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Tuesday, October 7th, 2025 04:03 pm
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Monday, October 6th, 2025 03:03 pm
U, Chris, and I met as usual, walked out trails and met at Jewel Lake, which shockingly had water in it! We had a little rain last week but there must be something else going on. Anyway, the Black Phoebe was very active - we watched him beat a large bug into submission and swallow it - and two Mallards were swimming about. The highlight on Lower Packrat was hearing a Swainson's Thrush! It's been a couple of weeks since the last one. ( The list: )
As I was walking along the creek I heard a sound I knew but not in this context: a bird was bathing! The creek is very well hidden for most of that trail and I did not see the bird, but one of my favorite people on youtube posts videos of birds bathing in her several water features in Eastern Tennesee, so I could imagine it.:) Honestly, I did not think there was clear water enough in the creek for birds to want to bathe, but it is upstream from Jewel Lake. Warbler Ridge Birds, if you're interested.
As I was walking along the creek I heard a sound I knew but not in this context: a bird was bathing! The creek is very well hidden for most of that trail and I did not see the bird, but one of my favorite people on youtube posts videos of birds bathing in her several water features in Eastern Tennesee, so I could imagine it.:) Honestly, I did not think there was clear water enough in the creek for birds to want to bathe, but it is upstream from Jewel Lake. Warbler Ridge Birds, if you're interested.
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Monday, October 6th, 2025 10:37 pm
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Monday, October 6th, 2025 06:06 pm
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Sunday, October 5th, 2025 03:47 pm
It was a beautiful morning but I keep hoping for warblers and not finding them. I heard one Yellow-rump.:( But there were California Quail in the road, American White Pelicans on the reservoir, and a Say's Phoebe just past the corner. Most impressive were the Fox Sparrows. They seem to come in pairs and there were pairs all along the road. In the dip I watched two birds foraging while another bird was singing down slope. ( The list: )
The sun is low enough that the bank I sit on in the dip is in the shade! Which is lovely now but perhaps less welcome a bit later.
The sun is low enough that the bank I sit on in the dip is in the shade! Which is lovely now but perhaps less welcome a bit later.
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Sunday, October 5th, 2025 11:56 am
I have reviewed my ALL THE THINGS LIST and still think I can make real gains before the end of the year.
#ORJENISE100 carrying on and will complete in October. My space feels a little lighter even though I only got through half the prompts. Worth completing!
HOME: spent most of last week at the cottage - left home at 4:15am Monday morning when the roads were quiet and was in Tesco's in Bangor by 9:30am which is pretty impressive. For comparison left the cottage at 3:15pm on Friday and got home at 9:30pm. It was lovely to have the time away even though working. I got a tiny bit of gardening done, the cats travelled well and I now have another list of things to sort out when next up there at the end of the month! Back at the flat I have blitzed my kitchen, hall/landing/stairs and bathroom clean and am about to start on the chaos of my bedroom.
HEALTH: knees still aching - possibly as a result of long drive Friday. Need to get flu shot booked in this month and debating whether to pay for Covid shot as it seems to be doing the rounds at work.
LIFE ADMIN: hold onto your hats - I have started to check my current pension status. I've misplaced the login details to my Civil Service and Social Housing schemes so asked for those. The first part of my TLS scheme looks OK but I do need to find the second part after they switched suppliers. My Local Govt scheme is OK though I should increase my contributions or buy AVCs. Things seem a bit better than I expected and I'm glad TLS had a good scheme and I was able to have a few years adding 20% of my take home pay thanks to their matching policy. Why the sudden push? A seminar last week by the LGPS scheme which set out how much income you need for a basic or comfortable retirement which was, quite frankly, scary!
DIGITAL DECLUTTER: this is a combo of #orjenising things, getting my life admin sorted but also dedicating some time to dealing with the massive amount of stuff I have digitally. I have multiple of email accounts - there's my main one, a back up and my fandom related one just on the top of the pile. I'd had my main Gmail since the early 2000s and there was (last year) over 35,000 emails in there plus a G:drive full of docs. I've done a bit of dedicated sorting over the last few weeks and am down to just under 13,000 archived emails and transferring important things over to Dropbox. I've been unsubbing from mailing lists, or setting them up to my backup account (so I can have one account for Important Things and one for Everything Else) and it seems to be working. My back up account is in very good order. I hope to get to the fandom related account over Christmas. I also had over 1000 images on my phone - so many pics of cats, garden, allotment and epic amounts of screenshots. It'll probably take me most of October to sort those out and then I'm scheduling a monthly image review in my diary!
