Reading

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(Less Than) 48 Hours to Deadline

The assignments that you received when signing up, and pinch hits #1-96, are due at 9pm UTC 17 December (see countdown). It's nearly here. For most people, it'll be Wednesday. Please check the links!

When you post your story, please make sure...

It is at least 1,000 of your own original words and marked as complete. You can update and edit your story after the deadline, but any version you upload must be a complete story that could be read in that state, with a beginning, middle, and end, and no placeholder text.

It is not posted as a draft. If your work is still in Draft status on AO3 at the deadline, it will not count as fulfilling the assignment, as no one but you can access it. To check if your work is a draft, go to your assignments. If you see a work title and the 'Fulfill' button, your work is a draft and you have not yet fulfilled the assignment. You can also check your drafts at the 'Drafts' sidebar link from your main AO3 page. Fully-posted works can be viewed from your Stats page and from Works in Collections. You can also reach out to mods to check!

It features *all* requested characters or follows exceptions specified in the additional tags ("My gift must feature..."). Please see this post for a reminder of how the additional tags work. Regarding Worldbuilding: if your recipient has not selected characters beyond that tag, whether to flesh out the world using original characters or canon characters is up to you. If they have vetoed specific characters, obey those DNWs.

It does not contain Do Not Wants. Please check that your story does not contain any of the Do Not Wants (DNWs) listed in your recipient's Optional Details. If you have any doubt about the meaning of your recipient’s DNWs, please contact the mods.

Its title and other metadata are not placeholders. Please don't call your work Placeholder Title or Yuletide 2025 Work - upload a title that reflects the unique work. You don't need to write a summary or append detailed tags, but please make sure that if you do include that information, the information is real.

Other important notes

Stay anonymous! Yuletide is a secret exchange. Don't give away publicly what you're writing or who you're writing it for. Don't add your work to an existing series on AO3, or a personal works collection. Don't identify yourself in your author's notes by, for example, linking to your tumblr or dreamwidth.

No AI! This is a creative writing challenge - do not use ChatGPT, Claude, or any other similar generative text tool to write any part of your story, summary, or notes.

Please don’t use author’s notes to apologise for your story, to go into detail about the difficulties you had writing it, or to promise a fix or a continuation.

Please check your story immediately after posting to ensure it is showing up okay.

Dyslexia

My female main character just told someone she's dyslexic. News to me, but that's how my characters roll <3 and it may perhaps help ground something else about her as a secondary consequence of childhood struggles with reading.

I've read a lot but it's all professional overviews and such, not enough from people who actually are. Right now I'm looking for small things I can tuck in which will suggest dyslexia to attentive, aware readers without spelling it out. She is 32 and those who are closest to her will be well used to working with her needs.

A few childhood memories can be tucked in as well.

Another question for those with dyslexia, if someone suggests reading novels out loud to her, would that be likely to work or might there still be difficulties with following everything? I understand there's a range of differences but I'd like to have her be fairly representative that way if I do include that sort of scene. Or maybe he suggests novels and she asks for short stories?

I'd like to do better than just 'trouble reading' and consequently struggled at school.

Her possibly relevant characteristics (things mentioned on the overview sites) which can't change - she is very adept physically and has excellent spatial awareness, reaction times, navigation skills and such. No dyspraxia or ADHD. If there's any executive dysfunction, it needs to be limited and compensated for well. She needs to be quick-witted, adaptable and confident she can hold her own in conversation with people who are trying to get the upper hand too.

But so far there's only one scene where she reads or writes anything and that can be altered. It's almost like she's been trying to tell me this all along.

I hope this makes sense. If you feel the need to tell me how wrong I am, please be gentle with your vehemence.

TIA for any help.

Staff

https://www.oglaf.com/staff/

Entry tags:

krad.txt

(no subject)

i am such a terrible hater because i write one (1) genuinely cranky/scathing post and immediately ask myself 'would i rather be drawing hot bishies or sleeping instead of rereading this and being mad when i know this isn't useful for anyone' and the answer is always yes. and then i immediately delete it.

i respect the Hater(tm) game, just it ain't in me, clearly LOL

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pinch hits

Posting; Pinch Hit; Betas

The DEADLINE is getting closer and closer!

