Meredith Milton's Writings and Ramblings

AVOID HEAT STRESS

If you have a laptop DO NOT use it on a soft surface like a pillow or on a blanket, it’ll block the vents on your computer and make it get really fucking hot inside.

If you have a desktop you gotta open it up and blow out the dust sometimes.

If you are moving your laptop in a bag turn the laptop off. Don’t put it to sleep, don’t just shut the screen, turn it off, because otherwise it’s in the bag generating heat and there’s nowhere for the heat to go in the bag. OFF. Not sleep. OFF.

DO NOT DROP

Okay I know that should be obvious but drop damage to your hard drive is bad bad news. Be as careful as you can to set your computer gently on flat surfaces; don’t leave it hanging out on a bed where it can get knocked off, don’t set it on the roof of your car. And yes, just dropping it a couple inches can kill your hard drive or totally shatter your screen.

DON’T PUT SHIT ON YOUR KEYBOARD

Look I’ve seen four people ruin their laptops because they had a pen on the keyboard and closed the laptop and it fucked up the screen and the keyboard and it sucks so much and you feel awful after it happens because it’s so avoidable just don’t put things on your keyboard and always check that your laptop is clear before you close it.

PROTECT YOUR PORTS ON YOUR LAPTOP

You’ve only got one power jack and a limited number of other inputs on your computer and if they detach from the motherboard you’re fucked. USB ports get damaged because people use them a lot and eventually it weakens the connection and then they just stop working and it sucks. You can get around this with USB ports by using a USB hub to connect things like your keyboard and mouse.

For your power plug you just gotta be careful. Avoid tripping over the cord at all costs, don’t yank the plug out of the computer. It will SUCK VERY MUCH A LOT if you have to buy a new computer because the power port lost contact with the motherboard.

Don’t move your computer with things plugged into it. Take the power cord off before you put your laptop in the bag, take out the USB mouse dongle, do not travel with little nubby bits sticking out of your computer that can easily get caught or get tweaked or snap off inside of the thing.

(I really can’t emphasize enough that most of the “it will cost more than it’s worth to fix this” laptops I see are because of USB ports and power jacks. People don’t seem to know that this isn’t something that can be fixed easily; a broken power jack is a “remove the motherboard and resoldier components” job, not a “plug a new one in in fifteen minutes” job and most computer repair shops aren’t going to solder things for you and if they DO it’s going to be very expensive)

RESTART YOUR SHIT AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH AND JUST LET THE FUCKING UPDATES RUN

You should probably restart more than once a month but whatever. This is actually something that I consider part of reducing heat stress because when your processor is straining to keep up with all the background bullshit that’s running from a program you opened three weeks ago it’s going to use up resources and get hot and look just restart it once in a while.

Also the updates are almost always okay and safe and generally running updates is a good and secure thing to do (though maybe follow a blog dedicated to the OS you run because if there IS a problem with the updates that blog will probably talk about it before the update gets forced on your computer)

ANTIVIRUS BULLSHIT

Yes you should probably be running an antivirus.

Sophos is free and it’s fine. But don’t pay for it - if you’re using Sophos use the free version.

If you’re looking for something paid and a little more comprehensive I recommend ESET - get the cheap version, renewals cost less than the initial purchase, and feel free to get a multi-year version, the credentials follow your email not the computer so if your computer dies before your license expires you can install the license on a new computer.

DO NOT INSTALL NORTON OR MCAFEE THEY ARE EXPENSIVE BULLSHIT. Kaspersky is whatever. It’s less bullshit than Norton or McAfee but not as good as ESET for about the same cost.

If you think you’ve got a virus run the free version of Malwarebytes and get your shit cleaned.

KEEP LIQUIDS THE FUCK AWAY FROM YOUR COMPUTER

Again this should be obvious and yet. But seriously, just make a rule for yourself that drinks aren’t allowed on the same table as your computer and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches.

PLUG YOUR COMPUTER INTO A UPS

Okay I fucking hate amazon but here’s a thing you should be using, just search the rest of the internet for “surge protector/UPS” and you’ll find something that isn’t from amazon - APC is a solid brand for this.

