October’s Membership Drive ran smoothly, with Communications drafting posts in coordination with Development & Membership, and Translation making drive materials available in 26 languages. Finance also published a mid-year budget update prior to the Drive. This year’s October Drive spotlighted Systems, who handle the OTW’s server infrastructure, respond to outages, and perform routine upgrades and maintenance to ensure the OTW’s projects remain available.
In total, we raised around $290,000 USD during the Drive, with around 2,500 gifts requested and around 7,000 people either starting or renewing their OTW membership. Thank you so much for your support!
Accessibility, Design & Technology upgraded their servers to Ruby 3.4. They had a record 6 releases in 3 weeks which included bug fixes, usability improvements to a variety of AO3’s site features, and further preparatory work for making AO3’s interface and emails translatable in the future.
In September, Policy & Abuse received 4,300 tickets, while Support received 3,372 tickets. Tag Wrangling wrangled over 520,000 tags—around 1,150 tags per wrangling volunteer.
Communications’ Con Outreach division coordinated the OTW’s attendance at COMICUP ShangHai Plus 2025 in Shanghai, China, and MCM Comic Con London 2025 in London, England. Thank you to the volunteers who tabled these conventions, and everyone who said hi to us there!
Fanlore celebrated a Books themed month in October! Their next editing challenge will give editors a chance to earn missed badges from previous challenges. Keep an eye on their Bluesky, Twitter/X, and Tumblr for announcements about the challenge, which will run from November 16 to 30.
In October, Legal and an ally, the Wikimedia Foundation, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that Mississippi’s online age verification statute overburdens mission-driven platforms and threatens the free speech rights of those platforms and their users. For more details, head over to our latest Spotlight on Legal Issues. Legal also answered a number of queries from fans.
Board held their third quarter public Board meeting on October 5 in the Board Discord. There were 35 attendees, and they answered 8 questions. Meeting minutes are available on the OTW website. Board also approved signing on to two US Supreme Court amicus briefs, one on opposing an age verification law and one on public domain of a folklore character.
The Board Assistants Team assisted with Board turnover, continued work on the OTW website, and collaborated with Organizational Culture Roadmap towards their goals. Organizational Culture Roadmap is currently in the process of evaluating responses to a survey of volunteers about the OTW Code of Conduct.
Strategic Planning continues to prepare for the 2026-2029 Strategic Plan. They are currently exploring different tools to support them in running the next phase: prioritization.
V. OUR VOLUNTEERS
Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for five committees this month: Fanlore, Open Doors, Policy & Abuse, Translation, and User Response Translation. Volunteers & Recruiting also finalized an update to the OTW Name Policy, which contains information on what OTW names are now permitted, under what name volunteer work may be credited publicly, how to request a reference letter if someone’s OTW name is not their legal name, and more.
From September 25 to October 24, Volunteers & Recruiting received 145 new requests, and completed 140, leaving them with 54 open requests. As of October 24, 2025, the OTW has 983 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Directors: Elizabeth Wiltshire and Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Board Directors), and Rachel Linton (Vice President) New Committee Chairs/Leads: Kyrie (Support) New AD&T Volunteers: marcus8448 and ömer faruk (Software Developers) New Development & Membership Volunteers: 2 Development & Membership Volunteers New Open Doors Volunteers: eviltothecore13 and 1 other Technical Volunteer New Support Volunteers: V Snow (Chair Assistant) New User Response Translation Volunteers: meat (Volunteer Coordinator)
Departing Directors: Jennifer Haynes (Director) and Kathryn Soderholm (Vice President role only) Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: 1 Accessibility, Design, & Technology Chair Departing AD&T Volunteers: 1 Software Developer and 1 Senior Volunteer Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: 1 Editor Departing BAT Volunteers: spacegandalf (Volunteer) Departing Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: Vihi (News Post Moderator) Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Technical Volunteer Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Executie, Hazelwyrm, Jas, SCEnt Hope, Zoë Two Dots, and 4 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers Departing Translation Volunteers: heine and 1 other Translator Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: Amy2 (Projects Volunteer) and Ehryn (Volunteer)
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
Bookshop.org is now selling ebooks in the UK as well, with profits (as with paper books sold through them) going to indie bookshops; you can either pick a specific shop you love to benefit (in my case, Juno Books), or have the money go into a collective pool.
My (silly but ambitious) goal in this prelaunch period is to gather the same number of “followers” on the prelaunch page, as we had total backers in the original campaign (436). That seems doable, right??
