2025 OTW Election Statistics

Sep. 1st, 2025 07:48 pm
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by therealmorticia

Now that the 2025 election is over, we’re happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!

For the 2025 Election, we had 15,138 total eligible voters. Of those, 2,197 voters cast a ballot, which represents 14.5% of the potential voters.

Our voter turnout is lower than that of last year, which had a turnout of 22.8%.

We also saw a decrease in the number of ballots cast, from 3,415 to 2,197, which represents a 35.6% decrease.

Elections is committed to continuing to reach out to our eligible members to encourage them to vote in elections. Whoever is elected to the Board of Directors can have an important influence on the long-term health of the OTW’s projects, and we want our members to have a say in that.

For those who might be interested in the number of votes each candidate received, please note that our election process is designed to elect an equal cohort of Board members in order to allow them to work well together, so we do not release that information. As a general rule, we also won’t disclose which of our unsuccessful candidates received the fewest votes, since we don’t want to discourage them from running again in the future when circumstances and member interest might be different. However, as there were only 3 candidates this year, revealing that information is unavoidable.

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who participated at every stage of the election! We hope to see you at the virtual polls again next year.

kingstoken: (Vintage Mermaid)
[personal profile] kingstoken posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Books/Granada)
Pairings/Characters: Holmes/Watson
Rating: G
Length: 1114 words
Creator Links: MadamzelleG
Theme: food & cooking 

Summary: Holmes never orders dinner for himself, but Watson has long since stopped asking why. Instead, he allows the quiet ritual to unfold—Holmes sipping his coffee, stealing a bite here and there from Watson’s plate with effortless precision. In the warm glow of the Café Royal, amidst the murmur of conversation and the clink of silverware, an unspoken understanding lingers between them: Holmes takes, and Watson never minds.

Reccer's Notes: An intimate little scene of Watson and Holmes dining out together. With some exploration of Holmes' canon issues around food, but not in clinical way, more like Watson observing Holmes.

Fanwork Links: Ao3

Round 178: Food & Cooking

Sep. 1st, 2025 08:03 am
runpunkrun: combat boot, pizza, camo pants = punk  (punk rock girl)
[personal profile] runpunkrun posting in [community profile] fancake
Photograph of steel spoons and spices in a dramatic setting with added text that gives it the look of a gourmet magazine cover: September 2025. Food & Cooking, at Fancake. Steel teaspoons are arranged in an elogated oval to suggest a fish, with the bowls acting as scales and some of the handles left visible to create the fins and tail, giving the creature a spiky appearance. The concave bowls are dusted with a powdery orange spice for color and one spoon at the front of the fish is filled with a coarse black spice to create an eye. The fish is on a black surface with a rough texture and around it are three skinny green peppers, a mound of salt, a mound of orange spice, and a dipping bowl filled with a clear amber liquid.
Our theme for September is food & cooking!

The tag for this round is: theme: food & cooking

If you're just joining us, be sure to check out our policy on content notes. Content notes aren't required, but they're nice to include in your recs, especially if a fanwork has untagged content that readers may wish to know about in advance. Because food can be a sensitive subject, you might want to indicate things like disordered eating, food allergies, dieting, weight loss or gain, food policing, fatphobia, and body shaming.

Rules! )

Posting Template! )

Promote this round! )

(no subject)

Aug. 31st, 2025 11:43 pm
skygiants: clone helmet lit by the vastness of space (clone feelings)
[personal profile] skygiants
Sometimes you hit the end of a book and immediately think 'I'd like to read that over again' because there's some sort of big twist that you know will make you experience the whole thing differently, and sometimes you hit the end of a book and think 'I'd like to read that over again' not because of any Major Plot Reveals, but because the book is woven together in an interesting enough way that you want the chance to fully appreciate how all the pieces fit now that you've seen the full puzzle.

This second case was my experience with The Fortunate Fall, a cyberpunk novel from 1995 that came back into print last year and that I did not quite manage to read in time for the Readercon book club (so I extremely appreciate [personal profile] kate_nepveu's extensive notes on it including the intertextuality with Moby Dick.)

The book is narrated by Maya Andreyeva, a 'camera' -- a cyborg news-reporter modified to provide not just full sensory experience but also associated memories, context, etc. to the viewing public. When the book begins -- well, when the book begins, it has already ended, as Maya tells us; her whole audience has already experienced all the relevant events through her eyes, and now she's telling it to us again, in a narrative that she can control and that's on her own terms, contextualizing only what she wants to contextualize and hiding what she wants to hide. Which is a very fun way to begin a book, by consciously keying you into its distortions and elisions, and for the most part I think the text lives up to it.

