Happy little doorbells!

This is basically what my physical therapist had me do for my back problems last year and it helped with the pain so much! Also walk for at least thirty minutes a day, even if it's just in small chunks throughout the day.

Just so everybody knows, the mirror is actually more reliable than the camera. Even though people say “the camera never lies”, it distorts your photographs a little bit. It has to turn a 3d image (you in real life) to a 2d image (a photograph) and consequently skews the proportions a little bit.

Also, “photogenic” is a real thing. Certain faces photograph well and others don’t. It’s all down the angles, proportions and size of your features.

Have you ever seen someone stunning who looks great in professional photographs and not in candids? Yeah, that’s because there’s a huge difference between a professional and an amateur. Professionals know how to minimise the issues cameras have. Lighting, angles and even the distance you are away from the camera plays a part (the amount of distortion varies depending on how close you are).

TL;DR if you think you look great in the mirror but not in the photo, trust the mirror. You look great!

NOT ONLY THAT, but when you look in a mirror, you’re seeing your face in motion, how others would see it. In a photograph, you’re still, and it can make small flaws and the like seem a lot more prominent, despite them being quite minuscule in person.

Also! Also, when you see yourself in the mirror you are looking at you face reverse of how a camera pics it up. No face is perfectly symmetrical so you get so used to seeing a mirrored version of your face that when it’s flipped in a picture you subconsciously notice the tiny differences in your face and thus you think you don’t look right.

I have never felt so relieved and beautiful thank you guys

ALOK VAID-MENON Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness 1x03 (2022)

Alok’s book report of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Dr. Kyla Schuller

I wish that ao3 had an option to filter warnings (and tbh certain authors) out like I will never ever want to read it and just seeing it puts me off so much that often I end up closing my browser because that content upsets me so much lmao

There is a way to do this but I can’t recall how to do it. it’s something you type into the box for “other filters” or something, I don’t remember. who knows?? It’s not a great option, and I don’t know if you can sort out authors that way, but it’s better than nothing if someone can reblog this with how to do it!

Alrighty friends! It takes some specificity, but you can do this. Let me show you how!

So I started with going to the Sherlock (TV) section of Ao3. On the right we find this lovely section! ((I know I’m going over things you already probably know, but I figure this post may go to new Ao3 users, so bear with me.))

Underneath this, I chose sort by Kudos, because that’s a quick way to find most popular fics, for the sake of this demonstration. 

With those filters on, we end up with this being our first two results: 

As you can see, we have Nature and Nurture by earlgreytea68, and The Internet Is Not Just For Porn by cyerus. So what if I am utterly sick of seeing earlgreytea68 on my list? Let’s pretend I’ve read all their fics, or that I just don’t like her, or whatever. I want this author out. I go to this section on the right: 

In “Search within results” I type earlgreytea68 into the bar, with a minus sign in front. This gives me the following page, upon hitting the sort and filter button:

There goes earlgreytea68! But now I’ve decided that Crack is just not my thing, I’m sick of that, too, for heaven’s sake, I want something reasonable in my gay slash fanfiction about detectives that solve crimes about glowing dogs and irish megalomaniacs. Heaven forbid this get ridiculous.

Well, then I add this to my search:

Which gets rid of everything with that tag. My results are now:

Performance in a Leading Role is now my first result!

You can do this as many times as you want; the biggest problem I have is trying to filter out multi-worded tags. For example, “Secret Relationship” is hard to filter. Better to go with authors you dislike or with words like “DubCon”. 

I hope this helps! Also remember that googling site:archiveofourown.org and then adding search terms will mean google searches Ao3 for you, and sometimes that works far better. 

Good luck!

An excellent in-depth guide! Thank you!!

omg changed my whole ao3 rarepair game

An excellent guide to filtering on AO3!

You can filter out phrases by enclosing them in quotes. For example, if ABO and Hydra Trash Party are not your things, try:

-“alpha/beta/omega dynamics” -”hydra trash party”

I have more advice!

Say, you’re in your random fandom- I went with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since I’ve been reading Iron Man stuff recently. Tony Stark is awesome.

But anyway, you’re on the page, and you see that there are 174,774 works! That is way too many for a casual afternoon’s browsing.

