Yuletide reveal, Taskmaster New Year Treat, fannish meme
Happy 2023! At our NYE gathering yesterday, my mother refused to toast to 2023 being a better year than 2022, because that was too low a bar, so we settled on "may it be better than 2019", as the closest acceptable baseline). So, may it be better than 2019, or than another decent year for all of you, dear flist (and passing Snowflake folk)!
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Yuletide reveals! I wrote... a thing.
The E-Team (9497 words) by hamsterwoman
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Elements - Experiments in Character Design - Kaycie D., Object and Concept Anthropomorphism, Unspecified Fandom
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Technetium (Elements - Experiments in Character Design), Beryllium (Elements - Experiments in Character Design), Chlorine (Elements - Experiments in Character Design), Phosphorus (Elements - Experiments in Character Design), Boron (Elements - Experiments in Character Design)
Additional Tags: Superheroes
Summary:
Director Mendelevium tapped a pencil on the podium in front of him. “Thank you for your presence and your attention, agents. You see, we are dealing with an F-level threat.”
Technetium felt a spike of processing power requirements in the nanosecond it took him to absorb this information. Next to him, Beryllium gasped and Chlorine gave off a whiff of sharp smell that triggered an automatic response to shield his eyes with protective lenses. Boron fumbled for a handkerchief in his coat pocket, which caused it to slither to the floor once more.
“Your F-level threat is a kid?” Beryllium cried, banging their fist on the table. As usual when they were agitated, they had manifested the crystalline gauntlets which were their preferred armor and weapon, and chips of aquamarine and emerald sheared off and scattered around the point of impact. “What are we supposed to do about a kid?”
Which, yes, more chemistry anthropomorfic, but with extra obscurity XD (The fandom is a 5 minute fandom consisting of about a hundred character designs/element flashcards, and I think can be read without knowledge of canon also.)
I've been aware of this canon for a while -- and browsed them again last year as part of trying to find my way into writing Periodic Table anthropomorfic. But I'd never thought of it as a Yuletide fandom in its own right until it showed up in the tagset, and then I obviously had to offer it. There were no requests for it for the longest time, so I was assuming I'd end up writing in a fandom I've written before, but nope, this is what I matched on.
It was quite tricky to start with, because I didn't have a pastiche voice to fall back on, to know if I was doing it "right", the way I did with my book canons, and then even with last year's chemistry nonsense, since I was writing a Christie-style mystery, I still had something to pastiche. This I just had to... write, which was weird XD I ended up going through the full character set and clipping, in addition to the nominated characters (the request was for Any), the radioactive and precious metal elements my recipient mentioned liking in their sign-up, the elements named after scientists, since the signup mentioned an interest in the history of science, and then just all of my favorite designs, and then I paged through the clipped art until something started coming together. Basically, the only way I could get all the characters I wanted to fit into the same story was to go with a superhero mishmash-of-everything approach -- normal-looking people with apparent superpowers! weird-looking people who might be aliens! men (and a few women) in suits! creepy supernatural-looking shadow creatures! and a few regular people just doing their thing. I didn't particularly want to write a superhero story, because unlike mysteries it's not a genre I enjoy reading (maybe because I haven't seen it written particularly well), but it clearly wanted to be that, so I caved and let it.
Meanwhile, I'd read up on the 4 nominated characters (well, I had a pretty good grounding in Chlorine from last year's chemistry nonsense already, but the other three) and my attention immediately snagged on Technetium (the one I knew/remembered the least about) being the first artificially made element, and then I was like, ooh, android! Which was fortunate, because that was one of the designs that was otherwise not giving me much. And it was fun writing an android's POV -- I was almost surprised to discover I'd never done that before, given how much I like robot characters; my betas flagged both the influences I had been conscious of (lunasariel highlighted a line that made me think of Murderbot too) and the ones I hadn't been thinking of (cafemassolit referenced "robot boners", which is her code for my early imprinting on R.Daneel Olivaw). Anyway, Tc ended up being a lot of fun, but I kind of had to figure out what he was like through writing his POV. The character who came to me immediately was Boron, for a combination of pretty random reasons. First, my inorganic chem professor in uni was obsessed with boron, and so I both remembered a bunch a bunch of facts about boron, and had a vague annoyance about him, because this had been my least favorite professor. So the other elements' attitude about Boron comes from there (although I was determined for him to have a CMoA, and hopefully that comes through in the fic). But when it came to giving Boron a personality, I looked at the art and was struck by a random-ass paralel -- the sort of glum, "what is this person doing in a superhero story?" demeanor reminded me of... John Kearns from Taskmaster series 14, so I was basically writing Boron as John Kearns (plus superpowers) throughout the fic, which provided me with some extra amusement. Although my westerosorting-alum betas also pointed out that I was also channeling Dolorous Edd, which they are correct about in retrospect. Beryllium was the one where, just looking at the art, I was incredibly charmed -- the character has so much personality and seems so fun, and I loved the arms-encased-in-crystal thing -- I really had a great time expanding on that with Be's superpowers. I debated for a bit whether I saw Beryllium more as a male or nb character, and ultimately kept coming back to nb, so that's what I went with -- and it was easier than I'd expected to write a character using they/them pronouns (although I did keep defaulting to "he" occasionally and having to fix that). Anyway, Beryllium ended up being my favorite of the four nominated characters, which probably shows. And then Chlorine -- it actually took me the longest to figure out what Chlorine's deal was -- I thought she might be some kind of fey, and then that she might be an alien, and finally settled on "unspecified supernatural sea-dweller", presumably from this world's version of Atlantis. The weird thing for me with Chlorine was writing a version of the element so different from the stoic, Stark-y soldier type of last year's chem nonsense -- but I definitely feel like I've succeeded in making them very distinct. (Beryllium also featured in chem nonsense part 1, although in a tertiary sort of role, and also ended up being very different.) And then Phosphorus and Magnesium ended up kind of stealing their scenes for me, which is how they also feature in the last scene.
It definitely felt like writing in a different fandom from Periodic Table anthropomorfic. I'd gotten the chemistry puns out of my system (mostly) last year, but I think the final characterization and plot combine both the character designs' influence and actual chemistry stuff, like Technetium's android identity, spoiler and Chlorine and Boron's powers beyond those depicted/mentioned in the art, and also the relationship between elements. /spoilers
I got pretty far into the writing without feeling like I had any sense of whether the story was working or not, but my betas' comments were enthusiastic, which was reassuring. Somewhere along the line, I realized that while I didn't have a written text to pastiche, I was mentally seeing this as an episode of an animated superhero show, like the 90s X-Men, complete with imagining a dun-dun-DUN -- commercial break! -- at a climactic reveal and scene changes signaled by a spinning character face (in the Google doc marginalia I also jokingly mention that at the end, Tc gives an earnest PSA about how you shouldn't make fun of people with phobias). And it ended up being even longer than last year's chemistry nonsense XD -- though it ended up falling short of 10k, and being a few words shorter than the longest thing I've written for Yuletide so far.
