Snowflake catchup
Challenge #3: Create a wish list of fandom things (podfic, graphics, playlists, canon recs translations, research help, vids, sky's the limit!) that you'd like to receive.
- Not just for me but fandomtrees needs fills for needy trees before the planned January 11 release can happen. The goal is to have a minimum of 2 gifts for everyone, and about 15 trees are currently short of that goal (although that's much better than before this weekend, yay!), per the spreadsheet. (My tree is here.)
- I would, of course, still welcome anything I asked for on my tree (Penric & Desdemona, Chronicles of Amber, Discworld, Dragaera, Rivers of London, Some Desperate Glory, Taskmaster, Terra Ignota, Vorkosigan Saga fannish things) and for Yuletide (Terra Ignota, Some Desperate Glory, Dragaera) -- though I do consider myself extremely lucky to have received Yuletide (or Yuletide-adjacent) fic in all three of these tiny canons.
- Actually Dragaera anything. Fic, art, graphics, meta, random headcanons, crossover ideas, or just more people who are fans (if there's anyone left on DW/LJ that I haven't tracked down and friended yet).
- Still all the crossovers/fusions between my tiny fandoms (because I've actually gotten a couple of those via Snowflake before, and it was AWESOME :D) -- art or fic or just a chance to chat about the crossovers: Miles Vorkosigan/River Tam, or Dragaeran Dragonlords and Elantran Dragons hanging out and matching tempers, Nanny Ogg and Uncle Iroh having tea and/or scumble, Cheris (or Hemiola) and Murderbot watching their shows together, Terra Ignota set-sets and the Dedicates from The Iron Children and Murderbot talking about humanity and/or being something other than human and self-determination, etc., etc. Or fusions, fusions are great too. Everyone in Hogwarts houses! (or Dragaera houses! or Hexarchate factions! or Terra Ignota Hives!), people and their daemons, their dragons, their wolfbrothers/sisters -- it's all good! It would be especially amazing to have crossover art with Vorkosigan, RoL, or Dragaera characters in AU settings, because I've never seen that (and as established on Snowflake day 3, I love me some setting change AUs/fusions. And by now we have a canonical Hogwarts sorting for Peter, hey!
I've added a couple of fandoms since two years ago when I think Snowflake last used this prompt, but I was trying to think of whether I have any wishes aside from that, and I can't think of anything -- I don't have new fandoms to ask for recs in (well, Sudoku and Taskmaster are newish, but both the YouTube algorithm and the community are good about pointing me towards new stuff).
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Challenge #4: IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself. Think of it as an elevator pitch, or a manifesto; give us bullet points or lyrical prose. Want to make a game out of it? Tell us things that are true and things that aren’t and let us guess. Don't know what to say? Hate elevator speeches, but don't want to skip a day? Try this Random Question Generator and make yourself a meme all your own.
Yeah, this one isn't really working for me as a challenge. I do hate elevator pitches or manifesto-by-way-of-introduction, and while I do love random meme questions, there's a reason I do them under friends-lock. And two-turths-and-a-lie I think doesn't really work with an "audience" where some people have been reading my journal for ages (I doubt there's any truth I could come up with that isn't mentioned somewhere on here over the last 20 years, or any lie that is not disproven, and I don't want it to be, like, a test of "are you paying attention" XP) and some are total strangers passing from Snowflake, who would just be guessing randomly.
So, brief intro c&p'd from my DW profile:
Mid*-40's, married, two nominally adult children, engineer, all around nerd, easily amused.
Mostly lurk on the outskirts of various fandoms: LotR, HP, Discworld, ASOIAF, Temeraire, Vorkosigan Saga, Chronicles of Amber, Dresden Files, Vlad Taltos/Dragaera, Terra Ignota, Babylon 5, Firefly, AtLA. Book posts and the occasional meme are public, everything else under f-lock.
I have a short fannish intro post here.
[* I really should update that at this point; I think I've stretched the definition of "early 40s" as far as it can go XD]
And, borrowing an idea from chacusha:
Here's a little icebreaker game: Ask me some questions about my fandoms or tastes! Some options:
- Make me choose [between two things A and B].
- My favorite / least favorite thing in [category].
- Rank all of the [x].
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Challenge 5: Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture (a link to a picture will be fine!) or description of something that is or represents:
1. Something your favorite character would like
I was stumped by this at first, but after browsing some answers, realized I should do what some folks were doing and pick an OC, since I feel more comfortable claiming what a character I came up with would like. So:
This is for R, who is a little obsessed with dragons :) He is not my favorite character of all time, but he's definitely the one I've een spending the most time with in the last decade or so -- actually, I looked it up, and it's been like 19 years! O.o
These are not all of our household dragons -- not even half of them! -- just the ones it was easiest for me to gather together. And not all of these are mine -- the Krakow dragon belongs to my daughter; the Ljubljana one is I think mine, although there is a larger one of the same design we have, and I'm not 100% sure which one is mine and which one my son's. The crochet dragon is one my daughter made for me as a New Year's gift a couple of years ago.
