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Fandom 50 (9/50): The Chase

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:14:39 GMT

I was staying in a hotel for a few days and caught three episodes of The Chase (US gameshow). I'd seen some of the UK show before, but a few minor differences made this version strangely compelling to me, narratively?

( more below )

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Fandom 50 (8/50): Dorohedoro

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:01:41 GMT

Dorohedoro season 2 is coming soon! I randomly stumbled into season 1 knowing absolutely nothing. The first thing I saw was some guy with a lizard head clamping his jaws over another guy's (mostly regular) head. Stuck inside the lizard jaws, second guy thrashes around frantically until a third guy appears from deep in the lizard gullet, scrutinizes him, and says, "You're not the one." That's... Dorohedoro!

But seriously, it's a fun show. Those first 30 fever-dream seconds resolve into a coherent world: just as chaotic and weird as you'd expect from that opening, but with its own logical and internally-consistent rules that are just slightly nuts.

( spoilers below )

Side note, I think it's been about 1 year since I started doing fandom50, so I guess I made it 8 posts. Hmm, 16% completion is not bad, considering. Guess there's nothing stopping me from continuing to work on it!

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2025 Writing (Year in Review)

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 03:59:11 GMT

This year I posted 65k words on AO3. Over a third of it (25k!) was posted on (or redated to) 12/21, so I was again heavily backloaded to the end of the year. I was a lot more tired in these later months than I remember feeling in the first half of the year. Perhaps that's why I had the energy back then to write fics that no one even asked me to write!

I did mostly the same exchanges as last year, except I (unintentionally) swapped Yuletide for IPQ. Most of my works were again T and Gen or M/M. I think I just generally rate my fics T when I don't have a clear reason to pick something different (smut). The average wordcount was about 5k words and the median was 4k, which is a bit longer than I remember advising myself to make my exchange fics in one of these past reviews. The shortest fic I posted was just over 2k words.

( stats )

( meme questions )

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Fandom 50 (7/50): Ōoku: The Inner Chambers

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:44:35 GMT

I started watching Ooku on a whim and got through it over the holiday. (It's only 10 episodes!) It's about an alternate history of Japan where a plague wiped out most men and continues to keep the population gender-imbalanced, and women began to take over their roles in society. The story centers on the Ooku, the male harem of a female shogun.

( mild spoilers below )

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FIAB reveals! (much belated round-up)

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:39:26 GMT

( my works and excessive stats )

( my gifts, comments, and recs )

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holiday love meme 2025!

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 20:09:02 GMT

✨ holiday love meme 2025 ✨
my thread here

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FIAB letter 2025!

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 20:59:21 GMT

Due to unfortunate scheduling circumstances, I am doing my entire sign-up from my phone. Wish me luck! (Edit: damn it!)

I am just going to give a few prompts for each fandom. Don't forget about my tried and true likes/dislikes post!

( cut for length )

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Fandom 50 (6/50): The Greatest Estate Developer

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 23:33:39 GMT

I just wrote a promo post for this for ficinabox, so I thought why not make a Fandom 50 out of it? What I didn't say over there was omg, I finally found it. I found another Hiruma/Senku/Haru that wasn't written by Inagaki. It's Hiruma #4, architect Hiruma!

( Cut for images )

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Fandom 50 (5/50): Étoile

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 06:19:54 GMT

It's the ballet show by the creator of "Gilmore Girls" and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"! If you've watched them all (like I have) then you kind of know what you're in for. Vibrant set design and costuming, witty fast-talking, fun and flawed characters blitzing through their lives and struggles and relationships at a rapid clip. With every successive show, the creator seems to bring more of the same to a bigger and brighter stage—except this time she also added a M/M ship that, sigh, I was predictably and embarrassingly taken in by.

( I danced that for you. )

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Fandom 50 (4/50): Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:20:20 GMT

I'm only a few episodes into this show so far but really love it and would recommend. I went into it knowing nothing except that some of my friends liked it, so I had fun discovering the unusual storyline for myself, but I don't think knowing the general idea would have hindered my enjoyment.

