#text: autoethnography

[smokefalls]

I don’t want to reject confessional writing outright, I wrote to you, but it’s a tricky mode for works received as black or feminist texts, autoethnography is expected of us, you get that voyeuristic thing where people are really looking for confession, trying to root it out, and it’s fetishistic, brutal, I wrote, one is deprived of philosophy, I’m less interested in “what happened to you” than the transmission of a feeling, something breathable and contagious, a vast, raw, yet untethered emotion, that’s how I want to be seen and how I want the writers I love to be seen, not for the self but for the ecstasy, the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric charge.

Sofia Samatar, Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life

[thetendertongue]

unarchaeology — from Fargo Tbakhi: a queer, anticolonial orientation that asks us to examine how texts, objects, artifacts, bodies, and histories have been dug up and narrated in service of particular, oppressive ideologies—what we might understand as a form of archeology. informed by queer, anticolonial aesthetic practices like collage and autoethnography, unarcheology asks that we intentionally engage our poetics in service of putting back‚ or reburying, restoring complexity and dignity to those texts and subverting those oppressive ideologies

[mpchev]

You like reading fanfics? How about reading about fanfics? 😏

Here’s what I've read so far (or am currently getting through) for my dissertation on fanfiction bookbinding! I'll be updating it as I go until the end of July. If you have any recs to add to the towering pile or any questions/opinions about something on there, I’m all ears!

on fan studies & ficbinding ✔

Alexander, Julia, ‘Making fanfiction beautiful enough for a bookshelf’, The Verge, 9 March 2021 <https://www.theverge.com/22311788/fanfiction-bookbinding-tiktok-diy-star-wars-harry-potter-twitter-fandom> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Buchsbaum, Shira Belén, ‘Binding fan fiction and reexamining book production models’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 37 (2022)

Dym, Brianna, and Casey Fiesler, ‘Ethical and privacy considerations for research using online fandom data’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 33 (2020)

Jenkins, Henry, Textual Pochers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routeledge, 1992)

Jenkins, Henry, ‘Transmedia Storytelling 101’, Pop Junctions, 21 March 2007 <http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html#sthash.gSETwxQX.dpuf> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Hellekson, Karen, ‘Making Use Of: The Gift, Commerce, and Fans’, Cinema Journal, 54, no. 3 (2015), 125–131

Kennedy, Kimberly, ‘Fan binding as a method of fan work preservation’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 37 (2022)

Minkel, Elizabeth, ‘Before “Fans,” There Were “Kranks,” “Longhairs,” and “Lions”: How Do Fandom Gain Their Names?’, Atlas Obscura, 30 May 2024 <https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fandom-names> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Penley, Constance, Nasa / Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997)

Price, Ludi, ‘Fanfiction, Self-Publishing, and the Materiality of the Book: A Fan Writer’s Autoethnography’, Humanities, 11, no. 100 (2022), 1–20

Schiller, Melanie, ‘Transmedia Storytelling: New Practices and Audiences’, in Stories: Screen Narrative in the Digital Era, ed. by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 99–107

on folklore, the internet, other background reading ✔

Barthes, Roland, ‘La mort de l’auteur’ in Le Bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984)

Blank, Trevor J., Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2009)

Mauss, Marcel, ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.’, L’année sociologique, 1923–1924; digital edition by Jean-Marie Tremblay, Les classiques des sciences sociales, 17 February 2002, <http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/2_essai_sur_le_don/essai_sur_le_don.html> [accessed 10 June 2024]

McCulloch, Gretchen, Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing (Random House, 2019)

Niles, John D., Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1999)

hopefully coming up next (haven't started yet)

A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. by Paul Booth (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2018)

A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, ed. by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021)

Dietz, Laura, ‘Showing the scars: A short case study of de-enhancement of hypertext works for circulation via fan binding or Kindle Direct Publishing’, 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ‘23), September 4–8, 2023, Rome Italy (ACM: New York, 2023)

Fathallah, Judith May, Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017)

Finn, Kavita Mudan, and Jessica McCall, ‘Exit, pursued by a fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe’, Critical Survey, 28, no. 2 (2016), 27–38

Hjorth, Larissa et al., eds. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017)

Jacobs, Naomi, and JSA Lowe, ‘The Design of Printed Fanfiction: A Case Study of Down to Agincourt Fanbinding’, Proceedings from the Document Academy, 9, issue 1, article 5

Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006)

Jenkins, Henry, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning In A Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013)

Kennedy, Kimberly, and Shira Buchsbaum, ‘Reframing Monetization: Compensatory Practices and Generating a Hybrid Economy in Fanbinding Commissions’, Humanities, 11, no. 67 (2022), 1–18

Kirby, Abby, ‘Examining Collaborative Fanfiction: New Practices in Hyperdiegesis and Poaching’, Humanities, 11, no. 87 (2002), 1–9

Kustritz, Anne, Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction (New Work: Routeledge, 2024)

Lamerichs, Nicolle, Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affecive Reception in Fan Cultures, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Universtiy Press, 2018)

Popova, Milena, ‘Follow the trope: A digital (auto)ethnography for fan studies’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 33 (2020)

Rosenblatt, Betsy, and Rebecca Tushnet, ‘Transformative Works: Young Women’s Voices on Fandom and Fair Use’, in eGirls, eCitizens: Putting Technology, Theory and Policy into Dialogue with Girls’ and Young Women’s Voices, ed. by Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves

Soller, Bettina, ‘Filing off the Serial Numbers: Fanfiction and its Adaptation to the Book Market’, in Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. by Johannes Fehrle, Werner Schäfke-Zell (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 58–85

[talesfrommedinastation]

Redneck Doug on ALL the other Clones in Star Wars!

As promised, for reaching a new number of followers, here's Doug's list when I asked him to name off all the clones in 'The Clone Wars' and 'The Bad Batch'!

Some are obviously repeats of other posts, and some are brand spanking new.

I'm using my autoethnography skills to their fullest extent, here, people.

This is LONG but hey! 7 seasons of The Clone Wars and 3 seasons of The Bad Batch means animated Star Wars in the Days of our Lives of animation.

If I'm missing someone, let me know! I'll reach out to Doug!

Enjoy, everyone!

CW: Redneck Doug just rambles needlessly about people.

And Clermont Lounge is one of the scariest and yet, most fun places in the ATL and I could 100% see one of the 501st working there.

-----------------------

Bly: That’s a boy, his name’s Miguel. Got his friends, they drink Pabst, shoot the empty cans behind the garage when they done, and hit on every woman that walks by. But Miguel’s got his eyes on Babe-the-Blue-Jedi and steals flowers from people’s yard and gives them to her. Babe-the-Blue-Jedi knows the man’s not that bright but his heart’s in the right place and that’s all that matters, right? 

Rex: That's Rex. He's a king. Respect him. 

Cody: That’s Obi-Wan’s Boyfriend, he’s sad all the time. We know why. (Confirmed that Doug is a Codywan shipper and I don’t know what to do about that)

Howzer: That’s my niece’s boyfriend, Jorge. We all love Jorge, nice guy, owns an auto repair shop and always remembers plates and napkins for the cookouts after church.

Gregor: Jorge’s cousin, Manny. Met him once at Christmas in Miami, nice guy, only drinks brown liquor and insists everyone arm wrestle him. But he’s got a good job as a PE teacher, we respect education, come on now. 

Hardcase: Wiggles. He laughs at everything and never wears a helmet both on his big head and his lil head and that explains everything about the man.

Kix: Nurse Mark. He's tired and sick of your shit, sick of the creeps trying to get the Fentanyl, that's a crime now, ain't it.

Echo: "Eh, Toaster Strudel. Homeboy looks like his daddy had an affair with a convection oven on shore leave and forgot to pay child support."

Mayday: Aw, I liked this guy so much! That’s Sassy Park Ranger, he’s the type that gives you your camping permits, warns you about the bears, and then is all disappointed when you don’t properly stow your food and the bears destroy the campsite. I need to go back to Little River Canyon, that place was pretty. 

