She Enigma Fault Til Amigara

AO3 filters are incredible. The show ended over a decade ago but you're only getting around to watching it now, and you want to avoid spoilers for later seasons? No worries; you can filter out anything posted/updated after a given air date. Don't want to see crossovers? Guess what -- you don't have to. Three clicks is all it takes to make them go away. ONLY want crossovers? They've got that option, too. In a hurry and only have a few minutes to read? Filter out everything over whatever word count you consider to be "too long." Absolutely can't stand this one character/trope/relationship? Exclude, exclude, exclude. And all they ask in return is that you tag your stuff properly. Incredible.

If you haven't seen the filters before, you might be finding fics via searching. Search is great (and you can get *really* specific with it), but it doesn't have the quick filter menu.

Tap on a tag you're interested in reading (just at the top of a fic, for example). That will bring you to a results page that shows every fic that uses that tag. To get rid of the ones you don't want, look right above the works list to the buttons and tap on Filters. (if you're on a computer, the filters will already be there, on the right hand side of your screen).

Once you've found the filter menu, it's like the OP said. There are a *lot* of options for you to choose from. You can tap on any of them to open up a sub menu with specifics.

For relationship/character/trope tags, AO3 will automatically show you the top ten most-tagged ones within the tag you're already looking at. If the one you want to exclude isn't in that list, you can type it into the "Other tags to exclude" box and AO3 will give you a dropdown to pick from. You can add a theoretically unlimited number of tags to your exclude list, but I think it's possible to have a list that breaks things eventually. I've never personally hit it? But I bet someone out there has.

You can also Include things you want to guarantee are tagged, but be careful with that filter. Include filters stack on top of each other, so if you Include 3 different tags, you'll only get fics that have all three of them tagged. You won't get ones that have*any* of them tagged. For more info on how to do an "any of these tags" filter, see this post over here.

love the word fruitless. arguing with you is like if there was no apples involved whatsoever

August 💭

I need @pangur-and-grim to know that I sent a picture of the title of Chapter 7 of ASCNTD to a friend.

And their response was to demand to know what book it was and then to demand that I tell them where they can get it THIS instant.

I had to look it up to remember how chapter 7 started:

gnawing at the bars waiting for the breeder to take more pics

I've graphed the times and dates of her previous photo dumps. what can we extract from this

people are being very cruel about my graph

I see. so you are also my enemies

I don't want to make everyone mad again, but according to the graph new puppy photos can be expected on Sunday between 8-8:30pm

He said no way 🥹

poundcake.princess

Pro-censorship wattpad refugees drama is so funny to me because when I started using ao3 as a kid I was a devout mormon and I thought that reading anything even remotely pornagraphic was a sin and would ruin my life. So when I was 13 and found ao3 I went "oh awesome I found a fanfic website with a filtering system so I won't ever randomly stumble into porn. This is great! I was really worried about seeing something I didn't want to see on the other platforms." I didn't read any smut online until like three years later. If a mormon 13 year old can figure out 'don't like don't read' wattpad users can too cmon you guys i believe in you.

this sucks so bad i need to [remembers suicide jokes only worsen my mental health] put on the best talent show this towns ever seen

guys this post is a big hit on the adolescent psych ward

Fish in the great lake being like

Wait shit wrong fucking post

losing it over this. unbridled chaos

everyone loves to hate terfs until they realise that it actually entails rejecting bioessentialism entirely and then suddenly you’re “taking things too seriously” and you “don’t have a sense of humour” like i’m sorry but saying protect the dolls doesn’t make you immune to terfism it has seeped into every corner of mainstream feminism and unless you’re actively searching it out and checking your own biases you will always be at risk of sharing a space with terfs

“Only women can—” nope. “But all men—” nah. “The divine femininity of—” gonna stop you right there. “Everyone born ama—” if you finish that sentence I’ll kill you. “Men don’t experience—” you’re wrong. “Gender isn’t real but sex is imm—” *loud incorrect buzzer*

It also goes without saying that bioessentialism inherently can’t be trans inclusive no matter how hard you try. “All men including trans men—” probably not. “This is only a woman’s issue—” is it really? “Afabs only—” why? “All trans men are like—” what? what are they like? finish the sentence i dare you.

if i could say anything to my 14 year old self it would be "please dont stop playing tf2, when youre an adult woman youll try to get back into it but youll have forgotten all the soldier rollouts and youll only be good at the hitscan classes and itll hurt your Gamer Cred". and my 14 year old self would say "when im a what,"

are you lost little boy

This is so much funnier than my caption, dammit

I'm right where I want to be

Also hey you cut off the part where I support the Oregon Ducks. We just beat UW a few hours ago, sco Ducks!

Lmfaoooo this is hilarious

I ever tell you guys about my ethically dubious radio show back in college? The Mad Dad Hour?

it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

And thus, the Mad Dad Hour was born.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite: