Check In: Day 12
Mar. 12th, 2026 05:47 pmDoes anyone have writing plans for the weekend? Do you use other art forms for brainstorming or motivating your writing (art, fan mixes, editing)?


| Physical imperfections | Pink (Love it, Loathe it, Embrace it, Reject it) | Dancing and Singing | Steel | Powerful |
| Tornados | Dissociation / Multiple Personalities | Justice | Complementary Colours (Opposite on the Colour Wheel) | Birth / Beginnings |
| Unnecessary Force | Sirocco | Wild Card | Flesh and Bone | Illness |
| Vicious | Weather | Echoes | Afternoon | Blood |
| Soft | Neutral Colours | Magnificent | Lost Limbs | Dusk |

Naturally, from various angles of my interests, I am going to click on a link like this, no? Pornucopia: The World’s Largest Collection of Smut, and You Can’t See It.
And while I have a certain historianly interest in the contents of the collection (though I was having a conversation with somebody a little while ago and we reckoned we would love to take a gander at Antony Comstock's Private Cupboard, because a leading smuthound must have accumulated a really outstanding filth collection, hmmmm?)
- I was going to myself with my archivist hat on, OMG, this is so many problems - there must be HUGE conservation issues, I just hope none of those porno movies are on nitrate film, but I do not think the smart money would be betting on it, and a lot of those relics are on degrading media even if they're not going to spontaneously combust. Some of them I wonder if there are actually means of playing them still.
(Tangentially I mention my wince when hearing thrilled younger scholar recount how they had listened to a 78 rpm recording in a sound archive, and I was, really???)
Then it sounds as though they are Not Keeping Up With Basic Processing ('embarrassed about the unorganized conditions', heh) which sounds as though ambitious collecting agenda has totally outrun capacity of institution to keep on top of it (should I add 'fnar fnar, nudge wink' at this point???).
Plus on the access thing and being not entirely welcoming to visitors, while - perhaps - historically collections like The Private Case (in the BL), L'Enfer (Bibliotheque Nationale), etc, were only made available to selected readers for fear of contaminating the public, in more recent days this is because this material is particularly vulnerable to to being mutilated - pages torn out or defaced, etc - which is why if you want to consult Cup. classification material in the BL you have to do so under the eye of the Librarian's Desk.
I suspect also in play is a probably legit fear of persons presenting themselves as SRS Scholars who once they are in will go BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES on the place ('wary about divulging warehouse locations', totally figures).
Over here, being niche.

