silveradept | Entries tagged with fandom snowflake: 2019

Talk about why you participated in Snowflake and/or what you got out of it.

Well, I could say that I can't resist the opportunity to pontificate at length about topics and show off my cleverness while I'm at it, but that's not actually true, mostly because if I tried to say I was clever, the brainweasel horde would rise up and start laying siege.

It's not actually that, anyway. Yes, I try to compose things that other people will find interesting, insightful, comforting, or unique in perspective, because that's how I write, with the idea of engaging people in a discussion about a topic that we're all interested in some aspect of. But I also try to go out and see what other people have written and leave comments about their works equally as well. After all, I write one entry, and there are hundreds other perspectives out there to look at.

So the first reason I do Snowflake is because it's a thing that draws the community together to talk to each other, if only for half a month or so. It's kind of like a convention, except we're all panelists and audience at the same time, which makes for some of the best conversations that you can get around. I like the upswing in activity that comes with Snowflake, and the comments waiting for me over time as the challenge progresses through its days.

For people who worry that Dreamwidth is a bunch of individual fiefdoms who don't always talk to each other or know how to find each other to talk, Snowflake brings people together in a community and puts them in front of each other. There's been a lot of talk about how difficult that seems to be on Dreamwidth as compared to other platforms currently on fire, falling over, and sinking into the swamp. It's got the gears in my head turning about discoverability, taxonomy, indexing, and how much of this idea could be achieved by machines doing the lifting and how much of this has to happen by humans instead. While also respecting that some people do not want to be found by the wider community and others don't want to participate, and the likelihood of any approach having to be opt-in, which might limit its efficacy. Tricky problems, and things that might need to involve the very helpful and thoughtful people at

dw_suggestions picking apart the ideas and telling me what I'm not thinking of that's important.

The second reason I do Snowflake is because it's a gathering of fans to talk about the things in their lives, good, bad, or indifferent, and to receive support from their community in doing so. Have done a lot of leaving cheerleading comments. Also, more than a few questions or attempts to begin some discussions about what was posted for any particular challenge. Questions about the future of fandom and what are the most useful parts of any given platform came to light this year more than many years because everyone was still lit by the fire of Tumblr imploding and a large amount of fans were decamping for the next great adventure, whether on Dreamwidth or some other platform of their choosing. The question of finding a place that's fan-friendly and also loaded with enough capital to pay for the hosting and the bandwidth of serving images, audio, and video is a big question without a useful answer at this particular point. The existence of AO3 gives someone a template to work from, I suspect, if they want to build a platform similar to that, but there's the sheer money question. If OTW had an endowment arm somewhere whose job was essentially to get donations and accumulate enough capital such that the interest on it could run AO3 and whatever the multimedia AO3 would be, that might solve those problems, but endowments require fiscal management as well. There aren't any answers yet, but Snowflake helps spark the discussions, and perhaps somewhere in these conversations, someone is coming up with an idea that might solve some of these problems, if not all of them, and they will unveil it to all of us at some point in the future.

There's also all the less weighty conversations, too, about things that were excellent in this year's fic haul, in finding a way to create that works with your schedule and your brain, in the serendipity of discovering that there's someone who shares the same interest as you in tokusatsu shows. In discovering that the stargate Atlantis fandom is pretty massive, even though that show's been done for a while, and that older fandoms are still trucking along pretty solidly, even though they'd like more people around to talk to and make fanworks for them. In remembering that people participate in fandom in more ways than fic/art/podfic/vids, and that a lot of fandom relies on the people who write meta and recs to get the stuff that they really will enjoy, because humans are still better at recommending for humans than algorithms are. (So support your local public library.)

The last reason I do Snowflake is because it's a license to talk about things fannish. It's probably just a thing about my brain, but I have a style and a brand, as it were, for what entries look like in my space, and what someone can expect to see when they get here, and what sort of topics are likely to be covered. Because it's what I do, there's a certain amount of subconsious worry about putting something out that might stray from the idea I've created for myself about what goes in this space. Yes, even though it's my space, and therefore I can do whatever I'd like with it, at any point I would like, and the audience can adjust or go elsewhere. This gets a little exacerbated by the part where I'm often not as interested in discussing the romantic possibilities going on in a canon as a primary motivator as I am interested in examining the story and the characterization and the underpinnings of the material. I'm not interested in the will-they-won't-they of Marinette, Adrien, Chat Noir, and Ladybug by itself. In how the characters and their superpowered alternate selves are mirrors and the way in which the anonymity of the mask allows them to behave in different ways, and how that creates these one-sided dynamics, that's interesting. The lament of the meta folk everywhere is that they can't seem to find each other, and Snowflake offers an opportunity for that, assuming you hit it big by finding a friend who is also into the same meta and the same fandoms that you are. (Another problem to be solved, somehow, through the use of human-mediated algorithms, perhaps.)

Snowflake gives the opportunity to say "Yeah, I'm a fan!" and not necessarily have to pen out a manifesto of the whys. (It's not lost on me that this is exactly what I'm doing with this entry. Familiar forms are familiar, after all.)

So, as we draw the curtain on another year of the challenge, there are some new ideas that need thinking about, there are people who are looking for a new home for their fandom, and I've really enjoyed getting to talk with all of you about things that I've written or that you've written as well. I'd like to continue these conversations throughout the year. And, now that I'm not desperately trying to write these entries in the spare time that I have, I might be able to go back through my notifications and examine the new subscribers and access. Mea culpa that I haven't done that yet. I'm looking forward to getting to know you more and to see what you're up to.

See you again next year. Or possibly earlier, depending on whether we want to run Snowflake twice a year, so that people in the other hemisphere have the opportunity to do this in their peak winter season, too.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Masami Ueda and Hiroshi Yamaguchi - Okami - Looking Forward To The Next One

Talk about what you think the future holds for fandom.

I'll start with most of the flavor text, because it seems to be the inspiration for the post itself.

