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idle contemplations
Jun. 27th, 2025 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waterswordVery pleased at how fast my ankle's been healing; it barely hurts at all except when I flex my toes, and I assume that will get better next week. Ice and rest doing their job as advertised! The knee is — I don't want to say getting worse, that's not true, but as the scab gets thicker and more attached to the skin, it feels more uncomfortable to move my knee through flexion/extension, and that is not fun. Botheration.
I have a dark feeling I should get PT after this; I can feel my gait getting fucked up by having both legs injured in different ways. A new adulting experience, and I already do not like it because it will involve insurance. Maybe I'll call the EAP and make them give me a to-do list or something.
While lying in bed and icing my ankle, I have re-read Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and Fledgling; I know we've talked about it before, but wow it gets more and more noticeable how she just doesn't think of queerness as related to desire. The stuff she's interested in about gender and sexuality forces her to acknowledge the existence of same-sex sexual interactions, but nothing about them is ever anyone's first choice or pleasurable except in the ways her worldbuilding allows her to impose on the characters.
I am idly fantasizing about a shopping app that lets me:
- manually add items from a variety of independent vendors (i.e., not Amazon);
- once a month (or whatever time period I set), checks if any of the items on the list are on sale;
- if it finds an item on sale, it stops going through the list and purchases that item, removing it from the list;
- if nothing is on sale, it picks a random item from the list, purchases it, and removes it from the list;
- repeat next month.
Note: steps 2-5 do not involve me making decisions or receiving alerts.
Things to Get Me [referral link] is perfect at #1. Google Shopping kind of does #2 but only kind of. The rest of it, I'm fairly sure it doesn't exist and I understand why, I can easily see where this could go very wrong, but I want it for myself and I'm mad that either I gotta build it (no) or outsource to a human. Further botheration.
AO3 Releases 0.9.409 – 0.9.413: Change Log
Jun. 27th, 2025 02:23 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
otw_news_feedIn May and June, we made some security additions for user accounts by adding email notifications when an account’s username or password is changed. We also made some improvements around tag sets and challenge signups. As one more security change, we also permanently disabled image embedding in guest comments.
A special thank you to our new contributors Ashley Tan, dismayonnaise, Grayson von Goetz, Jen Mann, kitbur, and ryelle!
Credits
- Coders: Ashley Tan, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Connie Feng, dismayonnaise, EchoEkhi, Grayson von Goetz, Hamham6, Jen Mann, kitbur, marcus8448, ryelle, Sarken, Scott, slavalamp, weeklies
- Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, james_, lydia-theda, redsummernight, slavalamp, Sarken, weeklies
- Testers: Bilka, Brian Austin, choux, Deniz, Eskici, LilyP, Lute, lydia-theda, Maine, megidola, Runt, Sam Johnsson, Sarken, Scott, Tal, Teyris, therealmorticia, wichard
Details
0.9.409
On May 11, we deployed some improvements to tag sets and added an email notification whenever the username on your account is changed.
- [AO3-5513] – Admins can now successfully create and rename media tags without running into 500 errors or caching issues.
- [AO3-5714] – When a canonical fandom and a non-canonical character or relationship were added to the same tag set, the non-canonical tags were automatically listed under the fandom. However, this is just how the tags were displayed in the tag set. They weren’t really connected to the fandom, which meant they weren’t included in autocompletes and couldn’t be used in challenge sign-ups. We’ve stopped automatically listing the non-canonical tags under the fandom and will instead only do it if the tag set moderators set up an association (which will also make the non-canonical tags usable in sign-ups and help ensure they appear in the autocomplete).
- [AO3-5919] – We updated the code for kudos emails to avoid using a method that wasn’t particularly efficient.
- [AO3-6757] – When an admin hides a comment, any embedded images in the hidden comment will now be replaced with the image URLs.
- [AO3-6844] – We fixed a whole bunch of display and page structure issues on pages that list the tags in a tag set.
- [AO3-6977] – We’ve started spam checking edits to comments from new users and stopped spam checking any comments a work creator leaves on their own work.
- [AO3-6981] – To improve account security, we now send you an email when you (or someone logged in to your account) change your username.
- [AO3-6984] – Our dependency updater bumped our version of net-imap to 0.5.7. It’s not something we use, but keeping dependencies up to date is good.
- [AO3-6988] – We started caching the package installs involved in our automated tests, making each test run faster.
