Last Snowflake! Look I made it to the end, we aren't even two weeks late.

The last day of Snowflake was to set yourself a challenge.

I will admit: I've spent the last several years not challenging myself really. (Like. I did some challenging stuff! But the personal goals I set for myself lately have been more like "survive till next month.")

Also, I was summonsed to a federal grand jury, which means a weekly commitment for 18 months if I was empaneled, so I didn't want to plan much before I knew if that was happening. But then jury selection got delayed twice for covid, until they finally had it this week! And I was selected as an alternate. Alternate #1. Which, in federal grand jury terms, basically means I *still* don't have a clue what it's going to do with schedule - I will be called in to start if someone else drops out, and the clerk seemed pretty confident that at least one person would, but who knows when? Could be next week, could be next Thanksgiving.

I'm feeling a little bit more resilient lately though! Which maybe just means I'm riding for a fall. But as a result I have actually signed myself on for some things this year, jury or no jury.

First and foremost, from my start-of-year goals:
1. Get the apartment ready for a cat
2. Get a cat

And then I have actually signed on for:

cookbook_challenge, where I said I would cook at least one new thing from one of my recipe books once a month, which should be easy because in theory I've been doing that once a week, except I have really backslid on that in the new year. (In my defense, it's hard to cook new recipes when you're trying to avoid the grocery store 'cause it's a plague pit. And when I'm trying to find stuff to use the ingredients I have, it's so much easier to google it. But I will be making clam chowder tomorrow using more or less recipes I found in my books. So it's a start.)

crack_the_wip, where I signed on for finishing one wip by the first week of April, which really *should* be doable, given I went through my WIP files and pull out 50 files of things where I both still care about them and know what I want to write. (Granted half of them went into the "if finished, will be the longest thing I have ever finished" pile, but that still leaves 25!!)

I'm also signed on for the Digress-a-thon challenge, for which I was hoping to finish an old LM fic, although as I'm seeing stuff other people are posting I'm wondering if I misunderstood the idea fundamentally, but oh well, I'm still going to try to finish that fic anyway! (lots of stuff about sewers and municipal water supplies. At least that was the plan, I somehow ended up digressing from my digression last time I worked on it.)

I also started a weather-tracking cross-stitch project - it's going to be a bookshelf where every book is colored for the high temperature of the day, and is the height of the temperature swing for the day, and the embellishments encode precipitation. Each month is a shelf. This commits me to about 10-25 stitches a day, which is just enough to seem worth pulling the project out but few enough that I can do it every night. (So far I haven't missed more than two days in a row, and it's easy to catch up.) I'm also trying to post to track progress (and other crafting stuff) every month when I finish a shelf, on the needlearts group on Ravelry. It's been really good at giving me that little 'you accomplished something!' boost every day, even bad days.

The read-and-review-your-comics idea has been postponed until after Daylight Savings starts. It's just too dark when I get home for me to be excited about reading things that I want to see colors and art details on. But hopefully to restart over the summer, when it's still light after work!

And then - I dunno. I'd like to keep posting more on DW. Challenging myself to post every day does seems to result in a post at least once a week, so... victory? I do *like* posting more here and talking to you all! It's just I also like putting on stupid youtube videos or podcasts and sleeping a lot. Especially in February. There's a thing going around DW that's a femmslash questions prompt for February, maybe I'll pick that up for posting prompts now that I finished! Snowflake!

I'm back to doing a thing where I sit down at the end of every work week and make a list of things to do. It's Saturday bedtime and I have 7 out of 33 things crossed out, so which is actually farther than I usually am at this point, so go me I guess?

I'd like to do more organizing/decorating on DW. I'd like to get a bunch of other projects done. I'd like to put together a commenting bingo for people (like me) who sometimes just find it very hard to talk to people. I'd like to get my email inbox down to 0 (the oldest stuff-that-needs-action in there is from 2014.) But, you know. I probably. I probably have enough.

For Snowflake #11 I have started cleaning out my email inbox. I now have less than 300 unread messages in it! (This isn't as bad as it sounds because it gets all my DW and AO3 notifications, so a lot of time it's stuff I've already seen and replied to. It's still pretty bad though.)

