hamsterwoman | Recent Entries

Locked (except for book babbling) during the last round of LJ paranoia, but generally happy to add people if we know each other from somewhere (comms/mutual friends/other interaction).

Crossposts: https://hamsterwoman.livejournal.com/808469.html

3. Diana Wynne Jones, Hexwood – I was intrigued about Hexwood since hearing that several flisters are big fans, and when I was in the UK,

cafemassolit presented me with a beautiful UK cover copy – very forestry and mysterious – because the non-Chrestomanci DWJs are hard to find in the US. With the 8dodwj podcast getting to Hexwood in late January, and having figured out some kind of reading schedule with the sync read – what seems to work well is, I read during the BART portions of my commute, which is a solid hour+ chunk, and requires the least attention from me, because the station announcements are hard to miss, and listen to podcasts for the bus and waiting portions, which is allowing me to keep up with new podcasts and make some adequate progress on the E&J retro dive – I now actually read it. And it’s definitely unlike anything by DWJ I’ve read! Early on, when I had finished part 1 or 2 of 9, Best Chat asked which one that was, and I said, all I can say about it is that it’s a non-Chrestomanci DWJ, because I have no clue what’s going on – but neither does anyone else in this book, so that’s cool. Once I’d finished, I said, “At basically no point could I predict what was going to happen next, and this is like five or six books in one, matryoshka style except less linear. But I definitely liked it!” Which I think is a pretty good summary both of the book and my reading experience. And the rest goes under ( the SPOILER CUT )

And hereby I have finally read Hexwood, after talking vaguely about doing so for several years. Having done the same with Fire and Hemlock about two years ago, I should probably now pick a next target to read – I’m thinking Black Maria/Aunt Maria or Homeward Bounders probably… Although I do actually have a copy of Archer’s Goon, unlike these other two, so, sensibly, I should read THAT.

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Week 3 of Stuff I Love: Top 10 Edition (hosted by

dreamersdare here) is Music Picks.

I’m not fannish about music, and my favorite songs would be heavily weighed towards Russian and they are my favorite because of the lyrics, so that’s not going to be interesting to most of my flist. So instead, I’m doing top 10 songs that I’ve seen used in fanvids that I’ve loved. These have to be songs I actually like, and fanvids I actually like/love, which restricted this to a manageable and relatively easy to track down set.

( 13 fanvids to 11 songs – because I had to add some bonus ones and prime numbers are cool )

And this is not part of the above list, because I just discovered it while searching for something else and stumbling on the playlist of someone with very compatible tastes to me, but there’s a The Goes Wrong Show fanvid to “Odds Are” by the Barenaked Ladies (who have several songs I really enjoy, but I think this is the first time I’ve found one paired with a vid for something I also really like), and it was a lot of fun to revisit a bunch of my favorite disasters to such a jaunty and optimistic song.

2. Elis James and John Robins, The Holy Vible – so this is the book Elis & John wrote together in ~2017 and toured in 2018. I actually bought it and started reading it really early in my Elis & John journey – May 2024 – because I thought it would be a “concentrated” way to get a feel for them as a duo. And it kind of works in that regard, but only to a point – some stuff is more reliant on already knowing the inside jokes, and most of it is enhanced by being able to hear certain key phrases in their voices (they recorded the audio book version, which I do think would be fun, especially for certain chapters, but I don’t think this is something I need to experience twice). Anyway, I started reading it back in May 2024, while I was still trying to figure out/decide how to catch up on the back catalogue, and fairly quickly decided this was not the best way. But I’ve now listened back to before this book was published, and that seemed like a very good time to go back to the rest of it, especially when I wanted something undemanding and light. ( More, with… spoilers of sorts, I suppose? )

This was definitely a better time at which to read this book, and I’m glad I can say I have done so now :) Probably audiobook would’ve been the better way to go from the start, but on the other hand, I already have hundreds of hours of audio content, and being able to change it up with the written word was probably good :)

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Speaking of addenda to other media I’m consuming, after I watched The Goes Wrong Show, YouTube helpfully popped up the BBC broadcast version of the play Peter Pan Goes Wrong, and I watched it too. It was interesting to see this bunch / this humour at much longer form – the TV episodes are <30 min and the play was over an hour, so it was a slightly different vibe. ( More, with SPOILERS )

I then also watched A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, which was shorter and felt closer to the show, but I still like the show more. ( More, with spoilers )

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Week 2 of Stuff I Love: Top 10 Edition (hosted by

dreamersdare here) is Series. For week 1’s “Standalones”, I’d chosen to focus on SFF stories because I tend to favor SFF series. So I’m thinking of doing basically the opposite, for the same reason, for this week – usually if I read/watch a series, it’s almost certainly going to be a SFF series because it’s a chance to spend time in a constructed world, get to know magic rules or alien races, maybe even learn a bit of an invented language. So it’s much rarer for me to have a series I love that isn’t SFF – and that’s what I decided to go with here (partly because, y’all already know what my favorite SFF series are, it’s basically all my tags :)

Again, not trying to rank these:

( Top 10 NON-SFF series I love )

dreamersdare is hosting a Stuff I Love – Top 10 Edition weekly challenge throughout February, with the first week being media one-shots.

I’m not going to try for a ranked top 10 for this or other weeks, because that way madness lies, but I did want to try to get to a list of 10 things I love that fit the challenge.