GARDENING/ALLOTMENTING: at the cottage I planted up some flower beds and cut backs the herbs. I Still have remaining winter pots to plant at the flat, as well as sorting out a load of new house plants and the allotment. It's been too wild to do much outside the last two days (thanks to Storm Amy) but may try to work from home on Wednesday and take a long lunch break to finish the winter pots.
COOKING/EATING: ate like a queen at the cottage - duck breasts, sea bass and ribeye steak were features of the week away. Decent meals every evening and lovely lunches and I ate pretty much everything I bought plus a lot of the fruit/veg I took with me. Also discovered I really like persimmons. Cancelled the Oddbox which should have arrived on Friday as I still had plenty of fruit and veg at home so have time to eat down my courgette, onion and potato gluts as well as empty the fruit bowl. About to make a big pot of something to feed me for a few days and then either a Thai green curry or Keralan Prawn curry midweek.
READING/LISTENING: Not reading/ listening at the moment - been too busy!
WATCHING: dumping a lot of my viewing as the autumn shows are coming back I find myself oddly lacking in enthusiasm to watch them. I signed up for a free trial of Acorn TV and blitzed my way through the two most recent seasons of Whistable Pearl and then all four seasons of Harry Wild. Might keep it for one more month then cancel. Have cancelled Disney+ - meant to do it for ages but the recent debacle was the final straw.
CREATING/LEARNING: still here -> summer has been nuts at work so hardly any time for crochet club or other creative endeavours.
CATS: all good. They travelled very well to the cottage and the passenger seat of the car is now covered in cat hair.
VOLUNTEERING: recent committee meeting was short and productive. The only task I have arising from it is to be around on the morning of Friday 24 for a skip drop off and be present on Saturday 25 that for a work day. Which means I should be free Sunday 25 to drive to the cottage.
SOCIALISING: not last week.
WORK: still hoping October may be a bit quieter than March through September have been! Though this coming week looks full on but the following two might be easing off a bit especially with the new way of doing inspections agreed at the last reps meeting.
Plans for this afternoon include my bedroom, cooking, and sorting house plants. If the wind drops possibly a little bit of tidying the front garden.
#ORJENISE100 carrying on and will complete in October. My space feels a little lighter even though I only got through half the prompts. Worth completing!
HOME: spent most of last week at the cottage - left home at 4:15am Monday morning when the roads were quiet and was in Tesco's in Bangor by 9:30am which is pretty impressive. For comparison left the cottage at 3:15pm on Friday and got home at 9:30pm. It was lovely to have the time away even though working. I got a tiny bit of gardening done, the cats travelled well and I now have another list of things to sort out when next up there at the end of the month! Back at the flat I have blitzed my kitchen, hall/landing/stairs and bathroom clean and am about to start on the chaos of my bedroom.
HEALTH: knees still aching - possibly as a result of long drive Friday. Need to get flu shot booked in this month and debating whether to pay for Covid shot as it seems to be doing the rounds at work.
LIFE ADMIN: hold onto your hats - I have started to check my current pension status. I've misplaced the login details to my Civil Service and Social Housing schemes so asked for those. The first part of my TLS scheme looks OK but I do need to find the second part after they switched suppliers. My Local Govt scheme is OK though I should increase my contributions or buy AVCs. Things seem a bit better than I expected and I'm glad TLS had a good scheme and I was able to have a few years adding 20% of my take home pay thanks to their matching policy. Why the sudden push? A seminar last week by the LGPS scheme which set out how much income you need for a basic or comfortable retirement which was, quite frankly, scary!
DIGITAL DECLUTTER: this is a combo of #orjenising things, getting my life admin sorted but also dedicating some time to dealing with the massive amount of stuff I have digitally. I have multiple of email accounts - there's my main one, a back up and my fandom related one just on the top of the pile. I'd had my main Gmail since the early 2000s and there was (last year) over 35,000 emails in there plus a G:drive full of docs. I've done a bit of dedicated sorting over the last few weeks and am down to just under 13,000 archived emails and transferring important things over to Dropbox. I've been unsubbing from mailing lists, or setting them up to my backup account (so I can have one account for Important Things and one for Everything Else) and it seems to be working. My back up account is in very good order. I hope to get to the fandom related account over Christmas. I also had over 1000 images on my phone - so many pics of cats, garden, allotment and epic amounts of screenshots. It'll probably take me most of October to sort those out and then I'm scheduling a monthly image review in my diary!
