A Fan's Playground

one

It's been about two months now of spending a bit of time working on my writing every evening at bedtime, and it continually amazes me how well it works and how much I like it. I enjoy the process of writing so much more like this! I never expected to be the kind of person with a daily writing habit; that seemed like it would never work for me and I thought people who did it were fascinatingly alien. guess I'm an alien lol!

my word count goal for each day is tiny (100-200 words) but I love to see my fic increase in size bit by bit, and to look over what I've written and see how much I like the story I'm telling

every time I stop writing for the night, it's at a point where I have no idea where I'm going next. all the next day I continue to not know, but I don't stress about it. and having so much time for my subconscious to process it between sessions of writing means that when I get back into bed for the night and open my fic to write the day's words, I'm able to figure out what to write next! and it feels so good


two

I have never gotten any tattoos before due to being afraid of needles, but I worked on that phobia and it's much less of a problem now....and I have a tattoo idea I love.

which is:

description of dinosaur-themed tattoo idea

dinosaurs are cool, right? and the scientific process is cool, and paleoart is cool! what if we take an example of a dinosaur which has gone through significant evolutions in our understanding of its appearance over time, and create line drawings of the scientifically accepted understanding of the dinosaur at two different points in the past plus our current most up to date understanding, and then line up the three versions of the dinosaur in a row on my forearm.... with space left for an even more up to date version to add onto it in the future as our understanding continues to grow

the thing is. I need to be able to get this art drawn by someone who has an art style I like, and has sufficient paleo background to know what they're doing in depicting these dinosaur variations, and is taking commissions!

I would definitely want this dinosaur to be a theropod dinosaur, one of the ones we're now sure had feathers. and I'm feeling fond of oviraptor in specific! not because it's my fave kind of dinosaur (I don't have just one fave!) but because it's particularly interesting in terms of its history in scientific misunderstandings of it, so it would be thematically resonant in this tattoo context

three

I just! am so fond of bingqiu! the way they're incapable of normal healthy emotional communication but are so crazy with respect to each other that they can yes-and each other into truly wild displays of horny possessiveness!

it's endlessly fun to play with. characters who WILL hold the idiot ball but only in extremely specific ways that nobody else could ever match. but they match each other! 🥰


four

"x character makes a different choice at a significant canon moment" is a fairly popular type of canon divergence au, and it's interesting to me to think about how it often doesn't work for me. in most contexts in a canon there's a reason the character makes the choice they did, so if the story changes their choice out of nowhere, it doesn't feel grounded in the narrative and in the character.

often these fics are about making things nicer for the characters in question because the canonical choice is ouchy, and I get why that's popular, but I usually find it boring!

Details on what I find more interesting than that

I think I'm just more interested in the question of why people make the choices they do. and less interested in "let's turn this story into straight-up fluff," though there is of course a spectrum of how much this kind of story is interested in going straight for the fluff.

I think to do this type of fic in a way I'm most likely to be into, is to write it so that there's a small but significant change BEFORE the moment of decision, which allows the situation to be just different enough that the character would make a different choice. and even then I'm more interested in exploring the things that lead up to that moment of decision, what makes the character choose what they do, how the change to canon has affected things. Ending the story with "they made the good choice" rather than beginning with it; that's the happy ending right there!

or make the fic an exploration of how you'd think that this choice would be immediate happy ending times, but actually has its own complications and problems as well.

or make it a time loop!

five

As you may or may not know, I have been a power user of online bookmarking services for nearly my entire time in fandom. I was of course on delicious back in the day, until it got altered into unusability, and then I switched to pinboard. I've been trucking along with pinboard ever since.

But I heard that the pinboard guy is a jk rowling supporter these days, and I'd been thinking about trying to leave pinboard anyway because it seems to be basically abandonware at this point. But the jkr support was the tipping point on overcoming the inertia of staying with what I know.

