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Attempted Murder

@gentlemancrow / gentlemancrow.tumblr.com

She/Her • Gray Ace/Bi • Old • Fan fic and Originals • TMA Brainrot • World's Okayest fan fic writer • Here there be the mad raving cawcaws of two crows in a trenchcoat (Not tall enough for 3) who writes sometimes... Enjoy my fan ficcery on AO3! Writing Tag is "#Crow Writes"!
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Crow's TMA fan fic Masterpost

GREETINGS!! Welcome to my tumblr and BEHOLD!! A master list of all of my TMA fics which can be found on my AO3 here! Feel free to peruse, and I'll keep this list updated as I write things! :>

Multi-Chapter Fics:

  • In Scientia, Magicae - A Beauty and the Beast inspired AU. Martin winds up the new assistant to the mysterious and beastly Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute. Together they must work to unravel the secrets of magical statements, the nature of magic itself, and The Archivist's curse before it overtakes him, the institute, and perhaps even the entire world.
  • The Graveyard Shift - A Halloween themed fic! (Written for the @seasons-in-the-archives Halloween Event!) Werewolf Martin gets transferred to the graveyard shift in The Archives which is run by Vampire Jon. Supernatural workplace shenanigans ensue.
  • Anyone Can Whistle - An unabashedly fluffy Holiday karaoke fic! The Archives Crew heads out for karaoke! Both Martin and Jon try so hard to win the attention of the other a potentially disastrous miscommunication occurs, only to be mended by the magic of Sondheim...
  • White Shores Are Calling - Written for the Fiction Podcast Big Bang 2022. The year is 1863 and ghosts are all the rage, but Head Butler Jonathan Sims of Magnus Manor does not believe in ghost stories. Until, that is, he finds himself inextricably tied up in the mysterious tale of Martin, the last lonely spirit remaining there. Though Jon too, is facing the end of his mortal life, he will do whatever it takes to unravel the secrets of the house and free them both from its tethers.

One Shot Fics:

  • Written in the Stars Will Have to Do - A post Mag 200 fic about healing, moving on, and a stolen wedding for two people who don't technically exist underneath the stars.
  • Presented in Technicolor - A Scottish Safehouse fic where Martin is left with his fair share of demons after The Lonely, and they haunt him in the form of parroting lines from all his old favorite movies when he should be able to finally tell Jon how he feels about him.
  • The Grapes of Mild Annoyance - Written for the What the Tapes Didn't Catch zine! (@tapesdidntcatchzine) Jon is being extremely weird about grapes during lunch. Martin is decidedly concerned, to say the least, but the reason why comes as a rather pleasant surprise.
  • One Night in the Garden of Unhappy Endings - The Archivist keeps telling him there is nothing left of Jon inside of it, but Martin never believed that. Not really. Martin is tired of unhappy endings, and only he seems to understand that fate is only a story itself. It can be rewritten, reborn, regrown as well.

Collections:

  • Tumblr Ask Drabbles - A collection of all the request fics/ask drabbles that I get here! Posted either as one shots or compilations!
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the-crim-rat

“kill them with kindness” wrong. ceaseless watcher gaze your eyes upon this wretched thing👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️

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"Today marks one year since the death of the People’s Bubbie Shatzi Weisberger. Before she passed, she said, “I’ll fight like hell for a free Palestine until the day I die. Then I’ll keep fighting. Your queer ancestor is with you.”

If you’ve been rising up in solidarity with Palestine these past two months, your queer ancestor is indeed with you, along with countless other antizionist Jewish ancestors. For many, family and community rifts may be especially painful right now. No matter what, you are not alone. Remember that you have a long lineage of elders and ancestors at your back.

Last night, Israel resumed its brutal bombing of Gaza and has already killed dozens of people. Shatzi would encourage all of us to do everything we can right now for a permanent, lasting ceasefire. To mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.

Shatzi died on World AIDS Day, which was b’sheret ("destined”) because in addition to being a lifelong organizer, she was a nurse for 47 years who cared for people living and dying with AIDS.

From ACT UP’s organizing to end AIDS to the movement for Palestinian freedom, we honor the ancestors and movements who made us possible."

We will be forever grateful to the ancestors who paved the path before us. May their memories fuel us to work towards freedom for all people — no exceptions."

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HERE’S THE THING THOUGH

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.

This is my new favourite story.

When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring. 

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arctic-hands

Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.

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voroxpete

But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.

Seriously, this is legit.

In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.  Here’s the ad they posted.

Only problem is, they misprinted the number.  And the number they printed?  It went straight through to fucking NORAD.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.  NORAD was the front line.

And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD.  Oh no no no.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.

And then, it got better.