Scorch: The Son of Robocop. His daddy told him to get off his lazy Robo-son ass and go get a job, so he works for the Empire now, because no one can get a job in Detroit. That’s why he’s a bad person. (Because he works for the Empire? “No, because he’s a Lions fan and that ain’t a good look for anyone.”)  

Fives: Alex-from-Manitoba. He reminds me so much of this awesome guy I knew, Alex, was from Winnipeg, we worked in oil together. Smart, knew his shit, loved guns and getting his hair did. No one listens to him, management hates him, and he gets fired. Man I was so pissed off when that happened with that damn alien that ran the ocean on the mall! He deserved better, damn it!

(Fives or Alex-from-Manitoba?

“BOTH!!!”)

99: 99!  

(You actually remember his name?  

“Hell yeah! He’s one of the most important characters! Why would I not?” 

::cue me, quietly staring at all the weird-ass names over texts and saying NOTHING in response::) 

Wolffe: Bernando. I dunno, man, he got that Bernardo energy. I’ve met three and they all looked like they wanna run off into the woods and come out when they got a deer they need to process and take a shower and find a lady before running back into the woods. Also Bernardo never has a girlfriend that lasts more than 6 months with him. Don’t know why. Just trust me. 

Gree: Carnie Joe. Man, he looks like the type of guy who drives an ice cream truck but there ain’t no Bomb Pops inside if you know what I mean. 

Cut Lawquane: Not-Wolverine. He ran away from the Empire, grew out his muttonchops, wanted to join the X-Men, Charles Xavier said ‘Nah son you need super powers for that’, and then Not-Wolverine stomped off into Tremors-land and started a pot-and-chicken farm like every other hillbilly in Kentucky. But he got a hot wife out of the deal and some nice kids and lots of guns, and ya know, that ain’t a bad ending for the man. 

Commander Fox: Red-Chief-of-Police. He’s absolutely on them Ticky-Tack videos my nieces and nephews watch where the cops are doing bad things but they ain’t gonna get fired over it. Man. It ain’t right. 

Tup: Alex’s-Friend-Matt. Aw, Matt, good guy, but too much brain damage after that time he fell off the roof while laying down tar. He grew out his ponytail to hide the dent in his head and talked funny afterwards, but he real good at roughneck work and I can’t fault the man, nope. 

Hevy: That’s Ross. He’s always mad because he’s insecure. He’s got a lot of Nerf guns and only eats stuff you can find at 7-11. 

Jesse: That’s Jesse, he’s a trucker, was a bouncer at Clermont Lounge in Atlanta, and has three ex-wives who all hate him. He shaves his head because his hair hates him too. 

Crosshair: So that there's Daddy Warcrimes. All you need to know is he lives on beer and Slim Jims, has more guns then Jesus got faith, and that he does your mom on the weekends, and then you thank him for his service.

Hunter: Aw man, we got Rambo up in this place. Daddy Rambo. He looks like he's got some hot wife with a huge butt who makes amazing biscuits, but he only showers on the weekends for reasons he won't tell you.

Wrecker: I know, I KNOW, he's got some cool Star Wars name, but in my head, he's Julio. He looks like a Julio, ya know? Every Julio's been the nicest guy with a truck and a million friends. I swear. I bet he's a contractor and lays pipe like you wouldn't believe. ::winks::

Tech: Hm, yeah, I know him. That's Ryan-from-Accounting, somebody's hipster dad. You know, everyone knows a Ryan who works in accounting, he's quiet, only drinks IPAs, and has a bitch wife named Laura who drives a Kia and is always yelling at him. Poor man. I hope Julio saves him from his bitch wife Laura.*

Omega: Little Orphan Blondie. I hope she gets real parents or something besides those freaky alien things running the mall on the ocean.

Emerie Karr: Stepsister-Beth. She’s got a stick up her rear, was in a sorority known for bitchy Daddy’s Girls who wouldn’t touch below the belt but are all about using other places for their date’s hoses to put out the fire, and only drinks almond milk lattes. She’s a bitch to waiters and drives a Prius. 

(“Doug I drive a Prius.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t a southern sorority girl so y’all forgiven.”)

Nemec and Fireball: Trigger and Nutsy. They’ve been in a survival militia in the Florida Everglades and that’s all you need to know. 

CX-2: The Guy from Tron. He’s a guy, and he was in the movie Tron. That’s it. 

[talenlee]

The 2025 Pitch

Hi, I’m Talen Lee. It’s 2025. This is my daily blog.

Here’s what to expect here, in the simplest term:

Every Friday, I put up a Game Pile article where I examine a game.

Every Wednesday, I put up a Dev Update article where I talk about what I’ve been doing in game dev that week.

Every Thursday, I put up a Story Pile article where I examine a non-game piece of media.

Wanna know more about what I write? Well, this is a daily blog, in which you can read things I think about the things I do for work and for fun. I’m interested in making games and I want to make sure you can see ways to make games. I want to make thinking about games clear, and I want to make sure academic resources about thinking about games are reasonably available.

Wanna know why you should listen to me? I have a degree in media and communications which I understand is a punchline, which I have used to focus on digital media and playful online creativity. Basically, I try to bring these concepts that are seen as ‘fancy’ to bear on things you’re familiar with and try to get people to take games and play and pop media as seriously as you should any text.

I’m one of those ‘everything is art’ people.

Wanna know more? Well, click the ‘more.’

Monthly Themes

The even numbered months of the year get themes! They are:

February is Smooch Month, where I talk about romantic media. I usually talk about at least one Hallmark branded movie here!

April is Talen Month, where I talk about things that matter to me personally, which often involves a degree of what’s called autoethnography.

June is Pride Month, which is about queer media.

August is Tricks Month, where I talk about magical tricks and illusions, lies and hoaxes, which are a favourite topic and so far, historically, usually features a weirdo who fought Nazis.

October is Dread Month, where I look into horror and darker topics, where I try to confine the grim topics.

December is Decemberween, a celebration of cool things I’ve seen through the year and all the other features of the blog can take a backseat.

Now, there are two secret hidden themes, which is January tends to be ‘everything left over from the previous year’ and November is ‘No Effort November’ where almost all the articles I’ve written throughout the year that didn’t have a home get chucked, meaning that that’s truly the disconnected weird brain worms stuff.

Topics

Anyway, I have a bunch of topics I like to revisit, regularly. Given the right circumstances, it turns out I can sometimes spend four or five days at a time talking about the same thing, and I would rather keep my work varied. It feels like a way to keep engaging in more things and avoids burning out on any topic that frustrates me. Always a new thing.

I have a list of subjects I consider the ‘one a month’ set: That is to say, to keep talking about things in a varied way, I have limited myself to at most one of each topic each month. These topics get about a thousand words at a time, it’s not something airy or empty, and that means I space out research for them, too. Those topics are Transformers, Pokemon, and The Locked Tomb.

I also write about Dungeons & Dragons a lot; I write about 4th edition D&D as the edition I enjoy playing to encourage people to try it, 3rd edition D&D as a historical artifact with problems to show what I’ve learned as a designer through working in such a weird space, and I write an article every month about my own D&D setting, Cobrin’Seil. Then in addition to the article about some specific part of Cobrin’Seil, I also write a Worldbuilding article which is about how to handle developing components in your world, on all levels of culture and interaction, and things you might do a good job of or worse and how to approach them in ways that I think are helpful.

Finally, because 4th edition was criticised for being a system that didn’t give you room to make interesting characters, I have a series called How To Be, which takes a character from a piece of media, and reinterprets them as a 4th edition character, with the intention that the build function easily early on.

Magic: The Gathering

Get a load of this, though, this card game designer, he talks about Magic: The Gathering! Yeah shocked I know. It’s a cool game! I like it! I play it pretty regularly, like, daily, and I can probably always talk to you about it, certainly if you approach me on reddit or kind.social.

