humanist + humorist

New AO3 canonicals I worked on during the Jan-March round of NF Syn Hunters

2026-04-03T04:53:09Z

First, a bonus announcement: Puella Magi Madoka Magica & Related Fandoms officially has the requested fandom subtags! You can now filter on the fics that are specifically tagged with Oriko Magica, Kazumi Magica, Suzune Magica, and Tart Magica!

As of today, all the characters/rels/freeforms that belong to each of these spinoffs should be in the correct fandoms. If you spot any that still look misplaced, feel free to let me know.

And now, a wrap-up for the last round of Syn Hunting. (I did a similar post at the end of the July-September 2025 round. Didn’t sign on for the Oct-Dec round, and I’m not in the current April-June one, either.)

Over the past 3 months, I did Some Amount Of Work on all of these canonicals, anywhere from “did all the actual synning” to “some other wrangler did all the synning, all I did was check their work at the end”. Verrrry roughly in the order they were presented to the team, oldest first:

For perspective: I think the newest of these are a few tags found in the November 2025 New Canonicals announcement post. A whole lot of them are from the October 2025 announcement post.

So if you’ve ever wondered about the “If you have questions about specific tags which should be connected to these new canonicals, please refrain from contacting Support about them until at least two months from now” part of the update posts…this is why. The syn-hunting process is working about 4-5 months behind the canonizing process.

It’ll have a chance to catch up once wranglers finish all the Reader-Insert tags…but whoo boy, there were 200+ new RI tags announced in the April 2025 post, so that’s going to take a while. (If the pace of “processing about 20 RI tags per round” has been consistent, we should be done with 80-ish by now, and we’re on track to finish them all some time in 2027.)

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Nice links roundup + Darwyn Cooke + More cat news

2026-03-29T00:45:31Z

Clearing out some nice links:

Mastodon poll (now closed, but please enjoy the results): “Pick the best fallacy“

Interview with Rachel Manija Brown, writer turned bookstore owner: “I had never intended to open a bookshop. I always thought it was one of those idle daydreams that people who love reading and books have. I never planned to actually do it because I didn’t think it would be successful—they frequently go out of business. But after I moved to Crestline, which is a very small town in the California mountains, the little town did not have a bookshop.”

The promised official postmortem of the AO3 downtime in early March 2026 from AO3_Systems is out! (I added that link to my earlier post about the downtime.)

Speaking of AO3…I checked the backlog on some fandom tags where I hadn’t seen updates for a while because their RSS feeds glitched, and now my To Read list has ballooned by +9 pages.

Art process:

Watching a video on iconic DC writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, which led me to an interview with this quote:

“I don’t work in a formal fashion — I don’t sit and type a full script and then draw it. What I do is I plot it. And then I sit down and draw it and then I write the dialogue afterwards.”

Oh, hey, that’s what I do.

Pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone else describe making comics this way. Maybe they just won’t admit to it, because Having A Script is seen as the “professional” way to do things? But nobody could accuse Darwyn Cooke of not being a professional — and here he is, revealing this is the process that works for him.

Vindication, hah.

Cat news: The fluff has also survived his latest vet visit!

This went so much smoother than it used to in his younger years. He didn’t struggle at all once he was in the carrier, allowed the vet to pick him up and carry him to a different room for shots, and didn’t pee on anything (or anyone).

I hope that means on some level he’s internalized “the scary trip doesn’t last too long, you’ll be home safe soon, just hold very still and wait for it to be over.”

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The Sora deal flops before it started, and other LLM news

2026-03-25T17:27:41Z

AI Video links:

“OpenAI shutting down Sora, Disney drops investment: The news comes less than four months after Disney announced a $1 billion licensing and investment deal with the owner of Sora.” That’s the ComicsBeat article, but this news has been shared all over.

The original Disney-Sora announcement had me going “yeahhhh, I’ll believe it when I see it.” I figured any attempt to do content moderation would be overwhelmed by the onslaught of “users determined to make video of Disney characters doing inappropriate things.” Did not have “the whole thing implodes before they even get to that point” on my list! But here we are.

