tsukinofaerii | Network

I wrote for True Detective: Night Country this year and kind of just sunk myself into this world for a couple of months. Did a bunch of research on polar night, only to have to acknowledge that the show just hand-waved whatever it wanted so I followed suit. I love these characters so much that I had an absolute blast writing this.

Endless Night (4657 words) by alchemise
Fandom: True Detective: Night Country (TV)
Relationships: Liz Danvers/Evangeline Navarro
Characters: Liz Danvers (True Detective: Night Country), Evangeline Navarro, Peter Prior, Rose Aguineau, Bee Malee
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Horror, Cosmic Horror, environmental horror
Summary: Liz hadn’t intended to watch the first sunrise of the year.

( fic )

kaffy_r

Testing, Testing

I'm going to post something without coding the text color, just to see if a change I made with help from

muccamukk will do that.

Woo-hoo! It worked!

kaffy_r

Five Years Ago

This happened.

I will not forget. Nor will I forgive.

mxcatmoon

Written for the prompts, 170 Ineluctable, 175 specious at

vocab_drabbles
Title: Reminders of Miami
Fandom: Miami Vice (TV)
Author: Cat Moon
Rating: PG
Words: 668
Characters: Sonny/Rico
Summary: Sonny, Rico, and a cat. A study in Cute.
Notes: This fic in in the same ‘universe’ as my story, “Baby Ducks,” but works fine as a standalone, too.
Inspired by the scene in “Death and the Lady,” where the boys got a kitten for Gina, because I died of cute. Also, I have a special interest. I lost my own orange baby last year, after 14 years of companionship. When I got him, he’d been named Sonny. Yes, I had an orange cat named Sonny. Of course I didn’t change his name, but I did mostly call him Chewy since he was always chewing on things he shouldn’t (especially plastic bags).

( Memories of Miami )

Current Mood: touched

amalthia

( The Untamed )
( DCU )
( Star Wars )
( The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System )
( Heaven Official's Blessing )

rachelmanija

Once upon a time, the moon Panga was industrial and capitalist and miserable. Then robots suddenly and inexplicably gained self-awareness. They chose to stop working, leave human habitation, and go into the wilderness. The humans not only didn't try to stop them, but this event somehow precipitated a huge political change. Half of Panga was left to the wilderness, and humans developed a kinder, ecologically friendly, sustainable way of life. But the robots were never seen again.

That's all backstory. When the book opens, Sibling Dex, a nonbinary monk, is dissatisfied with their life for reasons unclear to themself. They leave the monastery to become a traveling tea monk, which is a sort of counselor: you tell the monk your troubles, and the monk listens and fixes you a cup of tea. Dex's first day on the job is hilariously disastrous, but they get better and better, until they're very good at it... but still inexplicably dissatisfied. So they venture out into the wilderness, where they meet a robot, Mosscap - the first human-robot meeting in hundreds of years.

I had previously failed to get very far into The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this novella. It's cozy in a good way, with plenty of atmosphere, a world that isn't quite perfect but is definitely one I'd like to live in, and some interesting philosophical exploration. My favorite part was actually Dex's life as a tea monk before they meet Mosscap - it's very relatable if you've ever been a counselor or therapist, from the horrible first day to the pleasure of familiar clients later on. I would absolutely go to a tea monk.

I would have liked Mosscap to be a bit more flawed - it's very lovable and has a lot of interesting things to say, but is pretty much always right. Mosscap is surprised and delighted by humanity, but I'm not sure Dex ever shakes up its worldview in a way it finds true but uncomfortable, which Mosscap repeatedly does to Dex. Maybe in the second novella, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy.

And while I'm on things which are implausibly neat/perfect, this is a puzzling backstory:

1) Robots gain self-awareness and leave.

2) ????

3) ~~PROFIT!~~ Society goes from capitalist hellscape to environmentalist paradise.

Maybe we'll learn more about the ???? later.

