Otter's Rock

I just realized that I haven't looked at Dreamwidth in I have no idea how long. At least a week, probably. I wasn't especially busy; I did take a few days with my family for Memorial Day weekend mini-vacation (which we have done every year since before I was born), but judging by how far I've gone back in my reading list and haven't started seeing posts I recognize, I had stopped well before that.

Normally, checking DW is part of my daily routine. My flist isn't hugely active, so there's no need to check more than once a day, but it's the only place that I can reliably check in with several long-term friends, and of course a lot of exchanges are mostly run through DW and it makes it easier to keep up with what's planned and what's in progress. I missed the signups for Fandom 5k, and none of the pinch hits are things I'd want to write, which is a shame, because I prefer the longer exchanges. Ah, well, I guess that means I will have more time for shorter-minimum thematic exchanges instead.

If you posted something important and I missed it ... sorry! Feel free to let me know in the comments!

Hallelujah, Praise the Lord! There's finally a canonical tag for reader-insert fic on AO3!

From the latest admin post:

During this round of updates, we tested a discussion method which permitted many related canonicals to be canonized at once, instead of each canonical having its own separate discussion period. This allowed us to canonize over 200 additional tags from one discussion.
Consequently, we've canonized many additional tags related to Reader-Insert. All Reader-Insert modifier tags will be subtags of Reader-Insert. The full list is available via tag search.

Let us hope that people start using this so that people who want it can find it, and those who don't want it don't have to deal with it!

They're also changing pregnancy canonical tags, so if you've got fic that deals with pregnancy you might want to check it out and figure out if you want to change how you have tagged it.

A couple of days ago, I gave my critique about The Tomb of Dragons, the latest Chronicles of Osreiath story (i.e. the stories based in the Goblin Emperor universe). In addition to the technical issues/writing issues I noted, I also had two bits of worldbuilding that threw me. There's a lot that is very interesting, but there's also some things that ... I think she would have done differently if she'd had a better grasp on how real-world societies handled similar things.
 

( Imperial Gifts and Rural Parish Finances )

WHY has nobody ever told me that some genius composed a score to the Zahn trilogy of Star Wars novels? This is amazing, and wonderful!

Also, given that this exists, and that the audiobooks use music, why didn’t they pay this guy for the rights to use his stuff instead of slapping music from the OT in at random? Here’s an example: there’s a scene of an Imperial admiral reminiscing about how awesome the Imperial Navy used to be and how great a tragedy the battle of Endor was. They used the Binary Suns theme (you know, part of Luke’s hero music!) as the soundtrack for this, which is highly inappropriate.

If you are a Star Wars fan and have never read/listened to the Zahn trilogy (AKA the Thrawn trilogy, composed of Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command), you are missing out and should do that IMMEDIATELY. Yes, it’s part of the old EU, and is no longer canon, but it is imho by far the best piece of tie in media ever produced for Star Wars. Timothy Zahn has the OT cast note-perfect, I can hear them speak their lines all through the book, and that book taught me a LOT about the craft of writing, and especially writing villains.

highadrenalineexchange 2025 has wrapped, and so I can reveal what I wrote! Although I think it would be pretty easy to identify this one. For one thing, I had a great deal of trouble reigning myself in from making it my second TGE fic in a year to be about "why the Ethuveraz needs trains and how it might go about getting them." (Perhaps I should make this and Amber part of a series titled "Ethuverazheise Train Cinematic Universe"!) The request was for Idra, Ino, Mireän, and Maia, and I had trouble getting all three of the kids in--Mireän only appears in passing--and I'm still not quite satisfied with how I managed to tie together Idra and Ino's plots. It is very much Ino's story, with the others mostly there to support her (except for the bit where Idra is all HI HERE'S WHY WE NEED TRAINS!) But my recip liked it, so that's good.

And my usual beta for TGE fics was unable to do it because of the time crunch, so I had NOBODY to double-check my pronoun usage, which is always nerve-wracking for TGE fics. I was still fixing things an hour before the collection went live.

Title: A Winter's Visit
Author: Beatrice_otter
Fandom: The Goblin Emperor
Written for: DontStopHerNow in High Adrenaline 2025

At AO3. On Squidgeworld. On tumblr. On Pillowfort.

Cousin Maia was very good with children, and very affectionate with them. More than that, he held very different views on the proper place of children than most others in the court. Thus it was that, unless the duties of the court required his presence in the early morning (which very seldom happened), he had breakfast with all the children in the Alcethmeret nursery old enough to reliably feed themselves without assistance.

