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Posted by therealmorticia

The Pinky and the Brain Page, a Pinky and the Brain fanfiction and fanart archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

Background explanation

James, the archivist, used to run and maintain a Pinky and the Brain fandom site from around 1995 to 2000. When he recently found some of the stories in an old hard drive he searched the Internet for some of them, but his searches came up empty. Rather than letting those stories sit unread he thought he would rather they be shared on the AO3 for people to enjoy and remember.

The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with James to import The Pinky and the Brain Page into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all fanfics and fanart currently in the The Pinky and the Brain Page will be hosted on the OTW’s servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from The Pinky and the Brain Page to the AO3 after September 2025. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.

What does this mean for creators who had work(s) on The Pinky and the Brain Page?

We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We’ll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.

All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.

Please contact Open Doors with your The Pinky and the Brain Page pseud(s) and email address(es), if:

  1. You’d like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than you used on the original archive.
  2. You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
  3. You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
  4. You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3, or would NOT like your works added to the archive collection.
  5. You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
  6. You have any other questions we can help you with.

Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your The Pinky and the Brain Page account, please contact Open Doors and we’ll help you out. (If you’ve posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they’re yours, that’s great; if not, we will work with the The Pinky and the Brain Page mod to confirm your claims.)

Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on:

If you still have questions…

If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.

We’d also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of The Pinky and the Brain Page on Fanlore. If you’re new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We’re excited to be able to help preserve The Pinky and the Brain Page!

– The Open Doors team and James

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.

full_metal_ox: A gold Chinese Metal Ox zodiac charm. (Default)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia; No Reservations
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Anthony Bourdain, “Global” Alan Weeks, Todd Liebler, Tracey Godwin, Reepicheep, Aslan, and a cast of colorful Narnian OCs.
Rating: Teen and up (mostly for Bourdain-characteristic profanity.)
Length: 6,228 words
Content Notes: a vast variety of food, some narratively presented as off-putting; drunkenness; smoking; weed (that he doesn’t get to use); Bourdain’s typical abrasive impertinence; Author Showed Her Work.
Creator Links: (AO3) [archiveofourown.org profile] Edonohana; (Dreamwidth) [personal profile] rachelmanija
Theme: Food and Cooking, previously recced for Crossovers/Fusions, previously recced for Small Fandoms, Cultural Differences, Fandom Classics, Older Characters, Research, Worldbuilding

Summary: I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table.

Author’s Notes: Cut_for_length. )

Reccer's Notes: Okay; what’s the September 2025 Food & Cooking theme even for if this classic doesn’t circle around for a threepeat? (Twelve years since the last mention should be a sufficient interval.)

This brilliant crossover, all the more poignant in hindsight, nails both Bourdain’s voice and the Narnian sense of place, painstakingly hitting all the beats: Food Porn; Food Gorn (with the acknowledgement that the difference between the two is in the palate of the beholder); departure from what Diana Wynne-Jones would term the Guided Tour into Parts Unknown, with the aid of knowledgeable locals; hospitality in austere circumstances; martial arts (with thought given to the size logistics!); scary local politics; above all, food as a vehicle of cross-cultural understanding.

“No Reservations: Narnia” has the additional distinction of being RPF that not only reached but impressed the subject:

“This is astonishingly well written with an attention to detail that’s frankly a bit frightening…I’m both flattered and disturbed. I think I need a drink.”—Anthony Bourdain.

Fanwork Links: No Reservations: Narnia, by [archiveofourown.org profile] Edonohana for [archiveofourown.org profile] innocentsmith; cover art by [archiveofourown.org profile] moonblossom_graphics.
full_metal_ox: A gold Chinese Metal Ox zodiac charm. (Default)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling
Pairings/Characters: M/M; Song Lan | Song Zichen/Xiao Zingchen; Song Lan | Song Zichen, Xiao Xingchen
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 3,632 words
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, determinedly Taiwanese cuisine, Food Porn because the author inexplicably omitted that tag, racist microaggression (a character recounts getting renamed by his exchange host family.)
Creator Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, First Meetings, Taiwan, Street food, chinese diaspora feelings and food as love language, SongXiao Feast
Creator Links: (AO3) [archiveofourown.org profile] Irrelevancy; (Tumblr) [tumblr.com profile] touchmycoat
Theme: Food & Cooking, Cultural Differences, Fluff, Going Home, Identity, Modern AU, Slice of Life

Summary: Flirting and cultural reclamation via Taiwanese street food. Songxiao modern meet-cute.

Author’s Notes:
For the #songxiaofeast on twitter, thanks for organizing the event~!!!! There's so much great art in the hashtag *~* love me some food love....

Chinese glossary at end lolol, and is this all a shameless marketing ploy for Taiwan night markets? yes.

…The menu (a twitter thread w pictures)
(Unfortunately no longer accessible—FMO.)

大腸包小腸 (dà cháng bāo xiǎo cháng): "little sausage wrapped around a big sausage" lol
蚵仔煎 (ó-à-tsiān): oyster pancake. I'm using the Taiwanese romanization here because it better captures that Hokkien pronunciation. Ningxia Night Market seriously has the best ones.
臭豆腐 (chò dò fǔ): stinky tofu!! I think it smells delicious; don't be like SL eat it normally without that crazy amount of sauce nkfsjdfds
肉圓麵線 (bà wán miàn xiàn): meatball & rice noodles. Two separate things but they're typically sold together. Meatball is always pronounced in Hokkien and sometimes rice noodle is too (mǐ suǎ)
豆花 (dòu huā): tofu pudding. It's not too sweet and it's sooooo refreshing to have on a hot taiwan evening with ice!
雞蛋糕 (jī dàn gāo): egg cake! They're seriously very good but a hit-or-miss from street vendors lmfao.

Drop a comment~! Happy feastings!!!!!!!


Reccer’s Notes: Taiwanese bartender Song Zichen, taking both pity on and a fancy to diasporic American tourist Xiao Xingchen, proceeds to initiate him into the ways of local street food (as both a welcome into his heritage and a courtship overture.) This fic, stuffed with delicious Unresolved Sexual Tension, serves as a reminder that the Sinosphere is a very big and diverse place, and brought an outpouring of nostalgic yearning for the Taste Of Home from diasporic commenters.

(And Ningxia Night Market needs to hire Irrelevancy as a publicist, dammit; I was fervently wishing my neighborhood had something like that up the alley!)

Fanwork links: Comfort Food / 有可能的夜晚 (AO3-locked.)

OTW Board Meeting, October 5, 2025

Sep. 19th, 2025 03:02 pm
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Posted by Elintiriel

The OTW Board will be holding its next public meeting at 00:00 UTC on October 5 (what time is that for me?).

This meeting will be held in the Board Discord server. The server will have a team of moderators and a set of rules (including question rules) and community guidelines. The server will remain open even after the meeting, but the channels for meeting and asking questions will be read-only. Board will be posting replies to questions that do not get addressed during the scheduled meeting two weeks after the meeting in the server’s #questions-answers channel.

The agenda will include:

  • Decisions made since the last public board meeting
  • 2025 OTW Board Election wrap-up
  • OTW Culture Roadmap Update
  • Board Roadmap Update
  • Any other business (Questions & Answers)

Prior to this meeting, there is an opportunity to ask questions in advance to be answered as part of the meeting. This allows anyone who wishes to ask the Board questions, whether they will be able to attend the meeting live or not. Board will also accept questions during the meeting.