It's not a surprise given the story is pretty long and in an obscure fandom, but it was definitely very slow in terms of hits, etc. compared to other things I've written for Yuletide. It ended the anon period with 24 hits, 6 kudos, 3 comment threads, and 1 bookmark that I assume was just a to-read bookmark -- which is the lowest stats I've had. (For comparison, chem nonsense part 1 had 109 hits, 28 kudos, 5 bookmarks, and 13 comment threads (from 12 distinct people) at reveals, although that was also a bit of an outlier for me, in the other direction.) But this was also the first time I've written the first-ever fic in the fandom (although the first Harriet fic, although written later than the other Harriet fic in the Yuletide collection, was of course revealed at the same time -- and it was still one of three fics to pop up between Yuletide and Madness that year).
Like the other times I've written a longer fic for my assignment, I've had no creativity left over for anything else, which is unfortunate, but also with these last couple of fandoms, I don't know how I could've done them at shorter length in a way that would've been interesting to me, given the need to establish characters and setting before I could then do anything else with them.
My awesome gifts were indeed by the people I thought they were by: The Ponedelnik fic was written by plumedy, who had already written me a wonderful fic in this fandom two years ago, which I was basically certain of from the time my gift popped up at deadline, because I was checking Ponedelnik requests/offers in the sign-up summary (since it was also a fandom I was offering) and so I knew (pretty much) that Plumedy was the only other person offering the fandom (barring bucket lists, I guess) based on when the signup summary incremented and I saw Plumedy's letter on my flist. And when my squeeful comment turned into a lovely conversation with my Anonymous Author, it was the rest of the way clear that I was talking to a flister. The Adelis fic was written by sholio, which I also suspected from how quickly it appeared, given the "yay, you also nominated Adelis!" conversation we had on the Yuletide queries post when we noticed he showed up twice in the tagsand then strongly suspected based on the lovely hurt/comfort elements, and then was certain about when I saw the other Adelis fics on sholio's recs list but not this one. (I'm also super amused that 75% of all Chalion fic and all of the full length fic across the Yuletide and Madness collections this year ended up featuring Adelis, quadrupling the number of Adelis fics on AO3, especially because I have the impression that he is not a popular character in the fandom, even for a secondary.) So, yeah, least surprising Yuletide reveals ever, but still a wonderful Yuletide experience :D
I was also amused to see that, as per usual, one of the fics I'd rec'd was by misura (this one for Unnatural Magic), the brilliant Madness drabble I rec'd was by isis (who I think has written the majority of drabbles I've loved), and that another fic I'd loved and rec'd was by a flister as well. Which just really shows how consistent my good taste is :)
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I get to watch a Taskmaster New Year Treat in real time! spoilers!
Ooh, these are all strong prize tasks! I'm instantly charmed by the fly coffin, because that is totally something I would have done as a kid, and the van and the blowdryer are definitely surprising, while the statue and the art are hilarious. I think I can't necessarily quibble with the scoring (and LOL at Greg writing down his own name for the show's first contestant named Greg), but I liked all of these things.
Dotty task: I was convinced, when Greg James was left for last, that he had answered the phone and that was the loophole/shortcut, so pleased to see that was indeed the case. But how impressive was Carol Vordeman to have gotten as close as she did without any shortcuts! Also, I'm with greg on Sir Mo's "Helloooo! whooo!" being a fantastic bit to clip -- in general, he was so charming throughout this task!
I thought Greg James's painting should've gotten, if not 5 points, then at least the hightest score, but as Greg said, the massage stuff eclipsed the actual task. Definitely Sir Mo's amazing faces, but also Alex's expression as he was administering the scalp massager on him, and then the turnabout with Alex and RLT.
Carp pellets and boobytraps task -- I was impressed by everyone! (except maybe Amanda) and especially by Carol and RLT's dedication, with the robot lean and the army crawl under the trip-wire respectively. This was a great task, because it was actually possible to recover from the "failures" if one was committed enough, but also possible to make one's life easier by thinking ahead, like some people had done with the trip wire and the pulley system in the lab and the biodome trap.
The Simon Says live task was clearly getting to everyone, but I was pleased to see that the performance on it led to a 4-way tie for second place, because I liked all of these contestants and didn't want any of them to be losers. But I'm also happy Sir Mo won, because I was rooting for him from about the second task onward. Also, this is a random thought, but he had the kind of energy and charm that makes me think of Terra Ignota's Sniper -- I don't know what it is specifically, but it's something about being very aware of being the center of attention, but also being genuinely charming in acting from within that center?
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I'm not even sure I've read enough books this year to make my annual year-end book meme worth doing, but I can still do the general fannish ones.
1. Your main fandom of the year?
I mean, I suppose it was Taskmaster, seeing as how I mainlined every minute of available content, including the podcasts, and also read a bunch of fic (despite not being into RPF) and watched some fanvids, and enjoyed discussing it with fans and introducing new people to it, and constructed headcanon AUs, and am requesting it in fandomtrees -- so, like, definitely a fandom.
But then there's also sudoku fandom, with Cracking the Cryptic as the lead-in, but I've since branched out into following other channels. I have, in fact, also read the CtC fic that last year's Yuletide produced, and watched this definitely a transformative work video -- and I've spent SO MANY HOURS doing sudoku this past year.
In more conventional definitions of fandom, I certainly enjoyed my dive into Ghosts, BBC and later US; really enjoyed catching up on Penric & Desdemona canon (and my Yuletide gift in this fandom); and was delighted to talk Dragaera with people who were posting/commenting about it, like silverflight8, helicoprion, tinny, and scytale. And then there's MCU, which I feel I'm somewhat losing interest in but still watched Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight and a couple of the movies on Disney+.
2. Your favorite film watched this year?
I watched Turning Red, Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange 2, Death on the Nile, Dune, The Batman, The Good Liar and Smallfoot. It's easy to say what my least favorite of these was -- Smallfoot was bad without even the slight benefit of featuring my favorite actors, like The Good Liar. None of these were movies I loved, unlike last year, which had several to choose from. I think Dune and The Batman were both very good movies, but also happen to be canons I don't care about. So I think I enjoyed Shang-Chi and Doctor Strange 2 more, but I don't think I can call them favorites either. I dunno, this was a weird year. I guess let me say Shang-Chi, but really just for tiny incidental things like the not-MUNI bus fight scene and Morris the butt-chicken.
