mrissa | Network

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/01/updates-my-husband-doesnt-want-anyone-i-work-with-to-know-were-married-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=35818

Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. My husband doesn’t want anyone I work with to know we’re married

Thank you for publishing my letter — it was quite reassuring to read that this particular request from my husband was giving others pause as well.

There was a lot of speculation in the comments, which was quite amusing to read, and lots of excellent points being made too! I do want to add that my husband has always been very conscious about sharing “private” info, but to be clear — he’s never hidden the fact that he is a married (straight) man, but he won’t go around telling his coworkers my name or my employer. Like you said, this was more of a husband problem than a work problem.

As recommended, I had another sit down with my husband and explained again why the situation made me uncomfortable and how awkward this could be for Jeff, too.

I wish I could tell you that this fixed everything, but it didn’t. The argument actually got a little heated, and we could not get on the same page. This might sound unbelievable, but my man is generally emotionally intelligent (one of the many qualities I adore in him) and yet I could not get him to see things from mine or Jeff’s point of view. I can’t remember there ever being a subject between us where it was so hard to find common ground (and we’ve been a great team through far worse). Disappointing, sure, but it is what is.

I did let him know that I would not be crossing that line of lying — either implicitly (by omission) or explicitly — again with Jeff. He wasn’t happy about it, I wasn’t either, but at least it was clear where we both stood on the matter.

A few weeks after that, Jeff found out anyway (as I always assumed would happen at some point, it’s really hard to keep a mutual connection secret in this day and age!). Jeff asked me about it at a company event, and I kept it very matter-of-fact (“Yup, that’s my husband, he prefers to keep that info private, kinda weird but oh well”) and that was … it? Jeff made no fuss about it, so if he thought it was weird, he kept it to himself. Jeff hasn’t brought it up with my husband either. My husband knows the cat’s out of the bag because I told him, and he got a little huffy at first, then dropped it.

I see Jeff weekly at tennis now, and all is well. I’m a bit more mindful than usual about the things I share but we have plenty of other common interests to talk about so my husband doesn’t really come up as a topic of conversation.

Not the most exciting of updates, sometimes you’re just going to clash with your person.

2. Why does job-searching feel like actual torture?

I wrote in earlier this year about being unhappy in my job but feeling unable to make myself search for a different one. Well, I now have a new job!

I really lucked out because a role opened up at my company in a department I’ve worked with the entire time I have been here. I immediately talked to the decision-makers for that department and accepted the job a few weeks later after the role was reworked specifically for me (!). I’ve been slowly transitioning from the old job to the new one over the past couple months and officially transferred a couple weeks ago. It’s a step down in pay but still a comfortable wage for me, and I’m SO much happier with the work and the team … plus I don’t have to change any of my benefits, learn a new office culture, or kiss my unvested retirement funds goodbye!

This situation made me realize how much anxiety was affecting me and how much extra anxiety my previous job was creating. I knew I had anxiety, but I didn’t realize the full effect until I started feeling like I was on the brink of a panic attack one day at work, which was a new experience. I’ve been on an antidepressant for several years, but after that day, I went to my doctor and added an anti-anxiety medication, which has been incredibly helpful. It’s made a huge difference at work and basically every other part of my life (imagine that)!

My plan now is to stay in my new role for at least three years. I think it’s likely that having this job on my resume will open a lot more doors for me next time I end up job-searching, both because of the skills I’m developing and because it will make sense to employers that I’m applying for jobs that I previously wouldn’t have looked as qualified for. I’m also hopeful that better management of my anxiety will make job-searching feel more doable in the future.

Thank you again for answering my letter!

3. How do I apply for a job internally without my boss knowing?

I did apply to the internal job. I read my employee handbook and it said I need to let my manager know, so I did that and then let the hiring manager know I had applied.

While I tried to play it cool, I pinned a lot of hopes on this new position. Just a couple weeks later, guess what happened? A partner org outside my company contacted me (I do a lot of answering outside partner questions as part of my role) to ask about being put in touch with new hire Samantha. Samantha? Who was that and what role did she get? My dream role, that’s what she got.