- [AO3-6990] – We bumped our version of the rack gem to 2.2.14 to get the latest security fix.
0.9.410
On May 16, we added an email notification whenever the password of your account is changed. We also made a number of small improvements all around the site.
- [AO3-5712] – Under certain circumstances, it was possible to sign up for a challenge using a character or relationship that wasn’t permitted by the challenge’s tag set. Now you’ll get an error if you try to do that.
- [AO3-6267] – If a draft chapter was added to a work in your History, your History would lie to you and say an update to the work was available. Now it will only tell you an update is available if a new chapter has been published since you last accessed the work.
- [AO3-6627] – Whenever a site admin tried to update the roles for a user who already had roles outside the admin’s purview, those existing roles would be removed. (For example, when a Tag Wrangling admin gave the tag wrangler role to a user who had the Open Doors archivist role, the user would lose their archivist role.) We’ve fixed it so any existing roles will stay in place.
- [AO3-6994] – We fixed an issue that was causing our spam checker to run on comments from accounts with recently changed email addresses.
- [AO3-6005] – We used feature tests somewhere we should’ve been using unit tests, so we changed them over.
- [AO3-6975] – At some point the admin setting for how long to keep around unactivated accounts had become disconnected from the code it was meant to control. We fixed this so the setting once again affects the right piece of code.
- [AO3-6970] – When the Policy & Abuse committee hides a work, you get an automatic email to notify you. To prepare for some future changes, we’ve updated the email text to allow for multiple works in the same email.
- [AO3-6973] – Another account security enhancement: you’ll now get an email when you (or someone accessing your account) change or reset your password.
0.9.411
On May 24, we deployed an improvement to word counts for multichapter works on the Statistics page. We also took steps to fight abuse in guest comments by preventing them from ever displaying embedded images.
- [AO3-3818] – On some specific browsers on certain devices, leaving comments or submitting support tickets would result in an error. We’ve now fixed that.
- [AO3-4190] – Every time invitations were sent, the log on the site settings page updated to say the settings had been modified. We’ve fixed it so it will only say the settings have been updated when an admin updates them.
- [AO3-7000] – One of the external links in the Creating a Skin help pop-up pointed to a site that had been taken over by a crypto magazine, so we’ve replaced it with a new resource for learning about CSS.
- [AO3-6995] – In a previous release, we tried to drop an unused database column. Unfortunately, we had to put it back when it turned out Rails was still looking for the column due to caching. We’ve now made a code change that will let us drop the column for real after a future release.
- [AO3-5270] – The yearly word counts on your Statistics page will now only count words written in chapters posted in that year. That means if you add a chapter to a WIP you started last year, the words you wrote last year will still count toward 2024’s total instead of being added to 2025’s total.
- [AO3-5347] – The notification you get when someone cites your work as a related work has now been prepared for translation.
- [AO3-6092] – A while ago, we unintentionally fixed a bug where the chapter title didn’t display in Entire Work mode if the work only had one posted chapter. Now we’ve added an automated test to make sure we don’t unintentionally break it again.
- [AO3-6684] – The close button on the banner we use for sitewide announcements uses an ×, which typically makes sense if you’re looking at the page, but which gets read as “multiplication sign” if you’re using a screen reader. That was confusing, so we’ve made sure screen readers will now say “hide banner” instead.
- [AO3-6967] – We’ve added a second save button to the top of tag edit pages to make things a little more convenient when the page is long and a wrangler is just changing something at the top of the form.
- [AO3-6987] – Under certain circumstances, we strip embedded images from certain fields. We used to just show the image URL when we did that, but now we show all of the HTML.
- [AO3-6991] – As a safety measure, guest comments with embedded images will always show the HTML instead of embedded images. (This includes existing guest comments.)
0.9.412
On June 5, we deployed a small release with some bug fixes.
- [AO3-6166] – If you knew the ID of an unrevealed work you could access a few subpages of the work, such as the collections page, and find out the title of the work that way. Since that’s meant to be unrevealed, we’ve changed these pages so you can no longer access them if the work is unrevealed.
- [AO3-6937] – We changed the browser page title on inbox pages to a format that matches other user pages: “username – Inbox | Archive of Our Own.”
- [AO3-6953] – We made sure you’ll get an error message if you attempt to clear your History and it fails.
