themurderrose

[themurderrose]

When you’re so viciously angry about circumstances so far outside of your control they may as well be space

[themurderrose]

My take is that if you’re going to break up a happy healthy committed straight ship to make room for a gay one (or vice versa, but lbr the former happens more often in fandom) then you HAVE to keep the characters’ insanity for each other intact. Like ok yes sure we can handwave “it was a different time and we were younger and now that things are settled it’s for the best that we split” sure whatever BUT! I will not accept these guys becoming ambivalent to each other. You MUST maintain the fact that they would absolutely kill someone if the other asks. if you take away the romantic attraction then the years of history and emotion remain and now instead of kissing each other the blorbos just have to be really intense about their ex’s health and safety instead.

[themurderrose]

this is not a comprehensive tutorial, but it is an intro to some things that have made my life so much better. you may have already heard of these! but every time I talk about them in a group-chat or whatever, someone learns of one of these for the first time, and I want to share the good news. so here are

the Four Simple Tools Which Have Most Improved My AO3 Experience (on the computer, at least):

FIRST, for writers: the AO3 posting script google doc.

if you take nothing else from this post, let it be this. let the blessed light of the ao3 posting doc shine upon you.

okay so you know how if you copy your doc into the rich text editor on AO3, it will fuck up your formatting? just a little. like, if a word is italicized at the end of a sentence, but the full stop isn't italicized, there'll be a space between them and it looks weird? or it'll insert extra line breaks between paragraphs?

that's because the rich text editor takes what's copied into it and converts it to HTML, and I guess weird stuff can happen in that process, e.g. the rich text editor interpreting every line break as a new paragraph, including blank ones, thus the weird extra line breaks.

thankfully, there's a way to convert your doc directly to HTML that doesn't run into all those problems! it's the AO3 posting script. you make a copy of that google doc for yourself, so you have editing privileges. then you copy your fic into it, hit "post to AO3" -> "prepare for pasting into HTML editor" and boom, it will do the damn thing for you. it has saved me so much time and energy and annoyance. lots of people know about this, but every time I bring it up I find someone I know has not yet heard the good news, so: now you know!

okay, for the rest of these you need a userscript manager for your browser, like greasemonkey or tampermonkey. a userscript manager is a browser extension that lets you run a userscript (a little program, usually written in JavaScript) to modify particular webpages. I use firefox, so I use the greasemonkey browser extension linked above, but there are others out there! they should have their own installation instructions.

SECOND, for readers: the floating comment box.

wish you could write up comments while you read instead of waiting until you get to the end of the fic/chapter? this script creates a way a, well, floating comment box that you can access while you read! you access it by clicking this little "O" button in the upper left-hand corner of the brower.

when you do that, a floating box pops up, into which you can type your thoughts in as you read! you can also highlight text and click "insert selection," and that text will show up in the box, italicized, for you to tell the author what your favorite lines were!

hitting "add to comment box" will make the contents of the comment box at the bottom of the page match the contents of the floating box.

THIRD, for readers: ao3 savior and ao3 savior config.

is there shit you just never want to see again? say, for instance, you'd love to never see a harry potter fanfiction again. ao3 savior can help!

the way this one works is that you install the 'ao3 savior' script and the 'ao3 savior config' script separately. then when you want to add something to your blocklist, you go to your userscript manager extension (e.g. greasemonkey), go to the ao3 savior config script, and hit edit.

there are some default/example tags included to show the various ways to blacklist or whitelist works, but, for instance, here I've added "Harry Potter*" to the list of tags to exclude. (the * is a wildcard, so it will include "Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling" AND "Harry Potter - Fandom" AND any other tags that start with "Harry Potter".)

now, if I'm looking through fics and there's a Harry Potter crossover in the list, it will be hidden, and I'll be able to see why! and if I look at the tag itself...

ah! what bliss.

and FOURTH, for readers: ao3 tweak formatting.

finally: say there's a fic posted by someone who has not yet seen the blessed light of the ao3 posting script doc, and you want to read it, but the extra paragraph breaks really annoy you. or they learned to type in 1931 and so they double-space between sentences. or... various other common typing quirks! this script creates a handly little dropdown that will remove those quirks, just after the notes, after the beginning notes and before the chapter title.

click on "remove line breaks" or whatever, and poof! the extra line breaks are gone.

it's like magic.

