silveradept | Entries tagged with sunshine challenge: 2019

The final Sunshine Challenge for 2019 asks us to say good things about ourselves. At least one, at some length that is comfortable for the person posting.

At this time, we want to encourage everyone to make a post to discuss at whatever length is comfortable something they love about themselves. We recognize that this is both very introspective and personal, and that sharing the results can be difficult. If you need to keep your post private, that’s fine! What’s important is that we all take this opportunity to be daring and push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to be more kind to others, but more specifically ourselves on this one. Reflecting on ourselves and putting it in writing is the goal.

( Here we go! )

If you are able to share your post in some way, we also invite you to ask your friend list to comment and add things they love about you as well. You may well be surprised by the results.

And I'm working on believing it when other people say nice things about me.

Just remember that we could all use a little sunshine in our lives, and while it's great to have friends and family who love and support you, it important to recognize that sometimes we need to be our own light. Be warm and bright. Love yourself. ♥

Sure, we can try that.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: gorilla's via Frog Leap Studios - Feel Good Inc.

Sunshine Challenge's Sixth Prompt asks us to talk about collecting and our collections. As with other prompts, this is not supposed to be limited in any way, so if someone has carefully curated rec lists, bookmarks, series, or other things that are semi-tangible. It also includes memories and physical objects (which the challenge is a little more geared toward).

This is the time to share all of the things we have collected over the years showing our love for our favorite fandoms. This can include both things we personally own and things we wish we could add if money/space were no object. It also includes stories and memories that brighten our days.

Have a fandom tattoo? That custom keychain your friend made you 10 years ago? That life size statue of Iron Man soeone made that lights up and you absolutely would center your living room around if you could get your hands on it? Convention stories, internet friendships and the ensuing shenanigans…anything that makes you smile when you reflect on it, we'd like to learn more about it.

One of the benefits of having a space of your own to live in is that you get to decorate it in the way that you want. And since I was the first person here, and I had a pretty significant collection of things before I had people to share my house space with, I spent a significant amount of time hanging up the posters and the scrolls and all the other things that I had been forced to keep mostly out of view of the guests when they should come to the house.

Plus, I've spent the last couple of conventions buying fanart prints to continue covering the walls, and getting things from Kickstarters and other things to do the same with. And now I have to make decisions about what goes on the walls. I'm not out of space at all, but it is definitely worth asking the question of "where will you put that?" for any new acquisitions that I want to put on the wall. Or for the various stuffed characters, small bits, and other goods that have been collected over the years that aren't art for the walls.

The media room, such that it is, mostly reflects that time in college where I could have animation on a pull list, and collect mangs from the bookstores. And then, y'know, reality ensued, and it wasn't as easy to have money to spend on things, and the collecting stopped, at least until the fanart spree and a few things from the artist alley from these last few years. (Funny enough, I ended up getting a discount on a print at one of the local comic conventions because I recognized the shirt that one of the vendors was wearing from a book series I had read when I was much younger. It's apparently their convention special on Sunday to see if anyone recognizes the series.)

Collecting ties into a few other things. Like wanting, which is difficult to do, and also spending money on yourself, which is also difficult to do when you have a lot of already fixed expenses that eat most of your salary every month. So there are things where I would have liked to continue collecting, but it's difficult to do so because there just isn't the money available to do all the things that you want to do or to get all the things you want to get.

(At least one thing in my collection is from a friend who I helped pass collegiate algebra and they got it as a thank-you for me.)

So the walls are adorned with art of various fandoms, there are some collections in the media space that haven't been added to a whole lot since I stopped feeling like I had spare money to buy things with. There's small bits that get added, but not what I used to do. And these days, there's a certain advantage to having a lot of digital when you don't have the ability to make all of the available walls into book and media shelves.

And there's a lot more critical consumption of canon these days, so deciding what you want to have in physical form, if it should exist, is a much bigger question than it was. Plus, the transformative works collections sometimes are more important than the canon itself, which you need for understanding, but not much more after that.

