So, in my Outgunned
Jan. 27th, 2026 10:26 pmAmong my other ideas
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Open Doors is pleased to announce the completion of 9 archive import projects in 2025, plus an additional 5 subcollections, a total of over 34,000 works! We hope that you will find old and new favorites in the collections listed below.
Completed: February 2025
Remembering Tiger Lily Roar is a memorial account for fanfiction written by Tiger Lily Roar, who was active in many fandoms, especially Young Justice. This memorial account was set up with the assistance of Open Doors with permission from Tiger Lily Roar’s family and is maintained by Eva.
Find works at the Remembering Tiger Lily Roar AO3 account.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Remembering Tiger Lily Roar import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Tiger Lily Roar Fanlore page.
Completed: March 2025
due South Seekrit Santa (dSSS) is an annual gift exchange challenge for fans of due South. The dSSS archive was originally on http://dsss.crocolanthus.com/. After many attempts to communicate with the server admin/owner went unanswered, the crocolanthus dSSS archive went offline, and the domain name was lost. To preserve the archive, the works from the 2004-2009 exchanges were imported to AO3 by Open Doors and dSSS.
Find works at the due South Seekrit Santa AO3 collection.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the due South Seekrit Santa import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the due South Seekrit Santa Fanlore page.
Completed: April 2025
Snow Lands was a fanfiction and fan comic archive for The Lion King (1994 animated movie) online until June 2023 and was run by Athari. The website hosted works in English and Russian and preserved some of the fandom’s masterpieces.
Find works at the Snow Lands AO3 collection.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Snow Lands’ import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Snow Lands Fanlore page.
Completed: May 2025
The Slash Advent Calendar was a multifandom slash challenge that ran every December from 2002 to 2005. Founded by kira-nerys at Lady Kardasi Productions, it included works from fandoms such as Star Trek, Harry Potter, The Sentinel, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The archive went offline in 2010.
Find works at the Slash Advent Calendar AO3 collection.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Slash Advent Calendar import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Slash Advent Calendar Fanlore page.
Completed: August 2025
My Mongoose is a Sentinel fanfiction and fanart ezine collection archive. In an effort to consolidate all My Mongoose Ezines, including all stories, art and miscellaneous, the creator and moderators decided to house the works at Archive of our Own.
Find works at the My Mongoose AO3 collection.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the My Mongoose import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the My Mongoose Fanlore page.
Completed: October 2025
Stayka’s Saint Seiya Archive was a Saint Seiya fansite that started in 1998. It was an important early contributor to the Saint Seiya fandom, as one of the first sites on the internet to use English, unifying the uniquely global and diverse fan following. The site went offline in 2019, after which Tracy began contacting individual creators and collecting permission to ensure permanent preservation.
Find works at the Stayka’s Saint Seiya Archive collection.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Stayka’s Saint Seiya Archive import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Stayka’s Saint Seiya Archive Fanlore page.
Completed: November 2025
Oz Magi is an annual gift exchange for the HBO Oz fandom that has been active since 2004 on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. The moderator created an AO3 collection for Oz Magi in 2012, but wanted to also archive the earlier fanworks. This will be an ongoing import, with each year’s fanworks being transferred across to AO3 on behalf of the creators.
The related imports of HBO Oz archives Unit B and Twisted Sisterhood are still in progress.
Find works at the Oz Magi AO3 collection.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Unit B, Twisted Sisterhood and Oz Magi import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the Oz Magi Fanlore page.
Completed: November 2025
InDeath.net Fan Fiction is a fanfiction archive for the In Death book series by Nora Roberts, writing as J.D. Robb. It was a sub-section of the InDeath.net forum community, and the forum had sections for discussing fanfiction posted to the InDeath.net Fan Fiction archive.
Find works at the InDeath.net Fan Fiction AO3 collection.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the InDeath.net import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the InDeath.net Fanlore page.
Completed: December 2025
Inugrrrl was a longtime fan and fanfiction writer of InuYasha and the InuYasha/Kagome pairing. In her own words, she was known for “writing characterization-breaking, smut-filled, angst-riddled, alternate universe pulp fiction without a hint of shame, regret, or apology.” She was active in the fanbase from 2005-2024. Inugrrrl tragically passed away in June of 2024 and her daughter wished for her mother’s fanworks to remain online for the fanbase to enjoy.
