Snowflake Challenge 02025 #8: Promotional Rate

Challenge #8 asks us to show our work about why we love the things we do

Seems like we all spend a considerable chunk of our fandom time trying to convince loved ones, friends and total randos alike that our blorbo is in fact the best. This can take shape of anything from watch parties/read-alongs to capslock squee in DMs to relentless gifsets to PhD dissertations.

One of my favourite forms of this is the "fandom manifesto" or "fandom primer," wherein one writes up an outline of what their blorbo is, why it's great, and links to where one can find more (with more or less detail and formality, depending on the venue).

Challenge #8

In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for a beloved character, relationship or fandom.

( A lot of summaries and ideas. )

But if I do have to talk about something, maybe it can be this: I like that we have scads of digital interactive fiction, from IF using a Z-Machine or interpreter, through Twine and visual novels (and that apparently, Ren'Py can do all kinds of things), and the applications that we can get that are essentially interactive fiction where the dice rolling all happens in secret, but could we bring back the gamebook format into print? Chooseco isn't necessarily the only game in town these days, but there used to be an entire explosion of interactive fiction with RPG elements while I was much younger, and while I could tell that some of those adventures were going to be very tough to complete as intended, with the dice rolling and the keeping track of one's vital statistics, it was nice to have them as passages and puzzles and trying to do things. (Even if some adventures really did hinge on a coin flip as to whether you were going to win or fail at the last step.) They were pulpy and sword-and-or-sorcery, and they probably don't hold up all that great. Yes, I know that Project Aon exists, if I just need a specific kind of fix, but there were so many other types of it at the time, and they all just kind of vanished, and because they were pretty well pulp adventurers with a small amount of RPG mechanics, they haven't been preserved nearly as much, as best as I can tell. So, for another generation of kids (and grownups) who might want some solo adventures while they're away from their tabletop and who might have people telling them not to use their electronics so much, maybe we can bring back the format and showcase the many different ways that someone can do fantasy worlds. And possibly slightly more forgiving adventures, as I recall an awful lot of them end in the same way that a lot of Chooseco books do, with an abrupt death. These ones have that abrupt death based on whether or not you had good RNG as much as whether you made good choices. These gamebooks were being made in the era of Sierra games and the H2G2 IF that were specifically all about ending your adventure if you forgot to find the one secret object that only glints on Thursdays. We've had many more years of knowing how to craft a better adventure, so why not do it?

And one into the new year - Early January 02025

Hello! We started this year with a large chunk of material entering the public domain from that very recent year of 1929. And always, the hope that copyright gets reformed at some point so that significant amounts of the materials created in my lifetime can be used for building blocks for the next great things.

A thoughtful reflection on the ways that the somewhat closed grouping of fanworks in relation to fandom has now become The Next Big Thing for all kinds of people who see lots of unmonetized content instead of the activities of a fandom. And the ways they either poach authors to publish works or steal the works to sell themselves to an audience mostly outside the fandom that's looking for content and is willing to pay for someone else's shoddy work. It's also got an interesting undercurrent of the understanding that trope language has supplanted fandom language in how people look for things and describe them, and that this shift is also helping people think of fanworks not as things that are bound in specific contexts, but as "content" that no longer has any attachments to it.

A program for men in prison that works on reconnecting them with the emotions and skills they have long since closed off from themselves, and teaches them ways of avoiding escalation or acting like men with stunted emotional development. It also creates a very small recidivism rate among those who are released, but the actual point is that if these men, in prison, can get the skills they need to become vulnerable, caring, understanding, then presumably, we can do this for men outside of prison, before they enter the system, before they take lives or lose them to the inside. Men can find common ground in admitting to all the things that people who are perceived as men are failing at masculinity over, which is a perfectly good starting point toward the second stage of "well, if men are all failing at masculinity because of things like having emotions, or body issues, or behaviors that are deemed insufficiently masculine by their peers, what's exactly stopping men from rewriting the definition of masculinity to better suit all of the people who are failing at it, rather than trying to live up to an impossible ideal?" (For most people perceived as men, as is noted in the post, the answer is "other men," but surely, somewhere, you can trace the line back to someone who has either seized or been ceded the definition of masculinity by enough people that getting them to change would make a fair amount of progress. I suspect, somehow, though, that the people who have that kind of power are the kind of people who are the most invested in propping up, disseminating, and reinforcing the impossible standard, whether for their own ego or because they're making money off the rubes.

( Plenty more inside, including serious allegations and Establishment Clause violations )

Last for tonight, the latest installation of an annual series about what people got stuck in genitals and rectums over the course of the last year.

And a reworking of the first DOOM level so that it is instead an art gallery experience, complete with drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Which gets paired with an implementation of DOOM in a single PDF, showing just what kind of nonsense you can achieve in the Portable Document Format.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)