got_quiet

The Snowflake Challenge is over so my posts will probably drop off again. I am however in one of the rare lulls at work so I might still have time to keep posting about random stuff. We'll see. I always like the Challenge, because even though interactions can be brief and don't always lead to longer term associations, it's nice to have little chats that make this place feel a little bit more like a community, and to see what is going on outside my little bubble. A random and probably obvious observation - people have a lot of different fandoms out there! This is something I obviously know intellectually, but it's interesting to me that once I step out of the tag centered, algorithmic, build your dashboard world of tumblr and into spaces that are more for fandom at large, the stuff I'm interested in can disappear and be replaced by a bunch of stuff I've either never heard of or haven't thought of in over a decade. As someone who very rarely falls into fandoms with live actors, I forget how much of that space fandom occupies.

I picked up a couple of interesting recs from other people, so I'm putting them here to refer to later, and because maybe someone else would be interested too.

Madame Magenta (recced by shipperslist ) - A podcast that looks like it will be hilarious, if the web design is any indication. The premise also gives me Thrilling Adventure Hour vibes, which is a show I loved.

Dead Plate  (recced by bedes ) - A free VN with a cool art style and a weird premise that includes cannibalism? I am intrigued.

I'm also slowly going through the friending meme and checking out posts that others have made throughout the challenge. I figure if I would enjoy replies well after the fact, other people would too. 

I'm skipping a few Snowflake Challenges because I still don't have time for anything at all ever auuugh.

So,

Challenge 11 - Share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.
It's hard for me to pick one thing I like cause I have pretty broad tastes. I'm trying to think of bulletproof tropes, and maybe there are a few. Amnesia, alternate selves meeting, and similar "new first times" is one trope that I enjoy a lot. It's often a way for characters to see new sides of each other that may have been hidden from them, and for characters that play things close to the chest to find themselves in situations where they need to be more forthcoming, or where the politeness of not trying to investigate a relationship goes away as one character needs to understand what the circumstances of their new existence now are. I often like characters that struggle to be open about their feelings, so this is one of those mechanisms through which they can be released from that. And the idea of getting to try again, getting to meet someone again, getting to confess again, getting to apologize again, is another reason I find those sorts of stories so appealing. They can be a vehicle for a lot of catharsis.

I'm also a big fan of bad ends and tragedies, which I don't really see all that often anymore. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right fandoms! Back in Inception there were a few where the ending was suicide, and there are sometimes whump fic that hit the right spot in this regard (though they often tend to trigger a different type of satisfaction.) I have never experienced ASMR and in fact have a rage reaction to most ASMR triggers, but when I read a tragic story where everything is going to shit, people are making terrible choices and suffering for it, no matter how hard someone tries it's not going to work out, and so on, if it can get me weeping and hits the right spot, I actually experience a full-body tingling sensation that is the closest I've ever gotten to what people try to say ASMR does to them. So I love tragedies or even tearjerkers that pull out in the end and try to make a happier ending.

Also, I finally filled out the end of year survey that I usual do:

( Read more... )

Something about the rich text editor is going wild right now. Including a user link to the Snowflake Challenge was causing some massive errors.

I decided to do something for Snowflake Challenge 2 after all. Instead of giving an origin narrative which I already sort of did, I figured I'd just throw in a few random memories of my earliest relationships with media. This is almost all stuff that happened before I hit high school, lots of it was before I turned ten.

Content warning for mentions of real-life sexual abuse (not mine) in a weird context.

( Snowflake Challenge 2 )

Challenge 3

I'm sure I've changed my mind about lots of things but not much comes to mind. I've changed my mind about Blizzard as a company, but this has less to do with my re-evaluating the facts than the facts themselves changing or becoming public. I guess the biggest change in my opinions has been the merit of live action shows. When I was a kid I believed that they were inherently inferior to animated shows because the presence of an actor meant that the purity of the story was diluted by an extra layer of interpretation or something. I've matured up and now appreciate that actors are artists in their own right that can elevate a work but still generally prefer media that doesn't involve live acting.

Challenge 4
This is the New Year's Resolution Challenge.
I have no resolutions for this year. The ones I set I never meet so I'm just going to stop setting them. I am a little too trampled by 2024 to really be thinking about 2025 right now anyway. Maybe... cut down on internet fucking around still.

( Resolution Review )

So that's why my resolution this year is no resolutions. Fuck it, this is a cheat year.

Challenge #14

Try something new
I considered trying to set up a trading page for sidequest but I noped out when I saw a bunch of php  so I'm still not doing any of the TCG stuff yet, even though I like collecting pixels. Someday I'll have the energy to set something up.

Instead I just opened up the Cambio Fude that I bought in Japan and tried it out for the first time. It's actually an amazing pen. The ink flow is great and completely wasted on me, who has ass handwriting no matter the language. But I'm working on it...


Challenge #15

Fandom Snowflake Challenge's 2023 Fandom Wrapped!

