silveradept | Entries tagged with fandom snowflake: 2016

In your own space, talk about what you're taking away from this challenge. Did you learn something? Did you interact with new people? Or did you try out different fandoms or formats or relationships? What's changed between Day 1 and Day 15 of this challenge?

Well, in both cases, it was an experiment, seeing if this landscape calling itself fandom had a place for someone who writes less of pairings and threes and more of reasons why vampires playing baseball would look very different than humans. I'm pretty sure there's a place for me in there, but it seems like me and my fellow travelers are the nomads of the universe, wandering about and staying in the various cities of fandom, but not necessarily building houses there.

I did learn of the presence of podfic, which seems like an awesome thing and I salute the people that can carve out enough time to actually perform works. I can only guess at the amount of time needed for things of multiple chapters and hundreds of thousands of words.

I got to see a pretty good range of major fandoms at work, with not too many things mentioned that I hadn't seen or at least knew what was going on. I got to read some neat fiction bits in things I didn't expect, like incompetent time-traveling saxophone haters or planetary bodies and science instruments.

Most of the people participating were user names that I had never seen around, so that was neat. I don't think too many of them would take a look at me and think of my journal as a place to follow, but I did get some nice comments on the Night Vale ficlet I wrote on day four. That was encouraging, at least.

And I had to write the exercise of things you like about yourself, which is one of the hardest things to do. So, all in all, I'd consider the whole thing a success, even if I didn't find the secret enclaves of Meta and the group that are all about analyzing the same shows that I'm watching. I'm sure they're there. Of course, it would probably help if I ever actually said what kind of shows I was watching. Or books I was reading, or albums listening, and all of that stuff that helps build a community. Maybe I'm afraid of people making fun of me for it. (That would be a holdover from teen years - I've been away from that for a long time, but it was during that perfect time when you form your opinion of yourself and others using the people around you as the template.)

Anyway, still not sure that I'm that far up on the canon of the more popular things to participate in exchanges...or that I have time for it, but maybe I'll keep peeking in for things that aren't that demanding on the time.

Current Mood: rejuvenated
Current Music: The X-Files - Main Titles

In your own space, share your love for something fannish: a trope, cliché, kink, motif, theme, format, or fandom.

Where to start? (The Beginning.) I think I'm always going to have a soft spot for the newspaper comic style, even though I haven't regularly read any sort of comic, save Unshelved, xckd, and Girl Genius, all delivered to me, regularly. If I think about my comfort reads in comics, they tend to be slice-of-life style stories. What that life consists of can be plenty weird, as it is in Calvin and Hobbes, Ozy and Millie, Sinfest, early College Roomies From Hell!!! (the three exclamation points stand for quality), xkcd, Yotsuba&!, and Lucky Star, but it tends to be serial, slice-of-life, and drawn in a four-panel style with bigger sets on occasion. There's something about the format that's good for me, like it isn't demanding too much time, there's usually going to be a joke involved somewhere, and a lot of the subjects touched on there do so without sliding off into the darker places. (Not universally, of course - there are plenty of serious subjects that happen in strip form.) Maybe it's just my nostalgia filter being tripped, and comics in that style recall memories of a previous, happier, less responsibility-burdened time. Even as I was reading about Watterson battling his syndicate and dove headfirst into Dana Simpson's political spinoff (I Drew This), the adult concerns expressed in those places weren't as real as they are now, having lived without the protective shields put in place to make sure I could get to adulthood safely.

If I keep going like this, I'm probably going to harsh someone's squee about the things I've mentioned so far. Happier thoughts, happier thoughts, like the independent spirit on display in those comics. Calvin, Millie (and Ozy, on a much quieter delivery), Yotsuba, Konata, Ayamu, Chiyo, and most of the cast of these comics are doing their thing, regardless of social pressures. Those pressures, when presented, tend to take the form of comedy, even if it wouldn't be quite as funny now to watch a character obsess about their weight and others their cup size. And my fingers still wince in sympathy for Saki. None of the characters in the comics receive severe and permanent consequences for their decisions to be who they are. They might have sheep for rivals, and the visual metaphors might be a bit much from time to time, but their stories don't reflect the reality around them, just outside their universe, where the readers are.

I wonder if that's part of the draw of fanworks - to be able to set up the world in such a way where sometimes, everyone lives. Or gets the person they are happiest with, or finds their happily ever after, villains included. To build the world we want to see, fully realized, as a break or a counterweight to the world outside, which is nowhere near fully realized and still needs a lot of work.

Oy. Melancholy again. I like comedy, and to laugh, and clever wordplay and pratfalls, and my stories as a relief from the world outside, as Pratchettian little lies and big ones, and to see heroes defeat villains, for the reasons that are right to them.

I like my stories happy, because I've had more than enough of my fill of depression and anger and negative self-talk, and those things will just keep coming, so what I like in my stories is the ability to set that aside and pretend, even if for only a little while.

What I get fannish about, most of the time, is a world that isn't this one.

Current Mood: moody
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Organization XIII

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you did not create.

One way to level up today's challenge is to try to rec any of the following: tiny fandoms, rare pairings, fanworks other than stories, lesser known kinks or tropes. Find fanworks that have few to no comments, or creators new to a particular fandom and maybe aren't well known or appreciated.

And, a last quick bit of advice: if possible, do your fellow fan a favour and give warnings for triggery fanworks (deathfic, noncon, etc.) You'll get good fannish karma in return. :)

Solid advice with regard to this challenge - recommendations should come with the possible issues accompanying. It makes it easier to decide whether to forge ahead or shelve the recommendation.

