It's deeply annoying. The writer clearly is making some assumptions there, and I do not like that assumption.
( Read more... )
In other news, my younger brother's wife G. recently received some news she didn't want widely circulated, but she told her brother, who told his wife, who told her mother, who told my brother. He was already aware of the news, what with being married to G., and it still got back to him. It's good news that she wanted private, which has me abjectly baffled she told anyone who'd go around sharing it. For contrast, after my mother found out she then told me G. had received some news and I could ask her about it if I wanted, which at least acknowledges a boundary.
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ER | Carter, Weaver Gen | ~1200 words | Episode tag for 7.05. Thanks to
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheafrotherdon for audiencing.(Also on AO3)
( Carter, Kerry, and the aftermath of the day. )
PRAISE
As always, you can interpret the prompt literally or figuratively, in whatever way works for you.
Each work created for this challenge should be posted as a new entry to the comm. Posting starts now and continues up until the challenge ends at 4pm Pacific Time on Monday, July 20th. No sign-up required.
Mods will tag your work for fandom. When you've posted entries to three consecutive challenges, you will earn a name tag, and we'll go back and tag all your previous entries with your name, as well.
All kinds of fanworks in all fandoms are welcome. Please have a look at our guidelines before you play. If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to contact a mod. And if you have any suggestions for future challenges, you can leave them in the comments of this post.
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ffw_social post, which will go up in the next couple of days. If you haven't joined the ffw_social comm, it's never too late to come and check it out. (Posts are locked, which means you have to join to see them.)due South: Fanfiction: A Little Rest, by
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infinitum_noctemThe Pitt: Fanfic: keep on whispering in my ear, by
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badly_knittedno fandom : icons : they've got ears, by
highlander_iiViola come il mare: Fanfic: Winter Cold, by
veronyxk84Domundi (Thai BL) Actor RPF: Fanfic: uneven pieces (clumsy words), by
bluedreamingTorchwood: Fanfic: Sounding board, by
m_findlowDispatch: Fanfic: Crying over Birds, by
iserlohnaOriginal: Haiku: late night with cats, by
teaotterBartimaeus & Hogwarts Legacy: Fanfic: Eavesdropping, by
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New challenge coming right up!
How are you doing?
I am okay
7 (70.0%)
I am not okay, but don't need help right now
3 (30.0%)
I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)
How many other humans are you living with?
I am living single
4 (40.0%)
One other person
3 (30.0%)
More than one other person
3 (30.0%)
Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
Fandom: Bartimaeus & Hogwarts Legacy
Rating: G
Length: 666 words
Content notes:
Author notes: Last minute upload if I can make it!!
Summary: Matilda Weasley overhears yet another suspicious conversation between two of her brightest students.
( Eavesdropping )
Today in Social Anxiety: I approached a human and asked about filming myself in the gym, got the go ahead, proceeded to do so for deadlifts, spotted three things wrong myself, shared a video with some folk for a form check, and got some useful pointers and MANY contradictory opinions on what, exactly, my butt should be doing.
There were diagrams.
Also today I had the most comfortable experience lugging watering cans around of my life (not hanging off joints!!! it's a thing you can do when you have muscle!!! it turns out!!!), several plants are not dead, I didn't eat any more jostaberries but I really need to, and we had A Fantastic Time taking all the various sections of The Puzzle that we'd done and sliding them around the coffee table sadly. This was complicated by the fact that the coffee table is juuust wide enough for the thing to fit, with space at one end for the box to sit neatly once you're finished. Eventually we resorted to The Giant Puzzle-Doing Cardboard! There was Much Swearing, it is now sat happily on the table and I am grinning at it every time I look over, and yesterday she released another in the series.
Also: strawberries. That is all.
The easiest way to deal with these type of people is to disable guest comments completely."
2) Platforms sought no age proof for any of 50 test accounts declaring age 16, researchers said. "Some dummy accounts received advertisements for youth banking products, an indication the platform registered the person's age range, Hammond said. One account which signed up to Elon Musk's X claiming to be 16 was served pornographic content, he added. None of the platforms let users sign up if they declared they were under 16. But just one, Australia-based live-streaming platform Kick, refused to let users create an account without proof of age."
