hatman | Reading

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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I looked up links about the best fantasy from 2025...

Award-Winning Fantasy Novels of 2025

Mid-Year Reading Roundup: Best Fantasy Books of 2025 (Jan-June) You Absolutely Need to Add to Your TBR

Readers' Favorite Fantasy -- Goodreads

Current Mood: busy

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recommendations

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 5 by Haegi

Spoilers ahead for the earlier ones.

( Read more... )

There is a three-way tie in the Patron category, so there will be a runoff vote. The voting
will run from March 3 - March 15 and the winner will be announced March 16. As this is a runoff vote, each person may only vote for one project.

Poll #34319 Runoff Vote for Patron

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6

View Respondents

Vote for your favourite Patron.

View Answers

Anthony Barrette patron of "Poetry Fishbowl" by Elizabeth Barrette aka Ysabetwordsmith
1 (16.7%)

Siliconshaman patron of "Poetry Fishbowl" by Elizabeth Barrette aka Ysabetwordsmith
3 (50.0%)

Elizabeth Barrette aka Ysabetwordsmith patron of Feathering the Nest by Sarah Williams aka Dialecticdreamer
2 (33.3%)

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https://www.dn.se/kultur/fan-edits-har-blivit-filmbranschens-nya-maktfaktor/

”Fan edits” har blivit filmbranschens nya maktfaktor

Thanks to naye for posting on bluesky! Translation via google translate.

“Fan edits” have become the film industry’s new power factor

– Fan edits are created out of genuine commitment, rather than a commercial purpose, and then they can certainly be perceived as more credible than traditional trailers, says Lovisa Jönsson from the PR agency Jung.
In July 2025, the anonymous TikTok account Areq posts a video collage of scenes from the boxing movie “Creed.” In the clip, punches are thrown wildly to the beat of the music, while blood and sweat spurt.

The clip has over 215 million views at the time of writing. Less than a week after it was posted on the platform, the number of viewers of the film increased by 29 percent on Amazon Prime, according to data from Luminate.

Areq is an example of a growing group of TikTok creators, often fans, who make so-called video collages, or “fan edits,” of series and films for fun. The phenomenon has its origins in fan fiction, where fans use characters and settings from existing works to write a new story.

Several film studios have recognized the explosive power of fan logic and have now started to hire fans to drive their marketing efforts.

The film studio Lionsgate has recruited a dozen or so fans to make TikTok clips under the film studio’s banner. The company’s TikTok page now has around a hundred clips from films like “Twilight” and “Divergent.” All of them are bursting with references and Generation Z jokes that only a die-hard fan can understand.

In an interview with Variety, Lionsgate's head of international marketing, Briana McElroy, says that fan edits are a "love letter from fans" and that it is free marketing.

- If we are going to have a conversation with fans online, we have to speak their language, she tells Variety.

Streaming giants such as Netflix, Hulu and Paramount+ also publish clips on their Tiktok channels with clear inspiration from fan logic.

Fan-edited video collages from the ice hockey drama "Heated Rivalry" have been streaming on social media since the series was released in late 2025. The clips have reached both existing fans and attracted new viewers.

Some of the fan community's most viewed clips are edited by fan Melanie, 25. In one of the clips, countless sex scenes and hockey matches flicker past in one minute and thirty seconds. That clip has received over four million views.

When DN reaches her, she wants to remain anonymous, she wants to protect her privacy on the internet but is happy to talk about the phenomenon. Since she was 17, she has spent countless hours editing such videos, about everything from One Direction to Harry Potter and Marvel.

– Fan edits are their own art form. It is a way for a fan to tell a story or describe how they themselves interpret a series through their own lens. It is noticeable in the way they edit, in what order they place the clips or which song they use, she says.

Unlike a traditional trailer that is directed and tailored by a film company with the aim of reaching as large an audience as possible and generating revenue, fan edits lack a financial drive and are born out of pure desire and love for a series or film.

– It is created out of genuine commitment, rather than a commercial purpose, and then they can certainly be perceived as more credible than traditional trailers, especially for Generation Z, says Lovisa Jönsson from the PR agency Jung.

She points out that fan-produced content is spread organically on platforms like Tiktok and that it can reach target groups that do not usually watch traditional trailers. This provides a large distribution at a low cost.

– When marketing arouses emotions and is perceived as authentic and genuine, it tends to be more effective. It is a quick way to spread content and can create hype that makes more people feel that they “have to see” a certain film or series, says Lovisa Jönsson.

It is not only within the world of film that fan logic is being valued. For example, the artist Miley Cyrus hired superfan Olivia Rudensky to be responsible for her digital marketing and fan contact. Rudensky was recruited because she ran one of the star’s largest fan accounts, according to Forbes.

In the book “Blank Space”, the American author W David Marx describes how fans have shaped the popular cultural landscape. According to him, they have been crucial in consolidating the position of international artists. He writes that: “At a time when the media landscape has become increasingly fragmented, fans have contributed to strengthening the cultural power around a few top artists.”