Some of us have been in fandom for a year, ten years, twenty years, but fandom itself has been around longer even than that. I [spikedluv] joined fandom when the internet was relatively new and Yahoo Groups were the thing. I made the move to LJ/DW and have a sparsely used Twitter and tried out Tumblr . . . The people who came before us used ‘zines and newsgroups.

What changes will the future bring? Given the great Tumblr Purge of 2018 and the influx of people to Dreamwidth and other platforms, such as Pillowfort and Discord, I thought this round was a good time to revisit this question.

[Challenge text goes here.]

What are your hopes and dreams for fandom? Do you have any predictions about what the next five years holds for fandom? Where do you think fandom will end up congregating? Feel free to answer this question with a sentence or a couple paragraphs, express your feelings with a good old fashioned meta or through words, music, graphics, dance, recipes, etc. Whatever works for you. *g*

I appreciate that the perspective on the past pointed out here is not one that presumed fandom sprang fully-formed from the forehead of the Internet. It is easy to believe that the universe started with you and that everything that came before is either unimportant or soon to be eclipsed by your own greatness.

There's an established definition in fandom that fanworks really took off as their own separate and distinct category with the advocacy of The Premise. (That's Kirk/Spock, for those of us who have never heard that phrase or its context which I didn't know of until I did a little digging into fannish history.) Before that, we're often willing to admit that Holmes pastiches are definitely in the right vein of fanworks as we understand them now, with multiple authors taking a turn with characters that had been previously established, but it seems like there's a line drawn there making the Holmes pastiches something different. Perhaps because it's all dudes taking their turns at it, and these are published works for which the author got paid, instead of fan works gifted and given freely?

The tradition of riffing on someone else's canon goes back much further than that, though. Allusions and plays and building on things goes back at least as far as the Aeneid, because Aeneas is supposed to also have been at the battle of Troy, where that other hero, Odysseus/Ulysses was before he pissed off a sea god and had to take the long way home. So there's a case to be made that fandom and fanworks are way older than even our commonly accepted definitions are.

Much of this goes in the service of saying the first thing that I want to point out about fandom and its future. Wherever there is canon and fans, there will be fandom. I realize that sounds trite, but it's the bedrock on which everything else works and exists. It's also a little comforting, when you're going through upheavals and platforms are changing and people are fragmenting and disappearing and there are takedown notices and legal battles and holding your breath about whether there will be yet another copyright extension at Disney's insistence or whether some things will actually be allowed into the public domain (as they were this year). There's always the tension present between the creator as supreme authority over all things and the fans who want to make tweaks and changes or who interrogate works from whatever perspective they bring to the table. (Sometimes, a better one than the author themselves.) Fandom may or may not be a very visible part of the world and its history, but it is there. And as we go forward, it will likely be a better-documented part of that history, assuming that our digital preservation efforts are up to snuff and we can carry forward all the things that we've created into the future. I can hope, or dread, either one works nicely, that the archaeologists two thousand years hence are sifting through this entry looking for something to work on their doctorates with, but it's unlikely just because so much of our things degrade over time to the point where they're unusable. (And in digital, that degradation accelerates at the speed of computers.)

There's another thing that I suspect is becoming more true as we go along, although it was probably still true in the pasts of fandoms, given how the history suggests that the entire subterfuge of "The Premise" was needed in the letters pages and discussion spaces of pre-Internet fandom. Fandom and money will always get along uneasily. We're seeing it more clearly now in the Tumblr purge, and in Facebook's newest guidelines, but it was present in Strikethrough, and the payment processor issues with Dreamwidth, and the Moral Guardians, and the way that letters pages are communication, and conventions, and even things like how the Superman radio serial decided to integrate secret information being fed to them from the KKK in order to make the racists a laughingstock of society. (Or, at least, to try.) Social platforms are often driven by advertising dollars. Canon is also often driven by advertising dollars. That fences in what's acceptable material to display to audiences. And when the advertisers get upset and take their money elsewhere, that's usually the end to any given platform, even if the idea of its founding was to be a place where more grown-up, more kinky, more fannish people could be without repercussions. A canon can be cancelled if there's an outrage campaign against it. The "innocence of children" are usually the most convenient shield for outrage campaigns to hide behind, despite our increased knowledge that children are really good at understanding the world around them, even at really young ages. Which is to say that fandom arrives in a place, builds a presence, becomes visible, has a good time, and then is often given the boot because the advertisers noticed the fans were being fans and talking about fannish things.

And that's before we get into the various flux states around copyrighted characters and how they can be expressed without infringing on that copyright, and whether a particular expression is protected under exemptions to copyright or is considered distinct enough to not infringe, and how vigorous and zealous authors, rights holders, and others get about trying to protect themselves from infringement and from other people potentially using their work. Nobody necessarily wants to be the test case to more certainly determine what is and isn't allowed in fanworks, because while there's a lot of good that can come out of a favorable ruling, there's a lot that could be erased by an unfavorable one, and there's not enough of a sense of the world to know which of those results is going to be the one that happens. And when money gets involved, rights holders get involved a lot, as well. Because when money gets involved, then there's potential harm, and that's when the lawyers start making money of their own.

Fans will continue to migrate among platforms until they can find one that understands them and is okay with their presence. In all their myriad ways of expression. I foresee a certain amount of cycle going on as fans head to a platform that looks like it will be big enough to attract a lot of fans and that will scale up nicely to all the images and videos and text they want to put on it, and they will stress-test that system to see if it stands up technologically. Assuming that it passes, then they'll add content to it and share content and be happy there while it grows in user base size and content. And then, at a certain point, if it was bought with venture capital or advertiser funds or anything else, really, than built from the ground with seed money and financed by donations and subscriptions, someone will complain about the content in the space, and the platform will turf out any of the fans it deems unacceptable. Having been told they aren't welcome, some amount of fans decamp for other spaces, and the cycle begins anew, although with a bit more fragmentation involved as some who were not deemed unacceptable stay behind, because it's the place they want to be or because they've invested so much in that space that moving to another location is too much work.