3) The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. "From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice."
What I found most fascinating was this study's results: ( Read more... )
4) And it's not just text that video is displacing: End of an Era: Longtime Podcast Hosts Go Quiet as Video Dominates "Over the past year, various indicators of this transition have been piling up. Marc Maron ended his program after 16 years. Al Franken, an audio evangelist going back to the days of Air America in 2004, released his final episode last week, too. And many of the remaining audio-centric stars are attempting video in some fashion. (Witness Ira Glass, who is now recording promotional clips for This American Life.)"
5) France versus Morocco. ( Read more... )
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 2
Want to leave a Kudos?
* It came as a surprise to me, anyway— I'd forgotten about/haven't read her dystopian speculative fiction novel Future Home of the Living God.
( More details under the cut. )
Vivian Mansour (illus. Emmanuel Valtierra, trans. Carlos Rodriguez Cortez), Pilgrim Codex (2025)
Heroic account of a Mexican family who, driven from their homes by violence, cross the US-Mexico border to try to find a safer home. Re-imagined through the lens of Mesoamerican codices, the family's peril, sacrifices, and bravery are told with sympathy and pride. Alas, not everyone in the family makes it alive to the US, and some of the scenes are genuinely harrowing. Nevertheless, I'd still call this age-appropriate: given that some children have themselves survived similar events (or have classmates or playmates who did), this could be a useful text for helping children discuss and make sense of their world.
Duncan Tonatiuh, A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexihcah Word Painters (2022)
Story of young tlahcuiloqueh (scribes) in training, learning to paint amoxtin (books, aka codices). Illustrations draw heavily on Mesoamerican glyphs, and shows several example of completed codex-pages in progress. The more one knows about how to read Mesoamerican codices, the richer this book becomes. Glossary of Nahuatl in the back (used liberally in the text), but unfortunately does not include a guide to Mesoamerican glyphs, dating systems, or other conventions of the Mixteca writing system. I highly recommend pairing this with Gordon Whittaker's Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs (not a children's picture book) or similar, to get insight into everything Tonatiuh is doing here.
Duncan Tonatiuh, The Princess and the Warrior (2016)
Tonatiuh's version of the Mixteca origin story of the volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, which are visible from Tenochtitlan / Mexico City. As above, the illustrations are inspired by Mesoamerican codices, and the text is rich with Nahuatl vocabulary. As ever, I am caught by random side-characters: what became of the messenger who was bribed to betray Popoca? He lucked out that Popoca was too caught up in Itza's illness to hunt him down for revenge...
Duncan Tonatiuh, Feathered Serpent and the Five Suns (2020)
Another Mixteca origin story, this one for humanity itself. We read in bookgroup one of the sources Tonatiuh draws upon, but I didn't recognize the middle section of Tonatiuh's narrative--and the afterword suggests that the novel-to-me section was Tonatiuh's own creation, imaging that Quetzalcoatl faced the same challenges on the path to the underworld that the dead do.
Duncan Tonatiuh, Diego Rivera: His World and Ours (2011)
Introduction to the life and works of Diego Rivera, who was one of the principal artists of the Mexican government's muralism campaign of the 1920s and 30s. The art is a Mixtecan riff on Rivera's style, and alternates between Rivera's work, reimagined in Tonatiuh's style, and speculation about what archetypically Mexican subjects he might have immortalized had he been working today.
There may or may not be further posts of Hum-110-adjacent materials dribbling in as we go: there are a number of books I checked out from the library as potentially interesting, but which I didn't get to while we were reading related units. We'll see how it goes!
On occasion, the OTW shares posts from a guest, providing an outside perspective on the OTW or specific aspects of fandom. These posts express each individual’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy.
Atticus Yus (she/her) is a postgraduate student at Cambridge Digital Humanities, affiliated with Newnham College. A fanfiction writer herself, she is currently most active in the Identity V and Hannibal fandoms and enjoys baking banana bread in her free time. Today, Atticus talks about her research regarding fan communities with a particular focus on tagging systems and social networks.
How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?