I know installing scripts might seem a little daunting if you've never done it before! but it's actually really easy and handy. I know there are other, more in-depth tutorials for installing/using these scripts out there, too, if this is confusing. and probably there are other great tools out there that I don't even know about! I'm just writing this up quickly while I was thinking about it, so I can go to dinner.

I hope at least some of this is useful to you. happy writing, reading, and commenting!

[themurderrose]

To me the most heartwarming aspect of Rivers of London is how Molly adapts her cooking once Peter enters the scene.

Molly is essentially a fugitive who comes from a completely alien culture who has no frame of reference for anything in our culture. And obviously back in the day it was the easiest to hide her away with all the staff, who were supposed to be practically invisible anyway. So she's learnt to cook the English way and while we don't really know anything about the cooking of the fae I doubt it looks like English cooking of the public school variety. And then Peter enters the scene and he takes the whole Folly into the modern world, which includes Molly's cooking. So she's definitely not the parody of the terrifying housekeeper she's first made out - she's eager to learn.

And then Peter's mum's recipes enter the picture and so she learns a quite different style of cooking and takes it all in her stride and her food is such a success.

She's not a relic and while her learning to cook may have been pure chance it's something that she's made her own thing.

[themurderrose]

Finally figured out how to permanently disable google assistant on phone

[themurderrose]

seungcheol x seungcheol, supernatural au. THE PLACES THIS COULD GO

Warm Ups!!! -> Create an AU!

Let the Warm Ups BEGIN hungergamenoises

Just for fun, create your AU! Share with what you have!!!

[themurderrose]

blows my mind that cheetahs are apex predators. that is the single most anxious creature I have ever seen. at any given moment a cheetah is exactly one stubbed paw away from bursting into tears. that is a sad dripping wet animal, and it's at the top of the local food chain? babygirl what happened

[themurderrose]

As someone who's been a lover of traditional folk music from the British Isles for several decades, one thing I've learned is that "True Love" didn't always mean what you think it means. In the older songs, "true love" is not some mystical quality, some type of connection that is magically better than other Loves. No. A love that is "true" merely means that your Love is "true TO YOU." "True" as in faithful and loyal and trustworthy. A lover who will stand by you and with you no matter what comes. True the way a good sword is True. True the way a good knight is loyal. The contrast is "False Love," which is a lover who betrays you, who cannot be trusted.

"True Love" isn't something you find, it's a vow and a choice that you make, every day, to BE TRUE.

[themurderrose]

It's very #problematic of me I'm sure but if they must do either I really desperately prefer authors coming up with fancy always-italicized elven words for being gay or trans than having preindustrial warrior aristocrats and barely-socialized monsters have a vocabulary that casually includes 'demisexual' and 'enby'.

This is only slightly a principled stance (queernorm fantasy worlds are very obviously not trying to have any sort of realistic political economy of gender, which I only slightly judge them for), mostly just painful aesthetic mismatch.

[themurderrose]

Bail Organa is barely in "Revenge of the Sith" and he's such a badass in those few moments that it's wonderful. The Jedi have been declared traitors? Better go pick some Jedi Council members up personally and smuggle them onto Coruscant to destroy the trap beacon. Yoda tries to assassinate the new Emperor? Bail Organa is waiting solo outside in the getaway speeder, giving free taxi rides for people trying to kill dictators. Anakin Skywalker has turned to the Dark Side and killed Padmé? Better adopt and raise Darth Vader's daughter with unconditional love. And after this movie is over, Bail is apparently going to go right back to work in the Imperial Senate while helping to found the Rebellion, because this superspy does not fucking blink.