GARDENING/ALLOTMENTING: at the cottage I planted up some flower beds and cut backs the herbs. I Still have remaining winter pots to plant at the flat, as well as sorting out a load of new house plants and the allotment. It's been too wild to do much outside the last two days (thanks to Storm Amy) but may try to work from home on Wednesday and take a long lunch break to finish the winter pots.
COOKING/EATING: ate like a queen at the cottage - duck breasts, sea bass and ribeye steak were features of the week away. Decent meals every evening and lovely lunches and I ate pretty much everything I bought plus a lot of the fruit/veg I took with me. Also discovered I really like persimmons. Cancelled the Oddbox which should have arrived on Friday as I still had plenty of fruit and veg at home so have time to eat down my courgette, onion and potato gluts as well as empty the fruit bowl. About to make a big pot of something to feed me for a few days and then either a Thai green curry or Keralan Prawn curry midweek.
READING/LISTENING: Not reading/ listening at the moment - been too busy!
WATCHING: dumping a lot of my viewing as the autumn shows are coming back I find myself oddly lacking in enthusiasm to watch them. I signed up for a free trial of Acorn TV and blitzed my way through the two most recent seasons of Whistable Pearl and then all four seasons of Harry Wild. Might keep it for one more month then cancel. Have cancelled Disney+ - meant to do it for ages but the recent debacle was the final straw.
CREATING/LEARNING: still here -> summer has been nuts at work so hardly any time for crochet club or other creative endeavours.
CATS: all good. They travelled very well to the cottage and the passenger seat of the car is now covered in cat hair.
VOLUNTEERING: recent committee meeting was short and productive. The only task I have arising from it is to be around on the morning of Friday 24 for a skip drop off and be present on Saturday 25 that for a work day. Which means I should be free Sunday 25 to drive to the cottage.
SOCIALISING: not last week.
WORK: still hoping October may be a bit quieter than March through September have been! Though this coming week looks full on but the following two might be easing off a bit especially with the new way of doing inspections agreed at the last reps meeting.
Plans for this afternoon include my bedroom, cooking, and sorting house plants. If the wind drops possibly a little bit of tidying the front garden.
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Sunday, October 5th, 2025 07:00 pm
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Sunday, October 5th, 2025 07:52 am
I. UPDATES TO AO3 COLLECTIONS
In late September, Accessibility, Design & Technology updated AO3's collections feature by introducing collections tags—allowing more granular filtering and browsing between collections. This update also generally improved collection performance, introduced the ability to mark collections as "Multifandom", and added Subcollections to the Collections filtering page.
For more details on recent AO3 releases and code changes, check out the most recent release notes.
II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN
Besides updates to Collections, AO3 committees also continued work in a variety of areas.
Open Doors finished importing My Mongoose, a The Sentinel ezine archive, and announced two new import projects: Faerie: Tolkien Fanfiction and Forging Ghost, a Spike/Angel archive.
Tag Wrangling continued their work on creating new "No Fandom" canonical tags and announced another batch of tags in mid-September. On the @ao3org Tumblr, Tag Wrangling also announced changes to Critical Role fandom tags in light of the upcoming Campaign 4. They hope these changes will help users in finding and filtering for the works they want to see.
In August, Policy & Abuse received 3,863 tickets, while Support received 4,319 tickets—the current record for the most tickets either committee has received in one month. Tag Wrangling wrangled over 579,000 tags, or over 1,200 tags per wrangling volunteer.
From mid-July to mid-September, User Response Translation helped Support and Policy & Abuse with 38 translation requests.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Fanlore's Stub September editing challenge was a big success! Thank you to everyone who took part. For October, Fanlore is currently running a book-themed month. Check out the Help page for how to take part and claim a book-themed badge!
TWC's Transformative Works and Cultures has released issue No. 46, a general issue! It includes the launch of a new special section, New Currents. This section collects articles on new topics or approaches at a smaller scale than a special issue. In this issue, New Currents focuses on how fans and fan studies scholars engage with AI as a tool for transformative engagement with fannish texts.
