Book recommendations needed
Dec. 26th, 2025 12:50 pm1) Something about different legal systems and the philosophies that go with them. How they shape how people think about what the law is even for, and so forth. Would prefer to focus on modern systems, but historical examples are fine if they help illuminate the present. (E.g. I have come across mentions a few times that things work in such and such a way in France or its former colonies because they were shaped by the Napoleonic code.)
2) How the governments of really huge cities/metropoles work.
Blogs or newsletters are okay too. But no podcasts or YouTube series unless they're scripted, please.
put the biscuit in the basket
Dec. 26th, 2025 03:17 pmHalf my tumblr dashboard became obsessed with the new gay hockey show Heated Rivalry so I was like 'okay, I will try it' and yeah, it gave me feelings. I am, however, like the 1% of fandom that cares way more about Scott and Kip than Shane and Ilya. I've watched episodes 3 and 5 multiple times. After episode 3 I also decided I was going to read the Scott/Kip book so:
Game Changers by Rachel Reid. This reads like what I imagine hockey RPF fic to be like. Book Kip is annoying to me but I love show Kip. Overall I think the show hugely elevated the source material.
I will now begin my annual Christmas to New Year's vegetating phase :)
Check-In Post - Dec 26th 2025
Dec. 26th, 2025 08:13 pmHello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: What are your crafting goals for 2026?
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
I now declare this Check-In OPEN!
For Sale: Nintendo Switch games
Dec. 26th, 2025 02:58 pmPokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! (example on Amazon)
Spyro Reignited Trilogy (example on Amazon)
TemTem (example on Amazon)
If you're not interested but know someone who might be, please point them my way.
For payment, I have CashApp ($Settiai), PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle (nancy.lynn.foster@gmail.com).
The Friday Five for 26 December 2025
Dec. 26th, 2025 02:37 pm2. What foods would you be sure you got to eat?
3. What landmarks would you be sure you got to see?
4. What airline would you use?
5. Would your knowledge of other languages influence where you went? (i.e., would you be more likely to go to France if you spoke French?)
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
Dec 26 only -- Free romance books
Dec. 26th, 2025 12:30 pmLinks to all platforms / booksellers.
https://www.romancebookworms.com/
As always, feel free to share.
Update on Our 2020 Commitment from the OTW Board, Chairs & Leads
Dec. 26th, 2025 05:38 pm
In 2020, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) made a commitment to our users, members, and volunteers that we would work towards making our organization and our projects more welcoming and inclusive to fans of color, and preventing and combating racist harassment on our platforms.
We provided an update on this work in 2023, acknowledging that progress had not been as fast as we had hoped, sharing details of the changes that had been made by that point, and laying out the road ahead.
Today we are delighted to share that we have fulfilled the last of the promises we made to you back in 2020. While we celebrate the hard work and dedication to improvement that has taken us to this point, we also regret that it has taken us five years to get here. We are sincerely grateful for all the support we've received from our users, members, and volunteers to complete this work, and we apologize that it has taken this long to do so.
This post lays out both the progress we've made and the specific ways our 2020 promises have been fulfilled, as well as what is coming next and how we will ensure that our work doesn't stop here.
What We've Done
Since our update in 2023, we have completed the following goals to help protect our users and volunteers against harassment:
- Reviewed and updated the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS) and TOS FAQ. You can read more about this update in the news post announcing the TOS review as well as the accompanying review guide. For some key highlights, we:
- Simplified the language and removed redundancies throughout the TOS in order to improve readability for all users, including those who may have English as an Additional Language (EAL);
- Generalized the Abuse Policy to provide the AO3 Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) with greater flexibility to determine how to address harassment and other TOS violations; and
- Reviewed the existing mandatory Archive warnings and considered new ones.
- Improved admin tools, particularly for the Policy & Abuse committee so that they can more easily handle Abuse reports.
- Implemented improvements to AO3 to help curate your Archive experience, including:
- Expanded blocking features to cover more situations, including preventing unsolicited gifts from blocked users and preventing kudos from users you've blocked.
- Further limiting how guest users can interact with you, such as stripping embedded images in guest comments and adding a preference to prevent guests from replying to your comments on other users' works and on news posts.
- Restarted the creation of "No Fandom" canonical additional tags to allow users to more easily filter in and filter out for concepts as they want. Read more about new canonicals in the Tag Wrangling news posts.
- Implemented collection tags and improved collection filters.
- The Diversity Consultant Research Officer completed their internal review, engaged with contractors, and made a culture audit firm recommendation to the OTW Board in 2023.
- Following that recommendation, the OTW contracted with an audit firm and underwent a months-long organizational culture audit that included interviews with volunteers at every level of the organization and in every committee.
- The Board, working with the firm and OTW volunteers from several committees, created an Organizational Culture Roadmap of items that need to be addressed and changed to promote a healthier and safer OTW for all our volunteers.
- To ensure the completion of these goals, we established the OTW Culture Roadmap Workgroup. This is an independent body from the Board so that this work is unaffected by Board turnover. This work remains ongoing and will continue long beyond this update.