As for my own, first, I want to highlight a couple items using the technique of psychocronography to analyze various media in their contexts. The Near-Apocalypse of '09 is looking at episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, with the idea that Batman, despite being a vigilante operating outside the law, is always a character working to uphold the structures of order and society in the face of more chaotic figures such as the Joker. The Super Nintendo Project (link is to first post in the series) uses the various games of the platform as a reflection on an idealized past, the one populated by various Puppies, Gamergate adherents, and others who believe firmly in the nerdy version of The Past That Never Was. Since the subtitle is "A Sixteen-Bit Ritual to Destroy Gamergate", you can see where it will be going.

The very first fandub I saw was Evangelion Re:Death, a blisteringly funny send-up of Evangelion, where Gendo intends to become the Uber-Pimp. Since it came out in 2000, you can probably expect less progressive views on sex and sexuality, and a lot of things about the women characters get sacrificed in favor of the broad satire characterization of Misato as a drunkard, Rei as an ice queen, and Asuka as butch (with bad Schwarzenegger-accent).

On the pure fiction side, however, I can thank the Snowflake challenge to introducing me to On the Mating Habits of Muggles & Naturalist Witches (OR Muggles in the Midst), which tickled my funny bone with the way that it portrayed Luna. (Admittedly, Luna became more crystallized for me from the movies, but the actress portraying her nailed it.) The way that she his about attempting her studies makes me hope for a sequel where Luna and Arthur Weasley compare notes about the Muggle World and its inhabitants.

As for fanart, I have a lot of it stashed. But, for a single piece that I like, here's Konata doing what she does best - trolling everyone.

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Beware The Forest's Mushrooms

What makes you fannish? And by that we mean, what is it about a tv show/movie/book/band/podcast/etc that takes you from, "Yeah, I like that," to "I need MOAR!!!" Is it a character? A plotline? The pretty? Subtext that’s just screaming to be acknowledged?

In your own space, tell us what it is that gets you to cross that line into fandom.

As it turns out, non-main characters and the ensemble in ensemble cast often spark the fannish idea. I'm not sure whether it's that we only see into their lives a little bit, whether they're allowed to be written a little bit more loosely, or what it is, but the presence of a good cast can make a lot of difference.

Compare, for example, Warehouse 13 and Haven, shows aired on the same network. Both have meh main characters in Pete (The Warehouse's everyman chauvinist jock) and Nathan (the man afflicted with a trouble that prevents him from feeling anything with his skin). Where the Warehouse shines and Haven flops, in my opinion, is in their other characters. Myka, Claudia, and Helena are all far more competent Warehouse agents, and Jinksy is Pete's foil on toxic masculinity. Nathan has Audrey, who is useful in that she is immune to Nathan's troubles and far more empathetic than he is, and Duke, who is mostly there to snark at Nathan and occasionally use his own Trouble. It's a very different dynamic, and I like 13 better, despite the violence the showrunners did to their own universe by putting Pete and Myka together as the Official Couple, when Myka and Helena are clearly the correct call.

I like lower decks episodes and beach episodes and stories that pause a bit or shift perspective off of Our Hero(es) so that we can see the world around them and learn what passes for normal around there. I like to see villains with logical reasons and well-built relationships last.(Joss Whedon, I'm giving you the biggest side-eye ever on this.)

Show me that your world has more dimensions and give your characters more to do than relate to the protagonist, and you're well on your way to making me a fan. (Doesn't hurt if you can hang a lampshade or two along the way, too.)

I'm not busily pairing characters in the background, though, which is why a lot of fandom can sometimes feel a little orthogonal to the way I'm viewing / reading. Playing matchmaker isn't necessarily a thing I'm interested in. Evaluating whether a relationship presented in the text / screen is a good one is. I like looking at the world and poking it to see if it falls apart. And, in many ways, seeing if I can build it better.

Which is, I suppose, one of the core fannish impulses.

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Jamiroquai - Soul Education

In your own space, make a list of at least 3 things that you like about yourself.

Well, that didn't take long. Goal 2, called up to account already. So, here it goes, I guess.

Thinking of things that you like about yourself raises a few spectres. If you read the guest post I linked to in an earlier Snowflake (about Twilight as a story of a girl desperately trying to get away from all the attention focused on her), there's a really big strain of perfectionism, and it's accompanying binary thinking, baked into my being as a defense mechanism against children that exemplified Tall Poppy Syndrome. If they can find no fault, then I'm safe. What that also does, though, is set up the duck problem (those placid-looking waterfowl gliding on the surface of the water are actually paddling furiously underneath it - everyone else looks like they're gliding along effortlessly on the river of life, while you know you're just trying to stay afloat) in such a way that things that might be good things about you are discounted or qualified, because you know that you're not all those things.

Incidentally, this is the best illustration of the duck problem that I have seen.

The other issue is the one of scope. With our communication methods and worldwide connectivity, we have the idea of "local celebrity" or "Internet celebrity" - the making explicit the domains by which sunshine can become a famous person, with general worldwide fame as the pinnacle and a place in the history books as the ultimate goal. Since very few people actually make it to that point, it's very easy to discount everything you do because you're not like those people who have the world hanging off their every word.

And then, of course, there's feedback. Many of the talents and skills we have are great, but without someone else noticing them, how will we know that they're good and have had impacts on someone's life? I got a very nice piece of feedback last week about a young woman that had come to a beginner choosing class I had put on. Apparently, she caught the programming bug, to the point of her parent enrolling get in camps taught by a local company. Without that conversation, I wouldn't have known what happened. Now I can be confident I put at least one child on the programming path, and I hope that nobody and no society dissuades her from it.

