enchantedsleeper

Last entry I decided that I would do something I'm calling "Archive April", in which I focus on archiving to my personal site during April. I set a goal of at least 10 new fanworks archived, with additional soft goals of creating my Fanart and Fanvid pages and improving the site navigation.

It's taken me a while to make time for any more archiving since March Meta Matters, because I was on a trip a couple of days after my last post and then we had Things Being Done to the house that were quite chaotic and all-encompassing. And I held a belated birthday party 😁 But I still had a chunk of April left, so I was determined to get back on the archiving train and keep my commitment to myself ☺️

I got back into the groove with a quick, easy upload of a short Rurouni Kenshin fic that just needed a page and some formatting to go up. That was all I could manage on Saturday night, but on Sunday I had time to get stuck in. I realised that I'd been avoiding archiving longer fics because I wanted to improve the way I handled the chapters, so, I tinkered with my already-uploaded multichapter Yu Yu Hakusho Peter Pan AU (Hiei Jaganshi, Legendary Bandit) and added some links to previous and next chapters. Rather than create a page for each chapter, I wanted to make it possible for people to read the fic continuously if they wanted to, but also have the ability to navigate to individual chapters. I also looked up how to center a bullet point list so that I could create a little chapter navigation menu at the top.

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I've been doing this post series that I call "Something old, something new" over on Pillowfort (things are still going well there, btw! Having a lot of fun) where I post about an old thing (book, TV series, film, song, etc.) that I've been enjoying over the past week, and a new one. Well - it was meant to be at weekly intervals, but in practice it's been more like every 10-14 days. Or whenever I feel like I have something to write about.

I will say, though, that no-one has seemed super interested in the posts (I got a couple of likes on the first one, and nothing since) but I was pretty pleased with the edition that I wrote most recently, where I talked about a new webcomic that I'd got into, and then an old favourite. They're both solid webcomic recs (the 'old' one barely even needs reccing, but I wanted to talk about why I love it), and so I thought I would also bring the post over here for anyone who might be interested.

First, the New: Infernal Relations by Tab Kimpton

I discovered this comic on Monday and couldn't stop bingeing it (work be damned! ...which is apt, given the subject xD) until I was sadly caught up. I also became a Patreon supporter and enjoyed the bonus NSFW scenes there, as well as some early-release pages from the current chapter.

Infernal Relations is a fun story about a romance between an angel and a demon, set in a corporate version of heaven/hell - but contrary to what you might assume, it's the angel who does the seducing >:3 If "huge and broad but self-conscious and awkward demon is seduced by flirty twink angel and they try to keep a sexy office romance a secret from their respective sides" appeals to you, then you will love this webcomic. (The actual sexiness is all on Patreon as I referenced above, but even reading the SFW version, it's very clear they are getting it on off-page xD)

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The Drabblethon has ended! Luckily, since February had 29 days this year (leap year! \o/) I was given an extra day in which to write drabbles, and I needed it xD

I came very close to not writing anything more since my Starship Iris drabble on the 20th, but it got to the 29th and I was determined to get a couple more of my ideas down before the month officially ended, and I managed to write two more works on the last day!

• Someone (Questionable Content): Yay thinks that Roko should have gone to them for help with her scraped knee. (DW) (SqWA)

I was really determined to write at least one QC fic for the Drabblethon, because it's a tiny fandom (fanworks-wise, anyway) but I also have a lot of fannish thoughts and feelings about it. (I've written for QC before, including for Yuletide one time, and I also received it as a Yuletide gift in 2022). I was batting around a few ideas, but decided to go with this little Yay~Roko scene following on from Comic 5243, in part because I wanted an excuse to use the QPR tag on SquidgeWorld again xD
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So, things are looking a bit dire over at Tumblr dot com. (Again). I planned to post something about this during the last Demise of Tumblr episode, back when they announced that Tumblr's dedicated staff was being downsized to a skeleton crew, but I didn't get around to it.

