A Collection of Oddities:

you have been turned into this cat breed!

We are having a problem in the bloodymary side of the fandom where we are flooding the Iron Lung and Project Hail Mary (and adjacent) tags with the ship. And I say that with love for the creators for bloodymary and the ship itself, as I am one of them. I love that ship to death! But we have gotten to a point where it is becoming as or even bigger than the main tags, which is where the issue arises.

I'll speak mostly from the Iron Lung side as that's my beggining as someone who followed Mark as he was making the movie: it took a long time of scrolling to find a post not about bloodymary on the Iron Lung tag.

Putting more bluntly: we are chasing people and the Iron Lung fandom off their tag because they can’t find posts about their movie anymore. It's not fair; the movie/game came first and is why bloodymary exists. It makes people justifiably annoyed and angry. It prevents new people from interacting with and joining the fandom, because they can’t see the fandom.

I'm sure this is also a problem for the Project Hail Mary side of things, though perhaps on a smaller scale as the bigger of the two projects.

And as much as we want to see the ship, the fact stands some people don’t, which is perfectly ok, and they should be able to not see the ship while searching the movies tags.

With the way tags work on tumblr, even if it is blocked it'll still show up on the searches as a "this post contains a blocked tag", which still clogs the main tags. Which is absolutely something the app/site should improve on, so we don't see something releated to what we don't want to see at all (thinking blocked tags on ao3). But since it doesn’t work like that, I think we have grown enough to only tag our ship and it's varied names.

I do understand the value of tagging everything related to the post, better reach and letting more people know about and see what you're posting and what not. But we've reached a point where we cannot find content for solely the movies where bloodymary comes from.

Again, people are justifiably annoyed.

It's annoying as someone who does enjoy bloodymary but wants to see stuff from the movies on the movie tags.

I have gone back and untagged the main tags from bloodymary reblogs I made, even if those don't show on the searches, on the remote case anyone comes to my blog and doesn’t want to see bloodymary on those tags, so at least the tags are properly directed. I will not be tagging the main tags and their character tags on any posts I make about bloodymary.

Nothing can be done for the fact posts that mention something on the text still show up on the main tags, but not tagging them should go a long way to unclog them.

The following prompts will be split over the eight-day span. Feel free to mix and match as much as you like! Do one prompt each day, or write something using all three. If you want to reuse a prompt across multiple days, go ahead! Everything below is a suggestion—creative freedom is yours.

Some event rules: please keep things civil. No discourse. Tag things appropriately. The event tag for this event is BloodyMary System Failure 2026, and the AO3 tag/collection will (ideally) be the same.

This event is NOT specifically NSFW, but if your works are, please tag them accordingly.

Prompts Below Cut

You guys have been asking for a fic inspired by this drawing, and lucky for y'all, I just finished both! I also included my headcanon that the space/time/reality warping characteristics that exist in Simon's world bleed over into PHM's -> check out this post!

1,368 words. If you guys like it, I'll see about making a part 2? Enjoy!

To everyone who followed me solely for my completely sane and rational PHM pebble comic, I apologize for absolutely blasting you with the pinkest, most mentally unstable, cursive variant of the bloodymary crackship.

Behold...

The FBI cut the phone lines during the 1977 disability rights sit-in. Then they turned off the hot water.

They locked the doors from the outside. One hundred and fifty people were trapped on the fourth floor. Half of them used wheelchairs. The government assumed they would leave.

Kitty Cone was thirty-three. She had muscular dystrophy. Her muscles were failing, but her logistics were flawless. She knew how to organize people.

The federal government had promised to sign regulations protecting disabled Americans from discrimination. The policy was known as Section 504. They printed the promise on paper. Then they stalled. Without a signature, it was just typography.

The protesters entered the regional Health, Education, and Welfare building in San Francisco on a Tuesday morning. They took the elevators to the director's office. They brought sleeping bags and catheters. They informed the staff they were not leaving until the law was signed.

By sunset, the police surrounded the exits. Kitty sat near the windows. She organized the floor plan. She assigned committees for security and sanitation. She kept her medication in a small cooler.

According to federal memorandums released decades later, the strategy to end the occupation relied on medical attrition. The building was not equipped for long-term habitation. The FBI calculated that a population requiring ventilators, specialized diets, and daily medical aides would voluntarily evacuate if the environment became sufficiently hostile. They instituted a blockade.

The blockade went into effect immediately. No food deliveries allowed. No medical supplies permitted through the lobby. Guards stood at the main doors checking identification.

Kitty's muscles deteriorated faster under the physical strain. She couldn't walk. When the phone lines went dead, the fourth floor lost contact with the press. The government waited for the quiet.

Kitty dropped to the floor. She realized the barricades were designed for standing adults. The police had blocked the hallways at waist height. They hadn't blocked the linoleum.

The floors were covered in cigarette ash and spilled coffee. She dragged her body through it. She crawled under the barricades to reach the restricted elevator shafts and unguarded offices.

She carried notes in her pockets. She found a single working payphone the FBI missed. She called the local news desks. She called the mayor's office.

She crawled back. When her arms failed, someone pulled her by her ankles. The Black Panthers heard the news reports. They crossed the police lines with hot meals. The FBI could not stop them without a riot.

They shut off the elevators, so she crawled.

The occupation lasted twenty-five days. It remains the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in American history. On April 28, the Secretary of HEW signed the regulations without a single alteration.

The protesters left the building the next morning. They went back to their apartments. The Rehabilitation Act regulations laid the groundwork for every accessibility law that followed. The HEW building still stands on United Nations Plaza. The elevators run on a schedule. The doors are heavy glass.

Kitty Cone: the woman who crawled under the barricades.

Source: Kitty Cone's oral history, Bancroft Library.

Verified via: National Museum of American History.

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.

I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.

(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)

Apps/Websites

eBird (birds

Merlin (birds)

citizenscience.gov (big project database, US-based)

iNaturalist (nature)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data) Smithsonian archives (transcriptions, many subjects)

Cornell Bird Lab (birds)

FoldIt (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

In person

Bioblitz (nature) Species watch (species) Audobon Society (birds)

Also:

This stuff makes a huge difference.

Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.

So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead

I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.

From their website:

Data Everywhere

It is not saying you should distract yourself from what's going on right now.

It's saying that if you are feeling despair, you will feel and do better if you channel that into something to help.

I especially want to highlight MapSwipe again.

Help make maps accurate so people in war zones, disaster zones, and remote locations can get medical attention, rescue, and hope - by making sure the disaster response and aid workers have good maps!!

More info about MapSwipe and the work they do on their website, and also here.