3. Your favorite book read this year?
I answered this recently at more length for both book, and haven't finished any new book since then so that's still Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race and Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun. But of the two, Elder Race had more things that I personally love, so that is what I would call my favorite.
4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
Still Encanto's "Surface Pressure" and Bo Burnham's "Wecome to the Internet", from the last two years. Although a late addition to the list is Fern Brady's diss track from Taskmaster series 14:
(O was playing the piece on his violin yesterday, and I was INSTANTLY earwormed XD)
5. Your favorite TV show of the year?
Three guesses and the first two don't count XD But in addition to Taskmaster, which is obviously the one true answer to this, I did enjoy all the other TV shows I've watched in whole or in part: Ms Marvel, Moon Knight, (part of) Sandman, and the two Ghosts. BBC Ghosts would be the second place winner after TM, but all of these were at least as good as I expected and usually better.
6. Your favorite LJ(/DW) community of the year?
Sticking to LJ/DW, it would have to be the Yuletide-related comms and snowflake_challenge, but I also have not hung out in any year-round comms.
7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Taskmaster, obviously, but also Ghosts.
8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
No huge crushing disappointments, but here are a few things that I was annoyed by: 1) Hugo results for Best Novella and Best Novel, and, relatedly, 2) Becky Chambers's writing trajectory away from the things I like about her writing, 3) Doctor Strange 2, which I liked a lot less than the first one.
9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
Well, I mean, Morrolan always. But of the guys for whom I actually consumed media this year: Adelis Arisaydia (the later Penric books reminded me how much I love him, and then Yuletide fic delivered even more of him :D) and Peter and Nightingale from RoL. Among new-to-me characters, Esen-Temur from She Who Became the Sun.
Like several characters last year, the Captain from BBC Ghosts doesn't need to be my boyfriend, but I'd enjoy having him as a friend. I'm not sure I can say that about Trevor from US Ghosts, but he is weirdly adorable. I definitely don't want Tennalhin Halkana from Ocean's Echo as a boyfriend (too chaos), but I think I would enjoy hanging out in his vicinity and watching him happen to people (this is the book I finished that I haven't written up; I need to get around to that).
10. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
Hadia from Master of Djinn, Death from Netflix Sandman, and I'd enjoy being friends with Kitty from BBC Ghosts as long as I was not stuck wihh her forever, and with Ms Marvel's Kamala Khan (aged up), I think.
11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Reading my gifts Yuletide morning, I think.
12. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Ridiculously, Taskmaster once I'd caught up on the backlog and there wasn't a new series airing, so between series 13 and 14 and then once 14 ended XD Except it's not an old fandom, so, hm, I guess World of Five Gods/Penric & Desdemona once I read sholio's write-up of the later books and the comments, and realized that the time had come for me to dive back in and catch up (what an excellent decision that was!).
13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
I have already read some US Ghosts fic without waiting to catch up on canon, but I look forward to being able to read it in a more informed fashion.
In terms of actually trying new canons -- maaaybe I'll get around to watching Andor?
14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?
TSALMOTH!!! which I've had on preorder since May 2022.
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Challenge #1: In your own space, update your fandom information! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
My basic info was already up to date (reproduced below). What I really need to do one of these days is take my into post from LJ and create a fully functional DW mirror, with links pointing to the DW posts, but I don't know when I'm going to have time for a project like that -- definitely not now.
Transformative Works Policy: Posted on my AO3 profile - You're welcome to create fanart, podfic, translations, etc. for anything I've written; just please link back to the original work via Related Work or some other means, and please send me a link to your creation so I can enjoy it, or at least the fact of its existence, also! :)
Current Passion 2022 has been a weird year, in which Taskmaster and sudoku have eclipsed my usual fannish pastimes of reading SFF, but I'm still passionate about my Yuletide-sized-or-just-a-tiny-bit-bigger fandoms like Dragaera, Terra Ignota, Vorkosigan Saga, Rivers of London, Discworld, etc. We'll see what happens in 2023!
Where to Find Me: Pretty much just here (DW/LJ)
Master List: AO3 (hamsterwoman) for fannish poems/fic, icons tag for icons.
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Below is the previous Yuletide post that I never cross-posted manually to LJ, which includes the links to my gifts as well as the other recs mentioned in the post above:
We're wrapping up a lovely Hawaiian holiday (well, lovely except for the mostly-minor injuries sustained by 75% of us -- L and I bruised our knees, L twisted her ankle as per usual, and O did something to his shoulder that seems likely to require a doctor's visit and/or PT when we get back) in the company of lizards, feral cats, assorted invertebrates, and SO MANY CHICKENS (but not my coworker, alas), but this post is not about that. This post is about Yuletide!
I received two AMAZING fics for Yuletide this year, in two different fandoms, and can't wait to share them with my flist because they are both perfect!
First is the fic I impatiently shook a month ago: World of Five Gods (Penric & Desdemona series), a brilliant take on my "Adelis contracts a demon" prompt, which nails everything I love about Adelis and his relationship with the other characters featured, and does the thing I most love fanfic for, putting a character I'm interested in into a new scenario and exploring what happens from there in a way perfectly consistent with canon.
Demon Touched (3634 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Adelis Arisaydia, Penric kin Jurald, Desdemona (Chalion), Nikys Khatai
Additional Tags: Friendship, Demonic Possession
Summary:
Adelis's entire life changes in an instant. Set somewhere post-current-canon.
And then there's the Ponedelnik fic that completely blindsided me with its existence when it popped up, which brilliantly manages the very difficult feat of sounding pitch-perfect in a different language than canon, full of tiny, incredibly fitting details of Soviet life and magical science mumbo-jumbo, and a first-person POV of the right degree of unreliability, and feels just right slotting into this canon I know by heart.
the fern blossoms on Kupala Night (2372 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Понедельник начинается в субботу - Стругацкие | Monday Begins on Saturday - A. & B. Strugatsky
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cristóbal Junta & Feodor Simeonovich Kivrin
Characters: Aleksandr "Sasha" Privalov, Feodor Simeonovich Kivrin, Cristóbal Junta, Naina Kievna Gorynych, Amvrosiy Ambroisovich Vybegallo
Additional Tags: Friendship, Bureaucracy
Summary:
Kivrin, Junta, and navigating a trade union meeting.
I feel very spoiled! :D (I'm also, like, 98% sure I know who my mystery authors are, and: ♥!)
(I also got a nice comment from my recip and also from a total stranger on the fic I wrote, which is even more obscure than anything I've written for Yuletide previously, so that's also nice.)
