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Yuletide 2025 Tag Set Open!
Fixes and Polishing
We're ready to work on corrections. Please tell us what we need to fix! We may make posts with further queries, depending on the issues you raise. Please keep an eye out for those! Sign-ups are projected to start October 14. If nothing's wrong in your fandoms - or if you can multitask - take part in activity at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
If your fandom is the wrong category. (such as Books when it should be Celebrities & RPF - etc.)...
- first, please check if it is also in the right category. If it is also in the right category, we can't help.
- If it's only in the wrong category, please tell us what it is and what category it should be in.
Tell us about…
- if you nominated something, but you can't find it at all
- if you nominated characters in a particular fandom, but you can't find them there
- if the fandom or characters you nominated were changed to something incorrect
- if you see the exact same character tag (including disambiguation) in multiple fandoms
- if a character or fandom name is mis-spelled (we don't care as much about disambiguations, so if the words in brackets entered after your fandom name are wrong (mis-spelled, misleading), feel free to tell us, but this may not be corrected.)
- if you see something that doesn't belong
- if you see two fandoms that are duplicates of each other
- if you see the same character twice under one fandom
- if your new fandom has been categorized in the wrong media category (and it isn't in any other category).
For missing nominations and corrections to your nominations, please provide your nominations link.
DO NOT tell us:
- if your fandom is in the wrong media category (a book under movies, etc), unless that is the only category that it is in. Please check ALL the categories before you report a problem.
- if your fandom is in Uncategorized Fandoms. This is a work in progress, please be patient as we work through these fandoms.
- if the characters in your fandom all belong, but the disambiguation tags entered in brackets after their names aren't all the same. Sometimes we have to enter really long strings after a character name to keep the character where they're supposed to be. We only care if the information in brackets is wrong.
Suggested template for corrections requests:
<b>Fandom tag (current)</b>:
<b>Problem</b>:
If correcting a tag or tags:
<b>The current tag(s)</b>:
<b>The correct tag(s)</b>:
Some Stats
This year, we approved 16,466 characters across 4,278 fandoms!
The most nominated fandom this year was Murderbot (TV), with 15 nominators. Close behind it was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Video Game), with 13 nominators.
Nine Worlds Series - Victoria Goddard is far in the lead by approved characters for a second year in a row, with 39 to select from. Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett has 30, and The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison is in third with 27.
At the other end of the spectrum, 82 fandoms were nominated without characters.
Worldbuilding was nominated 356 times this year! John edged out Jack for the most common first name. Our review suggests the most ubiquitous characters of 2025 are, once again, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes.
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Mishmash. It's just a mishmash post.
Flu and covid vaccinations are rolling out provincially (just announced this morning), and hopefully we can get ours scheduled for fairly soon. (Which isn't actually urgent, given how little exposure risk we have, but I'd still like to get it done.)
Part of my brain seems to really think there can never be too many mugs or too many blankets. I'm not sure how it came to this conclusion, when storage space (perhaps especially kitchen cupboard space) is finite and while both mugs and blankets can be used in rotation, it can get excessive fast. I wonder if this is the same part of my mind that believes I can actually follow everyone who strikes me as interesting on any social media platform.
Last year during post-holiday sales I bought a Hallowe'en blanket that then spent nearly a year waiting for the season to come around again, and now I have it out as a lap blanket in my office. It is extremely warm and ridiculously soft and cozy on one side, which is great, except this week started out with, frex, a high of 29°C or so on Monday. At this point the temperature's much more reasonable for fall (high of 9°C today), even if it's warming right back up to highs of 16°-ish over the next few days. Not exactly classic October temps, but hopefully we'll be free of full-on summer heat after this.
Other parts of the province got some actual significant rain last night, which is a relief. Only 2mm or so in my area, but I'm glad a good amount wound up in the regions that desperately need it this time.
Tori has a new album coming out next year (with accompanying tour), with info on the front page of her site. (My feelings are the now-usual ones: I don't expect to fall in love with the new music, but I'll gladly buy it to support her and be ready to be wrong about the assumption; either way I'm so glad that she's still making music, even if it's been a long time since any of it punched me in the heart.)
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is it tacky to bring branded items from your old job to your new job?
A reader writes:
I have a pretty low-stakes question but it’s been on my mind a lot lately: is it tacky to bring branded items from your old job to your new job?
