Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

ME: Ah! I've been a library assistant for 5 years. Surely I can explain this in a reasonable and nuanced, yet concise way!

2 HOURS LATER:

Like, here are some VERY COMMON examples of personal breaking points that can come up in archiving:

Trans person whose friend keeps writing Harry Potter fanfic

Parent whose coworker loves drawing shota/lolicon

Uncle going down an anti-vax documentary hole

Mom pushing diet magazines on her daughter

Racist old dudes on school reading lists

True crime Youtube clickbaits

AI-generated Elsagate brainrot shorts

Comic books by a white guy posing as Asian

$2 exploitation porn DVDs

School shooter simulator video game

Guides on making explosives

LiveLeak content

Odds are pretty good that at least one of those made you, reading this, viscerally cringe and want to argue about, WHICH IS WHAT I MEAN. Every person has a breaking point, and THAT'S NORMAL.

The point of the library training isn't to make you into a unique person who has never, ever been reviled by or wanted to destroy a piece of media. It's to learn how to live with that feeling, step back, and work with your team to maintain the archive, anyway.

And sometimes, maintaining means recognizing that not every place IS an archive! I'm only able to maintain an archive space BECAUSE I know I have spaces where the stuff that revolts me is banned! It's okay to curate multiple spaces; tolerance is more than blind acceptance.

The library archives information, the bar should not be allowed to become a Nazi bar. The AO3 tags archive every fic, the Discord group chat isn't made to be a museum. You don't have to take everything home with you at all times to prove yourself.

versus the way the coffee names could start a fight ("i am curious" for macchiato? because no one knows what a macchiato is, apparently? also, all that pretentious energy and you don't have a cortado?)

versus the way some food have names in other languages, some don't, and some are a mix. like the crunchwrap of all things is in spanish:

while this japanese-inspired tofu has one japanese loan word

meanwhile, the menu is full of other things borrowed from other cultures, and those are all entirely in english

(not to mention, "forbidden black rice?" you mean wild rice native to the americas? an important food to some native nations?)

look, the actual burrito doesn't get a spanish name. but on the tea menu:

alma is a noun

the matcha drinks don't even get a half-japanese name this time

Speaking from my own experience as an autistic person who can get fixated on things for an extremely long time...

Don't plan on quitting cold turkey. If you start missing it, engage with it privately, like watching movies or reading books you already own, or can get without profiting the creator or boosting some algorithm. Keep discussions to private groups and don't post new art, fics, headcanons, whatever, in public spaces.

Put lots of time into developing your own things and turning your favorite characters into OCs in the meantime. You can start with small changes to the characters at first, then follow your whims and your impulses wherever they go, and maybe experiment with bigger changes until you find what resonates with you. Once you get a bunch of OCs and figure out how they connect to each other and what they all get up to in your thing, it's pretty easy to keep yourself engaged thinking up scenarios for them.

Also, keep checking out new media. It can take awhile to find something that clicks as much as the other thing did, or to find something that scratches the exact right itch. (And sometimes, the media that can scratch the itch is in a completely different genre!)

You might start with media that includes the same actors, or media that has a similar aesthetic. You can also try to look into the author's influences. This help you can satisfy the desire to engage with the thing a bit while you explore new things.

You and a friend have an argument and they decide you’re toxic? You said something problematic when you were 12/13? You like something that makes someone else uncomfortable?