Find works written by Inugrrrl at the Absolution – The Inugrrrl Memorial AO3 account, and works gifted to Inugrrrl at the Inugrrrl’s Gifted Fics collection.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the Absolution – The Inugrrrl Memorial import announcement post. To learn the history of Inugrrrl or to share some stories of your own, check out the Inugrrrl Fanlore page.
In June 2025, Open Doors imported the following subcollections from FictionAlley: AstronomyTower, HPInkPot, Riddikulus, Schnoogle, and TheDarkArts.
Find works at the FictionAlley AO3 collection.
ArtisticAlley is yet to be imported, which means the import of FictionAlley is still ongoing.
For more information about the archive and its move to the AO3, see the FictionAlley import announcement post. To learn the history of the archive or to share some stories of your own, check out the FictionAlley Fanlore page.
We want to give a huge THANK YOU to all of the archivists and volunteers who made these imports possible, as well as all the creators who have transferred or claimed their works! We look forward to importing more archives in 2026.
Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding these imports after that date, please contact Open Doors.
Thinking about the 'how can you do/think about normal innocuous quotidien things' while shocking horrors are going on -
(Am not actually going to invoke pet genre of 'look at all these novels being written at a time when World War 2 was just about to begin/beginning'.)
This was just a coincidental thing that occurred to me when I was talking about something tangentially related when being a Nexpert for a journalist yesterday.
Who wanted to know about a certain sex manual v popular in its day and its author -
In the course of which I mentioned that it was not prosecuted for obscenity** unlike Eustace Chesser's Love without Fear (1940). One would have thought that possibly people had other things on their mind in 1940 than maximising matrimonial happiness, particularly considering that families were being broken up by men being conscripted into service, women being evacuated with their children, etc etc, but anyway, it was published, and sold several thousand copies before, in 1942, it was prosecuted for obscenity by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Again, one would think people had other things on their mind. Anyway, Chesser and his publisher decided to take the case to court and plead not guilty before a jury, bringing three medical witnesses for the defence. The jury was out for less than an hour before returning a 'not guilty' verdict.
***
Yesterday saw snowdrops appearing in the local park.
*WH Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)
**However, the Pope did put it on the Index.

My feeling, on finding somebody who is apparently a reader in political theory at a well-respected institution of Teh Highah Learninz positing this, is that he may have read a lot of political theory, poor lamb, but maybe he should spend some time with dystopian science fiction if he's going to contemplate these sort of questions.
I suppose, with the Organ Donation register, there is an issue that a) it is Opt-In and b) presumably by the time many people reach that state when their organs come up for donation, those organs are probably past their Best Before date.
(I just now, in connection with an entirely unrelated transaction with a government body, was solicited to sign up with the Organ Donation Register. Already have, thanks, if anyone will want my tired old organs when the time comes.)
And on the intrusion of Commerce into this matter, has this person considered the sorts of things that have been happening - only, one admits, affecting the bodies of wymmynz? - over selling their eggs, or being surrogates, and the stories one hears are Not Pretty.
He might also consider Richard Titmuss' famous 1970 work The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy on blood donation:
[T]he author compares blood donation in the US and UK, contrasting the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is in the hands of for-profit enterprises, concluding that a system based on altruism is both safer and more economically efficient.
In the 18th century, for example, some viewed being paid to sing as akin to prostitution, and professional opera singers, particularly women, could be deemed morally suspect. At that time, therefore, it might have seemed appropriate to subject professional singing to legal strictures, just like prostitution.
(I'm also thinking - has this one cropped up on
agonyaunt or have I seen it elsewhere - of that scenario in which member of a family - even an estranged member of family - is being heavyed into being a donor for a relative because they are A Match. Was it even child adopted but later traced?)

Last week's bread held out pretty well.
Friday night supper: the hash-type-thing of boiled chopped up sweet potato, fried with chopped red bell pepper and chorizo di navarra.
Saturday breakfast roll: the adaptable soft rolls recipe, Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour, maple syrup, sultanas.
Today's lunch: Scottish Loch Trout Fillets, poached like so, with samphire sauce, served with Ruby Gem potatoes roated in goose fat, sugar snap peas roasted in walnut oil with fennel seeds and splashed with tayberry vinegar, and padron peppers.

