Snowflake Challenge 3 & 4

[got_quiet]

New Year's is kinda over, but I still want to sneak in a rec for a fun design blog, Spoon and Tamago. Every new year they do a "New Years Cards" post that shows of some cool graphic greeting cards. Here's the post for this year.

And here's the recent two Snowflake Challenges.

Challenge #3

Fandom Wishlist

Well, if we are talking about fandom genies, my go-to fandom wish is always that my favorite artists and writers always end up as enthusiastic as I am about all my rarer fandoms and pairings, but I think it would require supernatural power for this to happen.

I'm not feeling particularly covetous at the moment of writing, but I did post a  tree in Fandom Trees so that gives a pretty good idea of what sort of fandom stuff I like, in terms of creative works.

I always love being introduced to new artists! Art is still my favorite way of consuming fandom content so the fact that it's hard to find art without going to twitter nowadays really sucks! I still spend most of my fandom time on tumblr, so recs for any cool artists blogs there would be great. I love OCs and follow a lot of artists for fandoms I'm not otherwise in just because I like the art.

Oh, and recs for good m/m original fiction is always welcome. Either on Ao3/online, or published works. I tend to be lukewarm towards stuff marketed as YA but am still willing to give it a shot. Some titles I've enjoyed recently are The Tarot Sequence, Lord of the White Hell, and Whyborne and Griffin.

 

Challenge #4

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

 

Well, the first thing about myself is that I am very private and my fandom philosophy has always been that the Streams Do Not Cross. So I won't say too much about my real life, but I can say some stuff about who I am in the context of fandom.

Tl;dr because the below got a lot longer than I expected: I'm mostly just a blogger and member of the peanut gallery. I've written a few fic but mostly just like talking about stuff I like with other people and looking at nice art and reading the occasional fic. My fandoms are mostly video games, but I'm also into anime and cartoons, and sometimes fiction.

I tend to be a little nitpicky. I like complaining about things or being critical about them, but only in a well meaning way if that makes sense? I never expect others to share my views of media and don't think if something doesn't work for me it shouldn't work for anyone else. I just have a pessimistic nature I have never been able to completely tame.
 

 

The very first thing I was really fannish about was probably Pokemon, but the fandom that I really consider my first was Gargoyles, because that was the fandom that I Asked Jeeves about on the library computers, back when regular people still didn't have the internet and all the library computers were available with no time limit because no one know what special things they were yet. I printed out fanfiction I found there to read at home, and then would spend the rest of my time trying and failing to get any sort of progression in Aardwolf MUD. I was like... 9 so I had no clue honestly.

When I was in grade school my interests were mostly around Anime and Video Games. My output was back then was building websites and posting on Gaia Online, a platform I dearly miss ("I can still hear its voice sometimes"). Web forums were where I joined my first real fannish communities, and they were largely centered around art, even though I never became any good at it and largely stopped trying to draw anything after I graduated high school. I was what the kids back then called a Otaku. Now the term Weeb has superseded it, though I don't really claim that one cause my awkward stage is mostly over. Mostly.

I played a lot of Blizzard games. Diablo and Star Craft being the big ones, though I only played custom maps in SC and the solo campaigns in Diablo. I have never been a big theory crafter. I get bored quickly if I discover I have to plan out my gaming time. During my college years I effectively stopped watching Anime, and became addicted to World of Warcraft. I spent like... 50-60 hours a week playing that game for something like a decade. That game consumed all of my creative and productive time. I largely spent my time on RP serves and made many good friends. I would log in, chill out in an empty building, and serve anyone who walked in like a tavern NPC. I didn't even hit cap in Vanilla I was so busy RPing. After I quit, I went back maybe a year later and people still remembered me, andthere were people I had never met who said I had been mentioned by others, which really made me feel wonderful. But such things are ephemeral and the adventures and stories that my characters experienced are now mine and mine alone to think fondly of. When I wasn't RPing I was grinding PvP.

Shortly before I finally dropped the WoW habit for good, I found LJ fandom. I had kind of been aware of fic fandom before. I knew about fanfiction.net and had a livejournal, but shipping was not a thing I had ever really gotten into. Weirdly enough a link on the old del.icio.us bookmarking site to an Arthur/Eames fic made me go, huh?! and I looked it up and fell down the LJ fandom hole. I spent about 3 years in Inception fandom, mostly as a Arthur/Cobb shipper though I wrote a lot of A/E too, and was just sort of lucky in terms of my RL situation where I was able to write a lot during that time, so it was probably my most productive fandom.

After Inception fandom finally settled down a bit I ended up drifting back to my old mainstays of Anime and Video Games, which is where I now spend most of my time. I dabbled in MCU and Starwars (Honestly just Kylux) and stuff like that as it comes by, but they don't tend to represent permanent passions, just places where the fanart was at. I don't create all that much. Tumblr was the perfect platform for me cause I could just collect and enjoy all the stuff other people were making.

I've always been interested in game design, particularly ways in which mechanics and narrative interact, so most of the games I enjoy let me pick apart this topic. For that reason I find visual novels interesting and like playing those a bunch. But I also am a masochist and like some twitchy, skill-based games. I spent a lot of time playing Hades for example, and Overwatch was my go-to multiplayer for years. I was a big fan of the OWL and have watched every single match from the S1 preseason to this year's grand finals, at which point the league folded.

Nowadays I just play video games, read books on occasion, and when lucky enough find a random Anime or Cartoon I like.

 

 

Comments

[vriddy]

This sent me on a merry chase to figure out when "weeb" became a thing and where it came from 😂 "Otaku" was also the vaguely derogatory term of choice when I was younger, haha. Your WoW RP story is really neat :D I got unhealthily obsessed with a mediocre free MMO when I was younger so I knew to stay away from WoW (and any later MMOs) when it came out. I would be homeless probably. I don't know how to be reasonable with these games. It's so cool people still remembered you and talked about you after you left, it sounds like you made a really positive impact on that small part of the game :D

Are you playing anything at the moment, VN or otherwise? :D

[got_quiet]

I just started playing Balder's Gate 3 so that's sucking up all my time, but I've been working through all of the Visual Novels that were included in the itch.io BLM bundle 3 years ago, and I'm allllmost done with that. The one I'm working through right now is called This World Unknown, and I've been enjoying it!

[vriddy]

Oh, that's neat :D BG3 is definitely on the list of games I want to play (I loved the previous ones, especially the first!!) but I also know it will eat my life so I'm not dipping in there yet... There's also the second Breath of the Wild game I'm holding off on for similar reasons. The first one utterly consumed me and starting it needs to be planned carefully 😂 Hope you have a great time!! :D I've only heard good things about it.