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Posted by Lute https://www.transformativeworks.org/dreaming-the-answers-is-moving-to-the-ao3/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269265 cj2017 and feroxargentea, publishers of The X-Files fanzine Dreaming the Answers, are importing the zine’s fanworks to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).
In this post:
Dreaming the Answers (DTA) was a 33-issue The X-Files fanzine published from November 1997 to March 2001. The zine featured primarily Mulder/Scully fic with additional meta, reviews, and news of note. The publishers are still proud of Dreaming the Answers, and they’d like to make it freely available and preserve any of its fanfic that isn’t yet archived. For more information, refer to Dreaming the Answers’ Fanlore page and AO3 collection.
The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is to assist publishers of fanzines to incorporate the fanworks from those fanzines into the Archive of Our Own. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with publishers who want to import their fanzines and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with cj2017 and feroxargentea to import the fanzines listed above into separate, searchable collections on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the fanzines in their entirety, all art in the fanzines will be hosted on the OTW’s servers and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.
We will begin importing works from cj2017 and feroxargentea’s fanzines to the AO3 after November. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the task. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collections in the meantime.
We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We’ll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.
All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.
Please contact Open Doors with your creator pseud(s) and email address(es), if:
- You’d like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than the publisher has a record of.
- You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
- You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
- You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3, or would NOT like your works added to the fanzine collections.
- You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
- You have any other questions we can help you with.
Please include the name of the publisher or fanzine in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account the publisher has a record of, 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 cj2017 and feroxargentea to confirm your claims.)
Please see the Open Doors website for instructions on:
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 Dreaming the Answers 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 Dreaming the Answers!
– The Open Doors team, cj2017, and feroxargentea
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. https://www.transformativeworks.org/dreaming-the-answers-is-moving-to-the-ao3/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269265
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It is my birthday. I am forty-four years old, the age some fictional character must be. I woke to a pair of packages, one from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) nineweaving that proved to be Vaughn Scribner's Merpeople: A Human History (2020) and from my parents which was a DVD of The Sea Wolf (1941). Hestia was a small black round of purr like an extra present at the foot of the bed. It is bright and brisk and cloudless as all the classical autumns outside.Current Music: Jealous of the Birds, "Pendulum"
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A hapless minister is drafted into international intrigue.
The Cool War by Frederik Pohl
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Most of the Draconids we saw tonight were short flashes like Morse in the mind of the dragon, but even through the faint haze and the half-sky shine of the harvest moon just past, we saw two true long-tailed fireballs like dragon-stars, streaking through Lyra and Boötes. Their radiant stands in Eltanin and Rastaban, the dragon's eyes. Meteors, too, feel like a gift for an erev birthday. I still dream one will earth itself in a field while I am watching.Current Music: Crystal Eyes, "I'm Nature"
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a_reasonable_man thought I could use a talisman and brought me a 1923 Peace dollar that belonged most likely to his grandfather's second wife. It's as old as my grandmother would be. I have buttoned it inside my coat. It's a treasure.
 Current Music: Alex G, "Afterlife"
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Welcome, visitor, to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG, the Cypher System tabletop roleplaying game rulebook from Ganza Gaming about the Permian Basin Superorganism.
Bundle of Holding: Mystery Flesh Pit
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Posted by callmeri https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-otw-is-recruiting-for-policy-abuse-volunteers-2/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269327 Are you a frequent AO3 user who enjoys helping others? Would you like to assist AO3 users by resolving complaints? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!
We’re excited to announce the opening of applications for:
- Policy & Abuse Volunteers – closing 15 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.
Policy & Abuse Volunteer
The Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is responsible for addressing questions and concerns about potential violations of the AO3 Terms of Service. We determine whether reports are about legitimate violations of the Terms of Service, and what to do about them if they are. PAC volunteers correspond directly with AO3 users and collaborate on projects both within PAC and with other OTW committees.
Our main goals as a committee are:
- to adhere to the AO3 Terms of Service
- to make our reasoning and processes as clear and transparent as possible
- to handle all user reports consistently, no matter which volunteer is doing the work
- to keep every case we work on completely confidential
We are seeking people who can:
- Commit to working on cases regularly
- Be patient with rephrasing explanations
- Ask for help when needed
- Collaborate both inside the team and with other committees
- Act in accordance with established rules, policies, and procedures
- Treat confidentiality and user privacy as a priority
You must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. While English proficiency is required, we welcome applicants who are fluent in other languages, especially Spanish (Español), Brazilian Portuguese (Português brasileiro), Russian (Русский), Chinese (中文), or Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia).