I pondered just a free-form list of one-shots of different mediums and genres, but eventually what coalesced is this: a list of standalone SFF fiction. One of the things I really love about SFF is the long series, the magical sagas, multi-volume explorations of worldbuilding, sometimes across real-world decades and in-universe millennia – your Tolkien Legendariums, your Earthseas, your Dragaeras, your Vokosigan Sagas. So it’s particularly notable when I enjoy a SFF standalone, which manages to pack that worldbuilding and that sensawunda into a single piece. Sometimes even quite a short one, because I included short stories, novellas, and novelettes in scope of this.

In no particular order, and selected by starting with a considerably longer list and picking things from it until I felt like I’d picked all the right ones.

( top 10 )

Behold, I have read a book!

1. Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath – I did this as part of a sync read with

lunasariel,

cyanmnemosyne, and

hidden_variable (though not all of us are yet finished), and you can see our in situ reactions as we read along here.

Back when this book first came out, a couple of flisters read it, and basically everything I learned about it from their write-ups made me feel like this book had been written just for me – magic school! dragons! learning to do chemistry with dragons at magic school! When I described this premise to L, her reaction was, “Did you black out and publish a novel?” So, yeah, this was incredibly well-suited to my interests, which raises the question of why it’s taken me nearly 3 years to read it, especially as I’ve owned a copy of this book for a while. And I liked it a lot! Not in an iddy way, which is a little bit of a surprise given just how well it aligns with some of my favorite tropes, but I’m both very glad that I finally read it and am curious to read more. (Book 2 is now out; let’s see if it takes me another 3 years to read it…)

( More, with spoilers )

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I have also watched a thing:

The Goes Wrong Show:

rionaleonhart started posting gloriously cracktasting ficlets which were intriguing to read canon-blind (I’m a sucker for rivals-to-lovers, and Chris/Robert was clearly that), and also were giving me vaguely Taskmaster-y vibes in the combination of absurdity and disaster. And then Riona posted a very helpful fandom primer, from which I learned more context and also that the show was only about 6 hours of content (i.e. within my “impulse binge” parameters) and available to me to watch on YouTube. And I have now binged it, and had a great time, and am even more able to appreciate Riona’s Chris/Robert fic, heh.

( More, with spoilers )

Great fun, and I’m sad there isn’t more to binge. (Well, I understand there are plays which predate the show, but I’d need to track them down somewhere.)

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #15: How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?

Pretty good! I’ve been doing Snowflake for about 10 years now, and it’s always a good time, one of the fannish staples I look forward to every year. As always, I enjoyed answering the challenges and the “ritual” of the month of fandom chat/squee. But I did feel less of a sense of community this year (which makes sense, given what else has been going on in the world in January 2026…), which is a little sad, since that’s also an important part of Snowflake for me.

Actually, let me talk about that latter part here, because here’s where it seems to fit best into the flow of this post. ( Snowflake Challenge 2026 sense of community musings )

I answered all the challenges, like I usually do, and enjoyed the mix of old favorites and new prompts.

( Favorite challenges )

Old challenges I was looking forward to seeing again which were not repeated: I missed the Snowflake staples of “create a fanwork”, “try something new”, and “set some goals for yourself”. This is fine, though, because I can just do those anyway, as a challenge to myself – they do not require any creativity to SET as a challenge, and while I enjoy browsing people’s answers for them, the main reason I like them is the action I take in response, so I don’t really require a community for them. I’ve also missed the “rec something” / “rec yourself” type challenges – which I can still do on my own, since they don’t require creativity to set either – but a large part of those is definitely browsing other people’s answers. (I also miss the scavenger hunt, but that one’s not the same sort of staple as the others are, I think. And definitely not something I’m going to do on my own.)

So I’m just going to set myself those challenges anyway. The unasked challenges:

Make a fanwork:

I guess the moodboard and the primer are both fanworks, and I also made a fanwork for

fandomtrees during this month, so that one is technically fulfilled, but also I use Snowflake as my push to make some icons for new fandoms and/or new images I’ve come across during the previous year. I still plan to do this, but I will wait a little bit because there’s an installment of Taskmaster cartoons coming that I want to potentially include in that icon batch.

Try something new:

I did this naturally, by watching the first 5 episodes of The Goes Wrong Show that

rionaleonhart has been writing delightful fic for and posted a primer for. I will post about it in full once I’m done with both series, but it has been a very fun thing to watch and, as I’d hoped and as Riona mentioned, does have a similar vibe to Taskmaster – not that it’s a similar format or anything, but, like, the low-stakes absurdist disaster feeling is similar – which is obviously great!

Rec some fanworks:

I have also done this a little bit in the course of completing the other challenges, like reccing the Taskmaster cartoons when I was talking about r/Taskmaster for community promo and reccing a brand new Elis/John longfic in the E&J fandom primer post. But here are things that did not come up naturally that I was hoping to have a chance to rec: ( Vorkosigan Saga, Murderbot, original art )

And, you know what, I am going to do some self-recs, too: ( chemistry anthropomorfic, Machineries of Empire poem, Monday Begins on Saturday )

Set some goals for yourself:

( 2025 Fannish goals check-in )

( 2026 Fannish Goals )

Challenge #14: In your own space, create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom

I have had such great fun (and good luck!) with fandom primers in past Snowflakes, in the sense that I both really enjoyed writing them up, find them very useful to refer to down the road if I need to explain what obscure/hard-to-understand-from-osmosis thing I’m talking about, AND I think I have had at least one flister either directly take the plunge because of the primer each time or have it be a helping-along nudge towards that, which is really the best possible outcome. (Past primers: Dragaera, Terra Ignota, my 50-year-old Russian book love Monday Begins on Saturday, and Taskmaster, and I finally created a tag for them).

