Snowflake Challenge 1 & 2

[got_quiet]

Happy Snowflake Challenge Season!

It's a testament to my messy first week of the year that I'm already late in doing these. Here's 1 and 2 combined.

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it. 

Hello, I'm Lea. I also go by GotQuiet in a handful of fandom spaces. My stickied post gives the general lowdown on who I am and what I post about. I find the Snowflake Challenge is a great way to meet new people on Dreamwidth, and to cultivate more frequent posting habits, which sometimes go by the wayside when I get busy or otherwise distracted. It's also fun to chat with people also taking the challenge! Sometimes it's really the only time of year that some of us interact all that much because our journals are otherwise not as aligned in interest, so now I also see it as having a chance to say a friendly hello to DW acquaintances. 

I hope everyone has a lovely January and that 2026 is at the very least better than 2025 lol.

And here's Challenge 2:

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

Hmm, here's some scattershot responses.

• Our family dog was called Luke after Luke Skywalker. I think Marty after Marty McFly was also considered.
• Best boy of gaming probably has to go to the Mabari in Dragon Age: Origins who stayed in my party through my entire first playthrough and naturally was named Luke.
• My prefered starter Pokemon is always the grass types. Bulbasaur is king. However my preference was always for Digimon and Monster Rancher. The Monster Rancher game kind of sucked, or at least I didn't really have the patience for it, but it had this novel system on the PS2 where you got new monsters by inserting random CDs into the system, and some magic calculation would result in a new monster for you. I had a decent CD collection and I fed all of it into the game lol. That's the only thing I really remember about Monster Rancher. 
• My early internet life had a large chunk dedicated to the Petz games. There were websites dedicated to "breeders" who offered custom pet files for both breeds and individual pets that you could either take for free or literally put in an adoption application for. I never had a Petz page of my own but I kept track of about a dozen of them. There is a free executable of Petz 4 available now, but it's just not the same now that I'm not 14. 
• I think the gaming environment would be vastly improved if all fishing minigames were replaced with pet raising minigames. 

Comments

[lightbird]

I love when people name their pets after Star Wars things/characters. Luke is such a sweet name for a doggo.

One of my co-workers named their dogs Yoda and Jedi (Jed for short).

[got_quiet]

I wonder if their dogs mastered the art of mind tricks the way ours did. He had us wrapped around his little paw.

One of my friends named her dog after a Star Wars character too, but she's a much bigger nerd about it than I am and I can never remember what the name is, because it's one of the offshoot properties I've never seen. I think it's something like Freja, but specifically because of a Star Wars Character.

[tropicsbear]

I think the gaming environment would be vastly improved if all fishing minigames were replaced with pet raising minigames.

Yes, please. Fishing minigames end up infuriating me because I can never get the timing right 🥲

[greetingsfrommaars]

ooh yeah i learned of the CD system in Monster Rancher recently, and i feel like i would have gotten a lot of entertainment out of that as a teenager. i don't know if i'd have had the patience for the rest of the game either though...