#fanhacker

[fanhackers]

How To Be Gay, by David M. Halperin

While there are obvious fan studies classics, there are other books that don’t always fall into the “fan studies” canon that I have found incredibly useful for my own thinking.  I cited one of them, Carol Dyhouse’s  Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (2017), a few posts ago; another is David Halperin’s How To Be Gay (2012)

How To Be Gay came out of a course Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, whose full title was “How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.”  The initiation in question was not sexual, but cultural:  Halperin believes that there are not only gay texts, a gay canon of sorts, but also gay ways of reading that are taught and learned and that help constitute something we might call a gay subjectivity (that you don’t have to be gay actually to have):  e.g. Hollywood movies, opera, Broadway musicals, camp, diva worship, drag, muscle culture, style, fashion, interior design. Halperin asked both why this set of things–why musicals? why this diva or that–and what do they tell us about gay experience? Halperin was trying to trace “gay men’s characteristic relation to mainstream culture,” which often involves collaborative and camp appropriation: a queering.

I find this book very useful, both because fandom also has its own shared languages and rites of initiation (consider the idea of watching something with fannish goggles or slash goggles or a fanfic lens, as was recently discussed in a previous post; think about all the languages and tropes and artistic structures we all learn from each other) but also because Halperin talks about modes of identification that aren’t representational or based obviously in identity politics. So, for example, he says that the gay male students in his class were more likely to express themselves vis a vis a shared text like  The Golden Girls than vis a vis the traditions of what Halperin calls “good gay writing.” There is, Halperin argues, a queer pleasure in the Broadway musical that’s different than the pleasures of gay identity or even gay sex; similarly, queer female fans might find pleasures in identifying with, say, Sherlock, Crowley, or Blackbeard that are very different from the pleasures offered by a woman- or lesbian-centered text. 

Here’s an excerpt that gives a good sense of the book, I think: fans might identify with this or recognize it as descriptive of their own fannish feels.  (FWIW, the italics are all his!)

[H]omosexuality is not just a sexual orientation but a cultural orientation, a dedicated commitment to certain social or aesthetic values, an entire way of being.  That distinctively gay way of being, moreover, appears to be rooted in a particular queer way of feeling. And that queer way of feeling—that queer subjectivity—expresses itself through a peculiar, dissident way of relating to cultural objects (movies, songs, clothes, books, works of art) and cultural forms in general (art and architecture, opera and musical theater, pop and disco, style and fashion, emotion and language). As a cultural practice, male homosexuality involves a characteristic way of receiving, reinterpreting, and reusing mainstream culture, of decoding and recoding the heterosexual or heteronormative meanings already encoded in that culture, so that they come to function as vehicles of gay or queer meaning. It consists, as the critic John Clum says, in “a shared alternative reading of mainstream culture.” As a result, certain figures who are already prominent in the mass media become gay icons: they get taken up by gay men with a peculiar intensity that differs from their wider reception in the straight world. (That practice is so marked, and so widely acknowledged, that the National Portrait Gallery in London could organize an entire exhibition around the theme of Gay Icons in 2009.) And certain cultural forms, such as Broadway musicals or Hollywood melodramas, are similarly invested with a particular power and significance, attracting a disproportionate number of gay male fans. What this implies is that it is not enough for a man to be homosexual in order to be gay. Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a distinctive way.  (p. 12 - 13)

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

[transformativeworks]

July 2024 Newsletter, Volume 191

In July's OTW newsletter, Fanhackers is looking for zine submissions, the 2024 Election is around the corner, and Policy & Abuse made a pie chart of 2024 ticket submissions so far! Read all that and more at: https://otw-news.org/4fs2uyk7

[fanlore-wiki]

Fandom Friendships Editing Challenge

Fandom is all about community and the friends we’ve made along the way! To celebrate the upcoming Fanhackers Fandom Friendships zine, we’ll be running a brand-new editing challenge on the Fanlore wiki from November 11th through 24th. Complete tasks by adding content to community-themed articles and earn badges for your edits!

You can learn more on how to participate in our Fandom Friendships Challenge guide!

Don’t forget to also check out the zine’s submission page! If your fandom friendships have shaped your experience as a fan, consider submitting to the zine, which is open until November 30th.

If this is your first time editing Fanlore, you can also check out our New Visitor Portal and tutorial pages to learn how to get started, or join our Discord server to chat with other Fanlore editors!

We hope to meet you on the pages of Fanlore, and happy editing!

[ourwitching]

Mark Heresy, American, b. 1965. Will to Power (detail), 1992, Ink on paper, 28 x 22 in, 2000.11.5, ...

[sprintingowl]

5e And Me

I want to preface this by saying that folks who write 5e hacks are incredibly strong designers, and are working uphill against an engine that wants them to spend a ton of extra effort in order to do anything.

If you don't believe me, here's a quick Mork Borg monster that I wrote while typing up this sentence: Typography Goblin (3 HP, Morale 4, Tiny Knife d2, if it hits you with an attack it also changes one letter on your character sheet to another letter of its choice)

Anyway, 5e fanhackers, I respect your work. And exactly one week ago, I tried to write a fanhack of my own.