Questions submitted to this Google Form will be accepted up to three days before the meeting begins or until 50 questions have been submitted. At that point, the form will be turned off. You need to be logged in to a Google account to submit a question. In the future, these rules may be amended as needed.

Further information will be available in the OTW Board Discord server.

sinesofinsanity: For use in leading quests and destorying balrongs (Default)
[personal profile] sinesofinsanity posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Avatar the Last Airbender
Pairings/Characters: Zuko, Iroh, the GAang in the background
Rating: G
Length: 2,889 words, 19min 30s
Creator Links: Haicrescendo
Theme: Food & Cooking, character development, family, families of choice, going home, missing scenes,

Summary:

[Zuko’s greatest failing, not his only but just one that stands out the most in a very long list, is that he’s never known quite what he had until it’s gone. Or, on the opposite hand, he covets the things that don’t matter, that seem to matter so much at the time and turn out, in the end, to be something that Zuko’s made up in his head.

And then Zuko finds, of all things after it all, that he misses Uncle Iroh’s tea.]

Or,

Zuko screws up his life and in the process of fixing it, figures out some tea wisdom along the way.


Reccer's Notes: This story is so beautiful and gentle. I absolutely love seeing how Zuko's growth and character development is mirrored with his finally learning to make a decent cup of tea. Plus the neat detail of how he despite learning from and trying to emulate his uncle, he makes it his own way. Zuko and Iroh's relationship is lovely in this too. Just an all around lovely story. klainelynch does a beautiful job with the podfic as well

Fanwork Links:
Heat, Wait, Steep, Repeat
and the Podfic both on AO3
[syndicated profile] savagelove_feed

Posted by Dan Savage

It’s gonna be a very brief struggle session this week — hardly a session, barely a struggle — since I’m a dozen times zones away from home and dying of jet lag. Got this via email… With Jimmy Kimmel, many journalists, many professors, and even fast food workers getting fired and suspended for pointing out … Read More »

The post STRUGGLE SESSION: Gonna Be a Shortie… appeared first on Dan Savage.

Murderbot Humble Bundle

Sep. 18th, 2025 10:55 pm
fred_mouse: pencil drawing of mouse sitting on its butt reading a large blue book (book)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

For some days, I've seen people mention the Martha Wells Humble Bundle offer and gone 'nah, I don't need it, I've got most of the Murderbot stuff, I DON'T NEED IT'.

And then someone posted that it has the short stories, and I nearly caved. And then someone shared it on Tumblr, and I don't remember what was said, and I was like 'it won't hurt to look, right'?

I will tell you that I did not cave because it has a Murderbot book I have either not read or have entirely forgotten reading (and may not, in fact, own). I did not cave because of short stories, for I noticed not the presence of said short stories. I caved because nearly the first thing I saw was The Emilie Adventures, which I know not if I will love, but has been in my wish list many many years (best guess: 2018, which is the copyright date of what I think is the first Murderbot book I read, which was at the time the most recent. The two Emilie stories are copyright 2013 and 2014, but by the time I tried to acquire them, no legal avenues worked).

So now I have 14 ebooks, some of which I have read and some of which are short stories, and I do not have the oomph to put them in the acquired books list (which has a gaping hole in it in which I either bought no books, or did not record them), along with the three that turned up ... yesterday (and one I really wanted is not sodding available and my money has been refunded. I hate this 'warehousing glitch' or whatever the excuse is, it happens so sodding often).

full_metal_ox: A Chinese gold Metal Ox charm, with a textured teal frame. (framed)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi; Chen Qing Ling
Pairings/Characters: Gen; M/M; Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian; Jin Zixuan, Wen Qing, Wen Ning, Nie Mingjue, Nie Huaisang, Jiang Fengmian, Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, Jiang Yanli, Lan Xichen, Lan An, Lan Wangji
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 1,209 words
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, arrant pedantry, Author Showed Her Work, Food Porn, gastrotravelogue, tea nerdery, Tumblr work
Creator Tags:
headcanon, the untamed 陈情令, cql, mo dao zu shi, mdzs, wei wuxian, lan wangji, nie huaisang, jin zixuan, wen qing, nie mingjue, wangxian headcanon at the very end because that's what i'm here for, tea, i really like tea, heicha, oolong, white tea, green tea, dragonwell, my ramblings, qi is a thing for some tea drinkers

Creator Links: (AO3) [archiveofourown.org profile] Haoppopotamus; (Instagram) [instagram.com profile] haoppopotamus; (Tumblr) [tumblr.com profile] watch-grok-brainrot (formerly [tumblr.com profile] wangxianbunnydoodles)
Theme: Food & Cooking, Cultural Differences, Meta, Research, Worldbuilding

Summary: Since watching ep 3 for the first time (i.e. january), this has been knocking around in my brain. In ep 3, we see JZXuan waltzing into the same inn as the Yunmeng Trio, booting them, and then rejecting “bad tea”. Ever since, I’ve watched a lot of tea being poured in CQL. It got me thinking, what kind of tea would different sects prefer and what would different characters drink?

Reccer’s Notes: In which Haoppo uses her tea connoisseurship as a vehicle for characterization and worldbuilding (and invites her imaginary friends to illustrate and share her interest.) For the likes of me (with no claim to Asian cred by birth or upbringing, and whose blunted sensory range reduces almost all tea to hot leaf juice), this serves as a window into an unfamiliar area of interest and body of cultural reference frames (the idea that tea might possess qi, not necessarily related to its flavor, was a new one on me—but of obvious importance to cultivators.)

Fanwork Links: Tea Preferences by CQL Sects - a Headcanon

(The original post, preserved on the Wayback Machine, includes a beautiful and apropos GIF header: Tea Preferences by CQL Sects - a Headcanon ([tumblr.com profile] wangxianbunnydoodles)
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Posted by therealmorticia

Do you have experience copyediting or proofreading academic journals? Would you like to wrangle AO3 tags? Can you read and translate from Chinese to English? Can you read and translate from Italian to English? Do you have experience in managing or leading people?

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

  • TWC Committee Copyeditor – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC
  • Tag Wrangling Volunteer – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 125 applications
  • Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Chinese) – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 45 applications
  • Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Italian) – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications
  • Fanlore Chair Track Volunteer – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications

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.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

TWC Committee Copyeditor

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an international peer-reviewed Diamond Open Access online publication about fan-related topics that seeks to promote dialogue between the academic community and fan communities. Copyeditors professionally copyedit submissions for TWC according to Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) 18, Merriam-Webster online, and the TWC style guide. Editorial standards are those of a university press.

The copyeditor’s main responsibility will be to carefully copyedit word-processed manuscripts to correct errors of grammar, usage, style; normalize presentation of information; check the literature; and ensure consistency of usage of, e.g., presentation, capitalization, italic, and numbers.

Applicants are required to pass a brief copyediting test that will be drawn from live copy (a not yet published article that is currently in production). All returned tests will be assessed and the applicant provided with feedback.

Applications are due 24 September 2025

Apply for TWC Committee Copyeditor at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Tag Wrangling Volunteer

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive.