Last year the thought of doing one for Elis & John did occur to me, but I had only consumed one third of the “content” by then, and didn’t feel like I was ready to write any sort of primer. This year, I’m still not done catching up: I have listened to almost 9 years of radio out of 12 years, but that does mean I have about 25% to go. But, I do feel like 9 years of content is a lot of content, and I have now listened to at least some of all of the phases of their “digital decade”, and got to experience a live show, and E&J fandom on four different platforms, which hadn’t been the case last year, so I was thinking it was time. And then a 30k Elis & John fic popped up on AO3 the very day this Snowflake prompt went up, roughly doubling the total amount of E&J content on AO3, and if ever there was a sign from the universe, right? :P

So here you go. This is what I’ve been obsessed with for the last 20 months, to the extent of flying to England to attend a show.

What is it? Elis James and John Robins is a British radio show/podcast that has been on air almost-continuously in some form since February 2014. It started out on XFM/Radio X (“digital indie music radio”, as the boys rattle it off) as a live weekly radio show, moved to the BBC in 2019, as a live weekly radio show on 5Live, and in February 2024 changed to a “podcast-first” format, the exact mechanics of which are too complicated to explain (the show has adopted a sarcastic “it couldn’t be simpler!” tagline when attempting to explain it), but essentially it moved to two podcasts a week, with new episodes currently dropping Tuesdays and Fridays, and then the highlights of those go out on the radio once a week. The key thing is that across these last 12 years, with the exception of a couple of months when they were moving stations or formats, there’s been a steady output of 1-2 hours of new content a week, with occasional bonus special episodes, and all of that is available in podcast form. As of this writing, the BBC version of the show is up to 509 episodes, and there are 264 episodes on Radio X, plus a bunch of bonus ones that are unnumbered across both versions.

Elis and John have also written a book together, The Holy Vible, have done a bunch of livestreams over the years (not available officially anywhere, but there are curated sources), and have done live gigs and tours, most recently in the fall of 2025 (also not available anywhere, but there are clips, photos, etc.). You know, in case the 1000+ hours of radio/podcast content was not enough ‘canon’.

The premise: ( the key players and the chemistry )
( the format )

OK, I think that gives a sense of the format sufficiently.

How to listen: The current BBC shows are on Spotify (and BBC Sounds, and Podbean, and all the other places). There is also bonus BBC Sounds-only content that is only officially available within the UK (but there are sources; inquire within). The Radio X/XFM shows are also available on Spotify, separately.

You can see visuals and video versions of short clips on the Instagram “carra” at bbc5live (probably easiest to search by the #elisandjohn tag.

And longer clips are on YouTube in this playlist.

Where to start: This is a great question! Opinions vary.

( Two options that I think might work )

Links to things:

( fannish spaces and resources )
( fanworks, and more )

Challenge #12: Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

This was a hard one! I would feel weird addressing specific individual people, and I feel like I’ve covered the general feeling of this in the “fandom love letter” post. There are a couple of specific groups I could talk about, but actually I’ve already talked about them on previous Snowflakes,

westerosorting back in 2014 (everything I wrote there is still true, except that I’ve met 2 additional people in person <3) and

westerosorting again and Best Chat (which grew out of

westerosorting) in 2022 – and the Best Chat is still going strong, with additional exciting in-person meet-ups (I have now also met

tabacoychanel in person, after 15+ years of online friendship, got to crash at

cafemassolit’s place in a second country, and got to live together with 80% of Best Chat for a couple of days, bash’ style) and the most amazing birthday card.

But what do I actually write about this time without it being a rehash? I liked the approach some people took of addressing this challenge to fandom resources or collections or platforms – DW, AO3, Tumblr, Reddit, TV Tropes… but I think there’s only one such thing I truly feel strongly about (you’re reading it), and that not purely as a fannish resource.

So here’s my thing: I’m going to appreciate the people who enhanced my fandom life not in fannish spaces (which I’ve written about many times), but ( out in the Real Life wilds )

In many cases this was a momentary interaction, or a couple of shared hours of fannishness, or a shared nod of recognition in a relationship that has nothing to do with fandom, but all of them were memorable bright spots, and all the more so for coming in unexpected places. So in addition to the wonderful fannish spaces and fannish relationships that I've been lucky enough to cultivate, I also appreciate these moments of fannish serendipity. They enhance my fandom life, too :)

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.

By this point I think the only fannish DW communities I participate in are seasonal ones like

fandomtrees, (lurking in) the Yuletide comms (

yuletide/

yuletide_admin), or

snowflake_challenge itself (which additionally are all kind of clumped together October through January and dormant the rest of the year. I can’t seem to get the hang of Discord, even for fannish things I absolutely adore, like Terra Ignota.

So really my only current continuous fannish community is r/Taskmaster – and while Reddit is not my preferred way of doing fandom AT ALL, it is a really fun comm.

