So, the clown car of malicious incompetents laughably called this country's 'government' have decided they want to make us all sick for reasons of political expediency. I am so looking forward to catching crowded trains to work filled with hordes of unmasked teenagers. Thankfully, I only work one day a week in the office, and that's going to be the case until at least June, but two train rides a week is obviously still plenty of time to catch COVID.

My cousin (who lives in Korea) and I have been having an ongoing conversation since the pandemic started about the different ways wearing facemasks has been framed in East Asian and 'Western' countries, and the very different attitudes this framing engenders. In Korea, she says, wearing a mask is framed and thought of as something that gives people freedom — it's enabled them to escape the pandemic without having any lockdowns, and with few restrictions on people's activities — wearing a mask is seen as the thing that frees you from having to remain in your house. Meanwhile, in the UK, and in our country of origin (Australia), wearing a mask is seen as a terrible, restrictive imposition that must be endured, a limitation on individual freedom. That being said, most people in the UK comply with mask mandates in all settings — but as soon as they stop being mandated, in my experience compliance drops to about fifty per cent.

At least ByDonkeys are absolutely spot on here.




Onward to snowflake_challenge: In your own space, rec a fanwork (fic, art, vid, playlist, anything!) you did not create.

I'm going to share my Yuletide recs list from this year. It's got one of my own fics in it, but the remainder are by other people.

I'm not going to go through the list fic by fic and explain what I loved about each individual work (although if you click through to the comments on each fic on AO3, you'll see a comment from me pulling out the elements I particularly enjoyed. However, I will try to briefly summarise what I most enjoy seeing in fanfic, and what tends to be a common thread in all that I rec.

Firstly, I almost exclusively read fic in tiny fandoms — generally fandoms that only have a handful of works on AO3, generally book fandoms. Usually I'm not looking for works that try to mimic the writing style of the original (in fact I tend to find that distracting). Instead, what I enjoy is fic that makes prominent certain elements I enjoyed about the original: specific character dynamics, an underlying theme, a really strong sense of place. I find it even more impressive if the fic makes me take note of certain elements that the original canon only whispered in the margins, and brings those submerged elements to prominence. I generally prefer fic that has a lyrical, lush, or even portentous turn of phrase, unless it's a humorous canon/fic. And I really, really love fic that digs into the veins of fairytales, folktales, medieval literature, or mythology and finds a hidden seam of darkness, melancholoy, or just straight up weirdness to mine in fic.

What do you look for in fic, or in other fanworks?