Snowflake Challenge, days 7-13 + things learned in December
Catching up on Snowflake Challenge, days 7-13:
Day 7: In your own space, create a fanwork. Make a drabble, a ficlet, a podfic, or an icon, art or meta or a rec list. Arts and crafts. Draft a critical essay about a particular media. Put together a picspam or a fanmix. Write a review of a Broadway show, a movie, a concert, a poetry reading, a museum trip, a you-should-be-listening-to-this-band essay. Compose some limericks, haikus, free-form poetry, 5-word stories. Document a particular bit of real person canon. Take some pictures. Draw a stick-figure comic. Create something.
I did this, a few days late, by dropping a couple of icons into various fandom_stockings. But reveals are delayed, so I can't share them yet. But I did also make five quote icons from The Hanging Tree that I can share:
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Day 8: In your own space, make a list of at least 3 things that you like about yourself
Meh. I don't like this challenge, but not because I find it difficult to come up with good things to say/things I like about myself, but because I find it kind of boring (other people saying good things about me = not boring at all :D). Anyway, I thought about doing a fannish 3 things I like about me, but I just ended up recreating last year's list (my consistency is another thing I like about myself! XP) But let me try to come up with 3 different fannish things:
1. I think I'm a good fannish role model for the rodents. I think it's good for them to see that one does not need to "outgrow" being passionate about fiction/stories, and that it's possible to make fannish connections that become real friendships, that it's OK to treat yourself to something like fannish swag if it makes you happy. (And I try to be a good listener, too, and to pay attention to O's interminable DC comics explanations and Minecraft plans... :P)
(Like, one of the reasons that I think I've been pretty happy in fandom all my life is that while my parents and grandparents may not have been fannish, per se, they were definitely passionate about books (and movies, to a lesser extent), and stories in general. My grandfather told me stories he made up and put up with my crossover "pereputanitsa" games; my grandmother was willing to sew booties for my toy poodle so he could be like Buck in Call of the Wild, and to play Kirill to my Red Schuhart the summer I was obsessed with Roadside Picnic, taking scientific measurements and pouring me "fingers" worth of juice. My mother told me all the Greek myths by heart, and drew me pictures of mice acting them out. My father introduced me to Konduit i Shvambraniya and then listened to me prattle on about my turtle-shell-shaped planet (this was long before Discworld, for the record). Anyway, so I felt like passion for books/stories was something that was normal to retain as an adult, and to want to share with your kids. Which is what I'm trying to do with the rodents, too.)
2. I like that I'm thorough and detailed in talking about my reading (and watching, when I get around to watching something). I don't have the knack of the mood-perfect single precise sentence to describe the way a canon I'm consuming is making me feel, which is a skill I admire, but that's OK, because I'm good at the sort of empirical, data-collection heavy side of lit analysis/response, quotes and tracking arcs, and all that stuff -- and it's fun for me to note them down. The side benefit of this is that I can go back to a book write-up from years ago and reread it, and it will remind me of a lot of details I otherwise would've forgotten, and also it's rather good for spurring multi-comment discussions with like-minded individuals :D
3. I don't know if I'm a useful beta, since only the authors can really answer that questions, but I'm definitely a conscientious one :)
Day 9: Send feedback to two fannish people - they can be anyone you want: a writer who’s made you happy, a moderator of your favorite exchange (not us!), a fanartist you avidly follow… There are so many possibilities. Just let someone know you appreciate their work.
I've been doing this all along, since I'm still reading through Yuletide, and also through recs people are posting for Snowflake :) So, done.
Day 10: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (More than one is okay, too.) Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs.
I'm honestly hard-pressed to come up with something in addition to the lists from previous years: 2015 (Family and high school/Hogwarts AUs) and 2016 (animal companions, Proud Warrior Race Guy, competene kink, Tam Lin retellings, and chibis)
But let's go with another favorite, brought to you by me continuing to watch Killjoys: Action Girl / Non-Action Guy duos, whether we're talking romantic relationship (Zoe and Wash, shipping Toph/Sokka) or friendship (Dutch and Johnny, which made me think of it in the first place, or the relationship between Xander and Buffy). I like Action Girl characters in general, and I like this set of dynamics. It is proooobably not coincidental that in a lot of my friendships with guys, as well as my marriage, I'm more stereotypically 'masculine', personality-wise, than the guys... :P
Day 11: In your own space, talk about a creator. Show us why you think they are amazing.
