Grumpy Beastie's Other Lair

ABOUT ME
About Me Fall Edition
About Me: Fall Edition: This or That coming soon
About Me: Crafting Edition coming soon

Transformative Works Policy

2023 Dear Yule Goat & Wishlists Links

For bribery and good feelings: Wishlist

If you find a broken image on one of my posts anywhere, let me know here.

What I am Working on (ficwise):

2024 Wrisolutions

What I Know: Anime and Manga Fandom List

What I am Reading:
Good Reads Link Comming
2017 Reading Challenge
2021 Reading Challenges
Kingstoken's 2024 Book Bingo

What I am Listening to: 1000 Recordings to Listen to Before You Die

Snowflake Challenge 2024 Masterpost
Snowflake Challenge 2023 Masterpost

WIP Bingo Cards:
Online1roomscholhouse's Pride Bingo 2024
allbingo 2024 Pride Fest Bingo
allbingo 2024 Super Hero Bingo
Stargate Anniversary Fest 2024

Stargate 25th Anniversary Watch List

25th Anniversary Table

Bang and Whimper Prompt Table Feel free to use.

Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

I did a character playlist for an original character of mine named Moth. It feels a bit odd doing something for an original character for a fandom challenge, but working on world building for the original fantasy series universe he's in is one of the few things that's helping keep the anxiety demons at bay right now. (And several side characters may have started as Stagate SG-1 & Atlantis characters with the serial numbers filed off. Also, I just wrote a whole sorta meta thing on how he would have dealt with Soldier Boy in The Boys, which will probably never see the light of day.)

Moth Playlist
Meet Me in the Woods - Lord Huron
I Found - Amber Run
The Middle - Jimmy Eat World
By the Way - Red Hot Chili Peppers
Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen
Die Young - Kesha
Ghosts that we Knew - Mumford & Sons
Hungry like the Wolf - Duran Duran
Semi Charmed Life - Alex Melton cover
Genghis Khan - Miike Snow
A Good Song Never Dies - Saint Motel
Goodbye Sun - I Monster
Creep - Raoul & the Kings of Spain/Tears for Fears cover
Paint it Black - Hildegard von Blingin' cover
Adore - Savages
Endless Neon - LO
Bad Moon Rising - Mourning Ritual cover

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

My online footprint is not nearly as fun as it used to be. Basically, I visit here on DW, my library website, Subeta, YouTube, Buzzfeed & mental floss for quizzes, and canihazcheeseburger for memes (mostly cats and Tolkien Tuesday). Outside of researching and trying to see if dead crafting sites from the 2010s are still functional, that's it.

Subeta is a 21 year old browser based pet adoption game. Think neopets, but snarkier, you have a human avatar you can dress, and they know their core user base are adults. I am coming up on my 11th (12th?) Anniversary of playing there. I have 12 pets. The game can be as social as you want it to be and enough activities, you could spend hours each day playing outside of events. My favorite things are wizard questing, curating my pets' treasures, creating outfits and scenes for my human avatar, and gentech experiments.

As for events, the site just had it's new year's event from the 1st until the 18th. You earn new years tokens by questing or from random events. There is a shop that while open year round, only takes new years tokens as currency. The Snowtapult is open. This normally happens from December 21st until whenever Survival starts in February. Basically, there are something like 80 different kinds of snowballs you can buy with in game money and fling at other users, each with unique effects that temporarily show up on their human avatar. I have slowly been working for the maximum achievement for this for years. Coming up is one of my favorite events, which is Survival. It's a 2 part event. One part is "kissing" other users to earn candy hearts, which are one of the many in game currencies. The other part is "biting" and being bitten by other users to get infected with zombie virus' to collect the different wearable zombie skins. There are more details, but those are the broad strokes.

Dungleon is a Wordle mechanics dungeon crawl based game. You can play once a day. You have to figure out what creatures occupy the dungeon before you run out of guesses. It's a lot of fun.

YouTube Recs I spend possibly too much time on YouTube, mostly watching reddit reaction videos or long form video essays and podcasts. I also have several unfinished youtuber recs post in progress, so what thought I would do was make a list of YouTube channel recs that I feel should be be recommended, but I don't think I have recced anywhere. (I did include if they were primarily short or long content video creators, but most do both.)

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Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

We are kind of in between pets at the moment. Both of my cats have somewhat recently passed. Romeo in 2021 at the age of 15 and Kamikaze in 2023 at 16 1/2. We do plan on getting more cats, it just hasn't worked out yet.

