Snowflake (days 12-13)

Jan. 25th, 2026 09:17 pm
hamsterwoman: (Taskmaster -- John time starts now)
[personal profile] hamsterwoman
two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #12: Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

This was a hard one! I would feel weird addressing specific individual people, and I feel like I’ve covered the general feeling of this in the “fandom love letter” post. There are a couple of specific groups I could talk about, but actually I’ve already talked about them on previous Snowflakes, [community profile] westerosorting back in 2014 (everything I wrote there is still true, except that I’ve met 2 additional people in person <3) and [community profile] westerosorting again and Best Chat (which grew out of [community profile] westerosorting) in 2022 – and the Best Chat is still going strong, with additional exciting in-person meet-ups (I have now also met [personal profile] tabacoychanel in person, after 15+ years of online friendship, got to crash at [personal profile] cafemassolit’s place in a second country, and got to live together with 80% of Best Chat for a couple of days, bash’ style) and the most amazing birthday card.

But what do I actually write about this time without it being a rehash? I liked the approach some people took of addressing this challenge to fandom resources or collections or platforms – DW, AO3, Tumblr, Reddit, TV Tropes… but I think there’s only one such thing I truly feel strongly about (you’re reading it), and that not purely as a fannish resource.

So here’s my thing: I’m going to appreciate the people who enhanced my fandom life not in fannish spaces (which I’ve written about many times), but out in the Real Life wilds )

In many cases this was a momentary interaction, or a couple of shared hours of fannishness, or a shared nod of recognition in a relationship that has nothing to do with fandom, but all of them were memorable bright spots, and all the more so for coming in unexpected places. So in addition to the wonderful fannish spaces and fannish relationships that I've been lucky enough to cultivate, I also appreciate these moments of fannish serendipity. They enhance my fandom life, too :)


Challenge #13: TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.

By this point I think the only fannish DW communities I participate in are seasonal ones like [community profile] fandomtrees, (lurking in) the Yuletide comms ([community profile] yuletide/[community profile] yuletide_admin), or [community profile] snowflake_challenge itself (which additionally are all kind of clumped together October through January and dormant the rest of the year. I can’t seem to get the hang of Discord, even for fannish things I absolutely adore, like Terra Ignota.

So really my only current continuous fannish community is r/Taskmaster – and while Reddit is not my preferred way of doing fandom AT ALL, it is a really fun comm.

What you’ll find there )

While I’m at it, let me link to a recent rec I came across through r/Taskmaster: this super fun fanart series with cartoonish headshots of contestants (so far up to s16, but the rest coming soon).

Snowflake (days 10-11)

Jan. 21st, 2026 03:36 pm
hamsterwoman: (John Robins -- larkin)
[personal profile] hamsterwoman

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a wrapped giftbox with a snowflake on the gift tag. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.


Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board) – CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

OK, I’d never made a Moodboard before, but had been sort of wanting to try it, so this was the perfect opportunity. I thought briefly about whether I should do a Taskmaster one, but I do feel like my colorbars from last year fill a similar niche, so I felt like I’d done it. Well, besides Taskmaster, I think it’s fair to say I have only one truly active fandom at the moment, so… Elis James & John Robins it was. And I might have gotten a little carried away XD

elis and john moodboard

(Let me know if this looks giant on your page and I'll add a cut -- mine seems to automatically resize it to something reasonable, but not sure how universal that is.)

Blathering )

*

Challenge #11: In your own space, grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

I really like the idea of this challenge, but don’t terribly like the idea of linking to “granted wishes”, so I won’t do that part. I’ve already granted a couple of wishes when originally browsing Challenge #5, but this was my reminder to go finish commenting on another one I’d done in my head but not actually commented on. But then I went ahead and browsed the day 5 comments some more until I granted a wish I hadn’t even looked at before. I plan to continue doing that, but with that I feel like I can call the challenge “done” for the purposes of posting about it :)

Oh, right, and I should probably link to my wishlist, shouldn’t I.
hamsterwoman: (Ghosts BBC -- Thomas)
[personal profile] hamsterwoman
[community profile] fandomtrees pulled through with reveals this weekend! I got an adorable harried spider prepping for the holidays, a lovely crop of Discworld icons from illustrations and movie adaptations, and the cozy Elis & John AU of my dreams.