I'm also pretty sure that there's going to be something in the next few years that none of us really thought was going to be the big hit it's going to turn out to be. Whether because we think it's the best thing since Babylon 5, or because we can't understand why everyone else likes it so much when we feel distinctly cold about it. It's going to bring entire new groups of people to fandom that weren't there before, and we're going to have to be patient with them as we show them to ways and mores of our particular platform and community. But if we can always manage to be welcoming to the new fans and resilient enough to shrug off the groups that think of us as something other than normal or acceptable or people who should be allowed to show our faces in public, we'll keep the thing moving and keep spreading joy and enjoyment to each other and ourselves, by being our best selves.

We've already come a long way toward acceptance, inclusion, and demanding diverse perspectives and ideas to be present in our canons and our fanworks. There's a lot more open discussion of things that would have otherwise needed code names and allusions in the letters pages of our publications. The trend seems to be positive, even if we have hiccups and snarls and Strikethroughs and purges and changes to the TOS that benefit the advertisers not wanting themselves to be associated with fandom, rather than deciding the fans are worth keeping around and making the advertisers compromise.

In short, the future is going to be what the past has been and present is now -- constantly in motion, in change, in dialogue with itself toward the ultimate goal of making sure everyone has a space of their own to be a fan in, and to find people who are the same sorts of fans that they are. At least to the extent allowable by law, a good ethical and moral code, and an outlook that is fundamentally about not causing harm to others through your fandom actions.

Current Mood: refreshed
Current Music: Hillman Morning Show - Star Trek Rhapsody

Set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

I am not a goals and resolutions person. Some of that comes from the fact that I'm not all that far off from a time in my life where all of my energy was devoted to keeping a multitude of plates spinning and hoping that none of them came crashing down and that nothing that was a giant emergency happened that would upset everything. I was doing this basically by myself, and the person who was supposed to be helping with the plate spinning kept adding more plates to spin, instead. The fallout from that part of my life is still ongoing, and so, if I have goals as such, it's essentially "dig myself out from the hole I put myself in."

And note, yes, that I said "that I put myself in," despite the clear description in the previous paragraph that there was another person and their machinations involved in digging this particular hole. I am loath to blame or otherwise indicate that the situation that I am in is something that another person is responsible for, whether primarily, secondarily, or otherwise. This is a terrible habit. It tends to lead to the thought process of "Since I'm responsible for getting into this, I have to be able to get myself out of it. It would be unfair to anyone else to ask for help to fix my problems." It's a little different than the narrative people are used to, but it has the same roots of "If I asked for help, I would be admitting to an unacceptable weakness in my person. My conception of masculinity does not allow for weakness or help." There's a lot entangled in those ideas, but one relies on strength as the determining factor of worth, and the other relies on intelligence.

Things got better for me once I started seeking and accepting help, but it took me a while to get there, because I had to stop believing that I could get it all done by myself. "Getting all that done by myself" has roots in the past, too. The sorts of things that get into your head when you're a much smaller, younger being and part of your formative experiences involve people making fun of you for failure. Well, not all that much for failure and a lot more of "succeeding at a less-than-perfect level." There was a lot of success, but there was also a certain amount of "Oh, look, someone did better than Silver did on this! What a failure Silver is." that came with it from others. So the smaller-me logiced out that being perfect was the only way to avoid being teased. Show no weakness of brain, get no taunts in return. Maladaptive practices set appropriately. It makes it more difficult to start new things or to try stuff out, because being a beginner means not being able to be perfect at something.

Goals, then, just become ways of failing even more if you don't reach them. And that can start a downward spiral that's very hard to get out of. Setting goals and not achieving them, and feeling like the things aren't worth trying or doing because the goals never get met anyway. And eventually giving up on the thing itself because it's just a boulevard of broken dreams. Yes, there's a lot of advice around on the Web about setting yourself realistic achievable goals, and several frameworks that are supposed to help with those ideas. That can help someone who isn't already in a terrible brainscape figure out what looks like a good goal to shoot for. And for some of us, that's what we need. And for others, there's a lot of healing that has to happen first, before we can start getting to the idea of setting reasonable, achievable goals for ourselves that will challenge us and make us feel good for achieving them.

So, in terms of the goals that I'm setting for myself this year, I'm going to follow a useful piece of advice from an aerial silks instructor that one of my friends is taking lessons under. The advice is that successes are more important than perfection. My goals, then, are to succeed at the things that I want to do - keep the household running, write fiction on time for exchanges, collect achievements and trophies, support other people in their endeavours and goals, and be as good a professional as I can be. There aren't any specifics associated with those things because successes are more important than perfection, and I know that if I give myself specifics, I'm going to start thinking about specifics and whether or not I'm meeting them, and it's just going to be a big ball of stress involved. I'm not interested in stressing myself, or anyone else, out, because successes are more important than perfection. Way more important.

Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Vector To The Heavens

In your own space, create your own challenge.

Here's some of the flavor text to help inspire the process of creating something for others:

Is there a challenge you've seen in the past that's no longer being run, and you wish it was? Or maybe one you've heard about in some other fandom that would be perfect for yours? Is there a challenge you'd love to see, but can't seem to find? Now's your chance to fill that void. Do you wish there was more (fill in the blank) in fandom? This could be something specific to your favorite fandom, or something more all-encompassing. Have you always wanted to try something, but needed that extra push?

Which inspires people to a lot of possible things. A lot of the challenges will be practical to fanworks, like finishing a work in progress (or adding another chapter to it), or contributing to the greater knowledge of fannish history by creating pages on Fanlore (or, possibly for that matter, TvTropes). Others might repeat the Day 7 challenge and ask people to expand their horizons by writing or reading in new fictions or new fictional universes, because there are a lot of sandboxes around to play in that would happily welcome new friends. Or repeat other days' challenges about making recommendations for works that you found enjoyable and want to share with others.