I try to limit myself to a maximum of one article about Magic: The Gathering each month. This year with the release schedule we have, that means we’re basically going to have room for maybe four or five articles about specific topics and the rest are going to be – probably – about investigating the new set and seeing what design technology they introduce that I like. 2024 was honestly a wild year for establishing new design tech in Magic: The Gathering cards, and I want to talk about that.

Here’s the other thing I do: Every day, I share a custom Magic card I designed using art from artstation as part of a 365-card set that’s divided up along normal rarity and colour lines. This is a big undertaking, posted every single day, and back last year, my version of it was two posts a month, no matter what, meaning that Magic: The Gathering got something like 35 articles, and you had to be invested in the first 33 for the 34th to mean anything. Now, that article set is winding down, so there’s just a bit of cleanup for that set this year, and then, this year, there’s going to be one blog post about the year’s custom card set.

That set’s called Harrowed Night, the set code is HNT, and you can check it out, in full, in a few days. It’s still going to get a single card a day to reddit and kind.social, like I did last year, but if you want to look at the whole set, on day one, go for it. You can put everything in a meaningful context if you want and see my creator notes and everything.

Just Stuff About Me

There’s also two other features that I write, each month, one of which is a reflection on Christian Fundamentalism – specifically, Christian fundamentalism – and the connected faith of Christianity. These are all informed by my background being raised in a cult and spending a lot of time studying the Bible and coming to understand the problems with non-fundamentalist Christianity. I file this stuff under the heading of ‘fundie stuff.’

The other thing I write about once a month is a treatment of one of my own original characters, not a character from a greater fiction work or something like that, but a fan character or MMORPG character or a D&D character, but writing up and providing a guide to interacting with one of the weird little critters I made up in my head to tell stories about. I think this is cool and fun and it’s a way to talk about not just what characters are like but the kinds of stories you think your characters should be in. I’d love to see it as a normal thing for me to open tumblr and see someone providing a Reader’s Guide to the kind of prototype version of their OCs.

Reflection

Last year I made a dedicated choice to stop thinking of what I do in vague terms. I have grown to hate the way that online creators describe themselves as making ‘stuff’ and doing ‘lots of things’ or, worst of all, content creators. I had a whole reflection on how I hate thinking of my writing as ‘content’ and my videos as ‘content’ and my podcasts as ‘content’ because none of those things are the same kind of thing and they meet different needs and they meet your needs differently.

To that end I avoided referring to work as ‘content’ for a year and I think I’ve become very good at that. One problem I have with describing whether or not I successfully excised that term from my thinking is that obviously, I use the word ‘content’ all the time, such as whenever I talk about media that has something within it that has a potential trigger. That is to say, a lot of posts I make lead with Content Warning.

I hit a target of 1,000 words minimum for every article that wasn’t an audio recording, a sticker, or shirt design last year, including Decemberween articles. You were going to get your ten minutes of time on this blog at least, every day, if I had anything to do with it, and if you didn’t, you could at least look at a picture and know that it was a thing I spent effort making and uploading somewhere.

I also talked more about non-mainstream TTRPGs, with ten of the fifty-two Game Pile slots dedicated to talking about games you can get on itch.io, and taking those games seriously rather than just opting for the lowered bar of ‘well, it’s indie’ mean that the thing didn’t deserve to be considered carefully. I also converted eleven of my older game articles into videos, with some updates and deepening where necessary.

A thing I also tried is putting one of my D&D articles up as a video? I’m liking this and think I might do more of that in the coming year, because I write about D&D a lot and I like doing it.

Alt text was another push for the year! I tried to make sure I used alt text on the images in my blog. Not everything had it – some things were made a year out, after all, and their pictures weren’t made with alt text in mind, and it’s an easy thing to slip the mind. Some things have a lot of alt text (like all the Magic the Gathering cards) and doing 380 cards and adding alt text to all of them was a huge burden I hadn’t considered ahead of time. Hopefully, that’s going to be fixed for this year’s cards, and I’ll be further in the habit of using alt text.

And Also There’s More:

I have a Youtube channel, which updates weekly. Every other week, the current programming is a video of Fox and I playing a game together, where I have the means to talk about games and optimisation and design while we talk about historically interesting games. Then on the other other weeks, I put up a video article, which is either taking one of my other articles from the past into a video form, or, a new video made for the specific format of Youtube.

I have a Patreon. It is my tip jar, a way for you to say ‘I like what you are doing, here, have a dollar.’ But you can give me something there even if you don’t want to give me money, because I use the Patreon as my behind-the-scenes weekly update site. Every week, at the end of the week, I update on what’s happened in the past seven days. If you just follow the Patreon it gives me some numbers on that, but largely, it’s just a way to show more interest in the never-ending word pipe that is hanging around me on the internet. It’s also a venue you can ask me questions and provide comments on the progress of the blog week to week, or answer me if I ask questions like ‘hey, are you all okay with this?’

There. That’s what 2025 offers you. About 365,000 words of thinking about games, fiction, media and your own ability to create. Maybe some free games, we’ll see how it goes.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[enactivewebs]

23.1

Annotation #8: Adams, T. E., Jones, S. H., & Ellis, C. (Eds.). (2021). Handbook of Autoethnography. Routledge.

Brisini, T., & Simmons, J. (2021). Posthumanist autoethnography. In Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 355-366). Routledge.

What are the meanings of the text? What’s the Author’s voice? Apply it to your own process and thinking. What’s its value to my practice? Unpacking it 200-400 words

Handbook of Autoethnography 2nd Edition edited by Adams, Jones and Ellis is a collection of key contemporary academic articles and research projects exploring and unpacking the field and methodological practice of ‘autoethnography’, from across different social science and creative disciplines. The handbook’s introduction outlines a description and unpacking of what autoethnography is, its underlying ethos and politics, and what the project aims to achieve in terms of real impact in and for communities, and within academia. The editors highlight a definition of autoethnography, breaking down the auto (self), the ethno (culture) and graphy (representation) and how autoethnography looks to present and communicate personal subjective experiences, which creatively shed light and insight on cultural and societal issues, questions and/or problems - conveying more impactful representations of phenomena and cultural issues in ways that complement, support, and surpass more traditional forms of research. 

The relevance of this book, and especially the introductory section, is that it has given me a potential methodological framework in which to consider and underpin my intersubjective interactive documentary. Autoethnography or autoethnographic techniques could be used to conceptualise how I am looking to document lived experiences and phenomena of pluriversal and global south design, in order to add to pre-existing theories and research in a more evocative and subjective way, as well as to uncover and explore these phenomenological methods as potential ways of doing pluriversal and global south forms of design. 

The article within the book, Brisini, T., & Simmons, J. (2021). Posthumanist autoethnography, is also relevant and valuable to my practice, as it formulates a more relational approach to autoethnography, which aligns to nondualistic, new materialist, and posthuman threads which are emerging in my thinking and research already. This article highlights a way forward for writing and thinking about personal experiences in relation to the environment and culture in ways which don’t centre the human, but take into consideration all other living beings and matter as part of the experience which is co-created and ‘brought forth’ together. This thinking resonates strongly with my interests in enactivism and intra/inter subjective thought and theory. 

Although autoethnography is an interesting and relevant genre of research which can inform and highlight some methodological approaches to conducting and ways of conceptualising my research (i.e. through centering my lived experiences to connect and shed light on wider theoretical pluriversal/global south design issues and questions related to socio-ecological problems), I would not consider my project as wholly an autoethnographic form. Because the project is based in a practice-based/led research paradigm and design theory, the social scientific background of autoethnography does not sit 100% comfortably with my research, which looks to not only address wider socio-ecological contexts and issues, but also the process and practice of design, design thinking, and technology itself. The work also strives to more poetically and evocatively explore the phenomena and subject matter (in line with artistic, design research) which does not explicitly lend itself to directly connecting to social science research and can be more open ended and open to interpretation… ? (check this rationale)

[hamishpetersen]

Pākehā Listening: my BA (Hons) Thesis

Pākehā Listening and Indigenous Voices in Contemporary Art Research: Troubling neocolonial methodologies toward reciprocal relationality; Working on relationships with Cora-Allan Wickliffe.