But overall, I did quite like the novella. The parts where Dex is a tea monk, with the interactions with their clients and their life in their caravan, are very successfully cozy - an instant comfort read. And I liked the robot society and the religious orders, as well as a lot of the Mosscap/Dex relationship. I'll definitely read the sequel.

lebateleur

Games: Travel and vacation schedules meant no board game gathering this week.

Miscellaneous: A couple of longform articles:

A Ghost Estate and an Empty Grave

We Still Live in Fast Food Nation

Music: First house session of the new year; with only four of us there, a lot of opportunities to call sets, which consisted of a good mix of familiar and new tunes. One of the guys is, unfortunately, a noodler, playing into any and every silence, which makes it very hard to start sets. I will just have to be assertive about playing over him if he's there next week.

Roleplaying: Newest D&D Homebrew campaign had our "Beach Episode" holiday one shot this past weekend. As ever, it was an absolute blast. I sound like a broken record, but our DM is phenomenal: she gets such a good mix of role play, exploration, and combat into every session, and you'd never know she is--by her own admission--winging things half the time.

I played a kobold bard and loved it. As with my goblin rogue, I chose this critter because I wasn't convinced it would be fun to play, and as with my goblin rogue, she has become one of my favorite characters. Turns out, I really enjoy playing characters that don't quite get larger humanoids. And bards are just so versatile. It's been...five years since I last played this class, and man it was fun throwing all those spells and buffs into the mix and watching what happens. We'll be back to our main characters in the next session, but since this one shot took place in the same universe I hope we'll have a chance to revisit these ones as well.

Television: We finished Max Headroom S1. The final episode, Blanks, is my favorite of the season, and I'm always surprised by how long the show takes to introduce them compared to the movie. Having blanked myself from as much 21st century Big Tech as I can, I feel a special affinity with those guys. (And again, damn, this show was prescient: social media-elected leaders, the attention economy, doomscrolling, ransomware--it envisioned them all.) We'll probably get started on S2 tonight.

I also watched the first three episodes of Heated Rivalry. This is a very horny show. (Which, no complaints there. XD) But I had been anticipating something more along the lines of Our Flag Means Death, where the romantic relationships are one element of a larger general narrative, and not the primary focus of the show. (I was surprised and honestly a bit bummed that the hockey is just window dressing. I'd been expecting an ice hockey story with a romance subplot versus a romance story on an ice hockey stage set.) That said, the production values are good and the actors have excellent chemistry that they--blessedly--maintain even in the show's most explicit scenes...which unfortunately has not always been the case with other such offerings (I'm looking at you, Our Flag Means Death).

I don't feel particularly participatory about this show (yet?), but I am very much enjoying it and will probably wrap up the final three episodes this week.

Video Games: Finished my first game of the year, Botanicula, which is a perennial favorite. It's just such a visually beautiful game, with a great soundtrack and really clever puzzles. As ever, I have to space out my playthroughs so I don't just immediately remember how to solve everything the next time I play it. I'm trying to decide if I want to dive straight into Samorost 2 or opt for something a little more serious (e.g., Darklands or Pentiment).

これで以上です。

kaffy_r

Music Meme, Day 17

A song that reminds you of somebody:

When I first came to Chicago in 1981, I stayed with one of the friends I'd made when I attended Suncon, the 1977 world science fiction convention, and my very first convention. His name was Ed Sunden and he was overwhelming. He was awful and generous, outrageous and brilliant, manipulative and kind, and definitely sui generis. He loved music, and he loved introducing me to New Wave music that was definitely new to me - the Police and Elvis Costello among the groups he loved.

His way of introduction? He would tell me to sit down in the tiny living room of the basement apartment he shared with Joan, the woman who became his wife. Or rather, he would order me to sit down, and then he'd put on an LP, or power up a tape he'd recorded on his music system (primitive by today's standards, but incredibly impressive back in 1981.) Sometimes he'd play the same song twice, to make sure I understood the words.

All these years later, and 25 years after he died, it's Elvis Costello's songs that immediately bring Ed and that dim little apartment singing and shouting back into my mind.