Anyway, when not the book but the story begins, Maya has decided to put together a series commemorating the anniversary of a major [future]-historical tragedy, and has just gotten assigned a new screener for the project -- a sort of editorial figure who sits in between the camera and the audience, filtering out bodily functions and bad words and anything else that could be trouble for the network. Because of the amount of time they spend immersed in the heads of their cameras, screeners tend to become rapidly very enthusiastic and romantic about them! Maya's new screener Keishi is a beautiful and mysterious young woman who is, indeed, very enthusiastic and romantic about her! And definitely not keeping any secrets about her skills, her identity, or her reasons for being there working with Maya, no sir.

In true noir mode, Maya's initially normal-seeming historical research into a tragedy that's as long-ago and terrible and world-shaping for her as the Holocaust is for us ends up leading her increasingly out of the bounds of conventional society down a dangerous rabbithole, at the end of which lies forbidden knowledge about the world, forbidden knowledge about her own past, and forbidden knowledge about a really sad whale. And, following along with her, we as readers gradually start to piece together not only the particular dystopian shape of the world -- the parts that Maya already knows and the parts that Maya doesn't -- but also the shape of the story, the themes that it cares about and that have actually been driving the plot this entire time: embodiment, censorship, the atrocities we commit to end atrocities, and the power and beauty and absolute hard limits of queer love, just to name a few.

I don't know that everything about the book has fully aged well. I understand the well-meaning failure mode in cyberpunk that leads an author to posit a Monolithic Utopian Isolationist Africa when the rest of the world has gone to dystopian shit, but I think it is a failure mode. I also admit that I thought the entire grayspace digital-world sequence was a little bit boring. But for the most part the book is not at all boring, it's interesting in the way that only a book that actually trusts its readers to be doing an equal amount of work as they go is interesting. I did not in fact actually then read the book over again, upon hitting the end, because it was extremely overdue at the library [and I had five more equally overdue books on the pile] but I expect I will do so sometime in the nearer rather than the further future. Maybe I'll have the chance to hit another book club.

Don't be afraid of the stars

Sep. 1st, 2025 01:56 pm
copracat: alia from Children of Dune, eyes bright blue, strands of hair blowing across her face (alia)
[personal profile] copracat
I'm at the penultimate episode of Coroner's Diary and there are simply too many cinnamon rolls of the kind who die tragically. I am on melodramatic tenterhooks for the second, third and fourth couples. If it all goes too pear-shaped I am watching A Dream Within A Dream again.

In other news my copy of Hetty McKinnon's latest, Linger, has arrived. Coronation cauliflower and chickpeas is calling to me.

Code deploy happening shortly

Aug. 31st, 2025 07:37 pm
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Per the [site community profile] dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

umm

Aug. 31st, 2025 05:57 pm
fred_mouse: line drawing of a sleeping sheep cosplaying the seventh doctor, with a dream bubble that reads 'dreamwidth' (dreamsheep-seventh-doctor)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

One of the fascinating parts of now being a Humanities student is encountering things that need reframing to make sense. For example--

"the metric foot"

--which caused me to make one of those boiling kettle type noises.

The context of the full sentence helps a little:

“The metric foot — that is, a foot with a fixed number of syllables — became established in Chaucer's time, largely through the influence of Chaucer himself, and it remained the norm of mainstream English verse for the next five centuries. 1

working out that the meter in this is not the metre I'm used to using sure helped.

(I'm not studying linguistics at all. I just think that this is going to be useful background when I get to trying to understand semiotics, which I think I'm going to need for contrastive media analysis, which is the actual methodology I'm hoping to use)

1. Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar M.A.K. Halliday, 2014.

POI: Love and Marriage by astolat

Aug. 30th, 2025 11:13 pm
mific: (Orange mandala)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Person of Interest
Characters/Pairings: John Reese/Harold Finch, Lionel Fusco, Jos Carter, Bear
Rating: Explicit
Length: 4697
Creator Links: astolat on AO3, silverkat1620 on Audiofic Archive, kalakirya on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Marriage of Convenience, Friends to lovers

Summary: "Harold," John said, "are you asking me to marry you for your money?"
"Well, Mr. Reese," Harold said, "given how much of it you've spent already, I don't really see how you can complain."