- [AO3-6993] – The Edit Multiple Works page will no longer display a bunch of unusable options when you don’t have any works. Instead, it will simply tell you you don’t have any works.
- [AO3-6550] – When displaying work titles, we used to call a function on them that had already been called. We’ve stopped doing that since it’s redundant.
- [AO3-6948] – We added some code to enable us to monitor the performance of the job that sends invitations to people in the invitation queue.
0.9.413
Our June 16 deploy added the ability to embed media from audio.com in works.
- [AO3-6515] – We fixed an error 500 that occured when a work with end notes was marked as published, but only had draft chapters.
- [AO3-6912] – We changed the browser page title for unrevealed works to include the site name at the end.
- [AO3-6437] – We removed some unused database tables.
- [AO3-6996] – We finally dropped that unused database column and removed the code we added to make that go smoothly.
- [AO3-6235] – Admins from the Policy & Abuse committee can now turn invitation requests on and off from the site settings page.
- [AO3-6588] – Admins from the Open Doors and Support committees can now give users the role that disables password reset emails for their account.
- [AO3-7003] – You can now add embeds from audio.com to your works.
Fun with kanji: 参照
Jun. 27th, 2025 05:42 ambrithistorianToday I learned that the Japanese word for reference (as in bibliographical reference) is 参照 (sanshou). Breaking it down by kanji, it means "nonplussed" (参) "illumination" (照). So if you're nonplussed by what the author said, checking the reference should give you some illumination!
June recs: MCYT Battleship 2025 part 1 (15 works)
Jun. 26th, 2025 11:02 pmschneefink( 11x fic, 1x webweave, 3x art )
In which I read a bunch of stuff my kids told me to read
Jun. 25th, 2025 10:16 pmcahnThis is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
( American Born Chinese, All American Boys, Frankly in Love, Raisin in the Sun, Keeper of the Lost Cities: 2-9.5, all of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Olympus/etc. series )
I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...
(no subject)
Jun. 25th, 2025 08:25 pmskygiantsThe two books were not even much alike, but I'm going to write them up together anyway because a.) I read them in such proximity and b.) though I did not like either of them, neither quite reached the over-the-top delights of joyous badness that would demand a solo post.
The first -- and this one I'd been hanging onto for some years after finding it in a used bookstore in San Francisco -- was Esbae: A Winter's Tale (published 1981), a college-campus urban fantasy in which (as the Wikipedia summary succinctly says) a college student named Chuck summons Asmodeus to help him pass his exams. However, Chuck is an Asshole Popular Boy who Hates Books and is Afraid of the Library, so he enlists a Clumsy, Intellectual, Unconventional Classmate with Unfashionable Long Red Locks named Sophie to help him with his project. Sophie is, of course, the heroine of the book, and Moreover!! she is chosen by the titular Esbae, a shapechanging magical creature who's been kicked out into the human realm to act as a magical servant until and unless he helps with the performance of a Great and Heroic Deed, to be his potentially heroic master.
Unfortunately after this happens Sophie doesn't actually do very much. The rest of the plot involves Chuck incompetently stalking Sophie to attempt to sacrifice her to Asmodeus, which Sophie barely notices because she's busy cheerfully entering into an affair with the history professor who taught them about Asmodeus to begin with.
In fact only thing of note that nerdy, clumsy Sophie really accomplishes during this section is to fly into a rage with Esbae when she finds out that Esbae has been secretly following her to protect her from Chuck and beat her unprotesting magical creature of pure goodness up?? to which is layered on the extra unfortunate layer that Esbae often takes the form of a small brown-skinned child that Sophie saw playing the Heroine's Clever Moorish Servant in an opera one time??? Sophie, who is justifiably horrified with herself about this, talks it over with her history professor and they decide that with great mastery comes great responsibility and that Sophie has to be a Good Master. Obviously this does not mean not having a magical servant who is completely within your power and obeys your every command, but probably does mean not taking advantage of the situation to beat the servant up even if you're really mad. And we all move on! Much to unpack there, none of which ever will be.
Anyway. Occult shenanigans happen at a big campus party, Esbae Accomplishes A Heroic Deed, Sophie and her history professor live happily ever after. It's 1981. This book was nominated for a Locus Award, which certainly does put things in perspective.
