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Snowflake Challenge: A warmly light quaint street of shops at night with heavy snow falling.

RL got a little nuts, but I'm determined not to let this fall by the wayside, so have a belated Day 4 post.

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!

The instructions for this one confused me, and I don't really do social media, so instead, I thought it would be fun to link some of my favourite fic/art exchanges!

Despite my sometimes Cursed Exchange Luck, I really do love taking part in exchanges. They've gotten me some of my favourite fics ever, and pushed me to write things I never would have otherwise. Here's a list of all the exchanges I'm taking part in this year:

fffx

The Five Figure Fanwork Exchange! You get five months to write either 2 5k or 1 10k fic, or equivalent art. (Has the five month period ever stopped me from leaving it until the last minute? Nope. But we live dangerously 'round these parts.)

ficinabox

Possibly my favourite exchange ever. You commit to writing 10k, or doing an equivalent creative activity... but it can be split up into a mind-boggling variety of mediums, from AITA posts to CYOA games to literal knitted things. One year I'm going to lose my mind enough, recipient willing, to write 10k entirely in drabbles.

highadrenalineexchange

The converse of FFFX - you get two weeks to write 10k. I was somehow insane enough to do Pride and Prejudice fic my first go-around with HAX, and the two-week deadline was the only reason I managed to get out of my own head enough to do it, lol.

worldbuilding_exchange

I utterly adore worldbuilding, so it's no surprise that an exchange based on it is my catnip. If the exchange somehow allowed me to nominate JUST the first four Harry Potter books, I'd be in heaven, lol.

rule_63

Genderbends are another of my very favourite things, and the main fandoms I'm in - HP, Avengers, Superbat, Numb3rs, and Star Trek - have amazing potential when it comes to male-to-female genderbends. Plus, honestly, girls are just more interesting, lol.

idproquo

I am a firm believer in, and defender of, idfic. I also live in the AU where Marvel made no movies after the Avengers and Harry Potter is an unfinished four-book series with no movies, lol.

This year, I also want to take part in

seasonsofdrabbles ,

everywoman , if it's running, and

halfamoon . We'll see how things go.

swingandswirl

So one of my friends has been bugging me to read Casey McQuiston's Red, White, and Royal Blue for years.

I resisted, partly because it felt a little too close to RPF for me to feel comfortable (I know posh British men have like five acceptable names but still) and partly because... well, I'm not a fan of the British monarchy, even a fictional version, for very obvious child-of-colonialism reasons.

And then this morning my buddy complained, once again, about the idiot sheltered Tamil Brahmin boy in the RWRB discord's latest terrible take, which was that India does not have racism. (As someone who remembers seeing a front-page ad in the newspaper of record offering a free whitening cream with purchase of soap that had the tagline 'We're sending some compliments your way', AHAHAHAHA.)

So I made a half-joking comment about that I should finally read RWRB so I could join the discord and back her up next time the idiot idioted. And lo and behold, I had a free afternoon and an available copy of the book, so... why the hell not?

And y'all, I feel like such a damn idiot. Because this book, once I let go of my grudge about the names? Was actually really good. The writing is top-notch, the characters are complex while still being fun, and the story balances escapism and realism really well, especially when it comes to the depiction of the monarchy. It's even making me want to see the movie, which is not a thing I say often.

So yeah. Five out of five stars to Casey McQuiston's Red White and Royal Blue, and a reminder to not judge books by their covers, lol.

pensnest

In response to Rahaeli's recent suggestions on Bluesky (I think) about the way LiveJournal is going, I thought it might be a good idea to see if I could figure out how to import the fic_requests community. Back in the day it provided very considerable inspiration for me—I should think at least fifty of my ficlets were inspired by something in that community.

And I noticed a community on my DW that I had completely forgotten existed. It is called

popslash_lollipops and it is, in fact, a repository of the fic_requests community from the old popslash-on-LiveJournal days. I don't think there's any point attempting to import the Index, which wouldn't work anyway as all the links will be different, but the stories (or at least the links) are here on DW.

alias_sqbr

I finally got back to this! Masterlist.

The chapter: Construction of Meaning: Picture Composition.

It was really interesting reading this as someone who has read lots of art theory for the purposes of being better at art, and picked up some more formal theory via vague osmosis from my artsy parents and their books, but not generally thought about composition very deeply from a media analysis angle.
( Read more... )

alias_sqbr

Going through the free university mini-course Media and Power from the University of Iowa.
( Read more... )

swingandswirl

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #3: Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

Wow. Where do I even start with fandom?

Fandom changed the course of my life, for the better.

