Okay, I frickin’ adore the Earth Is Space Australia business, so here’s my two cents. Someone did a great post about laughter as a fear response and how freaky that would be to aliens.
There’s another thing we do when we’re about to go into battle and we’re scared out of our minds.
So Alien Steve is minding his own business as the new guy on the Starship Incandescent. It’s a mixed ship, about half human, a quarter Silesian, and the rest a grab bag of species, but he hasn’t had any major problems so far. Then the pirates show up and shoot out their FTL drives so they can’t escape, and they’re outnumbered ten to one, and he calculates their odds of survival at very low. The comm link is still active, so they can hear the pirates laughing as they get ready to tear the Incandescent open and vent them all into vacuum. At least the end will be quick.
And Human Steve starts chanting. It makes no sense. Human incantations are for birth anniversaries, or aquatic grooming rituals, or for the ancient rite of passage known as “ka-ra-oke”. This is not a time of celebration. It is a time of preparing for imminent and ugly death by gravity cannon. But every human on the bridge starts chanting, too.
The pirates aren’t laughing anymore. Human Steve wraps his fingers around the main gunnery controls, and the crew descends as one into battle.
Teradecads later, his students will beg him for the story of how the Incandescent destroyed the Tyn’x Syndicate. To this day he credits their victory to the invocation of the great Human battle god Queen.
I’m officially the kind of person* that looks at this and takes it as confirmation that Megamind’s genitalia is internal/retractable, almost certainly NOT in his crotch (look at the detail the suit shows where his legs join, but not between them), and that the belt is almost CERTAINLY gentalia protection instead of, you know, holding up pants.
which means that when he was choosing his super scary Dark Lord name, he just mashed up the surnames of the most positive figures in his life. poor sod can’t even evil right
literally a ‘what is your star wars name’ meme
2nd two letters of your mother’s last name Last two letters of your father’s last name
1st three letters of your name but with an R
Urbs Ray
which sounds like a nickname for a space drug dealer tbh
While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror using my cellphone. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.
If you’re like me, you use the AO3 Work Search form all the time to help zero in on the fics you want to read. But this form has some weird quirks. Take the “warnings” section for example:
What do I do if I want to search for fics that don’t include Major Character Death? If I just check the MCD tag like so:
Then my search brings up all fics that DO contain MCD!
I can instead choose “No Archive Warnings Apply” of course, but that will also rule out “Violence”, “Non-Con”, and “Underage” and maybe I’m OK with those. All I want to do is to avoid MCD, that’s all.
I can try adding -“major character death” to the search terms, but doing so will also rule out any fics tagged with benign variations like “temporary major character death”.
What I want to do is specifically avoid fics which use the MCD archive warning. So how do I do that?
You need to make use of the specialized search parameter terms that AO3 actually sends to its servers when you use the work search form. For the archive warnings, these are as follows:
Chose not to use = warning_ids:14
None Apply = warning_ids:16
Violence = warning_ids:17
MCD = warning_ids:18
Rape = warning_ids:19
Underage = warning_ids:20
So, if I want to rule out MCD and only MCD, I search for “-warning_ids:18″ (the hyphen before the search term means “not”) by entering that into the “Any Field” search bar:
And voila! All fics except those with MCD warnings!
If you want to avoid violence or non-con or underage instead, simply change the warning_ids number to the one you want to rule out. You can also rule out more than one at a time, like so:
Combine this with your other favorite search terms and happily find the fics you want and avoid those you don’t 🙂
You can use variations on this trick to more accurately search for specific categories and ratings too. If people are interested, I’ll make a separate post about those.
And for everyone that doesn’t know!
You can also block things like certain characters,relationships, fandoms, or any commonly used tags from the archive page its self using -filter_ids:(number)
Note: This will not work for the custom tags.
So lets say I wanna read some Rotg fics but I don’t feel like searching through all the Frozen crossovers. (I have no problem with the frozen crossovers I’m just not always in the mood for crossovers)
I would go to the Frozen tag and hover over the RSS Feed button.
At the bottom left of the screen a URL will appear with a number
Now I can enter -filter_ids:966650 into the search bar on the side and Ao3 will filter out all fics that have frozen as one of the tags.
And you can do this to as many tags as you want by adding a space in between each filter!
I suggest you have a place to write down the numbers of the tags you don’t want so you don’t have to go to an unwanted tags page more than once.
Happy Reading!
Reblog to save a life
@ao3commentoftheday I can’t remember if you’ve reblogged or made a post on how to avoid specific tags on fics?? It’s super useful to have!
setepenre-set 