sarasa_cat | Recent Entries

Fan fiction archives:

sarasacat on fanfiction.net - most of my older fiction, some of my new fiction
many Final Fantasy drabbles on LJ's ff-fortnightly comm
some Final Fantasy drabbles on DW's ff-fortnightly comm
sketchbook of DA2 stories in Mari Hawke's universe: a history of lies
sarasa_cat on AO3 (locked to AO3 users only)
FFVII - Even The Littlest Monsters series

I have a tumblr that mostly runs by queue as a personal social bookmarking reference mess.

While clicking around deep inside dreamwidth's settings for this account, I realized that there are a number of personal journals I subscribe to and am mutuals with (and often but not always folks I know on tumblr) for which I have gone COMPLETELY UNAWARE of whenever those journals have updated.

Trying to figure out what went wrong.

For years I relied on the LJ and then DW email notification option to know when journals updated.

I have since learned this doesn't always work, especially when a journal post is marked private when published and then later switched to a broader permission for reading.

But there appear to be at least a couple of edges cases that are a bit funky with notifications on DW...

One thing is entirely on me though: I STOPPED using my "Reading" page on DW during all of the time that I mostly connected via iOS (usually via my phone). Currently on a Windows10 gaming machine right now, poking around, realizing the obvious. The oh. The oohhhhh.

Well. Either I might spam older posts with grossly belated comments or I'll just be more attentive moving forward.

I really do want to make more use of this platform for Reasons.

I'm behind on absolutely everything dreamwidth-related bc life. Sometimes life is like that. Also, DW isn't the best via phone although I will read often and occasionally even comment by phone. All posts in recent months were made via iPad and ... uh ... well. It worked. but far less than ideal.

Last week my replacement laptop finally arrived and it is mostly set up. Still need to deal with a few more set up issues today or tomorrow. Probably tomorrow.

But this means that I have a nice comfortable full featured fully-modern laptop that is easy to drag around the house (or outside or to a local coffee shop once the weather finally cooperates) and do so all hours of the day and night.

Which means I can finally catch up on dreamwidth things and be more active over here once again.

More thoughts forthcoming -- need to get other things done first.

My card for

genprompt_bingo Round 23 is an opt-in card generated with prompt lists 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 29.

This card is making me really happy. I cannot remember the last time I received a bingo card that just vibrated with possibilities. While fic fills are always the easiest, I am challenging myself to make an attempt at mixing it up and including other kinds of fanworks.

Trauma	Spring	Early Morning	Disgust	Terrible Choices
Watching Helplessly	Forgiveness	Identity Crisis	Evening	Sirocco
Fate	Regret	Wild Card	It was a Dark and Stormy Night	Contentment
Someone is Disguised	Decay	Sacrifice / Letting Go	May Morning	Abandonment
Anger	Surprise / Shock	A Long Walk	Thunder and Lightning	Hurt / Comfort

In addition to playing with this card, will be keeping an eye on

drabble_zone and

fan_flashworks for more prompts to play with.

While I cannot guarentee life/adulting will remain calm and orderly, I am feeling a strong need to get back to writing purely for fun. :D

no_true_pair recently opened signups and is about to start a new round. Prompts go up on August 17th so sign up before then if you are interested. Very low pressure / low commitment.

Apparently amnesty is now a forever thing on that community so I should dig up my ancient ntp prompts from years back to see if anything still sparks.

Fandom in the 1990s: Usenet news groups. Mailing lists. Geocities. PAPER ZINES exchanged at cons or by sending your address and some money through the mail.

Death of 90s fandom? The birth of Web2.0 baby!

Fandom in the 2000s: Blogs. LiveJournal, InsaneJournal, other LJ spinoffs now dead. Fanfiction.net. Various fanfiction websites that came and went. Deviant Art. Various forums. Delicious.

Death of 00s fandom? Strikethrough. Blogging platforms folding or selling off to other companies with different goals. Yahoo!'s kill-the-goose approach to ownership.