Fandom was how I, a sheltered teen growing up in a conservative country, encountered gay couples for the first time, when shipper drama had me fleeing to the slash side of HP fandom.

senmut and

ilyena_sylph introduced me to poly couples with Happy’Verse, and I’m still friends with both of them to this day. The very kind encouragement of the folks in the World’s Finest Superbat comm gave me the courage to publish my own fic, first Harry Potter and then Superbat. And then Numb3rs fandom (and specifically numb3rs100 and its weekly prompts) taught me how to write. And then my beloved co-writers taught me how to write things longer than drabbles.

I’ve lost a lot of those old fannish friends, whether they moved on from a fandom or I did, or when platforms shut down. But I’ve been lucky to keep some incredibly dear ones, and make excellent new friends, too. /waves to

rhi and

draconis, among others/

Speaking of new friends, I want to talk about one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced, fandom-wise.

Numb3rs will always be the fandom of my heart. But it was never a particularly big show, and by 2022, the fandom was pretty much dead. And then someone (Hi Byrne!) wrote, and posted, an incredible story. Which inspired me to rewatch the series, and start writing again. And pull others in, too. And while Numb3rs will never be as active as it was, it’s still really cool to see the part I played in resurrecting it a little bit.

Another really awesome thing about fandom? Exchanges, and how much they’ve gotten me to push my limits. If it weren’t for exchange prompts, I would never have written To The Sticking Place, about Percy Weasley (and NOT a story I could have written in my 20s or without years of reading fic and meta). I definitely wouldn’t have been brave enough to think I could replicate Jane Austen’s style well enough to attempt thy love like a mark is stamp’d (I am a Jane/Colonel Fitzwilliam shipper to the end. Sorry, Bingles.) Or, even after shipper nonsense annoyed the fuck out of me, take on the challenge of writing The Goblin Emperor fic. Or write 10k of smut for an upcoming challenge, despite being ace.

Fandom also had me reading things I never would have encountered otherwise. Not just slash, although that's part of it. Thanks to fandom, I discovered drabbles, my beloved random fact fics, fic in the form of in-universe documents or meta, and a whole host of other things. I found writers who put the pros to shame, fics that made me gasp at the brilliance of their creators. I can safely say that reading fic has been an education, as much in what I should strive for as what not to do.

Fandom also helped me reclaim my identity. When Numb3rs first aired from 2005-2010, I explained away some of the egregious errors in the show’s depiction of Amita (who was a Tamil American character played by a very westernized half-German actress) by making her half-Rajasthani. (It still didn’t fix everything, but it was better than nothing). When I returned to writing Numb3rs in 2022, I made a decision. Amita would be 100% Tamil Brahmin, and that would be enough.

Never mind that Hollywood thinks all Indians speak Hindi, love Bollywood, and subsist on naan and butter chicken. Never mind neither the showrunners nor the actress bothered to give Amita a defined backstory until s4, and even then, they chose the most goatfucking stupid way of going about it possible. I would write Amita as she should have been written, like the second-generation Tamil American daughter of immigrant parents with a connection to the old country the show said she was while failing utterly to depict it accurately.

That conviction led to me writing saaptiya and 25 Random Facts About Amita Ramanujan, two fics I’m incredibly proud of, with the support and encouragement of non-Desi friends. And in doing so, I healed a wound that I never realized had been hurting me for nearly two decades.

So yeah. Thank you, fandom. For everything.

pensnest

The world is still white, and likely to remain so. It's going to be -5C tonight, which has not happened for a *very* long time, and our heat pump is working hard! And the house is pleasantly warm. Sable has taken to sleeping on the beanbag in Beast's study, with her head next to the radiator. I have thoughtfully provided her with a fleece-lined sleeping sack, but she has spurned it. Sigh.

Snowflake Challenge #3: a Love Letter to Fandom. I refer you to my previous answer here.

swingandswirl

Ganked from

muccamukk.

01. Grab the nearest book.

02. Turn to page 126

03. The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

So the closest book to me was Indian Christmas: Essays | Memories | Hymns, about how the nearly 30 million Christians in India celebrate the festival.

Sentence #6 on page 126 is from the chapter 'Did Your First Christmas Cake Come Out Of An Ammunition Box, Too?' by Estherine Kine.

Mrs Tanquist baked her cakes in a big mud oven, but her students ingeniously used ammunition boxes after the men discovered they were airtight and preserved head very well.

So for context, cooking on gas ranges rather than wood- or kerosene-fired stoves only came to India in 1965, and even then, it was limited to larger urban areas. Electric ovens came even later - my mother, born in 1961, has stories of my grandma baking cakes in a 'sand oven' - a large pot filled with sand that was heated over a flame, functioning as a sort of bain-marie. Even now, gas is standard in any home that can afford it rather than wood or kerosene. Electric stoves are not common, or are used as a sort of secondary cooking device, since power cuts are pretty common even in big cities.

