ExtraPenguin

In the midst of wrestling with French bureaucracy (you'd think I was the first person ever who moved to France), I have been incredibly disappointed in the selection of fruits and veg in French supermarkets. My local grocery (a non-chain Asian store) is better for veg, especially East Asian cruciferous vegetables, but doesn't really carry fruits and a penguin wants an orange sometimes, ok? Yesterday I learned that the general horrendous state of fruit and veg in supermarkets is because it is all processed through a central processing station, most likely also frozen, and in general about a million years old before it hits the shelves. This is fine for e.g. ginger, but cucumbers? Lol no.

So the locals go to various farmers' markets, usually on Sundays. I generally go to one in Little Africa, and, while usually Paris has Way Too Many People for me, this is fine somehow, despite having a larger concentration of people than Paris usually does. I did a bit of introspection while I was chomping on my (delicious, delicious) orange, and then realized that it's a tori! Sure, the Finnish ones are on a square, and this is a bit more cramped due to the fact it's on a street, but this is a healthy marketplace where people sell stuff like fruits and veg, and there's just this fundamental sense of Rightness that I get when buying stuff from such a market: this is the way things should be.

(You could also make much about how I feel more at home in places filled with other immigrants/minority cultures even when physically I look less like them and more like the local majority, but that's a deeper can of worms.)

ETA: All ficlets now on AO3.

A meme, via shipperslist.

1: Pick five fandoms and list them in alphabetical order.

2: Click to receive a Random Famous Poem. Write down the 5th line (yes, even if it's an e.e. cummings poem and you wind up with an apostrophe). Repeat five times and list them in alphabetical order.

3: Write a very quick 50-word half-drabble for each fandom (try to do it all in one sitting), using the line from the poem as a prompt. (You don't have to include it in the half-drabble - it's just inspiration.) – okay, I just went for "short ficlet", because I cba to count words. Never been one for drabbles.

Fandoms chosen: Couple of Mirrors, Legend of Yunze, Sect Leader and Little Shimei's Story, two very short films starring Sheng Wei
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Considering putting the ficlets up on AO3. At least the Miss Shen and the Woman Warlord one. Thoughts?

Via independence1776, fiachairecht, and ermingarden: give us the links to your fics with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fewest words.

Most hits: Questions at Dusk, 36,117 hits.

This is a MDZS WangXian fic that was written well before the donghua or CQL came out; as such, for the bulk of the fandom, this is a relic of the past and was not poised to grow up into a mega-phenomenon, even if it was posted as a chaptered WIP. (Also, the fandom is full of incredibly squeamish people who are discomfited by a great many things.) It has, however, had time and opportunity to rack up a bunch of hits and kudos, with the immense fandom peeking into the backlog on occasion. As far as content, well, I think it's okay? I've grown in character interpretations and authorial voice since then. (I would be significantly more sympathetic about Yu Ziyuan, frex.) Not what I would consider my magnum opus in the fandom (one of the two options for that comes later), or my best; in fact, given how much good shortfic I've written for MDZS, I'd actually put this in the bottom 5% of my MDZS works.

Second-most kudos: Questions at Dusk, again, with 2,136 kudos. (#1 by kudos is #5 by hits)

Third-most comment threads: Questions at Dusk, yet again, with 101 comment threads! (#2 has 110, #4 has 91)

Fourth-most bookmarks: Ding Dong the Sith is Dead, with 651 bookmarks (Questions at Dusk is at #5, with 602; #3 has 675)

This is a short and funny Star Wars Prequel Trilogy fic. I am wholly unsurprised by its popularity, especially when coupled with the slightly silly title. I like it, though I (and all readers) like The Will of the Force (Mayday, Mayday) better.

Fifth-most words: Rediscovery, Reconstruction, with 27,059 words.

Another MDZS work! This one, however, is an actual contender for my magnum opus. (The other option would be From Ashes of Sunlight.) Wei Wuxian-centric rape recovery fic that worldbuilds Lan sect stuff and charts Wei Wuxian as he grows up. (No WangXian, though, so the fandom doesn't care lol.) Also a better take on Yu Ziyuan. And more worldbuilding, that's always dear to my heart! Then, when I was posting this, having decided to grab the technological levels of the Warring States era for the various inventions, the serialized translation updated with a mention of potatoes, which arrived in China in the late Ming/early Qing era, approximately 1400 years after the date I picked, oops.