“Rest easy, Marvel screenwriters. The video that supposedly cooked Hollywood was, get this, appears to be made by humans to hype AI.“

“Finji, publisher of beloved indie titles such as Night in the Woods and Tunic and the developer behind Overland and Usual June, says that TikTok has been using generative AI to modify its ads on the platform without permission and pushing those ads to its users without Finji’s knowledge, including one ad that was modified to include a racist, sexualized stereotype of one of Finji’s characters.“

Crimes and defamation links:

“Angela Lipps, seen here in a photo from her GoFundMe page, spent more than five months in jail for a crime she maintains she didn’t commit after AI software linked her to a series of bank fraud incidents.” (The incidents happened in North Dakota. She was verifiably in Tennessee at the time.)

AO3 spambots have pivoted from “accusing random authors of using AI” to “accusing random authors of committing IRL sex crimes.” If you get any of these yourself, go directly to the Mark Spam button. I mean immediately. Sprint like you’re training for the Olympics.

“An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.”

“The feature crashed frequently and its “sources” linked to spammy copies of legit websites, or other archived copies that aren’t the actual source page. Some sources even went to completely unrelated links that weren’t written by the person whose work they were supposedly an example of, potentially indicating that the suggestions Grammarly’s AI offers with one person’s name may be based on a different person’s work.”

And the rest:

“Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States.”

“The fact that these guys can’t shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That’s a thing I strenuously resisted doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentless bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn’t understand crypto.“

Video: “The “AI Revolution” actually started decades ago, it was just a massive lie. In this gaming history documentary, we investigate how companies like Sega and Tiger Electronics used marketing smoke and mirrors to sell the “intelligence” of the 80s and 90s.“

“Stop spending money on Claude Code. Chipotle’s support bot is free.”

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Two offers (postage scale + DW Points)

2026-03-17T05:34:51Z

Two offers:

1) Anybody want a small postage scale?

Works on items up to 5 pounds. I used it on Leif & Thorn shipments for a few years, but packages with the full backlist weigh 11+ pounds at this point. (The scale I use now works up to 90 pounds. It'll last me a while.)

~~If you're in the US, I'll mail it to you for free. Just DM me a shipping address.~~ ETA: It's been claimed!

2) Anybody want a paid Dreamwidth account?

Comment and say so. No other requirements. I'll send 350 DW points (enough to buy all the Paid Account extra features for 1 year) to the first 10 commenters who ask.

Every time a news story comes out about other social-media sites kicking their users in the shins, I appreciate DW a little more. Right now, I want to show that appreciation with money. Help me out by giving me something to spend it on.

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Fandom-dropping process, Ides of March report

2026-03-16T01:10:59Z

Down to 1034 fandoms wrangled. Almost exactly 100 dropped since last check-in.

I did a big “invitation to all wranglers, look through my list and grab any webcomics you want” post, and managed to hand off 80+ that way. The rest are from dropping more A’s and B’s.

Only 39 of these have any tags that need wrangling. Higher than usual. I didn’t wrangle as much last week…tbh, I was low-key hoping some of the lightly-active webcomics would get claimed in the big invitation post.

(By “lightly” I mean “there are 1-5 new tags.” It’s still not an overwhelming burden, here. Just a mild annoyance to check lots of individual tag bins.)

While I’m at it, AMT updates: My “please combine the redundant Frosty the Snowman fandoms” request was approved, so my count will go down by 1 when that gets processed. The Madoka Magica requests I mentioned last month…are still on the waiting-for-approvals list.

I haven’t actually made the request to restructure the Fake News tree. The wranglers of other fandoms involved have all signed off on it — but now I’m waiting on a response to a different question. Which I kinda suspect has been forgotten at this point. Maybe I’ll just go forward, on the premise of “since nobody has responded to say [thing] is a roadblock for the tree, that means [thing] is not a roadblock for the tree, and I won’t worry about it.”

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Erin Reads: What If…Marc Spector was Host to Venom?

2026-03-15T02:02:49Z

Finally got around to reading the What If…? book that has Moon Knight in it.

It’s good!

Age of MoonKnight over on Tumblr did a chapter-by-chapter liveblog, which I enjoyed. Check that out if you want a more beat-by-beat coverage of the plot (and lots of quotes). This is more of an overall post-game reflection.

