This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Tuesday, January 20, to midnight on Wednesday, January 21. (8pm Eastern Time).




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 

Do you watch educational TV shows or documentaries? What makes these shows watchable or interesting to you? Are there particular ones that spoke to you?

Good luck everyone!

Works are due at 11:59pm EST, Saturday 24 January | see countdown.

That's soon.

Additionally, AO3 is going down for 15 hours on January 21st. So you won't be able to upload a draft or check your assignment on AO3 during that time.

Good news! You can always check the details of a prompt at the app.

This is a great time to check your recipient's Do-Not-Wants - because if your story or comic overlaps with an unwanted topic, you still have time to change it, check with a beta, send your recipient a question through me, or default.

Good luck again to everyone currently working!

Hello detectives! There is a scheduled AO3 maintenance that will go into effect and will apparently last for 15 hours, which will impact nominations as AO3 will be down during this period. Please view their "What time is it for me?" so you can plan your nominations accordingly. As we may miss a day to nominate, I've chosen to extend nominations to Saturday 24 January. [ In your timezone + Countdown ]

*

Please review our nomination guidelines before nominating. There's an opportunity to transfer accepted tags from the 2025 tagset to the 2026 tagset.

I'm seeking clarifications on the following nominations. If I could hear back about these, that would be appreciated so we can keep our nomination approvals moving.

All Media Types + Related Fandoms
Can the nominator(s) please amend their nominations? We do not accept "All Media Types" and "Related Fandoms" without a case being made.

Transformers - All Media Types
Any Decepticon Character
Drift | Deadlock/Perceptor
Impactor/Springer (Transformers)
Megatron/Rodimus | Rodimus Prime
Optimus Prime/Ratchet
Ratchet/First Aid
Rung & Whirl (Transformers)

Can the nominator please renominate this under the desired series? Are you after the Michael Bay or animated movies? The video games? Books?

Crossover Fandom

Crossover Fandom
Avengers Team Members (Marvel) & Loki (Loki TV)
Avengers Team Members (Marvel) & Mobius M. Mobius (Loki TV)
Loki & Sylvie (Loki TV) & Thor (Marvel)

Can the nominator please update their disambiguations for the Marvel portion of these nominations? The disambiguation is too vague. Is it MCU? Marvel 616?

Crossover Fandom
Phryne Fisher (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries) & Jane Marple (Agatha Christie)
Phryne Fisher (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries)/Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV)

Can the nominator please specify which version of Jane Marple and Phryne Fisher they would like? It seems the character of Jane appears in books, TV and anime, and Phryne in books and TV. If you're happy to receive any version, please let me know and I will accept these as is. Sorted!

天官赐福 - 墨香铜臭 | Tiān Guān Cì Fú - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Xie Lian (TGCF) & Wei Wuxian (MDZS)

I'm canon blind to the canons in the disambiguations. Can the nominator, or someone familiar, please confirm if this should be nominated under "Crossover Fandom"? The disambiguations imply it should be. Can the nominator please renominate this under "Crossover Fandom" so it can be accepted?

Recursive fandom missing permission statement proof

Rigel Black Chronicles - murkybluematter (DFE)
Arcturus Rigel "Archie" Black/Hermione Granger (Rigel Black Chronicles)
Draco Malfoy & Pansy Parkinson & Blaise Zabini (Rigel Black Chronicles)
Lionel "Leo" Hurst/Harriet Potter | Rigel Black (Rigel Black Chronicles)
Solo: Aldon Rosier (Rigel Black Chronicles)
Solo: Harriet Potter | Rigel Black (Rigel Black Chronicles)

Can the nominator please provide proof of the permission statement for this work? I approved these and cannot find any evidence that the nominator has provided a permission statement for this work. Our nomination guidelines state that recursive works need permission evidence provided by the nominator. If it's not given by the end of the nomination period, I will remove these tags from the tagset.

Please read up on the nomination guidelines for recursive nominations and be sure to provide evidence! Sorted!

Other

Lucifer (TV) — Does it belong in DC's Arrowverse?