If you’re an experienced AO3 user who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role, we’re currently looking for wranglers for specific fandoms only, which will change each recruitment round. Please see the application for which fandoms are in need.

Wranglers need to be fluent in English but we welcome applicants who are also fluent in other languages, especially Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), Čeština (Czech), Español (Spanish), isiZulu (Zulu), Polski (Polish), Português brasileiro (Brazilian Portuguese), Suomi (Finnish), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), Türkçe (Turkish), Українська (Ukrainian), ไทย (Thai), Русский (Russian), беларуская (Belarusian) and 한국어 (Korean) — but help with other languages would be much appreciated!

Applications are due 24 September 2025 or after 125 applications

Apply for Tag Wrangling Volunteer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Chinese)

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive.

If you’re an experienced AO3 user who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy Tag Wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role we’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Chinese.We welcome all Chinese dialects! The work will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Chinese into English.

Applications are due 24 September 2025 or after 45 applications

Apply for Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Chinese) at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Italian)

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive.

If you’re an experienced AO3 user who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy Tag Wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role we’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Italian. The work will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Italian into English.

Applications are due 24 September 2025 or after 30 applications

Apply for Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Italian) at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Fanlore Chair Track Volunteer

Do you have experience in managing or leading people? Are you an organizational wizard? Do you have an interest in preserving fannish history or experience in wiki editing? The Fanlore committee is looking for new Chair Track Volunteers to join our team!

Fanlore is the committee responsible for maintaining and promoting the Fanlore wiki. We promote Fanlore on social media, run Fanlore editing challenges, support Fanlore editors, write the wiki’s policy and help pages, and respond to emails from editors and readers. The Chair Track Volunteer position is for people who have the time and dedication to learn all about our operations so that they can be considered for the role of committee Chair.

We’re looking for someone who has experience in wiki editing and an understanding of social media, who is comfortable with personnel management and training new recruits, and who is experienced in leadership or management whether in a business or nonprofit environment. Candidates also need strong time management skills and the ability to work on and track multiple tasks at a time. If that’s you, please apply!

For your application to be considered, you will be required to complete a short task within one week of submitting your application.

Applications are due 24 September 2025 or after 40 applications.

Apply for Fanlore Chair Track Volunteer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

(no subject)

Sep. 16th, 2025 09:20 pm
skygiants: Cha Song Joo and Lee Su Hyun from Capital Scandal taking aim at each other (baby shot you down)
[personal profile] skygiants
I liked the Korean movie Phantom (2023) enough that I decided to hunt down the novel on which it's based, Mai Jia's The Message -- in large part out of curiosity about whether it's also lesbians.

The answer: ... sort of! The lesbians are not technically textual but there's a bit of Lesbian Speculation and then a big pointed narrative hole where lesbians could potentially be. It is, however, without a doubt, Women Being Really Weird About Each Other, to the point where I'm considering it as a Yuletide fandom (perhaps even moreso than the movie, where the women are also weird about each other but in a more triumphant cinematic way and less of an ambiguous, psychologically complex and melancholic way. you know.)

The plot: well, as in the movie, there's a spy, and there's the Japanese Occupation, and there's a Big Haunted House where we're keeping all the possible spies to play mind games with until somebody fesses up. Because the book is set in 1941 China, there are actually three factions at play -- the Japanese and collaborators, the Communists and the Nationalists -- and for the whole first part of the book, fascinatingly enough, we are almost entirely in the head of the Japanese officer who's running the operation and choreographing all the mind games in an attempt to ferret out the Communist agent in his codebreaking division. The result is sort of a weird and almost darkly funny anti-heroic anti-Poirot situation, in which Hihara is constantly engineering increasingly complicated locked-room scenarios designed to get the spy to confess like the culprit in a Thin Man movie, and is constantly thwarted by his suspects inconveniently refusing to stick to the script, even when presented with apparently incontrovertible evidence, placed under torture, lied to about the deaths of other members of the party, etc. etc.

The suspects include several variously annoying men, plus two women whom we and everyone else are clearly intended to find the most interesting people there: quiet and competent Li Ningyu, cryptography division head, mother of two, whom everyone knows is semi-separated from an abusive husband, and who somehow manages to keep calmly slithering her way out of every accusation Hihara tries to stick on her; and her opposite, loud bratty chic Gu Xiaomeng, whom Hihara would very much like to rule out as a suspect as quickly as possible because she's the daughter of a very wealthy collaborator, and who seems moderately obsessed with her boss Li Ningyu For Some Reason.

Both book and movie spend, like, sixty percent of their length on this big house espionage mind games scenario and then abruptly take a left turn, with the next forty percent being Something Completely Different. In the film this left turn involves DRAMATIC ROMANTIC ACTION HEROICS!!!! so I was quite surprised to find that the book's left turn involves spoilers )
mific: (Dief is happy)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: due South
Characters/Pairings: Diefenbaker
Rating: Gen
Length: n/a (artwork)
Content Notes: may induce donut cravings!
Creator Links: Wagnetic on AO3
Theme: Food and cooking, Happy endings, Crafts, Textiles

Summary: A bag featuring Dief and the imminent demise of some donuts.

Reccer's Notes:
I will never stop reccing this! An excellently crafted bag with a felt appliqué of Dief about to enjoy a stack of donuts. It's so good, and a perfect likeness of Dief with a "donuts incoming" gleam in his eye!

Fanwork Links: Hungry Like the Wolf

Round 179 Theme Poll

Sep. 16th, 2025 08:44 am
runpunkrun: combat boot, pizza, camo pants = punk  (punk rock girl)
[personal profile] runpunkrun posting in [community profile] fancake
Poll #33623 round 179 theme poll
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 109

Pick the next theme of fancake:

Mystery & Suspense
38 (34.9%)

Platonic Relationships
33 (30.3%)

Uncommon Settings
38 (34.9%)

[syndicated profile] savagelove_feed

Posted by Nancy Hartunian

A man in a poly triad has a girlfriend. His girlfriend has a boyfriend, and they all live together, share a dog, and plan to have kids. The caller and the other guy will be at a wedding full of normies who don’t know the nature of their relationship. Should he just say they’re a … Read More »

The post Pretend Your Girlfriend is a Watermelon appeared first on Dan Savage.

Making the Upgrade

Sep. 16th, 2025 11:00 am
[syndicated profile] savagelove_feed

Posted by Patrick Kearney

I hate to admit this, but I have a hard time feeling comfortable having sex or even talking to guys unless I’m drunk or high. I’m a trans man. I’m a sexual assault survivor. Admittedly, I’m also a bit insecure about myself. And while I’ve been in therapy for years, I don’t feel I’m making … Read More »

The post Making the Upgrade appeared first on Dan Savage.

denynothing1: (Default)
[personal profile] denynothing1 posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairings/Characters: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Rating: Mature
Length: 7,571 words
Creator Links: whateverrrrwhatever on AO3
Theme: Food & Cooking

Summary: John decides that California doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

It's an AU where John Sheppard inherits a supermarket right next to Cal and meets Rodney McKay, physics professor. They kiss. That's it, that's the fic.