Fewest words (fic): The Four Motivations of Man, with 153 words.

Vorkosigan saga ficlet. I had completely forgotten this piece of juvenilia existed before today. It is nonetheless charming! A bit underwritten, but it gets the point across and manages to be funny.

(I have a bunch of vids, art, fanmixes, and poetry with fewer words, but the meme called for fic, so this one it is.)

( some brainstorming of what could go where )

Some baihe dramas I'm definitely planning to at least check out (Nü Er Hong + a bunch of stuff aurumcalendula said was requested in festivids):
Couple of Mirrors (双镜) loved it!
The Evidence Tells (消失的痕迹)
Intimates (自梳)
The Message (风声)
Moonlight Fills the Western Tower (月满西楼)
Soulmate Adventure (风灵玉秀)
Nü Er Hong (女儿红)

Plus some other cdramas:
Side Story of Fox Volant (2022)
Legend of the Condor Heroes (2024)
Story of Yanxi Palace

I am ExtraPenguin and this is my space_swap letter.

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Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Expanse series - James S. A. Corey
Uplift series - David Brin

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As it's been almost 3 years since vexercises last ran, I decided to go through and categorize what happened on which week on each round (2020, 2021, 2021 summer [autumn] school, and 2020), in part as a way of seeing how the curriculum evolved and in part in case I ever want to find, say, the lightbuilding examples and explainers. The pechakuchas are a constant, and every round had one genre mashing/AU/multivid/transform -type exercise (with a different name each year).

Content lists:
2020
2021
2021 summer
2022

( all the exercises, plus which week they happened )

Which ones were your favorites? I really liked the pechakuchas and lyrical play ones. I should probably think more about color and lightbuilding at some point...

Out of curiosity, I took my song library and tossed all the titles in an online n-gram analyzer for housekeeping of future music posts. (Procrastination levels: over 9000.) No four grams, but bi- and trigrams, as well as a frequency analysis of words/unigrams.

The top words were "the (177)", "of (77)", and "to (33)" which, well, no surprise; this is, after all, a mostly English corpus. Scrolling down, the most used actual "content" words were

not quite peak metal stereotype but

world (9)
dark (9)
sun (8)
light (8)
night (7)
never (7)
time (7)
heart (7)
call (6)
dead (6)
love (6)
fire (6)
blood (6)
storm (5)
die (5)
hell (5)
ghost (5)
darkness (5)
black (5)
home (5)

Bigrams: apart from all the "of the (22)" stuff, perhaps the most me thing was "on mars (2)".

Everything with 3+ incidences that's not just prepositions

the dark (8)
i am (6)
the night (6)
the light (5)
the sun (4)
of time (4)
the heart (4)
the world (4)
the storm (3)
through the (3)
you will (3)
we are (3)
the wind (3)
the moon (3)
the end (3)

Trigrams:
in the dark (3) (Dancing/Shine/Shot in the Dark)
of the night (3) (In the Middle/Magic/Opus of the Night)
ghost in the (2) (Rain/Woods)
i am the (2) (Fire/Storm)
into the light (2) (two songs with this exact title)
into the night (2) (two songs with this exact title)
of the world (2) (Returning to the End/On Top of the World
stand my ground (2) (two songs with this exact title)
the end of (2) (The End of an Era/Returning to the End of the World)
the path, pt (2) (The Path, pt 1; The Path, pt 2)

(There are other full duplicate title songs in my library, but as one-word titles, they won't show up in this analysis.)

...okay, maybe I should do something a little bit less useless.

AO3 Stats

Stat	2024	2023 then	2023 now	All years
User Subscriptions:	269	235	-	-
Kudos:	410	2002	3605	51585
Comment Threads:	99	147	209	3254
Bookmarks:	59	619	1212	11888
Subscriptions:	1	60	103	1364
Word Count:	9238	70555	70555	912252
Hits:	3550	15074	28713	528382

I did not even break 10k, which explains the entire rest of the stats lol. Not surprised given the creative and other sort of burnout I have been experiencing due to RL stuff. Partly also 2023 exacting its revenge once I ran out of fumes to run on.

I posted 23 things to AO3 in 2024. Mostly for Battleship – some fic, some art, a few vids, one fanmix.

