#dwcrosspost

[meeedeee]

Another example of fans not being valued by the world...or by themselves.

“The literature suggests several reasons why fan fiction is largely ignored by libraries, of which the most significant are that fan works are "not proper books" and that they cannot be easily fitted into library structures and processes. These ideas are visible in comments about fan fiction on GoodReads (https://www.goodreads.com/), a book review site:

“I thought this site was for real books. Is there any way to restrict my searches to avoid this stuff?

I thought this site was for reviews about books that I could get from the library ...

These commenters might, in fact, enjoy fan fiction, but they believe that it is less appealing than commercially published works, particularly if they are not familiar with it. This lack of awareness and understanding is probably shared by many librarians, present and past, including those who created the bulk of existing library collections and collection development practices. This sets up a vicious circle: libraries don't collect fan fiction because their patrons don't expect it to be there because they know libraries don't collect it.”

Later the paper quotes another fan why fanfiction does not deserve to be preserved: 

“There is far too much of it and it is a waste of resources…And most fanfiction is only of interest to people who belong to that particular fandom and not the wider populace. .... “ and “ I don't think it should be necessarily and actively collected at the level of public library due to its nature; quite impromptu,ephemeral, amateurish and numerous" 

Thankfully in the UK, one fanzine publisher (ScotsPress) provided a single copy of each fanzine she published in the 1970s and 1980s to the British Library.  This was done as part of the UK’s legal deposit requirement (works published in the UK are to be submitted to the British library.)

The publisher later donated not only her private zine collection to University of Iowa Fanzine Archive, but she also sent scans of over 500 fanzines to Texas A&M University to form the core of their digital fanzine collection (The Sandy Hereld Fanzine Collection)

So a huge thank you to every fan and librarian out there who thinks fans and their fanworks are worth preserving. Women have, for far too long, been told that we and our creations are not valued. And sometimes, it is a story we tell to ourselves. Or impose onto each other.

[strangesequitur]

So the Illinois primary election is today.

Here’s the thing, I actually give a shit about this sort of thing. Probably not as much of a shit as I could give, but fucks are had! Before every election I pull up a sample ballot based on my exact address and spend a good hour on Google and Ballotpedia researching candidates bill sponsorships, voting histories and position platforms and deciding who I’m giving my vote to.

So it would be nice, maybe, if those sample ballots were fucking complete. Because without fail, at least 60% of the actual ballot isn’t included. Mostly the positions that aren’t on the sample ballots are judges and Water Reclamation* but there were at least two ACTUAL RACES I didn’t know anything about. “Just vote for whoever sounds the least like an old, white dude” is an amusing way to fill out a ballot, but it's not foolproof.

And choosing judges is important shit.

COOK COUNTY HAD A FULL-STOP RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA MEASURE that I knew nothing about! Pot might be legal in Chicago tomorrow and this was the first I’d heard of it. (I mean, not really. It’s Chicago, they gotta write the tax laws and regulate the growing and find a way to add Corruption first.) [Edit: Turns out this one was Advisory Only, which wasn’t super clear in the wording.]

There were also measures to the effect of “Do you want the Governor to decide that he cares about bump-stocks?” Things like that I can let slide, the wording is informative enough and it’s a simple yes or no. But people are harder, and I need lead-up time to fill in my spreadsheet, god dammit.

*One of the Water Reclamation jobs had NO CANDIDATES, just a write-in slot. Do you want Batman? Because this is how you get Batman in charge of the water quality of Lake Michigan. Alternately, I briefly thought about electing myself to a new job.

[meeedeee]

Copying and pasting

“Greetings, fellow fannish Elder,

I’d like to invite you to participate in an anthology of collected essays and interviews exploring the co-creative aspects of women in fandom, in their own voices, during the latter half of the twentieth century.

This anthology, Geek Elders Speak: In Our Own Voices (with the subtitle, Women Co-creators and Their Undeniable Place in Fannish History), will be published by Forest Path Books, LLC., an independent press.

My name is Jenni Hennig. I’m a published author (most recently The Books of the Wode, a historical fantasy series), and I administer Forest Path Books. Some of you might remember me from Star Trek, Star Wars, Man From UNCLE, and Robin of Sherwood fandoms, where I wrote fanfic, was an artist, filker, award-winning costumer, and publisher of zines such as Far Realms and Against the Wind.

