petra: Lan Wangji glaring at anyone who might dare to wake Wei Wuxian, who is napping and leaning against him (CQL - Often not been on boats)
[personal profile] petra
My new collection, Petra's Food Bank Donation Thank-You Works, has its inaugural work:

And spread the welcome mat for you (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji/Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian
Characters: Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji, Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian
Additional Tags: Drabble, mid-autumn festival, mooncakes
Summary:

Wei Wuxian presents Lan Wangji with a mooncake.


*

Details on how to participate in the collection here.
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Spotlight on Open Doors

The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is a partnership between the Open Doors committee and fan-run preservation project Zinedom through which fanfiction and fanart originally published in print fanzines is imported to the Archive of Our Own. Fanworks can be imported to AO3 with the consent of either the creators of the works or the publisher of the fanzine in which the fanworks were published.

Today, Open Doors is pleased to announce a list of collections that it has created since September 2024 to house fanworks imported through the FSHP. A collection has been created for each fanzine from which one or more fanworks have been imported, but these collections do not contain every work from each of these zines, and many so far only include one work each in cases where Open Doors only has permission to import that particular work. For full transparency, Open Doors plans to continue to announce collections as they are created that may or may not grow with additional fanworks as additional permissions are obtained from more creators in the future.

As of August 2025, Open Doors has created the following collections to represent fanzines from which it has imported works:

For answers to frequently asked questions, please see the FSHP page on the Open Doors website. If you'd like to give Open Doors permission to import any of your fanworks that have been previously published in print fanzines, or if you have any other FSHP-related queries, please contact the Open Doors Committee.

We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of any fanzines in which they may have been published on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

Thanks for your interest in preserving fannish history for future generations of readers!

- The Open Doors team

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.


The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

coffeeandink: (Default)
[personal profile] coffeeandink

Chess is a show I know entirely through the cast recordings; if I recall correctly, it was such a thoroughly Cold War project that the liner notes referred to the two chess players as only "the American" and "the Russian". The new book by Danny Strong turns it into a (even more) melodramatic period piece, with the chess matches not simply a allegory for political tensions or a way of obtaining minor diplomatic concessions but tools for averting World War III. The Arbiter is dragooned as a narrator, who exposits both the global situation and the personal interactions with the characters, partly through a series of very bad and very obvious jokes.

Freddie Trumper, American grandmaster and obnoxious wunderkind, is challenged by Anatoly Sergievesky, mordant, depressed, and engaged in a clandestine flirtation with Freddie's chess second and lover, Florence Vassy. Freddie is notoriously a weak point in the original book, so prone to anti-Communist slurs, misogyny, and temper tantrums it is impossible to extend him much sympathy. The new version mediates this by giving him bipolar disorder and medical noncompliance, and also by casting Aaron Tveit. Tveit is indeed so good and so charismatic that I was on Freddie's side way more than I expected, although not enough to take self-pity anthem "Pity the Child" seriously. (The rest of the audience seemed less skeptical.) Lea Michele as Florence is just as strong vocally, and almost as strong in terms of acting, though unfortunately without much romantic chemistry with either partner. (The closest any scene comes to an erotic charge is Freddie's sleazy half-assed attempt at persuading Anatoly to throw the game in Act II.) Nicholas Christopher as Anatoly is the weak point in Act I, where I had the same opinion as I had of his Sweeney Todd: he's got the potential to be great, but he isn't quite there yet. He really needs to work on his emoting, which is too flat even for the murderous Sweeney or the dour Anatoly. He is greatly handicapped in Chess by having to affect a Russian accent, which I really hope the production drops. But! He pulled out all stops in Act II, both for the songs and the acting, and won me over with his intensity and vocal power.

So basically: the book is still flawed and they need to cut the runtime, particularly in Act I. This was the second night of previews, so there's still time for changes before the show technically "opens". If we're lucky, they'll start by cutting the topical jokes.

But the point of Chess has never been the book; it is the score full of bangers and power ballads. The music is by ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and the lyrics by Ulvaeus and Tim Rice. And the musical performances are GREAT. I am still guiltily fond of the kinda-no-really-very-racist "One Night in Bangkok" (which can plausibly be explained as Freddie's typical white guy take on the city) and which in this production is a camp masterpiece. I am seriously tempted to see the show again just for that.