Submitted November 2018, Department of Art History and Theory, University of Canterbury, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand.

From the introduction:

"In this text, I am telling my story of coming to an orientation towards research, towards researching Indigenous artists while being Pākehā, and towards my relationship with Cora-Allan Wickliffe (Ngāpuhi, Tainui, Alofi, Liku). In the face of a global higher education largely fixated on the resolution of inequity with knowledge, language, methods, values, and people descended from the imperialist, European ‘west’—and my lived position within that worldview—I am seeking a methodology that unravels this worldview’s power and implicit oppression of those in its margins through the weaving together of relationships. I attempt this not in order to become the same as, or fully know the indigenous collaborators my Pākehā/Tauiwi self seeks to have a relationship with, but rather to have a relationship that is about difference, in order to reciprocate with one-another by offering ourselves where one of us needs to speak, while the other must recognise the need to listen. Therefore, I am not telling Cora’s story here. I may present Cora’s words as stories on their own, with all the contamination of editing, structure, and framing that this written format implicates. However, through a queer autoethnography, I will tell my story of what happens while feeling, reading, writing, sensing, talking, and listening to my relationship with Cora."

From the Conclusion:

"Judith Butler and Stacy Homan Jones recite a duet about the precarity, obligations, and potential we recognise, when we recognise people as real ‘as they are’ and not as only real ‘for them’. “There is losing; and there is the transformative effect of loss. Neither can be charted or planned.” “After all, if someone is lost and that person is not someone.. ‘Then what and where is the loss and how does mourning take place?" “Queer stories also recount the debts we owe to other’s voices, words, and ways of living and loving—not as a way of getting over or closing down grief or moving on, but instead as an opening up and out into new ways of relating.” Indigenous, Queer, and other exploited and oppressed knowledges and people must be materially empowered as being real, legitimate, speakable, and legible ‘as they are’. Those of us in positions of power must learn to relate in new ways to these people and knowledges not for the survival of difference as a hollowed-out, marketable brand, but rather for the flourishing of healthy ecologies of reciprocity because of difference in order to escape the grips of our shared anthropogenic, and earthly catastrophes. Braiding together people, cosmologies, critiques, and disciplines I have traced a thread through the material, personal, and metaphysical. I recite a story to you, hoping it might pass as a legitimate stepping stone upon which new, equitable methodologies might be realized and practiced."

[romilly-jay]

Thoughts on Blog-i-sode Six

Better. Better than I felt about the current state of the material in B-4 and B-5. Could it still benefit from revision and polishing? Is the Pope American? [Yes, but also, that's of course not how that line used to go, but also, the world in which the leader of the Roman Catholic church was basically inevitably Italian has gone, probably forever. This untethered-from-a-currently-meaningful-context phrase echoed into my head and I made space for it here. Partly that's because I have a fondness for the Wrong Answers Only game we used to play with that phrase and partly t's because I'm still reading Bochner & Ellis on Evocative Autoethnography - will be returning to this elsewhere - and I've been provoked once more to think about how I as writer shape my text/s, both deliberately and unconscious-subjectively. So: when this personal marker nudged me, I let it in.]

I *think* it's fair to say that the moment of attraction shown between H and S was me trying to enact one of the most helpful pieces of advice I currently recall from the City MFA, which was not to hold back information that could (or would) naturally come out in a scene.

Okay, clearly - genre tropes - and clearly - if a writer has the whole plot figured out, then there are all kinds of things they know that can't come out yet. BUT - if there's no reason why the characters *would* know, then, it's only logical the information can be held back - ALSO - if the withholding is being done by the character in a way that makes sense within the storyworld and aligns with their nature...

The lecturer's point was that we might be missing interesting possibilities for the narrative - what might be hiding beyond this piece of information, that can only make its way into the story if the characters get to interact with each other around it? I think he was also saying that the effort involved in dodging around the information that could/should be known drains energy from the writing and potentially makes both writer and reader feel bored and in limbo.

My mind went back to the later scenes in Your Friends and Neighbors S1 episode 8, which IMO offer a really good example of the energy injection: Oh, they went there. Oh, and then THAT happened. Didn't see THAT coming. [Immediate up-surge in energy and attention (?)]

Don't feel like being spoilery so instead here's the officially released Sneak Peak for the episode which gives a cool montage scene and a character-led reframing of what we've witnessed in their plot to date.

[p0v2snsitive4thintnet]

𝕭𝖗𝖆𝖎𝖓 𝕯𝖚𝖒𝖕 #1

Too sensitive for the Internet’s judgement

I feel like as if I am well suited for autoethnographies. It feels so easy for me to not pre-analyse myself and just stick to putting down my genuine, uncorrupted thoughts and primal feelings. Although I often don’t trust my own feelings and judge them before feeling them. Like not letting myself be sad for example, because being sad is supposed to be a waste of time and something most people are not interested in.

This doesn’t stem from researching as you (the reader) can imagine - I believe it is linked to my general lack of self confidence and me wanting to protect myself from disappointing someone else by disappointing myself first. 

How does this relate to my internet experience, you ask? I think it explains why this project is called “2 snsitive 4 th intnet”. At the same time - I am producing multiple cultural objects such as Text, Images, Montages, Maps, Collages and so on but I still feel very reluctant to share them on Social Media or show them to anyone, or even finish them. Because if they are shared, if they are out there, people would be able to connect them to me and me as the person Lisa or electro_lyzer. They would judge what I did. Inherently. Of course they would. Everyone judges everything all the time. That’s even more true for pieces of art. 

In fear of this judgement, and having the feeling that everything I do is constantly being evaluated, I rather refrain from producing any judge-worthy materials or share the view I have with others. 

I am too sensitive for the vastness, the immediacy and the straight-forwardness of the internet. 

[digitalrevolutions]

Potential Rabbit Holes (Methodological Insights) From William I. Wolff

Texts, terms, and methodologies Wolff mentioned I want to explore when I have time.

Example Autoethnography

Tweets from the April 4, 2012 concert at the Izod Center were chosen following Daniel Cavicchi's (1998) ethnographic approach where he began his study of fans at a concert he attended with his wife (pp. 22–37).

Social Media Scholarship

Liza Potts and Dave Jones (2011) have shown how writers using social media must navigate complex, often disruptive writing spaces in order to successfully access and move information. Like most Web 2.0 writing environments, Twitter requires "users to learn new vocabularies, recognize the characteristics of new writing spaces that contain multiple symbiotic genres, reconceive of the relationships among multiple applications, and be able to transfer knowledge of functionality from one application to the next" (Wolff, Fitzpatrick, & Youssef, 2009).

Porter (1986) broke down intertextuality into two instances: iterability (repeating fragments of text) and presupposition (presumptions a text makes about its context and readers) (p. 35). Bazerman (2003) broke intertextuality down even further into five instances, with the most relevant for our purposes being "using certain implicitly recognizable kinds of language, phrasing, and genres, [which] evokes particular social worlds where such language and language forms are used, usually to identify that text as part of those worlds" (p. 87).

Methodological Considerations

To complete axial coding, I adopted Kathy Charmaz's (2006) approach of using gerunds when coding. Charmaz (2006) argued that "adopting gerunds fosters theoretical sensitivity because these words nudge us out of static topics and into enacted processes. Gerunds prompt thinking about actions—large and small" (p. 136). Whereas the categories that emerged from open coding were "static topics," most that emerged from axial coding are composed as gerunds. Those that could not be formed into gerunds still suggest, as Charmaz (2006) advocated, "emphasis on actions and processes" (p. 136).

Michele Zappavigna (2011) took pains to describe the problematic nature of the term "community" when applied to non-hashtag keyword corpuses. It is also difficult for me to describe what I have collected as a community or even virtual community. Similarly, it is problematic to consider the collected tweets as an "information ecology," as Brian McNely (2010) was able to adapt Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O'Day's (1999) concept to describe tweets for a convention, because in my corpus there is no hashtag grounding the tweets in a specific virtual classification space (Wolff, 2015).

