Hi, this is a generic letter with details of my DNWs/likes/generic prompts for exchanges, in case people want a more detailed reference of what I generally like/don't like than what tends to be in my exchange-specific letters. Details in exchange-specific letters generally supersede this if they conflict.

( DNWs )
( Likes: general )
( Likes: smut )
( Likes: art )

( Fandom promos )

General request info

I'm chacusha on AO3. I'm requesting art, fic, and podfic for all requests. If you're the kind of person who either wants a lot of detail or just wants a list of pairings to choose from, I've included some lists of ships I like in my letter. However, I've also hidden/collapsed those lists in case you're the type of person who doesn't want to be influenced in any way in picking a pairing. Feel free to expand them or leave them closed as you wish.

( General notes )
( Bravely Default: Alternis Dim )
( Final Fantasy Tactics: Argath Thadalfus, Rapha Galthena )
( Princess Maker 2: Daughter | Olive Oyl )
( Puyo Puyo: Rulue )
( Soulcalibur: Seong Mi-na )
( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Quark )
( Sword of Mana: Heroine )

I figured out how to do these HTML openable thingies (using <details> and <summary> tags) from here.

Kind of a random post, but I have been doing a practice called Morning Pages more-or-less every morning since 17 October. It's been an interesting experience, so I thought I would write up some of my experiences and findings so far having done this for about six months.

I first heard about Morning Pages on the getyourwordsout Discord server -- someone mentioned The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and wanted people's opinions on it as a writing advice book. A lot of people either didn't like it or said they gave up once it started getting a bit too religious/Christian/spiritual, but multiple people said they liked the Morning Pages technique and that was their main takeaway from the book. I was intrigued at this universal approval for Morning Pages, so I looked up more information online.

( More info on Morning Pages )
( Other miscellaneous observations )

Conclusion

So yeah, basically, I quite like doing Morning Pages, although they can be hard to fit in my schedule sometimes, and I'm honestly still not sure if they are overall worth it/helpful. They're not a cure-all -- for example, there are still hard/intimidating tasks I get avoidant about and even with Morning Pages and my awareness of my avoidant attitude toward those tasks, I am not sure I have been able to get any closer to tackling them.

Even though Morning Pages ARE time-consuming, I would ordinarily take some time in the morning anyway to make a to-do list for the day, and the way I do Morning Pages is basically to do that but in a more extra way, and sometimes they also come in handy to just vent out some feelings or frustrations or try to figure out where my stress is coming from. In that sense, I think they are kind of similar to a sort of mandatory two-hour meditation exercise at the beginning of the day. It's not always clear that that meditation time would be better spent doing something else, but it does help to focus me, and 90% of the time, my meditation time is spent on something productivity-focused (just a reflection of the kind of person I am -- I don't think Morning Pages has to be like this for someone else).

And already that mandatory reflection has helped me understand things about work/productivity, so I think those insights have been one good thing to come out of these Morning Pages at least (even if the insights might have been obvious to other people!).

Ah... huh. I apparently have quite a few books I've read that I've reviewed but have not archived those thoughts here. (I tend to write book reviews on Tumblr first because I read very slowly and take notes as I go, and Tumblr's drafts are just much better for doing that.) Also, I finished one of the arts I promised I would do in February (a couple of days late shhh), and so now I can use it in this post. I'm not going to include book club books in this round-up -- I'll save them for another time.

( Enchantment (1999) by Orson Scott Card )
( The Infinite and the Divine (2020) by Robert Rath )
( Anthropology (2000) by Dan Rhodes )
( The Big Game (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, #4) (1993) by Sandy Schofield )

Challenge #12: Create a Rec Countdown.

I've decided to rec: 5 icon communities, 4 media featuring women on a ruthless revenge quest, 3 direct-to-DVD Disney movie sequels I think are actually good, 2 communities for finding fannish events, and 1 movie I'd rec to everyone (which is extremely uncommon).