Reccer's Notes: This is an *almost* complete AU, shot through with wonderful location details, wherein John is a veteran who spent time in Antarctica and Rodney is a professor at Berkeley. In a series of snapshots, John inherits a run-down local market, decides he likes the neighborhood, and sets about making a place for himself. Then one day, an "unnecessarily dramatic" (as described in the tags) Rodney walks through the door.

This was one of the first SGA AUs I read and it stayed with me. I truly enjoyed following John as he problem solved; first the store, then Rodney. (Spoiler: the solution is snacks.)

Fanwork Links: Story on AO3
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by Lute

AO3 Tag Wranglers continue to test processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don’t belong to any particular fandom (also known as “No Fandom” tags). This post will provide an overview of some of these upcoming changes.

In this round of updates, we continued a method which streamlines creation of new canonical tags, prioritizing more straightforward updates which would have less discussion compared to renaming current canonical tags or creating new canonical tags which touch on more complex topics. This method also reviews new tags on a regular basis, so check back on AO3 News for periodic “No Fandom” tag announcements.

None of these updates change the tags users have added to works. If a user-created tag is considered to have the same meaning as a new canonical, it will be made a synonym of one of these newly created canonical tags, and works with that user-created tag will appear when the canonical tag is selected.

In short, these changes only affect which tags appear in AO3’s auto-complete and filters. You can and should continue to tag your works however you prefer.

New Canonicals

The following concepts have been made new canonical tags:

In Conclusion

While all these new tags have already been made canonical, we are still working on implementing changes and connecting relevant tags, so it’ll be some time before these updates are complete. We thank you in advance for your patience!

While we won’t be announcing every change we make to No Fandom canonical tags, you can expect similar updates in the future on the tags we believe will most affect users. If you’re interested in the changes we’ll be making, you can continue to check AO3 News or follow us on Bluesky @wranglers.archiveofourown.org or Tumblr @ao3org for future announcements.

You can also read previous updates on “No Fandom” tags as well as other wrangling updates, linked below:

Got Questions?

For more information about AO3’s tag system, check out our Tags FAQ.

In addition to providing technical help, AO3 Support also handles requests related to how tags are sorted and connected.​ If you have questions about specific tags, which were first used over a month ago and are unrelated to any of the new canonical tags listed above, please contact Support instead of leaving a comment on this post.

Lastly, as mentioned above, we’re still working on connecting relevant user-created tags to these new canonicals. If you have questions about specific tags which should be connected to these new canonicals, please refrain from contacting Support about them until at least two months from now.

(no subject)

Sep. 14th, 2025 09:01 am
skygiants: Hazel, from the cover of Breadcrumbs, about to venture into the Snow Queen's forest (into the woods)
[personal profile] skygiants
We watched Scavengers Reign because it was enthusiastically recommended to [personal profile] genarti as fun animated science fiction about being stranded on an alien planet with interesting alien biology. Which is true! This is not incorrect! Not Mentioned was the extent to which it is also very definitely lovingly animated body-and-survival horror ..... every time we watched we checked in with each other like 'still good to proceed? not too much eugughghhhhhh?' '[grimly] let's watch at least one more episode and see what happens,' and in this way we eventually crawled through all twelve episodes.

NONETHELESS I do think it was very good, once we acclimated to the eugughghhhhhh factor. (I ended up higher on it than [personal profile] genarti did, in some part because I liked the ending for my favorite character better than she liked the ending for hers.) The first episode introduces you in media res to the several sets of people stranded on this planet that the show will be following:

- Sam and Ursula, an older man and younger woman traveling together, who've developed a plan to bring down their heavily damaged ship, the Demeter,, still in orbit around the planet with most of the crew in cryosleep; Ursula is fascinated by the planet and interested in learning more about it, while Sam is laser-focused on Getting Out Of There
- Azi, a motorcycle butch who's been in crop-growing survival mode supported by (a) Levi (unit), a pleasant manual labor robot whose behavior is becoming increasingly altered by some kind of planetary growth thriving in its innards
- Kamen, alone and still trapped in his escape pod, on the verge of death until he encounters a telepathic creature that brainwashes him into symbiotic/parasitic collaboration, and yet somehow his biggest concern is still His Divorce

Over the course of the story, we learn through flashbacks more about who these people were on the Demeter and what happened to strand them on the planet, while they cope (or don't) with the various challenges of the planet and the hope of escape provided by the Demeter. The real fears that the show evokes, IMO, are isolation and transformation -- being, yourself, transformed without your knowledge or consent, or, perhaps even worse, seeing your only companion changing into something unrecognizable and untrustworthy. These are things that scare me personally very much and so I often found this a very scary show! But -- like Annihilation or Alien Clay, the two other stories that Scavengers Reign reminded me of the most -- it also evokes the flip side of this fear, the beauty and wonder of the transformative and strange. The animators loved animating these weird alien ecosystems.

You can watch the trailer here:



(The trailer is very clear and accurate to the amount of body horror in the show. From this you will be able to tell that we did not in fact watch the trailer before we began the show itself.)

A second season was planned, but has not been ordered and may never be made; IMO the first season does stand as complete but I would very much like to see the second season and I hope it happens.
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by therealmorticia

Every month the OTW hosts guest posts on our OTW News accounts to provide an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom. These posts express each individual’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy.

Karis Jones, PhD (she/her) is an educator, literacy consultant, public humanities scholar, and community activist, as well as Assistant Professor of Secondary English Language Arts at Baylor University. She has published widely, including in the journal of Transformative Works and Culture, and won several scholarly awards from the American Educational Research Association.

Scott Storm, PhD (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Literacy in the School of Education at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Scott is a former high school teacher with 15 years of experience designing, founding, and sustaining urban public schools; his work has appeared in Journal of Literacy Research, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and English Teaching Practice & Critique, among others.

Today, Dr. Karis Jones and Dr. Scott Storm, authors of the book Fandoms in the Classroom: A Social Justice Approach to Transforming Literacy Learning—join us to talk about how bringing fandom into the classroom can turn student passion into real learning.

How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?

As fans of fantasy and science fiction genres ourselves, we have long been interested in fandoms and fan cultures. Even as teens, we wrote our own creative fanworks inspired by the stories that we loved. Once we became teachers, we noticed that our students had incredible passionate intensities around the fandoms that they loved. Moreover, they were participants in fan cultures, reading memes, analyzing discourse, and writing fanfiction. As English language arts teachers, we noticed that students were not only excited about participating in fandoms, but also that these were spaces of rich literacy learning. For example, students posting their original writing online often revised their stories based on feedback from the community in order to strengthen the writing and deepen connections. Reflecting on how important fandoms had been to us and in seeing how important fandoms were to our students, we knew that we had to think about how to make school a place that could support these passionate student interests for literacy learning.

Your book highlights how bringing fandoms into the classroom can shift the focus toward student experiences and interests. How does this approach support a more student-centered form of pedagogy, and what kinds of transformations have you seen as a result?