For those familiar with Lucifer (TV), do you think this show should be considered under the DC Arrowverse umbrella? I'm only familiar with Lucifer's involvement in the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event and the ramifications of that. I'm happy to keep it separate, but I wanted to check in with nominators/interested parties to see if it should go under our DCTV umbrella. Sorted! Keeping it separate. :)

There are queries from the first nominations post that I'd appreciate the nominator's input on.

Please let me know on any nominations post if you see any duplicates or errors (like typos!) in the tagset. We've had some wandering tags a few detectives have successfully captured (thank you!). Happy nominating!

Title: when the mind lets go 
Character: Anders
Fandom: Dragon Age (series)
Theme set: Theme Set Alpha
Rating: T 
Warnings: N/A

Can also be read on AO3

( when the mind lets go )

In this daily puzzle game, the goal is to spell out the words in a newspaper headline by choosing letters to drop down from the columns above. The headline starts blank, so you have to figure it out based on possible English words, syntax, and context. (E.g. If there's a one-letter word and the possible letters you can drop are A, G, and X, well...) When you've filled in the headline you get to read a short news article from the cozy fantasy realm of Yliad, where arcane scribes study at rival magic schools. Each week's puzzles form a story arc, and the arcs gradually piece together the worldbuilding.

I saw this game linked in the Clues By Sam newsletter, and I've added it to my morning round of daily puzzles. I find it pretty easy, but word puzzles are definitely more in my wheelhouse than logic puzzles, and there's nothing wrong with a quick warm-up before your brain is fully in gear. The little stories are on the cutesy side, so, you know, don't expect epic tales of blood and sacrifice or anything. The narrative just adds some interest and flavor to your standard drop-quote puzzle. And it's queer-inclusive so that's a plus!

The Daily Spell is free to play in your browser. ✨

 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Monday, January 19, to midnight on Tuesday, January 20. (8pm Eastern Time).




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 

i spent part of this weekend very cranky about not getting enough stuff done fast enough and then i realized i'm on track to finish four (4) giant projects in january alone (2 comics, tellius bg resource, gunter animatic) that have been on my plate since middle of last year.

... suddenly less cranky XD

anyway Very Cool Stuff is happening art-wise, i'm finally getting the clothes shipments/some sick doujin packages from last year and i feel like i can start for real celebrating the new year \o/

Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Honestly, trope doesn't entirely resonate. I can remember years ago, seeing something about tropes and just not relating to any of all that forced to share a bed/enemies to lovers/coffee shop AU stuff. But I do have a theme, which is alternate timelines. What if So and so never died? What if the villain made the obvious choice that the original writers seem to have somehow totally missed? What if Character X was the one to move from his cancelled spinoff to the main show? I have done them all.

The first series I ever saw to completion was Once Upon a Time, where Jafar was the one to move across from the Wonderland spinoff to the main show (imagine his lamp ending up in Gold's shop and Zelena accidentally letting him out). Another one was The Flash, where Eobard manipulated Nora into giving Barry the metahuman cure and the finale showed a dystopian 2049 that resulted from this (at the time I started that, I was convinced that was the route canon was going to take; to this day, I still don't get why the writers wasted time on Cicada rather than pursuing this route and just letting Eobard be the bad guy). I've saved Sun, Jin and Sayid on Lost several times over (and after a prompt in last year's three sentence ficathon, I was even tempted to expand on my attempt at Smokey McSmokeFace going back to the classical Roman era to get off the island while he was still human).

And yes, I have a few ongoing such works which I'm determined to finish. The School Spirits one where Mr Martin chooses to possess Emilio instead and the impact this has on Charley and Yuri is barely started (the upcoming new season may help with that), and I am determined I will push past my mental block on a) the Lost series where Sun joined the others in 1977 (I lost heart after the decision in canon to kill her off, which I still strongly disagree with 15 years on) and b) the Dark series where Ulrich successfully rescues Mikkel from 1986 (at this rate, I think I'm actually going to end up going down the Choose Your Own Adventure route, one where Ulrich and Mikkel get their happy ending and the minimum of characters are erased from existence, and one where Claudia gets hers.)

