Polymorphous Perversity

Day 5: Compare and/or contrast your very first fandom obsession and your very latest fandom obsession.  
My entry to fandom - where I became aware of fandom as a thing and started writing as well as reading - was Twilight. It had its own very idiosyncratic fansite with mods who betaed your fics whether you wanted them to or not, and the dynamics of the site, maybe of the fandom, were a bit weird, in retrospect. Rather adolescent, which is probably to be expected, although there were a lot of "cougar" fans, and there were lots of WIPs, which was where I learned to avoid WIPs rather than getting burned by abandoned cliff-hangers. It was largely het at first, but a small contingent of slash writers developed, largely for Edward/Jasper, and I discovered slash writing there, and fell into it. It's no surprise that the initial fic that "Fifty Shades of Gray" was based on was in Twilight - one of those weekly-posting WIPs that I read at the time. It was only later when SGA fandom had educated me about "safe, sane and consensual" BDSM that I realised how messed up that fic had been, but the Twilight fandom as a whole was more juvenile and politically dodgy, apart from Minisinoo, the first really good writer I encountered who was mainly there for Jacob, as a Native American writer. 
My latest obsession isn't new, as after discovering LJ and wandering through Potterverse after Twilight, I got swallowed up by SGA and it's still my main fandom. I came into SGA just after canon ended, when the fandom had settled a bit, and the culture was different, with very few long, unfolding WIPs and a predominantly slash fandom, very McShep-dominated at first. SGA fandom has broadened and explored many other pairings across the years, and so have I, with side-trips off into Sherlock, The Losers, Captain America, etc etc. SGA, and especially McShep, is comfortable, and like its stars, it feels like a safe, grown-up fandom that's fundamentally friendly and not beset by controversy, shipping wars, or politics, or not these days. 

Day 6: What's a fandom that you wish had a bigger following?
I tried Captain America fandom at the height of its rise after Winter Soldier came out, but the hugeness of the fandom, and the many very young writers in the ginormous challenges was a bit difficult. So I'm not fond of juggernaut fandoms when they're in juggernaut phase and wouldn't wish that on a favourite fandom. I wish The Losers fandom was still active, as I miss it and loved those characters. And it'd be nice for SGA to be a bit bigger and more active, with more stories to be read, but there's a lot to be said for small post-canon fandoms that stubbornly persist like icebergs - not so much activity above the water, but loads of wonderful stuff below the surface, stored in the AO3 and on Wayback. 

Oops, got a bit behind due to RL work busyness.

What is your favorite celebrity interaction from any fandom you've had?
Well it wasn't exactly a fandom as I had no idea such things existed, but in my teens I wrote a fan letter (yes, gentle readers, those were the days of letters!) to Elaine Morgan, author of The Descent of Woman. She wrote me a very kind reply and was delighted to hear from a reader in NZ (we were more exotic in those pre-internet days). 

What is a kink that fandom introduced you to, and you said, "Yes, Please!"
Slavefic, so I guess consent play, non-con and dubcon really, and that rapidly segued into the full BDSM arena. (See here for an expansion about noncon and dubcon) I was into mind control before I knew about fandom though, via very badly written "original" porn stories (all by straight men, from the intensely 'male gaze' in them) on an alt.sex site. But that's what introduced me to this thing called fandom, so...

Is there any fandom that you regret getting into?
No. I'm mildly embarrassed that my first real fandom was Twilight but it was the gateway to all the rest so I don't regret it.

Besides deathfic, rape/non-con, what is something that, no matter the pairing, you nope out of when it comes to reading?
Partner betrayal. I can't stand infidelity especially involving my OTPs. I'm also not keen to read my OTPs getting together because one of them's cheating on a canon partner. Negotiated threesomes, on the other hand, are excellent!

How open are you about being in fandom to your non-fandom friends/family?
I was too open initially because I fell headlong in love with fandom and was honestly a bit hypomanic for about 3-4 months. So there was a little oversharing with close friends and (agh) a work colleague at a conference which makes me wince to remember! Luckily that colleague wasn't local and I never saw him again, whew. I'm a bit sad that, unlike some, I don't have any locally-based RL fannish friends I can hang out with - like, people who also have DW or AO3 accounts. I've learned to stop chatting about fandom stuff to my closest local friends - they're just not interested. So it's all virtual for me, especially these days of course - another way in which Covid's made my relative social isolation into the norm. 

