Snowflake days 7 & 8, including a poll
Challenge #7: In your own space, interact with a community or a fic.
I stole from several other commenters the great idea of interacting with threesentenceficathon (which is a thing I've been aware of for several years, but usually only stumble on/remember to go look at once everything dies down, when doing a DW search for my small fandoms). I read and commented on a whole bunch of microfiction, which seems to be the length of fiction I'm up for reading at the moment (outside of things tailored to me personally, that is).
Some favorite commentfics (mostly so I can find them again, but also consider these recs):
- Howl's Moving Castle for the prompt "Howl/Sophie, For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love"
- The Little Mermaid dark AU, Ursula, stealing the voice of a siren for the public good (there are other neat fills for this, but that was my favorite)
- Prompt: Sherlock Holmes series, Sherlock (/any), "My dear Watson, how I do love respecting women and having feelings," he said, 100% legally --> Fill: I could post this. For money. Nobody could legally stop me.
- for the prompt "ASOIAF, Joffrey, a good king" (there is also a fix-it AU as another fill to the prompt)
- Tam Lin, Janet/Tam Lin for "queen of roses" prompt
- Two Feanor fills for "my peace has always depended / on all the ashes in my wake" and for "no fate but that of which we make, noble as the oath we undertake
- Romeo & Juliet, the title pair finds a way to survive
- for "time-traveling raven" prompt
- and obviously I have to end on this: for "Anthropomorphic; 3SF, English language and grammar; 'I'm gonna kill you.'" - (Smut) The Sentence Will Continue Unless You Safeword
I also noticed a small burst of comments pop up on my fic, including some old fic, that day, which I don't know if it's connected to the Snowflake Challenge or not, but of course that's always nice.
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Challenge #8: In your own space, create a quiz or a poll (or tell us your thoughts about answering quizzes/polls). /
Well, I'll certainly start off by rambling about it, and then we'll see.
The use of 'quiz' here is as a term for the 'find out what X you are' tests you can take online. I love those things! I loved them even in the pre-internet form you used to find in magazines, where you'd get "mostly A answers -- you're X" kind of results. Fannish quizzes (which Hogwarts House, which member of the Fellowship, which sci-fi character you would be, etc. etc.), psychology-type quizzes (MBTI, enneagram, color profile, etc.), and just plain silly stuff, like "what flavor of ice cream would you be" or whatever. I even -- I recently remembered this when talking to the family about this -- once, when I was in high school, filled out what turned out to be a Scientology questionnaire that they distributed door to door and went to a meeting to get my results (and then used a blank copy of the questionnaire I collected and my own results to, like, reverse-engineer how the questions were mapped to the results, and proceeded to fill out the questionnaire for the characters in my Magnum Opus. When I say Gordian is my Terra Ignota Hive, this kind of thing is why, lol). Anyway, so I do love quizzes like this, and I always take them when I encounter them -- though it seems to have become less of a thing.
I've never made one myself, though, I think mostly because I'd want to do it "properly", with thought put in, then user-tested and tweaked in accordance, but it's absolutely not worth that amount of effort, so it's better to just not even start XD
Like, I'd love for there to exist a good "which Dragaera House would you be" quiz (there was at least one, which I've taken, but I think that link is dead and the results were quite unstable), but there would need to be 17 different options, some of which we don't even know much about, so, yeah, no. This challenge did make me wonder if there was a Terra Ignota Hives quiz, and there is! It's long and quite thoughtful, but it landed me at Whitelaw Hiveless -- which, nope XD I could see Graylaw Hiveless -- that's probably my second self-sorting after Gordian, and I could see opting for that if I didn't want to commit to Gordian. I wouldn't have been surprised with Humanist or Mitsubishi, but Whitelaw for sure surprises me XD (Also, not q quiz, but while thinking about Hive sorting, I also found this poll of where people sorted themselves, and no, I'm not surprised by the Utopia results XD)
So, OK, that's quizzes, but polls are much lower barrier-to-entry type things, both to create and to fill out.