The flavor text asks about adopting, adapting, or creating challenges for your favorite pieces of canon so that others might participate as well and increase the amount of fanwork available to everyone to enjoy, possibly centering it around a particular medium, pairing, or trope so that everyone has a starting point to work from. Moderating and running challenges, or standing up spaces for people to come together and talk is a lot of hard work, but is also hopefully rewarding when everything happens according to the plan you've put forth and a thriving community happens around the place you've set up or adopted.

Others will talk about the practicalities of having a body and existing in it, with all the ailments and variable emotional and intellectual states that come with it. Challenges to do something nice for yourself, or something that makes you happy, or something that can make you proud, are all about staving off one of the more common things that happens to creatives - the feeling that because there is always someone better, they're not good enough. Which isn't true, but brainweasels are quite adept at convincing us of things that aren't true, because they know how to make us feel like they are. It's difficult to beat them, because they cheat unapologetically. There will be challenges as well to leave comment-feedback on works that you enjoy. Kudos are excellent at counting "Hi, I was here and I liked this," but for many people making creative work, we want to know why you liked it. Details matter, because many of those details were crafted specifically for the story as a way of making it distinct and enjoyable in a sea of other works that take the same basic plot beats and put them together in similar ways. Close reading is a very helpful skill to pulling out good detailed comments.

All of these are wonderful ideas, and if you can, doing any one (or more) of them regularly can be very helpful, to yourselves and to the other people that you'll come in contact with by doing these challenges.

If I wanted to do something unique and unparalleled and un-thought-of before, well, there are a lot of you out there, and so it's unlikely that what I can come up with is going to be truly unique. Some part of me wants to try to do it, though, because one of my brainweasels around creating fanworks is that I'm a nobody, I'm going to stay a nobody, and I will never ascend to the heights of having people who follow me as an author and comment on my works specifically because they like me as a writer, rather than because they were looking at the tags for a particular fandom and I happened to be one of the works that appeared. My metrics certainly seem to suggest this. (Counter-point: Have only really been doing this on AO3 for two years at this point, and doing exchanges all the time doesn't mean you build up a following in a single fandom, not really.)

I think, though, this leads to my challenge for all of you.

If you're someone's fan, let them know.

Anything from a "Hey, you know, I really enjoy your work specifically in this fandom. Thank you for being a creator of good things here." to a long list of the things that you have enjoyed about all their works so far that you've read. (Assuming it's not going to be taken as going overboard with it.) Tell a creator that you like their stuff because it's their stuff, and why, if you can articulate it. I think some creators (which includes myself) can attribute their successes more to the fandom, the characters, the canon, everything else except the skill they bring to the table in the creation of their fanworks. Impostor Syndrome is rampant among creative types (and certain segments of the population in general). Sometimes the best thing we can do for someone is to unapologetically take the stance that they're good at what they do, and refuse to be budged from that stance by whatever brainweasel horde erupts from making that declaration. If you stand firm on your assertion, at some point the person who you believe in might start to believe it, too.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

In your own space, talk about your creative process(es) — anything from the initial inspiration to how you feel after something’s done. Do you struggle with motivation or is it a smooth process? Do you have any tricks up your sleeve to pull out when a fanwork isn’t cooperating? What is your level of planning to pantsing/winging it?

Well, that's embarrassing. Mostly because I might have spent a significant portion of December talking about just that. And several of the things that go along with it. Heh. Who knew, right?

For me, I enjoy being one of fandom's short-order cooks, turning around exchange works on their deadlines, often because it can be easier to take someone else's idea of what they would like to see and weave in the parts that are uniquely mine. There's less risk of a work being a complete flop if you know at least one person is supposed to like it other than yourself.

It's fairly rare, at least for me, on exchanges, to match with someone on me than one of their potential topics, so a lot of the prep work involved for me is in the signup part - if it's not a fandom, pairing, or combination where I get a glint in my eye about the possibilities, I pass on it and keep looking. Sometimes I might go back and fill things in later so that I can have a wider net cast and make it an easier time for matching, but I'm really trying to set myself up for success right from the beginning by not including things that I'm not feeling an itch to write right now.

At that point, when the exchange assignment goes out, I find the matching fandom and then read up what's present in the prompt suggestions and the Dear Author letters to see whether we're going to be relatively compatible in our characterizations and how to approach the thought. Some ideas get shelved at this point because they're not really going to run compatibly, and others get promoted to the working table.

At that point, I often let the ideas cook until one of them spits out something, whether dialogue or action, that I can envision, and that brings that glint back to my eyes. That idea often becomes a key frame in how I structure the work. Then comes the writing of "how do we get there, and what happens afterward, if anything?" Sometimes extra key frames appear, and those get grafted into the timeline and have their own webs spun out until the work is finished (or the deadline is approaching.)

Usually after the first draft is done, I'll do a quick wordcount to make sure that I'm at least close to the line. Whether it's under or over or comfortably there, the process of adding usually happens next, filling in spots that might have [COOL ACTION SCENE GOES HERE] or spots where, on a reread, I or a beta goes "that doesn't make as much sense" or "that's feels like the wrong character, or the wrong motivation for that character" or other things that help mold the hot take into a more polished and complete work.

There will always be one thing that slips through SPAG and only gets noticed after posting and gifting. It's almost like a signature at this point.

And then it's done, and ready to go out into the world and collect a small number of hits, comments, and kudos. (I just had one piece reach the century mark, two years after posting.)

Then comes the next assignment. And sometimes it helps to be able to oscillate between assignments so that another idea can take over when one work is starting to run dry.

There's very little formality and outlining and all those tools that seem to be helpful in building epics. Which might be why my biggest wordcount is still under 10k.

No matter. I still like being a short-order cook.

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown - Book Report

Create a fanwork.

Okay. That's done, on schedule, no less, as Thursday is posting day for each weekly installment of the giving-of-grief to Pern. I've also got another work or two in the hopper for exchanges and challenges that aren't able to be posted yet, because they're not in reveals time r past their anonymity.