Which is to say that it's all pretty weird, thinking about what constitutes a collection these days, when there's a whole lot of it that's digital and not tangible. And that makes things interesting when you think about things like "who succeeds me, and how do I bequeath my collections to them when I'm not here any more to enjoy them?" Which are thoughts you don't necessarily want to have to think about, but you do, because there's something about only getting one lifetime, no more, no less.

The walls and the shelves and all the other things are indicative of at least some of my fandoms (there's a Princess Luna from the Build-A-Bear Workshop right next to a miniature of the clown Godfrey Daniels close to a representation of a card from Tabula Idem across the doorway from the Sidekick Quests poster that's next to the board game shelf. Go the opposite direction and you see the plush Gengar, close to webcomic alley and the wall scroll from Fuishigi Yugi, and then the posters continue along all over, before the door, and more posters of artwork and so on. There's a lot.) but there's still plenty more that have no goods nor art nor anything else to indicate their presence (like Aggretsuko.)

Given infinite space and money, I'd probably devote whole rooms to different fandoms and just enjoy being able to have everything I wanted on display, but I do not play the lottery, and therefore will never have the opportunity to see everything that I could ever want all together.

(Nah, no pictures. I'm generally a fairly private person about showcasing anything. Mostly because I'm too used to it being used as ammunition that I'm weird in some way, rather than as a celebration that we're all fans, and old traumas die harder.)

Current Mood: good
Current Music: Laguna Coil - Blood, Tears, Dust

Prompt Five from the Sunshine Challenge asks us to fulfill a fannish wish for someone else.

The last time I posted about a wishlist of mine, it was mostly generalities like being good to each other and having transformative works statements, and a request for sourcing meterials for some lesser-loved characters in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic canon and finding things that really represent Hufflepuff Pride. Those things are still true, and the problem that undergirds putting up any wish list at all is still present.

Namely, that it's bad to want, and it has a cousin in that I don't really know what I want. Not knowing is easier to deal with - with time and reading and viewing, in theory, I'll come to understand what my tastes are, but it's also becoming apparent that I can appreciate a wide band of things. It's not like I've zeroed in on "all my gift fics have to be soulmate AUs" and can present a discrete list of fandoms that I want soulmate AUs in.

Because I can appreciate things that explore stuff left behind or left unsaid by canon, I can appreciate fix-its, or transformations where characters have different orientations or identities, I can enjoy them placed in other situations, whether by AU or crossover or fusion, and so it's the problem of having too many flavors of jam to list anything coherent about "what do I really wish for?" Other than those things like "have a tansformative works statement" and "don't harsh on other people's squee, dammit, fandom is big enough for everyone." And also possibly "If you're going to tell someone what's wrong with their work, be sure they want you to, first, and second, don't be an asshole about it." You can be the most correct person in the world about something, and you can be as mean and derisive about that author to your friends as you like, but if your goal is to inform someone that they made a mistake with the further goal of having them change it, at least your initial approach should be friendly. What they do in response can dictate whether you choose to engage further and on what level of hostility, but going in with the intent of telling someone they're wrong and not considering how they might take it is generally a recipe for failure, because most people, even the ones who are working on not being defensive when called in (or out), will have that defensive reaction. If you're coming across as being an asshole about it, that makes it easier for them to give in to that defensive reaction and plaster you with verbal acid.

You don't have to educate everyone. Or anyone. If you choose to take that role onto yourself, then you're choosing to be invested in the outcome, and that probably means you're choosing what method of delivery your education is going to take. (These days, someone might be able to educate themselves by lurking when you're complaining to friends, so if that's what you feel you can do, do that.)

Right, back on topic. My interests are wide and far-ranging, and if we share a canon, there's a good chance I will appreciate your fannishness about it. We may disagree about it, but there's a high probability that I will enjoy it all the same.