I've been browsing the archive patchily outside of that, so here's a definitely-not-exhaustive list of recs-so-far, from Yuletide and Madness:
Radiant Emperor / She Who Became the Sun: "a fly on the wall" (2.7k, M, General Ouyang/Wang Baoxiang) -- moments woven in-between canon events, as complicated and tragic as these characters canonically are (but in a way that doesn't feel like wallowing in angst, which I appreciate)
Swordspoint: A Castle on a Lonely Hill (1.5k, gen, Alec/Richard) -- really great Richard POV and levels of Alec-ness at which I find him amusing rather than insufferable
Temeraire: "Parole" (4.6k, T, Napoleon/Laurence) -- AU from a point in Crucible of Gold that reads just like canon in characterization and prose
Unnatural Magic: suomi (<1k, gen, Loga, Jok Finnbair) -- AU moment where Loga and Jok have a conversation about what Jok is doing
5 min fandoms:
Top 5 Rat Movies I Just Made Up: Legends of the Great Below: i'm sorry i just love these two so much (1.5k, Gen, Original Female Rats) -- a ship manifesto for rat NPCs in the tie-in game for the imaginary rat movie, which, if that isn't peak Yuletide, I don't know what is
Give That Wolf A Banana - Subwoolfer (Song)Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale): Prey preference of Canis lupus, Keith, J., and Jim, K., University of Norway (ABSTRACT) (drabble, gen)
SoftBank's Next 30-Year Vision (2010 Corporate PDF): akademeia (1.3k, worldbuilding, original characters, epistolary/e-mail) -- I'm really glad this amazing powerpoint, which I learned about via the Yuletide evidence post, got some fic written. This fic is a nicely creepy take on the canon.
Enjoyed without knowledge of canon:
my wife doesn't know I hench, the evil sex ray made my employees do it, and more (Hench + Ask a Manager column, 2k, T, worldbuilding) -- yes, everyone has seen this outside of Yuletide even as Ask a Manager linked to it herself, but it really is very fun.
A Beginner's Guide to Octopus Football (17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future, 2.2k, gen, worldbuilding) -- I don't even know what this canon is, but the fic had me at the Monterey Bay Aquarium setting and octopodes octopuses, and it basically reads like an adorable original sci-fi story without canon grounding.
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Meme from sophia_sol:
Rules: If you'd like your own questions, let me know in the comments! (please say this explicitly :) I'll ask the first five commenters [asking for questions] five questions each. Answer them in your own journal, offer to give the first five commenters their own sets of questions, and let the cycle continue!
1. what's your favourite book you read within the last year?
Oh man, this is such a hard year for this question, because I've read so little due to my weird inadvertent fiction boycott thing... and a lot of what I read was for Hugos homework, which leads to some great things but also to reading things I don't like much.
I've read: 1 graphic novel, 11 SFF novellas, 7 SFF novels, and 1 YA novel (and most of a general fiction novel). I have enjoyed, sometimes a lot, the books the continued a series that I was already a fan of (Rivers of London, Penric & Desdemona), but the books did not set new bars in their respective series, so I'm not going to count them. So the ones that really stuck with me were Adrian Tchaikovsky's novella Elder Race and Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun. I read both of these for Hugo homework (well, I was planning to read SWBtS earlier, but it was the Hugo nomination/ceremony lead-up that finally made me actually do so), and I still think it's nuts that these didn't win their respective categories, but whatever.
2. Your turn to think about Teixcalaanli names! What would you choose for yours?
I adore this question! I actually cast about for some time for the noun before realizing that, duh, there was only one answer to that: Dandelion. Plants are traditional, and dandelions have been a thing I've identified with for a long time -- I even made a self-portrait back in high school ceramics with imprints of dandelion leaves in my hair. (I could have Puff as a nickname, I guess? that sounds cute) My feelings about the number part are less strong. I have a lot of favorite numbers (favorite integers, even, although the trolly part of me would enjoy going about introducing myself as "Planck's Constant Dandelion" or something :P -- but maybe that would be my parody-writing pen name). Anyway, back to integers: I like the numbers 8, 9, 11, and 31. Thirty-one seems like a nouveau riche kind of number, and eight would feel culturally-appropriative at this point even though I liked it independently before I learned of its meaning in Chinese. So down to 9 or 11, and I just like Eleven Dandelion better in terms of how it sounds. So, there you go: Eleven Dandelion.
3. How long have you been participating in hugo voting? What inspired you to start?
I've been participating since 2018, although I haven't voted every single year since then -- but I think I have done something, either norminations or voting, if not both, each year. What inspired me to start is quite prosaic: 2018 was the year Worldcon was in San Jose, and I was like, well, if ever there was a time to attend, it's never going to be more convenient to me, and since I knew a fannish friend who was going (cyanmnemosyne), I got an attending membership. And then my completism took over, especially since I had ambyr's example of voting on all/most of the Hugo ballot to follow. It turned out to be fairly easy to vote for at least one thing in every category, with the aid of the Hugo Voter Packet, and that made it really fun to attend the Hugo ceremony, because I had *some* opinion on everything, even if it was not always an opinion on what won.
After the voting, I tallied up the things I discovered courtesy of the Hugo homework and appreciated vs not, and it was a pretty good tally -- I read some great short fiction and an amazing novella, and discovered some interesting new-to-me authors, so I continued doing it as much as possible in the next couple of years, though not to the same degree of completism. Like, that first year I tried to read through the semiprozine, editor short form, fanwriter, fanzine, etc. packets, but in subsequent years I didn't go that far, and mostly just stuck to the fiction categories plus Campbell/Astounding.
And then I did nominations the next year, which definitely caused me to read more widely in short fiction, and I've tried to do nominations every year that I've been eligible to do so.
4. What do you enjoy most about your favourite season?
I feel like I'm sort of at an inflection point with favorite seasons. It's always been summer for me, between my summer birthday and summer vacation, and even after I graduated myself, my husband (in academia) and kids still had their summers off, so it still felt like a break vicariously, and also meant that our fun travel would have to happen in the summer. But my kids are going to be graduating in a couple of years and even now they don't necessarily have their summers free. And in my 40s, birthdays are not so exciting anymore.
So it wouldn't surprise me if some time soon fall actually became my favorite. I love Halloween, I like the foods that start showing up in the fall, like pumpkin pie and yams. (I also like fall leaves, but we don't get that where I live, although I remember fall colors fondly from my childhood.)
5. If you could go to space, would you?
I was surprised to consider this question and realize that I think my answer has changed recently! When I was a kid, I was SUPER into space -- I loved playing at being Gagarin and building planetary rovers out of my construction sets and all that kind of stuff -- so of course I wanted to go to space! Then at some point, as an adult, I considered the question again and realized that the answer about whether I'd want to go to space was now no -- I just had too many responsibilities on earth which trumped whatever cool things space had to offer. But now that I've had reason to think about it again -- I might be looping back around to yes? I mean, I still wouldn't want to apply too much actual effort to going to space, but I feel like it is something I could see myself taking a chance on if the opportunity presented itself; maybe not right now, but, you know, at some point.