When you’re trying to get folks excited about their own digital rights, a lot will depend on the examples you give them to understand the fight. As the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn certainly has examples. But which ones to choose? In this Big Idea for Privacy’s Defender, Cohn offers up her choices and explains why they matter.
CINDY COHN:
Do we have the right to have a private conversation online?
In this age of constant, pervasive surveillance, both government and corporate, how do you get people to believe that they can and should have that right?
And how do you show that safeguarding privacy is part of safeguarding a free, open and democratic society?
In Privacy’s Defender, my Big Idea is that by telling some rollicking stories about my three big fights for digital privacy over the past 30 years, I might inspire people not only to understand why privacy matters, but to actually start fighting for it themselves.
The challenge was different for each of the three stories I told. The first one, about cryptography, was in many ways the easiest, since it had a pretty straightforward narrative. Before the beginning of the broad public internet, in the early 1990s, I led a ragtag bunch of hackers and lawyers who sued to fight a federal law that treated encryption – specifically “software with the capability of maintaining secrecy” – as a weapon. We argued that code is speech and put together a case based on the First Amendment. By pulling in help from academics, scientists, companies and others, and by the grace of several women judges who were willing to listen to us in spite of the government’s national security claims on the other side, we won.
Many other stories from the early public internet are about men and the products they built. This one is different: It tells how some scruffy underdogs beat the national security infrastructure and brought all of us the promise of a more secure internet. But it’s otherwise kind of a hero’s tale with a dramatic ending when I was called to DC to negotiate the government’s surrender.
The second and third stories don’t end in such clean wins, which perhaps makes them more typical of how actual change happens when you are up against the government.
The second set of stories are about the cases we brought against the National Security Agency’s mass spying, starting after the New York Times revealed in late 2005 that the government was spying on Americans on our home soil. The fight was pushed forward by a whistleblower named Mark Klein who literally knocked on our front door at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in early 2006 with details of how the NSA was tapping into the internet’s backbone at key junctures, including in a secret room in an AT&T building in downtown San Francisco. This is the most cloak-and-dagger of the stories, made possible both by Mark’s courage and that of Edward Snowden, who revealed even more about the NSA spying in 2013 because he was angry at watching the government lie repeatedly to the American people, including before Congress.
As a result, Congress rushed in to protect… the phone companies, killing our first lawsuit. Later, after Snowden’s revelations, lawmakers passed some reforms to some of the programs we had sought to stop, but not nearly enough. In the end, the Supreme Court supported the government’s argument that – even though the whole world knew about the NSA spying and that it relied on access to information collected and handled by major telephone companies – identifying which company participated would violate the state secrets privilege. But we had dramatically shifted how the government did mass spying: ending two of the three programs we had sued over, scaling back the third, and providing far more public information about what the government was doing. In writing my book, I wanted to tell the truth about the progress we made without sugarcoating that we had not succeeded at nearly the scale that we did in the cryptography fights.
The third set of cases had a similar trajectory – an early win in the courts and some reform in Congress but ultimately not enough. These were the “Alphabet Cases” – so named because we couldn’t even name our clients publicly, assigning the cases letters instead – that we brought from 2011 through 2022 to scale back a kind of governmental subpoena called National Security Letters (NSLs), which let the FBI require companies to provide metadata about their customers but gagged them from ever telling anyone what had happened.
Though an appellate court ultimately sided with the government, we did succeed in helping our clients participate in the public debate and use their own experiences as evidence to counter the government’s misleading assertions. We had increased the procedural protections for those receiving NSLs, including clearing the way to challenge them with standards that were not quite as stacked against them. And we had helped create a path for corporate transparency reports that at least gave some information to the public about how often these controversial tools were being used.
I wanted this book to bring readers with me into the actual work, the bumpy ride, the incremental progress of protecting privacy, especially in the courts, in hope that people will think about how they too can join the fight. What we worried about in the 1990s, and fought to prevent in the 2000s and 2010s, seems closer than ever: that surveillance becomes the handmaiden of authoritarianism. But even in our troubled times, I’m confident that we are not powerless and we can prevail if we are patient, smart, thoughtful and work together. The Big Idea is that privacy is not just a coat of anonymity that you throw on before doing something embarrassing – it’s a check against unbridled government power. And as it turns out, the actual work of protecting that privacy can make for a fun, exciting and surprising life.
Privacy’s Defender: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
Author socials: Website
Izuku and Katsuki just want to live together with Shoto and keep their friends and family safe. But when they keep being sent to Alternate Universes every time they die, will they ever find a universe where they can live with the people they care about?
Words: 3841, Chapters: 3/?, Language: English
Class 1A is now in their second year of UA and Denki has had a rough couple of months. They have to settle into their new foster home and settle into their new relationship.
Words: 5679, Chapters: 3/?, Language: English

Are you interested in helping keep OTW news post spaces a welcoming and safe space for engagement? Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish, and want to help us better reply to users all around the world? Are you a skilled organizer who enjoys working in a team? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!
We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:
We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.
All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.
If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.
News Post Moderation is a Communications subcommittee that is responsible for moderating comments on AO3 and OTW News Posts as well as liaising with other OTW committees to respond to individual commenters as needed.
News Post Moderators freeze, hide, or disallow comments that do not comply with our News Post Moderation Policy. We approve comments that do comply, respond to user questions and concerns, and communicate with other OTW committees so that users can receive helpful, accurate answers.
You must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. We are looking for volunteers who can maintain a consistent level of work, ask for help and collaborate both inside the team and with other committees, and make fair and objective decisions about what comments to moderate.
Applications are due 18 March 2026 or after 60 applications
Apply for News Post Moderator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.
Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish, and want to help us better communicate with AO3 users all over the world?
User Response Translation (URT) volunteers help AO3 committees to correspond with users in other languages. URT translators will assist the Policy & Abuse and Support committees by translating correspondence between these committees and AO3 users into specific languages. URT does not translate AO3 or OTW site pages, news posts, or fanworks.
We are looking for volunteers who are at least 18 years old and fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish. Applicants will be asked to translate and beta (edit) short text samples as part of the selection process.
Applications are due 18 March 2026
Apply for User Response Translation Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.
Are you a skilled organizer who enjoys working in a team, liaising with people, working with documentation and texts, and making sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes?
The Translation committee is currently recruiting Volunteer Managers. Volunteer Managers coordinate localization efforts across the OTW: the translation of site pages, news posts, AO3 FAQs, AO3 Support and Policy & Abuse tickets, and any inquiries that reach other committees in languages they can't translate themselves.
While translators do the actual text translation and editing, volunteer managers support them by keeping track of priorities, deadlines, and pending tasks; assigning work; talking to and working with other committees to coordinate the translation of their content; uploading translated documents; documenting volunteer training, procedures, and workflows; checking in and actioning translators' feedback; and many other tasks involved in managing a wide, diverse and very active volunteer pool.
If you'd like to find out more about the work before applying, feel free to send your questions to translation@transformativeworks.org! Please note that you must be over 18 years of age to apply for this role.
Applications are due 18 March 2026
Apply for Translation Volunteer Manager at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

