Snowflake Challenge #9: The past is in the past?

[aquietjune]

I'm back. I made a commitment to this journal for the next months, but I admit I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with all the things. Sometimes everything is so incredible that I can't even understand how it can exist in this universe, with me being a witness; some other times I feel that everything is futile. I want to rewire my brain into remembering that fandom -- and many things in life -- can be done just for fun, but heh, we live here.

Challenge #9

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, time you spent in the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

One thing that regularly happens at the start of the new year is that I renounce every single thing that I've done in the past 12 months. Not necessarily because I hate those things now, but because I feel that since those things are in the past, they no longer matter, or they do not matter enough. Recency bias, I guess.

This mindset, however, hurts me in many ways--when I'm feeling down it's very easy for me not to remember any of the things I should be happy about, the things I know I can do even if I'm not doing them now, because what I learned to do is not lost, nor what I experienced.

So, let this post be a reminder of some of the things I did in 2022 that are valuable, even now. Even those things that are just "fandom" or creative things done "just for fun" (and not to open an Etsy shop or anything of the sort).

• the multi-chapter fic I'm writing is the longest and the most complex piece of fiction I've ever committed to: to write it, to plan it, to world build. No, it's not complete yet, and I gather that I'm somewhere in the middle of the first draft, but I still started writing it in 2022, working regularly on it (full immersion in the first months and now at about 1 chapter per month advancement, although right now I'm in a new planning phase). I'm worried because time is limited and sometimes motivation falters, but I still consider it a win.

• I learned how to sew tridimensional plushie toys. Highly recommended patterns & video tutorials: TSMinibears

• I had the realization that not just fandom, but the Internet as a whole cannot be lost in the sea of privately-owned social media. It's not just about having control of my data & the way I want to present them, but also of the quality of conversations and the approach to dialogue. The IndieWeb and Yesterweb movements really made me reflect on this and now I want to have a website. It's also the reason I decided to try to be on Dreamwidth. A lot of the disconnect I felt on fandom twitter is due to the lack of engagement with valuable discussions because of the search for the other type of "engagement". I want to go back to the former. (Project: go back to the good old HTML and CSS and make a website).

• About this, I participated in three fandom events and also in some RPG events and I learned that I cannot just do things to please others--that will not give me satisfaction or happiness. At most I get a burnout. Be mindful of the things I choose to occupy my (very limited) time with.

• However I also ran a fan event for a very minor character -- Mrs. Kirstein Week -- and I was amazed by the participation. Sometimes twitter fandom is also good.

• Also I took part in other RPG or RPG-related events that were meaningful, satisfying and fun.

• I've done my first cosplay this year and I did it in a group with my BFF -- I went as Anya from Spy x Family and my friend went as Yor. It was really fun and I want to do more now!

• I have published many fics last year. If I need to choose one I'm proud about, I'll go with Princess and Prince of the Great Escape, a quiet story about a first (accidental?) date between Armin and Annie (Shingeki no Kyojin). It's a story that gave me several headaches, and many scenes I've rewritten multiple times. It's not perfect, but I'm glad I managed to complete it, even if it was so difficult.

And that's it, from what I could recall. Let's see what I will make this year :)

Thanks for reading.

Comments

[enchantedsleeper]

Oof, can I jump in here and say I miss forums so much??? I've never been a big fandom socialiser so most of my forums experience was actually roleplaying with only one or two (genuinely unsure if I can remember being on a Spider-Man movieverse forum or whether I dreamt that or it was something else) fandom forums, but like. I just miss how you could lurk and get the lay of the land as much as you pleased before you joined in - Discord really doesn't make that possible, and discoverability is super hard - and that "open but closed off" feel that forums had where anyone could join but you still felt like you were in a room of like-minded people. (Not all of them *nice* people, this is still the internet, but aligned in some way). The only other place I've found that is on Mastodon (fandom.ink to be precise) but it feels like a fluke once-off more than something you can reproduce. I also miss LJ comms dearly...

[aquietjune]

I agree. I took part in forums back in the day and while it wasn't always idyllic and like you I usually went there "with a purpose" rather than just do the equivalent to "small talk" I liked the very different idea of time. I use Discord but the way in is Twitter -- that's the only way to get invited to small servers, and in the end it's also very difficult to manage a small server (keep it alive, that is), so Discord for me is mostly a place to talk to friends I've already made at some point. More than that, it leaves no traces on the outside and I want to go against this type of closed-off Internet where the history of a fandom is wiped off once a major Twitter of that fandom account deactivates. Impermanence has its uses but that's not great for "places" where people could arrive at any time to participate. Fandom is also a thing that lives in the moment, sure, but it cannot be just that. Mastodon I have yet to explore...

[enchantedsleeper]

More than that, it leaves no traces on the outside and I want to go against this type of closed-off Internet where the history of a fandom is wiped off once a major Twitter of that fandom account deactivates.

Absolutely, 100 times this. Having said that, even forums can vanish without a trace - I was part of a Pirates of the Caribbean forum back in the mid 00s, Hide the Rum, that vanished (beneath the waves) because the original owner didn't renew the domain. Sadly, most of it is not archived on the Wayback Machine. There was also a second one that someone else started up afterwards and I don't think that one was archived at all. But at least they can *be* archived, unlike Discord servers. The amount of fandom history, discussion, knowledge and activity that just vanishes into the Discord ether is horrifying when you stop to think about it. I've had at least one debate with someone on Discord who didn't understand why anyone would want things to be easily findable and non-ephemeral. 😔 I think if that's your baseline for how the internet has always been, then anything else does seem strange.

Mastodon's user interface resembles Twitter in most ways that matter (it has a 500 character limit instead of 280), but the servers give it a bit more of a "closed" vibe, depending on the size of your server and how well it's moderated. I feel I got lucky with fandom.ink, which is very much run with the ethos of older-school LJ fandom in mind; if not for that server, I probably wouldn't have stuck with Mastodon. But it reminds me of forums in the sense that it's a closed-but-open community (anyone can join and read, but you also feel like you're addressing a dedicated audience of people who like the same thing) and it feels less like talking into the void than other social media, because people will actually read your posts and talk back. I also like the granular post visibility controls, so like, you can set one post to be visible to your followers only while another is public. But it is also designed to be ephemeral (and Mastodon is unsearchable by design, which I agree with while also wishing I could retrieve things more easily). So in that sense its drawbacks are the same as Twitter. I want to use Dreamwidth as a bit of an archive for my Mastodon posts and threads that I'd like to go back to.

[aquietjune]

I saw that it's a good idea to create a Mastodon account on an instance that makes sense for your kind of content. At the moment I'm trying to share less and try to rebuild my ability to engage & have a dialogue outside of Twitter's reach (both physical and psychological), but I like the idea that I can just look up at what everybody else is saying on the server and engage in discussions.

I totally agree that personal websites and independent-run forums can disappear even faster and with less trace than big social network accounts -- this is definitely something we should be aware of even in our awe for some things of the old web.

[facethestrange]

YESSS! I made friends for life on one-fandom forums, literally. Specifically on this one ski jumping forum back in 2002 I met some of my best friends ever, and some of them are still my friends, 21 years, more than half of my life. ♡♡♡

I'm still confused to this day how to meet people in fandom now that forums are gone (vs people who are also fans, but not necessarily active in your fandom(s), which you can do easily on dw, and for this at least I'm grateful :D). No other platform I've tried gives this possibility, and I know I'm ~doing it wrong~, but I am clearly wired for forums, I can't do it ~right~ because I can't do it any other way. xD