2025 Disneyland Trip #75 (12/1/25)
Dec. 1st, 2025 10:07 pm( Read more... )
Daily Happiness
Dec. 1st, 2025 09:32 pm2. Had a nice dinner trip to Disneyland after work. The park didn't feel that crowded, and it was nice to see all the Christmas lights.
3. Carla called the dealership and got an appointment to take the car in on Friday morning, so hopefully they will be able to get the AC fixed quickly. Temps have gone back down again but I definitely miss not having it!
4. The other car is parked all the way up the driveway while Carla is out town so I don't have to move it to get the trash cans out to the front for pickup, and it makes a nice spot for Tuxie to hide under.

Five Things AuroraT Said
Dec. 1st, 2025 02:35 pmEvery month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with AuroraT, who volunteers as an administrative volunteer for Open Doors.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
I’m an administrative volunteer with the Open Doors Committee, which helps import at-risk digital archives to AO3 in order to preserve fanworks that might otherwise be lost. I’m responsible for project management, walking an archive and its archivist through our lengthy import process. We put a lot of effort into keeping track of the metadata for each work and respecting creators’ privacy, so a lot of what I do involves managing spreadsheets and communicating with the archivist, other committees in the OTW, and other teams in the Open Doors Committee. I also write documentation for the committee, updating or writing down our procedures and information about the archives I’m managing.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
There’s a lot of variety in what an import project requires, so my weeks tend to vary a lot. Sometimes, I’ll spend one of our weekly meetings working on a single task, such as preparing the documents we need to initiate a new import or cleaning up a spreadsheet. Other times, I’ll jump around from task to task: emailing a different committee, discussing a procedure change with other admin volunteers, responding to feedback on documentation I wrote, creating the AO3 collection where we’ll add the works we imported, answering a ticket from a creator wanting to claim works we previously imported, and so on.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I’m a huge supporter of the OTW’s mission to preserve fanworks and fight censorship, and I had been watching calls for volunteers for positions I was qualified for in order to contribute to those efforts. I’d recently gotten much more into fanwork preservation when I began working at a library with a zine collection, where I was managing cataloguing and shelving a backlog of donated zines. Project management and working with spreadsheets is a lot of fun! When I saw the application for the administrative volunteer position, it seemed in line with my interests and skills, so I applied.
(Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to me when I applied, the library I was working at is one of Open Doors’ partner institutions for our Fan Culture Preservation Project, which helps connect donors with physical fanworks to libraries and archives with zine collections. Some of the donations I was processing were facilitated with the help of Open Doors!)
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
It’s absolutely task management. Our process for importing an archive is over a hundred steps long and some of those require a lot of prep work and communication between people. And that’s not even including documentation or other administrative work! Thankfully, through the miracle of digital checklists and automatic reminders, as well as the detailed procedure instructions Open Doors has written over the years, it’s not too difficult to keep on top of everything. Plus, I have my lovely fellow committee members to help out when I need it :)
What fannish things do you like to do?
I read a lot of fanfiction these days, especially longfics—the one I’m currently reading is over 430k words long and still being published. I also really like to leave long comments on the fics I read. It’s a lot of fun to get that sweet, sweet AO3 email that the author responded to me! Recently, I started writing fanfiction for the first time in several years. Joining a new fandom really helped get those creative juices flowing.
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you’d like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
Daily Happiness
Nov. 30th, 2025 05:10 pm
I was planning on just getting one donut and a drink, but couldn't resist a second one. This is a banana bread latte, Apple Pan apple pie donut, and huckleberry donut. I ate the apple one there and brought the huckleberry one home for tomorrow, but I did have a taste of it already because they had samples out. Both were super tasty. The latte was just okay. I opted for no walnut topping but it still had a stronger walnut flavor than I would prefer.
2. I am bummed to go back to work tomorrow, but I did have a very nice long weekend!
3. Ollie hopped up on this shelf before I noticed! D: Thankfully I was able to extract him before he did any damage (though of course I had to take several photos first lol).