( What you’ll find there )

While I’m at it, let me link to a recent rec I came across through r/Taskmaster: this super fun fanart series with cartoonish headshots of contestants (so far up to s16, but the rest coming soon).

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a wrapped giftbox with a snowflake on the gift tag. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

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).

OK, I’d never made a Moodboard before, but had been sort of wanting to try it, so this was the perfect opportunity. I thought briefly about whether I should do a Taskmaster one, but I do feel like my colorbars from last year fill a similar niche, so I felt like I’d done it. Well, besides Taskmaster, I think it’s fair to say I have only one truly active fandom at the moment, so… Elis James & John Robins it was. And I might have gotten a little carried away XD

(Let me know if this looks giant on your page and I'll add a cut -- mine seems to automatically resize it to something reasonable, but not sure how universal that is.)

( Blathering )

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Challenge #11: In your own space, grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

I really like the idea of this challenge, but don’t terribly like the idea of linking to “granted wishes”, so I won’t do that part. I’ve already granted a couple of wishes when originally browsing Challenge #5, but this was my reminder to go finish commenting on another one I’d done in my head but not actually commented on. But then I went ahead and browsed the day 5 comments some more until I granted a wish I hadn’t even looked at before. I plan to continue doing that, but with that I feel like I can call the challenge “done” for the purposes of posting about it :)

Oh, right, and I should probably link to my wishlist, shouldn’t I.

fandomtrees pulled through with reveals this weekend! I got an adorable harried spider prepping for the holidays, a lovely crop of Discworld icons from illustrations and movie adaptations, and the cozy Elis & John AU of my dreams.

I left some recs/recipes, but my creative endeavors this time around were limited to this:

sysann requested, among many other fun crossover ideas, a Dragaera/Ghosts UK crossover wherein the Dragaerans find themselves in Button House. Here’s what I wrote:

(If you’re not familiar with Dragaera, all you need to know is that Aliera is a particularly haughty member of a Proud Warrior Race who are en masse extremely touchy about their honor and love to fight duels about it. She is sensitive about her height and levitates to appear taller, and her normally-green eyes turn blue when she’s angry.

If you’re not familiar with Ghosts UK, all you need to know is that Thomas is the ghost of a (bad) Regency era poet, who is an oblivious romantic who died in a duel over a lady’s honor.)

( Dragaera/Ghosts UK, Thomas Thorne, Aliera e’Kieron, terrible poetry )

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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.)

I think this time around, I’ll just go with the tropes that are making my current reading – To Shape a Dragon’s Breath – such a fun and this-book-was-written-just-for-me reading experience :)

( magic as science, magic school, animal companion, alt history, Sweet Polly Oliver )

Some fannish catching up!

1)

fandomtrees still has 3 trees below the minimum number of 2 gifts, and is thus at risk of delaying reveals again (currently scheduled for Jan 17 reveals), with the decision on delaying to be made the morning of 1/17. Needy trees are mastershield's Tree (f:astro boy, f:balan wonderland, f:kingdom hearts); kalloway's Tree (f:brave nine, f:crossovers, f:fire emblem, f:granblue fantasy, f:gundam, f:kingdom of heroes, f:super robot heroes) whoremoantreatments' Tree (f:advance wars, f:bleach, f:hypnosis mic, f:kuroko no basket, f:pokemon, f:tales of berseria, f:the world ends with you). (List kept updated here.) All of these are open to fic, and the minimum fill for fic is only 100 words, if anyone knows these fandoms and can help out.

(My tree has above the minimum number of gifts but is here, and I’m eager to see what’s on it :)

2) I should’ve mentioned this earlier, but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

lunasariel is hosting a sync read of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath in her DW here. Currently it’s her, me, and

cyanmnemosyne reading along, but contrary to the name, we don’t actually have to be all synched up to participate, so if (like me) you’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, or if you’ve read it already and want to follow our impressions as we make progress through it, come join! I am currently just past halfway,

lunasariel is 10-20 chapters ahead of me, and Cyan has just recently started. (And yes, my thoughts on this book are ~50% on the chemistry. Actual Periodic Table of Elements chemistry, I mean, not chemistry between characters, although I’m enjoying that too.)

3) Snowflake catch up!

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

The problem with doing Snowflake every year for the last, uh… 10 years, I guess? – is that for repeated questions like this, which are about ME as opposed to about my fandoms or projects or objects, which can accumulate it is much harder to come up with something new to say! Both of these questions fall under that category, and so were more challenging than most for me to answer. But let’s see if I can come up with something without repeating myself.

Challenge #7: LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

I do want to stick to fandom-related things I like about myself for this one, so, hm. Last time I answered this question seems to be in 2017 (and my things were “good fannish role model for my children”, “thorough and detailed in talking about what I’m reading/watching”, and “conscientious beta”) and the first time in 2016 (my answers were “good fannish baba/matchmaker”, "committed to fannish crack”, and “conscientious about fandom participation”) – and I do still feel those things are all applicable to me and I still like them. But I’ve done a bunch of new things in the last 9 years, from attending conventions to paying attention to the Hugos to signing up for Yuletide, so let me focus on those new things and see if I can extract three new things I like about myself fannishly from them.

( things I like about myself viz conventions, fanfic, and Hugos )

Challenge #8: Talk about your creative process.

