Snowflake Challenge 02025 #13: Say Hello
Jan. 25th, 2025 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptChallenge #13 asks us to expand our circle of people we've made contact with.
One of the things that helps build community is having shared things to talk about, and so when Snowflake rolls around, I try to make a concerted effort to comment on various challenge posts and the like. Of course, because so many people participate, I inevitably fall behind on taking care of such things, but I do try to give comments where I have something to talk about with someone else. And most of the time, the people that I'm talking to are usernames that I haven't seen before on Dreamwidth.
Much of the skill I've gained in talking to other people is not because I have sufficient extroversion or the memetic confidence of a mediocre white man to strike up conversations with other people. I can start conversations with other people because I have props. Icebreakers are a specific kind of prop that group facilitators use to try and get people to find things to talk about together, for example, but a fair number of people don't like icebreakers in specific situations because they're there to do work, not to feel like a faaaaamily. My props tend to be contextual. If we're in the middle of a convention space, the prop I use to start a conversation might be a pin that I see, or a cosplay, or some other visible expression of fannishness that can be a springboard to a short or long conversation. Or it's a meetup, where we can be reasonably assured that the people who are present have similar experiences or interests. Similarly, the satchel of pins that I have in convention space are also potential conversation-starters, in the same way that the lanyard I wear at work has pins on it that also work reasonably well as conversation-starters with kids (and sometimes adults) who recognize characters and want to talk about that.
One of the artifacts that I have that intersects with the Juggalo culture (the fans of the group Insane Clown Posse, where my most recent interesting thing about them is Violent J's support of his daughter being a furry by having a Violent J-themed fursuit to wear along with her at conventions) is a game called Morton's List. It advertises itself as the end to boredom, a "real-life adventure." The general way the game works is that you gather a group of people who promise to commit to the game for 60 minutes minimum (or until the group declares success on the quest, if before 60 minutes). The group determines who will be the leader, with the use of dice to help resolve conflicts. The leader then rolls a 30-sided boulder and consults the various tables in the book until a quest is decided on, or the group fails out of getting a quest. (It's a 1-in-30 chance at any given time that the current step will fail out.) The tables include various thematic elements, and also the presence of changes to the rules or modifications of the normal procedure of obtaining and detailing the quest to the group of players. There are safeguards in place so that if the quest rolled up is wrongly timed, is not possible in the constraints currently present, or would go against the moral convictions of one or more of the players, that quest is discarded without penalty and a new one obtained.
Once a quest has been obtained, and the appropriate entry read from the list, the sixty minute clock starts. The group decides how they are going to go about fulfilling the charge of the quest, and then puts that plan into action. At sixty minutes, or total victory, the group is released from their obligation. They can continue, if they like, toward total victory, or they can disband the current group and form another to do a different quest.
Morton's List is, in essence, a prop for starting conversations with other people, and, if you have sixty minutes to burn, like you might in between panels or showing or other such things at conventions, you can get to know complete strangers through the prop of knowing the structure, but not the specifics, of what's about to happen. Now, admittedly, the Juggalo connections (and the reputation of Juggalos) means that sometimes Morton's List gets banned from convention spaces on the assumption that it will encourage anarchic and anti-social behaviors or be used as a vehicle for harrasment of others. There are certainly ways that props can be used to invade someone's space and disrespect their boundaries, but the people who are likely to do that are also likely to do the same using other props or pick-up lines, and it's not fully the fault of the game itself.
Being in similar or shared spaces or among people that you are likely to have similar discussion topics makes talking to them easier, and being in fannish spaces, and sometimes in specific fannish spaces, makes it much easier to jump into conversations or to leave your kudos, or otherwise generally participate in the community around you. Which sometimes can lead to passionate opinions being rendered and the reminder that "fan" is short for "fanatic," with all of the implications therein. Depending on the culture of the place, conversation and community may be easier or more difficult to achieve by someone just arriving. What helps in those cases is often the presence of written and easily-shared rules and norms for the place that the conversation is taking place in. Lurking some will give you an idea of what the unwritten rules of a place are, but "lurk moar" should not be the sole directive that someone receives about how they can meaningfully participate in a space. Playing Mao is fine for a card game where the idea is to figure out what the secret rule(s) are, but it is not okay for social spaces, whether they are more public or more private. And some people won't participate at all unless there's a clear rules and guidance document for the space.
