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More crossposting from my OTP tumblr.

( incest & silliness )

City council and "wellbeing services county" elections are coming up this Sunday and I haven't been amazingly invested in them so far. I follow news mostly through doomscrolling reddit, which means I'm mainly feeding my brain ragebait headlines. (Of course I wouldn't have to.) Not that r/suomi doesn't have actually good discussion and analysis, but there's also the... other reddit stuff.

In Turku, one big election theme is The Tram: a forever project. There was a tram system in Turku from the 1890s until 1972; since at least the 1990s some people have argued that it should be brought back. Turku is known for construction projects that last forever and cost millions extra, like the Logomo bridge and toriparkki (below-market square parking space), and the tram would undoubtedly join those ventures. I honestly don't know what to think - I am inclined to be pro-tram because of environmental reasons, and the arguments against seem to be based on racism and classism (the tram would connect the city centre and Varissuo, which is an immigrant-favored neighborhood), similar to the Western Metro expansion in Helsinki. Some people consider the tram yet another example of the "Turku disease," which refers to the corruption-tinged phenomenon of tearing down historical buildings and landmarks in favor of new construction. (Interestingly, the closure of the original tram could be considered a part of the original "disease" wave. An interesting article on English here.) And then, Turku is known for its car culture and opposition to the tram is simply based on Public Transportation Bad and nimbyism.

An example of the tram discourse, a group with anonymous backers launched a campaign called Ratikkavaalit (Tram Election) whose only purpose is to basically shittalk the tram project and claim that it is Bad and Wrong.

Since I have no strong opinion on the tram one way or another, I'm going to vote based on stances on social and healthcare services. I did a vaalikone and will probably make my pick based on those results. And I'm going to watch the HS election debate which starts in about an hour, but I expect it to be more litigation of government policy instead of actual regional issues. Not that I don't get a certain perverse joy out of seeing our tapeworm of a prime minister squirm.

I did a single-fandom signup for the Candy Hearts exchange, so I wasn't sure if I'd get a gift, but I did! And it is so lovely!! It's a peek into Pyria's work in the Arborlon archives, and I really like her voice here.

A Story Untold by Anonymous
Fandom: The Shannara Chronicles (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Allanon/Pyria Elessedil
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, First Meetings, Banter, Mind Reading, Meet-Cute, or something like it
Summary:

Pyria never noticed just how lonely the Royal Archives was until an unknown human stumbled into her world and drew her attention from the dusty scrolls and books.

Here's one of my favorite Lynchian videos, an extra from the Inland Empire DVD. I started cooking quinoa because of this.

I finished watching Queen of Fucking Everything and wow was that a ride. It's a fantastic black comedy that touches upon some very Finnish issues, city planning, the labour market, how backdoor deals work... I saw a comment calling it the Finnish Breaking Bad and that's pretty accurate. The protagonist is such a selfish, honestly a terrible person, and yet I found myself cheering for her success. Darkly delightful.

Then, on a whim, I started a rewatch of Alias, which used to be one of my favorite shows back in the day, and it's got me hooked. I'll be binging that for the days to come.

Here's the next two snowflakes:



Challenge #4

Since this is the start of a new year, this challenge will be to set your own goals! Of course we can all make large or ambitious goals, remember that small and/or short goals are also good!

I already made my rambly post with resolutions, but to make it more numerical, I decided on these goals:

✏️ read 26 books
✏️ watch 52 movies
✏️ go see 3 stage plays
✏️ go see 3 live shows
✏️ go to 1 music festival
✏️ take part in 3 exchanges

Already on the last one, I signed up for Candy Hearts, and the assignments just went out today. I'm excited about writing for my recip and already have ideas. :) I did a single fandom signup and I'm expecting not to get anything, and I am totally okay with that, but at least it's out there. It was just nice to put together a prompt and it helped me get out ideas for my own future fic.

For the first movie of the year I ended up picking a bad one (not on purpose), The Marvels. Goodness me was it bad. I liked all the preceding MCU parts a lot (Captain Marvel, Ms Marvel, WandaVision) but holy shit. Noooo. Eternals was at least so bad it was funny!

Challenge #5

Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom.

Fandom has been part of my life for 20+ years, and it has affected me in ways I can't even explicate. Particularly thinking about my "second life" in fandom, these six years I've been active in namespace on DW: I have started writing and regularly posting fic, I have made new friends, I have a drive to journal regularly and so work out my thoughts. I have met some of my closest friends through fandom - a bunch of you on here, isevsianne directly (it's been almost 15 years!) and a few others because we connected over fannish interests or past IRL. Half of me always lives in that ephemeral space that fandom is; mostly hidden from the other side, still, but always there. I wouldn't be me without it.

