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sunshine_challenge 2019: Prompts 5 & 6
May. 10th, 2020 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quietmoonPrompt 5: Fulfill A Wishlist Item for Someone Else — we invite everyone to embark on something of a fannish scavenger hunt!
I commented on some fic, said hello to someone new, and followed some new journals. :) I also tried writing my own wishlist, and now I understand why I had trouble finding them on other journals; they're so hard to write! This prompt also got me thinking, though, that I'd like to set up a requests post of some sort — I would like to grant some wishes outside this challenge, too. So look out for that coming soon. ^_^
Prompt 6: Share Fannish Collections — we invite everyone to share fun fannish things they have collected over the years, be they physical items, stories, photos, or links.
Until two or three years ago, I had a rule for myself that I was quite strict with that I wouldn't buy any at all. A mix of lack of money, lack of space, worry for my own hoarding tendencies, and an innate comfort within a more minimalist living space led to me concluding that I just shouldn't let myself start buying things, because if I started I'd never stop. (In hindsight, I think part of this was to make myself feel better about being unable to really buy any of the stuff I wanted haha.)
I've since laxed on that rule — although I'm still careful about what I buy and how much I want it, my slowly growing collection of nerdy memorabilia brings me lots of happiness (and my 'Darth Vader daddy shrine' has become somewhat of favourite amongst my friends). Right now, I'm actually in the middle of redecorating! Now that I have all these prints and posters and keyrings (so many keyrings, what did I think I was going to do with them all?...), I want to put them somewhere I can see them.
So, as everything is very messy right now, and I don't know where anything is, my answer for this prompt shall honour my old rule. Rather than sharing various gadgets and gizmos aplenty, I'd like to share some the story of my first fandom friend group. ♥ When I think about what I've collected in fandom that brings me the most joy, it's always the friendships I come to first, and my first experience with this was on FFn.net with a group I now refer to as 'the tumbleweeds'.
In 2014 (on my birthday, actually) I posted a story called carbon copy princess — it's a short purple prose filled vignette about incredibly minor characters from Fairy Tail (the parallel universe duplicates of two side characters, to be specific). I got a message from someone (M) freaking out over the story, which in turn made me freak out, and after a few more backs and forths our messages ballooned in size as we started talking more about our own personal troubles and joys. A year later found me writing a story for M, about the same characters (a sequel to the fic that started it all) and soon after, they invited me to their little skype group chat with other friends in the same fandom. I was the odd one out for a few reasons (the most obvious being the big age gap) but we all clicked, and for maybe an hour every day — sometimes the entire day — I'd chat with them all about anything and everything under the sun.
I got really sick in late 2015, and was hardly able to leave my apartment for weeks on end. This silly little group where we'd all rant about the new chapter or episode, and throw each other story prompts, and laugh and cry over nothing — it very suddenly became my biggest support group. I'd go to sleep with messages wishing me well, I'd be woken up because M had a very clumsy thumb that would constantly call the group at absurd hours, I'd text feverishly as I walked to and from the grocery store. It completely snuck up on me one day, the realisation that these people had somewhere along the way become my dearest friends.
The name 'tumbleweeds' came about because whenever there were a few days of silence (because everyone led busy lives, naturally) someone would passive-aggressively send that little skype tumbleweed emoticon. I jokingly changed the group chat name to Tumbleweed Central, and it just stuck. We've been through various iterations since then (right now we're on Tumbleweed Central 3.0, having moved to discord a while back) and life is busier than ever — I'm the only one who hasn't got kids to look after, and the timezones have never been in our favour — but we still check in on each other. We still chat and catch up. I actually had the opportunity to fly across the ocean and meet one of them in person (can confirm, one of those special people who just gives incredibly good hugs).
We definitely aren't in the same fandoms anymore. Some of us don't even have time to really participate in fandom at all. But that one dumb fic led me to meeting M, who in turn introduced me to their friends, and now it's a group that I can't imagine my life without. When I was lonely, and unwell, and felt like I was invisible, this group of strangers from all across the globe became a little family for me.
I love fandom and the connections it can create — the kindred spirits it can bring together despite distance and circumstance. I've met more people since then, have collected more beloved relationships, but I wanted to share this abridged story for today's prompt because it had me feeling all sorts of sappy. (๑>◡<๑)
On a wholly unrelated note, it was my birthday recently, and a (non-tumbleweed) friend sent me this decepticon dice to play D&D with and I wanted to show it off, look how cute!!! I now have a matching dice for my totally-not-Megatron-insert Warforged Paladin.