Last November we asked the community to submit questions to our OTW volunteers in celebration of International Volunteer Day. In this series of posts we will spotlight some of our committees’ responses.
The Volunteers & Recruiting committee (VolCom) is in charge of inducting, retiring, and placing volunteers on hiatus. They handle personnel records and tool access, as well as assisting with the formation of new committees, subcommittees, and workgroups.
We asked VolCom for replies to your questions, and received a lot of feedback! Below you can find a selection of their answers:
Question: Sometimes I want to help the OTW, and consider applying for a volunteer position like tag wrangling, but I don’t have a lot of time to commit. Is there anything I can do sporadically, or without a lot of time per week?
Committee answer:
All of our roles come with a weekly time expectation—when we recruit for a role, we post a position description, it’s listed there. For some roles, the time requirement starts at two hours per week, while for others it may be five hours or more. How this time is split up in a week depends a lot on the role.
If you find yourself not having enough time to volunteer, but still want to support the OTW, please take a look at our How You Can Help page.
Question: Since this is a non-profit organization, if I wanted to become a volunteer (for fun and because I care about the work being done here), would I be able to use my time as legitimate service hours? (for highschool for example)
Committee answer:
The OTW is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the United States, but whether we are a good fit for legitimate service hours depends on the specific requirements your school/work/etc may have. Our volunteers usually do not volunteer under the name they use at school or at work, but if you are comfortable letting either your Chairs or the Volunteers & Recruiting committee know that name, you can receive a written proof of volunteering. If there are other requirements, e.g. a proof of volunteered hours, we can’t guarantee that this will be possible for all roles. If you are considering this option, please reach out to the relevant committee via the contact form to discuss what’s possible.
Question: Is there a limit to how many times someone can apply to volunteer and be rejected? How many times should you try before giving up? I’ve applied at least five or six times to different groups and I’m wondering if I should stop bothering you!
Committee answer:
We do not have a limit for applications to the OTW in general. However, if you’ve been repeatedly not accepted for a role, chances are that you are not fulfilling the requirements for that role. Additionally, some committees might have their own restrictions (see the recruitment post and/or position description). Please also consider your application quality and whether there are other reasons that might lead to you not being offered a role. You can email us and ask why an application was rejected – it depends on the committee how much feedback they are willing to give, as the goal is not to write the “perfect application”. Our roles differ a lot in the skills required, so keep an eye out for other roles that might be better suited for your skill set!
Question: What types of things can be done by volunteers? I say this as someone who’d love to volunteer at some point in the future, but have no idea if I have any skill that would actually be helpful.
Committee answer:
The skill sets required from our volunteers depend a lot on the role: There are roles that require some kind of formal education or in-depth knowledge of a specific topic, such as being a lawyer or a financial analyst. Other roles, however, are teaching all required skills during the training period, for those roles it mostly depends on being the “type” for the role. For us in VolCom, it’s more of the latter than the former. For example, our volunteers need to enjoy documentation work and ticking off tasks of to-do lists while being able to do work autonomously. There are many roles in the OTW that look for a specific type of person more than a person with a specific set of skills, or the skills are very transferable: Skills such as project management, navigating tricky interpersonal situations, dividing big-picture goals into actionable items, etc. If you keep an eye on our socials and the news posts, you will see us recruiting regularly. Each role comes with a position description that explains both what the volunteers in this role do, and what is required of applicants, so just watch out for a role that matches your skills and interests!
How many hours a week do you spend on your OTW volunteer work?
How do you manage your volunteer time, and do you do the same thing every day like with a day job?
What’s your favorite part about volunteering at the OTW?
What’s the aspect of volunteer work with the OTW that you most wish more people knew about?
What does a typical day as an OTW volunteer looks like for you?
What is your favorite animal? Alternatively, do you have a favorite breed of cat/dog?
Do you enjoy reading fanfic? If so, what’s your favorite work on AO3?
Do you write any fanfic yourself? What do you enjoy about it?
What fandoms are you (currently) in?
Do you feel glad or proud to see fanfiction in your mother tongue?
Thanks so much to every volunteer who took the time to answer!
(For more answers, check out this work on AO3, where we collect additional replies to each question!)
