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It’s a five-minute walk from my house to the pub.

It’s a thirty-five minute walk from the pub to my house.

The difference is staggering.

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This meme is relevant to my interests.

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#raven cycle

AITA for realizing that my best friend is actually a ghost and not telling him because i'm worried that if he realizes he's dead he'll finally be able to accept it and fully pass on and i won't be able to hang out with him anymore?

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Honestly, if you see an angel that’s all eyes and wings and wheels of fire, you should be worried. Like, not because it’s going to hurt you or anything, but because scripturally, angels invariably appear to ordinary people in human form. In general, they only show their inhuman true forms to prophets – which means if you’re seeing them like that, they come bearing responsibility.

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sometimes i’m like ‘fanfiction can’t shock me anymore i’m numb to it’ then i find this shit

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"That's fixed in Xaranthius' latest publication, you just have to rewrite your entire spellbook for compatibility."

oh god why is this so true

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

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Types of AO3 Summary

Option 1 - The Excerpt:

The quickest, the easiest! Find a section of your fic that contains the main premise of said fic and also showcases your writing. Copy paste that into the summary box. BOOM! Done.

Best used for any fic, unless it's so short the excerpt would be the whole fic.

Option 2 - The No Frills:

Just a description of the fic. No need for drama. No need to complicate matters. Keep it simple, keep it safe.

Example: "A short character exploration of Blorbo's thoughts after Daisy leaves."

Best used for short fics, poems and fics where the style/format is more important than the plot. Or fics that tie directly into a scene/episode from canon or another fanfic.

Option 3 - The Hook:

Draw the reader's interest by giving them a set up with no conclusion. Introduce the main character(s), introduce the status quo, describe an inciting incident, leave a question in the reader's mind.

Example: "Blorbo is a barista at a coffee shop, struggling to pay their bills, but after handsome rockstar Obrolb walks into their coffee shop they find that they have to decide whether a chance at love is worth the cost of fame."

Best used for mid to long fic where there's a strong premise and follow through. Especially good for AUs. Can be expanded for more complex plots or used multiple times in one summary for multiple characters or subplots.

Option 4 - The Sitcom One-Liner:

"The one in which [over simplified description of one of the main plotlines]" This is essentially 'boil your plot down to the very simplest statement you can, oversimplify if possible. The more bizarre or unhelpful the better.

Example: "The one in which Blorbo learns to like cake".

Best used for fics with at least a little humour in them.

Option 5 - The Rule of Three:

Three is a magic number. Find three key moments in your fic and just list them. That's it. Often ends with 'not necessarily in that order' if used for comic effect. If it's an AU, establish that quickly (i.e. 'Star NHL player Blorbo…').

Example: "Blorbo makes a friend, falls in love, and almost burns to death, not necessarily in that order."

Best used for anything, really. Three is a magic number. The human brain loves things that come in threes.

Option 6 - The Trope Lure:

Why bother describing the plot? We all know AO3 readers are here for the tropes. Similar to The Sitcom One-Liner just using tropes instead of plot. Often followed by the phrase 'that nobody asked for'.

Example: "The Space western/ABO/Mail Order Bride fic that nobody asked for."

Often tacked on to the end of The Hook or The Excerpt as a tl;dr.

Best used for fic that plays its tropes straight with no shame or second guessing.

Option 7 - The Pre-emptive Strike:

(Not recommended) You just wrote this fic, the self doubt is consuming you. You feel the need to apologise profusely for your existence for no apparently reason. You feel cringe, you think the fic is cringe, you want everyone to know that you think the fic is cringe in case they don't like it and judge you for it.

Example: "So I fell in love with this pairing and had to write this. It's weird and terrible. Lol! I suck at summaries! Sorry!"

Best used for no fics ever. I cannot stress this enough.

(Seriously, I am begging you, don't do this. If you're planning to use this option, rethink it and do one of the others. I guarantee you more people will want to read your fic.)

Sometimes added on to any other summary as a strange disclaimer. (srsly. don't.)

Option 8 - The Unapology:

Embrace the mayhem, embrace the deep dark depths of your soul. The opposite of The Pre-emptive Strike. A combination of The No Frills and The Trope Lure that truly gives no fucks.

You have committed crimes and you are proud of them. You know what your USP is and you're going to make sure your target market finds you. Look upon my works, ye readers, and despair!

Example: "There aren't enough tentacle fics in this pairing, so I had to write one myself!"

Best used for fics with controversial/polarising tropes with all relevant details already clearly stated in the tags.

Option 9 - The Interrogation:

What if you wrote a summary entirely in questions? What if your readers had to read the fic to discover the answers? Who knows what will happen if you do this?

Example: "What happens when Blorbo McBlorbo gets his wish and Daisy doesn't make it to the plane on time? What happens when Obrolb finds out? How will this change Daisy and Blorbo's friendship?"

Best used for... I honestly don't know. This style of summary does not vibe with me. Mystery fic maybe? Sorry guys.

Option 10 - The Multipack:

Got a bunch of shorter fics in one work? No way of summarising them all without a wall of text larger than the Great Wall of China? This one is similar to The No Frills in that you're not describing the plots themselves and similar to The Trope Lure in that often broader genres and tropes are mentioned. What links those fics? Are they all in the same fandom? The same pairing? The same challenge? Just slap that right in the summary. A chapter list with 1-2 word trope/pairing summaries can be included or not.

Example: "A collection of Blorbo/Daisy/Obrolb fics based on Tumblr prompts. Chapter 1: Regency AU Chapter 2: Werewolves vs vampires Chapter 3: Ghost!Daisy Chapter 4: Space pirates!"

Best used for (obviously) works that are compilations of fic.

Option ? - The Void:

I said The Excerpt was the quickest and easiest summary to do. I lied, well... I didn't exactly lie. What is quicker and easier than not having a summary at all? After all, that's what the tags are for.

Example:

Best used for... nothing? Write a summary, guys. Please?

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naw. i think the monkey part of my brain just thinks that trees are Safe. besides god would have needed to climb up the tree if he wanted to smite me, which would’ve opened him up to getting kicked in the head. if the romans could kill him for three days with t-posing im pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to make it up my tree, which would’ve turned the whole thing into a siege, and i can say right now there’s a 0% chance of god being able to out-wait an autistic kid in a tree. he’s gonna get called away on some godly task in an thirty minutes tops but that kid has nowhere to go until lunch. easy win.

I can't debate this logic it's pretty sound

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Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

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Steve Irwin in a Jaeger would be entertaining.

Look over there. There’s a Catergory 3 Kaiju. Biggest one yet. 

Ah’m gonna wrassle with it. 

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😳

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it's really weird having a first dog be blind and then getting a second who can see...like how was I supposed to be prepared for this.

this creature can perceive when I put the treats up on the high shelf. or when I hide stuff behind my back. I can't fool her!! she's always watching me and she shouldn't have this much knowledge!!!

I walk around at night and I shine my flash light directly into her eyes and I'll just be standing there staring at her weird blue orbs for like 5 seconds until I realize it's probably extremely annoying to her, because she has eyes!! I'll turn on the light in the room and she gruffs and grumbles like ?? oh right!! light wakes you up!! the fuck??

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incredible. LOTR fandom truly NEVER stops giving

( created by stixywixy | video on tiktok )

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Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

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hello dear physics explainer, can you explain to me how/why photons are both a wave form and a particle?

oh that's easy. light isn't a wave or a particle.

I mean that's it's not a wave, and it is also not a particle.

light is light. it is a strange substance that has a lot of strange properties. we can model the behavior of light in a few different ways, however. If we are working with light and we are interested in interference, then it is useful to model it as a wave and treating it as a wave will predict its behavior reliably. If we are trying to do something with the photoelectric effect, then it's far more useful and predicative to model light as a particle.

think of it like map projections. this is the mercator projection:

it wildly distorts geography the closer you get to the poles, so it is not useful for finding the area of any sea or landmass; however, the lines of longitude are perfectly straight, which makes it a very useful map for navigation.

This is the Goode-homolosine projection:

This is quite a good map for accurately finding the area of landmasses. But because the lines of longitude point in different directions across the map, it's worthless for navigation.

asking why light is both a wave and a particle is like asking why the Earth is both Mercator-shaped and Goode-homolosine shaped. It isn't. It's not. The earth is round. We just need multiple models in order to interpret it two dimensionally.

photons are quantum objects. the only way to accurately model them in totality is via quantum theory. but that isn't useful for most of the things you'd want to measure photons for, because it's much too complex. wave-photons and particle-photons are both practical simplifications of quantum-dimension objects.