pennswoods | Reading

Challenge #3

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

I was an outsider at school, never really belonged. But when I found fandom, I could be part of a community. It gave me a reason to start writing (hello, fan fiction) and a reason to do art (hello, fan art). I made friends through fandom, some of whom I've known for years now.

When one of my old schools advertised a school reunion recently, I flinched in horror and stayed away.

I would rather go to a sci-fi convention, even if I didn't know anyone there. But I would definitely have more fun.

Current Mood: contemplative

$radiantfracture: a white rabbit swims underwater (water rabbit)$

radiantfracture

Where is there to sit exactly
If everything is shining on me

Friend, you have buttsense
you have stone buns, as your grandma says
Here in the driftwood feeling sundrunk, sunbent
Sensate among the ebb tones of the sea

I thought you said stun bone
You draw with a stick among the ebb stones
The tide wriggles up the sand grooves
Your breathing makes the subtones shimmer

You draw the water up to bait our shoes
Just for the craft of it, just because you can do it
Like a gull riding on the sky tide
Laughing at our temporary ruin

* * * * * *

Every morning very nearly without fail I solve the Merriam-Webster Blossom puzzle, and then I re-solve it to see if I can get a higher score, and if I'm not careful this becomes a kind of intellectual busywork I can use to distract myself from actual writing.

So a thing I'm trying to do (among all the other things) is to use the puzzle as a prompt. Inevitably each group of letters generates a semantic zone. Real and nonce words produce themselves. The letterset today was BENOSTU.

Here's a less complete poem from Sunday (letterset EINRTVW):

The riverine interview of winter,
that inept vintner: cool distillate
interrogates the view, shreds and repurposes it,
turns window to vitrine
where the morning light, when it comes,
cold citrine, tobacco stain,
will ennerve us, animate the inert twin

...Not sure what I planned to do with that twin, but I will let you know.

§rf§

tjs_whatnot

Snowflake Challenge: A warmly light quaint street of shops at night with heavy snow falling.

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page
( 7 Very Old Fics and 1 Very Recent )

sugareey

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

Okay, as a content creator who writes and draws for fun and professionally, here are 2 resources I swear by:

Hemingway Editor: Add your sentence/paragraph in and see if there are problems with it. More specifically with SPaG, weak/passive words, and reading level...this will highlight problematic areas that you might want to edit with general advice. This has also been a lifesaver at my past corporate jobs, because apparently, a lot of people don't know how to copywrite or edit properly!

Coolors: This is my go-to when I can't decide on a color palette and I need something for a project! I use this for commissions, my own personal projects and when I want to experiment with colors and see what happens.

Current Music: Strategy by TWICE

imhilien

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

When I was a kid, I had a pet rabbit that lived in a hutch outside. Later on, I had budgies and goldfish as pets.

Mum and I were allergic to cats, so sadly I've never had any.

I like cats in fandom though - there's Data's cat Spot in ST:TNG and Uncle Rogi has Maine Coon cats in the Galactic Milieu book series by Julian May.

Current Mood: chipper

sugareey

Challenge #3: Write a love letter to fandom.

Today’s challenge is a chance to express your love to fandom, and what better way than a love letter? If you feel really creative, the letter doesn’t have to come from you. You could write as your favourite character, someone completely fictitious or your past or future self - or just as you in this moment.

It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

Here's my general letter to Fandom (and the folks who have created so many different communities)!

( Dear Fandom... )

Current Mood: thankful
Current Music: Your Idol: Saja Boys- Andrew Choi, neckwav, Danny Chung, Kevin Woo, samUIL Lee

tjs_whatnot

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

I had so many ideas, I could talk about my sister's ridiculous dog. I could talk about the important pets in the books I've recently read. But then I saw this on FB and thought it would be a fun game to play with y'all. 😍😍

sugareey

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

( Doggies, and other creatures, I guess? )

Current Mood: content
Current Music: Tally by BLACKPINK

sugareey

Challenge #1: The Icebreaker Challenge

Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

Hiya! I'm Krissy, a multi-fandom geek who appreciates a bunch of characters and ships. I've been part of fandom for over 2 decades, and uhh...I guess you can say I dabble in a little bit of everything, including fanart, fic and crafting. I'm also very much a stationery/planner/journal kind of person...I just finished my first year of journaling and daily lettering, actually!

My primary fandoms as of late have been Teen Wolf, Kpop Demon Hunters and Hazbin Hotel. Every once in a while, there will be smidges of Good Omens, Merlin, Helluva Boss, Harry Potter, and probably a gazillion of other fandoms I'm currently forgetting.

