You can still see it with a small telescope

Catching up, before I fall too far behind...

3. Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

I've posted about this before, but it's worth saying again: not to put too fine a point on it, but fandom saved me. 

I found fandom in the late '90s, about a year before I hit a wall with the chronic illnesses I'd been grappling with for several years, and had to give up work. Going from being in an office every day to being at home by myself was a big shock, even though I wasn't well enough even to interact with other people much at the time. I'd also recently moved out of the city to the Mountains, and left all of my friends behind. I felt very isolated.

I had my cats to keep me company in body, but fandom was what kept me company in spirit. Fandom saved me. As I said, I wasn't up to interacting in person much, but I could interact a little bit at a time online. I remember spending days writing a single email - about a shared fannish love to someone who I'd only just met, but who is still one of my dearest friends 27 years later. I remember painstakingly writing fic, because it was the one thing I could do that showed me that my brain still worked now that I couldn't do my job any more. I remember getting into discussions about canons and characters and meta. I remember engaging - and suddenly I wasn't alone any more.

My health issues have gone up and down over the years, and so has the degree of my involvement in fandom, but neither has ever gone away completely. I still take part in yuletide and I still take part in snowflake, and I still talk to friends old and quite new who I never would have known existed if not for fandom.

Thank you, fandom. Just... thank you.

4. Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page
Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

My choice is Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811 (download from Project Gutenberg here - so it qualifies as a page ;)

Recently I've been writing a fic set during the English Regency (1811-20), and this updated edition of the original dictionary from 1785 is a go to for getting the flavour on the time, particularly when writing young male characters and their very specific slang. It includes many fascinating terms, including tiffing, meaning snacking between meals (and yeah, almost certainly a verb taken from tiffin, meaning the snack in question). And let's not forget the many and varied terms for penis, including: arbor vitae, plug tail, tickle tail, whore pipe, and, my personal favourite, gaying instrument.