I commented on some fic, said hello to someone new, and followed some new journals. :) I also tried writing my own wishlist, and now I understand why I had trouble finding them on other journals; they're so hard to write! This prompt also got me thinking, though, that I'd like to set up a requests post of some sort — I would like to grant some wishes outside this challenge, too. So look out for that coming soon. ^_^
Prompt 6: Share Fannish Collections — we invite everyone to share fun fannish things they have collected over the years, be they physical items, stories, photos, or links.
Until two or three years ago, I had a rule for myself that I was quite strict with that I wouldn't buy any at all. A mix of lack of money, lack of space, worry for my own hoarding tendencies, and an innate comfort within a more minimalist living space led to me concluding that I just shouldn't let myself start buying things, because if I started I'd never stop. (In hindsight, I think part of this was to make myself feel better about being unable to really buy any of the stuff I wanted haha.)
I've since laxed on that rule — although I'm still careful about what I buy and how much I want it, my slowly growing collection of nerdy memorabilia brings me lots of happiness (and my 'Darth Vader daddy shrine' has become somewhat of favourite amongst my friends). Right now, I'm actually in the middle of redecorating! Now that I have all these prints and posters and keyrings (so many keyrings, what did I think I was going to do with them all?...), I want to put them somewhere I can see them.
So, as everything is very messy right now, and I don't know where anything is, my answer for this prompt shall honour my old rule. Rather than sharing various gadgets and gizmos aplenty, I'd like to share some the story of my first fandom friend group. ♥ When I think about what I've collected in fandom that brings me the most joy, it's always the friendships I come to first, and my first experience with this was on FFn.net with a group I now refer to as 'the tumbleweeds'.
In 2014 (on my birthday, actually) I posted a story called carbon copy princess — it's a short purple prose filled vignette about incredibly minor characters from Fairy Tail (the parallel universe duplicates of two side characters, to be specific). I got a message from someone (M) freaking out over the story, which in turn made me freak out, and after a few more backs and forths our messages ballooned in size as we started talking more about our own personal troubles and joys. A year later found me writing a story for M, about the same characters (a sequel to the fic that started it all) and soon after, they invited me to their little skype group chat with other friends in the same fandom. I was the odd one out for a few reasons (the most obvious being the big age gap) but we all clicked, and for maybe an hour every day — sometimes the entire day — I'd chat with them all about anything and everything under the sun.
I got really sick in late 2015, and was hardly able to leave my apartment for weeks on end. This silly little group where we'd all rant about the new chapter or episode, and throw each other story prompts, and laugh and cry over nothing — it very suddenly became my biggest support group. I'd go to sleep with messages wishing me well, I'd be woken up because M had a very clumsy thumb that would constantly call the group at absurd hours, I'd text feverishly as I walked to and from the grocery store. It completely snuck up on me one day, the realisation that these people had somewhere along the way become my dearest friends.
The name 'tumbleweeds' came about because whenever there were a few days of silence (because everyone led busy lives, naturally) someone would passive-aggressively send that little skype tumbleweed emoticon. I jokingly changed the group chat name to Tumbleweed Central, and it just stuck. We've been through various iterations since then (right now we're on Tumbleweed Central 3.0, having moved to discord a while back) and life is busier than ever — I'm the only one who hasn't got kids to look after, and the timezones have never been in our favour — but we still check in on each other. We still chat and catch up. I actually had the opportunity to fly across the ocean and meet one of them in person (can confirm, one of those special people who just gives incredibly good hugs).
We definitely aren't in the same fandoms anymore. Some of us don't even have time to really participate in fandom at all. But that one dumb fic led me to meeting M, who in turn introduced me to their friends, and now it's a group that I can't imagine my life without. When I was lonely, and unwell, and felt like I was invisible, this group of strangers from all across the globe became a little family for me.
I love fandom and the connections it can create — the kindred spirits it can bring together despite distance and circumstance. I've met more people since then, have collected more beloved relationships, but I wanted to share this abridged story for today's prompt because it had me feeling all sorts of sappy. (๑>◡<๑)
On a wholly unrelated note, it was my birthday recently, and a (non-tumbleweed) friend sent me this decepticon dice to play D&D with and I wanted to show it off, look how cute!!! I now have a matching dice for my totally-not-Megatron-insert Warforged Paladin.