At deadline time - 9pm UTC on 17 December - your Yuletide assignment must be posted (published, not a draft!) to the Yuletide collection as a complete work.

Before then, we need your help, Yuletide! We have an outstanding pinch hit (#121) for the fandoms:
SMPLive
Roughhouse SMP
Mirai SMP - XYouly
Highcraft (Web Series)

See details here. Please email us at yuletideadmin@gmail.com if you can help, and spread the word if you have friends who might be interested. This pinch hit is due at 9pm UTC on 19 December.

More pinch hits will be advertised at

yuletide_pinch_hits, especially after 9pm UTC on the 17th.

Additionally, we love beta reader volunteers! You can connect with writers at this post by filling out a Google form, or you can join the Discord and keep an eye out for beta requests advertised by members with the Hippo role.

Good luck to everyone facing down the deadline!

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(no subject)

(crossposted from tumblr, tags included.)

on the Fire Emblem series' general trend towards marrying as a gameplay gimmick, at least beyond the "yeay"/"nay" polarization.

( Read more... )

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!2026,
admin

Admin Post: GYWO 2026 Promotion

If you want to share GYWO with your friends, please feel free to use either of the codes provided to let them know you’ll be writing a lot in 2026 and you think they should too.

You can also recommend they follow us on Tumblr (

gywo) & Bluesky (gywo.bsky.social) for writing advice, prompts, memes, and other great information to develop their writing life. (Our Tumblr and Bluesky accounts are open to the public.)

GetYourWordsOut: Year Eighteen!
Pledges & Requirements | getyourwordsout.net

( Promotion )

Thanks for sharing

getyourwordsout!

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Admin Post: GYWO 2026: Pledges & Requirements

GYWO is BACK for 2026! We're starting our eighteenth year-long writing challenge with thirteen pledges to help you challenge yourself, achieve your writing goals, and build a writing life.

Keep in mind that even our smallest goals require a serious commitment throughout the year. While it’s okay for writers to be behind or even entirely miss their pledge goal, we want you to pick a pledge that will keep motivating you all year long. Before choosing your pledge, please take note of the few requirements we have of our members, and carefully consider which of the thirteen pledges you'd like to choose. You may choose only one pledge.

( Membership Requirements & Information )

( Pledge Types )

Pledging

If you pledged in a previous year and didn't meet your goal, quit, or were removed from the comm for missing check-ins, you are welcome to pledge again.

When choosing your pledge, consider your personal writing habits and what you find most motivating. Will hitting your word count goal early help propel you to keep writing through the remainder of the year? Do you need a major challenge to keep you on pace? Have you surpassed smaller goals in previous years and need more of a challenge? Are you already writing multiple days a week? Make sure the pledge you make is one that will motivate you. (If you need help deciding, please check out our post Choosing Your 2026 Pledge.)

To make your pledge, there are two steps to complete: Pledge & Request.

Step 1: Pledge
Complete the GYWO 2026 Pledge Form. You must provide (1) your email address, (2) your Dreamwidth or OpenID username, and (3) your 2026 pledge level.

Your email

Your Dreamwidth or OpenID

connected to Dreamwidth

Your Pledge Level

If you participated in GYWO previously under a different username than the one you plan to use this year, please take your best guess at your previous username—we track repeat members so we can see how the community has grown year to year.

Optionally, we request your Discord, Bluesky, and Tumblr usernames and your birth month for a monthly celebration post.

Any GYWO writer may join the GYWO Discord at any point during the active year—just follow the instructions once you join the server to receive full access.
For Bluesky, we only follow back GYWO writers who have provided their accounts for the current year.
On Tumblr we interact with accounts who ping or message us, but it's helpful to know if you're a current GYWO writer.
For birthday celebrations, we only include GYWO writers who have provided their birth month for the current year.