I thought of sharing "Oliver's Army" with you, because it's one of the Costello songs that really hit me when I first heard it. Unfortunately, and despite the fact that Costello wrote the song as an anti-fascist tune, it uses at least two racist slurs that I'm uncomfortable listening to these days. He wrote it after being in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, and the Oliver he sang of was Oliver Cromwell, who invaded and conquered Ireland. British fascists have taken Cromwell as one of their own, so Costello's brutal parodying of fascism and how it sucks working class kids into a losing game in this song is close to perfection in terms of the written word. Still, the racial slurs, parodies though they are, made me nix this tune.

In its place, and most definitely one that still makes me think of Ed, is "Pump It Up." Enjoy, and if you want to know my previous answers, go to Day 17, and it will give you access to all the previous songs.

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: Elvis Costello, "Pump It Up"

watersword

I'm not dead; I've taken today & tomorrow off work and would not be surprised if I call in sick Thursday & Friday as well; I'm in less pain than I was, but I'm still pretty uncomfortable; mostly stopped coughing but my head is full of goo, which may honestly be worse. I felt marginally better yesterday, and thank goodness I took advantage of it to change my bedlinens and run the robovac, because today the prospect of taking the dirty linens down to the basement to wash them is making me quail. (ETA: 1/3 accomplished.) Naptime now.

luzula

Placeholder.

ao3_news_feed

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33966

AO3 Logo with the words AO3 Update

In 2020, we gave you some insight into our traffic numbers, focusing on the impact that global lockdowns had on our user base. Five years later, we have not only sustained that rise in users but also continued to grow steadily, so we thought we’d show you an update!

Comments in 2025

A line graph showing monthly comments on AO3 in 2020 and 2025 with the line for 2025 consistently one to two million higher than 2020.

Image 1: Line graph of monthly comments on AO3 in 2020 versus 2025. Both line graphs share small dips in February, June, and September; and peaks in July, August, and October; before sharply trending upward in December. 2020 sees an additional sharp increase in April, while 2025 shows a more typical slow rise throughout the year.

In our previous post, we observed a common pattern of slight dips in user activity in June and September. This pattern still holds true: Our users left 84,278 fewer comments in June than in May, before coming back en masse in July and August. We see a significant drop in September before cresting a suspiciously Kinktober-shaped peak in October. November sees the bustle die down one more time, before we reach record highs—crossing 5 million comments for the first time—by way of our typical end-of-year holiday increase in December.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Comments 2020/2025 (Google Sheets).

Daily page views

A line graph of daily page views from April 17th to December 31st 2025 generally trending upwards with many peaks and troughs.

Image 2: Line graph showing AO3’s daily page views (in millions) starting in mid-April and ending on December 31st. Smaller spikes show higher activity on weekends than weekdays. There is one big spike to 141 million on June 1st, and two big dips to 73.7 and 72 million respectively on July 3rd and September 29th. The trend line rises slowly but steadily, crossing 110 million daily page views in mid-October.

Site traffic tends to slowly increase throughout the year with a noticeable jump in December, and we then carry that forward into the new year. Our first anomaly happens around June 1st, with several days of incredibly high page views. After consulting with our Systems volunteers, we marked this off as likely being due to a large influx of bot traffic.

On July 3rd and 4th, we ran out of rows in the database table that stores bookmarks, so we had to move them to a larger table that can hold them all! This made it so you can once again add your own bookmarks to the 647 million we already had before then. The recovery after this outage is a little higher than normal, possibly due to an influx of users downloading works to tide themselves over any future outages.

On September 29th, we had to take some planned downtime to implement an update to collections—Collection owners can now use up to ten tags of any type to describe their collection, making it easier to find collections featuring the fandoms, relationships, tropes, and other topics you enjoy.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Daily page views 2025 (Google Sheets).

