"I'm not dignifying that with a reply" is honestly a great way to be on social media. Let the trolls starve.

we are so back

(ignore the teeth)

How To Put "I am a Ao3 Author" on Your Resume

"Published (number of works on ao3) written works spanning (lowest word count) to (highest word count) to a nonprofit international digital archive dedicated to preserving and maintaining society's reactions, impressions, and culture regarding various forms of fictional media."

You can also simplify it to "Creative Writer - Archive (dates) and then put "Wrote for a nonprofit digital archive as a volunteer."

Plus, if you have a lot of hits or kudos on your works, you can say, "I reached (number of hits) people and (number of kudos) of those people signified to the Archive that my work resonated with them."

Because, technically, we are all volunteering our time and donating our writing to AO3's cause of preserving the fandoms and the culture around them. And people do sometimes just call it "Archive". So nothing I just said was a lie.

If you're writing on Ao3, then you have experience writing -- which is the skill you're presenting here. In the long run, you're not doing anything wrong by phrasing your experience in impressive ways.

hey writers we have to talk.

if you've read any romance or fanfic in the past twenty years (i know you have), you know that there are a certain number of scents associated with hot dudes. you can probably recite the list of Things Men in Fic smell like in your sleep: leather, black pepper, pine, sandalwood, "something uniquely him", clean sweat, and if the character has ever fucking been within 50 yards of a firearm, something called "cordite".

here's the thing.

NO ONE SMELLS LIKE CORDITE.

cordite was a highly specific type of smokeless gunpowder developed in the 1890s by england specifically and used mostly in wwi.

if your good-smelling guy is not (a) english (b) using a very specific type of british rifle (c) dying in a trench in flanders, he does not smell like cordite. technically even if he does meet all those conditions he still doesn't smell like cordite because he smells like trenchfoot.

the point is, cordite is so far from universal that no one but the most hardcore gun nerds give a single shit about it. making your Sexy Hero smell like cordite is like naming a cassette-only bootleg live recording from the 1970s as your favorite grateful dead album. everyone at the party hates you immediately and knows you're doing it for clout. also, it's just factually... wrong. please stop. i know everyone else is doing it, but you can do the right thing here, i believe in you.

so what do people who are using guns smell like?

well if your story is set before the late 1880s, the smell of a fired gun is black powder, which, unfortunately, smells like seventeen flatulent cows have been shoved in a tire factory. trust me, you do not want your Hot Dude to smell like black powder. it's b a d.

if your story is set after the late 1880s, guns are using some variety of modern 'smokeless' powder - which speaking broadly doesn't really have a ton of scent when used. it does have some, but it's sort of non-descript: the best way i can describe it is the sweet, ozone, hot-plate smell of popping your car hood with a warm engine.

people who use guns a lot don't smell like fired guns all the time anyway, so while those scents might work in a fight scene, they're not realistic all the time. but there are some things that your Sexy Shootist will smell like basically 24/7 and that's metal and gun oil. metal you can go and sniff (i recommend non-stainless steel), but if you want a reference, most gun oils have a sharp, organic smell that's not dissimilar to canola oil but muskier and with a tang overtop. it's not unlikely leather is in the mix as well due to routine handling of leather equipment and gear. modern gear also tends to have a certain smell although it varies by production country and storage conditions - lots of opportunities there.

in conclusion: gunslingers and hired killers and military folks can be sexy and smell great on page, but i am begging you not to say "cordite" when you mean "gunpowder" ever again. we can do this. we are writers and therefore pedants. i believe in us!

this is a great post i'm so sorry i have to add one of my favourite low-fi indie songs to say that you might well be British or Irish and smell of cordite in the context of ww1 and hard labour:

:)

this is a fuckin great addition and coincidentally if anyone knows any romance novels about working class irish or scottish folks forced to manufacture cordite for the british empire.... please do tell

@notasapleasure that is a very cool song but would you happen to have the lyrics on hand? I can’t seem to find them

hey buddy, yeah, they're not even written out in the record sleeve afaik - here you go, transcribed by yours truly from the Les Cox version

I’m living over Scotchdyke By day I’m mixing up the cordite There’s lasses to the left of us and to the right

Drinking with the Irish navvies Fresh off the paddy line Belfast Fair City to Stranraer Through Dumfries and Muirside Towers

Well I hear there’s a war on In a country I don’t know I’m heading up Gretna Green I’m gonna get myself clean With a new job on the go

Seven for the day you know Through the Cotton Inn We’re in Carlisle, it’s six months later It’s five in the morning by the looks of it

Well I’m here, I’m on the road I’m waking up with snow in my eyes There’s three men lying nearby me Who are barely alive

The government-controlled bar Says he can’t shout a drink So wages have gone down the sink And round the riverbend this week

Ah, this isn’t funny When you got no drinks money No food money

Meanwhile Their majesties the King and Queen They’re on the scene

They’ll decide who lives and who thrives Who survives and how many Germans die

Well I couldn’t care less who wins the war…

actually your man doesn't smell of cordite at all!

Your woman does:

This is the precise context for the song! I hadn't looked up the details before but it's all here.

I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".

i find it immensely disappointing that we as a society fail to talk about what an absolute masterpiece the movie megamind is. like wow. it really surpassed every other movie of its time. i’m beyond pissed that pre-brain rot despicable me stole its thunder.

Megamind and his doom form

- What are you doing?

- I'm leading a free life, without any ties, my dear. Go away and leave me alone.

(an almost correct quote from Moominmamma👆)

I did find another sex shop story in my mind vault! Get ready for the most embarrassed I ever got at work.

When I first started my manager was this really cool guy and he set a matter-of-fact no nonsense tone to working there that I emulated. So as part of my training he brought me to a display case full of glass toys.

