PIMP LIKE THE WIND, SHE SAID Buffyverse Pub, Secret Slaying, SunnyD Memorial awards and more!

Title courtesy of the lovely and witty pickamix who asked me to do just that for two new comms: 


           

                      b_verse_pub|Profile|b_verse_pub|Profile|b_verse_pub                                               secret_slaying

b_verse_pub, "an oddly polite Buffyverse hangout"for polite and friendly discussion of the Buffyverse (no flames, no rudeness, and no trolls, open to all (and check out the amazing pub graphics)

and secret_slaying, an anonymous BtVS/AtS TW challenge/awards comm that accepts work in all media (text, images, videos) made specifically for the challenge. Round 1 prompts are up and due December 15. Guidelines and prompts here, detailed rules are here ; incredible graphics also by pickamix and shaketheangel. (LOVE the banner that looks like a cork push-pin board.) Like icontests such asotherworldlyric, the entries will be voted on anonymously, unlike any contest I've seen so far, (fr'instance the SunnyD Memorial Fanfiction awards, etc) works in all media are accepted, so check it out!

And speaking of the Sunnydale Memorial Fanfiction Awards and otherworldlyric.......  (How did you know I'd work them in somewhere?)

 * Voting open at Round 30 of Sunnydale Memorial Fanfiction Awards until NOVEMBER 30th; list of worthy nominees for your consideration here and the Rules here.  Full disclosure: I'm still combing through the awesome stories; it's a great opportunity as always to check out fics I might have missed otherwise. Or have been tripping over for months and never got around to reading and how the heck did that happen, I wonder to myself?

* Vote for your favorite 3 icons out of 11 fab entries at otherworldlyric Challenge 187, then get your entries ready for Challenge 188: The Love You Save May Be Your Own by Etta James (the Lioness!  A little bit of Etta makes everything betta.)

*  Vote now at slayerstillness Challenge 35 Least Favorite Eps challenge for 1st and 2nd place (no 3rd place this round) plus Best Crop, Colour and Most Creative.  I have a ton of admiration for fanartists who can take an episode (or character) they hate and not only spend quality time with it but turn it into gold, as the 11 entries this round are.

Then prep your entries for Challenge 36 "Ye Olde Vampyre Gang" dedicated to flashbacks of the Fanged Four pre-Sunnydale. starry_night helpfully provided a list of all btvs & ats episodes with fanged four flashbacks plus some sample caps to choose from. I'm expecting awesomeness to the nth degree.

Pimp Like the Wind, Part 2: Vote in Round 5 of btvsats20in20

The voting posts are up NOW for Round 5 of btvsats20in20 and this round things are a bit different. This round the voting is broken down into four posts. The first three parts are broken down by groups of entrants, chronologically, and we vote on the top 3 icons for each individiual artist within their own sets (not competing against each other).  The artists can vote for their favorites/best 3 of their own sets.

Part 1         Part 2         Part 3

Part 4 is where we vote for our top 5 sets out of the total 11 that were submitted; this time the artists cannot vote for their own sets.
(Which seems really really obvious when I give it about half a second's thought but was not quite so obvious at 1am in the morning after spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to decide on my "three best"; or at 8am this morning before I'd had two decent cups of black tea.  Oops.)

Thank you to everyone who stopped in and gave me really wonderful feedback on my set. Nearly every one of my icons has been named by at least one person as a favorite. This makes me ridiculously happy because I like to think it's a sign that my consistency and quality are improving overall.  But I don't know that other artists have gotten the amount of feedback I have (because my friends are the creme de la creme of awesome-sauce) so by all means vote in parts 1-4 and show your love and appreciation for individual icons.



I actually felt weird voting for three of my own set - it sounded more fun than it was in practice because I'm pretty happy with most of them. So 1 & 10 got my votes because, duh, but the third one took forever to decided. (And I actually don't remember what my third choice was. I could have picked any and been pretty happy.)

And trying to winnow down to my top 5 sets in Part 4 this time around was a freakin' nightmare - and I mean as in Buffy trying to take a test and staring at a blank page in Nightmares nightmare. Or was that just me?

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It's really nifty to see that there are at least fifteen people have voted thus far, which is already more than the number of artists who participated, so yay and thank you to everyone who has already cast their votes, and everyone who has pimped this round! And since I think it's not unreasonable to see at least, oh, I don't know, 25 participants including artists - baby steps, y'all, baby steps - here I am, doing my part to rock the vote.

Honestly I see no reason why there couldn't be 100 voters, especially when I read down the long and delightlfully exhausting list of nominees at the Sunnydale Memorial Fanfiction awards, but I get that 1) LJ is somewhat of a niche and 2) I think visual artists are more likely to feel comfortable voting in fiction awards than the other way around on the balance. The whole "art is mysterious and I don't know anything about art because my mom/dad/Uncle Charles/ 3rd grade teacher etc etc said so" headtrip. Which visual artists have to take responsibility for perpetuating over the centuries to make what we do more "legitimate" to the Christian Church or modern capitalist Western society.  (Represented by our friends and family who ask "When are you going to get a  real job?")

If such voices still haunt you - tell them to STFU in a firm, clear voice, as often as necessary. Or, send them my way and I'll be glad to do it for you. But it's so much more empowering when you tell them off yourself, trust.