"Nah, I'm Enjoying A Natural Wind Tunnel Ride!"

(source)

Unsplash -  photography, illustration, and art

Pixabay - same as unsplash

Pexels - stock photos and videos

Stockvault.net - stock photos

freepngimg - icons, pictures and clipart

Veceezy - vectors and clipart

Kissclipart and kissPNG - more vectors and clipart (often transparent!)

Getdrawings - simplistic images and drawing tutorials

Gumroad - photoshop brushes (and more)

Canva - needs login but has lots of templates

Library of Congress - historical posters and photos

NASA - you guessed it

Creative Commons - all kinds of stuff, homie

Even Adobe has some free images

There are so many ways to make moodboards, bookcovers, and icons without infringing copyright! As artists, authors, and other creatives, we need to be especially careful not to use someone else’s work and pass it off as our own. 

Please add on if you know any more sites for free images <3

Alternate version “Secrets” cover w/solid background for -ECRET-.

Remus Lupin's name is a sad joke, indeed. Especially if *cough* <i>Fenrir Greyback</i> targeted him out of black humor, which seems plausible, assuming he happened to hear the boy Remus's name.

But ... it's theorized that people often DO choose careers or hobbies related to their name [because the name got them interested]. Look up nominative determinism (plus aptronym, though that doesn't imply causality).

How JK Rowling's Overly Obvious Naming of her Characters Creates a World of Unimaginable Horror

So Latin in Harry Potter seems to be super important. It tells magic what to do and how to act. Accio is derived from accerso which means to summon so when you say it your magic goes and gets the thing you want, lumos is derived from lumen which means light sp your magic becomes light ect.

But it’s not just spells that Rowling uses Latin for but also names. Remus Lupin who’s named after a man raised by a wolf and has the last name meaning “grey wolf”, Severus translates directly to “harsh” or “severe”. Albus translates to “white”, Bellatrix translates to “warrior” and so on.

It’s a bit of a coincidence that they all somehow managed to become a person perfectly summed up by their name. So what if just like with spells magic just did what it was told but with names.

Severus’ magic mum calls him Severus and magic makes him more severe, Bellatrix’s magic family calls her Bellatrix and she becomes more of a fighter, Albus is called Albus and he becomes a figure of purity and goodness, Sirius becomes more like a dog just as the star he’s named after is the Dog Star, Minerva McGonagall named after the goddess of wisdom is wise, Pomona Sprout who’s name comes from the Latin word for fruit becomes the herbology professor. Draco meaning dragon or serpent is a Slytherin through and through. And then poor Remus Lupin who seems to just have his fate magically decided for him, his name creating a prophecy that must be fulfilled.

Hell its not even just the Latin names that magic seems to work with. Malfoy is derived from the word Mal meaning evil and Foi meaning belief from Old French, the Ancient and Noble House of Black is associated with darkness, Sybill Trelawney has a name derived from the sibyls of Ancient Greece who were oracles, Argus is the mythical watchman with 100 eyes much like Argus Filch is the watchman of the castle who sees everything, Rubeus Hagrid in Old English basically means red faced drunk.

Each name with magic behind it pushes the person into a representation of it. So yeah let’s face it JK Rowling probably just wanted to “hide” some meaning in the names that hint about their character but the scarily accurate names could imply something darker. A world where names are actually a curse that follows a person for the rest of their life and alters reality until you are your name.

A+ trope-subversions short story

In fairy tales and fantasy, two types of people go in towers:  princesses and wizards.

Princesses are placed there against their will or with the intention of ‘keeping them safe.’ This is very different from wizards, who seek out towers to hone their sorcery in solitude.

I would like a story where a princess is placed in an abandoned tower that used to belong to a wizard, and so she spends long years learning the craft of wizardry from the scraps left behind and becomes the most powerful magic wielder the world has seen in centuries, busts out of the tower and wreaks glorious, bloody vengeance on the fools that imprisoned her. 

That would be my kind of story.

[Image description in Alt Text.] [ID: Red, block text on a transparent background. The text reads: ‘Fanfic Author PSA’. The dark red Archive of Our Own logo is depicted on either side of the lettering. End ID.]

Many people who read fanfiction also require the assistance of text-to-speech or audio description software. Blind and visually impaired people are very much present in the fanfiction and fandom communities, but are so frequently disregarded or forgotten about.

If you are writing a work and like to utilise paragraph breaks, please do not use combinations such as the following:

[Image description in Alt Text. I have used an image to avoid what I will describe below.] [ID: Four examples of punctuation and icons that are disruptive when used as line breakers. The first line is a series of O letters. The second is a series of asterisks. The third is a series of dots, circles and stars. The last is a series of tildes. End ID.]

The software will read these combinations out loud letter for letter or symbol for symbol. For example; it would read to the user the word ‘asterisk’ six times in a row, or the word ‘tilde’ five times in a row.

This is unpleasant, confusing and often irritating for blind or visually impaired readers. If you would like a similar sample of what it would sound like, enter one of the above combinations into Google Translate and use the audio button.

Here is a post by @ao3commentoftheday​ that also details this difficulty and provides links to downloadable audio transcribers and fanfiction audio readers. These are also helpful for if you simply wish to listen to fanfiction but can’t find a podfic of the work.

Screen Reader Friendly and Screen Reader Compatible are AO3 tags that help visually impaired readers track and access fanfiction that is consciously created with their needs in mind. Please consider adding these tags to your works in order to expand the range of works that visually impaired readers can safely and confidently access.

Alternatives to these are:

Utilise HTML or embedded line break functions where possible, such as the feature on the Archive’s editing functions. Most screen readers should be equipped to understand these.

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Use an image divider/breaker and utilise the Alt Text or [ ] descriptor functions to label it as a line breaker.

Reminder: ‘liking’ this post does not spread awareness.

An interesting demonstration of how the human brain works.

But also something of a lesson regarding perception, and the unreliability of subjective perspective versus objective reality.

You can be extremely certain about how you perceive the world, your "lived experience," that which you "feel it in my heart." But that doesn't mean it's actually true. And it doesn't mean we have to endorse it, or ignore or outright deny objective reality.

That's a "you" thing, not a "we" thing.

Seriously just a bit of pollen could make your cat sick within a matter of minutes. Stay far away from Easter lilies if you have kitties!

One of my all-time-favorite fanarts from one of my favorite fanartists.

<- I’m with genius 

Rags and Bones cover

The Reichenbach-inversion fic I made this for is… unique, and hard to define. It's under 3K words, but very memorable. Its Sherlock "voice" is brilliantly done, and not quite sane.

Unfortunately, the hand-skeleton image I liked best in terms of position and wiring (why do so many anatomical models have the thumb wired too far up?!) is only available at a small resolution, so until I convince myself to use a different photo, this is as good as it gets.

It occurs to me the guy with the Starfleet badge could use a Vulcan persona, and dress as an elf, ears fully visible, no knit cap needed!