In September, Legal responded to a number of user queries; they also joined allies in filing an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court in the case of Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. The case deals with when internet service providers can be held responsible for the actions of their users.
Legal's brief discussed the importance of internet access as a practical necessity of daily life and argued that holding service providers liable for users’ copyright infringement based only on accusations of infringement, rather than actual proof of infringement, would threaten innovation and creativity by creating an incentive for service providers to deny service to creators without requiring evidence or providing due process. There is no date set yet for when the case will be argued before the Supreme Court.
IV. GOVERNANCE
Elections closed out the 2025 election—congratulations to the OTW's new Board Directors: Elizabeth Wiltshire and Harlan Lieberman-Berg!
In preparation for October's membership drive, Development & Membership has been organizing new donation gifts, Finance has been compiling the pre-drive 2025 budget update, and Communications and Translation have prepared the associated news posts.
Board coordinated with Communication's Con Outreach division to attend EagleCon in Los Angeles, USA, and received the Lemonade award on the OTW's behalf. Elsewhere, the Board Assistants Team (BAT) continued work on OTW website updates, prepared for the quarterly Board meeting, and completed a report on non-profit training.
Organizational Culture Roadmap, in conjunction with BAT, Board, and Volunteers & Recruiting, continued work on the cross-committee review of the OTW's Code of Conduct. A survey was sent out to all volunteers soliciting their feedback for potential Code of Conduct updates.
V. OUR VOLUNTEERS
This month, Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for 3 committees: Fanlore, TWC, and Tag Wrangling.
From August 21 to September 24, Volunteers & Recruiting received 171 new requests and completed 174, leaving them with 46 open requests. As of September 24, 2025, the OTW has 991 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New BAT Volunteers: Cait B, Deimos Crow, MelMel, MustardPot, and Sullie Tosho (BAT Volunteers)
New Communications Volunteers: 2 Chair Assistants
New Development & Membership Volunteers: Kae Coolen, Maddie64, and Mako (Graphic Designers); Danielle G., jennybug, LizLeaf, and 2 other Development & Membership Volunteers
New Open Doors Volunteers: AuroraT, Kayla G, and vinnawis (Chair Assistants); and Julie Bozza (Senior FSHP Volunteer)
New Strategic Planning Volunteers: Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Cybersecurity Delegate)
New Systems Volunteers: E.V. Moebius (Systems Volunteer)
New TWC Volunteers: 1 Review Editor
Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: 1 Board Assistants Team Chair
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: 1 Editor
Departing BAT Volunteers: Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Cybersecurity Delegate)
Departing Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: 1 News Post Moderator
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin Volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Julie Bozza (Chair Assistant) and 1 Import Assistant
Departing Strategic Planning Volunteers: 1 Strategic Planning Volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: SlantedKnitting (Support Volunteer)
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Mayrin, Yuechiang Luo, and 7 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: 1 Translation Volunteer Manager and 3 Translators
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, 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.
Saturday, October 4th, 2025 10:41 pm
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Saturday, October 4th, 2025 07:36 pm
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Saturday, October 4th, 2025 04:40 pm
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Friday, October 3rd, 2025 07:49 pm
U, Chris, and I spent a lovely, if warbler-free, day at Point Reyes. We started at the Fish Docks, where some huge trees have long been migrant magnets, but Winter before last, I think it was, at least one of those trees fell, and today of all days the tree people were there apparently to clean up. Bad luck for us, as they blocked us from the remaining trees. We may not have missed much, given the general lack of migrants overall. One cool thing about the Fish Docks is that we could hear the Elephant Seal males that were hauled out across the bay. You can even see them on google maps! From there we went out to the Point, where the wind was even stronger than usual; were I a small bird I wouldn't hang around there, either. So we went to eat lunch at Drake's Beach and check out the new marsh they created west of the parking lot, where we found two unexpected ducks amongst the Mallards. We stopped briefly at one of the now abandoned ranches in hopes of Tri-colored blackbirds, and found them, which was especially fun because Chris had never seen them anywhere but Del Puerto Canyon. Last stop was the RCA building with its long tunnel of huge cypress trees, but far fewer birds than we've come to expect there. ( A day's list: )
The visitor's centers were closed because of the government shutdown but bathrooms were open. I'm glad we went now because I can imagine they won't be if this continues.