 

Ha - so that went well. I posted once. Or no, with this one, twice.

Day 15: In your own space, talk about what you're taking away from this challenge. Did you learn something? Did you interact with new people? Or did you try out different fandoms or formats or relationships? What's changed between Day 1 and Day 15 of this challenge?

I should know better than to even try - this is unfortunately a really busy time of year for me, with a massive writing/formatting RL work task every year with a tight deadline around 12th January. So, faced with this task which at least I get to do comfortably at home, but which is tedious and tiring, what do I do? Have a procrastinatory multifandom blow-out in a fan challenge of course - specifically, fandom_stocking.

I had a fun and creative time with loads of fanart resulting, but everything else in my life got put on the back burner. Managing a daily posting/task challenge was unrealistic. As ever, I did the creative stuff (some of which would have met a few of the daily tasks), and failed on the social interactions. So the answers to Day 15 above are: Yes, No, No (or wait - I did, but in fandom_stocking), and what's changed is I learned not to try the snowflake_challenge again.

All the new artworks are on the AO3, an ongoing series being the Raccoonverse, which is fun (Rodney's accidentally transformed into a raccoon). I've also been doing the usual recs here and there - currently Ronon Dex genfic on stargateficrec and Star Wars on fanart_recs.

In other things, I've drifted into doing a full SG1 watch-through, only ever having dipped in here and there in the past.

I've been reading truepenny's (Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison) short pieces reposted over at her LJ from the Wayback Machine - about writing, and from them, I visited the Turkey City Lexicon which I'm sure everyone knows but is very much worth a read, and amusing.

( Brief mention of a non-tragic bereavement affecting a friend )

I've been exploring some keto recipes and have found some good ones, although some sites tend towards artificial ingredients that counterfeit carb-filled ones, which seems like that weird pseudo-vegetarianism where meat-lookalikes are faked with vegetable products. On balance, I prefer more straightforward eating; not that deli products are additive-free of course, but liquid splenda, xanthan gum and carb-free fake syrup are outside my comfort zone.

It's getting hotter here but we've had a cool start to summer overall. Muggy now, and pleasant temps in the twenties. I'm enjoying it. Possum is fine and says hi.

Hi there
So obviously I'm back to my old ways of doing stuff and hardly ever journaling. /o\ I did try, honest, about a week ago.

( stuff under the cut... )

So that's what I've been doing. Mostly instead of, y'know, sleep. Or flossing. I did make experimental muffins today, though. With prunes, as we didn't have anything else to go in them. They're surprisingly okay. How have you all been?

I had a fic blowout across Christmas, and since then I've been more on an art binge. Podfic for Podbang preceded the writing splurge. 
So I was thinking about how I react differently to them all. I get most caught up in the art, spending hours at the computer sometimes and not noticing while I obsessively work on some detailed piece. It seems to flow more easily once I get the initial idea, and then after it's "finished" there'll be a couple of days of obsessive self-betaing and tweaking of details. I've never used an art beta - I'm pretty crap at organizing betas at all, but especially for art, as I tend to see art as more inherently idiosyncratic and less bound by rules (like grammar and spelling). 
I was thinking that since I enjoy doing the art so much I should do more, but I do still love writing and recording (and let's not even think about RL work, as if my employers knew how much of my energies go into fandom stuff I might not have a job!). 

( more tl;dr thinky stuff here )

Anyway, the obvious problem with all this is that I am experiencing only recursive self-referential stimuli so I'm a little worried that I'll miss out on new and exciting fandoms because I don't read novels or watch TV. Still, that's what flists are for, eh? It worked for Inception and BBC Sherlock! Plus I just discovered trinityofone's booklog posts which are excellent for weeding out most books on the list as things with no appeal to me, so they can be ignored without guilt.  (Because they're not fanfiction...*slinks off to read some more*)