Carnevale

[bluemandycat]

my sister’s bf referred to eating cheese as “mousing out” and i’m so utterly charmed by that. can we all agree to adopt that into language.

[uhtreds]

locked the fuck out. distractionmaxxing

[depsidase]

[lucytara]

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

[ao3commentoftheday]

so, tagging background ships on AO3. I personally don't like looking for fics ABOUT my OTP and finding 90% fics where my OTP is a background ship and don't even have any moments about them. I feel like it clogs up my results. I know people sometimes want to know what background ships are in a fic for various reasons, but I personally would rather put that information in the summary than clog up tags. I was just honestly curious how many people prefer one or the other or feel the same lol.

I've described ao3 tagging in a few other asks, but I'll give a rundown here again because it's not entirely obvious to people, and people really are just trying their best.

So if you're an author who wants to tag something like minor A/B don't put it in the relationship field. Tag wranglers would have to syn that to the regular A/B tag, thus dropping your fic into the filter results for that ship - that's what anon here is experiencing. Instead, put your minor A/B tag into the Additional Tags field. People will still see it there on your fic, but it won't be filtered into ship filter results.

When you filter for a ship, that filter only applies to the ones tagged in the Relationship field in the work posting form. That's why putting the minor A/B tag in the Additional Tags keeps the fic out of the A/B filter. Same applies for minor Character A. If you put that into the Character field, it will get synned to Character A. If you put it in the Additional Tags, it'll stay out of the filters.

I, personally, don't want minor character information in the summary because I use the summary search trick to find fics where minor characters are actually the main character in the fic. My reasoning is that if their name is in the summary, they must be doing something important in the fic and/or the fic is specifically about them.

If you're someone who wants to try that summary searching trick, I've got a video and text tutorial for it over here.

Also, if you're someone who doesn't want to see A/B or Character A at all, not even in the additional tags, you can remove them by using the Search Within Results box. Just type in -"Character A" and that will remove them.

All of the above is just information for you to do what you like with, but I found it fascinating when I started learning this stuff myself so I hope you at least find it interesting too!

[puppygirllaika]

"you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel" girl i am living that balsamic life, that's the mommy down there at the bottom.

[puppygirllaika]

#are you havinf a stroke or am i i can NOT understand this

Balsamic vinegar is made by aging a reduced grape syrup in barrels with "mother", which is a kind of bacterial slime that develops naturally in the vinegar over time. True balsamic vinegar goes through a very particular process of aging it in a series of smaller and smaller barrels, transferring it from one barrel to the next either every year, or every few years, depending on the process, and then adding fresh syrup to the largest barrel and continuing the process. The slimy film that forms on the insides of the barrels is the mother, and due to the increased concentrations over the years, the mother in the smallest barrel is most potent, and is sometimes partially removed and used to seed new batches of vinegar, so production can be expanded. Scraping the mother from the bottom of the barrel is how you multiply the goodness, the sweetness, and the quality of your balsamic.

[puppygirllaika]

If you've ever bought a bottle of apple cider vinegar and thought "what's that cloudy stuff at the bottom?", that's the mommy <3

[puppygirllaika]

This is also a part of what makes a high quality balsamic, well, high quality. And part of what makes it expensive. Good quality balsamic is all about age, both the age of the batch itself, and the age of the mother that seeds it. Balsamic has to be at least 12 years old, but you can age it much longer, and many places do. As for the mother, that requires literal lifetimes. Some of the oldest balsamic producing families in Modena have mothers that have been kept alive for centuries, passed down through the generations to seed new batches year after year after year, hundreds of years over. The bacterial cultures develop unique and incredible flavors in this time, and you can really taste it in the end product. It's the kind of flavor and quality only age can offer.

[puppygirllaika]

we have entered laika's autism zone. u will learn food and cooking facts, whether you want to or not.

[puppygirllaika]

#That's beautiful actually#How each bacterial culture literally evolves in unique ways and we get to taste that evolution#It's like the population of a city changing with time and producing new cultural artifacts#Except it's bacteria#Feels almost anthropological#Beautiful!

your regular reminder that all living things in our macroscopic world are collections, systems, communities, and structures of other living things. a planet is alive in the same way a city or a forest is alive, which is in the same way that you are alive, and the same way your guts are alive. we are all just active complexity with agency defined by nested layers. <3

[awed-frog]

WHOA

[dulcewhisperlea]

[tywysogannwn]

this is one of the reasons it’s so hard to translate on the fly 😭 monoglots just don’t understand and think you’re bad at the source language 😟

[fymenhera-deactivated20181216]

Friendly reminder how to actually use band aids on fingertips because we see people doing it wrong all the time.

[velken]

[silentlycrazy]

Reminder?! How was I ever supposed to know this?!

[stupid-elf]

Today’s lucky ten thousand! Wait, no… That’s for things that are common knowledge…

With your help, we can make this reach ten thousand people! And then it will, in time, become common knowledge!

