#and my general fic output this year

[ragnarlothcat]

I know I’m a chronic overthinker but I’ve been in the same fandom for three years or so now and I was reflecting that writing seemed so much easier when I first started out. Just looking at my output since 2021 shows a clear trend: I’ve been writing much less and it’s been taking me way longer.

I figured that I’d gotten a little burned out and that three years is a long time to focus solely on the same two guys making out and that there’s a limit to the number of situations I can put them in before I start to get bored. But I don’t think that’s quite my problem because even now, a million years later, I have ideas for dozens of fics and AUs that would be interesting to explore or funny to write.

No, it’s that I’ve let the larger fandom overwhelm me and it’s left me constantly second-guessing my writing. And I don’t mean that I’ve gotten nasty comments or asks, because I haven’t! All the other fans have been consistently wonderful and fun people with really valuable insights. And it’s not that I’ve been obsessing over stats or comments or worrying about going against popular headcanons. I mean, I’m just as excited as anyone else to see an AO3 email in my inbox but I’m also perfectly happy posting niche fics for an audience of me and my three weirdest friends.

It’s more that after so long engaging with other fans and other fics and the general meta, I’ve ended up writing too self-consciously. I’ve read so many interpretations of canon events, analyses of characterization and comparisons between fiction and real-world politics over the years, and I’ve enjoyed them because I genuinely care about these stories and these characters! I like seeing what everyone else thinks and then considering their points of view, no matter how bewildering they might seem at first.

But now it feels like I’m writing almost defensively, like I have to justify every choice I’m making based on this enormous and contradictory body of information. Three years ago I’d have written a scene in a few thousand words and moved on to the next plot point with my momentum intact. Now I’m constantly wringing my hands over things like physical details (I guess he’s not exactly a redhead) or broader social implications (is this trope misogynistic?) or finicky logistics (these locations are too far apart for this scene to make sense) or controversial character nuance (does writing this guy as a kind, doting husband make me an abuse apologist???) and the result is that I’m paralyzed with indecision and a ridiculous need to support everything I write with a lot of context that isn’t especially fun to write or, I suspect, especially fun to read.

I’m aware that this problem is entirely in my own head and that no one has asked me for any of this. And it’s not that all those questions aren’t interesting and important things to contemplate. But I miss the days of sitting down at my laptop and going “wouldn’t it be funny if these dorks played a video game together?” and then writing exactly that.

I don’t know. Were my fics better three years ago? I kind of doubt it. I’ve looked back at some of them and if nothing else I now have a better grasp of what tense I’m supposed to be using. But I definitely had more fun writing those older stories, which maybe feels more important.

#personal #rambling #and it's not that i want the fandom to change or anything #i think i need to reboot my brain back to obikin factory settings #where i saw two handsome co-dependent space wizards and imagined them having weirdly intense sex #idk i always assume that other people are rational #and that there's some validity to their interpretation of canon or characterization #but if you try to write a fic with all these ideas in your head at once you will literally explode #anyway i might delete this later #i am just staying true to form and ruminating pointlessly instead of writing something i might enjoy

[39oa]

(nonsensical hrpf data exercise) degree centrality graphing & other archive insights

intro/prior work

hello 🙇‍♀️ i'm not sure this post will make any kind of sense at all, but i love analyzing ao3 data and i especially find it fascinating in the realm of sports/hrpf because of the amount of player- and team-related attributes that offer dimensionality to fandom analysis when examined in parallel with archive metrics. i've already kind of done hrpf overviews on two separate occasions over the past year or so, but my method of collection differed in each instance and also always gave me new things to chew on and potentially explore, such as expanding on the link between player talent and shippability and whether high-draft picks have more fic written for them on average.

i most recently examined player data based on aggregated relationship counts since 2022, but this was a limited snapshot meant to piece together recent ficdom trends (see top ships since 01/01/22) and not be representative of fandom overall. basically, things i want to visualize/talk about now are:

hockey is so widespread as a sports fandom because there are 32 teams in the league, which when compared to a community like f1 makes it difficult to succinctly summarize primary relationships for. there is no self-contained grid of 20 drivers that remains generally fixed within a season, where every move in/out of that "roster" is highly reported upon and instrumental to fandom makeup, but instead a more amorphous network of malleable rosters featuring high-variance cascading orders of character visibility; in short, the difference between the most and least popular driver in f1 fandom is not the same as the difference between sidney crosby and that one ahl lifer who was called up to your 4th line two months ago because your team is utterly decimated and gunning for bedard.

Still: because rosters are so malleable and trades happen with some amount of frequency, and because hockey is still an "insular" ecosystem in terms of geographic accessibility and junior-age development (for better or worse; mostly for worse, but that's neither here nor there), players intrinsically have a low degree of separation between one another, whether it be as teammates now or as friends growing up in the ohl, ntdp, etc. i therefore wanted to take that a step further and look at it through fic metrics especially: can we use a summary of ficdom's real, tangible output and visualize it through a similar network? (+ where and how does that network differ from player connections in practice?)

back to the impact of draft pick # and assessments of talent relative to popularity, i also wanted to look at the most "successful" ships in ficdom from this network and evaluate the different distributions and impacts of their respective attributes. are certain player positions more popular? which nationalities are the most commonly shipped?

etc. But let's just get into it.

process

getting any kind of information from a 60%-locked fandom on ao3 is a nightmare and introduces a myriad of data-collecting limitations, so i do feel it important to disclaim that what i present in this post functions more in the realm of Approximate Interpretation and Potential Correlation than any actual 100% objective representation of fandom metrics.

a perceived limitation i have with character tagging metrics on ao3 is that they don't exactly reflect shippability; that is, if q.hughes is tagged as a character in a n.hischier/j.hughes fic, it gets attributed to his character tag but doesn't actually say anything about how many Relationship Fics exist for him on a whole. my best solution for this was essentially uncovering most of a player's relationships and summing their individual fic counts to create an approximate # of "relationship fics" for each player. so any kind of shippability graph going forward will use that metric.

i used ao3's relationship tag search and filtered by canonical in the men's hockey rpf fandom and only pulled relationship* fics ("/" instead of "&") with a min. of 20 works. ao3's counts are... Not the most accurate, so my filtering may have fudged some things around or missed a few pairings on the cusp, which again is why all the visuals here are not meant to show Everything in the most exact manner but function more so as a "general overview" of ficdom. although i did doublecheck the ship counts so the numbers themselves are accurate as of time of collection.

(*i excluded wag ships, reader ships, threesomes to make my life easier although i know this affects numbers for certain players, hc/gm ships, and any otherwise non-NHL Player ship. for ex., this eliminated anna kasterova/evgeni malkin, tyler brown/tyler seguin, and kyle dubas/william nylander, just to name a few)

all ship data was collected march 16, 2023.

PART 1. SC87 ship networking

when i first began this exercise i tried graphing ships for all the first-overall picks from 2003-2022 because i wanted to get an overarching sense of their connections. however, doing so made me realize that sidney crosby was by and far the most-connected node in the graph (and basically all hrpf in general) with a degree of 11, and that he was centering one huge component to which only two ships failed to connect (op/kj and slaf/xhekaj). basically:

so then i was like, right! let me instead use sidney crosby as my sole starting node, map out all ships with 20+ works from him specifically, take the players he connects to and map out their corresponding ships (excluding sid) and just keep iterating until i basically reach a final child node. through this, i yielded 112 ships and 98 unique players, with my final connecting node coming 9 degrees of separation away through brady tkachuk ↔ tim stützle/quinn hughes. unfortunately i can't actually host this little code snippet anywhere lol but i also wrote an input to check the pathways between any two players which was kind of fun:

here is the actual network graph with colors from automatically generated clustering, which doesn't really mean much but i thought was one nice way of presenting it. the edge width refers to the sum of fics for each ship and the node size refers to the degree, or number of ships, for each player.

i then also joined my player set with a dataset that included draft year, drafted team, position, etc... and through that color-coded the graph with the team each player was originally drafted to (i always struggle between using current team and draft team because which one matters more is super contextual, but... using draft team made my life easier this time so i hope it's still interesting.) here i only included colors for 13 teams that had 3+ players each:

→ [full-size graph]

we can do a bit more analysis based on this specific sidcros network, like which players are the "most-shipped" or overviewing cross-team shipping tendencies:

but! of course, not ALL big hrpf ships lead back to sc87. using him as a central node essentially just helped me filter out excess "noise" when searching for relationship tags on ao3, because now i could exclude anyone connected to him at all (note: the relationship fics from my set equaled upward of 19,000 works, accounting for 60.4% of the entire men's hockey rpf archive) and hit other significant tags more efficiently.

through this method, i singled out a new set of 76 ships and 134 unique players (notice the significant decrease in overlap), which i then combined with my sid ships to create one massive set of Hockey Ships With Over 20+ Works On Ao3 that i could analyze holistically. no idea if this makes any sense but bear with me:

PART 2. general ship insights

i won't bore people with endlessly listing out ship rankings but here's the previous top chart with the new ships slotted in:

now for some overall player analysis!

first i wanted to look at how attributes like draft round, nationality, and position (F/D/G) are represented in the player set.

the nationality distribution is pretty close to all active nhl players this season, so there aren't major disparities there. however, the vast majority of players 1) were drafted in the first round and 2) are mostly forwards, with the forwards also seemingly reflecting the general philosophy of faster development/higher recent-round representation. we can take this overview a step further and actually examine the fic averages for each characteristic as a proxy for measuring shippability/ficdom popularity.

first, i scatterplotted all players by their draft pick and number of fic to (try and) show the heavy skew toward top picks (inspired by the gar draft pick value curve and other similar plots). this is... well, limited in many ways, and if i had an actually adequately large dataset i could specifically plot averages per distinct pick number and try to present something there, but the problem is that a lot of these later pick numbers only have like one player so there's way too much variance LOL.

but just for the sake of this exercise i excluded j.benn as an outlier and grouped fic averages by round (left below). again, noting the sample sizes, let's just say that first rounders on average seem to have the most fic written about them, even if it's not a particularly shocking insight. we can also try creating a histogram for "shippability" by draft year, binning here for every 2 years, to see which draft years appear to have had the most success (right below). note the peaks around 2005 and 2015, aka the sc87 and cm97 ~Generational Years~ 🤔

i've also been interested in figuring out which positions are commonly preferred—since centers are so often the faces of a franchise and are essentially the most sought-after position, and since goalies occupy a positionally static role/are less oriented toward contact (and the presumed homoeroticness thereof) in the way skaters are, is that reflected in the fic metrics as well? turns out: yes.

some ship analysis

learning more about player data in a vacuum is fun, but we also have all of this relationship data that lets us examine how different characteristics interact with each other, which is meaningful as well! for example, we know that forwards are heavily represented in the dataset, but is center4center the most common combination? or is there love for a franchise center and his beloved winger or the team's dependable 1d?

(fought for my life trying to figure out how to map this properly so please accept a horrible bar chart instead) as it turns out, the most common combination is centers/wingers, followed afterward by centers/centers. i don't know whether this really means much to me because i'd like to dissect the combos even further (is C/C more often 1C 2C or cross-team rivalry 1C shipping? are C/W usually linemates? etc.) but 🤷‍♀️ here's a graph.

i also distributed ships by their nationality combination, displaying to the surprise of no one a heavy preference (a whopping 66.4%!) for north american-exclusive shipping. i also thought stacking by "draft year" (= averaging the draft year between both players for each ship) offered some interesting insight into usa4usa shipping having slightly younger representation. also i do think usa/germany being singlehandedly driven up this chart by one family is remarkable and hilarious LOL.

also in the realm of draft year analysis, i wanted to look at draft year differences and whether fandom preferences seem to lie by way of same-age-ish pairings and In-Class Bicycling so to speak. graphing ships by these differences spanned a range of 20 years, with the oldest "age" (draft) difference being 20 years between zdeno chara and charlie mcavoy. overall, of 175 ships with a drafted player, 60.5% were drafted within 2 years of each other (18.2% in the same draft), and only 5% had a draft difference of 10 or more years.

then, of those 32 ships drafted within the same year, i distributed their counts by year to see which draft classes featured the biggest in-class clusters, leading us again to the Famed Class of 2015:

closing thoughts

i'll stop here :saluting_face: something else i had on the agenda that i don't really know how to adequately explore with this dataset is basically stanley cup champion stuff, e.g. looking at players and ships and fic counts from winning teams and how/whether a sort of "winning bias" has been trending down as of late (see the relative success of ships from teams like phi/ana compared to tbl/stl)—temporal data is so particular and difficult to wrangle with ao3 though so i'll have to let this one percolate a little bit.

finally, another thing (!) that i love examining is captaincy and how it often helps inform shippability; C/A/guyswithletters shipping obviously generously overlaps with being drafted early, high-impact players, some positional stuff like Young Star Center having the role foisted onto him, etc. and many of these aspects are immediately identifiable in top ships like 8771, 1634, 1386... just to name a few obvious ones. unfortch i don't really have the time or space to look at that here but it's something i'm still interested in maybe expanding on, and i also never ended up collecting actual skater *performance* data which would be super fun to eventually get to, e.g. mapping ficdom output to not just background identifiers like draft year/pick but also 1) actual tangible evaluations of player goals/points/(salary?!?)/etc. and 2) some dimension of draft outperformance/underperformance, which is pertinent for scenarios like late-round picks who have defied career expectations (see outlier jbenn having a shit ton of lifetime fic) AND early-round picks whose trajectories have not panned out as expected for whatever reason; often the ~tragic~ frustration of being a bust actually invites more narrative focus and scrutiny, but at the same time ficdom trends have pointed themselves to being attracted to many historic, talented, generational, and so on players, who more often than not are also winners, which potentially posits a need for some sustained line of access/visibility to high-expectation players significantly before they're regarded as "busts" in order to organically grow and generate initial interest that can survive the renewed reality of their situation. but who knows

again, i don't know whether any of this even makes sense or is interesting to literally anyone at all, but i personally enjoyed just dicking around graphing shit and getting to join a ton of tables together for absolutely no reason lol. that's all!

#(extremely long post warning) #*m #stats #>guy who needs to reflect

[randomfoggytiger]

The X-Files 30th Anniversary

Day 7: 30th Anniversary Extravaganza

Today, I'm thanking The X-Files community for bringing me across a wonderful show-- its amazing cast and writers and fans-- and inspiring me to get back on my own creative hobbyhorse.

My Thanks

Being a part of a collective who want to celebrate this show and others' creative endeavors with heartfelt good wishes has been exciting, fun... and humbling.

My special thanks to the many people who welcomed me with open arms and contribute to this space, even if it's "simply" (but it's never just anything, is it?) answering asks or reblogging or even liking a random post that passed from one blog to another.

There are too many to list, so I'll just chat about my most remembered moments:

@baronessblixen, for being so kind and encouraging that you drew me out of the anon shadows; for liking what I create; for giving me a logical mind to bounce my ideas off of in asks; and for inadvertently teaching me the joy of appreciating animal videos (and convincing me, along with Vavie, to watch Return to Me.)

@dd-is-my-guiltypleasure, for our cherished Duchovny talks; for your heart and your amazingly detailed dedication; for your artbook that I prize dearly; and for your warmth and good humor.

@suitablyaggrieved, for your spectacular and refreshing meta takes; for persevering in your creative works and this fandom; and for sharing the progress pics of your beautiful X-Files themed sweater.

@welsharcher, for being my mini Kermit-loving pool noodle~ (I love brightening your day as much as your messages brighten mine); for your gifs and posts that make my heart soar; and for our shared, priceless sense of humor.

@agent-troi, for being a solidly intelligent third party to the Pre-S1 Mulder Singleton Club; for your hilarious hashtags and great insights; and for your amazing fic output.

@mondfuchs/@annablume, for swapping XF fic recs in my early Tumblr days; and for making my year by drawing my little boopy-tongued tiger in Mulder's arms to celebrate our collective birthday (post here. Still makes me sappy thinking about it~.)

@amplifyme, for returning to Tumblr and giving me a chance to meet you; for sharing your excellent BATB series (in general and Nan Dibble in particular); and for sharing your thoughts as you slowly peel back the psyche of Vincent and the worlds Above and Below.

@demon-fetal-harvest, for being one of the first to die over my Scully Les Miserables amv (it's one of my favorites I love to rewatch; and I think of you every time I do); and for your hilarious reblogs and even more hilarious tags.

@xxsksxxx and @two-microscopes for being the first to reblog and like during a rough time. I'll cherish that moment forever~.

@medicaldoctordana, for being cool and creative and driven; and for hating the mainstream MBTI system as much as I do (and for your philosophy recs-- will get around to them someday.)

@ibringyouasong89, for being my fellow warrior in the trenches. We're new of acquaintance, but I think this will be a beauuuuuuuuuutiful friendship~. ;))))

@writingwell, @enigmaticdrblockhead, and @perpetually-weirdening, @spidey-is-tired, @cyb3rpeach, @scullys-scalpel, @frogsmulder, @teenie-xf, @dreamingofscully, @freckleslikestars, @cecilysass, @slippinmickeys, @gabby-msr, @thatfragilecapricorn30, @television-overload, @pianogirlxf @mollybecameanengineer, and @settle-down-frohike for being mutually supportive and welcoming. The world is both large and small; and I'm glad my path was able to intersect with yours.

And thank you to the silent-but-always-theres who take the time to drop in and give my posts the time of day~: @samucabd, @sonictacocat, @kiivitaja, @freckleslikestars, @nimlurks, @redteekal, @mindibindi, @marinas5099, @chavisory, @sizzlingempathspybat, @enigmaticxbee, @inflappible, @metamayou, @invidiosa, @txcb1013, @dytttt, @borogirl, @agentbluefox, @agentwhalesong, and ALL OF YOU. I can't tag anymore because Tumblr is tapping me out; but I include you-- yes, you-- in this as well.

My Projects

While The X-Files turned 30, my fandom experience turned (a little over) a year old! Wow, time does fly when you're... speed typing out multiple essays worth of fic rec lists, meta analyses, and personality typing posts (or even wrangling a video editor, compressor, and uncooperative Tumblr site to upload an amv.)

My full list of accomplishments can be found here; but these are a few highlights that were standouts to me personally:

My First Fic

randomfoggytiger’s Son of Egypt (Prince of Egypt twist on television-overload's what if: Samantha adopted and raised William.)

Fic Rec Lists

Meet the Mulders

Creepy and Cozy Cabins  

Time Travel, Time Loops, and Just Wrong Timing 

Car Wrekt 

S9 Mulder Stays or Returns While the Mytharc Barrels On

Fics That Deserve More Comments (Part I) 

Poll Results Fic: 1st Place- Scully Injured but In-Charge

Poll Results Fic: 2nd Place- Cleaning Out the Vineyard House

Poll Results Fic: 3rd Place-- Tithonus Mother Hen Mulder

The Field Where I Fix-It Fic-ed

Analysis Posts

Arcadia Analysis: Scully Was Enjoying Herself Immensely 

Never Again: An Intensive Essay (and its paired twin: Never Again and Fear)

One Son: An Intense, One-Shot Analysis of “You’re Making This Personal”  

The Mulder Family In-Depth (Part VI): Talitha Cumi and Tena's Lies

S5 Is a Pretty Dark Time for Mulder

The Scully Family In-Depth (Part VII): Mulder, Maggie, Melissa, and the Snake

Mulder Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn? 

Scully Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn?

Mulder and Dreams

Milagro In-Depth (Part II): Loneliness Is a Choice and Lamps Go Dark

How the Ghosts Stole Christmas In-Depth: Full Analysis

Scully Is the Conduit Conductor and Mulder Is the Dancer

How Scully Taught Mulder to Hug

Mulder and Dreams

CSM Inflicted Insanity On the Syndicate

Fire and False Romance, Ice and Love

All IVF Roads Lead Away from The Unnatural and to Millennium 

Jungian Personality Typing Posts

{{Extraction: Proving Mulder Is an INTP, Not an INFJ/INFP}} 

SCULLY, The Enigmatic ISTJ

XF Fanvids/AMVs

Les Miserables AMV: Scully's Solo

The Muppets AMV: Drivin’ Right Along

Fiddler on the Roof AMV: Mulder and Samantha

Bonus Content (Fandom Adjacent)--

React: "Return to Me" from the POV of Someone Averse to RomComs

Personality Typing: Return to Me

HAPPY 30TH ANNIVERSARY, XF!

And cheers to all~!

Enjoy!

#txf #dailytxf #xf30th #30th Anniversary #Day 7 #Extravaganza #Collector's Edition #fic #amv #xf fanvid #Typing #Personality Types #analysis #meta #xf meta #mine #Mulder #Scully #fandom #xf fandom #xfiles #x-files #the x files #xf fic #xf fanfic

[fuckyeahdindjarin]

Hey! The chili was a HUGE success, requests have been made for it to be a regular meal! So, with that triumph in mind, do you have any other Palomino recipes to share? I'd love to try something else!

Hi love! I'm so thrilled that the chili was a hit, and do I have more Palomino recipes for you! Many of the dishes that showed up in the series are my favourites, and if people are interested, I definitely have more to share 😘

Poppy’s chocolate & rum cupcakes

Darlin's birthday cake featured in Part IV Strawberry Roan is inspired by my own favourite recipe - the chocolate and rum cake. However, since the cake is super rich and heavy, I prefer to make them as cupcakes (pictured are my mini cupcakes and I pair them with fresh strawberries), but you can adapt this recipe for a cake as well.

You taste chocolate on his tongue - and dark rum, must be Poppy's secret ingredient - as it moulds around yours.

As mentioned in the fic, rum is the secret ingredient to this recipe. I've been using this recipe for about 8 years now, and it's adapted for my typical Asian palate i.e. it's not too sweet, and the dark rum gives it a deep flavour and aftertaste that goes perfectly with the chocolate.

Important: The type of cocoa powder makes all the difference. Recently, I've been using Ghirardelli and I love it, it's silky smooth and it has so much depth to the flavour. Alternatively, I used to use a blend of Valrhona and regular cocoa powder (just regular Cadbury drinking cocoa), about 3/4 Valrhona to 1/4 regular cocoa powder. I wouldn't use all Valrhona because it is too dense and it affects the texture of the cake.

