Snowflake days 7 & 8, meme, and links
Dreamwidth Circle Meme
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Challenge #7: In your own space, tell us about 3 fandom resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom!)
This is always a tough question, because I don't want to just repeat the same links every year, but the resources I use don't change that much from year to year, as my fandoms tend to be pretty stable. So these are more fandom-adjacent than outright fannish, but two things I haven't linked to before:
- Flights of Foundry virtual convention -- started in 2020, when Covid derailed regular in-person cons, this was something I really enjoyed in 2020 and 2021 and am looking forward to this year (in early April). It's focused on writing (/podcasting, illustration, translation, game design) craft, but I also just really enjoyed it as an opportunity to hear favorite/interesting authors (and other creators) on panels (Rachel Hartman, Becky Chambers, S.L.Huang, Marie Brennan, Ken Liu, F.C.Yee) and discover new ones (Valerie Valdes, PJ Manney, Jeremy Greathouse, whose debut novel I'm looking forward to) -- and sometimes also their young children or pets. You can find some archived panels/presentations from 2020 and 2021, but that's only a subset of the programming. Unlike many cons that were forced to go virtual, this was envisioned as a "natively" virtual con, which I think is to its advantage (and allows it to draw on a pretty international crowd).
- Worldbuilding for Masochists podcast -- I learned about this podcast when it was nominated for a Hugo, and have been having fun listening through the early episodes (I'm not very far in yet). This is also geared towards writers of original spec fic, but I've been enjoying it even as someone who is not interested in writing my own -- I just like listening to people (pro authors, both the core podcast group and occasional guests) passionately nerd out about worldbuilding and the tools they use to do it.
Things I've linked before but continued to use this year:
- Be the Serpent podcast of extremely deep literary merit, now sadly on indefinite hiatus after 100 super fun episodes. Three friends talking about pro works and fanworks with a lot of humour and insight and just great rapport that feels like you're hanging out with fannish friends is apparently the format that works best for me in podcasts, and I am going to miss them!
- File770, still the best resource for SFF fandom, especially in the old school sense
- Nancy Pearl's Four Doors to Reading, still a really handy framework to talk about what works and doesn't work for me in a specific work of fiction
- Sorting Hat Chats, still a really fun expansion of the Hogwarts houses sorting that I find to be a neat way to think about characters from various canons (and real life people). Since I posted about them last time for this challenge, they put out a couple of episodes of a podcast (which I assume isn't coming back, since it's been over a year since the last episode), which was another fun format to consume these ideas in (there's an intro and episodes focusing on sorting The Hunger Games, The Witcher, The Good Place, How's Moving Castle (book and movie), AtLA, She-Ra, The Locked Tomb, and (not relevant to my interests but perhaps to others') The Untamed.
- Paint.NET, still a great free image editing package (that I use to mess around with icons and also have occasionally used for non-fannish things, even for work). I believe still only for Windows users, sadly.
And a running list of neat-looking links picked up from browsing other people's posts this year:
- AO3 collection guide to coding and fanworks
- Collocation Dictionary
- Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
- Mansion, Medieval City, and world map generator
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Challenge #8: In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.
Ooh, I really like this way of phrasing this sort of "brag about yourself" question!
In random order, a couple of things that spring to mind:
1) I sold a poem! It has yet to appear in print (well, actually, up on a website, but close enough), because of some google website shenanigans, but apparently it still will, and there was a contract and everything, with an actual non-zero sum of money involved, which feels like a win for sure. And I kept up submissions until this happened, and also after, which I think is also worthy of being called a win.
2) I attempted a ghazal for the second time and, while I still find the form really tricky, I like this result much better than my first NaPoWriMo trial attempt: Humans and Augmented Humans (Murderbot Diaries, gen)
3) I went from chemistry puns + murder mystery = ???? and no idea how to write a mystery to something where people seemed to enjoy the mystery aspects even when they didn't care about the chemistry puns, and a couple of comparisons to Agatha Christie's style (which I was shamelessly trying to emulate, because duh) with my Yuletide chemistry nonsense, F is for Foul Play, Cl is for Clue (Periodic Table anthropomorphic, T, 8k)
4) I did a reasonable amount of reading in 2021, even though I still did not have my train commute, which had been my primary reading time for 20+ years until 2020. I caught up on some series I'd fallen behind on, read a lot of new-to-me authors courtesy of Hugo homework, tried some books I'd been meaning to get to for years (*cough* The Expanse *cough*). I was basically back to having a pretty normal reading year after something of a reading crash in 2020, and was really glad to get back to something approaching normalcy there.
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Speaking of things picked up from browsing other people's posts, a character meme that
reg_flint came up with for the
snowflake_challenge day 6 "create something" challenge:
Fictional Character Meme:
-1- Which fictional character do you relate with the most?
I don't really tend to relate to characters much, but when I did a different meme where I had to describe myself in 3 characters, my answer was Kragar (Dragaera/Vlad Taltos books), Perscitia (Temeraire) and, to a lesser extent, Willow from Buffy. Relate is slightly a different question, though. The Willow connection is less strong than the others, and I don't really relate to Perscitia -- she is a dragon and her circumstances and ambitions are quite different than mine. So I relate the most to Kragar. I also make a great sarcastic trusted lieutenant, who could do the more high profile job but would really rather not.
