justanorthernlight | Snowflake Challenge #11

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Snowflake Challenge #11

Challenge #11

In your own space, Interact with someone. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring a snow-covered green bench in a snowy park. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Good morning everyone, it is -7 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately -21 C) this lovely morning where I am.

This is kind of a tricky prompt, isn't it? I can't force anyone to come into my space and interact with me. I've been trying to go out and leave comments on a couple of other people's responses for each challenge, but it's a struggle.

I'm pretty shy, and as a commenter I sometimes get stuck in the 'I don't want to annoy anyone, I'll just say nothing' mindset, but as a poster I crave the comments and interactions, and then when replying to comments I'm trying to play it cool and not come across as too weird or clingy...

It's very hypocritical, I know. I'm trying to work on it and force myself out of my comfort zone.

I've always heard that asking other people questions is the best way to get a conversation rolling. One of the things I like best about Snowflake Challenge is that is has very specific prompts, (every year I look at Sunshine Challenge's prompts and am completely befuddled as to how to respond), so... specific questions:

Tell me about your favorite things, either from 2021 or just in general! Favorite book? Favorite song? Favorite recipe? Favorite dinosaur fact? Favorite rock? Favorite piece of trivia? Anything at all, tell me about it!

Feel free to comment about non-favorite things as well.

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I think my favourite songs of 2021 were: Demons by Hayley Kiyoko, Chillthefuckout by Romes, and Alittle by Romes. Just a warning these are the type of songs that get stuck in your head.

They are very earwormy! Thanks for sharing them :)

Man, I'm so shy and tired all the time, I'm having trouble just responding to people that comment on my own posts. I suck at socializing. One of my goals for the year, though, is to interact more in fandom spaces so I guess this counts.

Tell me about your favorite things, either from 2021 or just in general!

Of course, I also suck at "favorites" lists. I don't remember much of anything anymore and can never pick favorites. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is this playlist of J-pop songs I found over the summer that I listen to constantly. I like it because the songs are upbeat/peppy, but I mostly have no idea what they're saying so they don't get perpetually stuck in my head like Western music.

Interacting more in fannish spaces keeps being my New Year's Resolution as well, some years it goes better than other.

I will give that playlist a listen :) I took a year of Japanese in highschool and occasionally try to take it back up on Duolingo, so I'm constantly straining to understand J-pop songs, with very little luck.

I've been doing Japanese on DuoLingo and WaniKani since like October (I think). I can sometimes read some stuff, but I can't understand a word. My brain doesn't listen to the pronunciations and just translates the kanji to English instead. The only parts of the songs I understand are the parts in English. Maybe someday I'll understand more of it. I'd probably have to find the lyrics somewhere and translate them first, though.

I usually can't pick out any important words, just tiny fragments of grammar, pronouns, and particles. If it has lyrics in Japanese on the screen I can sometimes pick out some kanji.

(Also I love your icon <3)

My taste has swung a bit country lately, so I'd say my favourite song last year is an oldie from William Prince wrote about his father: Eddy Boy.

That is a lovely song <3

I'm pretty shy, and as a commenter I sometimes get stuck in the 'I don't want to annoy anyone, I'll just say nothing' mindset, but as a poster I crave the comments and interactions, and then when replying to comments I'm trying to play it cool and not come across as too weird or clingy...
Oh, same. T_T

Tell me about your favorite things, either from 2021 or just in general! Favorite book? Favorite song? Favorite recipe? Favorite dinosaur fact? Favorite rock? Favorite piece of trivia? Anything at all, tell me about it!

Here's some playlists of my favorite songs I listened to/discovered this year! None of them are "new" but they're kinda new to me, so I'm counting it, lol.

None of them are "new" but they're kinda new to me, so I'm counting it, lol.

It's never to late to go down a music rabbit hole!

>> I'm pretty shy, and as a commenter I sometimes get stuck in the 'I don't want to annoy anyone, I'll just say nothing' mindset, <<

There is a way to comment with zero chance of offense: look for folks who are counting comments. They'll say something like "It's okay to comment with Like or +1." We're often using the volume of replies to decide which things to make more of.

"I boosted the signal" is another zero-risk comment on anything that says "please share widely." It's almost always welcome for fanworks in general, thus low-risk there.

Another very low-risk option is to cut and paste your favorite quote(s) from an entry and mark it as such. I get that one fairly often on fanfic and it's fun to see what snagged someone's attention.

If you want to push a little farther, I made a post about making constructive comments.