But so not in the way people who diss on my lovely city of residence usually mean it.
London is the only place in the UK where you can find scorpions, snakes, turtles, seals, peacocks, falcons all in one city – and not London zoo. Step outside and you will encounter a patchwork of writhing, buzzing, bubbling urban microclimates.
Sam Davenport, the director of nature recovery at the London Wildlife Trust, emphasises the sheer variation in habitats that you find in UK cities, which creates an amazing “mosaic” of wildlife.
“If you think of going out into the countryside where you have arable fields, it’s really homogeneous. But if you walk a mile in each direction of a city you’re going to get allotments, gardens, railway lines, bits of ancient woodland.”
More than 10,000 yellow-tailed scorpions (Tetratrichobothrius flavicaudis) are thought to live in the crevices of walls at Sheerness dockyard, Kent, and are believed to have spawned a second colony in the east London docklands. They arrived in the UK in the 1800s, nestled in shipments of Italian masonry.
Meanwhile, Regent’s Park provides perfect woodland conditions for the UK’s main population of Aesculapian snakes (Zamenis longissimus). One of Europe’s largest snake species, these olive-coloured constrictors are thought to be escapers from a former research facility, surviving in the wild by preying on rodents and birds.
Art-loving falcons: 'Swooping from the Barbican, the falcons often spend the day at Tate Modern, just across the river'. Doesn't that conjure up an image?
Bats! - 'Wildlife experts believe they navigate much like human commuters, using linear railway embankments as guides through the city.' Bless.
And FERAL PEACOCKS!!! 'Other birds are legacies of Britain’s aristocratic past. Peacocks, for example, are known to strut through the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, feral descendants of birds once kept by the gentry'.
Mention of the pelicans in St James's Park as descendants of gifts to Charles II, but alas, no crocodiles from that era have survived.
Given this metropolitan seethingness of nature red in tooth and claw, do men really need to go on Rewilding Retreats in Cornwall? (there was a para about this in the travel section which I can't locate online) - particularly given the 'walks in ancient temperate rain forest', I felt this was folk horror movie waiting to happen - just me??
Dr rdrz may imagine the noises I made when reading this (we get the London Standard free from our newspaper deliver people): Make America Hard Again: is there an erectile dysfunction epidemic?, particularly when I came to '“There have been huge uncertainties about male virility since the rise of feminism,” says Grossman.' and started screaming 'THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY!!!!'
Okay, there are some very creepy blokes there.
***
Creepy but in a different way: I was being 'recommended' this on Kobo, Y O Y???? The Voyage Out: A Quick Read edition:
Discover a new way to read classics with Quick Read.
This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter.
- Reading time of the complete text: about 13 hours
- Reading time of the summarized text: 20 minutes
***
I'm sorry, but I couldn't help flashing on to the famous phrase 'Normal for Norfolk' when reading this: Archive reveals hidden stories of Queer Norfolk:
Norfolk: That's a queer ol' place
In the depths of the Norwich Millennium Library, there’s an archive dedicated to Norfolk’s LGBTQIA+ history
***
This is rather fascinating: Flap Anatomies and Victorian Veils: Penetrating the Female Reproductive Interior:
Lifting flaps that unveiled the female reproductive body for medical purposes could just as easily be interpreted as a pornographic act imbued with sexual titillation and voyeurism. The ‘obstetrical flap’ was thus understood and used as both a teaching prop and an obscene tool. It functioned as a ‘veil’ of Victorian modesty in the name of new and penetrating obstetrical knowledge and a ‘veil’ of man's apparently underlying and untamable penetrative sexual impulses.
One has rather worried about this, and it appears that there are grounds for concern: ‘That belongs in a museum’: The true ‘cost’ of detecting in England and Wales.:
My previous work has discussed various aspects of the hobby of detecting: how the context of archaeological finds is often lost, how private ownership of finds is reducing the archaeological dataset, how our obsession with monetary worth may be fueling an increase in artefact theft and, more recently, the hidden and unacknowledged costs of the hobby of detecting to the wider British public.

So, at long last, I finally have an email address associated with My New Academic Position (this has been A Saga to do with their system upgrade).
I have also achieved reader's card for library of former workplace (spat out from the bowels of their system with A Very Old Photo of Yrs Truly).