This is always a tough question for me, because I've met so many amazing fan authors/artists/etc through fandom, and how do I pick just one to talk about? But I was looking through past recs to see who I haven't talked about recently, and decided to make this year's answer guad. I'm not sure if Isa is in fandom at the moment -- she hasn't posted on LJ since 2014, and on DeviantArt since earlier than that -- but in the heyday of westerosorting (which is where I know her from), she was someone who stood out even among that coterie of extremely talented people. First of all, guad has a sense of humour that permeates whatever she's creating -- art, crack!fic, graphics -- and which very closely aligned with mine. And she is ridiculously multi-talented -- sadly the link is gone, so I can't share it with you guys, but in addition to the "regular" kind of fanworks, she's also composed and performed her own music. And she is an amazingly fast and prolific artist -- westerosorting old-timers will remember her absolutely epic piece where she drew Poterpuff-like ASOIAF figures for members who requested it -- little scenes featuring the user and an ASOIAF character of their choice: 24 scenes with graphics for each O.o
A lot of my favorite pieces are in locked comms, but here's what I could find in her DeviantArt gallery:
ASOIAF:
- ASOIAF Quidditch teams gallery
- minimalist Sam Tarly posters
- amazing stained glass windows, like this window of the Seven, the Great Houses, various minor houses, like Fossoway
- Potterpuffs style Red Wedding and more, for those who can't see the epic link above
- Bloodraven digital "woodburning" art
- ASOIAF webpage designs
Harry Potter: Hogwarts House windows
Dresden Files: Molly's choices stained glass window
Day 12: In your own space, post a rec for fannish spaces and resources - comms, challenges, twitters, tumblrs, etc. Tell us about where you hang out.
I was wracking my brains for something that I haven't used yet, and then realized there is actually a place I habitually rec and did so just a couple of days ago to cyanshadow: The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. The thing about it is, partly it's just amazing that a website I was using in the 90s is still there, in some form, today, 20 years later. (I'm pretty sure it's moved at least once, but is otherwise intact.) And partly it's just the scope of the thing when you consider it was put together and maintained long before wikis became a thing -- heck, at the very beginning of interactive online fandom involving both creator and fans. I think of it a bit like finding a functional computer in an ancient Egyptian tomb or something :P But the other thing about it is, it's actually a PHENOMENAL resource for a complex, well thought out show with very tight continuity and long arcs and a showrunner who liked having discussions with his audience. When I was doing my rewatch, I read the episode write-ups after we watched each one, and it was so cool to see how much foreshadowing people picked up on, watching real time, and all the neat little hints JMS had shared. And sometimes it's rather disheartening to see the political storylines JMS had scripted out, that fans complained were unrealistic at the time -- what modern society could be so dumb! so naive! so easily taken in! -- bear a depressing amount of resemblance to stuff going on in the world today. As I put it to Cyan: "Optimism of the 90s: 0, JMS and reality: 1."
Day 13: In your own space, write about a moment in fandom that meant a lot to you.
Let me start with a pre-internet fandom moment. I've talked about it before, as part of my love letters to LotR here and here, but, really, when I think about "fandom", that's the first one that occurs to me.
It was the summer I was 14, and my friend R and I went camping for 3 weeks with my mother and little brother in a local forest here. That summer, a friend of my parents had also organized a "pionerskij lager'" (Soviet-style summer camp) in the same forest -- several dozen kids, ~10-14, a couple of adults to look after them, an older lady to cook for the camp. We arrived on the same day (I think it was a coincidence), and because my parents were friends of the organizers, we went over to where they had their tents to say hello. So my mother was talking to the grown-ups, and R and I were wandering around discussing Lord of the Rings, as we pretty much always did in those days, and suddenly I heard my mother calling my name. Knowing my mother, I figured she'd found an interesting bug to show me. But no -- she had found an 11-year-old boy reading The Hobbit. We started talking, of course, and almost immediately launched intro a protracted discussion on the correct way to translate things into Russian in LotR -- we had read different translations and so had Very Strong Opinions on these matters. I don't remember what Pippin (for it was he; not his real name, obviously, but R and I have called him that ever since) thought the correct translation were because he was obviously wrong, but we were arguing over the correct way to translate Mirkwood, and I said "Liholes'ye", and then the older woman who was the camp's cook interrupted us very politely and asked what we were talking about. "Oh, it's about this fantasy book," I said, quite confident she'd misheard us and was not interested in being part of the conversation we were actually having. But no -- she had heard correctly, and she was a Tolkien fan, too, and she spent a nice long time participating in our discussion, until h duties called her away. And that was really an iconic fandom moment for me, because here we were, three people (well, four, but R and I already knew each other, of course) meeting for the first time in a completely random context, probably at least five decades spanning our ages, and we were drawn together by our love for a book.
