Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

Challenge #14 told us to remix a work into another medium, or to rec works that had been remixed into other media.

Not going to lie, the first thing that popped into my head was "gotta go find some remix recs, because I don't art well, or podfic, or otherwise."

And I have one or two of them, like how I can say kisahawklin made a podfic of my Librarians/Warehouse 13 work "And the Cartomantic Caper" and it's a delight to listen to. I like my works, but it's really pleasing to think that someone took the time to record one of them and mix it all together.

But, I've also been working on being okay if things don't turn out great, and as I was thinking about things, I realized I had an idea, but I wasn't sure if I could do it. So, naturally, I tried to do it and see what happened.

I remixed a work of my own, called We Didn't Start The Fire, based on a great tasted but discarded story idea from alexseanchai.

Specifically, I remixed it so the story itself would follow somewhat closely the cadence of the original song, and this is the result.

Enjoy?

Challenge Number 12 asks us to remember a time before and bring back some of its games.

Which, as the Great Old One of the Internet that I am increasingly becoming, I feel is a little bit like the recognition that the songs that I used to listen to when I was in high school are now the songs that are playing in the grocery stores. I have become the demographic that gets marketed to, in a lot of ways. That said, I'd say I'm still not the generation that's being catered to, because if that were the case, "ok, boomer" wouldn't be nearly as much of both a diss and a meme as it has become.

In your own space, resurrect an old meme. Have fun with it! Which is the goofiest meme you can think of? Put on your party hat and be silly!!

( Long preamble to actual games, contains thinking )

I decided, because why not play to stereotype, to select the Dewey Decimal Classification game, which came back with the designation that I'm in General Knowledge, classification 009. Here's what it has to say:

Main Class: 000 Computer Science, Information & General Works

009 Contains: Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.

What 009 it says about you: You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

So there we are! As with many scrying opportunities, what comes back is careful not to be too specific about you, and it talks about positive qualities that someone is much more inclined to believe about themselves. Being the library person I am, though, I also know that the information provided here is very generalized to the 000-099 block. A cursory search says that the 009 block is not in use, which seems like a bad result to give to someone. Admittedly, all of the results here are generalized to the hundred blocks for this quiz, which makes sense - it only means you have to program 10 results for potentially a thousand elements, and maybe do a quick specific lookup of certain numbers if they match an actual DDC heading. (We note The Other Wiki has a published list of the thousand sections, the hundred divisions, and the ten main classes, even though, since DDC is a proprietary system, specific call numbers will require getting access to the system, so you don't get any of the cutter numbers that provide more specific placement. Not that you need it for something like that, but it would be kind of neat if there were some specific cutter stuff involved, so that people would get a more specific placement. And some more personalized messages, and by that point, you've put a lot more work into the situation than you really want to for a fun game, and you would do better turning it into an oracle or some other thing.)

And, as usual, I've gone and gotten all analytical on something that's supposed to be a bit of harmless fun. Which might be why I haven't done a whole lot of them, because I'm still possessed by the idea that when I post, it has to be something useful, meaningful, or at least funny, because if I'm going to shitpost, I at least want to get a laugh or two out of it. And that, probably, says a lot more about me than most journal games.

(One last thing, I realized, as I'm looking at the results in other journals - I'm reminded a lot about how I used to (ha-ha, still do) look at the results codes blocks and go "Why? What's all this stuff here for?" when a lot of it was tables and stuff to make sure that everything got formatted correctly so it would look right. Those were the days when tables were easier and better supported than CSS was, so everything was rendered in HTML with very specific tables to make it all line up. I'm still super-glad for CSS being a lot better now, but I'm sure for some people, there's some retro-nostalgia for that incongruity between page / journal layouts and these table-filled quiz results from elsewhere on the Internet.)

Challenge #10 asks us to gush enthusiastically and unapologetically.

In your own space, write a love letter to Fandom in general, to a particular fandom, to a trope, a relationship, a character, creator, episode, or it could be your fandom friends. Share your love and squee as loud as you want to.