It seems a bit...nothing to leave it there, though, so instead, have an excerpt from an idea that's been rolling in my head, but that may not actually see fruiting for a while, because as it turns out, I tend to want to watch all of the available material for things before I start finding ways they might interact with each other.

---

When he went to open the portal and check on the progress of his latest akuma, there was someone already standing there. In his space. How she had gotten past security would be a question for another time, but for now, he needed to make sure she could be swiftly brought to his control.

Sensing Hawkmoth's entry, the window opened, causing the butterflies to take flight from where they nestled on the floor.

"I see you've been sent here by the Tele-strator," he said. The woman had the look of a creature from an old science fiction show, as if she had been pulled right from the broadcast. White skin, with black veining around her hands and eyes, a black gem on her forehead, white hair with black ribbons running through it, black dress, and...

Very red eyes.

No matter. Red bled through black and white productions, anyway. It had been the reason that war movie was so iconic. The girl in the red coat. Simply a trick.

"I wanted to congratulate Tele-strator on his success. But the Miraculous is still not in my hands. Without the Miraculous, our deal isn't complete, and there's no guarantee that Tele-strator's power will continue to exist."

The woman continued to stare at him, a slight look of contempt on her face.

"Go tell Tele-Strator that I want Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculouses! Go! Now!" he said, wondering if this construct was as two-dimensional as the broadcast she had been pulled from.

She fixed him with a glare, and then a black portal opened on the floor next to her, from which several...things emerged.

"No," she said to him, fully giving her attention. "I don't think I will. Take care of him," she said, addressing the creatures that had arrived from the black pool.

Hawkmoth fled, the creatures of Grimm quickly pursuing.

Salem turned to gaze out the window.

"Well, this certainly isn't Remnant," she said, a smile curling at her lips. "But I think, with a few changes, it might suit just fine."

Current Music: Casey Lee Williams - Divide

Commit an Act of Kindness.

And, if you're so inclined, there's also More Joy Day on the 17th, a couple days after Snowflake ends.

I find many of the acts of kindness we do to others are the things we don't think about, but mean significant things to others. We laud conscious acts of kindness, like making decisions to donate monies to charity, or paying for someone else's coffee, or leaving a note for someone about how awesome they are (because they are, and you are), but I often think that there are small kindnesses that we do to others without thinking about them.

Or perhaps, not kindnesses, because that implies the sort of thing where someone doesn't have to do something, and they do it anyway, but acts of respect. The sorts of things where when someone says "My name is Alexandra Wilhemina Desdemona Katherine Margaret Derkins, and my pronouns are xie/xem/xers", you call xie by xer proper pronouns immediately and consistently. (Or at least make the consistent effort to -- sometimes we mess it up and we have to correct ourselves and move on.)

Even if what happens when you hear someone using your correct pronouns and correcting others on that is a certain amount of "aw, how nice", because you're happy that someone is making sure they're doing it right and others are, too. But if you asked me why I use the right pronouns for people, I won't say "because it's kind to do so," but something more like "because those are the right pronouns to use, and people deserve to have their pronouns used." It's only seen as an act of kindness because we have too many examples of people doing just the opposite of that, refusing to believe in the agency and humanity of others and insisting that their view of the world is somehow objectively superior to someone else's self-determination.

Which is to say that I've already committed one act of kindness today just in helping make sure my household is able to get where they need to go so they can be self-determining people. And I probably will commit more of them today without thinking about it, because that's the kind of person that I strive to be in my life and at my workplace. Signal-boosting something I think is important, or well-put, or saying there's a gift work or two that I'm working on are also acts of kindness - I'm writing a thing for someone else, and I hope they enjoy it.

Perhaps the thing I find most difficult about doing a conscious act of kindness is trying to avoid being one of those people who have already received their reward about it. A bit that might be familiar (to Christians) is the beginning of Chapter 6 of the account of Matthew.

Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

There's a certain amount of secrecy that's supposed to be involved in giving and praying for Christians, and some of that is borne out of the ideas and newness of the religious movement needing a certain amount of secrecy, but also there's truth in that people get annoyed or discount when people do good things flashily or splashily, thinking it more for the public relations than for the actual good being done.

So, all of these many words later, and the truth is this: I have done something kind today, and yesterday, and will do so tomorrow, because that is part of who I am. (Also a reason that I identify as a Hufflepuff, but anyway...) Most of these acts of kindness will be un-commented on, un-remarked upon, because they will be unremarkable. Many of those things may change a person's life or direction in subtle or profound ways, but it will take a significant amount of time before those acts come to fruition, and by then, the people who received those acts of kindness may no longer know who it was that provided it to them.

I suspect this is the same for you, as well. And, disheartening as it is to consider, most of us are unlikely to have a situation in our lives where all of our students come back to play a piece commissioned in our honor on the day of our retirement. But the good that you have done is still there in the world, and while it may be small comfort to everyone who comes to this realization, it is the comfort I have for you.

If you are well, then I am well.

Current Music: Tom Hulce - The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Heaven's Light

In your own space, post self-recs for at least three fanworks that you created.

This is the "for all y'all suffering from Impostor Syndrome, here's your chance to say something nice about yourself" challenge. Because most of us are not Big Name Fans with thousands of kudos to our names on everything that we write, or every chapter that we write. Since I'm still mostly fandom-adjacent rather than specifically In Fandom, at least in my own (likely flawed) opinion, I'm not particularly bothered by the thing where most of my works have small amounts of hits, comments, and kudos. When another person mentioned kudos/hits ratios, I asked what they thought of as a good ratio, and they suggested 1 kudo to every 10 hits on the work.

By that metric, most of my works are not doing well at all. They're more in the range of 1:20 or 1:30. Crushing self-esteem problem, right? My fics are not receiving their accolades, so I can't be all that good of a writer. Except I spent an entire December working off the premise that regardless of what our metrics say, we are good enough to create and do fanwork and talking about the process and the results of writing from that standpoint. I still rather firmly believe that we can create, and that with time and practice, what we create will start to match up with what we believe is good work.