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Yuletide reveals! I wrote... a thing.
The E-Team (9497 words) by hamsterwoman
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Elements - Experiments in Character Design - Kaycie D., Object and Concept Anthropomorphism, Unspecified Fandom
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Technetium (Elements - Experiments in Character Design), Beryllium (Elements - Experiments in Character Design), Chlorine (Elements - Experiments in Character Design), Phosphorus (Elements - Experiments in Character Design), Boron (Elements - Experiments in Character Design)
Additional Tags: Superheroes
Summary:
Director Mendelevium tapped a pencil on the podium in front of him. “Thank you for your presence and your attention, agents. You see, we are dealing with an F-level threat.”
Technetium felt a spike of processing power requirements in the nanosecond it took him to absorb this information. Next to him, Beryllium gasped and Chlorine gave off a whiff of sharp smell that triggered an automatic response to shield his eyes with protective lenses. Boron fumbled for a handkerchief in his coat pocket, which caused it to slither to the floor once more.
“Your F-level threat is a kid?” Beryllium cried, banging their fist on the table. As usual when they were agitated, they had manifested the crystalline gauntlets which were their preferred armor and weapon, and chips of aquamarine and emerald sheared off and scattered around the point of impact. “What are we supposed to do about a kid?”
Which, yes, more chemistry anthropomorfic, but with extra obscurity XD (The fandom is a 5 minute fandom consisting of about a hundred character designs/element flashcards, and I think can be read without knowledge of canon also.)
I've been aware of this canon for a while -- and browsed them again last year as part of trying to find my way into writing Periodic Table anthropomorfic. But I'd never thought of it as a Yuletide fandom in its own right until it showed up in the tagset, and then I obviously had to offer it. There were no requests for it for the longest time, so I was assuming I'd end up writing in a fandom I've written before, but nope, this is what I matched on.
It was quite tricky to start with, because I didn't have a pastiche voice to fall back on, to know if I was doing it "right", the way I did with my book canons, and then even with last year's chemistry nonsense, since I was writing a Christie-style mystery, I still had something to pastiche. This I just had to... write, which was weird XD I ended up going through the full character set and clipping, in addition to the nominated characters (the request was for Any), the radioactive and precious metal elements my recipient mentioned liking in their sign-up, the elements named after scientists, since the signup mentioned an interest in the history of science, and then just all of my favorite designs, and then I paged through the clipped art until something started coming together. Basically, the only way I could get all the characters I wanted to fit into the same story was to go with a superhero mishmash-of-everything approach -- normal-looking people with apparent superpowers! weird-looking people who might be aliens! men (and a few women) in suits! creepy supernatural-looking shadow creatures! and a few regular people just doing their thing. I didn't particularly want to write a superhero story, because unlike mysteries it's not a genre I enjoy reading (maybe because I haven't seen it written particularly well), but it clearly wanted to be that, so I caved and let it.
Meanwhile, I'd read up on the 4 nominated characters (well, I had a pretty good grounding in Chlorine from last year's chemistry nonsense already, but the other three) and my attention immediately snagged on Technetium (the one I knew/remembered the least about) being the first artificially made element, and then I was like, ooh, android! Which was fortunate, because that was one of the designs that was otherwise not giving me much. And it was fun writing an android's POV -- I was almost surprised to discover I'd never done that before, given how much I like robot characters; my betas flagged both the influences I had been conscious of (lunasariel highlighted a line that made me think of Murderbot too) and the ones I hadn't been thinking of (cafemassolit referenced "robot boners", which is her code for my early imprinting on R.Daneel Olivaw). Anyway, Tc ended up being a lot of fun, but I kind of had to figure out what he was like through writing his POV. The character who came to me immediately was Boron, for a combination of pretty random reasons. First, my inorganic chem professor in uni was obsessed with boron, and so I both remembered a bunch a bunch of facts about boron, and had a vague annoyance about him, because this had been my least favorite professor. So the other elements' attitude about Boron comes from there (although I was determined for him to have a CMoA, and hopefully that comes through in the fic). But when it came to giving Boron a personality, I looked at the art and was struck by a random-ass paralel -- the sort of glum, "what is this person doing in a superhero story?" demeanor reminded me of... John Kearns from Taskmaster series 14, so I was basically writing Boron as John Kearns (plus superpowers) throughout the fic, which provided me with some extra amusement. Although my westerosorting-alum betas also pointed out that I was also channeling Dolorous Edd, which they are correct about in retrospect. Beryllium was the one where, just looking at the art, I was incredibly charmed -- the character has so much personality and seems so fun, and I loved the arms-encased-in-crystal thing -- I really had a great time expanding on that with Be's superpowers. I debated for a bit whether I saw Beryllium more as a male or nb character, and ultimately kept coming back to nb, so that's what I went with -- and it was easier than I'd expected to write a character using they/them pronouns (although I did keep defaulting to "he" occasionally and having to fix that). Anyway, Beryllium ended up being my favorite of the four nominated characters, which probably shows. And then Chlorine -- it actually took me the longest to figure out what Chlorine's deal was -- I thought she might be some kind of fey, and then that she might be an alien, and finally settled on "unspecified supernatural sea-dweller", presumably from this world's version of Atlantis. The weird thing for me with Chlorine was writing a version of the element so different from the stoic, Stark-y soldier type of last year's chem nonsense -- but I definitely feel like I've succeeded in making them very distinct. (Beryllium also featured in chem nonsense part 1, although in a tertiary sort of role, and also ended up being very different.) And then Phosphorus and Magnesium ended up kind of stealing their scenes for me, which is how they also feature in the last scene.
It definitely felt like writing in a different fandom from Periodic Table anthropomorfic. I'd gotten the chemistry puns out of my system (mostly) last year, but I think the final characterization and plot combine both the character designs' influence and actual chemistry stuff, like Technetium's android identity, spoiler and Chlorine and Boron's powers beyond those depicted/mentioned in the art, and also the relationship between elements. /spoilers
I got pretty far into the writing without feeling like I had any sense of whether the story was working or not, but my betas' comments were enthusiastic, which was reassuring. Somewhere along the line, I realized that while I didn't have a written text to pastiche, I was mentally seeing this as an episode of an animated superhero show, like the 90s X-Men, complete with imagining a dun-dun-DUN -- commercial break! -- at a climactic reveal and scene changes signaled by a spinning character face (in the Google doc marginalia I also jokingly mention that at the end, Tc gives an earnest PSA about how you shouldn't make fun of people with phobias). And it ended up being even longer than last year's chemistry nonsense XD -- though it ended up falling short of 10k, and being a few words shorter than the longest thing I've written for Yuletide so far.
