DNFs

Aug. 9th, 2025 01:37 pm
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
Seven Devils by Elizabeth May and Laura Lam

Enemies to lovers sapphic (at least that’s where I assume it’s going, based on the setup) scifi about the heir to the evil galactic empire running away to join the rebellion, and the ship mechanic she is forced to work with despite bad history. Sounds potentially fun, right? It might be, but this was sold as adult and no. Incorrect. This reads so much like YA, I had formed this opinion before even finishing the first page. Not in the mood, particularly for this brand of YA where the main characters are supposed to be in their twenties but are in their feelings – and their feelings about their feelings – as if they are sixteen. Probably reads better if you know what it is going in. Why do publishers mismarket a book like this?

Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn

Woof. If I’d read this in the 90’s when it came out, I would have eaten it up with a spoon. It’s 90’s romantasy, using that definition of romantasy as ‘reads like YA but with more sex.’ I read 25% of this and came so close to liking it. Young prince who wants to do things smarter not harder, and what’s up with the dragons. But I just cannot with the gender and sexual politics here. There was a lot that was hard to swallow (the dying father advising his son to make sure his wife knows who is the “master” in bed, and the book is like way into that) but I noped out for good when our hero finds out our heroine isn’t a virgin (like he is) and throws a massive tantrum. I suspect he will improve but nope. Out.

The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong

Cozy fantasy about the travelling seer whose lonely existence is disrupted by accidentally acquiring a found family, also various plot things. Lots of people like this one. I have no soul, so was variously bored and annoyed by it, even though it is perfectly competent at what it is doing.

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

Trans scifi with a literary bent that is supposedly about the trans kid of trans parents discovering that they were revolutionaries after their deaths. I could not pay attention to this to save my life, and I don’t know why, since I gave up so early and have little sense of it. Worth trying again sometime?
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (Default)
[personal profile] cimorene
Like oud or something. Not patchouli anyway. Because after shampooing it three times the night before last, I could still smell that on it yesterday every time it got in my face (the physically irritating part of the smell did wash out, but I personally dislike musks and think they're gross even when they don't make me sneeze). I can still smell it today too, but my hair is dry, and I don't want to shampoo it again yet.

So I guess this is no longer directly related to allergies, but I don't have a haircare tag or an "I fucking hate perfume flames on the side of my face" tag.
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


A middle-grade graphic novel about a boba shop with a secret.

Aria comes to stay with her grandmother in San Francisco for the summer to escape a bad social situation. Her grandmother owns a boba shop that doesn't seem too popular, and Aria throws herself into making it more so - most successfully when Grandma's cat Bao has eight kittens, and Aria advertises it as a kitten cafe. But why is Grandma so adamant about never letting Aria set foot in the kitchen, and kicking out the customers at 6:00 on the dot? Why do the prairie dogs in the backyard seem so smart?

This graphic novel has absolutely adorable illustrations. The story isn't as strong. The first half is mostly a realistic, gentle, cozy slice of life. The second half is a fantasy adventure with light horror aspects. Even though the latter is throughly foreshadowed in the former, it still feels kind of like two books jammed together.

My larger issue was with tone and content that also felt jammed together. The book is somewhat didactic - which is fine, especially in a middle-grade book - but I feel like if the book is teaching lessons, it should teach them consistently and appropriately. The lessons in this book were a bit off or inconsistent, creating an uncanny valley feeling.

Spoilers! Read more... )

Fantastic art, kind of odd story.

July 2025 Newsletter, Volume 202

Aug. 8th, 2025 06:44 pm
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Banner of a paper airplane emerging from an envelope with the words 'OTW Newsletter: Organization for Transformative Works'

I. UPCOMING BOARD ELECTION

The 2025 OTW Board Election will be held on August 15-18, a week from today.

Elections, Communications, and Translation worked together to announce candidate and voting information. Voting instructions have been emailed to all eligible OTW members, and translated versions of voting instructions are available on the Elections website. Candidate answers to Q&A questions can also be found on the Elections website, and a live Candidate chat was held on August 2 via Discord.

II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN

Legal has been closely monitoring legal developments and proposals about internet age verification in the US, UK, and around the world and taking steps to ensure that the AO3 user experience will not change. They also responded to a number of user queries and dealt with a commercial company that has been using the AO3 trademark in a confusing way.