I was in shock. I was so upset not only that I didn’t get the job but that this is how I found out. No notice from the hiring manager, who I spoke to on a regular basis, not even a form email from HR. As I sat there in shock, who came around the corner? Samantha herself, being given the tour of the office. It took all my strength to smile and welcome her — it wasn’t her fault, of course.

The most upsetting thing about all this was that the hiring manager, who I thought I had rapport with, never once mentioned this to me. She never again brought up the role or our conversation about it. It was hurtful, not gonna lie.

My own manager had my back and even though I was trying to leave her team, she was furious on my behalf!

While there are good things about working where I do, clearly my workplace has its issues. I’m contemplating what to do from here.

4. How do I give 360 feedback to my clueless coworker?

Thank you for the advice! I did end up consulting Bob’s boss with similar language to what you suggested and additionally noting that the 360 review was adding stress during a busy period. His boss looked at me and said, “He’s leaving for grad school in three months anyway, so don’t worry about it.” So, I didn’t end up saying anything in his review, and I helped hire and onboard his replacement, who is much better.

The post updates: my husband doesn’t want anyone I work with to know we’re married, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/01/updates-my-husband-doesnt-want-anyone-i-work-with-to-know-were-married-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=35818

otter posting in

thisfinecrew

These cards can be ordered or printed on you own. They provide a summary of constitutional rights and a brief script to follow if/when needed.

You have constitutional rights:
• DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR if an immigration agent is
knocking on the door.
• DO NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS from an
immigration agent if they try to talk to you. You have the
right to remain silent.
• DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING without first speaking to a
lawyer. You have the right to speak with a lawyer.
• If you are outside of your home, ask the agent if you are
free to leave and if they say yes, leave calmly.
• GIVE THIS CARD TO THE AGENT. If you are inside of
your home, show the card through the window or slide it
under the door.
I do not wish to speak with you, answer your questions,
or sign or hand you any documents based on my 5th
Amendment rights under the United States Constitution.
I do not give you permission to enter my home based
on my 4th Amendment rights under the United States
Constitution unless you have a warrant to enter, signed
by a judge or magistrate with my name on it that you slide
under the door.
I do not give you permission to search any of my
belongings based on my 4th Amendment rights.
I choose to exercise my constitutional rights.
These cards are available to citizens and noncitizens alike

https://www.ilrc.org/redcards#print

ysabetwordsmith

Snowflake Challenge 8: Creative Process

Talk about your creative process.

This challenge looks at what goes on behind the scenes to produce all the wonderful fannish contents that come to be in the world. By ‘create’ we don’t just mean fic or art or videos -- there’s a process behind every blog post, comment or any other kind of fannish engagement. We’re all creators -- and every creator loves to know about other peoples'.

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

I write fanfic "derive in, extrapolate out." This means I look for something in the canon that could use more explanation, think about how it could have gotten that way, then consider how that could influence further stories.

My biggest fanseries is Love Is For children (The Avengers). Several of these entries dig into the backstory of the characters, starting with a scene in canon that shows something already developed which must have had a way to get started but that part is never mentioned. So I used the character as known, and the context, to build something that would logically fit into that gap.

In the first Iron Man movie, we see Tony Stark build the Mark I suit in a cave, with a box of scraps. Specifically, we see him swinging a hammer, like Hephaestus at his forge. Now blacksmithing is one of those things that cannot be learned entirely from a book. It requires muscles and muscle memory; you actually have to do the work, a lot, over a long time. If you want to learn efficiently and also not set yourself on fire too much, it also requires a master blacksmith to teach you the tools and techniques. But the movie says nothing about how or where or when Tony learned any of that; it shows the end result of a mastersmith building a supergizmo out of junk.

I wrote "What Little Boys Are Made Of" to fill in that part of Tony's backstory. The earliest sections describe, also inspired by canon, examples of Tony's relationship with his father and Howard Stark's A+ parenting. Then it covers college, Tony's boredom because it's too easy, and his continuing efforts to get Howard's attention. The real key comes when Tony revisits Museum Village in Monroe, New York. There he meets a blacksmith and hits on the idea of working as an apprentice for the summer. And the rest is history.

Consider the Six Layers from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. With fanwriting, a creator necessarily starts at the surface of the canon element, in this case a movie. "Derive in" means picking a point on the surface, then delving underneath into the structure which supports it, and often consulting the idiom. To create something new requires an idea, which is the first or core layer. From there, "extrapolate out" simply works back up to the surface again.