So, that was a year. A really difficult year, Fandom. We couldn't see each other in the same ways that we wanted to, to come together for a weekend (or longer) and share our love with each other, encourage each other, admire the merch, and talk to and with each other in the panels, and in the lines (and there are always lines) and, when we're lucky, we even get to talk a little bit with the people who are the guests of honor and ask them some questions. (Questions are short, relevant, and end with a question mark.) And there's always a little bit of sadness at the end, because we don't want the party to end, but eventually, we all have to go back to the world where we have to earn wages, pay bills, and otherwise not devote out full attention and time to the things we really would rather be doing. Sure, there were still guests and interviews and demonstrations, but we missed out on a lot of the panels that we put together, and the meet-ups, and the gaming floors. And even though I was able to virtually attend a con that I haven't attended in years, it wasn't the same thing, because you all weren't there with me. I do kind of wish they'd do it again, though. Because we found out it's possible to have at least some of the convention experience through a screen and made more accessible than it otherwise would have been. Same thing for many of our more professional conferences, as well. Now that we've proven it can be done, not that it was ever in doubt, I hope that we don't fold it all back up again and insist that it's too hard to make things welcoming and accessible.

This year past, there was a lot more than the usual amount of things to process. There were plenty of missing stairs that became much more visible, and lots of terrible takes about the value and virtue of fanworks (one of which just landed a few days ago and I'm still calling part of 2020 because this month has basically been the overtime period of 2020 and all of its nonsense), and far too many examples of fandom, ships, tropes, and other components being wielded as weapons, intended to damage and harm each other or brand someone as "problematic" when what they meant to say was "differently opinionated than me." Or to insist that what someone writes in their works is what they endorse, believe, or otherwise are in their real life. There are not the virtues of the fandom I believe is possible, but I cannot disclaim their existence. I think, though, that seeing the contempt on display for everyone who didn't meet a very narrow definition, openly and without regard for the consequences, meant that a lot of us were part of the Lucky 10,000 for learning and viscerally understanding what a lot of other fans already knew, because they had experienced and seen it all already. And so, we come to something from Kubo and the Two Strings, which is a movie I really enjoyed (and thought Matthew McConaughey's voice was somewhat out of place for):

If you must blink, do it now. Pay careful attention to everything you see and hear, no matter how unusual it may seem. And please be warned, if you fidget, if you look away, if you forget any part of what I tell you, even for an instant, then our hero will surely perish.

That's what's been asked of us, in all of these years, and in all of these years to come, and it's difficult to keep looking, keep paying attention, and to not collectively fidget, or forget, because when we do, we lose heroes. Sometimes in body, but often enough, they stop being part of fandom, and we lose out on all of the things they could contribute. Or we don't get to see what they can make in any canon, whether original or licensed, because they've been run out of the community instead of allowed to stay.

Fandom has been the source of so many good experiences in life - reading good fic, viewing good art, talking with people about the meta, or about the tropes, and seeing some most excellent cosplay (with permissions asked for pictures, of course.) and a lot of the things that I like doing with fandom is taking things that didn't go well and fixing them to be more inclusive, to make them better than their originals, or to envision alternatives that might have happened. Things like where Tara lived because the showrunner didn't want to troll his audience by having a character who had made it to the main credits die in the episode she made it. Or that, if she did die by such random violence, it was because the showrunner had a point to tell. And had examined whether it was really a good idea to, yet again, Bury Your Gays. A place where the presence of humans bonded very tightly to dragons very quickly threw off the idea of vassalage feudalism and Randian selfishness. The kind of space that acknowledges and recognizes all of the students and works to make them be welcome at the school they'll be practicing and perfecting their magic, rather than insisting there are only two genders and putting measures in place to make sure certain spaces stay segregated.

The thing I love the most about transformative fandom is that it asks for transformation, of works, of canons, but also of us, too. To be able to see the world or the canon differently, to revel in the silliness of it all, or to help ourselves or work things out in our lives through the characters that we enjoy. It seems like a terrible idea to shut people out of that joy and community for reasons that aren't related to things that they do/say to show themselves as unsafe for that community.

So, my letter to fandom is all about being the best kind of people that we can be, to everyone, so that everyone can be the best kind of fans (and the rest of us get the best kind of material).

(Every time this challenge comes around, Sondheim starts playing in my head. I'm resigned to this.)

Challenge #8 tells us to say "I wish…" and compile a list of things we wish. Between one and ten makes a good list, and most of the suggestions are things for fandom sorts of things.