In early July, Accessibility, Design, & Technology resolved some issues and downtime related to creating bookmarks on AO3. They also deployed several releases of bug fixes and improvements, including a performance improvement for the page that administrators use to search for user accounts. Lastly, in conjunction with Systems having installed and set up new servers, they finalized some Elasticsearch upgrades. You can refer to the recent release notes for more details.

In June, Support received 3,348 tickets, while Policy & Abuse received 3,738 tickets. Their TOS Spotlight news post series has now concluded; if you missed it, we encourage you to look it over and contact Policy & Abuse if you have any further TOS questions.

Tag Wrangling continues to test processes for wrangling canonical tags in "No Fandom"—tags that aren't specific to any particular fandom—and announced some new canonical tags on July 14. More tags will continue to be canonized and announced on a regular basis.

In June, Tag Wrangling handled over 526,000 tags, or over 1,200 tags per volunteer! \o/

III. OPEN DOORS IMPORTS CONTINUE

Open Doors finished importing all fanfiction from the Harry Potter archive FictionAlley and is now processing fanart hosted on the site. You can find all imported works in the FictionAlley collection. Unclaimed works are currently restricted to logged-in AO3 users, but per Open Doors' agreement with the archivist, they will be unlocked 30 days after the import is fully completed.

All FictionAlley creators should have received one or more emails with links to claim, orphan, delete their works, or prevent the import of any additional works of theirs in the future. If you were a creator and did not receive this email, please contact Open Doors for assistance. You can also contact Open Doors if you would like to prevent future imports of your Harry Potter works specifically.

The import process for HarryPotterFanFiction.com and MuggleNet Fan Fiction are also underway. If your email address has changed since you were a member of either archive, or you would like Open Doors not to import your works, please contact Open Doors. Please refer to the import announcements for a full list of how Open Doors can assist you.

Elsewhere, Open Doors has continued their importing work on My Mongoose, an archive for The Sentinel.

IV. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

Communications' Con Outreach team wrapped up Capital City Comic Con in Lansing, Michigan, USA—thank you to everyone who tabled and who said hi to us! You can check out con attendees' fanwork recommendations in the convention's AO3 collection.

Fanlore's themed month for July, Fandom in Color, was a big success! They're now planning their next editing challenge, Stub September, which will be themed around animals with swords this year. Check out Fanlore's social media (Bluesky, Twitter/X, and Tumblr) for announcements about the challenge, which will run from September 8-21.

Transformative Works and Cultures is finalizing their upcoming general issue, volume 46, which will be published on September 15. Their upcoming Latin American Fandoms and Music Fandoms specific issues are still accepting submissions until January 1, 2026. Lastly, they collaborated with Communications on an OTW website page about the TWC committee, outlining the team behind the publication and spotlighting TWC's Fans of Color research prize.

V. GOVERNANCE

Board held the quarterly Board meeting on July 20 on Discord. There were 44 attendees, and minutes will be available soon on the OTW website.

Alongside preparing for the Board meeting, Board and the Board Assistants Team collaborated across the OTW and made progress on several goals, including the OTW Crisis Management Plan, OTW Procurement Policy, Cybersecurity Report, Paid Staff Transition, and researching nonprofit training resources.

Finance is wrapping up 2024 reconciliations and working with auditors for the 2024 audit.

VI. OUR VOLUNTEERS

Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for three committees this month: Communications, Fanlore, and Policy & Abuse. Volunteers & Recruiting also closed out all projects carried over from previous years and plan to start new projects this year in accordance with their 2025 roadmap goals.

From June 23 to July 22, Volunteers & Recruiting received 175 new requests, and completed 124, leaving them with 102 open requests. As of July 22, 2025, the OTW has 926 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: Deniz (News Post Moderation Volunteer)
New Open Doors Volunteers: Kriti S (FCPP Intern)
New Support Volunteers: moonlithic, SlantedKnitting, and 23 other Support Volunteers
New Translation Volunteers: 1 Translation Volunteer Manager and 1 Translation Task Assistant

Departing Communications Volunteers: 2 Fanhackers Volunteers
Departing Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: 2 News Post Moderation Volunteers
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Policy & Abuse Volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: Jennifer D2 (Liaison to User Response Translation), Geraldine and 2 other Support Volunteers
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: demilyver, Goodwin, Ratty, and 11 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: Ducky (Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteer) and 1 Tool Implementation Lead

For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.


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.

cimorene: A small bronze table lamp with triple-layered orange glass shades (stylish)
[personal profile] cimorene
Last night I was joylessly reading until way too late in bed, and then after I put my phone down, I suddenly started to notice my throat hurt a bit.