- Made multiple changes to the procedures of public Board meetings and Board communications generally, to improve transparency regarding Board work and OTW progress. This includes:
- Implemented a new moderation system for public Board meetings, as of the November 2023 public meeting, allowing the Board to address questions raised during public meetings; since the July 2024 public meeting, started addressing questions submitted asynchronously from people who can’t attend the meeting live.
- Implemented professional customer relationship management tools for Board work and Board email/communication.
- Released bi-weekly internal updates regarding Board and BAT work to OTW volunteers.
- Created two new committees and two new subcommittees to better support the completion of these goals and our long-term sustainability as an organization:
- Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution: subcommittee responsible for addressing volunteer complaints and conflicts independent from involved committees.
- News Post Moderation: subcommittee responsible for moderating comments on AO3 and OTW news posts, ensuring they abide by the OTW News Post Moderation Policy.
- Board Assistants Team: committee assisting the OTW Board of Directors with administrative tasks and project management.
- User Response Translation: committee responsible for addressing PAC and Support’s translation needs in specific high-need languages.
- Completed and published a Whistleblower Protection Policy to outline and enshrine the protections for people who make reports about misconduct in the OTW.
What We're Doing
We know that creating a safer environment for our users and volunteers is an ongoing responsibility, and we remain deeply committed to addressing harassment with both urgency and care. While the steps outlined in our 2020 statement marked an important beginning, we recognise that true progress requires continuous effort beyond fulfilling those initial commitments. We are dedicated to building on that foundation with transparency, accountability, and compassion.
We are committed to and already continuing to work beyond our 2020 promises to ensure that this work does not end here. Some examples of our ongoing commitment include:
- Completing the ongoing project to review the OTW Code of Conduct in full, bringing it into line with industry standards and updating it in collaboration with volunteer feedback;
- Supporting the ongoing development and growth of the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution subcommittee;
- Working on the 2023-2026 Strategic Plan's Diversifying Spaces goals; and
- Making AO3 more accessible for EAL users through our ongoing internationalization efforts. We've recently finished preparing all emails for translation and are continuing to work on other parts of the site.
Moving Forward
Looking forward to the future, we want to maintain our progress in this area and continue to improve transparency about changes within the OTW. We will make efforts to share information about updates like these in the monthly newsletter and our quarterly public Board meetings on Discord (you can also find updates from our quarterly meetings in our meeting minutes).
We appreciate your ongoing support and patience throughout these efforts, and we offer our sincerest apologies for the extended time required to fulfill our promises. Although progress has been slower than anticipated, we are very excited to share that our major goals are now complete and we are committed to continuing improvement into the future.
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.
Birdfeeding
Dec. 26th, 2025 01:22 pmI fed the birds. I've seen a few house finches and sparrows.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 12/26/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
EDIT 12/26/25 -- I did more work around the patio.
.
public domain day, ancient artifact cookies, antarctica
Dec. 26th, 2025 11:30 amHappy Friday! Here's some links-- deliberately focused on positive things, to give some end-of-year cheer.
Media of Various Types
- LibraryThing has a Winter Holiday Hunt game running through January 6th
- The Daily Spell is a (free, indie) word puzzle game with weekly stories and daily installments
- Public Domain Day is coming up on January 1st! Another Lord Peter Wimsey book is going PD which is exciting
- Here's some Hugo nomination ideas from
ladybusiness - DEMO FEST 2025 is out and there's some great punk songs here you can listen to for free. I put some of my recs here, if you need a place to start
Food & Crafts & Art
- These amazing cookies designed as ancient artifacts!
- Echo Zines has a great list of craftivism Youtube video recs as well as some of their own knitting projects
- MyTeaDB -- so you can track your tea collection! If you go to the New page you can see examples of how it works
- Little Golden Notebook has some amazing fiber art pieces
Social Media
- Green Grimoire (Youtube) is a Druid couple who make videos about homestead-y things and van travel, with a pagan bent
- Ruth Mottram (Pixelfed) is a glaciologist and posts photos of her work! She's currently in Antarctica now! She also has a blog; here's a recent post about heading down to Antarctica earlier this month
- And an event: Fediverse Punk Month (January 2026) -- a call for punks (and other subcultures) to leave Meta platforms and build communities in the Fediverse instead
RSS Feeds
- mixed color (RSS) a great blog about embroidery, sewing, dying, etc!
- Winnie Lim RSS writes very enjoyable blog posts about life and the things that happen therein
- sortition social is a community RSS feed reader! It selects a random feed from their (user-submitted?) database and added to the timeline for 7 days
Mopping Up a Few Books from November
Dec. 26th, 2025 02:04 pmFirst, I finished The Spring of Butterflies and Other Folktales of China’s Minority Peoples, translated by He Liyi and edited by Neil Philip. This is one of those books where the story behind the book is as interesting as the stories themselves. He Liyi started studying English in the 1940s, but during the Cultural Revolution he lost all access to his English language study materials. However, after the Cultural Revolution, he took it up again, and in the 1980s he got in touch with the BBC, which eventually arranged for this collection of translated folktales to be published.
