Into the garbage chute, fly boy

The prompt submission period will last around two weeks. Then we'll have the voting period. I'm hoping to have the prompts out by the beginning of September so y'all have plenty of time to plan and create content for the second week of November. :)

I have usually thought of Darth Sidious as kinda the one “happy” sith, the only one who isn’t just digging himself deeper and deeper into misery. That he truly enjoys his life, because he is just that evil. 

But yesterday it struck me that I while I think Palpatine had his own wicked version of fun during the clone wars, pulling off this entire centuries-in-the-making-plot to overthrow the Republic, he is bored as the emperor.

There are some good Lucas quotes on how the dark side of the force is very focused on transient pleasure, contrasted by the joy of the light side:

“The dark side is pleasure, biological and temporary and easy to achieve. The light side is joy, everlasting and difficult to achieve.”

“Pleasure is short lived. It lasts an hour, it lasts a minute, it lasts a month. It peaks and then it goes down–it peaks very high, but the next time you want to get that same peak you have to do it twice as much. It’s like drugs, you have to keep doing it because it insulates itself. No matter what it is, whether you’re shopping or you’re engaged in any other kind of pleasure. It all has the same quality about it.  (…) “People who get the pleasure they keep saying, ‘Well, if I can just get richer and get more cars–!’ You’ll never relive the moment you got your first car, that’s it, that’s the highest peak. Yes, you could get three Ferraris and a new gulf stream jet and maybe you’ll get close. But you have to keep going and eventually you’ll run out.  You just can’t do it, it doesn’t work.”

Palpatine hit peak pleasure in establishing his empire and murdering the Jedi. There is just no way to top that. He is bored out of his mind during his time as empreror. Oh, he gets a few more glimpses of amusement out of messing with Vader but that must have grown old quickly, as would inflicting systematic and personal pain on the galaxy (not that he would stop doing either, but that it just wouldn’t give the same satisfaction anymore). He can’t reach those same heights again. I also think Palpatine enjoyed the entire game of pre-empire, but now that he has won there is no need or space for that.

Luke showing up is probably the best thing to have happened for him in up to a decade. It’s a new way of causing Vader pain and he has one last Jedi to pull down into the dark (attempting to re-live his old victory). 

Cross won't admit it but he's looking forward to it

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.