their ideas intrigue me, and I subscribed to these newsletters

About their ideas intrigue me, and I subscribed to these newsletters

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner Oct. 23rd, 2025 @ 08:51 am
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Faraday, Oregon, seems to have a missing persons problem. Its problem is much worse.

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
Tags:


I can see the alchemy Oct. 23rd, 2025 @ 02:59 am
[personal profile] sovay
We had to wait until the clouds were only bands sliding across the stars like transparencies, but we saw the Orionids like sparklers in the southwestern sky, short streaks at the triple stars of the hunter's belt, one incredible fireball straight from the red coal of Betelgeuse at his shoulder. The air was softer than we had expected, but still clear enough for all seven of the Pleiades. Jupiter looked like gold inlay under the arm of Gemini. The DJ on WHRB commented melancholically on the cold turn of the weather and then played what she called a lot of warm songs to compensate. This is being a wonderful year for meteors.

Current Music: Dreamer Boy, "Lavender"


Is it the lustre of immortality? Oct. 22nd, 2025 @ 11:00 pm
[personal profile] sovay
I liked so much of T. Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep (2025), I just wish it had leaned as sfnally into its premise as it had the scope for.

Or a fear that forces us to displace our identities? )

In conclusion, I enjoyed the novella, I argued with it, I finished it and wrote a long string of e-mails to [personal profile] rushthatspeaks from which this post has been largely rearranged and went to bed and read Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"  (1971). I can always re-read Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), too. And Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" (2008).

Current Music: Desperate Journalist, "Consolation Prize"


Shielding Chart Oct. 22nd, 2025 @ 04:00 am
[syndicated profile] xkcd_feed
Sharks can occasionally travel short distances through air when pursuing prey, but their attenuation coefficient is pretty high.

Volunteer social thread #158 Oct. 23rd, 2025 @ 12:33 am
[personal profile] pauamma, posting in [site community profile] dw_volunteers
I'm listening to the rain pattering on the window outside.

How's everyone else doing?
Tags:


Anyway here is a cool person I didn't know about before Oct. 22nd, 2025 @ 06:08 pm
[personal profile] rydra_wong
https://bsky.app/profile/luketurner.bsky.social/post/3m35pa3ywek2h



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

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

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

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

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran Oct. 22nd, 2025 @ 08:53 am
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A robot muses contentedly on the events that led it to its rapidly approaching doom.

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

The OTW is Recruiting for Translation Translators, Fanlore Graphic Designers, Open Doors Import Assi Oct. 22nd, 2025 @ 11:35 am
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by an

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

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

  • Translation Translators – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC
  • Fanlore Graphics Designer Volunteer – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications
  • Open Doors Import Assistant – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 50 applications
  • User Response Translation Translators – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC

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.

Translation Translators

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

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

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

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

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

Applications are due 29 October 2025.

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

Fanlore Graphics Designer

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

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

Applications are due 29 October 2025 or after 40 applications.

Apply to be a Fanlore Graphics Designer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Open Doors Import Assistant

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

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

Our import assistants contribute to our goal by:

  • Importing works to AO3 from rescued digital archives and fanzines
  • Searching AO3 for existing copies of works that creators have already uploaded themselves (to prevent us from importing duplicate versions when we import an archive)
  • Compiling and correcting spreadsheets of works from an archive to be imported and/or tags to use on those works
  • Copyediting/proofreading works from fanzines that have been scanned from PDFs (to ensure that the scanned works were transcribed properly by the software we used)

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

To apply for this role, you must be at least 18 years old and legally of age to open explicit fanworks in your local jurisdiction.

If you’re interested, click on through for a longer description of what we’re looking for and the time commitment. For your application to be considered, you will be required to complete a short task within 3 days of submitting your application.

Applications are due 29 October 2025 or after 50 applications.

Apply to be an Open Doors Import Assistant at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

User Response Translation Translators

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

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

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

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

Applications are due 29 October 2025.

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




AO3 Celebrates 16 Million Fanworks Oct. 21st, 2025 @ 07:16 pm
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by Elintiriel

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

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

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

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

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

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



The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis Oct. 21st, 2025 @ 08:55 am
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The story that began the grand tradition of picking on a teenager's work.

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis

Did karma do you justice when you're down and out and lost? Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 11:38 pm
[personal profile] sovay
The rain eased off after four o'clock, but until I got to Chapin Beach I still thought I would be making an affectionately overcast farewell to Cape Cod Bay, not arriving just in time for one of those conch-pink flaming sunsets for which my camera creakily consented to make an effort for about five minutes before shutting itself back down again and stubbornly refusing to be coaxed further. I walked back and forth on the wet metallic sands and collected a fragment of white-and-purple-whorled shell and watched the clouds fade to peach and charcoal. I put my hands in the water where it ran clear over the wave-rounded litter all faintly green-tinged, just to feel it on my fingers colder than before. I had all the talismans necessary to remember myself.

