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Day 4 - Comment to someone you haven't ever interacted with before or introduce yourself to someone you've interacted with and friend/follow them.

Did this.

Promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.

My friend morethanprinceofcats is honestly the thing I miss most about being on tumblr regularly. She seems to have had neither cause nor motivation to move anywhere else, but her blog is honestly just so good. It is a combination of a peaceful flow of her beautiful aesthetic and a lot of really hard-hitting, good media criticism that she isn't trying to impress the Fandom Powers That Be with and I just love her a lot even if we don't talk much.

Reconnected with an internet person I really like overall through her running incorrectfateqs instead of just on tumblr. I love these things, so much. Fate is such a heavy, dense mythology and story that the silliness for it, canon or fanon, is needed and great.

Can I cheat and just go with dreamwidth for my last recommendation? It's circular and not going to lead anywhere new, but I just really enjoy having this type of outlet again. It's so much less pressure than other blogging or microblogging platforms, and it is so "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" in terms of its functionality. If you're willing to read the documentation you can do almost anything with it, and there isn't the pressure to have this pristine white page where you only ever talk in pt. 5 typeface.

Day 2

Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create.

Being totally honest, I have been guilty of not reading as much as I should in fandom circles for a long time. I have been a very vocal proponent for giving feedback to the fanfic one does read, but I haven't been as good to seek out fic as I used to be. I read "real books" even less. Some English teacher I am, though I have always admitted that maybe I was more of a grammar and linguistics fan when it came to academics than a literature buff like most English teachers seem to be. I'm really hopeful and encouraged that I've been reading more fic and even more canon material more often since I've started focusing on spaces like DreamWidth rather than the endless, fruitless, silent scrolling on tumblr.

I do have a few things I can rec, though! Without question. I just hope that I can consume more at a steady and reasonable rate so that this won't be so lopsided in the future.

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There is one, singular, amazing fanfic that I revisit over an over even when it isn't my main fandom wheelhouse and that I look at again and again to the point that it distracts me from even seeking out new fanworks...

Blue Sky by waffles

Portal, Chell/Wheatley

Meteors, signals, apologies, and that tricky little thing called humanity- four years after the events of Portal II, Wheatley's been handed a second chance, but it's not going to be plain sailing…

Portal, as a fandom, was a strange experience for me. I played it during a summer when I was having a lot of emotional growing pains and was petty isolated no matter what I seemed to do, even moreso than usual. I was trying to be healthy and also really itching to get out of the house, so between playing Portal and moping around, I took music with me to a state park a lot and did a bunch of walking. While walking, I daydreamed about Portal and the negative space in the subtly told story, even before I got to Portal 2 which has a much more developed, centralized narrative. I posted about it on tumblr one day, and from the tag I met someone who did a very excellent roleplaying rendition of GLaDOS. From there, I became a pretty well-known (for a moment) Chell RPer on tumblr, and while that didn't last long, I still RP Chell on a website called Pandora. She always come back to me.

Early on in my experience with the fandom, I got asked a lot if this fic had inspired the way I wrote Chell. It hadn't. I had never heard of it, and I have never considered shipping Chell and Wheatley at all. I mean, he's a robot ball? And not even that kind of robot. But this fic had a reputation. Lots of people loved it, and a few people hated it. The main reason for that response, I think, on both sides was how much it humanized Wheatley, quite literally. I just love the way this story is written. It is way up there with the novels I have managed to read as an adult. I am consumed with love for it every time I think about it.

It is not even that I "agree" or espouse every headcanon-y thing in it. If I have one major issue to take with it, it is the way in which this narrative and the fandom that likes Wheatley at large conflates the character of Wheatley and the person of Stephen Merchant together a bit too closely. I appreciate that way in which the office (as in, the UK The Office, I think a lot of the time) dynamics are translated into the Aperture environment - I think it's done brilliantly and in a way that is in line with the background canon we are given. However, I do think that there is some internal contradiction with the background given to Chell with regard to how she got involved in the story, given the canon, to make that part of the story more tropey meet ugly/cute. But it's so well done that I can overlook my few hang-ups with it. It is one of the most tightly and beautifully written stories I've ever read in terms of the fact that no detail is wasted, but it doesn't feel rush. It is rich, alive, and lovely, and one of the best plot or ship fics I've ever read.

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A lot of people seem to think of fanvidding as a dated art, from what I can tell, but I absolutely love it. I had just gotten a little bit of prowess during the era of .avis and some kind of weird extension thing on Windows Movie Maker when the technology marched on forever. It is one of my dearest wishes to make fanvids again someday. I recently got a new external harddrive, and it is one of the things I hope to do as a result. I love fanvid as this very stand-alone and yet very communicative, transformative commentary on a canon. Some people manage to use fanvids to create convincing AUs, but it is often more of a comment or perspective on what is already there, and I see it almost as a flipside of the coin to what I love most about fanfic. There is one pair of videos by KatrinDepp that are my favorite that I can ever think of.

I don't really ship Clara and Twelve per se, but I adore their relationship for the complicated mess it is. One of my biggest cool down and walk way moments with a Doctor Who conversation I ever had was someone who hated S8 and considered it out of character, because S8 and S9 of Doctor Who are two of my favorite narrative arcs ever.

These videos go together, one after the other, and contain spoilers for S8/S9 of Doctor Who. The second one is the BEST, but it means so much more with the first.

"darkness | Doctor Who" (Watch on YouTube)

"pulse | Doctor who | twelve/clara" (Watch on YouTube)

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It's hard to come up with a third specific instance, if only because of the abundant number of fics I have received through fic exchanges. I don't want to be nepotistic by choosing one by a close personal friend, though I could recommend anything by my best friend sheeana. However, one fic and other creator whom I'd consider a friendly face in fandom but more distant is a user named megkips / megkips that I met through Fate fandom very early on in being invested enough to write fic.

One fic of theirs that comes to mind is one that they wrote for me for GenEx one year in our same-fandom acquaintance ship:

Diaulodromia by megkips

Sakura and Shirou test the bounds of their friendship as Shirou slowly but surely becomes the Heroic Spirit he was always meant to be. Archer has a different perspective.

It comes to mind among all of them and even in this fandom (of which I've probably read the most, if only in betaing, over the past few years) because it doesn't deal with a ship. I've always been uncomfortable shipping Sakura with anyone on the terms that the canon seems to give us, and I am pretty firmly in the camp of shipping Shirou with Rin and/or Saber. However, I really hate the notion that just because a person isn't romantically involved with someone that they fade in all importance, which tends to take over in "romantic" fiction. This fic is so softly written and handles a sustaining friendship between Shirou and Sakura and looks at Arhcer's retrospective on it - the fact that he can still care all that time later, even if she isn't and never was his lover. I love it so much.