[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'There's a petition to ban conversion therapy in the EU' to Cas' 'I love you'. /End ID]
If you are a citizen in the EU please sign this petition:
Genuinely I think one of the best things you can do to build characters in your story is give them a kink. You do not have to put that kink in the story. You do not have to tell anyone but yourself. But thinking about their wants and needs and what would bring them comfort or desire, about whether they crave power or crave a situation where they're blessedly free from any power, about which taboo they might kind of want to cross, is really useful for getting inside their head. Also "what situation would make my character stupid horny enough to make a terrible mistake?" is a good plotting device. "It's a plot hole that they made that dumb decision" no they were just whistling like a lustful kettle and forgot to turn their brain on.
Day 2 in the Middle School Time Loop: you remember that last time, everyone ignored you at recess because they were talking about a TV show that you hadn’t watched. This time, you lie and say you’ve seen it. They ask you who your favorite character is, and you don’t know any of the characters, and so you’re tongue-tied. They think you’re weirder than ever, or maybe a liar, which is worse (and true).
Day 3 in the Middle School Time Loop: you tell your parents that you feel ill. They let you stay home while they’re at work. You spend the whole day watching past episodes of the TV Show.
Day 4 in the Middle School Time Loop: Recess again. The same person asks you who your favorite character is. This time, you're ready. You eagerly tell them, and supplement your reasons for liking them with solid evidence from all 4 seasons of the show. But! Tough luck: you’re now too invested. The atmosphere turns uncomfortable. They go back to ignoring you like they did on the Day 1 that you didn’t know was Day 1.
Day 5 in the Middle School Time Loop:
You decide to try a different approach and update your style. You've noticed that Ashleigh, who’s blonde and constantly surrounded by friends, always wears pink stripey sneakers. You try wearing a pink dress. Someone says it’s cute, but you know from how they say it that it isn’t the good cute.
“I thought that pink was cool,” you protest, more to the uncaring universe than to anyone in particular.
Your interlocutor shrugs. “Maybe on someone else.”
Day 6 in the Middle School Time Loop: You keep your head down, but still surprise the teachers by somehow knowing the correct answers to every spontaneous question they throw out to the class. You study the outfits of your classmates more closely. You realize that it wasn’t the color, so much as the brand that made the difference. It proves the shoes were expensive. You note down Ashleigh's sneaker brand in smudgy ink on the back of your hand, and then after school you take half a year's saved-up allowance and buy a matching pair at the mall. Your mom raises her eyebrows but doesn’t stop you.
Day 7 in the Middle School Time Loop: Today you make it to lunch before anything major goes wrong. You think that the sneakers have protected you, and stare down at them lovingly, watching the Barbie-pink plastic stripes reflect the tube lights on the ceiling as you turn your feet this way and that. But then at lunch, Ashleigh comes up, arm and arm with a friend. Her eyes are a little pink, but only a little.
“Ashleigh wanted me to tell you that she’s really hurt that you copied her sneakers,” the friend informs you, nobly, as if it would be too unpleasant for Ashleigh to have to say this herself. Her mouth is solemn but her eyes are gleeful.
“I didn’t…” You start to deny it automatically, even though it’s true. And yet, something won’t let you apologize. Doesn’t she see your imitation for what it is: the most sincere compliment you know how to bestow? This is your Hail Mary.
As you meet her eyes, you realize she does know, but this only makes her despise you more.
“I think a lot of people have these sneakers,” you stammer, in the end, and they just sniff and turn away. You go back to eating your lunch alone.
Day 8 of the Middle School Time Loop: even though you do well in every class, you must be so much more stupid than your classmates, to be missing whatever detail it is that they seem to have caught. How do they do it so quickly? Before recess, before the end of homeroom, even, they all just know. You’ve had endless chances to do this day over and yet you never seem to be able to catch up with them. Running to stand still, you’ve heard your mother say, when she’s busy at work. That’s you. Running to stand still.
