Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

snowflake_challenge wants us to think about the places where we have come together in shared pursuit of our fandoms, or the same fandom, or many other ways of joining us together and showing us that we are not alone in our pursuits.

Challenge #13

TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.

( In community, we join, and nowhere else is that more evident than at convention. )

snowflake_challenge dropped their eleventh challenge, and it's a call-back.

Challenge #11

Grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

( Merrily a wassailing... )

It's time for another snowflake_challenge, and this one is geared more toward those of us who like to talk about the building blocks, the character types, and the storytelling pathways that link and underlie any given specific story being told.

Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

( Discard the momomyth and understand that Tropes Are Tools )

We're over the halfway line at snowflake_challenge, and this challenge wants us to introspect about how we turn things out.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

( Not exactly a process that has a lot of visible things )

snowflake_challenge has sent up number 6 on the challenge list, and it's one of the ones I struggle more with than not, the recommendations-related one.

Every challenge we try to make at least one rec post, and each year, we try to find a new way to make it fun for everyone. This year's attempt:

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge.

The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

Can't think of 10 of anything? That's okay, 10 is just an abstract. It's totally up to you.

This is one of those situations where being profoundly multifannish is a disadvantage, because a top ten list of anything may or may not make it to me. Or I might not get so deeply into a fandom to where there would be enough material for a top ten list. And while I read and enjoy the gifts that get sent my way in the various exchanges that I participate in, they don't necessarily cohere to any kind of top ten list of anything, either.

Eventually, a random idea will settle into my head, and I can go forward with it and see what might happen from there. So, here you are:

( 10 roles one person played during my formative years )

snowflake_challenge posted their fourth prompt, and I had to look at it a couple times before I started getting close to an understanding of what was being asked for.

On many of the fannish websites we use, our history is easily compileable into "pages". When we look back through those pages, sometimes we stumble upon things that we think are rather cool.

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

( Here's where I admit I don't use fannish websites all that much. )

Oh, no! This tells you how much of a terrible year 02025 was for me - I skipped out on the mid-year AO3 output post, while thinking I had already done it. So, I guess we get the year-long version, instead. Let's get to it.

( The whole year of 02025 in AO3 output. 16 works, ahoy )

And that will get us through the year's worth of material. Hopefully, I'll be better about things in July and go back to the six-month situation, but no guarantees. Hopefully this year is better for all of us than last year was.

That said, I apparently turned in just over 61k words this year (including one thing that I cross-posted that you've already seen here in this journal). That's a pretty good haul of fic, and it doesn't count all the words here on the journal or in book club. So, once again, a good year's worth of writing, and here's to more of that good writing in the upcoming year, for me and for all of you.

Let's begin with a very important warning: if there's still content you want to archive on LiveJournal, yours or others, do it now. There are changes being implemented that move continually in the direction of severing parts of LJ from each other, and quite possibly nuking or jettisoning the English-language side of it entirely. The importer may not work quite as swiftly as it usually does due to an influx of import requests, but get yourself into the queue, or use some other archiving tool, post-haste, if there's still anything there that you want to capture and preserve.

A significant amount of material has entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 02026, put it to good use! And for the more detailed deep dive, your friends at Duke University have you covered for the more detailed examination of what we're getting into the public domain.

Here's a fact for you: that the most consistent and largest donor of money for toys to a children's hospital in Oregon have been strippers, and this year, they broke their own record.

We managed to close the hole in the ozone layer, thanks to dedicated and international cooperation. It may not stay closed for long, because this world is what it is, but we at least managed to get it done.

Let go of the idea that gender is a single point, a destination, an immutable truth, and support those who question and who are on the journey to finding what they want from gender in that moment. Acknowledging that gender is mutable, and that for some, it is constantly in mutation, can help those who are questioning or on a discovery journey not feel like they have to be absolutely sure and correct and that once they set upon the journey, they are not allowed to deviate from it.

A promising prevention method against HIV would require a twice-yearly shot and widespread availability to be effective. The fact that we have, in two generations, gotten much closer to giving the finger to HIV than we thought possible is a grand testament to science. (And a condemnation of those chucklefucks who continue to try and impede distribution of such and aid to places where HIV prevention would be most effective.) And, beyond that, we keep finding people who have managed to clear the HIV virus entirely, so it's possible that not only will we be able to prevent new infections, we may be getting very close to giving the finger to HIV infections already present. Scouring the world of that virus will be a great triumph.

For those of us in the mindset of the new year, consider this: the things you have said, unintentionally, may be the things that others are carrying with them for years. As has been said, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. If you have people that trust you, even if you don't want to ask what it is you said that they've been carrying and that you didn't mean, the reassurance and the understanding that such things are mist and should be treated as such, and that you are sorry for the hurt you caused, will be good for them. If we shadows have offended, we are sorry, please let it be mended.

The Archive of Our Own posted an administrative post about the progress they feel they've made about making the Archive less welcoming to racism. I don't know how to parse this update, since it doesn't seem like a lot of concrete things were done on their end?

Rob Reiner, actor and director, died at 78 years of age, with his wife, in what is being investigated as a homicide. (And also, the administrator made a social media post disparaging the man in his death and fluffing his own ego while he did it, but that's only mentioned because if you look for things about the death, you'll probably find the post.)

( Old coins, new targets, animals, nudity, techbros who can't help themselves, and more inside )

Last for tonight, it turns out that humans are generally nicer, warmer, and more friendly than our media accounts would have us believe.

A story of a man who did not get to say thanks to an idol, but who did manage to convince a group of carolers to sing his most holiday-appropriate song at him, and then get blown away when they found out that he could, in fact, sing.

And, perhaps most importantly in these times where we think about the turning of the wheel of the year, sometimes the best good news that you can give to others is "yet here you stand." (And no, the rate of people choosing to complete suicide isn't higher in the winter months, so there are more people out there who are also choosing "yet here you stand" along with you.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Last call for December Days for this year! Thanks for reading along with me as I talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

( 31: A Whole New Ballgame )

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

( 29: w00t )