Some short, spoiler-free reactions:

Based on the title, I expected “a canon-divergence AU where Marc meets Venom instead of Khonshu.” Instead, it starts in a universe that’s pretty close to 616, Khonshu and all. That gets crashed by an AU Marc who did get Venom’d…but it’s not a long-term divergence for him either, it basically happened that day. So, not the story I expected to see, but it’s good at being the story it wanted to tell
Jake and Steven get a very satisfying amount of page time. Haven’t counted, but I bet there’s a similar amount of chapters for all 4 POV characters (Local Marc, Import Steven, Import Jake, and Venom)
There are lots of fun deep-cut references to all kinds of random comics stuff. You can tell the author had a good time finding things to add in, and asking their MK-fan friends for suggestions
The author has good takes on Marlene! It’s one of their breakup eras, she helps out when the plot demands it and clearly still loves them, but she’s sticking to her boundaries and Marc is wistfully respectful about it
There’s an ongoing plot through all the What If…? books, which I mostly wasn’t interested in. Very authentic to the experience of “reading a Moon Knight tie-in with a Comics Event”

Longer, full-of-spoilers analysis and reaction follows.

( Two big things I look for in a Moon Knight installment are “making clear that Steven and Jake are just as valid/important/worthwhile as Marc” and “good takes on Marlene (or whoever else the love interest is)”. This nails it on both counts )

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 2, chapters 11-12)

2026-03-12T21:53:32Z

Wrapping up volume 2 of Seven Seas’ new print edition of PSOH! Sometimes with comparisons to volume 3 of the original Tokyopop translation.

I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here.

I made myself so hungry looking up the desserts named in this one, and I don’t think any of them are sold in my area. Boo.

( ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?! Were you waiting for him to sprinkle soy sauce on you?! )

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 2, chapters 9-10)

2026-03-10T00:17:17Z

Continued liveblog as I read Seven Seas’ new print edition of PSOH, and sometimes make comparisons to the original Tokyopop translation.

I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here.

When rounding up this post, I expected it to be shorter than the last one…then I actually checked the word count, and it’s almost exactly the same. Commented about fewer panels, but I carried on for longer, so it balanced out.

( This is directly after the “meditation at the museum of extinct animals” chapter, and it showcases a nice shift in their relationship if this is when D starts dropping pointed comments about “humans, like you, Detective, but not like me, hint hint.” )

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Recs for nice things + Cat News

2026-03-07T01:20:57Z

Some recs:

Preorders are open for this comics anthology by Iranian cartoonists. Already got mine.

A long and thorough Megatokyo breakdown from an ex-fan. (“I think I hate it better than anyone else.”) The criticisms are well-founded and well-explained, so even though I have some nostalgic fondness for Megatokyo and I’m not on board with every criticism, I liked reading it anyway.

The Skyjacks podcast, an original fantasy actual-play series, was on my “to try” list for a while. Recently, I opened the RSS feed, scrolled to the bottom, downloaded the first few episodes…and was confused to realize that it was (a) picking up from an existing story and (b) set in the Star Wars universe?

Yeah, the same group of players did an extensive Star Wars fangame first, spinning off from a short Star Wars adventure in a different feed, then moved on to their own series and kept adding that to the same feed. It’s a good jumping-on point, though. I’m 11 episodes in and not stopping.

Got caught up with Sporadic Phantoms, which was the last new podcast I mentioned starting. It continues to be very good. There’s a big pivot in season 2, but I think they handled it well. And…the season isn’t finished, so now I’m on a cliffhanger. Fingers crossed they stick the landing.

Also watched season 2 of the Ranma 1/2 reboot. It had a lot more of the madcap Jenga-tower-of-connected-gags pacing that I was missing while watching s1, where the personalities are wildly pinballing off each other and if you look away for 30 seconds you’ll miss something great. My “they couldn’t fully do this in s1 because they were too busy establishing the characters” theory is panning out.

And I did end up rewatching Cosmic Princess Kaguya. Turns out it absolutely rewards a second watch. There’s one character who knows about The Reveal from the start, and the amount of “oh that’s what you meant, I see what you did there” is amazing.

Cat news: Vet checkup for Fiddlesticks the other day.

When she had dental problems last May, they said she was down from 7-ish pounds to 6-ish, and theorized “maybe she’s eating less because it hurts her teeth.” But the current visit said she’s 7-ish pounds…and said that she was already back to 7-ish pounds last July (the visit where she had the bad teeth out).

Wonder if their scale in May was just having problems.

She developed these two Mystery Bumps since the last visit — you can’t really see them, they’re pea-sized at most and have normal fur growing over them, it’s just something you can feel when petting her. Official vet analysis on those is “probably just cysts, could develop problems in the future, but as long as she isn’t messing with them, we won’t mess with them.”

And she’s not messing with them! Doesn’t seem to notice them at all.