Day 9 of the Middle School Time Loop: you pretend to be sick again, and you realize that if you want to, you can pretend to be sick every day. It's easy to convince your parents: you look tired and unhappy, your eyes small within their dark circles, like some underground creature. You stop watching that TV Show that you never really wanted to watch in the first place, and instead dream your way through all your favourite childhood movies. Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli. You retreat into jewel-colored landscapes, where everyone is magical or beautiful or at least funny, and the heroes always win in the end.
Day 10 of the Middle School Time Loop: You notice that most of the Pixar heroes, the Disney princesses look more like Ashleigh than you. Long hair. Pale eyes. Button noses. And all of them, so thin.
Day 11 of the Middle School Time Loop: you go to school, but you don’t talk to anyone. You don’t even answer your name at roll call. Your teacher asks you if anything is wrong at school, or at home perhaps. You shake your head, but that evening you hear your father taking a call. You shrug off his worry: it’ll be forgotten tomorrow anyway.
Day 12 of the Middle School Time Loop: an unexpected development: your apathy almost seems to make your classmates like you more. When you say, truthfully, that you don’t care much for the TV Show that eternally dominates the recess chatter, some people look impressed. They ask you what you think is better. But you’re wise and don’t admit to liking anything. "Mysterious," someone says appreciatively.
At the end of recess, the girl who told you off for copying Ashleigh nudges you. “Hey. Look, Robert has an Up shirt. Kind of cute, that he’s still into that stuff, right?”
You know that it’s not the good cute.
You stare at her coldly. “The shirt just has a dog on it. It doesn't say he's from Up. So you must have liked the movie enough to remember him.”
She flushes scarlet, and hurries to catch up with Ashleigh, throwing you a dirty look. Robert glances at you gratefully but you don’t return his smile. He won’t remember that you did this for him. Anyway, you didn't, really. Do it for him, that is.
Day 13 of the Middle School Time Loop: You tell your parents you’re sick again. Today, you watch the second tier of Studio Ghibli movies, the ones that your parents always say, self-consciously, that you’ll find dull. Only Yesterday, Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There. You’re only a few minutes into Marnie when there’s a line that pulls you up short:
“In this world, there’s an invisible magic circle. There’s inside and outside. These people are inside. And I’m outside.”
The relief that washes over you is so profound that you almost cry, and then, when the movie's over, you do cry. Ugly sobs that make you sound like a toddler throwing a tantrum at the mall, that make your head pound with a dehydration headache. But behind the tears, there's relief. There it is, the truth that you were searching for, through all these do-overs. There’s an invisible magic circle. Of course there is.
But here’s the thing about circles: the inside is small. The outside is scary, and lonely, but it’s huge: huger than you could ever have imagined before you turned around and looked.
When your dad gets home, he asks if you’re feeling better. “Much,” you say, and it’s true.
Day ?? of the Middle School Time Loop: Sometimes you go to school, but ditch class and go to the library or the playground and do your own thing even if teachers yell at you. Sometimes you wander around the neighborhood. Sometimes you ask your parents crazy things, like to take you to work with them, or to the beach, or to DisneyWorld. Sometimes they say no. A surprising amount of times, they say yes. You wonder if maybe they’re trapped in a time loop too.
Sometimes you sit quietly in other classrooms than the one you’re meant to be in, until they shoo you out or even send you to the principal. (He finds you baffling. You feel a deep, slightly mournful affection for him, like you would for an very old and tired dog). It’s surprising, the amount of different things that are getting taught in one school in one day. It takes you a long time to work your way through them all.
You watch a frog getting dissected a few times before you start to feel bad and don’t go back to that classroom again. Your favorite class to crash is art, because the teacher always clocks that you’re not meant to be there but smiles and lets you stay anyway. When you meet her eyes, it feels like you’re sharing a secret.
Day One-Hundred And Something of the Middle School ...Wait.
At some point, time started moving again, and you didn’t even realize it.
For so long, the reprimands you received about your future seemed so empty, so laughable. There was no future. Only a more- or less-bearable present. But now, your classmates remember the unhinged things that you do; now, your teachers’ and parents’ worries about the future have the full juggernaut weight of reality behind them.
