I've had a change of dreams, I'm coming home

[yipyipallyall]

[schmergo]

The summer between the end of high school and the start of college, I wrote a ridiculous play about pirates and put on a staged reading with some friends at an amphitheatre at a local park before a small audience of friends and family. It was never published or staged again. But I just got a message from an old high school friend I haven’t seen in years. He accidentally quoted the play in a conversation with friends, was asked what he was quoting, he couldn’t remember either, and wracked his brain until he finally remembered it was that silly play reading that we did one day in the park over 10 years ago. It made me happy. (The line was, “Huzzah for mercantilism!” by the way.)

A very tiny percentage of creators go on to be famous, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t remember little things you did for years and years. Who came up with most of the world’s most famous jump rope rhymes? Who coined some of the famous idioms we use in daily speech? Who made up ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells?” Somehow, all of these things stuck and spread around.

When I was a small child, I saw a high school put on a production of the musical HONK. In one song, the mother duck describes various dangers that her baby should avoid in the water, including fishing line, which could strangle him. A member of the ensemble played the role of fishing line, doing a maniacal laugh and over-the-top strangling motions, and I found it hilarious– and to this day, that’s an example I often think of when talking about how ensemble members can still stand out in theatre. The guy who played the role might not even remember that he did that, but I do.

I took Suzuki violin lessons as a kid. The teacher made up lyrics to some of the songs, and she let her students make some up, too. Now whenever I hear the instrumental of one of those pieces, I always remember these ridiculous lyrics about a skunk that we sang in violin class. I don’t even know which student invented them!

In middle school, I found a video about atoms parodying Bill Nye made by some kids for a school product. It probably had less than 1,000 views, but I think of quotes from that video all the time. They had a parody of “We Will Rock You” with the chorus, “Protons, neutrons, electrons” that I think about a lot.

I just love that this is part of human life. Our memories don’t just pick up quotes from great art, literature, and music, but little things, too.

[reeddraws]

It's been a while since I've worked on a sincere, longer-form landscape study. I still had to keep a time limit of one hour on this, but I still had a lot of fun focusing on this. Daily drawing 2472.

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[elizabeth-mitchells]

"or something" 😭😭😭

[caffeinewitchcraft]

A 75 yo man proudly came into the cafe wearing an Ultra Maga hat. I excused my barista from the register to handle the transaction.

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

Anyone wearing that type of shit and preying on workers for their own spank bank material is a brainless fucking sheep.

[thelawfulchaotic]

This is beside the point of this post (which is correct in every way). I’ve seen very many posts lately about like “how do I even know when I’m an adult, I feel the same way I did at 16/20/25/etc.”

You know when you see a problem coming and you say to someone else, step back and I’ll handle this one. And then you handle it.

Kudos OP for real. Honestly more for excusing the barista than your lovely conversational judo.

[slipping-into-madness]

[allhailthe70shousewife]

[lonelyvomit]

ok that's enough summer, we can head into autumn now

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[transformativeworks]

Why AO3 Doesn't Have an Official App

#AO3 has no official app. All AO3 apps are from third parties – please be cautious about sharing your data with them. For information about why we don't have an app, and tips to make your AO3 experience more app-like, check out our latest news post: https://otw-news.org/yckzuv3v

Afrikaans • Čeština • dansk • Ελληνικά • English • español • italiano • lietuvių kalba • 日本語 • português brasileiro • português europeu • Română • Русский • slovenščina • Српски • Tiếng Việt • Українська

[belindarimbi13]

Augustrope 2026

This August, join me for the 30 Days Writing Challenge, #Augustrope✨

In which we have a list of various tropes as the writing prompts. While these tropes are commonly used as recurring plot devices in fanfiction, you can also write your original story with them.

For 30 days (August 1st—August 30th, the 31st is the rest day), you can write anything with a different prompt for each day.

Any ship, fandom, characters, genres are welcome. Be it fanfiction or original fiction, just write it!

★★ 2026 Augustrope's Prompt List ★★

Day 1 — First Meeting

Day 2 — They Were Roommates

Day 3 — Beach Episode

Day 4 — ‌Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics

Day 5 — ‌Domestic Fluff

Day 6 — Two People Love Triangle

Day 7 — ‌5 Times This + 1 Time That

Day 8 — Mistaken Identity

Day 9 — Coffeshop AU

Day 10 — Age Regression

Day 11 — ‌Near Death Experience

Day 12 — Enemies-to-Lovers

Day 13 — POV Outsider

Day 14 — There's Only One Bed

Day 15 — Coda/Episode Tag

Day 16 — Relationship Reveal

Day 17 — Hallmark AU

Day 18 — Amnesia

Day 19 — Body Swap

Day 20 — Potion/Spell Goes Wrong

Day 21 — Everyone Knows But Them

Day 22 — ‌Road Trips

Day 23 — Your-Fave-Movie AU

Day 24 — ‌In Vino Veritas

Day 25 — Elevator Fic

Day 26 — Fake/Pretend Relationship

Day 27 — Mutual Pining

Day 28 — ‌Meet The Family

Day 29 — Non-Human Character

Day 30 — Soulmate AU

🖇️ More info about Augustrope

Feel free to tag your work with #Augustrope (and/or #Augustrope2026) so that I can find them.

If you're on AO3, you can also add your work into the Augustrope Collection (Augustrope2026).

If you have any questions regarding the prompt, you can directly interact with this post 🫶🏻

Hope you can participate! ✨

[70sscifiart]

Taglines from science fiction covers

[inthedarktrees]

The Rescuers (1977)

[ryebreadgf]

yayyyy

[jomiddlemarch]

[eponine119]

i love looking up the cast for a show i'm watching and spoilering myself

[ao3org]

Trust & Safety Phishing Comments

Date Posted: July 23, 2026

AO3 has recently seen a wave of comments claiming to be made by the "AO3 Trust & Safety team", notifying you that your account has been restricted. These claims are not true. These comments are not being made by real AO3 volunteers and your account has not been restricted.

AO3 volunteers, including the Policy & Abuse committee, will never communicate with you through comments on your work. All important communications from AO3 will be sent through the email associated with your account. More general announcements will be posted on our official social media accounts or published as news posts on AO3 or OTW.org.

If you receive one of these comments, do not click on any of the links in it, reply to it, or interact with it in any way. The links in these comments lead to sites asking you to verify your identity by providing payment information. This is a common credit card scam. AO3 does not ever ask users to provide payment information, and the Policy & Abuse committee will never comment on your works asking you to "complete an identity verification process".

If you encounter one of these comments or believe your account has been compromised, please view the instructions under the cut!

We suggest that you review your account to verify that you're using a unique and secure password. Check out the advice from our Policy & Abuse committee on Protecting Your AO3 Account and Keeping Your Account Secure.

If you believe your AO3 account has been compromised for any reason (i.e. you received an email that your username changed), you can change or reset your password to ensure control of your account. Changing your password will automatically log you out of all sessions on all devices. You can find the option to change your password in your Preferences.

If you encounter one of these comments on your own work or someone else's, please report them to the Policy & Abuse committee. To do so:

Select the "Thread" button on the scammer's comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.

In the "Brief summary of Terms of Service violation" field, enter "Spambot".

In the "Description of the content you are reporting" field, enter "This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME."

Reporting in this fashion helps us auto-sort your report so that it can be handled as soon as a Policy & Abuse volunteer is available. To help us address reports about these types of bots as fast as possible, please only submit one report per account, and don't include multiple accounts in the same report.

We also encourage you to share this post and help spread the word about how to protect yourself from scammers and reduce spam on AO3.

For more information about spambots on AO3, you can review our News Post on the topic.