Fan-produced video collages set their first milestone in 1975 when Kandy Fong made a slideshow featuring the space officer Spock from the science fiction series “Star Trek”. The slideshow was set to music with the Spock actor’s interpretation of “Both sides now”. At the time, it was shown at various fan conventions, but since then they have been exhibited at museums in both Queens and Vancouver.

When YouTube became established, fans began publishing video collages there. As Instagram and Tiktok consolidated their role, fans have instead moved their creations there and through the spread of algorithms, some of them reach a huge audience.

Sweden is no exception. Here, fans of reality series such as “The Traitors”, “The Game” and “Paradise Hotel” have made their own compilations, where they highlight certain participants, among other things. Among other things, there are several collages about the “Best in Test” program host David Sundin, with carefully selected clips from the competition program, set to music by Arctic Monkeys’ “505”.

During the new film adaptation of “Doktor Glas”, the production launched a Tiktok account. Some of the content is clearly modeled after how fans usually edit their fan clips. Lovisa Jönsson at the PR agency Jung, however, believes that there is a risk when production companies follow the fan logic.

– When companies start to commercialize fan edits and use them in strategic marketing, authenticity can be lost, which is the very basis for the impact. To succeed, they must continue to be created on the fans’ terms, she says.

The second book I finished this weekend was Earthlings by Sakyaka Murata, translated from Japanese by Ginny Takemori. This book is about Natsuki, a girl who's always felt she doesn't quite belong with humans. This has been book #16 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

I've struggled a lot with what to say about this book, or whether to say anything at all. First, as many other reviews note, the book description does not in any way prepare you for the trigger warnings that may apply, so if you have no-gos for reading, do have a look around for a list before you crack this one open.

There are a lot of things you could take away from this book. The lifelong impact of childhood sexual abuse. The damage of a child having no safe adult to confide in. The pain of feeling alienated from society. The pain caused by strict social expectations that leave no room for individuals to pursue other modes of living. The danger that refusing to allow deviations from the "norm" will lead individuals incapable of conforming to that norm to reject society altogether. The idea that rejecting smaller social rules eventually leads to complete anarchy and amorality. The suffocating impact of the absence of privacy and the extremes to which it may drive people.

It is an exploration of the harm done, intentionally and unintentionally, to those who don't "fit" into the mold of society. How much of it is reality and how much of it is Natsuki's imagination is also up to the reader.

It's also a book about interrogating taboos, which leads to the trigger warning above. Natsuki's choice not to marry or have children is in and of itself, violating a taboo of her culture. Her feeling that violating this taboo does no harm to her or anyone else naturally leads to questioning other taboos, and you can't write a book about questioning taboos and then say "but not that taboo, that's too taboo!" so the book does go some dark places as Natsuki and her companions ask themselves if there's anything rational in refraining from theft, murder, and assault.

The translation is well done, particularly in dealing with a number of sensitive subjects.

I'm not sure what I ultimately take away from Earthlings. Perhaps how much damage societal rejection has on a person's psyche and the harms that can spawn from that. We are, in the end, social creatures. Feeling from a young age that you don't belong is bound to have detrimental developmental impacts.

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author: m

This weekend I finished two books, the first of which was The Seep by Chana Porter, which has been on my TBR for years. In this book, Earth has been peacefully invaded by a parasitic alien which goes about solving all of Earth's problems in exchange for insight on what being human is like.

If you're looking for a SFF book with heavy world-building, this is not it. Very little explanation is ever given about the Seep (the alien, not the book), how it works, how it got here, what its initial invasion was like. The practicalities of the Seep are not what this book is about; this book is about its protagonist, Trina, learning to live in a world where the Seep dominates everything, for better or worse.

The Seep itself could be an allegory for any number of things, but to me, it correlated strongly with modern technology, especially since the advent of AI, although the book was published in 2020, before AI hit the public market. The way Trina's misgivings about the Seep are brushed off as a sort of Ludditism, an old fogey being old (Trina is 50 for the better part of the book), the way even Trina acknowledges a lot of the good the Seep does but no one is willing to seriously discuss what's being lost, the way it has so quickly and totally seeped into every aspect of life on Earth so that those who choose to live without it are relegated to an isolated, ostracized community roundly mocked by everyone else.

However, while the book starts off with something to say about Trina feeling lost, about being unwilling to give everything up to the Seep, it peters out at the end without anything really to say about Trina's society (and by extension, our own). It floats around the idea that friction in our lives is good--various characters admit, under pressure, that they miss some of the more difficult aspects of life before the Seep, perhaps the sense that accomplishments meant more when you really had to work for them. Now everyone does whatever they want and it's easy, everything's easy. It hints that Trina, who is trans, has some resentment about how easily people are able to modify their bodies now with the Seep--friends walk around with angel wings, cat ears, change gender by day of the week--while Trina had to fight so hard to become who she is and feels that struggle is part of what made her who she is. It makes salient points that part of freedom is the freedom to chose wrong (the Seep is fixated on keeping humans from any unhealthy behaviors, and Trina longs for the days when she could have a drink without the overwhelming sense of alien disapproval, or the chance to grieve as she wishes to without someone trying to fix it for her). It implies that immortality takes some of the meaning out of life, because part of what makes our experiences meaningful is knowing that we only have so much time for them.