These things all run interference with trying to find good things about yourself. I've been trying to fight them off with daily (

awesomeers) and weekly check-ins (

synecdochic, among many others) that challenge is to talk about the good things that have happened and what we are proud of. Some days the proudest thing we have is that we were still here the next day. Other days are happier. I don't know if it's causing big changes, but I stare at that prompt every day, trying to see what I can come up with that was a good thing. And sometimes I'm supporting others more than talking about myself.

So, here are three things that I can say I like about myself:

I'm a wizard. Seriously. I make magic every day with finding useful material, doing programming, making recommendations, presenting, and learning. It's very Hufflepuff magic, the kind that doesn't create a lot of flash and that doesn't anyways generate a lot of feedback, but it's magic all the same. For as much as I get aggravated and annoyed with the way The Organization runs the place, I can see the magic happen regularly, whether by me or by others in the same profession.
I'm creative. That's...surprisingly hard to write, but if I stop thinking about creativity in a narrowly-defined zone of "stuff that produces a product" like art, writing, code, and the like, and include the things I do actually do, like essays, teaching, troubleshooting, technological and code adaptation, documentation, problem-solving, and engineering, as well as the fantastic grades obtained all throughout schooling, then there's creativity in spades at work in my head and all around me. It takes some perspective to get it, though, when you've been raised on the idea that creativity only has a limited domain. If I actually think about it, when younger-me wrote a noir detective spoof, the audience laughed when I read it aloud. Current-me still gets people having a good time at Story Time. These are creative endeavors, and they need to be acknowledged as such. As is the practice of arranging links next to each other such that their context days more than their individual selves, or that they tell a story despite being from disparate sources.

Remind me of this frequently, please. It is difficult to remember.
I'm making an effort. I often describe my upbringing as provincial for a reason - the state is not particularly friendly to people who don't fit in the boxes, and the town I was in did not particularly find compassion for people who expressed something other than the ideal of provincial normal - cis, straight, and very interested in "traditional" gender roles. One teacher had their classroom destroyed as part of a malicious prank while I was attending - I now don't think it a coincidence that she was unmarried, teaching advanced maths, and took no shit from anyone. Since then, she did get married, but that was the only change. There are lots of homophobic jokes, rumors about various acts that would actually satisfy one of the more outspoken feminists, and the stereotyping that accompanied any students that weren't white. I thought things got better at University, and they did, somewhat, just by exposure and by being in a culture that valued a more diverse experience. Now that I'm working on my community, I get the full thing of navigating an entire body of possible identities and cultures, and am charged with providing good service to all of them. And I'm friends with a very diverse group of people that teach me more about the experiences of their lives every day. Rather than throwing in the towel and declaring that my brain is full and I'll never be able to understand, I'm making the effort. I'm going to fuck it up, probably spectacularly, a lot in my life, since I already have before. So long as I can keep making the effort, though, I can be proud of that.

That's a really hard exercise for me. I'm much more comfortable talking about flaws and foibles than things I consider strengths. Possibly because I'm still holding on to the defense mechanism against those that want to cut down the smart and talented kids so as to make themselves feel better.

Here's hoping it comes easier later.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Janelle Monae - High or Low

In your own space, post a rec for fannish and/or creative resources and spaces. Tell us where you go to dig up canon facts for your fandom, or where you get all the juicy details about your favorite ship. Where do you like to hang out and squee like a squeeing thing?

Well, I touched briefly on this in Snowflake 02 - the Phenomenal Cosmic Power bit of being an information professional is that once you understand the structure and organization method of any given system, you can basically find anything, assuming that it's been indexed properly. The Internet being what it is, though, it may surface inferior resources at first pass when the search is just starting and generate a lot of frustration.

Here's a problem of the Internet and many other resources - keyword searching by itself is intuitive, but inefficient. Because keyword searches match the words themselves, and not their context. Natural language processing techniques and deliberate exclusion of common words from search results helps to make our keywords a little bit better, but for the most part, just typing in words isn't going to cut it, unless those words are in a unique combination that will point at a useful resource. Just typing in words will usually run a Boolean OR or Boolean AND search, looking just to see whether the words are there on the page and nothing more.

Google, for example, offers site search operators that will help you do more specific things with their engine. Which is nice.

What if, though, you could search the Internet in the same way that you can search academic resource databases like DIALOG? (Every librarian reading this is freely allowed to wince or make any other gesture of pain - many learned the power of searching on that system, often by cursing out the system for returning exactly what was requested and offering no help on how to make the search better. That DIALOG charges by how long you are connected in addition to any other elements you actually printed meant many hours of query construction went into building one excellent search, to be run and its records retrieved, selected, and printed as fast as humanly possible.) Some engines have wildcard or truncation support, most have "exact phrase" support, but very few, if any, handle proximity operations.

To supplement knowledge of the inner workings of search, it helps to know the terminology of what you're looking for. Sometimes, the whole point of the search is to find the right terms, which then yield the desired results. And for that, there are more than a few resources available.

Wikis tend to accrue lots of knowledge through their nature as "anyone can edit" devices. Any fandom that has been around long enough will likely coalesce around a few resources that manage to become encyclopedic and definitive through the luck of having an active group of contributors. In active shows and fandoms, the out-of-universe material is handled by Wikipedia, the in-universe material handled by a thematically-named wiki, and the meta handled by TVTropes. In older items, or finished series, both in and out of universe material may be handled or migrated over to static webpages, possibly with a forum attached for discussion, to archive the things that won't be kept on Wikipedia.