Fandom's initial response to the late 00's: Dreamwidth! Archive of our Own!

What fandom in the late 00's failed to see coming: The endless scrolling wall of decontextualized micro-posts.

Fandom in the 2010s: Tumblr. Twitter. Facebook. (Discord? Instagram??) ....meanwhile Dreamwidth and AO3 show their technological age while nonetheless doing exactly what fandom needs.

Death of 2010s fandom? No one really wants an endless scrolling wall of decontextualized posts controlled by corporatism. No one ever wanted the depressive-addictive dopamine hijacking that is purposefully engineered into these products and the side effect of these products amplifying outrage while suppressing measured discussion. No one likes the fact that they cannot consistently find *anything* that actually interests them within in this constantly updating endless scrolling wall and that there is no sense of community, moderation, or safety. No one has time or energy to be plugged in 24-7 while also **creating** fandom content and doing Adulthood(tm) and, meanwhile, the kids are terrified and screaming.

Potential harbinger of the future? AO3 receives recognition for what it has done and wins a Hugo.

So what is your vision for fandom in 2020s?

--

Edited to add: while this post addresses fandom, I think it could be expanded to all indie-media writers, artists, makers, and the consumers/fans of their original work. That said, Fandom is useful to talk about because of how large and all encompassing it is, but every indie maker, every solo artist or writer, and every consumer of their work feels similar pains, at least, from where I am sitting. Creators who make media for fandom and/or make original works are equally welcome to respond to this post.

I need a book reading challenge for 2020.

I need to return to regularly scheduled fiction reading.

Being mostly off the grid for a week taught me something about my bad habit of defaulting to crap reading on my phone: dwelling amongst low hanging fruit across various newspapers for far too long, daily. And the endless scroll on Instagram and tumblr, which can all mask itself as being more useful than it is regarding time spent.

READING CHALLENGE:

I don’t want to commit to something like “52 books in one year” bc I feel the need to have flexibility for:
- abandoning books that aren’t worth more time
- reading lots of short fiction
- reading a few epic length mega-sized novels
- allow fanfic to count too, dammit

I might instead aim for something like “read x pages/words of fiction per week.” Haven’t determined a value for x yet.

Or read for y minutes daily (or weekly).

And record all fiction I read in a spreadsheet.

No matter, this post is my declaration that It Will Be Attempted.

Anyone know of good reading challenge communities?

Subject line says all.

Try is the key word.

The number of Hawkes saved on two different computers plus one PS3 far outnumbers the number of game saves I have that go all the way through to the end of act 3.

After not touching DA2 (or anything DA related) for a long while, I made a red-tinted Purple!warrior!F!Hawke in late March but abandoned her when distracted and didn't feel like returning to her because playing a warrior in DA2 makes the the battles feel slow, and that's not where my head is at ATM.

Thus, a red-tinted Purple!Mage!F!Hawke was born earlier this week.

I almost *never* play purple hawkes, especially as f!Hawkes (which is why I made that warrior back in march) but ... idk. I've liked other warrior!Hawkes whom I have created but her concept (or lack of one) just didn't click for me?

Also, given how long it has since I have played DA2 with Carver, the whole game feels brand new to me because of it. ;)

Only playing 20-45 minutes per evening, and not every evening. Thus, not all that far in.

Was suddenly obvious to me while taking the Athenril route into the city that this Hawke will someday rationalize becoming a blood mage. As for other decisions? Tbd.

Words keep flowing from me like whooooaaaaaaaa.

Maybe there is hope that I will catch up on my GYWO’19 pledge because, right now, I am behind by 34,000 words for the year if my 200,000 word pledge is equally spread out over 12 months. That amounts to a lot of catching up. But, honestly, it is doable.

This certainly is NOT the first time in my life (omfg not at all) that I have emerged from an epic multi-month (half year) dry spell with a FLOOD OF WORDS.

