Hi, this is a generic letter with details of my DNWs/likes/generic prompts for exchanges, in case people want a more detailed reference of what I generally like/don't like than what tends to be in my exchange-specific letters. Details in exchange-specific letters generally supersede this if they conflict.

( DNWs )
( Likes: general )
( Likes: smut )
( Likes: art )

( Fandom promos )

As I mentioned in my Wish review, the plot of this movie is kind of a hot mess. It very much feels like a movie that went through at least three or four major versions of the plot, and many of those elements are still hanging in the film like vestigial limbs, leading to a very disjointed and nonsensical viewing experience. Meanwhile, there are like 5-second sequences slapped on like pieces of duct tape in order to hastily close up glaring plot holes, which makes me think there was a strong need for this movie to release on a schedule and it was shoved out the door half-dressed.

Anyway, since this Franken-movie has the suggestion of three or four other coherent movies in it, I thought I would make some suggestions about how it could have been fixed by deciding on just one version of the plot and changing the elements to fully cohere with that central plot. So here we go: 4+1 better movies Wish could have been.

( 4+1 better movies Wish could have been )

---

Welp, that's done. About 4 hours of my life diagnosing this movie that I'll never get back. You can suggest topics for future posts for this meme over here.

Continuing to push these out...

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!

For this challenge, I'm just going to rec the last thing I read that I thought was really neat. It's a blog post that was linked to on a Discord I'm in, which I thought was a fascinating read: Idle Words: Scott and Scurvy -- it's a very readable account of one part in the history of scientific understanding of scurvy. Namely, it talks about how various occurrences and advancements in science led to people having a worse theory of the causes of scurvy in the early 1900s than they did in the mid 1700s. This continued until vitamin C was finally isolated and its effects understood. I think it's a fascinating study of how scientific progress is not linear and how smart people reasoning with the best facts, tests, and technology of their time can still mistake the nature of things. Of course, our own scientific understandings are the same way, even as they're the best guess we can currently make.


Challenge #5: Wishlist - In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.

While I generally am like *gestures at all my exchange sign-ups* for this prompt, let me try to focus on a particular theme, namely -- AUs! AUs are something I'm always hungry for and I think it's unlikely I'll sign up for an AU exchange in the near future (as the only one currently running has a work minimum that's probably just a bit too high for me -- I don't know, I might sign up for it in the future but it would be a pretty difficult commitment for me to make, the stars would have to align, etc.). Okay, so let me highlight three particular things on my AU wishlist:

1) AU prompts: I'm still very much taking prompts for my au_challenge bingo card over here. I really enjoy the activity of thinking about AUs and how I would translate canons into certain settings/setups, and so appreciate people giving me random prompts and shaking some ideas loose that way.

2) My old AU exchange sign-up: Here's the one time I signed up for an AU exchange -- I would still love mini-presents for the requests here. A drabble, a doodle, an icon, or just some off-the-cuff thoughts you have about a neat AU, etc. The fandoms being requested are:

- A Song of Ice and Fire (Sandor Clegane/Sansa Stark)
- Bravely Default (Alternis Dim/Edea Lee)
- Final Fantasy VI (any or ensemble focus with some suggestions of characters to include)
- Pinocchio (1940) (Lampwick/Pinocchio or Blue Fairy/Jiminy Cricket)
- Soulcalibur (any or ensemble focus with some suggestions of characters to include)
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Odo/Quark)

But let me also add:
- Trials of Mana (any or ensemble focus)

3) Recursive fanworks for some of my specific AU ideas: These are both mentioned in the above AU exchange sign-up, but I thought I would highlight them: I've drawn art for two specific AU ideas I have, and I'd love recursive fanworks for them -- your take on the same idea, a drabble illustrating how you think it would work, or just tossing around some ideas or asking me some follow-up questions.

- Bravely Default, superhero AU with a two-person love triangle between Ringabel, Edea, and Alternis.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Quodo angel/demon AU.

Challenge #6 - Top 10 Challenge

Initially, I didn't have any ideas for this one, but then I happened to be looking at my old Quodo posts and found this post that opens with, "If someone makes a list of the top 10 most unhinged Quodo moments (which they should)..." and I was like, "Oh, I'm someone. I could make this list." So I decided to use this idea for the top 10 challenge.