[miseria-fortes-viros]

“what’s your dream job” im so glad you asked. picture this. i am the lone employee of a strange and mysterious tchotchke/bookshop in the middle of nowhere, full of fun and interesting things that i am allowed to take for the low low price of free of charge. i get one, exceedingly interesting, customer per hour. i work no more than twenty hours a week and am salaried 3 million dollars

[scientificphilosopher]

It wrinkles my brain that Jupiter’s moon Europa has oceans that are sixty miles deep, while Earth’s oceans only reach seven miles deep at most. I’m willing to bet good money that there’s life in Europa’s oceans. Like five bucks. You hear me, NASA? I bet you five bucks that there’s life on Europa… Now that there’s money and reputation on the line, I bet they send a mission there real quick.

[curiousobsession101]

I have no idea when this was originally posted, but NASA is working on their Europa mission RIGHT NOW to look for alien life! But get this, they theorize that because of the depth, gravity, and composition of the oceans, any organisms that lived there would be waaay bigger than aquatic life on Earth. So far everything’s going well with regards to their Europa mission so they should have a spacecraft on its way to look for giant sea monsters in space in only a few years. (The planned date is in the early 2020s.)

[scientificphilosopher]

Looks like my negotiations worked. You’re welcome, humanity.

[libraryspectre]

I’ve never been gripped with such cold terror and pure delight in my LIFE

[captain-snark]

explaining to an 18th century sailor that we’re looking for sea monsters in space. 

[gehayi]

The launch date for the Europa Clipper is October 2024.

[syolen]

Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space 

[silksufjan]

do you ever wonder what weird hobbies neil picked up as a way to ‘fill his time that would complete his personas’? ljke, does he have oddly specific knowledge of birds native to france because he and mary took up birdwatching as a reason to keep binoculars on hand? does neil know far too much about ancient ceramics from them weaving in and out of sites and museums in greece? maybe they got really good at making tea or tasting wine. maybe neil knows all about how to make international delicacies. i wonder what secret skills/hobbies/info he picked up as a means of survival that are just . floating around dormant in the back of his mind until something reminds him of it

[i-the-spoonie]

[fellshish]

The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol

[rebornofstars-deactivated202510]

you're falling in the trap!! it will be read by many people, many times, and it will live on in their memories. and maybe no single other human will match you in time spent dedicated to your story, but as a collective we will outlast you. acts of creation only grow when they are shared

[galadriel1010]

This. Writing is not like dinner. It can be consumed many times

[eraserheadbabyabortion]

i cant even imagine where id be without "thats a really mean way to think about me, i wish you wouldnt think that i dont know what im doing when i love you." and "people want to be useful, trying to do everything yourself makes the people around you think that you dont trust them or that you think theyre incapable" and "people are made to be burdens. we are made to carry each other and not leave anyone behind." and "its rotten work / not to me. not if its you."

[fishparasite]

you will live and you will say the wrong things and make mistakes and people will love you anyways.

[zarathustra-would-be-proud]

[teaboot]

Yall stop that

[infested-ev-deactivated20240227]

yeah i appreciate the sentiment man but i still feel worthless so idk what to tell you

[teaboot]

Listen. Listen.

You don’t have to feel like it’s true. You don’t have to believe it. It doesn’t matter. I sure as hell didn’t. Don’t, even. Present-tense, some days. All the “it gets better” shit sounds like crap, and it never really stops sounding a bit phony, but here’s the thing:

“Better” doesn’t mean happy-go-lucky perfect, on top of the world forever and always. It just means “better”. One day you’re walking to a bus stop in the freezing rain after a bad day and realize you’re actually kind of glad you didn’t die in your sleep when you wanted to. You catch yourself excited for something and it surprises you, cause you didn’t think you could still feel excitement anymore. You fuck something up and manage to shrug it off instead of hating yourself, and you notice.

So you feel worthless. You’re probably gonna feel worthless for a long time. You’re probably gonna feel worthless tomorrow, and the day after that, and a week from now. Maybe in a month, or a year.

But, and speaking as a 🌟 clinically depressed nightmare🌟, that feeling isn’t real.

We invented the concept of “value” and “worth”, so it’s not a fact of the universe. It’s not an objective truth. If there is no cosmic force that’s decided you alone are special and the best, then there’s also no faceless void that has chosen you to be the worst.

You’ve been birthed into the cosmos without your consent and all you’re really obligated to do at the end of the day is keep your body running so you can fuck around. That’s it.

And step one of having fun with it is not regurgitating the self-hating crap your brain likes to generate.

Yeah, it feels true, but it isn’t, and saying it out loud or writing it down or reading it over and over again on a screen isn’t going to do anything but force you further into that belief.

I like to say I’m fantastic. I’m godlike. I’ve never done anything wrong and I’m never gonna die. I’m the big dick wizard of sexy man Nation and my grilled cheese could make the pope weep.

Is it true? Fuck no. But it’s fun, and it makes me laugh at myself, and if I’m gonna say things that aren’t true then why say things that feel like shit? Why not feel better?

So yeah, actually, I may have fucked up with that edit. Here’s a better one:

[catullyst]

τυρὸς δ’ οὐ λείπει μ’ οὔτ’ ἐν θέρει οὔτ’ ἐν ὀπώρᾳ, οὐ χειμῶνος ἄκρω·

"But cheese does not abandon me, neither in summer nor in autumn, nor at the end of winter:"

--Theocritus Idyll XI.36-7