Applications are due 15 October 2025
Apply for the Policy & Abuse Volunteer role at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us. https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-otw-is-recruiting-for-policy-abuse-volunteers-2/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269327
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He said, I'm just out of hospital,
but I'm still flying.
—H.D., "R.A.F." (1941)
I had a lot of help—I was that sort of chap.
—Margery Allingham, The China Governess (1962)
Northbound and once again rear-facing for all the good that selecting my seat in advance did me, I watched the trees start to change beyond the gravel-span of the tracks from late southerly green to the occasional bright lick of Halloween leaves, as if the train were coming in to autumn. spatch met me at the station with a roast beef sandwich. Hestia sniffed me all over intently and then licked my nose: I was acceptable despite a week in the company of other cat. I spent the rest of the night in a sort of liquescent state and reconstituted myself this afternoon just enough for a doctor's appointment, after which I promptly decohered for several hours again.
It was such a good trip. It was low-key, which was literally what the doctors ordered. I sat on a bench with my godchild and watched him sketch in his lesser notebook. I slept into the afternoon and no one cared that I often napped after just about any exertion from a walk around the block to dinner out at a Balkan market that served me a pljeskavica that it was doing its best to be bigger than my head and the first can of Schweppes Bitter Lemon I have seen in a store for years. I ate several species of fancy tinned fish. I did not manage to get to a museum with selkie, but all things considered it may have been even better that we spent so much time just hanging out, mostly on the couch where one night my godchild came down to impart weird medical facts before returning to bed. Because he's reading it in English class, I left the first two lines of the Odyssey written for him on the refrigerator in dry-erase marker and Homeric Greek. I took many fewer photos than usual, but have my favorite: my godson, the Star.
I did not get a picture somewhere in Connecticut of the old fender pier of a swing bridge so overgrown with trees and brush, it had become an oak-trussed island, like the prow of a ship burial, but it was the best thing I saw on the return train. Changes in circumstances still being assimilated, but at least I was somewhere loving when they hit.Current Music: Hayley Williams, "Mirtazapine"
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Union technocrats had a plan for Gehenna, a plan that failed to take into account local conditions.
Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C J Cherryh
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Everything you need for Nazi-punching Mythos adventures
Bundle of Holding: Achtung! Cthulhu
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2017: The Royal College of Nursing’s alarming description of conditions in the NHS inspires the government to do worse, the Tories succeed in freezing British lifespans after a century of progress, and the UK begins that political equivalent of autoerotic asphyxiation known as Brexit.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 61 Which 2017 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
View AnswersThe Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
6 (9.8%) A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
42 (68.9%) After Atlas by Emma Newman
10 (16.4%) Central Station by Lavie Tidhar
9 (14.8%) Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
47 (77.0%) Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan
4 (6.6%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2017 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
After Atlas by Emma Newman
Central Station by Lavie Tidhar
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan
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The sheer lamination of meta in the source material must have attracted Orson Welles to The Immortal Story (1968): a story about the failure of the creation of a story. Perhaps to cap the parallel, it should have remained, like so many of its writer-director's projects before and after, unfinished, but instead it was the last non-documentary feature he completed in his life, a lyrical, theatrical, troubling curio around which the rest of a projected anthology of adaptations never materialized, stranding it like a chip from a mosaic of dream. The 58 minutes it clocks in at are at once ethereal and formal, so sensorially precise, what they detail cannot be real. If I had heard of it before last week, appropriately I had forgotten.