The ammunition boxes mentioned were left by British troops when they quit the subcontinent in 1947. Mrs Tanquist, the wife of a missionary, taught the author's mother and her friends how to bake Christmas cakes, among other things.

Given the state of the world around us, let's hope this sentence heralds a transition to peace after years of conflict. We can hope, right?

(For my own sanity, I am choosing not to delve into RL politics on DW. Let's keep it that way in the comments, please.)

coprime

It's always hard for me to judge my podficcing efforts, so looking back on what I've done this year is interesting. For some basic stats, I posted 32 audioworks to AO3 in 2025, and my podfic spreadsheet says I made 17.5 hours of audio. Of those 32 works, 13 were of my own fics & 4 were collaborations of some sort. Most of the pods for fics by other people were done for either Voiceteam or Voiceteam Mystery Box (the two podfic-centric events I participated in last year), which I knew but it's sort of startling to look back ad see.

The majority of my podficcing efforts that weren't either my fics or VT/VTMB focused on long pods! I actually at first forgot that I finished my first long pod, I Thought You Were Blind, in June. But I'm super proud of what I did! 9.5 hours longs, and I kept up a weekly posting schedule for almost a year to get it complete. (Archive.org going down sometimes prevented me from updating.) I feel like I really managed to find a rhythm with my workflow with this pod—because I knew what I was doing next and also had a reason to record regularly, I think it really helped me to find how I like to do things.

It was in the spring while working on this pod that I switched to a true punch-and-roll style for recording, and oh man I love it. I don't think my current work flow would have worked for me before, I needed to go through growth in getting more comfortable speaking before I could get confident with doing a take and moving on. But I am so, so glad I finally looked into how to do punch-and-roll in GarageBand because it makes podding so much more enjoyable for me. I just get the fun of reading and don't have to agonize over which take anymore!

Doing ITYWB also taught me that I enjoying doing long pods. The uploading process is soooo much simpler when I'm just updating in a couple places and not having to start new to make new posts constantly. Which explains why the majority of my other-people's-fics pods are for events, because I spent the year working on 3 pods I considered long pods: ITYWB (9.5 hours), Epistaxis Anime (3.5 hours), and The Place You Call Home (1.25 hours). And I've got my next 3 long pods chosen, and I'm looking forward to getting into them. ^^

I don't entirely know where I'm going with this. I learned a lot about how I like to make podfics and about my own style this past year. I sort of feel like I haven't done a lot, when I look at posting different works, but then I look at my long pods and I'm really happy about what I've done. I'm hoping in 2026 to continue my momentum and not being afraid to try new things if I think they look fun. It might be nice to do some more random, shorter pods, but I can't say whether or not that will happen. I want to try to pod according to my whims, with whatever looks fun to do in the moment!

alias_sqbr

Spirit City Lofi Sessions is a productivity game but I'm including it anyway :P

Actual puzzle games: Strange Antiquities, Mega Mosaic, Botany Manor, Logiart Grimoire, The Roottrees are Dead
( Read more... )

pensnest

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

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

Well, this is fun!

As it's loosely defined as 'pets of fandom' I won't go into raptures about my first dog, strictly my family's first dog, but she was wonderful. She was half Rhodesian Ridgeback and half Red Setter, which may ring a faint bell for assiduous readers of my stories.

My first pet, strictly speaking, was my daughter's pet, but Bun was only nine when we got kitten Socks, and Socks ended up more my cat because, well, there I was, and unlike my Beast, I was happy to have her on my lap. Incidentally, Socks took the leading role in my podfic of Let The Cat Out Of The Bag, written by lizibabes and produced for the Pod_Together Challenge in 2013.

Socks lived to the grand age of 19, and then for a while we were petless, but after moving to a new city and having copious building work done, we adopted Princess Fluffykins and Sable, sisters, the former of whom was a very beautiful beige tabby, the latter a void. Sadly, we lost the Princess, who was too confident for her own good and used to cross the road to maraud in the park, and, well. Sable remains with us, a plush, soft little cat, barrel-shaped but mostly fur, with her own quirks. She is a knee cat, rather than a lap cat, and will nestle between Beast and me when we watch telly, or between my knees when I am on the sofa alone.

It was hard to decide which pet icon to use, as I have several, but the eventual choice is Socks.

*

My early days in fandom occasionally also featured a cat, as I was brought into fic fandom by Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Data has one. There were at least three cats which starred as Spot. I attempted to explain their differing appearances in this story, Qualicative Assessment. And much later, I wrote An Odd State of Flux, set shortly after Data was kidnapped from the Enterprise by Kivas Fajo in The Most Toys. Spot helps him to recover. Rather fond of this one.