The Scavenger Door by Suzanne Palmer : The third book in The Finder Chronicles; as much fun as its predecessors, and the end had me immediately turning around to start book four. ( Spoilery thoughts. )

Non-spoilery thought: Suzanne Palmer sure knows what it's like to live with a cat.

Um Actually live show: I don't subscribe to Dropout, so I'm sadly unfamiliar with most of their shows, but during high pandemic, they dropped a bunch of Um Actually episodes on YouTube, and T and I spent a lot of time watching them. So when we learned that there would a live show at this year's SF Sketchfest, we immediately decided to get tickets. The panel, which was not announced in advance, was Janet Varney, Marc Evan Jackson, and Tawny Newsome; they were an awesome group who played well off the hosts and each other, and we had a great time.

Road Trip to the End of the World (2025, PC) -- Joined by a talking fish in overalls, a young woman drives across the United States to crash the wedding of her ex-best friend.


This Ren'py visual novel, a thesis project from Alex M. Lee as part of her MFA at SVA, is short and polished and free to play. It took me about an hour to experience from start to finish, and that brevity is both a strength and a weakness. On one hand: a perfectly self-contained one-hour game, we love to see it! On the other hand, perhaps due to the thesis-project demands of MUST DEMONSTRATE ALL PORTFOLIO STRENGTHS HEREIN, the game appears anxious about cramming in a full character arc for its protagonist. This means that she is maybe overly self-actualized and speaks in the idiom of self-help therapy TikToks -- but just when I was starting to frown at all the epiphanies being awkwardly vocalized, there was a Guy Fieri jump-scare joke that had me howling with laughter. So, on the whole: a good game!

See Part One here.

4. Babylon 5, G'Kar & Londo, post-canon, spoilers
any, the minimum amount of communication needed for a fix-it AU
Originally posted here

( Slightly more than 3 sentences of overthinking )

5. Babylon 5, early season one
any, low-effort illustration of something important
Originally posted here

( More than 3 sentences of ambassadorial bickering )

6. Murderbot, MB + Gurathin
any, "I adore floating." (Peggy Guggenheim)
Originally posted here

( 3 sentences for a change! )

7. Murderbot bookverse, MB + Mensah + Mensah's family
any, snowstorm
Originally posted here

( 350 words of fluff )

8. Murderbot, TV or bookverse, Bharadwaj
any, fossil footprints
Originally posted here

( A lil Bharadwaj character study )

So I learned to crochet a bit over a year ago! (Picked it up on December 30th 2024, with many thanks due to my friend Rath (navigatorsghost around various internetlands) who cheerfully answered at least half a dozen plaintive wait what do I do here and other confusions on that first day alone.

I crocheted many things last year (so, so many - perhaps I'll make a bit of an overview to show off here later, because I'm quite proud of some of it), and I even did three little markets! (where I sold a number of things, yay!) . . . but I also amassed a solid chunk of open projects on Ravelry and WIPs in general.

(Sidenote, please look me up on Ravelry if you like! I'm Limmiel there and I am . . . on it more often than DW honestly, though not much in social areas partly because no one I hooked up with there is very active. XD)

Anyway! I had loosely intended to already, but I took inspiration from a pterribledinosaurdrawings update and comic to actually set a goal to smallen that Pile (metaphorical, mostly; they aren't all stashed in the same place, and a number of the open Ravelry projects are batches of [thing] for marketable stock), and in service of that, I set up a spreadsheet to track some things.

So as of January 10th (when I set it up; I went and removed a couple projects I went 'ehh nope' on before I set up the spreadsheet) my numbers look like:

Active WIPs: 23
(Subset that are market batches: 14)
Hibernating: 8

Total projects (complete, WIPs, everything): 138

I'll probably try and update once a month (probably on the last/first day of month) with updates on those numbers, how many things I finished in a month, if and how many from The Pile have been finished . . . how many things I added to The Pile. . . >.>

And here is one of my most recent projects, which I am quite pleased with!

Mini rose:



It's crocheted with embroidery floss and a 2mm hook, and is about 8cm tall. (And I did a fair bit of design work to refine the rose, though I started with someone's pattern for the petals before I did a bunch of tweaks, designed my own calyx, and figured out a stem.)