Now, I do have a perfume allergy that has caused my throat to swell mostly-closed in the past, but only about 5(?)x in the past 20 years, and only after a Lot (the perfume has to be concentrated close to my nose and mouth probably).

And yes, yesterday I had tried a new curl-reviving spray and I had been mildly annoyed by its perfume all day, but it hadn't irritated my nose right away the way dangerous perfumes (and also many others) do.

So when I started to worry that the product was causing an allergic reaction that might make my throat swell closed and kill me in my sleep, this was extremely unlikely for several reasons: the perfume had already proven itself not similar to ones that caused a reaction before, and also that's not really how anaphylaxis works, probably?

But my throat hurt and every perfume I could smell seemed to be aggravating it. So I decided that getting up at 3 am and showering all the perfumed products off would be a better use of my time than going downstairs to take antihistamines, painkillers, and a benzo. I shampooed my hair three times and combed conditioner through it in the shower, then put a folded towel on my pillow and slept on it after towel-drying, without applying my usual leave-in.

My throat feels a little better but still irritated today, and I took loratidine and paracetamol with breakfast. I wonder why my throat got irritated, though. I hope I'm not getting sick, but probably not; the last time I went to the store was Wednesday, so the incubation period for a respiratory infection wouldn't match up very well.

slow climb, but quick to descend

Aug. 6th, 2025 08:07 pm
musesfool: Mal (i will not speak to lie)
[personal profile] musesfool
They are installing some fancy new app-based intercom system in my building, which I'm not particularly a fan of, but I dutifully downloaded the app as directed. They haven't told us when the new system is going to go live, or given us really any other instructions on how it works, but I hope I won't have to keep the ringer on because unless I'm expecting an important call, I Do Not Do That. I guess we'll see what happens!

*

Reading Wednesday!

What I've just finished
So a number of people have been talking about the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and I thought it was graphic novels, so I checked out a sample on Saturday. It's not comics, it's something called LitRPG, the trappings of which are a little tedious to me, but overall, it is pretty engrossing reading. I've finished the first 4 books of the series (out of 7) and I'm 2/3 of the way through book 5. It is about our eponymous protagonist Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, surviving a Hunger Games like set up after aliens invade earth. spoilers )

What I'm reading now
Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade. So far I find the setting more compelling than the last 2 books (though the train book was my least favorite in terms of settings) and I'm wondering how the rest of the book is going to go!

What I'm reading next
The last(?) 2 books in the series! I don't know for certain if #7 is the last book and I haven't wanted to google because I don't want to be spoiled. The series has taken some interesting turns I wasn't expecting and I enjoy that when it happens. Hopefully they can stick the landing!

*
cimorene: Olive green willow leaves on a parchment background (foliage)
[personal profile] cimorene
Benjamin is one of several large and venerable potted plants inherited from Wax's granny, so he's probably older than I am; he has been in front of the east window in the kitchen since we moved here. However, he's had a hard time this spring after Sipuli peed in his pot several times to protest her litter box being smelly.

Once it got warm enough to not shock him in the process, Wax discarded all his old soil, shook and jiggled and rinsed his roots, and repotted him with new soil; and in apology for the trauma of that, she felt obliged to let him stay out for a while (but not fully outside, where the temperature fluctuations and wind and rain would be too much for him).

The thing is... Benjamin hasn't been pruned in a long time, and he's probably about six feet tall and four feet wide, now.

The porch isn't large.

As Wax put it when carrying out the recycling last week, it's not very convenient having your porch half full of tree.

She says she can't bring him inside, though, because he's enjoying himself so much (making lots of new leaves) that it would be mean.
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OTW recruitment banner

Are you a detail-oriented and highly organized individual interested in assisting the OTW Board of Directors with administrative and project management tasks? Do you have skills with graphic design, fundraising, or customer service? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

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

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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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Board Assistants Team Volunteer

Are you detail-oriented, highly organized, and passionate about supporting meaningful work behind the scenes? The Board Assistants Team (BAT) is looking for volunteers to assist the OTW Board of Directors with essential administrative and project management tasks.

As a BAT Volunteer, you’ll play a key role in ensuring smooth operations by:

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Development & Membership Volunteer

The Development & Membership committee (DevMem) coordinates the OTW's fundraising and membership-building activities. Our primary responsibility is coordinating our biannual fund drives, although we are also responsible for communicating with donors, exploring new fundraising opportunities, and managing the voter roll for OTW elections. If you have skills or interests in fundraising, membership database management, creating promotional OTW graphics, eCommerce, or customer service, consider applying to join our committee!

