Root System

The dreaded "say nice things about yourself" challenge has appeared at snowflake_challenge!

While we’re busy celebrating fandom, it’s good to remember to celebrate ourselves, too. Fandom is all of us! I know it’s often easier to talk about what we like about other people than it is to talk nicely about ourselves, but challenge yourself here --

Challenge #7

LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

( Challenge: Say good Things About Yourself. Difficulty: Very )

snowflake_challenge has sent up number 6 on the challenge list, and it's one of the ones I struggle more with than not, the recommendations-related one.

Every challenge we try to make at least one rec post, and each year, we try to find a new way to make it fun for everyone. This year's attempt:

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge.

The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

Can't think of 10 of anything? That's okay, 10 is just an abstract. It's totally up to you.

This is one of those situations where being profoundly multifannish is a disadvantage, because a top ten list of anything may or may not make it to me. Or I might not get so deeply into a fandom to where there would be enough material for a top ten list. And while I read and enjoy the gifts that get sent my way in the various exchanges that I participate in, they don't necessarily cohere to any kind of top ten list of anything, either.

Eventually, a random idea will settle into my head, and I can go forward with it and see what might happen from there. So, here you are:

( 10 roles one person played during my formative years )

snowflake_challenge posted their fourth prompt, and I had to look at it a couple times before I started getting close to an understanding of what was being asked for.

On many of the fannish websites we use, our history is easily compileable into "pages". When we look back through those pages, sometimes we stumble upon things that we think are rather cool.

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

( Here's where I admit I don't use fannish websites all that much. )

snowflake_challenge has posted prompt #3, asking us to talk about the things we love about the communities that we are part of, or about the properties we form our communities around.

Challenge #3:

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

( It's often the people. )

The best thing I like about fandom is that it grows and evolves and produces new stories and new interpretations of stories, and new tropes and new ways of telling stories and smashing them together. The next best thing about fandom is how many people there are in it who are there to have a good time and to make community with others. Yes, there are always going to be people who feel like they have to defend their territory against all comers, or who loudly proclaim that their way is the only way and all others must yield, but most fans that I've encountered seem to be less concerned with purity, fortresses, or defense and are instead more concerned with community, mutual aid, sharing, and trying to encourage people who are in the fandom to stay in it or to getr even deeper into it. Maybe I just have good people around me and I've avoided the people who want to drag me into wars, but even if that's the case, the last thing I love about fandom (for this entry, anyway) is that it tends toward self-correction, and with time and maturity, most fen who stay, grow in ways that make their works better and their communities better.

The snowflake_challenge has posted prompt #2, and this time, they're definitely asking for something that will get a lot of people stopping by to say hello, in hopes that people might use the (somewhat limited) amount of image hosting that Dreamwidth has, if they have an account that has access to the image hosting.

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

( Pets, in all their forms )

So that's the extended riff about pets in fandom. Hopefully there's something there that you find interesting, or that you want to chase up or find more detail with. If not, have a good time exploring the other entries in the challenge for this time around, and we'll see you back in a couple days.

Let's begin with a very important warning: if there's still content you want to archive on LiveJournal, yours or others, do it now. There are changes being implemented that move continually in the direction of severing parts of LJ from each other, and quite possibly nuking or jettisoning the English-language side of it entirely. The importer may not work quite as swiftly as it usually does due to an influx of import requests, but get yourself into the queue, or use some other archiving tool, post-haste, if there's still anything there that you want to capture and preserve.

A significant amount of material has entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 02026, put it to good use! And for the more detailed deep dive, your friends at Duke University have you covered for the more detailed examination of what we're getting into the public domain.

Here's a fact for you: that the most consistent and largest donor of money for toys to a children's hospital in Oregon have been strippers, and this year, they broke their own record.

We managed to close the hole in the ozone layer, thanks to dedicated and international cooperation. It may not stay closed for long, because this world is what it is, but we at least managed to get it done.

Let go of the idea that gender is a single point, a destination, an immutable truth, and support those who question and who are on the journey to finding what they want from gender in that moment. Acknowledging that gender is mutable, and that for some, it is constantly in mutation, can help those who are questioning or on a discovery journey not feel like they have to be absolutely sure and correct and that once they set upon the journey, they are not allowed to deviate from it.

A promising prevention method against HIV would require a twice-yearly shot and widespread availability to be effective. The fact that we have, in two generations, gotten much closer to giving the finger to HIV than we thought possible is a grand testament to science. (And a condemnation of those chucklefucks who continue to try and impede distribution of such and aid to places where HIV prevention would be most effective.) And, beyond that, we keep finding people who have managed to clear the HIV virus entirely, so it's possible that not only will we be able to prevent new infections, we may be getting very close to giving the finger to HIV infections already present. Scouring the world of that virus will be a great triumph.

For those of us in the mindset of the new year, consider this: the things you have said, unintentionally, may be the things that others are carrying with them for years. As has been said, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. If you have people that trust you, even if you don't want to ask what it is you said that they've been carrying and that you didn't mean, the reassurance and the understanding that such things are mist and should be treated as such, and that you are sorry for the hurt you caused, will be good for them. If we shadows have offended, we are sorry, please let it be mended.

The Archive of Our Own posted an administrative post about the progress they feel they've made about making the Archive less welcoming to racism. I don't know how to parse this update, since it doesn't seem like a lot of concrete things were done on their end?

Rob Reiner, actor and director, died at 78 years of age, with his wife, in what is being investigated as a homicide. (And also, the administrator made a social media post disparaging the man in his death and fluffing his own ego while he did it, but that's only mentioned because if you look for things about the death, you'll probably find the post.)

( Old coins, new targets, animals, nudity, techbros who can't help themselves, and more inside )

Last for tonight, it turns out that humans are generally nicer, warmer, and more friendly than our media accounts would have us believe.

A story of a man who did not get to say thanks to an idol, but who did manage to convince a group of carolers to sing his most holiday-appropriate song at him, and then get blown away when they found out that he could, in fact, sing.

And, perhaps most importantly in these times where we think about the turning of the wheel of the year, sometimes the best good news that you can give to others is "yet here you stand." (And no, the rate of people choosing to complete suicide isn't higher in the winter months, so there are more people out there who are also choosing "yet here you stand" along with you.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)