Full recipe below the cut:

This is actually the first cake recipe I've ever shared, so apologies in advance if the batch numbers are not completely accurate! The recipe officially makes 36 mini cupcakes, but the output may be a bit more generous since I used to sell these, I always made a few more to take into account margin for error. This recipe should make 12 regular cupcakes.

For the cake:

The chocolate mixture

60g dark chocolate (I use 70% chocolate), chopped

0.6 cup boiling water

0.5 tablespoon espresso powder

6 teaspoon unsweetened cocoa powder (see my note above the cut)

The dry ingredients

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

Wet ingredients

118g unsalted butter, soft

1/2 cup granulated sugar

3 tablespoons brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.5 eggs (it’s a forgiving recipe - 1 large egg will do as well)

1/4 cup buttermilk

Directions

Make the chocolate mixture first as it needs to cool down before use. Chop up the chocolate into pieces small enough to be melted by boiling water.

Mix the cocoa powder and espresso powder with boiling water, then pour over the chopped chocolate. Stir until chocolate is completely melted and let cool.

Prepare the dry ingredients by stirring everything together in a bowl.

Using a stand mixer or a hand mixer, cream together butter and both sugars until incorporated. Do not overbeat.

Mix in vanilla extract and eggs until well combined, and scrape down the sides and bottom of the mixing bowl.

Pour the cooled chocolate mixture into the wet ingredients and mix until combined. Do not overbeat, scrape down the bowl again.

Alternatively add the dry ingredients and buttermilk to the mixing bowl. Always lead with the dry ingredients, and follow with buttermilk to ensure you don't add too much liquid. The batter should be silky and smooth, but not runny i.e. when you scoop it up with a spoon, it should be the texture of very soft soft serve, but it shouldn't dribble.

It depends on your oven, but for me, this batter doesn't rise a lot, so I fill up the cupcake liners to about 3/4 full. I suggest you bake one cupcake first to test how full you should fill it, and the time it takes. For mini cupcakes, I bake at 150C and check around the 15 minute mark, and they usually take 20 minutes. For regular cupcakes, I would check around the 20 minute mark, they might take up to 30 minutes.

A cupcake is done when it springs back when you press on it and your fingertip doesn't leave a dent. Don't overbake.

Let the cupcakes cool down completely before frosting.

Edit: I forgot to add that I poke little holes in the cupcakes with a toothpick and feed each one with rum before frosting!

For the buttercream:

I always make too much buttercream, because there's nothing quite as frustrating as not having enough for your last cupcake! And trust me, this buttercream is so good you can eat it off a spoon. So put any spare in a mason jar and enjoy it!

125g unsalted butter, cubed and softened at room temperature

1.8 cups powdered sugar

0.5 cup  Dutch-processed cocoa powder

0.3 cup heavy whipping cream

pinch of salt

1.6 tablespoon rum

Directions

Beat butter until it's soft and sticks to the side of the bowl in soft strips. When you scrape down with a spatula, you should meet no resistance and it should slide smoothly down the side of the bowl.

Add powdered sugar in half cups, scraping down the sides and bottoms of the bowl in between until the texture reaches the consistency of buttercream.

Alternatively mix in cocoa powder and whipping cream, always starting with the powder and ending with the cream. Add just enough cream for the the powder to incorporate into the frosting.

Add the rum bit by bit with the mixer on the slowest setting to make sure the buttercream isn't too wet - it will curdle if it does, and you want the buttercream to have enough structural integrity to pipe.

These cupcakes can be frozen frosted or unfrosted, and imho they taste even better when allowed to 'age'. Keep in freezer for up to 3 weeks, thaw in fridge overnight before eating. Pair with fresh berries, it's lovely when you have the acidity to cut through the richness! I hope this recipe makes sense and turns out well!

#palomino recipes #palomino series #chocolate and rum cake #tw food #tw baking

[aidaronan]

✨Fic Writing Review 2023✨

Tagged by the incomparable @greatunironic and my beloved @wynnyfryd.

Words and Fics

58, 889 words published on ao3

Plus at least 14,975 or so words of unpublished things that are started and incomplete.

At least 30 new ideas and/or WIPs.

8 published fics on ao3 + some new additions to the drabble/ficlet collection + many tumblr fics/microfics

One completed collab with @sparkle-fiend and one collab (two really) with @sparklyslug in the works

Two monsterfucker fics influenced by the Steddie FanExpo NoLa crew and getting crossfaded as fuck in the French Quarter after meeting Guiseppe Quintilliano.

Top 3 by kudos

Cassiopeia, Orion, Bootes (aka he was a gator boi) Like I Always Do (post-starcourt hurt comfort) Nothing Hurts (Like Your Mouth) (oops! all monsters. vamp eddie and were steve banging in a mausoleum)

Fandom Events in 2023

Lex's Spicy Six Spring Fanworks Challenge

Multiple @steddiemicrofic challenges: read here.

Upcoming Projects

Two Stranger Things Reverse Big Bang fics. Hilariously, neither of them are Steddie as the main pairing, but I think at least one is likely to hit novella length. I can't say a lot due to secrecy, but I feel safe saying one is a gen fic and one is f/f.

One tiny baker!steve/rockstar!eddie collab with @sparklyslug, hopefully out this holiday season.

One bigger collab with @sparklyslug in the spring if we keep our enthusiasm together long enough.

Will keep trying to plug away at the witches fic. I have, admittedly, lost some enthusiasm for them but I do know where the story is going. If you love this one, please be loud at me but in a non-demanding way lmao. I need you.

Two Fandom Trumps Hate fills of at least 10k for @withacapitalp and my dearest, Andi.

Eddie Bio project.

???Who Knows??? But there will probably be monstercock involved.

Some personal chat, rules, and tags under the cut.

Doing some oversharing because I'm starting to think it's vital that we all are honest about our struggles so we don't feel alone and so we know we're not failures. We're just people.

It's been a low production year for me. It's been a difficult year in general, but sometimes change is hard even when it's change you need.

Over half my year was eaten up with job hunting, moving, and trying to adjust while feeling the depressive effects of not having a local friend/support network yet or enough money for whatever the fuck the economy is, esp in this area relative to my salary. A good deal of my body of works for 2023 were written pre-move. Hell, a good deal of them were written in the first quarter. (Which, btw, shout out to anyone else who often feels a bittersweet sort of regret at not being productive in the current internet environment where you feel like you're old news if you can't keep up an unsustainable output. I love you, same, it's prob not true anyway, and here are 200 forehead kisses. <33) All of that said, I'm feeling much better lately. I've been reading again. Writing again. Feeling like I'm living again. I'm looking forward to another arbitrary border of time and on filling that border with joy, especially queer joy and weird joy and the intersection of both of those. As they say: let's fucking gooo.

I still love it here. I know steddie won't be forever for me, just like other ships before them weren't forever for me. But I'm having fun and have been really enjoying some of the connections made in this little sandbox.

On that note:

Rules: Feel free to show whatever stats you have. Only want to show Ao3 stats? Rock on. Want to include some quantitative info instead of stats? Please do this. Want to change how yours is presented? Absolutely do that. Would rather eat glass than do this? Please do eat glass, I’ve heard it’s good for your gums. Tagging, even though I know some people have already been tagged: @sparklyslug, @wormdebut, @banannabethchase, @just-my-latest-hyperfixation @messessentialist @rainbow-nerdss @plutosrose @thefreakandthehair and anyone else. @ everyone who keeps this fandom rippin' and roarin', kissing you, kissing you, kissing you

#fic writer things #fanfiction #year in review

[dzamie]

Man, one of the really annoying things about the whole ai art, large language model, sorta stuff is that I still find certain kinds of AI models fascinating!