-2- What is a song about a fictional character you love?
I assume you're all sick of me talking about "Surface Pressure" from Encanto, but what can I do? It's both a great song and a song that really deepens a character I was already enjoying into a character I love. Also, just not that many of canons I care about come with character songs. I mean, other Disney movies I like also have songs I love, but they tend not to be single-character songs (Mulan's "I'll Make a Man out of You" and Tangled's "I Have a Dream"); the nearest to "Surface Pressure" would probably be "Be Prepared", since I do like both the song and Scar, but at least at the moment "Surface Pressure" takes it for the Disney canons. And beyond that, I guess I could look at the Soviet musicals that I love, but, again, my favorite songs generally "belong" to characters I care less about, and my favorite characters have songs I love less (e.g. Est' v grafskom parke chernyj prud from the Three Musketeers movie or Florindo's song from Truffaldino iz Bergamo for the latter category).
-3- Which fictional character do you admire most?
Granny Weatherwax (Discworld) in the sort of admiration-but-from-afar way where I wouldn't actually want to meet with her. Cordelia Naismith (Vorkosigan Saga) in the way where I think I'd genuinely enjoy having someone like that in real life to look up to, not necessarily a close friend but in that "really impressive VP at work" kind of way.
-4- Which type of fictional character do you prefer...ie hero, villain, antihero? An example?
I guess complicated villains (e.g. Azula in AtLA, Tywin Lannister in ASOIAF) and antiheroes, or characters who could be villains in less capable hands (I'm thinking about people like Vetinari and Granny Weatherwax, who are an evil overlord trope and a subversion of an evil witch). But sidekicks, especially nerdy sidekicks, is another character type that I like (from Ron Weasley -- the non-nerdy variety -- to Wendell the Iguana in the Dragonbreath books).
-5- Which fictional character do you enjoy fanfiction of?
My AO3 bookmarks say Thomas Nightingale (Rivers of London); fair enough.
-6- Which fictional character do you enjoy most in a series?
I prefer series for all the characters I like, since that means getting to spend more time with them. But the way this question is worded makes me think about, is there a fictional character where the series nature gives me something beyond just "more of the same" -- i.e. is there a character I enjoy more specificially for their arc throughout a series, rather than just because I like the character and so enjoy hanging out with them for 20 books or whatever? And asking the questions that way ultimately led me to G'Kar (Babylon 5). He is a central enough character that you can really see where he was at the beginning of the show and where he was at the end, and how he got there, and it's an absolutely amazing arc, and one of the things absolutely pivotal to how much I admire the show on the whole.
-7- Which writer creates/created the fictional characters you love most?
That's a really interesting question! A couple of options occurred: Terry Pratchett created the characters I love/appreciate most intensely probably -- Vetinari and Granny Weatherwax are some of my favorite characters of all time, and judging by my reaction to The Shepherd's Crown, these are also characters to which I feel a deeper bond than just "hey, a cool character I like" (OK, there were other things going on with the posthumously published The Shepherd's Crown, but I do feel like I'd dealt with those feelings already). Then there's Lois McMaster Bujold, and I may not love her characters the most, but I do feel like, statistically speaking, I'm more likely to like a new character created by Bujold than by any other author -- the Vorkosigan Saga is a very "I love everyone in this bar" series for me, including newly introduced characters who are only around for a book or two, and though I'm less fannish about the World of the Five Gods, there are still a lot of characters there I love (Cazaril, Iselle, Arvol and Arhys dy Lutez, Penric and Desdemona, Adelis Arisaydia). I think maybe LMB is best at writing characters who generally appeal to me. And I do have to mention Joss Whedon[-and-team] (whatever may have come to light about him personally), because it is pretty rare for me to care about a fictional character from a medium other than a book, but Whedon has managed to create a bunch that I do care about, across Firefly (which has nearly a Bujoldean hit rate in terms of what percentage of the central cast I really love or strongly like) and Buffy, and it was his turn at The Avengers that made me into an actual fan of that universe and character interactions therein, rather than just someone who liked watching RDJ do stuff onscreen, so credit where it's due (which doesn't excuse shitty treatment of actors or people in one's life, obviously).
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A couple of very random links:
I really enjoyed Dom's Lost in Adaptation episode on Good Omens. I pretty much always enjoy something about it when he tackles an adaptation I know, especially one where I'm familiar with both the original and adapted versions, but this was particularly lovely, because Dom is a huge fan, especially of Sir Pterry, and was generally coming to the show from a similar standpoint as me. And I learned a couple of things I didn't know about the adaptation from this episode, like just how far in the planning they had gotten with the Other Horsemen, and also that when cuts had to be made, Gaiman prioritized keeping things Pratchett had written over his own contributions (aww!). And the story of how the book had come about in the first place is one I've heard before, but it's so great, I loved getting to revisit it.
L sent me a TikTok showing the Madrigal family from Encanto as felt rats. As I told her, I'm amazed that a) this exists and b) that she and I weren't the people who came up with this.
And having absolutely nothing to do with fandom, a video on the etymology of macaroon vs macaron, which I'd always wondered about actually.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1165028.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).