[charsal24]

Fan Autoethnography

In summary: This autoethnography summarizes the various ways I interact with fandom and how each one has shaped me differently. My relationship to every media is fundamentally different, as this will share. I've learned that while in style and talk I haven't been effected by fandom, creatively and the themes that carry with me, has.

Note: My peer review partners did not suggest changes, so I've kept it as is with the summary above added.

My experience as a fan ebbs and flows between deeply engrossed in the tv show/book/series, etc. to casually enjoying. With the former, I’m on Tumblr reblogging GIFs and fanworks like a madman, occasionally rambling in the tags about x character’s arc and y’s characterization and — fuck, tumblr user Kinegg, you must be a prophet from the Gods. Modified the actual user’s name there, but their take on Collector from The Owl House? Absolutely immaculate. Even in my fandom spaces, I can’t escape my writing-major-ness, and I really search for those users who share my love of analysis of characters/themes/subtext. It’s crazy the amount of essays that will be poured out over what could be a single line, a single painting, a piece of clothing.

In the Owl House (spoilers —albeit somewhat vague — ahead!), users poured essays over the tapestries in the Archive house and what they meant for the Collector’s backstory. I had found myself following along with their detailed descriptions and theories in such a way that I rewatched the scenes they mentioned and found myself nodding along to their takes: of course Collector is an orphan of war! Of course his siblings didn’t like him mixing with the titans! Of course this parallels the segregated magic system!

Surprisingly, despite the glory and beauty of anonymity, and my deep love of character analysis, I’ve never actually thrown my hat — or, well, a post — into the void, into my fandom community. Instead, I stay to the tags or rambles in friends’ DMs.

Here’s a particular long example about the game Dredge, another fandom favorite of mine taken from a friend’s DMs.

Massive spoilers ahead for the game!

Just the fact that like… it’s been Y o u and it’s always been Y o u just augghhhhhhhh when hands of love become hands of destruction and you burn away every piece of yourself resisting the natural course of grief because goddamn !!!!! You *will* bring them back !!!! But if you do, they can’t recognize you anymore, and if you can’t, then you destroy every part of yourself trying and just aughhhhhhhhh aughhhhhhhh just the way grief warps every part of you until all you can think of is *them* I just augghhgghhhhhhhh and then you can’t move on because to move on would be to leave them would mean it was all for nothing and you’ve come so far to stop and it’s just another step and then they’ll back and just another step until they’ll be back and just another step until you have buried yourself neck-deep in the ocean and still you will go one more step because you’re !!! So !!! Close !!! But !!! You !!! Can never!!! Be close !!! And just aughhhhhhhhh

Okay so there’s like three main colors, right? This sorta dark purple red — raspberry-esque — this sorta slightly darker sea foam green and I think there’s either like a yellow or another green, can’t remember. I think it’s another green. There’s also the colors of different fishing areas: coastal, shallow, dredge, abyssal, hadal, but not important I’m taking about the dialogue and some item colors

So — and as you can guess — the colors coincide with their usual associations: red is bad, green is good, etc. now what’s interesting is that parts of the horror elements come with that color association that “oh red is evil/corrupt” and so there’s a really neat sorta psychological element of like when a text reads “be careful” and it’s in red and those color associations tell you that “oh no something bad” and the like. But what’s really really fucking cool and sorta subtle is that during the game this “Collector” guy — so cool lore around this guy but won’t spoil anything if you wanna play/watch — asks you fish up some relics for him and in exchange he compensates you very nicely with some nice power ups that are very much Monkey’s Paw-esque.

So, you fish up some of the relics: necklace, ring, music box, key, watch, and other stuff and when you put them in your inventory, the items are *red* whereas usual items like wood or metal or non-relic rings are just like grey or whatever. Now what’s also red you may ask? Four things, but let’s talk about the first two first. One: mutant fish. Sometimes when you’re fishing you’ll pull out an oddity like a bass with three heads or its spine out—something mangled and warped beyond recognition. And that, too, is *red* in your inventory whereas regular fish are like grey

Two: panic. So, if you stay up too late you start to get this thing called “panic” and it presents itself as an eye appearing under the time looking around worried and not only that but everything gets red like a red fog and rocks may appear out of nowhere or scarier creatures start to chase you—it’s a lot like a gameplay mechanic of “oops you’ve stayed up too late now you’re paranoid and seeing things that aren’t there or are they” kinda thin

Three: crimson and silver book, which is the source of corruption happening in this place and causing all the auroras to turn red and shit to get warped and corrupted and stuff

Four: infection. One of which you never actively see so much as much as you just see a dialogue of a package you can deliver saying that it’s “squelching and wet” or something like that

And so back to relics and mutant fish! If you notice those colors when the mutant fish appear, you can start to notice that hey !!!! These relics you are fetching are fucking cursed !!! And not only that but like when you use the “power ups” that fetching the relics gets you, they come with a cost

So like the power-ups you get are: haste (move faster, but increase panic), manifest (teleport back to the first island, increase panic/time speeds up), atrophy (catch a whole area of fish in one go, fish rot and get infected faster), and I thiiiiiiink one has to do with like sounding a signal to scare fish away or something like that

But like all of them are strengths that come at a cost!!!!! Which feeds into the narrative of “everything has a cost/you cannot get what you want without sacrifice” and just that theme of time and madness and aughhhhhhhh power comes with sacrifice and you are losing a piece of yourself for every “power-up”

And like!!!!!!!! Everyone knows more about you than you do!!!! And like they are just watching you spiral once again and once again and once again and just aughhhh aughhhh everyone knows of the madness except for you

And then you have green!!! Green is like the stuff that’s good, that’s helpful!! And like you see certain characters who dialogue highlights some words in green !!! And you can tell “oh yes this is friend, they are good” like the lighthouse keeper who is wearing green and has green dialogue occasionally !!

And then you have the other green as like “location for you to go” and again it’s like you can use these colors to 1. Make things easier to remember 2. Have a psychological impact 3. Associations !!!!!!!! And it’s just such a subtle thing to impact how you intake and receive information and hints to the overall corruption of the items you’re fetching and the corruption of the book itself and just aughhhh aughhh aughhh aughhhh

God and just the eye imagery is so cool fucking love eye imagery !!! But god yeah just the fact that it’s you and it’s always *been you* AND THE POCKET WATCH!!!! One of the relics is a pocket watch whose hands cannot move forward because you !!! Cannot !!! Move forward !!! You cannot move on !!! And you keep finding pieces of your life you can’t remember and aughhhhhhh!!!! Aughhhhhhhh

God. Just….. unable to move forward without That Person in your life, unable to move on, the need to rewrite what was written, to grab death by the bones and shatter them until your beloved has returned, until your beloved has returned and sees not a shadow of who they knew and just…. God.

You were always bait……. You were always the hook on the fishing line going to and fro… all to see her again, all to see her again…. And everyone knows except You that she isn’t coming back and will never come back and still you will burn yourself to pieces to try

*Goddamn* just unable to go back, unable to play god, unable to bend the forces of nature to your whims. Aughhhhhhhhh

As the above long example suggests: I love the deep analyses and most importantly the emotional core of any given work. As I said, couldn’t escape my writing-major-ness even if I wanted to and that dips into my main fandom experience: fanfiction writing.

Surprisingly, it’s only Gen loss and Gravity Falls I’ve written fanfiction for. Gravity Falls was the first, of course, and I still remember the cringey Wattpad “Author Notes” — a staple of the ol’ era of a 12-year old’s writing in 2013. I haven’t revisited those old Wattpad fics and I never will, but I know for all their cringe, they’ve been stepping stones for my writing.