You thought that you’d be more terrified. For so long, you’ve dreaded this forward momentum. No loading screen, no mini-games, just one single, awful, pulsating life. But things are different now. Time’s moving again, and here you are, so far outside the invisible magic circle that you’re not even sure that you'd be able to see it any more. You can still feel its power, but faintly, like the pull between two magnets when they're an arm's length apart. Easy to ignore.
“Are you ready?” Robert says, catching your eye over the kitchen table. He comes here first thing so you can get the bus together. At some point, during the time loop, you started to seek him out. He was outside the circle, too, you realized. But even more importantly, not once, on any of those grimly looping days, did you see him try and push someone else out to make a space for himself. In this crab bucket, that’s something that counts for a lot.
“Our final day of middle school,” he sighs, half to himself. “Never thought I’d see it.”
"Me either," you reply, getting up to put on your talismanic pink sneakers. They’re scuffed and dirty after years of wear, and certainly Ashley would never be caught dead in them these days. Maybe that’s what you should have told her, all those loops ago: that no imitation, let alone one as unskilled as yours, can ever be perfect, and that indeed the very imperfection renders it an original work in its own right. Time and thought and human care transforms even the most diligent copy into something else entirely.
But you’ve been through enough time loops to know that that sort of explanation wouldn’t go over very well.
Many years ago, I was wandering around downtown Ottawa with my best friend. We ran into a friend of his who offered us some hash (it sucked), then said there was a really good house party nearby if we wanted to go. We were like, yeah, sure. So that’s how we ended up at some completely fucking random person’s house.
I look around to ask if my friend knows anyone here and he’s simply gone, as is his friend. And this isn’t some red solo cup hangout; this is a party. There’s people counting out pills on the kitchen counter. I am clearly neither as cool nor as drug-savvy as the kitchen people, so I back away and instead wander aimlessly into the living room, which seems to give off more of a chill vibe.
A bunch of people are seated in a circle on the floor. One of them is fiddling with a big wad of newspaper or something. A really cute grunge girl with piercings and tattoos scoots aside to make room for me, so I sit down.
“What’s that,” I ask her, gesturing at the newspaper wad.
She gets a really big smile on her face. You know the smile. It’s the I’m About To Watch This Innocent Soul Get High As Fuck smile. “You’ve never smoked a tulip?”
“What’s a tulip?” I ask.
“It’s like if a joint was also a bong,” she replies. “You gotta try it.”
“Alright,” I reply, a little uncertainly. This will not be my first encounter with weed. I am more comfortable with the janky newspaper bong than I am with whatever the fuck is going on in the kitchen. Besides, this girl is really cute and I would like to have a friend here now that my existing friend has turned into vapor or been transported to the Upside-Down or whatever the hell happened to him.
I watch as one person holds the newspaper joint-bong upright and holds a lighter over the top while another gets beneath it, tilting their head back to take a puff. Apparently smoking this Cheech & Chong monstrosity is a two-person job.
“Oh,” I say, looking at the fist-sized knob at the top of the wonky newspaper joint. “Yeah, it does kinda look like a tulip.” Grunge girl smiles at me.
I watch as the tulip is passed around the circle, along with the lighter, and hits are cooperatively taken. It reaches grunge girl, who takes a huge puff and holds it for an extended moment before exhaling an impressive blast of smoke. She smiles expectantly and holds the tulip up for me, preparing to spark the gigantic meteor of dank that makes up its tip. By this point I have completely forgotten about my missing friend. I only care about making a good impression on grunge girl. I tilt my head back and hit the tulip like a smokestack.
It is the following morning. I am sleeping between a couch and a wall. I’m not positive that this is the same house I was just in. My memories are gone. Someone is yelling at me: “dude! Dude! Wake up, dude!”
I sit up. My mouth tastes like cigarettes. I do not smoke cigarettes. “Wha,” I ask the yelling man, who I am quite confident I have never met before in my life.
“We’re going on a quest,” he tells me, gravely. “You have to come with us.”
I look around. Neither my friend nor his friend are anywhere in sight. I also do not see grunge girl anywhere. I shrug helplessly. “Okay.”