Applications are due 13 August 2025 or after 30 applications

Apply for Development & Membership Volunteer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Development & Membership Graphic Designer

The Development & Membership committee (DevMem) coordinates the OTW's fundraising and membership-building activities. Our primary responsibility is coordinating our biannual fund drives, although we are also responsible for communicating with donors, exploring new fundraising opportunities, and managing the voter roll for OTW elections. If you have skills or interests in creating promotional OTW graphics for our fundraisers, membership gifts, and donor communications, consider applying to join our committee!

Applications are due 13 August 2025 or after 30 applications

Apply for Development & Membership Graphic Designer 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.

The Bog Wife, by Kay Chronister

Aug. 6th, 2025 10:42 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


The Haddesley family has an ancient tradition: when the patriarch dies, the oldest son summons a wife from the bog. Now living in Appalachia, the current patriarch is dying and a new bog wife must be summoned soon, but their covenant with the bog may be going wrong: one daughter fled years ago to live in the modern world, the last bog wife vanished under mysterious circumstances, the bog is drying up, and something very bad has happened to the oldest son...

Isn't that an amazing premise? The actual book absolutely lives up to it, but not in the way that I expected.

It was marketed as horror, and was the inaugural book of the Paper & Clay horror book club. But my very first question to the club was "Do you think this book is horror?"

The club's consensus was no, or not exactly; it definitely has strong folk horror elements, but overall we found it hard to categorize by genre. I am currently cross-shelving it in literary fiction. We all loved it though, and it was a great book to discuss in a book club; very thought-provoking.

One of the aspects I enjoyed was how unpredictable it was. The plot both did and didn't go in directions I expected, partly because the pacing was also unpredictable: events didn't happen at the pace or in the order I expected from the premise. If the book sounds interesting to you, I recommend not spoiling yourself.

The family is a basically a small family cult, living in depressing squalor under the rule of the patriarch. It's basically anti-cottagecore, where being close to nature in modern America may mean deluding yourself that you're living an ancient tradition of natural life where you're not even close to being self-sustaining, but also missing all the advantages of modern life like medical treatment and hot water. I found all this incredibly relatable and validating, as I grew up in similar circumstances though with the reason of religion rather than an ancient covenant with the bog.

The family has been psychologically twisted by their circumstances, so they're all pretty weird and also don't get along. I didn't like them for large stretches, but I did care a lot about them all by the end, and was very invested in their fates. (Except the patriarch. He can go fuck himself.)

It's beautifully written, incredibly atmospheric, and very well-characterized. The atmosphere is very oppressive and claustrophobic, but if you're up for the journey, it will take you somewhere very worthwhile. The book club discussion of the ending was completely split on its emotional implications (not on the actual events, those are clear): we were equally divided between thinking it was mostly hopeful/uplifing with bittersweet elements, mostly sad with some hopeful elements, and perfectly bittersweet.

SPOILERS!

Read more... )
cimorene: SGA's Sheppard and McKay, two men standing in an overgrown sunlit field (pastoral)
[personal profile] cimorene
We live in a tiny town with only one commercial street, but spread out with low population density. Our island of Ålön is about 77 square kilometers (about 44 square miles), and most of it is farms and forests.

My late MIL's summer cottage was fifteen minutes by car out towards one of the corners of the island, in the village of Levo, but what a world of difference! Behind its little orchard stretched fallow and planted fields; across the winding road lay a little forest, and on the other side of that the bay of Finland. (The neighbors gave permission to park extra cars in their field and to use their little scrap of sand and dock for swimming.) The music of the evening in Levo was birdsong and the rushing of the wind.

Here one block behind city hall and the police station, in the village of Parsby, we sit in the midst of urban decay, as mentioned recently. Our little street contains three inhabited houses and two abandoned wrecks that the city owns and is allowing to fall into public health hazards, with asbestos everywhere, roofs caving in, broken windows, and fallen trees and power lines. The street leading down to the back of the police station contains two more inhabited houses and three more decaying wrecks, and the city tore all the pavement on it up last January to fix the pipes and hasn't paved it again yet. Across the other street (we live on the corner) is a big clot of densely-populated midcentury apartment buildings, whose retired inhabitants risk their lives on the above-mentioned poorly-maintained ripped-up road in winter (it's a steep hill).