Dear Yuletide Author, 2025

Oct. 24th, 2025 03:15 pm
roga: coffee mug with chocolate cubes (coffee chocolate)
[personal profile] roga
HI! Thank you, new friend who has good taste and likes at least one fandom I like, and hopefully the same characters in similar ways! I hope this is the kind of letter you click on and think, "Ooh, I can do that!" and not "Ahhh what have I signed up for /o\". It's yuletide, so... I'm very familiar with both. It'll be fine :)

(Is this most of this letter copy pasted from previous years? INCLUDING THIS VERY INTRO? Yes. Originality is overrated.)

The fandoms I request for yuletide are usually just fandoms that I really, really enjoyed, and I just want more of them. I would have loved to finish these canons and go to AO3 and just read 10-20 more fics in these universes! But alas they are not always there.

In all fandoms I requested, I am fine with any rating/sexual content (or lack of) that works for you.

In no particular order, let's go:

1. Three Men and a Baby (1987), 2. Lilywhite Boys - K.J. Charles, 3. Society of Gentlemen - K. J. Charles, The Summer I Turned Pretty (TV 2022), House of Guinness )

Generic DNWs: noncon, daddy kink, incest, anything you wouldn't traditionally gift to anyone unprompted. Dubcon of the 'they both actually want it' variety is fine (eg love spell, sex pollen, etc), pandemics/quarantines is fine, generally if it's a topic/trope that took place in the canon it's also fine.

*

I will finish with the usual end notes:

In the end, everything I wrote are just suggestions, and I am a very flexible reader who likes a WHOLE LOT OF STUFF so really, I'm just glad to be getting something in any of these fandoms, and I hope you enjoy the process of writing and participating. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to approach me via anonymous comment/the mods. Thank you and have a wonderful yuletide ♥♥♥

Dear Yuletide Writer

Oct. 24th, 2025 08:48 pm
proteinscollide: (Default)
[personal profile] proteinscollide
Placeholder - I'll be back in a few days to complete!

Yuletide Letter placeholder

Oct. 23rd, 2025 02:05 pm
dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Default)
[personal profile] dira
Yuletide letter coming soon!

US Politics: Food bank writing offer

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:59 pm
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
If you donate at least $25 in cash or in-kind to a food bank at any point between now and the end of the Trump Administration, and you either share a fandom of mine and want a drabble or fannish poetry, or you want original poetry, drop me a comment, and I will write for you.

Repeat customers welcomed with open arms.

Please format your request: Fandom or Original; Drabble or Poem; Character(s) and/or Pairing if any; Optional Prompt.

For example: Sesame Street; Drabble; Cookie Monster/Cookies; Food is not a sometimes luxury.

If you didn't make the donation in US dollars, please check the exchange rate on your donation at a currency converter to confirm that it qualifies. No receipt necessary regardless of which currency you donate in; this is on the honor system.

Please publicize this post.

Works will be collected on the Archive of Our Own and in my Food Bank Thank-You tag on Dreamwidth.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Oct. 22nd, 2025 05:00 pm
sineala: Detail of Harry Wilson Watrous, "Just a Couple of Girls" (Reading)
[personal profile] sineala
What I Just Finished Reading

Once again, nothing. I have had a migraine for 48 hours and counting. (It comes and goes, which is why I am typing this post now. But you can tell I have one, because I clearly don't understand narrative enough to be reading comics and/or am too tired to type much.)

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

Fantastic Four #4, Ultimate Spider-Man #22, Ultimate Spider-Man Incursion #5, Ultimates #17 )

What I'm Reading Next

Hey, whoever it was who wanted me to review the sequel(s) to Fourth Wing and I said I wasn't going to do that because only the first book was on Kindle Unlimited and the library ebook waitlist was long and there was no way I was paying money for anything in this series?

Yeah, so books 2 and 3 are on Kindle Unlimited now, so at some point when I can stand to read lengthy original fiction books again (I do not know when this will be) I am willing to read and review terrible fantasy books because I love dragons too much for my own good. Clearly.