It's not a surprise given the story is pretty long and in an obscure fandom, but it was definitely very slow in terms of hits, etc. compared to other things I've written for Yuletide. It ended the anon period with 24 hits, 6 kudos, 3 comment threads, and 1 bookmark that I assume was just a to-read bookmark -- which is the lowest stats I've had. (For comparison, chem nonsense part 1 had 109 hits, 28 kudos, 5 bookmarks, and 13 comment threads (from 12 distinct people) at reveals, although that was also a bit of an outlier for me, in the other direction.) But this was also the first time I've written the first-ever fic in the fandom (although the first Harriet fic, although written later than the other Harriet fic in the Yuletide collection, was of course revealed at the same time -- and it was still one of three fics to pop up between Yuletide and Madness that year).
Like the other times I've written a longer fic for my assignment, I've had no creativity left over for anything else, which is unfortunate, but also with these last couple of fandoms, I don't know how I could've done them at shorter length in a way that would've been interesting to me, given the need to establish characters and setting before I could then do anything else with them.
My awesome gifts were indeed by the people I thought they were by: The Ponedelnik fic was written by plumedy, who had already written me a wonderful fic in this fandom two years ago, which I was basically certain of from the time my gift popped up at deadline, because I was checking Ponedelnik requests/offers in the sign-up summary (since it was also a fandom I was offering) and so I knew (pretty much) that Plumedy was the only other person offering the fandom (barring bucket lists, I guess) based on when the signup summary incremented and I saw Plumedy's letter on my flist. And when my squeeful comment turned into a lovely conversation with my Anonymous Author, it was the rest of the way clear that I was talking to a flister. The Adelis fic was written by sholio, which I also suspected from how quickly it appeared, given the "yay, you also nominated Adelis!" conversation we had on the Yuletide queries post when we noticed he showed up twice in the tagsand then strongly suspected based on the lovely hurt/comfort elements, and then was certain about when I saw the other Adelis fics on sholio's recs list but not this one. (I'm also super amused that 75% of all Chalion fic and all of the full length fic across the Yuletide and Madness collections this year ended up featuring Adelis, quadrupling the number of Adelis fics on AO3, especially because I have the impression that he is not a popular character in the fandom, even for a secondary.) So, yeah, least surprising Yuletide reveals ever, but still a wonderful Yuletide experience :D
I was also amused to see that, as per usual, one of the fics I'd rec'd was by misura (this one for Unnatural Magic), the brilliant Madness drabble I rec'd was by isis (who I think has written the majority of drabbles I've loved), and that another fic I'd loved and rec'd was by a flister as well. Which just really shows how consistent my good taste is :)
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I get to watch a Taskmaster New Year Treat in real time! spoilers!
Ooh, these are all strong prize tasks! I'm instantly charmed by the fly coffin, because that is totally something I would have done as a kid, and the van and the blowdryer are definitely surprising, while the statue and the art are hilarious. I think I can't necessarily quibble with the scoring (and LOL at Greg writing down his own name for the show's first contestant named Greg), but I liked all of these things.
Dotty task: I was convinced, when Greg James was left for last, that he had answered the phone and that was the loophole/shortcut, so pleased to see that was indeed the case. But how impressive was Carol Vordeman to have gotten as close as she did without any shortcuts! Also, I'm with greg on Sir Mo's "Helloooo! whooo!" being a fantastic bit to clip -- in general, he was so charming throughout this task!
I thought Greg James's painting should've gotten, if not 5 points, then at least the hightest score, but as Greg said, the massage stuff eclipsed the actual task. Definitely Sir Mo's amazing faces, but also Alex's expression as he was administering the scalp massager on him, and then the turnabout with Alex and RLT.
Carp pellets and boobytraps task -- I was impressed by everyone! (except maybe Amanda) and especially by Carol and RLT's dedication, with the robot lean and the army crawl under the trip-wire respectively. This was a great task, because it was actually possible to recover from the "failures" if one was committed enough, but also possible to make one's life easier by thinking ahead, like some people had done with the trip wire and the pulley system in the lab and the biodome trap.
The Simon Says live task was clearly getting to everyone, but I was pleased to see that the performance on it led to a 4-way tie for second place, because I liked all of these contestants and didn't want any of them to be losers. But I'm also happy Sir Mo won, because I was rooting for him from about the second task onward. Also, this is a random thought, but he had the kind of energy and charm that makes me think of Terra Ignota's Sniper -- I don't know what it is specifically, but it's something about being very aware of being the center of attention, but also being genuinely charming in acting from within that center?
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I'm not even sure I've read enough books this year to make my annual year-end book meme worth doing, but I can still do the general fannish ones.
1. Your main fandom of the year?
I mean, I suppose it was Taskmaster, seeing as how I mainlined every minute of available content, including the podcasts, and also read a bunch of fic (despite not being into RPF) and watched some fanvids, and enjoyed discussing it with fans and introducing new people to it, and constructed headcanon AUs, and am requesting it in fandomtrees -- so, like, definitely a fandom.
But then there's also sudoku fandom, with Cracking the Cryptic as the lead-in, but I've since branched out into following other channels. I have, in fact, also read the CtC fic that last year's Yuletide produced, and watched this definitely a transformative work video -- and I've spent SO MANY HOURS doing sudoku this past year.
In more conventional definitions of fandom, I certainly enjoyed my dive into Ghosts, BBC and later US; really enjoyed catching up on Penric & Desdemona canon (and my Yuletide gift in this fandom); and was delighted to talk Dragaera with people who were posting/commenting about it, like silverflight8, helicoprion, tinny, and scytale. And then there's MCU, which I feel I'm somewhat losing interest in but still watched Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight and a couple of the movies on Disney+.
2. Your favorite film watched this year?
I watched Turning Red, Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange 2, Death on the Nile, Dune, The Batman, The Good Liar and Smallfoot. It's easy to say what my least favorite of these was -- Smallfoot was bad without even the slight benefit of featuring my favorite actors, like The Good Liar. None of these were movies I loved, unlike last year, which had several to choose from. I think Dune and The Batman were both very good movies, but also happen to be canons I don't care about. So I think I enjoyed Shang-Chi and Doctor Strange 2 more, but I don't think I can call them favorites either. I dunno, this was a weird year. I guess let me say Shang-Chi, but really just for tiny incidental things like the not-MUNI bus fight scene and Morris the butt-chicken.
3. Your favorite book read this year?
I answered this recently at more length for both book, and haven't finished any new book since then so that's still Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race and Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun. But of the two, Elder Race had more things that I personally love, so that is what I would call my favorite.