They also held a contest in China to find an illustrator, and eventually narrowed it down to either Zhao Li or Aiqing Pan… at which point they discovered that these two illustrators were actually a married couple! So they ended up illustrating the book together.
I also finished Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil. What a ride! What a riot! Our heroine Rae is dying of cancer when she gets the chance to go into the world of her favorite fantasy series and steal the Flower of Life and Death. Of course she jumps at it… only to discover herself in the body of the villainess on the eve of her execution! Aided only by her wits and her somewhat vague memories of the series’ plot (cancer did a number on her memory), Rae sets herself up as a prophetess in an escalating series of schemes that keep steering the story more and more off course.
And then it ends on a cliffhanger! This is the first book in a duology. Not deep but good fun. I usually steer well clear of cancer books (well, any kind of illness books), as they tend to set off my hypochondria so I decide I’m probably dying of whatever the main character has, but in this case the cancer is a fairly light presence after the first chapter so I didn’t feel that. Much. Except maybe a little bit in the days after, whenever I forgot something. Who knew memory loss could mean cancer?
Finally, because I was concerned I would run out of reading material before December, I got Peter Beagle’s Tamsin, and then December and my all-Christmas-all-the-time resolution were barreling down on me and I still have two-thirds of the book to go. But Bramble politely lay on my legs until two pages from the end to ensure I finished, which was suitable, as Tamsin features one of the great cats in literature: Mister Cat, our heroine Jenny’s Siamese cat, who falls in love with a ghost cat and therefore leads Jenny to meet and fall in love with the ghost girl Tamsin.
Animation Check-in: 🌪 Ninjago S6E6-8
Dec. 26th, 2025 01:00 pm
Episode 6: Cole's explanation for why some call boats etc 'she' was sweet, at least the non-joking one lol
The Pirates of the Caribbean and Tremors references. X'D
Nya used Airjitzu!
Waait Ronin is good again all because of the bottle message Jay sent? I still won't forgive him, he knew the boys were innocent from the start.
Episode 7: Aww, let Zane speak pirate too!
"If he's within earshot, he has to grant the wish" I feel like they could've done something with that sooner. Couldn't someone have wished that their friends were freed?
Was the sky-fall a reference to Spirited Away?
Episode 8: Zane's father built another Zane??
Lmao at the seagulls watching the chess game and the cleanup robot cheating.
Shouldn't Zane #2 have wishes too? Why didn't they use him to say the wish?
Okay so Nya really did like Jay, I guess she just buried it until now.
Eww Nadakhan didn't really kiss Nya right??
I don't think this was just about the audience appeal, srsly
Dec. 26th, 2025 06:32 pmCharles Dickens exhibition to shine light on powerful women in author’s life: 'Novels only ‘reinforced Victorian stereotypes’ of meek women to give readers what they wanted, says curator'.
Oh, come on.
Query, did readers (as opposed to various gate-keepers in publishing houses, Mudie's and other circulating libraries. etc) want meek women?
(Do I need to cite Victorian novelists who did quite well out of women who were not meek.)
I would also contend that any input from women in Mr D's life was going to filtered through a lot of his Own Stuff, and the article actually points out some of the things like His Mummy Issues.
There is no-one in the novels at all like Angela Burdett-Coutts, whom one suspects very unlike saintly Agnes Wickfield (and married a much younger man at an advanced age), in fact as I think I have complained heretofore, he was happy to work with this renowned philanthropist while the women philanthropists in his novels are mean and merciless caricatures.
One can make a case that he did worse than 'dilute' the women he knew when portraying them on his pages.
Also I am not sure what the 'debate' is over his relationship with Ellen Ternan!
Yuletide recs, end of year fandom meme
Dec. 26th, 2025 09:57 amI’m consequently a bit bleary for anything productive, but might as well post some Yuletide recs:
( recs for Ballad of Wallis Island, Doctrine of Labyrinths, D&D:HAT, The Odyssey, Philosopher's Flight, R&G Are Dead, Some Desperate Glory, Summer in Orcus, and a couple of 5 min fandoms )
*
I think new fandom developments are unlikely in the next 5 days, so I might as well do the year-end fandom meme:
Fandom end-of-year meme: ( fandom meme #1 )
feasts of the day
Dec. 26th, 2025 05:57 pmAnd I have three wonderful gifts in Yuletide, two that appeared in the main collection and one total surprise that showed up at the very last minute in Madness, all of them so beautifully tailored to my likes, I can't praise them enough.
Happiness In Time Of Joy, a Wimsey fic, some utterly adorable missing scenes just before Lord Peter and Harriet get married, featuring Gherkins being himself in full measure.
Double Exposure, another Wimsey fic, 17k of fantastic Peter/Harriet/Bunter casefic, with ghosts of WW1 and excellent period details and a beautiful get-together for my OT3.
Wandrers Nachtlied, a total surprise in Yuletide Madness, a 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' fic - which I've requested many years and never got before - with such a clever play on the non-linear narrative of the film, but with the Clive/Theo made even more central to it all, a gorgeous look at them both.
Every year I am totally astounded by the work people put in to making such generous and thoughtful gifts. Thank you, dear anonymous authors!

Yuu. Fic writer & book lover. M/Canada.