Your top 5 fandoms for 2023 were:

1. Overwatch League by a long shot
2. Honkai Starrail slipped into second starting at the end of the year
3. Well behind that is probably Whyborne and Griffin just because the fandom is very small
4. Visual Novels generally, though I don't actively participate in any fandom culture around them
5. Divinity: Original Sin II ... which again, really enjoyed the game but didn't really touch the fandom.

Your top 5 fandom spaces (Discord, Twitter, etc.) in 2023 were:

1. Dreamwidth, which has been a deliberate choice. I feel like I finally accomplished feeling settled here last year.
2. Tumblr, still my favorite of the "socials"
3. Reddit, though with OWL dead my site use is dropping off a lot.
4. Twitter, because I still don't know a better place for fanart
5. Discord. I'm not active in many fandom discords but I do have friends discords that I spend a lot of time in.

The top 5 things you did to contribute to fandom in 2023 were:

1. I wrote 2 whole ficlets for fandom giftbox/trees lol.
2. A bunch of VN reviews?
3. Honestly I'm a fandom consumer, not a maker.

Your top 5 most appreciated fandom contributions were:

1. Leaving genuinely thankful and enthusiastic comments on fic?
2. Again, I'm just chilling here, I contribute by trying not to be an asshole.

Bonus questions: Your fandom personality in 2023 was:
Fanart hoarder, devourer of published m/m, r/CompetitiveOverwatch shitposter

In 2023, you discovered:
Libby is very powerful and very dangerous.

Your fandom home in 2023 was:
Still anonmemes.

 

Challenge 12 - Share a personal win


My biggest win last year was paying off my student loans. It's a morbid thing to say but it's true that that the federal response to COVID was a miraculous windfall for a lot of people who's primary source of misery was their student loans, and I was one of those people. Suspending the interest meant I didn't feel like I was on the edge of homelessness anymore and could start saving up over 1/3 more of my paycheck. And even though we didn't get any permanent forgiveness, the time bought by the interest suspension was literally all I needed to be able to make a single payment when interest returned and wipe the whole thing away. I think I saved at least 20k by being able to do this. I'm in such a better financial position right now that it isn't even funny.

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I've been popcorning the recent mess with the Hugos. The Hugos have been on my shitlist ever since a number of the people associated with them showed their asses over the Ao3 win. I may have duked it out with a few of them on File 770 back then and my takeaway in the end was that while I have never cared for awards to begin with, I disregarded the Hugos completely, in particular.

So I haven't spent much time absorbing the details of the current fuckup. There is a write up here outlining some of the many questionable datapoints in the voting, but more amusing to me is that the response by those who ostensibly represent the Hugos is just as dumb and annoying as it was a few years ago. In particular the chair of the Mark Protection Committee whining about how they just can't protect their trademark in any way, they just can't! has got me rolling.

The org is simultaneously so desperate to be respected and obeyed, and so desperate to avoid accountability and be seen as just a bunch of hapless guys who can't do shit. They can't have their cake and eat it too but they are trying real hard.

Anyway my point is I just won a Hugo and everyone else did too. Congratulations!

Challenge 9: Rec Us Your Newest Thing.

My most recent fandom thing is Baldur's Gate because I'm in the middle of it. However, it's not like that game is struggling to find its audience, and I am much more eager to get a few people into the book series I finished reading just before I started playing BG3.

If you are into M/M stories, and like the romance to support a fantasy adventure with danger, battles, interesting worldbuilding, and a variety of pairings, check out Lord of the White Hell.

( May I interest you in some M/M fantasy books? )

So if you're looking for a fun fantasy series to read I strongly recommend this one. You can find links to the books on the author's website.

Challenge 7: Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources.

Fannish Resources I Created:

The BLM Visual Novel discovery tool I started this last year for the Snowflake Challenge. I've updated it this year to include some more games (5) and added a "no preferences" option to each question. Not every game labeled as a Visual Novel offered through the BLM bundle is included (Just the ones I thought rec worthy) but there are still 31 games to choose from. So if you bought the BLM bundle in 2020 and are trying to decide what's worth playing, maybe this will help!


The Bigass Fantasyland Challenge I created a series of worldbuilding prompts for a writing challenge on Gaia Online in 2010. I've been meaning to move it to a slightly more secure place, or maybe make a little ebook out of it or something. But for today's challenge I finally finished transferring it to neocities. The formatting is eh, but it's at least a step. There are almost 500 worldbuilding prompts here. It'd like to create a randomizer, or something more extensible, but haven't prioritized this in a long time.

Fannish Resources I Use

4thewords - Definitely the #1 fandom related tool I use. It's a writing tool where you fight monsters that represent a word count goal and a time limit, and you gain things like clothes for your avatar or furniture for your home by beating the monsters. I'm on a 1136 days streak writing there. However, 99% of those words are personal journaling and writing reviews, only 1% is fanfiction or anything like that.

