For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

otp:true will return results where there is only 1 relationship tag on the fic. If you want results where there are 2+ relationship tags (and no fics with only 1 relationship tag) then you can use otp:false

Meme + helpful search tutorial ftw!! Also saving the tags, because AO3 volunteers are indeed awesome:

Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic speakers, I need your help! 🇮🇪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

For a piece of academic writing I am working on right now, I was wondering if in the context of those three languages, you have positive or negative examples of:

1) The presence of non-standard dialects digitally or in the media (any content creator you know, any regular speakers on the radio that actively uses a non-standard dialect, or on the contrary, you only encounter standard Irish/Welsh/Gaelic. If you have any example of non-standard writing too, for example in the printed press, I am all ears)

2) Do you speak and/or write a non-standard dialect and have been looked down upon for it by other speakers? If yes what dialect and in what context

3) What do you think about purification practices in which loan-words from English are replaced by new words? Which words do you use? If you study the language formally, which are taught to you?

Thank you, and please reblog!

- A grateful Celtic student

Reblogging to come back to this later, but I have a few questions.

I speak Welsh (as a second language) and have been taught a little Irish and Scottish Gaelic at uni, but none of these languages have a 'standard' you can really point to. In the case of Welsh, the closest you get is Cymraeg Fyw - but even then it wasn't widely adopted enough to be *standard* standard. I'm also a Celticist so it'd be useful to see which versions of each language we're considering standard here.

Question 3 is also very interesting! Will reblog with my full thoughts later.

Regarding Welsh and Gaelic, there is no easily identifiable standard as you say, so usually we ask the question in terms of the language variety people identify as being spoken in media broadcasting and in school - the dialect that has the highest social prestige around them. That is because standard variety(ies) of a language can emerge either from the imposition of a policy of language planning, or in the emergence of common practice in usage in public domains. As such, Welsh and Gaelic speakers might have a different sense of what the standard is where they live, so I did not want to impose any definition on the matter.

For Gaelic, we also compare young respondant's answers to the SQA's Gaelic Orthographic Conventions (as it only became widely accepted in the 1990s, it of course cannot be viewed as the standard as of now), and for Irish, the standard is An Caighdeán Oifigiúil. For Welsh, G. German noted that "a spoken form of the Welsh literary language is clearly gaining in strength at the expense of local forms of Welsh dialect". What this spoken form is, is for speakers to define. I have read that one of its features is the favouring of a linguistically unified form of speech characterised by neoligisms, deemed artificial by many local colloquial speakers.

Regarding other comments: while standardisation of languages mostly concern their written form (though we have examples of standardisation of languages carried out for strictly oral purposes), it often greatly influences every-day speech, as it was the case for Irish. So that is what we are looking at concerning the spoken language - not a standard, but a speech more or less influenced by written standards.

Thank you so very much for all the answers and feel free to ask any more question/clarification! Again because I focus on the idea that language standard is inherently ideological, and not on describing/pinpointing said 'standards', I leave the questions up to personal interpretations 😊

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.

Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.

wow. really hope this isn't actually a norm taking hold with new users! this isn't facebook, you don't need to know people before following them

this is the '10 year mutuals you've never spoken to once' site

no matter how terrible my day is. i can always end my day in bed imagining fictional characters making out sloppy style and fucking raw. and that's beautiful. there's some good in this world mister frodo and it's worth fighting for

Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.

The Minimalist Character Sheet

So I am not the biggest fan of those ten page character sheets that include 100 questions like “What’s their favourite ice cream?”. Don’t get me wrong: If those help you with your writing, more power to you! Do what works for you. But I tend to discover all the little details of a character while writing. I only need the fundamental things. Maybe this works for you too!

The Basics

GMC (If you want to learn more about the concept, check out this post.)

Personality

That’s it! Hope this gave you some pointers on how to start out with character creation.

Have fun writing!