4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
Still Encanto's "Surface Pressure" and Bo Burnham's "Wecome to the Internet", from the last two years. Although a late addition to the list is Fern Brady's diss track from Taskmaster series 14:
Click to view(O was playing the piece on his violin yesterday, and I was INSTANTLY earwormed XD)
5. Your favorite TV show of the year?
Three guesses and the first two don't count XD But in addition to Taskmaster, which is obviously the one true answer to this, I did enjoy all the other TV shows I've watched in whole or in part: Ms Marvel, Moon Knight, (part of) Sandman, and the two Ghosts. BBC Ghosts would be the second place winner after TM, but all of these were at least as good as I expected and usually better.
6. Your favorite LJ(/DW) community of the year?
Sticking to LJ/DW, it would have to be the Yuletide-related comms and snowflake_challenge, but I also have not hung out in any year-round comms.
7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Taskmaster, obviously, but also Ghosts.
8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
No huge crushing disappointments, but here are a few things that I was annoyed by: 1) Hugo results for Best Novella and Best Novel, and, relatedly, 2) Becky Chambers's writing trajectory away from the things I like about her writing, 3) Doctor Strange 2, which I liked a lot less than the first one.
9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
Well, I mean, Morrolan always. But of the guys for whom I actually consumed media this year: Adelis Arisaydia (the later Penric books reminded me how much I love him, and then Yuletide fic delivered even more of him :D) and Peter and Nightingale from RoL. Among new-to-me characters, Esen-Temur from She Who Became the Sun.
Like several characters last year, the Captain from BBC Ghosts doesn't need to be my boyfriend, but I'd enjoy having him as a friend. I'm not sure I can say that about Trevor from US Ghosts, but he is weirdly adorable. I definitely don't want Tennalhin Halkana from Ocean's Echo as a boyfriend (too chaos), but I think I would enjoy hanging out in his vicinity and watching him happen to people (this is the book I finished that I haven't written up; I need to get around to that).
10. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
Hadia from Master of Djinn, Death from Netflix Sandman, and I'd enjoy being friends with Kitty from BBC Ghosts as long as I was not stuck wihh her forever, and with Ms Marvel's Kamala Khan (aged up), I think.
11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Reading my gifts Yuletide morning, I think.
12. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Ridiculously, Taskmaster once I'd caught up on the backlog and there wasn't a new series airing, so between series 13 and 14 and then once 14 ended XD Except it's not an old fandom, so, hm, I guess World of Five Gods/Penric & Desdemona once I read sholio's write-up of the later books and the comments, and realized that the time had come for me to dive back in and catch up (what an excellent decision that was!).
13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
I have already read some US Ghosts fic without waiting to catch up on canon, but I look forward to being able to read it in a more informed fashion.
In terms of actually trying new canons -- maaaybe I'll get around to watching Andor?
14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?
TSALMOTH!!! which I've had on preorder since May 2022.
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Challenge #1: In your own space, update your fandom information! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
My basic info was already up to date (reproduced below). What I really need to do one of these days is take my into post from LJ and create a fully functional DW mirror, with links pointing to the DW posts, but I don't know when I'm going to have time for a project like that -- definitely not now.
Transformative Works Policy: Posted on my AO3 profile - You're welcome to create fanart, podfic, translations, etc. for anything I've written; just please link back to the original work via Related Work or some other means, and please send me a link to your creation so I can enjoy it, or at least the fact of its existence, also! :)
Current Passion 2022 has been a weird year, in which Taskmaster and sudoku have eclipsed my usual fannish pastimes of reading SFF, but I'm still passionate about my Yuletide-sized-or-just-a-tiny-bit-bigger fandoms like Dragaera, Terra Ignota, Vorkosigan Saga, Rivers of London, Discworld, etc. We'll see what happens in 2023!
Where to Find Me: Pretty much just here (DW/LJ)
Master List: AO3 (hamsterwoman) for fannish poems/fic, icons tag for icons.
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Below is the previous Yuletide post that I never cross-posted manually to LJ, which includes the links to my gifts as well as the other recs mentioned in the post above:
We're wrapping up a lovely Hawaiian holiday (well, lovely except for the mostly-minor injuries sustained by 75% of us -- L and I bruised our knees, L twisted her ankle as per usual, and O did something to his shoulder that seems likely to require a doctor's visit and/or PT when we get back) in the company of lizards, feral cats, assorted invertebrates, and SO MANY CHICKENS (but not my coworker, alas), but this post is not about that. This post is about Yuletide!
I received two AMAZING fics for Yuletide this year, in two different fandoms, and can't wait to share them with my flist because they are both perfect!
First is the fic I impatiently shook a month ago: World of Five Gods (Penric & Desdemona series), a brilliant take on my "Adelis contracts a demon" prompt, which nails everything I love about Adelis and his relationship with the other characters featured, and does the thing I most love fanfic for, putting a character I'm interested in into a new scenario and exploring what happens from there in a way perfectly consistent with canon.
Demon Touched (3634 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Adelis Arisaydia, Penric kin Jurald, Desdemona (Chalion), Nikys Khatai
Additional Tags: Friendship, Demonic Possession
Summary:
Adelis's entire life changes in an instant. Set somewhere post-current-canon.
And then there's the Ponedelnik fic that completely blindsided me with its existence when it popped up, which brilliantly manages the very difficult feat of sounding pitch-perfect in a different language than canon, full of tiny, incredibly fitting details of Soviet life and magical science mumbo-jumbo, and a first-person POV of the right degree of unreliability, and feels just right slotting into this canon I know by heart.
the fern blossoms on Kupala Night (2372 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Понедельник начинается в субботу - Стругацкие | Monday Begins on Saturday - A. & B. Strugatsky
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cristóbal Junta & Feodor Simeonovich Kivrin
Characters: Aleksandr "Sasha" Privalov, Feodor Simeonovich Kivrin, Cristóbal Junta, Naina Kievna Gorynych, Amvrosiy Ambroisovich Vybegallo
Additional Tags: Friendship, Bureaucracy
Summary:
Kivrin, Junta, and navigating a trade union meeting.
I feel very spoiled! :D (I'm also, like, 98% sure I know who my mystery authors are, and: ♥!)
(I also got a nice comment from my recip and also from a total stranger on the fic I wrote, which is even more obscure than anything I've written for Yuletide previously, so that's also nice.)