Librarything  - I have been using librarything to keep track of the books I own and read for about 15 years. On top of managing my own library, I catalog for the legacy library project which creates catalogs of historical figures if we have a record of what they owned. Want to know what was on Susan B. Anthony's shelves? You can just check out her account on librarything! There are also groups if you want to chat with people, and fun with stats. For example the vu et nul autre section will tell you which books you and only one other person own.

As a platform for books I like it a lot more than goodreads (I don't use goodreads) because 1: fuck Amazon, and 2: librarything has a web 1.0 vibe and is relatively disconnected from the social net. It's a great site for people who think tinkering with data is a nice evening activity.

https://randombundlegame.com/ - After the BLM Bundle came out, sifting through the hundreds of entries to find something worth trying was a real chore, so a beautiful soul created a search tool that lets you filter by many facets to actually find something in that massive pile. It has been updated to include many of the major bundles that followed after the BLM Bundle's success as well. I wouldn't be able to work through all the Visual Novels in the bundle if it weren't for this tool (and I don't understand why itch.io can't provide something native that works like this >.<).

The second snowflake Challenge is goal setting. I've already mentioned some resolutions in this post but I'll refine them here.

I have been keeping track of my time usage after 7pm for a few years now, via a chart, but this year bothered to actually add up all the little squares and create summaries of my monthly time usage. The time usage for this year looks like this:
( Click to see fancy monthly rundown. )

I didn't track days in which I was traveling or sick, so months like October for example are very meager in their totals.

The yearly resulting hour sums are:

Reading - 85
Writing- 106.4
Study - 26.5
Chores - 252
Internet - 371
Gaming - 513.75

These stats are lopsided in the wrong way imo, so what I want to do this year is concentrate on cutting my internet faffing by half to around 180 hours total, cut down my gaming total, and increase my study total to 100 hours this year.

I also want to focus a little on my health. I'm moving towards middle age and have not treated my body well as we are not friends. Plus I've felt I should be cutting down my meat intake for moral reasons mostly, but have never been able to get that to stick because it's hard to be a trash eater and a vegetarian at the same time. So I am setting up a little graph in my notebook and will record whether I do or do not eat meat each day, and the goal is to have either a positive trend in rate of vegetarian days, or to have made it to 1/5 of all days per month being purely vegetarian. I really hate cooking so this is a pain in the ass for me, but we'll see how it goes.

And my final resolutions should -- theoretically -- be the easiest one. I will be buying no books this year. The reasons why are mentioned in this post.

I didn't realize I never posted this but I had my wisdom teeth taken out on the 31st and have been very unhappy ever since, with today being the first decent day in a week so that I've gotten to enjoy food food more solid than water so yeah.

This is an interesting question because "fandom" is such a broad and diverse place. A lot of the fandom I participate in is what is sometimes called "dude fandom." It's the part that's dominated by cis het guys who get a little uncomfortable when two guys kiss and think that generally games are a test of skill and the rest is maybe a bonus. They've been debating the future of gaming for as long as gaming has been a thing. We've seen a massive sea change in the past five or six years regarding the sort of games that come out, where once DLC and cosmetic addons were considered of questionable integrity, and now everything in the AAA space seems to want to be a live service that can sell you something new every couple of weeks. A lot of old standard developers have been utterly consumed by this bullshit and are considered fallen from their pedestals for it. However, there is still a lot of innovation going on in gaming, and good games still come out with regularity. My prediction is that the AA and smaller indy games will continue to gain ground, there will be more and more space for them to be successful, and live service games will be more sidelined in the process and people realize the market there is over-saturated and the experience is not as satisfying.

That's a remarkably optimistic take but I feel like being optimistic today.

For my specific main fandom, OWL, I'm pretty much completely on the "dude" side of things as I like fic of the game characters but RPF is a squick. When the league first started I said that I thought it might last three years and if it made it past that I'd be pleasantly surprised. We're no going into year 6 so that's actually a good run. I think the upcoming season is going to be significantly more scuffed than last year though. Last year seemed to catch its feet after two years of a COIVD mess and went relatively smoothly. There are major hurdles for this year, including chaos in China, a continuing downward trend of satisfaction from the owners of franchises, the bubble on the esports economy starting to leak air, and so on and so forth, I think we're going to continue to lose talent due to the poor framework and shrinking budgets, Blizzard will still not figure out how to balance the game mid season and give us yet another chaos finals, Guangzhou will maybe make it to a tournament again, and everyone will be complaining all of the time. I can't wait.

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As far as the future of the fandom that is situated around Ao3, Tumblr, and Twitter. I donno lol. Unless Twitter crashes completely or starts censoring NSFW it will probably remain the most reliable platform for artists. AI will continue to piss everyone off, I can imagine some future scandal about someone taking commissions without divulging that they are just a prompter. People will keep trying to introduce "the first AI whatever" and other people will keep laughing at them, but I think some things will slip through. I can imagine some artists will quit or find some way to lock down their art in response to the rampant harvesting, which will be a loss for everyone.