For context: I used to work for a big tech company, and I acquired a lot of swag over my tenure: jackets, mugs, travel cups, etc. At my old role, my colleagues and I would use branded items from competitors and no one batted an eye; lots of them would be free items from conferences and similar events, and hey, sometimes that branded travel mug from our competition is just REALLY nice.
But I’ve switched to a more conservative industry (law) and I’m wondering if it would be weird to bring branded stuff from my old job into the office. I’m not planning to like, plaster my laptop with stickers from my old company or anything; I’m thinking more along the lines of bringing in a branded mug (since my new office only supplies paper coffee cups). I wouldn’t think twice about bringing random branded stuff from other companies, but I wonder about the optics of bringing stuff from my old job specifically. Is it tacky? Does it make it look like I’m pining for the past?
Like I said, this is incredibly low-stakes, but I’d love your thoughts!
Nah, you’re almost certainly fine.
I mean, it would be weird if you were, like, fully decked out with branded items from your old job to the exclusion of having anything from your current one — like if people walked into your office and found you wearing your old company’s branded jacket, t-shirt, and hat and your mousepad and notebook had their logo — but that seems highly unlikely. A mug or a shirt? No big deal at all.
The exception to this would be if there’s bad blood between the two companies or, in some industries, if they’re a direct competitor (like wearing Pepsi swag when you work at Coca-Cola, and I’d suspect wearing Nike if you work for Adidas or similar).
The post is it tacky to bring branded items from your old job to your new job? appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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update: my coworkers are joking that I’m pregnant when I’m not
Remember the letter-writer whose coworkers were joking that she was pregnant when she wasn’t — including having a local radio host congratulate her on her “pregnancy”? The first update was here, and here’s the final resolution.
I was reading AAM as I do every afternoon when one of the recommended posts catapulted me back into my past. I’m the reader who wrote to you about six years ago about my co-workers who wrote into a local radio station to pretending I was pregnant as a “prank.” I’ve been meaning to share an update for a while now, and this felt like a sign. In the years since, things got okay, worse and then much better.
After the first post, I spoke to my director to put a stop to the joking around. No one apologized, acknowledged that they’d crossed a line, or even made eye contact for a while, but I was just grateful that the jokes were over.
A few months later, my relationship unexpectedly fell apart, and a couple of weeks after that I found a channel on our internal messaging system that had been set up to talk about me behind my back. It had been running for months, predating the radio prank, and was absolutely a nail in the coffin. We also now had an external HR provision by this point, so I made a formal complaint against everyone involved. A coworker had been on the ropes for a while and they were let go not long after. I’m not sure how much the channel played a role in this, but it certainly didn’t help. The others apologized to my face, which I was grateful for at the time.
As some background, when I first started, the company was owned by two directors, a husband and wife. A couple of years into my tenure, one served the others with divorce papers and the business was squarely in the middle. But even before I started there were office norms that were only there to keep us in our lanes. We weren’t really allowed to talk to one another other than on IM, were made to take staggered lunches alone, had to sit with our screens facing outward so the boss could monitor what was on them, and so on. I found out later that my job only opened up because one director got drunk and threw a punch at a past employee on a work night out, prompting a few people to quit. When that director finally left, the other did try to open up communication but things just ran too deep. I’m sure I contributed to this environment too and I remember being deeply frustrated with nowhere for it all to go.
I also don’t remember exactly what the messages in the channel said but I was so angry that it snapped me out of my post-breakup funk and made me realise that my workplace was crap and was not going to change. I searched for all the jobs I could find with a short list of prerequisites — they must have an active HR department, visible salary scales, and be based in an interesting part of the country. I applied for the one that was closing first, which turned into one of the best things I ever did. I said yes to an interview because I’d never been to this city and at least if I didn’t get the job I could spend a couple of hours in a museum I always wanted to visit. I interviewed in February 2020, got the job, and started my new role that April, just after the first Covid-19 lockdown hit in the UK. I moved to my new city about five years ago as restrictions were starting to lift, so as people were getting used to socializing again there was me starting life again in my late 20s.
I’ve since changed roles a few times but have been in the same organization, and I can honestly say things are a million times better. My job is infinitely more fulfilling, has scope to grow, and I’m strengthening skills that are niche enough to be interesting and broad enough that I’m not stuck in a corner. I’m also actively involved in our workplace union so there’s a perfect outlet to channel any injustices in a positive way.