Basically you want a fat surge protector that has a little bit of a battery backup and you want to plug your computer (desktop OR laptop) into that instead of into the wall. The benefit of this is twofold:

1) if there’s a power surge the UPS will prevent your computer’s power supply from getting fried and possibly frying parts of your motherboard

2) if there’s a power outage and you’re *at* your computer you’ll have enough time to save what you’re working on before your computer loses power (like, you’ll maybe only have a minute or two on a small UPS but that’s still time to hit CTRL+S and keep from losing work)

At a bare, bare minimum your computer should be plugged into a surge protector but NOT directly into the wall.

BACK YOUR SHIT UP

[we interrupt this yelling for me to tell you that Western Digital has apparently released their new My Passport line and I’m obligated to inform you that you can get a 2.5″ USB 3.0 backup drive with FIVE FUCKING TERABYTES OF STORAGE for $130. Or you can get 4TB for $93. Or you can get 1TB for $53. basically what I’m saying is that it is not only cheap computer season it is also cheap hard drive season.]

[also if you’re getting a backup drive get western digital not seagate seagate fucking sucks and has a much higher failure rate]

Uh, okay, anyway - Do an image backup of your computer every once in a while so that if you get infected or your hard drive dies or whatever you can just restore from backup and move on like nothing happened.

HERE’S HOW TO DO AN IMAGE BACKUP.

SAVE YOURSELF THE WEAR AND TEAR

You know what is cheap? USB Keyboards and USB mice. You know what is not cheap? Fixing the touchpad on a laptop or replacing a laptop keyboard.

Get yourself a USB hub, a USB Keyboard and a USB Mouse (wired or wireless, doesn’t matter) and if you’re using your laptop at home plug *that* into your computer.

Also if your keyboard on your laptop breaks it’s fine just to use a USB keyboard instead I promise; if the screen breaks it’s also usually cheaper and easier to get a used or inexpensive monitor than it is to replace the screen. Your laptop is basically just a very small version of whatever bullshit is going on inside a desktop, if the peripherals break but the core components are fine you can just use it like a desktop.

Unless it’s a piece of shit that doesn’t have any USB ports or video out in which case you got ripped off, friend, demand functionality in your devices I’m sorry.

Well the only dowry they have is £50 apiece from their mother’s small inheritance, per year; so that’s a total of £250 generated by Mrs. Bennet’s inherited investments per annum.

The Dashwoods (four women) are living on £500 a year when they are forced to live in Barton Cottage (with good-will making the rent presumably ridiculously low thanks to Sir John Middleton’s good nature, to say nothing of all the dinners and outings he invites the ladies to, which will help them economize on housekeeping costs for heavier meals.)

So there would be six Bennet women left to live on half as much as the Dashwoods are barely scraping by on. £250 is roughly considered enough to keep ONE gentleman at a barely-genteel level of leisure (presuming he does not keep a horse or estate or have any major expenses beyond securing his own lodgings/clothes/meals at a level becoming of a gentleman.)

None of the Bennet girls have been educated well enough for them to be governesses to support themselves, so…yes, their situation would heavily rely on mega-charity from others to just help them survive, much less maintain them in the lifestyle they’ve been accustomed to. The Dashwood women have NO social life beyond the outings provided by Sir John and the offer of Mrs. Jennings to host the older girls in London–otherwise they’d be stuck in their cottage, meeting absolutely no eligible men, creating a cycle of being poor and unmarried and too poor to meet anyone with money they could marry.

If the Bennet girls don’t at least have ONE of them marry well enough to help the rest before their father dies, they are really, truly, deeply fucked.

They may joke about beautiful Jane being the saviour of the family, but…it’s true. Mr. Bennet failed his daughters several times over in A) presuming he’d have a son, B) not saving money independently from his income to support his family after his death when it became clear he wasn’t going to have a son, C) not educating them well enough to enable them to support themselves in even in the disagreeable way of being a governess, D) not making any effort to escort his daughters to London or even local assemblies to help their matrimonial chances because he just doesn’t feel like it, E) throwing up his hands and shrugging when faced with the crises of Mr. Collins and Wickham.