Good job not having cancer, kitty.

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AO3 downtime info + reflection post

2026-03-05T07:10:15Z

Update: The official postmortem of the AO3 downtime in early March 2026 from AO3_Systems is out. Give it a look, find out how accurate my guesses were.

--

As a lot of y’all probably noticed, AO3 had some extended downtime this past weekend.

They upgraded their database software on Saturday. The first crash happened with Sunday-evening traffic. AD&T (the committee of OTW volunteers who manage the AO3 software) painstakingly nursed the servers back onto their feet. Then they crashed again under Monday-evening traffic. (I’m describing this in US time zones, because it correlated with “the spike when USians get out of school/work and start opening fic en masse.”)

Official AO3 social-media posts haven’t named the software. I assumed because it’s a third-party vendor, and they (very reasonably!) don’t want the place getting deluged with angry emails from AO3’s wankiest users. But at this point, there’s other public confirmation that it’s MariaDB.

AO3’s public Jira board had two new tickets created while they were dealing with the downtime. There’s a helpful breakdown of the tech implications by siropsalot on Bluesky. In short:

“Audits cleanup job” – AO3 has been storing certain logs in a single giant table that updates forever and never gets archived or cleared, which is fine if you’re a small or low-traffic project, but bad if you’re one of the top 100 highest-traffic sites on the internet. (This is part of a long pattern of AO3 being, ah, poorly-designed for the scale of traffic it gets.) This ticket is to create a regular clearing-up process.

“Patch Devise to prevent excessive audits” – One specific user has a buggy older browser, which generated over 2 million entries in the giant table just for them. This ticket is to patch against that specific edge case.

(Denise was pretty alarmed by the first one, because the proposed fix might delete data the OTW is legally required to keep. That’s a tangent, this is mostly a post about the tech problems, I’m just throwing it in because it seems worth knowing.)

MariaDB also has a public Jira board. Which documents this bug in the version of the software that AO3 just upgraded to: ““Local temporary space limit reached” on not so rare occasions.”

AD&T brought the site back up on Tuesday. It’s been safely up ever since. My understanding is, it stayed up after tech support from MariaDB helped them troubleshoot and implement a workaround for that issue.

Disclaimer that I am not a programmer! Someone more technical might come along and correct me on this! AD&T is working on an official postmortem — hopefully after they catch up on some well-deserved sleep — which will be way more illuminating than anything I can figure out in the meantime.

But my impression right now is that “AO3 software has problems with huge poorly-managed piles of data” ran headlong into “MariaDB upgrade has problems with not allocating certain operations enough space,” and it went about as well as a 12′ truck trying to drive under the 11’8″ bridge.

(Except in this case it’s a more normal bridge, where safely-loaded trucks usually pass under it with no problem, while AO3 is…I guess a truck with an extra 5 feet of clearance, caused by a wobbly pile of stuff held on top of it with a precarious set of bungee cords?) (It’s not a perfect analogy, okay. But you get the point.)

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HmmAI is at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence [and other LLM links]

2026-03-02T15:38:25Z

Have you heard about the “feed this document to an LLM, it’ll generate a podcast episode discussing it” gimmick?

Somebody fed it a document that’s just the phrase “poopoo peepee” over and over. And then took the discussion of that document, and fed it back into the LLM to discuss that. And then did it again. That link is to a 10-episode playlist. (…They’re only between 6 and 15 minutes long, so it’s not as much content as you’d think.)

It’s as stupid as it sounds — which makes it the perfect demonstration of “how LLMs will take anything, even the dumbest nonsense, and generate a response that has the vibe of something meaningful.” The recursion reveals even more levels of this. I swear every single video has included some version of “it reminds me of the absurdity of Dadaism”…and none of them acknowledge “the video we’re analyzing said it reminded them of Dadaism”…and they’re always repeating the same 2 basic facts about Dadaism.

(Bonus: the software always pronounces it “Day-day-ism” or “Daddy-ism”.) (Bonus 2: At least one of the videos inserts a fake ad break.)

There’s some hallucination, too. The TTS voices start referring to things like “funny sound effects” and “dramatic zooms”, which do not exist at all in the video they’re “analyzing.” One video says “Do we even really know what the original document said anymore?” (Yes. Yes, we do.) There are at least three variations of “it makes me think of apophenia, have you ever heard of that?” / “No, what does it mean?” when they’re supposedly “discussing” a video where apophenia was brought up and defined.