So, in that vein, I'm going to start recommending fanworks that I've created where you can see that process at work. Here we go.

December Days: Baseball Tarot is the first December Days series that I did, and it lasted for a few years, since it was specifically only during December Days, and there are 78 cards to walk through to get around the entire deck. Baseball's a big fandom, Tarot readers are a big fandom, and the intersection of the two is a very small sliver of the Venn diagram. More importantly, though, the deck served as a framework for talking about baseball in manageable chunks and that I thought would allow me to put my considerable experience as a player and fan to good use, expanding upon the parts of the game that were present in those cards. Since it happened over the course of three years, though, you can see a shift of how life circumstances (that aren't being talked about) made the interpretations change somewhat as well, and you can eventually see the smoothing of the form into something like a template, sort of, if you squint. It's a work that I'm proud of, even if there's some polish work needed for it to turn it into a fully standalone thing.

The long-running giving-of-grief about Pern and its...foibles, on Slacktiverse is probably my biggest fanwork in terms of wordcount. But you can also see shifts over time, from a beginning that was still feeling itself out, to something more polished and regular in posting and in knowing what content it is going to pay attention to in the narrative. Some of that is shaped by the community of the commenters (as was Baseball Tarot above), and some of that is realizing what I really want to talk about with regard to the series. There's not great navigation on getting to and from the next entries, and it's a lot of books that have been gone through, chapter by chapter, but if you are someone who thought Pern was great until you realized the Suck Fairy had set up condos there, this might be helpful. Or at least cathartic to know that you're not alone.

Origin Stories is on this list, because it's a progression of stories all in one work, but also because it's the first solely-about-this-work piece on the Archive of Our Own that I could find. An earlier me would have looked at the possibility of being the first one in somewhere like AO3 and blanched heavily. The me that created this was still a bit on edge about doing so, because if you're the first, that means you're shouldering, potentially, the entire burden of whether or not people are going to like the fandom and to continue writing in it. If there was anything to make someone's Impostor Syndrome flare up terribly, this is the thing.

The good part about writing this, though, is that since it was for an exchange, there was a deadline to meet, and I did my level best to do just that, which allowed me to push any thoughts about getting nervous over being the first one in out of my head and post the work itself. I think that represents a pretty significant journey toward being okay with my own work over the last couple years.

If you like what you see, or you want to peruse my other fic works, The AO3 output tag updates on six month intervals, with short commentary attached about the writing process and the things that went in to each work. If you want to get things more directly from the pipeline, you can look at my works on AO3, bookmark them, or subscribe to me or to stories and series themselves.

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: Project Destati - Aqua

Stretch yourself a little and try something new. Go play in a new fandom or with a new pairing. Try working in a new medium. Or check out some fanworks that might be new to you.

There's also a suggestion that Day 2's recommendations might be a good place to start to find something new.

I got recommended a Stargate Atlantis alternate universe. I realize from fannish osmosis that Stargate Atlantis is a place where a lot of very happy shippers make a home, but I haven't seen any of it, or any other Stargate other than the movie, once, i think.

Keira Marcos's Ties That Bind series wasn't recommended to me on the basis of the canon on which it rests, but on the specific that it's an alternate universe where BDSM practice is so tightly integrated into everyone's reality that it's basically the background, and everyone takes into account the dynamics of the relationships involved when it comes to getting things done. Unfamiliar fandom and an AU that I might give the side-eye to, given how uch that prompt idea could become something more like "I'm creating a universe that gives my characters free reign to do terrible things to each other and hide behind the idea of BDSM as their justification."

I read the first of the works in the series, and am happy to say that the worst fears I had about the AU aren't present, and that the first work revolves, to some degree, around what to do with someone whose past has a severe breach of protocol and mishandling of a submissive to the point where it seems like the general consensus of the people around, except for the person who did the things, is to treat it like abuse. (Hooray.)

What I actually had the most trouble with in the first work was the concept of a military organization where all of that BDSM was so tightly integrated. I have naught more than a layperson's understanding of command, fraternization, and all of the protocols in place in military organizations to prevent someone from engaging in abuses of power, retaliation, or other situations where a subordinate could be put into a compromising or otherwise improper situation at the behest of someone higher-ranking, but I know they exist, and they seemed fundamentally incompatible with the way the BDSM relationships were portrayed. It's just a show, it's just a show, I know, but it kept pinging in my head wanting to get an explanation of how everyone has these power-dynamic relationships and still manages to respect the chain of command. If there are conflicting orders between a commander and a dominant, whose orders prevail? It's entirely possible those questions get answered in later works in the series, but I wasn't sure whether I wanted to commit to further readings in the series if all I was going to do was start mentally yelling every time something came up where I couldn't see how those power structures could be integrated into each other.

But, here's a challenge about branching out and trying new things, and so in this case, I think I'm going to try sticking with this series a little more and seeing whether I still bounce out hard because I can't accept the construction of the world, or whether things go smoother (or address the issues) in later works where I can settle in and start paying attention to the other parts of the world. The parts that I'm sure are supposed to be the things I'm paying attention to, instead of pointing out this other thing that may not have been all that much on the mind of the author.

ETA: In comments,

lonespark wonders if any of the people who have looked at this and remember it might have been in the SGA fandom when it was most active on LiveJournal.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: gorillaz via the Trolls movie - clint eastwood

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.

Have I mentioned lately that I have a very strong mental block on asking for things I want? It's partially from my upbringing, where it was firmly put in my head that you don't get things that are frivolous unless you can pay for them in cash. And, notably, I never had much cash as a child.

Then there was a life situation where there was no spare money left for me to consider things I might want after I had taken care of the needs of the humans and the animals and the wants of the other person. (Who would occasionally be upset that I would pass on something fun because frankly, we couldn't afford it for one of us, much less both.