This isn't any sort of absolute rule, of course, but using those three items in combination with each other will probably net enough terminology to then go out to a search engine and sweep the wider world of fandom to find the details, speculation and fic that you want.

As for what engine I use, I've basically switched off Google as my primary search entity because I much prefer the bang syntax of DuckDuckGo that lets me search various sites directly instead of having to go out to their site, find their search bar, and then search that way. I also like that their results also include spaces for images and videos as well as text pages. DDG is a great engine with many helpful features, and can be best used in conjunction with learning a little bit on the Internet about how search engines work, so that you can structure your queries to include the most important information and use the appropriate operators to get the results you want. (Content creators: please don't neglect your metadata, your alt tags, or your semantic markup. It makes it easier for the engines to find you and put you in the place you want to be.)

As for hanging out and squeeing and actual fannish behavior, I'm pretty much Elsewhere, whether it's friends' spaces or websites devoted to deconstruction and review. The Slacktiverse has a nice list of assorted reviews and deconstructions.

So, mostly, my resources for you are things to help you search, wherever you may be searching, so as to more quickly find the perfect resource for yourself. Hopefully it's helpful.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Stay Human - I'm From Kenner

In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

Goals are tough things for me. They come with the possibility of failure if you set them at about the right spot, and failure is a thing that I haven't done well with in my life. That's a lot of privilege talking, but it's also the stark reality that all of that privilege hasn't actually been able to insulate or shield me from the realities of adulthood. The emotional crash hits harder when you realize that you've been playing on an easy difficulty and the game is still too hard to be able to succeed and thrive at. Goals are hard to create for yourself when you feel like just staying ahead of doom is going to take all your effort and resources.

That's catastrophising, though, and hopefully, needed perspective will arrive to keep the brainweasels out when they threaten to get in. Preferably not, however, by having my friends get hammered harder and invite comparison of one's relative privilege.

Another difficulty with goals is their scope. For some reason, hearing "goals" seems to invoke "major life choices and decisions", and, well, that privilege has actually got me to completion on most of those. Required education, check. Degree one, check. Degree two, check. Professional, full-time employment at a job I enjoy doing, check.

Become respected professional in field...insufficient data. How do you define respect? Publishing articles? Done. Giving presentations at conferences? Done again. Sparking a nationwide movement? Not so much. Being a well-known name with millions of Twitter followers? Not happening. Getting an idea approved at the workplace and having it come to fruition? Unlikely. (The Organization doesn't do a lot of solicitation of ideas from the front lines, and doesn't have a whole lot of process for dealing with them anyway.) Some other thing, then. Must be, and I'm sure I'll be happy to have it when it arrives.

So, goal-setting things that I see say that goals need to be small, measurable, attainable, and so forth. Think very directly, so that you can plot out the path to the goal, know when the goal will have been met, and take concrete steps on the path. If asked, though, I...tend to draw a blank. I don't want my goals to be "keep doing the things I'm already doing", but "do something new" is scary, because it's possible that someone might not actually like what I do. Or, people might like it, but it might not be the most popular thing ever, or there's someone else over there that's better than I am and I should just quit. This probably sounds familiar to a lot of other fannish people, who have each found their reasons to forge ahead anyway.

From talking about fears, worries, and processes in this entry, a few goals do all manage to appear.

Try things that are interesting
Be proud of yourself
Support others where you can

The decision to do Fandom Snowflake was based on looking at a friend's page and thinking it was interesting enough to do. Maybe I'll see an exchange or a prompt fill request later on and decide to do it. And then I have to remember to be proud of doing it and that it will likely be just fine and well-received because I took the time to do it for someone else in a fandom and pairing they want. Supporting others on their way is always good practice - they might be the people that have something good to wipe that I'll enjoy, too.

So, maybe they're not the most concrete of goals, but they definitely have steps that can be taken to feel like I'm getting them accomplished!

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Lindsey Sterling - Shatter Me

Comment to someone you haven't ever interacted with before or introduce yourself to someone you've interacted with and friend/follow them.

That said, what if you want to add more sparkle to the challenge? Well, how about leaving feedback on that one fanwork (fic, podfic, fanart, fanvid, meta post, knitting pattern, etc.) that you've always loved in a lurk-ey way? People love getting feedback on their creations--yes, even if it's something they posted way back in the pre-Geocities era. *g*

Another option is to follow/subscribe/grant access to someone you want to get to know better on whichever platform you prefer.

The point is to reach out to someone you normally wouldn't and connect with them, even if it's only for the briefest moment.

One could argue that the Internet is the world's largest and longest continuously running fan convention, given the amount of output and creativity that is posted on even a minute-by-minute basis, if YouTube's claim of millions of hours of footage being posted every minute is true. There's certainly more than enough panel discussion, workshopping, celebrity interaction, tournaments and contests, Artist Alley work, video programming, spontaneous glomping and more going on in each space.

The activity of the convention, though, isn't there for the sake of the convention itself - if it were, there would be no need for attendees and the amount of money they bring in. The real purpose is convention is twofold - it brings the fans together to be fannish with each other, because many fans have always corresponded with each other through whatever remote method is cheapest, and it brings the fans out in sufficiently large quantities that they can suspend some of the rules of the society around them and create their own society, even if only for the weekend.

Sometimes the rules suspended are ones that work better when intact, which necessitates codes of conduct and explicit reintegration and enforcement of those rules that ensure a good experience from everyone, but most of the time, the changes made are ones that benefit the community - it becomes normal, at convention, to wear costume, to adopt roles, to focus on the minutia, to engage in obvious squee, to admire craftsmanship, and to function on an economy that has room for sharing your Pocky or your animation while you wait in line. To take part in a community openly, among peers, rather than having to keep that identity carefully curated so that those who do not understand or will not accept it do not know. (Principle applies outside of fandom, as many kinksters are well aware.)