I used to go back and forth on how to make a "better" Markov chain generator, with the intention of giving it my fics as a dataset and seeing some charming nonsense from its output. I occasionally try to figure out how to make something that would find a series of best-matches between target phonemes to data phonemes to make sentence-mixing easier. I still, every so often, have a go at replicating the "Infinite Jukebox" I loved playing with years ago, back before it got snapped up and left to rot by Spotify.

The kinds of AI where you can pop it open and see, "ah yes, this is what it's calculating, and why." With a basic Markov generator, I can open up the model, look at "warm: , 24 embrace 7 and 7 sun 4" and understand why it keeps making infinite chains of adjectives.

Hell, there was a cool video I saw the other day about writing and pitting small chess bots against each other, and how to go about making the best ones.

But noooooo, the only time I ever see people talk about AI is when some "we have evolved beyond the need for art" dipshit brags about being able to make John Cena say the n-word or generate generic "anime-realism" images of some chick with HH-cups.

#text #rawrs #ai

[brofisting]

Brief thoughts on AI writing/art data-scraping and subsequent content production, & the conclusion I've come to.

Thought #1: There has been a lot of discussion about how AI is or is not art theft (or writing theft); from my understanding every model works slightly differently. What isn't up for debate, though, is that all AI models require data to function, and that data has to come from somewhere. The companies developing AI have a strong incentive to get data by any means possible; the internet is the easiest place to start, but there's no way to get permission from every single person who has ever put something on the internet for the use of that thing to develop the AI, even if every single person were inclined to give it.

Conclusion #1: Doesn't matter if the AI's output is a copyright violation; instead, it was a violation of copyright to feed that data to the AI in the first place, making the AI itself inherently legally problematic.

("BRIEF" DO NOT @ ME OKAY. SEE BELOW FOR THE REST OF MY BIG ASS ESSAY. I WILL REBLOG WITH THE SHORTEST TL;DR I CAN MANAGE.)

Thoughts #2&3: Due to how easy it is to scrape data online, and the way technology is currently progressing (silicon valley motto of Never Ask "Should" I Do It, Just "Can" I Do It), there is almost no way to prevent these AI from being developed with stolen data, and there's enough out there to make these very, very good. They've gotten immeasurably better in just the past few years. Also, preventing them from scraping one thing (ie archive-locking fic) is probably not going to do anything about the problem as a whole, even if it stops that one thing from getting used (and if it even does prevent that thing from being used; I am not sure there's not ways to get around that kind of obstacle).

Conclusions #2&3: Can't stop the technology from developing, and trying to prevent your data from being accessed through technological barriers is at best small potatoes and at worst futile.

Thought #4: What is the incentive for people to do this? Money. These AI are being developed in hopes that they can be used to do things humans can currently do, for cheaper, so they can sell them to companies who will then use them to replace human labor. Will it produce results as good as human labor? No. Will that matter? Not enough, and not in all circumstances.

Conclusion #4: How to prevent this from happening in a way that loses people jobs (or loses the least jobs, or at least protects creative work, or does the whole thing slowly enough to save your job and my job)? Make it so companies cannot legally make money by using the output of these AIs.

WHICH... takes us back to Conclusion #1 -- due to the copyright violation inherent in these programs, it is important to make sure the output can't be copyrighted. Which, at the moment, legal precedent says it can't be. But that's something that companies which stand to make money off AI-generated work are going to try to change.

THEREFORE... we gotta fight those fuckers every step of the way to make sure that AI generated work can't be copyrighted. Which, IMO, means:

educating people about how these models are developed using data theft

make the connection between AI development and potential harms clear (both things like face recognition tech and hurting creatives by replacing them in jobs)

encourage people to fight legally instead of technologically; ie instead of archive-locking work on AO3, continue to throw a fit at the AI company, file legal copyright complaints, etc (any useful suggestions here would be great!)

And then, bonus, if your company is considering using this kind of technology to replace artists or writers, throw a giant fucking shit-fit. Bring up possible legal ramifications. Bring up possible public backlash ramifications. Bring up ramifications of you personally quitting and being a huge bitch about it the whole time. Whatever you can safely do!

I don't think we can prevent AIs, nor do I necessarily think they're inherently evil; I DO think they are being made by people who do not care if they are being used or made in an evil way or not. I'm not sure we can prevent their usage to replace creative jobs entirely, but I think we should try. And I am willing to put my money where my mouth is on that. Which is all I can say about it!

NOTE: I am not a technical expert or legal expert on AI; I am some guy online, but I have a vested interest in this both as someone who pays to have art made and who makes art themselves. I have recently done a fair amount of research into this, and this is what I came to personally. If you have more information from a legal or technical perspective that contradicts this, I'd love to hear it!

#ai #ai art #ai art generator #ai content #content generation #copyright

[mistresseast]

I know I've been pretty quiet lately (the last two surprise fics aside) and that this year has been generally sparse on content, but I just wanted to rap with y'all for a sec.

First, I'm super grateful for all the kindness and support I've received, despite not being super active. Having nearly 1k followers here as a fic writer, especially with the way things are on this particular website rn, is wild to me. Even if only a few of you are still online, I'm really thankful.

Second, my new year’s resolution is to write more (shocking, I know), but that includes my original work as well, so I can't predict what the fic output might be. Regardless, I've got multiple things in the works rn and my interest in my current fandoms has not waned a bit. There might even be a curveball here and there, we'll see.

Third, in case you were worried about Liminality bc it hasn't been updated in well over a year, never fear! Part 3 is DONE and I'm just trying to decide on a posting schedule. Liminality is going to be a big big big project, and I'll be real with you, it's going to be a WIP for a very long time, so I understand why people might be hesitant to read it rn and that interest (and patience) will fade as fans naturally drift away from p5, and that does make me a bit nervous; however, I'm still very committed to and excited about this story, and I sincerely appreciate all the love it's gotten so far as well as everyone who sticks with it or takes a chance on it in the future. Y'all rock so hard.

I simply cannot stress enough how much it means to me that people read and enjoy my work. Finishing and posting fic still feels new to me, as I've always thought of myself as someone who burns out quickly and can't follow through on anything, so becoming a writer with a distinct style and works that people remember and recognize over the past few years has challenged this sort of low opinion I had of myself and actually affected how I approach things outside of fanfiction as well. It's a learning process that I'm still experiencing and I owe a lot of it to you guys, random people on the internet who took the time to read and like my stuff.

Seriously, thank you all so much. I hope I can continue writing and taking fictional characters way too seriously in 2024 and beyond. ❤️ Happy New Year!!

#my writing #copied pretty much directly from tw*tter #and i was gonna change the thing about the state of the website but tbh it's rough here too

[wildflowers-of-trolberg]

What the Future Holds

I’ve seen a few people making posts like this, and considering how much this series means to me and how it’s technically ending tomorrow, I feel like I should do my own, both to clear up things to y’all and for my own peace of mind.

So, to start with the obvious question; I’m not going anywhere once the show has ended, but I’m also not going to interact with any Season 3 content or write anything about it. As far as I’m concerned, Hilda is still my main fandom, and I have many more fic ideas for it, but there is no Season 3.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my fic output has been slowing down the last couple of years; part of that is that my interest peaked with Season 2’s release, and I do spend more time with other fandoms these days, but none of them have gotten to me the way Hilda has. The truth is I’ve had to take some time away from this fandom for personal reasons, and also, to be honest, 2023 has been a slow year for me as a writer in general. My output has basically been 1/3rd of what it was last year.

