#dotsandfoxes

[guqin-and-flute]

Responses to nice fic comments [read more because of length] 😊

@giedd Ah, that’s a high compliment, thank you so much! I’m glad you liked it!

 @canghai-sangtian​ As a person who still does that occassionally (oops) I don’t think he will ever be able to fully shake that, especially since it’s kept him safe in many instances, poor guy. Yessss, the brotherly chest thumppp!! It hit me so clearly! 😁

@madtomedgar HO yes, for sure. I think the only thing that kept him from going straight to ‘Oh no, I have to leave right now immediately’ was the fact that it’s been a slow sort of crawl and there have been a lot of little bits of him going, ‘wait...am I allowed to enjoy this?’ because I reckon that this is a little over a year since he was first married. But if this had happened in the first few months? It probably would have been a total shut down and it would have been a while before he resurfaced again, emotionally or physically. 

Y E S. And, strangely, I get the feeling it’s going to be worse now that he’s been accepted. Like, at the beginning, if JC got pissed about something, he could be his regular diplomatic self and just accept that, hey, Jiang Wanyin is a little immature. But as soon as it’s at him? About something he did? After they said ‘hey we’re family’? He’s going to jump immediately to ‘oh great, knew this was fake and they actually hate me :) Perfect :) ' It will feel like immediate rejection and it will not be really detectable the first few times it happens because he’ll probably just cover for it so well that it looks like him dealing like it like he always has, but it will begin to compound. 

THANK YOU, I’M SO GLAD, I always try hard with that ;-;

@trickybonmot AH I’m glad it’s accurate! I’ve nannied before and there was a moment where I held this little newborn and was like ‘....oh god, one day, you’re going to die’ and it was Not A Great Feeling. 

@elenilote​ THANK YOUUU 😍

@dotsandfoxes I’m so glad that you liked it, thank you!!

@tenthcorner AHHH I would apologize, but that’s a big compliment, so I’ll just say THANKS 😁💜

@booksfoodmusic-minion​ Thank you so so muuhuhuch ;-; I can just see him thinking of love as being such a dangerous thing

[Are You Here to Stop Me fic replies]

@yellingintothelegalvoid HE’S GOT THIS, HELL YEAH! Ahh, I’m so glad you like it!!! More to come with this specific piece, and more besides, so please keep breathing 😂

@canghai-sangtian​ THANK YOU! Right??? He’s gonna be so good for them!

@gingersnapwolves​ SO HIGH TENSION, BUT HE’S MAKING DO!!

@sparklespiff​ There he go >:)

@madtomedgar This is NOT the first time he’s had to grab WWX and say ‘okay STOP for a second and explain it to me’ and it’s definitely not gonna be the last. He’s so smart and he’s gonna fix it!! Gogogo!

[akathecentimetre]

Ok, and a second prompt, straight from my historian heart: Obi-Wan in the Jedi archives.

He’d heard tell of Jedi who were so devoted to theirhistorical studies, and so advanced in the control of their bodies and minds –so connected to the Force, so tied to the idea that it manifested itself inknowledge and its collection and dissemination – that they remained in theTemple’s library for days, or even weeks on end. Some took advantage of their species’natural abilities to hibernate in the stacks, keeping only their minds voraciouslyactive while their bodies slumped into restorative sleep; others, not soblessed, lived on caf and protein bars, sneakily hiding their stashes from thelibrarians, making nests and homes out of particular dark corners while theirpiles of tomes grew ever higher around them, fencing them in.

Obi-Wan had never been one of those sorts of people,despite his own finely-honed skill of applying himself to a task, even if itwas imbibing the contents of a five hundred-year-old volume on the linguisticvariations of the Code, and seeing it through to the end. He had never quitetaken to the atmosphere of the place, the slight tendency towards obsession,and the frankly alarming ability to shut out the outside world. The dim lights,which he suspected were more for the sake of ambience than the preservation ofmaterial, gave him headaches; he had taken longer, on average, than hisclassmates to force himself through his reading or to comprehend the lecturesgiven by the staff on the Scroll of Whomever or the Map of Whatsit – though hewas also surprised to find that, when it came to it, he recalled more than hispeers about what it was they were supposed to have learned.

There were times, nonetheless, when the only thing thatcould quiet him, that could disperse the nervous energy that he never showed inword or action, was to walk the archives at night. Here, a book touched by someold master – here, a gem from a planet that no longer existed, swallowed by asupernova – here, a painting by the foremost master of Coruscant’s storied past– there, the journal of –

– he felt, in these moments, the weight of everything thathad been, and the certainty of what would become, and, in the midst of his never-endingwar, was comforted. And that was the best, most lasting sort of peace.