So, while this challenge is complete through the acts that have come before it, as a natural consequence of seeing things that are new and interesting, the point of the challenge is making the connection. The point of the convention is making the connection. It's just that the Internet needs better maps, signs, and helpful guides to get the attendees from the place that they are at to the spot that they want to be, talking with the people that are interesting to them. (See also: essayist in meta land feels like inhabitant on island of misfit fans) It needs space for the people that are bold and dive right in, and it needs ambassadors that will walk the walls of the room and introduce themselves to the people there, to encourage them to participate and to tend to their needs and self-care decisions. Because someone bold in one context may be a wallflower in others. New situations are both exhilarating and terrifying, and the presence or absence of people whose job it is to understand and empathize with the terror can mean the difference between participation and lurking. (As can the visible presence is people whose job it is to swiftly react to breaches of good behavior in the community.)

Finding someone new to talk to isn't very easy for me, unless I know beforehand that there's a common thread to pull on that can be used as an icebreaker or conversation starter. It's why I wear fannish buttons and floral print shirts at work - they help reduce the gap between me and others sufficiently that we can have a conversation. At convention, it's easier still to start conversations - you are rarely ever in a group that doesn't have a shared purpose of some sort. The rules have changed from the world outside.

At least for the weekend.

Current Mood: good
Current Music: Joe Hisaishi - Sonantine III - Be Over

Share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

A thing worth noting, I suppose, is that even in strongly visual media like television, movies, and video games, I'm often listening more than I am watching. This makes me more typical than you might think - Leslie Nielsen, when talking about Police Squad!, the television show better known by its movie franchise The Naked Gun (the first movie has "from the files of Police Squad!" on it), he reflected that a lot of the homes in the show didn't work as well as they had hoped because during the daytime, even the show was on, the target demographic of at-home parents were usually doing something else while the television was on. Strictly visual gags didn't work because the audience wasn't watching.

Unsurprisingly, I also get glared at by other people in my life when it doesn't look like I'm watching a movie fully. I haven't yet figured out a way of saying "If I'm not watching the movie, it's because the movie is not doing enough things that will engage my attention." Usually, that translates to "the story isn't interesting enough and the main characters aren't, either." It also means "movies should be enjoyable by people with disabilities", including things like the descriptive video service and subtitles, but also that a movie should cohere pretty well if you removed the visuals or if you removed the audio. Paying attention to the details makes the experience better.

Here's an example, from a show I like a lot - Person of Interest.

"Person of Interest - Season 1 - Opening Intro" (Watch on YouTube)

This is the opening credits for the first season. Unlike other shows, the actors' names are not mentioned, and while the voiceover is of Harold Finch, the creator of the machine that gives him and his partner, John Reese, the numbers to investigate, the perspective is that of the machine itself, signaling who the main character actually is.

The credits sequence also foreshadows who will be the person of interest by inserting a small amount of episode footage into the credits. It's a small detail, easy to overlook unless you are watching many episodes next to each other, but since these episodes are from the perspective of the machine, it madness sense for the credits to include the person who is the target of the episode, in case later retrieval is needed.

"Person of Interest - Opening Credits - Season 2" (Watch on YouTube)

This is Season Two, which introduced a rather neat trick into the opening - not only is there a new character on the "hunted by the police", indicating the arrival of Detective Fusco by this point.

At a certain point in Season Two, the Machine comes under attack from a computer virus. In other series, where credits and other such things are considered outside the universe of the show, nothing would happen to the credits even as the Machine continued to suffer. In Person of Interest, though, we get this:

"Person of Interest 2x21 Zero Day opening" (Watch on YouTube)

And that's not the entire sequence, just what I could find available. Since the Machine is crashing, the credits are also crashing. The details are important.

Person of Interest does a lot of this in their opening sequences - swapping in new narrators, new looks, and occasionally messing with the flow of the credits sequence, depending on the status of the Machine and the humans. In some ways, it resembles the way that Fringe would also shift its title sequence around to give clues to the audience about the state of its universe. (I doubt this is coincidental, given that several names are in common between the two.) They all might also owe the idea to the short-lived Dilbert animation, which also changed things in the titles between every episode.

With the advent of digital recording technologies, season-at-once watching, and the ability for entire seasons and shows to be broadcast and financed at once, so as not to need to structure sorry around advertising breaks, I can only see this trend of titles tampering continuing as birth a way of informing viewers, but also as a way of getting a viewer not to simply fast forward or skip their way to the next chapter point.

Details are what help make fandom work. As creators and experiencers, we can both do well to pay attention to them.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Person of Interest - You Are Being Watched

In your own space, create your own challenge. What’s something you want to see more people doing in fandom? Is there something you’ve tried that you think other people would enjoy if they gave it a go? Dare your friends to try it out, and have fun with it.

Well, I suppose I could make a game or challenge of some sort of of this. Here's a prompt generator.

Here's a prompt generator for those that understand why Cards Against Humanity is both terrible and terribly popular (NSFW prompt generator).

So, those are the tools, and the challenge is to make a fanwork based on the random prompt that shows up. Use your favorite pairings more universes or anything else that you have that will help complete the game. Spend exactly as long as you want to on it.

Maybe challenge someone else to a game of animal spelling, going back and forth between yourselves, making small works in short time-frames, rolling up new prompts every time a new round begins. Maybe try to fill Yuletide treats and fandom stockings and other challenges while also fulfilling the prompts.