The second book, the free bookstore pickup, was Ronald Scott Thorn's The Twin Serpents (1965) which begins with a brilliant plastic surgeon! tragically dead! with a tragically dead wife!! FOLLOWED BY: the discovery of a mysterious stranger on a Greek island who claims to know nothing about the brilliant plastic surgeon ....
stop! rewind! You might be wondering how we got here! Well, the brilliant plastic surgeon (mid-forties) had a Cold and Shallow but Terribly Beautiful twenty-three-year-old aristocratic wife, and she had a twin brother who was not only a corrupt and debauched and spendthrift aristocrat AND not only psychologically twisted as a result of his physical disability (leg problems) BUT of course mildly incestuous with his twin sister as well and PROBABLY the cause of her inexplicable, unnatural distaste for the idea of having children. I trust this gives you a sense of the vibe.
However, honestly the biggest disappointment is that for a book that contains incestuous twins, face-changing surgery [self-performed!!], secret identities, secret abortions, a secret disease of the hands, last-minute live-saving operations and semi-accidental murder, it's ... kind of boring ..... a solid 60% of the book is the brilliant plastic surgeon and his wife having the same unpleasant marital disputes in which the book clearly wants me to be on his side and I am really emphatically absolutely not. ( spoilers )
Both these books have now been released back into the wild; I hope they find their way to someone who appreciates them. I did also read a couple of good books on my trip but those will, eventually, get their own post.
What I'm Doing Wednesday
Jun. 25th, 2025 05:57 pmsageastrology
I'm refreshing my knowledge. I used to be GOOD at it, and it's a thing I don't have to be healthy to do. I don't have to keep normal office hours. The trouble is most of my books are paper and reading paper is a migraine trigger. So it's slow going.
dirt
The thrips are srsly going after the rattlesnake beans, and it's making me crazy. Interestingly, they're less fond of the ornamentals. The bougainvillea sent up a new shoot that is thick enough to propagate, so I'm planning to do that in a week or two. The struggling spider plant is recovering. The teeny tiny leaf of the string of turtles has grown a nearly microscopic leaflet and a root inside its rooting bag of sphag & perlite. Maybe one day it'll be a real plant!
healthcrap
Skin clinic tomorrow. Cancelled botox for migraines on Monday, due to bureaucratic shenanigans I'm partly responsible for. Continuing to be in bed for 12 hours and sleep on and off for 7-9 of them. Little REM, little deep sleep, little rest, all thanks to the fibro. I've had PTSD triggers happening for the past week or more, I realized, which is getting me down. Good that I identified it, though, so at least I can point to some reasons for being a ball of anxiety and avoidance
yarning
I went to yarn group Sunday, go me, and had a nice time. I still feel little impetus to crochet or do anything else creative. I wish I did.
food
Started taking a big kid dose of a children's multivitamin in hopes of feeling better, and I do! I bought a ton of groceries after only doing one trip last month. The prices have gone up significantly, grrr. But now I have healthy options that aren't too hard to cook and will hopefully not find myself living on trail mix again...even though I bought fixings for that, too. Made mujadara again and upped the lentil to rice ratio. Again used 2 giant sweet onions bc anything less isn't near enough.
#resist
June 27: Stonewall Anniversary Protest
June 24 to 30: McDonald’s Boycott
July 4: Independence Day Boycott/Free America Protest/Weekend of Community Events
July 17: Good Trouble Lives On Day of Action (in honor of John Lewis, who died 7/17/2000)
Latest new exhibits in the LLM-Generated Garbage hall of shame
Jun. 25th, 2025 05:53 pmerinptah
Machine-Generated Garbage Hall of Shame: “What these bots are designed to do is essentially a matter of statistical programming, and presenting them as reliable sources of information can be misguided, foolish, exploitative, or even dangerous, as demonstrated by the examples on this list.”
Similarly, AI Hallucination Cases: “This database tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments.”
Not to be confused with cases about AI hallucinations. “A solar firm in Minnesota is suing Google for defamation after the tech giant’s shoddy AI Overviews feature allegedly made up wild lies about the company — and significantly hurt its business as a result.”
“The unreliability and hallucinations themselves are the hook — the intermittent reward, to keep the user running prompts and hoping they’ll get a win this time. This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult.”
“Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they can’t fund any projects if they don’t pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it’s the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world. Readers keep emailing me to say that their contracts are getting cancelled because someone smooth-talked their CEO into believing that they don’t need developers.”