(Once Upon A Time, in a far-off kingdom, lived a middling ficcer…)

Asking for things for yourself is often hard, especially when you've been socialized to give, and give, and give, and that the entirety of your identity requires you to subsume yourself and submit to someone else's desires and wishes, or you're behaving improperly. (There's a fixed version of the Giving Tree where the tree asserts healthy boundaries.) There's also a certain type of brainweasel that wants to attach all sorts of wrong ideas that appeal to them to whether or not anyone actually fulfills a wish, or suggests asking small things because those are the things that someone might deign to do, and all that you are worthy of having. There's a lot of negative talk, self or otherwise, around saying what you want without qualifications or preemptively trying to minimize yourself or your request.

(The woods are just trees. The trees are just wood.)

Maybe it's a sign of recovery or returning toward equilibrium that there are some things that actually come to mind as things I might wish for, fannishly, rather than spending a lot of time wondering whether it's even worth it to post something. Maybe it's that 02020, including the overtime period that we're in, has been harsh and terrible to everyone, and making a wish for something that will help take the edge off, even if only for a little bit, is much easier to do.

Things that I would wish for:

1. Transformative works (and feedback) would be lovely.
   
   I got a podfic of my Trick-or-Treat from 2019 this past year, and it was very nice to hear. Fanart of works or scenes in works would be neat, and podfic, or animatics or music videos or moodboards and such are also things that I think I would cherish and desire, mostly because I have trouble conceiving of the idea that people would like my stuff that well to do it.
   
   I realize, though, that creating art and podfic, or remixing or deriving works or creating a universe and other such things is something that takes time, effort, and dedication, and this past year has been a terrible sap on everyone's creativity, effort, and time. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like such things, and likely also not the only person who has put up a statement somewhere about what their transformative works policy is, so I suspect if you are in the mood for transformative works, you will have all sorts of choices to put your effort toward. So, barring that, I appreciate feedback on my efforts. You can find them all at silveradept, and frankly, because it's almost all exchange fic, there's a very long tail of possible fandoms you might find a useful work in.


2. I wish people could be more open about the things they were interested in.
   
   Which is a weird thing to say about fandom, right? We're the people waving the shipping banners from the rooftops, decorating the hotels when convention comes around so as to unmistakably say "We're here!" and otherwise making it clear in all of our spaces how much we are engaged with our canons and our fandoms.
   
   Except…not. For as much as the Geek Social Hierarchy is supposed to be a joke, or at least something to laugh at when you get the wider perspective of "the rest of the world just thinks you're a geek and will make fun of you accordingly," there's a lot of minefields to navigate in fandom, many of which, like their real-world counterparts, should be cleaned up so they stop harming people who step into them. I wish I had something more concrete to offer than "we know when someone is being shitty to someone else for bullshit reasons versus when they're making a sincere effort to raise awareness about something," but I feel like fen who have been around long enough, and have done the work to listen and educate themselves, can tell the difference between the two (much of the time, anyway, or at the very least not to dismiss someone saying a true thing out of hand), and it's a responsible thing to do, as fen, to not let people being shitty for bullshit reasons get a foothold or a following on the matter. The World Wide Web is much more tightly linked together than it was when I was smaller, and there's a lot of it built around the idea that you only ever should have one pseud (if they even allow pseuds) for everything you do, good and bad, so that your entire record can easily be scraped and scrutinized. Usually for advertising purposes. It's a little "fandom old yells at people" of me, but the speed at which someone can summon a brigade to harass someone until they leave is alarming, and it seems to be, more often than not, that the people with the biggest and fastest brigades are the people who are the shittiest people with the most bullshit reasons.
   
   So this wish isn't about "civility" or "neutrality" or "tone" or anything like that. It's a wish to metaphorically, or physically, punch the fascists in the face, ban their asses from any spaces you have control over, and generally lay about with your Aurora-class brickzooka in the service of making the space better so that more voices (and especially more marginalized voices) can be more open about the things they are interested in, whether it's about how cute that couple looks together on screen or that the general pattern of a particular author's works is "anything that doesn't look like me and believe exactly as I do is Evil and must be destroyed."