I'd like to believe that a lot of people are interested in making sure the spaces where they want to talk to people are welcoming and fostering community, conversation, and friendships. Not everyone necessarily has a template to work from, or enough experience to know what things will have to be mentioned before a space has at least a basic set of rules to work with. That's why I'm grateful totrascendenza for providing thoughts and demonstrating a template so that people can explain what the commenting culture they would like to foster in their journals. Inspired by that example, I created a sticky post with my commenting culture desires and other expectations or important things about myself and my space that should hopefully serve as a useful guide to answering the questions of "if I come across a silveradept thing, or I'm interested in adding them to my reading list, what can I expect, and what am I encouraged to do?"
It's so much easier to do something like this online, where I can generate a sticky post and point people to it, than to do it in person or at in-person events. At in-person events, there's usually a set of ground rules the space and the event impose to make things go well and to disallow egregious or anti-social behaviors that will negatively impact the experience of many. Some spaces have additional demands placed on top of those because of the way that specific attendees have been treated or specific behaviors they want to more actively discourage, or because the space they are in has different rules than the world outside, and it's imperative that everyone in that space understands the rules they are operating under here, rather than being able to coast on or use the assumptions they have brought with them from the space outside. Beyond that, though, there are sometimes things that individuals need to signal to others in ways that are unmistakable and impossible to miss, whether it is questions about photographs, or what the proper forms of address are for them, or whether they are interested at all in having people they have not been introduced to interacting with them. Most spaces don't have accommodations for those kinds of situations, even the ones that are relatively common and shared across individuals. (The ones that do, give them your support. It adds complexity, but if people keep appreciating those things in writing and in earshot of people who make decisions, they're more likely to see the complexity as worth it for the good experiences of attendees, rather than additional complexity with no obvious benefit.) So sometimes people have to resort to figuring out their own ways to communicate with others, and to do so in a way that will be both acknowledged and respected. At that point, usually, someone gets shirty because another person asserted a boundary around them in a way that couldn't be deflected, denied, or disguised as "help" to the person asserting the boundary. Getting shirty at someone for doing what they need to so that you will pay attention is shitty. Minimize how often it happens and how long it goes on for, if you can.
For online space, though, I'd really love it if people had their expectations spelled out in easy-to-reference places. For communication, for jumping in to comment sections, for permissions about making transformative works of your own works, all of those things. It doesn't require multiple-page justifications to accompany these things, although it might feel like it if you're asserting a boundary or an accommodation that most other people stomp over or won't even acknowledge the existence of. Or if someone believes that you belong to a group their group doesn't have to listen to or otherwise provide the basic respect due another sentient. As I have been professionally taught, if you have the rules in writing somewhere then you can reference the rules to someone when they break them, accidentally or intentionally, and at least personally, it makes decisions to bounce, ban, block, or otherwise remove someone's access to you that much easier when you've been able to show them the posted rules and how what they've been doing is in violation of those posted rules, and therefore they're not allowed in your space any more. Higher powers may have to be invoked for evasions or other coninued bad behavior, but at that point, it's almost certain that someone is violating the higher power's rules and terms. (Or, at least, it used to be the case. Now, I'm not so sure about many of those spaces and whether things that were forbidden still actually are, or whether new ownership has rescinded most of the rules in place that were about establishing a floor of appropriate behavior.)
In any case, this post, like all the others, is a perfect place to jump in and say hello! Ask questions, drop factoids, show links, all of those things. Just remember that it's more of a salon in my living room (asjenett says) than the public square, and comport yourselves accordingly.
For me, one of the best parts of fandom is the opportunity to interact with people who share my passions. Whether that's directly through comments or fanwork exchanges, or more indirectly by moderating communities, or reccing new work to people we already know -- talking to each other is one way I show fandom love.
Challenge #13
Interact with someone in fandom you haven't talked with before.
