Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

The Fourteenth Challenge says to find some neat things around you and post pictures of them.

This is probably the point where I mention to people that Dreamwidth does have image hosting capabilities, at 500 MB for free accounts, 1.5GB at paid accounts, and 3GB at premium paid accounts. The interface isn't the greatest to load everything in, but it does work, so you could potentially keep your pictures here rather than linking in through another service.

Despite saying this as my PSA, I'm mostly going to ignore it and instead link you to the pictures of things in their context in other places on the Internet, because I'm mean like that.

( Let's begin the scavenger hunt )

Challenge #12 asks us to constuct an even more dream cast than aleady happened.

In your own space, tell us who you would recast in a film, TV Series, or webseries, or maybe someone voicing a cartoon or videogame. Or who would you cast to play a chracter in a book, comic, or maybe even your own fiction!

I'll admit, the first time I would think about recasting someone would be if the original casted person turned out to be terrible, or ended up dying and took the media property with them when they did.

Casting for things that haven't happened, though, that's a little bit easier to figure out. Once upon the once upon, Dana Simpson thought that Sarah Vowell had the right kind of delivery to do Millie if Ozy and Millie were ever to be cast as an animated series. We can leave that one alone, but what about the rest of the cast?

• Ozy would need to be someone who can portray a child who takes things as they come and isn't particularly weirded out by anything because he's already seen weirder from his own family. Maybe Jason Ritter, doing something a little more sedate than Dipper Pines gets up to. Maybe John Cho if he can do a convincing child voice, since Ozy's supposed to be a grade-school student.


• Llewellyn, Ozy's adoptive father, would have been best cast by the late Leonard Nimoy, specifically in his "Old Spock/William Bell/Master Xehanort" phase, but alas, we do not have him with us any more (nearly seven years, wow.) But Michael Dorn would also do the role excellently, dispensing wisdom with a voice steeped in Zen and that very well knows just how much he's trolling everyone else, but won't break the kayfabe.


• Ms. Mudd, Millie's mother and long-suffering everything who raised Millie as a single parent, could be cast by Lauen Ash channeling Scorpia (but without the Obfuscating Stupidity Scorpia needed to portray) but would also work equally as well if Vella Lovell were giving us a slightly more grown-up Mermista who has a kid. The right quality for the role is someone who has seen all of those things and is jaded about the world, but still loves and will support her daughter's curiosity and ingenuity, even if it occasionally means having to clean up the aftermath of a particularly well-executed burn by Millie.


• Felicia, the alpha sheep when then goes on a Goth phase? She's written with a Valley Girl accent, but her personality is one where she would sound like a Valley Girl because she's practicing how to do it. Therefore, I would totally cast California native Kaley Cuoco for the role because she would probably be able to turn it up and down as needed.


• To round out the main cast, Avery, the perpetually cool-seeking child, that's probably a job for Dante Basco, who would be directed to put as much effort and emotion into Avery's shallow self-pursuits as he did with Zuko's quest to find the Avatar. (Avery's brother is Dee Bradley Baker, because everyone wants Dee Bradley Baker when it comes to characters that don't fully use language to communicate.)


• If Dana Simpson wanted to do a creator cameo in the series, I would say Dana would voice Ms. Sorkowitz, Ozy and Millie's teacher, or, for a slightly more substantive role, Isolde, Ozy's cousin, reporter for Channel 6 News, and member of the Dragon Conspiracy.

Not that I expect any such animated adaptation to be coming, since most of the effort and marketing is on Dana's current series, Phoebe and her Unicorn, but if things ever happened, and there was enough money to cast all of these stars, that's what I'd go for. (I suspect I'd end up getting one or more of Steve Blum, Tara Strong, Ben Diskin, or Grey DeLisle to help with various other voices and to do one of those roles, because they're in everything.)

Challenge Number 10 asks us to recommend the works of others.

In your own space, rec a fanwork (fic, art, vid, playlist, anything!) you did not create.
[…]
Tell us what's special about this piece. What draws you to it and what makes it special enough to recommend it to others. And don't hesitate to recommend both new and older works. Fandom is wide and deep, and folk who are new to your fandom or who are only casual participants may not be aware of older works.

