We Love Fu!

Challenge #13

TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

I kind of did this in Challenge 12! I listed communities and websites that I'm grateful for.

One other community space I must mention is Best Bar. They know who they are and where we hang out. They've been very supportive of me the past few years and I'm very grateful for that.

But really: Dreamwidth is one of my internet homes, and there's all sorts of great communities here! It's about time I post my list of DW community recs again. It was last posted in 2024, after all. Some of these may be dormant now but I'll include them anyway because I loved the idea of the community. HERE WE GO!!


nacramamo is National Craft-Making Month, and is gearing up now to kick off in October. The challenge is to work on some kind of craft every day for 31 days.

100words is a drabble community for fiction of all kinds. They post weekly challenges there.

birdfeeding covers everything to do with birdfeeding, gardening for wildlife, and related topics.

crowdfunding connects creators, patrons, and fans of cyberfunded creativity. Watch for the mid-month Creative Jam with a new theme each time.

reddit_refugees offers resources for newcomers to Dreamwidth.

snowflake_challenge runs in January, and is a way to celebrate fandom and meet interesting people on Dreamwidth. There's also sunshine_challenge that runs in the summer, but I'm less familiar with that one.

Newly added to the list since I last posted this:

allkindsofdolls is what it says on the tin. If you love dolls, check it out.

ladiesbingo is a bingo challenge to make works focused on the relationship between women, whether gen, femslash, or familial. I'm currently having great fun trying to fill my bingo board!

getyourwordsout is a writing challenge community where you can challenge yourself by wordcount of number of days written per month.

10trueloves is a writing challenge where you pair a character with ten others (IIRC, they don't have to be romantic pairings, but I'm not sure; check the comm for more info!)

1character is a writing challenge where you choose a character and prompt set, then write one line sentences to fill each prompt.

everykindofcraft is what it says it is.

inspiredby posts writing prompts monthly.

makezines is for folks doing just that!

threesentenceficathon is happening RIGHT NOW. People leave prompts, other write short fills of 3 sentences or longer.

The past list of community recs:

communal_creators is a community for creative types! A mini-round for time pledges will be happening this spring. ANY kind of creativity is welcome! We have people writing (both fic and original), knitting, crochet, vidding, storyboarding, baking, making websites... if it's creative, you're welcome here.

ffprompts posts monthly prompts for the Final Fantasy video game franchise. As a big fan of this series, I'd love to see more fills for the prompts happening!

addme_fandom is a place to find friends who share your fannish obsessions.

lyricaltitles is a bingo fest for fanfiction and original fiction centering around using songs for inspiration!

fan_flashworks is a multifandom comm that posts one prompt for the week you use to write a short fanfic.

c_ent is for Chinese Entertainment, and comes highly recommended by a few people.

booknook posts a weekly Read-in-Progress check-in posts on Wednesdays.

reference_library is a place to gather helpful links and share them, run by senmut.

sweetandshort is a low-pressure community for creating small fanworks / original works each week.

moodthemeinayear is what it says on the tin: the folks there are working on creating custom Dreamwidth mood themes over the course of a year.

1word1day posts a vocabulary word a day!

finalfantasy - of course this would be here, if you know me. It's been very slow there lately, but I'd love to see more activity there.

awesomeers - they make a post for each day of the week in which they challenge the members to comment with Just One Thing you did today that you're proud of accomplishing. Of course you are free to post more than one thing if you'd like! I love the idea of this community, though I haven't been very active in it lately. I hope to change that, if only to congratulate other people. Also: we celebrate all accomplishments there, so something as simple as "I got out of bed" would be acceptable!

do_it - A community for posting to-do lists to make yourself accountable to others.

readingtogether - has seen some activity the past few months. It's not like a normal book club where everyone reads the same thing - instead everyone reads their own thing and posts their progress.

justcreate - has weekly check in posts where you can update everyone on your creative progress. All kinds of creativity are celebrated there, including fiber arts, drawing, writing, and more.