Gravity Falls, especially, hugely influenced what became of my writing style and interests. The show introduced a world that balanced its lightheartedness with moments that had you staring at your screen like “what the fuck just happened?” and it balanced those moments beautifully. Not only that, but the premise of “normal kids move in to weird town but everyone who lives there just kinda deals with the weird stuff so it’s normal to them” has become one of my favorite things to write. I think what I like the most about that kind of premise is that it challenges the idea of what normal even is. Especially since “normal” means something different across cultures and what I, as an American, may find completely normal (let’s say, steering wheel on the left instead of the right), completely boggles the mind of someone who’s never seen that. To them, I’m the weirdo, and to me, they are the weirdo, but neither one of us is wrong or right and that’s the beauty of it.

This lends itself into the question of “us” vs. “them” — again, thinking about the “what is normal?” — that appears in some spaces in fandom. I think an “us” vs. “them” in fandom comes from the lack of acknowledgment that no one is right and that’s okay. There’s definitely a huge “us” vs. “them” in fandom spaces when it comes to shipping. Personally, I’ve never really understood why some people feel so personally to certain ships, and I’ve never really cared, but maybe it has something to do with what Jensen talks about: compensating and parasocial relationships.

For me, I find myself less compensating and more so either exploring pieces of myself through the other (a lot of this with grief narratives as found in Dredge) or examining other people. Characters and studying them and their actions is fascinating for me and I find that understanding characters allows me to be better at understanding people in my own life. After all, what is the self if not a character we all play?

@officeofdocmalone

[daytura]

Revision: "null theory" -> "minimalist theory"

From my PSYC 100 Mini-Autoethnography:

Transcript, with bolded emphases: "like bottom-up tagging, full-text search, or just relying on wikilinks. Finally, he [Niklas Luhmann] wrote for himself, from his illegible handwriting to his telegraphic note-taking style. Many digital gardens at the time read like fragments of hypothetical blog posts — interesting, but unusually well-edited. Inspired, I developed a minimal theory of PKM for myself: the task of knowledge work is to connect and interpret a text towards a broader project, problem, set of texts, and/or itself. A reader's interpretation transcends the format of the text. Today, I now see interpretation connects myriad disciplines like law, literature, philosophy, and science."

a null theory of knowledge management

I have recently hit on a radical null theory of personal knowledge management that has thrown my understanding and models so far into space. It is both painful and exciting. My theory comes in two parts:

The substrate of personal knowledge remains the same in all frames of reference.

All representations of personal knowledge are interchangeable vantage points, where each vantage is no more or less useful than every other vantage.

More directly: It does not matter how you arrange your notes, so much as you can index, access, and defragment them in a personally readable way.

Graphically: Knowledge is and can only be the boxes. However, as individuals and thinkers, we can "rise" to a level of abstraction to become the arrows. As humans, we naturally erode structure. It would only be logical that we also erode learned structures in our mind, if we are left unchecked. Structure may not be arbitrary, but it always has the potential to be arbitrary.

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

My Life as an Acafan: So I finally talked to my advisor

When I first started researching fanfiction (back in 2018), I had a very different idea about what I was going to study. The only thing that remained the same was the subject: fanfiction. Everything else? It changed so much. 

At first, I had a general idea of what I wanted to research: fanfiction as queer representation and link that to Captain America’s fandom, specifically the Steve/Bucky (aka Stucky) pairing. Around the time I had realized this, I found an English literature professor in my college who was open to be my advisor. Then, I started reading a few introductory texts from fan scholars, mainly people that studied fanfiction, and those readings started shaping my perspective better. That was when I realized I should study the construction of queer romance in fanfiction and how it was portrayed in it, using Stucky stories as reference. That was when my problems with my research really started.

In 2018, I hadn’t accepted yet, but I was mostly out of Captain America fandom. I was kinda holding onto it and I’m still not sure why I did that. Maybe it was because once I promised myself that if I ever had the opportunity to research fanfiction, I’d definitely pick Stucky stories. I have this stupid tendency of trying to stick to every promise I make to myself, even if I’d grown out of it ─ which was exactly what happened to me.

By the time I started researching fic, I was barely participating in Captain America’s fandom and that was Marvel’s fault. First, we had the whole Steve is actually Hydra plot in the comics and I got pissed off beyond reason because of it. And then, shortly after that nightmare of storyline, the movie Civil War was released and it was everything but a Captain America movie. So, I think you can imagine my frustration at that point. I was so mad at Marvel that not even fandom could salvage it. Unfortunately, it took me almost a year and a half to understand this. 

When I finally realized the problem was the pairing, I changed to Merlin/Arthur (aka Merthur) from Merlin BBC (2008) TV series. After I got rid of Stucky, I was able to actually work on my research. I researched about Romance Theory, Queer Theory, representation of minorities in movies and TV shows. And, even though I read the most important books in those fields, I got nowhere. The reason it happened was that nobody had a framework that met my needs and that realization was the crucial part for me. I finally understood what I was supposed to do. I needed to create some kind of framework that could define fanfiction, specifically, slash fanfiction. Then, I’d be able to discuss how queer romance is constructed within a fic. That changed my world. 

After I understood that, I contacted my former advisor and I explained to him I was going to change fields. My research evolved into something really different and it made more sense to have an advisor from Literary Theory than English Literature. He was very understanding and wished me good luck. Quickly after that, I sent a message to one of the best professors I’ve ever had in my life, who conveniently taught Literary Theory, and he accepted to become my advisor. And last week we finally had our first conversation about my research. 

It was very productive. My conversation with him was the solid proof that I’d made the right call. We managed to establish so many things. First, I already know how I will start to build the framework I had in mind, which was the greatest breakthrough of all time to me. 

I’m not gonna pretend I wasn’t terrified about the idea of creating a framework from scratch. I had no idea how I would even start before my advisor talked to me. He went over every piece I had written related to my research and he ended up seeing a solution. However, he didn’t directly tell me the solution, he walked me through it until I reached the conclusion myself. He didn’t deliver the answer to me on a silver plate. For the first time since I’ve started my research, I felt actually capable in carrying out the whole thing. It really helped me to build the confidence I was lacking and that was a beautiful development. I finally saw actual progress. So, one important lesson I’ve learned with this whole situation is that an advisor needs to make you feel secure that you will find a way with their guidance, even if they don’t really understand your subject. 

Now, you must be asking yourselves: what are you actually going to do then? Well, I’ll build a framework to delineate slash fanfiction that follows the standard of “well-written” stories, published on AO3 between the end of the 2000s and throughout the 2010s. To create this framework, I’ll use excerpts of fanfictions and compare it to a book series written by a former ficwriter that successfully reproduced the fanfiction style, but using original characters. My goal with this research is to offer an academic definition to our famous compliment ‘this (story) is like fanfiction’. It’s a way to show that fanfiction has its own style and it’s actually affecting the literary market. Actually I’m pretty sure someone (I think it was Kristina Busse but could also be Karen Hellekson or even both) pointed out the lack of research focused on the structure of fanfiction. They said the field needed someone who attempted to define said structure in academic terms. So, that’s what I’m gonna do now. This is going to be my lifetime work and honestly? I can’t wait to start it!

[ohmypreciousgirl]

CALLING ALL KIMCHAY FICWRITERS!

My dear Kimchay ficwriters, 

I invite you to participate in my undergrad research which is me analyzing my creative process of writing a kimchay oneshot. The research consists in an autoethnography which is “a research method that uses personal experience to describe and interpret cultural texts, experiences, beliefs, and practices”. However, for me to do this in a satisfactory way I need to have other people's experiences to contrast with my own. I’m just accepting Kimchay ficwriters because I want everyone involved to have the same basic background: obsessed with Kimchay and write fics about them.

To participate in the research, you need to become part of the discord server ‘kimchay ficwriters group’ and interact with me and the rest of the group. We have three main channels: 

Question and Answers: As the research moves forward, I’ll post questions for you to answer. As we just started, there’s no questions yet.

Discussion Zone: every few days we’ll have rounds of discussions about different topics related to fanfiction (writing process, outlines, tropes, squicks, etc) and kimchay (characterization, headcanons, interesting plots, things you want to explore or would like to read about, etc).