There in a nutshell is the process for most of my fanwriting. It works equally well with all sizes and media. I use some other methods, but I usually pair them with this one.

Current Mood: busy

muccamukk

AKA, my Very Serious Holiday Break Reading List.

Flamer by Mike Curato
One of my professors (who's also a librarian) mentioned that they'd just gotten this for the library's graphic novel collection because it was on the banned book list yet again. So I picked it up, then left it on the mantel until school ended for the year.

Centred on a teenager in boy scout camp, the summer before high school starts, the story covers about a week of intense emotional turmoil. The Scouts had banned homosexuality, but were filled with homo-erotically charged jokes and behaviour from the boys, as well as overt homophobia, fatphobia and racism. Like the author, the protagonist is mixed race, chubby and gay, and none of those seem to him like they're going to lead anywhere good. He's looking forward to leaving the Catholic school system, where he got religious guilt on top of bullying, but afraid of the big public high school and future bullying. He's desperately in love/lust with his tent-mate, and terrified what might happen if anyone finds out he's gay.

The art is simple grey scale with occasional red and orange, and showcases the juvenile over-exuberance of the characters, and how every emotion is the most emotion anyone has ever felt. Not a whole lot actually happens in this story, but it does a wonderful job of showing how world-endingly monumental the mundane can be at that age, when everything you feel is going to be all you feel for the rest of your life. The specific experiences aren't something I dealt with at that age, but the intensity felt very familiar.

It's a well done story that I think would be very useful to teens and tweens going through similar situations, which I assume is why it's widely banned.

The Claiming of the Shrew by Lauren Esker
(Usual disclaimer about knowing the author.)

The reservation system worked! For those not following the Fated Mountain Lodge series, the previous novels have all depended on reservation system mishaps putting people in odd situations, but this time it worked! We're in business, baby! The hero does end up in the Honeymoon Suite because it's the only available room, but that's no one's fault but his.

This is probably tied with its sister novel, Joy to the Squirrel, as my favourite in the series so far, with the fully charged shrew (as in she can turn into a shrew) heroine ready to go out there and solve some crime! Even if she has no experience in solving crime. She's paired with the honeymoon-suit inhabiting trash panda private detective, who does know how to solve crime, but is definitely getting off to a slower start. And there also a theatre troop living in the woods. And a dragon. It's just really, really sweet and fun, with charming characters to root for, and largely pretty low stakes. I really appreciated having a disabled heroine, and how she worked with her disability as a shapeshifter. Absolutely this series at its best.

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, narrated by James Lloyd
(

sanguinity just read this, which made me want to read it again (third or fourth time through), so I did.)

I think Sanguinity does a better job of summing up what's great about this book, but to be brief: Caz, our hero, who has had the worst time of it, is my platonic ideal of an iron woobie. He's just trying to get through the day so he can catch a damn break in some hoped-for future, but unfortunately a variety of gods have other plans for him. Does he set out to save the kingdom? No! He sets out to have a nap, but the nap turns out to be on the other side of some serious political shenanigans, so off he goes. Like it or not. And he very much does not like it.

The book is an exercise in slowly ratcheting up the stakes, until the kingdom's fate rests on the fall of some beads, and just doesn't feel like it's going to work out. I really appreciate Bujold's ability to put the reader through it along with the characters. I also like how though there are heroes and villains (and some convincingly loathsome characters), no one's a panto baddie, who's just evil for the sake of the plot. The story is about corrupting influences, and power turning people into their worst selves, and how to fight back against that, which I appreciated.

I have some thoughts about the theology and world building, which will probably get their own post some day.

The Gifts of the Magpie by Lauren Esker
(Know the author, etc.)

The most recent Fated Mountain Lodge book, and the reservation system is... working! But several characters still accidentally get booked into the honeymoon suite, because why not? There were also some fun winter adventures on snowmobiles, and I really liked the set up for the next book's main character.

Unfortunately, that's about all that worked for me. ( slight negativity )

summersgate

I'm taking it easy today. A "pajama day". It's turned cold (16F), windy, with off and on snow. I was up many hours of the night last night watching "Self Made" and sewing Rowan's crib blanket together. Progress below:

It'll probably end up being at least 39" by 52". I'll add a border and that will add an inch or two. But then it might shrink a bit after washing because it's cotton so we'll see.