And went and looked at the items I wanted to check, and found that lo, I was right and they did NOT have anything pertinent, as I had in fact hoped they would not. Though I had hoped to look, for another thing, at a couple of closed stack items and discovered that these cannot be ordered on a day's notice INFAMY I am sure I recall the times when there were regular deliveries throughout the day. Not actually critical, but irksome. (Also irksome was that I moaned about this on bluesky and got various responses that had no relevance at all to research libraries, in the UK, in particular this one.)
I then managed to get a digital passport photo at one of the photobooths on Euston station and have applied for a new passport, as mine is well out of date and I seem to keep seeing things that want 'government ID' to verify WHO I AM (over here, making like Hemingway....) so thought this was probably the way to go.
Also this is a trivial thing but in the course of my perambs of the day I walked past the statue of Trim, and his human.
In the niggles department, I did that thing of putting my phone down in place I never usually put it and flapping about trying to find it.
The lockers at the library have really annoying electronic locks.
Printer playing up a bit again. Though I think this really is that one has to let it mutter and sulk for a bit between turning it on and actually trying to print anything.

Are you a current or former Digital Humanities or Library and Information Science student? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!
We’re excited to announce the opening of applications for:
We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don’t see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.
All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.
If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.
Open Doors is a committee dedicated to preserving fanworks in their many formats, and we’re looking for a temporary intern to support this goal. The work we do preserves fan history, love, and dedication to fandom: we keep fanworks from offline and at-risk archives from being lost, divert fanzines from the trash, and more.
Open Doors is seeking a current or former Digital Humanities or Library and Information Science student to join us for approximately 8-12 weeks (start date is flexible between 1 April and 1 July 2026). The intern should be able to commit at least 10-15 hours per week for the duration of the position. This internship will provide the intern with a temporary position on Open Doors during which they will complete at least one of several available relevant projects while learning more about the committee’s work. The primary project available is to scope and gather requirements for a digital asset management system for archives/zines. However, time permitting, there may be additional projects available, such as investigating options for automating metadata cleanup.
Applicants should be studying toward (or have completed) a Library and Information Science or related degree (in the US or elsewhere in the world), and they should be fluent in written English. The position will be unpaid and entirely virtual/remote. (We may be able to work with university programs that provide compensation or credit for nonprofit work, but we cannot provide in-person supervision.) We will need your assistance connecting us to any university program that may need documentation to provide credit for you.
The intern might be offered a continuing (unpaid, not for credit) volunteer position upon completion of this internship. However, Open Doors cannot guarantee that completing this internship will result in a continuing volunteer role, and the intern will not be required to accept a continuing role if one is offered.
If you’re interested, please click through to the application form! Please note you will be required to provide an unofficial college/university transcript as well as a resume/CV as part of your application. For your application to be considered, you will be required to complete a short task within 3 days of submitting your application.
Applications are due 29 January 2026 or after 40 applications
Apply for Open Doors Digital Collections Intern at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.


What I read
Finished I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz, though will cop to only skimming the final section 'Fiorucci: the Book' (1980) about which I was a bit WTF? and 'what was she on?'
Over the weekend saw a review somewhere of the latest work by Madeleine Gray speaking well of her first novel Green Dot (2024) so thought I might see what it was like, especially as it was at a very reasonable price on Kobo - gave up about a third or so in. Did not care about the narrator or her situation.
A bit of sortes e-reader (inadvertently opening a book) started a supernatural thriller but I couldn't work out whether it was part of a series and I was supposed to know who these characters and their predicament were, or whether I was supposed to work it out over chapters jumping back and forward over time and didn't feel grabbed. May return because that might be me?
Dick Francis, Risk (1977), where I realised I have recently identified a Francis pattern such that I could finger a certain character very early on as likely to be implicated in bad stuff going down.
On the go
Have been dipping into Timothy d'Arch Smith, The Stammering Librarian (2025), some further collected essays, including one on a person of research interest, and a rather fun Anthony Powell parody.
Dick Francis, The Edge (1988), which is the one involving a lush train journey, with additional Staged Murder Mystery, across Canada (reverse direction to the way I did it).
Up next
Well, the local history society publications in which I was interested have been ordered and have arrived.