Many English teachers create lectures focused on the teacher’s interpretations of often-read canonical literature. This puts the thrust of intellectual work on teachers. However, it is students who need to be doing the learning and who should therefore do much more of the daily intellectual work of the classroom. We use students’ interests in fandoms in order to center student expertise. Students come with much knowledge about how the texts that they love were created and about some of the different ways to interpret those texts. We have students lead inquiry-based discussions with their peers to dig even deeper into these texts. Then they build off these discussions by reading extensively, writing analytic papers, and presenting their work to the local community. As students engage with fandoms they love, we note when they are using literary elements to create deeper interpretations. For example, sometimes a student will trace the metaphors or characterization in a fandom but might not use those exact words to do so. During student-led class discussions, we sit in the circle with students and chime in when they are using an analytic tool and that literary scholars have given a special name like metaphor, hyperbole, archetypes, or tropes. In this way, over a few weeks, we build a large set of analytic tools that students use to make sense of texts. Thus, throughout all the discussion, reading, and writing that students are doing in our classes, students are learning deeply because it is the students who are doing the crux of the intellectual work.

One of the intriguing ideas in your book is the reframing of academic disciplines as fandoms. How might this way of thinking open up new possibilities for teaching across different disciplines?

In Chapter 6 “Imagining Academic Disciplines as Fandoms,” we give examples of ways that teachers can put their academic disciplines in conversation with media fandoms. This helps students navigate across disciplinary practices, which may at first feel distant or strange, by comparing them with media fandom practices, which may feel more familiar. Guiding youth to compare communities and think through ways to improve or remix their practices can be a productive pathway for making sense of the academic disciplines. For example, teachers can take up a participatory fandom lens to help youth understand disciplinary conversations happening on social media (e.g. the controversy around Charlotte the Stingray’s pregnancy in March 2024), or schools can take up fandom formats like conventions to help youth dialogue around current disciplinary topics (e.g. a school academic history conference including symposium panels moderated by historians at local universities).

Integrating fandom into the classroom sounds exciting—but we know it’s not always straightforward. From your perspective, what are some of the challenges educators face when trying to incorporate fandom-based practices in their teaching?

As educators who have been teaching with fandoms for a long time, we absolutely understand the challenges. In Chapter 8 “Tackling Barriers to Fandom-Based Teaching,” we walk readers through a series of questions that educators have asked us about this kind of work. We give strategies for advocating with one’s administration, even in light of standardized curricula. We talk about ways that educators can bring fandom media into classroom spaces even if they are not familiar with those fandoms themselves. We consider how to balance issues of mature content with issues of censorship. We guide readers through issues of student resistance to publishing their work in fandom communities. We talk readers through suggestions of ways to engage youth with local conventions — or ways to create your own!

How did you hear about the OTW and what do you see its role as?

We are obsessed with OTW! This may not be surprising, but we first encountered OTW as fanfiction readers. We love how this platform is built for fans by fans, and have a special appreciation of how it is organized in a bottom-up way that lifts up fan-created genres (e.g. Magnifico & Jones, 2025). Additionally, Karis is a big fan of Naomi Novik’s writing. At a local author talk, she learned more about Novik’s role in the platform’s founding. This led her to explore current academic work on fandoms in the JTWC. Later, Karis went on to publish her own work in the JTWC. We hope that new trajectories of media and fandom studies continue to remain in close conversation with the field of education, engaging in interdisciplinary conversation and research, because we believe this strengthens our understanding of fandoms and their implications across fields.

What fandom things have inspired you the most?

We have been most inspired by fan acts that move the world toward justice. We are excited by fandoms that bring attention to issues of representation and work to make sure that all kinds of people are represented in creative and fanworks. We love fandoms that think about how to make communities more inclusive and are drawn to fan communities that focus on opening doors for everyone to participate instead of being gatekeepers who want to limit fandoms to only the most diehard fans or exclude groups of people from participating. What inspires us most is when fandoms can be spaces that bring people together in order to follow their passions, and perhaps even change the world.


We encourage suggestions from fans for future guest posts, so contact us if you have someone in mind! Or if you’d like, you can check out earlier guest posts.

(no subject)

Sep. 13th, 2025 09:21 am
skygiants: clone helmet lit by the vastness of space (clone feelings)
[personal profile] skygiants
Broadly speaking, I liked Star Wars: The Mask of Fear, the first book in a planned trilogy of Star Wars Political Thrillers pitched as Andor Prequels, For Fans Of Andor.

This one is set right after the declaration of the Empire and is mostly about the separate plans that Bail Organa and Mon Mothma pursue in order to try and limit their government's whole-scale slide into fascism, with -- as we-the-readers of course know -- an inevitable lack of success. It is of course impossible not to feel the weight of Current Events on every page; the book came out in February '25 and so must have been complete in every respect before the 2024 elections, but boy, it doesn't feel like it. On the other hand, it's also impossible not to feel 2016 and Hillary Clinton looming large over the portrayal of Mon Mothma as the consummate politician who is very good at wrangling the process of government but whom nobody actually likes.

That said, as a character in her own right, I am very fond of Mon Mothma, the consummate politician who is very good at wrangling the process of government but whom nobody actually likes. With her genuine belief in the ideals of democracy and her practiced acceptance of the various ethical compromises that working within the system requires, she makes for a great sympathetic-grayscale political-thriller protagonist. I also like the portrayal of her marriage in this period as something that is, like, broadly functional! sometimes a source of support! always number three or four on her priority list which she never quite gets around to calling him to tell him she's back on planet after a secret mission before the plot sweeps her off in a new direction, oops, well, I guess he'll find out when she's been released from prison again!

Anyway, her main plot is about trying to get a bill passed in the Senate that will limit Palpatine's power as Emperor, which involves making various shady deals with various powerful factions; meanwhile, Bail Organa has a separate plot in which he's running around trying to EXPOSE the LIES about the JEDI because he thinks that once everyone knows the Jedi were massacred without cause, Palpatine will be toppled by public outrage immediately. Both of them think the other's plan is kind of stupid and also find the other kind of annoying at this time, which tbh I really enjoy. I love when people don't like each other for normal reasons and have to work together anyway. I also like the other main wedge between them, which is that both of them were briefly Politically Arrested right before the book begins, and by chance and charisma Bail Organa joked his way out of it and came out fine while Mon Mothma went through a harrowing and physically traumatic experience that has left her with lingering PTSD, and Mon Mothma knows this and Bail Organa doesn't and this colors all their choices throughout the book.

Bail Organa's plot is also sort of hitched onto a plot about an elderly Republic-turned-Imperial spymaster who's trying to find the agents she lost at the end of the war, and her spy protege who accidentally ends up infiltrating the Star Wars pro-Palpatine alt-right movement, both of which work pretty well as stories about people who find themselves sort of within a system as the system is changing underneath them.

And then there is the Saw plotline. This is my biggest disappointment in the book, is that the Saw plotline is not actually a Saw plotline; it's about a Separatist assassin who ends up temporarily teaming up with Saw for a bit as he tries to figure out who he should be assassinating now that the war is over, and we see Saw through his eyes, mostly pretty judgmentally. I do not object to other characters seeing Saw Gerrera pretty judgmentally, but it feels to me like a bit of a cop-out in a book that's pitched as 'how Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Gerrera face growing fascism and start down the paths that will eventually lead to the Rebel Alliance' to once again almost entirely avoid giving Saw a point of view to see his ideology from within. But Star Wars as franchise is consistently determined not to do that. Ah, well; maybe one of the later two books in this trilogy will have a meaty interiority-heavy Saw plotline and I'll eat my words.

