Shen Yuan who transmigrates into what seems to be a fairly standard and generic isekai harem story (not one he's familiar with), and yet every time it seems like he might add a waifu to his harem, things veer off at the last minute and she either leaves or gets paired up with someone else.
Ning Yingying, initially reluctantly betrothed to him? Yeah she doesn't actually warm up to the idea of marrying him, even after they become friends, and still breaks off the engagement when he arranges the option for her instead of insisting that she's fallen in love with him.
Liu Mingyan and Sha Hualing fight over him? You'd think that would mean they both want him, but if he's not around they'll just pick another guy to fight over instead. He's starting to think it might not even be about the man at all!
Little Palace Mistress, stuck in her unwanted betrothal to Gongyi Xiao? Actually she warms up to her betrothed when Shen Yuan gets involved and ends up inviting him to the wedding, instead of dumping Gongyi Xiao to pine after him.
Qiu Haitang, who claims he's a dead-ringer for her long-lost fiance? Actually seems to genuinely not like him because of it! Not even in a tsundere way!
It's starting to hurt Shen Yuan's self-esteem a little, honestly. Not that he wants all these women necessarily but he knows the tropes, he can see quite plainly that he's in a situation where he should be building a harem, and yet for some reason it's just not coming together. The problem must be him, but he's also read/watched enough isekai to know that even some pretty rancid guys manage to accumulate harems. He doesn't think he's so bad that he should be failing this utterly! Is he?
He'd ask his good male friends (which he has accumulated many of on his journey, having helped a lot of them with their various problems, quests, emotional difficulties, revenge arcs or mysteries) what they think, but he has no idea how to frame the question without sounding either insane or utterly egotistical.
A three-circle venn-diagram where the circles are "sex workers", "the furry community", and "people working in morgues". I don't know what the overlap parts are.
Ultimately, she spent 20 hours redoing the copy from scratch — and with her $100-per-hour rate, that meant her client was shelling out $2,000 for copy that likely would have ended up being far cheaper had a human just written it in the first place.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
i have access to powers and locations that he cannot access independently; he needs my help to navigate the world i've brought him to
i simply found him outside and abducted him one day
there are many cats in the world, but this one is the best and my most favorite. why? because he was available to abduct that morning and for very little other reason.
i have a much greater understanding of this world than him, but he has unshakable confidence in his ability to figure it out and i find that really cute
the power dynamic is fundamentally unbalanced, but i let him have a little audacity. a little combativeness and sass. as a treat.
some humans are needlessly cruel to cats or take them in for a short time before neglecting or abandoning them. but i have chosen to love and guard this one with my life. because i think he's neat.
he is very well-treated and has pretty much everything he could possibly want or need, but he is my prisoner.
people who comment on fics just to say that they are re-reading and still cried/felt emotions/loved it are the greatest people on earth and should be given a thousand dollars.
addition: people who comment on fics to say that they are not even in this fandom and didn’t know the characters at all but read it anyway and loved it are also the greatest people on earth and should also be given a thousand dollars.
For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.
summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.
Examples:
summary: Bruce
summary: "Bruce Banner"
summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk
You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.
The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.
expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.
You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.
otp:true will return results where there is only 1 relationship tag on the fic. If you want results where there are 2+ relationship tags (and no fics with only 1 relationship tag) then you can use otp:false
This page is so beautiful and honestly I hope it reaches and helps any new people that are just starting out on Ao3 because it's helping me and I’ve been using the site for 5+ years now
I saw your tags @jackdaw-sprite and I figured I could offer you some help? You've got a few options to find fics that are actually about your fave who is often sidelined.
My own personal go-to is to use the Search Within Results filter. You can find the filters by clicking/tapping on any tag. If you're on a wide screen like a laptop, they'll be on the right hand side of the screen. If you're on a narrow screen like a phone, you'll need to press the Filters button at the top of the page to open up the menu.
In that menu, scroll down until you're near the bottom. That's where you can find the box labelled Search Within Results. In that box, you can type
summary: Renhardt OR summary: Rendog
When you filter for that result, you'll get 19 fics with that name mentioned in the summary, and if the name is in the summary you've got MUCH higher chances of them being central to the fic.