The screenplay by Welles from the 1958 Isak Dinesen novella preserves its nest of narratives sometimes down to the word, even as it chronicles how slipperily they can twist away from even the most controlling teller. Late in the nineteenth century of tea-trading Macao, the autocratically self-made Mr. Clay (Welles) has become obsessed with a story he heard long ago on his passage to China, of a penniless sailor hired by a childless old man to service his beautiful young wife for a fee of five guineas. It is not the titillation of this scenario that occupies his gout-ridden hours in the great house that belonged originally to the partner he ruined over the miserly debt of three hundred guineas, which may be the stuff of scandal to the European colony but for the aged merchant is merely one more sum in the million-dollar litany of his own ledgers read nightly back to him by his head clerk Elishama Levinsky (Roger Coggio). It is its unreality, which so offends this man of closed accounts and futures only in the sense of investments that he determines to render this maritime legend fact: "People should only record things which have already happened." Unmarried himself, he will arrange for the union of a woman procured for the role of the wife and a sailor authentically solicited from the docksides, wined and dined, proffered the traditional piece of gold and brought to the candlelit bride-bed "in order that one sailor in the world will be able to tell it from beginning to end as it actually happened to him." They will engender between them not a child, but a true history. The defeat of this project will be apparent to anyone with half a head for story. The tale of the lucky sailor has its own reality to which historical truth is irrelevant, its own vitality of the oral tradition which is predicated on exactly the fact that it can be told by any man on the sea as if it happened to him because it never did. It is known across ships, it lives on them, it replicates itself through the reception of travelers from London to Singapore. It can never be made to happen for scare-quotes real because in the narratological sense which eludes the literal-minded god-game of Mr. Clay, it happened the first time it was told. The most he can achieve with his mortal marionettes is the second order of a reenactment, inescapably aware of its own script—Welles doesn't need to force the further metatext of capturing this stagecraft of bodies on film, it shimmers under the surface of the production like the ironies inherent in Dinesen, the pitfalls of collective art. "You move at my bidding," Mr. Clay crows at the hymeneal scene, directorially prepared to oversee its consummation until the curtains like a furious proscenium are jerked closed in his face. "You're two young, strong and lusty jumping-jacks in this old hand of mine," but his desire can dictate only the act. The idiosyncrasies of their chemistry, their conversation, their lovemaking and most of all what any of it may mean past the morning remain out of his grasp, these surrogates for his authorial potency whose own histories he seems curiously, adamantly oblivious to. Does he recognize the elegant, embittered Virginie Ducrot (Jeanne Moreau) as the daughter of the man he drove to suicide, now the mistress of another of his clerks after her own tumultuous sexual adventure at sea? Can he hear more than fantasized frustration in the reticence of his choice "catch out of the harbor of Macao," the ragged yet quietly independent Paul Velling (Norman Eshley), shipwrecked a silent, solitary year? It seemed not to register with him when Elishama alluded to a flight from Poland before reading from the amulet of the prophet Isaiah which is his one remnant of a trauma-drowned childhood. All these true stories lie within his reach and he disregards them, hellbent on masterminding the simulacrum of a meme, perhaps because in his greed for realism he prefers the roles to the actors, more likely because it has never occurred to him to listen. It is left to the other principals of this chamber fable to share themselves through their stories, their silences, their songs, their lies, a cat's cradle of relationships at once foreclosed and facilitated by the moves of the tale which from the start is unraveling beyond its boughten bounds. "No man in the world can take a story which people have invented and told and make it happen . . . One way or another, this story will be the end of Mr. Clay."
Of this folkloric quartet, I am predictably fascinated by Elishama, effectively the stage manager of this devil's comedy who explains his complicity in it with a sort of corporate stoicism: "I'm in Mr. Clay's employ. I cannot take on work anywhere but with him." With his Dickensian wire-rims and slicked-ink hair, he looks a familiarly servile figure in his coat as pen-black as his eyes, his hands so often folded as if with his hat in them, pale-faced as a horn-shell. The film flags his Jewishness long before he introduces himself by name, but any threat of caricature blows off with the wry courtesy with which he contradicts his master as to the nature of the story which he heard so many more times in the tempest-tossed travels that led him to Macao, and the longer the film spends with him thereafter, the more enigmatically he will emerge as a small man of substance, disillusioned, ironical, not without compassion, not even old for the concentrated fatalism of his scant room by the company's godown, "things not yet to be recounted which moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind." Dispatched on a pimp's errand, he approaches it without excuse; the straw of his sober pork-pie hat is a concession to the climate, but it lends a dapper silent clown's dignity to the implacable matter-of-factness with which he waits for Virginie to realize that, like himself, she is infinitely purchasable by the mad rich men of the world. "I suppose that nobody could insult you even if they tried," she appraises him challengingly, meaning it to, like the slap in the face she gave him for delivering his master's proposition. With the same grave lightness as if taking it as a compliment, Elishama replies, "Why should I let them?" The executor of his employer's whims, he makes at the same time a strange, tacit confederate for his chosen heroine, so unfailingly respectful of her person rented for the three hundred guineas of her father's final debt—instructed to offer her a hundred, he in fact brought the correct amount—that when she begins to disrobe vehemently in front of him, the haste with which he gets the door slammed between them is the clumsiest we have seen this self-contained man, his faintest compression of reluctance as he reopens it at her call as good as another character's monologue. Paul he deals with as an impersonal factotum, but to Virginie he reveals his own stark, poignant history, hears out in turn her fears of reentering the house of her childhood, play-acting the seventeen-year-old innocent she has not been since the night of an earthquake in Japan. Her table is scattered with a time-stained deck of Tarot, but it is Elishama who foretells like the pattern in a shawl or a bottom line of figures the fatal conclusion of Mr. Clay's desire. He alone discerns that her real price is revenge. In our one direct insight into his interiority, we were assured by the intermittent narrator that he "might well have been a highly dangerous person except that ambition, desire in any form had been washed and bleached and burnt out of him," but he does not seem all that much more innocuous in its absence, a dispassion that should not be mistaken for weakness. From the right, unpredictable angles, his sharp-lined, heat-sweating face is more beautiful than the tall young sailor's in its aureole of angelically fair hair. "I thought you were a small rat out of Mr. Clay's storehouse," Virginie reconsiders him, standing before her still like a question she cannot avoid answering, "et toi—tu es le Juif Errant."