get_knitted - is similar to justcreate but posts daily check-ins. The folks there are GREAT about commenting on each other's comments. It's not just for knitting, either - there are people there who do scrapbooking and jigsaw puzzles.

drawesome - has drawing challenges. I haven't taken part yet because I am a very sucky drawer, but I hope to start there in the future.

genprompt_bingo - for the writers! They generate bingo cards of prompts, with all the prompts being gen. You can, of course, write a shippy fic from the prompt; it's just the prompts themselves aren't meant to be shippy. I'm currently working on a bingo for my last card, wish me luck!

allbingo - They do all sorts of bingos, mostly writing-related but I think they've had some crafting ones as well. There's new challenges monthly!

agonyaunt - critiques letters to advice columnists and the answers the letter writers get. I love this community because it is filled with smart people that I am learning a lot from. I'm a person of a certain age, and I know because of the timeframe I grew up in I have a lot of inherit biases and whatnot. I try to be above those biases, but sometimes I don't recognize them. Reading the other commenters to agonyaunt helps me recognize those biases and better myself.

holiday_wishes - active in the last two months of the year. People post their holiday wish lists there, and others fill them! I really was blessed one year - I got a bunch of cards, some yarn, some chocolate, and some other sweet treats. ♥ I couldn't do much in return but I did send back cards to everyone who sent me things.

thisfinecrew is a social justice community focused on the USA. It doesn't get as much action as it once did but there are still informative posts there once in a while. thissterlingcrew is the UK equivalent.

3weeks4dreamwidth is a thing in which people post/interact more on Dreamwidth, to show love for the platform. ♥

your_favourites is an icon making community that migrated over from LiveJournal. Looks like they have themes for members to create icons for, and then take a vote for best icon. I've joined it in hopes of finding more icons to add to my own journal.

addme and findingfriends are communities to help you find people to add to your Dreamwidth circles. The latter has a set questionnaire to use, and asks that if you use it elsewhere you include a link back to the community.

journalsandplanners - what it says on the tin: for those who use a journal or planner to organize their lives. There's also bujo for bullet journalers.

anime_manga has seen some activity lately!

fandomtrumpshate raises money for charity by creating fanworks.

getting_started is a community with resources for those new to Dreamwidth.

indie_games sometimes sees activity, and in the past, we did a play-together of A Short Hike which was really fun.

common_nature is a photo community to share nature pics from your area, and has been active recently.

followfriday recommends people/communities to follow each Friday.

iconthat is another icon challenge community.

signalboost is for getting the word out to others about people needing help in some way.

twitter_refugees is for folks migrating to Dreamwidth from Twitter.

bnha_fans is for fans of Boku no Hero Academia. It's modded by vriddy who I got to know during a snowflake_challenge!

comment_bingo is a bingo challenge community for commenting on all those fanfics you read.

womansplace is a community that holds dual purpose: 1) Celebrate characters who identify as women or who are aligned with womanhood in transformative fan works. Events include community recs, a prompt fest, and a vid exchange. 2) Raise funds via a vid auction

kittens_and_spitefic's goal is to prompt fan content by acting like a total troll and pretending to bash what you want to see up one side and down the other. Commenters then engage with the supposed "troll" by spamming them with cat (and other animal) macros and/or content that caters to everything the original poster professes to hate.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd I think that's it! If there's any interesting communities you know about that I've missed, feel free to drop them in the comments! And also feel free to share this post, I'll make it public so you can pass it around.

Challenge #11

In your own space, grant someone's wish from Challenge #5. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your own post with the wishes you granted if you feel comfortable doing so.

Okay, I actually granted wishes by commenting on folks' posts, but here's a round-up of the ones I did:

1. catness wanted recs for games featuring cats, so I recced Stray, Sudocats, and Cats Love Boxes, along with a mention of the kitties of Forspoken.

2. falena asked for book recs and voice recordings, so I recced Connie Willis and Courtney Milan, and also linked to my Twitch stream where they can watch videos of me chatting.

3. visualjyushi asked for FFVII icons and writing advice; I commented with both when Challenge 5 first went up.