“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.

For real.

“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”

So yeah.  I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.

No okay THAT is adorable and I’m queueing this for next December.

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alphynix

Halszkaraptorines were a group of small dromaeosaurids known only from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia. They were odd little raptors with flattened snouts, long necks, and flipper-like arms – features that suggest they were specialized for swimming, making them the second known lineage of semi-aquatic non-avian dinosaurs after the spinosaurids.

This "duck-raptor" interpretation has been a little controversial since it was first proposed in 2017, but we've just gotten some more evidence for it in the form of an entirely new halszkaraptorine.

Natovenator polydontus lived in what is now the Gobi Desert in southern Mongolia, around 72 million years ago. The size of a small duck, about 45cm long (18"), it had jaws full of many needle-like teeth, a long flexible goose-like neck, and a streamlined body with a wide flattened ribcage convergently shaped like those of modern diving birds.

Although it had long strong legs, these don't show much in the way of aquatic specializations and would have been used more for walking and running on land. Instead it may have used its flipper-like arms to propel itself through the water, like modern penguins or auks.

It probably had a lifestyle similar to modern mergansers, swimming and diving in lakes and rivers, and preying on fish, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates.

———

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artistotel

hey! for todays protest, i made this little zine about palestine (holding just simple and basic information).

no credit is needed. feel free to leave it around bars, protests, or wherever. simply print it (borderless) and fold it. here is a tutorial on how to do it.

dont stay silent. there is a genocide of horrendous, atrocious proportions going on. also if you are a zionist here to argue with me, i dont plan to entertain you at all, not on my art blog. fuck off, you'll be swiftly blocked. i see enough of you clowns on my main and i have no energy for you. you can skip the death threats too bc i dont give a shit.

(i'm off to get ready for a surgery now, i just wanted to post it before this. if you need anything, i might take a bit to reply)

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In honor of today's global strike in solidarity with the people of Palestine, here's an excerpt from "If I must die" by Palestinian professor, activist, poet, and father Refaat Alareer who was killed last week in Gaza.

A prefilled email to contact the UN about invoking article 377 and overturning the US's recent veto: tinyurl.com/yvbu8cdn

Poem full text under cut

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reblogged

“don’t ever be surprised to see a rose shoulder up among the ruins of the house: this is how we survived.” - “a rose shoulders up” by Mosab Abu Toha

a painting referenced from this photo of Mohammad Abu Thabet and his children picking anenome flowers, photographed by Abed Omar Qusini in 2016.

in honor of today’s global strike for a free palestine ! @fairuzfan suggested making art for the strike so i rushed to finish this for today 🇵🇸🇵🇸 from the river to the sea. there is palestinian joy in the future

[ID: A digital painting of a Palestinian man, Mohammad Abu Thabet, and his children picking red flowers in a field. Mohammad is kneeling in the flower field holding up a bouquet of the flowers and smiling warmly at them.]

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ibtisams

It has been hard for me to talk about how what is going on with Israel and Palestine is affecting me personally, but I grew up in Gaza and most of my family still lives there. My father did not survive the bombings last week and I have not been able to contact my younger sister in days. I am try to being understanding that most people do not have personal connections to what is happening and therefore are justifying their silence, but is heartbreaking to see this misinformation being spread. What’s happening there is a genocide, not a war. It is not antisemitic to support Palestine, it’s not even antiemetic to criticise Israel. There is no grey area or neutrality regarding this, and it is so easy to find resources that will educate you on the subject. It is my people and my home being destroyed so I will never be silent about this, but I please urge everyone to get informed and start speaking up and finding ways they can help.

decolonizepalestine has tons of information on Palestine’s history/propaganda that has been spread throughout the years

Jewish Voice for Peace also has many resources for ways for US citizens to get involved, including protests

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Accessibility tip:

If you want to automate your home a bit, but you don't want any "smart" tech, you can just buy remote controlled power sockets instead

  • They are a lot cheaper and easier to set up and use than some home automation smart tech nonsense
  • They don't need an app (but some models come with optional apps and there are apps that are compatible with most of these)
  • Many of them use the 433mhz frequency to communicate, which makes most models compatible with each other, even if they are from different manufacturers
  • The tech has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time to come
  • You don't have to put any fucking corporate listening devices like an amazon echo in your home
  • Models for outdoors exist as well

[Image: Five electrical outlet enhancers accompanied by two remotes; each of the remotes has ten buttons: Two for each outlet (one on, one off).]

Cannot express enough my love for these. My entire apartment is on five circuits, controlled by two duplicate remotes. I can turn off the living room lights from my bed, if I forget, without getting up. And no apps needing so nothing to hack or spy on you.

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