erinptah: A map. (writing)
([personal profile] erinptah Sep. 8th, 2026 03:58 pm)

For anyone who reads and/or writes on AO3: how do you feel about “freeform tags that are questions” being synned as if they don’t have the question mark?

Some examples of tags where it’s happened:

And examples of tags where it hasn’t:

As far as I know, there’s no official Tag Wrangling guidelines about how/whether to syn Question Tags. (I don’t know of any plans to create one, either — this post is just for my own personal curiosity.)

So: if you got to wave a magic wand and write the Question Tag Policy, what would it be?

A very strong point:

Last December: “Call them the Cassandras: the people—mostly not white and male—who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they “alarmists,” and how did “anti-alarmism” become cool?”

The “we can always tell who’s trans” panic is going just great:

May: “[Trans man] Strobel was using the bathroom that many conservative lawmakers and anti-trans pundits want to force him to use — and he got arrested anyway, seemingly because of the panic surrounding gendered bathrooms.”

The couple, who are both cis women, said their afternoon ended when hotel security searched the women’s restroom and allegedly asked them to show their identification to prove their sex. “

“He believed that Marie, who is living with dementia, was a man dressed as a woman. Bailey knocked Marie to the ground and threw her into a wheelie bin before applying pressure to the lid, CCTV footage showed.” (He’s in jail. Good. Now where are the consequences for the people who convinced him it was okay to assault a frail old grandparent in the first place?)

June: ““After seeing my license, he spent like 10 minutes questioning me on if my license was real before I explained to him that I am a transgender woman,” Ripper said. “It has to say ‘M’ legally.””

Follow-up: Here she is talking about it on Youtube! Apparently not planned, she was just in the audience for comedian Ashley Gavin, who has a delightful back-and-forth with her about it.

Racism and general politics:

April: “In early December, Prieto was told to show up for an immigration check-in at an earlier date than ICE had initially requested and to bring his family. He complied. At the check-in, Prieto, Marcano, and Amalia were arrested. They weren’t provided with arrest warrants or any paperwork explaining why they were being apprehended. Amalia cried after the family was loaded into a van full of other parents and young children. “Why are you doing this?” Prieto asked the immigration agents. He recalled that an agent replied, “It’s a change of Administration. They pay us to deport you.”

June: “At the hospital, Morris “informed a nurse and a security guard that he was a member of the famous Motown group the ‘Four Tops’, and that he had current security concerns due to stalkers and fans,”[…] An ER doctor decided to “remove him from oxygen and pursue a psychiatric evaluation instead, despite his clear symptoms of cardiac distress and significant medical history,” the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit states “a security guard was instructed to ensure he was placed into a restraining jacket and/or a four-point restraint mechanism.”

August: “Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, are reporting that there have been multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stresses on the Lincoln reach the breaking point. The crew is in its ninth month at sea, and has spent 250 days consecutively without making land – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times.

Baltimore has engineered a 68% drop in homicides since 2019, outpacing the national average—all while operating with 400 fewer officers. Here’s how the city debunked the myth that more police are the only answer to violent crime. “


gelateria: (Default)
([personal profile] gelateria posting in [community profile] dreamwidthlayouts Aug. 30th, 2026 10:58 pm)
Animated preview of seven Moon Series splash pages

Moon Series

Click here for the seven splash pages

Seven splash pages for a Tabula Rasa journal. The moon sits on the page; hover a destination to change its phase. Each listing has the CSS, the entry HTML, and a live preview. Please credit gelateria if used!


Home stretch of this reread now! Chapter 40 “Departure” is the start of Tokyopop volume 10, and halfway through Seven Seas volume 7.

Sidenote: I still haven’t solved the mystery of the “Madam C” character tag on AO3…but I happened to reread an older fic that refers to “Madam C’s” as a bakery. So now I’m guessing we only ever hear about the bakery, we never meet the proprietor. (Probably don’t even know if it’s a solo small business run by a person with that name, like D’s pet shop, or if it’s just the brand name, like how you can order from a Wendy’s without anybody named Wendy being involved.)

Originally liveblogged on Mastodon / Bluesky, threads collected here. Affiliate links for the whole Collector’s Edition, and let me drop another link to the Fanshop Discord server.

Also, I’m finally posting that Little Sister D darkfic I teased a couple months ago. Chapter 1, mind the warnings.

Artbook page of D with a bunch of cats

 


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