That's enough for now--I might look through the list again later to see if there's more I can grant.

My own wishlist is here - I've already gotten some great comments but I'll link it again in case folks are feeling generous.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

Okay, I can do this! But I'm creative in different sorts of ways, so I'm going to break it down by area.

Fiber Arts

I have 800 finished objects on Ravelry, so I've made a LOT of stuff. Most of the time, I see a pattern and go "OH THAT LOOKS FUN I WANT TO MAKE THAT!" and do. Sometimes I've made stuff for craft-alongs, like I used to be active in Dishcloth Weekly and Hat of the Month groups. And sometimes, I make stuff to fill a Nerdopolis theme (Nerdopolis is a crafting challenge on Ravelry where we get themes to craft to, like "Architecture" or "Cats vs. Dogs").

I do create my own patterns as well, and those have mostly come by because of fannish passion. The first time I recall making something from an mere idea is Olive, from Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. She was a very strong unit and I was lucky enough to pull her AND get her geared pretty well, and I just loved her and so I made her. I hadn't done many dolls or toys at the time, and I was more confident with crochet, so I winged a design with separate pieces for her limbs. It worked out okay, but she was BIG and FLOPPY.

I eventually had ideas to create more FFBE dolls. I adored Lasswell, for instance, so made him... and Lasswell adores Rain, so I had to make a Rain for my Lasswell. This time, I found a doll pattern designed by someone else and altered it for my use - the limbs are attached as you make the doll so it's much more sturdy. But the clothes were designed by ME. I pretty much took other patterns I was familiar with and used them as a guide, shrinking down the pattern considerably.


[Image Description: Handmade dolls of Rain and Lasswell. Rain's on the left and has a shock of blond hair. He's smiling and wearing a green tunic with a red kilt on his waist. Lasswell is on the right. He has long black hair and a serious look on his face. He's wearing a white shirt, black pants, and a flowing purple coat.]

I made more FFBE dolls, too, but then wanted to branch out into other Final Fantasies. I was showing off my latest FFBE doll in the Final Fantasy group on Ravelry, and the moderator admired the dolls but lamented that she couldn't crochet... and well, CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

So I designed my own knitted doll pattern, utilizing knowledge I had picked up over the course of my knitting career. I made Rinoa from FFVIII (which I seem not to have a good picture of here on DW, and I'm running out of time so can't upload one at the moment) and eventually made Aerith from FFVII:


[Image Description: A doll of Aerith from Final Fantasy VII. She's got brown hair pulled back in a braid, and is wearing a pink dress with a flounce of lace at the hem. The dress is accompanied by a cropped red jacket.]

I'm pretty fearless with my crafting. Yarn is forgiving, and many mistakes can be fixed with some patience and practice. I continue to get excited and make things. It's not all fun, though - I'm currently knitting a cardigan for myself and well, I am a fluffy lady which means a LOT of long rows and it's tedious and feels like I'll never finish. But I persevere, because I want the end result.

(and I wrote this section last. I need to post it and get ready for Stitch Club! feel free to ask questions about my creative process if you have them!)

Fanfic Writing

I'm still fairly new to fanfic writing. Oh, I had thoughts of writing fanfic way back in the Sliders and seaQuest era but as far as I can recall, it was just thoughts and I didn't follow through. I did briefly play a character in an RPG on LiveJournal, and that was mostly fun except for when it was not (drama behind the scenes).

Back when I was playing that character, I was still able to daydream. So I'd be sitting on the train going to work, giggling because I was imaging my character doing silly things (we were a comedy RPG) and it was FUN. These days, it's hard to daydream, and so well, I didn't write fanfic for about ten years because I had no ideas.

Then came the Final Fantasy Kiss Battle in 2021. I remember asking if it was okay if I left prompts even though I doubt I'd write anything, because I do NOT write, and they said "sure!". But then I was reading prompts, and lassarina prompted "FFV, Bartz/Gilgamesh, duel" and well, my brain exploded: I had an idea!