I owe my big sister everything for introducing me to fandom! Growing up, I remember her and her friends sitting in our family’s living room talking for hours about YuYu Hakusho and My Chemical Romance. She’s got a creative soul, writing her own fanfictions and serving as a beta reader for her friends too. She had fan art all over her childhood bedroom, which I thought was the coolest thing ever.
By the time I reached an age where I was discovering my own favourite media (back then, it was One Direction and The Hunger Games), she was quick to introduce me to fannish lingo, including “fanfiction” and “fan art.” Learning these terms eventually led me to websites like DeviantArt, QuoteV, and AO3. After enjoying other people’s fanwork, I decided to start creating my own stories.
Your research brings together fanfiction, consent, and reading practices. What first led you to think about reading fanfiction through the lens of consent?
I discovered fanfiction at the same age that I was first encountering sexuality. I consider fanfiction to have been my first exposure to content that challenged my understanding of consent as it was taught in school, where I was taught that “no means no,” though, never learned what happened when these rules were not followed. Through fanfiction, I encountered tags such as “dubious consent”, “consensual non-consent”, and “consensual but not safe or sane”. I had been taught such a clear framework of understanding consent that it felt intimidating to encounter content that seemed to challenge it. Later in adulthood, I became aware of fan conflict, such as pro-shipper and anti-shipper, which made it clear to me that fans are invested in conversations on ethics and consent. However, these debates have deep social roots in matters including shame, censorship, and American purity culture (Samantha Aburime’s 2022 article on this exact topic is useful here).
Witnessing pro-shipper and anti-shipper conflict online taught me there is much at stake regarding sexual content in fan spaces, and this led me to consider how consent is signalled in the first place. As an AO3 reader, I pay attention to tags before deciding whether to engage with a work. A tag such as “dubious consent” is not simply a descriptive label, but also a warning, invitation, or signal of how the author interprets consent in their content. I started to wonder whether consent tags operate on multiple levels: not only between fictional characters, but also between authors and readers.
Fanfiction spaces often rely on detailed tagging and content/authors notes. How do these systems shape a reader’s ability to give or withhold consent?
I think of the tagging system, summary, and author’s notes as paratexts: drawing on Gerard Genette, paratexts function as a threshold priming the reader’s interpretation before they have entered the text. In this sense, consent on AO3 is not located solely within the narrative but is negotiated before reading begins. However, paratexts are not universally consistent in usage. On AO3, authors assign tags to their own work, can choose to not provide archive warning, and may create tags too. Through my research, I identified what appears to be an informal gradient of consent, ranging from rape/non-con to enthusiastic consent. Yet I was unable to identify clear boundaries between categories such as “mildly dubious consent” and “extremely dubious consent.”
This ambiguity is not surprising. Understandings of consent are shaped by personal experience and cultural context rather than universal definitions. Thus, an author’s subjective interpretation may not align with a reader’s. Consequently, readers may encounter content they did not agree to. Tagging systems facilitate informed decision-making but cannot guarantee it; they rely on trust that authors have represented their work in ways readers will find meaningful and accurate.
Related to the praxis of consent around AO3’s usage, what are your thoughts on fanfiction (and AO3 in particular) becoming more well known with the mass media/audience? Have you noticed any changes within fandom spaces related to an increase in interest from people who enter fandom spaces without prior experience with fandom culture?
Although fanfiction is becoming more mainstream, I think it is often misunderstood as a textual object rather than a practice. I am thinking about a 2025 TikTok trend where users generate AI ‘fanfiction’ about themselves and their friends. I thought calling the generated text ‘fanfiction’ wasn’t quite right, because these works were not really fan produced. Recently, I was reading through the comments under OTW’s 2023 post “AI and Data Scraping on the Archive”, where it announced that AI generated content is not prohibited under its Terms of Service. I thought the comments caught onto a legitimate concern that resonates with my own research: what happens to fanfiction when we remove the fan?
I have also noticed more fanfiction being shared through screenshots on platforms like Instagram and X. In these cases, work is often circulated outside AO3 without author consent or the surrounding paratexts that shape reading practices. My assumption is that many writers (like myself) expect AO3 to function as a relatively contained space governed by its own norms of tagging and consent, and taking these works out of context disrupts fandom etiquette. I don’t have answers, but I ask myself questions like, how might new forms of automated or decontextualised “fanfiction” reshape consent practices altogether?