And this time, something about my voice is different, at least in non-fiction. A no holds barred honesty that just says what needs to be said. Just says it. hm. Editing will be interesting? (or easy???)

Yeah, sure, it's the 12th of may and more than one third of the year is gone. But now I am finally ready to take my 2019 writing goals seriously!!

So, where do I stand?

2019 GYWO Pledge: 200,000 words
Monthly Goals: ~16,500 to 17,000 words/mo

Current count for the year so far: 35,452
Which means that I am:
-- 2,689 words behind for this month (catching up is very doable for monthly goals)
-- 36,329 words behind for the year.

So:

--> To stay on pace, monthly (and call the first few months a loss), I just need to catch up for this month and then keep going
--> To make up missed words for prior months, I need to add an extra ~4,500 per mo, which might not be doable every month but I have certainly had 20,00 to 40,000 word months in the past so anything is possible

Well, time to word more words before calling tonight a night.

On to monsters. ;D

( I swear this works in the text. Really. I swear. )

It is hard to explain my mixed feelings about MBTI ... I find it useful until I do not and there are so many ways in which it is not useful plus there is so much MBTI garbage littering the planet.

That said, something struck me earlier today -- The Anna Karenina Principle and how it applied (to some extent) to MBTI, and that became the seed for a 4500 word essay on Tumblr.

https://sarasa-cat.tumblr.com/post/183238307477/the-anna-karenina-principle-and-mbti-type

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Have been looking through some of my old Dragon Age drafts -- mostly DA2 fic -- and have only scratched the surface of all of those words.

Holy shit... I forgot that mostly outlined A/B/O story that requires capital W warnings in the first part, and then it completely deconstructs the whole A/B/O trope in the second part.

And Anthem ... I remember writing it but now that I am reading it ... omfg. Fenris. This. Why did I never finish it?

Wow. There is so much fic hidden away in my dropbox and google drive. I just ... whoa.

(and all of that orig I forgot about too.)

When I first tried using twine a million years ago ... or sometime in 2014-15 or something like that, it reminded me the experimental fiction I had to read at the end of the 1990s in some graduate-level seminar on Hypertext.

I never did much with twine.

Over the past few years while I have lived under a rock, twine has grown up A LOT and clearly I am extremely late to the party.

The other day phdfan (

breakfastdragon ) reblogged a post on Tumblr about a free indie fan-game, Dragon Age Insurrection, that is currently a work in progress and will employ a variety of programmatic aspects -- character race and class, romances, etc -- and it is being made with Twine2/SugarCube. Interesting! Twine is growing up!

Last night I...

...skimmed through the SugarCube documentation
...started hunting down into on the underlying Twee format
...started realizing that it would be possible to hook a lot of extra javascript in and have the js make calls to a backend database
...which means Twine can now be used for far more complex projects

huuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

(▰˘◡˘▰)

But now I need to learn the basics of Twine and dust off all of my haven't-used-in-four-years programming skills.

So, rather than work on a bigger original project that I would consider using this stuff for, perhaps?? idk? Just a perhaps?

...Idrelle -- the person making DA Insurrection as an exploratory "learn how to make a text game" portfolio piece (and I am looking forward to it) -- ended up giving me an idea.

I have many many many hundreds of thousands of words of Dragon Age fanfic-in-draft that has been sitting in deep freeze for a while. Certainly, something small from within it could be the starting point for me playing with Twine? Obviously, I'd need to think about how to make it choice based with branching and and choice consequences but... hm. Why not?

Although I won't make anything that is anywhere near of the size and complexity of what Idrelle is making. Small. Or maybe a few small things. All... small. Learning exercises.

[is the icon for this post a hint? maybe. maybe not. but maybe. ;)]

Sometimes I just want to game on my lightweight work laptop (a MacBook) rather than on my aging, big gaming machine or on a console.

DA2 happens to run beautifully on my MacBook. Currently, I am playing a completely unmodded game. I might add mods later?