Site traffic throughout a typical week

A line graph showing daily page views in August 2025

Image 3: Line graph of daily page views. A subsection of the above graph, more clearly showing the ebb and flow of traffic on the archive throughout the calendar week. There are five clear peaks on every weekend with the apex on Sunday. Thursday and Friday are where traffic dips to its lowest.

If we zoom in a little, we can clearly see that weekends are most of our users’ favourite time to engage with fanworks. Some may wonder about the peaks seeming to run over into Monday—our systems run in UTC and much of our traffic comes from later timezones. More North and South Americans reading late at night on Saturday and Sunday equals peaks on Sunday and Monday!

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Daily page views August 2025 (Google Sheets).

New Year’s Eve by the minute

A line graph of server requests on New Year’s Eve across the globe

Image 4: Line graph of requests received by our servers between 9:00 UTC on December 31st 2025 and 9:00 UTC on January 1st 2026. Requests start to rise from ~550K at 12:00 UTC, peaking at nearly 800K at 17:30 UTC before slowly decreasing back down to ~650K. Sharp, sudden drops are noticeable at 16:00 UTC, 23:00 UTC, and 5:00 UTC, with smaller drops at 0:00 UTC and 6:00 UTC.

The delayed effect described in the previous section is especially noticeable on New Year’s Eve. We receive sudden, hourly drops in requests to our servers as users in different timezones pause their reading to ring in the new year. At 16:00 UTC, 47 thousand users in UTC+8 promptly went offline before coming back in force half an hour later, giving us our first noticeable drop. The yearline swept across the globe with minor dips on each hour, before UTC+1 dropped us by a whole 50 thousand requests and UTC followed with just 43 thousand requests. By far the most severe dip occurs when UTC-5 entered 2026, with over 80 thousand fewer requests—compared to UTC-8, which only dropped us by 30 thousand requests.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: New Year’s Eve by the minute (Google Sheets).

Site traffic over the years

A bar chart showing the past 13 years of weekly traffic on AO3

Image 5: Bar chart showing weekly traffic during the last week of November on AO3 from 2012 to 2025. Large jumps are noticeable between 2019 and 2020, 2022 and 2023, and 2024 and 2025.

To round things off, let’s have a look back through time!

We had a big jump in users this year—November 2025 saw over 146.6 million weekly page views more than the previous November. At first glance this is significantly higher than the 129 million increase we experienced from 2019 to 2020, but this is only 22% growth over the previous year as opposed to 52% because our baseline looks completely different.

We are excited to see where 2026 takes us, and it looks like we're already starting off strong! In the first week of the year we amassed a record high of 879 million page views, a significant jump up from 816 million the week before and averaging out to ~125 million page views a day. We look forward to breaking more records with you.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Weekly Traffic 2012-2025 (Google Sheets).

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

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33966

marthawells

I updated my sticky post with: PSA: if you get an email out of the blue that is supposedly from me, offering to help you with marketing or other publisher services, or asking for money, it is not me, it is a scammer. Also, if you see me on Facebook or Threads or XTwitter, that's not me either.

This is a very common scam now, one of the many scams aimed at aspiring and new writers.

***

I'm still sick, ugh

***

Nice article on Queen Demon on the Daily KOS:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/1/5/2361356/-The-Language-of-the-Night-Martha-Wells-takes-on-colonization

One of Wells’ most compelling gifts as a writer is the way she interrogates trauma, and trauma is very much in evidence in her recent works, especially in both Murderbot and The Rising World. Where the Murderbot stories form an enslavement narrative as personal journey and healing, the Rising World series applies a wider cultural lens to trauma and loss.

Kai has seen his world ripped apart twice: the way to the underneath, the world of his birth, is shut off; the world of his above existence, the world of the Saredi, is also gone, both of them murdered by the Hierarchs. (You could argue that the third traumatizing loss-of-world is losing Bashasa, but that lies in the gap between past and present narratives.) In the past narrative, a vanquished Kai himself is imprisoned in the Summer Halls until Bashasa frees him and he joins the ad hoc rebellion.

otw_news_feed

Posted by choux

https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-statistics-2025-update/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=274368