Snowflake Challenge 2024 #4: Hello Again!

[silveradept]

Challenge #4 takes its cue from a Rachael Isadora picture book (or a Jay-Z song) with the request "Say Hello."

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.
[…]

Think of it as an elevator pitch, or a manifesto; give us bullet points are lyrical prose. Want to make a game out of it? Tell us things that are true and things that aren’t and let us guess. Don't know what to say? Hate elevator speeches, but don't want to skip a day? Try this Random Question Generator and make yourself a meme all your own.

Whatever you want to do is grand. After all the best thing about fandom really are the people you share it with. The rest—the fic, the art, the vids and metamdash;is just gravy.

I do at least a little bit of people getting to know me, or at least how I like to order this space, in the sticky post about comment culture. The biography in it is still accurate enough. If you want to get to know me more than that, I can point you at the most recent December Days sequence or any of the other December Days sequences, like the ones that focus on computers I have known and worked with, video games and their tropes, writing and transformative fandom, or well-reasoned and insightful opinions on the library sciences.

If you're here to browse my back catalog of fanworks, the AO3 Output tag has them, with little bits of extra information about their creation or specific situations and commentary related to them. (It's been a very nice surprise that so far in this year's Voiceteam Mystery Box round, two of my works have been podfic'd enjoyably, so here's your reminder to have visible and clear transformative works policies, whether that's "Yes!" "Maaaaybe" or "NO!")

You can also look at the tags for previous years challenges, both Snowflake and Sunshine, if you want to see how answers have changed over the years, or how other challenges were approached.

There's also some lesser-used tags for when I get on my horse about specific media properties, or if you would like to laugh along as I try to wrangle code and logic to make a smart home brain do what I want.

And, oh yeah, there's that almost fully across to AO3 retrospective read I did of all three authors so far who have contributed to the official canon of the Dragonriders of Pern. (As of this post, we're through Anne, Todd, and Anne+Todd, but Gigi hasn't been ported across yet.)

Plus, there's the twice-monthly set of neat links gathered from basically everywhere that may inform, amuse, or entertain. There's probably information you can gain about me from reading those and analyzing how things get put together.

Which is a lot of reading to do to get to know someone, really. So I should probably condense it into something useful.

• I'm old enough to have performed Y2K maintenance on a computer, and I intend to live long enough to see what the Linux kernel does when 2038 rolls around.


• Use gender-neutral pronouns for me, of the they/them variant, if that exists in your language. If it doesn't, but you have ungendered pronouns that indicate humanity, use those instead, please. Most people perceive me as a man, and I generally do not correct them on that, because most times, they're perceiving me as a man doing something not traditionally masculine, so either way, I win.


• My wetware is configured with the variable attention stimulus trait loadout (VAST being a less stigmatizing way of referring to Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder) and therefore there may be things that slip through and would appreciate a gentle reminder.


• I am sufficiently multifannish and multishipper that even if I don't know the first thing about your fandom or your ship, I'm curious enough to learn about it. Someone else that I encounter might be perfect for that, and your pitch might be what sells them on it. Since I also write the exchange circuit, generally, I'm pretty used to figuring out how any given combination might plausibly work.


• You may get to know me better because I've shown up in your comments about the neat things you're posting about than anything interesting that I'm posting. This is normal.

So, what did the random question generator ask me?

What is the easiest way to bring a smile to your face?

Tell me a bad pun. Or a good one. I just saw a visual joke where it was three panels. The first two panels were identical, depicting the Sun God of Ancient Egypt. The third panel was the hand of the Sun God carrying a dish made of brown gravy, cheese curds, and fried potatoes.

Comments

[musyc]

My current favorite pun:

What do you call a snail on a cathedral?

AN ESCARGOYLE.

Thank you, thank you.

[silveradept]

That's fantastic.

[ghoti]

this is great.

[yalovetz]

My partner's preferred language is the term polyennic, meaning 'many minds', as a non-patholigising term for VAST that isn't an acronym.

[silveradept]

I'll keep that one in mind and see how I like it.

[tjs_whatnot]

You're awesome. That is all.

CARRY ON.

❤️❤️

[silveradept]

Good to know, thank you. Carrying on.

[ghoti]

alas my current favorite pun is 100% visual and I'm not sure where I originally saw it to link. probably the book of faces.

instead, why do Norwegian ships all have bar codes on the side?
.
.
.
.
.
so when they come back to port, they can scan the navy in.

[silveradept]

Choice pun there.

[tuzemi]

Well now I have some very interesting reading about Pern coming up! 😺

I loved Dragonsinger, and even read it at an appropriate age. Dragondrums not quite so much the first time around, but I am curious how Modern Me would see it. 🤔

...off to AO3 now... 🚀

[silveradept]

Have fun!

(And if you don't like it, my feelings will not be hurt.)

[galadhir]

I don't know what a dish containing gravy, cheese curds and fried potatoes is, but back engineering it, could it be poutine? (What are cheese curds? Are they like cottage cheese?)

One day, a man is walking through the cemetery where Beethoven is buried, and as he walks by his grave, hears a faint rustling sound. Startled, he runs to the cemetery caretaker, who arranges to dig up the grave to investigate. They dig the hole and open up the casket to find Beethoven's skeleton furiously erasing a pile of papers. "What the hell is going on here?" asks the caretaker. "Don't worry, I'm just decomposing," responds Beethoven's skeleton.

[silveradept]

Excellent pun there.

Yes, it's poutine. Cheese curds are, well, they're chunks of cheese made from curdled milk but they haven't been aged much or at all.

[galadhir]

I'd love to try it just for the sake of trying it, but I can't imagine that the vegan version (if there is one) is a lot like the real thing.

[silveradept]

I'm sure there's something that can be put together that's a good approximation and still vegan, but it might take a few swings at it to get the ingredients and the spicing right.

[linky]

This is the first I've heard about the Linux kernel! Granted I don't know much about Linux, but I am curious at looking into it sometime. I know what I'm going to be looking up next to read about. (Even though I'm not the most technologically inclined I do like to read about things pertaining to technology. :D)

I am sufficiently multifannish and multishipper that even if I don't know the first thing about your fandom or your ship, I'm curious enough to learn about it.

Definitely can relate to this! I always love learning about what others enjoy. I also enjoy a good or bad pun.

[silveradept]

It's more specifically that the way that Linux and other POSIX-compliant operating systems that use the UNIX epoch initially devoted a 32-bit signed (as in, +/-, not signature) integer to counting the seconds since 0 (00:00:00 1970-01-01), which means at 03:14:08 2038-01-19, time exceeds its boundaries, having had 2³¹ seconds pass from 0, and the most likely thing that will happen is wrapping around to 20:45:52 1901-12-13 (as the first bit in the integer is the sign bit). That's bad. (64-bit systems get to be smug, they still have 229 billion years before they have to be dealt with.)