Hello Thursday!

Halloween was nice this year. Election Day was very nice — while there were some races I wish had come out differently (Florida governor, California wealth tax), so many of them came out the way I would have chosen that even mentioning the others feels ungrateful. Even former Florida Governor and all-around waste of oxygen Ron Desantis called the results “an extinction-level event” for the Republican party. One can only hope.

Besides holidays and politics, another thing that has been drawing a lot of my attention over the past week is the AO3 outage. If you read or write fanfiction, or know anyone who does, you’re already keenly aware of this. But just in case there’s anyone reading this who isn’t: On 29 October, Archive of Our Own, the internet’s largest fanfic archive, went down for maintenance. It was initially expected to be down for about 12 hours. Before those 12 hours had elapsed, it was announced that the site would be down for 2-4 weeks because of a security incident. Since that time, there have been several attempts to put up shadow archives of varying degrees of scumminess (phishing for authors’ data, trying to monetize fanfictions, or just posting them on other sites without authors’ permission), generally based on a 2025 scraping of AO3 that has already been used in the training of generative AI (which is a whole other sore spot with fanfic authors). Additionally, there have been people uploading large amounts of fanfic that they had legitimately downloaded before AO3 went down to Google Drives (where they are in danger of being scooped up by Google’s AI) and making them available, all without authorial permission.

All of this has led to a division into two camps: One of (self-designated) readers, located primarily on Twitter, who say that the authors are being entitled and self-important, that we should be grateful that anyone wants to read our works, and that they’re going to do what they want anyway, because there’s nothing we can do to stop them. The other is made of largely of authors, located largely on Bluesky, who are standing up for authorial rights, fighting back against the scam sites, and wondering “if our works are so terrible and unimportant, why is it stressing them out so much to lose access to them for two to four weeks?” Suffice to say, there’s lots of bad feelings all around, and things aren’t showing signs of improving. Some of the people in the authors’ camp have brought up the idea of some sort of symbolic authors’ strike once the archive is back up again. I don’t know if we could get a critical mass of authors for such an event to have any effect, but I’m certainly not opposed to the idea. 

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim?, vol. 1 (art by MyeongMi Kim, story by GyeongYun Jeong)

I’ve continued reading

• Artforum, April 2026

• Artforum, September 2026

• Architectural Digest, October 2026

• Of Cats, Giraffes, and Mice (inkheart9459)

• Once Upon a K-prom (Kat Cho)

• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Thomas De Quincy)

• Cozy Companion, vol. 29

• Vanity Fair, 2026 Style Issue

and I’ve started reading

• Absolute Batman, vol. 2: Abomination (Scott Snyder, writer; Nick Dragotta, Marcos Martín, Clay Mann, artists)

• The Loney (Andrew Michael Hurley)

If you missed any past Thursdays, you can access the archives here.

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason