Good To Know - Tumblr Posts - Page 3

Yet another AO3 bot situation - please spread the word!

Hi, it's me again, the person who wrote that viral post about fanfiction plagiarism! Today I'm here to warn you about abuse perpetrated by bots who have stolen AO3 usernames.

There's currently an epidemic of bots going around leaving (apparently random) horrible, hateful comments on people's fics. This isn't the first time bots have invaded AO3, but the big problem with this wave is that they're using real AO3 usernames to do it.

I learned about this when another writer contacted me after receiving the following comment on their story:

Now, while that is my username, I DEFINITELY did not leave this comment (and anyone who would leave something like that on a fic should be slapped! What an awful thing to post). This fic is in a completely unrelated fandom that I have never participated in, nor has that author participated in any of my fandoms, so the probability of it being some intentional fandom drama thing to make me look bad is also low.

The writer whose fic the comment was left on enlisted the aid of some friends and tracked down other guest comments with unrelated usernames attached, which is pretty strong evidence that they are being left by bots at random.

The TL;DR: If you receive a cruel comment from a (Guest) with an actual AO3 username attached, it's most likely from a bot. Please do not lash out at or dogpile the AO3 user who owns that name, and who in all likelihood has no idea that their name has been hijacked for evil.

If finding this kind of comment on a fic, even left by a bot, is likely to upset you, I would recommend changing your comment settings so that only users who are logged in can leave comments. To do this, edit your story settings, and under "Privacy," select the radio button that says "Only registered users can comment," as shown below.

Please spread the word to other AO3 users! And if you see mean guest comments on other fics, maybe let the author know that it's probably from a bot and not a real person who thinks their writing is bad.

Rape Escape

Easy and very effective

Requires nothing but your body

Includes attack

Not to be a killjoy (though it is what I do best) but the unsafe and rough handling of a baby Pygmy hippo in a pretty substandard Thai zoo being meme-ed into something funny and cute really shows just how much groupthink plays into public perception of animal welfare.

Moo Deng shows avoidance, threat displays and stress around her keepers that are constantly man-handling her, blasting her with a hose and harassing her. The enclosure is mostly concrete, which is horrible for her soft feet. There looks to be some substrate but there doesn’t seem to be any areas for wallowing or deep water wading.

There’s also very easy access of this hippo to the public with no places to hide. I’d love if someone could shed more light on the enclosures but from what I’ve seen it’s not great.

Also the free contact and forcing into tubs that the keepers do is only going to create an avoidant and potentially aggressive and dangerous Pygmy hippo.

But the public happily overlook that because she’s cute. It’s a similar attitude with seals too.

Stop rewarding bad husbandry with clout. Baby animals deserve agency and respect and to grow up without getting harassed and feeling the need to defend themselves constantly.

are you or a loved one expecting to use a fountain pen for the first time this holiday season? you need this information.

fountain pens are making a comeback, with good reason. fountain pens require virtually no pressure to write, and many people used to ballpoint, gel, or rollerball pens will actually damage a fountain pen on their first use because of how much pressure they are accustomed to using. on the flip side, many people with joint pain will find that they can only write without pain when using a fountain pen.

fountain pens are customizable, reusable, ergonomic, comfortable, and utilize fantastical fountain pen inks containing shading, sheening, and shimmer.

using a fountain pen correctly for the first time just elicits that ever elusive and emphatic "oh." you will, with likelihood, understand why people use fountain pens just by using one yourself. it cannot be put into words.

but before you learn how to use a fountain pen, you need to learn how NOT to use a fountain pen.

here are my top 3 tips for how not to use a fountain pen.

first, what makes a fountain pen. a fountain pen is defined as a pen with an internal resivoir that feeds ink through a feed and to a nib. they do not require dipping.

the internals of the end of a fountain pen look like this. fountain pens are a lot of different parts. although this diagram shows a pen using a converter, most first time fountain pen users will use a cartridge, which is a pressurized pouch of ink.

the slit in the metal nib forms two tines, and the end of which is tipping. ink flows from the converter (or cartridge or other filling system) down the feed and through the slit in the nib, down to the tip.

since fountain pens are a bunch of very closely fitted different parts, they take specialized, thin, water-based ink.

which leads me to the first major thing to not do with a fountain pen.