This is almost as good as the Chatbot Chess Championships 2026. (Which had a lot fewer random nonsense moves than the last one…but in one of the videos GothamChess mentions that he’s been “reminding the bots where their pieces are.” Boo.)

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The rest of this is just a roundup of bots faceplanting in non-chess fields:

“I decided to do an experiment/torture myself with the default image model you get when you open Gemini. The prompt: “create a grid showing the flags of european countries in alphabetical order. there should be labels below them stating their name. the one for Liechtenstein should have a note below it saying “doubly-landlocked”.”“

“What really happened was that someone who is fully equipped to know better was surprised when her AI agent — a class of software that does not work reliably and cannot work reliably — messed up. […] This is not a misfortune befalling some random person — this is the director of AI alignment at Meta.”

“Amazon is absolutely clear who’s to blame for all this — this 13-hour outage caused by their own bot turning something off and on again is officially user error!“

“Press Start Gaming is almost certainly a tool for making money off of ads and sponsored posts, and posts like the Phantasy Star Fukkokuban misinformation exist mostly to give the site more juice of looking like a real website. If someone goes out and buys a copy of Fukkokuban expecting a new and improved Phantasy Star with better graphics and new sidequests, what do they care? The article wasn’t really meant to provide information.”

“It finally became clear to me and the COYOTE team that we’d been bamboozled. Someone had fabricated an identity and put our call for pitches into a large language model like ChatGPT, just to make a fake story that we’d feasibly pay for. When I started asking too many questions, that someone evaporated.“

“Even entire passwords repeat: In the above 50 attempts, there are actually only 30 unique passwords. The most common password was G7$kL9#mQ2&xP4!w, which repeated 18 times, giving this specific password a 36% probability in our test set.”

The Onion: “HmmAI is at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, responding to prompts about recipe ideas, ancient history, or even advanced nuclear physics with the word ‘huh’ in just a fraction of a second.”

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Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 3b (chapters 31-36)

2026-02-27T00:01:03Z

Final post of reactions to The Rose Field. Spoilers throughout. Previous HDM-related posts on DW; see also The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

Illustrated with TV-series screencaps again. Also, I decided to be self-indulgent and throw some of my own fanart in there.

I have a large but poorly-organized heap of “ideas about How To Fix These Books.” Might round those up and make a post about them at some point? TBD. For the main liveblog of the trilogy itself — this wraps it up.

( 80% of the way through the book is a little late to reveal their whole quest is fake. So where is this going? )

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Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 3a (chapters 23-30)

2026-02-20T20:56:56Z

Start of Part 3. As of this point, I had 40% of the audiobook left to go, and 1 week until it returned. So these next 2 posts will cover the final 2/5 of the book.

Light spoilers for the whole book in my annotations; comments are a free-for-all. Previous HDM-related posts on DW; see also The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

Didn’t bother putting screencaps in this one. Too much of it was either “new elements introduced in the sequel trilogy” or “things that didn’t get visually adapted in the TV series.”

Onward.

( Tiny Gryphon is good-guy-coded, so her idea of “who needs to die” is presumably correct and unproblematic in every way )

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Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 2b (chapters 16-22)

2026-02-16T18:23:01Z

Liveblog roundup from the rest of Part Two.

Light spoilers for the whole book in my annotations. Go wild in the comments.

Previous HDM-related posts here. To start from the earliest Book of Dust reactions, see The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

It’s getting harder to find relevant HDM TV moments to screencap for some of these parts. Sometimes I just went “eh, this is very loosely relevant, and Pan is cute, so I’ll go with it.”

( Hasn’t heard of alkahest, but he’s a bookish guy, so he does the very obvious thing of Picking Up A Dictionary. )

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Fandom-dropping process, mid-February report

2026-02-15T17:30:40Z

Down to 1135 fandoms total. (As of this posting, there are 24 total with any tags that need wrangling.)

So, dropped about 50 over the past month. Including almost all the random little fandoms that aren’t “part of a tag tree I’m actively keeping” or “webcomics.”

The update I’m considering to the Fake News fandom tree would, if approved, shrink my fandom count by 2. But my next requested additions to the Madoka Magica tree, if approved, could grow it by up to 4 again.

Haven’t started the planned “another full A-to-Z pass through all the webcomic fandoms.” For the past month-ish, I’ve been using a lower-key strategy of “inviting other wranglers to take whichever half-dozen tiny webcomics got new tags this week.” On the theory that, if the comics are popular enough to have new-fic-writing fans, they’re more likely to have fellow-wrangler fans.