So this will probably not be the next thing, but it's on the list.
musesfool: Rachel Roth (Raven)  from Titans (it will take all your breath)
[personal profile] musesfool
I'm off work today because I had to go get a tooth crowned. They've streamlined the process since early last year, when I had to go one week for the preparation and then back again a week later for the installation - they did it all in one day today, with about a 30 minute break between parts 1 and 2, where I just sat in the exam chair and read my book on my phone. This time I had to stop them a couple of times during the first part because they just spray water everywhere without sufficient suction so I felt like I was drowning a couple of times. The dentist warned me about it ahead of time and was apologetic about it, so I didn't feel like I was too much of a problem patient for stopping so I could, you know, breathe. One of the things I like about this particular dentist (there's a bunch of them at the practice and I've seen most of them over the last 5 years) is that he tells you what he's going to go ahead of time and answers questions, and then he tells you each thing he's going to do during the process right before he does it, and he gives you a heads up as to how far along in the process you are/how much more time it's going to take. Because it's unpleasant, at best. I mean, I was all numbed up for it (so numbed that my right EYE was feeling numb - the tooth being crowned is on the top right way in the back - which is a real fucking weird feeling), but ugh. I'm sure there are probably other crowns in the future - they want to get out all those old, old silver fillings, and he said this tooth did crack while he was removing it, so we caught it before it happened on its own.

I'm glad I didn't get new glasses this year - that left $950 in my FSA, which I had to supplement to pick up the rest of the cost, because I do not know what my insurance will cover as the dentist is out of network. I know I should find someone in network (and preferably near my apartment instead of in Manhattan), but as mentioned above, I like this guy and I think that is an important factor with any medical practitioner if you can get it.

So I came home and took a 3 hour nap because I didn't sleep much last night due to anxiety over all of this. Oh, and I mailed my ballot for Mamdani. I'm very curious to see if his lead in the polls translates to winning the election or if all the people who are scared because he's Muslim will turn out for Cuomo (or Sliwa, I guess, but I cannot take him seriously as a candidate). We have tended to pick terrible mayors recently, so it'll be interesting to see how this all turns out.

And I guess I mentioned reading up there, so yes, I am in the middle of a reread of Blue Lily, Lily Blue, which I am enjoying! ♥BLUE♥ remains my favorite.

*

Stranded, by Melissa Braun

Oct. 22nd, 2025 11:38 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


From the blurb:

One fellow camper will do whatever it takes to make it out of the Boundary Waters alive. Even if he's the only one.

A psychological thriller mixed with intense action.


Nah, just kidding! It's not a psychological thriller, it's a survival story. One of the teenage campers is a racist, a sexual harasser, and an attempted rapist, but he never tries to kill any of the others or abandons them to die or anything like that.

Yep! It's another disappointing survival book with a misleading blurb and gratuitous grossness towards teenage girls!

Teenage Emma is traumatized after failing to save her younger sister from drowning, so she gets her parents to book her into a teen wilderness survival course to take her mind off things. In a portentous scene, her father gives her a Swiss army knife. She's confused and concerned that he's giving her a weapon to take on a camping trip - does he expect her to be attacked? I was confused why she would think of a Swiss army knife as a weapon rather than a tool. If you don't even know what a Swiss army knife is, then you can't tell that it's a knife at all when it's folded. If you recognize it when folded, then you know that it is a multitool.

The early part of the book jumps around confusingly in time, to the point where I flipped back pages repeatedly to see if I'd missed something. No, it was just the author's pointless decision to start with them pitching their tents after the first day's walk, then jump back to them packing their supplies.

We get very little characterization, but that's okay: three of the seven are about to die! Two days in, a strange storm hits their camp. It's described in such a portentous way that I thought it was supernatural or man-made, but nothing ever comes of this so I guess not. Two of the campers and the guide are squashed by falling trees, then a wildfire starts. Instead of jumping in the lake, they run for their lives and get very lost.

At this point, we get some characterization. Chloe is the girl who isn't Emma. Her race is coyly not mentioned until Isaac, the creepy boy, gets racist at her about being black. Oscar is the boy who isn't creepy, so Emma naturally falls in love with him. Isaac constantly sexually harasses Emma, once tries to rape her, and is sadistic to animals. This goes on for the entire book.

