Pat🐺 @pattywonder10 - Tumblr Blog

herc0mbat

more minecraft steve jason bro doodles

genetakavics

BOB ODENKIRK as JIMMY MCGILL

Better Call Saul (2015-2022)

rhoadkill

Look at my lawyer Dawgggggg I’m goin to jail😫🤯🤣

barrintegrity

he's got maggots for brain when his baby goes away

#whiplash #whiplash 2014 #andrew neiman #terrance fletcher

kkthanks

Ignacio’s face reacting to this car will never not be my favorite thing.

rovingotter

Many times, I've heard people say "I hated John Walker in TFATWS but in Thunderbolts he kind of won me over." I had the opposite journey. Thunderbolts was my introduction to him, and I came away kind of meh about him as a character. Then I went back and watched TFATWS and I was like "oh he's actually pretty interesting."

(spoilers, btw)

Some Walker fans feel he was done dirty by that show but I think TFATWS did John perfectly, actually? Like possibly I'm wrong and the writers just wanted us to despise him from start to finish but I felt the show handled him and all its other characters with a good degree of nuance and groundedness. John is obviously not the hero, but I never got the impression we were meant to see him as a straightforward villain. One review put it something like, "Steve Rogers was chosen because he was a good man, John was chosen because he was a good soldier." And yes him being a blond, blue-eyed white guy was probably a factor in the government's decision as well.

He can't be Captain America. He's too thin-skinned, too volatile. Even before The Incident, that shows. Like, he shoves some guy against a wall for spitting in his face.

(And yeah, Sam and Bucky make some morally questionable choices too, like freeing Zemo, but those were done with an eye toward their goals, a calculated risk, rather than just losing their shit.)

John's instability is also part of what makes him interesting as a character, but in the end John himself has realized that he's not Captain America material. That's his arch. He gets out of Sam's way and finds something else. He's been dishonored and stained but in the end he accepts that, too; he's figured out that down in the dirt is where he does his best work.

I like that he doesn't get a straightforward redemption arch in Thunderbolts. I don't think that would feel fitting. He's the same guy. He was gray in TFATWS and he's still gray. Now he's with other gray characters. (And yes they are all gray; Yelena is not morally accountable for the things she did as a child or under mind control but she is responsible for what she did as an adult, which included killing civilians, covering up evidence of Val's crimes, etc.) He's found his niche in the ecosystem.

As I talked about in an earlier post I do kinda hope that future Marvel movies grapple with his past more, particularly in regards to his relationship with Sam and Bucky, because there is so much dramatic potential there. But I'm satisfied with how both his incarnations were handled.

trainer-from-unova

lovvedaggers

the depressed woman pulling the man from the literal void of darkness and despair...

beybuniki

horikoshi was writing a good story but then he suddenly got really horny for endeavor for some reason i think the story would have worked much better had he died in the war arc as originally planned

hori when he drew ch.291 and noticed endeavor is kinda sexy from some angles

ofduskanddreams

How I download fics and give them covers before sending them to my Kindle.

Hi all, I've been considering making a post about this for a while and now seems as good a time as any. I'm not an expert, and there is more than one way you can do this; I'm just going to show you my process using "Call It What You Want To" by @separatist-apologist as an example. [This will only work on computers FYI.]

Part One — Getting Started

Download Calibre (it's free.) Calibre for PC. Calibre for Mac. They also have it for Linux but idk if that's still relevant.

Follow the program's setup instructions, and then those for wirelessly connecting Calibre with your Kindle account. Alternatively, you can connect your Kindle/e-reader to your computer with a cable and transfer files manually or download the file to your hard drive and share it another way. I highly recommend taking a few extra minutes to set up the wireless sharing as I think it's far more convenient.

Create a folder in which to store fanfiction downloads so that you can be an organized human.

Part Two — The Fanfiction

Find the fic you want to download on ao3 and click it so that you're on the fic's first page.

Above the box of metadata (ratings, warning, tags, etc.) on the far right click the "download" option. When prompted to select a file type, choose "MOBI."

Note: Though ao3 has an "EPUB" option I've noticed a bug that removes the chapter navigation from the fic when downloading the EPUB directly from ao3. If you enjoy the "x minutes left in this chapter/book" feature on your e-reader, you will want to download "MOBI" and we will be converting it later in Calibre.

Save the file to the folder you created.

Launch Calibre if it isn't already running.

In Calibre, click "add books" on the toolbar at the top of the screen.

Navigate to the folder you saved the fic in, select the fic, then click "open." Calibre will import the MOBI file to your library.

Now as you can see, "Call It What You Want To" already has a cover when we imported it to the library. That is because the cover image is embedded in the fic on the archive. Some fics will already have covers embedded such as this one.