[themurderrose]

This machine kills AI

[themurderrose]

I bought a quarterly needlepoint magazine from 1991 today for $1 at an op shop, and there’s a four page spread about a woman who completely faithfully remakes samplers from the 1600s and the part that blows me away is that she was keeping women in history alive.

The original sampler maker was a teenaged girl called Loara she’s the only one known of seven siblings in that family. She was born approximately 1632 and had passed before her father had in 1656 which they know because it was mentioned in his will.

So in the 1630-40s a girl made a sampler, in 1991 a woman had put in years of research before recreating the sampler as Loara had 350 years earlier , and I’m reading about it in 2024.

Embroidery keeps women alive in history, and it’s part of why I love samplers so much.

Here’s a quote from samplers that I think about often:

[themurderrose]

I mean, fuck, I like bed. I like sleep. I like cozy blankies I like napping, I like to eep. I like Z catching and wink catching and counting sheep. I like doing beddie bye shit. Snooze it? Honk mimi

[themurderrose]

ARE YOU READY FOR ROUND TWO?!?!?

[themurderrose]

non-romantic prompts for writing about your faves

Please feel free to add a prompt if you reblog!

A brings home three new jigsaws and one of those roll up jigsaw mats because "they were three for the price of two and we've been wanting a mat forever". A has put together 4 jigsaws in their life. Somehow everytime A&B are in the same room for longer than 30 minutes, the jigsaw appears.

A&B meet for an early lunch. They finish catching up by the end of lunch, but by dinner they haven't left their seats and they're onto reminicing and plotting. They get kicked out of the resturant just past midnight.

A&B are going on a citybreak (weekend holiday) to a (relatively) nearby city (1-2.5hour flight max, but bonus points if this is a 1-2.5hr train journey). They spend the entire flight plotting food options and talking about different recepies they've cooked or would like to cook and what they're most excited about eating in this city.

Most of A's friends have moved abroad with work (or college if they're younger, or travel if they're gap yearing) and A is not having a birthday party this year for obvious reasons. They come home from work on said day to a pile of envelopes and packages in their entryway. Every card and gift makes them smile more and more as they realise that friends may be abroad but they are not forgetting them.

"You look amazing!!" "So pretty/handsome/hot omg" A wakes to a flurry of comments on their instagram/insertmediahere post. Basking in the glow. Bonus points if one of the commenters is someone they've half drifted away from & they strike up a convo in the dms off the back of it.

The weather is nice and A has the best back garden for sunbathing. So some friends come over, they make iced drinks and bask in the sunshine. Maybe there is chatting and gossip, but maybe they all read their books in companionable silence.

A gifts B a plant that they've divided from one of their own. B tries to keep the plant alive.

A and B only send letters to each other, even though they have all the apps. They've started including their favourite most recently read poems. [bonus points if they're silly poems or ones that are selected to make one another laugh, or to play to their interests]

C is venting to A about [insert plot point here] and A is fed up and venting to B about C. This can be as innocent or as intense as you wish!

A is a writer/poet/composer. B doesn't read/listen in the genre/fandom but everytime A asks them if they'd like to read/listen they feel like they've been handed A's heart and soul. It never fails to impress them more and one day they say this to A. Write what happens next.

[themurderrose]

I am a mosaic of everyone I have ever known and loved and touched and I find fragments of them in my playlists and how I make my tea. we may not know each other any more but we will stay connected like this. I hope a fragment of me is with you too.

[themurderrose]

How to deal with the "Chose Not To Warn" warning on AO3 in one easy lesson:

"Chose not to warn doesn't sufficiently prepare me for this story" then don't read it "but" don't read it "what if there are triggering topics" don't read it "I can't read a fic with X warning" then don't read this story "what if I really want" don't read it "but I" DO NOT READ IT "but why won't you cater to-" DO. NOT. READ. IT.

Hope that helps!