Late in the book, Oscar and Isaac both fall over a cliff. Isaac dangles from a rock stub by one hand, and holds Oscar, who is suspended in mid-air, by one backpack strap. Emma and Chloe make a rope of clothing, with a key part being her bra. Isaac somehow grabs the clothes rope without falling. He's clinging to a rock stub with one hand and a backpack strap supporting another person. How does he get one hand free to grab the bra rope without falling? This is not described as it's not thought through. He grabs the rope - again, anchored by A BRA tied to a tree - and, it's not clearly described, but it seems like Emma single-handed pulls him and Oscar up. Is the bra made of bungee cord?

Emma ponders that Isaac was very brave and unselfish. People are complicated, she realizes. This is as close as the book comes to any resolution on Isaac sexually harassing and threatening her for the entire book, oh and also TRYING TO RAPE HER.

This book sucked.

Trying one new recipe a week

Oct. 22nd, 2025 07:54 pm
cimorene: Illustration of a woman shushing and a masked harlequin leaning close to hear (gossip)
[personal profile] cimorene
I decided a little while ago to try one new recipe per week as far as I can manage.

Since then we have made:

Ina Garten's Black Bean Soup, which is basically a mirepoix+bell peppers plus a bunch of black beans, Southwestern seasoning, and vegetable broth. It's similar to a couple of our favorite soup recipes and also to just the way I make black beans for burrito filling, but it's good.

RecipeTinEats' Country Harvest Root Vegetable Soup, which is very simple: a huge quantity of root vegetable chunks (she gives weight of each and we followed this pretty closely, but this style of recipe is easy to substitute of course) and some alliums sauteed with thyme and curry powder for seasoning and then cooked in water till soft, with cream added at the end, pureed with an immersion blender. This was delicious and we will definitely be having it regularly.

RecipeTinEats' Ultra Lazy Creamy Chicken and Broccoli Pasta Bake. I love pasta casserole and want to try more recipes where you don't have to pre-cook the pasta. The pasta came out great and this was delicious, but it's a little rich for me. It's a bit like oven-baked mac and cheese with broccoli in it. The vibes are very creamy and fatty and it just feels extremely heavy as a main dish.

Trying a white bean soup recipe this week. (I like to make soup once a week at least in the fall and winter.)
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
https://bsky.app/profile/luketurner.bsky.social/post/3m35pa3ywek2h



[Image description: Bluesky post by Luke Turner reading "here is a pleasingly anti-fascist animal painted on the Hurricane of gay RAF pilot Ian Gleed", above a picture of Gleed in the cockpit of his plane pointing to the image on its side of a cartoon cat swatting at and destroying a swastika.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gleed (he may have been the fastest RAF pilot to ever make ace, in two days; he was only 26 when he was killed)

Further research by [personal profile] robynbender established that he actually had said antifascist cat painted on all his planes:

http://www.hatfield-herts.co.uk/aviation/gleed.html

Dear Yuletide Writer Letter 2025

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:11 am
marks: WHERE ARE YOU (nuts to you (yoi))
[personal profile] marks
Yuletide time again! I'm Marks on AO3 and nonnegative on bsky and tumblr, if you want to find me anywhere else. I hope you have fun writing for me.

All ratings are good. Explicit content is great. Treats are welcome and I have gifts enabled on AO3.

DNW: long discussions of consent, the traffic light system, non-canonical nicknames, explicit works featuring characters younger than 16, hopeless endings, pregnancy, lactation

All ratings likes: canon-divergent AUs, dystopian AUs, reincarnation AUs, timeloop AUs, loyal knight and their liege AUs, mutual pining, confessions, praise, vulnerability, descriptions of kissing, loyalty to the point of it being a detriment, hurt/comfort, smoking, alcohol and drug use, road trips, sharing a bed, motorcycles, shaving, haircuts, memory issues ranging anywhere from amnesia to that thing where a person had dental surgery and realizes their long-term partner is hot as they're coming out of it.