It’s worked for a few! Biggest win: a couple of non-English-language comics, which I was able to pass to a wrangler who’s a native speaker of the language.

I’ve also recently been involved in an effort to solicit wranglers for some of the currently-untouched “Religion & Lore” fandoms. So my giveaway posts are spaced-out between recruiting posts for fandoms that aren’t on my list in the first place. (Some of them are very small, only 1-2 works total, it would take no extra effort to just pick them up for babysitting myself…but that would really offset my fandom-dropping progress.)

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Looking at updating the Fake News/Pundit RPF fandom tags on AO3…

2026-02-14T00:52:39Z

I know there’s not a ton of people left who actively care about this fandom. But of the ones who do, I’m guessing at least a few of you still follow my blog(s).

So here’s a quick writeup! Let’s find out if anyone has feedback.

For people who weren’t in this fandom (or have forgotten the details by now), I’ll start with some backstory.

( A little unwieldy, a little awkward. It kinda counted on taggers having pre-existing knowledge of “which terms the LiveJournal-based fandom uses in which specific ways.” But for a long time, it worked! )

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Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 2a (chapters 9-15)

2026-02-12T03:40:30Z

“Part 1” of The Rose Field was chapters 1-8. “Part 2” is twice as long (chapters 9-22), and I haven’t gotten any less chatty. So you’re getting a Post 2A and a Post 2B. Look forward to a 3A and a 3B to finish off the set.

As of this roundup, I’ve finished the whole book. Post will have light spoilers, in the notes I put in while editing. Comments are a free-for-all.

Still adding relevant BBC HDM screencaps to break up the text.

Sidenote: At some point in the middle of the original liveblog, I managed to injure my hand. Nowhere near as bad as Lyra’s — I kept an ice pack on it for the first several hours, and within two days, it only hurt if I touched/bent the injured part wrong. (The next week saw a steady decrease in which kinds of motion counted as “doing it wrong.”)

But every time I did, I remembered how Lyra’s spent this whole book with full-on broken fingers, and have an extra wince of sympathy. The only treatment she’s had is some (rose-scented) salve. She hasn’t even splinted them! Has to be a miserable, constant pain.

( Didn’t you set off to find Lyra’s imagination? You must have had some idea of what you were looking for... )

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Recs of nice things (Marvel, A for Angel, Sporadic Phantoms, Cosmic Princess Kaguya)

2026-02-07T04:01:14Z

[Youtube] Sir_Superhero’s backstory breakdown of Wonder Man in the comics. I only ever saw scattershot appearances of the guy, never knew his whole deal, so this was cool and enlightening. (Haven’t actually watched the MCU show yet, I’ll be curious to see which parts they keep.)

AMA with Jed MacKay on League of Comic Geeks. Fun insights and tidbits about the Moon Knight comics, along with the other projects he’s working on.

[Youtube] A for Angel, a pilot for Cartoon Network that I guess was stuck in rights/development hell, and finally got released? By the creator of the webcomic Angel’s Advocate (also started but not continued, maybe because of the cartoon being in production), and you can see a lot of the character designs coming through, although the plot and worldbuilding seem pretty different. Charming and adorable.

Sporadic Phantoms, a fictional true-crime podcast…set in a 2020-AU version of the Animorphs universe. There’s something weird about The Sharing, these amateur journalists are starting to think it’s a cult, and they’re here to investigate! I’m only a few episodes in, but the continuity bonuses are [chef’s kiss].

For most of the time I was watching Cosmic Princess Kaguya, I was thinking “Well, this is cute. The animation is excellent, the designs are a lot of fun…the plot is pretty basic, and the video-game fight sequences do not need to go on for this long, but it’s still a good time.”

And then I got to The Reveal — maybe 20 minutes from the end — and thought “…wait, hold up, I might need to rewatch the whole thing now??”

Somewhere in the middle, I had actually noticed that [Character] was animated with an expression that’s very characteristic of [Other Character], and idly thought “huh, maybe they’re connected somehow.” How many more hints like that did I miss? How many can I catch now, if I watch with The Reveal in mind?

Not sure if there’s much else I can say without spoiling it! But yeah, quite good. If you like grumpy/sunshine canon f/f, with internet friendships, weird fantasy age gaps, the power of expressing yourself through virtual avatars, and the power of music, don’t miss this one.