#1: do not use anything other than 'fountain pen ink' in a fountain pen

so let me tell you a little story here. I got into dip pens before I got into fountain pens. years and years ago. I found out that a converter allows you to use bottled ink with a fountain pen, and I already had some decent ink I was using with my dip nibs. I bought a converter, a fountain pen, and then did one of the worst possible things you can do to a fountain pen: I loaded it with dip ink. if I remember right, it was some kind of india or sumi ink.

the pen no longer wrote, and I could not even replace the alleged easily replaceable parts. what happened?

ink is more than just liquid and color, it involves complicated chemical formulas. dip pens can be dipped in just about anything and then write to some degree, but fountain pens can only safely be used with ink designed specifically for fountain pens. dip ink is usually thicker and can clog the slits in the fountain pen's feed, preventing the ink from reaching the tip of the nib. but diluting dip ink is not good enough. the chemicals in dip inks can melt or rust the internals of a fountain pen. this damage is often irreparable without paying a specialist a lot of money to restore the pen, which can cost more than just buying a new fountain pen. in my case, the internals of my fountain pen melted slightly and got glued together.

unfortunately, many sellers on websites like amazon, etsy, ebay, aliexpress, and more will claim that their ink is fountain pen ink, when in reality it will destroy your fountain pen.

until you are used to which types of inks are safe for fountain pens, use a dedicated and reliable stationery website like jetpens, gouletpens, or cultpens to tell you which inks are designed for fountain pens. jetpens in particular will also tell you which cartridges and converters are compatible with the fountain pens they sell, which is essential, because many fountain pen cartridges and converters are proprietary and only fit certain pens.

when in doubt, just buy compatible cartridges.

#2 do not expect the fountain pen to flex

calligraphy videos are really popular right now. many of them involve fountain pens and dip pens using flexible lines to create gorgeous cursive. in reality, most modern fountain pens do not flex, and trying to make them flex can break them.

this is a dip nib. if you try to do this to a fountain pen nib, you will damage it. this is what NOT to do to a fountain pen nib.

there are two main materials used for making fountain pen nibs: steel and gold. steel is harder and stiffer, gold is softer and generally more bouncy or flexible. vintage gold fountain pens gained a reputation for writing like "wet noodles" and creating fantastic line variations. they are very desired for calligraphy. but vintage flex fountain pens start at hundreds of dollars each. and virtually no modern fountain pen with any degree of flex will skip on the chance to advertise themselves as flex pens. anything not blatantly advertised as a flex pen should never be flexed.

and honestly? your first fountain pen should not be a flex pen.

fountain pen nibs, as mentioned above, are metal pieces with a slit to form two tines. where the tines meet together is where the ink is dispensed. since most modern fountain pen nibs are NOT designed to flex, trying to use them like flexible dip nibs or even just using the fountain pen at the wrong angle can cause the nibs to splay and not be able to go back together without some skilled repair. there are fountain pens worth thousands of dollars with shining gold nibs that will promptly get fucked up if you try to flex them.

in my opinion, your first fountain pen nib should be steel. gold nibs are softer and way more easily damaged, while steel nibs are firmer, can be just as smooth in writing, and are a lot friendlier to beginners. not to mention, a lot more difficult to damage. the smoothness on paper is mostly determined by the grinding of the tip of the nib, not by the material the nib is made out of. there are plenty of steel nibs that write smoother than gold nibs, and they are a hell of a lot cheaper, too. a slight impact to a gold nib can cause them to bend to the point they cannot write, but a steel nib has a greater chance of surviving a drop.

fountain pens require very little pressure to write. you want to write with as little pressure as possible, without separating the tines (for the majority of pens).

flex pens are also not the only way to do calligraphy with a fountain pen. since flex pens required varied pressure, flex calligraphy is way more likely to cause joint pain and hand strain than doing italic calligraphy, which uses angle-based line variation at a steady pressure. there are a ton of fountain pens out there that come in italic nibs that are great for this type of calligraphy. a cheap way to try out italic fountain pen calligraphy is by grabbing some pilot parallel pens, which come in up to 6mm nibs, and are sold in many retail stores.

for a more practical daily use fountain pen that comes in both rounded and italic, grab a pilot metropolitan in medium (rounded) or cursive medium (italic).

and if you do still want to try out flex nibs, fountain pen revolution makes affordable steel ultra flex nibs that work better than most modern gold nibs.

#3: do not expect any paper to work / DO NOT USE MOLESKINE

with this post now apparently at over 75,000 notes, I am one of the most prolific moleskine haters in the world. and with good reason, I know a thing or two about fountain pen paper. moleskine is garbage. there is nothing it does that other paper companies do not do better and/or cheaper, aside from maybe the brands that agree to collaborate with them. they have some notebooks with hello kitty, pokemon, james bond stuff on the cover among other things.

if you roll into any fountain pen community and say you are trying to use moleskine with a fountain pen, you will get laughed at and/or pitied. yes, even though moleskine literally sells kaweco fountain pens on its website. kaweco is not exactly known for being ethical.