Thank you for your well wishes for Skye. I feel like the situation has finally become real and we are on the home stretch now. Important decisions to be made and nuances in Skye's behavior to notice. It feels oppressive.

sinesofinsanity posting in

fancake

Fandom: Star Wars Clone Wars era
Pairings/Characters: All the Clone Commanders and the Jedi Council so:
Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mace Windu, Plo Koon, Aayla Secura, Depa Billaba, Quinlan Vos, Anakin Skywalker, Yoda, CC-5052 | Bly, CC-2224 | Cody, CC-3636 | Wolffe, CC-1004 | Gree, CC-1010 | Fox, CT-7567 | Rex, Doom, Monnk, CC-8826 | Neyo, CC-1138 | Bacara, CC-6454 | Ponds
Rating: Gen
Length: 4,700 words podfic is 29min 10s
Creator Links: written by always_a_slut_for_hc
Podfic done by PolynomialPandemic
Theme: Crack Treated Seriously, angst (with a happy ending), crack, fix-it, humour

Summary: The Jedi Council was nervous. The Jedi Council was very, very nervous, so much so that the usual meditation-and-releasing-emotions-into-the-Force shtick had failed and High General Mace Windu had broken out the spotchka.

If anything called for drinks, it was discovering that your whole Order was sitting on a primed thermal detonator - well. More like a million of them.

Reccer's Notes: A bit less Crack-Treated-Seriously and a bit more Serious-Treated-Crackily. Starts out super funny, veers into heartbreaking, and then swings right back to being funny again. I love the attention to detail that makes every single character (and there are a lot) feel unique and in character even if they only get a couple lines. The Clone Commanders chat is also super fun and is a feature I've seen used before but never so well with so many characters.

Fanwork Links: your heartbeat's a countdown on AO3 and the podfic

arstechnica_feed

Posted by Kyle Orland

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/01/online-mod-for-rockstars-classic-bully-is-abruptly-taken-down-after-one-month/

A PC mod that added online gameplay to Rockstar's 2006 school-exploration title Bully was abruptly taken down on Wednesday, roughly a month after it was first made available. While the specific reason for the "Bully Online" takedown hasn't been publicly discussed, a message posted by the developers to the project's now-defunct Discord server clarifies that "this was not something we wanted."

The Bully Online mod was spearheaded by Swegta, a Rockstar-focused YouTuber who formally announced the project in October as a mod that "allows you and your friends to play minigames, role-play, compete in racing, fend off against NPCs, and much more."

At the time of the announcement, Swegta said the mod was "a project me and my team have been working on for a very long time" and that early access in December would be limited to those who contributed at least $8 to a Ko-Fi account. When December actually rolled around, though, a message on Swegta.com (archived) suggested that the mod was being released freely as an open source project, with a registration page (archived) offering new accounts to anyone.

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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/01/online-mod-for-rockstars-classic-bully-is-abruptly-taken-down-after-one-month/

bloodygranuaile

My big fat slowmaxxing winter break reading was Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina, or at least that was the plan. The book is over 850 pages long and I had been reading some other stuff during the first half of break, so I don’t know what on Earth made me think I was going to read the thing in six days and have a nice fat book already on my list by January 2nd, even if I hadn’t ended up spilling water all over it on December 30 and needing three full days just to dry it out to a readable condition. (It took at least five days to get it fully devoid of moisture again, even when strategically placed right by a heating vent.) Then I had to go back to work, and so here we are, halfway through January, and I have finally finished it.

It was absolutely worth the time and even the damp interruptions.