We embark from this house. I learn that the destination of this quest is Tim Horton’s. This is a relief to me, as coffee and a donut sounds really fucking good right now. Somehow, the route to Tim Horton’s takes us past the Governor-General’s residence, which everyone else in the group loudly heckles on the way past. I do not know what the Governor-General has done to raise their ire, nor do I particularly care. I trudge along with my hands in my pockets, pleased to note that I still have my wallet, phone, and keys. I fervently wish that I could remember anything about last night. Maybe I talked to grunge girl. Maybe she’s why my mouth tastes like cigarettes. The tulip tasted nothing like cigarettes.
I am asked about my politics. I voice my frustrations with corporate corruption, the pay-to-win electoral system, the lack of transparency and accountability. This is met with great approval. The guy who was yelling at me claps me on the back. I get the impression that we became friends last night. I don’t recognize his face. I do not know his name and he definitely does not know mine. I behave as though we’re friends anyway. We are comrades on a quest.
By the time we make it to Tim Hortons, the gaggle of stoners I’m walking with have all run out of energy and/or attention span. People order snacks and break away in pairs or solo, to call for rides or plan the day’s events or just vegetate and wait for the drugs to leave their systems. I look around and find that my nameless friend has also gone to the Upside-Down. As I wash the cigarette taste out of my mouth with coffee, I unsuccessfully try to remember whether I saw grunge girl smoking tobacco at any point. I remember nothing. That tulip was so fucking powerful that it instantly sent me a whole day forward in time.
Alone in the city, I try to call my best friend and get no answer. I walk to the nearest bus stop, catch a bus most of the way home, and call up my parents to ask for a ride back. They ask where my friend is. I tell them that I have no idea; we went to a house party and I don’t remember anything else.
When they pick me up from the bus station, they ask me some very safe, nonspecific questions, and seem to relax when I describe what little I can remember. It isn’t until years later that I realize they were probably terrified I’d gotten rufied or something, and were so relieved to learn otherwise that they didn’t even bother chiding me for smoking myself unconscious in an effort to impress a strange woman. In any case, they were probably happy to find out that I did, in fact, like girls; I suspect they had been privately wondering whether I was gay.
After getting home, I finally manage to get my best friend to answer his phone. I discover that he tried the kitchen pills, spent most of the night crossing the entire city on foot, and crashed at his cousin’s house. He sounds like shit. I tell him that he should have tried the tulip, instead. He fervently agrees with me.
I never see grunge girl again.
That’s okay, though. She got to see a clueless stranger get fucked the entire way up on some ungodly strain of giga-weed, and I got smiled at by a cute girl, and then I got to go on a quest. Wherever grunge girl is, I hope she’s happy. I hope she’s smoking the fattest fucking blunt and smiling as some kid passes out behind a couch.
Anyway, my parents were right about me not being straight. A couple of years later, while walking out of the bank, I passed a tired-looking grimy young construction worker with dirty blonde hair and bright blue eyes as he went in, and I actually stumbled and turned to stare after him over my shoulder because my heart had straight up skipped a beat. Guy was hauntingly, harrowingly cute. I didn’t even have time for denial. It was just “????? I guess? I’m bisexual??”
Like, right in that moment, I knew without question that I absolutely would have let that guy rail me bareback. I went from straight to queer as hell in the blink of an eye. Cannot stress enough how gorgeous this dude was, grime and exhaustion notwithstanding.
Anyway that experience fucked up my sexual wiring and that’s why I get funny feelings when I watch Tom Hardy play Max in Mad Max: Fury Road because he’s a) cute, b) tired, and c) dirty.
Or: why Sam has more guns, but Dean is the better shot
So I can’t find much proper meta about the weapons (and even the SPN wiki was making mistakes.) But I think there’s a goldmine of good character stuff here. Ryan Steacy has been the SPN armorer since the beginning of the show, and he’s put some really nice thought into the boys. Respect, love, appreciation for him.
So… I’ll just jump right in, shall I?
Dean’s M1911A1
Dean carries the baddass American pistol. It’s very macho, very MURICA. The 1911 was the service gun during WWI & WWII, right up through the Korean war. So it gets (and deserves) a lot of love. They have a reputation for needing more maintenance than some modern pistols, but considering how often Dean’s just sitting there, casually cleaning while chatting with Sam, he probably sees this as more a feature than a bug. He’s a natural mechanic. Firearm maintenance is probably relaxing and zen for him.