Reccer's Notes: This story is deeply based in canon and yet, despite having only a partial grasp of the show and never having watched more than a couple of seasons, I still find it easy to follow, and it packs an emotional punch. The reason for the marriage of convenience this time is financial, to strengthen John's cover story and explain a recent massive outlay of funds. This isn't one of those stories where there's a prolonged slow burn after they marry - despite the pragmatic reason and their initial obliviousness, they're kissing like it's their job even before the celebrant pronounces them hitched. The characterisation is perfect, and there's a wonderful original character in Miriam Hechel. This fic is a gut punch in the best way on a number of levels - from unexpected attendees at the wedding, to John's catharsis afterwards, to the very end when it seems someone powerful in the shadows made sure their wedding day was undisturbed. It's a lovely story, beautifully written, and there are no less than two excellent podfics.

Fanwork Links:
Love and Marriage - the text
Love and Marriage - podfic by silverkat1620
Love and Marriage - podfic by kalakirya

starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] fancake
 
Fandom: The Old Guard
Pairings: Nicolò/Yusuf
Characters: Nicolò, Yusuf, Andromache, Quynh, Nile, OCs
Rating: Explicit
Length: 14,400 words
Creator Links: [archiveofourown.org profile] Sixthlight
Theme: Marriage of convenience, Diplomatic marriage, Complete AU, Historical AU

Summary: There can be no misinterpretation or confusion on Yusuf’s part when what Duke Nicolò says is “But I didn’t want a husband, what does my brother think he’s doing?”

Reccer's Notes: Arranged marriages may be common in wealthy families -- but when the groom doesn't know a marriage has been arranged, and certainly doesn't want one, it throws a wrench in the works. Nicolò rejects the idea of marriage, and Yusuf can only accept that -- but everyone around them really, really want the two men to be married. Yusuf doesn't know how to do the seduction that Nile suggests, but a friendship slowly grows between them, and then more, which leads to a thoroughly satisfying ending.

Content Notes: None

Fanwork Links: Diplomatic Complications, by Sixthlight at AO3
 
starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] fancake
 
Fandom: The Old Guard
Pairings: Yusuf/Nicolò, background Andromache/Quynh, hint of potential Nile/Booker
Characters: Nicolò, Yusuf, Andromache, Quynh, Booker, Nile, OCs
Rating: Explicit
Length: 24,600 words
Creator Links: [archiveofourown.org profile] sharkie335
Theme: Marriage of convenience, Complete AU, Historical AU, Diplomatic marriage

Summary: Genoa managed to destroy Tunisia's navy, leaving the royal family to sue for peace. A treaty was struck, and Yusuf was offered in marriage to the King of Genoa's second child, the Princess Veneranda.
        At least, that was the plan.

Reccer's Notes: Yusuf has no choice but to make a political marriage to bring peace between Genoa and Tunisa... but when the bride-to-be runs away with her lover, Nicolò it forced to become the substitute marriage partner. Yusuf and Nicolò find they are well-pleased by these developments... until they learn that Nicolò's father and brother have decided to hold Nicolò's mother for ransom. Throw in escape under cover of night, each enjoying copious amounts of married sex, a touch of palace intrigue as Nicolò doesn't know if his family's actions will reflect on his position, and we have a thoroughly enjoyable story.

Content Notes: This is an alpha/omega universe, but the story doesn't make a big deal about that; it's treated as just ordinary life.

Fanwork Links: A Fine Arrangement, by sharkie335 at AO3.
 
[syndicated profile] savagelove_feed

Posted by Dan Savage

Struggle Session is a bonus column where I respond to comments — just a few — from Savage Love readers, Savage Lovecast listeners, and the occasional online rando. I also share a letter that won’t be included in the column and invite my readers to give advice. Excellent advice from YamatoGun for the caller who … Read More »

The post STRUGGLE SESSION: Cream Pies, Bondage Boys, Gift Cards and More! appeared first on Dan Savage.

sinesofinsanity: For squeeing (Batman Squee)
[personal profile] sinesofinsanity posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Avatar The Last Airbender
Pairings/Characters: Zuko, Toph, Lu Ten, Sokka, Katara, Aang, Suki, Hakoda, Ty Lee
Rating: Author did not rate it, I'd call it G
Length: 20,008 words
Creator Links: thetrickisnotminding
Theme: Marriage of convenience, arranged marriage, fork-in-the-road AU, diplomatic marriage, disability (blindness), families of choice, 

Summary: In some facet of reality, there /was/ a way to help Lu Ten. And so the Avatar woke into a world where no one was questing for the Avatar yet, because certain soldier boys had different methods in their march home.