I’m not in touch with anyone in my old job. I wish them the best and hope everyone is successful and fulfilled in their own ways, but it took me far too long to realize it wasn’t the place for me. The fact I didn’t realize this after someone wrote to a radio station to pretend I was pregnant is beyond what I’d ever put up with now. I’m still embarrassed by the whole ordeal but grateful I can look back on it as a bizarre story rather than a situation I’m still stuck in.
The post update: my coworkers are joking that I’m pregnant when I’m not appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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Thundarr the Barbarian is finally getting a comic book

This cartoon re-ran for many, many years on Saturday mornings; I met it around '84, probably, and I loved it. I own a print-on-demand copy of the DVDs (its only kind of DVDs). I hope that this comic run will be all it should be; I'll probably dip my toe in with high hopes.
Yet I also feel caution. Two years or so ago when my beloved Dungeons & Dragons (cartoon, 1983-85) got its first comic run (from IDW, not Dynamite), the initial arc of stories was fun, though I had quibbles, especially with the too-obviously copy/paste-panels art, but the second arc made the sad mistake of trying to move on from what made the original series great. It casually, off-screen, gave the kids swords, breaking the prime no-offensive-weapons directive of the network censors that had forced the original series to tell stories in other ways and had shaped the characters and the audience. It also brought in a parade of name-brand guest stars from modern Forgotten Realms properties without making them really serve the D&DC story, which the original series had done with its much more occasional red-box NPCs.
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let’s discuss chaos at work restaurant meals
Let’s discuss chaos — or just mildly embarrassing / funny / off-key things — that happened when you were eating in a restaurant for work.
Some stories that have been shared here in the past:
I was in my mid-twenties traveling to a conference with my fifty-something boss. He could be odd and a bit awkward but never creepy or inappropriate. We were having dinner at the hotel restaurant when approached by a violin player obviously offering romantic musical accompaniment. I politely declined but my boss excitedly requested a specific piece. I then had to sit there awkwardly for several minutes while the violin player played his piece circling around us as if he was enhancing our romantic dinner. My boss smiled the whole time and afterward spoke about how lovely the music was as if he had no clue everyone was thinking I was his much younger mistress meeting up at with him at a hotel. We were both married to other people and after this we went back to discussing business.
• • • • •
I had just been promoted and my new boss invited me to lunch to discuss the job and any suggestions I might have. Having been a faceless drone for most of my short career, I was beyond excited and desperate to make a good impression. Above all, I wanted to order something tidy and easy to eat so that I could spend the lunch hour being insightful, witty, and bristling with helpful contributions. I ordered French onion soup. While channeling the business version of Dorothy Parker/Oscar Wilde, I quickly swallowed a spoonful of soup and discovered to my horror that the glob of rubbery cheese now nestled in my stomach, was attached via a rope of the stuff to the glob still in the soup bowl. While gagging and choking, I bit and gnashed at the rope like a demented shark, hoping I could finally swallow it and be free. A memorable first impression.
• • • • •
My third interview for my very first managerial job involved me flying into Chicago where I would be meeting with “the Big Boss” right at the airport.
Finding each other, he suggested we get a table at one of the restaurants, where we both ordered sodas. As he was speaking, keeping my eyes focused on his face, I bent down to take a sip of my soda. My straw went way up one of my nostrils! Neither of us said anything and I prayed he somehow had not noticed.
I got the job! Years later, it was time for me to move on. On my last day, that same boss called me in to say good bye. Grinning ear to ear, he asked me if I remembered what he called “the Straw Incident” when he had first interviewed me. (As if that were something I could forget!)
• • • • •
At a business meeting at a private club, I ordered a glass of lemonade and received a glass of lemon juice. Nothing like a cool refreshing mouthful of acid!
• • • • •
My brother’s mother-in-law was a vegetarian in a rural community who once accompanied her husband to his company’s annual dinner. The dinner organizers were very proud of themselves for coming up with something they assured her was much better than the plates of plain vegetables she’d been served in the past. Her husband got steak. She got a slice of watermelon cut into the shape of a steak.
• • • • •
Please share your own stories of work restaurant meals gone wrong in the comment section.
The post let’s discuss chaos at work restaurant meals appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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Community Recs Post!
This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)
(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)
So what cool fanvids/fancrafts/fanart/fics/podfics/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.
BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here