quick bright things

I've been privately griping (i.e. mentally feeling hard done by) for the past few weeks about never getting a comment from my Sewerexchange gift recipient. Then today I was signing up for the Les Mis Holiday Exchange, writing my prompts, and as I re-added a prompt I'd used before, a memory stirred: hadn't somebody written a fill for this exact prompt?

I headed over to my Gifts tab on AO3 and paged back to 2020 only to discover yes, I had received a gift, opened it in the middle of a busy holiday time, seen a couple of my least favorite SPAG errors, lost my motivation to read 8k of text, and left the tab open until my ADHD ass forgot all about it. For TWO YEARS.

ಠ_ಠ

Anyway, I read it, and despite the SPAG errors at the beginning, it was pretty good as gifts from total strangers go! I left a nice comment with a profuse apology. And I have officially revoked my right to feel sorry for myself over the silence of my Sewerexchange giftee.

The discourse around fanwork comments is often pretty bitter, when it's not outright aggressive. I'm usually pretty firmly in the camp of "comments are wonderful, but nobody owes you any," but I do feel that when the fanwork itself was owed, as in an exchange, then some kind of at-least-minimally-positive reaction is the polite thing to do, even if you didn't enjoy what you received.

I'm usually in exchanges to give rather than receive, so it doesn't bother me much if what I get is underwhelming. Getting assigned an unskilled partner for a Big Bang, though? THAT has led to me dropping out of an event at least once TT_TT

I don't think I have a thesis here, other than that I want to put together a post about making my Sewerexchange gift, because comments or no comments, I'm really really proud of it (✿◡‿◡)

Saw a username mentioning wugs (of Wug Test fame) and was suddenly seized with a desire to publish a fantasy or sci-fi series in which wugs are featured creatures

then I realized that if wugs were recognizable creatures, the wug test would no longer work to ascertain children's acquisition of English morphology

and THEN I remembered that even if I managed to finish such a story, there'd be absolutely no chance of it being successful enough to have such a drastic impact, so.

Anyway. Have some wugs.