Reccer's Notes: I love this take on the different ATLA characters. Zuko is trying so hard in this to both prove himself and make up for how terrible his father is, but he's ultimately still the awkward turtle-duck we know and love. His "proposal" to Toph basically amounts to "you give our side a ton of money, I'll take you away from your over-protective parents and let you boss me around." Which she LOVES and takes full advantage of. Being a prospective princess does absolutely nothing to stop Toph from being a goblin-child and it's beautiful.

Content Notes: Some reference to suicidal behaviour; canon-typical reference to child abuse, war, and genocide

Fanwork Links: Lu Ten's Hawk on AO3

OTW Signal, August 2025

Aug. 28th, 2025 04:52 pm
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by Lute

Every month in OTW Signal, we take a look at stories that connect to the OTW’s mission and projects, including issues related to legal matters, technology, academia, fannish history and preservation issues of fandom, fan culture, and transformative works.

In the News

An article from Roster Con analyzes how fans are reinventing community online, creating inclusive digital spaces that thrive, and fundamentally changing the way people with shared interests connect and interact with each other.

Instead of waiting in line at conventions or gathering in packed theaters, people are now forming tight-knit communities online—spaces where shared interests thrive without borders.
What’s striking isn’t just the tech that brings people together; it’s how fans are reshaping what it means to belong, connect, and celebrate something bigger than themselves.

Today’s pop culture fans are constructing elaborate digital networks that have no geographical boundaries and do not follow traditional media consumption patterns. For example, the article notes that the Stardew Valley network on Discord has grown from a small chat group into an expansive community where players share content and organize multiplayer events. This transformation from content-focused discussion to community-centered interaction is taking place across online fandom spaces. Platforms like Discord and Twitch support active fan communities and host virtual conventions, complete with panel discussions, cosplay, and live Q&As, allowing fans to experience the excitement of fandom gatherings while removing barriers like travel and cost.

What’s even more powerful is the reach. People who would never have made it to San Diego or Tokyo due to cost, distance, or accessibility now have a front-row seat. A fan in Nairobi, a student in Warsaw, and a parent in São Paulo can all be part of the same hype cycle, cheering and reacting together.

The article also addresses how creative platforms like Archive of Our Own (AO3), FanFiction.net, and DeviantArt are no longer simply repositories for fan-created content. Creators post works in progress to seek input and engage in collaborative projects that may span multiple authors and extended timelines. Similarly, social media has become a powerful tool for fan communities, with hashtag campaigns fueling organized fan movements and creative collaboration that spreads quickly and travels far. These activities provide a sense of community and support previously found in schools, clubs, and community groups, reshaping how fans engage with each other in the digital age.


For Gen Z fans in Australia, the sense of belonging that comes from participating in fandom is particularly valuable right now, according to an article by Lucinda O’Brien in Amplify. With the rising cost of living and a looming recession, one in four young Australians reports loneliness and isolation as daily stressors. Fandom offers a space for them to express themselves and to make friends with others who share their passions—an antidote to the ongoing loneliness.
Fandom expert Dr. Georgia Carroll explains that fandom provides a critical sense of community and belonging, especially in difficult times:

Joining a fandom often begins as a light-hearted endeavour for Gen Z to bond over shared interests, but these spaces can deepen into emotionally rich communities where personal stories and identities are shared. Fandoms become places where fans feel seen, validated and safe to express themselves.

For Australian fans of international fandoms, distance often makes it difficult to meet with other fans in person, leading them to seek connection through online communities. As digital natives, Gen Z are adept at connecting through online fandoms.
As conventional community spaces continue to decline and social isolation grows, these digital communities offer something more than just entertainment or distraction. For Australian Gen Z, online fandom offers new and invaluable opportunities for connection and belonging.

OTW Tips

The AO3 community is now nine million users strong! In 2024 alone, users shared over two million new fanworks, and the site received an incredible 34 billion page views. You can find these and other highlights in the OTW’s 2024 Annual Report.

Bonus tip: many of our statistics are also available as graphics that chart the OTW’s growth over the years.

To everyone who helps this space thrive—thank you for building community with us!


We want your suggestions for the next OTW Signal post! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or news story you think we should know about, send us a link. We are looking for content in all languages! Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in an OTW post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

garryowen: made by signe (Default)
[personal profile] garryowen posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Star Trek AOS (Reboot)
Pairings/Characters: Kirk/Spock
Rating: G
Length: 1832 words; 11:27 minutes
Creator Links: [archiveofourown.org profile] reeby10 ; [archiveofourown.org profile] cookiemom6067
Theme: Marriage of convenience

Summary: The Enterprise makes contact with an alien race who will only speak with a couple as representatives. Jim figures it's not a big deal to pretend he and Spock are together, but it turns out they play the role a little too well.