How did you hear about the OTW and what do you see its role as?
I first encountered the OTW through AO3. Recently, my research has depended heavily on Transformative Works and Cultures and Fanlore. Across these interactions, I understand the OTW’s role primarily through advocacy; it works to establish fandom culture as legitimate, and as deserving of protection and scholarly attention. Coming from English departments, this feels particularly personal to me, as fan studies was consistently dismissed as not properly literary by peers and faculty members alike.
But I also see the OTW as performing care work within fandom. AO3 emerged in response to the need for a stable, non-commercial space for fans to share their creative works without censorship and monetization by platform owners, as outlined in Astolat’s post, “An Archive of One’s Own.” I am intrigued by the post’s connection to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” addressed to students at women colleges and touching on the importance of giving women the resources and private space to achieve creative freedom. Like Woolf’s essay, the OTW addressed an infrastructural gap that left fan communities online vulnerable and without a space of their own. Now of course, it isn’t perfect; as a woman of colour, I cannot disregard racism in fandom communities and AO3’s infrastructural failure to address this (refer to Alexis Lothian and Mel Stanfill’s 2021 article). But maintaining fandom infrastructure by providing an archive, preserving at-risk works, and keeping a wiki of community knowledge is essential to continuously improving the conditions of fan culture over time.
What fandom things have inspired you the most?
Squee! I love that so many fans have reclaimed fangirling. Specifically, the idea of passionately loving—or even being obsessed with—a piece of media, but not having to explain why. When I made the decision to pursue fandom during my graduate studies, I was always asked, why? Constantly explaining my decision felt redundant and even patronising. So, I am inspired by all the fangirls who squee unapologetically, proudly and loudly.
We encourage suggestions from fans for future guest posts, so contact us if you have someone in mind! If you enjoyed this post and would like to read more like it, we encourage you to look back at earlier guest posts.
Content notes: none
Challenge: Ear
Summary: Why I can never pee in peace, lol.
( Read more... )
Mr Tuppert had a very stressful time of it yesterday, locked in the bathroom for a couple of hours while the movers took everything out, then abandoned in an empty apartment for several hours, and finally carted out to Mya's place where I'm crashing for a few days. He seems to be doing alright: not the happiest, but he's at least out from under the bed.
I am entirely out of Corvaric. The POD (storage container) I'd arranged for yesterday was too small to fit my stuff, so I've got a bigger one and will get it loaded up today.
Yesterday morning, literally the last shower I took in the apartment triggered a leak in the overflow drain. Per the plumber who came out this morning, there's a gap at the top of the overflow cover, it catches shower water, and that drips through into the unit below. The overflow drains not working is a known problem with this building, and I was really hoping to be able to pass the buck. Oh well. I will be out money, but not the time/hassle of dealing with the plumber.
Still need to find someone to deal with my mattress set (nine years old, not worth moving) and one or two other things. Also need to repack to confirm that everything I'm taking will fit in two suitcases, and that it's enough for several weeks while my stuff ships.
I have an apartment in Minneapolis. I'm flying out Monday with Mr Tuppert. The plan had been to crash with Steph for a couple of days but due to [REDACTED] that's almost certainly nonworkable, so I'll need to find a hotel that accepts pets. Tuesday I will acquire a bed, and Wednesday I get the keys to my apartment. For those playing along at home it's in Longfellow, near the Lake Street station. Close to Steph, close to groceries, close to transit. Should be alright.
I am in a weird limbo state at the moment. There is too much Going On for me to process any kind of emotional response to anything. Ask me again in a week.
Moving, of course, remains The Worst.
