Snowflake Challenge Day 5

[thisbluespirit]

Still catching up!

Day 5

In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Some comms of my own:

tardis_library - a Doctor Who reccing comm, made as a successor (but different from) the lovely calufrax (now inactive, but with an amazing backlist that is still one of the best ways to get at gems from the Teaspoon Archive) - recs from all corners of the Whoniverse, posted anywhere, and in any media format. I'm so pleased with how this has taken off - more people & more recs are always welcome!


historium which I have just set up as a central hub for all history fandoms, whether RPF or fictional to meet, post stuff, or use as a launching pad to set up more specific comms. It's had a great beginning & I need to get back to it once I am a little more recovered.


tic_tac_woe or Apocabingo - a panfandom mini bingo challenge (using a tic tac toe 3x3 card) with all apocalyptic prompts! No deadlines, just sign up for a card & then end worlds/countries etc. or save them as you wish. (Fictionally, obviously.)


who_allsorts - as an extra, because I meant to only include three, but I've a soft spot for this one. It's another Doctor Who community - an old-school prompt table with claiming, but with bite-sized tables. You can sign up for up to two at once and claims are very flexible (anyone can make the same claim, pairings/characters/eras/themes are all accepted, so you can choose how wide or narrow to make it). I created it with the object of enabling more DW content of all kinds, and I still think the prompt tables are very pretty!


Not-by-me communities:

hc_bingo - still my favourite bingo, despite frequently being terrified by the prompts! It's very flexible about interpretation of prompts, and fills can be comfort, or hurt, or hurt/comfort as you please, and any fanworks are eligible. It runs once a year, but there are fun amnesty challenges and you only need to create one fanwork a year to stay eligible for the next round. It's been the perfect excuse to write a lot of things, and I've really enjoyed the Amnesty challenges when I've taken part. (Which are open to anyone if that works for you better than a bingo.)


fic_rush - we need to sort ourselves out for another round soon, but this 48 hour actual ficathon (i.e. writing marathon) has been a wonderful supportive & social ingredient of my journalling life ever since I first plucked up the courage to join. There are ninja penguins, alien fish, glowsticks, and writerly pasta and attempts at galactic domination, but you don't have to worry about that. I mean, until and unless the penguins get you...


I enjoy recs and reccing comms, the main two of which I follow here are fancake (though I never can get myself together to post for a theme) and gensplosion for gen recs (which I have recced for, but am bad at doing), both of which have led me to some excellent fic, and both of which are panfandom.


There are so many comms I like! Here are, quickly, some more:

who_at_50 (general DW comm, despite the name)

Bingos - ladiesbingo, trope_bingo, allbingo and genprompt_bingo. (Of these I particularly like genprompt_bingo (which takes any kind of fills, despite the name, it's just that the prompts are gen prompts) but they're all good in their different ways.)

Icons - iconthat, icontalking, icon_library, icons10in20, icons & fandom_icons. (A mix of challenge and general posting comms.)


Which is probably enough from me, but I still like comms. And that's even before we get to all the exchanges or my other comms I run or co-mod...

Comments

[rosefox]

How do bingo comms work exactly? I see people talking about them but I don't know what they are.

[thisbluespirit]

Well, obviously each one has slightly different rules, so you should always check out whichever one you're interested in, but basically you get a bingo card with 25 squares on a 5x5 card, like this, my current one for genprompt_bingo here. Each square is a prompt that you can use to create a fanwork. If you get five prompts filled in a row in any direction, you get a bingo (and usually a reward banner from the comm). One prompt in the centre will be a wild card (so you can choose it to be any prompt from the comm's list not on your card already.) When you sign up, you can usually veto at least three prompts off the comm lists (and some have more flexible opt in/opt out sets), but it's usually easy enough to just make a bingo that avoids a prompt you don't like anyway.

That's basically the usual idea, so they're pretty laid back and fun, if you enjoy prompts/need a bit of a push/encouragement to write or create. I can rarely resist them, but they're not everyone's cup of tea.

Each bingo comm will have its own rules, of course, as to how flexible they are on prompt interpretation, what the minimums are for fills, deadlines, and there will usually be extras you can do - or ways to make more complicated bingos, like going for a blackout, which is aiming to fill every square on your card. Some have deadlines (and amnesty periods for posting fills you made that didn't make a bingo), and some are just always ongoing.

There are also some cool bingo generators around, like this one, which allows you to put in your own prompts (or use some of the lists it already has pre-loaded) if you like the idea, but not deadlines/rules etc. If you do that, allbingo is quite cool, as it is there for people to use to post to if they make their own bingo, or re-use old bingo cards and things, although they usually have monthly challenges of their own as well.) I forgot origfic_bingo off the list, too.

I hope that makes sense! My tic_tac_woe is a mini-bingo comm, so we just have 3x3 squares (full of apocalyptic prompts), and if I generated you one, it would look like this:

Technology fails	Geomagnetic reversal	Erased from reality
Genetic experimentation	WILD CARD	Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Knocked out of orbit	Virtual reality	Robots/androids

And you would get a bingo by filling three prompts in a row in any direction, but if you filled, say, three corners, you'd have three fills, but they wouldn't make a bingo. (I'm very good at filling non-connected squares and failing to make bingos, but most comms, if they even have any sort of penalties at all, ask for no more than one fill to be posted by the end of the amnesty period in order to get a card in the next round anyway.)

[rosefox]

Huh, okay. I think it was the social part of it that I was missing—whether/how one does this in one's own space or in a shared space, what the rules are, what happens if you win or don't win, etc. Thank you for explaining!