Reccer's Notes: Sliding in with one last rec for this theme. I'd forgotten about this story, but I happened to listen to the podfic this morning. It's a great example of a short marriage of convenience story that relies on what we already know to be a strong friendship between Kirk and Spock. In this story, a diplomatic mission requires Kirk and Spock to pretend to be a couple, but their clear bond (in the general sense, not the Vulcan sense) leads the planet's representatives to offer to hold a marriage ceremony for our favorite Starfleet officers. I like when outsiders are able to see the heart of things and call it like it is. This is such a sweet and gentle fic with a big helping of optimism. I'm sure someone needs that today. The podfic is also clearly and steadily read by cookiemom.

Fanwork Links:
For the Greater Good
Podfic by cookiemom6067

Circle Updates

Aug. 27th, 2025 05:56 pm
havocthecat: sunflowers and dreamwidth (random dreamwidth)
[personal profile] havocthecat
Just evening up a bit of subscription/access issues. Drop a (screened) comment if I removed you by accident.
jasmasson: (cookies)
[personal profile] jasmasson posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed
Pairings/Characters: Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji/Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian
Rating: Explicit
Length: 70,972 words
Creator Links: harriet_vane at AO3
Theme: Marriage of Convenience

Summary:

It’s a really unfortunate thing, developing a crush on your husband. Wei Ying had assumed this would be easy. Lan Zhan had been so icy and unpleasant to him, it had never occurred to him that he might end up spending the next however many years with this dumb, burning feeling in his chest whenever he looks at him.

“Okay,” says Wei Ying. “But tell me if I…if the pretending gets to be too hard, okay?”

“It will not,” says Lan Zhan, quietly certain.

Reccer’s Notes: Is it redundant to rec a fic that has 31,682 kudos (and counting)? And has already been recced on this community (although 5 years ago and for a different theme?) Probably. Am I going to do it anyway? Yes. Yes, I am.

Because it is fabulous.

It’s kidfic with Yaun at his most adorable, it’s a modern AU, it’s beautifully written and even if you’ve read it before I’m sure now is a great time for a reread.

Lan Zhan is his impeccable, smitten, useless at communicating self and Wei Wuxian is, as always, just doing his best in the circumstances he finds himself in.

An absolute classic. BTW, If you haven’t dipped a toe in MDZS canon or fanon, you could read this anyway due to its AU nature, and then perhaps be hooked… 31,682 AO3 users can’t be wrong, right?

Fanwork links: The Simplest Way Forward

Hawaii five-O: hoʻokāne by Siria

Aug. 27th, 2025 01:08 am
mific: (Steve and Danno)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Hawaii five-O
Characters/Pairings: Danny Williams/Steve McGarrett, Grace, Kono, Chin
Rating: Explicit
Length: 13,614
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: Siria on AO3
Themes: Marriage of Convenience, First time, Fake marriage, Action/adventure, Family, AU: fork in the road

Summary: As active as Danny's imagination was, however, as strong as all his fears could be at the thoughts of his little girl being taken away from him again, he'd forgotten to factor in one very important element: Steve.

Reccer's Notes: This take on the marriage of convenience trope centres on Danny's devotion to his daughter, Grace. His ex moves to the US mainland with her husband and the only way Danny can get custody is if he's in a stable relationship - a marriage. Steve tells the judge they're about to marry and Danny stumbles through it, baffled at the way his team fully accept the situation and only berate him for keeping the affair a secret. The story takes us through the usual enjoyable dilemmas of a fake marriage like the need to share a bed, made more pressing with Grace in the house as she believes the marriage is genuine (which of course it is - Danny just doesn't know it yet). They're clearly married in the show and in this fic, but in Danny's case, massively oblivious (Steve not so much, having masterminded the marriage plan), and it all works out happily, as expected. Along the way there's lots of amusing snark and backchat, and it's wonderfully written, and a thoroughly good read.

Fanwork Links: hoʻokāne

Martha Wells/Murderbot book bundle

Aug. 26th, 2025 08:42 pm
alias_sqbr: (happy dragon)
[personal profile] alias_sqbr
Martha Wells' Murderbot & More is about $30AUD (so $20USDish?) for a whole heap of her books. It's available for the next 18 days. I had no trouble downloading them as DRM free ebooks in Australia.