The less-helpful one of the pair is the one that says "You're not allowed to want." It usually takes the form of "What kind of ego do you have, asking others to do things for you, spending their time and labor (and sometimes materials and shipping costs) on something?", but it can also land on "Receiving gifts creates obligations to reciprocate, because it's not fair to them for you to just accept their gift and not provide something back" or "Asking people to do things for you is crass and cheapens gifts (because people can magically read your tastes and wants and provide you with a gift without you having to ask)", but the one it tends to hit hardest, in conjunction with "How big is your ego?" is "You're not important enough for someone to want to do something for you."

And that's mostly trauma and childhood and institutionally-instilled guilt talking. Because it's difficult to un-see yourself or your ask as a burden on others when others are pretty freely talking about what's difficult for them and what they're already doing for themselves to manage those difficulties. They might really enjoy doing the thing if asked, but I always want to make sure it's not imposing on them in any way if they did want to do something for me, and to put me at the loweset priority, since I'm asking them to do something for free (usually) for me.

People can manage their own priorities and what they want to do, and what they will set aside if something else that has higher priority appears. I trust them to do that. I can't conceive of myself or anything I'd ask as being important enough to have priority over anything else, that's all.

And while I have my own difficulties, they're not important at all, because they're my difficulties, and I'll figure out a way of dealing with them. Until it's apparent that they need more than just me to fix, anyway, and I've tried all the ways I can to fix them with just me. And even then, I'll still see it as an imposition on you to ask.

So. There's a list of some things from a previous ask. There's a confession of "I love all of your stuff, but I'd never ask you to do something as a gift for me because your time could be spent doing something more valuable." And there's also the admission of "I don't even know what I like, so that I would know what to ask anyway." I'm pretty unhelpful that way.

So maybe take a look through things. If something strikes your fancy and you want to do it, do it. Whether it's for me or for someone else. I'll cheer you on for doing the thing for someone, and it'll make me feel happy that someone got something nice. Genuinely happy, not plastic-face "I'm so happy" that really says "My envy is rivaled only by my jealousy."

So maybe my wish is the same as the challenge: Go do something nice for someone. Fill one of their wishes. Share with others that you've done it (with as much or as little detail as you want). Encourage others to do the same.

And maybe, someday, I'll actually know what I want well enough to ask for it.

(Sorry if this is a downer.)

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Vector To The Heavens [Memoria! ver.]

Sunshine Challenge Four asks us to recommend fanworks. In such a broad category, they offer some advice on how to make it even more broad, but also potentially easier to find something to recommend.

Fanworks in this context can mean anything a fan has spent time creating for their beloved fandoms (.gifs and amv’s and cosplay and that tile you painted in your apartment bathroom to look like that fannish thing … don’t let traditional views of what constitutes a fanwork limit you here).

You do not need to be a content creator to share fanworks. I’ve seen it mentioned in various places that some people don’t feel as much a part of fandom as those who create content, but fandom exists for ALL fans. Many of us are here to enjoy and spread love and this is your time to shine. We want to see what you’ve found over the years!

That said, if you are a creator, then also consider taking this opportunity to self-promote. It can feel awkward for many of us to share our own fanworks and shine lights on them, and if you are one of those folks, please consider this your nudge to step on the podium and be proud of the works you’ve labored over.

With such a broad definition, it would be hard to narrow anything down to "this, these, these are the things I recommend", and yet there are people who do it all the time. (Usually on a theme of some sort, which I am currently lacking, so perhaps as this post unravels, something will turn up that allows for some sort of categorization.)

There's the "recommend yourself" part of it. I'd like to think most of the things in

silveradept are worth your time, at least if you're in the fandom that the works are in, but that's a very small and private hope, and not one that necessarily gets out a lot. Far better for someone else to say that your work is something they really enjoy than for me to say a work is something worht looking at and then staring as the crickets chirp.