I responded to missed DW comments from the past couple months, and then moved out ones I will probably not be responding to ever. (So if you got a belated comment reply from me today, that's why. And if you didn't get a comment reply from me today I have given myself amnesty and you probably won't, sorry.)

That leaves all the other assorted things I need to reply to or clear out floating to the top of the inbox. I am going to sit here tonight and work through them before bed. I am *definitely* going to do that, and not just watch Minecraft youtubers until 2 AM again. Probably definitely.

The thing is - okay the thing is, we all know that replying to emails is almost but not quite as bad as returning phone calls, but look, tonight I am full of vim, and pep, and moxie, and probably could get through them all! Many of them I have been anxiously rehearsing in my head enough that I can just dictate them onto the screen directly anyway. But. Sometimes an email is not just an email. Sometimes an email is a tacit commitment to engaging in social interactions of indefinite length and intensity. And I am bad with commitment! And also just because I had the vim and moxie to reply tonight doesn't mean I will when you reply to me tomorrow or next week! So I should just not get anyone's hopes up. Right?

Well, I have bribed myself by leaving the comment notification for the new chapter of It Seems the Hills and Rivers Have Been Waiting at the top. I can at least get through that.

I didn't really know what to do with this one, because: emotions? connected to memories? Look I'm lucky enough to be able to connect an emotion to the present ok. Plus - and this has tripped me up before with prompts like this - I feel like most people expect a "favorite memory" to be a thing that you enjoyed while it was happening, but the emotions I have connected to remembering a thing aren't necessarily the same emotions I felt while experiencing a thing? So one memory that sticks is the teacher in fifth grade telling me "the assignment said to write about a good memory, but these are all about times you cried and were sad!" Well yeah, the day I had wasn't fun but the memory I made out of it is, what don't you understand?

(Not to say that I don't also have terrible memories of terrible days when bad things happened and I was sad. But I also have memories of good days when I was happy that are bad memories because of what they're connected to. And when I'm prompted for a "favorite memory" good days that I have good memories of are never the first things I come up with.)

Anyway! That's way off topic so let's just say this prompt is hard, which is why it's one I got stuck on, so here's something that doesn't really fit the prompt, but I had it on my mind, and it's about imperialism, avoidable tragedy, death, rotting ice mummies, and cannibalism, all the sort of things that immediately come to mind when somebody asks me for good memories.

Four reasons I know more than anybody ever should about the lost Franklin Expedition (and one reason I don't.)

1. When I was in elementary school, there was an annual event where the Girl Scouts got to have a campout in the big science museum, and the year I was old enough, I went and I was very excited! As you would be. Unfortunately, when it came time to lay out our bedrolls, the room with the neato physics deelybobbers and thingamajics was already claimed, and so was the room with the models of the Solar System, and the one with the gorgeous math sculptures demonstrating topology and tesseracts, and the one with the jellyfish. So we ended up in the room with the exhibit on mummies. No, this was not the ideal place for a bunch of nine-year-old girls to try to sleep. On the plus side I don't remember any actual mummies. On the other hand, it was one of those exhibits that was mostly giant backlit signs on the walls, and they stayed lit all night. Specifically, I was positioned so as to spend the entire night looking at a blown-up backlit image of one of the Beechey Island ice mummies (Do not google for those photos! Please! it was the one of William Braine that's on Mummipedia I recognized it immediately) alongside text about how the expedition had gone mad with mercury poisoning and then eaten each other.
   
   I didn't sleep that night.


2. Reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture


3. Several of my friends from the heady days of post-movie Les Miserables fandom have spent several years deep in the fandom of AMC's The Terror. This kind of makes sense, if you were in Les Mis fandom because it was a historical costume drama about a bunch of attractive people forced by circumstance into bad choices who all die tragically in the end. (That wasn't why I was in Les Mis fandom.) Weirdly I don't think any of them were even aware of the dS connection and nobody active in that fandom on Tumblr seems to even know who Stan Rogers is??
   