[gffa]

aifsaath replied to your photoset: Master and Apprentice | by Claudia Gray I DON’T...

Qui-Gon is a good man strangled by his own hubris. And on the issue of leeroy jenkinsing the slave situation: you do realize they’re essentially hostages. The moment anyone comes with the force at the slavers, it’s *slaves* who’re going to pay the price.

Qui-Gon is absolutely a good person, a moral person, who is getting strangled by idealizing his own ideals! And there’s a few further inconvenient truths about the situation:  Qui-Gon’s half-assed call to leeyroy jenkins it wouldn’t necessarily work, we know it doesn’t, because we’ve seen it in Star Wars already.  We’ve seen it in Claudia Gray’s books already!  The Rebellion overthrows the Empire and sets up the New Republic (which was after they tried to better the system and had hit the moral event horizon for the whole thing), the most leeroy jenkins thing they could do.  And there’s still slavery.  Leia walks right past an “indentured servant” in Bloodline and barely blinks, because the system hasn’t been changed and the public’s opinion hasn’t been changed. Not only are you right that the slaves are the ones who would pay the price in any faction coming at them in force (and would only be replaced, because it’s not actually solving the problem), not only does Qui-Gon ignore the reality of the numbers of the galaxy (the Jedi are 1 in something like 7 to 20 billion, no matter how good a Jedi is, there’s no way they can each stand up to a billion’s worth of people, they would absolutely get their asses kicked, along with they would lose any and all legal authority to help anyone else, they’d have to go rogue and given that we see the galaxy is willing to stand by and let their Temple burn and their children be murdered, I’m pretty sure everyone’s willing to turn on the Space X-Men on a dime)--but none of it would actually work. You have to change the system of oppression itself and you have to change the public masses, from top to bottom, you have to make it so that slavery isn’t tolerated by the majority of people, because otherwise it will just come back again and again and again.  And Bloodline shows us that already. dotsandfoxes said: 

I love your metas so much and this is a really smart take. A minor thing that really threw me was that Qui-Gon discovered the perpetuity clause in the treaty at the 11th hour. Like, seriously, no one else read it that closely? Or was versed in Pijali legal terminology? Where are the experts here, or is Qui-Gon supposed to be an expert in gov and law and trade policy in addition to being a space!Jesuit with a laser sword?

I think the book is on your side with this!  It’s mentioned that, yeah, no one else read it that closely, that Rael Averross was supposed to have read it that closely, but he became so attached to Princess Fanry that everything he was doing was only for her benefit and he was losing sight of the rest of Pijal.  I think they were all trusting him to give them a heads up if he needed help--which he does when it comes to the Opposition, but not when it comes to having actually paid attention to the treaty and how it wouldn’t benefit anyone but Fanry. Further complicating it was that nobody off-planet realized the power of the perpetuity clause, because it was cloaked in local metaphor that only people on Pijal would get, someone reading it on Coruscant would have no idea that it was a permanent clause instead of just fancy language, that they trusted the locals would advise them on any tricky stuff like this.  But everyone on Pijal is just sort of sticking their head in the sand about the truth of it, is tunnel-visioned about it, or possibly in on it/wants Czerka to have permanent rights.

[sethnakht]

DOCTOR APHRA #10, written by Kieron Gillen, pencils by Kev Walker, inks by Marc Deering, colors by Antonio Fabela

The thing about Aphra for me, I don’t know about you, but for me Aphra is always: what will she do and what won’t she do? You can never be quite sure what she will or won’t do. It’s these moments of horror when she’s going to do that awful thing and there’s also moments when oh no, she’s chosen not to do that thing. - Kieron Gillen (x)

[bomberqueen17]

dotsandfoxes replied to your post “I got yet another Hot Business Tip here on phone etiquette– if you get...”

Ohhhh, those calls are the worst. The "life story in lieu of actually explaining what you want and/or listening to me when I tell you why what you want is not possible" thing happens to me all the time when I'm working reference at the library too.

Calls, or in-person, it’s hard to say. We used to have a higher percentage of regulars who were into that. For a while one of the women who worked here was... I don’t know how to put it, but she was like, Constitutionally Unable not to have two-hour conversations with people, and she drew in the worst people who wanted to come in and talk to her for hours and basically get therapy from her and it was always ostensibly about photography in some way but really, mostly, it wasn’t? And it was fucking awful. She had stalkers. I mean for real, stalkers. It was bad. People would look for her car, would call just to see if she picked up (so we had to answer the phone for her, that kind of thing, sometimes we had to hide her in the back room and lie and say her car was here because her boyfriend had picked her up to take her out for lunch, that kind of shit). 

