akk | Reading

Do you like making icons, gifs, or art in general? Enjoy customizing your online space? Want a chance to earn Dreamwidth paid time, and maybe even contribute to the site while you're at it?

Come check out

moodthemeinayear! If you make a mood theme, any mood theme at all, for personal or public use, you can earn Dreamwidth points, Dreamwidth's on-site currency—and you'll get bonus points if you make a mood theme theme that can be added to Dreamwidth as an official choice for everyone! Find out all the nitty-gritty details over here.

Don't know what a mood theme is? Check out this post for more information! (Shortest version: It's like a sticker you add to the end of a post to indicate the mood you're in.)

Worried that you're too late to join in this year? No need! In addition to the full 132 mood track that starts on January, Mood Theme in a Year runs several shorter tracks throughout the year, including an 18 mood track that lasts only six weeks—and which also just restarted on Thursday! That said, the community mood theme schedule is also just a suggestion for anyone who wants the extra structure; there area also bingo cards, Mood Theme in a Month calendars, or you can check the tags and create everything that's listed for the first week of a scheduled Part at a time. And that's just if you want to take a more scheduled approach!

Drop on by

moodthemeinayear and join the fun!

goals_on_dw is a community for people who like goals and goal setting. A key focus is New Year's resolutions, that being among the most popular contexts for such activities. Although the most common time is January 1, "new year" can also refer to other calendars or cultures, whatever works for you. Alternatively, just pick a time that works for you and go for it. You can introduce yourself or make new friends here.

We talk about different goal systems, pros and cons of resolutions, arts and crafts for tracking goals, human psychology, and more. You can share your resolutions or other goals. There are weekly check-in posts in January, and monthly ones in the rest of the year, for folks to talk about their accomplishments. December-January is the most active period, and it starts ramping up in November as lots of people begin thinking about their goals for the next year.

2026 Free Printable Calendars, Planners, and More is the guide post for this years goal-setting activities. For more details on relevant topics, see "Things You Can Talk About Here."

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

Posted by an

https://www.transformativeworks.org/five-things-linwelin-said/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=291948

Every 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 Linwëlin, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangler on the Tag Wrangling committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I wrangle tags for several smaller fandoms and I help with translating tags from Spanish to English so they can be wrangled. I mostly pick up fandoms to wrangle that have a majority of Spanish tags.

I think the most interesting part of translating tags is finding the different meanings of words in different regional dialects other than my own español rioplatense. It’s fascinating to me how within the same language a word can have a ton of different meanings, or the same concept can be named a ton of different ways. Look up all the ways you can say ‘popcorn’ in Spanish and you’ll see what I mean!

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

It all depends on my energy and pain levels, but I usually break it up into smaller chunks of time (just an hour or two at a time) as often as possible because that’s what I can usually manage best.

Sometimes, though, I get in The Zone™ and I might only realise it’s been eight hours when my partner calls me for dinner!

What made you decide to volunteer?

I joined fandom later in life than most others I know, but I found the community just in time—it’s helped me through some of the roughest moments in my life. It’s provided an escape, a way to express my creativity when all my other hobbies were inaccessible to me.

I don’t have disposable income to donate, but I do have spare time, and I wanted to give back somehow to this community that has given me (and many others) so much. When I saw the call for Spanish-speaking volunteers back then, I decided to give it a shot!

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Managing my own time and energy without burning myself out is the hardest part. I’m disabled, and my chronic pain (along with the medication I take and the side effects of it all) means that I have to be very careful about pacing myself if I don’t want to crash and burn.

I would like to spend a lot more time wrangling than what I can feasibly (and sustainably) do on an average week, but my health has highs and lows. Sometimes I can sit down for eight hours and have a blast translating and shovelling a ton of tags, and sometimes I can only sit for half an hour and only manage to do one or two tags. Sometimes I’ll only be able to do the bare minimum for a couple of weeks, and then I’ll bounce back.