The plan is to launch mid-next week! That’s pretty soon!!
I’m assuming at least some of you reading this are OG Boltheads who jumped on the train early and have been patiently waiting for me to wrap it all up. I’m super grateful for your initial support!
And now that the manufacturing part of it all is in motion, I’m super pleased that the timing will allow for another chance to get it in front of folks for pre-orders.
Since I’m only likely to print this game once, I want to make sure anyone who’s interested will have a chance to grab a copy. So I’ll be talking much more about this in the days to come!!
Discovering what she expected to be a lucrative new job is instead an internship, Ropa Moyo tries to pay her bill by resorting to her avocation of detective.
Fear in the Night (1972) may be minor Hammer in the scheme of the studio and minor horror in its cast's CVs, but it is the rare slow-burn twist-based thriller that doesn't melt itself down for scrap in the third act and until then it does more than atmospherically mark time. It even manages some surprises, little inclusions of the unexpected. Befitting a genre predicated on warped psychologies, its foreseeable moves are all a little off the beam.
Part Gothic and part giallo, the screenplay by writer-director-producer Jimmy Sangster doesn't just forebode from the start with an eerily deserted glide through the autumn-blown grounds of a school concluding in the macabre enigma of a corpse by the football pitch, it scarcely bothers with establishing a premise when it can slap down its tropes like a misfortune of Tarot. Six months out from the breakdown whose psychiatric sessions intercut the present action like intrusive thoughts, newlywed Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson) hasn't even made it as far as the stockbroker Tudor of the public school where her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) contends with the lower fourth when her quiet evening of packing out her live-in situation is shattered by the terrifying break-in of a black-clad figure of whose assault no trace remains when she comes to, not even the prosthetic arm she wrenched off in her struggle. "No, it's not spoiled. It's just . . ." Not what she hoped for, this whirlwind honeymoon in a picturesquely mod-conned cottage when she wakes in the middle of the night to watch for movements in the ivy-wreathed shadows of the school she will explore by day, her champagne-soured choke-out memories tinting her encounters with the gentle-voiced headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his brusquer wife Molly (Joan Collins) whose violently avant-garde sculptures are the discordant note in all the mellow panelled oak and clerestory reflections of school cups. The sounds of a Latin lesson echoing from a classroom with no one in it nudges the question of her sanity, or perhaps only the supernatural. Worse yet, a second visitation by her nighttime strangler provides no vindication when once again she can offer no proof of the attack beyond her distress that does not equal the signs of forced entry or even bruising. Tear-shocked under the weight of her husband's concern, Peggy clings to her terror like dreadful wreckage, disturbed if she does, endangered if she doesn't: "My imagination . . . He kept saying it must have been my imagination. Well, it couldn't have been my imagination. Could it?"
Fear in the Night is far from a film noir, but it leans into much of the same chilly sense of nightmare, the superficially ordinary charged with indescribable dread. To say that the headmaster discoursed on the therapeutic value of knots before addressing himself to the kerchief tangled in the heroine's hair does not convey the disorientating infusion of eroticism and detached courtliness in his manner, the tender vagueness in speaking of his students which may unsettle the audience more than the reveal of his black-gloved artificial hand. "Do you know that is the most difficult part? To make them want to learn?" To call her near-fatal miss by the headmaster's wife out shooting a rude welcome to the rust-brushed parkland underrates the brazenly personal and unaccountable hostility of the interaction, as territorially intimidating as the housewarming gift of the gorily potted rabbit that could just as easily have been Peggy's shining blonde head. "Well, why didn't you say so, my dear? I nearly made a widower out of you, Robert." Despite repeated invitations to dinner, it is impossible to picture them at the same table, a cracked Crocker-Harris, a brutal Diana. Even the never-named school seems to squint in and out of focus, a neglected exterior of moss-sponged brick and discolored plaster, interiorly spotless down to the neatly laid china and the matron-cornered beds, dust-sheeted in the dead days between terms and worth a quarter of a million according to Robert, who jokes wistfully about his own work-shyness compared with his employer's dedication: "I wish I had just half Carmichael's money . . . You do that every time I go off to work and I shan't go off to work." A unicorn of a husband for a frightened woman in cinema, he's supportive despite his acknowledged skepticism of an intruder right out of a horror comic, decisively reaching to ring the police when she reiterates the reality of her attack, but the suspicious viewer could make something of his very attentiveness, especially when it comes with its own lacunae—he refers to the retired maths master who had the cottage before them, but what exactly does he himself teach? The possibility of another strike from a half-mechanical strangler hangs in Chekhov's plain sight like the loaded shotgun in the Land Rover, but the real tension hums through the bare-branched days because even normal human conversations have a habit of skewing off true as if the world itself is slipping like a badly pasted advertisement. Peggy herself makes an unusual choice of woman in peril: she fits the outward profile with her small, fair looks and huge celadon eyes, but she does not give off an automatic sense of fragility or helplessness—she worked successfully as a carer—which means that to watch her terrorized does not register as the natural condition of a horror heroine, it feels violatingly wrong. Under other circumstances, we would not at all be surprised to see her defend herself with the gun she expressed real distaste for, unloading both barrels at point-blank range as if she'd held her own in a slasher movie before. That her efforts against her own panic are rewarded with nothing more than the advance of an apparent dead man behind his glasses splintered blind as some specter out of M. R. James feels like cheating; the question is on whose part.
