“I don’t care about dumb weed jokes,” I said naively, before I saw this

This 420 is a palindrome!!!! 4/20/2024

It is!

Neil Banged out his tunes today, on a train you have the comfort and relaxation to bang out your own tunes

No

Hi! This is a rickroll. Please visit youtube dot com, type "never gonna give you up" in the search bar, then click on the first video that comes up. Thank you for your consideration.

Happy Julius Caesar gets stabbed day! Here’s a Les Mis take on the subject, courtesy of Grantaire’s Drunken Rambles:

See you can tell which one was written by Combeferre, because it actually has a coherent thesis instead of devolving into "did you know Brutus was gay for a statue how weird what was I saying oh yeah Nero was also in love with a statue and also"

As always, on this, the anniversary of his passing, GNU Terry Pratchett

i’d better be seeing cousin oskaar on my dash this morning

do everything my goddamn self around here

pratchett will write an entire book about the grim reaper pretending to be santa claus while the grim reaper’s granddaughter goes about hunting down the dumbass who decided to kill santa, and then right when you think you’re done and the oddly pointed shenanigans are winding down he hits you with “humans need fantasy to be human. to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape,” and knocks you into next wednesday

#YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT ARENT TRUE#HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME#god those words are engraved on my heart#gnu terry pratchett

“Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.”

GNU TERRY PRATCHETT

Gnu Terry Pratchett

Gnu - Question for native speakers

Guys, why do you call Terry Pratchett either a type of antelope or an astroid?

It was called the lucky clacks tower, Tower 181. It was close enough to the town of Bonk for a man to be able to go and get a hot bath and a good bed on his days off, but since this was Überwald there wasn’t too much local traffic and - this was important - it was way, way up in the mountains and management didn’t like to go that far. In the good old days of last year, when the Hour of the Dead took place every night, it was a happy tower because both the up-line and the down-line got the Hour at the same time, so there was an extra pair of hands for maintenance. Now Tower 181 did maintenance on the fly or not at all, just like all the others, but it was still, proverbially, a good tower to man. 

Mostly man, anyway. Back down on the plains it was a standing joke that 181 was staffed by vampires and werewolves. In fact, like a lot of towers, it was often manned by kids. 

Everyone knew it happened. Actually, the new management probably didn’t, but wouldn’t have done anything about it if they’d found out, apart from carefully forgetting that they’d known. Kids didn’t need to be paid. 

The - mostly - young men on the towers worked hard in all weathers for just enough money. They were loners, hard dreamers, fugitives from the law that the law had forgotten, or just from everybody else. They had a special kind of directed madness; they said the rattle of the clacks got into your head and your thoughts beat time with it so that sooner or later you could tell what messages were going through by listening to the rattle of the shutters. In their towers they drank hot tea out of strange tin mugs, much wider at the bottom so that they didn’t fall over when gales banged into the tower. On leave, they drank alcohol out of anything. And they talked a gibberish of their own, of donkey and nondonkey, system overhead and packet space, of drumming it and hotfooting, of a 181 (which was good) or flock (which was bad) or totally flocked (really not good at all) and plug-code and hog-code and jacquard …

And they liked kids, who reminded them of the ones they’d left behind or would never have, and kids loved the towers. They’d come and hang around and do odd jobs and maybe pick up the craft of semaphore just by watching. They tended to be bright, they mastered the keyboard and levers as if by magic, they usually had good eyesight and what they were doing, most of them, was running away from home without actually leaving.

Because, up on the towers, you might believe you could see to the rim of the world. You could certainly see several other towers, on a good clear day. You pretended that you too could read messages by listening to the rattle of the shutters, while under your fingers flowed the names of faraway places you’d never see but, on the tower, were somehow connected to …

She was known as Princess to the men on Tower 181, although she was really Alice. She was thirteen, could run a line for hours on end without needing help, and later on would have an interesting career which … but anyway, she remembered this one conversation, on this day, because it was strange. Not all the signals were messages. Some were instructions to towers. 