The visitor's centers were closed because of the government shutdown but bathrooms were open. I'm glad we went now because I can imagine they won't be if this continues.
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Friday, October 3rd, 2025 01:52 pm
Thursday, October 2nd, 2025 06:41 pm
The letter will be here soon.
Wednesday, October 1st, 2025 10:45 am
Backdating this to 1st Oct because I meant to post before bed and forgot!
The world is on fire everywhere and I'm mostly continuing to deal with that via Twitter, Threads and Instagram and trying to keep over here focused on the good things or attempts to do good things.
On that note
I signed up for Action for Happiness's Optimistic October and the task for day 1 was to write down 3 things you're looking forward to this month so mine are:
1. Seeing two films which are part of the BFI film festival with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ravurian on 18 and 19 October.
2. Our community work day at my allotment site on 25 October
3. Coming back to the cottage at the end of this month to work a week remotely again.
Having only managed half the prompts in the September round of #orjenise100 on Insta I'll be carrying on through October. However 183 items left my flat so I'm counting it a success. As well as picking up the missing prompts I'm also looking at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bitesizedcleaning's Organisational October challenge. The task for the 1st October was to make a plan and I'm using my ever evolving To Do List for that!
And I've transformed Project 65 days (do as much as I can of my To Do's by end of Sept) into Project 92 days (keep going until end of December) and plan to do at least 4 things a day which are either tasks from To Do List or are part of Optimistic/Organisational October.
On that note yesterday:
1. I organised and deleted email from a couple of subfolders on my main email account. Now down to a total of 14,792 emails, 14,700 of which are archived in subfolders. Down from over 35,000 last year so it is progress!
2. Cleared up my free Canva account so I can see the images I really need and deleted the rest.
3. As I'm here in Wales and away from London and the flat I did some gardening, sorting out two flowerbeds (cut back overgrown plants, planted some autumn colour and bulbs for spring) and cut back the herb bed.
4. Signed 4 petitions - I already donate a healthy chunk of cash each month to a number of charities and would bankrupt myself if I threw cash at every deserving cause - but I do have time to sign petitions and write to my MP and councillors. So 4 petitions signed yesterday. Need to keep a proper track of these!
Small steps.
The world is on fire everywhere and I'm mostly continuing to deal with that via Twitter, Threads and Instagram and trying to keep over here focused on the good things or attempts to do good things.
On that note
I signed up for Action for Happiness's Optimistic October and the task for day 1 was to write down 3 things you're looking forward to this month so mine are:
1. Seeing two films which are part of the BFI film festival with
ravurian on 18 and 19 October.2. Our community work day at my allotment site on 25 October
3. Coming back to the cottage at the end of this month to work a week remotely again.
Having only managed half the prompts in the September round of #orjenise100 on Insta I'll be carrying on through October. However 183 items left my flat so I'm counting it a success. As well as picking up the missing prompts I'm also looking at
bitesizedcleaning's Organisational October challenge. The task for the 1st October was to make a plan and I'm using my ever evolving To Do List for that!And I've transformed Project 65 days (do as much as I can of my To Do's by end of Sept) into Project 92 days (keep going until end of December) and plan to do at least 4 things a day which are either tasks from To Do List or are part of Optimistic/Organisational October.
On that note yesterday:
1. I organised and deleted email from a couple of subfolders on my main email account. Now down to a total of 14,792 emails, 14,700 of which are archived in subfolders. Down from over 35,000 last year so it is progress!
2. Cleared up my free Canva account so I can see the images I really need and deleted the rest.
3. As I'm here in Wales and away from London and the flat I did some gardening, sorting out two flowerbeds (cut back overgrown plants, planted some autumn colour and bulbs for spring) and cut back the herb bed.
4. Signed 4 petitions - I already donate a healthy chunk of cash each month to a number of charities and would bankrupt myself if I threw cash at every deserving cause - but I do have time to sign petitions and write to my MP and councillors. So 4 petitions signed yesterday. Need to keep a proper track of these!
Small steps.
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Thursday, October 2nd, 2025 01:06 pm
Thursday, October 2nd, 2025 02:36 am
In September, we deployed a major upgrade to our HTML sanitizer (which interprets formatting tags) and introduced new features to collections! We also made a variety of fixes across different areas of AO3, including clarifying some confusing language and making new site elements translatable as part of our ongoing internationalization work.
Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors brooke x, Jamis Gelvin, katieyang, Kylia Miskell, ömer faruk, Samridhi, and Yanpei Wang!
Credits
- Coders: Bilka, Brian Austin, brooke x, Jamis Gelvin, katieyang, Kylia Miskell, Jo Kingswood (Littlelines), ömer faruk, Potpotkettle, Samridhi, sarken, weeklies, Yanpei Wang
- Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Hamham6, irrationalpie, redsummernight, sarken, ticking instant, weeklies
- Testers: Allonautilus, ana, Aster, Bilka, Brian Austin, Lute, lydia-theda, megidola, ömer faruk, Pent, Sam Johnsson, Sanity, sarken, Teyris, therealmorticia
Details
0.9.427
On September 5, we deployed some improvements to get our HTML sanitizer up to date for HTML5 and fix a number of tiny but annoying parser-related bugs.
- [AO3-5801] - We changed the sanitizer and parser to use Nokogiri's newly available native HTML5 features.
- [AO3-3282] - If your summary or notes had formatting followed by blank lines, extra blank lines would appear each time you edited those fields. Now the spacing stays the same, like it's supposed to.
- [AO3-4599] - We prevented the parser from modifying the formatting inside of <pre> tags, since that defeated the point of marking text as preformatted.
0.9.428
On September 8, we deployed a lot of changes by first-time contributors. If you're interested in contributing code to AO3, check out our GitHub Contributing Guidelines.
- [AO3-5552] - We removed some unused code as well as the tests for it.
- [AO3-7110] - We fixed an automated test for the database data we use for development, which was failing intermittently.
- [AO3-6921] - We made it so the commas used in series browser page titles are now translatable.
- [AO3-6924] - The browser page title translations for some user-related pages (e.g., the Change Password page) were in the wrong place, so we moved them to the right locale file.
- [AO3-7089] - We cleaned up some duplicate code in our automated tests.
- [AO3-5769] - We updated the phrasing of the text you see when you hover over the "Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings" icon in the work blurb.
- [AO3-6581] - We changed the title on the page that lists works you've marked for later to "Marked for Later," so you don't get it confused with the overall history page.
- [AO3-6914] - We clarified the error message site admins may see when updating language codes.
0.9.429
On September 15, we did a small release to improve the technical implementation of how certain AO3 pages are accessed.
- [AO3-5953] - Some actions, such as marking a work for later or switching back to the default site skin, could be performed by simply visiting a URL. That isn't great for a number of reasons, including security, so we've updated those actions to use more standard routing.
0.9.430
On September 26, we moved collections to Elasticsearch and added collection tags and better filtering options when browsing collections.
- [AO3-6026] - We added collections to Elasticsearch for better filtering capabilities, made it possible to tag them, and also automatically added tags to existing collections.
- [AO3-3748] - We changed the Collections page to also list subcollections, not just top-level collections.
- [AO3-7122] - We updated the default value of two database columns in the collections table to work better with Elasticsearch.
0.9.432
On September 28, we made two more changes as part of our collections upgrades as well as a few low-impact updates that were easy to get done at the same time.
Additionally, our deploy script accidentally bumped us a release ahead and skipped 0.9.431 so this ended up being released as 0.9.432 instead!
- [AO3-7141] - When we moved collections to Elasticsearch, we inadvertently started sorting items on users' Collections pages and collections' Subcollections pages by date. We've changed the sorting back to alphabetical order.
- [AO3-6133] - The service we were using to deploy code to our testing environment will be discontinued in 2026, so we switched to using GitHub Actions instead. This switch also brought us some sweet speed improvements and better integration into GitHub and Jira, so it's a win all around!
- [AO3-7117], [AO3-7118] - Our friendly dependency updater bumped the version of two GitHub actions.
- [AO3-4698] - We added a missing hyphen to the browser page title for the New Challenge Sign-up page.
- [AO3-7123] - We added the ability to filter for collections based on whether they are marked as multifandom.
Tuesday, September 30th, 2025 12:19 am
Purrcy was loving being petted while being as close to outside in the lovely fall sunshine and smells as he could get. Even though we're in NJ, we have *coyotes* as well as foxes, Great Horned Owls, & motor vehicles--it's much safer to be indoor-only, as well as better for the birds.