It didn't go so well.

1 week and 129 pages later, it is finished. Also, it has these features:

-No passing resemblance to 5e

-Design that reads like a panicky subway rant

-WEIRDLY thirsty for lumberjacks

-Classes have abilities like "when you damage someone, you may pick up all of the dice in arm's reach, roll them, and add them to the damage roll"

My goal at the outset was to tighten up a few bits of 5e that felt cumbersome (whole turn misses in combat, passive relationship with the dice, clunky per-class spell lists, players only using DnD beyond buttons for things because the rules feel hard,) and I don't think I accomplished any of that.

Instead I:

-Completely rewired the action economy

-Wrote fourteen new classes

-Wrote fifteen new species

-Wrote new rules for cross-classing and hybridization

-Overhauled magic into a new and different nightmare

-Rewrote the bestiary

-Rewrote the setting

And along the way I think I started to go a little squirrely, because balance-wise the least impressive classes are the ones that can pop off into gamebreaking combos, meanwhile the warlock becomes immune to damage while being pinned.

Anyway, I'm going back through and editing it and trying to take the horny for lumberjacks thing down a notch. AMA if you want to know anything about this cursed project.

[sonichedgeblog]

'Martlet's Fun Adventure! ' (Hack) by Roebloz A family-friendly platformer fanhack of Sonic 1 on the Sega Master System, starring Martlet from Undertale Yellow. https://shc.zone/entries/contest2024/1081 Support us on Patreon

[olderthannetfic]

Ao3 tagging survey from British Columbia Okanagan university:

tumblr.com/fanhackers/772074544451174400?source=share

--

[gwenpools-aesthetic]

Check out this blog post I wrote for Fanhackers about my dissertation!

[selfportrait27]

Some of you might know this already, but Ween fans have a Yellow Balloon group too, called Sunny Bunny Recovery. They got a shoutout from Aaron at a show last year, so this is what he was talking about if you didn't know. They're still running online meetings through their Facebook group in the absence of shows; if you're not on Facebook there's a contact form at the bottom of their web page to have the meeting link sent to your email.

These guys have specifically built harm reduction into their policy. Total abstinence isn't a condition of membership or the default gold standard. They also make a point of welcoming people on Medically Assisted Treatment programs (methadone/suboxone etc), which is a huge deal in itself. Their webite says in no uncertain terms, "Telling someone that they are not clean because of their use of MAT is not allowed." I have zero doubt that that policy alone has already saved lives.

Importantly as well, their website explicitly states that membership in AA or NA is not implied. That means that a) they understand how deeply ingrained the AA model is, that it's basically still implied as the default if your policy doesn't single it out by name, and b) they actually have the balls to openly take a position on that. (I also love that they didn't defensively over-explain the difference between opposing the dominance of the 12-step model and opposing the model itself. Smart motherfuckers.)

The Fanhackers article above (which does briefly mention the Sunny Bunnies) is a pretty nice primer on the Yellow Balloon movement's history, from sober Deadheads forming the Wharf Rats in the 80s, through to present day. Very cool stuff, check it out.

Oh yeah - I was in the Sunny Bunny Facebook group for a while, and yes they do actively use their own policy in practice. I didn't really see any examples of rules needing to be enforced, and I think the incentive for everyone to cooperate and make it work is pretty obvious, but the fact that people actually feel comfortable talking honestly about their *current* drug use on the main feed is the best evidence to me that there's no lip service going on. Lack of conflict isn't always a good sign, and that's a whole nother post on its own, but I think it says a lot about the culture of a group when its members feel safe to actually do everything they're supposedly "allowed" to do. (Also, they're a super lovely bunch of people.)

While the audio portion of the podcast is on hiatus, we'll be publishing at least one longform piece of reporting/analysis on fan culture a month, and we're THRILLED that our first piece up is a another from Maria Temming (who wrote our whump deep dive).

This one is on yellow balloon groups, fandoms-within-fandoms for clean and sober music fans. Click through to read or listen to a full audio version of the story!

[fayesemblemring]

If Engage modding ever gets to the point people are able to make custom Emblems, I need Emblem Kelik to be a thing so badly because it'd be the funniest shit

[fanhackers]

[Survey] Content Management on Archive of Our Own

Carol Zhang, a second year Masters of Digital Arts and Humanities student at the University of British Columbia Okanagan is doing research on Archive of Our Own under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Cinnamon. This research is specifically examining how users interact with the archive’s tagging system and how their wider Internet usage could impact that. Part of this research is the survey - available on this link - for which Zhang is looking for participants.

The survey is anonymous and it takes 10-15 minutes to fill out. It will be available on the above link until January 20th. Participants must be at least 18 years old. More information about how the responses will be stored can be found in the consent form and if you have any further questions, you can contact Carol Zhang at the email address zcarol@mail.ubc.ca.