as I mentioned before, fountain pen ink is thin and water-based. most ball-tipped pens have thicker ink made up of completely different chemicals. ballpoint ink is made of oil and alcohol, gel ink is made of a thick water-based ink, rollerballs often use ink that is almost as thin as fountain pen ink. basically, most writing utensils use thicker ink than fountain pens. which means, paper that works well with any other writing utensil might still work very badly with fountain pen ink. most paper sold in united states stores, as an example, will probably not work well with fountain pen ink. even if it is an expensive notebook. trust me on this.

there is no way to tell whether or not a paper will work with fountain pen ink without trying it first. do not rub paper to try and guess if it will work well with your desired ink, rubbing paper just damages the paper. there are tissue thin papers that work better with fountain pen ink than heavy art papers, there are rough papers that work better than smooth papers, there are ugly papers that work better than pretty papers, there are cheap papers that work better with fountain pen ink than expensive paper.

fountain pen ink looks best when it dries slowly rather than absorbing into the fibers of the paper. and since fountain pen ink is so thin, it can often cause feathering (fuzzy spreading of lines) and bleeding (going through the page). if your lines look fuzzy or if they go through the page, it is almost definitely a problem of the paper you are using, and not the problem of the pen or the ink.

some examples of showthrough, bleedthrough, and feathering from a jetpens article on fountain pen paper. while showthrough is not necessarily a problem depending on how you want to use the paper, if you have high bleedthrough or high feathering, you are definitely going to want different paper.

fountain pen lines should look crisp. paper that can handle most fountain pen inks is considered "fountain pen friendly paper". the best way to find fountain pen friendly paper is to look up reviews of paper online. there are a lot of fountain pen enthusiasts who test out fountain pen inks on different types of paper.

one of the reasons I really like jetpens is they test fountain pen ink on all their paper, and show the results. as far as stationery stores go, jetpens has the most testing of their products that I have ever seen. the information and testing from jetpens can be used no matter where you wind up buying stationery supplies.

if you are getting a fountain pen, or if you are gifting a fountain pen, expect to need fountain pen friendly paper to go with it. ink problems are usually actually paper problems.

I recommend products like midori md, maruman mnemosyne, rhodia, clairfontaine. if you want the best possible color for fountain pen inks, check out tomoe river paper and cosmo air light/snow, but they feel very different from typical types of paper.

do not ever get moleskine.

with these 3 tips, you are way less likely to flub your fountain pen. happy inking!

ko-fi

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

Wanderer: (gruff cowboy voice, wheat stalk in mouth, wedged between bottom teeth) Sometimes… sometimes a man gotta come to terms with a few hard truths in this world.

:*Stares off into the distance, crackling of campfire*

:The Sun comes up. God ain’t here no more, and sometimes you just gotta dive in and learn how to draw furries because that’s where the money is.

:*Rips a cig, the wheat catches on fire*

there’s nothing purer or better than how much kids enjoy being picked up and then hurled at soft surfaces

Spicy-brained friends, I would like to propose an update to the very useful ‘if you hate everyone, eat, if everyone hates you, sleep, and if you hate yourself, shower’ mantra to live by

Have you suddenly become a petty, hateful little gremlin who thinks people should face the firing squad for (checks notes) leaving teabags on the counter, breathing loudly, or daring to exist in the same space as you? Perhaps mundane and reasonable requests like ‘hey, we agreed to hang out now, let’s hang out’ make you want to scream and move to a yurt in the woods.

You. Are. Overstimulated.

People talk a lot about being overstimulated, and the physical/mental effects of it. What I haven’t seen is people talking about what it does emotionally, and it took me an embarassingly long time to link up those nitpicky, resentful emotions with the state of overstimulation/meltdown/shutdown.

These feelings do not mean that you’re a bad person! They probably aren’t how you actually feel about the people around you. They probably do mean that your nervous system is at its absolute limit and any request/demand/stimulus is Too Much and taking you into fight or flight territory.

Go lie down in a dark room for an hour, or find somewhere safe and familiar to stim for a bit. If it’s happening a lot, schedule yourself regular low-stimulation shutdown time

Signed: someone who moved in with their nearest and dearest only to have a massive crisis of faith about Suddenly Hating All of Them. I don’t hate them, it’s just overstimulating living with people. If I can spare anyone else a similar 9 months of suspecting that they may actually be a bit of a shit person, then this post is worth it!

does anyone else follow people who don’t even have the same interests as you, but you’ve followed them for years and you can’t imagine unfollowing them?

it’s like, no that’s joan the dolphin lover? she’s practically your neighbor on this website? you’ve never talked, you’re not even mutuals, but damn she loves dolphins. And every time you see her on your dash, you’re just like, oh wonderful, joan’s still alive, just doing her thing. she’s getting into golden age russian cat literature, good for her!

this person doesn’t even know they’ve been on your dash through the ups and downs of your life.  Their presence and cactus obsession is just something kind of familiar and almost comforting to you?