This is another one I’ve done before, in 2019 and in 2015, but looking at even the 2019 one, I talked about fannish poetry and graphics, but not about fannish prose/fanfic. So clearly that’s what I should talk about, but what IS my process?

( Fanfic process )

Snowflake Challenge: A warmly light quaint street of shops at night with heavy snow falling.

Challenge #5: In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.

-

fandomtrees reveals got pushed to Jan 17 because there are still some trees (16 as of this posting) that don’t have the minimum amount of gifts (at least 2) necessary for reveals. So, any fills for the needy trees listed here (real-time updates at the Google spreadsheet). Most of the fandoms I don’t know anything about (but hopefully some of you do!), but of the ones I do, there’s a request for the Raven Cycle, Discworld, and some Original Work requests, and a niche rec request.

- My tree does have the minimum number of gifts, so is not holding up the fest opening, but does list all kinds of things I want (fandoms: Chronicles of Amber, Discworld, Dragaera, Rivers of London, Taskmaster, Terra Ignota, Vorkosigan Saga, and critter art).

( More specific requests for Dragaera, Taskmaster, Elis&John fandoms and crossovers/fusions )

- I included this in last year’s Snowflake wishlist and it worked really well, so doing it again: I'm planning on Doing the Hugo Awards (and hopefully Worldcon) this year, and have just recently come to the realization that if I'm going to nominate some short fiction, I should actually, like, read some that was published in 2025. So, looking for recs for "Hugo-worthy" SFF short stories and novelettes published in 2025 that are ideally accessible online. Authors who tend to semi-reliably work for me in short form are Sarah Pinsker, Kelly Link, and Naomi Kritzer, to give some sense of what I like. And also happy for any recs for published-in-2025 novellas, Related Works, and dramatic presentation short form things (<90 min) that are standalone (i.e. not episodes of a serial show, but either a short(ish) film or part of an anthology show but standalone), and Astounding-eligible authors to check out.

Challenge #6: Top 10 Challenge. The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

After some consideration, I’m going to do my Top 10 Dragons :) I’m currently reading a book with dragons (To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which I’m enjoying a lot), whose dragons are, so far, somewhat different than I’d been expecting, and that’s been making me think about various other fictional dragons I’ve known and loved and the universes they come from, so I figured I’d make a list of my favorites.

They can be dragons that can assume human form, or even spend most of their time in said human form, but they can’t be just humans who are for some reason called Dragons (i.e. no Sarkan from Uprooted or the Dragaeran Dragonlords). Moreover, I tried to keep it to one dragon per canon. So here we go!

( Top 10 dragons )

What about YOUR favorite dragons? Introduce me / sway me over to any I might've missed, or squee with me about my favorites :)

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I think I was actually low-key avoiding the Taskmaster New Year Treat because I subconsciously resented it for being 2 episodes when I wanted CoC to be 2 episodes, lol. But I have watched it now, and it was fun!

Part 1 – Ooh, I knew one of the contestants (Rose) was deaf, but it was still jarring to see her interpreter sitting there next to Alex. Alex’s banter (OBE/oboe) and the several layers of bad joke was pretty fun. ( More, with spoilers )

My midpoint impressions are that I do enjoy Susie, but in exactly the same way I enjoyed her on Catsdown, so the “revelations” are Sam and Rose, who are both extremely adorable cuties whose cheeks I want to pinch. I’m very meh on the others – Jill’s doing well, but is a bit deadpan for me, and also I’m not a fan of how she brings up football all the time – like, I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything about her outside of her football career (in stark contrast to David James, who mentioned some footballers or travels associated with playing football, but talked about things like painting and just came across as a delightful massive weirdo – IDK, goalkeepers are different, I guess, was the consensus at the time). Apparently even the cat costume, which I did find cute, is a football reference, to her local football team, which someone on Reddit said she said in the studio taping. And Big Zuu is just kind of there… It sounds like he’s a charming person to work with, from all the podcasts, but as a viewer I have not been charmed.

Anyway, I don’t mind spending another episode with these guys!

Part 2 – Greg made me laugh out loud with his Alex intro: ( More, with spoilers )

And of course there was also the Series 21 cast reveal. ( Spoilers? )

I still have some Taskmaster stuff to catch up on – Acaster’s ultimate episode, the next installment of Taskmastermind, and some outtakes. But meanwhile ( WILTY has returned and is being a lot of fun )

Catching up on the last two days, because ugh, work. Who thought that was a good idea? XP

Challenge #3: Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

I love reading people’s responses to this challenge (particular highlights on my flist were

muccamukk’s beautiful analogy and

author_by_night’s poem “To Fandoms I’ve Only Observed”), but I’ve done this a bunch of different ways for past Snowflakes and was struggling for a new angle. I thought about an abecedarian poem (as I’d done for characters at one point), but had a harder time coming up with a “balanced” list of fandoms in ABC order, about which I’d have about the same amount to say. I finally did settle on an abecedarian idea, just not a poetic one, so: (all links go to AO3 works-in-fandom pages, with a few exceptions)

I love fandom ( because fandom is )

Obviously some letters were harder to fill with fandoms than others, but all of this is true, and these are all reasons I love fandom :)

Challenge #4: Rec Your Last Page: Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

Maybe I should go through my billions of open tabs and see if there’s something in there worth reccing? (and take the opportunity to close some, lol)

Relevant open tabs (and the reasons I have them open):

fandomtrees spreadsheet of needy trees. Reveals are targeted at Jan 10, but there are still 39 trees short of the goal of at least 2 gifts. (Mine is not one of the needy trees, but it is here.) (Open because I was checking how likely reveals were to be delayed.)

