I lived and worked in a lighthouse at a previous job.  There was a thick line painted in a circle around the shack where the fog signal was kept.  The line represented how close you could get to the fog signal without experiencing physical harm in the form of eardrums shattering or worse.

Even in the house it was LOUD.  Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval.  You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off.  It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.

At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks.  People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.

One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit.  It did.  Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that.  People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.

That said Id do it all again, I really do treasure those days

you know you could’ve just said “no they don’t have wifi” and that would’ve answered the question

But then you wouldnt have known about the moose

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you’re going to love again, find a job again, create art again, do what you love again, feel powerful again. you’re going to be back on track. i don’t know when, but you are going to feel like yourself again, eventually. this isn’t the end. hang in there.

really? another album? didn't she just make one??

taylor swift is the MCU of music

do you realize what you're wishing on me

was told I should post this on tumblr

i think what’s on a person’s nightstand is very telling so reblog this and put in the tags the things you have on your nightstand

18+ 616 Steve/Tony Discord Book Club: Captain America: The Chosen

It's Captain America week for Book Club and we've found yet another weird grimdark nihilistic Cap miniseries from the mid-2000s! We're reading Captain America: The Chosen, by David Morrell and Mitch Breitweiser, a six-issue miniseries from 2008, originally released under the Marvel Knights imprint.

In a world where the super-soldier serum has stopped working, Steve is dying in a hospital bed in DC, but as part of Project Multitude, he is using long-distance telepathy to fight one more battle. Literally. He uses his powers to project himself into the mind of a US soldier in Afghanistan and help give him the courage to fight on.

We do get a retelling of a lot of Steve's background here, with a version of Project Rebirth where Steve was never actually supposed to be chosen. And now, here, in the present, it's about who he chooses to follow after him.

Come join us on You Gave Me A Home, an 18+ comics Steve/Tony Discord server!

This is what happened when a fanfic site is profit driven. Wattpad sucks 😞

The email from Wattpad is so condescending imagine pressuring writers to update and work while they are doing it for free and fun. Also the discovery? Algorithm? Of Wattpad looks like a stressful popularity contest 😑

Hey I just wanna quickly say that you only get these if someone reports the story. I've barely updated on Wattpad in the past two years and haven't gotten any of these, mostly because I don't even have an audience over there who has the potential or drive to report my fics. So, corporate greed is bad, yes, but it's also readers being buttheads

Hmm, that's interesting! You know what happens if someone reports a story for being incomplete on AO3? Jack shit, because not churning out content for your fun little hobby is not a reportable offense on AO3! And that's because, unlike Wattpad, AO3 isn't profiting off of your work, either directly or indirectly, and so when readers are buttheads, the AO3 abuse mods ignore them, instead of sending out weird automated messages harassing writers for daring to have a wip.

(english butler voice) Will you be making an attempt on your life this evening, sir?

Leonid Pasternak  (Ukrainian, 1862–1945) - The Torments of Creative Work

oh leonid, we're really in it now

What if we pushed our fingers into each other's wounds?

Willi Geiger Sankt Sebastian

Oil on canvas, 122 x 100 cm, 1914

@Fanfic writers:

My friend send me this link, is a series on a profile on Ao3 (tumblr) that has different tutorials to insert things to fanfics via html code, I thought I would share bc it’s really cool

Lists of tutorials:

This is a tutorial/live example on how to make large images fit on mobile browsers but remain normal size on desktop browsers.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic the look of letters, fliers, and stationery (as well as other forms of written media) without using images. For all your epistolary fic needs.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" fic. While this has been explained before (see here), this particular tutorial shows you how to use a work skin to hide the next parts from the reader until they click through to get to them.

This is a live example of how an author can create linked footnotes in their work with only a little bit of HTML and no workskins required. This is best viewed by clicking "Entire Work". While I've included the actual coding in bold and italic once you click "Hide Creator's Style", there's a more detailed explanation here.

This a tutorial/live example on how to have text change or appear once a cursor is hovering over it. Helpful for pop-up spoilers, language translations, quick author's notes, etc.