3. I wish to feel like less of an outsider.
   
   I kind of missed the part where Fandom got online, augmenting their zines and small press options with web sites, web rings, listservs, and eventually, the Archive of Our Own. While events like Strikethrough happened and I noticed them and commented on them (how could I not?), I don't think I really made it to Fandom until well after everything had settled in, and now I was interacting with a group that had known each other since I got online, but had been in different circles than the ones that I had been hanging out in. I missed out on a lot of fannish history. (Obversely, I missed out on a lot of fannish drama.) And, by at least some standards of Fandom, I'm already too old to be here and need to go so I stop polluting their space. It feels like, even with my successes, that I'm still speaking Fandom as a second language and hoping that my accent doesn't come through too much. Some of that is probably because I'm making deliberate choices about which sites I maintain a presence on, and many of the choices I'm making are against turning on the firehose or not engaging on platforms that don't have the kind of curation tools that I want to have, even if those tools could be provided with some browser add-ons.
   
   I suppose some of it is that, like everyone else, I miss the communities that I joined when I was smaller, but they have gone, and there hasn't really been anything that provides that feeling of community or communities any more. Things change, and so have I. But I feel like I lack the origin story, of coming online and finding My People and building all of that together into something, even if we eventually drifted apart and only some of us stay in contact. I look at the stories contained in things like The Internet Girlfriend Club, and while I can understand them, I don't have that visceral sense of relating to them, as if these are my own stories being echoed back to me through other people's experiences. And so, I feel, still, like I'm on the outside, looking in.


4. I wish, practically, for baking projects that can be done with smalls, ages 6-10, that don't require ingredients or tools outside of what would be affordable at the local Western grocery market, and that can be accomplished from startup to finished project in an hour or less.
   
   Even after the pandemic lifts and we start doing programming in person again, I will probably argue a bit for the idea of continuing at least some of the virtual programming that we've started, including some regular times in the kitchen where smalls can learn how to make stuff (with grownups, of course, helping out, either in the frame or just outside of it). Plus, it turns out these recipes, and doing them on camera for smalls, are really helping me build my own confidence about being able to follow cooking and baking directions and turn out things that taste good.


5. And finally, I wish, (more than life, more than anything, more than jewels, more than the moon) that if you are a person who has influence over some part of your world, that you use that influence to enrich all of us, to build a more sustainable world, and that, even if it is in only a small space of existence, that things become better for everyone because you were there.

We could certainly use a lot of good things, either as distraction from the terribleness that is too much outside, or as a reminder that while there are always more fascists and wankers than we think, there are some really cool cats in fandom as well. Here's challenge #6:

In your own space, rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create. [...] You can include three or three hundred links to any kind of fanwork that strikes your fancy: meta, gifsets, podfic, graphics, fic, art, mixes, crafts, resources, whatever strikes you as having been pretty darn cool.

I totally encourage people to include a note of why they liked the thing, but linking to them with accompanying exclamation marks also works.

I always love the breadth of fandom and what kinds of things that fandom can create and then showcase to everyone else. My niche is in writing, for the most part, which sometimes feels like the most common thing (and perhaps the lowest-valued one compared to the rarer one, but I am also reminded that there is an entire space of fandom that considers themselves unable, unskilled, or unversed enough to create, and so anything produced is neat for some of the audience.

Have I gushed sufficiently about Fantasia 2020 yet? Because there's an additional degree of awesome that comes from knowing that someone put together an eight-piece, fifty-minute playlist as a pinch hit and put together some animatic ideas for the pieces that hadn't already been animated as previous Fantasia segments? And how it's a wonderful suite of things I am familiar with, having already played them, things that are part of previous Fantasias, and several new pieces that I wasn't aware of, but that are wonderful and I'm glad to have been introduced to? (It comes with a playlist mode and an alternate Firebird, in case the original one gets copyright-blocked.) It's just such a delightful thing and it was a gift for me and it's one of those things that really exemplifies the best bits of fandom.