When Ino had been seven, it had been wonderful. She had delighted in the attention, felt very grown-up, striven to be worthy of it, and the severest punishment her nursemaid Suler needed was a threat to keep her in the nursery of a morning instead of at the Emperor's breakfast table.

( Now that Ino was nineteen, it was a very different matter. )

My parents are watching and enjoying a French detective show that's currently airing on PBS called Astrid (In French, it's Astrid et Raphaëlle) It's about an autistic woman who works as an archivist for the police, who partners with a police detective to help solve crimes. They think it's good autism representation, I haven't seen it but am curious to know what other autistics think about it.

fffx is live! There are a whole host of great longfics to read, go check it out! I received two delightful stories:

Indulging Their Curiosity (5434 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: The Original Series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Spock/Nyota Uhura
Characters: Spock (Star Trek), Nyota Uhura, Amanda Grayson
Additional Tags: Post-TV-Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friends to Possible Bondmates, TOS Novel Influenced, Anything Can Happen on Shore Leave
Summary:

Spock and Uhura find themselves together on Vulcan after the five year mission...

Touch and Go (12102 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Columbo, Batman - All Media Types
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lieutenant Columbo (Columbo) & Bruce Wayne
Characters: Lieutenant Columbo, Bruce Wayne, Jim Gordon (DCU)


Also, be sure to check your gifts page regularly! There is an intermittent bug that has been happening for the last several months where not everybody is getting notifications for all their gifts. I only received a notification email for one of my two gifts, and stumbled upon the other when trawling through the collection for fic to read. Checking my gifts page, I found a gift from November that I had never seen a notification for either. (And I double-checked my spam and deleted emails folders, just to be sure--neither notification ever got to me.)


Here are some other great fics from the exchange:

( 17 fics in 15 fandoms )

So I was reading a Batman fic (that I have read before, this was not my first reading) and something snagged my attention that I had just ... never noticed before.

And that is that it mentions a coat closet.

And I thought, Wayne Manor was built back in the days when people had armies of servants. Why would they have a coat closet? You would be greeted by a servant, who would take your coat and whisk it away until you were ready to leave.

I checked the plans of the Carnegie Mansion in New York (which I analyzed before), and sure enough, it does not have a coat closet. Separate Waiting Room and Receiving Room, but no coat closet.

Then I found the plans for the Biltmore Estate, which is out in the country (and so not constrained by the city around it) and of the same era and opulence, but even more ginormous than the Carnegie Mansion. It's the largest private residence ever built in North America, and it's 175k square feet--it's got a TON more guest rooms and also its own gym, swimming pool, bowling alley, etc. You know what it doesn't have? A coat closet. (And closets are marked on these plans.) The servants' areas are either downstairs or way the heck and gone on the opposite corner of the building, so the servants would have to schlepp those garments a long ways to get them out of sight. Ugh. This place is a lot less well-thought-out than the Carnegie mansion; the servant areas especially are not as well-thought-out, but also, just in general, there's a lot that I look at and go "that is so inconvenient, why would you do it that way" which is not a thought I've ever had with the Carnegie mansion.

One of the things that caught my eye about the Biltmore Estate is the Bachelor's wing. I assume that's what it's called, because it's a very self-contained part of the building with very little description, but in the ground/first floor there's a room called the "Bachelor's Wing Hall." Above that is two floors that are just filled with rooms called "Chamber"--obviously guest rooms, but smaller and without special names like the rest of the guest rooms. And, notably, it doesn't connect very well to the rest of the house. On the ground/main/first floor, you can get from there to the rest of the house without going outside. On the second floor (where the chambers start), you can get from those bedrooms to the rest of the house by either going downstairs to the main floor or walking across an outside balcony that takes you over to the master bedroom suite. And if you are given a bedroom on the third floor, you don't even have the outside balcony--you either stay in that wing, or you go down to the first/ground floor and go into the public rooms, or you go down to the second floor and take that outside balcony.

I knew that at least in English Stately Homes, they often had bachelor quarters that were purposefully separated from the main residential part of the building so that the ladies' virtue would be protected from even a hint of scandal, but that is ... very separated. (Also, married men are no less likely to be predators than unmarried men.) I find it funny that not only are the bachelors quarantined, but in order to get into the area where the ladies and couples are staying, they have to go past the host and hostess' rooms. (Or, of course, they could go downstairs, walk to the other side of the building, and go up the main stairs, which will bring them to the area where the female guests would be staying, not even on the same corridor as the master bedrooms.) The regular guest rooms are obviously much swankier than the bachelor's rooms, and they have a living hall on their own floor, whereas the bachelors have to go downstairs if they want to hang out somewhere other than their room.