Now, I said kind of because there is the matter of Tuxedo. Going on 6 years ago, a next door neighbor moved away and left his kitten behind. This was very much a kitten and not a full grown cat. The reasons the cat was left behind are unclear, as there are too many versions of the story, but what we know for sure is that while the old man who owned the cat was in the hospital, whoever was caring for it did something to it and it has been terrified of people, including those it used to be fine with, and will not come indoors. He has never left the neighborhood and has survived all this time. Not knowing his original name, my mother and I have always called him Tuxedo. We have sense learned that his name was Quiz.

In the first 2 years, my mother and I both spent quite a lot of time trying to trap him to surrender him to the local animal shelter with no success. He is crafty. The local neighborhood children speak of him like a local cryptid. Everyone in the neighborhood has tried to capture him at one point or another. Eventually, we gave up. All it did was encourage Tuxedo to spend more time in our front yard which royally upset our inside cats.

But in April of 2024, my mother came to a realization; we have no longer have cats. She thus began her campaign to convince Tuxedo to live with us.

After 20ish months, there have been mixed results. He appears for food 1 to 5 times a day. He now shows up everyday fairly consistently, whereas before it wouldn't be uncommon for him to disappear for up to 3 weeks at a time. When the weather is nice, he will spend the vast majority of his time either in our yard or side garden, though he still "checks his trap line," as Mom puts it. During bad weather, he holds up in our garage. (He has several nice beds and boxes in the yard and the garage.) He understands the various things we call him as names that are in reference to him. He understands the words Mom uses for food time as meaning food time. While, he still run from the sight of me, he also seems to understand that when I say, "no stop" he doesn't need to leave the garage and "I'll get the old lady" means he's going to get fed. I feed him too, just not nearly as often. He also actually ran to my mother when she called him for lunch time the other day. We've never seen him run in his life.

He has also learned to get my mother's attention by staring at her through the screen door window, if the front door is open. He's done it exactly twice.

All that said. He is very much still his own cat. No one can approach him without him freaking out. He hisses at my mother when she puts food down for him. And after accidentally getting locked in the garage for an hour one morning, he wouldn't go in it for 2 weeks. (He did still expect food, just brought to his general vicinity outside. )

Though with the Christmas tree and several boxes of holiday decor down, he seems to have decided to winter in the newly free space in our attic loft.

Is he our cat? No. But we feed him and sometimes he kind of lives here.

I was also going to write a bit about our muder of crows and my 12 virtual pets on Subeta, but this got kind of long. I will add more upon request.

Starts tomorrow!

Challenge #11

In your own space, create a fanwork.

I'm not sure if this is the final version of this and I've already shared a version of it at ushobwri, where I was given the suggestion of refering to the genre of the series as urban fantasy.

This is a short scene between Zuko and Jason in my Batman/Avatar the last Airbender crossover, urban fantasy AU. All you need to know for this is that Jason is a werewolf, Zuko is a magic user, and they are dating.

Warning for non-graphic conversation about hypothetical cannibalism.


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Challenge #10

Five Things! The five things are totally up to you.

Five Things I am Passionate About You Might Not Know From Just Reading My Journal

1. Cheese I am not sure I have ever really talked about cheese on DW, aside from an odd comment here and there about liking cheese boards and making it a favored food in a land at madrona_project, but am REALLY into cheese. I’m not sure why and I couldn’t really give you an “origin story” about it, but it is a weirdly big part of my IRL. I am constantly making cheese board (or planning them for funsies). I used to go to a lot of cheese tastings. I have a self-complied guide book to cheese – including ways to describe flavors, pairings, etc., that went to college with me. I think about half of my list of new foods I tried last year are cheeses. I genuinely get excited in the cheese section at the grocery store and one of my favorite things about the discount grocery we primarily shop at is that it has an imported cheese section. I am currently working my was through a wedge of mustard seed gouda from Holland. My favorite cheese is smoked gouda.

2. Historic Fashion (and subverting it) I absolutely love historic and vintage fashion. A huge part of my YouTube subscriptions are devoted to it, along with personal study of it. This is honestly an offshoot of my love of history in general and of period dramas. However, I am also not a purist. Sometimes, depending on what the end goal is, getting the silhouette or the idea down is more important than the details. I also see fashion as a kind of art, and sometimes bending the rules is necessary. Also, I love changing up details/reimagining things to fit fantasy and alternate universe settings, as well as things like, “what would a 14th century peasant dress look like if they had access to Lisa Frank fabric/aesthetic materials?” Of course, I will also talk your ear off about the proper way to wear a corset and why those buttons on that coat is wrong, so, *shrug*