Since it has been a couple of years since I've last done this challenge (and I feel like was a very much a different person going through different things back then), I thought this would be a good time to show up again, and to say hi to some old and new friends. I know fandom and community is constantly changing and evolving, so I'd love to explore what that's looking like today.

Current Music: See U Later by BLACKPINK

sugareey

Snowflake Challenge: A mug of coffee or hot chocolate with a snowflake shaped gingerbread cookie perched on the rim sits nestled amidst a softly bunched blanket. A few dried orange slices sit next to it.

Well, since I haven't (digitally) journaled in almost a couple years or popped in here for while, I thought it might be fun to do the 2026 Snowflake Challenge! You can get more deets here!

Current Music: JUMP by BLACKPINK

sugareey

Here's to another year, and let's hope it's better!

(It must say a lot that I tapered off in 2024 and didn't even post in 2025 because it was that much of weirdo roll coaster of chaos.)

Anyway, hiii again! We're going to see how much I pop in and out for 2026!

Current Music: Golden by HUNTR/X & EJAE & AUDREY NUNA & REI AMI

oracne

While the church for my choir's New Year's Eve performance was not absolutely jammed, it was pretty full, including the balconies, and judging from comments from friends as I exited through the sanctuary, it was an excellent and meaningful performance. Jean, who used to sing with us, said she had cried through the entire part three. Whoa. It was also special because for one of our regular soprano soloists, Jess, it was her fiftieth performance as a soloist.

Rebecca and Jess are founders of Variant 6, my favorite local small vocal ensemble. Rebecca is on the left, Jess on the right, in gold:

Watch on YouTube

"Laudamus Te" from last year's NYE Bach B Minor Mass.

Watch on YouTube

After the performance, I was too wiped out for dinner; luckily, a bus came pretty quickly. I got home, ate dinner, removed my eye makeup, and crawled into bed. Surprisingly, after my afternoon coffee, I managed to get to sleep fairly soon. I don't recall hearing many fireworks (apparently, someone saved their illegal firecrackers for the night of New Year's Day...a lot of them).

New Year's Day, I had decided our menu was nachos and another small trifle. The nachos had cheese, pre-cooked chicken seasoned with adobo and mild salsa, and spinach. The trifle was in a glass loaf pan: more cinnamon graham crackers for a base, a layer of spiced peaches (from a jar), a thick layer of whipped cream, pumpkin snaps, blueberries, and a drizzle of the sugar syrup from the peaches. It all turned out great!

January 2, I hung out with

drinkingcocoa and family.

Today is laundry and more Flight Rising. I have to go back to the dayjob on Monday, so I might do some cooking today or tomorrow as well.

pegkerr

Christmas itself was pretty quiet for me. Delia was in Eau Claire with her fiancé's family, and the Onas gathered with Alona's family. They invited Eric and me to join them, but Eric wanted to keep things low-key because he was still recovering from his surgery. So I made roast duck for the two of us on Christmas Eve:

any my traditional Christmas breakfast on Christmas morning:

In my family, however, Christmas isn't over on the 26th of December. My extended family gathers between Christmas and New Year's day:

My brother, who lives in New York, has been faithfully bringing his entire family out for family week for decades. We gather in various configurations: some go out to movies. Some of my nephews and nieces went to one of my nephew's house to get a lesson in throwing pottery. We gathered with my mom for lunch one day in the party room of her assisted living facility. We gathered in the evenings to eat hors d'ouevres, cook food together, and play games. And as always, we gathered at my sister Cindy's house on New Year's Eve and spent the day together, feasting on Chinese take out and sharing memories. All of the nieces and nephews had stories to tell of their memories of family week. My brother-in-law remarked how splendid it is to see the rich and deep relationships that the cousins share with one another, which have been nurtured by our family traditions of getting together every year to enjoy one another's company.

This year we had the additional joy of two new babies joining the festivities. M is a genuine extrovert who obviously had a wonderful time flirting with everyone, and when Fiona and Alone arrived each evening, there were plenty of eager volunteers to cuddle with her.

We genuinely enjoy each other.

I hope you all had as splendid a holiday as my family and I did.

This is my last collage of the year, but I intend to continue next year.

Image description: Top: members of a family, men and women, smile at the camera. Below: a table covered with a red tablecloth set for Christmas breakfast. Right: an older woman holding a walker (Peg's mom) stands beside a younger woman (Peg). Lower right corner: four young woman smile. Left corner: a silver candlestick with a gold lit candle with two glittering snowflake brooches.

Christmas

52 Christmas

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: grateful

tjs_whatnot

Challenge #1

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

Hello! I'm TJ. I accidentally chose the pronouns any/any at my new job (remind me to tell you all about that later! ) and now, the more I think about it, the more I like it. I never really liked they/ them (but get why others do) but I really don't mind either he/she him/her.