My website host, Siteground, has been trying to shove AI hype into their services lately. I can’t help wondering how many customers are actually asking for this, versus how many VCs and managers are insisting they’ve gotta be on the bandwagon. Especially given my fun new personal experience of bringing a problem to their customer-service LLM, where its very first response included a hallucination — advising me to change a nonexistent setting it just made up.
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)
Jun. 25th, 2025 03:34 pmpauraqueThis autobiographical novel follows Ada, a young Nigerian who is inhabited by multiple spirits. In Igbo the word for this is ọgbanje, which seems to sometimes refer to the spirits and sometimes the host (or maybe trying to distinguish the two is a failure of cultural literacy on my part). From birth, Ada knows she's different, and sometimes living with the spirits is a struggle. At other times they're a source of comfort and protection as she deals with unsettled family relationships, a move to an entirely new culture in the US, and intimate partner abuse. A lot of the time it's both.
Like Stone Butch Blues, this book is so memoir-shaped and episodic that it's hard to parse it as a novel, but it does have novelistic prose which is quite strong and evocative, and there's a satisfying arc. The use of alternating POVs among the different spirits is effective at establishing them as their own voices with their own motivations and interiority. Ada isn't really the main character—we get the spirits' perspectives on entering her body, being born from her trauma, and making decisions about how to deal with her, long before we ever get Ada's own POV. So it's more of an ensemble piece. Conversations between Ada and the spirits take place in an internal mind palace where each entity has a physical form, which helps it feel more vividly concrete rather than an abstract dialogue among inner voices.
The book takes an eclectic perspective on spirituality and mental health. Western psych concepts of dissociative identity are fluidly interwoven with Igbo religious traditions, as well as with Christian spirituality. (Jesus is an occasional visitor to the mind palace.) This feels very honest and unafraid to hold diverse truths, which is refreshing as well as thematically resonant.
Though the character Ada goes by she/her, she does have gender stuff going on, which is presented in the context of one of the inhabiting spirits being male. It was a little startling to me to have this portrayed so frankly, because it's one of those things we talk about in the trans community but not necessarily outside it, and it made me feel a strange mix of comfortable familiarity and high anxiety. Like, yes, there are trans/nb/genderfluid people who experience their gender(s) in whole or in part as plural identity, but you're not supposed to say that in public. But when I take a breath and look past that initial reaction, of course I realize that we can't get where we need to go by sanding the rough edges off our reality in the name of not scaring the straights.
I plan to check out some of Emezi's other books. Since this one is obviously a lightly fictionalized recounting of things that really happened, I'll be interested to see what they come up with when they write outside of their specific personal experiences.
Content notes for the book include: Rape, self-injury, disordered eating, and attempted suicide.
two, two, two reviews in one
Jun. 25th, 2025 03:21 pmfoxIn the past two months I have been fortunate enough to read not one but two ARCs for upcoming novels by KJ Charles. One was Copper Script, which you'll notice has already been actually published. The other was All of Us Murderers, out in October 2025. So here we go, two reviews, one tardy, one timely, happy to separate them into two different posts if someone official would prefer that I do that.
( Copper Script )
Both titles: A+ would recommend.
Initial Air3 usage report!
Jun. 25th, 2025 02:10 pmumadoshiYesterday there was a casual in-person meeting at Dayjob where the team properly met the two people who our office's managing editor answers to. Donuts were promised (and turned out to be quality donuts, although I opted not to bring one home with me [since I sure wasn't about to unmask to eat anything there!]. Fun times in needing to be picky about what I spend my sugar intake on). We also had a heat warning, so I was all the more glad/relieved to have a drive to and from the meeting rather than taking transit for the first time in, oh, three years or so.
I'll put most of the rest under a cut, but I do want to note--especially since probably at least one or two of you clicked on the link for the Air3, and the price looks horrifying--that I'm incredibly glad we didn't order ours immediately when they first became available, because at that point the Air3 alone (as opposed to the kit) was more like $1000 USD. The original plan wasn't for
scruloose to get one at all, given that initial price and given that they have a respirator setup that works well for them. But then a few weeks later, the price dropped to $549(/$649 for the kit with extra stuff, which is what we opted for, as well as a few extra filters etc. in the name of minimizing future need to deal with shipping), so we got to say "Well, that's still really spendy, but it's also now not completely outrageous to get two." (And then we wound up having to contact the company because of shipping/import charge shenanigans, but those were on the courier's side, not Microclimate's, and the person scruloose dealt with was great, so it's all good.)I should also note that one of the review videos I watched about this made sure to point out clearly that its price (which initially was a MAJOR jump up from how much the Air2 cost when that was available) was in line with the cost of other NIOSH-certified powered respirators. It's far from cheap, but it's not the gouging attempt it might seem like. (I do wonder what the deal was with the massive price drop so soon after its release, though!)
