KJ

• Transformative Works Policy: Anyone is welcome to make transformative works based on my fic, or link to/comment on any of my writing including my posts here, without permission, although a pingback is always appreciated!


• Current Passion Once upon a time I broke my Civilization addiction, but I got back into it this fall. Hopefully it won't last much longer. My primary fandoms are Final Fantasy, Dragon Age, the MCU, and Critical Role, but I haven't been super active in any of them for the past few years. Attempting to rediscover my passion for fandom is a long-running desire of mine.


• Where to Find Me: In as much as I'm active anywhere these days... the site I check every day without fail is Twitter (iamkj), for all its recent failings, and inertia is likely to keep me there until the lights go out. DW is the social media site I feel the strongest personal attachment to. I've started dipping my toes back into Tumblr (owlmoose95), but I'm not really in the habit of checking it regularly yet. But it's the most likely site to serve as a Twitter replacement for me. And I'm still playing Flight Rising (my profile page) if you want to come find me there. I also use Instagram and Facebook, but I'm only likely to add you there if I know you IRL. If you meet that criteria and are interested, let me know.


• Master List: Most of my fic is posted on AO3 (owlmoose). My non-fiction writing is here and on ladybusiness


• Anything Else: This is the first time I've posted to DW in over two months. There's a lot I could say about that, but every time I think about laying it all out, I get paralyzed, and I don't do it. So instead I'm just going to jump back in like nothing ever happened and see if I can manage do complete some Fandom Snowflake challenges, no pressure, just whatever seems fun or worthwhile.

So, WisCon. It's happening, both in-person and virtually, and unless something changes drastically in the next 10 days, I'll be there, in Madison.

I've thought a lot about this, weighed the risks and my options, and I've come to the conclusion that I would rather accept the risks involved than not go. I'm happy talk more about my reasoning in comments if anyone is interested, but since I want neither to focus on justifying my decision nor for anyone who feels differently to get the impression that I'm trying to change their mind, I'm going to leave it at that for now. If you will be there, let me know! I'm currently on four panels -- three in person, one virtual -- but the schedule is still a bit in flux, so I'll share it when things are more settled.

Also, I wanted to make sure that folks know that there will also be a full virtual convention running, and the registration price has recently dropped to only $25! While I'll probably focus my participation on in-person events, as mentioned I am on one virtual panel, and I'll definitely check in online throughout the weekend. I'll be really curious to see how the hybrid model works out. And I'm so glad they were able to offer the option.

Your main fandom of the year? I wrote the most stuff for and paid the most attention to Dragon Age -- getting back into the games definitely helped with that, although my replay time dropped off a lot when I started revisiting Ace Attorney, and now it's all about Hades. But I'm about done with Hades, so going back to DA again (next up is Awakenings) is definitely part of the plan for 2022.

Your favorite movie seen this year? Nothing really stands out. Maybe Free Guy as the most recently memorable, anyway.

Your favorite book read this year? Toss up between Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee and The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrak.

Your favorite album or song to listen to this year? Probably the most honest answer to this question is the Ace Attorney Trilogy soundtracks and other Ace Attorney music.

Your favorite TV show of the year? Maybe Ted Lasso (both seasons) or Only Murders in the Building, although Arcane was also excellent.

Your favorite video game of the year? No question, Hades. We haven't reached the epilogue yet -- and may decide it's not worth the grinding it would take to get there -- but it's one of the most perfect mergers of gameplay and storytelling I've ever seen, and its Best Game Hugo award was richly deserved.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year? Not sure I have one.

Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year? WorldCon. I decided somewhat last minute not to attend in person (it sounds like I made the right decision), the timing made it impossible for me to engage virtually, and while for the most part the Hugo ceremony and the slate of winners made me really happy, the last minute announcement that weapons manufacturer Raytheon was sponsoring the ceremony cast a serious shadow over the whole thing. There's a bunch of reasons I haven't talked about that issue in more detail here, but I can say that the finalists were as blindsided as everyone else by that piece of information, and almost everyone was extremely unhappy about it. Probably I should write a real post about this later. I do want to make clear that I do not include the fact that Best Fanzine was awarded to Nerds of a Feather in that disappointment -- NoaF is a fantastic blog run by an amazing team, and their recognition with a Hugo rocket was long overdue.

Your fandom boyfriend/girlfriend of the year? Zagreus (from Hades) and Vi and Caitlin (from Arcane).

Your biggest squee moment of the year? The SF Giants winning the National League West. I wish they'd gotten further in the playoffs, but just watching them pull off that accomplishment was a huge rush.

The most missed of your old fandoms? As usual the answer to this is everything. How do I even fandom anymore?

The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to? Not sure. Maybe Arcane? Hades?

Your biggest fan anticipations for the coming year? Top of this list is Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn that is due to be released in February.

I am thrilled to announce that ladybusiness has been named a Hugo finalist for Best Fanzine!