Reminders:

Step 2: Request
Once you have completed the GYWO 2026 Pledge Form, please request to join the Dreamwidth community if you are not already a member. We will approve memberships on January 1st (as we still have 2025 members scrambling to hit their goals!), and we'll hold you in the queue until then. You're also invited to use the link provided on the confirmation page to join our Discord server. Access roles are assigned starting on December 31, but it's a good idea to get yourself acclimated to our server rules before then.
If you are a current GYWO member or already have access to the GYWO Discord server, you won’t need to request membership. But it may be a good idea to confirm you can view Dreamwidth member-locked posts and see the full channel list on Discord.
If you are not planning to use Dreamwidth, let us know in the pledge form. You still need to sign up with a DW or OpenID account, but we won't hound you about joining the community. (But really, we strongly recommend it.)
If you are not planning to use Discord… you don't need to do anything, actually. But it is where we host writing sprints.

If you’re concerned we didn’t receive your pledge:

GYWO 2026 Writers

IMPORTANT: Anyone requesting to join the community who has not made a pledge will not be added. To ensure you are not left out, make your pledge first, then request to join.

You have through January 15, 2026 to make your pledge.
After that time you will NOT be able to change your pledge
or join the challenge, so think carefully before committing.

Got all that? Then it’s time to complete
the GYWO 2026 Pledge Form

If you still have questions, ask them here! But hopefully this post covers everything you need to know about what is required of members, what the pledge options are, and how to make your pledge. We hope to see your pledge soon!

FAQ
• If I’m a 2025 member, do I need to pledge? Do I need to request membership?
• Can I pledge if I previously quit the challenge, was removed for missed check-ins, or didn’t meet my goal?
• How do I change my pledge? What if I decide I'm not ready for GYWO this year?
• I participated before but can’t remember my previous username. What do I do?
• How do I track my pledge?
• What happens if I finish my pledge early?
• What happens if I don’t finish my pledge?
• Do I have to participate in the Dreamwidth community? Do I have to regularly check Dreamwidth?
• How do I get or retain membership on GYWO Discord?

If you want to share GYWO with your friends, feel free to snag one of our banners at the GYWO 2026 Promotion post.

Entry tags:

Default deadline passed (and deadline change reminder)

The default deadline has passed! Defaults after this date will require a New Year’s Resolution fic before you can sign up again. See more info about defaulting at our FAQ.

Original assignments and pinch hits #1-96 are due in a little over 6 days, at:

9pm UTC, 17 December
See when that is in YOUR timezone
See countdown

This is an international exchange, and deadlines are given in UTC/GMT. This deadline is also at a DIFFERENT TIME OF DAY to deadlines we've used in recent years. Please click the links and check when the deadline is for you. We appreciate it!

Good luck to all writing, and especial thanks to everyone tackling pinch hits! Check out

yuletide_pinch_hits for requests currently in need of writers.

Entry tags:

krad.txt,
projects

art health

it's fascinating reflecting back on my art situation and seeing how much has improved since 2020.

not even stylistically, i'm actually mostly thinking of project management and general peace of mind.

( Read more... )

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afk post

2025 Away from Keyboard post

Yuletide is coming! If everything goes well, we will reveal works in the main collection at 9pm UTC on 24 December, two weeks from now. Madness works are revealed a day later.

(Default deadline is 9pm UTC on the 10th; posting deadline is 9pm UTC on the 17th.)

In Yuletide, it's important to leave a comment on your gift (or gifts) to thank your author.

If you think you'll be delayed in commenting until late in the anonymous period (ending 1 January) or maybe not even until well into the new year, you can use this post to OPTIONALLY let your author(s) know about that delay ahead of time. You don't need to give a reason, but an approximate time indication may be helpful. Please include your AO3 name.

Thanks everyone! Good luck with writing, and please consider the beta post or

yuletide_pinch_hits if you have capacity for beta jobs or pinch hits!