I left some recs/recipes, but my creative endeavors this time around were limited to this:

[personal profile] sysann requested, among many other fun crossover ideas, a Dragaera/Ghosts UK crossover wherein the Dragaerans find themselves in Button House. Here’s what I wrote:

(If you’re not familiar with Dragaera, all you need to know is that Aliera is a particularly haughty member of a Proud Warrior Race who are en masse extremely touchy about their honor and love to fight duels about it. She is sensitive about her height and levitates to appear taller, and her normally-green eyes turn blue when she’s angry.

If you’re not familiar with Ghosts UK, all you need to know is that Thomas is the ghost of a (bad) Regency era poet, who is an oblivious romantic who died in a duel over a lady’s honor.)

Dragaera/Ghosts UK, Thomas Thorne, Aliera e’Kieron, terrible poetry )

*


Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a wrapped giftbox with a snowflake on the gift tag. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.


Challenge #9: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

I think this time around, I’ll just go with the tropes that are making my current reading – To Shape a Dragon’s Breath – such a fun and this-book-was-written-just-for-me reading experience :)

magic as science, magic school, animal companion, alt history, Sweet Polly Oliver )
hamsterwoman: (dabbler)
[personal profile] hamsterwoman
Some fannish catching up!

1) [community profile] fandomtrees still has 3 trees below the minimum number of 2 gifts, and is thus at risk of delaying reveals again (currently scheduled for Jan 17 reveals), with the decision on delaying to be made the morning of 1/17. Needy trees are mastershield's Tree (f:astro boy, f:balan wonderland, f:kingdom hearts); kalloway's Tree (f:brave nine, f:crossovers, f:fire emblem, f:granblue fantasy, f:gundam, f:kingdom of heroes, f:super robot heroes) whoremoantreatments' Tree (f:advance wars, f:bleach, f:hypnosis mic, f:kuroko no basket, f:pokemon, f:tales of berseria, f:the world ends with you). (List kept updated here.) All of these are open to fic, and the minimum fill for fic is only 100 words, if anyone knows these fandoms and can help out.

(My tree has above the minimum number of gifts but is here, and I’m eager to see what’s on it :)

2) I should’ve mentioned this earlier, but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. [personal profile] lunasariel is hosting a sync read of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath in her DW here. Currently it’s her, me, and [personal profile] cyanmnemosyne reading along, but contrary to the name, we don’t actually have to be all synched up to participate, so if (like me) you’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, or if you’ve read it already and want to follow our impressions as we make progress through it, come join! I am currently just past halfway, [personal profile] lunasariel is 10-20 chapters ahead of me, and Cyan has just recently started. (And yes, my thoughts on this book are ~50% on the chemistry. Actual Periodic Table of Elements chemistry, I mean, not chemistry between characters, although I’m enjoying that too.)

3) Snowflake catch up!

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.


The problem with doing Snowflake every year for the last, uh… 10 years, I guess? – is that for repeated questions like this, which are about ME as opposed to about my fandoms or projects or objects, which can accumulate it is much harder to come up with something new to say! Both of these questions fall under that category, and so were more challenging than most for me to answer. But let’s see if I can come up with something without repeating myself.

Challenge #7: LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

I do want to stick to fandom-related things I like about myself for this one, so, hm. Last time I answered this question seems to be in 2017 (and my things were “good fannish role model for my children”, “thorough and detailed in talking about what I’m reading/watching”, and “conscientious beta”) and the first time in 2016 (my answers were “good fannish baba/matchmaker”, "committed to fannish crack”, and “conscientious about fandom participation”) – and I do still feel those things are all applicable to me and I still like them. But I’ve done a bunch of new things in the last 9 years, from attending conventions to paying attention to the Hugos to signing up for Yuletide, so let me focus on those new things and see if I can extract three new things I like about myself fannishly from them.

things I like about myself viz conventions, fanfic, and Hugos )

Challenge #8: Talk about your creative process.

This is another one I’ve done before, in 2019 and in 2015, but looking at even the 2019 one, I talked about fannish poetry and graphics, but not about fannish prose/fanfic. So clearly that’s what I should talk about, but what IS my process?

Fanfic process )

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