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Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 1 (chapters 1-8)

2026-02-05T21:45:18Z

Library hold for The Rose Field came in. The TOC divides it into 3 parts, so this is the liveblog for Part One.

Previous HDM-related posts here. To start from the earliest Book of Dust reactions, see The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

I’m going in mostly-cold. Got spoiled for a few individual details, but the rest, including basically all the actual plot, is a mystery.

When doing the original reactions, I usually don’t stop and rewind the audiobook to make sure all the quotes are exact. For this roundup, I have an ebook version I can text-search, so I’ll try to correct them. Carefully, because I’ve only read chapters 1-17 in total, and don’t want to spoil myself by seeing search results from chapters 18-36.

For visual interest, I’ll throw in some screencaps of relevant people/places/items from the HDM TV series.

Chapters 1-8 ahead:

( Look, I’m connecting some dots here (one of the things that generates Dust is conscious beings using their imagination, the red building is a source of roses whose oil lets you see Dust), but I have no idea how or whether Pan is connecting those dots. )

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Sky is blue, water is wet, ICE needs to be abolished

2026-02-04T19:35:33Z

Justice for Keith Porter Jr., shot by an ICE agent who wasn’t even on duty.

Justice for Geraldo Lunas Campos, killed by a guard while imprisoned in an ICE facility.

Justice for Luis Beltrán Yanez-Cruz, died while imprisoned by ICE, from health issues they only made token efforts to treat.

Justice for Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, died while in ICE custody, they did get him to a hospital but not soon enough.

Justice for Parady La, died while imprisoned by ICE, from a medical crisis they didn’t even pretend to treat.

Justice for Heber Sanchez Domínguez, died while imprisoned by ICE, under suspiciously-unclear circumstances.

Justice for Victor Manuel Diaz, died while imprisoned by ICE, under suspiciously-unclear circumstances.

A US attorney in the Minnesota courts, who only didn’t quit because her job includes processing the release orders for ICE’s onslaught of detentions, “told U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell on Tuesday, “I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep.”” (Since then, she’s been fired. Commentary from rahaeli: “I hope the poor woman gets her 24h of sleep before filing her whistleblower retaliation lawsuit“)

Elected Democrats are actually fighting this. It’s a shame they don’t have the numbers to just out-vote every single atrocity Republicans are hot for. Can this be the year the voters figure that out, and finally elect more Democrats?

As if all of the above wasn’t enough reason, here’s some more: “Democrats Successfully Strip All Anti-Trans Riders From Final Appropriations Bills“

Can we vote out the party that keeps designing the anti-trans riders in the first place? Please?

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AO3 fandom metatags are back!

2026-01-29T18:45:18Z

At long last, after a year’s worth of internal discussion and a few more months of preparing for the rollout, AMTs are back on the menu.

Two of my requests have already been approved! His Dark Materials & Related Fandoms and 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ | Puella Magi Madoka Magica & Related Fandoms are the metatags on a couple of shiny new tag trees!

Official AO3 announcement post is here. The number of “I’m so happy to see this, it’ll make my fandom browsing so much easier” comments are a joy to see. (The comments about “well, geez, took you long enough” are…valid, honestly.)

A lot of specific tag trees are still works-in-progress, especially if it’s a big complicated franchise. So don’t worry too much if a fandom you love doesn’t have one yet — the wranglers might still be working on it. Honestly, I’m still working on investigating all the Madoka Magica fandom syns, which is why most of the spinoffs still don’t have their own separate fandom tags. We’ll get there, I promise.

Fun little twist that’s only a problem for me: this means “more fandoms” listed on my wrangling page. The amount of work is objectively exactly the same! It’s the same amount of fic, just spread across slightly more fandom tags! But the recently-added limit is on the number of fandoms, not the amount of fanworks those fandoms get.

Current number of fandoms on my list: 1142.

Current number that have any tag-wrangling to do: 28. (Not the same 28 as the last time I posted. There’s some overlap — a fandom like Sailor Moon has new tags every week — but the others rotate, especially the “just got new tags from its first fic posted in 2 years” type of fandoms.)

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 2, chapters 7-8)

2026-01-29T00:17:32Z

Continued liveblog as I read Seven Seas’ new print edition of PSOH, and make sporadic comparisons to the original Tokyopop translation.

I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here. (I now have Collector’s Edition 1-4 on my shelf!)