[…]
We all have different levels of comfort in putting ourselves out there. And while we here at Fandom Snowflake love to challenge people to go out of their comfort zone, we also want you to feel safe. You don't have to strike up a conversation with a total stranger (unless you want to). You could try any number of things! Comment on someone else's journal, or comment on a fanwork. Speak up in a Discord conversation. Leave kudos on a work at AO3. Reblog a fanwork on Tumblr. Fill a prompt at a community. Chat up the random person who posted about your favorite fandom here in our challenges. Find someone to wave to in tags. Really, anything that has you communicating with someone else counts.
Here's some suggestions if you want them:
- Challenge #8 asked people to post a promo or manifesto for one of their beloved fandoms. Look at the comments for someone who shares your interests, and leave them a comment!
- Challenge #9 asked people to create a fanwork. It's a great place to find new people!
- Go to AO3 and sort the fics in your favorite fandom by comments, and leave a comment or kudos on one you've never read before.
- If you would like to find a community that suits your interests, try
One of the things that helps build community is having shared things to talk about, and so when Snowflake rolls around, I try to make a concerted effort to comment on various challenge posts and the like. Of course, because so many people participate, I inevitably fall behind on taking care of such things, but I do try to give comments where I have something to talk about with someone else. And most of the time, the people that I'm talking to are usernames that I haven't seen before on Dreamwidth.
Much of the skill I've gained in talking to other people is not because I have sufficient extroversion or the memetic confidence of a mediocre white man to strike up conversations with other people. I can start conversations with other people because I have props. Icebreakers are a specific kind of prop that group facilitators use to try and get people to find things to talk about together, for example, but a fair number of people don't like icebreakers in specific situations because they're there to do work, not to feel like a faaaaamily. My props tend to be contextual. If we're in the middle of a convention space, the prop I use to start a conversation might be a pin that I see, or a cosplay, or some other visible expression of fannishness that can be a springboard to a short or long conversation. Or it's a meetup, where we can be reasonably assured that the people who are present have similar experiences or interests. Similarly, the satchel of pins that I have in convention space are also potential conversation-starters, in the same way that the lanyard I wear at work has pins on it that also work reasonably well as conversation-starters with kids (and sometimes adults) who recognize characters and want to talk about that.
One of the artifacts that I have that intersects with the Juggalo culture (the fans of the group Insane Clown Posse, where my most recent interesting thing about them is Violent J's support of his daughter being a furry by having a Violent J-themed fursuit to wear along with her at conventions) is a game called Morton's List. It advertises itself as the end to boredom, a "real-life adventure." The general way the game works is that you gather a group of people who promise to commit to the game for 60 minutes minimum (or until the group declares success on the quest, if before 60 minutes). The group determines who will be the leader, with the use of dice to help resolve conflicts. The leader then rolls a 30-sided boulder and consults the various tables in the book until a quest is decided on, or the group fails out of getting a quest. (It's a 1-in-30 chance at any given time that the current step will fail out.) The tables include various thematic elements, and also the presence of changes to the rules or modifications of the normal procedure of obtaining and detailing the quest to the group of players. There are safeguards in place so that if the quest rolled up is wrongly timed, is not possible in the constraints currently present, or would go against the moral convictions of one or more of the players, that quest is discarded without penalty and a new one obtained.
Once a quest has been obtained, and the appropriate entry read from the list, the sixty minute clock starts. The group decides how they are going to go about fulfilling the charge of the quest, and then puts that plan into action. At sixty minutes, or total victory, the group is released from their obligation. They can continue, if they like, toward total victory, or they can disband the current group and form another to do a different quest.
Morton's List is, in essence, a prop for starting conversations with other people, and, if you have sixty minutes to burn, like you might in between panels or showing or other such things at conventions, you can get to know complete strangers through the prop of knowing the structure, but not the specifics, of what's about to happen. Now, admittedly, the Juggalo connections (and the reputation of Juggalos) means that sometimes Morton's List gets banned from convention spaces on the assumption that it will encourage anarchic and anti-social behaviors or be used as a vehicle for harrasment of others. There are certainly ways that props can be used to invade someone's space and disrespect their boundaries, but the people who are likely to do that are also likely to do the same using other props or pick-up lines, and it's not fully the fault of the game itself.