(I do think that for Sam it’s more a stressed-based compulsion. He tends to do it when he’s feeling helpless or scared. In “Hello, Cruel World” Dean interprets Sam’s gun-cleaning as sign that he’s in a bad headspace.
BOBBY: Well, at least he’s not curled up under the sink.
DEAN: Yeah, no, he’s just sitting there silently field stripping his weapon.
And Hallucination!Lucifer sees it as evidence that Sam’s suicidal. Sam goes for a more traditionally low-maintenance pistol, and I kinda think Dean may clean it for him a lot of the time.)
But anyway. Dean’s 1911 holds large .45 caliber Colt ACP rounds - which means it can only fire seven shots before he has to reload. (Sam’s pistol, by the way, can fire seventeen shots in a row.)
And people who like the 1911 say this is fine. The bullets are so big and the gun is so powerful that seven shots is all you need. (You hear the phrase “stopping power” or “knock-down power” a lot.) But there are also the people who think that the 1911 is just over-powerful, and it isn’t worth it to sacrifice carrying capacity and accuracy for pure force.
Because yeah, it is harder to be a really good shot when you’re using .45 ACP rounds. Target shooting teachers will probably start you off with baby .22mm bullets, then slowly move you up to something bigger (bigger bullets = slower bullets = less accurate bullets. Also more recoil, which makes everything harder.) This guy is kind of intense, but puts it well when he says “every step up the caliber ladder means another round of very serious training.”
But hey, Dean is a better shot than Sam
Like, I don’t think it’s ever explicitly stated, but of course he is?
Their entire childhood, it would have been Sam going back to the motel room early to study or do his homework, while Dean dutifully puts in another three hours shooting coke cans off fenceposts.
This also helps explain his choice of handgun. Dean uses a less accurate pistol with a smaller carrying capacity because he can. He knows he’s going to hit the thing the first time. And if he’s going to be fighting literal wendigos, I guess he wants the holes he pokes in them to be as big as possible.
(plus all this classic Americana does kind of go with the Impala)
Sams’ Taurus PT92AFS
Sam spends the first season borrowing Dean’s Smith & Wesson 5906. It’s very clearly Dean’s - it fires .45 ACP rounds (Dean’s preference) and Dean sometimes actually loads it before handing it over to Sam. Since Sam doesn’t actually want to be a hunter though most of S1, this makes perfect sense.
Then in S2, Sam gets his Taurus PT92AFS – basically, a budget version of the Beretta M92. In a lot of ways, the Taurus is the souped-up Honda civic you get when you can’t afford a Ferrari. (and in both cases, you’ll totally get people saying they’re being smart by not paying extra for the brand name.)
A Taurus PT92AFS is a practical and cautious choice. It’s not the least bit flashy. It’s light and accurate, it carries a lot of rounds, and they’re little 9mm rounds, which are more budget conscious and accurate than .45 ACP rounds.
Partway into S2, Sam’s Taurus gets nickel plating and pearl grip. Possibly Sam did this so his gun would match Dean’s. Or possibly Dean customized Sam’s pistol as a gift. (it’s the firearm equivalent of painting racing stripes on your car.) Either way, it’s a pretty darn cute touch.
Sam’s Taurus Judge (his “witch killer”)
“For an unknown reason, Sam appears to prefer using this gun for firing witch-killing bullets rather than loading his regular pistol with them. In contrast, Dean uses his Colt M1911A1 for witch-killing bullets rather than employing a similar practice.”
@supernaturalwiki, it’s because the witch-killing bullets Sam makes are .45 ACP, not 9mm. They wouldn’t fit in Sam’s normal Taurus PT92AFS. He makes them for Dean, so of course he makes them in a caliber that Dean prefers.
Sam’s Taurus Judge is a close-quarters backup piece that fires five shots. This is just in case Dean (the better shot) isn’t able to take out the main threat. Hilariously, the Judge is a revolver that chambers both .45 ACP rounds and shotgun shells. This means Sam can load it up with rock-salt shells or witch-killing bullets or silver bullets. So you know. Whatever’s on the menu that day.