Much as we are relieved on a romantic level that Mr. Bennet’s support of Elizabeth saves her from parental pressure to accept Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet is NOT A DICK for pushing for the match, because on a material level it very much means they get to KEEP THEIR HOUSE and gain a connection to the powerful patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh, which could be VERY advantageous for the other unmarried girls.

And the scandal of Wickham very nearly scuppers the chances of ANY of the other girls, and Wickham is a further DRAIN on the family finances, not a man who is going to substantially be able to support them. It is SUCH a disaster, and of course there’s not much Mr. Bennet can do until they are found, but he’s away in London and doing…what, exactly? Mr. Gardiner takes over and manages everything and Mr. Bennet seems happy to just let him.

The Dashwoods at £500/year are at about £42,000 for 4 women to live on today.

The problem is that while Mrs. Bennet is certainly the only one in the Bennet household taking this issue seriously, she’s also gone too far in the opposite direction. The point of the Bennet marriage is that it’s bad for both of them. Mr. Bennet married a beautiful, foolish woman and then didn’t live according to the economy he would have had to in order to leave her a tidy sum once he died. Mrs. Bennet held herself safe under the happy expectation that she would produce a son, who would inherit the estate and provide for her in her own age.

Once it became clear that wouldn’t happen (and remember Lydia is only fifteen when the book opens, so Mrs. Bennet might only have given up the idea that she would have a son possibly a decade before, when Jane was about twelve) Mrs. Bennet had to focus on her daughters’ marriages in order to ensure the family’s well-being. The problem is that she overcompensated beyond what the society she lives in found good form. 

Mrs. Bennet is a foolish, vain, nervous woman who is often called out in the narrative as an older woman with Lydia’s naturally foolish and selfish character. Her husband long ago realized he’d someone for looks who he was incompatible with personality-wise. The readers (especially modern readers) see his neglect of family affairs readily, and his gentle (and at times less than gentle) mockery of his family (particularly his wife and his three youngest daughters). But importantly, Mrs. Bennet also is meant to come across as a lesson to the reader. A silly woman who married above her station (it’s mentioned several times she secured the better marriage compared to her own sister) Mrs. Bennet doesn’t have the social graces she should have been expected to, as her husband’s wife.

This is an important plot point. Raising Mrs. Bennet up as the only Bennet aware of their impending doom as Mr. Bennet ages is important and adds depth to her matrimonial scheming on her daughters’ behalves. But vitally the way she goes about her work causes Mr. Darcy to hold the greatest of disdain for her and her family. It’s that disdain that helps induce him to persuade Mr. Bingley to leave Netherfield Park. This isn’t truly questioned by Elizabeth, who understands that her mother’s over-eager grasping immediately raised Mr. Darcy’s concerns. Remember, at this time there was an abundance of women who were deliberately setting out to marry men of good fortune, and desperate to make themselves amiable enough to secure that marriage, regardless of their true feelings. Mr. Darcy (and honestly Mr. Bingley too should have known better) would have spent his entire later youth and then adulthood on the alert for women whose intentions were only for his wealth, and not for his happiness. That’s important, especially after we see the great care Mr. Darcy takes with Pemberly and his dependents. 

Mrs. Bennet’s desperation is understandable. Her character (grasping, foolish, too needy and nervous to understand the social graces she must display to appear acceptable to men of the station she wants her daughters to marry) isn’t virtuous. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are intended by the narrative to stand as examples for what happens when people who are not of similar or compatible characters marry. Mr. Bennet grew so disillusioned with his wife that his reaction to his family’s financial insecurity is to make jokes and wave his wife’s concerns away as foolishness. He’s not really concerned with the future of his female family members. Mrs. Bennet on the other hand, doted on for her beauty then ignored and trivialized after that beauty lost it’s attraction, is left to indulge her worst impulses as she tries to snap up eligible young men for her daughters. Importantly, Mr. Wickham easily fools her as to his true character, even after he runs off with her daughter. 

We have ADHD. Sometimes we’ll get it on you. We don’t do it on purpose, it’s just not something we can control all that easily.

I recommend you find ways to enjoy the goo with us. It’ll make everything far more pleasant.

This blogger remembers when we didn’t have AO3.