The reason for that is because I’ve been working on a truly massive other project. I initially planned on setting aside 3 months for it, but it’s evolved into an entire year’s work and it’s still not quite done. But I am still writing in between working on this, and I have decided outright that I’m done once 2024 starts, so hopefully I’ll do more writing then. Either way, I have many more ideas I want to get down, including two more Hilda fics by the end of this month alone.

Longer term? I can’t promise I’ll be here forever, but I also can’t see myself leaving this franchise behind. Hilda and Twig will hopefully spawn some more ideas, and eventually I need to continue the Runaway AU alongside others.

Plus, Hilda, or at least the first two seasons, are like home to me. I have an entire Hilda corner in my bedroom. I love this little blue-haired kid and everything about the world she lives in, and I can’t imagine that changing for a long time yet. It’s already been years since my favourite parts of canon came out; what’s a few more, eh?

#hilda the series #hilda netflix #elf paperwork #sorry for the negativity

[copperbadge]

Sam, I say this with love, exasperation, and admiration: I have no idea how you write so much. I'm in the middle of a long-overdue update of backing up my favorite fics to my hard drive, and your fic archive is basically a mini-project in itself!

LOL! I had this conversation with myself when I moved all my fanfic over to AO3. By hand. From Livejournal. :D I think it's mainly that I was undiagnosed with ADHD while being either understimulated in school or underutilized in my job. I think it's indicative of how my priorities have shifted as I've gotten older, that I haven't really written much fanfic in years, and in general my words-per-year output has dropped quite a bit.

Prior to 2019, it was a rare year I posted less than 150K words and some years I posted over 400K. It was almost always fanfic, because the first few novels were posted to Livejournal, not AO3, and I didn't move them when I moved over all my fanfic. I was in grad school, which was not demanding for me, and then I was in a series of jobs where I began with large amounts of downtime, then slowly had less and less as I gained more responsibility. Up until 2019, when my former office just disintegrated and I changed jobs.

So the output in those earlier years was this balance of struggling to keep myself entertained, having the time to engage with a time-intensive coping mechanism, and processing hyperfixation. It still feels weird to describe myself as having hyperfixations, because that's not how I've ever thought of my own mental processes; I have a specific mental definition of hyperfixation under which I do not fall, but I'm beginning to realize that definition is inaccurately narrow. Given my duration in a fandom is almost always two years on a predictable cycle, I can't really refute the idea that I develop and process hyperfixations like a lot of neurodiverse people do. (Marvel is an outlier in that the canon is massive and much more widely disbursed than most -- even so you can kinda see me move through characters within Marvel on two-year cycles.)

In 2019 my wordcount dropped dramatically, and in 2020 most of what I posted was original fiction I actually wrote in 2019. So I didn't post much in 2020 and didn't post anything at all in 2021, which was shocking to me when I realized it. This past year, 2022, is the first year I've bounced up, posting 246K words, but it's mostly been original work. I rarely engage in meta anymore, and currently don't really have an active fandom that I write or talk about. Looked at on paper, I haven't truly been in fandom in about four years. It's fortunate that fandom is a culture -- it's not something you leave or are expelled from just because you stop participating in some aspects of it. There is no way for me to truly leave fandom now even if I wanted to, short of leaving social media altogether, which I have zero plans on doing.

This all got very deep from a pretty simple ask about my formerly prodigious output, but it was fun to go look up my AO3 stats and engage in a little self-reflection.

#fandom #fanfic

[mister-eames]

1/? If you wrote a thesis on Arthur and Eames I would literally carry it around in my pocket & read it daily, so I’m begging you!! Please don’t spare your 5k essay on why you think Arthur thinks he doesn’t have a chance with Eames!! I Wanna know your thoughts on this!! Because I think it’s a combination of elements. Firstly I think initially Arthur truly believes Eames doesn’t like him. They’re too different. Arthur is everything Eames isn’t & vice versa. & even tho the saying goes “opposites

2/? attract”.. sometimes you just clash & that’s that.. I think at first he also mistakes Eames playfulness, his snark, quips & attempts at riling Arthur up as genuine condescension & disdain. I also read once in a fic where Arthur made a comment about how nobody likes the pointman cos at the end of the day it’s his job to pick apart everybody else’s work & point out the weaknesses. So the idea that a guy like Eames, who as a forger has one of the most creative/artistic roles in dreamshare. --- 3/3 would be interested in a guy whose role often involves probably telling people to tone it down... yeah. Not gonna happen. & then I think there’s that fear of mixing business with pleasure. The idea of ruining such a great working partnership by bringing something as messy as FEELINGS into it? I think that’s something that would make Arthur not even entertain the idea of ever having anything more with Eames because how could he ever risk losing Eames as a work partner?

---

Aha, are you ready? Obvs these are all just my headcanons, and that the beauty of inception is that the characters can be who we want them to be, all interpretations are valid, etc etc...

So, with Arthur and why I think he thinks doesn't have a chance with Eames. You're right that it's a combination of elements:

I think, at his core, Arthur like, all of us, carries some kind of emotional bruising when it comes to loving and being loved. And like, all of us, Arthur does not think he's perfect. He has self-perceived flaws. Every single one of us, as human beings, has insecurities - even Arthur. I think he uses all of the surface, logical, 'rational' arguments like not wanting to mix business and pleasure to justify not actually addressing these hurts and insecurities.

You know my personal headcanon for Arthur, generally speaking canonically, is that he did not come from money. He grew up poor with a parent that wasn't, say, well enough to be there for him the way a child would need. That he was the caretaker in the household most of the time.

And, bear with me here, on Arthur caring about his looks - Arthur is buttoned up to all hell not because of vanity, but because of how he will be perceived--- he wears his suits less like armour and more like a weapon. Arthur, to me, is scrappy, not defensive.

But despite how he presents himself, deep down Arthur still is that fourteen year old version of himself, the one that lashed out everyone Eventually, he learned to control that anger, the one that showed everyone else where he was wounded -- but he never addressed the ways he was hurt, or the parts of him that has always been deeply lonely. As an adult he isn't keen on loving anyone else because it's always been a one-way transaction. He does not know how to interpret loving someone and being loved in return. For him, what does that even look like? Arthur doesn't want to love anyone because he's never received the same output of love he gives out. And maybe he thinks something is wrong with him, for feeling affection the way he does and never truly getting it back in kind - platonic, familial or romantic.

So he wears his weaponry to keep people from getting too close to touch, figuratively speaking. And maybe Eames takes him on face value for a beat too long.

While I don't really consider Arthur and Eames to be opposites, I do think they are flip sides of the same coin. They share a basic foundation, beliefs, ethics - but can also clash where they combine. It's like when you just... get someone on a basic level, like you share a frequency without needing years of getting to know them. Like when you meet someone and you just know you must have known each other in a past life. Arthur thinks that this weird, antagonistic thing he has with Eames is something different, isn't it? Except, it isn't. It's just love, baby.

Arthur feels it, with Eames. That 'something'. Over time it develops into a feeling that is both thrum and quiet. Like his whole body is vibrating but also completely still just by being near him, thinking about him.

But, at least initially, Arthur is just too... wary to place his money on it, that feeling. It's never provided dividends before.

Which isn't to say that Eames is the one to show Arthur he is 'worth loving', or anything like that. I believe that Arthur comes to that realisation all by himself - realistically, they're both still young and young enough to be insecure at the time of the film. Late 20's, 30s? Babies, in the grand scheme of adulthood. They are only just consolidating out who they are, really. But Arthur, at some point, realizes its okay to put his sword down and be loved in a different way from those who'd said they'd loved him before. To have someone take care of him, to run point for him. He gets better at reading love languages.

