szgrey - Tumblr blog

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millenial here who works regularly with gen z students. in my experience, (1) concise text instructions and (2) pdfs incorporating screenshots with a bit of highlighting and maybe a few arrows are WAY MORE EFFECTIVE than tutorial videos for pretty much any online tool or process students need to know how to use.

In Prince's funky name, amen.

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Commission me!

a surprise mold problem sprung up in my bedroom, so now i'm offering some postcard-sized watercolors to cover it and also maintain sanity.

Price is between 50~80 dollars. Contact me at elanorpam.commissions@gmail.com if you're interested!

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Margaret Hamilton, Director of the Apollo project Software Engineering Division, with a stack of papers containing the code to the Apollo Guidance Computer navigation software. The software that on this day, in 1969, guided Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they landed on the Moon.

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happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !

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Mark Heresy, American, b. 1965. Will to Power (detail), 1992, Ink on paper, 28 x 22 in, 2000.11.5, Gift of Peter Norton, Collection of the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University

Putting on an exhibition was the furthest thing from my mind when, through my PhD assistantship, I was placed at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art in the Fall of 2022. To say that I was anxious to talk authoritatively about fine art would be a dramatic understatement. Historically, my visits to art museums included confusion about what was (and wasn’t) considered “good,” and my daily experience with art centered around the fan pieces I saw posted on Tumblr and Instagram. I was, to put it bluntly, terrified.

During the same time period, I was struggling to find the focus of my dissertation. With Master's degrees in both English and Business Administration, and with a passion for fanfiction, I knew I wanted to talk about fan compensation. I had read plenty of scholarly books and articles that were passionate about promoting fandom as valid, positive, and useful, and plenty more that broke down the unpaid labor that fans engaged in for their fan objects, but I had never seen these two concepts addressed at the same time. Texts considering fan compensation tended to view fan labor in a negative light. At best, fanworks were viewed as a gift from a fan to the fan community at large, with fans knowing they would be repaid when other fans within the community gifted their own fanworks in return. (Nevermind that I myself have a fic on AO3 that is—as of writing this—the only fic belonging to its extremely rare-pairing). At worst, fanwork was viewed as unpaid labor, utilized—often unethically—to prop up the mass-media corporations who profited from it. I wanted to consider the ways in which fans were paid that weren't specifically monetarily based, and I wanted to address the topic from a position of honoring and respecting fanworks in all their forms. 

Even with this knowledge of what I wanted to discuss, I was struggling in my program. My experience in both of my Master’s programs had not prepared me for the fast pace at which new ideas and theories were disseminated in fan studies and through digital communities. Each time I thought I had found something new and exciting to add to the scholarship, I read a new paper—or more often watched a TikTok—which said my great idea in a better and smarter way than I had considered it. I felt discouraged and lost. I took a step back from my research, deciding to focus my time and energy on my assistantship instead. The museum was showing a portion of Marquette University’s collection of Tolkien manuscripts, and part of my duties included gathering three minute oral histories from fans for The J.R.R. Tolkien Fandom Oral History Collection. Inspired by this experience, I began to think about museums and archives, about what gets archived, about what gets displayed, and about who gets to make those decisions.

When the Haggerty Museum’s Curator for Academic Engagement approached me about an exhibition centering my own research, my first thought was to hang fan art on the walls. This, I was quickly told, was not an option for a plethora of reasons. Couldn’t I instead, it was suggested, use fine art pieces to discuss these types of fanworks? I first considered using pieces that could themselves be seen as fanworks—variations on mythology and biblical stories, new ways of considering historical moments and places, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe… but this didn’t feel like enough. Everything is inspired by something. Is that enough to make it a fanwork?  

It was from these thoughts and musings that Affirmation/Transformation: Fandom Created was born. Fourteen fine art pieces were selected from the Haggerty’s permanent collection—each of which will be used to discuss something that fans create. I categorized fan creations broadly: alternative readings, collections, community and collaboration, emotional responses, histories, identity, meanings, new texts, parasocial relationships, play, political and social movements, rivalry and opposition, rules, and theories.. The 14 fine art  pieces will be hung in the gallery during the exhibition, but are also currently available to view online. In this ongoing project, fans are invited to create fanworks inspired by these 14 pieces, and the fanworks submitted will be displayed digitally alongside the fine art. Think of it like a Prompt Meme challenge, featuring fine art as your prompt!