While Anna is the title character–and certainly provides one of the main storylines–this book has a pretty large cast of characters, and we spend significant inside-their-head time with at least half a dozen of them. The book opens from the point of view of Anna Arkadyevna’s brother Stepan Arkadyevich, a friendly, good-humored specimen of Russia’s upper class, holding various executive-level government jobs that consist entirely of schmoozing and continually cheating on his long-suffering wife with an absolutely clueless lack of malice about it. We also end up spending a lot of page time with his wife Dolly; with Dolly’s little sister Kitty Schterbatskaya; with Konstantin Levin, a friend of Stepan’s who’s in love with Kitty; and of course, with Count Vronsky, the man Anna blows up her life over, who in the beginning is having a flirtation with Kitty that temporarily blows up Levin’s plans to marry her. We also spend some time with Anna’s husband, who I found to be a particularly fascinating character. A lot of the time we spend with these folks they are not necessarily doing very much, although they are all very busy; Levin is basically a little freak among the Russian aristocracy in that he spends a lot of time in his place in the country, not only managing it and trying to come up with better administrative schemes, but also actually doing the occasional spot of farming himself. He’s got very tortured ideas about what it would mean to fix Russian agriculture and how to be alive, which are oddly relatable if you are the type of person prone to overthinking things sometimes, like me, even if the things he is overthinking are entirely outside of my experience (I have no opinions, tortured or otherwise, about 1870s Russian agricultural improvements). These very close third-person POVs are full of dryly funny observations about the absurdities and hypocrisies of these characters, and yet all of them are ultimately sort of endearing (except Vronsky, who is not necessarily actually a bigger piece of shit than any of these other useless rich idiots but who I just could not ever warm up to). The result is both timeless & universal exploring the human condition etc. and also extremely specific, deeply rooted in the time and place that the story takes place in. The place of the church in society, the influence of various 19th-century social and political movements, the state of the divorce and custody laws, the unsustainable financial state of the Russian nobility, all shape the novel and the events that happen in it profoundly, and it simply could not be the novel that it is if it took place somewhere else or at another time.

It is very hard to try to say anything about this book that smarter people than I haven’t said a million times in the past 150 years, I am sure. I haven’t read all that people have said about it but I really don’t feel like I have the chops to comment on a work like this. For starters, everything I know about 1870s Russia is basically running on knowledge of 1870s England and hoping it’s not that vastly different.

One reason I am under-read in the great Russian novels is that every Russian short story or novella I have ever read has been the saddest thing in the entire world, especially Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” which continues to haunt me even as it’s been several years since I’ve read it. As a result I have been a little hesitant to be like “Yes, I want 870 consecutive pages of that.” But somehow, Anna Karenina ends on a hopeful note, even though Anna rather famously dies by throwing herself under a train. The trick to this is that the train thing is a full fifty pages from the end, and we have to tour the entire rest of the dramatic personae afterwards to see how they are reacting to it. Somehow, this works.

This book is just truly excellent on a craft level. While the whole book is long, its story huge and sprawling and taking place over many years, the sentences and chapters are wonderfully clear and direct, especially compared to a lot of other 19th-century writing that I’ve been exposed to. They are only convoluted and long when a character is having convoluted long thoughts, in which case, they work perfectly to illustrate the confusion, heartbreak, dissociation, or just plain disordered thinking that afflicts the characters. Big credit to translator Constance Garnett, since I certainly wasn’t reading the book in the original Russian.

I am extremely curious to check out some of the many, many, many adaptations that have been made, since I really can’t see how they could get across some of the stuff going on in these characters’ heads. Maybe they don’t. But I will find out!

dolorosa_12

I'm so far behind on this, so let's attempt to catch up somewhat.

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge 6 is Top 10 Challenge — a list of top ten anything. I was going to do something music-related, but a better idea popped into my head this morning:

( Top 10 things to do with tomatoes )

Challenge 7 is LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

( List of three things behind the cut )

potentiality_26 posting in

polyamships

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duckprintspress

Graphic 1 of 11. Text and a screenshot of Wikipedia’s title page. The text reads: Our Favorite Wikipedia Articles for Wikipedia Day!

Today is Wikipedia Day, an annual celebration of Wikipedia’s founding anniversary! The community-built encyclopedia for all turns 24 years old today. Normally, Duck Prints Press doesn’t highlight specific businesses or even non-profits as part of our posts, but we decided to make an exception for Wikipedia, especially with it facing unprecedented challenges caused by the growing popularity of generative AI (boo, hiss). There are a handful of services and organizations that Duck Prints Press supports with modest monthly contributions, and Wikipedia is one of them.

Since we love Wiki so much, we wanted to celebrate its birthday too! Many of us have wiled away otherwise empty hours by falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. We’ve uncovered many gems that way, or while researching specific topics. Today, Nina Waters, S. J. Ralston, boneturtle, Shannon, Rascal Hartley, Shadaras, and an anonymous contributor share our favorite Wikipedia pages!