It wasn't the last time I found myself bonding with someone in a random context because they, too, were fans of Tolkien (there was my English professor who charmed me by recognizing my email handle, which was Yavanna in those days, my summer internship boss, an aging hippie, who told me about driving cross-country with his girlfriend in a minivan, stopping to read LotR under the stars, the vendor intern from Germany I was squiring around the fab who recognized Minas Tirith on my desktop wallpaper and told me about the Tolkien LARPs he'd attended)
For online fandom, the moment that bubbles up is the early days of westerosorting, when we were all a small, close-knit group of incredibly awesome people who had somehow managed to congregate in one sorting/landcomm. We were sorting everyone and everything we possible could, and the first one I got to participate in was the epic post sorting historical figures into ASOIAF houses (locked post, sorry). Just, the level of erudition and passion and wit from everyone, and then jesatria made icons and more icons (unlocked, so you can see the consensus results). There were later sorting posts, just as amazing and fun (Discworld! such arguments we had! and Greek mythology, and the chats late into the night when we were doings Simpsons sorting and figuring out what characters would prefer what drinks and other such incredile silliness, and the hilarious rush of Character Meme campaigns, and the frenetic pace of Tourneys of the Hand, but that historial people corting post was the first big fun thing I remember from westerosorting -- the first time I realized just how amazing the group was, with their different backgrounds and fields of expertise and sundry talents -- so it's the one I reach back for.
*
And I finally got around to cleaning up my Things learned in December
1) What "sett" (stones) are in the paving sense, via tinnny (till then, I only knew it in the "badger's den" sense.
2) Also via tinny, a way to test of a battery is dead
3) From my mother, after she returned from Portugal, about the Lisbon earthquake in 1755
4) Also from my mother, that Portugal was the last colonial power in Europe, handing over its last colony in 1999 (Macau)
5) Via ms_geekette, about Miss Baker and Miss Able, US space monkeys.
6) That English names for the mushroom I know as maslenok include "sticky bun" and "slippery jack"
7) About nuclear waste diamon batteries
8) Via aravishermione, that Goji berries are a thing.
9) Via Tumblr, about the periodic table inscribed on Martyn Poliakoff's hair.
10) The origin of the Russian phrase vnesti svoyu leptu (lepta = small Greek coin, so it's actually very similar to the "my two cents" expression, it turns out!)
11) Via pashoshi, about the Irish initial mutations that account for some of the odd phonography.
12) Via Imzy, neat stuff about social graphs
13) That Kirk Douglas's real name is Issur Danielovitch (I knew he was the child of Russian immigrants, but not what his birth name was)
14) Via deeplyunhip, that sweet potatoes have anti-inflammatory properties
15) From L's test, the definition of a kite in geometry -- it is the third thing with perpendicular diagonals, besides rhombus and square.
16) Via B, that Euler is buried in St Petersburg
17) From L's algebra book, what a mantissa is in scientific notation (although it's also used in logarithms, apparently; I don't think I learned it while studying either...)
18) From R, that when you get your citizenship, you actually have to inform social security form once citizenship
19) Via coworker EY, the difference between rambutan, lychee, and longan
20) Via Tumblr, that this is called a pedalo
21) Via yuletide_coal, that what I think of as "Russian quotes" are really called guillemet
22) MICE acronym that describes motives for spying (also, elephants...)
23) How to eat passion fruit
24) Where "vetting" comes from, in the sense of "we have thoroughly vetted this decision" (etymology is from veterinarian, and origin is from horse racing)
25) Where coconuts come from (India and Southeast Asia, apparently)
26) Via blakmagjick, the charming Victorian expression "got the morbs" (can be found here, along with some other fun slang) -- "se of this 1880 phrase indicated temporary melancholy."
