i wanna be part of the human race

I've decided 2026 will be the Year of Crafting (and Other Creative Endeavors).

And in typical crafting fashion, I started multiple projects and haven't finished any of them yet! Yay! But the day I decided this I did manage to finish one small thing, which is I drew this pixel art of a food item from Stardew Valley:



Nothing particularly fancy, it just felt cathartic to ignore my phone for an hour and draw colored boxes. A lot of this thought came about because I know I just spend Way Too Much Time on my damn phone. Usually tiktok or reddit or tumblr or whatever. Too much doomscrolling. I know everything is terrible and I do what I can in life to help combat that. But scrolling on tiktok isn't activism and all it does is cause me psychic damage. So, here's to a little less of that in 2026.

I also need to get back onto doing my pottery regularly. I really let it slack off in the last half of the year. I have a whole batch of stoneware items I just need to glaze and fire. Must get off my butt and do that.

I did really well in terms of writing fic in 2025, publishing 8 fics (for over 50k words total)! So proud of myself for that. Would really like to keep it up. (Thank you Criminal Minds for the creative juices.) Also I got really into gifmaking over on tumblr, and I just love making gifs, and I've been learning new techniques and methodologies and expanding my skills.

I've also made the conscious choice when I find myself doom scrolling but not in a situation where I can do anything else (eg, I'm lying in bed) then I close the app and play a game instead. I have several logic puzzles and daily word games, and they have the added bonus of helping me use my brain instead of letting it rot, haha. And usually if I'm in bed trying to sleep, I might scroll tiktok for 2 hours if I let myself, but if I switch to a word game I get sleepy shortly and can go to sleep. I know the better thing would just be to uninstall tiktok, but I also know I won't stick to that. Just gonna try the whole moderation schtick first.

Wishing everybody's 2026 to be a little brighter. <3

There's all kinds of end-of-2024 activities or memes to post for fic/icons/whathaveyou, but I can't really participate as I barely did anything this year! So I'm just going to do a summary for my fic and icons. I don't usually post these things in my journal so this will serve as a good roundup post:

2024 Fic

I wrote 3 fics this year:

Egg Therapy - Psych, Jules & Lassie, post-ep for "Mr Yin Presents..." (for 2024 Candyhearts exchange). 525 words.

I was deep in my Psych rewatch and living in my Jules & Lassie feels, so this was felt like perfect timing for me that my exchange recip requested this. It's on the shorter side, but one of those fics where I stared at it and just couldn't figure out how to make it any longer without just adding extra random stuff. Basically, I said what I want to say in it! But I think it worked, and I like it despite its shorter length.

must've done something right - Law & Order Criminal Intent, Alex/Bobby hurt/comfort. 15,033 words.

I may not have written many fics but I did manage to write this beast. It's actually the 3rd longest fic I've ever written, so that was an accomplishment for me. As I've mentioned a million times I'm deeply obsessed with LOCI at the moment, so, this was inevitable. I had to get my feelings out about this pairing. I was driving to work one day and thinking about possible fic scenarios and the scene of Alex cleaning blood off the walls popped in my brain and then the fic was pretty much crafted around that one image that I wanted to write, haha. I wrote this in a fever pitch over a handful of weekends, cause I just like to get manic about my obsessions sometimes.

Free - Law & Order Criminal Intent, Alex & Bobby, post-ep for Frame (for 2024 Yuletide). 5,098 words.

I got so lucky that my assignment for Yuletide was also the subject of my current obsession. I put together a list of at least 2 dozen possible fic ideas for my recip (who was very open to pretty much anything) but then I rewatched Frame, and I was struck with feels, and went in a little fix-it direction instead. I rewatched the episode five or six times while writing this and I felt pretty good about how I addressed some of the issues between our two heroes at this point in the canon.

2024 Icons

5 True Detective Night Country Icons. This lovely little show capture my imagination for a while. I was guaranteed to watch it because I love Jodie Foster and I love strange cosmic horror vibes. The show really delivered. My favorite from the batch:



11 Star Wars The Acolyte Icons. My heart is fucking broken over this show. To the point that I can't engage with any new Star Wars media, because I refuse to give my views and dollars to a media company that capitulates to the loudest, most bigoted assholes around. It was an utter travesty this show was cancelled and it will probably go down as the single biggest missed opportunity in the Star Wars canon. But, what we did get was wonderful. My favorite from the batch:



11 Law & Oder Criminal Intent Icons. Beating a dead horse.. my obsession du jour. I want to do more icons eventually (I can feel the inspiration for more in my body), but this post was more practical because I just needed some icons for myself to use! Haha. My favorite from the batch:



2025 Resolutions

I'm being pretty lofty here by setting some goals for myself. Historically, I usually don't manage to reach goals I set for myself, lol. But I would like to challenge myself a bit more so if I shoot high and only get halfway there I'll be satisfied.