Entry tags:

krad.txt

(no subject)

not even 20 pages through (aka just the introduction) of 'addiction by design' - a book about gambling, and i'm already staring in the middle distance of how word for word this type of addiction psychology could go for basically every social media algorithm & UI dark pattern & gacha & viral bait engagement post/media & ai addiction.

necessary read, can already tell it's going to be one of those books that's mission critical.

but man! genuinely nauseated over here to see how virulent it is across media/technology as a whole.

Entry tags:

awareness

(no subject)

"Growing up, August 15 always meant two things for my family: my mother's birthday and the first day of the CNE, a giant traveling fair that would park itself on Toronto's waterfront for the last three weeks of summer. We'd get there early, and by 10AM, there'd always be some poor bastard lugging around a galactic-scale giant teddybear that was offered as a prize at one of the midway games.

Now, nominally, the way you won a giant teddybear was by getting five balls in a peach basket. To a first approximation, this is a feat that no one has ever accomplished. Rather, a carny had beckoned this guy over and said, "Hey, fella, I like your face. Tell you what I'm gonna do: you get just one ball in the basket and I'll give you one of these beautiful, luxurious keychains. If you win two keychains, I'll let you trade them in for one of these gigantic teddybears."

Why would the carny do this? Because once this poor bastard took possession of the giant teddybear, he was obliged to conspicuously lug it around the CNE midway in the blazing, muggy August heat. All who saw him would think, "Hell if that dumbass can win a giant teddybear, I'm gonna go win one, too!" Charitably, you could call him a walking advertisement. More accurately, though, he was a Judas goat.

Digital platforms have the ability to give out giant teddybears at scale. Because digital platforms have the flexibility that comes with running things on computers, platforms can pick out individual platform participants and make them King For the Day, showering them in riches that they will boast of, luring in other suckers who will lose everything (pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/). That's how Tiktok works: the company's "heating tool" lets them drive traffic to Tiktok performers by cramming their videos into millions of random people's feeds, overriding Tiktok's legendary recommendation algorithm. Those "heated" performers get millions of views on their videos and go on to spam all the spaces where similar performers hang out, boasting of the fame and riches that await other people in their niche if they start producing for Tiktok: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Uber does it, too: as Veena Dubal documents in her work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," Uber offers different drivers wildly different wages for performing the same work. The lucky few who get an Uber giant teddybear hang out in rideshare groupchats and forums, trumpeting their incredible gains from the platform, while everyone else blames themselves for "being bad at the app," as they drive and drive, only to go deeper and deeper into debt: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Everywhere you look online, you see giant teddybears."

(x)

Entry tags:

krad.txt

TIL, flag edition

one of the many weird little things i've learned about being in the ex-/k/ server is the concept of "flag cones" (for when a general country flag is displayed on a pole but has a suspiciously conical shape). some are less "fake looking" than others; but for a particularly fake-looking example, see this reddit post. generally this depends if the flag is straight up painted on, or if there's more like a conical mannequin shape underneath where a real flag is draped over (aljazeera screenshot example).

once when you've seen one you can't *not* notice them everywhere in news screenshots/NATO briefings, etc, lol. ~~sometimes it makes for a fun drinking game to spot when you need something other than The News~~

there's technically similarly adjacent things called "flag spreaders" that are another step closer to how flags authentically drape but i don't see those as much in big news screenshots.

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Tips for Getting Unstuck

Welcome again to everyone joining us for the Year-End Marathon and to everyone looking for a peek behind the curtain at GYWO. Each month volunteers post discussions about writing craft, life, and publishing. This rare public post is to give a taste of the full GYWO experience. We welcome you to interact, comment, and share your own experiences on the topic.

Tips for Getting Unstuck

No matter how much planning you do, there is always an opportunity for a writer to get stuck. Maybe your characters don’t agree with your plan, or you realize the plot twist is too obvious, or for whatever reason today this scene just doesn’t want to be written. Regardless of what’s actually going on, the bottom line is that you’re stuck in your writing and you need to not be stuck.

Let’s talk about some ways to apply a little grease and get your draft moving again.

( Tips for Getting Unstuck )

How do you go about getting unstuck while you’re drafting? Have you tried any of these strategies? And if you’re stuck right now and want to throw spaghetti at a wall, some of us will be around in the comments.