( And now, the actual experience: )
Not to tempt anyone but ...
Jun. 24th, 2025 12:50 pmsholioANNOUNCING TERRIBLE TEMPERATURE TROUBLES FLASH FEST: a multifandom flash fest for all your terrible temperature troubles!
Nomination & Sign-ups: Now-June 30.
Assignments Out: July 2.
Works Due: July 10.
Work Reveals: July 11.
Creator Reveals: July 17.
All times at 11:59 PM Eastern.
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/temptroubles2025/profile
https://archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/23809
Hypothermia ... heatstroke ... etc ...
(And it's one of those 1-fandom minimum request/offer exchanges, I'M JUST POINTING THIS OUT, IN CASE IT IS RELEVANT TO ANYONE.)
I realize this would be a terrible time for me to sign up for anything because I'm leaving tomorrow and I'll be gone until July 4 (Mom stuff again), but there's still almost a week of writing time after that.
Pride Book Bundles
Jun. 24th, 2025 09:40 amoracneItch.io gives authors a larger portion of the royalties, which is why I've been giving them some promotion. My lesbian erotica reprint collection, "Spicy Sapphic Treats," is in the Contemporary and Historical bundle as well as the big one.
OTW Signal, June 2025
Jun. 24th, 2025 09:35 amotw_news_feedEvery 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
The Conversation’s article “The lore of ‘lore'” explores how fandom fueled the reinvention of a 1,000-year-old word:
Now essential online slang, [“lore”] can be traced back to Old English, where it referred primarily to learning, as in the act of teaching or being taught. Over time, lore came to be associated with more informal knowledge, passed on through word of mouth … [but then it] largely slipped out of common usage … So, how did “lore” come to hold such contemporary relevance?
“Lore” still carries shades of its original meaning, but just as fans expand and transform canon, modern usage reimagines it. Oxford University Press—which shortlisted “lore” for their 2024 word of the year—explains:
In recent years, people have been using “lore” in different ways and in new contexts. For example, they might now talk about the lore surrounding a particular celebrity, or a character in a book or film, or even refer to their own personal history as their lore. Online cultures and social media have seen the emergence of new kinds of celebrities and highly-engaged fandoms, and the word has been applied much more widely.
From its popularity in K-pop to the semi-eponymous Fanlore, the rise of “lore” is a great example of how fans build cultural meaning through shared language and creative reinterpretation.
The Geekiary’s article on fandom holidays speaks on how fans mark time within their communities. Be it May the Fourth (Star Wars Day) or Destiel’s confession anniversary, fandom holidays are not an uncommon phenomenon. Some humorous, some profound, these unofficial yet widely beloved holidays are often tied to moments from canon (such as a character’s birthday or an in-universe event) and serve to foster community building.
These observances turn the ordinary calendar into a timeline of shared emotion and meaning. As an act of tradition, they become ritual anchors that give structure to the fan’s calendar, offering a sense of comfort and familiarity in an ever-changing world. The article notes how this act of building new traditions and creating opportunities for community bonding forges a sense of cultural memory for fans.
In her book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Abigail De Kosnik describes how “Memory has gone rogue in the sense that it has come loose from its fixed place in the production cycle. It now may be found anywhere, or everywhere, in the chain of making”. Celebrating holidays online or by digitizing photographs/experiences allows these memories to be accessed later on, rather than be fixed to just a specific person or place. It lets our fandoms live outside of us as individuals.
Like lore, fandom holidays demonstrate how participation itself becomes a form of authorship—each contribution adding another thread to the tapestry.
OTW Tips
Fandom is global, and many amazing fanworks are written, drawn, or subtitled in languages other than one’s own. Whether you’re tagging fanfiction in your native language or collaborating with international fans, your efforts enrich fandom’s diversity and inclusivity.
The OTW is recruiting for Tag Wrangling Volunteers (Russian), Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution Volunteers, and Support Volunteers (Chinese).
Consider volunteering for one of the OTW’s teams to support and celebrate global fan participation!
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.