This blogger remembers when we had to put disclaimers at the head of our fics and pray that someone didn’t take it into their heads to sue us for what we created.

This blogger remembers brilliant artists and writers getting decades of work obliterated on LJ because someone who wanted to tell people what they were allowed to create went running to someone who wanted a profit, and told them the artists and writers had been naughty.

This blogger remembers just how hard the creators of AO3 worked to build the thing we all seem to take for granted now.

This blogger watched friends dive into the creation process so heartily and determinedly that they all but disappeared from the writing/gaming/artistic side of their fandom for YEARS while they worked to make the archive happen.

This blogger remembers the sense of giddy wonder that there would possibly be LAWYERS involved, willing to defend our right to create these works, and not leave us hanging at the mercy of corporate legal teams.

This blogger is aware that she reads between twenty to fifty books’ worth of material every year on AO3, and is never REQUIRED to pay a penny for the privilege of getting access.

This blogger is aware that she will not ever see advertisements on AO3, and that her personal data and reading preferences won’t be sold to advertisers in order to raise the money that AO3 needs to pay for the services they provide.

This blogger is aware that AO3 is, and has always been, a labor of love; by fans, for fans, and not for profiting off fans – and this is what makes it unique in the whole of the media universe.

What is dat *aggressively scuttles* 

My current hobbies are not writing and throwing out prompts to everyone on Discord, but mostly @festiveferret​.

Prompt 1:  Tony’s a criminal profiler from the FBI dispatched to NYC to help find a serial killer who is targeting gay men in NYC’s underground club scene.  Steve is the cop who best fits the victim profile and gets assigned to go undercover and hopefully attract the killer’s attention.  Of course, they clash right away. I can just imagine Tony saying something really sarcastic like, “I’m really having to stretch my mind to imagine why someone would want to murder you.”

Prompt 2:  Speaking of police AUs, what about officer Steve who regularly patrols Brooklyn and knows everyone, who gets to know very exclusive escort Tony who sometimes helps out the street kids because he remembers what it was like to get thrown out with nothing.  He teases the upstanding officer Steve a lot, but when he gets himself embroiled with a mobster clients bad doings, Steve is the only officer he will trust to protect him, so they enter witness protection together and have to pose as a couple while Steve tries to keep him safe and a mobster is out to get him.  Feelings happen

Prompt 3: All this talk of mile high club makes me think of that prompt where Steve is the steward, Tony owns the airline and sometimes pilots for it, and they had a relationship that ended very badly with a huge fight.   Tony thought he had a one night stand with Ty, his co-pilot at the time, when he was super drunk on a layover, Steve blew up at him, broke up with him, and then a rumor gets back to Tony that Steve was really with someone else the whole time and using Tony to get a promotion/good flights/whatever.  Tony kind of expects to be used like that so he believes it.  Of course, Ty is behind the rumor, but the next time they see each other, Tony’s super rude and Steve, who was thinking maybe he should forgive Tony for one indiscretion, is hurt and they drift apart. Of course, Tony never actually did sleep with Ty, it was all a plot by Evil Plot Device Ty. Tony ends up on one of Steve’s flights despite successfully avoiding him for years and as Steve walks by to clean up before take off he’s like, “Trash” and Tony’s all “Ha-ha, funny, Rogers,” and then it turns out that there’s still a spark there and they end up having sex in the bathroom.  Based on this:

They have sex in the bathroom then something Dramatic™ happens with the plane and Tony has to fix it while Steve keeps everyone calm and then in a life or death moment they realize they still have Super Intense Feelings.  The tension, the annoyance, the simmering feelings, all culminating in dirty airplane bathroom sex with Tony wondering about his life choices and how he ends up with his bespoke pants around his ankles staring at himself in a tiny bathroom mirror where someone left a used paper towel on the counter with a foot precariously balanced on top of an airplane toilet seat while Steve fucks him from behind and they try to keep quiet and be quick about it. Imagine Steve coming by after Tony is back in his seat and he’s kind of uncomfortable b/c you know, bathroom sex wasn’t super planned out, and Steve comes by and is like, “Warm towel to refresh yourself, SIR?” and Tony’s all “You ASS” but there’s a sort of mutual smirking happening b/c they don’t like each other but they also know each other way too well

Prompt 4: Okay, but so Steve discovers the joy of his prostate during some SHIELD required medical exam and this leads to experimentation which leads to maybe I like this to maybe I LOVE this to who would I want to do this with to, well, I like Tony and he is definitely good in bed and up for most anything and I trust him with my life to friends with benefits sexcapades to feelings

Prompt 5: When Steve was young, his entire homeland was wiped out by Stark’s invading army. Now a mighty warlord with an army of his own at his back, he takes the one thing he assumes will anger Stark the most: his only son and heir.