My experience with fandom is as much about community as it is about the thing I’m a fan of, and this is why it was so important to me to avoid discussing fandom in a vacuum. An exhibition of just my voice explaining what fans created felt cold; it felt disconnected from and disrespectful to the very thing I was trying to celebrate. This is why my dissertation project is collaborative, featuring the voices and creations of fans everywhere. I also feel called to ensure that these fanworks are treated with the respect that they deserve. This doesn’t just apply to the ways in which I will write about them in my final dissertation text; moreso, it is vitally important to me to take advantage of the opportunity I have to archive fanworks in Marquette’s institutional repository. Archiving these fanworks not only preserves them for potential future academic research, but also marks them—and fanworks in general—as being worthy of a place within the academic archive.  Fan submissions for Affirmation/Transformation: Fandom Created are being accepted now, and will continue to be accepted through the close of the exhibition (December 22, 2024). In order to be on display in the gallery on opening night (August 23, 2024), fanworks must be submitted by August 1st. All types of fanworks are welcome, as long as they are submitted digitally. Sound will be available to be played in the gallery (fanworks will be displayed on tablets with headphones attached).  For more information, visit https://epublications.marquette.edu/fandom/Affirmationtransformation/, or email Kate Rose at AffirmationTransformationShow@gmail.com

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Reblog and put in the tags what you would have been blogging about on tumblr in 2004.

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not giving a “depends on the media” answer cause i feel like ppl will automatically go for that one lol. if it does depend on the media for you, pick which one u USUALLY fall under. polyshipping counts as multishipping 🫡

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this is entire subspecies of nerdy guy erasure. where's computer guy? comics guy? music guy? nature guy? tabletop/board games guy? all the guys with whom i have shared social circles for the last 20 years?

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WAIT!

Before you hit send on that ask, reblog, or reply, remember to stop and PROOFREAD!

am I Pissing on the Poor?

did I Read the post in bad faith?

could I be Overexaggerating?

am I Out of line for saying this?

is it kind of Fucked up to say that to a total stranger?

is what I said Rude?

am I being Egotistical?

am I Angry at words that weren't in the post?

did I Dream up a pretend person to get mad at?

ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT YOURSELF FROM LOOKING LIKE A JACKASS ONLINE!

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I can't keep this blog running by myself, so I’d love to have people to help me around!

What do you have to do as a moderator?

You have to search for new posts related to fandom and Fan Studies and read them to evaluate their content (we have a compilation of places to help to do this task);

You have to select posts and then tag them according to the topic the posts are about (we have a guide explaining how the tag system works);

Ideally you should know how to queue posts, but it’s not a requirement. If you’re willing to learn, that is more than enough.

You have the freedom to choose how your schedule as a moderator of @studiesof-fandom will work! We only need to have content posted a few days every week to keep this blog running and updated.

If you’re interested, please send an inbox to @studiesof-fandom!

I ask for my followers to reblog this post to spread the word!

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植物モチーフのおもしろグッズ　ヽ(^。^)ノ ﾜｰｲ Functional fake plants

（r/SipsTea　u/Kahnza）

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As a 13-year homeowner, La'Shaundra Benion has long been waiting for a new roof for her ranch-style home in Pontiac.

And after she recently received $25,000 in home repairs, it included that new roof and even windows through the Pontiac Home Repair Program. The program is using $3 million from the American Rescue Plan Act to help Pontiac homeowners complete major repair projects.

"I was looking to get my driveway done, my roof, the windows and some electrical work," said Benion, 44, adding that she needed plumbing work in her kitchen. "They did all of the windows in my house, the roof and some minor electrical work."

Pontiac received $37.7 million from ARPA and allocated more than $3 million for the home repair program. The program allows up to $25,000 per household in home repairs including plumbing, HVAC, roof repair and waterproofing for residents earning less than 80% of the area median income, adjusted for family size.

Thirty-eight homes in Pontiac have had repair services through the program, including 14 homes under construction. In addition to the four completed, including Benion's, 20 other homes have received approval to start renovations, according to a news release.

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unfortunately, “it’s complicated” continues to be the correct answer to most questions worth asking. yeah I’m annoyed about it too

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[We argue that at minimum, the outputs of LLMs like ChatGPT are soft bullshit: bullshit–that is, speech or text produced without concern for its truth–that is produced without any intent to mislead the audience about the utterer’s attitude towards truth. We also suggest, more controversially, that ChatGPT may indeed produce hard bullshit: if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda. So, with the caveat that the particular kind of bullshit ChatGPT outputs is dependent on particular views of mind or meaning, we conclude that it is appropriate to talk about ChatGPT-generated text as bullshit, and flag up why it matters that – rather than thinking of its untrue claims as lies or hallucinations – we call bullshit on ChatGPT.]

Submitter comment: One of my favourite recent papers on AI - the authors pull no punches, actually substantiate their argument, and it's also extremely readable and hilarious. Free to read: ChatGPT is Bullshit

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Politically, governments decided to sell a “we beat the pandemic” narrative to the public after vaccines failed to produce herd immunity as promised. For this reason, political health bodies like the CDC began putting out guidance from the very top encouraging people to accept the “new normal” of unending reinfections. Acceptance of constant reinfections relies heavily on the perception that COVID infections are a truly neutral event for your health- something that no research, and no study, has ever concluded.

COVID infection endangers pregnancies and newborns. Why aren't parents being warned?

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Every time I see this question come up in a poll, the answers are always so very obviously by a very young fan. So we’re going to try this.