Only 2 chapters this post. I got a little long-winded. It’ll probably happen again.

( D invites Leon back to the shop for tea, then has a little internal monologue of his own, while looking sadly at the moon )

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A quick Pet Shop of Horrors translation question

2026-01-22T01:49:04Z

All right, I’ve asked questions about the original Japanese in PSOH before and people have popped up with the answers. Hoping to have the same good fortune again.

In Volume 10, the chapter “Duplication”, there’s a panel where Leon’s long-time co-worker Jill introduces herself on the phone. In the Tokyopop translation, she gives her name as “Detective Jill Freshney”:

Jill Freshney is also the name of the managing editor on the book:

I assume this is her bio on Aces Editors. She’s a real person, that’s just her real name.

So — does our detective Jill also have this name in the original Japanese text?

If the TP translation had started before the original series ended, I could see it being written in by Matsuri Akino, as a little “aww, there ended up being a real Jill working on my books, I’ll give her a shoutout” homage. But the Japanese volume 10 came out in August 1998, and the NA release of Volume 1 wasn’t until June 2003, so she wouldn’t have known.

Was it added by the TP writers, as their own little gag/homage? Or was it there in the original, and this is an absolutely wild coincidence? (…Or a secret third thing?)

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CWRU Sci-Fi Marathon liveblog 2026

2026-01-20T08:09:17Z

Spent the weekend at the 51st CWRU Sci-Fi Movie Marathon.

Like last year, I used the OpenVibe app to auto-crosspost my liveblogging to both Mastodon and Bluesky. The app has threading now! So these are in slightly-longer chunks of text than last year, because I could split a longer reaction across multiple threads and post them all at once.

…But the overall text is shorter, in part because I swear the breaks between movies were seriously cut down this year. There was a lot of “I had a longer thought here, but the next thing is already starting, so I have to finish typing as fast as possible (with my coat draped over my phone so the light isn’t bothering everyone else) and hit send.”

( Special Message From James Gunn. “I regret that I can’t be with you all in Cleveland tonight…” )

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Fandom-dropping process, mid-January report

2026-01-16T06:47:59Z

It’s no longer the 15th of the month as I’m finishing this post…but I ran all the numbers on the 15th, so I’m counting it as a regular scheduled update.

I’ve finished one A-to-Z pass of “handing off and/or punting specific webcomics.” In total, that knocked a couple hundred fandoms off my list. Guess I’ll do another, go harder, and knock out a couple hundred more.

There was a point when I thought about starting a habit of “sweep the Unassigned Fandoms list for tiny underloved Christmas movies,” because sweeping for underloved webcomics was working well. Didn’t end up doing it regularly, though — I just got 12 movie fandoms with 1 fic each, and stopped there. So I dropped all of those in an afternoon. (In the years I was babysitting them, the most active of these fandoms came out with…a whole 2nd fic.)

I also dropped some Random Things that I picked up through the irregular process of “checked out a new canon, enjoyed it, went to see if there was any fic on AO3, found an unwrangled fandom with 1 work.” Stuff like Phoebe in Wonderland (2008), Gary and His Demons (Cartoon), or Her Voice is a Backwards Record – Ozy Brennan. They almost certainly won’t suffer if they stay unwrangled for a while.

(There’s still only one fic for Shadow Man – Melissa Scott…and it’s the one I wrote. Guess it’s depressingly safe to leave “the queer intersex revolution/romance where everyone’s on space drugs” unwrangled, huh.)

With bigger Random Things, when they’re active enough I don’t want to leave them unwrangled, I’ve been making the occasional post about “looking to hand off this fandom, will anybody take it?” Breaks up the monotony of the batches of webtoons, I think. And it’s had maybe a 50-50 success rate — not bad. I’ll keep at it.

…I did actually add 2 new fandoms since the last update. A couple fans wrote about the Toon Makers US Sailor Moon pilot for Yuletide 2025, so that has a fandom tag now, and I picked it up to go with the rest of the Sailor Moon fandom tree.

Then it came up in the “wranglers wanted” channel that Pet Shop of Horrors was unassigned. And how was I supposed to resist picking up PSOH? I love PSOH. That manga reread I just recently started will pair perfectly with a review of the existing PSOH tags.

So my current total number of fandoms is 1183. (The number of “fandoms that actually have any new tags to deal with right now” is 28.)

344 down, 733 more to go…

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