3. Beverages This feels slightly cheaty, as it could probably been guessed by the amount I talk about tea and energy drinks, and the tea reviews I have been doing all month, but the truth is, I am passionate about beverages in general, not just tea and energy drinks. I have serious FOMO when new flavors of things come out. There are special seasonal flavors I MUST have during Halloween and Christmas. And I have yet to resist the siren’s call of something strange and interesting appearing in the beverage aisle at the discount grocery store, unless it has an ingredient I know my digestive issues will not play well with, but honestly, sometimes not even then. I have a thorough review of the limited edition AI generated coke flavor – I believe it was labeled as tasting of the future – that I never posted. (Yes, I have had most of the weird limited edition coke flavors, including Dreamworld and Starlight.) It’s also not something I am entirely proud of for a host of reasons, but here we are.

4. Outdoorsy-ish By PNW standards, I am not considered outdoorsy, but I do enjoy camping, hiking, campfires, and generally spending time outdoors. Nature fascinates me. The problem is that I want my hikes to be leisurely so, I can really look at things and take pictures or do sketches, not forced marches. I want to get up when I want to and sleep on something padded, not forced up at 5am and sleep directly on the ground. Basically, I get shamed a lot for not liking outside the "right" way. But I do like spending time outside. I'm just more of an indoor/outdoor gremlin.

5. Miniatures I have loved miniatures as long as I remember. The quickest way to get me to fall in love with something is to make it tiny. The only reason I don't have a hoard of meticulously decorated creepy dollhouses is lack of space (and money). I have the skills, I could make it happen. I do have a variety of other minis I am trying to build displays for, including a pill organizer full mini ducks & octopuses. Most of my fandom minis are on display, but I am not the biggest fan of their current set up. It looks like an army of Batmans were attacked by other fandoms and slugs. And there is of course my small collection of Funkos, which are not technically minis, but I sort of think of them in the same way. And the gaming miniatures I need to paint. And pieces of my Halloween village. And let's not forget the tiny pigs I have hidden among my mother's living room knickknacks. I think you get the point.

Link to Mine in Particular:
https://snowflake-challenge.dreamwidth.org/74474.html?thread=14274538#cmt14274538

Challenge #7

Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources

First I want to point out my standard “My three most used resources are (aside from DW & AO3) are”:

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I may add to this later, but the computer’s little countdown clock on my allotted library computer session is yelling at me.

Challenge #15

Fandom Snowflake Challenge's 2023 Fandom Wrapped!

Your top 5 fandoms for 2023 were:
1. Batman
2. Stargate Atlantis/Stargate SG-1
3. TTRPGs/D&D
4. Our Flag Means Death
5. Avatar the Last Airbender
HM: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)

Because this varied wildly depending on platform, I have included those too:

Your Instagram top 5 fandoms for 2023 were:
1. Batman
2. Our Flag Means Death
3. Good Omens
4. Supernatural
5. Avatar the Last Airbender

Your YouTube top 5 fandoms for 2023 were:
1. ASMR
2. Knitting
3. TTRPGs/D&D
4. Batman
5. Cult of the Lamb

Your AO3 top 5 fandoms for 2023 were:
1. Batman
2. Stargate Atlantis
3. Stargate SG-1
4. Merlin (BBC)/Violet Evergarden (anime)/Sherlock Holmes
5. Good Omens/Supernatural/The Witcher/Interview with the Vampire (TV)

Your top 5 fandom spaces (Discord, Twitter, etc.) in 2023 were:
1. AO3
2. Instagram
3. YouTube
4. Dreamwidth
5. Spotify

The top 5 things you did to contribute to fandom in 2023 were:
1. Reading fic
2. Reacting to fic
3. Watching fan vids
4. Watching gaming playthroughs
5. Creating fandom playlists/writing fanworks (even if only 3 got posted)

Your top 5 most appreciated fandom contributions were:
(I really wasn’t sure how to answer this one)
1. Comments & kudos I received despite a definite lack of posting on my part
2. Having access to appreciate the works of others
3. The bounty of well written kinktober works on AO3 that kept me alive during October
4. Anytime anyone posted fan art that wasn’t AI generated
5. Finding thriving community for older fandoms on Instagram/all the Our Flag Means Death memes

Bonus questions:

Your fandom personality in 2023 was:
Panicked Gremlin

In 2023, you discovered:
Whole new genres of ASMR to explore, new genres of Batboys fanfic to explore, Jason Todd Hockey AUs, & the InuYasha side of Instagram

Your fandom home in 2023 was:
Snuggled in a pillow fort w/ my other phone & a pair of headphones