( Rec countdown )


Challenge #13: Interact with someone in fandom you haven't talked with before.

(Skipping this one.)


Challenge #15: Talk about an unexpected joyous moment you experienced last year.

Well, I was really delighted to get a late treat for my Quodo-as-exes prompt in Quodo Mini-fest! And a vid too! I don't think I really realized this about latetreatbonanza until after I'd run it the first time, but nothing much matches the surprised delight of getting a late present out of left field (I mainly made the community from the creator's perspective of just wanting motivation to finish up my own late projects). But I've noticed it in the way the recipients react to their gifts -- it is definitely SUCH a joyous experience getting a surprise gift! So yes, that was an unexpected joyous moment for me last year.


And I'm done with snowflake_challenge, reasonably on time this year!

Challenge #11: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.

Since I wrote my Bravely Default canon promo last year, I've been meaning to post a discussion about trios that strongly fit a ( Sun/Moon/Star aesthetic )


Challenge #12 is giving me a bit of a hard time and I might need to meditate on it a bit more. And I might be too shy for Challenge #13 -- in any case, giving it a bit more time seems like a good idea. So I'm going to just skip ahead to Challenge #14?


Challenge #14: In your own space, create your own fandom challenge.

I feel like in this year's challenge, there wasn't really a lot of opportunities for people to talk about specific characters they like in fiction, so I'd like to ask a question related to characters. So feel free to answer any of: Do you have a character you used to be obsessed with and no longer are, or a character you've encountered recently that you're like, "Younger me would have LOVED this character"? Which character do you find yourself thinking about the most / rotating in your mind lately, and why? Do you have a character you feel has been done dirty by fandom, and if so, in what way? Do you have a canon that you think does a particularly good job at establishing its cast of characters, and if so, what would you say is its secret to success?

Challenge #9: In your own space, create a fanwork.

Well, kind of inspired by hamsterwoman's colorbars, I decided to make an icon set for the current challenge of lgbtrainbow.

( Various graphics under the cut )

Challenge #8 - In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for a beloved character, relationship or fandom.

Ack, so this is kind of late (I was hoping to do one of these per day, and this took me three days to write!), but since I am a pinch hit in fffx, I thought it would be nice to write some canon promos for some of the more niche canons I'm requesting. For this exchange, the fandoms I was requesting were: Bravely Default (canon promo already written); Kingdom Hearts; Pinocchio (canon promo already written); Soulcalibur; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Star Trek: Discovery; and Trials of Mana. Of those, Kingdom Hearts and the Star Trek shows are already pretty popular fandoms and they're also huge/sprawling canons, so I don't think writing a promo to encourage people to pick them up for my pinch hit really makes sense. So that just left Soulcalibur and Trials of Mana. It took me a really long time, but these are now up over here: Soulcalibur promo (2613 words) and Trials of Mana promo (1776 words)

My pinch hit has apparently already been claimed, though, so once again I am too late with these Snowflake Challenges!! Ah well, I assume canon promos are those kinds of things that have long-term payoff rather than short-term payoff, so it's nice to have these up for the future.

Continuing to churn these out...

Challenge #6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.

( Favorite piece of original canon )

Challenge #7: In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a wishlist of sorts.

( Wishlist )

I posted this on Tumblr a while ago; thought I would copy it here:

( About artists thinking of their art/fic/etc. as 'content' )

Also, here are my thoughts on various AUs done for this AU Bingo meme. I'm still taking requests for this, by the way!