November Group Read Check-In Final
Nov. 30th, 2025 07:04 am(and a reminder that
Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!
Nov. 30th, 2025 02:42 amThe standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.
( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )
Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.
On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.
Allbingo and Crowdfunding
Nov. 29th, 2025 11:54 pmFurther details below ...
( Read more... )
Purrcy; Turkey Day; Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison
Nov. 30th, 2025 12:00 amI was able to let go completely and have E&P do almost everything for T-day because of a combo of pain & exhaustion from pain. We ate at 5, so early in the day there was dining room table clearing, and giving bills to me in my study to look at and pay. And I remember asking Dirk to bring me the shoulder-shaped ice pack, and later him coming in to ask me a question and all I could was just ... stare at him, because even as the pain went down the exhaustion from it surged forward and there was nothing left.
So Purrcy & I had to lie in bed a lot of the time. I couldn't really fall asleep, but I continued binge-reading.
This week's binge-read was Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths 4-book series, now re-issued under her Katherine Addison pen name, the better to pull in fans of The Goblin Emperor and the other books in The Chronicles of Osreth. I found them a quick read and enjoyable enough, though partly because I could see how many elements there are in these early works that she re-worked for the Osreth books, and which elements she decided meh, don't have to do that again.
Reused elements: stories within the story; labyrinths; lower-class people having important POVs; palaces being full of servants who know stuff & who you'd better get to know; theatrical costumes are a great way for a woman to get upper-class clothing even if she's not upper class; aristocrats are mostly assholes.
Element she realized she didn't need to reuse: POV character who's an asshole. OMG Felix is *such* a yaoi character, I now see why when Melusine came out & I was hearing about it 2nd hand your opinions were *so* divergent. Because on the one hand, he's just the Maximum Poor Little Mew Mew ... on the other hand, when "sane" he's a total jerk and bully toward Mildmay & anyone else in range of his tongue.
So the series as a whole feels like her working out, can I develop Felix's backstory enough to show how he was shaped into a charismatic abuser, and then can I believably show him becoming a better person? And I dunno if I'll read the series again, because it just is too many chapters from Felix's POV. I 1000x prefer Maia and Thara, both of whom absolutely abhor picking fights, *shudder*.
Daily Happiness
Nov. 29th, 2025 08:59 pm2. I finished another puzzle today. This was a 750 piece one but went pretty quickly as it had a lot of pattern and color differentiation.

3. Carla bought some gingerbread oatmilk recently and I had some tonight in a mug of cocoa and it goes so well together!
4. Found a hidden Molly in the curtain.

(no subject)
Nov. 29th, 2025 07:24 pmFinally committed to buying myself some solid gold flatback earrings that I can keep in, and got the Maison Miru pavé lightning bar pair, which are almost identical to the Mateo bypass studs, except not diamonds, and about 20% of the price. (Christ, when I bookmarked those earrings, they were almost a hundred dollars cheaper.) I have managed to get them into my ears all by myself (look, I didn't get my ears pierced until I was 30, and push pin flat backs are even harder), and I am pleased to report that they are delicate and sparkly and I look forward to wearing them for the foreseeable future.
It's a shame that Saturday is my long cardio session at the gym, because damn does my hair look great on Sundays, when it is clean but the curl has fallen out juuuuust enough that the ringlets don't look fake. (My natural curl texture in the front is, genuinely, Shirley Temple curls. It is absurd.)
I have made cranberry-apricot cake and poppyseed cake and am restraining myself from making a miso-maple cake. The cod with artichokes and saffron broth did defeat the bag of artichokes that had been in the freezer since the dawn of time, but I actually think the broth isn't great — oddly bitter? — and won't be making it again. (I have leftovers and will eat them, but I won't be happy about it. Thank goodness I didn't waste the second cod fillet on this.) The pesto + white beans, on the other hand, were delicious and will become a new staple.
Sir Tom Stoppard's death is extremely upsetting and I am watching "Shakespeare in Love," "Enigma," and "Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead" and reading Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia about it. And re-reading the cricket bat speech from The Real Thing.