It's a bit different, writing in an active fandom and in the primary-esque pairing or characters. Where before it took a significant amount of time to reach three digits of kudos, I dashed off Chat Noir's Convention Cosplay Crisis on a whim, and it swiftly became the biggest-kudoed work that I've written. I don't know if that's because it's actually indicative of my writing, or whether it's just silly and the fandom enjoyed it. But maybe you can look at it and see where the magic is. And then tell me.

As for things other people have done, well, there's a lot of things I've enjoyed, and some of the ones that I really, really wanted to make sure I recommended are in my AO3 bookmarks tag, but that's all stuff that's on AO3. Which is mostly fic. Like, I really love looking at fanart, but I'm not necessarily seeking it out all that much, or really making very sure that I show it off to other peopole when they send it along for me to see. Like, the image searches on anything that fits the pairing or description you're looking for will often bring back a boatload of fanart and vids and other such things. But I've received some nice pieces of art as gifts - As The Wood Is Still and But it is Certain I am Loved of all Ladies, Only You Excepted were both by laughingpineapple and have my favorite Final Fantasy XII pair, Fran and Balthier, in different situations. Who Hangs Out With Predators? is a first contact kind of situation with sentient balls of things and cats and all sorts of scientific curiosity between the humanoid and the not-humanoid.

I really like Project Destati as a fanwork for Kingdom Hearts, and walking all the way backward, apparently, they're part of the Materia Collective, which just gave me a lot of new album work to listen to that I didn't realize had been done. I also like the idea of Post Modern Jukebox, which takes lyrics and riffs from pop songs of the current (ish) decade and reworks the music so they sound like various other forms of music, like doo wop, big band, or disco. The concept, a lot of the time, is pretty good (and the tap-dancing is top-notch, when that's involved), the choice of singers is excellent (I especially like Puddles Pity Party singing "Chandelier") and it asks a lot of really interesting questions about what makes a song unique and what makes it tick. It's a conversation that entities like Muzak started, but Post Modern Jukebox is really trying to be as transformative as it can be to the originals without rendering them utterly unintelligible. If, however, you want to go in the opposite direction, there's Frog Leap Studios' metal-style covers of works. Which have a lot of really good options. I particuarly like the video associated with Gorillaz' Feel Good Inc., but also the skill at the playing.

I suppose that's enough possible recommendations. I don't know if I found a theme, other than "Here's some stuff that I found interesting," but if you've been reading the blog long enough, you know that's usually the theme anyway. And if you're looking for more good stuff, there's years upon years' worth of link-laden posts to satisfy your curiosity and more with.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Gorillaz via Frog Leap Studios - Feel Good Inc.

sunshine_challenge's third prompt asks us to talk about a show, series, or media piece with special significance to us, or one that we think doesn't have the fandom that it deserves.

Most of us here have at least one movie/book/tv series/comic book/and more that speaks to us on a special level. Here is your opportunity to wax poetic on those things!

We want to hear what new canons to investigate. Tell us why that thing is cool. Tell us why you enjoy it so much. Tell us where to start if we want to get into it too (and how to find it if it’s not something mainstream that’s easy to find everywhere). It can be difficult to find fandom friends with shared interests sometimes, but this is your chance to cultivate a shared interest!

This particular question goes on very different directions depending on how I choose to interpret the important parts.

For instance, I was the target demographic for a lot of the animation reinvestment that started with the era around Batman: the Animated Series. It also created the thing that could have sunk the reinvestment entirely while it was still getting its legs, Cartoon All-Stars, an anti-drugs PSA broadcast on every network at the same time that was a massively multi-property crossover of the toys in a kid's life animating to keep him away from doing drugs, like his older brother already was.

