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Just saw this challenge by astriiformes and thought it looked fun!

What is AU Roulette?
A casual fic-writing challenge encouraging authors to play around with different types of alternate universe stories, which will be randomly assigned to each participant regardless of the fandom they sign up with. The goal of the challenge is to encourage creativity and get authors to write fics with premises they might not otherwise have considered, with varying difficulty levels of participation for writers of all experience levels.

• more info (including dates) in the full post; here’s a reblog including the sign-up form
• only requires an email and fandom; Tumblr and Ao3 handles optional
• sign-ups close August 7, midnight Central Time (+nifty conversion tool)
• AU assignments will be sent via e-mail on August 8th
• additional QnA in astriiformes’ #AUroulette2023 tag

Side note, I am not affiliated with this person, just caught it on a stray reblog and it’s only got 484 notes as of writing! If you sign up, which fandom did you use? :Dc

1.
Found a very cool community whilst Reading Page-hopping: little_details! It reminds me of those script[profession] blogs (e.g. scriptmedic); ask a niche question, get a niche answer.

One of my favorite things is art (and writing and other media types) where you can tell the artist is really into what they’re making, and hyper-specific knowledge is a big part of that :D And yes this very much includes non-“professional” subjects; there was a piece of fanart I saw on, uh, not-Twitter a while back (although like hell if I can find the link again, alas) where the artist had like, these super in-depth headcanons for how the characters would play Dance Dance Revolution, what songs they’d be best/worst at for all these specific reasons, and I’m just reading it like. ????? there’s a niche for that????? The more you know!!

Basically, I might not have a clue what niche-indulging artists are on about, but it feels like the passion bleeds through and I am giving them the biggest thumbs up from the sidelines. Reeling this back to the boost, QnA communities like little_details make for excellent reading.

2.
Shameless bragging: Last night I finally, finally, finally finished a scene I’ve been stuck on for over!! a month!!!! lies down and dies.

There’s probably still stuff I’m going to tweak with it later (writing emotional moments is my burden, I always feel like I either focus too much on making An Upset Scene (as opposed to a scene that happens to be unfortunate) and it turns unintentionally melodramatic, or I go in the opposite direction and the ensuing $behavior comes out of nowhere), but!!! multiple false starts later I have officially reached the point of I Am Satisfied For Now and Thus Done Fussing With This, so.

🥳. . . !! 8 chapters down, 3 more to go, babeyyyy
(well technically 4 but the last one’s basically an epilogue & I don’t expect it to change too much from the first draft, so it prooobably won’t take long….)

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Today’s song is brought to you by a post that’s making me go [interrobang noises]. I found the particular cover linked below years ago, though, during a brief Vocaloid/UTAU kick. There is something deeply fascinating to me about people tuning voices like instruments—although I think the biggest mindfuck is that the company behind Vocaloid also manufactures motorcycles and pianos. Now that’s what I call range!