27) What languages are spoken and taught in St Maarten
28) What a frigatebird looks like
29) From _coal, the term semantic satiation
30) From my new St Maarten friend, about the Saramaccan language spoken in Suriname
31) From B, Fermat's theorem on the sum of two squares (that any prime number which is divisible by 4 with remainder one can be expressed as the sum of two squares. This came up because 2017 is such a number (and 2017 = 9^2 + 44^2. This came up as part of B's coworker's new year greetings XD)
Day 7: In your own space, create a fanwork. Make a drabble, a ficlet, a podfic, or an icon, art or meta or a rec list. Arts and crafts. Draft a critical essay about a particular media. Put together a picspam or a fanmix. Write a review of a Broadway show, a movie, a concert, a poetry reading, a museum trip, a you-should-be-listening-to-this-band essay. Compose some limericks, haikus, free-form poetry, 5-word stories. Document a particular bit of real person canon. Take some pictures. Draw a stick-figure comic. Create something.
I did this, a few days late, by dropping a couple of icons into various fandom_stockings. But reveals are delayed, so I can't share them yet. But I did also make five quote icons from The Hanging Tree that I can share:
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Day 8: In your own space, make a list of at least 3 things that you like about yourself
Meh. I don't like this challenge, but not because I find it difficult to come up with good things to say/things I like about myself, but because I find it kind of boring (other people saying good things about me = not boring at all :D). Anyway, I thought about doing a fannish 3 things I like about me, but I just ended up recreating last year's list (my consistency is another thing I like about myself! XP) But let me try to come up with 3 different fannish things:
1. I think I'm a good fannish role model for the rodents. I think it's good for them to see that one does not need to "outgrow" being passionate about fiction/stories, and that it's possible to make fannish connections that become real friendships, that it's OK to treat yourself to something like fannish swag if it makes you happy. (And I try to be a good listener, too, and to pay attention to O's interminable DC comics explanations and Minecraft plans... :P)
(Like, one of the reasons that I think I've been pretty happy in fandom all my life is that while my parents and grandparents may not have been fannish, per se, they were definitely passionate about books (and movies, to a lesser extent), and stories in general. My grandfather told me stories he made up and put up with my crossover "pereputanitsa" games; my grandmother was willing to sew booties for my toy poodle so he could be like Buck in Call of the Wild, and to play Kirill to my Red Schuhart the summer I was obsessed with Roadside Picnic, taking scientific measurements and pouring me "fingers" worth of juice. My mother told me all the Greek myths by heart, and drew me pictures of mice acting them out. My father introduced me to Konduit i Shvambraniya and then listened to me prattle on about my turtle-shell-shaped planet (this was long before Discworld, for the record). Anyway, so I felt like passion for books/stories was something that was normal to retain as an adult, and to want to share with your kids. Which is what I'm trying to do with the rodents, too.)
2. I like that I'm thorough and detailed in talking about my reading (and watching, when I get around to watching something). I don't have the knack of the mood-perfect single precise sentence to describe the way a canon I'm consuming is making me feel, which is a skill I admire, but that's OK, because I'm good at the sort of empirical, data-collection heavy side of lit analysis/response, quotes and tracking arcs, and all that stuff -- and it's fun for me to note them down. The side benefit of this is that I can go back to a book write-up from years ago and reread it, and it will remind me of a lot of details I otherwise would've forgotten, and also it's rather good for spurring multi-comment discussions with like-minded individuals :D
3. I don't know if I'm a useful beta, since only the authors can really answer that questions, but I'm definitely a conscientious one :)
Day 9: Send feedback to two fannish people - they can be anyone you want: a writer who’s made you happy, a moderator of your favorite exchange (not us!), a fanartist you avidly follow… There are so many possibilities. Just let someone know you appreciate their work.
I've been doing this all along, since I'm still reading through Yuletide, and also through recs people are posting for Snowflake :) So, done.
Day 10: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (More than one is okay, too.) Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs.
I'm honestly hard-pressed to come up with something in addition to the lists from previous years: 2015 (Family and high school/Hogwarts AUs) and 2016 (animal companions, Proud Warrior Race Guy, competene kink, Tam Lin retellings, and chibis)
But let's go with another favorite, brought to you by me continuing to watch Killjoys: Action Girl / Non-Action Guy duos, whether we're talking romantic relationship (Zoe and Wash, shipping Toph/Sokka) or friendship (Dutch and Johnny, which made me think of it in the first place, or the relationship between Xander and Buffy). I like Action Girl characters in general, and I like this set of dynamics. It is proooobably not coincidental that in a lot of my friendships with guys, as well as my marriage, I'm more stereotypically 'masculine', personality-wise, than the guys... :P
Day 11: In your own space, talk about a creator. Show us why you think they are amazing.