( Top 10 most unhinged Quodo moments )

Okay, of the four things tied for first place in the WIP meme poll, I felt this one was probably the easiest to quickly finish up in January.

Warning: Spoilers for various things including Braid, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Final Fantasy X.

( Eternal recurrence stories )

In my classic snowflake_challenge fashion, I will count this as fulfilling Challenge #9 - Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works, even though I don't know if this would actually count as a favorite trope of mine!

I meant to post this earlier, but here are 19 recs for art drawn for doodle4doodle this year (a doodle/art exchange) -- mostly fanart but with some original work as well. There were a HUGE number of both sign-ups and works for this event (at least using the similar event multifandomdoodle as a rough comparison), and lots of gems in the collection. I don't have time to rec everything I enjoyed, but here's my shortlist of recs!

( 19 art recs from 11 fandoms + original work )

I'm chacusha on AO3 and I have treats enabled.

( General information )
( A Song of Ice and Fire )
( Bravely Default )
( Brother Bear )
( Final Fantasy X )
( The Orville )
( Secret of Mana )
( Soulcalibur )
( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine )
( Visions of Mana )
( Creator's Choice of Doodle )

This summer, I had two really big, multi-month projects at work I needed to make progress on and I noticed that (lacking any urgent deadlines for either of them other than "everything needs to be done by the end of the summer"), my natural inclination was just to work at a very leisurely pace and make extremely slow progress on them. This is exactly what happened to me last year, meaning that a lot of my plans to revamp my curriculum fell through and I needed to push them back a year to this summer. And this summer it was happening again!

I clearly needed to make short-term deadlines to give me a sense of being on-track or behind schedule. The issue, though, was how did I know what I needed to work on, and how long it would take me, and how to make reasonable goals, and how to rework my timeline and priorities if I fell behind where I expected? The projects I'm talking about here are BIG with a lot of different components that take an unknown amount of time. Short-term planning was difficult without some serious long-term planning.

Basically, I decided I might want to take a page from my software-engineering students' books and do some project management, like sprints and agile methodology and Gantt charts to make a rough, prioritized plan for these projects to make sure I was on track throughout, and be able to detect when I'm veering off track and replan as needed to make sure I'll still have the high-priority components done before the end of summer. But then as I set about doing some serious project planning work, one of my toxic traits immediately kicked in, which is that basically, before I had even been able to plan my projects in any detail, I instantly fell down a productivity tools research hole that lasted over a week where I spent all my time at work (AND all my free time over the weekend!) just trying out project-planning software and combing through documentation desperately trying to find a tool I liked that would help me with the project planning I wanted to do. Initially, I thought this task would take, IDK, maybe half a day at the most and then I'd move on to the other tasks I had planned out for the early project period. Instead, work entirely ground to a halt for over a week in early July as I spent all my time on this one task, and then another half a week or so actually using the tools to come up with a project plan. I had tackled the first/preliminary task -- only to find myself two weeks behind schedule already. Fun!

In my defense, I've had to try out a LOT of different software, and each one I've had to use for quite a while before I could figure out whether it actually had the feature set I needed, so that was quite the timesink. And the reason why it took me so long to figure out if the feature set was sufficient was basically due to non-transparent or -- in some cases -- broken functionality or unclear or missing documentation, so that's been frustrating.

In the end, for my particular needs (a one-person project; no internet connection or integrations into other software needed; need the ability to cover project planning at both a high-level/long-term scale (via Gantt charts) AND at a medium-length scale (through weekly, sprint-level kind of goals); being able to sort and color-code tasks coming from 4+ different streams of work, by the stream generating that task), I ended up picking Obsidian. (I'm also using TrackBear lightly just to make sure I'm putting in a reasonable amount of work into my important long-term projects each week.)

But along the way, I tried out and rejected: Monday.com, Microsoft Planner, GanttProject, Agantty, and ClickUp. I also looked into but ended up rejecting ProjectLibre, OpenProject, and TaskJuggler without trying them because they didn't look like what I needed or looked too difficult to install. I also had Asana, Wrike, and Notion on my list of things to look into, but they didn't seem particularly promising compared to the options I had already checked out, so I didn't get to those.

If anyone is interested in my adventures with and evaluations of various productivity/project management software...