The trick to leaving amazing comments on fanfic (if you’re nervous to comment/have nothing to say)

Sometimes, I see people who want to comment on fics, but are shy, nervous, or just don’t think they have anything to say. So, here’s the trick to low-effort but amazing comments:

- copy-paste your favourite line from the fic into your comment.

- add an emoji showing how it made you feel, or write what it made you think.

- That’s it. That’s the entire comment.

“But that’s so low-effort, won’t that disappoint the author?” Firstly: no, authors in general love any positive feedback. English teachers aren’t grading your comments. Authors will love that you bothered to say anything no matter what you say, so long as it isn’t mean. There’s no situation where this is a concern.

Secondly: authors love this kind of comment. It’s my favourite. It demonstrates that you engaged with the text, which s always super flattering, and additionally provides extremely useful data. We want to know what lines stood out to you the most, to be worth commenting on! We want to know what they made you feel or think! Again, this isn’t an English essay; pasting your favourite joke and attaching a laughing emoji is enough! This kind of data helps us improve as writers and demonstrates that our work made somebody think or feel something. It’s great.

So there’s the tip. If you want to comment, but have nothing to say, copy-paste your favourite line and add a reaction. Works every time.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Tumblr added a bunch of tracking shit to share urls, so now ill teach you how to get rid of them

if you copy a url by sharing on the website, the link will look like this

getting rid of tracking in these is easy, just delete everything after the question mark and you are golden

in the case for the app, its slightly more complicated

first you have to delete at. that appears before tumblr(.)com the other tracking shit on this one has a lot more info, so please, clean app urls. after the first set of numbers, there's a / you have to delete everything after it

a clean Tumblr url should look like this

blog safely

My subjects, may you use this information wisely 🗡

I don't know who needs to hear this

But if you go into the comments section on AO3

And type

Then replace image url (keep the " marks) with the url of a picture

You can leave fan art in the comments of a fic

PSA for Ao3 Users:

Be sure to check the URL before clicking on any site to go to Ao3. I noticed today when I searched via Google Chrome that there is a false Ao3 site that comes up as the first result.

It says archiveofour.net

When you go to it, it looks EXACTLY like Ao3, but it is NOT.

When I curiously tapped the search bar, a pop-up opened to direct me elsewhere. I believe this to be a spoof site for the purpose of either phishing or possibly hijacking PCs for mining bitcoin or some other malicious purpose.

I could be wrong. Perhaps it's a proxy site- but the fact that it redirected me to yet another suspicious-looking URL is alarming.

I let a few friends know, but it doesn't appear on every browser. @plague-of-insomnia mentioned using CC and Safari, and it didn't appear for them.

Ya'll be careful, and remember to always check the URL! At first glance, this spoof site is very convincing. If I had been half asleep, I may not have noticed it was different.

Please reblog to make your friends and other fic writers and readers aware!

I’ve found that I often work with weirdly tinted scenes which are sometimes challenging to colour, so I’m here to share how I tend to work around them.

There is no one way to colour gifs, and something that works for me may not work for you! This post just contains some things I wish I’d known when I started making gifs years ago.

To understand this, you need to:

already know how to make gifs on Photoshop

have basic knowledge of different adjustment layers

I personally use Photoshop CS5.

Keep reading

Doc, what are the top five items food banks LOVE to receive? I'm doing a collection soon and want to ask for specifics.

MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY

That aside.

 I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome. 

1) Canned chicken and beef 

looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins. 

2) Fancy nut butters

Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)

3) Canned or packaged tuna

You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend. 

4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like) 

Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry. 

5) Shelf-stable juice

This is one people never think of! But if you show up with a bunch of (preferably reduced sugar stuff) bottles of juice at my door, oh man, you are gonna get so many check mark and okay hand emoticons. This stuff is great for kids, and it doesn’t require refrigeration until it’s opened, so it works great for food drives. 

Just started Breaking Bad. Having this on hand 🤚🏻

“When you are your own best friend, you don’t endlessly seek out relationships, friendships, and validation from the wrong sources because you realize that the only approval and validation you need is your own.”

— Mandy Hale

So my sister wants to start sewing more, because

a. She’s 5′ 11″ and can never find pants long enough for her legs or shirts long enough for her arms.

b. She hates synthetic fibers as much as I do and it’s difficult to find natural fiber clothes that aren’t made of cotton

c. She’s a biologist and would physically fistfight microplastics if given half a chance

So her gift from mom and dad for her birthday was a sewing machine. Not a super expensive one but a good solid serviceable one.

And recently she asked “So where do I GET wool or linen and thread that isn’t polyester” and mom was like ‘go ask your sister’

And I, of course, crashed into the group text like “GET A PEN I HAVE WEBSITES FOR U” and honestly I’m thrilled about this