Being in similar or shared spaces or among people that you are likely to have similar discussion topics makes talking to them easier, and being in fannish spaces, and sometimes in specific fannish spaces, makes it much easier to jump into conversations or to leave your kudos, or otherwise generally participate in the community around you. Which sometimes can lead to passionate opinions being rendered and the reminder that "fan" is short for "fanatic," with all of the implications therein. Depending on the culture of the place, conversation and community may be easier or more difficult to achieve by someone just arriving. What helps in those cases is often the presence of written and easily-shared rules and norms for the place that the conversation is taking place in. Lurking some will give you an idea of what the unwritten rules of a place are, but "lurk moar" should not be the sole directive that someone receives about how they can meaningfully participate in a space. Playing Mao is fine for a card game where the idea is to figure out what the secret rule(s) are, but it is not okay for social spaces, whether they are more public or more private. And some people won't participate at all unless there's a clear rules and guidance document for the space.
I'd like to believe that a lot of people are interested in making sure the spaces where they want to talk to people are welcoming and fostering community, conversation, and friendships. Not everyone necessarily has a template to work from, or enough experience to know what things will have to be mentioned before a space has at least a basic set of rules to work with. That's why I'm grateful to
trascendenza for providing thoughts and demonstrating a template so that people can explain what the commenting culture they would like to foster in their journals. Inspired by that example, I created a sticky post with my commenting culture desires and other expectations or important things about myself and my space that should hopefully serve as a useful guide to answering the questions of "if I come across a silveradept thing, or I'm interested in adding them to my reading list, what can I expect, and what am I encouraged to do?"It's so much easier to do something like this online, where I can generate a sticky post and point people to it, than to do it in person or at in-person events. At in-person events, there's usually a set of ground rules the space and the event impose to make things go well and to disallow egregious or anti-social behaviors that will negatively impact the experience of many. Some spaces have additional demands placed on top of those because of the way that specific attendees have been treated or specific behaviors they want to more actively discourage, or because the space they are in has different rules than the world outside, and it's imperative that everyone in that space understands the rules they are operating under here, rather than being able to coast on or use the assumptions they have brought with them from the space outside. Beyond that, though, there are sometimes things that individuals need to signal to others in ways that are unmistakable and impossible to miss, whether it is questions about photographs, or what the proper forms of address are for them, or whether they are interested at all in having people they have not been introduced to interacting with them. Most spaces don't have accommodations for those kinds of situations, even the ones that are relatively common and shared across individuals. (The ones that do, give them your support. It adds complexity, but if people keep appreciating those things in writing and in earshot of people who make decisions, they're more likely to see the complexity as worth it for the good experiences of attendees, rather than additional complexity with no obvious benefit.) So sometimes people have to resort to figuring out their own ways to communicate with others, and to do so in a way that will be both acknowledged and respected. At that point, usually, someone gets shirty because another person asserted a boundary around them in a way that couldn't be deflected, denied, or disguised as "help" to the person asserting the boundary. Getting shirty at someone for doing what they need to so that you will pay attention is shitty. Minimize how often it happens and how long it goes on for, if you can.
For online space, though, I'd really love it if people had their expectations spelled out in easy-to-reference places. For communication, for jumping in to comment sections, for permissions about making transformative works of your own works, all of those things. It doesn't require multiple-page justifications to accompany these things, although it might feel like it if you're asserting a boundary or an accommodation that most other people stomp over or won't even acknowledge the existence of. Or if someone believes that you belong to a group their group doesn't have to listen to or otherwise provide the basic respect due another sentient. As I have been professionally taught, if you have the rules in writing somewhere then you can reference the rules to someone when they break them, accidentally or intentionally, and at least personally, it makes decisions to bounce, ban, block, or otherwise remove someone's access to you that much easier when you've been able to show them the posted rules and how what they've been doing is in violation of those posted rules, and therefore they're not allowed in your space any more. Higher powers may have to be invoked for evasions or other coninued bad behavior, but at that point, it's almost certain that someone is violating the higher power's rules and terms. (Or, at least, it used to be the case. Now, I'm not so sure about many of those spaces and whether things that were forbidden still actually are, or whether new ownership has rescinded most of the rules in place that were about establishing a floor of appropriate behavior.)
In any case, this post, like all the others, is a perfect place to jump in and say hello! Ask questions, drop factoids, show links, all of those things. Just remember that it's more of a salon in my living room (as
jenett says) than the public square, and comport yourselves accordingly.
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