And right as animation was coming into existence, Saban appeared in the United States, taking footage of Zyuranger, a Super Sentai franchise, and spinning an entirely new story of "teenagers with attitude" to work around it. Which has since become a storytelling feat worth admiration, whether you like Power Rangers as a concept, because the suit and mecha material it used for the first few years (at least) was already determined and a continuing storyline was woven around those pieces. (I'm not sure how much of the current series of Power Ranges uses its Super Sentai counterpart's suit footage. And there's at least a couple of welds across series that have to be written in to keep the storyline going.

Once animation stopped being solely for young children, and someone found a working model for a Sentai show, then the market flooded with a lot of anime, and the increased availability of broadband connections made it easier for fans of the "suits and monsters" shows to find broadcasts or to have releases subtitled for new audiences. And from there, we get an entire sequence of shows, from Gennedy to Lauren and Rebecca, that are entirely worth watching and wouldn't exist at all if, arbitrarily speaking, Kevin Conroy's Batman hadn't been a massive hit. (Which is not to say that it all came ex nihilo. Nothing truly exists in a vacuum.) Or the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast didn't decide to do an animated show about statues that came to life at night. Or that a show about a wallaby, a heifer, and a turtle could get away with so much crap in the animated medium without being as in your face about it as, say, Ren and Stimpy. That it was a novel concept for two boneheads to make fun of music videos. And so forth.

And that's one small fragment of one facet of the canon I've consumed, in animation, video gaming, live action material, books, music, and so forth. Picking one (or a handful) out of all of them and saying "these ones are the road map of my fannish journey, watch these and you will understand all" is trying to find one needle in a stack when all you have is a neodymium magnet.

Because half the fun in science fiction shows is spotting someone who played a similar (or very different) role in another show. You often have to go by voice, because the makeup department is trying to make you believe it's two separate characters. It doesn't make any sense to say "holy fork, Spock is the Big Bad of Kingdom Hearts, and the Joker gets to play the good mentor guy across from him" unless you know the various roles that Leonard Nimoy and Mark Hamill have done over their careers.

(Skip the fifth season of Fringe, unless you really have to know what and who the Observers are.)

Sometimes you hold what seems like an odd opinion, only to find plenty of other people share the same. I think Escaflowne and Fushigi Yugi are magical girl anime, even though they don't have the transformation trinkets or the outfit changes that often accompany more standard shows in the genre. (They weren't relatable stories, in the sense that I have never had to deal with a harem of attractive men throwing themselves at me. But their worlds are fascinating and have lots of places for someone to put a transformative hook into.)

Then there are the things that you think will never work, and then they succeed beyond what you could imagine. Disney and Square-Enix making an RPG together? Hello Kitty's company is making an anime about a salarywoman with an actual chauvinist pig for a boss and many of the workplace concerns that come with that (and the other women in the company that help or create their own problems for her)? Seth MacFarlane is making a science fiction show? This movie is going to tell a story about magic and eyes and the moon, it's all stop-motion, and it's going to be scored with Beatles music?

(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.)

And, yeah, then there are the ones that are personal. The show that sells itself on big action sequences, but keeps you there because it doesn't pull punches on how messed up the relationships are between many of its characters, especially the nominally parent-child or teacher-student ones. And in the middle of that, still shows them standing up to their abusers and staying functional despite the trainloads of trauma they've suffered. And finding and keeping friends who stick with them through all of it.

I don't talk about them in those terms. Because they're that personal, and talking about them that way means talking about the reasons why my personal life made that series special.

(I know that I could do so much, if I could just believe in me.)

So it's kind of hard to say "this canon deserves more love, and all y'all should watch it." Because ultimately, the thing I want you to watch is the thing that you're interested in, but might not have seen before. And even if it's a re-watch for me, all that means is I get to pay attention to the details and the things surrounding that I didn't get on the first pass. Or I can pay more attention to the music and sound to see how well it fits together.

