brokenmnemonic

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 favourite show, top 10 characters in your favourite 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.

So... ( Top 10 Boardgames )

Challenge #4: Rec Your Last Page

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

For today's Snowflake challenge entry, I thought I'd flag up Rebrickable. Anyone who's had to take part in the VidUKon quiz in the last few years (or is in my Welsh class) knows I'm a big Lego fan, and I think Rebrickable is a great site for the community. I started visiting the site because I wanted a way to track which sets and spare parts I had, and got hooked almost immediately.

Rebrickable goes well beyond tracking sets and parts; it's a big part of the Lego MOC world (MOC being shorthand for "My Own Creation") where people post up models they've designed, either based on the parts from existing sets completely from scratch, with both free MOC plans available and MOCs you can buy. The site's also regularly updated with both upcoming new official sets and a steadily-growing record of past Lego sets going back to the very first ones. It has a build engine that takes your part lists and set lists and suggests other sets and MOCs you can build with the parts you have.

Beyond this, one of the big reasons I love the site is that it hosts instructions for past sets, including a lot that aren't available on the Lego website, and has links to other sites that also host instructions, helping you build old sets you may have collected the parts for. I'm currently slowly collecting the classic Lego Space sets from my childhood that I wanted but could never afford, and there's a member on Rebrickable who's finding, scanning and uploading hi-quality PDF files for the instructions for these sets, which were on sale from ca. 1979-1988.

I also really appreciate that people involved with the site are digging into really niche areas of Lego history. For example, how many colours do you think Lego parts have been produced in? Have a guess, and then go and look at this Rebrickable Colours page and see how close you were. One of the site admins has a personal project running in which he's hunting down and buying sealed Lego sets of varying degrees of age from long out of production themes in an attempt to identify, catalogue and photograph every shade of pink Lego brick that's ever been produced.

Rebrickable also has regular review articles, essays about bits of Lego history, and a lot of people post workbench posts detailing the things they're doing with Lego. It's a great community hub, and I visit there basically every day.

After thinking about it over the weekend and reading a few posts about it, I've decided to see if I can manage to complete...



Challenge #1

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

I've noticed over the last few years that I've been slowly withdrawing from communities and fandoms I was active/interested in, and I've not really had the enthusiasm to do anything creative that I had even 2-3 years ago. I took part in the #MusicAdvent on Bluesky this year, and just about managed to post up each day of my Lego calendar, and that was quietly satisfying; I'm hoping that taking part in the Snowflake challenge as a month-long activity will help get me moving again.

The active fandoms I've been involved with the longest that are still active are BattleTech and vidding - I'm an admin on Sarna.net, the biggest BattleTech wiki out there, and I've been involved helping run the vidding convention VidUKon for every convention from 2011 onwards, although I only make perhaps one vid a year.

The tv shows I've been most interested in over the last few years have largely all been cancelled now; Ted Lasso, Lady Jame, Renegade Nell, Doctor Odyssey, the Wheel of Time, Dead Boy Detectives, The Residence... I'm starting to wonder if I'm the common denominator!

I've fallen rather behind with the Fannish Fifty thing due to a couple of months of being distracted preparing for conventions, so I might try catching up a little via shorter posts than my first ten.

For today's post, I'd like to recommend a movie. I'd call it the best zombie apocalypse musical I've ever seen, but that would be a little disingenious because it's also the only zombie apocalypse musical I think I've ever seen. The movie in question is Anna and the Apocalypse, which I tracked down on Amazon Prime Video after seeing the author Seanan McGuire recommend it on twitter.

It's predominantly set in a secondary school somewhere in Scotland (possibly near Glasgow?) although a bowling arcade also appears for some fun scenes. It's tough being a teenager approaching the end of secondary school, what with worrying about exams, having disagreements with parents and tryng to escape from the walking dead. It's genuinely funny in a number of places (I guarantee you won't forget the plan for escaping from the bowling alley) and the musical numbers are excellent. It's still tragic in that way that most zombie apocalypse movies are, but there aren't many movies that can make me laugh in the middle of an apocalypse, and I defy you not to find the opening musical number on day 2 and its backdrop hilarious and really well done.

For this Fannish Fifty post, I thought I'd rec moddable games that I play to chill out. I don't play a wide variety of games because I tend to spend a lot of my time playing the smae few games I like over and over, but there are definitely games that I play when I want to chill out with.

( Video Game Recs )

Having watched Predators a couple of times recently, I thought for this Fannish Fifty I'd list some of my favourite Predator comics produced while Dark Horse held the license to produce tie-in comics. Dark Horse have produced a lot of Aliens, Predator, Aliens vs Predator and Aliens or Predators vs other comic crossovers, usually as either one-shots, 3-4 issue miniseries and an occasional longer run (Aliens: Colonial Marines was about 12 issues, IIRC). Some of the runs have sequels, and others don't, and the line's been rebooted at least once (there was a ten-year gap in the noughties).

( Comic Book Recs )

I've been debating posting vid recs as part of Fannish Fifty, but I don't watch all that many, and I'm not sure I count as much of a vidder these days. However, after doing some digging around online, I thought I'd share some of the NuBSG vids that had a big impact on me when I was making my first attempts at vidding. I have a lot of feelings still about this show, and it turns out I also still have a lot of feelings about these vids, although sadly a number of those I wanted to rec seem to have vanished online.

A couple of the embeds below are from Vidders.net, and for some reason they generate a lot of white space after them when I preview the page - I don't know why, but I'm going to consider it some kind of internet mystery that would make me quake in fear if I understood it.

( NuBSG Vids )

I got distracted and am running a bit late with this post - partly because I wasn't sure what to do for a Fannish Fifty post. So, I've gone with something simple: some of my favourite zombie-themed comic book series. I actually haven't read as many zombie comics as either my current or former comic dealer would have you beliveve, but it was one of these comics that got me back into reading comics after a long hiatus.

( Zombie Comics! )

So, those are my favourites so far, but I'm always open to reading more if you have any favourites...

Fannish Fifty #2: Steampunk Novel Series

I've been having a bit of a difficult week, so I thought I'd try recommending something cheery for my second Fannish Fifty post.

( 3 Steampunk Novel Series I Really Enjoyed )

For one reason or another, I've been thinking about dwarves a lot lately - specifically, dwarves infantasy novels. I know that a big part of it is because I've been chatting about Dragon Age: Origins recently; the part of the game involving Orzammar, the Deep Roads, and the choices made there was one of the most emotive parts of the game for me. Seeing bits of the trailer for the prequel-LOTR Tolkeinverse show has added to that. So, I realise that this is a bit of a random request, but does anyone have recs for fantasy novels in which dwarves play a prominant role, but where they aren't the remnants of a once-great culture/empire/series of kingdoms but are now fading/dying-out/a remnant of what they once were?