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silveradeptChallenge #9 is a direct challenge to the socialization that a significant number of people are brought up with and expected to follow all of their life.
This does not happen in real life. This does not happen on the Internet, either, and the reading audience is free to choose whichever harassment campaign of a marginalized creator that means the most to them as illustration that being unapologetically awesome is not a cure-all for all the people out there who think that you can't possibly be better than they are, simply because you're not a cis white male, and so any success you have must be due to some unfair and unearned advantage given to you by a not-man for a counterfeit reason. Or their superior work was denied because some not-man gave away spaces to not-cis, not-white, not-males for political reasons instead of forcing them to compete on merit with everyone else.
Most of us are also coming out of a year where we got to see what happens when people who can only fail up because of their privilege were allowed to continue failing while others covered for their failures and exacerbated the, to the detriment of anyone who isn't them. In this kind of environment, it can feel a little dangerous to say good things about yourself if you're not in the privileged group, because all of those trolls and assholes feel more emboldened than ever to say and do terrible things and assume there will be no consequences for it.
All the same, it's worth taking stock of the most impressive things we've done, because there are still a lot of cool things that happened. So, it's casually worth mentioning, say, that through the first author loop, the Dragonriders of Pern retrospective is up over 550k words, between commentary and quotation of the source material. Even if it's 25% quotations by volume, that still means about 400k of those 550k is commentary. Since that's only the first author loop, that means there's still eight novels to go in the second author loop, and one more from the third author, so the final project might end up closer to 750k with quotations. That's a really big project. And that's been a project that's been running weekly for more than six years, and will be close to seven when the second author loop finishes. That's not the longest project I've ever done (I did a M-W-F webcomic for about nine years), but it is, by far, the biggest chunk of words that I'll probably ever write in a single fandom on a single project. It's not for everyone, because not everyone has the attitude toward Pern that it's a really good setting marred by really terrible characters, arbitrary consequences, and inconsistencies between works that someone reading them in quick succession will notice and likely WTF about.
AO3 stats helpfully informs me that in addition to that gigantic project, I've put up about 400k more words in the four years I've had an AO3 account, so that's a 100k / year clip for fiction efforts, which is actually about double what I assume I'm putting in on any given year. I'm pretty sure that's not very high up on the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout pledge list, but all the same, that's pretty impressive. And, perhaps something that I'm more impressed with, in the course of those four years, I did 100 assignments, so between exchange participation and pinch hit pickups, I've crafted 100 gifts to others, as of the end of 2020. I do like writing to other people's prompts, so that's not surprising, but I have occasionally heard from others suggesting that I do a lot more exchanges than others usually do. Since I have no frame of reference other than myself, I don't know if I'm completely weird or not.
There are some non-fannish things to brag about, too. Because of the way that programming has changed in the not in-person era, I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the kinds of programming that I would not necessarily have put on myself, for things that are more arts-and-crafts, and for baking, and the sorts of things that are a lot more "ish" than exact, or that are things where failure or things not turning out as planned is both a thing that's possible and a thing that will just have to be dealt with should it arrive. Weirdly enough, working with children and their creative decisions reminds me that there are a lot of different ideas around what qualifies as a good project, and what I do is really much more one set of decisions, rather than a question of objective good or bad. Which is a really good way around any blocks induced by a fixed mindset upbringing, or an upbringing where you stick to your strengths because there are people looking to make fun of you for failing or not doing as well as others.
So, yeah, compared to a lot of years before, there's a lot more easily-recallable happy stuff, braggable stuff, or other stuff that's good going on in my life. It's been a few years since I made some major choices in my life, and while I'm still having some difficulty about thinking of them as positive ones, because they came with significant long-term consequences, the people around me have mentioned that I'm much better now than I was when I was suffering. I'll believe it more when those consequences finally disappear, but even this situation is better than the one I was in.
The world tells us we must be humble, we must take a compliment, but never to compliment ourselves. Never toot our own horn and many other cliches about how to be proper and not overbearingly egotistical. We at Fandom Snowflake Challenge say, f&#k that! Tell us of all the ways you are the BEST! All the things you’ve done, want to do or will one day do. All the ways you are marvelously you.This one's a more difficult one, because of that socialization, and because a lot of people experience Tall Poppy Syndrome if they take advice that says they should be proud of the person they are and not try to hide themselves. I got that advice as a smalling, in conjunction with the advice that jealousy drives most bullies, so ignoring them will eventually make things go away, because at some point, those bullies will either get over their jealousy or realize what kind of jerks they've been and stop.