Get creative with it. Because, really, you're probably better at it than I am.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Ben English - Troublesome Foe

Leave feedback for a fanwork. Or multiple fanworks. It can be as simple as I liked this to a detailed list of all the things you loved about the fanwork. The key is to leave some sort of feedback.

If you've already left feedback in the course of a previous challenge, it totally counts. But you're free to leave more feedback.

The accompanying message for this challenge reminds us of the asynchronous nature of creation and consumption.

Creators create for a number of reasons. Often, we find ourselves inspired, and in the moment, we create. But creation doesn't occur in a vacuum, and it's too easy to walk away from a fanwork without saying anything.

Creators create for themselves, but they need to know that they have an audience and that their fanworks are being enjoyed by others. Feedback is a way to get some validation that what you've created is good.

Sometimes we go to comment on a fanwork and we find ourselves without the words to express how we feel about the fanwork. Or we become overwhelmed by all the amazing comments the fanwork has already gotten.

Don't let either of these things stop you from leaving a comment. There's no prize for the Best Comment Ever, and the creator just needs to know that you enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

Since the only people who seem to have unlimited surveillance powere are government agencies and advertising corporations, the rest of us have to rely on someone telling us that they've experienced our work. This is the basic intersection of fandom - I'm brave enough to put this item out here, and hope you're brave enough to let me know you experienced it. Because commenting requires bravery, too - going on the record that you like something, or offering criticism, or your own perspective, is a brave act, with how many ways it could go pear-shaped through no fault of the commenter.

Which is why i also wanted to talk about a most useful post on this subject -

trascendenza posted about anxieties and commenting on other people's work, along with an idea of creators making an explicit statement about what kinds of comments and feedback they would like and having it somewhere handy so that people who are new to the space can feel more confident in leaving comments. I think it's a wonderful idea, and that's why it's my sticky post for this space. Because I want people to comment and feedback on what they see in these entries, instead of worrying about what would be appropriate comments.

So go! Leave comments! Create culture statements to go with your transformative works statements. And enjoy the shared experiences of fandom.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hell

There were some very cheering words from the challenge prompt today that I think deserve reproducing, and I think they can be repeated across many other vocations and professions. Swap a few words, and it's just right for open source and technology, too.

One of the things that's hard to remember is that you don't have to be a creator to be a fan. It's not a requirement, there's no rule that says you must be this *holds hand up chest high* creative to be in fandom. Lurkers (who totally support me in email) are just as much fans as those who run challenges and create fanworks.

Don't let an arbitrary definition of fan keep you from claiming your space in fandom.

Having said that, keep in mind that what constitutes a fanwork shouldn't be limited to a small handful of formats. Fanworks are more than fics and art. Maybe your fannish creativity takes a different path. Don't discount yourself just because you don't write or make art.

This is important, and one of the ways that you might figure out there's a place in fandom for you is by dipping your toe into the pool of fandom and reading material, viewing art, and following recommendations for things. Doing that, though, can be very scary, because you immediately encounter all these talented people doing great things, and there's clearly more than a few people with lots of followers. It can be intimidating to be confronted with the likelihood that your stuff may not be as good as their stuff, and may never be as good as their stuff.

When I was looking for the previous entry to do recommendations with, I ended up coming across a guest post I had written about Twilight as a story where Isabella Swan desperately just wanted people to stop paying attention to her, because her formative experiences of attention would have been almost universally negative, given her traumatic upbringing, unstable family structure, and the near-constant negative attention she would likely receive for, heaven forbid, being smart, female, and occasionally, as we all are, wrong. The post was about the suffering that goes on when your coping mechanisms tell you that the only way to avoid negative attention is to do everything flawlessly. In a social-media magnified world, it's that much easier for someone to get attention, both positive and negative, and the fear of the latter, especially for women, might keep them out of fannish circles they would otherwise participate in, because very few people want to invite the trolls and dudebros in and would rather just create without sharing.

Today's challenge is, then, a prod to try and overcome all of these things getting to get in your way:

In your own space, create a fanwork. Make a drabble, a ficlet, a podfic, or an icon, art or meta or a rec list. Arts and crafts. Draft a critical essay about a particular media. Put together a picspam or a fanmix. Write a review of a Broadway show, a movie, a concert, a poetry reading, a museum trip, a you-should-be-listening-to-this-band essay. Compose some limericks, haikus, free-form poetry, 5-word stories. Document a particular bit of real person canon. Take some pictures. Draw a stick-figure comic. Create something.

Which, stuff above might qualify as a fanwork all by itself, being a fanwork about fanwork. But it's really an extended riff on "You know, putting your creative self out there is really fucking hard." With a side of "Going back and reading your own work is highly recommended, but also quite a trip." Because I recognize my own writing, but I appear to have changed some in the intervening time.

Anyway, here's a shot at something more akin to traditional ficcing, most likely classed as a ficlet by virtue of a low word count. It's Welcome to Night Vale. If you're not familiar with it, think of it as a town where all the conspiracies and horror stories are true, and the residents don't notice. Too much, anyway. The only glimpse you get into the inner world is through the community radio station and its charming host, Cecil Palmer. And the occasional guest, or guest host, as the case may be...

---

"Hello, listeners. Um, it seems like Cecil isn't back from his petting session with Khoshekh, the cat that's still floating in the men's bathroom, and station management is sounding very irritated that they can't sell their advertising spots as quickly and thoroughly as they want, so I guess it falls to me to sit down at the microphone and try to make a little magic. I'm......not going to say my name, since just thinking about it just caused the station management office door to display a sigil that looked unmistakably like a threat to move on, unless I liked having my entrails removed from my body and then used as the City Council's holiday decorations. I'm an intern here at Night Vale Community Radio, and this, I guess, is the Community Calendar."