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selfship shenanigans

(no subject)

crossposted fire emblem selfship meta from tumblr, see this post for context if none of those words mean anything to ya.

( i'm trying to be better about keeping everything-over-one-paragraph-i-write here. :P )

Entry tags:

krad.txt

(no subject)

I was recently reading an essay on babyfur vtuber .... wank? (the actual execution of the essay was pretty nuanced, but the topic was... yeah. nothing the world hadn't seen before.)

but what was interesting is the way said essay referred to "communities" almost exclusively meaning "personal discord servers of vtubers". and it made it click in my head of how baffled i've always been at this recent post-2018 merging of identity/community = a specific sense of moderation policies (for example the anti/pro fandom alignments) and moderation choices which made no sense to me with how "community" was defined in real-world terms before then.

because if we are exclusively talking about personal discord servers, i can see how young folks could come to the assumption that identity is a narrow set of moderation choices.

what's allowed in a personal discord of an influencer strikes me as a mix of pure "brand" (say, artwork that they draw or videos they create), brand-as-shared-interests or genre (shared artwork topics or cool inspirational art everyone likes), and once when one's locked into that kind of enforced bubble it pretty quickly spirals into myopia given how discord server social politics roll. it takes some pretty extensive "old school" moderating to keep the general server populace from getting incestuous; most influencers aren't interested in keeping a wide variety of folks in their server (assuming they're using it to make money/engagement); it's much more of a parasocial dynamic to extract something. money for access to the influencer (reminds me of the onlyfans model), other perks, etc.

(one of many reasons why you could not pay me to run a discord server lol; modding nazine's is the closest i'll get and that's only because it's tiny and full of mutuals with a weirdly high degree of media literacy; much less of the usual modding issues).

i'm not going to attempt to define what real-world "community" means as a term in contrast to discord-server-as-community (DSAC?) but the latter feels exceptionally more fragile in comparison to the former, and the implications of that sure explain a lot of current online issues.

Signs

https://www.oglaf.com/signs/

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krad.txt

(no subject)

watching 'hackers' may have been a bad influence because i've spent the last three days on an unexpected clothes shopping spree that can only be described as 'krad will shortly look like an fashionable extra in cyberdelia'

(to be fair i haven't brought new clothes in uh. 5-10 years??? ;D;;; it's been a while. and it'll be a good time to rotate out of the same 3 tshirts i wear all the time.)

that plus some recent furniture window shopping for my office... it's nice to actually want stuff again, with the full intent of making it happen within a year. <3

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(no subject)

"Sometimes you get a fictional character that stays with you for long enough that they become Nursery Real. This is not a new phenomenon; I have no way of proving this, but I imagine this has been happening for as long as people have been telling stories. This relationship is far and away beyond any responsibility of their creator/s (assuming the creator is not yourself), totally independent of their intentions, the same way the person sewing together a toy rabbit for sale, one of a hundred such, isn't necessarily predicting that this one in particular will become someone's most important companion, in joy and in despair. This creation may not even resemble who or what they were when they were a toy-- worn into a new shape from being much beloved-- and as a consequence it becomes much more difficult to share them, because they have become a piece of your heart. (That's alright. Some things can just be for you. Not everything meaningful can be shared.) They have grown up with you as your understanding of what it means to be a person has grown. You can no longer look at them and think: "this character is my favorite part of this story" but "ah, it's you". "To me, you are a person, and I have loved you in every way that one can love." And you know, as you must know, that they exist as an idea-- certainly they cannot take you to the hospital if you fall ill, or do your shopping, or intervene on your behalf during a quarrel you are not present for. But you can nurture each other in a real way, and they can give you strength in a real way; having a relationship with someone who is made of thought is an exploration of vectors of the soul and selfhood and love that I have not yet found to exist anywhere else. Yes, they are an idea, and perhaps when we die and become an idea ourselves, we will meet again in recognition. This isn't your favorite fiction, this is your velveteen rabbit."

(x)