Soulless!Sam’s Heckler & Koch Mk23
Sam switches over to this when he loses his soul, then switches back to his Taurus products when he gets his soul back. When Soulless!Sam and Sam!Sam fight in their vision quest, they fight Heckler & Koch vs Taurus.
The Heckler & Koch Mk23 is designed to have the power of Dean’s 1911 and the carrying capacity of Sam’s 9mm handgun. So it’s huge, and very intimidating. It’s waterproof, crazy durable. It’s made by a fancy schmancy German defense contractor known for their precision engineering and their popularity with the special forces. H&K weapons are also known for being crazy expensive. This pistol would have set Sam back at least $2,000 (and for reference, you can get a Taurus PT92AFS for $500, easy.) So, either Soulless!Sam killed someone with a Mk23 and looted it, or somehow raised 2K very quickly. And I’m not even sure which option is more terrifying.
But the Mk23 still has that vibe of practicality and caution that Sam seems drawn too. (’Over-prepared’ is a good word to describe it.) It’s still an in-character choice. Just, Soulless!Sam is more brusque and intimidating when he’s dealing with persons of interest, as opposed to Sam!Sam’s softer, more approachable manner. And I think those two attitudes are pretty well represented by the H&K Mk23 and the Taurus PT92AFS respectively.
Interestingly, the H&K Mk23 does not fire Sam’s normal 9mm bullets. It fires the larger .45 ACP caliber rounds. And Soulless!Sam can get away with this because - I’m pretty sure Soulless!Sam is a much better shot than Sam!Sam.
SAM: Ever since I came back, I am a better hunter than I’ve ever been! Nothing scares me anymore. ‘Cause I can’t feel it.
Like again, why wouldn’t he be? Soulless!Sam is ice cold, steady heartbeat in a crisis. Marksmanship is a mental thing as much as it’s practice, and Soulless!Sam’s hands aren’t shaking. And that’s why he eventually switches back to his Taurus PT92AFS. It doesn’t matter if your shots are more powerful, if they don’t hit anything.
(he still does have that H&K Mk23, though. He cleans it when he’s in a bad mental place. It’s not like he borrowed it from the Campbells or anything.)
tl;dr
Dean uses big slow American bullets, because he’s a good enough shot to compensate. Sam uses little, accurate European bullets, and he uses a lot of them (because he’s cautious, and not quite as good as shot as his brother.) The witch-killing bullets Sam makes are a larger caliber, because he makes them for Dean. He’s got a little revolver that can take them, but he’d prefer it if he didn’t have to use it so much.
Soulless!Sam is both a better shot, and not adverse to giant expensive German handguns acquired though less-than-legal means. So he switches over to a pistol that shoots giant bullets, and lots of them.
(Also, disclaimer: I do not pretend to be a firearm expert. I’m just here to have fun.)
#how fucked up#is this part#Like EVEN STEVE ROGERS thinks this is a Bad Idea#he does not want to do this thing#He’s liTERaLLY doing it with a gun to his head#he even tries to make himself slow down by falling with his arms and legs out#And his shield flat side up#Like yeah Steve I bet that five second of air resistance definitely helped slow down from terminal velocity#A for effort honey#And then he makes himself as small as possible to get through the atrium roof#also GOOD AIM BB because hitting a steel girder going 50-70 meters per second -aka A HUNDRED ODD MILES PER HOUR- would sting a bit#And then he slams down into a fucking marble floor#no fucking wonder Sitwell is in shock#EVEN STEVE IS LIKE#WOW THAT WORKED#MR JUMP OUT OF A FU KING JET WITH NO CHUTE#THOUGHT THIS WAS A BAD IDEA#fucking steve rogers#*muffled screams of horror from bucky barnes in the distance*#I would shoot a rocket at you too after that shit#steve rogers is also a problem
‘Fuck around and find out’ is a thing Steve Rogers says to himself in moments of deadly peril, but he doesnt mean it as a threat. It’s a lil’ pep talk, and he gets some of his best ideas from that.
