Fannish options & enthusiasms: January 2024

[brightknightie]

Announcement: Effective for the new year, I'm converting my old Forever Knight monthly newsletter ("Recently:FK" tag) into a post about whatever happens to fannishly engage me at that time ("Recently:Enthusiasms" tag). Likely, that may often include FK. But it won't always. Our fannish options are wide and fascinating!

To kick off this new plan with high hopes of a happy new year, we have:

Some interesting ficathons, fests & communities

• Fiction
  • yuletide_admin revealed the '23 main and madness collections. yuletide has been seeing recommendation posts; it will likely soon see some reflection posts.
  • hlh_shortcuts brought us 25 assorted new Highlander stories for '23. Check out the collection.
  • seasonsofdrabbles, a quarterly exchange, has sign-ups 1/07-1/14, with assignments out by 1/17 and due 1/27.
  • genprompt_bingo, a low-commitment challenge, runs its 25th round through 3/20.
  • trope_of_the_month's January theme is "amnesty" (that is, any of the previous themes).
  • allbingo's January theme is "Public Domain Day."
• Non-fiction (meta)
  • snowflake_challenge, an annual celebration of fandom, is back. The challenges post 1/01-1/31; there are no deadlines.
  • fancake, a fic recommendation community, has a January theme of "indigenous characters."

Some history podcasts to which I currently subscribe

• Wide-ranging
  • Throughline (NPR; hosts Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah) -- "The past is never past. Every headline has a history. ... Go back in time to understand the present."
  • The Rest is History (Goalhanger; hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland) -- "Interrogating the past and attempting to de-tangle the present."
  • History Extra (BBC; host Ellie Cawthorne) -- "Interviews with notable historians ... everything from crusading knights to Tudor monarchs and the D-Day landings."
• Targeted
  • Fall of Civilizations (Independent; host Paul Cooper) -- "Exploring the collapse of different societies through history."
  • The History Chicks (Wondery; hosts Beckett Graham and Susan Vollenweider) -- "Two women. Half the population. Several thousand years of history. About an hour."
  • The Gilded Gentleman (The Bowery Boys; host Carl Raymond) -- "A look behind the velvet curtains of America’s Gilded Age, Paris’ Belle Époque and England’s Victorian and Edwardian eras."
  • Medieval Murders (University of Cambridge; hosts Nora Eisner and Manuel Eisner) -- "Delves into the world of violent crimes in the streets, taverns and privy chambers of fourteenth-century London, York, and Oxford. ... Show the similarities and the differences to violent crime in our modern world."