The biggest challenge is accepting that not every day will be a satisfying marathon of productivity and efficiency, give myself some grace, and try to work with my limitations, not against them. I end up achieving a lot more when I manage that.

I mention all this because I was a bit afraid when I applied that my disability would make it impossible to keep up with the commitment of volunteering, but I’ve found that not only can I, but I enjoy it immensely. I’ve found community and support within the OTW, and personally I’ve never felt alone or lacking in help and resources. I hope this gives a new perspective to someone reading this who might be on the fence about it!

What fannish things do you like to do?

I read a lot of fic, and fandom is my main creative outlet, especially on hard days. I love writing, and lately I’ve been listening to and learning how to record podfic as well. I like to participate in drabble writing events, sprints, and other mostly-small challenges.

I’m also trying to learn how to draw! I have a lot of scenes I’ve pictured in my mind and I hope to someday be able to bring them out into the real world.

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.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/five-things-linwelin-said/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=291948

newcomers is a community for people who are just getting started on Dreamwidth, in the tradition of

twitter_refugees and

reddit_refugees. This community supports former users of other platforms who are moving to Dreamwidth because their previous platform has become untenable or has closed. As such, it will increase activity with each wave of new users, in hopes of helping them get settled in Dreamwidth so they want to stick around. It also serves previous users returning after a long hiatus, people who want to do more with a Dreamwidth blog that was only intermittent, or anyone else who wants help connecting and figuring out how to use this venue.

The community is highly active at present because Pillowfort is closing. Many posts are appearing to help Pillowfort users who are migrating to DW.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

https://xkcd.com/3315/

https://xkcd.com/3315/

I'm a newcomer to Dreamwidth and am still getting my footing, but I made a community for Solo TTRPGs - these are tabletop role-playing games that are made for one player, or solo-play rulesets for group play games like D&D and Pathfinder. If you don't have the time for a group ttrpg, solo play games can help scratch that itch. There's a huge variety of game styles and settings, and many are easily accessible via print & play.

Learn more by visiting the Solo TTRPG Community. :)

Posted by Nancy Hartunian

https://savage.love/after-action-report/2026/10/23/after-action-report-52/

https://savage.love/?p=12760

Deep in rural Sweden, the tantric kinksters are getting FREAKY. At the “Sexsibility Festival” a 5-day erotic gathering where you can explore tantra, contact improv, and eye gazing along with impact play workshops, there’s a lot to do and see. But everybody’s still gotta eat, right? Enter Pearse, who cooked breakfast for over 500 participants. … Read More »

The post After Action Report #52 appeared first on Dan Savage.

https://savage.love/after-action-report/2026/10/23/after-action-report-52/

https://savage.love/?p=12760

Kodansha is back for a second round this year with the Blue Lock: The Perfect Shot bundle. I'm going to go ahead and quote HumbleBundle's description for this one:

When Japan’s national football team ranked low at the 2018 World Cup, they knew something needed to be done. Enter Yoichi Isagi, the hero of Blue Lock, Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura’s shonen manga series about a cutthroat football training program designed to create the best striker in the world! Now, you can get all currently published digital volumes of Blue Lock in one bundle, including volumes of the main series up to #38, redemption code for #39 on kodansha.us, and seven volumes of prequel miniseries Episode Nagi by Kota Sannomiya, Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura! Dive into a manga series perfect for football fans and shonen readers alike! Get these manga ebooks now at the price of your choosing, and support BINC with your purchase!

The full bundle is 45 volumes for $30, but you can get smaller bundles for lesser amounts.

This bundle supports Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which has helped bookstore and comic book store employees and owners who encounter unexpected financial crises. The Binc Foundation works to keep book people in their homes, in their jobs, and with their families – stabilizing the brick and mortar bookstore community. With some bundles, you can pick which charity you want your donation to go to, but that doesn't seem to be the case with this one. If you scroll down on the right hand side of the Humble Bundle page, you can also find an area where you can adjust how much of your purchase goes to which organization (the charity, the publisher, and Humble Bundle, respectively), with a minimum mandatory amount to Humble Bundle as the host.

