And This Whole World Is Haunted

I really want a science fiction story where aliens come to invade earth and effortlessly wipe out humanity, only to be fought off by the wildlife.

They were expecting military resistance. They weren’t counting on bears.

Imagine this as the season finale of “WandaVision”:

It’s right after the Maximoff family (Wanda, Vision, Evan Peters Pietro, Tommy, and Billy) have their big superhero showdown with Agatha Harkness and Mephisto, our main villain. Suddenly, everyone but Wanda starts disappearing due to the simulation being shut down. Just when you think Wanda is ready to let them go, she suddenly whispers, “Stay.”

Then…the entire show just goes haywire. The entire MCU glitches out, leaving the audience wondering what the fuck is going on.

Cut to the Sanctum Sanctorum. Doctor Strange, who felt a disturbance in the multiverse, managed to hide away in a pocket dimension before Wanda’s epic, reality-changing moment. When he comes back to the MCU, he brings up the news to figure out what Wanda changed. His eyes then widen when he sees what Wanda did.

The MCU timeline is mostly the same. All the movies and TV shows are still canon as before. However, the universe has been modified to accommodate the mutants. All of a sudden, people are acting as if the mutants have existed in the MCU this whole time. Then, when Strange brings up news about Wanda, he’s shocked to see that not only are Pietro and Vision alive, it’s the Evan Peters version, not the original one. And not only that, she has kids, a new sister (hello, Polaris) and even brought her dad back to life (now played by either Sir Ian McKellen or Michael Fassbender). 

Wanda pulled a reverse “House of M” by literally rewriting reality to include the mutants, just so she could bring her family back to life. 

The show ends with Strange freaking out over the fact that the entire MCU has been rewritten/retconned by Wanda and that he’s the ONLY ONE who still remembers how the universe was before. 

some old winter soldier sketches from back when this movie possessed me body and soul

I previously mentioned the Internet Movie Firearms Database in my journal. Full credit for the information in this post goes to the IMFDB editors who contributed to its entry on Captain America: The First Avenger.

Steve’s main weapon is a Colt M1911A1 pistol. In some scenes, he’s shown with an M1928A1 Thompson submachine gun.

Peggy’s preferred sidearm is a Walther PPK. In the final attack on the HYDRA base, she wields an M1928A1 Thompson submachine gun.

Bucky uses a customized, scoped M1941 Johnson rifle to snipe. In a deleted scene, before his capture by HYDRA, he uses an M1903A1 Springfield rifle with a scope.

Gabe’s main weapon is a Browning M1919A4 machine gun.

Morita’s main weapon is an M3/M3A1 “Grease Gun,” a submachine gun.

Dum Dum’s main weapon is a Winchester Model 1897 “Trench” shotgun.

Falsworth and Dernier’s main weapons are Sten MkII submachine guns.

★ "Finally at peace" ★

How to recover fic deleted from AO3 that’s NOT on the Wayback machine

Sharing this because I just found out about this and it blew my mind.

The short version of it is: The Wayback Machine is not the only backup/archive of AO3 content out there. It’s just the most user-friendly and immediately browsable.

THIS database on Archive.org contains most AO3 fics as text files, including plenty that are not Waybacked: https://archive.org/details/AO3_final_location

What you’ll need: A browser for .sqlite3 files such as DB Browser for SQLite, an archive manager (e.g. WinRar or 7zip), good internet download speeds, and potentially a LOT of free GBs in storage space.

Not needed but heavily recommended: A download manager such as HTTP Downloader (so you don’t lose the entire download the second your internet stutters).

1. Click here to get to the archive’s files. It’s going to look something like this:

ao3_current.sqlite3 and ao3_old_files.sqlite3 are metadata files. The .zip files contain fic, most of them in simple .txt format. The metadata files tell you which fic is in which zip.

The “current” metadata file is recent backups. The “old” metadata file seems to be fics archived until 2020ish.

2. First, download either ao3_current.sqlite3 or ao3_old_files.sqlite3. Now launch DB Browser for SQlite, then File > Open Database Read-Only > open the sqlite3 file. Now click on the Browse Data tab.

3. It’s going to look like this.

4. The “Filter in any column” field can be used for keyword searches in, well, any column of this table. Be warned, it takes a while to update, give it time, it’s indexing.

5. Here I searched for all fic which gets a hit for the “Avengers” keyword (usually fandom). You can also search for a specific title, author, description, etc.

Let’s try to locate the first fic on the list. Click on the field on the left - row 1, column 1.

On the right you’ll see the full content of that cell. The most important thing here is the start - ao3_01. This means that the fic is located in ao3_old_files_part01.zip.

6. Download ao3_old_files_part01.zip and open it with your archive manager. It’s 5.5 GB. This will take some time.

7. There are multiple ways to find the fic within the zip file. Probably the easiest way is to use your archive manager’s search/find function to locate the fic by keyword - author is a good bet here, or title if it’s unique enough - and extract that. This way you don’t have to extract the entire archive. Be sure to add a wildcard operator (*) on either side of the keyword.

8. Extract the file and you’re done. Note: It will probably be in .txt format, and might be in one giant block of text. Just select-all and paste it to a proper word processor to restore the paragraph formatting.

+ I suppose if you’ve got like a free TB of space you could just skip the metadata step and download all the zip files and unzip them and use a command line search tool for keywords, too. This will work with keywords like title, author and fandom that are part of the file title. The metadata file just contains additional info, like character fields, description, etc.

This isn’t a perfect remedy, there are still fics that got deleted before they could get archived here. But it seems more complete than the stuff on the Wayback Machine on average.

What better way to celebrate the anniversary of Michael’s death than by getting absolutely knackered?

[The Asset strongly resists the programming and ultimately regains its identity.]

Sam Wilson and the Art of Moving On as an International Fugitive

Bucky and Nat should retire and open one of those cat cafés :3