There's also a way to find fics with a tag in the X position. Fan coders have had this same issue, and so they've created userscripts that you can add to your web browser (like an extension). Here are a few that might be helpful for you to try:
AO3 Actually Relevant Characters - Sorts and highlights works based on how relevant the tagged character seems in the work's tags and summary.
AO3: Prioritise my Faves - Hide work if chosen tags are late in sequence, or if blacklisted tags are early
AO3 Secondary Character & Pairing Filter - Replaces works with placeholder if the tags you want aren't the first few tags, with option to show work.
Editing to add: this version of the post has a syntax error in it. To remove oneshots with a filter, use
Have you guys seen the Gojo vs Sukuna fanimation by fyemaj??
Really cool, oof. I had tears running down my face seeing Gojo's smiles during the fight, and then I cried more at "I shall never forget you for as long as I live."
I won't say much more so I don't spoil any neat things, but I will say that the Shoko moment really hit me hard too (you'll know when you see), and of course some Megumi moments as well.
I feel like fandom in general pretty desperately needs to reconcile the fact that characters can be both interesting characters and terrible fathers without one factor taking away from the other. And this does not just apply to biological or adopted fathers!
Like, that man being dad-coded is already debatable, but if he is dad-coded, it's absentee-or-outright-deranged-father-coded. And that's fine. Not every character needs to be a dad and the fact that fandom pigeonholes so many sucky or pathetic men (/lovingly) into one dad-shaped hole is frustrating.
The above is explaining three semantically similar statements with different connotations, in decreasing order of prevalence. In the early twenty-first century, native English speakers would understand the connotations implicitly, and would not need the detailed explanation of the above, which draws from the pattern.
In all cases, these statements serve as the prologue to some correction for a mistaken assumption, as explained above.
In the first case, the word "easy" is used to emphasize that the mistake is common, natural, and understandable, and that there is no shame for being mistaken on the given matter of topic. This is a very common turn of phrase.
In the second case, the word "tempting" is used to emphasize that the mistake is born out of some desirable motive. The biases that caused one to form the mistaken assumption as potentially sympathetic to the corrector. This is an less common, but known, turn of phrase, implying a harsher critique.
In the third case, the word "comforting" is used to emphasize that that the only reason someone is making an assumption is because they are coddling their own biases, even though any attempt at thinking things through would prove it irrational. It is the equivalent of accusing someone of sticking their head in the sand, like an allegorical ostrich. "Read for filth" is an idiomatic expression meaning to offer full, unfiltered criticism of something, ripping it apart. This is even less common to use, but the point would be understood as being a prelude to the harshest criticism of the three.
one time this nondescript guy came into my dunkin donuts and ordered a small black coffee with blueberry flavor shot, and for some reason that peculiar order stuck with me so much that when, seven months later, i saw him in the parking lot walking towards the door, i quickly made a small black coffee with blueberry flavor shot. he ordered it and i was already holding it.
i would describe his demeanor that second time as “incredulous”
it’s such a perfectly bonkers order because like, most unusual orders are maximalist and sugary but this one just combines the most basic drink with the most incongruous little add-on. it’s the order of a simple, regular man who has something wrong with him
this post always makes me laugh. this guy has the weirdest drink order and he probably never goes to this dunkin’ if it took seven months for the barista to see him again. so think about a coffee shop you go to so little you’re not even sure if you’ve gone there before and you walk in and the barista hands you the drink you were about to order before you even ordered it. he will remember that for the rest of his life
All I want is to find a codywan fic that is Clone Wars divergent. No Jedi Cody, no Mandalorian Obi-Wan, no Sith Obi-Wan, no pregnant Obi-Wan (why are there so many of those) just a normal, canon compliant fic. THERE HAS GOT TO BE AT LEAST ONE. WHY IS AO3 HIDING IT FROM ME
Hey, I've got a few! It's a mix of during the war and post-war (both happy fix-it variety and Somebody Lives/Not Everybody Dies variety).