Explicit likes: sex pollen, aliens/captors/other outside forces made them do it, sloppy makeout sessions with fully or partially clothed frotting, rimming, barebacking, praise kink, grumpy characters getting railed, touch-starved characters getting touched and losing their minds over it, oral fixations, arranged marriages that have to be consummated immediately because of law-related reasons.


fandoms and prompts are under here )
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OTW recruitment banner

Are you fluent in a language other than English? Do you have graphic design skills and enjoy creating social media content? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Are you fluent in a language other than English, passionate about AO3, and want to help us better reply to users all around the world? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

  • Translation Translators - closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC
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We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

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Translation Translators

If you enjoy working collaboratively, if you're fluent in a language other than English, if you’re passionate about the OTW and its projects, and want to help us reach more fans all around the world, working with Translation might be for you!

Translation volunteers help make the OTW and its projects accessible to a wider global audience. We work on translating content by the OTW and its projects from English to other languages, such as site pages, news posts, AO3 FAQs and AO3 Support emails. (However, we do not translate fanworks.)

We really need volunteers who speak Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh—but help with other languages would be much appreciated. If you're interested in starting a team for a language we don't have yet, you're very welcome to!

(Please note that our Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian teams are not accepting new members at this time. If you are fluent in one of these languages and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead. The User Response Translation Committee is currently recruiting for the following languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as Russian. For more information, please refer to the Volunteering page.)

Applicants will be asked to translate and correct short text samples and will be invited to a chatroom interview as part of the selection process. More information about us can be found on the Translation committee page.

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Apply to be a Translation Committee Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Fanlore Graphics Designer

Would you like to help Fanlore reach more fans and get new editors? Do you have graphic design skills and enjoy creating social media content? If so, we need your help! The Fanlore team needs designers to create graphics and banners for social media posts, editing challenges and other outreach projects to help us reach more fans and potential editors. We have a lot of amazing fan history and fandom content, but we need you to help others find out about it. If you think you might enjoy that, come and join us!

If you’re interested, please prepare a portfolio of your work to submit with your application. As part of our design review process, applicants will also be asked to create a sample graphic for Fanlore. Further directions will be given upon applying.

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Open Doors Import Assistant

Do you enjoy spreadsheets, self-paced projects, and helping protect fanworks from getting lost over time? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Do you still guiltily--or not so guiltily--love the first fanwork that opened your eyes to fandom?

Open Doors is a committee dedicated to preserving fanworks in their many formats, and we’re looking for volunteers to support this goal. The work we do preserves fan history, love, and dedication to fandom: we keep fanworks from offline and at-risk archives from being lost, divert fanzines from the trash, and more.

Our import assistants contribute to our goal by:

  • Importing works to AO3 from rescued digital archives and fanzines
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The training is self-directed, and so is the work for the most part, though we also have weekly working meetings/parties for people to all chip in and work on tasks together! Import assistants can generally alternate the types of tasks they work on. At any one time, we usually have several tasks of different types available.

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User Response Translation Translators

Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish, and want to help us better communicate with AO3 users all over the world?

User Response Translation (URT) volunteers help AO3 committees to correspond with users in other languages. URT translators will assist the Policy & Abuse and Support committees by translating correspondence between these committees and AO3 users into specific languages. URT does not translate AO3 or OTW site pages, news posts, or fanworks.

We are looking for volunteers who are at least 18 years old and fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish. Applicants will be asked to translate and beta (edit) short text samples as part of the selection process.

(If you are fluent in languages that are not listed above and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead. The Translation Committee is currently recruiting for the following languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. For more information, please refer to the Volunteering page.)

Applications are due 29 October 2025.

Apply to be a User Response Translation Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.


The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
[personal profile] lightreads
Being Mortal

5/5. Discussion by a surgeon about how poorly we often handle mortality – care for the elderly in general, and death for both the old and young.

Excellent. I’ve had this book on my radar for over a decade, but the last time I went to pick it up, I found out literally the next day that my father was terminally ill, and I noped out. He lived another eleven months, which was about five months longer than he was expected to, but it’s taken me nearly eight years to come back to this book. I’m very glad I did, though this is depressing and infuriating and did make me cry.

It is also incredibly useful. There is an aging person in my life whom it is likely my wife and I will need to provide care for when it is needed, and this book was incredibly grounding on what that might look like, and in supplying an ethical framework to think about it. It would be oversimplifying to say that the book argues for privileging autonomy over safety, because there’s more to it than that, but the points it makes about how so many elderly care facilities are designed for the psychological comfort of the residents’ families at the expense of the residents’ comfort and happiness is sobering.