Because our town is rural and the driving age for cars is 18 in Finland, the plague of Parsby (and small towns everywhere) is teenagers on mopeds. The music of the evening in Parsby starts with wood pigeons, thrushes, and the distant buzzing of cars on the highway, but is interrupted periodically by the deafening roar of mopeds speeding by under the window and teenagers practicing being cool and adult by shouting the equivalent of "FUCK" at each other. (I fantasize several times a week about an externally-mounted loudspeaker that would play a voice yelling "Shut up" towards the street.)

It would've been impossible to quickly walk to the store from Levo, though.

The Ambulance Merry-Go-Round

Aug. 4th, 2025 09:45 pm
cimorene: A painting of a large dragon flying low over an old pickup truck on a highway (dragon)
[personal profile] cimorene
My dad (C5/6 quadriplegic wheelchair user) has been in and out of the hospital all spring and summer.

Initially, there was some kind of internal bleeding, I think, and he kept having very low blood pressure and cardiac events and then having to have his many medications adjusted. Then he had to have a colectomy, and then he got a persistently recurring UTI that is resistant to antibiotics. A lot of these times he's been carted off to the hospital it's been for low blood pressure or a slight fever, and it seems to my sister and me like they're just stabilizing him, tweaking his medication, and releasing him, sometimes the same day, only for him to be back in an ambulance in less than a week.

This is having a weird effect where it's cumulatively and abstractly more scary every time he goes, while at the same time it is becoming so familiar that it's starting to feel routine. I know this is why people got convinced they were safe from COVID after a few months of wearing a mask and why people are frequently injured in the streets near their homes: the cognitive illusion that an action is proved safe if you've done it a bunch of times and nothing bad happened. Or in the case of these hospital visits, bad things happened, but he didn't get seriously (ICU) ill.

It's rough on my sister, who lives with her husband and my parents in the US, and I can't really support her long distance very effectively. And even if it were safe to travel there now, there's no way to know how long it would keep happening, so it still wouldn't probably be practical for me to go.

the summer of four to three

Aug. 3rd, 2025 02:55 pm
musesfool: orange slices (orange you glad)
[personal profile] musesfool
I made a half-batch of corn fritters this morning, but having neither scallions nor chives, I used garlic and onion powder and Italian seasoning, and Parmesan instead of cheddar for the cheese. They are a little bland. Also, I definitely need to dig out my splatter guard, because they do spit and pop while they fry. If you have a fear of frying - and I know some people (reasonably) do - definitely invest in a splatter guard.

*

August Theme - Rest & Relaxation

Aug. 3rd, 2025 05:16 pm
peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)
[personal profile] peaceful_sands posting in [community profile] bitesizedcleaning
This month's theme is Rest & Relaxation and while unfortunately that doesn't mean we get to do no cleaning and sorting, it means that we are considering our own wellbeing. The idea of this month is to make a few chosen spaces in our homes more relaxing.

Starting this week with decluttering your bathroom - make your bathroom a pleasant place to relax and pamper yourself - remove unwanted/unneeded/out of date products, tidy and organise what's left.

Upcoming themes for the rest of the month
* Declutter your sleeping space - clearing the bedside cabinets, floor, organising your sleep area to make it more relaxing when you go to bed
* 'sightlines'. The idea for this week is to clear clutter from your chosen place to chill.
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
Greenhollow duology

3/5. Pair of novellas about the wild man of the wood and the folklorist who moves in next door.

Okay, now I’m taking this personally. I picked these up because I got interested in Tesh, who wrote a book sharing some themes with mine. But I thought I wouldn’t be as into these and we wouldn’t crossover interests here because I’m generally meh on British folklore. And indeed, these are well-written, but not very interesting to me.

But do you know what the second one is about? In part, it’s about the mistakes of a queer near-immortal who is having a really hard time loving a short-lived mortal, and who makes some bad decisions as a result. Do you know what I am currently writing about? Do you?

Content notes: Various kinds of magical mind control.

Five Things calamario Said

Aug. 2nd, 2025 10:42 am
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Five Things an OTW Volunteer Said

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with calamario, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangler.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a tag wrangler, I work behind the scenes of AO3 to help organise the tags that users add to their works.

This primarily involves creating new canonical tags (i.e., the tags that show up in the dropdown and that you can filter on) for the fandoms I wrangle, connecting new tags to already-existing canonicals (i.e., making those tags ‘synonyms’ of these canonicals, a.k.a. ‘synning’ them), or otherwise wrangling the tags to their correct fandoms if they can’t be synned anywhere.