>>Tell me about your favorite things, either from 2021 or just in general! Favorite book? Favorite song? Favorite recipe? Favorite dinosaur fact? Favorite rock? Favorite piece of trivia? Anything at all, tell me about it!<<

Favorite recipe of 2021: Apple Cider Caramel Sauce.

Favorite rock: an ancient super-gizmo that I found in my yard. It looks like an ordinary flake tool until you pick it up and realize it can be held in different ways to activate several different functions -- like a Swiss Army knife that doesn't move. Genius.

Another very low-risk option is to cut and paste your favorite quote(s) from an entry and mark it as such. I get that one fairly often on fanfic and it's fun to see what snagged someone's attention.

I do do this occasionally for fics (along with simply hearts, smiley faces, and 'this was great'/'I loved this'), but for journal entries I do like to add something of substance to a conversation.

That rock sounds super cool... my dad was very into history/archeology and the coolest rock tool he had was a piece of Icelandic spar for finding the sun on cloudy days :)

Yeah, sunstones are awesome tech.

I'm trying to play it cool and not come across as too weird or clingy...

Is very me in my everyday life. But in Snowflake? I have like zero chill and am leveled up on my emphatic, combustible enthusiasm for the things that happy me and others. ❤❤

That is one of the perks of Snowflake, everyone participating is openly inviting the interaction :)

I also have an easier time with the specific Snowflake prompts than the Sunshine Challenge ones, which is why I've looked at Sunshine every year and been like, ooh, this would be fun to do in the summer! -- and then never even started.

hmm, favorites are hard!

Well, favorite book of 2021: a sci-fi series I've been obsessed with published its conclusion after several years gap, and it was everything I'd hoped for and also completely surprised me in many different ways, which is the best thing for a series, I feel like (Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars)

Favorite song of 2021: unexpectedly, Encanto's "Surface Pressure" (it's been almost a month since I heard it, and I still love it a lot / am a little obsessed)

Favorite recipe of 2021: a flister on LJ introduced me to this amazing rhubarb-meringue pie/cake thing, which I subsequently also tried with sour cherries, once rhubarb season was over.

I don't think I encountered any new dinosaur facts and rocks in 2021, but I do have a favorite rock overall: Morro Rock on the California Central Coast (which I did get to visit again in 2021, after a year of staying away while CA was in lockdown.

"Surface Pressure" is such a great song! I haven't seen Encanto yet (I'm getting Disney+ as soon as NFL season ends completely and I can cancel the streaming service I get ESPN through) but I've been listening to all the songs on youtube.

Morro Rock is very cool, thank you for telling me about it :)

Oh, I've never heard of the Sunshine Challenge. Is it on DW?

sunshine_challenge is similar to snowflake challenge but runs in July, there are only 7 prompts I think, and they tend to be a lot more vague than snowflake's prompts. One year it was just colors, last year was greek mythology themed.

Sounds interesting! Thanks for the info :)

We Are All In The Gutter, but Some Of Us Are Looking At The Stars - Oscar Wilde.

An excellent quote by an excellent man :)

I first read his work when I was ten and was inconsolable when I found out what the bastards did to him.

...my poor mother. :D

I saw the movie version of The Importance of Being Earnest at a very young age, did not find out any of the rest of it until many years later.

My family Didn't Talk About Those Kinds Of Things, and as a not-straight person growing up in an evangelical environment it left me with a ton of confusion.

I don't think it would have been my mother's first choice but... yeah. I read the Conan Doyle stories at about the same age and when my mother asked me what I thought about them I told her that I thought Watson was in love with Holmes but that Holmes didn't want to kiss anyone. :D

I'm sorry you had to deal with that. ♥

Commenting around and putting yourself out there is definitely a struggle! I try to adopt a "Fuck it" mentality (thanks to Chris from Skins) where I sit here and go back and forth and then eventually just say "Fuck it" and do the thing. What do I have to lose? If someone thinks you're weird and clingy, then that's on them. To every person who thinks that there are ten others who think you're the bee's knees. (Trust me—I love that you put yourself out here in your entry because that's not easy to do in front of a bunch of strangers, which is why I wanted to comment!)

A few things I always try to remember is that you won't have chemistry with everyone and that's okay (but you won't know unless you put your leg out to flag them down) and that I'd rather regret having reached out than not having reached out at all. I know it's super hard to get out of your own head. It's why I try and put the onus on the other person—if they think I'm annoying, then it's up to them to tell me! (I also feel like commenting to people online is a lot easier than talking to people offline because you can easily say someone not responding to you is because they got busy. When it's face to face, I feel it's way more awkward.)