( FFIX + 20th Century AU )
( FFT + Monster Hunter AU )
( ST:DS9 + Royalty AU )
( ST:DS9, Quodo + Superhero AU )


And then to round out this post, just a couple of links I wanted to share:

- The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design -- I knew what "black woman author" book cover style they were talking about before any examples were given... There are also book genres that my partner calls Blue Book and Pink Book, and you can instantly tell which type of book is being advertised on the subway with basically no information given, just based on the graphic design of the ad. It's very powerful visual branding!
- Magic: the Gathering now has a game state in which you need to prove that there are an infinite number of twin primes to win

Crossposting from Tumblr, but here is my Visions of Mana review:

( Non-spoilery thoughts )
( Spoilery thoughts )

I promised myself I would allow myself to request an au_challenge bingo card once I cleared some exchange fic off my plate. I have FINALLY done this, so here we go! I am not actually going to make any fanworks for this, but I just want to use it as a meme/activity to allow people to give me AU prompts and I can share my thoughts on how I think an X AU for Y canon would look like.

So, help me fill out this bingo: Pick a square + a fandom you'd like me to apply that AU to (+ optionally, a set of character(s) or ship(s) you'd like me to focus on for that AU), and I will write up some thoughts on how I think it would work. Here's a list of my fandoms if that helps. (If you happen to know I'm familiar with some fandom not listed there, feel free to request that.)

( Bingo card behind the cut )

This is just some behind-the-scenes notes on the process of writing my fic, Mission to the Dominion. This post contains spoilers for the ending quite early in the post, so I recommend not reading it unless you've finished reading the whole fic itself. (n=2769)

( Commentary on Mission to the Dominion )

Writing my Pinocchio canon promo and writing about Lampwick reminded me that I need to finish a mini fandom meta piece I've been meaning to write up for a really long time.

Basically, late in high school and during college, I got into three things: (1) I played Soulcalibur for the first time (Soulcalibur II), (2) I finished playing Sword of Mana, and (3) I watched Pinocchio for the first time (at least, at an age old enough that I actually watched/remembered the whole thing).

These three canons actually share something in common, which is that, well, I got unreasonably attached to a particular character who made it to the end of the story alive, but who I later found out died in a different version of canon!

Let me go through these one by one:

( Spoilers for Sword of Mana, Soulcalibur, and Pinocchio )

Anyway, I was wondering if you know of any characters like this, where it's possible to go through the whole story under the belief the character survived, only to find they died in another version of the story -- characters who live in one version of canon but die in another. And if you consumed the one where they lived *first* and then got blindsided by their fate in a different version. I wonder if the experience is very different when the order is swapped (you're expecting the character to die and are like "huh, interesting choice" when they survive); I feel like I must have experience with that too, but for some reason, these three examples always stick out in my mind when it comes to these "Schrodinger dead" characters, maybe because it's more memorable that way. Do you find you tend to latch onto these characters who have a habit of maybe-dying in canon, or that those kinds of characters don't really stand out to you?

EDIT: Oh man, I kept feeling there was another example of me knowing a character should die and being surprised when they didn't, but I couldn't think of it. But I finally remembered -- it's actually the opposite: Mild spoiler warning for Magic Knight Rayearth, but I read the manga first, and then I watched the anime. In the anime, Presea dies once she gives the main trio their new weapons/armor. Having read the full manga, though, I was like "Mm, well, that's an... interesting choice..." because I knew Presea would be plot-relevant later. And then I later read that the anime dealt with this problem by... introducing Presea's twin sister, Sierra! Lmao, amazing. Great save.

Since I'm signing up for fffx, I wanted to take the time to write at least one new canon promo for one of the canons I'm requesting, so I've decided: Pinocchio (1940)! The canon promo is available over here, but I've also included the text below, massaged a little bit in order to be in a more natural format (n=1686). (I've talked a little bit about what I like about Pinocchio before, so I'm sorry that some of this treads the same ground.)

( Why I love Pinocchio )

---

So that's it -- that's a more detailed treatment of why I like Pinocchio and why I think it's worth watching and why I'm quite fannish about it (and have been for, like, 15 years).

You can suggest topics for future posts for this meme over here.

I'm chacusha on AO3 and am requesting 1x10(000) and 2x5(000) versions of comics and fic for everything.

