shinyopals

Ask An Exec by @shinyopals takes on all five seasons of The Magnus Archives from the point of view of an innocent definitely-not-Ask-A-Manager career advice blogger, who starts getting some interesting queries from a certain archivist...

The entire story is told through blog posts, featuring Jon's terrible anonymized situations, Abigail's attempts at providing genuine advice while also going "WTF?", and many commenters who are also saying WTF while also encouraging Jon to unionize. Shinyopals is masterful at pulling out the true horror in TMA: poor corporate management. It's hilarious but also heart-twisting as the seasons progress, and somehow, somehow, you start caring about not only Jon's situation from a more personal point of view, but also various OC commenters and their attempts at trying to help Jon without having a clue about what's actually happening.

Because this fic is very heavily based on Ask A Manager, I leaned into a self-help tradpub design.

The interior design is not so tradpub-y, but leans into the sterile graphic design of many advice blogs. :D

As mentioned, the fic is formatted like a series of blog posts, which the author did an amazing job of emulating on AO3 (seriously, check it out! A true feat in wrangling code!). It was interesting seeing how much of the comment threads I could preserve while flipping pages, but hopefully it worked out! The fonts, colors, and general design were specifically chosen to mimic the current version of the Ask A Manager blog.

(TMA SPOILER) There's a certain shift change for the epilogue, so I took cues from the author's AO3 coding and changed the design accordingly!

ALSO

ALSO

ALSO

TWO BOOKS:

@rhipidurafan is the BEST and so is @tiesthatbindery who did the original typsetting for SECOND BOOK, tmi vs 21st century. 💜💜💜

Grace Rocky Save Stars!

if you are non-american then it can be dangerous to hold beliefs about your rights that are only applicable in the US.

i am australian and i have seen young australians have completely us-american perceptions on the rights they hold (or do not hold) in regards to protest, police officers, self-defense, medical care, higher education, debt, and legal proceedings. i am not talking about "boooo americans" i am talking about the genuine danger it might present to have us-centric assumptions in high-stakes situations

"He's still out there, somewhere. And I'll find him, Gramps. Even if I have to wait a hundred years, I'll find him."

The first time they have to use it (over something stupid like a tiny ammonia leak), Grace wakes up to like three different foghorns and a hundred camera flashes going off at once and is like HOLY GEEZ THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US

RIP Rocky’s project