Super General Advice (the thread for advice without making a thread)

Hey does anyone have any recommendations for media (TV shows, anime, video games, books, webcomics, whatever else) that have a lot of fodder for fanfic and/or a good-sized active fandom? I want to get into something besides SU and OTGW, and I'm not well versed enough in Homestuck to write anything for it yet, so I gotta find something else.

 

Marvel Cinematic Universe, Young Justice, and all other variations of comic book fandoms (both in the comics themselves, spinoff TV series, or movies) are almost always pretty active and have absolute boatloads of source material to work with--there's bound to be at least one thing that you'll enjoy, and I've yet to see one that was any smaller than a couple hundred works on AO3 within the first month or two of release.

Anime can be a little bit more fickle--some fandoms last forever, some flare up and then die again pretty quickly. Shonen anime seem to be more long lasting because they just keep updating, so that might be a good area to poke around too. HunterxHunter, Naruto, and DBZ are all some that still have thriving fandoms that I've seen and new stuff out recently.

 

Harry Potter fandom is eternal.

Star Wars is another one of those giant juggernaut franchises with boatloads of material, though the new trilogy fandom is hella wanky and still kind of on fire from The Last Jedi.

Boku no Hero Academia seems to be popular recently and has stayed that way for a while, though I haven't watched it myself.

Yuri on Ice Badfic Friend always seems to be able to find new awful, awful fic to tell me about, so presumably there's still some activity in that one, though it's mostly centered on the juggernaut ship.

 

star trek is another juggernaut fandom! i mostly don’t read fic for it (although i do like writing in that verse) but every time i’ve poked around there have been oodles of fic for pretty much every thing you could want. spirk is eternal but there’s lots of stuff for other series and ships too.

BNHA is pretty active, yeah. if you like anime and western superhero narratives you’ll probably like it, and there’s a lot of content and characters to engage with. i don’t anime much but i like it!

 

It was delicious and my gastrointestinal system is totally fine! Looks like I was right again and consequences aren’t actually a real thing that exists! :D

It actually was good, the dough had a tangy flavor to it, I might try to do something similar intentionally some time

 

You might want to add beer as the liquid in dough?

 

Touhou fandom's quite large and has remained consistently active for ages. It is kind of...spread out though. Across a variety of fic archives and so on. A good chunk of the fan material is remixes, fangames, and fancomics so doujin sites and niconico will become your friend if you dive into the Touhou abyss. It offers an active fan experience I've never been able to get anywhere else though. Save perhaps Star Wars now that I'm getting into it.

 

*hides playlist of 21 different Nuclear Fusion remixes behind back*

 

the hobbit and lotr! mainly the hobbit I think.

also live action tv shows that are ongoing or were popular for a while seem to have a pretty steady base?

I've found that a good way is to see what has events, that usually helps

(something like avatar the last airbender might be a good one too)

 

@vuatson maybe try sourdough recipes

 

Tolkien fandom is one that's been comfortably trucking along for decades and will probably keep trucking along, yeah. There's a lot of literary fandoms, especially older ones, that have smallish but extremely devoted fanbases, especially if they've had a high-profile adaptation or two- Sherlock Holmes is probably the largest example, since the BBC show had a massive fandom for a couple of years and Holmes/Watson is eminently slashable in the majority of adaptations and continuities.

 

There's such different chunks of the fanbase too. Like you can hide away in the movie fandom or hide away in the Silm fandom or you can be like 'It is time only to argue with people on the internet about the exact levels of canonicity of all the texts while writing an essay about the evolution of the word dagor in the Elvish languages'.

 

How long can cat be home alone? Am pro/con a vacation. I have someone to feed him but. Emotionally, I'm trying to imagine the toll. :(

 

I think it depends on the cat. I’ve left mine alone for about five days before, but I wouldn’t want to go longer than that, and my cat isn’t super cuddly in the first place. I know there are services online to hire someone to come sit with a pet for whatever amount of time each day. My sibling occasionally petsits with Rover, for example.

 

Generally my family would leave our cat without a sitter if we were gone for less than 72 hours, which he would be a bit upset at as a youth, and we started making sure he had daily visitors when he got older, mostly because he was getting feline dementia and needed more attention though.
He was also a free-grazing kibble-fed cat so as long as we put extra water out there was zero risk of him running out of anything he needed

He did poop outside of the box once when we got home as an expression of his disapproval, though.

 

Definitely depends on the cat. We board our sphynx if we're not taking her with us, because she needs wet food daily, but the other cats we're okay to leave for ~a week or so, just with a couple of those big food dispensers and copious amounts of water sitting out.

My mother-in-law stops by to check on them to make sure they're not being complete bastards and scarfing all their food at once, but they're usually okay. If someone's coming by to feed him, that should keep his social up for a little bit until you get back.

 

Been trying to get over my AS-related pickiness by trying new stuff. I know now that fish tastes fine, but I'm still reluctant to eat it in case it's awful, even though I rationally know it won't be. Will I get over that? I'm trying to just eat a small piece every so often to get used to it.

 

maybe just try one kind of fish until you've convinced your hindbrain that it's fine, and then branch out to other kinds? it's what i did to work on my picky eating

 

Maybe try something like fishsticks? The taste and crunch of the added breading might make it easier to mentally transition fish from not-food to food. If you like fried stuff, that is.

 

I have a really hard time conceptualizing direction stuff and visualizing routes to places I need to go, but I'd really like not to rely on GPS for everything when I'm gonna be taking these roads all the time. I know I can learn really slowly, like by LOTS of repetition, but it's getting a little grating to have to consult stuff every time I'm going out. Plus I'd rather not get lost all the time, so. Tips for developing a sense of direction and remembering driving routes?