( cut for length and early spoilers )

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Fandom 50 (3/50): Pokemon TCGP

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 04:01:11 GMT

I have been playing way too much Pokemon TCG Pocket. I mostly used to play it for the simple pleasure of card collecting. They do a great job with the animations, as a Pack Opening Simulator. There's a lot of illusion of choice, like when you go to open a pack, there's a circle of them for you to choose from - you can spin them around and find the that's flipped backwards (clearly special!), or you can rotate them around yourself and do your own rituals of superstition. The animations and sounds are all very tactile and satisfying, like the foil crisply tearing, and the shuffle of your new cards slotting themselves away. They have nice-looking rare versions of cards, like gold ones, and full art cards with immersive animations. And their latest series of booster packs introduced shiny cards, which are very pretty and fun to collect too!

But then came the new PVP ranked mode.

( cut for length )

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Fandom 50 (2/50): 10 Cloverfield Lane

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 02:16:19 GMT

The most recent movie I watched on Netflix was "10 Cloverfield Lane", which is not one I would have chosen for myself, but enjoyed nonetheless in a nail-biting way. (Is my fandom50 just going to turn into all Netflix reviews? Ah well.) It begins with the protagonist, Michelle, waking in an underground bunker with a man named Howard, who claims to have saved her life—and that some kind of disaster has made the world aboveground uninhabitable, so he can't let her leave. She'll have to stay down here with him for the foreseeable future.

Throughout the movie, both Michelle and we the audience are trying to figure out whether Howard is telling the truth, in whole or in part. Even as Michelle begins to uncover some dark secrets, we still wonder how much of the situation is true and how much is manufactured. Even in the end, I still have questions about his actual version of events, but being left without solid answers is the intended effect, I think. (To top things off, I've never seen the "Cloverfield" movie, so I came into this even more clueless—nor did I know whether it was at all related to this one despite the similar name.)

( cut for length )

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Fandom 50 (1/50): Trillion Game

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 20:23:15 GMT

I optimistically signed up for fandom50challenge even though I hardly ever post on DW! My first entry is about Trillion Game, a show that I got into the same way I got into Dr. Stone:

Step 1: fall randomly and deeply back into an old fandom of mine, Eyeshield 21. As you can imagine, 20 years on, this was an absolute ghost town. Understandable: the canon ended, it had its weaknesses that didn't entirely hold up over time, and American football is kind of lame.

Step 2: go questing for more of the same. Part of what intrigued me so much about Eyeshield 21 were a few specific characters and dynamics—and in 20 years, I don't think I ever found them done quite the same way elsewhere. So I went hunting for other things by the author, Inagaki Riichiro.

Step 3: profit??? This worked out once with Dr. Stone, which was fantastic! So I decided to try my luck with his current manga, Trillion Game.

( cut for length )

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2024 Writing (Year in Review)

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 20:00:24 GMT

Better late than never!

This year, I posted 35k words on AO3. This is about half of what I posted last year, so it seems my resolution to do fewer exchanges (especially Triple Crown ones) is working. But I think I forgot to do the other half, where I work more on non-exchange writing instead? (And that's really the most important part!)

I'm definitely seeing a trend of low activity for most of the year and then reviving to participate in winter exchanges. I started out this year by wrapping up my 2023 exchange season: a Fandom Trees "pinch hit" and two fics for Bulletproof. In the summer, I made some progress on an ongoing WIP (hallelujah!), and noticed this put me over 500k words posted on my account (in 4 years!), so took a couple prompts on Tumblr to celebrate. Besides that, I wrote nothing until it came time for my winter exchange season again with FIAB, Eyeshield 21 Winter Gift Exchange, Yuletide, and soon Bulletproof once more.

It's unfortunate because winter was again my busiest and most stressful time of year professionally, personally, medically. With more writing gaps, I also felt quite rusty coming into both my WIP in the summer and then FIAB in the winter. Being busy and rusty meant I wasn't able to participate to the full extent I wanted in my exchanges. I got a bunch of FIAB swaps, but they were all in the same fandom (Genshin) which I didn't expect and found discouraging. I actually ended up defaulting on 2 of my 4 swaps, but fortunately the exchange rules were generous enough to allow earning back my wordcount by writing more of my original assignment - which worked out because that was turning out to be a monster anyhow. I also didn't have my normal level of commenting energy - I left 40 comments in the FIAB collection and 16 in Yuletide - and there were several treats I wanted to write but didn't get close.