Yesterday and today so far have been snowy days, with me inside, binging the new season of Squid Game and Arcane (first watch for me). As a break, here's the second snowflake:



Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.

I wrote about my first fandom experiences for another meme a few years back, and the forum I remember fondly. It was 2001, Fellowship of the Ring was about to come out, and I discovered LotR-focused websites and was generally getting the hang of online spaces. I had been somewhat regularly online since 1997 or 1998, but I think we got proper internet home around ~2000. (I am of the Habbo Hotel generation, but it never became my thing.)

The very first fanfic I actually remember writing before internet was widespread was inspired by Enid Blyton's The Famous Five, featuring OCs. I didn't know the word "fanfiction," but it totally was that! My first contact with true transformative fandom wasn't LotR itself, but LotRiPS, and actually not the RPS side but Elijah Wood/OFC. Which is something I later became embarrassed of when Mary Sue mockery became a thing, but something I now consider sweet. :D Quite quickly I made the jump to Girls Falls Into Middle Earth, and then Orlijah and Viggorli. I was still reading fic for the RPS ships around 2003 and 2004, because I remember frequenting Mirrormere. So, my LotR fangirling was a smorgasbård of realities, and I happily jumped between the subfandoms.

The other big fandom for me was HP, and my first brush with fic there was with the Draco Trilogy. (As much as I was, again, embarrassed of it later, Cassandra Claire had a big impact on me, and I also followed her Very Secret Diaries.) A lot of Finnish HP fans congregated at FinFanFun and Vuotis (the Vuotava noidankattila boards, named after The Leaky Cauldron), and I have some RL friends who were of that stock - I even went with them to the Vuotis screening of Deathly Hallows in 2011. It cannot be overstated how active the HP fandom in Finland was, and it presented itself in many forms. There's even the concept of "potterlarppaaja" - A Harry Potter LARPer - which denoted a certain type of LARP aficionado and fan behaviour. And it was so big that even though I didn't interact directly with those groups, I'd still stay I was a big fan. I just happened to latch on to the English fandom and primarily lurked on forums and then later Livejournal.

I've always been multishippish and a fandom hopper, but those were the big ones, and they had a big effect on me in many ways. Hell, I learned English because of poring over fanfic at ff.net. I'm not actively in them these days, but they're still "my" fandoms when asked.

I am doing Snowflake Challenge this year. The first challenge, of 15, is to update your fandom information in your own space.

Earlier in the fall I updated my short About Me sticky post, and in December I made a longer public introduction post, so I don't have much housekeeping to do.

However, I decided to spruce up my journal by searching for and uploading new icons, which better showcase my fannish likes. I have a premium account, I have ample icon space left, and my icon variety isn't that great. When I made the move here from Livejournal, I brought over a few Twin Peaks icons, and since then I've uploaded new ones sporadically. Some of the new ones I snagged are actually from old posts in the LJ comm _fandom_icons_, which looks still active! It was fun to peek at a comm over there.

Christmas came & Christmas went. It was a good decision to spend it with friends, though this week has been a middling time for me mental health-wise. I found it hard to focus a lot of the time, to the point of dissociation, which I need to discuss with my doctor. I brought a couple books with me, and had planned on starting When the Moon Hatched, but it took me until now to finish Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts, the follow-up to Borne. What a read! The last third of the book is a furious crescendo that left me breathless: a polemic on animal welfare, among other things.

The words I had to look up this time:

scrim — harso(kangas)
sough — havista, humista, hymistä
disgorge — antaa ylen, 'to discharge or let go of rapidly or forcefully'
recuse — jäävätä (itsensä)
catafalque — katafalkki, ruumisarkkukoroke
weft — kude, kudelma
bulrush — kaisla

Digital skin update: I got some hydrocortisone cream from the pharmacy (actually my sibling bought it for me "as an early Yule present") and it worked wonders. The inflammation went down, and the patches of rash are now dry and don't itch anymore. Yay medicine. Hopefully the skin will renew quickly. My hands have been really good lately and I don't want to go back.

*

Remember how I start making a series of themed posts, like my Dylan posts and the Frankenstein meme, and always lose steam? I decided for next year, I'm trying a couple more, and maybe this time I'll make it. Maybe I should actually use this an opportunity to finish what I've started in the past... More seriously, now that I've got back into updating my DW almost daily, and thinking about fannish things, a posting meme might work just right to keep this train running. So I'm going to do both snowflake_challenge in January and Fannish 50 throughout 2025.

I don't know if I'll set more Near Years Resolutions besides those, though I'd like to challenge myself to set goals such as Write X Exchange Treats or a reading bingo or the like. Perhaps!