What do you have to lose from commenting? Nothing! ;) (I can only hope this ramble helps you know that you're so not alone. Do what feels best for you, and know that you're you and that's not annoying at all.)

My favourite book series is the Great Library series by Rachel Caine. It's a young adult and has excellent worldbuilding. It's a series based on the question of what would have happened if the library of Alexandria was never destroyed. It deep dives into the power of books and storytelling and how damaging it can be to try and control information. I don't usually read books quickly or reread them, but this is a series I devoured so quickly I'm a stranger to myself! (I've reread the first book at least three times now.)

What's one of your favourite things?

Aww, thank you <3.

The Great Library series sounds super interesting, I might give it a go!

My favorite thing I read last year was Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. The Narnia references alone put it over the top (The Silver Chair was always one of my dark horse favorites, and there's a very prominent parallel to it in Piranesi).

My favorite recipe is a hodgepodge of this star bread and my family's fruit filled holiday cookies. Basically you make the dough from the star bread, but instead of doing the cinnamon sugar and egg layers, take 2/3 cup ground figs, 2/3rds cup ground apricots, and 2/3rds cup ground dates, boil them with 2/3rd cup water, 2/3rd cup sugar, and 2 tsp flour until it's a thick consistency. Assemble and bake the star like in the star bread recipe, using the fruit mixture as filling instead of cinnamon sugar and egg wash. You can add an egg wash to the top before baking and/or dust with powdered sugar after (I was making it for a family member with an egg allergy, so I left it off and it looked and tasted just fine).

That recipe seems so easy to follow! I was wondering how you make the detailed pieces of bread and the images there helped so much. It looks like it'd be nice and crunchy. It's great that you can adapt it for someone with an allergy and it still tastes delicious!

I know it's so much easier than it looks! Your dough circles don't even have to be particularly circular for it to come out beautiful, mine are usually slightly rounded rectangles and nobody can tell the difference.

The dough tends to be very soft like a yeasted pastry, the egg wash on top might give it a similar texture to the top of challah or other bread with an egg wash, but I wouldn't personally call it crunchy.

I hear you on not wanting to annoy others, even if I'm not the kind of person who says "Ooh, tell me more about this, please, let's continue the conversation." Which could be equally annoying.

One of the things that I have fun with is sometimes being able to pick out a voice in a different context and see what kind of fun linkages that can create. The sort of thing that leads to a statement like "Master Xehanort thinks all of the Seekers of Light are illogical." Or "Hawk Moth is not just Adrien's father, he's Sailor Moon's father as well!"

Yeah, I'm starting an online university program and one of the orientation articles talked about how online communication lacks tone/body language clues and makes everything seem harsher. I think interest/disinterest is harder to gauge as well.

Spot the voice/actor is fun! Cham Syndulla from Star Wars moonlights as Babylon 5's least favorite telepathic cult leader! Somehow Teal'c has been turned into Magneto! Back in the day I read several fics where Jack O'Neill was Macgyver under an assumed identity.

Autocucumber decided to insert an extra word in there. I am the kind of person who wants to encourage conversation, which can also be annoying, I would guess.

It's interesting to see the kinds of attempts we make when communicating in text to get that additional nuance across.

Spot the actor is often really fun to do, and I can occasionally make my housemates blink a couple of times when I say things like those sentences. (The "Hawk Moth is Sailor Moon's Dad" had someone go look it up on IMDB, just to be sure, but I heard it and went "I know that voice!" It's harder when you're trying to listen for Dee Bradley Baker, though.)

Edited 2022-01-22 03:19 (UTC)

Going through my pinboard account, it appears I have one (1) favorite LOTR fic that I saved back in TWO THOUSAND AND SEVEN, and it is They Say of the Elves by Brancher.

Aww, that is a sweet little fic <3

One of my favorite Star Wars fics is from 2006: Shadows of the Future by stormqueen873. Sometimes I still feel the mid '00s were the heyday of fanfiction, but that's probably because that was when I was first exposed to fanfiction...

Thanks, I'll check that one out!

I still feel the mid '00s were the heyday of fanfiction

Right? I can't speak for anything else, but Stargate Atlantis was booming then, and that was probably my most active fandom to date.