Thesis Fic: There are 9 threads and, in each thread, there’s a scene from the fic I’ll write about in my research. This is the part, the participants give me feedback about the story. I need honesty because the whole point is for me to write about the struggles and feelings that might arise while writing fic. 

How the information will be handled: I won’t reveal any kind of personal/sensitive information about the participants, only your AO3 username (or Wattpad username, if that’s the platform you use). However, I might use a lot of excerpts from our conversations, which is expected if you agreed to be part of my group research. Keep in mind, if you accept it this is a commitment, because I really need your help to develop my research. It’s something you need to give your attention at least once a week for a certain amount of time. That also means you’ll have to read my writing, so if you don’t know my writing style and want to read before committing to anything, you can go over my AO3 and read one of my fics. 

If you want to participate, send me an ask or a DM and I’ll send you the invitation for the discord server. If you know any Kimchay ficwriter that might be interested in participating, send this post to them!

Thanks, everyone!

[talenlee]

Talen Month 2024!

Welcome to Talen Month here on press dot invincible dot ink!

A pattern has formed, a groove has been worn, and I treat April as a month in which I’m going to focus on writing about indulgent, entirely self-serving nonsense. No topic is too niche, no character exploration too unnecessary, and no corner case complaint about some other nonsense is too specific for me to do it if it tickles me distinctly and doesn’t also fit better into another theme month.

Like, c’mon, there’s gotta be something for Dread Month and Tricks Month. October and August if you’re new here.

But what does this actually mean?

The whole question of making a blog which is literally just my own daily writing, and then having a month dedicated to talking about myself or my interests seems when viewed at arm’s length like nonsense. Everything on this blog is stuff I care about. I’m always going to talk about things as they relate to me, duh. That’s the whole point, I didn’t train myself to understand and deploy autoethnography relentlessly because I wanted to pretend I didn’t exist.

If you go back and read earlier parts of the blog, you can find my posts from when I was trying to position myself as a neutral observer of videogames, and even then I found the idea of it stifling. Early Game Pile entries would include a list of reasons I could imagine someone wanting to play a game, and of course, that list was going to be filtered through my imagination and opinion. On the one hand it’s not that hard to have some empathy for a potential or imagined reader, and what might help a game or piece of media interest them. It’s hard to have empathy for every possible reader, and that’s where we start to get into the shape of you – the reader – that is in my head.

In my mind, you’re probably queer. Not necessarily, but probably. You at least are adjacent to queer spaces, since you got to found me. I don’t have an assumption that you’re a boy or a girl, though I think I probably joke around as if you’re a girl or girlthing more likely than you are a boy. I think I do that because I don’t think it’s interesting to joke about my reader being a boy — everyone does that. It’s much funnier to — accurately or not! — crack jokes about not liking girly games like Bloodbourne and Dwarf Fortress.

You’re younger than me. You watch anime and you play videogames, but you don’t read as many books as you like. I think this because I think that I think of reading books as interesting and a way to broaden your horizons, but I also don’t read as many books as I’d like. Sometimes this is because my day can consist of choking through six dense chapters of four different books and sometimes it’s because it’s a lot easier to put the TV on and let twenty episodes of Bluey happen.

You’re more of a console gamer. I can talk to you about old PC games from the 1990s and I need to explain how they work or what life was like for people interested in that play space, because you don’t know what I’m talking about. Not a cruel thing or a ignorance thing – I don’t think less of you for not knowing, but I think it’s worth explaining it. I think that part of that is because I think it’s interesting. When I dig into how Commander Keen works, being able to explain how the EGA processor worked is really me teaching myself something I half-understand, and then share with you because I … I like talking about it?

I definitely think there are words and topics you’d rather I avoid. I think that you don’t like seeing me be mean to things, or about things. I think that you’d rather not see me using generative media for bumpers in my posts, and that you either don’t care about my using of alt text or you care about it in hypothetical. The fact I’m trying to get in the habit for it is something you probably think ‘oh, that’s nice, that’s a good habit’ and that’s the end of it. I think that if there are people reading this who benefit from good alt text, there aren’t many of you, maybe one or two. I also think that that one or two are worth doing a good job for, as a matter of principle. But I also think if I screw up, or my alt text is bad, I’m not going to get told about it.

I think you used to be on twitter.

I think you think I’m interesting, but not cool.

I think you think my writing is engaging, but not deeply affecting. I think you’re really glad to see stuff on a website that’s being made and maintained and not being used to advertise. I think that if I started promoting or doing calls to action, you’d find that unappealing. You wouldn’t necessarily hate me for it, but it would be something that you didn’t have to deal with here, previously, but now you do have to deal with it, and that’d be a bummer.

I also think there’s a good chance every single thing I’ve looked at and thought ‘wow this sucks’ is someone’s favourite thing. I think, if I rubbish an anime or a game, I have pretty good chance that you are either really relieved to see someone finally talk critically about it, or you’re super bummed to see someone you respected talking about something you love cruelly. I think this is part of why I keep a mix going on: I think that you might tolerate a few sassy posts about something you like, but if I let my natural impulse to complain overwhelm me, you’d have a blog that’s grumpy and mad for several days in a row and that might just be enough to make you give up on checking.

I don’t think you check. I think you’re either using an RSS reader because you’re smart and cool and better than me with computers, or you see my work linked other places. The idea that my blog lives in a space like someone’s daily webcomic link folder is kinda nice but I have no idea if anyone else even does those any more.

This is mostly just anxieties, of course. I’m concerned about being seen a particular way. I’m afraid of behaving in a way that’s too much. I don’t want to make you feel like you shouldn’t bother checking. I want to share things that are funny and exciting with you. I also want to get better at writing and part of that is forcing variety, because otherwise I will default to cliche phrases and reusing jokes from a more successful Adams, whether that’s Douglas (very good) or Scott (very bad).

This month, I’m going to try and talk to you with less of the anxiety. More willingness to talk about things I normally skirt around. And yes, that means I will probably spend a lot of words focusing on some extremely niche nonsense or maybe diving way too deep in something I think you’d find dull.

Sorry.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[canmom]

Worth the Candle, end of 228.

so. I understand it now. this is Baru Cormorant: When They Cry.

i thought this story was going to be stupid fun, in a kind of well-above-average litrpg way - I was (kinda still am) very depressed and the other books I was reading were too heavy. instead, it surprised me be being good, like actually good: a genuinely thoughtful, well structured and even insightful story. this is not something that I ever expected to write about a litrpg isekai webserial, and certainly not a 'ratfic'.

it does, admittedly, take a while to come into its own. what 'its own' turns out to be is, as one commentator deemed it, 'competence porn for therapy'.

at first i thought it was about grief, then i recalibrated to a really scathing self-crit, as the story worked to absolutely dismantle self insert protagonist Juniper interpersonally and ideologically. now, 25 chapters from the end (which is still like an entire novel lol) it seems to be... complex metafiction about learning to work through shit and understand yourself and other people? woven of course in between exploring a variety of off-the-wall magic systems and settings, with an analytic eye to how and why they're made.

it's safe to say it blows Yudkowsky out of the fucking water. if more ratfic is like this, i might have to get into the genre.

it can be quite... dry isn't the right word, but there's a lot of chapters of people having penetrating conversations about their motivations and feelings, or coming up with plans, or the nature of the story they're inhabiting. which isn't to say it can't hit the feelings or evoke a mood... especially if that mood is an oppressive one, but there's plenty of genuine humour. it's often kind of horny but in a really analytic way, where it's about breaking down hangups around sex that largely happens off camera, and sexuality is just part of what comes under the scope. in some ways it feels... anthropological, in the sense of autoethnography - which I suppose is what it is, given how much Wales seems to be putting his own experiences into it, though of course I'm not sure exactly the line between what is directly roman à clef for his own life and what is there for a rhetorical point. some of the constructions and parallels feel too neat to be exactly real, but that doesn't say a lot, bc if you're fictionalising something you'd neaten it up.