   As a result while I was never particularly interested in watching the show, too much horror in the wrong way for me, I am in fact all in for terrebus-fc fandom (which is one of the only reasons I was able to follow what's going on in Ted Lasso fic.)


4. One of my non-DW fandom friends has a long-standing interest in the Franklin expedition - unrelated, as far as I can tell, to either childhood trauma or dueSouth fandom. I think it might have started with her picking up Lady Franklin's Revenge on a whim? Anyway, she reads all the books that come out and follows the archeology news, and since I was possibly the first other person she mentioned it to who had any idea what she was on about, I am her Talking About The Franklin Expedition person. (Yes, she knows about the childhood trauma, it's fine.) In return she puts up with me telling her all about the lost apocryphal Mallory/Irvine photos, the mysteries of Green Boots, and the Rainbow Valley, so it works out.


5. Here's the thing though: Shackleton and Amundsen were both immeasurably cooler. Scott's expedition was more tragic and everything Vilhjalmur Stefansson did more entertainingly shambolic, not to mention those guys with the hot air balloon for sheer ridiculousness, or Matthew Henson and his crew for a complicated story of heroism, imperialism, and race. And if what you want is ice mummies, unsolved mysteries, and Englishmen dying with a stiff upper lip for an abstract ideal of exploration and honor, let me tell you about Mallory and Irvine.
   Okay, admittedly none of those have the "going mad with mercury poisoning and then eating each other" aspect, but I think the childhood trauma has ruined that for me, and the mercury poisoning probably didn't happen anyway.
   
   I think the most interesting thing about the Franklin expedition - and it's one of the things that fascinates my friend - is that it's still interesting. The lost expedition, and Lady Franklin's dogged attempts to keep it unforgotten, gripped the public imagination in a different way than any of the others firmly enough it keeps bobbing back up to the public consciousness in odd new ways every decade or so. It's a pointless tragic disaster that's always had a fandom, and that's so strange and uncomfortable and interesting.

Well, "post every day" didn't go super well for January, but it did go better than the previous month?

snowflake_challenge is over except for the wrap-up friending meme, but I guess I'm going to try to keep going on the ones I missed (I wasn't doing it right anyway.)

Challenge #12 was to do a recast. I would need to be less faceblind and a lot more visually oriented and interested in celebrities to do this well, but once in awhile I to stumble on a perfect casting for someone, and luckily I did that relatively recently!

So here's a cast list for Harrow the Ninth (I wanted to do Gideon, but you very quickly run into a severe lack of female options for the cast; Harrow is therefore slightly more doable.)


John Gaius, the Emperor Undying, Necrolord Prime: Kermit the Frog
The Body/Cytherea's corpse (dual role): Miss Piggy (Also playing Commander Wake if needed for flashbacks, in a red wig.)

Augustine the First, First Saint to Serve the King Undying: Rizzo the Rat
Mercymorn the First, Second Saint to Serve the King Undying: Uncle Deadly (or possibly an Uncle Deadly relation done all in peach fuzz, but I think Deadly could pull it off.)
�̸̨͔̙͍̃�̴̨̝̞̜̲̎̀͊̅̚͝�̴̢̭̲̘̖͈̈̌̒̀͐̂̉͠�̵̝͉͈̻̊͒̄�̴͓̤͓̈́̕̕ the First, Third Saint to Serve the King Undying: Scooter I forgot we had worked this out in the discord. Not Scooter. Played by Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, only occasionally he starts talking in MEEP MEEPs and everybody pretends not to notice.
(sorry)

Camilla the Fifth: Camilla
Palamedes Sextus: Gonzo the Great
Judith Deuteros: A female relative of Sam the American Eagle
Coronabeth Tridentarius: Janice

I think I would want to cast Harrow and Ianthe as young, relatively unknown actresses, preferably Maori and Pakeha, the only non-Muppets in the 'real world' scenes - having them be the only human characters would point up how isolating and dissociating their circumstances are (and I think it's important to cast Ianthe that way too, because Harrow/the camera sees her as way more together and on top of things than Harrow, but she is also thrown into a situation she isn't really ready to handle. Also neither of them can be classically Hollywood beautiful, which leaves out most star actresses who are young enough.)