Did the shamrock on your shoulder bring good fortune and pay off? )

It was such good sea. I had not had so much of it daily in years. And it is not that I can get none of it in the still working seaport of Boston, and Cape Cod remains sandier than the mountain-folded ledges of Cape Elizabeth or the glacier-scraped boulders of Cape Ann, but it is still Atlantic and still cold to the touch and still live. I am home now and approved by Hestia for the second time in a month, an unusual sign of travel in my life these days. Dinner was with my parents and [personal profile] spatch and came from Szechuan's Dumpling, who thanks to my being literally the last customer in and out of the restaurant threw in an order from earlier in the evening that no one had ever come to collect, i.e. free crab rangoon and what it just occurred to me to recognize as suan la chow show made by a kitchen that wasn't Mary Chung's. I did not get anywhere near as much done with my brain as I had wanted, but I am working on thinking of it as recharge rather than failure. I am not acclimated to unemployment. Tomorrow I plan nonetheless not to move very much.

Current Music: Dropkick Murphys, "Longshot (feat. The Scratch)"


Emperor Palpatine Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 04:00 am
[syndicated profile] xkcd_feed
Many things about Star Wars were not well planned out, but having a 37-year-old in old-age makeup play the Emperor in Return of the Jedi was such an incredible call.

Five Anticipated Books and Stories That Remain Unpublished Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 04:25 pm
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Since the authors are no longer with us, will we ever get a glimpse?

Five Anticipated Books and Stories That Remain Unpublished

Bundle of Holding: Ghastly Affair Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 02:04 pm
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A bundle for Daniel James Hanley's tabletop roleplaying game of Gothic and Romantic Horror in the decadent, disastrous age of Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon, and Lord Byron.

Bundle of Holding: Ghastly Affair

Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists: True Names by Vernor Vinge Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 12:40 pm
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The young people wrestle with what is arguably an early example of Cyberpunk.

Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists: True Names by Vernor Vinge

AWS outage Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 10:11 am
[personal profile] alierak, posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Clarke Award Finalists 2019 Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 08:54 am
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2019: The Tories somehow find someone worse than May to be Prime Minister, UK pleas to the EU for a Brexit negotiation do-over on the grounds “our negotiators were fucking numpties” fall on deaf ears, and Tory MPs reject multiple Tory Brexit proposals, for which UK voters rebuke the incompetent Tories with a massive majority.

Poll #33744 Clarke Award Finalists 2019
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33


Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Rosewater by Tade Thompson
7 (21.2%)

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
2 (6.1%)

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
25 (75.8%)

Semiosis by Sue Burke
10 (30.3%)

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
4 (12.1%)

The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
1 (3.0%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
Semiosis by Sue Burke

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

I now have basically no internet or phone reception at home Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 09:37 am
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Except very occasionally if I can locate a spot that currently has reception.

So while that's going on, replies to anything may be delayed, but I'm reading when I can and distractions are still very much appreciated.

ETA: may now be fixed, I am deep in spoon debt and would like to be allowed to falldowngoboomnow.

Distant as a northern star Oct. 19th, 2025 @ 10:05 pm
[personal profile] sovay
The oldest gravestone still extant in the Ancient Cemetery in Yarmouth dates back to 1698, but I did not encounter it as I photographed a small selection of winged death's heads and lichen. Afterward I went back to the salt marsh where my camera with unnecessary aptness apparently died.

Wood and whisky, time and tar. )

Judah Thacher d. 1775 had a rather bland angel at the top of his gravestone, but some unusual stars and curlicues down the sides and above all both fancy lettering and the best memento mori I saw in the entire burying ground:

Reader ſtand ſtil & Spend a Tear
Think on the duſt that Slumbers here
& When you think on yͤ State of me
Think on yͤ glaas that runs for yͤ


I just side-eye my camera taking it to heart.

Current Music: Desperate Journalist, "No Hero"


October 2025 Membership Drive: Thanks for your Support Oct. 20th, 2025 @ 12:37 am
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by therealmorticia

The Organization for Transformative Works’s (OTW) October membership drive is over and we are delighted to say that we are finishing with a total of US$288,692.28 raised. We are particularly pleased that 7,339 donors chose to either take up or renew OTW membership with their donation, exceeding our goal of 4,500 members.

These donations came from 8,753 people in 79 countries: thank you to every single one of them, as well as to all of you who posted and shared the news about the drive! The OTW would not exist without its users all around the world, and your continued support for us is our absolute pride and joy! We are so glad to know that our ongoing mission to support, protect, and provide access to the history of fanworks and fan culture continues to resonate with the people that matter most of all: the fans themselves.

If you were intending to donate or join and haven’t yet done so, don’t worry! The OTW accepts donations all year round and you can always choose to become a member with a donation of US$10 or more. Memberships run for one calendar year from the date of your donation, so if you donate now you’ll be able to vote in the 2026 OTW Board elections, which will take place in August. And our exclusive thank-you gifts are available whenever you donate!

Thanks again to our donors, our volunteers, and everyone who supports the OTW and its projects. We can’t wait to see what milestones we hit in the future.


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


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