Also notable for some candid and messy examinations of how doctors do and don’t approach mortality with patients. There are no easy answers there, as patient need will vary widely. Some need to hear it to be prepared. Some don’t ever want to hear it. But he offers up some really good advice on frameworks for decisionmaking in life or death situations that can, if done right, make things vastly easier for the family making hard calls.

Highly recommended.

Content notes: Terminal illness, death of a parent, medical gaslighting

Multiversal Cards Against Humanity

Oct. 21st, 2025 04:05 pm
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
This NPR article about Cards Against Humanity (the company) suing SpaceX for trespassing makes me want Cards Against Humanity, Inc., in various fictional universes.

Surely it exists in Leverage-verse, home of professional trolls. Possibly Hardison owns the company.

How scathing are the anti-Imperial cards in the Galaxy Far, Far Away? What wild schemes have they undertaken to mess with the Powers That Be?

The conflict between the Kardashians Cardassians and the Federation seems fruitful territory for people to have done really, really stupid things. Also, that allows for a tournament on Deep Space Nine. Is Garak really good at this game, or does he overthink it to the point where no one can follow his logic?

I would also love to see the Slow Horses playing the game, if only so they can observe that the real winner is Lamb, because they're all sinking to his level. Alternately, perhaps they could get mixed up in a corporate scheme.

As for The Expanse, clearly there are competing entities putting out propaganda packs on all sides all the way through, and they're all making political statements for Their Team.

AO3 Celebrates 16 Million Fanworks

Oct. 21st, 2025 07:18 pm
[syndicated profile] ao3_news_feed

16 Million Fanworks on AO3

Celebrations are in order, because the Archive of Our Own (AO3) has recently surpassed 16 million fanworks! Incredible timing, as very soon AO3 will also celebrate its 16th anniversary (keep an eye out for that)!

As always, we'd like to thank each and every one of you for contributing to this achievement. Whether you are out there creating fanworks celebrating them in the comments, sharing them online or hosting fandom-related events - or engaging in fandom in any other of the myriad possible ways - you are a cornerstone of the archive's continued existence, growth and improvement!

Speaking of improvements: Did you know that you can learn about all the latest changes and updates to AO3 by reading our change logs? Our volunteer programmers, code reviewers and testers work tirelessly behind the scenes to maintain the site, combat bugs, and bring you new features. If you are interested in reading the latest releases, simply filter AO3 news using the release notes tag.

Or, if you want to delve deeper into some AO3 and OTW related technical topics, the Systems committee—who manages the OTW's servers and technical infrastructure— occasionally posts about exciting insights into past tech-related issues with AO3 on their account: AO3_Systems.

If you are interested in coding yourself, you can even contribute to improving AO3's code, all without becoming a volunteer! You can find more in our Contributing Guidelines on GitHub.

Whether you are a tech enthusiast or here to celebrate reaching 16 million works on AO3, we are once again more than grateful for your support, and excited to share more achievements with you in months and years to come!


The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

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[personal profile] cimorene
I wonder how many people have gotten about three hours of research deep into "How to break up with all your Google products" and given up because it's too hard or too much work. This has DEFINITELY happened to me AT LEAST three times in the last ten years.

I'm not even doing it today, I'm just reminded because there's YET ANOTHER post going around about Firefox updating to integrate AI and the hidden switches in about:config you have to use if you want to turn it off. The same post talks about switching your default search engine. In one of these previous times years ago I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but DuckDuckGo has been pushing AI more over time and it's really annoying so I've been meaning to switch and -

- at the bottom of the post it said we should all switch to Qwant or udm=14, and so I looked up both of those. Qwant is a French search engine that is aggressively integrating AI, but they are big on not storing and selling your data at least, which would've been nice if not for the llm. udm=14 is a string you can append in Google search that gives you the "old" (pre-AI) style results. (There are other search engines - I found a link to The Search Engine Map, which shows all the ones which give English results - but I feel this experience is representative.)

I'm weighing whether I want to switch browsers. I'm definitely mad enough to, but I hate switching browsers...

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