Long Time!

Aug. 26th, 2025 11:00 am
[syndicated profile] savagelove_feed

Posted by Patrick Kearney

Long time reader! I’m a mostly straight boy in my early 20s with a new girlfriend. I say “mostly straight” because I’m into bondage and finding men who wanted to tie me up was always easier than finding women who wanted to tie me up. But I met a girl at a party early this … Read More »

The post Long Time! appeared first on Dan Savage.

All Hail E. Jean Carroll!

Aug. 26th, 2025 11:00 am
[syndicated profile] savagelove_feed

Posted by Nancy Hartunian

A woman’s old friend and sometime lover asked her for a beaver shot to ease his stress on an upcoming couples trip. She obliged. Did he thank her? No he did not. She’s miffed, and wonders if she’s being too sensitive. We love questions like this: What do gay men actually do with vibrators? Our … Read More »

The post All Hail E. Jean Carroll! appeared first on Dan Savage.

[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by callmeri

Faerie, a Tolkien fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

Background explanation

Faerie: Tolkien fanfiction was an archive founded by Esteliel in 2011 and run with the help of mods Narya and Spiced_Wine. The site welcomed all sorts of stories, poetry and non-fiction writing, regardless of genre, rating or pairing. Due to unforeseen circumstances the site owner could no longer maintain it and the site was taken offline sometime in 2021. As a result and in order to keep the stories available to the fandom, the mods Narya and Spiced_Wine decided to move the archive to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project.

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 Narya and Spiced_Wine to import Faerie into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all fanfictions currently in Faerie will be hosted on the OTW’s servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from Faerie 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 Faerie?

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.

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Please contact Open Doors with your Faerie 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.
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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 Faerie 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 Faerie mods 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 Faerie 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 Faerie!

– The Open Doors team, Narya and Spiced_Wine

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.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

(no subject)

Aug. 24th, 2025 01:59 pm
skygiants: the princes from Into the Woods, singing (agony)
[personal profile] skygiants
Once upon a time, I read Exiled from Camelot, the novel-length Sir Kay angstfic by Cherith Baldry that Phyllis Ann Kar politely called 'one of the half-best Arthurian novels that I have yet read,' and then launched it off to Be Experienced by [personal profile] osprey_archer and [personal profile] troisoiseaux.

Now my sins have come back upon me sevenfold, or perhaps even fifteenfold: [personal profile] troisoiseaux has discovered that, not content with the amount of hurt and comfort that she inflicted upon Kay in exiled from Camelot, Cherith Baldry has written No Less than Fifteen Sad Kay Fanfics and collected them in a volume called The Last Knight of Camelot: The Chronicles of Sir Kay.

This book has now made its way from [personal profile] troisoiseaux via [personal profile] osprey_archer on to me, along with numerous annotations -- [personal profile] osprey_archer has suggested 'drink!' every time Baldry mentions Kay's 'hawk's face,' which I have not done, as I think this would kill me -- to which I have duly added in my turn. I am proud to tell you that I was taking notes and Kay only experiences agonized manly tears nine times in the volume. That means that there are at least six whole stories where Kay manages not to burst into tears at all! And we're very proud of him for that!

The thesis of The Last Knight of Camelot seems to be that Kay is in unrequited love with Arthur; Gawain and Gareth are both in unrequited love with Kay; and everyone else is mean to Kay, all the time, for no reason. [personal profile] troisoiseaux and [personal profile] osprey_archer in their posts have both pulled out this quote which I also feel I am duty-bound to do:

"Lord of my heart, my mind, my life. All that I'll ever be. All I'll ever want.”

He had never revealed so much before.

Arthur leant towards him; there was love in his face, and wonder and compassion too, and Kay knew, his knowledge piercing like an arrow into his inmost spirit, that his love, this single-minded devotion that could fill his life and be poured out and yet never exhausted, was not returned. Arthur loved him, but not like that.

He could not help shrinking back a little.


However, I also must provide the additional context that this tender moment is immediately interrupted by the ARRIVAL OF MORGAUSE, TO SEDUCE ARTHUR, TO MAKE MORDRED, leading me to believe that Baldry is suggesting that if Kay had instead seized the chance to confidently make out with Arthur at this time, the entire doom of Camelot might have been averted. Alas! instead, Arthur dismisses Kay to go hang out with Morgause, it all goes south, Arthur blames Kay for Some Reason, and Kay spends a week on his knees in the courtyard going on hunger strike for Arthur's forgiveness until he collapses on the cobblestones and wakes up to a repentant Arthur tenderly feeding him warm milk.

