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Girl under a Distant Sun

@rueckenfigur-i-am / rueckenfigur-i-am.tumblr.com

But its light still shines on everyone.
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The least realistic thing about the Lord of the Rings is that a team got together for a group project, decided everything in one meeting, and their plan worked.

The group abandoned the original plan halfway up Caradhras, split up several times, some group members started looking into different projects, found new partners and ended up doing something else, the original plan was abandoned early on, and the project was salvaged at the last moment by the one group member that didn’t get sidetracked. Sounds like a pretty astute description of teamwork to me

One of them also died.

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irondadfics

hii i hope youre doing well <3

i'm looking for fics where peter and tony discover they are biologically related while they're together in the lab/tower/etc. (whether they do the paternity test on purpose or find out accidentally) . i read a few fics like this a long time ago but i don't remember enough to ask about them individually

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here are some where Tony and Peter accidentally learn they are father and son.

Tony heard something drop and shatter while he was still finishing up his work on Rhodey’s suit, “Kid?” It wasn’t like Peter to drop things. He had sticky super powers after all. Peter was just staring at the screen.
Peter Parker is Tony Stark's son! After Tony run a routine DNA test on Peter, he discovers he is his son! Having missed the first 15 years of Peter's life, Tony is determined not to miss anymore. But Peter feels insecure, and fears Tony doesn't really want to be his dad. Tony & Peter navigating their new father-son relationship. ProtectiveTony! SensoryOverload!
“Hey, Tony Stank” Rhodey starts speaking as soon as he opens the door, “what’s this I’ve been hearing abou-“. Rhodey freezes mid-step and mid-sentence when he see’s Tony… or more accurately when he sees a kid sitting next to his friend. …a kid that, when he and Tony look up at him entering the lab, looks freakishly like Tony did when he first met him back at MIT. It may have been 30 years, give or take, since he met his best friend, but he’d never forget the first time that he met the skinny little kid that had a busted lip because he had mouthed off to one of the much older students. He’d never forget that little face. The face that he was suddenly seeing all over again…sat next to his best friend.  --- Yes, this is one of those stories where Tony find's out Peter is actually his son. I'm a sucker for these kind of stories and I've wanted to write one for a while...so, here it is :)
“Peter—look behind you!” The boy clasps Peter’s head, forcefully turning it around. Peter’s looking. And— Well, Rhodey’s not looking at Peter. He’s looking at a living memory—lightning wit and calculating brown eyes. Rhodey’s lightheaded with it—with late nights hidden in lab cupboards as tired security guards search for the source of echoing laughter—with breaking into Tiberius Stone’s dorm room and stealing his pipsqueak best friend’s final paper back—with punching Howard Stark in the face, shaking his knuckles out without an ounce of regret—with bunny-eared yearbook photos and shared school hoodies—with ‘I got it! I got it—Rhodey—stop—It’s not even—even heavy’ and ‘It’s a two-hundred pound robot, of course it’s heavy, dummy’—and later—so much later—too late, alway too late—with searching, searching, searching and never finding—
Happy Hogan never forgets a face. And suddenly he remembered where he knew that face from. The blood in his veins turned cold and for a second his lungs forgot they need oxygen to function. He counted back the years, hoping it would calm his racing heart. Hoping it wouldn’t match. But it did.
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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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This one is pissing me off because there’s cheese in it. I’m not sure there’s a period of Chinese dynastic history wherein the type of dudes likely to be having rap battles would also have been familiar with hard cheese. There’d be political fucking implications to that. Fermented dairy products were often seen as uncivilized foods, and were associated in particular with northern “barbarian” cuisine (see: <lactose intolerance in Eurasia>), whereas competitive poetry was viewed as a civilized and scholarly pastime appropriate to civil servants and courtiers. Mentioning cheese in a verse which also references the heavens could be seen as an effort to legitimize the presence of these dangerous foreign elements within Chinese society, and, thus, as seditious. If dairy were to become a common theme in rap battles, it might be viewed as a dangerous sign of poor morale and defeatist thinking among the literati. “Emperor, we have got to move the capital to the south. The scholars are rapping about cheese. It’s all falling apart.”

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cryptotheism

Now this is a fucking post

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vaginadude

Litany against anthropocentrism

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mosscrab

[ID: A picture of an excerpt from the book A Natural History of the Future, which reads: "affirmation. 'I am large in a world of small species. I am multicellular in a world of single-celled species. I have bones in a world of boneless species. I am named in a world of nameless species. Most of what is knowable is not yet known.'" End ID.]

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myconetted

affirmations

  • i am a complex organism brutally engineered by uncaring forces of nature
  • i am a product of billions of years and trillions of deaths
  • i am building a machine greater than myself
  • i am able to make phone calls and appointments
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you can pry happy endings from my cold-dead hands. It can be the most heart stopping, gut wrenching fic that has every existed and I will read every drop of it if I get my happy ending. I have had enough painful endings in real life, give me happy in my fantasy world. It can be at the last second, it can be a single sentence, even a single word. Give me all the angst and hurt in the world for 500,000 words, but please give me the comfort I need in the ending. please and thank you.

This is also 100% why I stopped watching shows, following cinematic universes, etc. They can bend either towards happiness or towards tragedy, and life is too sad and short for tragic endings and hurt without comfort in my fiction.

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you can pry happy endings from my cold-dead hands. It can be the most heart stopping, gut wrenching fic that has every existed and I will read every drop of it if I get my happy ending. I have had enough painful endings in real life, give me happy in my fantasy world. It can be at the last second, it can be a single sentence, even a single word. Give me all the angst and hurt in the world for 500,000 words, but please give me the comfort I need in the ending. please and thank you.

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irondadfics

Heyo!

I'm looking for a fic where Tony and the avengers (not all of them but definitely cap, widow and i think rhodey) go on a mission but while out the jet takes damage and they lose contact with the tower.

Peter was rebuilding Jarvis for a birthday present, and when the jet lost contact, he freaked out and got Jarvis to work early to find Tony. By the time the jet is back in range, Jarvis has been searching, and Tony has just gotten comes back up. There's a super cute reunion at the end.

It was a short ficlet no more that 30k words but don't take my word on that.

If you could find it, I'd be super appreciative! I've been looking for jt for the better part of 2 or 3 years now! Thank you so much! <3

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Sorry it’s been so long. We found a few fics where Peter fixes Jarvis. Could any of them maybe be your fic?

Peter liked to keep things. Or more accurately, just… never throw them away. It wasn't really to the point that he'd say he had a hoarding disorder. He was just fine with the idea of throwing them away. It's just… what a waste, you know? They’d find some use later on, he was sure. Naturally, this extended to his activities as a science nerd and, later on, his vigilante persona. This may or may not have… caused some problems.  Or: Peter Parker finding things to give to the Avengers in his pile of random things.
It's Tony Stark's birthday. Peter Parker is in dilemma. One conversation with FRIDAY and he gets the best birthday present idea ever. The only question is, will he be able to do it?
When Tony birthday roles around, Peter is invited. But what do you give someone who already had everything? After a few emotional moments in Tony's lab, and a mission were Peter finds 2 old Stark Server, the answer is easy. Even if it takes a lot of work to get done in time. Add some Genius Peter Parker, a sensory overload, some BAMF fighting, and we got a complete fanfic with all the best things.
In which Peter Parker makes Tony Stark feel things because of a belated christmas present.
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