( and 10 more links, from general to specific )

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom: Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

I was going to say that I don’t have any pets, but I guess that’s not true anymore: we do have the “sidewalk fish”, so called because we rescued them from the sidewalk when our neighbors moved out and left an aquarium full of murky water along with other garbage for trash pickup. ( Sidewalk fish story ) My daughter subsequently added some shrimp to the tank (now known as “the shrimpfestation”) and also a mystery snail, who proceeded to do what mystery snails do and gift us with progeny. The current snail count of the tank are two adult snails, a blue and a magenta, who are the children of that original snail, and >20 baby snails, the third generation. (Anyone want a mystery snail?)

( Feeeesh )

As for pets-in-my-fandoms, a couple pop up here and there, more or less significantly – I mean, Bill the Pony is not quite a pet, Bel Thorne’s exotic pet hamster is hilarious to me personally but extremely minor, I’m not all that fond of more significant pets/pet-adjacent critters in my fandoms, like Toby the wonder dog in Rivers of London or Greebo in Discworld. But my answer to this is definitely Loiosh in the Vlad Taltos books. He is also not exactly a pet, being, rather, a witch’s familiar with a very serious job to do, and also a sapient creature, but he is also not NOT a pet, and I’ve wanted a wiseass shoulder-dragon ever since meeting him.

*

2025 books and book meme:

( 2025 book list )

My usual ( year-end book meme )

Happy New Year! I'm having a fairly pleasant 2026 so far, and hope you all are too! <3

Yuletide reveals! :D

I wrote two things this year (which, it's been a couple of years since I've managed a treat, and I'm very glad I was able to this year).

My assignment:

Voyages of the Valence: The Lanthanide Cluster Job (7862 words) by hamsterwoman
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Elements - Experiments in Character Design - Kaycie D., Object and Concept Anthropomorphism
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Vanadium (Experiments in Character Design), Chromium (Experiments in Character Design), Iodine (Experiments in Character Design), Rhenium (Experiments in Character Design), Sulfur (Experiments in Character Design), Carbon (Experiments in Character Design), Xenon (Experiments in Character Design), Helium (Experiments in Character Design), Dysprosium (Experiments in Character Design), Indium (Experiments in Character Design), Thulium (Experiments in Character Design), Rhodium (Experiments in Character Design), Yttrium (Experiments in Character Design)
Additional Tags: IN SPACE!, Space Opera
Summary:

Elements IN SPACE!

( Blathering )

The days leading up to story reveals were spent frantically beta-ing a couple of fairly long fics that required a canon primer, so I had given up on the idea of writing a treat. But I felt so blessed by my last-minute crossover treat and the fact that my main gift was in a much rarer fandom than I’d been expecting, that it gave me a sort of second wind – after reveals, obviously, but there was still Madness. And thus:

FAQ: The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Magical Practitioner Examination (581 words) by hamsterwoman
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense - Luke Burns, Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Peter Grant (Rivers of London), Thomas Nightingale
Summary:

Nightingale was aghast at my lack of ophidian knowledge.

( Blathering )

Full text of the ficlet, with the missing bit: ( under here )

*

snowflake_challenge is back, with lovely new banners:

Snowflake Challenge: A mug of coffee or hot chocolate with a snowflake shaped gingerbread cookie perched on the rim sits nestled amidst a softly bunched blanket. A few dried orange slices sit next to it.

Challenge #1: The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

My intro post from a year ago was mostly current but was missing ~~Elis & John~~ a couple of things that feel too relevant not to mention, so, I’m including an updated one below. As for the other challenge questions:

I love the little bright splash of fannishness that Snowflake brings to the start of the year – it always leads to interesting fandom reflections (my own and other people’s), getting to read/watch/look at things I wouldn’t have come across or taken the plunge on otherwise (fic/vids but also trying new canons), creating things I otherwise wouldn’t have created (one tangible highlight: a couple of years ago I wrote a pantoum, a poetic form I hadn’t tried before, for Snowflake’s “try something new” day, and it was actually published this year, which is pretty cool!), and usually also new friends. Which I guess has also answered the question of what I hope to gain from it this year :)

( fannish me in 2026 )

*

YouTube now apparently also does a Wrapped: ( so here are my fairly predictable results )

*

( Fannish end-of-year meme #2 )

B is back and appears to have somehow given me his jetlag, because I was awake around 5 a.m. and then got up about half an hour later so he could make me coffee and eggs, since he was making himself some.