These are stunning solid glass pieces that just so happen to be shaped into gentle curves. Honestly several were abstract and beautiful enough to be displayed on a mantelpiece. They can be used with any kind of lube, they’re easy to sterilize and overall they’re excellent sex toys.

But I, like every other person, am the culmination of my lived experience. Glass breaks. I know this to be true, I’ve dropped glasses and plates and the fear of glass breaking was all I could see looking into that display.

My manager was well aware. He calmly informed me that I was looking at triple fired borosilicate and he pulled one out and banged it on the counter with all his might making me jump ten feet in the air. But there was the glass toy, triumphant and unscathed in his hand, after leaving a new dent on the counter. Forget sex, these things were viable murder weapons.

Over the years I worked there I did the exact same demo he did hundreds of times, smacking the solid glass onto the unyielding counter and showing off how sturdy the glass was. “Theres nothing your vagina can do to harm this,” I’d assure people.

So one day I had a group of three ladies looking at them, tittering nervously to each other. I assured them that these were extremely safe and they smiled skeptically.

“Really,” I said, pulling out an example, “our bodies are soft and wet, we have no way of damaging these.” I lifted it and brought it down onto the counter like I had a thousand times before. Like I’d seen countless times from my coworkers.

Except this time. The toy decided it must give up its grip on the mortal coil. It rebelled against its treatment of smacking the counter with a display of explosive protest. It shattered.

The women screamed and flinched back as I stood frozen in absolute perplexity as my mind tried to make sense of what had just happened. The toy had broken in huge safety glass sized chunks, leaving me a nub in my grip while it’s former glory lay in pieces all around me.

I looked back up at the ladies, speechless. They all broke into hysterical laughter. “Your face!” They gasped while clutching each other to stay on their feet.

“I- I’ve done this demo hundreds of times- it’s- it’s never broken!”

They crowed even harder as I sweeped up the mess, still in disbelief and horror at what I’d done. “Well. I at least know your bodies can’t provide that much force to a toy… I can’t believe this, it’s never broken before.” I babbled on in embarrassment to their obvious disbelief.

They looked back at me with the certainty of three women who will never in their life trust a glass toy not to shatter inside their bodies after watching the worlds most explosive demo.

I love this story because it is a hilarious and fantastic demonstration of a concept I must routinely explain to people when they hire me to do inspections: Objects don't heal.

This isn't a slight to anyone, it's just that I run into this constantly and it is so so important to remember, when it's involves things that are not the power of a vaginal spasm versus triple fired borosilicate sex toys.

Like whenever someone says "this was built to last" Yes - true, but, it does not heal. If you do not inspect and maintain said thing (e.g., an I-beam clamp), one day the exact same force you have applied to it for the past X years will cause it to fail.

Sometimes in spectacular (read: catastrophic) fashion. Other times in mildly annoying ways.

People - remember this story. Remember how funny it is because no one got hurt [besides OP's pride] and how novel due to the setting, and remember the lesson: Objects don't heal.

OP I truly appreciate your recollection. Even if the reason the toy broke was because of the *exact* *precise* angle of force applied that one time, it may still stick in someone's mind that they need to inspect their hardware / software (or call someone in to inspect it).

this is also an excellent example of fatigue failure. basically, when you subject a material to stress (i.e. bang it against the table, or whatever), depending on the material and on how hard you hit it, it may develop microscopic stress fractures, also known as fatigue damage. some materials like steel have an "endurance limit," which is a level of stress below which fatigue damage will not happen - if that were a stainless toy, for example, you could bang it on the table until the sun explodes and it would be no worse for wear, because the stress of being banged on a table is probably well below its endurance limit - it would dissipate all the energy of the impact as heat and sound, and none of it would actually damage the metal. but other materials, such as aluminum and carbon fiber, essentially do not have such a limit - even very small impacts can cause accumulated damage to these materials, and their failure becomes inevitable over time (you may remember the hull of the doomed submersible Titan was made of carbon fiber - this is why that was an extremely bad choice of material for a structure exposed to repeated cyclic stress).

so, it was my assumption that glass was in the latter category of materials - that it didn't have an endurance limit, and that these impacts were causing cumulative damage over time. To my surprise when I fact-checked myself though, borosilicate glass does have an endurance limit, and it's actually fairly high - from what I could find online, various sources show that borosilicate glass only accumulates stress damage when the stress exceeds 20-30% of its total (one-time) yield strength. However, they also show that the stress fatigue characteristics of glass is complex - it is well known that surface flaws like scratches severely affect yield strength due to the way they amplify stresses in the area of the imperfection, and one paper even found that the type of stress matters, with impact stress causing samples to perform a lot worse compared to static stress tests (which are more common in these types of studies).

so my conclusion here is that one of two things was happening: either OP was just plain hitting it hard enough to surpass the material's endurance limit and causing an accumulation of stress fractures over time (which I honestly doubt, because borosilicate is a very strong material, and even 20% of its yield strength would probably be a very hard impact), or the demo piece that OP was using got scratched up from being hit against the table so often and failed due to the stress concentration (+accumulated fatigue) around those scratches.

hope u enjoyed my materials science infodump. don't let your toys get scratched up, bacteria can grow in there and it also increases the likelihood that they will explosively shatter when you bang them against a table

Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore

Might I add, free database of mostly European folklore and myths

:0

Thank you!

you know you’re a writer when…

im sure someone already made a post about it but i came across a ublock origin add-on that blacklists around 950 AI websites and disables AI overview ☝️ so u can be free from seeing AI in your search

- Madame Mayor ! How can I help you?

Mega dance 1

I'm working on important things

Mega dance 2

so important