I'm pretty shy, and as a commenter I sometimes get stuck in the 'I don't want to annoy anyone, I'll just say nothing' mindset, but as a poster I crave the comments and interactions, and then when replying to comments I'm trying to play it cool and not come across as too weird or clingy...

Oh, big mood! One of my goals this year is to comment more often, but it can be hard. I can't tell you how many times in the past I've started writing a comment, only to backspace it all and close the window because I just felt uncomfortable in some way. This is my first year doing

snowflake_challenge; I never did it before because it felt like it was for Big Fans Who Are Big Into Fandom, and while I fit the Big Fan description, I am not that Big Into Fandom.... yet.

But then last year I wrote a few fic, so I figured why not, I'll try this

snowflake_challenge thing. I'm glad I did! I'm having fun meeting new people and leaving comments.

Tell me about your favorite things, either from 2021 or just in general! Favorite book? Favorite song? Favorite recipe? Favorite dinosaur fact? Favorite rock? Favorite piece of trivia? Anything at all, tell me about it!

Hmm, I don't have an absolute favorite book these days, but I can tell you about one I read in the past few years that I really enjoyed: The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan. My review of it is at the bottom of this post in my journal but in a nutshell: it is rare that I read a romance novel in which I utterly believe the main characters do, in fact, love each other, but this book had me convinced pretty early on.

Favorite Song from last year? Well, one of my most played songs was Locus by Masayoshi Soken, which is from Final Fantasy XIV's Heavensward expansive. It's a very catchy song that energizes me! I like to listen to it first thing when I sit down to do some crafting, and I invariably imagine the Leveilleur twins from the game dancing to the song using the /cheerjump emote... the mental image makes me smile. The song wasn't released last year, though... probably my favorite from last year is "Close in the Distance", also by Soken-san, from Final Fantasy XIV's latest expansion, Endwalker.

Favorite Recipe from last year? Definitely Ginger Sandwich Cookies.

I do not have a favorite dinosaur fact, but the Favorite Rock question immediately made me think of Grade 4 Skybuilders' Rock Salt from Final Fantasy XIV, which has an amusing description. (always read the descriptions in the game! The writers are fantastic!)

Some of my other favorites can be found in the comments to my challenge 11 post!

I'm not going to lie, I've had your challenge 11 post open in another tab trying to come up with a comment for an embarrassingly long time this afternoon (along with several other peoples, but still)! Interacting with people is hard!

Those cookies look great (I am of the opinion that all ginger/gingerbread cookies should be chewy and have a hint of cloves in them). I still have half a batch of gingerbread dough in the freezer from Christmas, but once that is baked and eaten these will be in my baking queue!

I'm not a huge romance reader, mostly because I don't find most romantic plots believable (*cough*everyactionmovieromanticsubplotever*cough*), but a genuinely good romance plot is a rare thing, I might check it out!

OH MY STARS AND GARTERS THAT IS COLD. what - and i cannot stress this enough - the fuck.

i want to be like

tjs_whatnot during snowflake - no chill whatsoever when it comes to comments. altho i have a bunch of snowflake tabs open right now because i want to comment on some posts but i don't know what i want to say. >.<

my favorite phrase i learned last weekend is "shooting the baloney". my favorite tv show right now is claws. my favorite chicken recipe is honey harissa chicken. (soooo goooood.) my favorite building on the us east coast is the chrysler building. (i'm not sure what my favorite west coast building is.) my favorite bits of chrysler building trivia that probably nobody cares about but me are a. it never owned the land it sits on - it rents that square of pavement from cooper union, b. walter chrysler paid for it out of his own pocket so his kids could inherit it (rather than it being built for the chrysler corp), and c. there used to be apartments in it. margaret bourke-white, the photographer, rented one in the 30s. her editor had to cosign the lease because at the time women couldn't rent their own apartments in their own names.

Edited (what's with the random quote marks?) 2022-01-22 05:10 (UTC)

I don't know if it's climate change or I just didn't notice the super cold days as much as a kid (we did get school canceled occasionally for cold rather than snow). For a while we would get notifications about polar vortexes, but the past few years the news/weather apps haven't made a big deal about it and that's just what happens in January. There is a day in next week's forecast with a low of -13.

That chicken recipe looks super interesting- I'm trying to cook for myself a lot more this year, I bake a lot of sweet stuff but actual meals are a struggle.

I think I remember hearing that the chrysler building leases the land it's built on, but had no idea about the rest of it! Super fascinating stuff.

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Snowflake Challenge #11

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