And you see that the first one is Peter Parker/Tony Stark and that is not your jam. It doesn’t work for you, or it squicks you, whatever. Wouldn’t life be easier if you could browse without seeing that pairing (or whatever pairing you don’t like)? You can!

First, click on that pairing tag(You may want to open this in another tab, actually.):

and it’ll take you to the page for that pairing tag. Click this button:

and then look at the address bar! The actual page is unimportant. Copy the numbers located here:

and go back to the original search page! Down on the side, in the same place you can get rid of other tags, type -relationship_ids:”the number you just copied”

Then hit ‘sort and filter’ annnd… magic!

The fics with that pairing are gone! You can also do multiple pairings, get rid of any tags you don’t like, and sort it by date or length or kudos, or whatever.

Enjoy.

I’d just like to add that these sorts of search modifiers ALSO WORK IN GOOGLE AND MOST RESEARCH DATABASES. The more you know.

Just a quick reminder that AO3 uses Lucene as a search and index engine.

That means you can pretty much use all the Lucene Query Syntax in the “Seach within result” field.

I don’t think AO3 indexes the whole fic for searching but definitely it’s meta data. Combined with Lucenes awesome query syntax you can do pretty much every search you heart desires.

Addtional Lucene Query Syntax that has not been mentioned yet and you might find useful:

Wildcard Searches

You can use wildcard searches within single terms. For a single character wildcard search use the “?” symbol. For a multiple character wildcard search use the “*” symbol.

AND/OR

Lucene allows you to combin terms through logic operators. You’re looking for fics that are either “reunion” or “enemies to lovers”?

Just put in >“reunion” OR “enemies to lovers”< into the field

and you end up with all the stories that are either or but not both.

But wait, now you’re looking for fics that are both “reunion” and “enemies to lovers” at the same time? Now worries Lucene got you covered.

Just change it into >“"reunion” AND “enemies to lovers”“<

and you’ll get all the fics that mention both “reunion” and “enemies to lovers” somewhere in their meta data (note: it’s not just tags. It’s also title, summary …)

Boosting

You can also boost specific terms when doing a multi term search.

You can use the “^” Operator followed by a number to boost a specific term.

Say you’re interested in fics that are either “first kiss” or “bed sharing” but you’re much more interested in “bed sharing” fics and feel they are more relevant.

You can use the search >“first kiss” “bed sharing”^5<

to manipulate the order of your results in a matter that the score of every fic that contains beg sharing is multiplied by 5. Therefore all fics containing that term are given priority and shown at the top of the list.

You can also combine all of the above, target specifc fields (that’s what you did with the “relationsship_id:xxx”) and many more things.

For more info about the Lucene query syntax check out Apache’s Lucene Query doc.

^ sharing this because we all love fanfics and @itsmajel is a freaking nerd 👌

Some of these searches can also be achieved via the “exclude” function in the search bar - this offers you for each section (ratings, category, relationships, tags, etc.) the most commonly used metadata for these fics, to check or uncheck (and thus exclude or not) as you please!

Workout For Daily Life

Reblogging for the neck pain ones… whoa Nelly, do I ever get the most killer neck pains.

Don’t forget to keep your abs tensed for better posture and diminished back injury and pain. Tense the muscles below your navel, and the rest of the group will follow.

Ok, so, the beef vegetable soup that I love so much. Homemade bone broth, beef chunks, veggie chunks, topped with some creole seasoning? Amazing. Perfect. Beautiful. This is my mom’s recipe and she’s been making some version of it since I was a kid, but the bone broth has been added within the last 5 years or so. So, here’s what you need:

For the broth:

For the soup:

Steps for broth:

Now that you’ve been plagued with delicious scents for an entire calendar day, let’s make the soup:

This soup will last a while in the fridge, and does best flavor-wise if you heat it up on the stovetop again. It’s kinda like chili; the flavors get to know each other when they rest in the pot together for a while. Makes for a good several meals with tasty tasty soup

My mom just made this and sent me home with a bunch of it so I’m bringing back this recipe. Also, using fire roasted diced tomatoes? Very tasty. Also also, tbh use as much barley as you want, go crazy.