I have a vital and personal interest in this anthology. I remember our history: Fanzines cranked on mimeo, or typed with carbons and passed out by hand at cons. Art and “illos” hand-drawn and hand-screened. Costumes hand-sewn, constructed with fabric, wire, and bondo, with odds and ends like shaving cream can tops or shiny Leggs® packaging. Filks taped at cons on handheld recorders. Music videos made in the oh-so-lengthy process allowed with Beta and VHS. All of us laid claim to our creative power, over the years and in our own terms.

I was there, too.

We have so many stories to tell. And that’s why I’m reaching to you.

You’re probably wondering how the anthology’s title came about. I’m all over giving credit where it’s due, so kindly let me give you a wee bit of background for this project. The idea was sparked at a Seattle convention called Geek Girl Con, where in 2014 a panel called “Geek Elders Speak” proved one of the most popular events at the con.

(See this article: https://geekgirlcon.com/?s=geek+elders&post_type=post )

Four women who had been active with media fanzines in the 1970s and 1980s were speakers; I was an incognito ‘Elder’ in the audience, listening to comments made by both women and men. The younger fans were visibly astounded by the stories they heard—especially the geek girls who’d never heard about the crucial role of women in creating and defining media fandom. Hungry for a history they’d never imagined to exist, they embraced the panel with pure joy. And the older women in the audience? Well, one was in tears, believing her local Starbase fan group would be—and was—forgotten.

The Elder panellists could have answered questions for the rest of the day!

Fast forward a couple of years, and my own repeated attendance of conventions where a great majority of younger fans haven’t the slightest clue about the history of their own fandoms, much less the women’s shoulders upon which they stand.

It’s time, ladies, that we told our story. Not as some at-arms-length and rarefied curiosity of academia, not as seen through the often-clouded lens of those who weren’t there, but IN OUR OWN VOICES. We need to be heard: all our work, all our experiences. We need to be more than yet another lost or wiped-clean anecdote of women’s history.

And, with the recent announcement that a fanfiction archive has been nominated for a Hugo Award, it’s timely.

Many of us have already been silenced by time and illness. Many of us are grappling with the hard realities of twilight. Our voices are dwindling. We aren’t getting any younger, my friends, and that makes it all the more imperative: we need to record these things now.

To this end, Geek Elders Speak: In Our Own Voices is on the Forest Path Books publishing schedule, with a prospective release in the last quarter of 2020. Contributors will receive standard pro anthology pay rates and contracts. We are planning worldwide distribution in paper, e-book, and audio, with suitable advertising and promotion. As the first contributors come on board, we will be registering and promoting a Kickstarter to help with publication costs.

But we can’t do any of this without YOU. Your singular voice, your personal story, your experiences both good and bad… in short, your creative participation in a phenomenon that meant and continues to mean so much to all of us. These are truly the most vital aspects to make this anthology the success I know it can be.

Please consider contributing, either with an essay or via interview. Check out te attached suggestions. Feel free to share this letter with your fellow female Elders. Pitch us your own, unique story. We would love to hear your voice!

All the best,

Jeanine ‘Jenni’ Hennig (J Tullos Hennig) Forest Path Books Jeanine Tullos Hennig P.O. Box 847 ~ Stanwood, WA 98292 jth@forestpathbooks.com

[meeedeee]

Editing Fanlore is often a very fun (and funny) experience –- fans have wicked senses of humor, and you’ll stumble across some real gems on the wiki........I’d been casually using Fanlore as a resource for years, and I would often come across pages that I knew were missing something cool or important about our histories and our creative practices. But for some reason, I never felt equipped to contribute. I’ve talked to a lot of other fans who have also felt daunted about editing Fanlore; I think that we often discount the value of our own knowledge as fans, and it can also be overwhelming to start editing a wiki without any prior experience. Once I started editing, though, I found that I really loved it — and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be!

Five Things Kate Flanagan Said (OTW Volunteer Q&A, 2019)

[meeedeee]

Cool panel this year at Wiscon 2019.

Panel notes can be found under # FanWorkPerception hashtag 

[meeedeee]

WayBack Machine Archiving Tips For Any Blog

These tips apply to your bog. Or that of anyone else’s. You do not have to be the blog owner to archive through the Wayback Machine (WBM).

1. The Wayback Machine allows you to submit a URL to archive.  Read more.

2.  If you have your Tumblr set to endless scroll you have to save each post one by one

3. If you set your Timblr so that there are pages (Previous/Next) you can "bulk" save each page of 5-10 posts and not just each post: 

Ex: https://meeedeee.tumblr.com/page/2

http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://meeedeee.tumblr.com/page/2

4. If you run a post or a page through the WBM, it is not guaranteed that the  embedded art will also be saved. If there is something you really want  to save, right click on the art and submit the image URL through the WBM machine

5. “Read More” and flagged material may not be archived correctly through the WBM. Check your links.