"A-hem. Monday is scheduled for the Apocalypse of Saint Bernard. Night Vale will experience a rain of adorable domestic animals, with fluffy coats, fuzzy features, and a vicious killer instinct. Citizens approaching the domestic animals will be eviscerated. The Sheriff's Secret Police are looking for volunteers to help them herd the domestic animals to the dog park. If you are chosen, the Secret Police will contact you by dragging you out of your home during the rain."

"The City Council would also like to remind you that dogs are only provisionally allowed in the dog park. People are not allowed in the dog park. Personally, I don't see the point of having one of you can't go in, but I'm told the Hooded Figures use it to keep the town safe from...things, so I suppose that's okay."

"Tuesday is the Apocalypse of Saint Basil. Night Vale will be flooded with waves upon waves of detectives, investigators, sleuths, old women who write mysteries, and meddling kids. The Sheriff's Secret Police will employ street sweepers, helicopters, and volunteers to herd the deluge of people into their proper home in Radon Canyon, where they will be able to attempt solving the greatest mystery of all - life. That sounds kind of grisly. Couldn't we do something more humane with them, like sacrifice them at Eternal Scout ceremonies?"

"Wednesday is a time correction day. You will feel like you have had this experience before, but you will be unable to pinpoint exactly why. Don't worry about the why, and instead try to right previous wrongs or get yourself out of any pesky time loops."

"Thursday is a figment of your imagination. Pay no attention to it, and it will eventually go away."

"Friday is a time correction day. You will feel like you have had this experience before, but you will be unable to pinpoint exactly why. Don't worry about the why, and instead try to right previous wrongs or get yourself out of any pesky time loops."

"Saturday is the day when the heavens open and things of unspeakable beauty rain down on civilization. That is, if you are part of the underground civilization currently living under the pin retrieval area of Lane 5 of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. For the rest of us, the City Council reminds you that Saturday is Earthquake Preparedness Day and that there will be several drills with real earthquakes to ensure all citizens are fully compliant with Council Ordnance 23-B."

"This has been...what's this? Listeners, I am informed by a note on the desk that Station Management has enacted a policy that declares no interns are allowed to broadcast over the air, for...insurance purposes. Any interns violating this policy will proceed directly to termination."

"Well. No wonder this station keeps losing interns. I'm going to talk with Cecil about this. Maybe that will finally pull him away from the cat. Since I'm already in trouble enough as it is, and I've always wanted to say this, I will take you to...

"...The Weather."

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: The Bran Flakes - Give Yourself a Stereo Checkout

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.

When your creative output (or rather, what you think of as your creative output) is so small, recommending your favorites is easier than it might be if you had a giant amount of possible works to choose from. It doesn't say a lot about the breadth of my fandom, though, unlike those who have a lot to choose from.

As a fantasy reader, primarily, I tend to key into dragons as a large part of my reading choices. Preferably dragons not in the one-dimensional Ultimate Evil forms. So the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Wrede) are great for a young me to see that those stories exist (with bonus active princesses, invisible dusk-blooming chokevines, and wizards being melted with dish soap and water. Argelfaster.) and books like Seraphina and Shadow Scale (Hartman) successfully showing how living as a dragon in the human world is full of the sad experiences of discrimination.

And then there's The Dragonriders of Pern, which at the time of reading it, seemed like a good fit for a dragon-loving child. It was because I liked it a a kid that I decided to go back through it and see how much I was looking at it with rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. As it turns out, a lot. So one of my recommendations is an ongoing giving-of-grief to The Dragonriders of Pern, because I can't change that I liked it as a kid, but I can go back to it and understand what it was I liked.
That is not to say that I think it's wrong to like problematic things. As our social consciousness expands, we look at things from our last and realize how far things have come from days when everyone assumed slaves were an essential part of a functioning society - at least now we try to hide it better. For all their faults, and those faults are legion, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey advance the goal of a literate society by providing them with entertaining works to read.

Being fannish, though, often means noticing details and their execution (or lack thereof). Being able to apply your own expertise to a story to make it better or to fix issues of Did Not Do The Research can help salvage an otherwise excellent fandom. So, number two is An analysis of the baseball scene in Twilight, pointing out as many ways as I could think of that proper baseball fans who are vampires would not be doing what the Cullens do (with extra care for Isabella Swan's life and health than the Cullens show).

Speaking of baseball, the last two years I've been writing various essays about the game, its players, and some of the things that make it compelling and wonderful. The frame that helps give it coherence and scope has been a deck of Tarot cards with a baseball theme. Of the comments received on this series, the people reading certainly seem to enjoy them, which is nice to hear. They are all filed under the December Days: Baseball Tarot tag - please do look and comment. I love comments.

So there's a sampling of the stuff that I do - it may not be your favored flavor, but it seems to be what I'm interested in writing.

Current Mood: rejuvenated
Current Music: Pharrell - Freedom!

In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your wish-list if you feel comfortable doing so. Maybe someone will grant a wish. Maybe you will grant a wish.

One of the interesting things about being an information professional is that you learn an epic amount of stuff about search - both how things get organized and how people usually traverse that organized space to find what they're looking for. This can make it look like I can work miracles when a couple of fragments of information end up being all I need to help someone find the object of resource they want, or to produce something new for them that they will enjoy.