This is always a tough question for me, because I've met so many amazing fan authors/artists/etc through fandom, and how do I pick just one to talk about? But I was looking through past recs to see who I haven't talked about recently, and decided to make this year's answer guad. I'm not sure if Isa is in fandom at the moment -- she hasn't posted on LJ since 2014, and on DeviantArt since earlier than that -- but in the heyday of westerosorting (which is where I know her from), she was someone who stood out even among that coterie of extremely talented people. First of all, guad has a sense of humour that permeates whatever she's creating -- art, crack!fic, graphics -- and which very closely aligned with mine. And she is ridiculously multi-talented -- sadly the link is gone, so I can't share it with you guys, but in addition to the "regular" kind of fanworks, she's also composed and performed her own music. And she is an amazingly fast and prolific artist -- westerosorting old-timers will remember her absolutely epic piece where she drew Poterpuff-like ASOIAF figures for members who requested it -- little scenes featuring the user and an ASOIAF character of their choice: 24 scenes with graphics for each O.o
A lot of my favorite pieces are in locked comms, but here's what I could find in her DeviantArt gallery:
ASOIAF:
- ASOIAF Quidditch teams gallery
- minimalist Sam Tarly posters
- amazing stained glass windows, like this window of the Seven, the Great Houses, various minor houses, like Fossoway
- Potterpuffs style Red Wedding and more, for those who can't see the epic link above
- Bloodraven digital "woodburning" art
- ASOIAF webpage designs
Harry Potter: Hogwarts House windows
Dresden Files: Molly's choices stained glass window
Day 12: In your own space, post a rec for fannish spaces and resources - comms, challenges, twitters, tumblrs, etc. Tell us about where you hang out.
I was wracking my brains for something that I haven't used yet, and then realized there is actually a place I habitually rec and did so just a couple of days ago to cyanshadow: The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. The thing about it is, partly it's just amazing that a website I was using in the 90s is still there, in some form, today, 20 years later. (I'm pretty sure it's moved at least once, but is otherwise intact.) And partly it's just the scope of the thing when you consider it was put together and maintained long before wikis became a thing -- heck, at the very beginning of interactive online fandom involving both creator and fans. I think of it a bit like finding a functional computer in an ancient Egyptian tomb or something :P But the other thing about it is, it's actually a PHENOMENAL resource for a complex, well thought out show with very tight continuity and long arcs and a showrunner who liked having discussions with his audience. When I was doing my rewatch, I read the episode write-ups after we watched each one, and it was so cool to see how much foreshadowing people picked up on, watching real time, and all the neat little hints JMS had shared. And sometimes it's rather disheartening to see the political storylines JMS had scripted out, that fans complained were unrealistic at the time -- what modern society could be so dumb! so naive! so easily taken in! -- bear a depressing amount of resemblance to stuff going on in the world today. As I put it to Cyan: "Optimism of the 90s: 0, JMS and reality: 1."
Day 13: In your own space, write about a moment in fandom that meant a lot to you.
Let me start with a pre-internet fandom moment. I've talked about it before, as part of my love letters to LotR here and here, but, really, when I think about "fandom", that's the first one that occurs to me.
It was the summer I was 14, and my friend R and I went camping for 3 weeks with my mother and little brother in a local forest here. That summer, a friend of my parents had also organized a "pionerskij lager'" (Soviet-style summer camp) in the same forest -- several dozen kids, ~10-14, a couple of adults to look after them, an older lady to cook for the camp. We arrived on the same day (I think it was a coincidence), and because my parents were friends of the organizers, we went over to where they had their tents to say hello. So my mother was talking to the grown-ups, and R and I were wandering around discussing Lord of the Rings, as we pretty much always did in those days, and suddenly I heard my mother calling my name. Knowing my mother, I figured she'd found an interesting bug to show me. But no -- she had found an 11-year-old boy reading The Hobbit. We started talking, of course, and almost immediately launched intro a protracted discussion on the correct way to translate things into Russian in LotR -- we had read different translations and so had Very Strong Opinions on these matters. I don't remember what Pippin (for it was he; not his real name, obviously, but R and I have called him that ever since) thought the correct translation were because he was obviously wrong, but we were arguing over the correct way to translate Mirkwood, and I said "Liholes'ye", and then the older woman who was the camp's cook interrupted us very politely and asked what we were talking about. "Oh, it's about this fantasy book," I said, quite confident she'd misheard us and was not interested in being part of the conversation we were actually having. But no -- she had heard correctly, and she was a Tolkien fan, too, and she spent a nice long time participating in our discussion, until h duties called her away. And that was really an iconic fandom moment for me, because here we were, three people (well, four, but R and I already knew each other, of course) meeting for the first time in a completely random context, probably at least five decades spanning our ages, and we were drawn together by our love for a book.