And I think, to address Arthurs own insecurities -- we all also have that kind of rose-tinted view of the ones we love while thinking we are plain and unremarkable - we look at them and go fuck, you are amazing, you are incredible, you can do anything and you don't even know it, how do you not know how powerful you are?? --- that's part of it too. Maybe he looks at Eames, Cobb and Mal and thinks just that. Maybe he wonders in what world would Eames ever look at him the same way? Maybe he does underestimate his own power and he takes it all too seriously and to heart when he's not perfect. Maybe he can't look past his own fuck ups in life and in work that it truly clouds his perception of himself and his compatibility with others.

That, I think, are the basic fears Arthur has. It's like inception, right, these 'simplest version of ideas' manifest in more convoluted ones. Those fears get translated and articulated into very simple 'reasonable' arguments he hoodwinks himself with so he never has to face his own vulnerability: it would never work out. I don't like the way he does x, y, z. He is so annoying. He doesn't even like me like that. It'd be bad for business. It's not worth the risk. We're here to work.

So I think Arthur leaves his attraction to Eames like a mailbox slowly accumulating with more and more junk mail. He'll clean it out some day, pushed aside in his own mind, left unattended by him for a long time without realizing the pile is growing. On this, some of my fave fics are the ones where Arthur has this sort of... comically misbehaving subconscious because of his ignored affection for Eames. The ones where there are errant projections who fawn over Eames, or the ones where his subconscious is literally incapable of hurting him. I think Arthur is not.. repressed... as an individual, but the feelings he has for Eames are so large and encompassing and that he's tried to fit it into too small of a box, and that box is spilling out at the sides. What he feels cannot be contained or disposed of. He would be that kind of hot mess.

But, Arthur, you darling fool. The feeling is mutual.

#10000% pure self indulgence #like actually #but i don't even care #thank you so much nonnie for letting me indulge so much on Arthur and maybe go overboard on him idk cant stop wont stop it makes me happy #there's something just so remarkably human in these two #these blink-and-you'll-miss moments of vulnerability in the film #my brain can't stop latching onto reasons why arthur is a fucking disaster sweetheart of a human bean #anyway #love these two idiots forever! #arthur x eames #dreamhusbands #inception

[esta-elavaris]

AAAAAND WITH THAT-- WE ARE DONE! I just finished and queued up my final flufftober fill to be posted tomorrow! Thirty-one stories in thirty-one days. One more story than I originally planned, because I couldn't resist in the end. 55,105 words total for flufftober alone, in addition to the ~four chapters of HWFG I wrote, and novel work, which brings the total up to somewhere between 75-80k. On a year where I decided I would not be taking part in NaNo events, to give myself a break from insane output expectations 💀 I'm actually stunned that I managed it. I went into it sure that I'd fall behind and some would be late, or I'd end up still going through the list in November, or something. But uhhh?? Insanity prevailed!

I'm especially proud because a depressive episode hit in the final week, which was? The worst possible outcome (bar the 'vid, which is what happened last year, so there's definitely a curse afoot) but I managed it!! It was more difficult than NaNo in some ways bc at the end of those days your stuff doesn't need to be fit for reading, but the lack of focus on the word count itself really helped me get caught up in the stories, which made it a lot more fun.

Again, thank you guys so much for all of the lovely responses and the likes and the reblogs and the general enthusiasm, it quadrupled the fun I had with it all this month, and it was a blast experimenting with new pairings without taking on the commitment of a proper long!fic. Can't wait to get back to all of the fics I neglected over the last month!...and to be freed up to write some devastation 👀

But first, I think I've earned a nap 💜

...until 2024.

#RIP to october 2024 lucy who now has to match this #she's cursing me rn frfr #esta's flufftober '23 fills

[jamietarttsnorthernattitude]

Answer the questions and tag five fanfiction authors you know!

Tagged by the talented @kvetchinglyneurotic

1. How many fandoms have you written in?

One! Two if you count the truly bad LOTR fic I wrote in high school.

2. How many years have you been writing fanfiction?

I wrote a story or two in high school and then nothing for a long time. I started really writing almost a year ago (just looked published my first fic on 5/21)

3. Do you read or write more fanfiction?

Writing because I basically only read Ted Lasso fan fiction recently and it’s just slowed its output.

4. What is one way you've improved as a writer?

I’ve learned to outline a bit more than just winging it like I did for so long. I’m not sure if there’s a specific thing I’ve improved on, just generally I think (I hope).

5. What's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

How to make chloroform lol but mostly just injury related things, spleen removal, stuff like that. Total normal whump writer things.

6. What's your favourite type of comment to receive on your work?

I truly love any and all comments, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I loved the long, detailed type with quotes, etc but I also love the ones that are just a sentence of reaction like one I got that just said “good fucking fic” and I LOVED that.

7. What's the most fringe trope/topic you write about?

My online circle contains a lot of whump-enthusiasts but probably whump although gen stories sometimes feel very fringe.

8. What is the hardest type of story for you to write?

All of them? I can’t do anything short, which is why whumptober was so hard to get though, I want the whump but then I want the comfort and I just don’t know how to write something concise that is satisfying to me.

9. What is the easiest type?

I don’t know if I find anything about writing easy. Different parts of the story are easier than others but I haven’t found a type that is easy.

10. Where do you do your writing? What platform? When?

Wherever I can, but usually from my couch. I use google docs but have wanted to look into other platforms but none seem to have exactly what I want. Whenever my brain tells me to write.

11. What is something you've been too nervous/intimidated to write, but would love to write one day?

Hockey AU for sure, along with an idea I have for a post-series fic where Michelle and Henry move to London and Ted stays.

12. What made you choose your username?

I was looking for a new one that I could use here and on ao3. When I mentioned this to the brilliant @jamiesfootball they suggested something to incorporate my love of Noah Kahan (many many of my titles are from his songs) so jamietarttsnorthernattitude was born. I’d like to think Jamie and I share a Northern Attitude.

Trying to tag who hasn’t been tagged but these things spread quickly and I might have missed people so trying @fanficfanattic @jamiepoptart @nativestarwrites @lunar-years @providing-leverage and anyone else who would like to play

#writing things #tag game

[itwoodbeprefect]

12, 27, 42, 46 for the fic writer asks

12. How does receiving or not receiving feedback/support impact you?

i could try to pretend that it doesn't matter to me if people read my stuff or not, but that would be a lie. i think maybe it's more... by this point i've had years and years of posting fic and people being extremely sweet and kind and encouraging about it, and that has absolutely had an impact both in terms of keeping me posting more fic and the ways i view my own writing (and how i view myself, i think, especially pre-ao3. i'm pretty sure people online telling me i was funny played a not insignificant part in building any sense of self-worth as a deeply awkward kid irl in high school), and having all of that history and experience, at this point i have the luxury of not caring about the numbers that much. comments are always very awesome, but if any particular fic would end up getting ignored completely for whatever reason, that's okay. i'm not writing for max engagement (i've made some hilariously terrible decisions lately if that's what i'm going for), but that doesn't take away that people being excited about a thing i made remains a really really nice benefit to how the fandom ecosystem works.

though i will also note, i don't think there's a single thing wrong with wanting or needing feedback or support to your writing. i frequently feel extremely spoiled in that regard, because i've been around for so long and my output in that time has been so high on average that i know people know my name, and i also write pretty easily digestible uncontroversial stuff generally speaking no matter what fandom i'm in at the time, so the responses i'm getting are oftentimes not the average, and i'm very aware of that. it's much, much harder getting started in fandom.