A lot has been going on at the Archive of Our Own (AO3) lately! In January, we celebrated 10 million registered users on AO3. February was all about International Fanworks Day, which we celebrated with several events, culminating in our 30-hour chat and games party over on Discord. And now, we've hit another milestone: 17 million fanworks on AO3!
With this many amazing fanworks, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to remember your favorites. This is why we have bookmarks on AO3! Bookmarks are a useful tool to save fanworks for re-reading whenever the mood strikes, or to recommend a work to other users.
And did you know that not only can you bookmark works posted on AO3, but also external fanworks you want to remember? To bookmark an external work, go to your Dashboard, and then to the "Bookmarks" section. In the upper right corner, there should be a button called "Bookmark External Work". For more information on bookmarks, check out our Bookmarks FAQ!
As always, we are beyond grateful for each and every one of you who contributes their free time, love, and effort to AO3, and helps us grow and flourish! We're excited to see what other achievements we'll celebrate together this year.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

On February 15, Communications coordinated many International Fanworks Day (IFD) activities, including a Feedback Fest highlighting fanwork recommendations, an editing challenge in conjunction with Fanlore, and an IFD Discord server with games and chatting. Additionally, Translation helped make IFD materials available in 22 languages. Thank you to everyone who joined us in celebrating!
In February, we celebrated AO3 reaching 10 million registered users! \o/
Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) focused on some important upgrades and bug fixes, including upgrading to Ruby on Rails 8 and improving the collection revealing process. They also published release notes for December's code changes.
AO3 Documentation began their biannual review of user-facing documentation.
In the past month, Open Doors signed five new agreements with moderators to import their archives to AO3! Fandoms include Highlander, The Magnificent Seven, My Chemical Romance, and others. They also completed the import of Slashknot, a Slipknot (band) fanfiction and fanart archive.
In January, Support received 3,811 tickets, while Policy & Abuse (PAC) received 7,972 tickets. User Response Translation completed 12 requests from PAC and 37 requests from Support. PAC continues to work closely with AD&T and Systems to combat spam that users have been experiencing across the site.
Tag Wrangling announced 28 new "No Fandom" canonical tags for February. In January, they wrangled over 648,000 tags, or around 1,400 tags per wrangling volunteer.
Fanlore ran a Femslash February monthly editing challenge! Systems also helped upgrade Fanlore to a new version of MediaWiki.
In February, Legal had one of their volunteers participate in a briefing for staffers in the U.S. Legislature to gain a deeper understanding of copyright fair use. Elsewhere, Legal answered a number of questions internally and from users.
TWC is preparing their March 2026 issue on "Gaming Fandom" for publication. They also completed an update of TWC's editorial board as part of their ongoing work to expand TWC's scope, diversify their discipline in terms of historically marginalized fans and scholars, make the journal more international in scope, and increase multimodal approaches.
Board has concluded all Board-committee check-ins and is reviewing key themes across the organization. They also voted to approve an interpretative rule of one bylaw to better accommodate any future Board members with hearing disabilities.
Board Assistants Team continued work on various projects, including revamping the OTW Board Discord and researching projects on volunteer retention, public meeting best practices, and volunteer mental health.
Organizational Culture Roadmap continued work on the OTW Code of Conduct update project by finishing a summary of internal survey results and adjusting Code of Conduct drafts based on recommendations from an external HR firm. The OTW Crisis Management Plan has been finalised and approved by the Board.
In February, Volunteers & Recruiting ran recruitment for seven roles across four committees and one workgroup.
From January 23 to February 21, Volunteers & Recruiting received 182 new requests and completed 295, leaving them with 61 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below). As of February 21, 2026, the OTW has 985 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Communications Volunteers: 3 Social Media Moderators
New Translation Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Manager and 1 Translator
New Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: corr and peaandsea (Chair Assistants) and 1 Volunteer
Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: Elizabeth Wiltshire (Organizational Culture Roadmap Head) and 1 Elections Chair
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: 1 Editor
Departing Communications Volunteers: Abby (Social Media Moderator) and 2 Weibo Moderators
Departing Elections Volunteers: 1 Voting Process Architect
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Mei and 2 other Import Assistants, and 1 Chair Assistant
Departing Support Volunteers: Mily and RRHand (Volunteers)
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Indes, lifeisyetfair, PinkBrain, plantpun, and 14 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Idiosincrasy (Volunteer Manager and Translator), 3 Volunteer Managers, and 1 Translator
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: corr, peaandsea, and 1 other Senior Volunteer; and 2 Volunteers
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.