Holmes Minor

Challenge #12

Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

So, my mind did not go immediately to Transformers on this one. Yeah, I know, I'm as surprised as anybody else. Although, I guess it's more accurate to say that my mind didn't go specifically to Transformers, since it's still in there in its way. Just not as important this time.

I remember being a kid who was into old music, old movies, old shows, old cartoons. I remember discovering and getting into old comics. Honestly, it doesn't seem like it should've been all that unusual at the time, at least when it comes to that initial list. Oldies stations were a thing, TCM was a thing, TV Land was a thing, Nick at Nite was a thing. Boomerang wasn't a thing yet, so I could catch an episode of any version of Scooby-Doo if I just turned on Cartoon Network at the right moment. Three Stooges shorts played in the same lineups as my Saturday morning cartoons. My school library was chock full of books older than my parents. Even without my parents' media collections and hand-me-downs, there was plenty of opportunity to be exposed to old stuff and plenty of then-modern shows, especially cartoons, referenced that same stuff.

And yet, as natural as it seemed to me to have an appreciation and even a liking for these things that I literally grew up with, adults were constantly expressing surprise that I'd ever heard of, say, I Love Lucy, never mind that I would watch it on purpose, for entertainment. The first time I ever went into a comic shop and asked if they had The Blonde Phantom, the clerk was flabbergasted. And I was flabbergasted in turn. I'd learned about the character in a magazine I'd picked up off a news stand in... Idk now, a drug store, maybe? Point is, the title was clearly remembered. I myself might not have remembered it, per se, but I was as capable as anyone older than me of finding out about it.

I think a lot about those reactions when I see people my age and older complaining about these kids today not recognizing or appreciating xyz from Back Then, while these same people make no effort to expose the young folks in their lives to xyz. Or else only doing so to make it a lecture about who has what too easy anymore.

This is all maybe more than the necessary amount of setup to say my thanks to people of old fandoms. Not necessarily fandom olds, though plenty of them count to. I mean anyone, old or new, who keeps old fandoms alive in any small way. Whether that means preserving media by any means necessary and keeping it accessible to future fans, creating fanworks or even just talking about old this or old that. Some of that media is part of ongoing IPs, some of it hasn't been touched in an official capacity for decades or more, some of it is in between the two. Even the most aptly called "forgotten gem" has to be remember fondly by someone to earn the name. Each and every piece of media is still alive, in its own way, as long as it's remembered. All of it will continue to live as long as it's appreciated. And I appreciate everyone who's a part of that, whether they've written meta or contributed to a wiki or animated Colombo shaking his hips to "Caramelldansen" or made a list of vintage recs or or or.

Challenge #11

In your own space, grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

Did this back when that challenge was posted! I'll probably go back tomorrow and see if there are any others I can fulfill but as of now, I mostly left comments on people's fics, did my daily clicks on arab.org and made a donation. I also wrote a couple of comments fics for alchemicink, which I am reposting below mostly so I can fix the typo I somehow managed to overlook in a frikkin drabble, lol. If I do go back and do any other creative fills, I'll probably update this post.

Anywho:

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We're expecting snow this weekend. Granted, we've been expecting snow for the past couple of weekends and all it's amounted to is a few minutes of flurries. But! This time, we're expecting it from the south. And the south doesn't have mountains to steal all our wintry weather. So, we're probably, finally, getting that snow. Aaand there's probably gonna be quite a bit of it. Plus some freezing rain at some point, just to make sure we get icy roads too. Then it's supposed to just be very cold. I'm trying not to overthink it, seeing as we've still got a few days, but I'm a little worried already about possibly being trapped in my complex again...

Nearly forgot my personal curriculum accountability post! Honestly, I've not got much in the way of updates. I suppose that'll often be the case, week by week. Still, I've found these posts help me to reflect and so I'll keep them going.

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We're allegedly getting snow tonight but we were allegedly getting snow yesterday and didn't, so I'm pretty skeptical. Just as well if we don't, I guess, since I wanted to go to the farmer's market in the morning and I'd rather not deal with the way people here drive in the snow.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

I sat for a good minute thinking about my writing process, realized it'd be easier to explain the Summers family tree and so decided to talk a little about my crochet process instead.

Or, rather, my favorite crochet process. Because sometimes I do just see a pattern I like, buy or go through my stash for the appropriate yarn and make the thing. And sometimes I see a pattern I like, decide that whatever yarn I have on-hand is Good Enough and then make the thing. But the most satisfying projects are the ones that start as an idea born from my own mind. Sometimes those ideas are inspired by patterns or projects I see, sometimes they spark to life on their own. Not having the most robust visual imagination, I'm always very pleased with myself when this happens.

So, that's step one-- get an idea. Step two is research: Has anyone done this or something like it before? And if so, how did they do it? I think it's the most fun when I can find something similar to but not quite the same as what I want. I'm always a little nervous about free-handing, no matter how often I've done it, so being able to look at an existing object as a sort of proof of concept helps me to get past that. But then not being able to find exactly what I want means that I get to ~experiment.

That second point is why I'd say I have the most fun when the "proofs of concept" are only for bits and pieces of what I want my finished project to be. Something that's the right shape but not applied the way I want to apply it, for example, so I have to patchwork different patterns or different stitches, even if just in small ways for the sake of small but significant differences. It's always a thrill when in the midst of the third step-- make the thing-- I come to That Part in a pattern that's, y'know, fine for what it is... but not for what I want. That Part where I look at it and know that I could follow it as written and it'd do the job but instead I say, "No, I don't think I will," and I do something else that makes it-- at least for me-- better.

Granted, this process hasn't always been successful, where success is defined by a satisfactorily finished item. Sometimes things don't work out the way I think they will. But, hey, even a failed experiment yields data, amirite? That's all just part of the process.