(If you push really hard, you'll find that I have a dear fondness for a book called Villains By Necessity, by Eve Forward, because it's a great story about what happens when Good finally wins and decides that nobody is ever going to do evil again. There's an identity reveal that hinges on a delightful pun, and it's great for anybody who has some familiarity with fantasy tropes. But we'll probably find something well before then.)

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Dream Theater - Train of Thought

sunshine_challenge offers Prompt #2: Talk about your fannish identity.

It comes with some kickstarting questions, too, so that we can avoid staring at the abyss that is our fandom and not meeping out at the task of even trying to sum up (since it's usually too long to explain, even if you have a master list handy.)

What does your username mean? How is it pronounced?

I came of Internet Age long before discussions of how problematic certain authors are become commonplace and easily findable with Internet searching. But my childhood consists of many of the SF/F hits that could be called "The Suck Fairy's Reunion Tour", and I picked a user name as a transformative act, although I didn't know it by that name at the time, extending a story that focused on one world that was completely high-fantasy and one that was completely rockets, rayguns, and AI, and how the two were linked with each other. There is no Silver Adept in the source, and that's probably a good thing, given the source is from someone who did Xanth. (I could have figured it out earlier, but I didn't start with the first book, where there's a scene where the main character man demands a printout of specs from a robot, she calls that rape, and it gets dismissed as a female robot being oversensitive.)

To put it mildly, like many of the books I read when I was younger, the concept is fabulous and I could totally run with it. The actual execution is a lot less good. Going back to that would be paying rent to the Suck Fairy.

Pronounce it as you would the two seperate words "Silver" and "Adept", although I usually go just by Silver.

What's your origin story? Is it fannish?

Ish? I mean, I came of age in the early days of the World Wide Web, so I wasn't specifically connected to mailling lists or what we would think of as traditional channels. That said, I did participate in an RP forum for Sierra's Quest for Glory series for significant years, and on various webcomic forums, including College Roomies From Hell!!! (the three excalamation points stand for quality.) So transformative works, absolutely, but not fic writing or reading as such. Those things started disappearing with time and my inability to stay on top of the source materials, but Livejournal started while I was at University, and it became a happy platform for me, doing what Dreamwidth does now. For the most part, I didn't use it for fannish or RP purposes, lacking connections and other such things, although I was avidly following along with many of the deconstructions (and then starting up my own Giving of Grief) of works around, which did involve flash commentfic and other ways of trying to make source materials better. Because, again, the concepts are stellar for a lot of stories, but their execution leaves much to be desired, like when C.S. Lewis lets his allegory get in the way of his fantasy narrative, or the likelihood that Stephanie Meyer had stronger characters than the story she wanted to tell with them.

It was eventually looking at an exchange on Dreamwidth that led to the creation of silveradept, but I also decided I liked those commentfic stories enough to preserve a few of them, and so that I would have some material to populate the new account with, so I didn't look too green.

And from there it's been a lot of exchange fic, and slowly working out into writing other things that aren't exchange prompts, but I still am mostly a prompts-based writer. Nothing wrong with that, it just means finding external inspiration a lot of the time.

So, I mostly skipped over a lot of the defining moments of fandom-as-defined-by-Fanlore by virtue of not really being in the thick of fandom. I always describe myself as fandom-adjacent, and I think that's still true.

What is your default icon about? Does it have personal meaning? Why did you choose it? What is it from?

It's a kodoma (one of the nature spirits from Princess Mononoke) holding a trombone, with music coming out of the trombone. It has personal meaning, in the sense that the original design was for a section shirt for my collegiate marching band, which I cleaned up and then used, and eventually, on the CRFH!!! boards, someone offered to make icons better, and then to make them more Halloween-y, and that's how the current incarnation was born, and I've been using that for years now. It's pretty cool, honesetly, and I really enjoy all the other icons that I've collected to this point. They usually have stories associated with them, but they're often too long to fit into the boxes where you can give credit and tell those stories. So if you're ever curious, just ask.