Some, as you operated your levers to follow the distant signal, made things happen in your own tower. Princess knew all about this. A lot of what travelled on the Grand Trunk was called the Overhead. It was instructions to towers, reports, messages about messages, even chatter between operators, although this was strictly forbidden these days. It was all in code. It was very rare you got Plain in the Overhead. But now …

‘There it goes again,’ she said. ‘It must be wrong. It’s got no origin code and no address. It’s Overhead, but it’s in Plain.’

On the other side of the tower, sitting in a seat facing the opposite direction because he was operating the up-line, was Roger, who was seventeen and already working for his tower-master certificate. 

His hand didn’t stop moving as he said: ‘What did it say?’ 

‘There was GNU, and I know that’s a code, and then just a name. It was John Dearheart. Was it a—’ 

‘You sent it on?’ said Grandad. Grandad had been hunched in the corner, repairing a shutter box in this cramped shed halfway up the tower. Grandad was the tower-master and had been everywhere and knew everything. Everyone called him Grandad. He was twenty-six. He was always doing something in the tower when she was working the line, even though there was always a boy in the other chair. She didn’t work out why until later. 

‘Yes, because it was a G code,’ said Princess. ‘Then you did right. Don’t worry about it.’ 

‘Yes, but I’ve sent that name before. Several times. Upline and downline. Just a name, no message or anything!’ 

She had a sense that something was wrong, but she went on: ‘I know a U at the end means it has to be turned round at the end of the line, and an N means Not Logged.’ This was showing off, but she’d spent hours reading the cypher book. ‘So it’s just a name, going up and down all the time! Where’s the sense in that?’ 

Something was really wrong. Roger was still working his line, but he was staring ahead with a thunderous expression. 

Then Grandad said: ‘Very clever, Princess. You’re dead right.’ ‘Hah!’ said Roger. 

‘I’m sorry if I did something wrong,’ said the girl meekly. ‘I just thought it was strange. Who’s John Dearheart?’ 

‘He … fell off a tower,’ said Grandad. 

‘Hah!’ said Roger, working his shutters as if he suddenly hated them.

‘He’s dead?’ said Princess. 

‘Well, some people say—’ Roger began. 

‘Roger!’ snapped Grandad. It sounded like a warning. 

‘I know about Sending Home,’ said Princess. ‘And I know the souls of dead linesmen stay on the Trunk.’ 

‘Who told you that?’ said Grandad. 

Princess was bright enough to know that someone would get into trouble if she was too specific. 

‘Oh, I just heard it,’ she said airily. ‘Somewhere.’ 

‘Someone was trying to scare you,’ said Grandad, looking at Roger’s reddening ears. 

It hadn’t sounded scary to Princess. If you had to be dead, it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. But she was bright enough, too, to know when to drop a subject. 

It was Grandad who spoke next, after a long pause broken only by the squeaking of the new shutter bars. When he did speak, it was as if something was on his mind. ‘We keep that name moving in the Overhead,’ he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly, and the everlasting clicking of the shutters grew more urgent. ‘He’d never have wanted to go home. He was a real linesman. His name is in the code, in the wind in the rigging and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”?’

- From Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

tl;dr: “gnu” is a term of respect from Sir Pratchett’s books that means “keep saying their name, keep saying their name.”

The really great thing is, it wasn’t planned.

After Terry Pratchett died, “GNU Terry Pratchett” started flying all over the internet. Tweets, Tumblrs, blogposts. People emailed and DMed each other with the news and the message. Coders for websites and blogs put the message into their code so that  “GNU Terry Pratchett” could never be removed from the internet. Sir Terry’s daughter said that she was astonished–that no one had expected this. 

Sir Terry’s fans found a way of using his own writing to memorialize him. To say, We love you. We remember you. And we won’t let you be forgotten.