it steers determinedly towards just about all the thorniest topics you can think of: grief, depression, suicide, rape (of its protagonist), genocide, eugenics. astonishingly, given its peers, it handles them with - for the most part, I'm not really sure about where they're going with the Tuung - a lot of grace.

it can be a bit cheeky with the metafiction occasionally but generally uses it purposefully, in the same way that a When They Cry VN teaches you how to read it. (promise I'll get back to that). in general it commits to the bit, hard. a brief arc riffs on the one page rpg Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf, in a way that sounds like it would be way too stupid, and yet it somehow makes it work by playing it serious.

it's a curious story to read because you have to take everything on at least four levels: what it means on the base level, how it fits in to the story that is being constructed with the diegetic DM character (the 'narrative' that the characters are aware of), how it reflects back on the inciting incidents on Joon's D&D games and grief spiral on Earth, and the purpose it's being put towards by Wales in the webnovel. (we can go further and take after Eco in distinguishing the author suggested by the text from the actual person Alexander Wales, but that's more @baeddel 's department.)

and now I've finally reached the Fel Seed Incident. cw rape. also spoilers.

the Fel Seed Incident is foreshadowed from early in the story, as the most heinous thing that Joon did while misanthropically turning on everyone after the death of his best friend Arthur. it's pretty much exactly what I thought, given the foreshadowing: Joon created a cheap grimdark body horror scenario to vent his feelings, that scenario centred on a sadistic rapist villain, a new player who Joon held in contempt joined the group, who was a rape survivor, and Joon steamrolled through several attempts to get him to back down, drove her away, flipped his lid and drove her boyfriend away, and made the session miserable for everyone by making Fel Seed invincible. most of this was pretty much spelled out already, but not the rape part.

this is the keystone of the whole story, and the reason it's delivered so late is because basically everything leading up to this point is telling us how to interpret this scene. particularly the arc where Joon gets raped by his sentient house, who then goes away for a long time to be taught a sense of ethics by the girl who eats demons to get therapy insight (I say, very matter of factly). Joon was pathetic and shitty, but it wasn't some grand act of sadism, just a tawdry story of lashing out at someone in the wrong place who he considered an annoyance beneath his notice - a recurring theme we've come to see throughout the rest of the story. it's presented very levelly. we've seen Bethel's efforts to change, we've seen Joon understandably not wanting to have anything to do with her, studiously examined that situation from each side. it all makes depressing sense, just as the scenes of abuse in Umineko do: this is how people act in these circumstances. 'well observed' you say.

yet it's not just going there to rub our faces in how much our protagonist sucks. because the whole point is to take it seriously, not wallow in self loathing. Grak doesn't kill himself and commits to living, Bethel and Valencia take the time to work at learning from their enormous mistakes. beating up on yourself is a sort of perverse defence mechanism. if you suck irredeemably you don't have to try.

the Fel Seed Incident is thus essentially a synecdoche (drink) of Joon's spiral and of the themes it's driving at, and thus a fitting capstone battle. it's almost annoyingly well put together.

but it's also rather self aware about this. Joon has by this point figured out that he's supposed to learn things from his adventures. the protagonists try to figure out what sort of narrative they're in and talk about postmodernism. so it's probably going to be about more than that.

self-improvement is the whole selling point of the rationalist ideology: the idea that if you follow Yudkowsky's teachings you can learn to put things in a mathematical perspective that will helpfully set you straight on matters from epistemology (Bayesianism solves everything) to ethics (utilitarianism is the answer, but you need to take into account a bunch of weird edge cases) to niche causes like cryonics and AI research. in fact, it's simply a cult. with all the shit that comes with, which means yes, rape and dead bodies.

many ideas in the story draw from the rationalist milieu. Joon's plan to 'win forever', usurp the DM and create a heaven that solves suffering, is of course an oblique spin the friendly AI singularity that Yudkowsky hopes to build. the soul magic arc, with its ideas of fiddling with motivations, is also about this. it seeps in in other ways, e.g. the idea raised now and then about keeping promises so other agents will trust you to keep promises is one of the founding elements of Roko's Basilisk. other elements, like the Second Empire, seem like an extrapolation of a society run by rat ideals.

I do not like the 'd' word. reading Eva and Madoka as 'genre deconstructions' obscures much more than it reveals (and also has very little to do with whatever Derrida was getting at). but it is honestly surprising to me that this is a celebrated ratfic reads like a splendid dismantling of rationalism.

the rape angle is relevant here. Yudkowsky's story Three Worlds Collide, a story about metaethics, rather infamously presents a future human society where rape is ubiquitous and considered a mild annoyance. it's like defamiliarising or whatever - don't you see, it's just our cultural assumptions! - and if you think it is going to do anything interesting, of course not, it's just Richard Stallman levels of pigheaded edgy obliviousness.

by contrast, the arc where Bethel rapes Joon... well, it feels almost like it's running down a checklist of how to write a realistic rape. Joon is raped by someone he knows well, he clearly says no, but when this is ignored, goes along with it in part because he's hyperconscious of the possibility of sudden violence; he knows something is up but blames himself because he was physically aroused and thinks it's just arbitrary cultural hangups and because he's a guy; he is reluctant to talk about it with his friends because he doesn't want his rapist to just be killed and she's important to their organisation. his attacker is a rape survivor herself in a complicated way, and she has spun a story where she was in the right that has to be very carefully unpicked by someone close to her and then she must take time to work through and change the whole way she relates to people, and there's some uncertainty in the others whether she's actually changed or just putting up a show of it. you could basically say it's cribbed from a "transformative justice" case study, but without the buzzwords.

and like, in a metafictional story like this one, situated in a milieu founded by Yudkowsky, that seems kind of like a statement. 'pay attention class, here's how to write a rape'. that might be uncharitable - i haven't seen how other rationalist writers handle it. (you can write a web novel without rape? ha, as if.)

Amaryllis in particular is the epitome of an idealised rationalist, effective altruist model. she's not emotionless, but manages her emotions clinically, according to scientific principles. she obsessively prioritises utilitarianism over her own feelings about a situation ('purchase fuzzies and utilons separately' is how it went i think?) and relentlessly builds power in order to remake the world according to her vision. she's hypercompetent as an administrator and has bizarrely mechanical ways of dealing with her own feelings. and it generally pays off and doesn't blow up in her face! (analogy: she's kind of who Baru Cormorant thinks she is, especially at the outset when she's most indoctrinated by Farrier.)

all of this seems to be very deliberate, given how Joon and the other characters react to her, but I'm scratching my head about the endgame here. I suppose, if each companion reflects some quality of Joon, we read Amaryllis and the slow burn romance as some kind of spin on gradually being enticed by the ideal of lesswrongism itself? but this story puts such an emphasis on self-understanding that there is no way it would uncritically present Amaryllis as an ideal. and with the Tuung essentially being put through what is painted as a hyperaccelerated residential school system that's been flagged up as an impending conflict a few times, and this story consistently choosing to steer into conflict rather than take an easy out to the point that the characters notice, it has to be going somewhere with this.

I'm honestly not sure how it's going to end, at this point. obviously Joon will find Arthur and confront the Dungeon Master, maybe he'll get to immanentise his personal eschaton. it would be too cheap for him to just go back to Earth with a bunch of lessons learned, especially with the IC meta discussions signaling hard against that. but it's the kind of excited expectant wait where I think I'll be surprised.

obviously I'm hooked. it's a kind of story it's very hard to share with anyone because it's 1.65 million words long, drawing from two milieus (D&D and LessWrong) that are very familiar to me but not necessarily anyone else I know, the premise on the face of it is kind of a hard sell, and as we've just discussed it kinda goes relentlessly for the hard stuff. all in all it's a Brynbait story. if you're tempted by what's above, I'd give it a shot.

aaand damn I guess I prematurely reviewed. I wasn't going to write until I'd finished the book, but I guess I'm writing now! I'll probably see the end after sleeping so expect a followup then.

also. he really did fuck the goddamn deer (tf was involved). and it wasn't a joke but meant something. fascinating thing, this book.