Graphic 2 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: G�vle Goat. For full text of this and the other screen caps in this blog post, use the links shared below the images.
Wikipedia Page: Gävle Goat

Graphic 3 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: Scam.

Wikipedia Page: Scam
Graphic 4 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: Dancing Plague Of 1518.

Wikipedia Page: Dancing Plague Of 1518
Graphic 5 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: Disco Demolition Night.

Wikipedia Page: Disco Demolition Night
Graphic 6 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: Eternal September.

Wikipedia Page: Eternal September
Graphic 7 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: Nobel Disease.

Wikipedia Page: Nobel Disease
Graphic 8 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: Ten-Cent Beer Night.

Wikipedia Page: Ten-Cent Beer Night
Graphic 9 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: List Of Obsolete Units Of Measurement.

Wikipedia Page: List Of Obsolete Units Of Measurement
Graphic 10 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: List Of Legendary Creatures By Type.

Graphic 10 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: List Of Legendary Creatures By Type.

Wikipedia Page: List Of Legendary Creatures By Type
Graphic 11 of 11. A screenshot of a Wikipedia page titled: List Of Common Misconceptions.

Wikipedia Page: List Of Common Misconceptions

We hope this list has given y’all some fun things to read! Please, PLEASE tell us your favorite Wikipedia pages too – we’d love to read them!

snopes_feed

Posted by Laerke Christensen

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/craigslist-stop-trump-philadelphia/

The advertisement first circulated around the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/craigslist-stop-trump-philadelphia/

askamanager_feed

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/01/whats-something-ridiculous-about-your-profession-that-youve-seen-in-movies-or-on-tv.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=35628

Movies and TV shows are notorious for getting things wildly wrong about real-life jobs. What’s something ridiculous about your profession that you’ve seen in movies or on TV?

Please share in the comments.

The post what’s something ridiculous about your profession that you’ve seen in movies or on TV? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/01/whats-something-ridiculous-about-your-profession-that-youve-seen-in-movies-or-on-tv.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=35628

machinistm

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Current Music: Untouched - The Veronicas

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

mekare

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arstechnica_feed

Posted by Benj Edwards

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-content-with-ai-firms-in-new-licensing-deals/

On Thursday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced API access deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, expanding its effort to get major tech companies to pay for high-volume API access to Wikipedia content, which these companies use to train AI models like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.

The deals mean that most major AI developers have now signed on to the foundation's Wikimedia Enterprise program, a commercial subsidiary that sells high-speed API access to Wikipedia's 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes than the free public APIs provide. Wikipedia's content remains freely available under a Creative Commons license, but the Enterprise program charges for faster, higher-volume access to the data. The foundation did not disclose the financial terms of the deals.

The new partners join Google, which signed a deal with Wikimedia Enterprise in 2022, as well as smaller companies like Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media. The revenue helps offset infrastructure costs for the nonprofit, which otherwise relies on small public donations while watching its content become a staple of training data for AI models.

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https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-content-with-ai-firms-in-new-licensing-deals/

glitteryv posting in

recthething

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

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 fics/fanart/fanvids/podfics/fancrafts/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.

prettygoodword

taro (TAHR-oh, TAIR-oh) - n., a widely cultivated tropical Asian plant (Colocasia esculenta) with large arrow-shaped leaves and edible starchy corms; any of several related plants (genera Colocasia, Alocasia, Xanthosoma, etc.) cultivated for their corms or as ornamentals; the starchy corm from these plants, food made from the corms.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

When grown as ornamentals, taro plants are often called elephant ears, for some indeed have very large leaves. This was mentioned in the entry on potatoes, but just to reiterate, taros aren’t related to either potatoes (which are nightshades) or sweet potatoes (which are morning glories), and instead are arums. Convergent evolution in action. Colocasia esculenta is native to southeast Asia and was probably domesticated in Malaysia. It was one of the staple crops Polynesians carried wherever they settled, and it’s even called taro in several languages (others have sound changes), but we got the name specifically from Maori via Captain Cook’s account of his voyages, where he first describes it as a Maori crop.

---L.

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