2. Something that makes you laugh
This does not beat last year's murder monkey, but:
My husband brought me the Gargamel from a conference in France or Belgium, and the banana slug Squishmallow was a birthday present from aome. Individually I found both toys quite funny -- the Gargamel is very expressive, the banana slug is a funny animal to begin with and the Squishmallow renders it cutely but also very incorrectly (its eyes are up there). When I was putting them away on our stuffed animal shelf, I did not intend to create a tableau in which Gargamel was biting the slug's eyestalk, but my husband pointed out that this is what it looked like, and that's pretty funny too.
3. A fandom place you would like to visit
Three related answers for the price of one :) Middle-Earth, of course, as the fictional place (many different places within Middle-Earth, so I didn't want to pick one, but Rivendell, and Fangorn Forest and Minas Tirith so long as it's safe, would be among the top ones.) Gandalf's hat magnet stands for New Zealand -- my brother got it for me on his visit to Hobbiton over there. I've never been to NZ but it's near the top of my list of places I want to visit, not just or even primarily for the Middle-Earth connection, but I ALSO want to see all the LotR fandom stuff. The Bodleian magnet stands for Oxford, where I have been -- on a Tolkien pilgrimage of sort, when I was 18, and then again as an adult -- but it's one of my favorite places, and indelibly linked to Tolkien and my love of his work, so I wanted to include it also.
4. A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
I was lucky enough to meet some creators I'm really passionate about (e.g. Ursula LeGuin at a conference I attended basically just for that, Ada Palmer at a Worldcon kaffeeklatsch), and then there are some that I regret never meeting but there is sadly no longer an opportunity, like Terry Pratchett. I don't think there's much chance of me meeting Lois McMaster Bujold either, but I'd really love to!
5. Something you find comforting
Last year it was a different thing on YouTube and a different mug for the tea (same tea, though -- rooibos ruby red chai). The cup is from Balticon; I've only been to the virtual ones they put on during Covid, since I live kind of far away, but I really enjoyed those virtual cons and also loved the cup, colors, and graphic.
6. Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
A bit of a story for this one. The movie is The Mystery of the Third Planet, a Soviet sci-fi cartoon I loved. My parents have an annual Halloween tradition of throwing a themed bash for their friends. The theme this year was a bit abstract, but reminded me of this cartoon, so we put together a family Halloween costume in which my husband was the bearded guy on the cover, my daughter was an alien bird that's pivotal to the plot, and I was an alien snail, a cameo character with a memorable line. The alien snail gives the girl protagonist a critter that changes color:
Click to viewI made the critter to be a prop for my snail costume, out of a small Priority Mail box, purple self-stick vinyl and stickers, and iridescent Mylar, with a pipecleaner legs and a Velcro closure so it could change color. I was very happy with it and very proud of how it came out.
7. A piece of clothing you love
This sage dress I wore to my brother's wedding in 2022:
(I don't know why Flickr does that to the colors, but the first photo has the correct hue. The exchange via text is with my husband. He was correct :D
8. A book or song with a color in the title
Not my favorite series, and not my favorite book in it, but I do like the cover!
9. Something only someone in your fandom would understand
Sudoku, it turns out, is totally a fandom, and has its own inside references/jokes.
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I've decided that one thing I'm going to do differently this time around is keep track of my progress towards the fannish goals throughout the year, even if it's incremental progress. Also, some things I just don't keep track of as well as others currently, for example sudoku, so that'll help (as I mentioned in zero_pixel_count's journal) "establish a baseline". So, over the past several days, I've made the following progress:
1.2 Submit at least 10 poems somewhere -- Oh, right, I realize I should've phrased that as sending out at least 10 submissions, not submitting 10 poems, since most places allow and some places require more than 1 poem to be included in a submission. Anyway, that's how I mean it and how I plan to count progress. Progress: 3/10 (I sent 3 submissions which encompassed 9 different poems)
1.3 Submit at least one chapbook (or micro-chap) length manuscript -- DONE (but will continue to track additional submissions). I submitted to Bottlecap Press). Supposedly they respond fast? If that's true, I might hear back from the before my other outstanding chapbook submissions. (The reason I did it so early in the year is that I thought their reading period was over -- but that turned out to be a different press with a similar name that I got confused between. Oh well, the only difference it makes is that I could've waited to do it sequentially after hearing back from the ones I already submitted which will supposedly respond this spring, but it doesn't really matter.
6.1 Learn how to solve a new sudoku type or a new trick -- DONE (but will continue to track additional things learned). I solved two sudoku using new to me rulesets: this one which is a new ruleset that has circles that define the dimensions of extra regions, and this one that has killer cages with divisors, which I think counts as a new ruleset too.
6.2 Solve at least one puzzle from CtC Greatest Hits vol 2 book -- Milestone: I've received the book :)
7.1 Nominate for the Hugos -- Milestone: I purchased my Supporting membership for Glasgow, which, OMG, was the most confusing of the several times I've done it so far (let's see, San Jose, Dublin, and Chicon at least? well, San Jose was attending, so maybe that was less confusing). But I did eventually figure out the very confusing way their Supporting memberships worked. And, lol, thanks for the 4 separate confirmation emails, Glasgow. That was super helpful both in the moment and will no doubt prove super helpful again when I'm trying to find info from you in the future.