elrhiarhodan

I've had reason to go back and look at some of the ways that I've participated in fannish activity on journal-based platforms (LJ and now DW). While in my early days in fandom, I had avoided signing up for too many challenges and exchanges. (IIRC, the first one I remember signing up for had been a bit of a disaster. I had to pull out of because of my dad's final illness and the mod refused to allow my exchange participant to give me my gift because apparently when her brother's girlfriend has been in the hospital I hadn't been sufficiently sympathetic. Nine years later, I'm still scratching my head over that one.)

But I rarely met a bingo challenge that I didn't sign up for. I liked them because the prompts were good at sparking my imagination, there was no real penalty for failing to make a bingo, and even if the mods would be strict enough to block me from getting a card in the next round, nothing could stop me from continuing to work on the card I already had even after the round closed. Besides, I honestly don't think any mod on any bingo challenge has ever had the patience or time to go through hundreds of signups and match those with requestors who never posted a bingo.

Anyway, in lieu of writing this evening, I gave in to my inner completist (she's a bitch but I love her), and I rounded up all of my bingo cards. There were quite a few of them.

Thirty to be precise.

Hurt/Comfort - 7
Trope - 5
Kink - 4
Angst - 2
AU - 2
Love - 3
Gen Prompt - 2
Kiss - 1
Season of Kink - 1
Fluff - 1
Dark - 1
Cotton Candy - 1

I have to admit that I'm a bit of a nut. I always look at a bingo card wanting to make a blackout (I've done that five times) but if I can't, I find I'm paralyzed and can't even make a one-line bingo!

What I've found interesting and a tiny bit annoying as I've gone back through my emails (thank you gmail, I don't have to get rid of anything) is that so many of those cards had been parts of pre-generated sets (For example, I found bits of code in the HTML of one card referring to Card_1_of_10 in the table header, another that simply said Card_5), which might explain why I kept getting cards for a certain bingo that reused the same prompts every year (out of a published set of several hundred prompt), because my opt-outs were the same every single year.

While I love my new Fluff Bingo card, I really adore my Trope Bingo card. The trope_bingo mods decided that they wanted people to actually write and create stuff, so they posted the prompt list and pointed people to a bingo card generator. I look at this miracle of Javascript (or whatever it is) and wonder, why can't all bingo comms work this? Tell someone signing up to pick fifty prompts, put it in the generator, and post the card to the comm. Or if there's a trust issue (people cheating and using prompts not on the list), have participants still pick their fifty prompts and let the mods generate the actual card and send out the HTML. Because using the same handful of cards over and over again, or having 500+ prompts but only having 100 active prompts that get onto actual cards doesn't make a lot of sense.

It's not my intention to slight the hard work that bingo community moderators do - especially come the end of the round, or for those comms that stay in active communication with members through out the round. It's just so darn frustrating to see the same prompts appearing over and over again.

I have both PNGs and HTML for all thirty cards, including the cards that had only been provided as images (Love Bingo, two rounds of Kink Bingo), so if anyone wants to find some inspiration and doesn't want to sign up for their own card, or the comm is closed down (I think only H/C, Trope, Gen Prompt and Season of Kink are still open for business), just drop a comment and I'll respond. Or if you just want a random card to play with, just ask.