All the characters in Harrow's dream bubble are also played by humans even if they were Muppets in the first movie, but I leave that casting up to the rest of you.

snowflake_challenge #8 was a personal win from last year.

My win was that I challenged myself to post recs sets for 100 different enemy ships in 100 days, and it may have taken more like 120 days, but I did it!!

And I even tagged them all (as of today) so now I can link to the tag to show off: 100+days+of+enemy+recs

Somewhere I do have a whole list of follow-ups I wanted to do:
-stats about what kind of ships I rec'd, what kind of canons I rec'd, where the fic was hosted, how much total fic I rec'd, etc.
-How well I followed the rules I stated at the beginning of the challenge
-things I learned/advice on how to find old fic you remember but don't remember where and how to do small themed recsets
-list of enemyfic tropes people should write
-bookmark it all to AO3
-DL the stuff I want to make sure I have copies of
-proofread and regularize the posts
-leave comments for all the authors
-bookmark it all to pinboard
--etc

The only one I have accomplished is to tag all the posts. But at least I did that one!

Today's snowflake is a visual scavenger hunt! I decided to make it harder by attempting to stick to recent stuff already on my phone.

1. a fannish item
   

( Read more... )

The next Snowflake I need to catch up on is to rec something. So have some catch-up with two new enemyship fandoms I discovered


Johnny/The Devil

The song The Devil Went Down To Georgia is a perennial yuletide fandom. I went through and read a bunch of them this month. (January is a good month for deals with the devil.) Here's my favorite.

• A Cornstalk Fiddle (32602 words) by notbecauseofvictories
  Chapters: 3/3
  Fandom: Devil Went Down to Georgia (Song)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: The Devil/Johnny (Devil Went Down to Georgia)
  Additional Tags: Music, Americana, Deal with a Devil, Body Horror, Theology, Souls, Bluegrass, Blues, Prophetic Dreams
  Series: Part 1 of The Devil Went Down to Georgia (And Then Went Down on Johnny)
  
  In which Johnny tempts the Devil into singing bluegrass instead of the blues

Ted Lasso

I don't know what Ted Lasso canon is doing that the top two 'ships are two middle-aged single fathers with fundamentally oppositional jobs; and the story of a man subbing for his ex-girlfriend and her new man, who he though hated him; but I hope it continues.

(Honestly I just don't know Ted Lasso canon. I this week learned, after reading over a third of the fic with him, that Trent Crimm is not in fact canonically gay? Next I'll find out that the "Ted Lasso Canonically Has A Huge Dick" tag is a lie.)

• Saltwater Ballads (37294 words) by Nanoochka
  Fandom: Ted Lasso (TV)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Trent Crimm/Ted Lasso
  Additional Tags: Post-Season/Series 02, Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, Sexuality Crisis, Ted Lasso Spoilers, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Dom/sub Undertones, Sexual Tension, Sex Mishaps, Humor, Porn with Feelings, Ted Lasso canonically has a huge dick, Accidental Dating
  
  Ted and Trent casually go out for an intimate dinner together. As you do.


• our bodies touch and the angels cry (19213 words) by lennynards
  Fandom: Ted Lasso (TV)
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Keeley Jones/Roy Kent/Jamie Tartt
  Additional Tags: proximity bond, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Jane Payne is a menace to society
  Summary:

  
  Roy and Jamie drink the special bonding tea that means they have to be constantly touching or they're in excruciating pain. Oops.

Today's Snowflake challenge was to make something! I did think really hard about finishing a WIP fic, but instead I made a Minecraft skin!



This is based on a really old OC of mine, Pirr, who spent most of her time doing minecraft-y stuff (running around a post-apocalyptic wasteland, making friends, engaging in improbable feats of athleticism.)

Here we are hanging on my home desert island with one of the tame sea turtles:




And here we are relaxing in the underwater spa during a rainstorm, working on our spinning.

I think I need to work on her face, she looks awfully grumpy.