Sangster had done much to form the iconic image of Hammer in the '50's with his Technicolor-shocker rewrites of Frankenstein and Dracula and Fear in the Night as his last effort for the studio was a much more subdued affair, although not blandly so. Veteran Hammer DP Arthur Grant gives the school a curiously, simultaneously vacant and vigilant look, so inhabited by absence that it would feel just as natural if it flashed over to ghosts. Shooting in the last rags of fall in Aldenham Country Park and what was just about to become Bhaktivedanta Manor provided a breath-fogged, brackenish palette against which anything bright—like blood—stands sharply out. One early shot of a service station in the mist of a greyed-out day should be merely establishing and feels instead like dissociation on the northbound M1. It fits with the elliptical editing of Peter Weatherley, which cuts actions as closely into one another as lost time until it can catch up at last to that rook-cawed, corpse-cold open in the pure singing of a punch line. Aside from the fact that it was taken years ago by an American B-noir, the title is almost misleadingly irrelevant, but the commitment of the cast and the odd, bleak artistry of the picture more than compensate for the fact that I would have called it End of Term. I watched it on Tubi, but it can be found just as freely on YouTube and the Internet Archive; it had gotten onto my radar years ago for Peter Cushing and I was prompted more recently toward it by the presence of Judy Geeson and Ralph Bates. It is small and weird and both qualities count for a lot with me. This end brought to you by my surprising backers at Patreon.
Current Music: The Last Dinner Party, "This Is the Killer Speaking"
Just finished:Emily of New Moon, on audiobook from Librivox. Dean Priest is sketchy as shit from Day One. Teddy is white-bread. Ilse and Perry at least have personalities. And Jimmy is darling.
Currently reading: Number 5 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl (slowly), and I'm partway through the audiobook of Jamaica Inn by Daphne duMaurier, which is hella gothic and really well-written. I'm mildly entertained by DCC but I cannot keep all the fancy spells in my brain and the body count is pretty excessive (especially once you know that all the NPCs are real people!)
Up Next:The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott, sequel to The Witch Roads. Happily it's available on Bookshop.org DRM-free, so I could download it and sideload it onto my Kindle.
*+*+*
In other news, work is insane and and and. But at least Prop 50 passed, and at least some of the Dems are figuring out that we need them to FIGHT BACK. But this shutdown sucks. I can't be more specific than that.
We’ve heard from users concerned about many recent laws and their potential to impact AO3. We want to reassure you that while this continues to be a challenging time with a number of troubling laws under consideration around the world, AO3 is not currently affected. AO3 is run by a noncommercial, nonprofit organization, and it does not implement infinite scroll, offer recommendations to users, or use other techniques with which many regulators are concerned.
While these bills should not directly impact AO3, they are a reminder to stay alert for potential legal issues affecting fans in your area. Where applicable, the OTW encourages people to contact their local representatives and voice their concerns. You can read more about the OTW’s Legal Advocacy work on our website.
Chinese Obscenity Laws and Danmei Authors
We have received a number of inquiries from concerned users regarding the arrests of dozens of danmei writers in China. As an organization, the OTW wholeheartedly shares these concerns. We stand firmly in support of free expression and we are closely monitoring the situation.