It is a stupidly gorgeous film to look at. If Welles had never worked in color before, if he spoke disparagingly of it as an element of film, he knew how to use it: cinnabar-red, malarially gold, boat's-eye blue or the bridal white of mourning, contrasted in such lapidary profusion by DP Willy Kurant that even open-air shots such as the veils of smoke against a dust-lichened wall that bloom across the initial conversation of Elishama and Virginie look as dreamily artificial as the room red-walled as sealing wax and side-splashed with the sheen of a five-guinea coin in which Mr. Clay makes his ritual pitch to Paul. The set decoration by André Piltant fabricates its port of Macao—in Dinesen it was Canton—out of landlocked Chinchón and a handful of its Spanish neighbors through the gloriously stagelike expedient of dressing their balconies and pillars and arcades with lanterns and banners, papering the walls like theatrical flats with signs in Chinese and the occasional Portuguese and stocking the market square with Chinese extras from chestnut-sellers to children at play. The harbor is suggested by nothing more than the ragged tilt of sails, just as the ellipses of the climactic sex act will be explicitized by the chirping of crickets in the equally imaginative sound design of Jean Nény. The score itself is selected from the melancholy solo piano of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes of Erik Satie. Edited chiefly by Yolande Maurette, the film moves at a pace it is not meant as a disservice to call entrancing, since it isn't a euphemism for glacial, especially when it strolls into handheld camera or breaks itself up in a quick-cut flourish of gossip or conspicuous consumption or the blowing out of candles lensed like calla lilies. Every now and then it can feel caught between its art forms: the greyed and jaundiced streaks of makeup used by Welles for the ailing Mr. Clay would convince even from the front row of a theater, but at the distance of a close-up are obviously paint, all the odder since Moreau's rouge and powder are judiciously in character. If it makes the film feel a little handmade, it's of a piece with the carefully spare props and costumes, an ivory-headed cane, a poppy-colored wrapper, the nacreous whorl of a turban shell, a print of the Empress Eugénie of France. It's too tactile to reduce to a hall of narrative mirrors. After all its talking, it ends with an unheard song.
Because Welles hardly ever met financing without conditions, The Immortal Story was a co-production of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française and can in fact be viewed in the alternate cut of Une histoire immortelle, shorter by eight minutes, deeper by a few lines, texturally altered by the revision of voices as well as language—Moreau handled her own ADR in French and English, but Welles was dubbed by Philippe Noiret while Coggio in the French-language version can actually be heard as himself; he has a drily musical, effective voice that runs against his deferential appearance and I prefer it to the lighter dubbing of Warren Mitchell, although the two versions are best viewed in any case as their own movies. I discovered the English-language one on TCM and it turned out to have an entire small collection on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched on the Internet Archive from its fairy-tale-like opening to its ultimate, perhaps inevitable punch line. "Yes, a comedy. I'd forgotten the word." It would be nice if further little jewel-boxes of Dinesen had followed, but then I'm still bummed that Welles' film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) once again with Moreau fell apart in the final stages of production. At least, unlike Mr. Clay, he made this one story as real as any performance ever is. This ambition brought to you by my recounted backers at Patreon.Current Music: Haim, "Relationships"
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Pacifist Dorsai, space forts, duelling reviews, a rant about that mean Mr. Einstein and more in this issue of Destinies.