Extended description of my efforts and successes in setting up a self-hosted bookmark manager after finding no other good options online

I'd heard good things about raindrop.io but when I gave it a try, despite some interesting features, I ran into major problems. My biggest problems with it were 1. that it truncates all bookmark descriptions and tags after a certain length, to save space, and I use a LOT of tags and description space; and 2. that I couldn't actually get the website to let me log in on firefox. So that was a deeply disappointing result for something that had seemed promising.

I also took a look at larder.io because it looked intriguing, but it failed to import the description field from my pinboard export, so that was a nope right out of the gate!

After a bunch of reading articles and listicles about other bookmarking service options, all the other online bookmarking services I could find were even less suitable for my needs, and I was getting pretty disheartened.

But then I learned from a friend about the option of setting up Linkding on a personal website as a way to self-host bookmarks, so that you don't have to rely on a service provided by someone else anymore, and it was so exciting to think of having personal control over my own bookmarks like that! I knew I had to give it a try.

I am very glad I went down that rabbit-hole of teaching myself css earlier this year for the purpose of ao3 site skin development, because it made me feel a lot more confident in my ability to try out unfamiliar tech things, and indeed my rudimentary css knowledge was helpful in keeping me from feeling quite so lost in the process.

Linkding has particular requirements around getting it integrated into a website, so I gather this means that what I did to get it set up is playing "my first website" on hardmode. But here's what I did:

I followed the "start a website" steps at https://landchad.net/

And then the linkding instructions here: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-own-bookmark-manager-with-linkding/

It definitely involved some moments of deep confusion, but I figured it out eventually, and I'm super happy with the result! You can see my public bookmarks here: https://linkding.aviansoph.com/bookmarks/shared

Having my very own website with my very own bookmarking instance feels very "I am learning the forbidden magic" in a gleeful way tbh

But just because I have this set up does not mean I am done! For I would like to CUSTOMIZE my linkding instance!

Linkding has a built-in way to customize a user's view of it using custom CSS, but that's only for what that specific logged-in user sees, rather than changing the appearance of the public bookmarks page for visitors, so that doesn't quite accomplish what I'm wanting to do. I am investigating how to make more direct changes to my linkding instance but I'm still on shaky ground there. (if you have any useful advice, I'm all ears!!)

Also I want to do things with the rest of my website, aviansoph.com. As I mentioned above, I'm playing create-a-website on hardmode for the sake of linkding, so I can't follow most of the guides you find online for building a personal website. But it looks like if I set up an FTP server on my VPS I should be able to make a reasonable system for doing my website? I haven't had time to try this yet but we shall see!!

I can't believe it took me until my mid-thirties to become the kind of nerd who has their own website for the purposes of cataloguing information. I feel like this is one of the kinds of nerd I was destined to be all along.

I have realized recently that even though I'm not nearly as consistent at commenting on fanfic as I'd like to be, fandom norms have really shaped my approach to feedback in the physical world as well.

I firmly believe, on some deep level, that when someone has done creative work from which I am deriving benefit, the correct mode of action is to provide direct and personal feedback to the artist with details about why I like it so much. Even if I'm also providing them money!

I buy a handmade work from etsy: I leave a detailed review, obviously. I buy something from a member of the local potter's guild: gotta send that potter an email saying how much I like the mug! I buy a beautifully crafted lap quilt from a woman on facebook marketplace whose mother's hobby is quilting and nobody in the family has space for any more quilts: I squirm over having no way to contact the quiltmaker directly because I GOTTA tell her she did a great job on the quilt! (SERIOUSLY, IT'S SO NICE)

I remember when I was much younger, going to a small-venue concert for a musician I really liked, and even though I am Very Socially Awkward I made a point of going up to him afterwards to tell him how much his music meant to me. Because it's The Right Thing To Do. And I did the same thing a few years ago when I saw Ivan Coyote give a spoken word performance. Approaching the artist is not viable at larger performances, but whenever it's a small-audience thing I try to thank the artist personally.