Fandom: Dispatch
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~670
Content notes: people talking after sex and naked in bed
Author notes: ignores the explanation given ins the comic series
Summary: Courtney wants to know why Robert has the clipped ear
( Crying over Birds )
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (trans. Margaret Sayers Peden), Poems, Protest, and a Dream, (late seventeenth century / 1997)
This was a fascinating collection of works. Sor Juana was both a courtier and a nun (at different times), and this collection samples both eras: at the one end we have secular diss poems and show-off pieces composed for competitions, while the other end includes a virtuoso defense of scholarship by female clerics and education for women. (The defense is the titular "Protest", which is a politically complex work in which Sor Juana responds to a rebuke by a church official who himself took on a female pseudonym for the purpose of chastising Sor Juana. Sor Juana then proceeded to play a "tee-hee, we're all just girls here" card while absolutely eviscerating the man -- while keeping up her own pretense of subjecting herself to church authority.) There's also a complex interplay between new world and old world symbols and signifiers in these works, which reflected tensions over whether New Spain or the Iberian Peninsula was the true center of the empire. Also, shoutout to the lesbian poem: we were very pleased to see it.
( III: One of Five Burlesque Sonnets )
Spanish and English on facing pages, for the convenience of the multilingual.
H.N. Branch (trans), The Mexican Constitution of 1917 compared with the Mexican Constitution of 1857
We leapt from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth and twentieth century, which was an unbelievable degree of whiplash: I had soooooooo many Britannica tabs open, trying to figure out what was going on with the century-plus of revolutions, counter-revolutions, deposings, assassinations, the Mexican-American war, and oh yes, the brief installation of an emperor again (by France, when the US was too busy with its own Civil War to meddle).
Discussion this month was mostly trying to get a grasp on the history and the problem of cultivating a stable government. But we also had a lot of admiration for the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which was extremely forward thinking in terms of labor rights, up to and including things like worker safety, union protections, and paid pregnancy leaves. (The seething envy in the room could be cut with a knife!) Surprisingly to us, the 1917 Constitution was also strongly anti-Catholic, seizing Church property and mandating secular (and universal!) education. (The weakening of the Church's power led to a few more years of revolution, of course, as pro-Catholic forces objected to that part of the Constitution.)
Mexican Murals: Diego, Orozco, and Sisquieros (1920s-30s) (online gallery)
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Xavier Guerrero, "Manifesto of the Syndication of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors," (1923-1924)
Cool art! Also, interesting things to discuss re auteur's vision vs. government propaganda; the radically ethno-nationalistic and peasant-centric vision of Mexico (vs. the context of European-trained artists who had been working in the U.S. for a living, and all painted on urban buildings, not so easily accessible to the rural peasantry); and murals as a public form of art (in contrast to easel painting).
Los Olvidados | The Forgotten Ones | The Young and the Damned (1950, dir. Luis Buñuel)
Cesare Zavattini, "Some ideas on the Cinema" (1953)
Realist film about life in the economic/criminal underclass of Mexico City. The original cut of the film depicts the inescapability of the circle of violence, but that ending played badly to test audiences, so a second, "happy" ending was filmed, in which the child protagonist slays his abuser (instead of being slayed by him), and returns to reform school. (Yay?)
( discussion )
All that said, I kinda enjoyed... maybe not watching the film, but having watched it? There was a lot of toothy chewy shit going on in and around the film, and it was satisfying to discuss, at a number of different levels.
Available on youtube with English subtitles, if you're interested.
José Emilio Pacheco (trans. Katharine Silver), Battles in the Desert (1980)
Novella of a man's remembrances of a specific year of his childhood, when he fell in love with his best friend's mother, and her ultimate erasure from (apparently) all memory and record but his own.
( A LOT going on )
We discussed this one to death and came to no agreement on it, but I can say it was one of the most enthusiastically discussed works of the unit.
Elena Poniatowska (trans. Helen R. Lane), Massacre in Mexico (1971 / trans. 1975)
( content warning for state violence, including massacre, imprisonment, and torture )
It's a powerhouse of the book, although most in my book group did not read it, or only read sections of it, because of the violence it relates. I found that frustrating, for in addition to discussion of the content, there's also ample opportunity to discuss the format of the book: how does one take reams of interviews and publicize their content, especially before one could dump a massive file of sources on the internet? How does one handle the vagaries of eyewitness accounts, the multiplicity of viewpoints, the uncertainty of memory, and conflicting testimonies? How does one do all this under a hostile government, that would much rather see your book suppressed than published? I'm a little reluctant to call this book my favorite of the course, given how challenging its content was, and yet it was definitely the one I found most rewarding, both to read and to discuss. Excellent choice for capstone of the Mexico City unit!