I also attempted to make an Arha skin, in case I ever get confident enough to actually try to start building the Place of the Tombs (I got distracted levelling up my armor and tools since I'm going to have to mine a LOT of obsidian), but I think I need to work on skin tones more, there's "sallow and wearing unflattering rusty black" and then there's... what I got.)

Thing I currently really wish either already existed or I had the skills to make:

The "Crowley saunters vaguely downward" version of the Horse Plinko meme.

This is the one for all the stuff I said wasn't right for the wishlist, isn't it? all the "I wish I could" and "I wish I had".

It does phrase it as "I wish I had the time/talent/energy to do the thing" and I'm going to lean away from that, because, honestly, I don't. I spend most of my evenings after work lately sitting under a warm blanket not doing much at all, and that's okay. I could rearrange my time and energy budget to use every last minute and every last spoon on 'being productive', if I really wanted to - I have, in the past, for stretches of a few months at least. (I even went on an extreme polyphasic sleep schedule for a few weeks once, two hours of sleep a day instead of ten - and it worked, I wasn't sleep-deprived, but also it was too much time in the day.) What I find is that I don't really like being the kind of person who has the energy and drive to be doing all the things all the time? It sounds exhausting and honestly not very much fun. Besides, if everybody spends all their time being productive there's nobody left to properly enjoy the things we're all making and doing for each other.

But that doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of things I wistfully wish I could do while still being a generally unambitious, lazy slacker.

I noticed that probably 90% of the snowflakes posts today include "I wish I could make this vid." Clearly there is a market for vids on demand!

Mine is still always first and mostest Doctor/Master to Paradise By The Dashboard Light. It would be such an amazing Lord King Bad Vid. "We got married as dumb kids and now we're stuck with each other until the end of time so I am going to do my best to hasten the end of time, but also I think I love you and we also have an inappropriate relationship with our vehicles and also the whole thing is just an extended sex scene even if it's never explicit" is just so 100% them. And you use the cricket game from Black Dahlia, totally non-sequitur, for the entire baseball sequence. And so much TARDIS porn. And shots of various people in Time Lord-level clothing showing an elbow or ankle for all the "barely seventeen and barely dressed" lines. I think you might have to do something clever with each set of regenerations looking back at the previous ones as the stupid kids they used to be. I will never, ever be the person who could do this, because even if I magically acquired vidding skill I will never be the person with the kind of brain that can pull footage from 700+ hours of canon, but, I still wish.

Also I would like to have finished even the tiniest fraction of the stories and art I've dreamed of.

Most of all though - and this one might actually happen someday - I would like to write at least one long, stereotypical, ordinary tropey romance fic of the kind I constantly read. The kind of thing that people are thinking of when they complain about how all fanfic is the same and there's too much of that? That kind of fic. I love reading them, the closest I have come to finishing one is If The Ever Put A Bullet Through Your Brain, I'll Complain but it's not even 20000 words and also the main character barely even interacts with the main love interest. I want to be able to go all in.

(Mind you, I say stereotypical, ordinary, but the kind of stuff I want to write is still stuff like ( Read more... )

Anyway. One of those. The ability to finish one ~50000-ish word fic like that. Would be nice. If only to pay forward all the many, many ones I have read.

I want to do all the indexing and tagging I said I'd do for last years' recs project. And all the other things I've said I'd do and let slide that still weigh on my mind and my to-do lists.

Also I would like to have updated my DW theme sometime in the past ten years. And to be able to code well enough to scrape my AO3 history. And to have the energy to run even a few of the communities I'd like to see on AO3 with even a fraction of the effort I'd need to do them justice, and to do a better job with what I've got. To be more active with OTW - not just actually keeping up with Tag Wrangling better, but also advocate harder for the changes I'd like to see, instead of just whining in comment threads sometimes. To be a better fandom friend - to comment more, to be better about replying and following up, to beta and alpha read, to keep up with people better, to never screw up and ruin relationships anymore, to do more to reach out and help and to let people in.

But mostly, I want to have made that Doctor Who vid.