I’m consequently a bit bleary for anything productive, but might as well post some Yuletide recs:

( recs for Ballad of Wallis Island, Doctrine of Labyrinths, D&D:HAT, The Odyssey, Philosopher's Flight, R&G Are Dead, Some Desperate Glory, Summer in Orcus, and a couple of 5 min fandoms )

*

I think new fandom developments are unlikely in the next 5 days, so I might as well do the year-end fandom meme:

Fandom end-of-year meme: ( fandom meme #1 )

Yuletide has revealed! (a bit more than intended, LOL, but everything appears to be back in order now, thanks to some swift manual workarounds by the mods! ♥)

I got two wonderful fics, which both really, really surprised me. I was convinced that I was getting a Rivers of London fic, because when my gift popped up, that was the only fandom I had requested with stories, and there was a RoL fic that fit what I had requested, which had recently appeared, so of course I figured it was mine. Then a treat popped up the night before reveals, and the fandoms were unchanged, so I figured it had to be another RoL fic… except Varvara wasn’t tagged in more than one fic, so I was very puzzled. Until I remembered/realized that Lady Eve’s Last Con would not have been wrangled yet, so, OK, my treat was probably that. But it never for a second occurred to me that my main gift could ALSO be Lady Eve’s Last Con, so I was completely blindsided by it:

Forgetting is Musical (1214 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lady Eve's Last Con - Rebecca Fraimow
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Esteben Mendez-Yuki & Sol Mendez-Yuki, Esteban Mendez-Yuki/Jules Johnson
Characters: Esteban Mendez-Yuki, Sol Mendez-Yuki, Ruthi Johnson
Summary:

Intimacy is a name given to an infinite distance.
Esteban has a few more things to learn.

It is a set of Esteban-centric vignettes, pre- and post-canon, and through this format it manages to fit pretty much ALL of my letter prompts into a single elegant package (all the more impressive because I know it was a late pinch hit). I loved getting a glimpse of the roots (heh) of Esteban’s interest in soil, the light humor, complicated family stuff, the abiding but very sibling-y love of his relationship with Sol, and a hopeful ending, the whole of it very poignant and warm.

I also absolutely loved my treat, which was indeed also Lady Eve’s Last Con, but still surprised me because it was for the crossover prompt I never expected to get, because I’ve been prompting crossovers since my very first Yuletide, in every fandom, and have never gotten any, until now! And not just a crossover between fandoms, but the specific crossover prompt that had greatly amused me when I was reflecting on the book:

Natural Habitats (2161 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lady Eve's Last Con - Rebecca Fraimow, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Esteban Mendez-Yuki, Mark Vorkosigan
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Esteban escapes New Monte for an academic conference on Escobar, where he receives an intriguing business proposal.

This was such a fun fic! The crossover works perfectly, the universes blended seamlessly, the fun of the premise itself – but I’d posited it offhandedly, as a cracky plot idea, and my author took it deeper, into excellent character work where Mark and Esteban can relate to each other in interesting ways. And I love this Esteban’s POV, and his awkward flailing at an academic conference, and the uplifting win-win ending.

(It appears from the comments that it is entirely possible to enjoy this fic with only Vorkosigan Saga knowledge, so, y’all who are Vorkosiverse fans should go do that, and then you should read Lady Eve’s Last Con, and read the other fic too ;)

Anyway, so, both fics were a blast, in highly complementary ways. And I’m so pleased that Lady Eve fic now exists in the archive! :D

And I got a very nice comment from my recipient within an hour of the collection opening, so, Yuletide is being very good to me :D

Also, it’s nice to be able to read my gift(s) and comment immediately, instead of reading them either while falling asleep or still bleary pre-coffee, so I’m a fan of this new reveal time.

*

In non-Yuletide news – Merry Christmas to friends who celebrate! Or actually, Merry Krysa-mouse!

(Backstory is that B made a joke, pronouncing "Merry Christmas" as "Merry Krysa-mas" and then L took it a step further to "Merry Krysa-mouse" [krysa = rat, for the non-Russian-speakers]. Of course, I embraced this new holiday, and was even compelled to illustrate it. You are looking at the pinnacle of my artistic ability, y'all. Drawn from "life" -- i.e. a rubber Halloween rat (which is no more, as it melted/disintegrated several years ago -- horrifying pictures available upon request) and a box of mouse finger puppets.)

We are having a quiet day after a very active Tuesday and before B’s return tomorrow, so I’m going to enjoy the peace and quiet for a bit :)

I was watching/reading a bunch of CoC IV-related content in the lead-up, and I’m going to post about it before posting about the episode itself, though I’ve obviously watched it as soon as that was an option. ( Askmaster and interviews )

Which reminded me that I should revisit my quantitative ranking of the series, because I’d fallen a couple behind, and some of the more recent ones were worth re-scoring.

original post

( Revisiting s15-17, scoring s18-20 )

OK, and the main event:

Tasmkaster CoC 4 – So, I did end up going and spoiling myself for the winner and the scores before sitting down to watch, which was the correct decision. ( SPOILERS )

I’m just really sad we don’t get more than one episode with this group. This was a really good line-up (even if one of them is someone whose comedy I don’t enjoy that much).

*

There’s some kind of weird thing with me and the Penric books, where I’ll read a bunch in a row, then not read any of the new ones coming out for a couple of years, until I have a bunch in a row to read again, repeat. So, like, the last time I read Penric, it was to read 6 in quick succession in late 2022, and meanwhile she’s released 4 more, that I’m finally getting around to reading. (I think it’s that the novella length is not quite long enough to be worth re-immersing myself in the world and the growing cast for just one of them.)