(NB: I have not yet seen S2 of Andor and I do plan to do so at some point, please don't tell me anything about it!)

More farewells

Sep. 13th, 2025 09:04 pm
fred_mouse: line drawing of a ladybug with love-heart shaped balloons (ladybug)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Today has brought the news of the passing of two more people - one I counted a friend, and one I knew more in passing. I've known both since the 80s.

David was a member of the dance group my mother and I joined in about 1984, and which I've intermittently been associated with since. I'm not sure if I ever had a conversation with them that wasn't about dancing. We were members of the same performance group, although I spent far fewer years in it than David. Other than folk festivals and dancing places, the only other place I ever remember encountering David was in one of the city queer pubs on a very quiet weekday afternoon. I never did find out if they were there because it was a safe space, or because it was their local pub.

Robert ran the Fremantle Music School, which I attended briefly in the mid 80s*. I've encountered Robert intermittently over the years, at various music events. They were involved in the Mandolin Orchestra, and I believe the Recorder and Early Music Society. We met up again when I joined the first of the two (very) amateur orchestras I've joined in recent years -- they have been the leader of the group in the years I've been there (two years? three?). In retirement, Robert became somewhat prolific in composing pieces, and I think we had one of their pieces at least every semester. We have one that is due to be debuted tomorrow, at a concert that is now going to be a bit fraught. **

* provided-by-school lessons ran to the end of year ten. I found a lovely teacher at the FMS, but when they moved away from the school roughly a year later, I followed them, mostly having lessons at their home.
** I really feel for our conductor, and for our other main organiser, both of whom have been dealing with calling telling people one on one throughout today.

birdylion: picture of an exploding firework (Default)
[personal profile] birdylion posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Leverage
Pairings/Characters: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer, Peggy Milbank, Amy Palavi
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 21452 words
Creator Links: [archiveofourown.org profile] page_runner
Theme: food & cooking, casefic, competence, outsider pov

Summary:
She was only here for a long weekend, using this convention as an excuse to see Alice for the first time in over a year, or using Alice as an excuse to get away for a convention, or using both as a reason to finally take a vacation, because it was about damn time.
At least, that was the original plan.

Reccer's Notes:
Peggy Milbank is a side character who appears in 2 episodes: once when Parker's alias "Alice White" gets called in for jury duty, and once when Parker, Sophie and Tara sneak into a ball at an embassy for an event where Peggy does the catering.

This fic has her meeting the team once more, and has her involved in a job in Portland when they investigate a sketchy business man who drives independent food cart owners out of business, not shying away from inflicting violence on them in the process.

While the team does their thing, Peggy offers to take over the food cart, and does so with remarkable competence - learning a whole new cuisine on the fly. Food plays a big role in the whole story, because of their case, but also because now there are several people in one place who care a lot about food. It's also about a community of food cart owners. And just like Eliot found a way out of his violent life by learning how to cook, there's a side plot in this story how he does that for others too.

While the ship Eliot/Parker/Hardison isn't the main focus, it is definitely in the background, and Peggy's perspective is a really nice outsider POV on them, so I tagged it as such as well.

Fanwork Links: The Food Cart Job on ao3

Sleep

Sep. 12th, 2025 10:26 pm
fred_mouse: Mummified mouse (dead)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

At my last psych appointment, I reported back that while getting my evening tasks done earlier was great, and for four nights I'd successfully gone to bed at a reasonable time, it hadn't lasted. I had continued to get the tasks done (most nights) but had lost the ability to then go to bed afterwards -- I'd adjusted to the new normal, and 'finish my list' was no longer 'and it's bed time' it was 'and it's time to read fic / flirt with tumblr / etc'.

(aside: the expression on the psych's face was priceless. They said approximately 'You did the homework?! only teachers do the homework!?'. And here was me feeling that I'd half arsed the homework. Which, yeah. )

Building on that success, I've moved my bedside lamp down from the top of the bedside shelf (say, 1.1m up) to the shelf that is the same height as the bed. This enables me to read in bed with just the lamp on, and not have a really bright room. And it will surprise no-one who knows about sleep and light and screens, putting the screen away and then reading in low light on paper? My insomnia is dramatically reduced.

I'm now waking up before the 7am alarm more days than not. But what I'm not feeling is rested. I'm obviously getting 'enough' sleep in some way, or I wouldn't be waking, but I'm not sure I'm getting enough sleep cycles. Or maybe it is that I've got a lot of stress happening, and I'm just burning through all the oomph I have.

birdylion: picture of an exploding firework (Default)
[personal profile] birdylion posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Leverage
Pairings/Characters: Maggie Collins, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker (Leverage), Amy Palavi
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 711 words
Creator Links: [archiveofourown.org profile] Hagar
Theme: food & cooking, gen

Summary: Her ex-husband's associates are occasionally useful. For example, when Maggie has a really bad feeling about her latest client.

Reccer's Notes:
Maggie visits the brewpub looking for help regarding a client of hers. It's lovely how the food she is served there acts as kind of character description for the relationship between her, Eliot, Hardison and Parker.

Fanwork Links: What friends are for on ao3
full_metal_ox: Lan Wangji from Mo Dao Zu Shi, with his bunnies. (bunnies)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi
Pairings/Characters: Gen; M/M; Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian; Lan Yuan, Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, OCs
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 2,442 words
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, anonymous author, autobiographical incident, Chinese diaspora feels, inappropriate choice of rabbit food, racist microaggression, secondhand embarrassment
Creator Tags:
Based on a True Story, yes my mom really couldn't find a basic cake and so we had to go with bread, Fluff, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Baking, Icing, Frosting, AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHH THOSE ARE TAGS, Michael's (the store) makes a big appearance, Father's Day, but idc if it's not father's day yet, I was inspired, Inspired by Real Events
Creator Links: none
Theme: Food & Cooking, Cultural Differences, Family, Fluff, Modern AU, Slice of Life

Summary: In which Sizhui and his Baba ice a loaf of bread for Father's Day (plus some angst, but we don't really have to get into specifics do we?)

Author’s Notes:

something i wrote while having writers block

enjoy

(also stay safe and wash your hands and quit going outside if you are)

this isn't really asian rep it just happened when i was 10 and i typed for two hours also its may and here we are with a fictionalized crackheaded version of what happened

yes there were mean girls

… lan zhan's the one getting the cake because his personality's the closest to my dad's but like my dad cut off the frosting and we ended up using the bread for other stuff


Reccer’s Notes: The Chinese-American author posted this anonymously on 8 May 2020 for U.S. Asian and Pacific Islander Month, apologizing that “this isn’t really asian rep”; given that the canon creator is Asian, her target audience is Asian, the characters are Asian, and the OP is Asian fictionalizing their Asian family’s real-life experience, I personally don’t see how it can avoid being Asian Rep.

The author’s self-consciousness—both at the time of writing and in retrospect—is flying from the ramparts, and arguably an integral part of the story. They never did emerge from anonymity, and they’ve since deleted the story—which is a shame, because this is a valid slice-of-life in the Lynda Barry vein, with the OP’s imaginary friends as proxies. Since there seems to be no identifying information that could be used to trace them, I don’t think posting a Wayback Machine capture will expose them to further embarrassment.

