I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Thanks to roxymissrose  for the birthday wishes!

It’s the OTW’s April fundraising drive! I donated, and I’m looking forward to my spiffy reward cup.  As cesperanza says: “Support the OTW y'all! You know you want to! Your nonprofit, all-volunteer, one stop fanworks site made by people who did NOT sell you out to venture capitalists and who are NOT trying to take a percentage of your work when you eventually make millions with your hot erotica trilogy! Ten bucks gets you membership. A hundred bucks gets you a nifty tote bag with useful mesh pockets! And a sense of goodwill and community feeling!”

crack_impala  is back! 

( memes in digital culture )

( our misguided drug war )

( youth and social media )

The AO3 needs volunteers to help support other users!

A really powerful article about the use of labor practices to destroy public education and also to prevent the ability to organize among young teachers expected to work eighteen-hour days for low pay.  What was particularly striking to me was the anecdote on upper management “walkthroughs” looking not at what was actually happening in the classroom (who cares?) but at whether the teachers had the right “look”—the right posters on the walls, the right ties. It was as if the charter school had the same principles as an Abercrombie & Fitch. This philosophy really does want to reduce workers to mindless automatons, further "justifying" their terrible working conditions.

Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe:

So you’ve recently suggested five tips for how people can make it much harder, if not impossible, to get snooped. These include using various encryption technologies and location-obscuring methods. Is that the solution?

My five tips suck. They are not things the average person can use. One of them is to use PGP [a data-encryption program]. But my mother can’t use PGP. Maybe some people who read your publication will use my tips, but most people won’t.

Basically, the average user is screwed. You can’t say “Don’t use Google”—that’s a useless piece of advice. Or “Don’t use Facebook,” because then you don’t talk to your friends, you don’t get invited to parties, you don’t get laid. It’s like libertarians saying “Don’t use credit cards”; it just doesn’t work in the real world.

The Internet has become essential to our lives, and it has been subverted into a gigantic surveillance platform. The solutions have to be political. The best advice for the average person is to agitate for political change.

Via giandujakiss, the AO3 is one of Time's top 50 websites of 2013.

Also: My relationship to Diet Coke, summed up.

An essay on Superman’s dog, in the form of a conversation between the author of an unauthorized bio of Superman and his editor. I may have to buy this book ….

Pretty Little Liars spinoff! (Spoiler for a character who will leave PLL.) The guy who’s been cast reminds me just a little bit of Jensen Ackles, so I guess we can add that to my DVR at least in the first instance.

And some fiction reviews:

( Diane Duane, CJ Cherryh, high school shenanigans )

I don’t use a disclaimer on my fiction, but I figure I should do so here, even though you already know this: herein is my unofficial opinion.

I remember when the OTW was starting up there was a discussion about “representing fandom.” I think everybody who volunteered at that point was pretty clear that we couldn’t and didn’t want to do that, in the sense of saying “we express what fandom is and wants,” because nobody could do that, because fandom is big and varied and self-contradictory, because fandoms (like Soylent Green) are made of people. I understood our goals to be more modest than that, albeit also ambitious, mainly: (1) work towards sustainability in fannish infrastructure, so that big chunks of online fandom wouldn’t disappear if a single person couldn’t continue to maintain them, (2) provide one relatively easily findable place that people could go for information that would be fan-friendly, whether they were journalists seeking to understand this strange phenomenon and explain it to the readers at home or fans interested in learning what the law has to say about fanworks.

In terms of advocating for fandom generally, the role I always saw for us was not that, or maybe I don’t know what that means. I saw us as a backstop: as in the Robert Frost poem, I wanted the OTW to be a place that, when you had to go, they had to take you in. Our resources should be useful if you wanted them, regardless of your fandom.

Many people have been vital to what we’ve built so far, and many of them have been behind the scenes: writing code, raising money, answering Support tickets, dealing with Abuse issues (true unsung heroes because they do a really stressful job and can’t talk about details!), maintaining the website and dealing with performance issues, coordinating volunteers, making sure the bills get paid, talking to fans one on one about legal issues, and so on. I strongly believe that a key priority is bringing volunteers in and helping them develop specific skills, most obviously in coding and related fields because the Archive is a big people-intensive project, but there are plenty of other needs as well. On Wikipedia, to take an outside example, there are people who just do grammar/style editing, and others who focus on contributing content; both of those are helpful to that project, and we need an even greater variety. We need to recruit more people to learn and do these things, without spamming other communities or giving the impression that our aim is to “take over” fandom, because it's really not.

We can only do what we have volunteers to do. This means that bottlenecks can develop quickly, and that we need an ongoing idea of our real capabilities. For example, I would love to have more non-US lawyers on the Legal team. It’s a real constraint to have to tell people that we can usually only provide US information and guidance. Sadly, I can’t confer law degrees, but there are many instances in which we can train volunteers. There’s a lot of talk about sustainability, and that’s really important, but for me sustainability means recruiting and training for specific skills as well as building a donor base to keep the lights on. 

What I want from the Board is support for people who are following their passions, without micromanagement. I have only worked directly with some of the candidates, so I’m only going to speak about people with whom I've had extended interactions.

( Naomi Novik and Betsy Rosenblatt )

From the most recent OTW news: Have you ever fancied coding for the OTW or wondered what it is we do? AD&T member Jenny will be hosting a public chat on coding, introducing Ruby on Rails and the setup for our coders. All are welcome! The chat will be held on Saturday, 27 August at 04:00 UTC (what time is it in my timezone?) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire.

Very helpful advice on how to get around the 1000-works limit on searches on AO3 before the planned fix takes effect.  I’m not sure I’ll ever have the impetus, much less the free time, to join an ongoing fandom and scour through thousands of stories the way I did when I found the XF in 1996, but it’s nice to think I could.

( sff noir and YA )