6. Audio and Video will not be archived

7. Why bother with the WBM? Why not download? Well, you should download your blog, no matter what. But you will be the only person who will see the download. To save the Tumblr post or entire Tumblr blog for future fans to see, use the WBM.

8. Want to save the blog of someone who has died or gone offline? You have  2 choices: submit the pages to the WBM or use the Python script below. 

Download only Tools to archive your blog:

Tumblr’s export tool

Github/Python Tool (you can also use this tool to archive someone else’s blog)

If you need help archiving a blog, Garfield, a fan vidder, is offering to use the Python install on their machine do it for free. 

[meeedeee]

When VCRs were first sold, companies like Disney and Universal Studies sued Sony (who manufactured the Betamax VCR) claiming that recording TV shows and movies that had been broadcast over the air was copyright infringement. And because they made the VCRs, Sony was liable for contributing to the infringement. The media corporations also sued individual owners of the VCRs. (this is the over simplified version, read more here)

Shortly before the lawsuit, Jim Lowe, a staff director for the Florida state  legislature started publishing a newsletter for fans of the new tech where they could talk about VCRs (or Betamax VTRs as they were called - Video Tape Recorder) and offer to buy and sell tapes.  He too was pulled into the lawsuit and deposed and they demanded  the names and addresses of his subscribers.

Ultimately the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the new technology finding it fair use.  But for a few years well into the 1980s,  some fan conventions were hesitant to offer formal “Video Rooms” to show hard to access TV shows and movies. 

Corporations are like bullies, focusing on stuffing themselves full of profits, while trampling  over anyone who stands in their way.

You can read the first few issues of the Videophile’s Newsletter online here.

[meeedeee]

Star Trek in 1966 was just another BEM (bug eyed monster) TV show.

The Greenwood Commonwealth Tue Sep 13, 1966

[meeedeee]

In the earliest days of fandom, we owned the servers. Of course, the "servers" then were just smiles and words, pen and paper, staples and stamps. We were intimate and secretive—and also small. Fan works passed hand to hand, and there were no unintended audiences, no critical outside eyes. We controlled channels of distribution; we controlled which ears heard our stories. We wrote for an "insider audience" (Bacon-Smith 1992) with an entirely different value and culture than the traditional writing market; it was our own thing. It is hard to say when the first fan work may have appeared on a server outside our control. The early days of the internet brought us Usenet and email-based mailing lists as popular modes of communication and dissemination. The internet altered the very substance of fandom; fan artifacts were no longer physical, and geographical boundaries no longer existed (Busse and Hellekson 2006). Without these barriers, participation in fan creation communities grew by leaps and bounds. It also meant that posting a story online required relinquishing some control; you weren't giving it to a person at a fan convention, you were giving it to the world at large, to anyone who could connect to a Usenet server. And suddenly, for the first time, the platform mattered. The problem with platforms is that they have their own agenda. When deciding on policies, for example, a platform (or, rather, its stakeholders) has its own concerns—about leeway, liability, profit, and public perception (Gillespie 2010)—and these concerns are probably not the same as those of its users.

Owning the servers: A design fiction exploring the transformation of fandom into "our own" by Casey Fiesler

[meeedeee]

This is neat. On Fanlore years ago I tried to create country specific pages for fandom history to highlight non-US events and contributions.  The idea would be to provide a page where we could link info already existing on Fanlore so it would be easier to find.  A few fans from one country felt this was segregating their fan experience so we dropped the idea . I did persuade fellow editors to tag fanzines by language. Ex: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:German-Language_Zines

[meeedeee]

That first Star Trek episode was not impressive. Spock was the exception..

Albuquerque Journal Sun Sep 11, 1966

[meeedeee]

Fandom history in the Smithsonian magazine

[meeedeee]

1994: Star Trek, Star Wars, MUDs and Sex. When geeks and nerds roamed free on the Internets.

You can check out the PDF from the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/internetyellowpa00hahn

The internet yellow pages by Hahn, Harley, 1952-; Stout, Rick

[meeedeee]

When I say “Fanfiction is free” part of what I’m saying is yes, you did not pay for the thing. But I saw a comment from someone that made me realize the rest of the intention behind these words is being lost. Fanfiction is provided for free, but it is not produced for free.

Keedreva (Dec 2018)

[meeedeee]

Star Trek fashion review.

The Philadelphia Inquirer Tue Aug 2, 1966