And let’s not be like the Mean Girls at Michael’s, okay?

Fanwork links: a loaf of bread is not a substitute for a blank cake

Forging Ghost is Moving to the AO3!

Sep. 11th, 2025 06:06 pm
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by callmeri

Forging Ghost, a Spike/Angel fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

Background explanation

Forging Ghost was a Yahoo! Group dedicated to fanfiction for Spike/Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series. Ghostsforge, the moderator, preserved Forging Ghost when Yahoo! Groups was shut down in 2019 and asked Open Doors for assistance in importing its works to AO3.

The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with Ghostsforge to import Forging Ghost into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all fanart currently in Forging Ghost will be hosted on the OTW’s servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from Forging Ghost to the AO3 after September. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.

What does this mean for creators who had work(s) on Forging Ghost?

We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We’ll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.

All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.

Please contact Open Doors with your Forging Ghost pseud and email address(es), if:

  1. You’d like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than you used on the original archive.
  2. You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
  3. You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
  4. You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3, or would NOT like your works added to the archive collection.
  5. You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
  6. You have any other questions we can help you with.

Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your Forging Ghost account, please contact Open Doors and we’ll help you out. (If you’ve posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they’re yours, that’s great; if not, we will work with the Forging Ghost mod to confirm your claims.)

Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on

If you still have questions…

If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.

We’d also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Forging Ghost on Fanlore. If you’re new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We’re excited to be able to help preserve Forging Ghost!

– The Open Doors team and Ghostsforge

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.

pronker: barnabas and angelique vibing (Default)
[personal profile] pronker posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Dark Shadows

Pairings/Characters: Roger Collins, CC Female, Which Would Give Away Too Much If Named

Rating: G

Length: 2,394 words

Creator Links: AO3 Profile

Theme: Food & Cooking

Summary: Roger meets a friend for dinner who shares his discomfort regarding marriages.

Reccer's Notes: Roger remains one of my favorite Dark Shadows characters, acted superbly by Louis Edmonds, a veteran of stage costume dramas. He always wears period clothing with impeccable insouciance despite figure-hugging trousers, wing collars, and Victorian handlebar moustaches. In this fic, we see how much food presents an opportunity for revealing, soul searching reflections with a sympathetic friend, in fact so much that they don't even eat until the last paragraph or so. The universality of sharing food provides a letting down of the hair, so to speak, voluminous in his friend's case and not-so-much in his. There's an absolutely delightful twist at fic's end. Also, the AO3 profile mentions Author's website, WickerManStudios which contains stories along with more personal content.

Fanwork Links: Mysterious Circumstances

SGA: Battle Potato by fiercelydreamed

Sep. 11th, 2025 11:09 pm
mific: (Teyla serious)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: Gen. Teyla Emmagan & Rodney McKay & John Sheppard & Ronon Dex
Rating: G
Length: 7229
Content Notes: No AO3 warnings apply.
Creator Links: fiercelydreamed on AO3, anatsuno on AO3, anatsuno on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Food and cooking, Team as family, Friendship, Hurt/comfort

Summary: The thing was, John had never been good at patient, and Teyla looked like okay was a couple galaxies over from wherever she was now.

Reccer's Notes: A touching hurt/comfort story set after the team rescues Teyla from Michael. Although Teyla and her baby are back in Atlantis, she's slow to recover and remains low and depleted. Rodney has a plan to cheer her up, though, involving food, and he ropes John in to help. It was I think written in the hiatus before the last season so a few minor details have been jossed, but that doesn't matter. This is the best sort of found family story, with them all rallying around to support Teyla. Lovely.

Fanwork Links: Battle Potato, and there's an excellent podfic read by anatsuno.

chibifukurou: (Psyduck Mystery Dungeon)
[personal profile] chibifukurou posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom:The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
Pairings/Characters: Luo Binghe/Shen Yuan
Rating: T
Length: 14.5k
Creator Links: [archiveofourown.org profile] CheckersXIV
Theme: Food and cooking, (Five) Things, Complete AU

Summary: Luo Binghe has accepted his life for what it is: a dull repetition of a burned-out passion for a job. Back when he started his "Not Your Mother's" cooking channel on youtube, he had been ready to face the world. Now he just wants the world out of his face. When he hits one more bump in the road, he can't really say it's too surprising considering that the universe seems to just hate him.

And yet, the universe sends him to Shen Yuan.
_
Or 5 times Shen Yuan accidentally distracts Luo Binghe's attention from his videos, and the one time Luo Binghe gets his.

Reccer's Notes: This theme was a good excuse to go back for a reread. I love a fic where the point isn't so much falling in love as growing into the kind of person ready to love and be Loved. 

5+1 is always a fun framing device. Particularly when combined with in universe comment section. And I love that this js a broad world with various people who know each other from various settings in it. 

Fanwork Links: The Way to a Man's Heart is His Stomach
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by callmeri

Over the past month, we rolled out behind-the-scenes upgrades and quality-of-life improvements across the site, including the addition of username links and chapter numbers to kudos and comment emails, respectively. We also made some major privacy and security enhancements, such as removing the email, birthday, and location fields from profiles and checking new passwords against known data breaches.

Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors anna, Liz Watkins, Riya K, and theamandawang!

Credits

  • Coders: Abhinav Gupta, anna, Amy Lee, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Connie Feng, Domenic Denicola, EchoEkhi, Hamham6, kitbur, Liz Watkins, marcus8448, Riya K, sarken, Scott, slavalamp, talvalin, theamandawang, weeklies
  • Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, HamHam6, james_, lydia-theda, marcus8448, redsummernight, sarken, Scott, weeklies
  • Testers: Allonautilus, ana, Anh P, Aster, Bilka, Brian Austin, calamario, choux, Dre, Keladry, Lute, lydia-theda, Pent, redsummernight, Runt, Sanity, sarken, Teyris, therealmorticia, weeklies, wichard

Details

0.9.420

On July 15, we massively improved the user search used by admins.

  • [AO3-6565] – We’ve improved the user search feature available to admins by moving it to Elasticsearch and adding the ability to search by past email addresses and usernames.
  • [AO3-7042] – Instead of redirecting to the main Collections page, we now give a 404 error if you try to access the collections page for a nonexistent user, work, or collection.
  • [AO3-7004] – We’ve added a database index to make it faster for database admins to search for comments using a specific guest name.

0.9.421

Following some email-related changes in our July 24 deploy, embedded images are now always stripped from comment emails, and usernames in kudos emails now link to the users’ dashboards.