And she could never ever ever ever ever even say something like “my shift was over like an hour ago and i have to go” or “if I do not go do some work I will get fired” or “I promised i’d print an order by now so I have to go do it for when that customer gets back” or “I have to cover my coworker’s break now can we talk some other time” or, for the love of god, “it is inappropriate for you, a relative stranger, to tell me such things in a workplace environment” or “for the love of god, you should consult a professional therapist or possibly a priest about that, not a retail clerk”-- she couldn’t even ... like...  look disinterested, or anything, she couldn’t do it, she had to appear genuinely engaged all the time no matter what, it was fucking horrible, she was like, actively encouraging these people, even though the instant they were gone she was like fuck what a waste of my life and said horrible things about them. It gave me a Complex, I tell you what. (I absolutely know she did the same thing to me, feigned interest and encouraged me in conversation only to later tell others what a boring piece of shit I was-- I have receipts.)

She went nuts (when i say I have receipts...) and quit a few years back though, and so slowly most of those people have drifted away. Some of them continued to stalk her, though, which was goddamn terrifying. 

anyway.

One of the services we offer, there’s another local shop that does just that-- as it happens, 8mm film to DVD. And when I say local, I mean, like, a half a mile down the road. For years, we just outsourced ours to him, and marked it up, and it was fine and dandy and this was great, because as a more generalist shop we had a big market, and so he didn’t have to market much. But he got increasingly unstable and unreliable and would yell at us and just generally be really scary (oh, he stalked the woman I discussed above too, but only briefly, I’d forgotten about that). So we finally just bought our own machine and learned to do it, because we literally couldn’t rely on this guy and sort of feared for our lives, he was so extremely eccentric.

He’s still there. (He might be a money laundering operation of some kind because AFAIK nobody actually goes there. Occasionally a customer stumbles in and is like “who is that dude” and we’re like, sorry, don’t take it personally, we’ll just do the job, don’t worry.) His marketing materials-- he has a flyer he hands out, and right on it, in bold font, is emblazoned, “NO STORIES”. It says, and this isn’t a direct quote but I swear this is what it says, “just drop your shit off and don’t tell me about it! Just leave it, and I’ll get it done for you fast and cheap! But don’t fucking tell me about it! Tell me a story and I’ll throw you out, I mean it!”

It’s not in those words but it is, I’m not lying, that exact sentiment. And NO STORIES is a direct quote. (And the customers who stumble into us usually do have stories, and usually were actually thrown out for telling them, so it’s not hyperbole, he means it. He told one sweet old lady whose photos I’ve been printing for years to, verbatim, “go fuck herself”, which shocked her quite badly and I had to console her. She just wanted to know what kind of process he used! I was like, ma’am, I would fight him for you, but the law frowns on it. I mean it, she’s a harmless sweet old lady whose photos I’ve printed for years and she has never breathed an unkind thought in her life. She was delighted to discover this was a service we now offered.)

So, sometimes, as customers are talking, the others of us will mutter “No stories!” under our breath. 

This is why machines can’t take our jobs. Machines won’t listen to Mrs. Hattenschweiler’s fucking stories. Until they teach the machines to pretend (convincingly) to care, there will still be room for a few retail stores.

[forcearama]

@dotsandfoxes replied to your photo: Recurring Theme: Elevator Bromance Speak of the...

YASSSSSS SO EXCITED. You’re the best.

Too much niceness! My readers are, in fact, the actual best. ;) 

(Thank you! Happy reading!) 

[akathecentimetre]

Woooooot, happy birthday! 29 *is* a weird number, it's not just you. (I think it's the almost-there-but-not-quite-tipped-over-into-30 quality of it? Liminality, yo.)

Literally used the word liminal in talking about it with my sister yesterday, oh my god we are so over-educated. Thank you! :-D

[akathecentimetre]

For the favorite story ask: I have a huge soft spot for all your Star Wars fic featuring Obi-Wan Kenobi, but for this I have to nominate your 'Gentleman's Agreement' series because I'm in the middle of another semi-regular re-read of it, despite the fact that I've read *zero* of the original canon. Nightingale and Walid's relationship is so soothing. (Clearly I love cozy middle-aged magical domesticity)

*squeak* Thank you so much! Honestly, people who are able to read fic for canon they don’t know (and enjoy it) astound me. How does your brain do it and can you teach me how?

[I re-read the series myself recently and felt pretty good about it, SPEAKING OF I made it through the Big Scary Fuckoff Seminar Presentation and it went very well and I am also feeling very good about myself in general! Turnup for the books. And now I shall spend the rest of the week crashing so hard...]