This time, I want to throw some thoughts out there, but I don't want to write a properly fleshed-out essay, so for the details on what sparked this off, check Tumblr itself and look for summaries/round-ups (there are several). From here on in I'll assume you either have context or are content with knowing that "shit's going down" without further detail xD

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I've been having a great time taking part in the Small Fandoms Drabblethon since I stumbled on it a week ago. It's always really fun to get back into drabble-creating, and it's fun thinking up small fandoms to write for.

I got a bunch of (slightly chaotic) prompts to work with from my friends, but I've also come up with a few ideas apart from those, some of which may or may not pan out; we'll see! But here's a round-up of my drabbles from the first week of taking part. I'm posting them all to the comm on Dreamwidth, but they're also archived on SquidgeWorld Archive in the challenge collection. I'm thinking of putting them up on AO3 right at the end and then backdating them (maybe making a series? Not sure yet).
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I just discovered small_fandoms and the February Small Fandoms Drabblethon! I love drabbles and I love small fandoms, so I'm super excited to create for this fest.

However, I tend to work best with something to spark inspiration, so I wanted to throw it open to anyone here to give me prompts! Even just a single word will be great. I can't guarantee I will "fill" them all (that's assuming I get any 😂), but I'll give it a go! I could use a random prompt generator, but it's much more fun to have an element of interaction ^^

Some of the fandoms I'm thinking of writing for are:

• The Strange Case of Starship Iris
• The Murderbot Diaries (still small, although decreasingly so these days 😂)
• Peter Pan
• FENCE
• Possibly Fandom for Robots, a short story by Vina Jie-Min Prasad that I can't recommend highly enough if you haven't read it
• The Wayfarers series

However, I don't need prompts to be fandom-specific (unless you'd like to prompt for a specific fandom, of course) - this is just to keep the fandoms uppermost in my mind so that I know what I'm connecting them to! I might get inspired for something totally different xD

For anyone who considers throwing a prompt my way - thank you! 💜

Now comes the part every year where I bawwwwww because the Snowflake Challenge is over for another year. 😭 But it wouldn't be as fun if it wasn't finite, and I've got the Sunshine Challenge to look forward to in the summer (as well as other events during the spring!)

Snowflake Challenge #15 is Fandom Wrapped! If you've come across Spotify Wrapped (and it's pretty everywhere) or one of its many variants, then you'll know this is a sort of "Top X" retrospective on the past year. (I was a bit sad that Tumblr didn't do their Wrapped this year, probably because of that whole "skeleton crew" thing...)

So here's my Fandom Wrapped for 2023, à la Snowflake Challenge:

Your top 5 fandoms for 2023 were:
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This is a list that I originally put together for the 2024 Snowflake Challenge (as the name shows :D), but I've decided to turn it into a rolling list of resources, guides and tutorials that I've found helpful in my small/indie web journey to create a personal fanworks archive.

I rely heavily on how-to guides for making my site (and I like to save cool/helpful things I find), so there'll always be plenty to add to this list! I've added each one with some notes about how I found or used it, which should hopefully be helpful for anyone consulting these sites.

I've added headings to break up the list and also make it easier to find a specific resource, though the categorisation may be a little idiosyncratic xD

Last updated: 2025-09-29

General indie web

How To Make Your Own Fanfiction Archive, In Just 10 Easy Steps by melannen

This guide is specific to Neocities, so I didn't really use it for reference myself, but it's a nice step-by-step for anyone who might feel intimidated by the prospect of creating a site from scratch. You can't get simpler than this! Also, there are lots of site examples and interesting discussions in the comments.

IndieWeb 101 by fLaMEd

This post was made as part of 32-Bit Cafe's August Code Jam and is a cool primer on the IndieWeb (it also differentiates between the IndieWeb and Independent Web, something I haven't come across before).