Snowflake today is about making a fandom wishlist, and I had a little trouble with it, mostly because? Fandom is being pretty good to me right now! I can find plenty of the things I want from it. Fandom ♥

So most of the things I can come up with for a fannish wishlist are more "I wish I was better at dealing with that" or "I wish I had the skill/time/attention to make that", and that's not really the spirit of this prompt.

But I thought about it and threw together some wistful "if only" thoughts I've had lately.

1. More posts to fictional_fans!
2. Any fills for my fanart requests from Wrapping Paper this year
3. Some kind of resolution - or at least acknowledgement - on the whole "Fanlore editors are reposting other fans' works in whole to Fanlore without permission or notification and ignoring fans' attempts to control archiving of their works". It is really bad to have AO3, which is so strongly in favor of making sure everyone who wants to can control who sees their fanworks and when and where, and Fanlore actively working against that in the same org.
4. A way to easily download my whole AO3 reading history to a spreadsheet, since the app from last year is still down and I still don't understand logins well enough to scrape it myself.
5. Some kind of gathering place for fannish types to talk about coding. Like, most of these I've seen are aimed at specific projects, or ancillary to other projects, and I have neither the skill nor focus to feel like I belong there. Is there like a discord for people who want to be able to talk about stuff like throwing together bookmarklets and javascript toys for fandom, or running their own fansite or forum or wiki, all the way up to way more complicated stuff.
6. A fic where you know who your soulmate is the first time you touch them (or see them, or talk to them, or whatever.) Some people will never meet a soulmate, some people have only one, some have a few or a dozen. You though you didn't have one until you heard some friends talking about how it felt to meet theirs and realized that was just what you'd felt every time you met a new person your whole life???
7. Some kind of place where you can just throw out prompts and you don't care what fandom/pairing they are written in. Like Bulletproof Exchange is running now, where you write prompts but the filler can fill with any fandom or pairing? Like that but not an exchange because I'm too tired to do more exchanges. A kinkmeme maybe, if if could be active enough to actually get fills!
8. Somewhere I can play multiplayer Minecraft with other older fans! I have never played multiplayer and I'd love to and there's so much potential to make fannish stuff in it, but I don't really want to dive into the wider Minecraft community.
9. Fanfic recs from people on dreamwidth! Especially aimed at people who may not be super into the fandom, but it's just so good. (Also, more dreamwidth people to link their own fic on their dreamwidths, I don't use AO3 subscriptions heavily and I am always shocked at end-of-year roundups where I'm like, wait, they posted fic this year? Also I just miss the days when my reading list would be chock-full of good fic every day.)
10. I miss in-person fan meetups. I never even went to that many but I want to be in a world where it feels possible again.

Snowflake Day 3 is about AUs and fusions, so I just want to say:

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, came to Canaan House with a Pokemon team of:

1. Cubone
2. Duskull
3. Shellder
4. Snorunt
5. Spiritomb
6. Galarian Corsola

Usually, upon becoming a Lyctor, a Necromancer's Pokemon team all evolve to their final forms. Which would have given Harrow the Ninth Saint a team of Alolan Marowak, Dusknoir, Cloyster, Froslass, Spiritomb, and Cursola. Not the strongest of teams in brute power, but that's not what Ninth Pokemon are known for, and she would've made it work.

However, she actually rolled up on the Emperor's flagship with a team consisting of:

1. Aegislash.
2-6. The five original MissingNo.

Nobody is quite sure what to make of this.

Today's Snowflake challenge was to set goals. I have already set my main goal: Get cat! There are other goals stacked behind that though (like 'finish the last bits of apartment redo so space is ready for cat'.)

Fandom-wise, I was thinking something like "keep up with snowflake challenge" or "post something to DW every day in January". I was about to go to bed without posting and do snowflake tomorrow but then realized that was a bad start to the goal!

I had also considered setting a goal of "post something to AO3 the last week of every month" - which wouldn't have to mean finish a fic, I have so many abandoned wips and ficlets and stuff - but idk, that might be too much commitment!

