October round up (26,072 words, 10 works)
Oct. 31st, 2025 09:22 pm( Shared Projects )
Single fics, by fandom, by posting date (related fandoms may be organized by chronology)
( Single fics )
In October, we continued our internationalization efforts to make AO3’s interface and emails translatable. We also worked on usability improvements to a variety of site features, including clarified buttons for posting and editing works, improved password reset messages and forms, and more consistent redirects when logging in or out. Alongside these updates, we overhauled exchange participants’ Assignments pages and smoothed out other smaller issues across the site.
Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors Cole Kelling, Cubostar, John Pork, and Tani!
On October 1, we deployed improvements around password changes and resets. We also made some other small security fixes all around the site.
On October 3, we upgraded to Ruby 3.4 and it all went smoothly! Except that our release script skipped a version number again, but that’s a very minor problem for a major upgrade.
On October 9, we overhauled the page where a user’s challenge assignments are listed to make it easier to find incomplete assignments. We also fixed some style issues and did a lot of work for our ongoing project to internationalize the entire site!
On October 13, we changed the buttons for posting, previewing, and editing a work to have clearer names and behave more consistently. We also fixed a number of small bugs.
On October 17, we deployed a large refactoring of how we handle redirects back to pages that you came from, which made redirects after logging in and out much more reliable and also fixed some redirect-related 500 errors when accessing AO3 through alternative URLs.
On October 20, we made several internationalization-related email updates and released a variety of smaller fixes.
Dept of, what will they think of next (some of this is, as I remarked elsewhere, resuscitating Ye Good Ol' Victorian Quackerie - though, as we concurred, VIBRATORS ARE NOT VICTORIAN!!!): With the menopause dildo, we've officially reached peak menopause bollocks.
(Declaration of interest: I once did a podcast with the author.)
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Dept of, well, on the topic of dildos, or at least, urgent phallicism: I spent a year dating conservative [frothingly alt-right] men:
Something about getting ready to go on these dates made me feel like I was 18 again — except now I had the ability to run professional-level background checks, which I did. Not because I was operating on preconceived notions but because the few peers I told about my mission encouraged me to. Given some of the vitriol against women in online alt-right groups, they felt I should treat every date as if it were a threat to my life. I came up with a routine: before a date, I’d tell at least three people in advance where I was going and what time they should expect to hear from me by. I enlisted a friend who’s a former Navy SEAL to be my unofficial security consultant.
And that's before getting to meet the actual doozies who are, apparently, not even the worst types on the dating apps.
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Dept of, let's have some better news, good news about snails (the snails that one thought had been mown down in the ONward March of Progress, or at least, building much needed housing):
the snails are OK. Nothing bad is going to happen to the poor little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail, the endangered creature which our Chancellor unfairly blamed for stopping a housing development, causing me to get grumpy on social media. But in following up to try and see what actually happened, I found out a bunch of interesting – and in my view extremely heartening – stuff.
.... it was always a false dichotomy, it was always possible to have the houses and the snails too.
Dept of gilded snails in a very different space: From snails to street signs: Soho’s history revealed on a new digital map - the snails on the facade of L'Escargot Restaurant.
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Dept of, gosh I have met (many years ago) the curator of this exhibition: New York City celebrates the “Gay Harlem Renaissance”
The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World by Jamil Zaki