The results of the research will be available through the university’s thesis archive, cIRcle.

If you are interested in talking about content management tools and your experience navigating the archive and you are eligible, consider contributing to the research by filling out the survey.

[transformativeworks]

Five Things LianneW Said

In FiveThings LianneW talks about researching acafandom and oral history projects as an OTW Fanhackers volunteer! https://otw-news.org/2p8tztdy

[sprintingowl]

Never Stop Calibrating

So I released a tabletop rpg a little while back. It's about 1920s occult horror.

The core book's about a hundred pages, and I've kind of released seventeen or so supplements for it as well, so it's getting up there in page count.

I've also been playtesting it, playtesting the supplements, running demo games, making corrections when I find something broken, and somewhere in this process I foolishly assumed I polished all the bugs out.

The thing is, even games that are as old as history, games like go and mancala that have been polished smooth by the river of human interaction, can still be tweaked just a *little* bit. Optionally, of course. To better suit a specific group of players.

And ttrpgs as an art form are (probably) younger than go and mancala, and are way rougher around the edges, and yeah I found some more stuff in my game I wanted to adjust.

I think this is kind of just the process, though. I think as long as people are playing ttrpgs, they're changing them. This happens at the micro level all the time, with GMs making house rules and tables agreeing to play in particular ways (lines and veils, discouraging or encouraging pvp, steering towards or away from romance and drama.) But it also happens at the macro level. There's a whole old-school revival about bashing 1e into increasingly refined or increasingly alien shapes. Heck, 2e's probably due for its own renaissance soon.

And the outcome of all of this is that a game is never really done. Sure, I'm doing active updates for this thing, but even if I weren't, all it would take for the game to change would be for someone to pick up and play it, maybe make a houserule or two, maybe scribble a fanhack in the margins.

And that's kind of sweet, honestly.

The folks who designed go, mancala, chess, final fantasy, punch out, the quiet year, gubat banwa, beyond the fence below the grave, have created these little perpetual motion machines that grow and change for as long as we do.

[francescacoppa]

Blogging at Fanhackers

Hi - doing something new at OTW, blogging for Fanhackers. Hopefully on Sundays (more or less.)  Gonna try to be here more too. 

Intro post here: https://tmblr.co/ZxUk-td-mhNUum00

[fanlore-wiki]

The Fandom Friendships Challenge is complete!

Thank you to everyone who completed this new challenge — we had 24 editors participate with 18 finishing all 6 tasks!

Fanhackers is still accepting zine submissions until 30 November!

Fandom Friendships Editing Challenge

Fandom is all about community and the friends we’ve made along the way! To celebrate the upcoming Fanhackers Fandom Friendships zine, we’ll be running a brand-new editing challenge on the Fanlore wiki from November 11th through 24th. Complete tasks by adding content to community-themed articles and earn badges for your edits!

You can learn more on how to participate in our Fandom Friendships Challenge guide!

Don’t forget to also check out the zine’s submission page! If your fandom friendships have shaped your experience as a fan, consider submitting to the zine, which is open until November 30th.

If this is your first time editing Fanlore, you can also check out our New Visitor Portal and tutorial pages to learn how to get started, or join our Discord server to chat with other Fanlore editors!

We hope to meet you on the pages of Fanlore, and happy editing!

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

Research Request: help a fellow acafan!

Hello, my dear people!

First of all, I hope everyone is doing fine and taking care of yourselves. Things have been hard for me, this is why I'm not posting here or dropping by at all. Honestly, I'm living just by doing the bare minimum each day and my bare minimum right now is my undergrad dissertation and that's why I'm here! I need some help!

My research is about fanfiction and its characteristics. I'll analyze a few Tumblr posts written between 2014 and 2021 that reflects, criticizes or points out fanfiction aspects in a wide range in a way to to explore some thoughts of fic writers and readers about fanfiction and its characterizations. The goal is to compare to academic studies related to fanfiction and then contrast everything that was gathered with my own experience. During my research I'll take part of XiChengClipse, a fan event that you can create fanworks to a non-canon pairing from The Untamed series. My plan is to write a fic and document the whole process and compare my findings with the information I gathered not only from fans, but also academic researchers. That's the initial idea, not sure how the project will end up like, but anyways!!!!

My issue right now is that I only have got a couple of texts about fanfiction and I'd like suggestions to expand my very limited options and see if I can find more compelling texts.

Requirements:

It needs to be some kind of analysis, criticism or reflection about fanfiction - it can focus in any kind of aspect: format, linguistic, pacing, genre, comparison to original fiction, tropes, etc. It just have to be about fanfiction and its characteristics.

The post MUST have been posted originally on Tumblr between 2014 and 2021.

The post doesn't need to include just the original post, you can send a post with a discussion and/or relevant commentary added after the post got out in the Tumblr world.

You just need to drop the link in the replies of this post and nothing more. If you guys can reblog to put the word out, it'd be even better!

Thanks everyone who can help me and sorry for the long text!