Overall, though, I feel good about the extent of my exchange participation. I think I've narrowed down to my few favorite exchanges and the amount feels reasonable, if unfortunately clustered in the worst time of year for it. Perhaps this means next year I can aim to work more on personal projects throughout the year, and quarantine exchanges to the winter alone!

( stats and meme questions )

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Yuletide 2024 recs

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 18:46:21 GMT

A couple niche things I've loved from the collection, currently each sitting at only around 20-some hits.

( Fandoms: Girls5eva, A Dark Room, A Guide for Young Ladies Entering the Service of the Fairies, The Queen's Thief, Alice in Borderland )

Fun fact: recs 3 and 4 have the same last three digits of their url, which tripped me up when I was double-checking my links! What were the chances?

There are 10^3 = 1000 different possible combinations of last three digits, so 1000^5 different combinations for the 5 recs I gave. The probability that they were all distinct (as I expected when using this heuristic to double-check I didn't copy the same url twice) should be 1000 * 999 * 998 * 997 * 996 / 1000^5 = 99.003%. That this didn't happen (at least two numbers were identical) is the inverse of that, 1%. Wow, less rare than I thought but still unlikely. Another Yuletide miracle?

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Yuletide letter 2024

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 04:32:59 GMT

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hello! I'm yelp on AO3. Thank you for taking a look at my letter this year. I tried to include some prompts, but please feel free to go where inspiration takes you! I also have a general likes/dislikes post here.

( DNWs )
( Eyeshield 21 )
( Zenless Zone Zero )
( Yamada-kun to Lv999 no Koi wo Suru )
( Alice in Borderland )

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ficinabox 2024 letter!

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 03:52:03 GMT

Hello! I’m yelp on AO3.

Thank you for taking a look at my rambly letter. I wrote this mostly from scratch this year, but if you're interested, feel free to check out my previous rambles about these characters, e.g. my letter from last year.

I also have a general likes/dislikes post.

( Zenless Zone Zero )

( Dr Stone )

( Alice in Borderland )

( Eyeshield 21 )

( Golden Kamuy )

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somehow still into TsukaSen

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 23:12:38 GMT

I posted a new chapter of my Dr. Stone longfic! The previous chapter was posted on August 14… of last year. So almost a reasonable interval between updates, plus an extra year!

How it happened was, I got a random urge to reread this story of mine, and enjoyed it to a frankly narcissistic extent. By the end I was kicking myself wishing I’d written more. Thankfully, I had some of chapter 6 drafted, some outlined, and the rest came somewhat reluctantly together.

Looking back, I’m surprised that I started writing this thing in (late) 2021, and I’m still so into this ship and this premise. That’s almost three years off and on, for only 6 chapters, 16k words of story. (Looking back, I had another 1.5 year hiatus in there too.) It’s both very flaky and very consistent of me, I guess. 2021 feels like a very different time in the world and in my life, and I also just took half a year off from writing fic, so I’m not sure I was able to maintain a consistent tone and style. I wonder, if I do a reread three years later, if I’ll notice a marked change between chapters.

While I was working on this new chapter, I rewatched a lovely scene between these two characters for inspo. (Linking the English dub because that’s what popped up on YouTube and I’m impressed with the quality of the voice acting.) Maybe I’m overscrutinizing dynamics that aren’t even there (as usual), but this exactly how I hope to portray them in my story. (Maybe this is part of what inspired the story in the first place, back in 2021? Unclear.)

( mild spoilers cut )

Jeez, I could write a whole manifesto on these two characters. Not like a legit one about how compatible they are, but just my reading way too much into every little interaction they have on screen. I guess that's what fic is for. On to the next chapter, hopefully, before I lose my momentum!