If the stories in this volume are any judge, this is a pretty normal week for Kay. I also want to shout out

- the one where Lancelot and Gaheris set up a Fake Adventure for Kay to prove his courage, which destroys Kay emotionally, and kitchen-boy-squire Gareth runs after him and tries to swear loyalty to him and ask Kay to knight him, but Kay is like "you cannot AFFORD to have Kay as a friend >:(( for your knightly reputation >:(((" and Gareth shouts "you can't make me your enemy!!" and then Lancelot finds them arguing and is like 'wow, Kay is abusing this poor kitchen boy' and sweeps the lovelorn Gareth away, leaving Kay's reputation worse than before
- the one where Arthur gets kidnapped by an evil sorcerer who demands Excalibur as Arthur's ransom, and then Kay decides to try and trick the evil sorcerer with a Fake Excalibur even though Lancelot is like 'FAKE Excalibur? that's a LIE and DISHONORABLE,' and then Kay rescues Arthur from being magic-brainwashed by pure power of [brotherly?] love, and as soon as their tender embrace is over Arthur is like 'wait! you brought a FAKE Excalibur? that's a LIE and DISHONORABLE'
- the one where Kay is accused of rape as a Ploy to Discredit Arthur and has to go through a trial by ordeal where he walks over hot coals while on the verge of death from other injuries and Gawain flings himself into the fire to rescue him but it turns out it's fine because Kay is So Extremely Innocent of the Crime that they both end up clinging together bathed in golden light that heals their injuries

Again: FIFTEEN of these. Baldry is truly living her bliss and I honestly cannot but respect it. The book is going to make its way back from here whence it came, but if anyone else is really feeling a shortage of Kay Agonies in their life, let me know; I'm sure an additional stop would be welcomed as long as whoever gets it pays the annotation tax.
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by Caitlynne

2.1 million AO3 works created and 1,298,541 AO3 accounts created.34 billion AO3 page views, averaging 93.2 million per day. Last year: 31 billion.5.4 million AO3 tags wrangled. Last year: 5.5 million.27,000 AO3 Support tickets received. Last year: 24,800.27,700 AO3 Policy & Abuse tickets received. Last year: 23,600.34 AO3 releases deployed. Last year: 23.9 archives imported to AO3 via Open Doors. Last year: 11.21,496 Fanlore accounts created.6,700 Fanlore pages created. Last year: 5,000.163,000 Fanlore edits made. Last year: 141,000.118 news posts published. Last year 118.17 Fanhackers posts published. Last year: 59.3 Issues of Transformative Works and Cultures released. Last year: 3.

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Reading notes

Aug. 23rd, 2025 10:24 pm
fred_mouse: pencil drawing of mouse sitting on its butt reading a large blue book (book)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

It is a mere 20 days since my last reading notes post. I do occasionally wish that I had it together to do this weekly, and write more comprehensive reviews, but eh, when it happens, it happens.

finished

  1. My Throat an Open Grave (Tori Bovalino) - teenager from Evangelical Christian small USA town wishes their younger brother away. Much darker than Labyrinth, does some very clever things with traditional story tropes. 4.5 stars. review
  2. What Feasts at Night (T Kingfisher) - reread. Not the Kingfisher I was planning on reading, but eh. 4 stars. review
  3. Of Melodies and Maledictions (Maddox Grey) - prequel novelette, good world building and characters, but I resented being treated as if I couldn't see the plot detials shaping the story. 2 stars. review
  4. Within Prison Walls: Being a Narrative of Personal Experience During a Week of Voluntary Confinement in the State Prison at Auburn, New York (Thomas Mott Osborne) - very well written kinda long form journalism, kinda memoir, about the social experiment of a prison reformer spending a week in prison. 5 stars. review

active

(started or progressed)

  1. The Siege of Burning Grass (Premee Mohamed) - this is on my phone, and I haven't been on the bus, so I got about a third in and then haven't touched it in a week
  2. Unmasked: The Ultimate Guide to ADHD, Autism and Neurodivergence (Ellie Middleton) - finding this much less readable than the Aussie one that was specifically about ADHD, and thus struggling to maintain momentum. Also, I keep stopping to write grumpy reading notes. Such as "late diagnosed". Sweetie you are 25. (which, yes, is late diagnosed using specific definitions, but this hasn't been defined, and I've a lot of friends getting diagnoses in their 40s and 50s. Possibly 60s).
  3. After Story (Larissa Behrendt) - continues to be emotionally hard going; I've read a chapter in two weeks

there are also several for uni that haven't made it into the reading record.