Also, like the Carnegie Mansion, the Biltmore Estate has not one but two basements. So figure that into your plans of the Batcave and Wayne Manor.

(HOW has that thing not fallen into the caves beneath? Like, even if you posit (as I do) that the batcave is adjacent to Wayne Manor rather than directly below it, so the Manor's foundations are on rock ... rock next to big open caverns is a lot less stable than rock that's solid for a long ways, and that is one really big house.)

I have long been a fan of Project Gutenberg, which scans books that are in the public domain, OCRs them, proofreads them, formats them, and puts them up for free as ebooks. That is a lot of labor, that a lot of people do for free, and in fact I have done some of that labor; I started proofreading for them through Distributed Proofreaders back in 2003. (I've been on there so long that my user name there is "Beatrice" and not Beatrice_Otter.") Now, over the course of that time there have been many years where I didn't do any proofreading at all; but I keep circling back to it. When I want to do something that is useful, and which has a concrete result where I can see exactly what I've accomplished, and which I can do from my computer, PGDP is great.

However, I've often bemoaned that when there's a tricky passage, I never know if I got it right, because I can't check and see if the next proofreader or formatter corrected things (they do three rounds of proofreading and two rounds of formatting per work, for quality control). I knew there had to be a way to do it! But I couldn't find it. I could find lists of pages I'd worked on, but nothing that would show me what the pages looked like after the next round of proofing or formatting was done. It's a bit frustrating!

But I have finally, after 22 years of working there, found the page that will SHOW ME what changes more senior proofers and/or formatters made, so I can see what I need to do differently. If you go to the "My Projects" page there is a link in the corner that says "Review Work" that will take you to a page that will show you links to every change that got made to work you did. I am linking the page here so that if I ever forget how to get to that page, I will have a link to it.

That particular frustration aside, I do recommend PGDP, they have a very slick system, it's great. And obviously, if you're looking for ebooks of works that should be in the public domain, Project Gutenberg is the place to start.

Or at least, that's what I thought until recently! Someone on the Yuletide discord mentioned Standard Ebooks, which is a group that takes Project Gutenberg ebooks and formats them nicely, to the standards of a major publishing company, and then puts them up for free. They are much nicer than PG ebooks; PG ebooks can best be described as "serviceable." They are very accurate! ... just not always nice to look at, and the formatting guidelines were created back in the early 2000s and are bare-bones at best. However, Standard is a much newer group, and also, they're smaller; PG has over 75k ebooks and Standard has 1200. (On the other hand, since Standard has focused on the great classics, the sorts of books that are most likely to be still in demand today, and PGDP has all the classics plus a lot of other stuff, chances are that Standard will have what you're looking for.) So now my advice for older books would be to check out Standard first, and if they don't have it, go to Gutenberg.

Another great resource for public domain ebooks is Librivox. They do crowdsourced audiobooks of public domain books, and I have thought about volunteering there because I do have a recording setup, but also, recording an entire book is a LOT more of a time commitment than proofreading a few pages, and also, the books that I would be most interested in already have versions available on Librivox.

And if you, too, are interested in doing crowdsourced data work and bringing old things to a more usable form, but if Gutenberg isn't speaking to you, check out the Smithsonian! The Smithsonian has a website where people can transcribe old records in the collections of a wide variety of museums. And they have things sorted by theme so you can choose to work with materials related to the African American experience, women's experience, Native American experience, art and design, natural history, and a variety of other categories. Although for most of the stuff here you need to be able to read bad cursive handwriting. (Anyone who tells you that everybody in the 19th Century had good handwriting is a filthy liar.)

AO3 just announced some changes in what nonfandom tags will be canonized (and what will be synned with what). They're all changes that will work well going forward, I think, but on a couple of them I'm worried about backwards compatibility with fic that already have certain tags. If you're a fic author you might want to check it out to make sure your tags mean what you want them to mean.

For example! They are creating a new tag for "Sensory Overload" and changing "Overstimulation" to "Sexual Overstimulation"

I think it's good to separate those two concepts to make it easier to find what you want and filter out what you don't want, but also, if you have a fic with an autistic character or someone who experiences sensory overload, now might be a good time to check what exactly you tagged it and make sure it's got the tag you want.

There's also some changes to gender-related and pregnancy related tags, and if you have fic about trans characters you might want to check it out.