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Bulletproof Exchange Roundup

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 05:24:18 GMT

It was my first time participating in Bulletproof, and I don't know why I waited so long! This is an exchange where you match on tropes rather than characters/pairings, and are likely not to even know the canon of the gift you receive. I often read fic for the tropes rather than the characters (and I absolutely do have a bulletproof kink that I scour the Archive for, regardless of fandom), so this setup suited me well.

Even though I missed nominations, my id was well represented in the tagset, and there were no request minimums. (Sign-ups were a breeze!) Also fun is that the exchange encourages treats by generating three assignments for each participant, and offering them up like pinch hits (though only one gift per recipient is guaranteed). Unhampered by my ~~terrible~~ niche taste in fandoms, I was amazed to receive three amazing gifts!

I thought I'd write for one of my rare fandoms and try to lure an unsuspecting soul into it, but I ended up writing two Genshin Impact fics instead. One was some Zhongli/Xiao D/s smut, and the other was a Neuvillette/Wriothesley AU for the same tag I requested. I was shocked by how much attention the latter received from the fandom at large. (To be fair, they are from the latest region, and more mainstream than Zhongli/Xiao was even back in its day.)

Overall a very good experience, and I had fun running around reading everyone else's id afterwards as well. (I managed to leave 19 comments!) Adding this to my slate of favorite exchanges. Only downside is that organization mostly happens on Discord, which is something I can't keep up with for the life of me. Well, here's hoping I'll notice it in time to participate next year too!

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2023 Writing (Year in Review)

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 09:47:07 GMT

This year, I posted 74k words on AO3. This is again about 15k words short of what I posted last year (which was 15k words short of the year before that), and again more than I had planned!

I only posted 14 works this year, for an average of 5.3k words per work (compared to 27 last year, for an average of 3.3k per work). In some ways my fics were more homogenous than usual: 100% M/M or Gen, and 100% M or T rating. This has always been my most comfortable zone, so it might just be a consequence of fewer works posted resulting in fewer outliers.

One of my goals for this year was to finish my WIPs, but I ended the year with one more WIP than what I started with. I’m happy I was able to add two chapters to one of my pre-existing WIPs, but my third remains untouched since 2021, yikes! Perhaps 2024 will be the year.

I participated in fewer exchanges this year than before: only 5 distinct exchanges, and FFFX and HA are from the previous round of Triple Crown, so I almost don't count them as new exchanges I decided to participate in, but a continuation of previous momentum. I don't plan to join again in 2024; looking back on what I've produced for exchanges, I'm least happy with my longer fic. I think it's just too much investment for a single exchange work, when my level of satisfaction in my work is very hit and miss - both in terms of how well I managed to create the story I was envisioning, and how well I managed to live up to my recipient's requests. I think a better strategy is to write several shorter things, rather than invest into one super long thing - eggs and baskets and all that. Looking at the results from this year, the 10k+ ones definitely fell into the too-long category. The 6.8k one I felt reasonably good about. But I think a good goal would be to keep my future exchange work to the 2-5k range.

The rest of this post is just several roundup posts in a trenchcoat, so I'll put it behind cuts...

( stats )

( zines )

( EOY exchanges )

( meme questions )

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ficinabox 2023 Reveals!

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 22:37:11 GMT

Hooray, another great FIAB! Reveals didn't happen at the greatest time for me (hence also the lateness of this entry and the unrespondedness of many comments), but I still managed to enjoy some of the collection and comment on 61 works. (With the massive number of works produced, that's still only about 6% of the collection!) I left some recs here, including the three gifts I received, all of which I was absolutely thrilled with!

I don't remember if I did anything different in sign-ups or if the mods/circumstances were just good to me, but I ended up with only 4 assignments this time, which was much more manageable than many little things. In all I wrote 19k words in 4 different fandoms, all of different media types. (Actually, checking my records again, I wrote 19k last year as well - it just felt a lot harder broken up into 7 chunks!) After my experiments last year, I decided to stick with normal prose this time, and am happy with that decision.