Age Verification Laws
Age verification laws have been proposed in multiple states and countries around the world. These laws create barriers that prevent open access to information, hamper the right to freedom of speech, and threaten users’ privacy. The OTW continues to strongly oppose these laws and we want to assure you that we do not intend to introduce age verification on our projects. We continue to monitor for opportunities to make our voice heard and encourage fans to do so as well. Local voices are often the most important for policymakers to hear from.
We’ve filed two amicus briefs on age verification laws already this year. One, filed with Wikimedia (who runs Wikipedia) and other organizations, in Netchoice v. Brown, urged the appellate court to uphold a block on the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act which requires online platforms to verify users’ ages before allowing access, restrict certain content for minors through strict controls, and actively monitor and edit content in order to remain compliant with these restrictions.
In a second amicus brief filed with Wikimedia in Netchoice v. Fitch, we expressed concerns with Mississippi House Bill 1126, which threatens platforms’ ability to distribute free knowledge by imposing broad, sweeping restrictions that encroach on free speech rights.
Copyright
We also filed another amicus brief with other organizations in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, where we discussed the importance of internet access as a practical necessity of daily life, and argued that holding service providers liable for users’ copyright infringement based only on accusations of infringement, rather than actual proof of infringement, would threaten innovation and creativity by creating an incentive for service providers to deny service to creators without requiring evidence or providing due process.
UK’s Online Safety Act
We are monitoring how the Online Safety Act is being interpreted and enforced by the authorities.
Russia’s LGBT Ban
Russia’s restrictions on LGBT-themed content have escalated from a 2013 law aimed at protecting minors to a sweeping ban on all positive depictions of LGBT relationships. In 2023, the Russian Supreme Court labeled the “international LGBT movement” as extremist, effectively criminalizing LGBT advocacy. We strongly condemn this and continue to monitor the situation.
Game Storefronts Delisting NSFW Content
Recently, gaming storefronts Itch.io, Steam, and Valve have begun removing or restricting adult content, citing pressure from payment processors like Visa and Mastercard. These moves are obviously concerning for freedom of expression. The OTW remains committed to both fans’ privacy and freedom of imagination. We will not change our policies on explicit or queer media.
KOSA
We continue to monitor the progression of KOSA, which has been reintroduced in the United States Congress. Although AO3 is not a covered platform under this bill, the legislation, if passed, is likely to have serious freedom of speech and privacy implications for all internet users. OTW Legal has already communicated its opposition to this bill to Congress and continues to encourage U.S. users to voice their opposition to it.
Australian Online Safety Act
While we do not believe that this law as-is applies to AO3 or any of our other projects, this is a developing situation that we will continue to monitor. Read more about this in our earlier post: Social Media Bans and AO3.
With regard to all the above legislation as well as any in the future, AO3 and the OTW will do whatever we can to preserve access to AO3 and inform users if anything changes. We remain committed to freedom of expression and will defend it as necessary to ensure that AO3 remains a safe, open space for creative expression.
Is there a new law that might affect fans or fannish activities in your country or region? Send us a message about legislation you think we should know about. (Submitting a concern doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in a future Spotlight on Legal Issues post.)
Construction on our street no longer even rates a jackhammer, it seems: the ponderously concrete-cracking blows reverberating directly across the road are the product of effectively punching the sidewalk with a backhoe. I have those mornings, too, but I don't make my neighbors listen to them. Facebook permanently deactivated my account in the night, deleting fourteen years' worth of memories, photos, conversations, connections, my profile picture on a mountainside in Vancouver. It is still nice to read political news that does not feel like the rear view of an event horizon. My plan for the rest of the day is heavily tilted toward returning from this afternoon's doctor's appointment and trying to sleep.
Current Music: The Last Dinner Party, "Second Best"
spatch and I have performed our civic duties and received stickers in exchange for the exercise of democracy. It's been at least a year since we had to prove our residence in this ward and precinct, but the original experience was so scarifying that we still show up carrying utility bills just in case. The moon was brilliantly full and some of the leaves streetlight-orange in it. Earlier in the afternoon, I walked some distance by the side of a road where the afternoon sun had tinted the conservation meadows like ambrotypes. I have seen the news of the death of Dick Cheney. Twenty-five years sooner would have been better, but I had begun to wonder if he was even in the machine. Since Halloween, WERS has been playing a lot of the Last Dinner Party's "This Is the Killer Speaking" (2025). I am completely unsurprised that the band has covered Sparks.
Because both shows feature a red-haired teenaged girl with a monosyllabic name and a troubled relationship with their family, my brain merged the continuities of Son of a Critch and Stranger Things.
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