Popularity

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Self-recs

Art/Comics
This year, I think my favorite is actually a solo art piece featuring a lava mermaid:
Hot Pool

Fanmix
I made another Expanse fanmix! This one is about the Ring Worlds and humanity's settlement of them: ::: our destiny, the void ::: there, the alien ::: there, a home ::: and in the end, we alone :::
Distant Skies, My Destiny

Vid
I only made five. I like all of them, so I'll rec the only one not shown at any sort of vidcon:
Return to the Sea

Fic
Not much this year, so have only one:

Yet the skies always sing to me is a gen pre-canon fic for the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, ft. Shmi and the Force.

2024 Resolutions & did I do them

Find love
No. My international move did not happen in 2024; instead, it will happen in February. Did not even consider this.

Do [redacted RL sports thingamajig]
Done! Successfully! GJ me!

Finish the work project
Done! Successfully! Woohoo!

Make a vid from a baihe short film
Done! Until Eternity features several in a reincarnation theme thingy.

Finish my vid_bingo card
Done! In July, I got a line bingo. Link to card.

Write some fic that is weird/wild/experimental
Not really? Did not write much of anything tbh.

2025 Resolutions

I have my RL todos already, so a small amount of fandom stuff for this year.

Write 10k
Should be doable if I sign up for Battleship again and maybe write people OW boob porn treats, since that's everything my brain is capable of nowadays lol.

Be more present on DW
Music posts, if nothing else. I enjoy my community of pocket friends but have been feeling burnt out of everything (see also: giant backlog of not-replied-to AO3 comments...) and hopefully reattaching myself somehow will help with the sense of burnout/"I am too tired to do anything" etc.

Get a new vid_bingo card and make at least one vid
Possibly a 3×3 so I can attempt a blackout bingo this time! I'll see if any of the readymade 3×3s look nice (music, character, theme – probably not music, given that I am picky about music and want my vidsong to be listenable) and if not, idk, generate my own.

I have a few songs that have the exact same title (well, in my Spreadsheet of Songs, at least) and figured I might make a This or That a semi-regular feature! Here's the first one, chosen because the songs are so opposites in mood.

1. Within Temptation - Stand My Ground

lyrics ("If I don't make it, someone else will stand my ground")

I can see
When you stay low nothing happens
Does it feel right?

Late at night
Things I thought I put behind me
Haunt my mind

I just know there's no escape
Now once it sets its eyes on you
But I won't run,
Have to stare it in the eye

Stand my ground, I won't give in
No more denying, I've got to face it
Won't close my eyes and hide the truth inside
If I don't make it, someone else will
Stand my ground

It's all around
Getting stronger, coming closer
Into my world

I can feel
That it's time for me to face it
Can I take it?

Though this might just be the ending
Of the life I held so dear
But I won't run,
There's no turning back from here

Stand my ground, I won't give in
No more denying, I've got to face it
Won't close my eyes and hide the truth inside
If I don't make it, someone else will
Stand my ground

All I know for sure is I'm trying
I will always stand my ground

Stand my ground, I won't give in (I won't give in)
I won't give up (I won't give up)
no more denying, I got to face it
won't close my eyes and hide the truth inside
if I don't make it, someone else will

Stand my ground, I won't give in
no more denying, I got to face it
won't close my eyes and hide the truth inside
if I don't make it, someone else will
stand my ground

2. Stratovarius - Stand My Ground

lyrics ("I will stand my ground – I need to see where it leads")

This is my way, these are my rules
These are my rhymes, this is my song
Don't take me for some bloody fool
For I still dream, you can't hurt me, I'm strong

You can try to bring me down, to keep me down
I will rise and I will keep fighting back
There's no way you can break my will

My dreams are guiding my every step
I have a destiny to fulfill

No one can bring me down
I will defend my beliefs
And I will stand my ground
I need to see where it leads
No one can bring me down
I will defend my beliefs
And I will stand my ground
I need to see where it leads

You can try to bring me down, to keep me down
I will rise and I will keep fighting back
There's no way you can break my will

My dreams are guiding my every step
I have a destiny to fulfill
No one can bring me down
I will defend my beliefs
And I will stand my ground
I need to see where it leads

I'm ExtraPenguin, and this is my ficinabox letter.

Navigation:
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Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky
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The Expanse series - James S. A. Corey
Uplift series - David Brin
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Star Wars: the Old Republic

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