I’m noticing an increase in new fic writers on AO3 who…uh…mayy not know how to format their fics correctly..so here is a quick and VERY important tip
Using a random fic of mine as example..
The left example: ✅✅✅
The right example: ❌❌❌
Idk how many times I’ve read a good fic summary and been so excited to read before clicking on it and being met with an ugly wall of text. When I see a huge text brick with zero full line breaks my eyes blur and I just siiiigh bc either I click out immediately or I grin and bear it…it’s insufferable!
If a new character speaks, you need a line break. If you notice a paragraph is becoming too large, go ahead and make a line break and/or maybe reconfigure the paragraph to flow better. I’m not a pro writer or even a huge fic writer but…please…ty…
This is a good thing to keep in mind! It is often and unfortunate that a really good fic doesn’t get love because its formatting makes it too difficult to read!
Hey pro tip if this isn't your fault, if you have typed it into a word processor, usually a mobile one, with the spaces and it stripped them, the fastest way I know of to fix it on Android is to use Gboard and paste it from here
Also you can investigate the rich text option on the AO3 interface, but I don't actually use it
It is really annoying when people don't add breaks or add breaks that are much too large, but there has been a problem for a while of people not meaning to.
If you use Google Docs, the AO3 formatting script is a lifesaver. I started using it ages ago and have not looked back since. (Linking to a Reddit post because I'm not going to send you direct to a random Google Doc. You'll get occasional warnings from Google about whether you really want to let it read your shit in GDocs, but it's safe.)
Make a copy and put it in your own GDrive. When you're ready to upload, paste all that shit into the doc and ask it to format the text for you. It handles everything I've thrown at it, including blockquotes and strikethroughs.
If for some reason you need to de-HTML your text, it will do that too!
Please note that things get particularly weird when people confuse line breaks and paragraph breaks.
In your word processor, whether google docs or anything else, if you hold shift while you hit the enter key, you get a line break. This puts you on the next line but does not put a space between the paragraphs. Useful for poetry or lyrics, LOUSY for easy formatting of text.
If you simply hit enter but don't hold the shift button at the same time, you get a paragraph break.
Now, some sites will automatically turn line breaks into paragraph breaks, and some sites will not. Sometimes you get line breaks in notes sections being converted to paragraph breaks while line breaks in the story are not.
Sometimes to compensate, people will use two line breaks in place of one paragraph break. This is a Bad Habit to get into.
AO3 naturally puts a space after every paragraph break in the body of a story. It does not do that after line breaks. This is normal and expected behavior, because there is a style convention for online materials to have space between paragraphs (AND NO INDENTED FIRST LINE) because things are easiest to read that way, and online, page real estate isn't an issue.
In print, to distinguish between paragraphs, there are NOT generally extra spaces between them in prose, just indented first lines. This saves paper and preserves readability. You DO need to indent first lines when you are laying out large blocks of text for print. But extra spacing should be preserved for scene breaks, for example.
IF you get in the habit of using paragraph breaks in your word processor, and only one per paragraph, it will help in two ways.
AO3 will correctly insert a small space between each paragraph.
You won't accidentally double-space your stuff and end up with giant gaps.
If someone makes a printed book out of something you write, it will save them hassles in the layout stage because we can tell a word processor or layout program or website to handle text differently without needing the body of the text to change to get the end result we want.
I set up a blank doc years ago for my own use formatted roughly the way AO3 does things, fonts, line spacing, style settings, all of it, and then set that as my google docs default. Which gets me a lot closer to 'what you see is what you get' (wysiwyg, pronounced whizzy-wig) and a lot less likely to reflexively double paragraph. Now if I hit a paragraph and it's not properly spaced, wherever I am, I go check my settings.
The exception is facebook, where often hitting enter will post and using double line breaks is the only way to do multiple paragraphs reasonably, because facebook.
Idk about anyone else here but personally...yeah? Thats why I reblogged it? I was extremely aware when that the extremely attractive man crushing fruit with his bulging muscles and getting extremely messy and wet in his slutty tanktop and workout shorts was meant to be sexual. I reblogged it because it was horny.