This should be no trouble, right? I am an information professional, this is what I do. I'll bury all of you in my recommendation links, ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Except not, because part of the work that I do is figuring out what things you're looking for in your next read and then curating down from Everything to a few specific choices. Truthfully, with a space like AO3, I'll probably get more mileage and have a better good hits rate explaining to you how to think like a search engine like Elasticsearch, give you a cheat sheet on how you might construct a search query in ElasticSearch (although this one is for books in a book database, not works), and then pointing you at searching, browsing, and filtering tips for AO3 and
the advanced search operators post so that you have an idea of what AO3 does differently or what AO3 has extended from the regular search operators so you can tailor your knowledge specifically to thinking about the AO3 database. If I do it right, you can then use all of that information to construct a complex search query that has the highest likelihood of giving you what you want while excluding things that you don't. Done properly, you get to construct your own personalized recommendations list from everything in AO3.

Okay, obligatory information professional bit done. What this challenge actually wants us to do is assume at least some part of the reading audience has the same or similar enough tastes to ourselves that recommending the things that we enjoyed (or found intriguing) will be good for them as well. Or may convince someone who is curious about a new fandom or looking for new works in their fandom to give a try to. So, in no particular order at all, have an arbitrary list of recommendations.

1. I generally recommend anything at all by AlexSeanchai for the way that the language itself builds the story, with secrets hiding in corners, subtle foreshadows cast, and as much said by what's missing than from what's there, but I just recommended Where the Firelight Fades to someone who was looking for three sentence fic fills based on a video of the destruction an Akumatized Marinette would wreak. It's considerably more than three sentences, of course, but it delivers on the premise of being as terrifying an Akumatized Marinette story as it can be while still having a happy ending.


2. The thing I most recently bookmarked on AO3 was Fantasia 2020, which I really love because it's a very faithful installment of the Fantasia series, mixing instrumental music of the distant past and the recent past, and ChokolatteJedi delivers some still forms with description of what the finished animated products might have been, so we can at least imagine the visual track along with the soundtrack selected. It would be the work of a Fantasia to animate those ideas, but we can always hope.


3. I really like receiving art as an exchange gift, mostly because I know it takes time and effort to bring artistic ideas into being and to the satisfaction of the artist. Which means it's great when laughingpineapple gives a gift. The First Athein Cow Race is a great moment from the Bone comic series by Jeff Smith, suggesting one of the early Great Cow Races might have had more than just Gran'ma Ben involved with the cows. It's a really well-crafted at piece, in addition to the scene that it paints.


4. Worldbuilding is one of my great loves in fiction, it appears, given how often I complain about bad characterization or keep consuming something because I'm intrigued by what's going on in the background or to the secondary characters even if I've given up on the primary characters. So it's probably less of a surprise that I really enjoy Pi'maat, a series by sixbeforelunch (you'll need an AO3 account to read it) that has no canon characters and devotes itself to telling the story of how society on Vulcan functions, especially in places that are fairly far away from the metropolises and the spaces where the tourists would go. It is also a meditation on how our experiences with war, pain, love, and duty shape us profoundly, regardless of whether we are combatants, healers, or civilians. It is profoundly Vulcan, and being Vulcan, does not shy away from the parts that are less easy to bear, because that would be illogical.


5. I'm a music and sound kind of person in a lot of my life, which might mean I pay a little more attention than usual to soundtracks and music choices and I get really excited by sound design in stories that use it, even if I am a know-nothing about how it all happens. I'm Not Afraid Of The Darkness takes Riku's theme from Kingdom Hearts and expands it into it's own symphonic style piece. Which is awesome. But I can also appreciate Alive 25, an idea of what the setlist might have been for a hypothetical 25th anniversary tour of Daft Punk, incorporating new albums and songs released since their last tour, as well as classics that have become part of the Daft Punk sound. It's nice having people who post music links in my feed, because it gives me time to listen to while I compose these entries and many other things.

I'm sure there's more that I'm not thinking of, or things that I will discover as we go along. But for now, this seems like a good spot to stop at.

Challenge #8 asks us to remember the parts of the last year where victory was achieved.

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.

The additional text from today's leader has some suggestions on where a win might be found.

[…]the general idea is to look back on the year (I know, even 2021) and think, "Hey, I'm actually glad for/happy about/proud of/pleased with how that one thing/list of things went." But more or less grammatically, as suits your needs.

