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Living In SunnyHell

@livinginsunnyhell

“Please scream inside your heart.” Tagline mood courtesy of Japan’s theme parks. I’m a writer, TV fanatic, avid reader, and basic human whose named after a Jane Austen character (Emma). You’ll find some of everything on here.
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About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

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luulapants

If any of my followers need ao3 invites, message me!

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For those who missed it, a Jewish man was threatened with arrest in London this weekend for being "openly Jewish" (that's a quote form the policeman who stopped him) while being near a pro-palestinian protest. He was then abused and harassed by protestors. The policeman said that the man's presence could lead to a "breach of the peace"

The police proceeded to release the most victim blamey apology I've ever seen - one so bad that they then had to withdraw it and issue a second apology

The original apology talks about a "new trend of those opposed to the main protests appearing alongside the route to express their views", and "knowing their presence is provocative".

The guy the police stopped was literally walking in London post shul. Not on a counter demonstration, not on a free the hostages demo, or a pro Israel demo. He was just there, and wearing a kippah.

Like I'm sorry but saying Jews being obviously Jewish is causing a breach of the peace when near a pro-palestinian protest makes it very clear that the police know that these are not actually peaceful.

I'm sure a huge number of people on these demos are not actually antisemites and have no intention to harm Jews, however herd mentality can make even the most reasonable person into a bigot, and frankly if people are afraid to stand against the antisemites, it shows that they now how dangerous the people around them are - so WHY are they still there?

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Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

— William Faulkner.

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dailymanners

If you take the bus, wave to the driver and thank them as you're getting off the bus.

Being a bus driver is an underappreciated and difficult job but still very vital to society. They still have to do customer service and deal with rude and even aggressive passengers, and on top of that have to deal with traffic and other drivers all day (and let's face it, there's a lot of bad drivers out there who aren't considerate about sharing the road). All while providing an invaluable service of getting us where we need to go. Showing them some appreciation can go a long ways for someone doing such an important job that usually gets little to no recognition or thanks.

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The buddie karaoke parallel to the madney karaoke scene in s2 IN the madney wedding episode IM SO DONE!!! 😭😭😭

Some things are just deliberate foreshadowing and not coincidences 🫠🫠🫠

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The fact that Microsoft Word has to be a subscription is upsetting. I already paid for it why do I have to pay again

Yes please be mad about it, genuinely- You used to be able to purchase a single disk to install it and use it forever after that initial purchase of one key. It sickens me to see all this stuff which used to be a one time purchase be shunted under a subscription now.

"Why is pirating going back up?!"

This. This is why. People don't mind paying a high price for software if it's only the once, or every 4-5 years.

But having to pay a high price regularly? Especially in the cases where you lose access to your own work if you don't?

That's why people are pirating software.

It’s possible to buy a non-subscription version of Word; Microsoft just intentionally makes it very difficult to find (and also expensive).

However, I know a guy who knows a guy website: MS Office Pro for $50. If the link starts going to a Page Not Found, just search the site; they usually have some form of this sale available. 

Worth noting: while $50 is still more money than $yo-ho-ho, that money is a great way to make VERY clear to Microsoft that we DO want one-time-purchase products, not subscriptions.

My laptop just died. If it can't be fixed and I need to replace it, this post is gonna be a real life saver, because my family has been sharing an old version of Word that came with a limited number of lifetime licenses, and we're fresh out.

Get LibreOffice. It's fully compatible with MS Office, but it's free and open source. You're welcome. :-)

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