Anonymous on tumblr: do you have a skin that would mimic the author’s notes and review/kudos buttons section from the end of a fic? the desired effect being that the fic could go on after the “end” of the fic, so after the author’s notes and review/kudos buttons

Here's a tutorial/live example to do just that, with some of the buttons actually functioning. I'll explain more inside!

This is a tutorial/live example on how to align images to the left or right of the screen and have text wrap around them.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic email windows on AO3 without the need to use images.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic iOS text messages on AO3 without the need to use images. There's also a chapter on how to have emojis displayed on AO3 as well.

Bored with the default page dividers? This is a tutorial/live example on how customize your page dividers with no images needed (though I do show you how you could use images if you wanted to do such a thing).

This is a live example how to make invisible text that can only be seen by highlighting the text. Tutorial is included in text, and you can always leave comments about questions you may have.

MOBILE USERS: Sadly, this probably won't work for you, since highlighting in a mobile browser is different than web. I've tried correcting this, but have yet to find a solution.

Original coding and design is from layouttest. I make no claims for it, just tweaked it so it will work on AO3.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of lined notebook paper in their work. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of sticky notes (aka Post-Its) in their fic. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of Deadpool's thinking boxes in their fic. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of a newspaper article in their work. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is really useful and I'll always reblog it.

I've seen a lot of fics disappear from my bookmarks, some 10+ years old, because they were added to an unrevealed collection. It makes me wonder if people realize what your fic being added to a collection actually means and if the authors approved it automatically without realizing what would happen.

If someone adds your fic to their collection, they can hide it! They can mark the collection as unrevealed and your fic will be unreadable to anyone other than them! If you're writing works for a surprise event, like a Secret Santa, this is really nice.

But if you're just writing and someone adds your fic to a collection for their own personal use and marks it as unrevealed, that. . . really sucks.

I bookmarked this fic in 2017, almost 5 years ago. Knowing me, the fic itself was probably at least a couple years old at the time I bookmarked it.

This is a 5+ year old fic that is completely inaccessible now because it was added to a collection that, as far as I can tell, is literally just for the collection owner's own reference. There's almost 30 fics in the collection, all of them unrevealed.

Please don't blindly accept collection requests and if your works ARE in a collection, make sure that they aren't being hidden without your knowledge or consent.

Are you able to remove a work from collection after you allow it or is it just a story that's just fucked?

Yes, you can remove your works! From the faq:

I'm not sure if you get an alert if your fic is marked as unrevealed though, so keep an eye on the collections that your works are part of.

There's also an option in your preferences to accept collection invitations automatically. I would highly recommend making sure that that option is not selected.

I realize this might be a dirty trick pro-censorship fandom harassers might try to pull on some people, so yeah.

Boosting for visibility.

Boosting because this is really, really important!

This is a common misinformation still going around because it *used* to be this way.

A quote from the current Collection FAQ under "What does it mean that a collection is Open or Closed, Moderated or Unmoderated, Unrevealed, or Anonymous?":

This means that before saying yes to a collection, you should check that it is not unrevealed or anonymous at the time of acceptance, but you no longer have to worry about your works disappearing after you put the work into it. AO3 realised this was not a good thing and has changed it a few years ago, even if the belief that they haven't is still so pervasive.

I know y'all have had bad experiences with this before the change, but it's time to stop spreading this around now that this is no longer true. (But do still check what kind of collection you put your fic in).

so i was unaware that as of the march 2023 update, by default, no one will be allowed to invite your work to their collection(‼️)

i'd noticed that nobody had added my works to any new collections in awhile, though i used to allow these without approval...

but now, if you want to allow people to add your works to their collections, you have to check the box under preferences that says "allow others to invite my works to collections" (which will enable you to approve these as they come, ensuring nobody can add your work to unrevealed collections without your consent). there's no option to let people automatically add your works to collections anymore.

thinking about that post of people assuming ao3 has an algorithm and also about how bonkers persistent the view is that ao3 is social media lite. like with startling regularity I get comments saying something along the lines of "it's probably weird to comment on a fic this old--" no it isn't!!!! this is an archive I am literally just assuming you searched for a selection of specific tags or sorted by kudos or looked back on my pseud or any other number of completely normal ways to use an archive site ?? kill the tiktok ghost in your brain and comment on old stuff it's NOT weird