This week (well, last week) Bret Devereaux continued his series on "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant" with Part IVd: Spinning Plates, about women's traditional work: household textile production. Devereaux's expertise is on Rome, broadening to the Meditteranean and premodern European more generally. I commented:
I also pointed out that although, unlike in the west, Chinese women's labor was a crucial & explicit part of the state's tax system, and the marriage system relied on bride prices, not dowries (which are supposed to be better, maybe?, for women's rights)--yet neither factor gave women rights, respect or control.
I also got to tell someone about how Iceland used to use cloth as currency.
This week (well, last week) Bret Devereaux continued his series on "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant" with Part IVd: Spinning Plates, about women's traditional work: household textile production. Devereaux's expertise is on Rome, broadening to the Meditteranean and premodern European more generally. I commented:
Women's textile production was *even more important* in China than in western Eurasia, believe it or not. The saying "Men till, women weave" was the classic expression of the gendered division of labor for more than 2000 years. Since the time of the Han dynasty at least both men and women were subject to taxation. Depending on the dynasty, either the household had to provide both grain and textiles, or each adult male was assessed an amount of grain, each adult female, textiles.I linked to my comment on Bluesky, and suggested that Chinese peasant households were probably more *efficient* at producing textiles than West Eurasian ones were, because they HAD to produce surplus to the household's needs: enough for the family, plus enough for taxes.
The cash value of the grain & textile taxes tended to be roughly equal (see, e.g. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, p. 186), but it's rare to see either primary sources or scholars admit it: the life-or-death significance of the grain tax, and the grain harvest, absolutely dominates everyone's thinking. But (as Bray shows) up until the Single-Whip Tax reform of the late 16thC (after which all taxes were rolled into one, to be payed in silver) women's textile production wasn't just a foundation of the home, it was a foundation of the *state*.
As is usual for premodern technology, most of the technical innovations Dr Devereaux mentions above were invented in China several centuries (at least) before they appeared further west. Originally, Chinese tax textiles were hemp in the north, silk in the south. Cotton became important starting around the time of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, and spread rapidly. I don't know enough about the workflow for hemp and cotton textile production to know how much of it went to spinning. The workflow for silk production is very different: silk is "reeled", because it comes off the cocoons as long threads, several of which need to be twisted together to make a workable floss.
I also pointed out that although, unlike in the west, Chinese women's labor was a crucial & explicit part of the state's tax system, and the marriage system relied on bride prices, not dowries (which are supposed to be better, maybe?, for women's rights)--yet neither factor gave women rights, respect or control.
I also got to tell someone about how Iceland used to use cloth as currency.
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Monday, September 29th, 2025 06:16 pm
Weather fronts can bring in migrants, but whatever brought a little rain last night seems to have chased off what was already here. I was tired and just walked up the road while U and Chris walked Upper Packrat, and although I heard a lot of Corvids and a few other birds, I saw just one, a Hermit Thrush chasing presumably another Hermit Thrush. No one was at the Lake except for a Song Sparrow or two, not even the resident Black Phoebe, nothing like the warblers last week. We did hear one Townsend's Warbler along the road, but none of us got a good view. ( The list: )
I think things can't get quieter and then they do. Maybe next week.
I think things can't get quieter and then they do. Maybe next week.
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Sunday, September 28th, 2025 09:53 pm
An empty jacuzzi is an ideal spot for wild! shenanigans! And it's also great for slowly sneaking toward mom, like the mighty predator you are.
Purrcy was very concerned, walking hunched and close to the floor, because there had been the distant sounds of a *very* large growling something out there in the sky earlier ... he REALLY hates the Thunder Growler, this is his Sad Face about it
My new icon is Clio, the Muse of History, from this painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Moreelse, because she doesn't look *at all* like a Greek goddess picking heroes, she's a young woman taking notes on your stupid-ass behavior.
Last week Bret Devereaux's Friday post was On the Use and Abuse of Malthus, and I commented:
Purrcy was very concerned, walking hunched and close to the floor, because there had been the distant sounds of a *very* large growling something out there in the sky earlier ... he REALLY hates the Thunder Growler, this is his Sad Face about it
My new icon is Clio, the Muse of History, from this painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Moreelse, because she doesn't look *at all* like a Greek goddess picking heroes, she's a young woman taking notes on your stupid-ass behavior.