Destinies, February-March 1980 (Destinies, # 6) edited by Jim Baen
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Posted by Aditi Paul https://www.transformativeworks.org/september-2025-newsletter-volume-204/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269062 I. UPDATES TO AO3 COLLECTIONS
In late September, Accessibility, Design & Technology updated AO3’s collections feature by introducing collections tags—allowing more granular filtering and browsing between collections. This update also generally improved collection performance, introduced the ability to mark collections as “Multifandom”, and added Subcollections to the Collections filtering page.
For more details on recent AO3 releases and code changes, check out the most recent release notes.
II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN
Besides updates to Collections, AO3 committees also continued work in a variety of areas.
Open Doors finished importing My Mongoose, a The Sentinel ezine archive, and announced two new import projects: Faerie: Tolkien Fanfiction and Forging Ghost, a Spike/Angel archive.
Tag Wrangling continued their work on creating new “No Fandom” canonical tags and announced another batch of tags in mid-September. On the @ao3org Tumblr, Tag Wrangling also announced changes to Critical Role fandom tags in light of the upcoming Campaign 4. They hope these changes will help users in finding and filtering for the works they want to see.
In August, Policy & Abuse received 3,863 tickets, while Support received 4,319 tickets—the current record for the most tickets either committee has received in one month. Tag Wrangling wrangled over 579,000 tags, or over 1,200 tags per wrangling volunteer.
From mid-July to mid-September, User Response Translation helped Support and Policy & Abuse with 38 translation requests.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Fanlore’s Stub September editing challenge was a big success! Thank you to everyone who took part. For October, Fanlore is currently running a book-themed month. Check out the Help page for how to take part and claim a book-themed badge!
TWC’s Transformative Works and Cultures has released issue No. 46, a general issue! It includes the launch of a new special section, New Currents. This section collects articles on new topics or approaches at a smaller scale than a special issue. In this issue, New Currents focuses on how fans and fan studies scholars engage with AI as a tool for transformative engagement with fannish texts.
In September, Legal responded to a number of user queries; they also joined allies in filing an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court in the case of Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. The case deals with when internet service providers can be held responsible for the actions of their users.
Legal’s brief 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. There is no date set yet for when the case will be argued before the Supreme Court.
IV. GOVERNANCE
Elections closed out the 2025 election—congratulations to the OTW’s new Board Directors: Elizabeth Wiltshire and Harlan Lieberman-Berg!
In preparation for October’s membership drive, Development & Membership has been organizing new donation gifts, Finance has been compiling the pre-drive 2025 budget update, and Communications and Translation have prepared the associated news posts.
Board coordinated with Communication’s Con Outreach division to attend EagleCon in Los Angeles, USA, and received the Lemonade award on the OTW’s behalf. Elsewhere, the Board Assistants Team (BAT) continued work on OTW website updates, prepared for the quarterly Board meeting, and completed a report on non-profit training.
Organizational Culture Roadmap, in conjunction with BAT, Board, and Volunteers & Recruiting, continued work on the cross-committee review of the OTW’s Code of Conduct. A survey was sent out to all volunteers soliciting their feedback for potential Code of Conduct updates.
V. OUR VOLUNTEERS
This month, Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for 3 committees: Fanlore, TWC, and Tag Wrangling.
From August 21 to September 24, Volunteers & Recruiting received 171 new requests and completed 174, leaving them with 46 open requests. As of September 24, 2025, the OTW has 991 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New BAT Volunteers: Cait B, Deimos Crow, MelMel, MustardPot, and Sullie Tosho (BAT Volunteers)
New Communications Volunteers: 2 Chair Assistants
New Development & Membership Volunteers: Kae Coolen, Maddie64, and Mako (Graphic Designers); Danielle G., jennybug, LizLeaf, and 2 other Development & Membership Volunteers
New Open Doors Volunteers: AuroraT, Kayla G, and vinnawis (Chair Assistants); and Julie Bozza (Senior FSHP Volunteer)
New Strategic Planning Volunteers: Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Cybersecurity Delegate)
New Systems Volunteers: E.V. Moebius (Systems Volunteer)
New TWC Volunteers: 1 Review Editor
Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: 1 Board Assistants Team Chair
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: 1 Editor
Departing BAT Volunteers: Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Cybersecurity Delegate)
Departing Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: 1 News Post Moderator
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin Volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Julie Bozza (Chair Assistant) and 1 Import Assistant
Departing Strategic Planning Volunteers: 1 Strategic Planning Volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: SlantedKnitting (Support Volunteer)
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Mayrin, Yuechiang Luo, and 7 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: 1 Translation Volunteer Manager and 3 Translators
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
https://www.transformativeworks.org/september-2025-newsletter-volume-204/ https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=269062
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I started the afternoon by sitting under the shade of some kind of ornamental cherry while my godchild pruned and weeded the sprawling twenty-one-gourd salute of a vine that has taken over the lawn, but then the sun moved to reflect itself directly into my eyes and I relocated to the fire lane on the grounds that technically I was not parked in it.