Fic - I would like to publish 6 total fics this year (an average of one every 2 months). I have many ideas and several partially completed WIPs, so, I think this is doable.

Icons - I would like to publish 12 total icon posts this year (an average of once a month). I already made my first icon post of 2025 so I'm feeling optimistic about this one!

I'm going to (attempt as much as possible) doing this year's snowflake_challenge. So here goes, challenge #2:

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.

( This is long, I'm so sorry. )

Law & Order Criminal Intent:

- Still continuing my rewatch-and-chronicle journey over on my tumblr.

- I put a lot of thoughts in all the tags but also I have some meta posts I'm doing (including too much over analyzation of one specific scene) because overanalyzing TV is one of my greatest joys in life.

- I spend an inordinate amount of time every day just thinking about Goren and Eames together and how wonderful they are and how they hit so many of my specific shipping kinks so perfectly.

- These caps omg:



They are a BONDED PAIR and they must be ADOPTED TOGETHER!!

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Criminal Minds:

- I've just finished season 5/just started s6! Season 5 has been the first season that's felt a little patchy. Some of the episodes have been almost boring. Also there was a terrible backdoor pilot for a spinoff in there, and lord how I hate backdoor pilots. BUT. Lots of great Penelope moments and great Hotch moments.

- Does Morgan ever stop being a giant asshole? It's like his whole job is to disagree with Prentiss, publicly, in front of everyone and god, just to do a Devil's Advocate thing. And Prentiss is my GIRL so it irritates the fuck out of me when he swans in just to be an asshole. It's really bothering me, IDK. Morgan has never really been on my good side this entire time, tbh. I don't like the way he treats, like.. anyone? In the s5 finale (or maybe the s6 premiere, I forget), Morgan is having a Bad Time and he takes it out on Penelope (who is my other GIRL damnit) and yeah sure he apologizes but wtf? And Penelope is like "oh that didn't bother me I understand" NO GIRL MAKE HIM GROVEL. Long story short I just Don't Like Morgan and Never Have and I feel bad about it and I tried REALLY HARD to like him but he's just an asshole and I can't abide it.

- I wish Reid had more to do? Especially in season 5 (but from what I read the actor had an injury that sidelined him for quite a bit so I'm guessing a lot of it had to do with that) Reid just sits in the background until they need someone to spit some mundane facts out or to quickly read a book, then he's there. PLEASE UTILIZE HIM MORE, SHOW.

- The Hotch/Garcia scenes mean everything to me but this one in particular was just *happy sigh*:


I will ship this insane grumpy/sunshine pairing until I die, I think. If I get no other joy from Criminal Minds, at least I will have them.

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Stargate SG-1:

- It's been a stressful few weeks for me and the other day I needed a day of Comfort Show Binging so I chose SG1/Atlantis. And I must report after rewatching a handful of specifically chosen SG1 episodes, I'm back on my Sam/Cam bullshit.


I was ruminating on it and wondering to myself why is it that Cam/Sam wasn't more popular, pairing-wise? Was it because by season 9/10 we were all kinda tired? I mean I know I was, I was angry at the show for a lot of reasons and I actually resented Cam at first, it took me a long time to warm up to him and then longer yet for me to decide I actually love his stupid macaroon-eating ass. But even still, you'd think as the sort of main het pairing option, it'd have gotten more fans. But alternately maybe everyone was too distracted by Daniel/Vala (which I could unfortunately never get into) to care about Sam/Cam which, by comparison, was tame and probably boring to some. But everything about Sam and Cam's interactions together really do it for me. Sam is so different with Cam than she was with Jack. She had to control herself around Jack, had to reign in her emotions, because he was her superior. But I think with Sam and Cam being equals, plus the (inferred) backstory of them being old academy buddies, they just had an easy affection and that worked for me. Also a lot of their Moments are specifically hurt/comfort-based and welp that's one of my kryptonites, so.

I wanted to read some Sam/Cam fics so I went to AO3, as one does, and there's only 155 completed works in the archive. And I wrote two of those! I've written 1.3% of all Sam/Cam fics on AO3!! Lol. I'm just sad it's such a low number of fics. Forever wanting more people to ship my ships.

Ancestry DNA tests were on sale this past prime day, so Chris and I ordered one for each of us. I should have my results in about 2-3 weeks.

I am very curious to see the results, although I know through family history generally where my roots are from. I'm Italian, Portuguese, German on dad's side, and English, Welsh, Scottish, Swedish, French on mom's side. So we'll see how the DNA results come back to compare and contrast. All told, I am a typical American mutt, so the results don't matter all that much in the scheme of things. It's just for funsies!

I'm particularly interested in my Portuguese family thread, as my ancestors were specifically from the Azores, a set of islands far off the coast of Portugal. ( Waxing poetic about my Azorean roots. )