Most of the icons I have weren't created for the specific purpose of being fannish about their source materials, but for other purposes. They're usually just a visual shorthand of what I'm thinking or feeling or doing at that particular point.

Preferred pronouns?

They/them/theirs is my preferred set, thank you.

Do you have a first language other than English?

Regrettably, no. I would like to be more lingual than I am, but that is not currently the case.

What does "fannish identity" mean to you?

That's a good question, and the subject of considerable discussion in and around fandom. There's usually a couple of categorizations that fandom thinks of itself in - what we consume and what we create. Consumptive fandom is easier to hide, as it were, because it's just absorbing the canon, maybe getting some goods, maybe some small discussions abotu plot points or goofs or other such things, but it's primary function is to receive what has been put out (and, often, judge it according to personal criteria. Which may or may not be shared by others in the fandom.)

Creative fandom is much less difficult to hide, and comes with the attendant risks that someone else might find you and find you problematic or dislike your ship to the point of starting a ship war and engage in animosity. But there's also the benefit that other people will find you and think you're the bee's knees and encourage you to do more and/or recommend new things to you to get fannish about. I'd like to think that there are more of the latter than the former, even though I also know that the former are much more painful to have to deal with or exclude.

Neither of these are inherently better than the other, because not everyone should have to be transformative to prove their fannish identtiy, but the ways that the transformative fandom interacts with canon, creators, and others is fascinating, and provides a lot of different templates to interrogate or twist a text into something much more representative or otherwise better than it could have been by itself.

But it does involve needing to be open to the possibilities that are there. YKINMK(ATO) and such. A hundred thousand different sandboxes to play in, each with their own toys and implements to build things with, and each of us guests in those places, having to decide for ourselves how much we are going to tolerate before removing ourselves or how enthusiastically we want to join in.

I think your fannish identitiy is whatever you're willing to claim as "your fandom(s)", whether that's wholehearted embrace of everything canonical, or just a fragmentary bit, or that you enjoy your canon with the necessary alternate timelines and universes applied to make it something less terrible. If it helped build you as a fan, and you acknowledge it, it's part of your identity.

Any questions? About this, or other things, or anything that you've seen around and would like more information about? I don't do a whole lot of talking about fandom unprompted, so it's a good opportunity to provide some prompts.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Caey Lee and Jeff Willians - From Shadows

It's Sunshine Challenge time! A low-stakes, low-worries, participate-as-you-like event as the summer equivalent of the Fandom Snowflake Challenge that runs every January. A much more realxed pace to the things, as well, with challenge things happening every four days instead of every day. If

snowflake_challenge seemed too frenetic to you, or you thought you wouldn't make it through all of them, and that was a disincentive to participation, hopefully

sunshine_challenge will make things work.

So, here's the first challenge: Do Some Fannish Housecleaning.

Because a lot of the fun in these challenges is that other participants come say hi (or you go say hi to them) and there's a certain amount of "oh, hey, this is a cool person and I should subscribe to them" that often happens when you're taking a look around all the people who participate in these sorts of challenges. To make that job easier on everybody, it helps to have the material that people are going to look at out front and updated. At the challenge page, there are suggestions on what to do to make your space ready for visitors.

A Transformative Works Policy

Friending Policy

Interests (in profile) + Introductory “About Me” Sticky Page

Master Lists (of fic or recs or meta or just squee about the different things you like)

Post Tags (can also help people notice your interests at a glance)

Current Icons (these can also help advertise your fannish interests. Does anyone not love it when someone pounces just to say, "Love your icon! I love that show!")

Sidebar Links (do you have an AO3 or Tumblr page that people might like to visit?)

Access Filters (do you have personal and fandom filters to keep your posts locked?)

Most of which I now have covered in my sticky post about commenting culture, and the rest in the profile. I'm ready for visitors. And, at least at this point, the main types of posts that will appear here are conveniently arrayed underneath. That's fun all by itself.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Dive To The Heart / Destati