  • [AO3-3154] – When you receive a kudos notification email, the names of users who have left kudos now link to the users’ dashboards.
  • [AO3-6060] – Even though they no longer had access to tag comment pages, former tag wranglers would still receive email and inbox notifications of replies to their old tag comments. This was both annoying and confusing, so we’ve stopped it from happening.
  • [AO3-6746] – If you changed your username or pseud name and you had some chapters that you co-created with another user, the chapter bylines would not always get updated with your new name. We’ve changed this so the cache is refreshed more reliably.
  • [AO3-6929] – The list of gift exchange sign-ups visible to collection maintainers now includes the pseud and username of signed-up users, instead of just their pseud.
  • [AO3-7011] – Using the Tab key to navigate in desktop Safari used to select hidden inputs, causing the focus indicator to temporarily disappear. We’ve fixed it so only visible links and inputs receive focus.
  • [AO3-7032] – If you tried to add your email to the invitation queue when it was already part of the queue, you would see two copies of the same error message. Now it only shows the error once.
  • [AO3-7065] – We fixed some intermittent failures in the automated tests for the bookmark importing tool used by Open Doors.
  • [AO3-7052] – We did a schema dump to capture what the current data structure looks like before we upgrade to Rails 7.2.
  • [AO3-7053], [AO3-7054], [AO3-7067], [AO3-7068] – We updated a whole bunch of gems and GitHub actions: reviewdog/action-rubocop, awalsh128/cache-apt-pkgs-action, nokogiri, and thor.
  • [AO3-5352] – We prepared the preface of work downloads that are attached to work deletion emails for translation.
  • [AO3-7001] – As an anti-abuse measure, we now strip embedded images from comment notification emails even when image embeds are enabled on the site itself.

0.9.422 & 0.9.423

On July 28, we made a number of small improvements all around the site. There were some issues while deploying these changes, so we did another release to fix it all up on the same day.

  • [AO3-5609] – We stopped sending subscription notifications for works hidden by admins, since hidden works are inaccessible to other users.
  • [AO3-7006] – When a comment contains an HTML list, the list numbers or bullet points no longer overlap with the commenter’s icon.
  • [AO3-7024] – You’ll no longer get an incorrect success message if you mark items in your inbox as read without selecting any comments.
  • [AO3-5476] – We cleaned up some unused code in the works controller.
  • [AO3-7064] – We updated the gems we use for automated testing.
  • [AO3-7072] – We updated the unicode gem to solve some issues with developing the AO3 software on Macs with Apple Silicon chips.
  • [AO3-5346] – Collection maintainers get an email notification when matches in a gift exchange have finished generating. We’ve improved the text of this email and prepared it for translation.
  • [AO3-6484] – We made a small change to the code that generates the HTML class names we use for hiding work blurbs by muted users. We were hoping this tweak would improve performance, but unfortunately it had no effect, so we’ll have to try again.
  • [AO3-6997] – If an Open Doors archivist tries to leave kudos while logged in to an archivist account, they’ll get an error message telling them to log in with their personal account instead.
  • [AO3-7015] – Work blurbs now contain an invisible code comment with the work’s update date, to make it easier for developers of third-party tools to automate downloads from index pages like tags, bookmarks, and search result listings.
  • [AO3-7021] – To make it easier to filter or search using work languages, we’ve added the language codes on the Languages page.
  • [AO3-7057] – We now provide any applicable error messages when an admin attempts to send an invitation directly to an email and something goes wrong.

0.9.424

On August 5, we deployed another batch of miscellaneous fixes.

  • [AO3-5025] – The Tag Wrangling committee can now use the Rich Text editor to edit the Wrangling Guidelines pages.
  • [AO3-7076] – We fixed some unwanted shadows that Chrome was adding to radio buttons and checkboxes.
  • [AO3-7088] – We fixed some flaky automated tests related to importing works from LiveJournal.
  • [AO3-7074] – We removed some unused CSS from our default site skin.
  • [AO3-6580] – We updated the account creation confirmation page’s title from “Create Registration” to “Account Created” so that it’s clearer you’ve successfully made an account.
  • [AO3-6818] – When an admin bans an email from being used for guest comments, that email is now also banned from requesting invitations.
  • [AO3-7026] – When we run a spam check on edited comments by new users, we now tell the spam checker that it’s an edit.
  • [AO3-7046] – We migrated the subscriptions table so it can hold more rows and we won’t run out of room in the future.

0.9.425

On August 19, we deployed an important change to account security that checks new AO3 passwords to see if they’ve been part of a known data breach. We also began allowing CSS variables in site skins.

  • [AO3-7073] – To better protect users’ privacy, we’ve removed the preferences and fields to display emails, birthdays, and locations on user profiles.
  • [AO3-7091] – We stopped using fixtures in our integration tests.
  • [AO3-7098] – We updated cache-apt-pkgs-action again.
  • [AO3-7099] – We bumped the version of actions/checkout – a utility that helps run automated tests on our code – from version 4 to version 5.
  • [AO3-3071] – Comment emails now include the chapter number, so you don’t have to follow the comment link to know where exactly it was left.
  • [AO3-7087] – To improve account security, we updated our password change process to prevent users from choosing passwords that are known to be compromised on other sites. (If you missed our post back on World Password Day, we also have some tips for keeping your AO3 account secure!)
  • [AO3-7090] – We changed links in emails to be HTTPS instead of HTTP.
  • [AO3-7093] – We added an automated test to make sure the fixtures used for seeding development databases result in valid records.
  • [AO3-7094] – We now allow limited use of CSS custom properties in site skins! You can find more information in the skins help text.

0.9.426

We upgraded to Rails 7.2 on August 26.

  • [AO3-7058] – We updated our version of Rails from 7.1 to 7.2.
  • [AO3-7095] – We added more example admin and user accounts with a greater variety of roles to our basic development dataset, which will make it easier for coders to work on things that require specific access levels.
22degreehalo: (AtLA Zuko/Aang hug)
[personal profile] 22degreehalo posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
Pairings/Characters: Luo Binghe/Shen Yuan
Rating: T
Length: 143,334
Creator Links: [profile] mellicindi
Theme: Food & Cooking, (Secret) Hobbies, Asexual & Demisexual Characters, Alternate Universe - Modern, Book Fandoms, Canon LGBTQ+ Characters, Characters of Color, Disability, Families of Choice, Favorite Fanworks, No Canon Required, Novel-Length Fic, Trauma & Recovery.

Summary: Shen Yuan isn't lonely. He's just overseas in a new city, trying to muddle his way through a business degree, and dealing with the side effects of his stupid intestines trying to kill him. So, maybe he sometimes watches ASMR to cope with his too-quiet apartment. Maybe he has a little bit of a parasocial-relationship-thing going on with one particular cooking ASMR channel. It's 2016, who doesn't? The point is, he's content with his quiet life.

And then Shang Qinghua strong-arms him into watching one Hallmark Christmas movie, and it all goes to hell.

Or: Shen Yuan is a Hallmark movie protagonist, Luo Binghe is a Lifetime movie protagonist, and somehow they make it work.

Reccer's Notes: I read this fic over three days right in the middle of Battleship and it instantly became one of my favourite fanfics of all time. I could seriously gush for hours about this fic and its themes: the recurring thread of food as a love language (especially given protagonist Shen Yuan's digestive disability he's too self-conscious to talk openly about), the differing nature of familial, romantic, and friendship bonds and the varying privileges and presumptions behind each, this Luo Binghe's long-term trauma that manifests in the best goddamn depiction of Borderline Personality Disorder I've seen outside Crazy Ex Girlfriend seemingly entirely on accident - and among all of that, it's just a goddamn well-written story, incredibly easy to read and funny and heartfelt and true to its characters while being 100% readable fandom-blind and just - if any of the above appeals to you, I really can't advise anything other than to read it ASAP. <333

Fanwork Links: Life is (not) a Hallmark Movie

December 2012

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