Prompt 6: Steve, Tony, Bucky et al went to high school together. Steve and Tony were that super annoying couple who adored each other, but Something Happens and they break up right after senior year. Steve is devastated, but eventually, he moves on to the Army with Bucky.  Tony takes over his father’s struggling company and turns it into one of the hottest companies on the new clean energy market.  Steve and Bucky end up accompanying Thor and Jane to a wedding planning event in NYC where you get to see all kinds of crap you can buy for your wedding. Flowers, decorations, music, DJs, and…food.  Food is good!  All kinds of samples, so Steve and Bucky are all in.  However, they end up in a photo taken of the event described as a happy couple planning their impending nuptials.  Tony sends Steve a congratulations card that says he always understood and didn’t hold it against Steve and is glad he and Bucky are so happy together.  Steve’s like…what?

Prompt 7: Soulmate AU where you draw your soulmate over time and it gets more and more realistic as you get closer to meeting them. Steve keeps drawing a robot and is very confused

Prompt 8: After Steve Rogers is left an orphan with no money to his name, he ends up heading for very distant relatives out in California who happen to have a ton of money thanks to the gold rush and a fledgling company that is working with the railroads and Army at remaking the American west, hoping for a leg up in the world and maybe a job.  He shows up with only the shirt on his back, with his best friends Bucky and Sam tagging along hoping for better prospects in booming California than what they have in New York.  Except when he gets there, he meets the current head of the company, Tony Stark, and they immediately clash, but Steve all but insists on some kind of chance, figuring it’s his last, best shot at a job.  Stark agrees to give him work and a place to stay out of some sense of duty to family, however distant, and because the older man who is apparently Stark’s butler seems to favor the idea.  Somehow, however, things go awry when Steve reads an engagement announcement for Stark in the morning paper.  An engagement between Stark and him.  Obviously, this was some kind of joke or mistake, but when he confronts Stark, Stark’s butler seemingly has a terrible heart attack.  It turns out, the butler was the one who placed the announcement, hoping to have Tony finally settled with someone fitting for him before he died.  As the butler clings to life, Steve agrees to Tony’s demand that they play the engaged couple so as to not upset his beloved butler.  Things do not go to plan.  (spoiler, the butler is not actually clinging to life, and there is a host of other folks working hard to make sure they get their happily ever after).  Stark is brash and loud and sometimes cruel, or so it seems, but as Steve gets to know him better, he finds out why Stark is often so standoffish and Stark himself slowly realizes that maybe his butler might know him better than he knows himself.

“The guy got on the roof of his van with a crazy look in his eyes I’ve never seen before, as if in his universe there was only him and the Skywhale. He hurled the broomhandle like a harpoon, got it right through the eye.

“We all clapped and cheered, not like we hate the Skywhale or anything but it was just unbelievably cool.”

It then took several hours for security staff and onlookers to disentangle Ahab from the corpse of the Skywhale which had slowly but majestically fallen directly on top of him, like a heavenly blanket with massive breasts.

The sculpture, a hot air balloon depicting a whale as it may have evolved if it lived in the air rather than the sea, has had a mixed reception since it was first launched in 2013. Critics of the Skywhale cited its outlandish appearance, large breast-like appendages and ‘dumb, smug whale face’.

…

Artist Patricia Piccinini, who designed the sculpture, has asked that charges not be pressed against Mr Ahab, claiming that she was “invigorated” to see the public engaging with the artwork on such a meaningful level and that she couldn’t ask for a “more fitting way for a big balloon that looks like a whale to complete its lifecycle in the public eye.”