It wasn't the last time I found myself bonding with someone in a random context because they, too, were fans of Tolkien (there was my English professor who charmed me by recognizing my email handle, which was Yavanna in those days, my summer internship boss, an aging hippie, who told me about driving cross-country with his girlfriend in a minivan, stopping to read LotR under the stars, the vendor intern from Germany I was squiring around the fab who recognized Minas Tirith on my desktop wallpaper and told me about the Tolkien LARPs he'd attended)
For online fandom, the moment that bubbles up is the early days of westerosorting, when we were all a small, close-knit group of incredibly awesome people who had somehow managed to congregate in one sorting/landcomm. We were sorting everyone and everything we possible could, and the first one I got to participate in was the epic post sorting historical figures into ASOIAF houses (locked post, sorry). Just, the level of erudition and passion and wit from everyone, and then jesatria made icons and more icons (unlocked, so you can see the consensus results). There were later sorting posts, just as amazing and fun (Discworld! such arguments we had! and Greek mythology, and the chats late into the night when we were doings Simpsons sorting and figuring out what characters would prefer what drinks and other such incredile silliness, and the hilarious rush of Character Meme campaigns, and the frenetic pace of Tourneys of the Hand, but that historial people corting post was the first big fun thing I remember from westerosorting -- the first time I realized just how amazing the group was, with their different backgrounds and fields of expertise and sundry talents -- so it's the one I reach back for.
*
And I finally got around to cleaning up my Things learned in December
1) What "sett" (stones) are in the paving sense, via tinnny (till then, I only knew it in the "badger's den" sense.
2) Also via tinny, a way to test of a battery is dead
3) From my mother, after she returned from Portugal, about the Lisbon earthquake in 1755
4) Also from my mother, that Portugal was the last colonial power in Europe, handing over its last colony in 1999 (Macau)
5) Via ms_geekette, about Miss Baker and Miss Able, US space monkeys.
6) That English names for the mushroom I know as maslenok include "sticky bun" and "slippery jack"
7) About nuclear waste diamon batteries
8) Via aravishermione, that Goji berries are a thing.
9) Via Tumblr, about the periodic table inscribed on Martyn Poliakoff's hair.
10) The origin of the Russian phrase vnesti svoyu leptu (lepta = small Greek coin, so it's actually very similar to the "my two cents" expression, it turns out!)
11) Via pashoshi, about the Irish initial mutations that account for some of the odd phonography.
12) Via Imzy, neat stuff about social graphs
13) That Kirk Douglas's real name is Issur Danielovitch (I knew he was the child of Russian immigrants, but not what his birth name was)
14) Via deeplyunhip, that sweet potatoes have anti-inflammatory properties
15) From L's test, the definition of a kite in geometry -- it is the third thing with perpendicular diagonals, besides rhombus and square.
16) Via B, that Euler is buried in St Petersburg
17) From L's algebra book, what a mantissa is in scientific notation (although it's also used in logarithms, apparently; I don't think I learned it while studying either...)
18) From R, that when you get your citizenship, you actually have to inform social security form once citizenship
19) Via coworker EY, the difference between rambutan, lychee, and longan
20) Via Tumblr, that this is called a pedalo
21) Via yuletide_coal, that what I think of as "Russian quotes" are really called guillemet
22) MICE acronym that describes motives for spying (also, elephants...)
23) How to eat passion fruit
24) Where "vetting" comes from, in the sense of "we have thoroughly vetted this decision" (etymology is from veterinarian, and origin is from horse racing)
25) Where coconuts come from (India and Southeast Asia, apparently)
26) Via blakmagjick, the charming Victorian expression "got the morbs" (can be found here, along with some other fun slang) -- "se of this 1880 phrase indicated temporary melancholy."
27) What languages are spoken and taught in St Maarten
28) What a frigatebird looks like
29) From _coal, the term semantic satiation
30) From my new St Maarten friend, about the Saramaccan language spoken in Suriname
31) From B, Fermat's theorem on the sum of two squares (that any prime number which is divisible by 4 with remainder one can be expressed as the sum of two squares. This came up because 2017 is such a number (and 2017 = 9^2 + 44^2. This came up as part of B's coworker's new year greetings XD)