( Obsidian )
( Monday.com )
( Microsoft Planner )
( GanttProject )
( Other FOSS software I rejected )
( ClickUp )
( Final options )
( TrackBear )
( Spreadsheets )

General request info

I'm chacusha on AO3. I'm requesting art, fic, and podfic for all requests. If you're the kind of person who either wants a lot of detail or just wants a list of pairings to choose from, I've included some lists of ships I like in my letter. However, I've also hidden/collapsed those lists in case you're the type of person who doesn't want to be influenced in any way in picking a pairing. Feel free to expand them or leave them closed as you wish.

( General notes )
( Bravely Default: Alternis Dim )
( Final Fantasy Tactics: Argath Thadalfus, Rapha Galthena )
( Princess Maker 2: Daughter | Olive Oyl )
( Puyo Puyo: Rulue )
( Soulcalibur: Seong Mi-na )
( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Quark )
( Sword of Mana: Heroine )

I figured out how to do these HTML openable thingies (using <details> and <summary> tags) from here.

Kind of a random post, but I have been doing a practice called Morning Pages more-or-less every morning since 17 October. It's been an interesting experience, so I thought I would write up some of my experiences and findings so far having done this for about six months.

I first heard about Morning Pages on the getyourwordsout Discord server -- someone mentioned The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and wanted people's opinions on it as a writing advice book. A lot of people either didn't like it or said they gave up once it started getting a bit too religious/Christian/spiritual, but multiple people said they liked the Morning Pages technique and that was their main takeaway from the book. I was intrigued at this universal approval for Morning Pages, so I looked up more information online.

( More info on Morning Pages )
( Other miscellaneous observations )

Conclusion

So yeah, basically, I quite like doing Morning Pages, although they can be hard to fit in my schedule sometimes, and I'm honestly still not sure if they are overall worth it/helpful. They're not a cure-all -- for example, there are still hard/intimidating tasks I get avoidant about and even with Morning Pages and my awareness of my avoidant attitude toward those tasks, I am not sure I have been able to get any closer to tackling them.

Even though Morning Pages ARE time-consuming, I would ordinarily take some time in the morning anyway to make a to-do list for the day, and the way I do Morning Pages is basically to do that but in a more extra way, and sometimes they also come in handy to just vent out some feelings or frustrations or try to figure out where my stress is coming from. In that sense, I think they are kind of similar to a sort of mandatory two-hour meditation exercise at the beginning of the day. It's not always clear that that meditation time would be better spent doing something else, but it does help to focus me, and 90% of the time, my meditation time is spent on something productivity-focused (just a reflection of the kind of person I am -- I don't think Morning Pages has to be like this for someone else).

And already that mandatory reflection has helped me understand things about work/productivity, so I think those insights have been one good thing to come out of these Morning Pages at least (even if the insights might have been obvious to other people!).

Ah... huh. I apparently have quite a few books I've read that I've reviewed but have not archived those thoughts here. (I tend to write book reviews on Tumblr first because I read very slowly and take notes as I go, and Tumblr's drafts are just much better for doing that.) Also, I finished one of the arts I promised I would do in February (a couple of days late shhh), and so now I can use it in this post. I'm not going to include book club books in this round-up -- I'll save them for another time.

( Enchantment (1999) by Orson Scott Card )
( The Infinite and the Divine (2020) by Robert Rath )
( Anthropology (2000) by Dan Rhodes )
( The Big Game (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, #4) (1993) by Sandy Schofield )

Challenge #12: Create a Rec Countdown.

I've decided to rec: 5 icon communities, 4 media featuring women on a ruthless revenge quest, 3 direct-to-DVD Disney movie sequels I think are actually good, 2 communities for finding fannish events, and 1 movie I'd rec to everyone (which is extremely uncommon).

( Rec countdown )


Challenge #13: Interact with someone in fandom you haven't talked with before.

(Skipping this one.)


Challenge #15: Talk about an unexpected joyous moment you experienced last year.

Well, I was really delighted to get a late treat for my Quodo-as-exes prompt in Quodo Mini-fest! And a vid too! I don't think I really realized this about latetreatbonanza until after I'd run it the first time, but nothing much matches the surprised delight of getting a late present out of left field (I mainly made the community from the creator's perspective of just wanting motivation to finish up my own late projects). But I've noticed it in the way the recipients react to their gifts -- it is definitely SUCH a joyous experience getting a surprise gift! So yes, that was an unexpected joyous moment for me last year.


And I'm done with snowflake_challenge, reasonably on time this year!