That message is still true.

nothing pisses me off more than when i see a fic on ao3 talking about reach. "this ship isn't here but i added them for reach" "this fandom tag isn't necessary but i'm adding it for reach" "reposting for reach" STOP IT!!!! this is not tiktok this is not twitter this is an ARCHIVE this is not how it works!!!

i will not deal!!!! that is not how any of this works!!!!

if you see people doing this shit, report it. its against the terms of service.

genuinely. copy the link to the fic or series, and then scroll down to the bottom of the page:

click on policy questions & abuse reports which takes you to this page:

if you scroll down, youll be able to report the fic right there but you can also check for yourself that its against ToS

all you need to do is explain that theyre deliberately mistagging things which is just not a thing on ao3 because its an archive.

by posting your fic there, ao3, has the right to manually recategorise tags. its in the ToS:

you cant deliberately mistag stuff on ao3; it is an archive. you cant tag for reach, and this is likely gonna get pat tag wranglers because they deal mostly with form not content of tags and if theyre tagging for reach, its gonna be the more popular tags.

so report the fuck out of them for it. most likely, their fic will just have tags adjusted and their account will be fine.

and if they keep doing it and get suspended for it, its their own damn fault.

also thats not even getting into the fact that mistagging fics is kinda antithetical to their goal of reaching more people because youre not reaching the people who want to read your fic?

Can anybody who's been a volunteer for Policy and Abuse chime in on whether this is actually a good idea? I guess I envision y'all being swamped with reports of harassment and other things that are more serious than an annoying mis-tagging.

Not policy and abuse, but unless things have changed since the last time I talked to them:

However, they're almost never going to do anything about tags in the other categories. If an author says their fic is A/B ship, AO3 is not going to argue with them even if A and B insist they're just friends the whole time. If C is listed as a character and there's no plans for C to appear, oh well. If it's tagged "fluff" and somebody gets horribly murdered, people have different definitions of fluff and P&A isn't going to tell them they're wrong. If it's tagged F/F and has no female characters in it, hey, stranger things have happened. So I wouldn't bother going to P&A if it's just someone who's consistently using a pairing tag on something you consider gen or whatever.

They will, however, yell at people for spam, so if someone is blatantly and consistently overtagging for spam reasons and admitting it, that's worth reporting.

If someone's tagging wrong it's also always OK to leave them a polite comment letting them know, especially if it seems likely to be a mistake or misunderstanding ("I think you may have missed adding the Major Character Death warning" or "I don't know if you realized that / always means romance on AO3" or "I know you're used to other sites, but on AO3 people get upset if you deliberately tag things that aren't in the story, and I wouldn't want you to make a bad first impression".) Most of the time this works and it's much faster and friendlier than going through P&A, and AO3 is designed for a lot of things like this to be handled via users sharing their own norms, not official TOS enforcement. (Of course, if you have reason to feel unsafe commenting directly, you absolutely should not.)

the fight is harder each year.

gotta keep going because nothing ever stops.

you deserve to be new and whole.

Me n the boys heading into 2024

every time i ask people if they do any new years resolutions its all ooooo i dont like making them bc i fail or ohhhhh no i couldnt keep up wiht that and then when they ask me and i tell them about Pasta Quest (i am eating as many different pasta shapes as possible in the space of a year) or when i did Fruit Adventures (every time i saw a fruit i had never eaten before id get one and eat it and read the wikipedia article about it) theyre like hang on i forgot you can make Fun Ones i want a fun one

while i actually made this post back in May, since New Year’s is approaching here’s some of my fave suggestions from the tags if you’re looking for inspiration!

other favorites from the notes I didn’t get screenshots of at the time:

there’s plenty more in there too :)

This feels appropriate for this blog

happy new year !!

it's the last day you can rb this

i fucking love tumblr on new years i scroll past a glittertext gif wishing me a happy 2002 i scroll past my mutual wishing me a happy 2018 i scroll past a gifset wishing me a happy 2013 i scroll p

happy 1915 everyone!

I would like to wish everyone an uneventful new year

May we live in very uninteresting times

may you experience very precedented events