Yet the climax lacks a follow-through to these premises, in my view. When a book starts off with such strong opinions, I expect it to conclude with a solution, a criticism, a proposal...something. But here, Trina makes her speech to the Seep about why each person's individual experience shapes them and why we're all unique, but she also returns to the fold of the same community she left before, which, I think, substantially failed her in her grief for her lost wife, and partakes in the social rituals they had been demanding of her. Her end feelings on the Seep aren't even clear. She just sort of...goes on with life as she was doing before her wife's departure. Which would be perfectly fine if the story was only about grief, but this one felt like it was about a lot more than that.

I still think The Seep raises interesting, and very relevant in today's world, points, but I wish it did more with them in the end. However, the book is quite short, so I do still think it's worth the read.

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author: p

title. god loves you, but not enough to save you
fandom. iwtv/tvl
character. lestat de lioncourt
song. "sun bleached flies" by ethel cain

what i wouldn't give to be in church this sunday; listening to the choir, so heartfelt, all singing: "god loves you, but not enough to save you." lestat character study vidlet. (spoilers for s3 trailers/promos.)

dw | youtube

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tv: iwtv

Peter Plymley's Letters And Selected Essays by Sydney Smith

Primary source. And polemic. Smith writing on the treatment of Ireland and the laws against Catholics, and reviews of books on Ireland. Sometimes very skillfully:

"When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool."

It is useful as a view of the issues -- one notes he heartily assures everyone he shares their views of the terribleness of the Catholic Church -- and of the era in general. He quotes one author, who discusses how one explanation of Ireland's backwardness was its elective kings, but points out that Poland also suffered horribly from the kingship being elective but wasn't so backward. Ah, the views one wants to research, sometimes.

Title: Victim
Fandom: Interview with the Vampire
Music: "Caroline's a Victim" by Kate Nash
Pairing/Characters: Louis-centric, Louis/Lestat, Louis/Armand, Louis & Claudia
Summary: Basically she likes killers

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

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tv: iwtv

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.)

–

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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title. venus, planet of love
fandom. iwtv/tvl
character. lestat de lioncourt
song. "nobody" by mitski

"venus, planet of love, was destroyed by global warming." s3 lestat vidlet.

dw | youtube

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tv: iwtv

small_fandoms has finished up its annual Drabblethon, with more than 140 drabbles posted.

The community is open all year for any sort of creations for small, tiny, and dead fandoms. Post your stories, art, icons, meta, and everything else.

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fandom_general

What are your planned crowdfunding projects for March? What did you accomplish during February?

The March

crowdfunding Creative Jam will run Saturday 14-Sunday 15 with a theme of "Opportunity."

Current Mood: busy

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recurring posts

youtuberecs is a simple, casual community for posting Youtube recommendations! It's meant to be easy peasy—you can leave reviews or commentary about your recs or just drop the embed and go!

We also now also have a nice backlog of video recs to browse, all organized within our tag system. ♥

Current Mood: working

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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Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox

A history/biography.

( Read more... )

Fandoms: 9-1-1: Lone Star, Beauty and the Beast, Bridgerton, Daredevil, Ransom Canyon, Shadowhunters, She-Hulk, Siren, Stargirl, Stitchers, Supergirl, The Leftovers, The Order, The Witcher, Vikings: Valhalla, Walker

rest HERE @

mundodefieras

I deleted my newly made Instagram account. I realized how much of a black hole this social media platform has become, just like X, Facebook, Tik Tok, and others, and that I really don't need it to boost my artwork or anything in particular whatsoever.

It makes me sick how many mind-rotting social media things are out there, and how it feels like you're supposed to be in every single one of them to even "exist."

I also have gained a new level of disgust with furry rick griffin in drawing smut of Fox and King having anal intercourse. It saddens me how little respect he has for his creations.

Title: Where Love Goes
Fandom: ClaireBell
Music: Where Love Goes by Kai Mata
Summary: 'this could be the start of something special'
Notes: Premiered at Escapade 36!

AO3 | bsky | DW | tumblr | YouTube

The Tea Party

AO3 downtime info + reflection post

Books

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 5

Runoff Vote for the Patron category of the 2026 Rose & Bay Awards

Swedish newspaper article

Recent Reading: Earthlings

Recent Reading: The Seep

vid. iwtv/tvl | god loves you, but not enough to save you

Peter Plymley's Letters And Selected Essays

New Vid: Victim (IWtV)

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

vid. iwtv/tvl | venus, planet of love

Small Fandoms!

March Monthly Post

Youtuberecs

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

Hunting the Falcon

multifandom icons.

Stuff

New Vid: Where Love Goes | ClaireBell

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