For example, have you ever wondered why tagging your work with something like “a lil angst” in the Additional Tags field makes it show up in the “Angst” tag, or why tagging “anidala” as a Relationship connects it to “Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker”? That’s because wranglers have synned them there!

If you’re interested in learning more about wrangling and the terms we use, you can check out the publicly available wrangling guidelines here.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

It depends a lot on how busy my real life is! At the moment, I’m working on my master’s thesis, so I currently have a wrangling session once or twice a week, usually consisting of a few hours per session. However, one of the wonderful things about tag wrangling is that it’s super easy to scale your workload, depending on how much time you’re able to dedicate to volunteering – so during holidays and such, there might be several days a week where I spend all day just wrangling!

For a typical wrangling session, I’ll first tackle my solo-wrangled fandoms to wrangle any new tags that have shown up in the wrangling bins there, before taking a look to see if any of my co-wrangled fandoms might especially need a hand.

If it seems like there are not any new tags to handle, I might go hunting for concepts that I can canonise in one of my fandoms! Wranglers usually follow the so-called ‘rule of three’ (colloquially shortened to ‘ro3’), which means that a new concept must have been tagged by at least three separate users on three separate works. This is so that we know that there’s actually a desire in the fandom for the concept to be canonised – so if there’s a particular concept that you’d love to see get a canonical tag that you can filter on, get a couple of friends to make works about it and tag for it!

Sometimes, I might have different projects to work on besides my regular wrangling, such as a renaming project. For example, if a character gets their surname revealed in canon, wranglers might choose to update their character and relationship canonicals to reflect the change! This is a manual process that requires the wrangler to first create a new canonical with the updated format, then move over all the syns from the old canonical, and then finally de-canonise and syn the old tag to the new one. If there are a lot of tags to go through, this is a process that can take days, weeks, even months! However, I actually find renaming projects kind of soothing in their repetition, especially after having established workflows that help me get through them smoothly.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I actually first started volunteering with the Translation committee as a translator and beta reader. It used to be my dream to become a translator, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to both get some relevant experience on my resumé, as well as give back to a website where I spent (and still do spend) a lot of my free time on.

After a few months as a translator, I also applied to become a tag wrangler! The more I learnt about what tag wrangling was and the kind of work that tag wranglers did, the more it sounded like something I would really enjoy – and it absolutely is! There’s something about organising stuff that tickles my brain just right.

When I started university and had to scale back on my volunteering hours, I ended up giving up translation and sticking with tag wrangling, which has given me a lot of opportunities over the years to distract myself from course work, while still helping me feel productive.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

There are honestly a lot of different things I could put down as an answer to this question.

As many people know, the last few years have been turbulent for the OTW as a whole, and the Tag Wrangling committee itself has also seen a lot of internal changes in the last year or so. While I’m happy to say that we’re now seeing a lot of progress in updating our policies and getting new projects off the ground, it definitely hasn’t been without growing pains.

While I haven’t been on the front lines spearheading any of these discussions or projects due to IRL commitments on my time and energy, I have been talking privately with some of the people who are pushing to make change within the committee. It has been incredibly disheartening to hear of some of the roadblocks that have to be overcome, whether it’s organisational inertia or simple lack of manpower, but I’m very hopeful that our current momentum will prevail so that we can make this committee (and this organisation as a whole) the best it can be. I’ll definitely continue to offer my support in the ways that I am able!

What fannish things do you like to do?

Mostly, I read a lot of fic! I rarely tend to stick to a single fandom for any length of time, but my bookmarks reveal that the fandoms I’ve read a lot in lately are Star Wars, Stranger Things, Hockey RPF, The Witcher, and The Pitt.

I’ve only written a handful of short fics myself, but I also beta fics for both friends and strangers! This is something I’ve done sporadically over many years, but I’ve been trying to offer my services more in the last year or so, as a way to give back more substantially to my fandom communities than just reading, kudosing, and commenting. Fic authors are so important to keep fandoms alive and thriving, and I’m happy to support them how I can! ♥️


Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

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.

he is throwing a gem tonight

Aug. 1st, 2025 08:36 pm
musesfool: a loaf of bread (staff of life)
[personal profile] musesfool
Anyone got a good recipe for corn fritters? We used to make them when I was a kid, but I have not turned up a recipe in the folder of old recipes I inherited from my parents, and neither my brother nor sister had a recipe. I'm guessing it was probably the Bisquick recipe, but I don't have any Bisquick, so I will probably end up halving the Smitten Kitchen recipe.

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