I'm just curious of other writers use similar forms to me/if anyone has any helpful ways to do this! If you guys are willing to reblog for greater sample size I'd be grateful but no pressure! <3

Hey guys!

I've had a few people tell me they liked my little disclaimer at the bottom of my tag games. So I am giving everyone who wants to full permission to use it.

Anyone who wants to is welcome to paste this word-for-word or alter it as they see fit onto any of their tag games. You do not need to credit me.

It is with a saddened heart that I just had to turn off reblogs on one of my 9 People tags so I am hoping a disclaimer like this will prevent this situation in the future, without me having to resort to drastic measures.

I hate taking away the ability for other people's mutuals/followers to interact with their tag games (in this case 24 other people) but alas, this would not have happened if they had just made their own posts in the first place.

I find reblog chains on my tag games very uncomfortable for a few reasons:

So yeah. That's all from me about this. Hopefully in a few months I can enable reblogs on that post again when everything dies down. But alas.

Anyone who wants to is free to reblog this post and add to it if they would like. And, of course, to use the disclaimer.

Speaking of badly-run organisations:

Don't use Nanowrimo anymore.

If you don't know, here is a link but there are also some more recent developments regarding how this is being handled and MLs are stepping down en masse as a result.

Nanowrimo is over. If you want to know about some cool writing communities on discord, facebook or twitch, I will happily share them with you, but there is no need to use Nanowrimo's services for anything any more.

You can still write 50K words in November if you want to of course.

realizing that sticking to the "do it bad" "do it scared" mentality implies theres also a "do it bored"

well. did it bored 👍

DO IT SCARED. DO IT BAD. DO IT BORED. DO IT HALFWAY. DO IT WRONG. DO IT EMBARRASSED. DO IT UGLY. DO IT LATE. DO IT DIFFERENT. but by god do it <3!!

🚨GOOGLE DOC WRITERS🚨

BE AWARE GOOGLE CHANGED THEIR SHARING TERMS

A fantasy book where many characters have dramatic High Fantasy epithets, but for incredibly non-dramatic reasons.

An adventurer known as The Herald of Dawn, but it's because she tends to wake up naturally at 4 or 5 am and every single fucking time wakes up the whole damn camp before sunrise by banging pots and pans together while making herself breakfast.

A nobleman known as The Lord of Shadows, but it's because his land is shaded from all sides by cliffs and mountains and all the other nobility are roasting this guy for not being able to grow or farm anything on his shitty, shady, no-sunshine-having estates.

A courtesan known as The Emerald of [location], but it's because the county she was born in is known for manufacturing forged jewels and gemstones, and so far she is the fakest pretty thing to ever come from there.

An assassin known as The Kiss of Death, but it's because he has somehow acquired every single known and documented STD in his mouth.

The Dark Huntress, named so to distinguish her from The Blonde Huntress.

A prince known as The Raven Prince, but it's because he's autistic and can and WILL tell you everything that is known about ravens, for five hours straight.

Can you imagine how passive-aggressive this would get in families. The hero goes on a book-length quest to find the Heiress of Light just to find out that thirty years ago, somebody got really salty that their sister and not them got the antique lamp in Grandma's will

this has probably already been done before but i was thinking about it earlier and got curious

Fantasy setting where the calendar has exactly twelve months of thirty days, but the year is still 365 days long; the remaining five days are nameless, numberless, considered to be part of no month or year, and may strike at any time, being impossible for mortals to predict in advance – you just wake up in the morning and see the Signs. Sometimes they're widely scattered throughout the year, sometimes you get two or three in a row; all five in one go is either a very good omen, or a very bad one. Some years have six nameless days rather than five and nobody knows why.

Fantasy Is A Metaphor For The Human Condition, a comic about magic, and art, and speculative fiction, and being sick, and how they all intersect. Originally laid out/pencilled November-December 2017, when I was in a very difficult place emotionally as I was relearning how to draw post-brain injury.

See more of my Brain Injury Comix at this link & in Dirty Diamonds #9: Being