Highlights of the later afternoon included napping for at least an hour, Japanese-style egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and fleurdelis41 notifying me of the identification of the Sanday Wreck and its four decades of service in the Royal Navy and the Arctic fishery. My godson spent most of the evening repainting and rebuilding a chair, partly by lantern-light out on the deck where he looked like some DIY Tarot draw of the Star.
Wildcat Bus (1940) is the definition of a programmer in that its premise of a small commercial bus line suffering a mysterious string of sabotage is reasonably disposable and in execution it is a thorough delight, starting with third-billed Paul Guilfoyle for once not playing a sleaze, a stooge, or any kind of crook at all, but the steadfast and sarcastic, textually acknowledged heterosexual life partner of the hero, the former oil heir played by Charles Lang who cracked up so badly in the wake of personal tragedy that the film opens with his spectacular eviction from the penthouse he couldn't afford on an installment plan, burrowed avoidantly into his bedclothes until spilled out onto the floor blinking at the receiver like the repossession of Bertie Wooster. Technically the chauffeur even when that 1937 Packard Twelve represents the totality of their possessions, Guilfoyle's Donovan is generally the person in the room with the brain cell, although Fay Wray gives him fair competition as the mechanically minded general manager of Federated Bus Lines who if she has a more feminine given name than "Ted" is never once addressed by it, while Leona Roberts' Ma Talbot does almost as good a bait-and-switch as Why Girls Leave Home (1945) as a criminal mastermind camouflaged as a little old charlady. What looks like a comic bit with a voluble Mexican turns into the lesson that if you want to drive a bus in southern California, you had better be fluent in Spanish. When a Chinese-American passenger sounds like a houseboy, he's doing it to razz Lang's Jerry Waters. There's some sweet if rear-projected footage of the Golden Gate International Exposition, a climactically left-field donnybrook, and the breezily Code-blowing demurral, "Why, no, Mr. Casey, I do my entertaining at the Athletic Club." It's not quite the full Only Angels Have Wings (1939), but when asked point-blank by Ted about the man he's pulled through more than one wipeout, "You really like him, don't you?" I'll take Donovan's thoughtfully frank, "Yeah, I guess I do." He has eloquently mordant eyebrows and an absentminded habit of tidying any office he's left to his own devices in. The whole thing came off the shop floor of RKO in a month and barely clears an hour in runtime and its attractions are unpretentious but satisfying, especially where character actors are perennially concerned. Guilfoyle may always have had a case of resting hangdog face, but come on, it worked for Walter Matthau. "I've taken an awful lot of guff from you for six years, you can take ten minutes from me."Current Music: Tones on Tail, "Go! (Club Mix)"
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Twelve books new to me. Four fantasies, one horror, one non-fiction, and six (!) science fiction works, of which at least four are series instalments.
Books Received, September 27 — October 3
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58 Which of these look interesting?
View AnswersChildren of Fallen Gods by Carissa Broadbent (December 2025)
4 (6.9%) Enchanting the Fae Queen by Stephanie Burgis (January 2026)
9 (15.5%) The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang (April 2026)
22 (37.9%) We Burned So Bright by T. J. Klune (April 2026)
21 (36.2%) We Could Be Anyone by Anna-Marie McLemore (May 2026)
8 (13.8%) These Godly Lies by Rachelle Raeta (July 2026)
4 (6.9%) The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural
16 (27.6%) Every Exquisite Thing by Laura Steven (July 2026)
5 (8.6%) The Infinite State by Richard Swan (August 2026)
7 (12.1%) Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 2026)
25 (43.1%) Moss’d in Space by Rebecca Thorne (July 2026)
20 (34.5%) Platform Decay by Martha Wells (May 2026)
43 (74.1%) Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%) Cats!
40 (69.0%)
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