So I opened up a Notepad++ tab and started writing. I shocked myself by not only completing that fic, but being the first that year TO post a fic. Here it is:

A Long-Sought Duel (676 words) by AltheaValara
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy V
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gilgamesh/Bartz Klauser
Characters: Bartz Klauser, Gilgamesh (Final Fantasy V)
Summary:

Bartz finally finds what he's been searching for.

For Snowflake Challenge 5, visualjyushi asked how to start a story and that led to some really good conversations. This is what I wrote:

I got my start for A Long-Sought Duel partially based on the Kiss Battle prompt (FFV, Bartz/Gilgamesh, duel) but also by thinking about what a duel would be like. Duels are passionate, and it just so happens that Bartz is associated with the Wind Crystal, which is the crystal of passion. So I started with him feeling lackluster and missing passion in his life, and at the end of the short story, he finds it again.

I'm still having problems daydreaming, so I can't come up with ideas without some sort of prompt. But I am currently delighted by my Ladies Bingo card because I have ideas for SO MANY of the prompts, and have 5 WIPs already. I haven't worked on them in a while, so it might be time to do so tonight.

But yeah, most of my writing IS from prompts now. I have self-prompted a few times, like for this fic:

if you like it, then you should've put an earring on it (243 words) by AltheaValara
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Additional Tags: Fluff and Crack
Summary:

The Warrior of Light's luck comes through once more in Eureka.

So I guess I *am* capable of coming up with ideas on my own. But yeah, I love a good prompt.

Neocities (Fanscripts)

Last year during Snowflake, I built the bones of my Neocities site and launched it live. It's a repository for my Final Fantasy story summaries and fanscripts.

I can tell you how I first got into writing fanscripts. I was heavily playing Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a mobile game, and I felt its story was on par with the stories of the main 16 games in the series. And I realized: it's a mobile game, so someday it will be shut down and I will never ever get to experience the story again. That made me all kinds of sad, so one day I wandered down to our kitchen with my tablet, some paper, and a pencil. I made myself a cup of hot cocoa, then started replaying the story from the Room of Recollection, hand-writing down the story.

I finished writing down season 1 four years and four months later. It took 434 sheets of paper. But by gods, I did it.

I originally posted the story in a Dreamwidth journal, which was fine but not always the best for navigation (all my navigation links broke when I renamed the journal). I had name squatted on Neocities a few years back, and I thought well, let's put them there.

Working on Neocities is a delight for me. My degree is in math and computer science (I double majored), so I have programming in my background and it's been really fun to stretch that muscle. When I first started working on transferring the files over from Dreamwidth to Neocities, I was hand-coding the HTML because there wasn't much HTML in my original entries. That was tedious and time-consuming, though. Well, I know a bit of Python, so I wrote a Python script to process my files and automatically put in the HTML. The script doesn't make the prettiest HTML file and there's some tweaking by name I need to do, but it took a process that could take hours and made it less than a second to run the script, plus about 15 minutes to tweak by hand.

When I started working on the FFBE script, I did not have a computer of my own, hence handwriting the script. I'm so glad I was able to document Season 1, because I do adore the story. Unfortunately, the game did shut down about two years ago. When they announced End of Service, I valiantly tried to extract the Season 2 story from the game files, but I was not knowledgeable enough to do it. If I had been able to, it would have saved me a LOT of time and effort.

The game is gone, but it lives on at YouTube. So I've started going through the Season 2 videos and making a script for them. Some might argue it is wasted effort since the YouTube videos exist, but I think there's value in having a written script. For one, it may help fanfic writers because it'll be searchable--and that thought delights me.

I've expanded my efforts on Neocities and am now writing fanscripts for Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XI as well. FFXI, at least, is not so bad because Windower (a popular third party tool) can make logs of the game text as you play. Alas, it triplicates lines, but I have a handy Python script to clean that up.

Final Fantasy XIV, I started by writing summaries of the story as I played through each expansion and patch, but as I went on, those 'summaries' got longer and longer and now I'm pretty much writing a real fanscript for Shadowbringers. I might go back and do fanscripts for the prior expansions, too, if I have time.