It contains some suggestions for things that people can do to get started on the IndieWeb, focusing primarily on marking up content with microformats2 and making an h-card, which is a sort of integrated contact card for your website, and an h-entry, which marks up individual posts or articles. It also touches briefly on webmentions. This was my first brush with all of these concepts, and I haven't done any of these things myself, but I felt like it was a resource worth passing on.( Read more... )

I love the Snowflake Challenge Scavenger Hunt, but I was drawing a blank on what to answer for most of the questions this year, until I had a bit of an epiphany this morning while half-asleep, and then I hit my stride 😄 I prefer to use brick-and-mortar/physical objects because it feels more like a "hunt", but it can also be more challenging to find something physical for each question! Still, the challenge is part of the fun 😊

Snowflake Challenge #5: Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture (a link to a picture will be fine!) or description of something that is or represents:

1. Something your favorite character would like

This was one of the first ones where I blanked, because first of all - how can I choose just one favourite character?? But even thinking about some of my faves, it was hard to pick a physical object I'd associate with them.

However, I realised that I had an object that Sakurayashiki Kaoru, aka Cherry Blossom, my favourite character from SK8 the Infinity, would probably like:



Actually, it suits him, doesn't it? 😄



Haha, well, he'd probably wear it with his Cherry Blossom outfit and not as part of his traditional Japanese attire, but it was easier to find space on his wrist in this outfit 😉
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This weekend, I finally finished my Festivid, which is my fourth fanvid in total since I started vidding in 2019. It took nine (almost consecutive - I had one day 'off') days of pretty hard editing to complete, and I'm really pleased with the result. (I've also been pretty "head down" in vidding mode all weekend, so apologies to the people still waiting on replies to comments they left me! I also have Snowflake challenges I want to catch up on).

Having said that I'm really pleased with my vid, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the quote by Ira Glass, which is much-circulated on Tumblr, about the gap between taste and creative output. From a transcript I found on The Marginalian (sidenote: the accompanying short film is really cool!):

"All of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? [...] But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you"

(That's not the whole quote, which is much longer, but it's the relevant part).

The song that I chose for my vid (I have to be a bit coy about what it is because the exchange is anonymous for now) is very snappy and upbeat, and I have this version of my vid in my head that's so crisply on the beat, where every visual and every audio beat combined is killer and the result just blows the viewer away. And the actual vid I've put together is good work, I think, but it does fall short of the version in my head, and I've worried that I'm not doing the material justice - the potential of the vid justice - with what I'm making.

But, of course, the only way to get to where I want to be as a vidder is to keep making fanvids. It's literally the only way. And so of course the vids that I produce as I go will have things that I need to improve on. There's no scenario in which I become a better fanvidder by never making vids or by giving up on them because they don't match my imagined ideal. I also have to love the idea of what I'm making enough to keep trying to create it - so if I didn't have a super cool version of the vid in my head, what would I be trying to make?

Another thing I've been telling myself is that when I'm writing fic (which is my main type of fanwork and the one I feel most confident in), not every single line that I pen is supposed to be killer. There'll be some that really hit home, but others are just there to move the story along or lead up to the killer moments. So, it follows that not every moment of my fanvids can possibly be The Amazing Golden Moment - some of them are just there to suit the flow or pacing, or because they looked kinda cool.

Vidding to a deadline also requires some sacrifices, in that I can't spend an infinite amount of time familiarising myself with the material or trawling for the perfect clip and experimenting with the best combinations. But I also like that I'm motivated to push past my doubts to some extent and just finish the thing. As it happens, in his full quote, Ira Glass also says to give yourself deadlines, so I'm doing that bit! And when I look back later at parts of my fanvids that made me wince at the time, I often think, 'What was so bad about that section? It looks fine'.

It'll be interesting to see how I manage when I'm not vidding to a deadline from an exchange or event, but hopefully I'll remember to focus on the end goal of accomplishing a finished fanvid rather than obsessing over an ideal version in my head.