And I feel great about all this. I think it is a net positive in the world to tell people when they done good. And I guess I just want to....thank fandom for that, for so thoroughly indoctrinating me from a young age that a good citizen of the world makes an effort to provide positive feedback to people who create.

(Making the effort is not the same as always actually succeeding of course. I continue to be a person with social anxiety and a finite number of spoons. But I'm working on extending grace to myself for the ways I don't live up to my own expectations for myself on this one.)

Oh lord, it's been five full years I've been active in online fandom. I lurked for absolute ages beforehand, but it is five years ago last month that I decided I needed to make myself a fannish LJ following the release of the Star Trek reboot, that I had lurked long enough and it was time to make my debut.

What a good decision that was! I've had such good times in fandom over the years. I have made wonderful friends, I have grown a great deal as a writer (I might moan about my current inadequacies, but I am so much better than I was five years ago), I have discovered the joy of podficcing, I have chatted and squeed and live-watched and read and written and thought and recced and participated. Fandom sustained me through some harder times; fandom was also there to be a repository of joy. I've not always been consistent about my degree of participation nor my manner of participation, but fandom has been a major part of my life the last five years and I am so grateful for it.

THANK YOU to all of you for helping make it so wonderful an experience!

OH RIGHT I was going to do posts about other books I've read lately! Here, have my thoughts about ( Among Others, by Jo Walton! )

So today I finished reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Yup, the book by the dude who wrote the article about fandom! And yup, that's why I picked it up!

( Cut for spoilers )

DUDE. Two year anniversary of being Sophia, of being an active part of fandom, of blogging my fannish thoughts regularly, of becoming more and more hopelessly polyfannish, of finding all sorts of awesome internet friends, of MANY OTHER THINGS.

This is my end of year post, since last year I started the tradition of doing it on my journal's anniversary instead of at the end of the calendar year. And a one-year-old tradition is obviously inviolable. :D

( My year in review )

Over the course of yesterday and today, I listened to the audiobook of King Of The Wind, by Marguerite Henry.* I acquired it ages ago, in the flush of my Man From UNCLE fannishness, because it is read by David McCallum. That was -- gosh, more than a year and a half ago, I think. But I never got around to listening to it until now.

I JUST finished it. And.

Reader, I cried. TWICE. Once when the queen was presenting the Plate and Agba remembered his promise to Sham and knew he had fulfilled it, and once when the explanation for the blank gravemarker is given. OH AGBA AND SHAM. THEIRLOVEISSOTRUE. ♥♥♥

I haven't read that book in probably close to 8 years, and it was fascinating to see the ways in which my perspective has changed. I still think it an unutterably fantastic book, and adore it deeply. But now I notice things like the fact that there's a character who stutters, and is portrayed rather as if the stutter is an aspect of his less than pleasant personality. Um. Problem.

But overall, it was every bit as heartwarming as I remember, though also a lot SHORTER than I remember. What's fascinating, though, is to see which bits my memory dwelt on but the book didn't, and which bits the book dwelt on but my memory didn't. There's this one bit that's dismissed with in only one line in the book, but is one of the bits that I can picture SO CLEARLY in my head that I was sure it must have been at least a page. I've never really had that experience before, because usually the books I really like I reread often enough that I never get the chance to develop these erroneous beliefs.

(Also, oh dear, I am obviously out of practice at reading books about the wildly passionately close love between a child and an animal. There were one or two moments when I couldn't help sporfling a bit over stuff fandom has trained me to see....)

ETA: I forgot to mention. David McCallum? An EXCELLENT audiobook reader. His voice is just so great. *happy sigh*



*I'm pretty sure I read every single book Marguerite Henry ever wrote, most of them at least 3 times, and the ones I OWNED? A truly astounding number of times. To have called me "horse-mad" would have been an understatement.