Apparently I've never created a poll on DW, though! I did it on LJ, and decided to scroll back through my "poll" tag to see what kinds of things I've used them for. I think mostly I've used polls for "help me decide stuff" type of things, both for things where I was seeking actual information (which attractions in San Diego / Germany / Japan / etc. ) should we target? What Kindle model / smartphone / etc. should I get? which episode should I use to lure someone into Firefly) and as basically a more sophisticated, and more interactive version of flipping a coin (which dress should I wear to my friend's wedding? should I attend or bail out on this weird kid's birthday party? should I submit an article to my friend's woo-sounding self-published anthology under my real name or a pen name or not at all? should I shell out for a permanent LJ account? what should I read next?) Once I used it to collect statistically questionable results along the lines of "can you raise one eyebrow/whistle/etc." and "Rank each letter of the alphabet on appearance on a scale of 1 (least aesthetically pleasing) to 9 (most aesthetically pleasing)." I've also used polls to sort X characters into Y houses, sort of combining polls and quizzes, I guess (Amberites into ASOIAF houses, Discworld characters into Harry Potter houses, etc.) I used polls most extensively on my own journal when I did a round of "cage matches" for SFF characters (this was around the time Suvudu was running theirs -- remember those things?), but in general I used polls even more when I was active in (and then helpin mod) westerosorting, because -- thanks to deeplyunhip's founding philosophy, polls were a lifeblood of that place -- we used them for fun things like ASOIAF elections/Survivor-style voting, etc. etc. as well as at all levels of makign decisions that actually impacted the community, like determining contest winners, making mod decisions, etc.
So that's for creating polls. As for filling out polls, lol, I will fill out any poll I have anything at all to say to, including if the only thing I have to say is "TICKY BOX".
As such, I've really enjoyed browsing the answers to this challenge, both on my flist and off it, such as philomytha's poll on hurt/comfort tropes and eglantiere's poll which also had an interesting h/c related question, and mekare's poll about fanart.
Actually, I had some thoughts on the h/c polls that got a little too navel-gazey for the comments, but I'm going to stash them here:
Limiting myself to a top 3 h/c tropes was very hard, but one thing it made me realize is that "bandaging wounds", which used to be up there for me for sure, has slid down the iddiness ladder now that I've actually had to deal with applying bandages and changing dressings on an actual person (kid in one case, grandfather in another). The other thing that surprised me is that "exhaustion" is the #1 h/c trope and "hiding an illness/injury" is nearly equal with it (also huddling for warmth, but I'm agnostic on that one), and hm! "Exhaustion" is one that just plain doesn't work for me -- probably because I fall instantly asleep when tired, so, like, there's nothing there to explore in my experience. "Hiding an illness/injury" is a little bit trickier -- it can work for me very nicely, BUT I think it's one of those things, like power dynamic tropes, where there's a narrow band where I like it A LOT, but there's a very sharp drop-off and a bit to either side are dynamics where I don't like it at all.
Meanwhile, eglantiere's question: "does it matter to you which character is hurt and which comforts?" made me realize that my answer is "sometimes". At first I was like "no, it doesn't matter" and then "yes it does matter", but upon deeper reflection I think for me there are couples where it does matter (e.g. for Firefly I would read Zoe/Wash h/c with Wash hurt but not the other way around, ditto for something like Locke/Jean in Gentleman Bastars (hurt Locke yes, hurt Jean no), Peter/Nightingale (hurt Nightingale yes please, but no interest in hurt Peter), or in The Goblin Emperor, Maia being the hurt one tends to work well for me while Csevet in that role absolutely does not (and Csethiro wouldn't either, I think). And there are just characters who are much better recipients of whump than sources of comfort -- e.g. Denis in the Kosmo-oluhi books, or Iron Woobies in general. But the couples where I most seek out h/c tend to be couples with dynamics where either way around works well for me (e.g. Battle Couples and Brothers-in-Arms) -- maybe that way there's more opportunity for variety?)
Going on TV Tropes as part of my h/c musings above, and scrolling through old polls, and then something posted to the Snowflake comm that reminded me of copperbadge's "Balloon Polls" (anyone remember those?), made me think of the following:
Let's assemble a crossover Five Man Band (caution! this and all subsequent links lead to TV Tropes). We're going to need a Leader, the Lancer, the Heart, the Smart Guy, the Big Guy, and the Sixth Ranger.
The options below were chosen in the following fashion: 1) going to the linked TV Tropes page for the role and picking from there name of characters whom I 2) knew, 3) liked, and 4) whose inclusion under that role did not make me go, "wait, what, WTF are you talking about, they're clearly [this other thing]". This means that some fandoms are over-represented because their fans use TV Tropes more consistently for stuff like this, and that I've left off some favorite characters I would've loved to include (e.g. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are listed under Lancer, Heart, and Sixth Ranger, but not under Leader, so I couldn't include Leonardo, who was my favorite), and some of my best-beloved fandoms are not represented at all, because they were not listed on those TV Tropes pages. I tried to get to at least five named characters per category, which sometimes required me to include people from canons I haven't finished/may never finish (e.g. Buffy, Farscape, Castlevania, Order of the Stick, Animorphs, way back when), as long as I liked them enough. And in some cases I had to pare down my favorites (I like Lancers a LOT, you guys), in which case I tried not to duplicate fandoms too much.
ugh, OK, the poll creation code is totally different between LJ and DW, so I can't just copy it over. If you want to see the poll, you're going to have to look here