EDIT (26 & 31 Aug): I made some minor edits -- added some AU prompts for Michael Burnham/Mirror Philippa Georgiou as I apparently forgot them in that fandom, and added (a link to) an opt-in list. I added more detail/opt-ins for my trans headcanons DNW -- sorry it's so long. Hopefully it says the same thing, but just with more clarity on scenarios that might seem to be touching/nearby a trans headcanon plotline.

EDIT (25 Jan): I don't know if it helps at this point, but I did write some canon promos for Soulcalibur and Trials of Mana that might help with finding and consuming these canons. They are now linked below.

( General information )
( Bravely Default )
( Kingdom Hearts )
( Pinocchio )
( Soulcalibur )
( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine )
( Star Trek: Discovery )
( Trials of Mana )

Hi all, just making a quick public post:

1. A PSA for those who don't track Dreamwidth's support tickets, some change in Dreamwidth code a couple of months back has created a bunch of new bugs. Some of these are fairly minor and merely annoying (like the inability to update subscription settings and your circles from the Manage Circles page), but there is one feature that is broken in quite a bad way: customizing journal styles on Dreamwidth communities. Basically, if you try to change your community's layout, it will instead change your journal's layout (I tested this out and it let me change my community layout ONCE, but then all subsequent changes were applied to my user account) (see below). I believe this means it is possible (although rare) to permanently lose customizations on your journal's layout if your community and personal account share the same style but with different customizations applied. And also, community layouts currently can't be updated properly (see below) (although you can still freely switch your main layout). So be careful!

I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been announced anywhere to the general Dreamwidth population either through email or on dw_news... This seems like something you'd want to give people a heads up on, especially since people have been waiting on a bug fix for something like two months now...

Edit: Okay, actually, I found a workaround to setting community layouts to the one you want. If you browse through all the themes and find which page (out of 128) the theme you want to switch to is on, then you just need to manually enter a URL like this into the search bar (if it's already in the search bar, you need to press enter to reload the page): https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/?authas=examplecomm&cat=all&page=52
This will take you to page 52 where you should see your community's (examplecomm) current theme listed on the right and then be able to select a new theme below. This should set the layout of the community rather than your personal journal. However, if you click on any other links while in the Select Style pages before clicking on the Apply Theme button, the theme will be applied to your journal instead.

2. For personal reasons, I had to do a minor cleanup of my access and subscriptions. But while I was doing that, I decided to remove some people who I friended through friending memes and I just didn't click with. (Note: Even though the manage circle page is NOT working (as mentioned above), you can can still change access settings by going to individual profiles and changing your settings from there.) As a result, this might be a generally good time to let me know if you would like to change our access settings (like want to (continue to) be friends, or are in a similar situation where we haven't clicked and you'd like to take this chance to revoke access and unsubscribe).

3. I'm taking icon and meta requests over at promptmepromptly. I would especially appreciate lots of icon requests!

4. Photobucket has actually... NOT failed me for the last time...? Basically, I got an email from Photobucket saying that they would like to sell public photos of people uploaded to their website to third parties for the purpose of AI training. Opting out of this policy requires account deletion. This seems... like a truly insane business decision from Photobucket, and that's really saying something given their history of insane business decisions. But well, I don't care -- I am no longer able to access my Photobucket accounts anyway as they are unpaid, and seeing this new policy made me decide it's time to call it and just delete all the accounts I can still log into. Surprisingly, when I did this, Photobucket offered me the chance to download all my photos, which is something I gave up trying to do years ago. ??? So now I have the full collection of images for my main Photobucket and also for wd_lims, which I forgot I once modded. (I have not been able to download the photos for the finalfantasyland Photobucket, though, because it is tied to the finalfantasylandmod@gmail.com account that I no longer have access to because I handed it off to a different set of mods who should have changed the password and also the recovery email.) Anyway, thus ends my relationship to Photobucket... on a weirdly bad/good note.

For promptmepromptly, I got the following prompt:

What tropes that came from Star Trek have resonated most with you as a viewer, possibly with examples of them in alternate medias? If that scope is too broad, feel free to pick a trope and talk my ear off about it.