Some starter ideas might be: "a list of three or more fanworks I'm especially proud of!" (the definition of fanworks including: meta, fic, icons, podfic, knitting projects, vids, graphics, AO3 skins, finger paintings, and anything else that strikes your fancy), or "I participated in the community in these ways!" (e.g.: left comments, helped mod, beta read, picked up pinch hits, et cetera), or "I worked on this skill, and am pleased with how it went!" (like: drawing hands that finally look like hands, improving pacing of soggy middle acts, making sharper vid cuts, organising meta more clearly).

It could also be a quality that you like about yourself that you felt got to really shine this year, like compassion and friendship, or fortitude, or problem solving, or just letting go (more difficult than you'd think!). What can you look back on with satisfaction and think, "I was the right person, in the right place, at the right time, and that went well"?

( The background ramble )

( Actual Accomplishments of 2021 )

Challenge Number 6 is succinct in text and broad in its scope:

In your own space, create something.

( A thought, a spell, a ritual, and hopefully, a thing created )

This time, in memory of the late Stephen Sondheim, rather than as tribute to him:

In your own space, make a list of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, and/or that you'd like someone to create or do for you. […]

A general guideline might be a list of three things, or one to ten things, but it can really be any number or length you want.

Your wish list items can be anything: a request for fanworks (art of your original character, podfic of your favourite story, a mood board of your AU idea, fic based on your art, someone to adopt that darn plotbunny), or for a some help with a project (cheerleader, beta reader, accountability buddy, someone to co-mod a challenge), or maybe you want recs for new canons or fic with just the right trope, or specific information about that one area you're having trouble researching.

(Note: If you would like artwork or podfic, please include a link to your story/podfic/fanmix. If you've requested podfic for someone else's work, ditto, and also make sure they've posted a permission statement. If you’ve requested icons or other artwork it’s helpful if you can link to screencaps or image galleries.)

[…]If you end up granting someone's wish, consider posting a link here, and maybe add it to our AO3 collection.

I wish…

( Once upon a time, there was a middling fic writer… )
And happily ever after. (I wish.)

snowflake_challenge is indeed happening again this year.

Challenge #1 was to get your housekeeping on, make sure your profiles are up to date and your sticky posts are stickied (and also, this is a good time for you to update or create a transformative works policy for your work, so that it's much easier for people to know whether or not it's okay to record your things, remix them, or otherwise, or whether you want them not to do so at all. Not everyone is on good enough terms with the people that you want to remix to be able to ask them.)

Since there wasn't anything major that needed updating, there wasn't a post for #1. #2, on the other hand, asks for something that requires an output.

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

Goals and resolutions are a fraught thing for many people in regular years. In these pandemic-powered years where everything is still disrupted and a return to something that doesn't require constant vigilance is still a very long way away, the idea of setting goals or trying to work toward something other than "survive, by whatever means are available" seems like foolish thinking.

( The windup to the things themselves )

I looked at last year's goal: 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. That still seems like an applicable goal for this year. Past that, to get all my exchanges and prompts in on time without defaults. That's what I aim for every year, but it's probably worth mentioning to myself that last year, that meant a total output of 27 works to AO3 of more than 100k of words, plus the incidentals, one-offs, 3 Sentence Ficathon, linkdumps, December Days, Snowflake and Sunshine Challenges, the weekly commentary read, and any other things that I wrote that didn't track quite as easily for wordcount. Add on to something like not dropping the ball on being a professional librarian and making sure that I contribute what I can to the upkeep of the house and the household and that's probably got the calendar full up before thinking about anything that I might do for myself to recharge.

And yet, I kind of want to explore a place like the Fediverse and get to understand it better, but I'm stuck being afraid that the first choice will be wrong, even though I know that it's entirely possible to pull up stakes and move, if necessary. Suggestions welcome. I want to be able to dream bigger about what my organization can do, even as I also need to be able to catalog all the reasons why that's a much bigger ask than it appears to be, and to be ready to hear not just "no," but "yes, but that's a three year project to get all the approvals necessary and the resources in place."

So I guess I do have goals for this year, but how many of them are going to have tangible end products? I haven't a clue. And I guess that's why I feel like I have trouble with goals.