I'm old. I've been here forever. Started doing fandom in 2009. Started doing the Snowflake Challenge in 2014, and accidentally got put in charge of running it in 2024. 😱😱 So, technically I'm here because I have to be. 🤣🤣 But really, I'm here because it's how I start the year. It's where I met my friends (either as reunion or as adoption). It's where I get inspired in my geek soul. I've carved out a queer space in my real life. I've carved out a writing community (and even a queer reading community) in my real life, but there is nothing like a geektastic, weirdo-centric, fan community to really make me feel less alone and ostracized.

Things I'll probably be talking about here for the next month (and forever after):

TJ Klune's Green Creek series (and probably other books he's written)
Cat Sebastian's and Alexis Hall's entire library of books
Murderbots
Queer media in general
Reading/writing in general

tjs_whatnot

I wanted to get this out before this journal becomes all about the Snowflake Shenanigans. It's not going to be as in-depth because I have lots of ends of year reading reflections planned already, and because I'm already two months behind, so I just can't put it off longer by stressing about reviews and whatnot.

Of course if you want to chat about any of these books, I'd love to do that with any of you. Good or bad.

First: here is November's Reads with my ratings. (Sorry to the person who recced "I Kissed Alice" it wasn't you, it was me.❤️)

And here are December's reads. Sadly, I don't have the cool graphic because Fable is too busy giving me a lot of Year in Review graphics (more on that later). Fortunately (or unfortunately depending how you measure these things) I didn't read a lot of December.

Zenobia July by Lisa Bunker ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Nightmare Before Kissmas by Sara Raasch ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Make You Mine This Christmas by Lizzie Huxley-Jones ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Kiss Her Once For Me by Alison Cochrun ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

And here's some more stats from Fable.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

imhilien

Happy New Year to the f-list, may it be a good one for all of us.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

Because when I make fan art, I like it to be as obscure as possible

Sure, it looks like a linocut of a loon but really it's a symbol of queer hockey transcendence

§rf§

[ETA: I want to use some of the shimmering ink* to create the iridescent effect of the black feathers and to do the red eye -- painting ink on overtop of the print didn't do what I wanted, so maybe painting it right onto the printing block somehow?]

* specifically, Octopus Fluids' Witch, pine green with purple sheen

arcanetrivia

godDAMNIT I wish there was anywhere I could safely share some bits of MI fanfic that anyone would maybe interested and not just unfollow me for even the sin of complaining that I feel alone and unwanted (as I am sure y'all are about to do who even saw this in the first place).

tjs_whatnot

It's going to be AWESOME!

Profile

pennswoods

January 2026

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Page Summary

imhilien - Snowflake Challenge #3
radiantfracture - Poem post: stunbone
tjs_whatnot - Snowflake Challenge #4
sugareey - 2026 Snowflake Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page
imhilien - Snowflake Challenge #2
sugareey - 2026 Snowflake Challenge #3: A Love Letter to Fandom
tjs_whatnot - Snowflake Challenge #2
sugareey - 2026 Snowflake Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom
sugareey - 2026 Snowflake Challenge #1: Icebreaker Challenge
sugareey - Hmm...the 2026 Snowflake Challenge?
sugareey - It's already 2026?!
oracne - Happy New Year!
pegkerr - 2025 52 Card Project: Week 52: Christmas
tjs_whatnot - Snowflake Challenge #1
tjs_whatnot - TJ Reads November and December 2025
denise in dw_maintenance - Привет! LiveJournal imports may be slow
imhilien - Happy New Year
radiantfracture - Art Post: Stupid Canadian Wolf Bird (Gavia immer)
arcanetrivia - (no subject)
tjs_whatnot - Who's Ready?!

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Page generated Jan. 9th, 2026 12:43 pm

Professor of Sherlockology and Advanced Snape Studies

Lover of snarky assholes, high-functioning sociopaths, and their loyal friends

Reading

Snowflake Challenge #3

Poem post: stunbone

Snowflake Challenge #4

2026 Snowflake Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Snowflake Challenge #2

2026 Snowflake Challenge #3: A Love Letter to Fandom

Snowflake Challenge #2

2026 Snowflake Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

2026 Snowflake Challenge #1: Icebreaker Challenge

Hmm...the 2026 Snowflake Challenge?

It's already 2026?!

Happy New Year!

2025 52 Card Project: Week 52: Christmas

Snowflake Challenge #1

TJ Reads November and December 2025

Привет! LiveJournal imports may be slow

Happy New Year

Art Post: Stupid Canadian Wolf Bird (Gavia immer)

(no subject)

Who's Ready?!

Profile

January 2026

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