With most manga ebook volumes costing around $7 USD (sometimes fifty cents less, sometimes a few dollars more), five volumes alone would justify the cost of the bundle—and the total bundle has 45 volumes! That's about sixty-seven cents per tankoubon.

This bundle will end in about three weeks.

( You're about to view content that the poster has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fancrafts/fics/fanarts/podfics/fanvids/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here

Posted by an

https://www.transformativeworks.org/updates-to-no-fandom-additional-tags-october-2026/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=291942

AO3 Tag Wranglers continue our processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don’t belong to any particular fandom (also known as “No Fandom” tags). This post overviews some of these upcoming changes.

In this round of updates, we continued to adjust existing canonical “No Fandom” tags to add or remove new subtag and metatag relationships. We also continued to streamline creating new canonical tags, prioritizing more straightforward updates which would have less discussion compared to renaming current canonical tags or creating new canonical tags which touch on more complex topics. This method also reviews new tags on a regular basis, so check back on AO3 News for periodic “No Fandom” tag announcements.

None of these updates change the tags users have added to works. If a user-created tag is considered to have the same meaning as a new canonical, it will be made a synonym of one of these newly created canonical tags, and works with that user-created tag will appear when the canonical tag is selected.

In short, these changes only affect which tags appear in AO3’s auto-complete and filters. You can and should continue to tag your works however you prefer.

New Canonicals

The following concepts have been made new canonical tags:

Acts of Service
Acts of Service as a Love Language
Bickering as a Love Language
Gift Giving as a Love Language
Making Tea as a Love Language
Music as a Love Language
Physical Touch
Physical Touch as a Love Language
Spending Quality Time Together
Spending Quality Time Together as a Love Language
Words of Affirmation
Words of Affirmation as a Love Language
Halloween Fluff
Halloween Parties
Pumpkin Patches & Farms
Armpits
Armpit Hair
Armpit Licking
Canon-Typical Body Horror
Canon-Typical Horror
Existential Horror
Eye Horror
Folk Horror
Gothic Horror
Horror Comedy
Horror Movies
Medical Horror
Mild Body Horror
Religious Horror
Slasher Horror
Space Horror
Supernatural Horror
Surreal Horror
Jumpscares
Scary Stories
Otome Games
Yumeshipping | Self-Shipping

Subtag/Metatag Revisions

Additionally, we continued to adjust existing canonical tags to add or remove new subtag and metatag relationships, which help users find related content and filter in/out content as they browse works on AO3.

Consensual Possession is now a subtag of Consensual and Possession
No Use of Y/N for Reader-Insert is now a subtag of Reader-Insert
Pyromania has been removed as a subtag from Psychopathology & Sociopathy
Serial Killers has been removed as a subtag from Psychopathology & Sociopathy

In Conclusion

While some of these tags may be tags and concepts you’re intimately familiar with, others may be concepts you’ve never heard of before. Fortunately, our fellow OTW volunteers at Fanlore may be able to help! As you may have seen in the comments sections of previous posts, Fanlore is a fantastic resource for learning more about these common fandom concepts, and about the history and lore of fandom in general. For the curious, here’s a quick look at a few articles about concepts related to this month’s new canonical tags:

While we won’t be announcing every change we make to No Fandom canonical tags, you can expect similar updates in the future about tags we believe will most affect users. If you’re interested in the changes we’ll be making, you can continue to check AO3 News or follow us on Bluesky @wranglers.archiveofourown.org or Tumblr @ao3org for future announcements.

You can also read previous updates on “No Fandom” tags as well as other wrangling updates, linked below:

For more information about AO3’s tag system, check out our Tags FAQ.