One of my absolute favorites is Pave Your Way With Stones Well Chosen. Cody's chip gets turned off early post-Order 66 and he makes the most of it. This one REALLY stuck with me for how Obi-Wan handles Cody and his trauma and the introduction of feelings into all of it; I still think it's one of the best written scenes I've ever seen with both characters so so true to themselves.
Another one in the same vein is The Crime of Grief series (the concept of this one is a little harder to describe succinctly, but it's a Padme Lives AU where she, Obi-Wan, Rex, and Ahsoka stick together for a while after Order 66). The same author has a happy fix-it AU set post-war called Slices of Happiness. These are both technically Codexwan and a little more Anakin critical than some others.
|intricate rituals| is a very sweet pre-relationship fic set during the war. |no war to reach you, no bolt to keep you| is a happy fix-it AU, but it's one of my favorites for how aroace friendly it is (there are INTENSELY few aroace Codywan fics out there).
in our hearts some ancient song is a fix-it AU that actually focuses on how the fix-it happens as opposed to just looking at the pretty aftermath.
Layers is a sweet little look at their relationship during the war where Cody reflects a little.
And I always rec Put Color in Your Cheeks even though it's not TECHNICALLY Codywan as the primary romantic relationship. Cody and Obi-Wan are more accurately something akin to platonic soulmates of a sort, but both of them are in separate romantic relationships with other people at the same time. Cody and Obi-Wan's relationship is the central focus of the story, however, and I truly love the way this author characterizes both the characters and their relationship with each other, with all of their warts and foibles.
Lastly, for a slightly smuttier rec, I really like deep in your marrow.
Okay, I have time, so here are some more recent canon/canon-divergent Codywan fic recs from my bookmarks.
Making Room and Frivolous Little Things are similarly themed fics revolving around the idea of Cody figuring out the concept of owning things that mean something to him, starting with small mementos he picks up during the war and escalating from there. They're both very light and fluffy.
illicit affairs is about Rex's reaction to discovering Obi-Wan and Cody's relationship, focused on both the problematic elements to the relationship as well as the reasons why it might be worth pursuing anyway. I love an outside view on the relationship and the more nuanced discussion of their dynamic.
Your Smile in Stone is a Somebody Lives/Not Everybody Dies fix-it fic, focused more on the aftermath of it all and apparently inspired by a Tumblr post. Obviously some angst here from Order 66 still having happened and all of the repercussions that would've had, but it's a happy fic.
Lost my head again is another outsider look at Codywan, this time from the perspective of a random clone shiny in the 212th.
Good Man of War is similarly a fic from the perspective of a new soldier in the 212th, but it's less focused on the Codywan of it all and is more explicit about The Horrors of War aspect that they're all in.
acts of service is a slice of life fic looking at one night during the war where nothing AWFUL has happened but they're both pretty exhausted and mostly just taking pleasure in getting to be around each other for a little while. I really like the way they take care of each other (especially Obi-Wan taking care of Cody, it's unfortunately a little bit more rare amongst the Codywan fandom than the opposite) and communicate in this fic.
more woman than warrior is a fic set in a happy fix-it AU where Codywan are in a queerplatonic relationship and Cody starts to explore clothes and gender post-war.
the harvest of a lifetime (real bad tea) is another mostly slice of life fic set during the war wherein Cody lies to Obi-Wan about liking tea in order to spend more time with him.
Traveling at the Speed of Light is a fic where Obi-Wan catches feelings long before Cody and is a little pathetic about it, while Cody just kind-of deals. There's a subtext of aromantic or demiromantic Cody in this, so while he doesn't reciprocate Obi-Wan's feelings, he DOES respect and care about Obi-Wan. A little funny, a little sweet, worth a read for the different take on the dynamic.
Fate and Lull is more slice of life, but this time a tad more angsty as Obi-Wan and Cody are both injured from a recent campaign.
Don't forget to check out other works by all of these authors AND to look at their own bookmarks to see what they enjoyed reading to try to find more fics you might enjoy!
A Dusty Little Corner @the-clueless-kitten - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