paused

  • The Spider and Her Demons (Sydney Khoo) - forgot I'd borrowed this, got a 'return or else you are out of renewals' notification, got about 2/3 read in the time before I could get to the library. Very annoyed that I can't opt out of automatic renewals, but not enough that I'd done anything other than be annoyed at a librarian who kept trying to tell me it was a good process.

abandoned

nothing! For a value of nothing that includes the fact that I've taken two books from the little free library near the office, looked at the first few pages, and then returned them. One was about the Corn Laws in the UK, and while it might have reached the point that I agreed with the author, the way the whole thing was being framed was very much 'these stupid people didn't understand what was being done for their own good'. And the other was a history of Singer (I don't remember if it was the sewing machines specifically or the company) that I decided was probably really interesting but I have too many other things I want to have read in my life, and I'd rather read something else (at which point I think I started Siege of Burning Grass, and I am still of the opinion that was the right choice even if I've stalled on that one)

(no subject)

Aug. 23rd, 2025 09:40 am
skygiants: C-ko the shadow girl from Revolutionary Girl Utena in prince drag (someday my prince will come)
[personal profile] skygiants
[personal profile] genarti and I both recently read Leonora Carrington's 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, about a selectively deaf old lady whose unappreciative relatives put her into an old age home, where various increasingly weird things happen, cut in case you want to go in unspoiled )

Beth found the pace and tone of plotting very Joan Aiken-ish and I have to admit I agree with her.

BETH: But I understand that The Hearing Trumpet is like this because Carrington was a surrealist. Is it possible that Joan Aiken was also a surrealist this whole time and we've simply not been looking at her work through the right lens?
ME: I don't think her life landed her in quite the right set of circumstances to be a surrealist properly ... I think she was a little too young when the movement was kicking off .... but I do think that perhaps she believed in their beliefs even if she didn't know it ....

Anyway, The Hearing Trumpet is in some ways has elements of a classically seventies feminist text -- she wrote it while deeply involved in Mexico's 1970s women's liberation movement, and the whole occultist nun -> holy grail -> icepocalypse plot has a lot of Sacred Sexy Goddess Repressed By The Evil And Prudish Christian Church running through it -- but Marian Leatherby's robust and and opinionated ninety-year-old voice is so charmingly unflappable that the experience is never in the least bit predictable or cliche. My favorite character is Marian's best friend Carmella, who kicks off the book by giving mostly-deaf Marian the hearing trumpet that allows her to [selectively] understand the things that are going on around her. Carmella plays the role often seen in children's books of Friend Who Is Constantly Gloriously Catastrophizing About How Dramatic A Situation Will Be And How They Will Heroically Rescue You From It (and then I will smuggle you a secret letter and tunnel into the old-age home in order to avoid the dozens of police dogs! etc. etc.) which is even funnier when the things that are actually happening are even weirder and more dramatic than anything Carmella predicts, just in a slightly different genre, and then funnier again when Carmella shows up towards the end of the book perfectly suited to surviving the Even Newer, Weirder, and More Dramatic Situations that have Arisen.

The end-note explains that Carrington based Carmella on her friend Remedios Varo, a detail I include as a treat for the Varo-heads but also as an illustration of how much the novel builds itself on the connections between weird women who survive a largely-incomprehensible world by being largely incomprehensible themselves. Carrington herself was in her late fifties when she wrote this book, but she too lived into her nineties; her Wikipedia article describes her in its header as "one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s." It's hard not to inscribe that back into the text in some way, which is of course an impossible reading, but one does like to imagine the ninety-year-old Carrington with just as much presence as the ninety-year-old Marian.
jasmasson: (cookies)
[personal profile] jasmasson posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Die Hard 4.0
Pairings/Characters: Matt Farrell/John McClane
Rating: Not Rated (I would say Gen or Teen at most)
Length: 13,139 words
Creator Links: Helenish at AO3
Theme: Marriage of Convenience

Summary:

“Anyway, he’s staying with me for a while,” John says.

“My place got firebombed,” Matt says, reflexively.

Reccer’s Notes: This fic is absolutely note perfect. The characters feel completely on point and the marriage of convenience trope feels totally natural. An exploration of how to be normal after something absolutely crazy has happened to you.

It feels very warm and true and absolutely delightfully done in Helenish’s brilliant way of writing.

Fanwork links: Pre-Existing Condition

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