In your own space, brag about yourself. Tell us what things you've done that you're proud of; the things that make you the wonderful person you are.
Rec YOUR work, YOUR fic, YOUR art, YOUR meta, YOUR anything! Maybe you host a challenge, or maybe you have lists of resources that you've lovingly curated that you'd like to share. Or maybe you…whatever you do, we want to hear about it!!
This does not happen in real life. This does not happen on the Internet, either, and the reading audience is free to choose whichever harassment campaign of a marginalized creator that means the most to them as illustration that being unapologetically awesome is not a cure-all for all the people out there who think that you can't possibly be better than they are, simply because you're not a cis white male, and so any success you have must be due to some unfair and unearned advantage given to you by a not-man for a counterfeit reason. Or their superior work was denied because some not-man gave away spaces to not-cis, not-white, not-males for political reasons instead of forcing them to compete on merit with everyone else.
Most of us are also coming out of a year where we got to see what happens when people who can only fail up because of their privilege were allowed to continue failing while others covered for their failures and exacerbated the, to the detriment of anyone who isn't them. In this kind of environment, it can feel a little dangerous to say good things about yourself if you're not in the privileged group, because all of those trolls and assholes feel more emboldened than ever to say and do terrible things and assume there will be no consequences for it.
All the same, it's worth taking stock of the most impressive things we've done, because there are still a lot of cool things that happened. So, it's casually worth mentioning, say, that through the first author loop, the Dragonriders of Pern retrospective is up over 550k words, between commentary and quotation of the source material. Even if it's 25% quotations by volume, that still means about 400k of those 550k is commentary. Since that's only the first author loop, that means there's still eight novels to go in the second author loop, and one more from the third author, so the final project might end up closer to 750k with quotations. That's a really big project. And that's been a project that's been running weekly for more than six years, and will be close to seven when the second author loop finishes. That's not the longest project I've ever done (I did a M-W-F webcomic for about nine years), but it is, by far, the biggest chunk of words that I'll probably ever write in a single fandom on a single project. It's not for everyone, because not everyone has the attitude toward Pern that it's a really good setting marred by really terrible characters, arbitrary consequences, and inconsistencies between works that someone reading them in quick succession will notice and likely WTF about.
AO3 stats helpfully informs me that in addition to that gigantic project, I've put up about 400k more words in the four years I've had an AO3 account, so that's a 100k / year clip for fiction efforts, which is actually about double what I assume I'm putting in on any given year. I'm pretty sure that's not very high up on the
getyourwordsout pledge list, but all the same, that's pretty impressive. And, perhaps something that I'm more impressed with, in the course of those four years, I did 100 assignments, so between exchange participation and pinch hit pickups, I've crafted 100 gifts to others, as of the end of 2020. I do like writing to other people's prompts, so that's not surprising, but I have occasionally heard from others suggesting that I do a lot more exchanges than others usually do. Since I have no frame of reference other than myself, I don't know if I'm completely weird or not.There are some non-fannish things to brag about, too. Because of the way that programming has changed in the not in-person era, I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the kinds of programming that I would not necessarily have put on myself, for things that are more arts-and-crafts, and for baking, and the sorts of things that are a lot more "ish" than exact, or that are things where failure or things not turning out as planned is both a thing that's possible and a thing that will just have to be dealt with should it arrive. Weirdly enough, working with children and their creative decisions reminds me that there are a lot of different ideas around what qualifies as a good project, and what I do is really much more one set of decisions, rather than a question of objective good or bad. Which is a really good way around any blocks induced by a fixed mindset upbringing, or an upbringing where you stick to your strengths because there are people looking to make fun of you for failing or not doing as well as others.
So, yeah, compared to a lot of years before, there's a lot more easily-recallable happy stuff, braggable stuff, or other stuff that's good going on in my life. It's been a few years since I made some major choices in my life, and while I'm still having some difficulty about thinking of them as positive ones, because they came with significant long-term consequences, the people around me have mentioned that I'm much better now than I was when I was suffering. I'll believe it more when those consequences finally disappear, but even this situation is better than the one I was in.
