Scales and Tales

While I'm on a posting roll, have a "post a picture of the outdoors that you took" challenge, ganked from scribblemoose, spiced_wine, heartofoshun and others.

I'm asking those who love the outdoors to post a picture on your page. A picture that YOU took. Just a pic. No description. The goal is to regain peace and harmony without negativity. Please copy the text, put a picture on YOUR page, and let's look at these beautiful pictures.

Here you go:

Last week, novembermond posted with a meme to talk about three selected icons.

Here are the ones I was assigned:




An old icon! So old that I honestly have lost a lot of the details. :D I think this one dates back to when I first started using this account; I needed some icons and figured that my limited icon-making skills would probably be better off if I ran with the snake theme than if I tried to make fannish icons. The snake in it came from a Google image search, most likely, and I just trimmed it down to fit. This is/was my "humourous post" icon, because to me the snake looks like it's laughing, or smiling.




A new icon! Very new; I made it on 1/2/19. :D I'd been watching and posting about Nirvana in Fire, and really wanted an icon to go with those posts! Again, I don't actually have icon-making skills, so this is really intended to be a placeholder until I find some nice professional ones. It's just a screenshot of the NiF episode page on Viki, cut down and slightly resized. I like both characters, I like blue, and the lack of background detail meant iconifying it was near my skill level... though I think it still took me half an hour to get it cropped just right. :/




Another new icon! But it's a new icon about being an old fan. :D It was made by china_shop, and I saw it in this icon post along with a number of other old!fan icons. It reminded me of LJ and the way people always had some new fashion to complain about: Why are all the icons full of tiny text nowadays? and People, please stop with the eye-searing custom colours! or What's with all these desaturated pastel icons lately?

I am not quite 40, but I have been in fandom since about 1997 (okay, I chose that date almost at random, because trying to define "in fandom" would be a huge post in itself) and find myself a little nostalgic now and then about the ways it changes and the ways it doesn't.


If you would like me to pick three of your icons for this meme, comment with "Pick me!" Or just comment and tell me about your favourite icon, yours or mine. :D

This meme stolen from melannen and extrapenguin, to help repair the lack of posts in my journal lately.

( 21 Questions, With Answers! )

This prompt from isis was a wonderful exercise in greed: "Design the perfect canon for you from scratch! What is it about? SF, historical, fantasy? Is it a tv series or a book series or a comic series or a game or....something else?"

( A tough one! )

What a great prompt from boxofdelights: "Tell me about a book that you loved when you were a child, that you would still recommend today."

This was in many ways a tough choice, because I read a lot as a kid, and a lot of my reading material was formative for me in some way! I ended up including both my choice and a runner-up.


( I read a lot of award-winning fiction when I was a kid! )

My prompt for the 13th was supplied by blnchflr, who asked me to talk about "Characters who are Good whom you like (unless you don't like any Good characters)."

I spent about three days trying to work out an answer to this one, only to belatedly realise that I may be overthinking it -- I kept trying to figure out the difference between good and Good, and it only occurred to me yesterday that maybe the uppercase was just an attempt to distinguish "a morally good character" from "a good character" in the sense of well-written. *facepalming* blnchflr, feel free to chime in with your intentions!

( Some thoughts below the cut! )

Well, that got long, and kind of turned into a "discuss two tropes you've grown to hate" meta more so than one on good characters and goodness! Sorry. *sheepish* In summary: I have a lot of ~feelings~ about the notion of "Good People" and characters who think they belong in that category, most of which are bound up in the very shallow, platitude-y way that many canons apply it.


Edit: Just discovered my HTML was borked, and half this entry never showed up! Welp. Fixed now, and I did a bunch of editing, too. Hope somebody notices!

Looping back today to cover my prompt for the 1st, which I forgot about. (It's oddly appropriate, considering the topic! This is a fandom that delights in screwing with the temporal dimensions of any number of realities!)

( Prompt by Edenfalling: How did you get into Homestuck? )

Tell me how you got into Homestuck, if you are! Or talk to me about backwards fandoms: have you ever entered a fandom backwards? How long did it take, and how hard was it?

The weather has warmed slightly; it's amazing how much less I hate the universe when that happens. :D (The snake name is truth in advertising; I was not made to deal with cold weather!)

Ooh, and I still need to make that post about Certain Characters! Maybe I'll prompt it to myself as part of the December meme.

Speaking of which: you can still throw prompts at me for the December Prompt Meme! I'm willing to take prompts all the way through December, really; all I ask is more than a day's notice so I can gather my thoughts if needed. :D If you're doing one, too, let me know and I'll be happy to scrounge up a prompt for you in return!

My fifth prompt was from ysobel: "favorite seasonal drink(s)".

( Well, 'seasonal' is a tricky concept. :D )

Tell me all about your own favourite beverages!

...Post 2 hasn't happened yet, but it will. *wry*

Today's (okay, yesterday's) prompt was from tropicsbear: "Why snakes?"

( The answer is: lots of reasons! )