Centaxday · Taungsday · Zhellday · Benduday.

• watches and clocks = chronometer or chrono

• Time measurement (all based off of the Coruscant solar cycle)

- 60 standard minutes = 1 standard hour

- 24 standard hours = 1 standard day

- 5 standard days = 1 standard week

- 7 standard weeks = 1 standard month

- 10 standard months + 3 festival weeks + 3 holidays = 368 standard days = 1 standard year

• Showers! = (most common) fresher, the fresher, refresher, (uncommon, used in desert planets) sonic shower, or just ‘sonic’

• pianos exist!

• what’s the most vile language you can cuss in?? why, in Huttese of course (which is the second most prevalent language in the galaxy after Basic. It’s the lingua franca for the Outer Rim Territories which is basically space wild west), try saying Fierfek five times (it means curse you)

• if you’re a droid or mechanic another cuss word would be “switch-off”

• if ur Mandalorian, ass/asses would be shebs, ‘dank farrik’ which is common for mercs to say = damn, fuck

• people working for the empire = colloquially called ‘imps’

• the mafia = pykes and the hutts

•characters in star wars do actually say damn (looking at you mace)

•as previously stated: glass is a thing! There's a place called "the glass abyss" (haven't actually finished reading that book yet, but the point still stands... I think)

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.