Challenge #11: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.

Since I wrote my Bravely Default canon promo last year, I've been meaning to post a discussion about trios that strongly fit a ( Sun/Moon/Star aesthetic )


Challenge #12 is giving me a bit of a hard time and I might need to meditate on it a bit more. And I might be too shy for Challenge #13 -- in any case, giving it a bit more time seems like a good idea. So I'm going to just skip ahead to Challenge #14?


Challenge #14: In your own space, create your own fandom challenge.

I feel like in this year's challenge, there wasn't really a lot of opportunities for people to talk about specific characters they like in fiction, so I'd like to ask a question related to characters. So feel free to answer any of: Do you have a character you used to be obsessed with and no longer are, or a character you've encountered recently that you're like, "Younger me would have LOVED this character"? Which character do you find yourself thinking about the most / rotating in your mind lately, and why? Do you have a character you feel has been done dirty by fandom, and if so, in what way? Do you have a canon that you think does a particularly good job at establishing its cast of characters, and if so, what would you say is its secret to success?

Challenge #9: In your own space, create a fanwork.

Well, kind of inspired by hamsterwoman's colorbars, I decided to make an icon set for the current challenge of lgbtrainbow.

( Various graphics under the cut )

Challenge #8 - In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for a beloved character, relationship or fandom.

Ack, so this is kind of late (I was hoping to do one of these per day, and this took me three days to write!), but since I am a pinch hit in fffx, I thought it would be nice to write some canon promos for some of the more niche canons I'm requesting. For this exchange, the fandoms I was requesting were: Bravely Default (canon promo already written); Kingdom Hearts; Pinocchio (canon promo already written); Soulcalibur; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Star Trek: Discovery; and Trials of Mana. Of those, Kingdom Hearts and the Star Trek shows are already pretty popular fandoms and they're also huge/sprawling canons, so I don't think writing a promo to encourage people to pick them up for my pinch hit really makes sense. So that just left Soulcalibur and Trials of Mana. It took me a really long time, but these are now up over here: Soulcalibur promo (2613 words) and Trials of Mana promo (1776 words)

My pinch hit has apparently already been claimed, though, so once again I am too late with these Snowflake Challenges!! Ah well, I assume canon promos are those kinds of things that have long-term payoff rather than short-term payoff, so it's nice to have these up for the future.

Continuing to churn these out...

Challenge #6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.

( Favorite piece of original canon )

Challenge #7: In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a wishlist of sorts.

( Wishlist )

I posted this on Tumblr a while ago; thought I would copy it here:

( About artists thinking of their art/fic/etc. as 'content' )

Also, here are my thoughts on various AUs done for this AU Bingo meme. I'm still taking requests for this, by the way!

( FFIX + 20th Century AU )
( FFT + Monster Hunter AU )
( ST:DS9 + Royalty AU )
( ST:DS9, Quodo + Superhero AU )


And then to round out this post, just a couple of links I wanted to share:

- The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design -- I knew what "black woman author" book cover style they were talking about before any examples were given... There are also book genres that my partner calls Blue Book and Pink Book, and you can instantly tell which type of book is being advertised on the subway with basically no information given, just based on the graphic design of the ad. It's very powerful visual branding!
- Magic: the Gathering now has a game state in which you need to prove that there are an infinite number of twin primes to win

Crossposting from Tumblr, but here is my Visions of Mana review:

( Non-spoilery thoughts )
( Spoilery thoughts )

I promised myself I would allow myself to request an au_challenge bingo card once I cleared some exchange fic off my plate. I have FINALLY done this, so here we go! I am not actually going to make any fanworks for this, but I just want to use it as a meme/activity to allow people to give me AU prompts and I can share my thoughts on how I think an X AU for Y canon would look like.

So, help me fill out this bingo: Pick a square + a fandom you'd like me to apply that AU to (+ optionally, a set of character(s) or ship(s) you'd like me to focus on for that AU), and I will write up some thoughts on how I think it would work. Here's a list of my fandoms if that helps. (If you happen to know I'm familiar with some fandom not listed there, feel free to request that.)

( Bingo card behind the cut )

This is just some behind-the-scenes notes on the process of writing my fic, Mission to the Dominion. This post contains spoilers for the ending quite early in the post, so I recommend not reading it unless you've finished reading the whole fic itself. (n=2769)

( Commentary on Mission to the Dominion )