Last week Bret Devereaux's Friday post was On the Use and Abuse of Malthus, and I commented:
The standard description of the demographic transition has a important counterexample. Birth rates in France started falling in the 18th century, before industrialization or a drop in infant mortality. Guillaume Blanc's 2023 paper, The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France, begins with a quote from Malthus, in fact. Blanc presents preliminary evidence that France's demographic transition was the result of secularization & anti-clericalism.
A reasonable level of birth control could be achieved using only materials found in the home (mutual masturbation, coitus interruptus--not to mention oral sex, sodomy, or the other thousand & one fun activities that are not PiV), once French people stopped worrying what God wanted them to do. The assumption that premodern people *had* to have as many offspring as possible is not supported by this evidence.
Faustine Perrin (2022) suggests that the Enlightenment/the Revolution/anticlericalism led to a rising level of felt equality for French women in marriages, so that they were better able to assert their desire to bear fewer children.
In the present day, this ties into the work of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, whose article on The Downside of Fertility I just read because she talked about Bujold's Vorkosigan series in an economics podcast. TLDR: Bearing & raising children is hard work, labor even, and women are reluctant to do it if they don't have help.
Sunday, September 28th, 2025 05:18 pm
Since I was out yesterday and will be out tomorrow, I turned back at the corner. It was heavily overcast but not fog on the ground or much wind, so while there would have been more activity if the sun had come out, I found good birds. While last time the Hermit Thrushes were so numerous I had to explain, this morning it was Fox Sparrows, with multiple birds in each of several mixed sparrow flocks. Perhaps the best birds were three American Goldfinches flying over the very top of the trail, vocalizing. First I've seen or heard this season. ( The list: )
A little sun would have been nice, but then it rained a bit this afternoon, so.
A little sun would have been nice, but then it rained a bit this afternoon, so.
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Sunday, September 28th, 2025 11:45 am
Sunday, September 28th, 2025 11:11 am
I had a swathe of things I was hoping to do this morning, but each one I do takes longer than I was anticipating. One of the things I'm abandoning off the list is a well thought out blog post.
In other news,
Middlest is getting married.
At the Zoo.
In about 3 hours
And it is raining (it most likely won't be by then, but now I'm in a tizz about which trousers to wear to go with which jacket because I had not planned for 'dammit, I'll get cold'. I've already hemmed one pair of trousers, going to have to do another. very much appreciating magical hemming tape)
Saturday, September 27th, 2025 12:55 pm
This morning U and I went to chase rare migrants around North Lake in Golden Gate Park. Driving out Fulton reminded me just how enormous that Park is! Anyway, we parked about 7:45 and walked clockwise around the Lake, then retracing out steps from the northeast corner. There were quite a few birders and photographers looking for the Chestnut-sided Warbler and the Blackpoll Warbler that had been reported there, and while we dipped on the Blackpoll we found some folks who'd found the Chestnut-sided and got some diagnostic if not wonderful looks. I'd see Chestnut-sided before - in winter they have an amazing hi-viz yellow-green head - and was more excited by the Black-headed Grosbeak that I heard and that was later seen by others. ( The first list: )
Back in the East Bay we stopped at Emeryville Marina to look for the Palm Warbler that's being reported. (Like so many warblers they are hilariously misnamed: they breed in Canada.) Some folks were on it when we arrived but I think the photographer pushed too close and the bird flew off. We wandered around for a while without luck, and when U said she was going to make a final loop I said I'd go back to where it had been when we arrived, and there it was: rufous crown, yellow below, and bobbing tail. So we both got pretty good looks. ( Another little list: )
Again, we'd seen this bird before at the edge of Berkeley Meadow, and I was more impressed by the long lines of Brown Pelicans and the Osprey fishing just off shore. What a wonderful morning!
Back in the East Bay we stopped at Emeryville Marina to look for the Palm Warbler that's being reported. (Like so many warblers they are hilariously misnamed: they breed in Canada.) Some folks were on it when we arrived but I think the photographer pushed too close and the bird flew off. We wandered around for a while without luck, and when U said she was going to make a final loop I said I'd go back to where it had been when we arrived, and there it was: rufous crown, yellow below, and bobbing tail. So we both got pretty good looks. ( Another little list: )
Again, we'd seen this bird before at the edge of Berkeley Meadow, and I was more impressed by the long lines of Brown Pelicans and the Osprey fishing just off shore. What a wonderful morning!