In addition to providing technical help, AO3 Support also handles requests related to how tags are sorted and connected. If you have questions about specific tags, which were first used over a month ago and are unrelated to any of the new canonical tags listed above, please contact Support instead of leaving a comment on this post.

Please keep in mind that discussions about what tags to canonize and what format they should take are ongoing. As a result, not all related concepts will be canonized at the same time. This does not mean that related or similar concepts will not be canonized in the future or that we have chosen to canonize one specific concept in lieu of another, simply that we likely either haven’t gotten to that related concept yet or that it needs further discussion and will take a bit longer for us to canonize it as a result. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Lastly, we’re still working on implementing changes and connecting relevant user-created tags to these new canonicals, so it’ll be some time before these updates are complete. 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 three months from now to give us adequate time to do so.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/updates-to-no-fandom-additional-tags-october-2026/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=291942

The Art of Games is a community to celebrate the hidden art in video games. Share your favourite screenshots, landscapes, and details. Gifs/screenshot edits are welcome!
Rules are here.

Ahoy there, adventure gamers!

monkeyisland is a community for the beloved classic game series Monkey Island, featuring the comedic swashbuckling adventures of the improbably-named Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™. Anything about Monkey Island is fair game: your own fanworks (art, fic, videos, games, music, cosplay, memes/silliness, whatever), recs of others' fanworks, livestreams/let's-plays, discussions, news and articles, tips for messing about in the game resources or scripting, requests for hints, screenshots, all that good stuff. If Monkey Island is your ~~jam~~ ~~rum~~ rum and jam (it's an old pirate favorite, everybody knows that), then come on over and have a grog.

I noticed that there was no overarching community on Dreamwidth catered towards aspec users (that I know of—although there are a couple of neat ones focusing on different aspec identities) So I made one! It's

aspec_community . Technically I created it as a continuation of the community I made on Pillowfort, but it's open to any Dreamwidth users who want to join :)

Current Mood: determined

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/27027393-sound-bites-for-the-spooky-month

So...

A science journalist in California whom I supplied with a quote before surfaced again. As a Halloween month entry, he was ginning up an article of assorted science and science fiction folks describing their "most unsettling reads", I presumed of nonfiction, though actually he left that open. My quote is at the end of the article...

https://nautil.us/the-most-unsettling...

Much of my science reading is of biology, paleontology, astronomy, geology, and other deep-time subjects that put distressing current human events into perspective as, as one of my characters once put it, "a faint smear on the surface of a speck". Which I find the opposite of unsettling, more calming. But with a little thought, I was able to come up with an older candidate book.

(This Robert Serling should not be confused with Rod Serling the creator of The Twilight Zone TV show, another staple of my childhood -- speaking of unsettling things. Two different dudes.)

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on October, 21

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/27027393-sound-bites-for-the-spooky-month

https://xkcd.com/3314/

Other numbers are largely unaffected, but anyone using '4' for their certificate key is urged to upgrade to '5'.

https://xkcd.com/3314/

Posted by therealmorticia

https://www.transformativeworks.org/translated-ao3-notification-emails/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=290215

For many years, our coders and translation volunteers have been working to internationalize AO3. Today, we are excited to announce that registered users will now be able to receive notification emails from us in another language! If you are logged in to your AO3 account, you can go to your Preferences page and choose the locale that we will use when sending you emails, such as kudos or subscription notifications.

We are starting off by enabling the option to receive notification emails in Simplified Chinese (中文（简体）). After we are sure that the new preference is working correctly and the translated emails are going out smoothly, other languages will be enabled – hopefully very soon!

Note that we are not translating user-created content, such as fanworks or comments. For example, in a translated kudos email, the subject “You’ve got kudos!” and the number of guests who left kudos will be translated. However, the list of usernames and the titles of your works will remain in their original languages.

When will my language be available?

Simplified Chinese (中文（简体）) is currently the only available language, because we wanted to focus on enabling the locale preference. More languages will be made available once we’ve confirmed that the new preference is working correctly. This staggered rollout allows us to get the completed translations to you as soon as possible, instead of delaying them until everything is fully coded, tested, and translated.