( Details behind the cut! )

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Dear Yuletide Author (2023)

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:44:09 GMT

Dear Yuletide Author,

Hello! I'm yelp on AO3. I hope that some of these ramblings may help inspire a story, but I'm also more than happy to receive whatever you want to write about these characters! I also have a general likes/dislikes post here.

( DNWs )

( Yamada-kun to Lv999 no Koi wo Suru )

( 20th Century Boys )

( Eyeshield 21 )

( Alice in Borderland )

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ficinabox 2023 letter!

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:33:12 GMT

Dear creator,

Thanks for taking a look at my small animanga fandoms letter this year! I'm thrilled that someone else may be enjoying these same characters with me, much less creating fanworks about them! For the latter 4 fandoms, besides some prompts about mediums, I've largely copied the rest from my previous exchange letters (in case that saves you a read!). I also have a general likes/dislikes post here.

( Golden Kamuy )

( Yamada-kun to Lv999 no Koi wo Suru )

( Chihayafuru )

( 20th Century Boys )

( Dr. Stone )

( Eyeshield 21 )

( Alice in Borderland )

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Recent gifts by me, for me, and not for me (but still for me)

Mon, 29 May 2023 21:36:07 GMT

Otherwise known as my belated post-HA wrap-up post. Long-term long-fic exchange (FFFX) was super challenging for me this year, so short-term long-fic exchange (HA) felt somehow less of a struggle by comparison.

There weren’t a lot of Genshin requests this time around, and certainly none for pairings I’d ever thought about, so I figured I was going to write Original Work as usual. But then this Albedo/Tighnari request started growing on me, and before I knew it I was drafting in-character research papers and doing the writing equivalent of that frazzled guy standing at a board connecting random things with strings. I always enjoy trying to tie together disparate parts of canon; it’s like jamming together pieces from different jigsaw puzzles. I also had fun trying to make subtle jokes in the research paper portions and poking fun at the seriousness with which people treat author ordering, etc. But I think different fields probably have their own styles and conventions, so it’s possible the academic context I’m used to is actually a hyperlocal fandom of one, and my jokes may fall flat!

My first draft weighed in at nearly 2k short of the minimum, but I knew I always add a lot during revisions, and I was certain these were the exact story beats I wanted to include, so I didn’t want to add any scenes. I ended up including a bit more context (and a couple scorpions) before a few of the scenes, which worked out for the better. I do tend to go a bit too in-media-res, to the point of confusion, and this probably helped ground the scenes better, especially with the non-linear narrative. The story is here: Sand and Chalk, Root and Stalk.

I received an amazing gift: an original work featuring robot monks, dragon riders, and, somehow, sign language! Then, towards the end of the anonymous period, I even got this fantastic Beidou & Kazuha treat that also connects disparate part of Genshin lore - via sea shanties. Receiving a late treat is so so thrilling, I have to say! I also read through some of the collection, found quite a few gems, and made my usual comment goal. That makes 3 years that I’ve completed Triple Crown, and certainly the last. I’m super happy with all the works I’ve created and received, but 10k is a lot to write for a stranger and then wait on tenterhooks hoping that they will like it! I feel like I joined exchanges at exactly the right time to experience this cool event from its inception.

PS. Unrelated to HA or any exchanges, I also came across this really well-done Genshin fan-animation. I have requested Albedo/Raiden Shogun before, and I frequently request cyberpunk AU, so this felt like a gift for me, somehow!

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it's that stage...

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 07:19:54 GMT

I just took a pass at responding to comments on AO3. Some of them have been languishing in my inbox since, uh, January. I'm thankful that procrastinating on highadrenalineexchange has led me to finally tackle this months-delayed task. (I also find that responding to comments tends to give me a mood boost about my writing, especially when I'm in the low stages of early rough drafts not matching my expectations for them.)

Unfortunately, I'll be traveling during the entire week between assignments-due and reveals, which is 1/3 of the creation/revision period for this exchange. Signing up probably wasn't the brightest idea I ever had, but I am excited for the story I've outlined (if not entirely how it's shaping up so far). I hope to finish the draft by the end of next weekend, potentially get a second opinion on it, and intensively polish on Saturday before reveals that evening.

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