I mentioned in my recent post about WorldCon 2021 that I was planning to attend the convention; now you all know why. Not that I hadn't already been considering going -- it was definitely on the table -- but the opportunity to attend the Hugo Ceremony as a finalist always is difficult to turn down. So assuming it is possible and safe, which by December I'm fairly confident it will be, I'll be in DC with friends and fellow finalists, and I can't wait.

Congratulations to my ballotmates in Fanzine, and to all the other finalists! There is some amazing work being recognized this year; I really need to get reading.

The Hugo Ceremony was today. Some amazing winners, some powerful speeches -- and it's all been overshadowed by the astOUNDingly craptacular performance of ConZealand toastmaster and Hugo MC, George R. R. Martin.

He spent almost three hours bloviating about Hugo and Worldcon history, with the old white dudes of the golden age heavily featured. He referred to Robert Heinlein as "the dean of science fiction" four times in one ten-minute segment. He brought up the greatness of John Campbell so many times it started to feel like trolling. His repeated praise of Robert Silverberg definitely felt like trolling. Between awarding the Astounding Award and the Hugo for Best Fancast, he spent SEVENTEEN MINUTES talking about the history of the Hugo rocket, including a "hilarious" bit where he kept mistaking thing like a juicer and a hood ornament for an older form of the Hugo. He mispronounced many, many names, almost entirely the names of people of color, including the title of Best Semiprozine finalist FIYAH, which is dedicated to promoting the work of Black authors. And worse, the vast majority of his presentation was pre-recorded, which means that 1) he had every opportunity to correct his mistakes with multiple takes and 2) there is every chance that other people watched these videos and said "yep, this is all fine! What a great way to honor an amazing and diverse slate of forward-thinking creators and welcome new people into fandom!"

So that's three hours of my life that I won't get back, but I can recommend a couple of things. As I mentioned, there were a number of wonderful speeches, but nothing set the tone better than R.F. Huang's Astounding Award acceptance speech. It was recorded in advance, but in her words about how to better welcome young new writers of color to fandom, she predicted nearly every damn thing that happened in the ceremony, including the mispronunciation of her name. I have rarely seen a better inditement of fandom. If you have more time, anoutlawlife has performed an important public service by creating an edit of the ceremony that cuts out most of GRRM but preserves all the acceptance speeches and gets the ceremony down to a much more manageable hour and 40 minutes.

I hope ConZealand and GRRM apologize, although I'm not holding my breath. I also hope future Worldcons learn from this. I have a little more hope for that, but not much. With all the big public failures that have happened this year, I'm starting to wonder if Worldcon is worth saving. I hope it is. But it's getting harder to hold on to that hope.

I've started a couple of posts on the discussions and revelations of abuse and harassment that consumed my Twitter feed for most of last week (and composed even more of them in my head), but now that things are slowing down it feels less crucial to say anything, if it ever even was necessary for me to wade in. I guess more and more now I'm thinking about fandom history, and how it gets slowly lost over time. For just one example, I have many friends, now, who either weren't yet in fandom during Racefail or were in different corners of it, and so they don't remember watching it unfold in real time and didn't live through the active fallout from it. This thread by clairewillett, in particular, served as a wake-up call to me. And it's a pattern not just with large-scale events like Racefail, but these waves of abuse accusations that come out every so often, and how often it seems like we see a name multiple times with no consequences. How do does a community impose lasting consequences when that community's memory is in a constant state of flux? And how do we provide space for people to get better and change, while prioritizing the safety and comfort of the people who they hurt? (Because if that's the choice we have to make, I'm definitely picking the latter.)

I want to say right now that I'm not interested in litigating the veracity of any of the charges, past or current. I don't know most of these folks and, in most cases, I don't have a vested interest in whether any specific creator's career is preserved. That's not what I care about, here. What I want is a climate where survivors feel supported in coming forward, and a culture where we understand why someone might choose not to do so. And I want a world where abuse and harassment have consequences. And I want a world where marginalized people feel welcome in fandom communities. Sometimes I feel like we're taking steps to create that world, and sometimes I despair of it being a world we'll ever see. But I have to believe that we're getting there, that every painful bandage we rip off will allow the wound beneath to heal a little more.

Speaking up works: the OTW has promised to release a public statement addressing racism. While I wish it hasn't taken this much pressure to get them to act, and of course we'll have to see 1. what they actually say and 2. how the statement is followed up with action, I'm cautiously pleased to see them reverse course on their policy of silence.

That said, I think it's still worth keeping the pressure up, and this open letter is very good. I recommend reading it, and signing if you feel so moved. Also, board elections are coming up, and none of the candidates (there are six candidates for three positions) address racism in their statements. If you're an OTW member, you can submit questions for the candidates here.

I had been looking at the snowflake_challenge prompts for the year so far and thinking they were mostly the same as last year's... and then checked back at my posts from 2019 to see that no, so far they're largely quite different. So, let's proceed, and I'll try to get back on the stick.

( Challenge 1 )

( Challenge 2 )

So that's the first two! I'll try to catch up on the rest over the next few days.