-

27. What is your most and least favorite part of writing?

ooooh. i mean, most favorite is easy, and probably a fairly universal answer, which is that moment when the writing flows nicely and it feels right and i get to put down at least a few paragraphs in a row (maybe even more!) without it feeling like any effort at all. least favorite is probably the opposite - when it just Won't Work, and every sentence feels clunky and awkward and overwrought, like there's just no way to bridge whatever tiny gap in a story i'm probably trying to fill at the time. the goofiest thing about that is that when reading things back later there's often not too much actual difference between the quality of the writing when it feels good vs. when it feels bad, because the problem is in my head, but it's also my head that needs to do the writing, so that doesn't make it less of an obstacle.

-

42. What’s the last fic you read? Do you recommend it?

Centrefolds / Distal Breaks by @redgoldblue, which i read because @redgoldblue wrote it, because i would absolutely recommend anything written by @redgoldblue.

-

46. How would you describe your style? (Character/emotion/action-driven, etc)

ha, anything but action- or plot-driven, i think. characters, emotions, characters having emotions, emotions to explore characters - that's my wheelhouse.

and on the topic of writing style: i've gotten a comment a few times (as a compliment! nothing bad about this) that said something to the effect that my writing is pleasantly economical or sparse, which frankly baffled me for a while, because right from the very very start i was writing mostly about relationships (whether friendship, romance, family), and not very much really happens in my stories (the traditional way, action or plotwise), so from my point of view almost everything was fluff and just sort of... not superfluous, and definitely not meaningless (there's a lot of meaning to feelings!), but a sort of deleted scene extra part to canon. those are some of the first responses i got to my work: i can't believe i read this many words about almost nothing happening, and i really liked it! so filler, i guess, might be the best word for it, and obviously "all of this is filler" and "this is a very economical use of words" is inherently contradictory, except, well. is it? it took me a while to, i guess, internalize, that when the goal is feelings and exploring characters, doing that in an effective way is going straight to the point.

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Get to know your fic writer! 🔎

#thank you!! 💖 #* #ask #ask game

[rookthorne]

— MERRY CHRISTMAS CHAOS KITTENS —

it's the day, my lil' loves! Christmas Day has rolled around here in Australia, and while I am not a very big celebrator, I know there are plenty of you that are.

not to mention, I want to take a minute to appreciate what I've been blessed with this year.

there's no tip toeing around it ― I have had a tough year in all aspects: physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, you name it.

a lot of you have been a witness to it, even though I generally am a private person ― I am not one that would outwardly and expressly admit nor comment on my personal things ― but, somehow, I tended to reflect what I deal with in my writing. and for those that have expressed their support and their love on those particular fics, I want to take this chance to say thank you for doing so.

this isn't to say that this year has been all bad, there's been so much good, too. I met the friends that I feel like are long lost siblings; I found my circle of close, close loves that I would do anything for; even more so, I expanded in my creativity tenfold by challenging myself with events and personal goals that I have almost reached just as the year is closing.

historically and habitually, Christmas isn't normally a good time for me thanks to many things outside of my control, but this year? I think it has been one of the best ones I have ever had ― I have y'all to thank for this. the continued support for all of my (quite frankly) insane output and ideas has kept me going, and it will do so for a long time.

this year, if you have left a comment or reached out to me for any kind of love and support, you have been part of my journey and you no doubt have been one of the reasons I did not quit my writing. that is the best Christmas gift I could have ever gotten.

so, for this Christmas, whether you celebrate or not, I hope you have a good day with your family and/or friends; even yourself, and if that's the case, me and all of my Bucky's are here with you ― giving you the biggest hug and kiss on the forehead.

I love all of you more than I can express. and thank you for sticking with me.

#Lana's rambles #milestone #important #personal

[doctorweebmd]

I never knew what to say about zsg because, well, there are a lot of aspects about it that don't align with my usual taste, despite its objective high quality. I mean, I'm a sfw fan 😂 That said, I'm always in awe that with your busy job, you continue to feed us so well. I'm busy too and only going yo get busier, so it's an inspiration, as longfics are what I prefer to write as well (though it doesn't come nearly as naturally, lol). And, you're right, zsg deserves to hear the love and admiration I have for it, so here goes.

To start with, the fic definitely has residence in my head, despite reading it nearly a year ago. There are scenes I still think about. I was talking about then with a friend just a week ago. Since I don't have time to read fic these days (cries), the most I can do is go back to old fics and reread my favorite scenes, and I do that with zsg, because there are such high quality, top tier moments. The "you're looking at me" "I never stopped" ??? That might be the pinnacle bkdk. I can't believe I've never seen that before in a bkdk fic? Or if it was there, it didn't hit as hard.

I know you're not so into the falling action part of a fic, but I loved the last bits with bkdk. When Baku realizes Deku's staying? Those moments they have of figuring things out are so good. And the provisional exam being inspired by Kamino was great. Really clever and a nice homage. And, of course, very nice that Deku could be a hero again.

Also, the Shinsou content is perf. I always love a side character having a big part in a ship fic and that shinbaku relationship is exactly why. (Similarly, I loved All Might and Aizawa helping Baku out.) That flashback scene where Deku calls Baku Kacchan? So good. And so smart as a flashback, because it would have been too much in the actual timeline, but where you fit it in the plot was really really clever. I also generally love a flashback--unpopular opinion, but I do.

Those were some of my biggest highlights! I hope my little disclaimer at the top isn't totally assholish 💀 I think you're just great and really admire your openness and the things you try to tackle in fics and your incredible output. I hope you're doing well <3

ahhh Anjum thank you so much for sending this!!! AHHH i'm sorry i complain on here so often i was so embarrassed i deleted the post lmao

gosh yeah especially when you read sfw stuff in general! i have this habit of writing REALLY detailed and explicit sex scenes 😳 what made you read it, in that case? (obviously you dont have to answer!)

god. every time i think about their devotion to one another i want to combust into flames. think for much LESS we had to work with when we were writing a few years ago?! the way horikoshi has developed katsuki into this passionate, level-headed, absolutely hopelessly committed to Izuku - literally never saw it coming. these two deserve peace in the end. they deserve to live a life on their own terms. they just DESERVE TO BE HAPPYYYY

urgh its Izuku's DREAM and of course horikoshi is setting him up to lose one for all, i think thats been his intention from the beginning, but his life is only starting!!! he's only 15!!! you're telling me he's going to risk his life and lose the only thing he's ever wanted?! i wonder if horikoshi used all might in his big-old mecha suit as a hint that deku would still be a hero, just using assist devices. at least i hope. this kid deserves a chance. (i dont know if you're caught up on the manga?? i'm kind of ranting lol)

adjfakldjflk;asjdlfjasdfj ANYWAY WHEN I TELL YOU THIS MADE MY DAYYYYYY adsjfaldjfkl argh you just made me so happy especially because its been a long time and i forget parts about it but TO HEAR THAT EVEN THE PARTS THAT FELT LIKE A STRUGGLE WERE STILL ENJOYABLE?! urgh i appreciate you so much thank you for taking time out of your day to reassure a complainy weirdo like me

#🥺🥺🥺 #i love you and appreciate you so much #i still remember izuku leaving U.A and that panel of him looking exhausted and saying 'a giant villain' was what inspired zsg #and just the thoughts of what katsuki would do. if izuku went full vigilante and disappeared #now we have SO MUCH. we have the apology. the izuku. the catching him in the rain. the literally thinking about him before he dies. #the instantly meeting eyes as he resurrects like some angel. them saving all might together. #god. i love they.