It's hard for me to tell what tropes Star Trek originated, and what it just popularized. So instead, I just decided to brainstorm some elements that frequently feature in Star Trek, and which resonate with me, and talk about them. I chose two topics:

( Humanistic Renaissance men / random ship concerts )

( Characters caught between different cultures )

And here's the fannish and personal updates post. I think I'm also going to use this as my last Snowflake Challenge post this year too.

For February/March/April, I've been taking it pretty easy in terms of fanworks, focusing more of my time on nonfiction writing and trying to prioritize pushing out overdue Dreamwidth posts. Most of my efforts the past couple of months have gone into ( running events and modding stuff )
( Current creative projects )
( Reading )



Challenge #11: In your own space, create a fanwork.

I'm going to count this as checked off. I've made some art for Quodo Mini-fest and also for phoenixdown_ex, I wrote a Quodo fic, I made a Quodo vid, and I've also been making graphics for the various events I'm running, so yeah, I'm tired. XD

( Vid and graphics under the cut )

Challenge #12: Tell Us about a Personal Win.

My personal win I'd like to talk about is that I have already been doing really well on the goals I made this year (friendslocked).

( More on this )


Challenge #13: Make a rec list of fanworks!

I'm going to skip this one. I AM intending to make a Quodo or DS9 rec list once I'm caught up on the tag, but I'm still very behind and I don't think I'll catch up anytime soon to want this challenge hanging over me.


Challenge #14: Try something new.

Done. As I mentioned above, some things I've tried out for the first time this year include:

- Making a vid.
- Making a Carrd website.
- Writing an HTML-scraping script (it's the first time I've done this!). Also, trying out a lot of Excel and/or Google Sheets functions I've never used before like XLOOKUP, FILTER, and IMPORTRANGE.

Hell yeah.


Challenge #15: Fandom Snowflake Challenge's 2023 Fandom Wrapped!

I'm skipping this one because I've basically already done this / already do this each year independently. Friendslocked: 2023 Fandom Retrospective and 2023 Writing/Fanworks Roundup.

February sure went by in a flash... phoenixdown_ex sign-ups close tonight (I am signing up to do art only -- about 60% done with my sign-up...) and there is also a Final Fantasy Kiss Battle going on, for those interested!



Huh... Remember how I was doing these? ^^; It is becoming increasingly unlikely I'll be able to do these, but maybe I'll try a couple more and call it a day (...a month, a year...).


Challenge #7: Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources.

I don't really have that many resources to give that I haven't mentioned before, so I'm just going to link my DW profile, where I link some Dreamwidth communities I think are neat. They range from fannish events, writing/art/icon support communities, and rec comms.


Challenge #9: Rec Us Your Newest Thing.

Very much NOT my newest thing, but this challenge mentioned that "You can absolutely use this space for that manifesto or fandom promo that you’ve always wanted to pen," so I decided to use it to try to finish up some fandom promos I've been writing up for my more obscure/hard-to-get-into fandoms and which I've been sticking in the bottom of my generic exchange letter. But they're NOT my newest thing because all the possible fandoms I could write a promo for are really old ones for me. And then unfortunately, doing just ONE of these promos took wayyy longer than I expected, so... here's my Bravely Default promo -- that's all I've got. It's... apparently 1558 words. I hope people looking to pick up new canons are willing to read mini-essays... (To be fair, most of it is just a list of things I tend to request in exchanges, which can be easily skipped.)


Challenge #10: Five Things! The five things are totally up to you.

I've decided to write up my top 5 ideas for a BFE (bangs, fests, exchanges) type multifandom event. These ideas are all too much for me to mod so I'm putting them up for adoption.

( 1: Telephone Fictionary )
( 2: One Trope Only )
( 3: One True Character )
( 4: Team-up Exchanges )
( 5: Reverse prompt/Prompting-for-prompts meme )