Which makes a question like "What do you want on a wish list?" a bit off-balancing, because if I'm looking for, say, the Root/Shaw pairing from Person of Interest as anthro characters navigating the issues and ramifications that come with having extra appendages to hack and/or kill people with, I can bend a search engine to my query and be reasonably sure that if I don't get any results, it's because they haven't been written and made public yet, not because I don't know where to look.

So we're back in meta territory already, and I haven't really said anything about what sorts of fannish things I'd like, pointing out the structure things that would make the experience better for a lot of different fans. Like tags and warnings and transformative works statements. And websites that are just as good on phones and tablets as they are on desktops. Like scripts that will nicely wrap up an arbitrary amount of fiction into a portable file to be read offline or with electronic assists that come with certain formats. And strong tools to block and bury harassers, along with police departments that will take those claims seriously when presented with proof. There's a nearly-infinite amount of work to be done on the infrastructure of fandom, and that's without the jerks that are actively trying to undermine it or try to keep other people from joining in.

I want licensing structures like Creative Commons and transformative works statements that allow for playing within the structure of the copyright law, but more than that, I want a culture that ushers creative works into the public domain in a timely manner. By this point, several icons of the culture should be available for use and expansion of their stories and canons without having to cross one's fingers and pray that they not be sued for using. Fanworks are wonderful, and many of the people that create them should be able to make a living on them, as E. L. James has, but that only works if the "limited monopoly" part puts all the weight on the "limited" and not on the "monopoly". It's not as immediate an issue as, say, policing that kills people based on their race and then evades accountability for those actions, but fannish culture is impoverished even more every time a megacorp gets another copyright extension passed.

I want information professionals for fanworks. As with just about any other form of entertainment and information in the 02000s, it is not a question of managing scarcity, assuming access is possible, but a question of managing the volume in a meaningful way such that a person going to find a thing isn't deluged in such a way that they give up. Information professionals have developed tools, vocabularies, shortcuts, and methods to help them sift to find the really best thing in the pool of possibilities. Where is the Archivist of Our Own and their staff of human and robot indexers, taggers, and categorizers, planting an agreed-on interoperable framework and taxonomy on fanworks such that tools can be successfully used to find content? Who has crosswalks written so that someone can build a federated search for AO3 and fanfiction.net and any other site that wants to join in and contribute their archive such that someone can type in a fandom and get relevant results across sites? And, of course, a way of filtering and constructing such that people who have specific pairings, ratings, or warnings to select for or avoid can do so. Fandom already has a pretty robust classification system in place - maybe it just needs a machine-readable cataloging record and metadata system. This doesn't mean having to create one from scratch - if there's already a markup system or a database structure that can be put to use, use that. There's already incentive in place for fanworks to be thorough in their metadata for discoverability purposes - surely it can be harnessed and standardized in such a way as to make the machines do the work.

And perhaps most personally, I want fandom to be inclusive, not exclusive. It feels good to have people who share interests and to build a community with, and having lots of people taking part makes the feeling spread. Part of being in fandom, though, is trying to find the attitude of "what you do to be part of fandom is pretty fucking awesome" (assuming it is good faith awesomeness and not trolling or abuse or the other kinds of community behaviors that rightly get called out for violating Wheaton's Law), whether it's beginning material or the latest polished work from your favorite creator. Inclusive fandom means that people like me will be more likely to participate, even though what we're contributing isn't what people think of as fannish activity. And takes place in other people's spaces, a lot of the time.

So that's my wishlist. Maybe another challenge will actually get me to reveal something about my fandoms.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: The Beatles - Help

In your own space, talk about why you are doing the Fandom Snowflake Challenge? What drew you to it as a participant? What do you hope to accomplish by doing these challenges?

I'm not exactly forthcoming with fannish glee about shows, movies, media, games, and the like, at least in my own space. I'll link to others doing it, and I will post in comment sections with my own thoughts about things. My most visible fan project right now is giving The Dragonriders of Pern a lot of grief for what it wrote and the society it created. I am the Suck Fairy, in that case, and in other places, I moderate and speculate, and occasionally write short fixfic, I guess. (Twilight annoyed me for a lot of reasons. At least I could provide some insight on why the baseball was handled poorly.)

I do not fic, really. Or vid, art, podcast, mix, spin, or really do anything that constitutes the bulk of fannish expression. I don't have an AO3 account. I am an essayist hanging out in meta land, and for that, it doesn't always feel like I'm part of fandom.

I also haven't done a whole lot of writing code, although I use and adapt programs and scripts all the time for my own nefarious purposes. Even on Dreamwidth, I'm better suited to the task of working with documentation than in coding. (Unsurprisingly, my signature achievement for my career this far is the creation of a new hire documentation manual, after I got fed up with the lack of one and decided it would be better to smooth the path of those that come after. Why yes, I am a Hufflepuff, which sidelines me from most of the action of Harry Potter, too, because it's a story about Gryffindors.) So I don't necessarily feel like I'm part of the projects because I'm a user or a documentation person, not a coder. (I totally enjoyed Open Source Bridge because they explicitly make room for people who don't code to show off things.)

You can sense a pattern here - of course, the Snowflake explicitly days everybody is welcome, but reading a few a Yuletide gifts has helped remind me of the breath of fandom, and so maybe this will work out. If not, there are more than a few people who are participating that I'll get to see the responses of, so that should be fun of itself - fandom is vast and contains multitudes, so seeing someone else's interpretation should be quite the fun time.

And maybe I'll find that fannish voice ready to express in some other form.

Current Mood: peaceful
Current Music: Queen - Another One Bites The Dust