Second, because last week was Awesome Games Done Quick, and I want to stretch the idea of a fanwork to include people who do speedruns and sequence-breaks and otherwise showcase all the delightful ways that a game can still be played and enjoyed and sometimes made into a ridiculous version of itself through the application of good bugs, bad bugs, and good bad bugs, I have to admit that I have a soft spot for the Avoid The Noid speedrun from the Awful Block of AGDQ 2019, mostly because I spent a lot of time on that game as a small figuring out all the necessary parts of succeeding at it and where all the secrets were, and felt very happy at finally beating it . (And I remember a specific time where I thought I had it in the bag, only to get roasted by a dart on my final pizza right before opening the final door.) Despite the fact that it was pretty much a Domino's promotion game (did we mention that there's an HD updated version of the Doom Total Conversion that Ralston-Purina put out as a pack-in bonus with Chex cereal boxes? Because you should know about this thing, too, if you were a child of such age where it was considered a good idea that would appeal to kids to TC Doom into a much less bloody game and then distribute it.), there was a surprising amount of action and puzzling that went on in that game to defeat it, assuming you weren't playing it on the eye-searing CGA version.

Okay, third item. I always like good music, especially good music in games, and even more good music in those parts of the games that you're going to be listening to a lot. And I like orchestral arrangements and the official orchestrations put out by various games and official projects, like Video Games Live and the Square-Enix orchestral tours. And it's probably no secret that I like most of the music of the Kingdom Hearts series (much of it more than certain gameplay aspects of the Kingdom Hearts series), so when it comes to fanworks, I'm on board with whatever Project Destati comes out with, on whatever time frame they use to come out with it. The projects, so far, go all the way through the games released before Kingdom Hearts III, so I'm hoping with some new source material, they'll be gearing up to release another something soon.

Three fanworks, not created by me (or three groups of fanworks, maybe?). And one bonus item, mostly because there's clearly lots of skill and thought put into this, and the results are good for most of the time - 2 Mello's Chrono Jigga, which took the vocal tracks of the Black Album, by Jay-Z (the one that DJ Danger Mouse used to create the Grey Album when mixing it with the Beatles White Album) and paired it with various versions of the themes from Chrono Trigger. It's a thing to appreciate for the skill involved, even if you don't particularly care for either of the artists involved, as both the vocal tracks and backing instrumentals have some tempo shifts done to them to make them match up well, as well as some additional beats and sound effects applied. Have fun...possibly have fun WTFing at my taste in everything?

The seventh day of the month that asks us to look backward and forward, and today's Challenge, challenge number four, is very much about the looking forward part of it.

In your own space, create some goals.

( Preambling before getting to the goals )

It's very tempting to say that 02021's goals all collapse into "Keep myself alive until the risk has lowered sufficiently that there is space capacity and ability to think about other things," and if that's you, then that's a reasonable expectation to set for yourself. You know yourself better than I ever will, and what capacitites you have and what your situation is that makes that goal the only one to focus on at this point. That's certainly a primary goal for 02021 - survive to see the other side of it.

( More goals )

Maybe the very condensed version of the goal for 02021 is to be the best person that I can be, to celebrate them when they are awesome, and to find a way of making them better when they're not. (I'm going to need a lot more help on the former than the latter.)

Day Three of Janus's month provides the second challenge: to make a connection with someone new.

In your own space (or their own space) interact with someone new.

That's halt slightly harder than usual this year, as many of the people that are running this iteration are people who have done it before or done other ones before or been participants in previous or other challenges like this one. There are also some newer faces and names, so I don't think it will be an issue to find new people to interact with.

For something like this, I thought I might borrow an idea from jenett and hold a salon for people to talk in and meet new people and have interesting conversations with them. I'll be borrowing her house rules and useful notes sections as well, if with a modification or two.

Here's a starter question that's on my mind. If you want to talk about something else, feel free.

As a Great Old One when it comes to the World Wide Web, it's been ingrained in me that part of making the Web accessible is providing descriptive text for your links to other parts of the Web. There's no technical wrongness involved in a link that only says "click here" or just "here", but usually, there's a perfectly serviceable description of what is on the other end of the link right there in the same sentence that says "Click here." Expanding the tag to include time description seems like something that could be easily done. Nowadays, I would expect something like that to fall under "good SEO" rather than accessibility, but I'm also a little shirty about the idea that we've optimized the Web for robots and in doing so have made it much more frustrating for humans and their assistive technologies.

Am I just "old man shouts at cloud" about this, or is there progress I haven't seen, or some other thing that I should be posting attention to about this? It seems small and petty, but it also seems fixable with a small and petty amount of work.

( Useful notes )

( House rules )