As of last night, I have a new Hawke: a female warrior who is extremely purple. Not my standard Hawke and no idea yet which romance path(s) this Hawke will take. Isabela? Fenris?

edit: huh? why did DW change my icon for this post? well, fixed.

Day 7

Stretch yourself a little and try something new. Go play in a new fandom or with a new pairing. Try working in a new medium. Or check out some fanworks that are new to you.

I keep thinking about making fanart and sometimes I even mumble about making making fanart, but I haven't made the commitment and, tbh, fan art of video game characters using digital tools (rather than traditional art tools) leaves me in a state of O_O: ...it is pretty much the exact opposite in every way imaginable of the kind of art I am competent at.

THEREFORE IT IS PERFECT FOR TRYING SOMETHING NEW. And flailing wildly until I get the hang of it.

To put pressure on me, I am open to prompts that I will work on during my (lol) copious "free time" throughout 2019. That gives me ample time to complete ten prompts.

I'll take up to ten prompts requests. Here are the rules:

1. Valid fandoms are limited to:
---- Final Fantasy VII / Compilation of VII
---- Final Fantasy XII & FFXII:Revenant Wings
---- Dragon Age: Origins (and DLCs)
---- Dragon Age II (and DLCs)
---- Dragon Age Inquisition (base game only)
---- Persona 5

2. Prompt in the format: "Fandom; Characters-or-pairing (list up to 3 characters); short prompt"

3. One prompt per person.

4. Do not leave prompts that require an explicit sexual interpretation.

5. Please prompt something different from what other people have already prompted.

6. AU prompts are allowed!

Warning/disclaimer/facts-of-life: I will work on these prompts over the coming months (and perhaps throughout 2019 depending on how little time I have). No guarentees about what my style will look like or what will actually occur because OMFG I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT WILL HAPPEN. WE ARE ON THIS JOURNEY TOGETHER AND .... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

NOTE: I am going to reserve a 0th prompt for myself (a prompt I create for myself) that gives me a warmup for just figuring out how I even want to start doing digital fan art**. BECAUSE THIS IS A JOURNEY FULL OF ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[** I am a traditional/analog artist but I also know how to use photoshop and sketchbook pro for a variety of things, mostly design related work, and my digital illustration experience is limited ... thus this pledge to do something new]

Prompt Slots to be filled during 2019 (approx 1 per month minus my travel/vacation month):

0. Artists Choice (TBD)
1. Final Fantasy VII (any): Barret/Tifa: In the snow.

wallwalker
2. Dragon Age 2 - Fenris, Hawke, Anders (happy for you to interpret their relationship as you see fit) - after the Chantry boom.

breakfastdragon
3. Dragon Age: Origins; the Warden's mabari; joy.

aubergion
4. FFVII; Yuffie, Vincent, and possibly Red XIII; "Pancakes."

sepdet
5. FFVII, Vincent, Yuffie, amusement park. and/or Vincent, Lucretia, amusement park.

renegadefolkhero
6. Final Fantasy XII; Penelo & Larsa; genealogy.

suzume
7. OPEN FOR YOU TO CLAIM
8. OPEN FOR YOU TO CLAIM
9. OPEN FOR YOU TO CLAIM
10. OPEN FOR YOU TO CLAIM

Day 6

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

( three wishes )

Day 5 In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.

Given that I have hardly ventured beyond my tiny little circle of fandom friends for the past year+, I am promoting ~~three~~ seven DW writing communities that I want to spend more time on during 2019. Below the list I'll explain why these communities intrigue me and hopefully others might feel inspired.

( Seven active DW communities for drabbles, double drabbles, flashfic, and short stories )

I HAVE TO DO DAY 4 WHEN I HAVE TIME. (finding someone, connecting, etc.)

-- NOTE: Might have to wait until Sunday 13th? TBD. Maybe sooner. This is a tough week for internet browsing. Difficult to do day 4's challenge via cell phone.

(time to catch up on other challenges for Snowflake...)