I've been browsing the archive patchily outside of that, so here's a definitely-not-exhaustive list of recs-so-far, from Yuletide and Madness:
Radiant Emperor / She Who Became the Sun: "a fly on the wall" (2.7k, M, General Ouyang/Wang Baoxiang) -- moments woven in-between canon events, as complicated and tragic as these characters canonically are (but in a way that doesn't feel like wallowing in angst, which I appreciate)
Swordspoint: A Castle on a Lonely Hill (1.5k, gen, Alec/Richard) -- really great Richard POV and levels of Alec-ness at which I find him amusing rather than insufferable
Temeraire: "Parole" (4.6k, T, Napoleon/Laurence) -- AU from a point in Crucible of Gold that reads just like canon in characterization and prose
Unnatural Magic: suomi (<1k, gen, Loga, Jok Finnbair) -- AU moment where Loga and Jok have a conversation about what Jok is doing
5 min fandoms:
Top 5 Rat Movies I Just Made Up: Legends of the Great Below: i'm sorry i just love these two so much (1.5k, Gen, Original Female Rats) -- a ship manifesto for rat NPCs in the tie-in game for the imaginary rat movie, which, if that isn't peak Yuletide, I don't know what is
Give That Wolf A Banana - Subwoolfer (Song)Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale): Prey preference of Canis lupus, Keith, J., and Jim, K., University of Norway (ABSTRACT) (drabble, gen)
SoftBank's Next 30-Year Vision (2010 Corporate PDF): akademeia (1.3k, worldbuilding, original characters, epistolary/e-mail) -- I'm really glad this amazing powerpoint, which I learned about via the Yuletide evidence post, got some fic written. This fic is a nicely creepy take on the canon.
Enjoyed without knowledge of canon:
my wife doesn't know I hench, the evil sex ray made my employees do it, and more (Hench + Ask a Manager column, 2k, T, worldbuilding) -- yes, everyone has seen this outside of Yuletide even as Ask a Manager linked to it herself, but it really is very fun.
A Beginner's Guide to Octopus Football (17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future, 2.2k, gen, worldbuilding) -- I don't even know what this canon is, but the fic had me at the Monterey Bay Aquarium setting and octopodes octopuses, and it basically reads like an adorable original sci-fi story without canon grounding.
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Meme from sophia_sol:
Rules: If you'd like your own questions, let me know in the comments! (please say this explicitly :) I'll ask the first five commenters [asking for questions] five questions each. Answer them in your own journal, offer to give the first five commenters their own sets of questions, and let the cycle continue!
1. what's your favourite book you read within the last year?
Oh man, this is such a hard year for this question, because I've read so little due to my weird inadvertent fiction boycott thing... and a lot of what I read was for Hugos homework, which leads to some great things but also to reading things I don't like much.
I've read: 1 graphic novel, 11 SFF novellas, 7 SFF novels, and 1 YA novel (and most of a general fiction novel). I have enjoyed, sometimes a lot, the books the continued a series that I was already a fan of (Rivers of London, Penric & Desdemona), but the books did not set new bars in their respective series, so I'm not going to count them. So the ones that really stuck with me were Adrian Tchaikovsky's novella Elder Race and Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun. I read both of these for Hugo homework (well, I was planning to read SWBtS earlier, but it was the Hugo nomination/ceremony lead-up that finally made me actually do so), and I still think it's nuts that these didn't win their respective categories, but whatever.
2. Your turn to think about Teixcalaanli names! What would you choose for yours?
I adore this question! I actually cast about for some time for the noun before realizing that, duh, there was only one answer to that: Dandelion. Plants are traditional, and dandelions have been a thing I've identified with for a long time -- I even made a self-portrait back in high school ceramics with imprints of dandelion leaves in my hair. (I could have Puff as a nickname, I guess? that sounds cute) My feelings about the number part are less strong. I have a lot of favorite numbers (favorite integers, even, although the trolly part of me would enjoy going about introducing myself as "Planck's Constant Dandelion" or something :P -- but maybe that would be my parody-writing pen name). Anyway, back to integers: I like the numbers 8, 9, 11, and 31. Thirty-one seems like a nouveau riche kind of number, and eight would feel culturally-appropriative at this point even though I liked it independently before I learned of its meaning in Chinese. So down to 9 or 11, and I just like Eleven Dandelion better in terms of how it sounds. So, there you go: Eleven Dandelion.
3. How long have you been participating in hugo voting? What inspired you to start?
I've been participating since 2018, although I haven't voted every single year since then -- but I think I have done something, either norminations or voting, if not both, each year. What inspired me to start is quite prosaic: 2018 was the year Worldcon was in San Jose, and I was like, well, if ever there was a time to attend, it's never going to be more convenient to me, and since I knew a fannish friend who was going (cyanmnemosyne), I got an attending membership. And then my completism took over, especially since I had ambyr's example of voting on all/most of the Hugo ballot to follow. It turned out to be fairly easy to vote for at least one thing in every category, with the aid of the Hugo Voter Packet, and that made it really fun to attend the Hugo ceremony, because I had *some* opinion on everything, even if it was not always an opinion on what won.
After the voting, I tallied up the things I discovered courtesy of the Hugo homework and appreciated vs not, and it was a pretty good tally -- I read some great short fiction and an amazing novella, and discovered some interesting new-to-me authors, so I continued doing it as much as possible in the next couple of years, though not to the same degree of completism. Like, that first year I tried to read through the semiprozine, editor short form, fanwriter, fanzine, etc. packets, but in subsequent years I didn't go that far, and mostly just stuck to the fiction categories plus Campbell/Astounding.
And then I did nominations the next year, which definitely caused me to read more widely in short fiction, and I've tried to do nominations every year that I've been eligible to do so.
4. What do you enjoy most about your favourite season?
I feel like I'm sort of at an inflection point with favorite seasons. It's always been summer for me, between my summer birthday and summer vacation, and even after I graduated myself, my husband (in academia) and kids still had their summers off, so it still felt like a break vicariously, and also meant that our fun travel would have to happen in the summer. But my kids are going to be graduating in a couple of years and even now they don't necessarily have their summers free. And in my 40s, birthdays are not so exciting anymore.
So it wouldn't surprise me if some time soon fall actually became my favorite. I love Halloween, I like the foods that start showing up in the fall, like pumpkin pie and yams. (I also like fall leaves, but we don't get that where I live, although I remember fall colors fondly from my childhood.)
5. If you could go to space, would you?
I was surprised to consider this question and realize that I think my answer has changed recently! When I was a kid, I was SUPER into space -- I loved playing at being Gagarin and building planetary rovers out of my construction sets and all that kind of stuff -- so of course I wanted to go to space! Then at some point, as an adult, I considered the question again and realized that the answer about whether I'd want to go to space was now no -- I just had too many responsibilities on earth which trumped whatever cool things space had to offer. But now that I've had reason to think about it again -- I might be looping back around to yes? I mean, I still wouldn't want to apply too much actual effort to going to space, but I feel like it is something I could see myself taking a chance on if the opportunity presented itself; maybe not right now, but, you know, at some point.