7. Lois McMaster Bujold, Demon Daughter (Pen & Des #12) – I was intrigued by the premise of this one, and enjoyed it, even though it was very, very domestic – much more so than I expected from the dramatic cover. ( More, with spoilers )

8. Lois McMaster Bujold, The Adventure of the Demonic Ox (Pen & Des #14) – I skipped Penric and the Bandit semi-accidentally – by which I mean that I finished Demon Daughter on the plane to Oregon, went to see what else was openable on my Kindle, and it was the ox one, so I figured it had to be the next one. Then when I realized it was not, because there was a significant time-skip and it referenced an incident with bandits, I figured I’d just keep reading. (And later it turned out I did have ‘Bandit’ on my Kindle, I just couldn’t call it up for some reason, in offline mode.)

This was a weird one… I found the first half of it slow and fairly boring, and found myself skimming, which I pretty much never do with LMB’s books. ( But then it picked up some (spoilers) )

I’m presently catching up on reading Penric and the Bandit, so we’ll see if I make it through all of the currently-out Penrics (that one + one more) before I run out of reading steam…

I'm giving myself a couple of Taskmaster-free weeks, even though I do have some TM NZ s6 I could catch up on, because Champion of Champions 4 is coming on Dec 22 -- so excite! The poster gives a full look at the costumes, answering the question of whether Mathew was going to wear EVEN SHORTER shorts, and the people on Reddit provided the extra context that John's Freddie's Harlequin outfit is associated with "We Are the Champions", and that Andy is wearing the cricket uniform associated with the one-day cricket as opposed to test match -- and I love the added meanings from these two nerds. (If there's a deep explanation or Maisie's nun or Sam's bellhop, that has yet to be shared. So far the hypotheses seem to be that Sam's is a reference to TM Hotel and Maisie's is going for something that will keep her knickers covered this time, or possibly another classic musical reference, Grease --> The Sound of Music.)

*

In the spirit of catching up on things, I went and got myself up to date on Rivers of London (especially as I'm requesting it in Yuletide and

fandomtrees. This is the first year I've had to catch up on it -- I've had a copy of the novel since early July, on preorder, and kind of forgot that Stray Cat Blues had been out for almost a year when I ordered it in October, and then proceeded to not touch for the next two months. But, well, I'm enjoying this patch of story less than previous ones, I guess, so there's less of an impetus to stay current even though I do still love the characters and the world.

5. Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky -- This one was an odd experience... I've been keeping up with the novellas and GNs, but it's been 3.5 years since I read the last novel, and this one seems to be continuing the trend where it's taking me longer to read each book than the preceding one, in the post-Faceless Man arc of the series: False Value I didn't like that much (relative to the series preceding it), but read in 1-2 days; Amongst Our Weapons I liked more but took several days to finish; and this one I read over the course of weeks, setting it aside and going back to it, and I'm not sure how it compares to the other recent ones for me because it just didn't feel like a Peter book, it felt like something else, and that something else didn't work for me as well as the Peter books, but also it was trying for a different thing. ( More, with marked spoilers )

6. Stray Cat Blues (RoL GN #12) -- it does go well with Abigail's heavier and more independent presence in Stone and Sky. ( But it was mostly meh as a stand-alone story (spoilers). ) Abigail was also the only one whose art I liked in this outing. I mean, I don't read these for the art, but this was more meh/downright ugly than most of these.

*

More year-end meme: ( movies, television, books this year )

*

And, the year-end meme was a good impetus to dust off the fannish goals I'd put together in early January and have not checked in on since end of May, LOL.

( Fannish goals check-in )

Dear Yuletide Author,

I'm thrilled that you like my requested fandoms and characters enough to offer to write them -- honestly, I'm thrilled you know who/what my requested characters ARE -- and I can't wait to read whatever you come up with! The prompts are there as optional jumping-off points I've collected while musing year-round over my rare fandoms, but if you have a different idea for these characters that you want to write or the story takes you in a different direction, feel free to do that instead. Really I just need more fic for these characters to exist in the universe; the rest is a bonus.

(Some of the fandom sections turned out longer than others, but this is primarily a reflection of the length and complexity of the available canon for those characters, and not of how much I want fic for them. How much I want fic for them is, in each case, A LOT.)

I have gifting enabled on my account and am always delighted to receive treats of any length, including art and poetry treats :)

( General likes and DNWs )
( Lady Eve's Last Con: Esteban )
( Rivers of London: Varvara )
( Dragaera: Morrolan e'Drien )

Thank you for writing for me! I hope you have a lovely Yuletide!

-

hamsterwoman

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Recent Entries

Friends Mostly

Reading roundup: Hexwood + Stuff I Love: songs in fanvids

Reading and watching roundup, and Stuff I Love: non-SFF series

Stuff I Love: Standalones (SFF stories)

To Shape a Dragon's Breath + The Goes Wrong Show

Last of the Snowflakes (+ fannish goals 2026)

Snowflake: fandom primer -- Elis & John

Snowflake (days 12-13)

Snowflake (days 10-11)

Fandom Trees and Snowflake day 9 (tropes)

Snowflake (days 7-8) and other fannish catching up

Snowflake (days 5-6) and Taskmaster NYT

Snowlake, challenge 3 and 4

Snowflake (pet), and 2025 book meme

Yuletide, Snowflake, and fandom meme #2

Yuletide recs, end of year fandom meme

Yuletide! :DD

Taskmaster CoC 4 and reading roundup (Penrics)

Reading: catching up on RoL, and year end meme (movies, television, books)

Yuletide Letter 2025