I've read around 200 works of fan fiction this year, totaling roughly 2.5 million words. Many of them have been excellent, but I thought it might be fun to pick some highlights on this New Year's Eve. Below are the fics that stood out the most in each of the categories listed, along with the comments I wrote after reading them.

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Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you enjoy my fanfic ramblings (because there are going to be a lot more in 2024).

It's 1998. Britney Spears is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Saving Private Ryan. This is also the year I saw the movie As Good As It Gets (released on Christmas Day 1997), which marked the first time I remember seeing a gay person portrayed in media. New terms coined include: amirite, bit rot, camgirl, cyberbullying, dark energy, distributed denial of service, gayborhood, microgreen, and neurodiversity. (An amirite is a type of fossilized stand-up comedian.)

For 1998, I read five fics: one Professionals and four Man from U.N.C.L.E..

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It's 1996. The Spice Girls are on the radio, and I'm hearing their song "Wannabe" ad nauseum while practicing for my school's talent show. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Independence Day. New terms coined include: cromulent, embiggen, face-palm, fist bump, flip phone, live streaming, trans man, trans woman, phishing, and turntablism.

I read five fics for 1996: two Man from U.N.C.L.E., two Professionals, and one A-Team.

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As I discussed in a post a year ago today, I usually use text-to-speech software to read fanfic.

Recently, I acquired a new piece of text-to-speech software called Speechify that I'm very pleased with. (I made a post about it a while ago, but deleted it because I wasn't happy with the included videos.) Speechify comes with a wider variety of high quality voices than I had previously, and one of the things I've been doing since switching to it is using US voices for fanfic based on US media (such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and UK voices for fanfic based on UK media (such as The Professionals).

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It's 1995. TLC is on the radio. (Among the songs I've featured in these posts, their "Waterfalls" is the first one that I remember being aware of at the time of its release.) Here in the USA, the year's top film is Toy Story. New terms coined include: anti-globalization, cap-and-trade, eurozone, genderqueer, jack in, lawyer up, meatspace, mom jeans, noob, and subprime.

I'm still helping my mother move and it is still exhausting. I've found energy for reading fic here and there, so that I've now finished my five fics for 1995. I have very little energy for writing them up, though. I'm just going to start and see how it goes.

For this year, I read one Man from U.N.C.L.E. fic and four Professionals fics. I hoped to read another Man from U.N.C.L.E. fic to make up for having none in the past two posts. I just couldn't get into the other one I had queued, though, and I ended up abandoning it. I also abandoned The Cat Came Back by Taz, a crossover between The Professionals and a 1993 movie called Hard Target. The fic seemed promising, but it spent a lot of time on characters from the movie, and I decided that, without seeing that, I didn't have the background to really appreciate the story.

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It's 1994. Green Day is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Forrest Gump. New terms coined include: bootylicious, cyberterrorism, digital divide, dot-com, metrosexual, MP3, neurotypical, terms of service, upcycle, and webcam.

For the year 1994, I read four Professionals fics and one Sherlock Holmes fic. Once more, there are no Man from U.N.C.L.E. fics. Don't worry, though, I've already started reading one for 1995.

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It's 1992. Whitney Houston is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Disney's Aladdin. New terms coined include: civil union, exoplanet, Frankenfood, hacktivism, kumbaya, MacGyver, personal digital assistant (PDA), photoshop, polyamory, transphobia, and woo-woo.

For the year 1992, I read one A-Team fic, one Man from U.N.C.L.E. fic, and three Professionals fics.

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It's 1991, the last year of the Cold War. Nirvana is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Terminator 2. New terms coined include: BDSM, carjacking, cybersex, ethnic cleansing, heteronormative, laggy, mixtape, NPC, pescetarian, and SMS. It's also the year I found out that years have numbers.

I read five fics from 1991: three Man from U.N.C.L.E., one Professionals x Star Trek, and one plain(ish) Professionals.

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DALL-E drew a picture of me. I did the color...

I've collected a large selection of fics to read as part of my Lifetime Fic Bingo game. While I was researching and collecting, I kept a list of the fics, with short notes to remind myself what they were. Tonight I've been reading back over those and finding some of them amusing. Here's a selection:

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