Calibre is not a genius. If there are multiple images in the fic it will usually take the first one and default it to the cover. In the next section, I will go over how to add/change the cover of a fic in Calibre and how I like to create them.

Note: Even if the fic doesn't have embedded images, covers may have been made by readers and linked to the fic either in the notes or related works sections so it's worth checking if a cover already exists. If a fic is popular enough, a Google search of the fic's title + "cover" or "cover art" will show you if there have been covers already created for it.

Part Three — Making The Cover (I use Canva)

On the Canva homepage click "create a design" then select the "custom size" option. Canva does have a book cover template but I've found that it's awkwardly tall compared to the default size for Kindle books so I make my own.

I set the dimensions of the design to be 1024 pixels wide, and 1600 pixels tall, then click "create new design."

This is where you can get creative, make whatever you want. These basic steps are shown in a gif at the bottom of the section:

One: Choose a background image (you'll want to make sure it's a high enough quality that it won't be pixelated.) I used an image I had already uploaded into Canva, but you can use whatever you would like.

Two: On the sidebar, select "elements" and then "rectangle."

Three: Make sure the rectangle covers the whole design, then change the color. I like using the colors from the photo that Canva suggests and then making them a darker shade. Once you have the color that you want, reduce the transparency of the rectangle to anywhere between 40-50%. (This step ensures that the text we put on top of the image is easily legible, play around with it a bit.)

Four: On the sidebar, select "text" and then "add a text box." Then type in the author's username and change the font, the color, and the size until you like it. Repeat the same steps for the fic's title. I like to center the title on the page and put the author toward the bottom but that's just my preference.

Once your cover looks the way you want it to, click "share" at the top right and follow the steps to download the file as a PNG. I usually just save the image to my desktop so I can grab it easily once I'm in Calibre.

Part Four — Adding the Cover in Calibre

In your Calibre library, hover over the fic and right-click. Then hover over "edit metadata" and click "edit metadata individually."

On the "edit metadata" screen, find the section that says "change cover" and click "browse."

When the file upload dialog box appears, navigate to the PNG you just saved from Canva, select it, and click "open." This will add your cover to the fic. You can use these same steps to add any cover image that you've saved to your computer.

Make sure to click "ok" at the bottom of the screen to save your new cover and navigate back to the library page.

Part Five — Converting to EPUB

In your Calibre library, select the fic and then click "convert books" on the toolbar. At the top right of the converting screen, set the "output format" to "EPUB."

Now, the following steps are unnecessary little things I do to make my reading experience more seamless.

Click "Look & Feel" on the left sidebar. Under the "fonts" tab, I embed the "Georgia" font family. I do this because I prefer reading in Georgia which is not a default option on my PaperWhite*. I have my Calibre conversion settings in place to do this automatically. You can embed any font that you have on your computer.

*It might just be me, but when opening a downloaded fic (following the methods in this post) for the first time on my Kindle the font is always weird. The trick to fix it is to go and change the font from whatever is selected (Baskerville in my case) to "publisher's font" and then I've found that switching it back to "Baskerville" on the font selection screen activates the embedded Georgia... even though it will say that it's Baskerville? Idk why this is, I just wanted to let you know how I fix it.

Calibre defaults to a justified text alignment unless you change the default settings. This appears as "original" in the alignment options. The random too-large spaces between words of a justified alignment give me the ick so to make everything left aligned, I stay on the "look & feel" page but move to the "text" tab where I can change the alignment.

Staying on "look & feel," move to the "layout" tab. To ensure even paragraph spacing regardless of how it appeared on the archive, I select both the "remove spaces between paragraphs" and "insert blank line between paragraphs" options.

On this page, you can also change the indent size of the first line of every paragraph (highlighted pink,) and the size of the blank lines Calibre will insert between paragraphs upon conversion (highlighted green.) I set the indent to 0.0 and leave the line size 0.5 which is the default.

The last thing I do is go to "EPUB output" on the left sidebar and check the box labeled "insert inline table of contents." This just means that Calibre will add a table of contents to the beginning of the EPUB. (By default it puts the TOC at the end which I don't like.)

When everything is set as you'd like it, click "ok" on the bottom right and Calibre will convert the MOBI file you downloaded from ao3 to an EPUB containing the settings we just changed. Both file types will appear in your library when you click on the fic and scroll within the right-side window. I usually delete the MOBI format after I have the EPUB because I don't need it any longer.

And you've done it! Now all you have to do is either right-click and share it to your Kindle, or you can "save to disk" and download the EPUB file to transfer to your e-reader by a method of your choosing.

I hope someone finds this marginally helpful. In truth, I was just bored so I made this post but in light of the recent DDoS attacks against ao3, I think everyone should look into downloading their favorites so that you're never left out in the cold again.

Happy fanfic downloading <3