This is not a costs-money list, and that makes it easier for me to actually make a request that people might be interested in seeing or doing. If it ends up being a costs-money thing to create something, hide it. Unless it's a tiny expense or you can spin it in such a way that I will believe it didn't inconvenience you at all to do the thing, because there is a minefield of "I asked you to spend resources for something frivolous for me" guilt brainweasels lurking just behind the sign denoting their territory, and they love to swarm.

*breathe*

Things that I would enjoy that are fannish:

I have a skewed idea of the amount of effort that goes into writing versus art, because I find wordsing less difficult than drawing. But I would really enjoy art, podfic, or vids of exchange prompts or ideas that I've put out that either didn't come into being or already had a story written for them. With the usual caveats that such things should be lowest priority, because guilty brainweasels are at the gates and they insist that I'm not important enough for someone to put me anywhere more than at the permanent back of the queue.

jenett has a fabulous icon with the phrase 'Virgo Hufflepuff: Details Managed". I think it's a brilliant idea. For me, it would be to be "Cancer Hufflepuff: _____ Managed." I'm not entirely sure what goes in the blank, but an icon of that nature would be great.

Just in general, it's really hard for me to find material that's Hufflepuff House stuff. War Badgers and other great things would be appreciated. As would anyone who has a line on the sort of clings you can put on windows, and then reposition on windows, of Princess Luna and the Nightmare versions of her and Celestia from My Little Pony. I inherited a set that had the main characters and Celestia, and it feels entirely too empty without the other characters present. (This is mildly embarrassing to admit to, because Great Prime, the way people look and talk about the peripheral fans of that show, and the behavior of some of those same fans, is the sort of thing that becomes a toxic cloud that threatens to drive people away from talking about it expressing interest in a decent show.)

For the good of your fellow fen, please have transformative works statements, make decisions about licensing your content by CC, GPL, or other ways, whether you want to or not, and please tag your works descriptive as well as amusingly, should you so decide to do so.

Peace on earth, good will towards fen, and also, if you have the ability to, would you please work to make sure that the world is better for creators and to dismantle copyright conglomerates that keep preventing good stuff from entering the public domain because they're not done squeezing us for every last penny?

Ahem.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: The Laziest Men On Mars - The Terrible Secret of Space

In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.

That's certainly a tall order for people who have a lot of interests and communities for the same, but I don't actually have all that much of that, so it's going to be a little harder to complete.

So, in relation to Day 3, and the reasons why we might need to keep reminding / finding ourselves in the sea of thoughts that carry a strong undertow,

awesomeers is a community with a daily challenge to find "Just One Thing" that you did (or didn't) that you can be proud of for today. It does not have to be grandiose or impactful on others - "I remembered to take my meds" is very much an okay thing to have there.

And in relation to my probably abnormal amount of fic exchange writing that I try to keep myself busy with, I keep an eye on

fandomcalendar to make sure I'm signing up on time for the various things I want to create for other people.

Beyond that, if you happen to have met Ana Mardoll, xie is fabulous at examining media properties (and also has written books!) and could use a few extra people contributing dollars or nice comments on xie's various enterprises. The main blog is Ana Mardoll's Ramblings, and once there you can discover things like Let's Plays of older Sierra adventure games and the Twitter of xie's cats.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Project Destati - Xion

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

Which has some extra-good timing, given that we're only a couple weeks out from Tumblr and Facebook making decisions that make good business sense (the people providing the money are more important than the people providing the content) even if they are the sorts of things that destroy a community and often remove the thing that was so appealing to the people who provide the money.

Without content, platforms are pretty useless. Without users, social-media sites have less reach. And it's difficult to find a place that is firmly committed to letting you be the person that you are, in all your aspects, fully, to explore the things that you are interested in to the fullest extent the law allows. Because that kind of place has to refuse advertisers and hope that it can get enough members to keep the site operating. Dreamwidth is managing it so far, even if it means it's not the most up-to-trendy kind of site.

So, given that it's about saying hello to new people (and older ones, too), here's what I'm proposing: In a lot of professional development circles, there's usually a conference service called "resume review" or "interview prep". The idea is to help people who are looking for new connections to get practice and advice on how to arrange their documents and cover letters so that people looking to hire them will put them past the first few screenings, and to give them practice in a low-stress environment at answering the kinds of questions that interviewing committees will want to know about them, to see if they have the skills and temperament to do well at the job, and to see if they're interested enough in working at the company to hire them.

I'm proposing that for this post, I want to do reviews / prep to someone's introduction posts or their "Hi, I'm appearing in your comments for the first time, here's a little about me so that you know we are going to squee about the same things" comments. Or other introductory forms that someone might want to use in their communities around. Because sometimes what we would like is another pair (or several) of eyes on our works to help make sure that the thing contains everything we want to say and that it's appealing and attractive to others that might be browsing.

So, it's not a friending thing, per se, because there's no form to fill out. But if people make friends with each other and get new connections, I'm going to grin and say "Hee. My ulterior purpose has been achieved. Go me."

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: "Weird Al" Yankovic - Your Horoscope For Today

In your own space, 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.

As it turns out, much of my new canon this year is everybody else's old canon. I've been introduced to Ladybug, The Dragon Prince, Hilda, and Steven Universe, among other things. And while there's a lot about Hilda that I really enjoy (the title cards on the episodes, along with the small musical cue that plays with them, reminds me a lot of Over The Garden Wall, and they're gorgeous, and I routinely think they're the artistically best part of the episode), if I were going to talk about Hilda, it would essentially be "you should watch it, go borrow a friend's Netflix login and binge away", and that's not really a piece of the canon.

So, instead, I'm going to talk about a small piece of Steven Universe. It contains a mild spoiler about the nature of a character, although that spoiler has been known for a few years at this point. So, under the cut it goes, just in case someone wants a clean viewing experience of the series.

( If you recognize the title of the post, you already know what's going to be here. )

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Steven and the Crystal Gems - We Are The Crystal Gems!

Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create.