Why are some emails still in English after I select a locale?

AO3 has over 30 different types of emails, but not all of them are translated yet. Instead, we are focusing on the most common emails, as well as some emails that are needed for technical or security reasons. As translations for more emails become available over time, we will start sending out the translated versions based on the locale you’ve chosen instead of the default, English text. This means that some emails may remain in English for some time, or be partially in English, even after you select a different locale in your preferences. Enabling a language as soon as the most used emails are translated helps get translations to you faster.

Additionally, we can’t send translated emails to guests, such as notifications for replies to comments you left without logging in.

Can I volunteer to translate emails in my language?

Yes! The Translation committee accepts translator applications year-round, and would love to hear from you, whether you’d like to join an existing language team, or pioneer a team for a language we don’t cover yet! Please note that our translators work on a variety of content, including AO3 email localization, FAQs, news posts, and other documents, and if you pass our selection process, you’ll receive several different types of tasks to work on. If you enjoy working in a team and would like to help make even more content available in your language, please get in touch with Translation!

Why isn’t the rest of the site translated?

We chose to translate notification emails first, because they are relatively self-contained and thus simpler to translate and technically implement compared to the full website interface. This has allowed us to use the emails to develop coding standards and translation processes which we can now utilize for the interface. We’re already making progress on this, but we can’t promise anything yet.

If you have experience with web application development, especially in Ruby on Rails and internationalization, you can become a code contributor to help us further this and other initiatives.

I spotted an incorrect translation, how can I tell you about it?

Please contact Translation with the following information, and they will review your suggestion.

the subject line of the email notification
a full quote of the text that you believe is incorrect
and an explanation of what you think it should be changed to and why

We’re excited to move forward with this important work to make AO3 more accessible to our international user base, and we look forward to adding more languages, as well as internationalizing the main website interface, in the future!

https://www.transformativeworks.org/translated-ao3-notification-emails/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=290215

So, trying to find a way to make things more manageable I have set up my first community here on Dreamwidth:

Our Modern Times

This is so current events (politics, wars, scandals etc.) that I would have covered back on Pillowfort in a separate community to avoid causing anxiety or triggers for folks that are have issues can avoid such in my own personal journal.

As usual, I have a Liberal, LGBTQIA+ positive and anti-Republican anti-Fascist anti-genocide and Anti-AI Authoritarians tendency on what I cover, post and discuss. I welcome others with like interests that want to join the community (it's set to open at present) but you can also choose to not join if its likely to cause you anxiety, distress or you just want to ignore these things right now.

I mostly post links to Youtube videos, articles from legitimate sources (not the Trumpie controlled news outlets but respected professional journals, newspapers, and the occasional commentator that I consider reliable in their analysis of things).

I post to inform, discuss what is being said to the content, and what folks can share of their own views and other useful material they may have come across.

Current Location: Cambridge

Posted by Nancy Hartunian

https://savage.love/lovecast/2026/10/20/12755/

https://savage.love/?p=12755

A 25 year-old queer, plus-size woman has never been in a relationship or had sex. Both her size and virginity make it hard to connect with people through the apps. How can she break through these barriers and get some lovin’ already? A married woman for 18 years with kids is sick to death of … Read More »

The post Help a Cuckquean Out? appeared first on Dan Savage.

https://savage.love/lovecast/2026/10/20/12755/

https://savage.love/?p=12755

Posted by Dan Savage

https://savage.love/savagelove/2026/10/20/shut-it/

https://savage.love/?p=12764

I think I’ve developed a crush on my wife’s ex. I’m in my forties and my wife is older than me. We’ve been together for fifteen years. We are both women. Before we dated each other, we dated men exclusively. She had told me a lot about her ex before me. They were together for … Read More »

The post Shut It appeared first on Dan Savage.