I also need to do a year-end crafting round-up and this year's crafting ambitions for a crafting forum I'm on, but: tomorrow! Because today I accidentally a three-hour walk outside in the snow (it was SO PRETTY, y'all. Prettiest snowstorm we've had in a decade. Every six feet was another Kinkade painting.)

We are back from a covid-careful visit to Alabama to see stellar_dust and her cat but I'm still scared to take the rapid test that's right next to me because I've had a little bit of a sore throat lately, what if I caught it anyway? (When I inevitably get omicron I want it to be sometime when I can blame it on work, please.) Happy 2022, everyone.

And I am proved correct in my prediction that I would continue to forget how to post regularly after my 100 days were up! Maybe I will attempt snowflake_challenge this year? Maybe I will actually do it?

Also I have exactly 100 comic trades shelved beside my bed, none of which I have read, so I could attempt a read-one-a-day-and-post-about-it thing, free up some shelf space and cognitive overhead and to-read list. They are all review copies that came from a friend who worked at Diamond and was literally avalanched with review copies; she no longer works there post-Covid layoffs so I actually have a chance of getting caught up on comics now! Maybe after Snowflake.

My New Year's resolution is to get a cat, which entails getting the apartment ready for a cat, and also choosing a cat to get and making a commitment. Maybe if I delay long enough one will choose me, that's how it's always worked before (also I really don't want to go tour shelters right now.) (I want one who can be like my sister's cat and clear executive function logjams by screaming at me until I get up and do stuff, but I don't know how to find that. Also one that cuddles and will walk on a leash.)

I made my Goodreads reading challenge by scrambling to add my Yuletide reading this morning! 52 books. The last few years I've started with a low number, been well over it by June, doubled it, and then read basically no books in the back half of the year, which also happened this year, although I think there were several re-reads and small books that didn't get counted, so I'm probably more comfortably over than I looked. (I really wish Goodreads handled rereads better. And reads of different editions of the same book! I read three different editions of my Yuletide canon and I still don't think I managed to get that in GR right, though at least it counted it for the challenge.) I put in 100 for next year while eyeing that shelf of trades, we'll see.

The AO3 download-your-history app has been down since November. :( I understand wanking to take it down around the period when everybody will be wanting their year-end stats, but I hope it comes back! Or somebody makes a new one! Not that it would tell me much this year, because the recs project would definitely mess up the stats. I added 132 pages to my AO3 history this year though! That's 2639 fic pages loaded this year, or an average of 7 a day.

The only fic I wrote this year was my yuletide fic. I wish I'd managed to write more on it - in particular you will just have to imagine Part 2, A Discourse on Translation, in which A. Square meets some Lines in the asylum who are so bent they are practically Polygons and various people realize they can rotate themselves through the third dimension for purposes of destroying gender essentialism, and also escaping the asylum. But writing about inverted Victorian geometry was great fun! And primeideal left a nice comment so I must not have messed up the maths too bad even if I worked too late to get a maths beta! (most of my knowledge of 4+ dimensional geometry can be credited to an 8 AM multivariable calculus course my freshman year of college, in which I learned that the way to see into the fourth dimension is to repeatedly fall asleep in your 8 AM multivariable calculus class, so this fic is dedicated to my recip and to the prof who though it was a great idea to schedule advanced freshman math at 8 am.) (Anything I did get wrong is due to A. Square not being up on the latest geometrical theory, due to being trapped in an asylum.)

A Discourse on Inversion Among The Inhabitants of Flatland (3164 words) by melannen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: The King of Pointland/A. Square
Characters: A. Square, The King of Pointland
Additional Tags: Solitary Confinement, Geometry, Solipsism, Dreams, Dream Sex, Dubious Consent, Worldbuilding, extremely nonhumanoid sex, Xeno, polygonal sex, Victorian Attitudes, Canon Nonbinary Character, it/its pronouns, sexual inversion, geometric inversion, a center point inverted to the point at infinity, hot vertex-on-vertex action, Sexuality Crisis, Non-Euclidean Geometry, sort of vore but not really it's complicated
Summary:

I should count myself a King of Infinite Space, were it not that I have bad dreams.