When I moved on to my beloved Popslash, however, it was generally about dogs. My sparkly dancing boys (Nsync, and a bit Backstreet Boys), canonically owned dogs. I'm grateful to them!

But there were others, and as I went through my index I found rather more unusual pets than I had initially remembered. Ferrets and dragons, for example. Oh, and this one, somewhere between a pet and a, hmm, baby: Justin Junior. In this story, there is a magical slash fairy godpiglet. (It's popslash, okay? Slash fairy godpiglets are entirely normal. I'm surprised there weren't more of them.) And a dog, too, eventually.

So, anyway, dogs.

In Cat Chris has an Entirely Canonical Dog (although this is an AU), and AJ seems to have acquired a cat.
My first Lance Bass/Adam Lambert story includes Lance's two Entirely Canonical Dogs. Bouquet.
In The Pussycat and Porcupine, JC acquires a cat, and Lance, two dogs. I'm sorry to have to report that nobody acquires an actual porcupine.
In The First Step Lance is walking his ECDs when he meets an unusual stranger, who knows them.
I wrote two versions of Wanna Tell Me About It? , but it is the revised (and much longer) version in which Lance and Adam get non-canonical dogs (eventually).
The dogs in Dragon Country are canon-based, but this is an AU. There is a scene of rape and violence in this story, so if you decide to read it, be warned.
And I think my final effort is Jamie, written for the final Make The Yuletide Gay challenge and featuring the adoption of a very cute little dog who was tenuously based in canon but not entirely. Pet adoption is a heartwarming thing to put in a Christmas gift story, yes? Happily for me, My Adored Lance spent quite a while advertising dogs on behalf of a pet shelter.

pensnest

I did just squeak in before the reveal with yesterday's recs, happily. Not that it matters, because there are so many authors around for Yuletide, and I maybe recognise a handful of names—I doubt I'd go looking for Writer X's Stuff. Anyway, I hope you all had a chance to read through whatever may have caught your eye.

My story was With What Intense Desire, a Mansfield Park fic which changes the end of the story so that Fanny goes home earlier from Portsmouth, and gets to listen to Edmund whingeing about Mary in person instead of reading his letters.

My recipient wanted Fanny to be happy, and my conclusion from re-reading was that Fanny's truest source of happiness is being at Mansfield, at Home, in fact, so that is what I gave her. I may not have been quite heavy-handed enough, as nobody in the comments said they were glad to see her becoming the mistress of Mansfield Park, but there it is. It was fun to do, mostly because I was able to adjust Fanny a wee bit so that she gets more impatient with Edmund, which I do myself.

The title is from a quote in Chapter 45, "With what intense desire she wants her home," from Cowper.

So, that's Yuletide done for another year!

*

Snowflake Challenge 2026, challenge no. 1: The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

I seem to have introduced myself many, many times, as I've been doing an online journal since I joined LiveJournal in 2005, and have (I think) done at least some of the Snowflake Challenge every year since it began.

So rather than reiterate how I came to be a fanfic-fandom person, I'm going to send anyone who's interested to the Snowflake 2022 post I made, in which I introduce myself via some posts. A selection of my posts, rather than a(nother) post About Me. The first is a love letter to fandom; the second mourns the death of a creative idol of mine (Stephen Sondheim) and also mourns the country I wish I lived in. The third is about death, though possibly a bit less miserable than that sounds. And there's a bonus fourth, to cheer you up a bit—a really unhelpful phonetic alphabet. As a collection, I think they give quite a good idea of Me, though I'm not usually quite so death-focused.

What do I want from Snowflake this year? I'm not sure. Some entertainment, maybe the discovery of a couple of new people to interact with? As much as anything, I have the feeling that this is a little burgeoning of posts, and I would like to be part of that.

What do I want from DreamWidth this year? Hmm. I'd like to put in a bit of the energy that I've been frivolling away on Reddit lately—although on Reddit I am somewhat more astringent and wit-focused, I think, than I am in this my own space. I hope there will be more discussion of Stuff I'm Interested In, whether that may be barbershop or fandom in general and the changes it has undergone of late, or the pleasure-pain of writing, or what to wear to dance at my daughter's wedding, and more. We shall see.

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Fandom talks meta

Member Posts

Snowflake Challenge Day 4

Never underestimate the power of spite, y'all.

you make my heart go giddy up

Media and Power: 01 Unit 1: Construction of Meaning: Picture Composition

Media and Power: Masterlist

Fandom Snowflake Day 3

as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes

New Years Book Meme

My 2025 Podficcing

Some Puzzle-y Games I Have Played Lately

Snowflake Challenge #2

Snowflake Challenge #1

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August 2012

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