I'm going to be convenient about this, as these are three items in my recommendations list from AO3 I think are great, and most of them are comedic!

Sprezzatura (1657 words) by Queue
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing)
Characters: Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing), Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing)
Additional Tags: Iambic Pentameter
Bookmarker's Notes:
Beatrice writes about her ambitions, and the things she most desires, and the things that she is willing to sacrifice to get those things. Which includes, perhaps, being willing to make nice with Benedick.

Bakes to Die For (6234 words) by Longpig
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Great British Bake Off RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Mary Berry, Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins, Paul Hollywood, Grim Reaper, Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Screenplay/Script Format, slightly black comedy, but only slightly - Freeform, more of a dark grey really
Summary:
While digitizing the BBC archives, an intern who asked to remain anonymous discovered a transcript of a lost episode of the Great British Bake Off. The paper could neither be photocopied nor scanned as all the copies came out blank; and the actual footage was never found.
Bookmarker's Notes:
If you've ever wondered why Death sticks to boring things like chess, it's because there was this one time where someone challenged him to a Bake-Off...

Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November (2087 words) by Edonohana
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Grizzled Soldier Who Keeps Adopting Abandoned Kittens, original kitten characters, Original Cat Character(s)
Additional Tags: Cats, Kittens, Alien Invasion, Military, Aliens, Pets
Summary:
When the Marines are sent to protect Springfield, MT from an alien invasion, a grizzled staff sergeant finds a whole lot of kittens in need of tender loving care.
Bookmarker's Notes:
Towns full of kittens after the humans are killed have their work cut out to adopt the soldiers coming to liberate the town.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Nobuo Uematsu - We Are Thieves!

In your own space, talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calms you or keeps you sane.

Now would be the perfect spot for a Dear Author letter. Except I don't really have one, because that says I have tastes and preferences and enough experience with everything to put down what I like into a post and be reasonably assured that someone else will understand it.

But language is ambiguous, to some degree, and besides, I haven't read my one thousand works on each trope I might be interested in to know whether or not I really do like it.

And there really isn't a home fandom for me. I find Steven Universe and Miraculous Ladybug charming for their own reasons, and I can appreciate the classical quality of the Merrie Melodies, and Farscape and Killjoys are equally up there as good things with Big Hero 6 and Kubo and the Two Strings. (Good Godfrey, Laika, that has all the feels.)

I love being able to peer into someone else's ideas and write something they'll find good or worthy of a long comment as a gift, because it means success in my endeavors. I don't necessarily have as well-developed a sense of writing something for myself or because that idea really needs to be written and I don't care how many words it takes to get done.

I'm not broken. But nowhere feels especially like home. And it might be because I spent a lot of my life feeling apart from everyone else, having weird interests and not having a lot of people around who shared those interests. (More people had those interests than I thought, but I didn't know that at the time.) And then a lot more of my life being actively separated from the people who would share those interests and be friends, because I didn't feel like I was allowed to have friends, much less do anything with them.

I've finally got art out on the walls that represents me and my interests, rather than it being closed away where the guests don't see it. I have friends that I see regularly and places to go and conventions to do. There's a lot more happiness in these last two years than there has been in the many before them. That happiness is often tempered by time and the knowledge that it eventually ends up coming to an end. Which is not to say that I don't fling myself headlong into it all, because I totally do. And I'm really happy and enjoying myself while I'm there. It just means there's a period of down that follows the up where I have to get readjusted to the idea that it's back to the regular world.

The idea of the Happy Place, where someone can go back to of the day is bad, or if they need cheering up, or just to be there and enjoy the sunshine and the friendly entities around, well, it sounds nice. And I'd like to have one or two around.

More and more, it seems like I'm getting too old to discover them, or I'm too old to hang out in those spaces without getting suspicious looks. By fandom standards, I'm probably already ancient, tapping away on Dreamwidth, not where the Zeitgeist is (or was) on Tumblr, watching as the new generation of fans do many of the same things we did when we were that age, but on topics that were on the fringes when we were arguing about them.

It is difficult to feel at home in a place that you're never sure you really belong in. (That's mostly brainweasels at work, honestly.) But it's nice to ride the coattails of other people as they get enthusiastic about things, or to give them encouragement as they go about their way, cheering in their successes and consoling them when it's less successful.

And to hope, perhaps someday, to experience what they are experiencing for myself.

A customer I interacted with frequently at work used to sign off, as it were, with this thought, "If you are well, then I am well." His context of meaning was very informed by Christianity, but I think that might be the closest thing I have to a Happy Place right now. If you are well, then I am well.

Be well.

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: Casey Lee Williams - Home

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Fandom Snowflake 2019 #15: Look Forward To The Next +5 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #14: Future Vision / Future Shock +15 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #13: Put the biscuit in the basket! +13 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #12: D.I.Y. +23 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #11: More TFLOPS than IBM's Watson +1 comment
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #10: Creative Impulse +3 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #9: Do A Good Turn Daily +5 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #8: The Vuvuzela of Self-Recommendations +6 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #7: Try Something New +12 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #6: And Happily Ever After (I wish.) +33 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #5: You May Also Enjoy... +10 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #4: Say Hello +11 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #3: Here Comes A Thought +13 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #2: Recommended Reading +8 comments
Fandom Snowflake 2019 #1: The Good Place +19 comments

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Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

A waystation of News and Opinion

Entries tagged with fandom snowflake: 2019

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #15: Look Forward To The Next

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #14: Future Vision / Future Shock

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #13: Put the biscuit in the basket!

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #12: D.I.Y.

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #11: More TFLOPS than IBM's Watson

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #10: Creative Impulse

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #9: Do A Good Turn Daily

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #8: The Vuvuzela of Self-Recommendations

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #7: Try Something New

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #6: And Happily Ever After (I wish.)

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #5: You May Also Enjoy...

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #4: Say Hello

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #3: Here Comes A Thought

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #2: Recommended Reading

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #1: The Good Place