This is the moment Derek realises Stiles is more than just the annoying kid with the buzzcut. Realises he's more than just hyper-babbling and inherent sarcasm. More than just Scott's best friend. Much more than just 'some human'.
Yeah, of course Derek could see Stiles's pretty right from the start—that snub nose and those cheekbones and the mole constellations fanning out across milky way skin—but right here, now, he sees more.
He sees Stiles's sharp mind, a whirring wheel spinning gold for the Pack; puzzle-solving and churning out sollutions like a fucking Ideas Factory. Derek can suddenly see how much Stiles cares, maybe even sees parts of himself, there... just a kid, broken by loss and no longer really a kid at all. Someone craving answers. Someone craving connections.
Craving a connection.
Yeah, this is it alright.
This is where Derek sees Stiles as Pack.
But also, so, so, so much more than that: This is where Derek falls harder than he's ever fallen before. Harder than with Paige or Kate. Harder than a rock in a stream. Right here and now, in this exact moment is where Derek Hale falls for Stiles Stilinski like a meteor—like nature, fierce and inevitable.
Friendly reminder as we head into tax season (for US Americans), that the major tax preparation companies are fully prepared to lie and mislead you into paying for their tax preparation software when you might qualify for free software through the IRS.
Don’t fall for their bullshit. Visit IRS Free File and see what services are available to you. The requirements vary depending on your household status and income, but if you make less than $79,000/year (which is nearly everyone I know), you probably qualify for something.
Even if you don't qualify for free the IRS fee is often more affordable. And if you get some small thing wrong they'll just send it back and tell you to fix it. My mother uses the IRS tool and messed it up 3 times one year and they didn't raise hell about it just had her fix it.
I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.
dude.
$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.
"In the instance an employer makes an illegal request for a photograph as part of a job application, you may submit a complaint to the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission." Successful violation fee collections are paid partially to the one who suffered the violation, which in many cases exceeds a year of work at these shit jobs. There's only two weak points to a corporation, and those are in the budget and in the supply chain. Hit them where it hurts.
Look y'all, this reveal means so much to me. So many times in movies these days there are big reveals for the audience’s benefit that mean absolutely nothing in the context of the story or to the characters in it. I’m talking the Thanos cameo in the Avengers’ stinger, I’m talking Benedict CumberKhan in Star Trek, I’m talking about every hackneyed “This character is actually this other character” when in universe nobody knows nor cares about their true identity.
But here? This reveal? This is a Big Reveal for us, Peter B Parker, and Miles, all on different levels. We and Peter both know Doc Ock is a portly dude, not a woman. We know the name Octavius… Otto Octavius. But when she says her name is Olivia Octavius we’re clued in to the fact that Doctor Octopus is a woman in this universe. And she has Peter captive.
Miles, if he was paying attention in science class earlier in the movie, would have known her name was Olivia Octavius, but that doesn’t mean anything to him, why would it? Liv has apparently been very good about keeping her supervillainy a secret. She’s in educational videos shown in high-schools. So to Miles, the reveal here is this scientist lady, who he knew enough about to know was the head scientist at Alchemax, is a supervillain. He gets the reveal a second or two after Peter.
And the movie? It was dropping hints the entire time, confident in our expectations blinding is to the truth. Olivia’s name was partially visible when Miles got to science class. Her glasses are octagonal. The lights in her lab are octagonal. We know she’s working with the Kingpin. Why wouldn’t she be a supervillain? Because she’s hot? Hell, Peter even says he needs to reexamine his internal biases. Maybe he was telling us that we should too.
It’s a reveal for us, and for our heroes. It means something, both in-universe and out. And that makes it infinitely better than other similar reveals.
Imagine you’re heading into a lab belonging to world famous children’s educator slash scientist Bill Nye’s place of work to help your midle-aged interdimensional dumb uncle-figure back to his own dimension only to lose track of him and find out that in His universe there’s a wanted criminal slash domestic terrorist named Beatrice Elizabeth Nye who tried to bone his aunt, and also Bill Nye is their cosmic parallel who is also, surprise! Secretly evil and has probably already boned his aunt
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