004. January 26, 2019

[thisweekmod]

I'm sure you all know this already, but: Always check the comments on a thing! A discussion post is just the starting point-- comments are the continuation and often end up even more interesting than the original post.

And speaking of comments: you are totally welcome to leave any kind of comment here. A response to a link, an idea for a new link, a tip or question about the newsletter-- anything goes.

Onto the issue!

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thisweekmeta collects links of fandom meta and discussions from all over the web, and welcomes submissions from readers. If you know of an excellent fandom discussion post that we've missed, whether new or old, please feel free to leave a comment on this newest issue or email the editor.

The FAQ can be found here, and our editorial guidelines can be found here. Questions, concerns, and feedback are all welcomed.

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Newer Stuff

cfiesler posted How does new canon impact fanfiction production?: "In looking at the relationship between two of the questions - how often respondents write fanfiction and when they are most likely to write fanfiction - we see that people who write fanfiction more often are less impacted by new canon, and people who write less frequently are more likely to be inspired by new canon."

fairestcat posted On Fandom and the "culture of selling": "Does joining someone's Patreon or tipping them on Ko-Fi or purchasing a fanwork from them change that relationship? Probably. But not as much as some old-school fans seem to think."

quiltingsarah (Reddit) posted The olden days of fanfiction-share your memories: "The first sort of fanfic I read was in a magazine that had a story in installments I got at a Doctor Who convention in the early 1980's. it was a Star Trek/Who xo, never did read the end of it because I only found the first 2. So I'd go to cons, pick up the occasional zine."

quinfirefrorefiddle posted Fandom History- A Quick Rundown: "There are certain events, trends, or facts in fandom that were important enough, or in some cases just weird enough, that I'm always kind of surprised when I meet a fan who hasn't heard of them. Totally unfair, of course, I learn about fandom history I've never heard of before all the time."

Rhodanum (Pillowfort) posted THE PREQUEL TRILOGY IN THE 2000s -- A WOMAN-RUN STAR WARS FANDOM: "One thing that gets lost when discussing the history of Star Wars is how heavily female-dominated the fandom for the Prequel Trilogy was, particularly in the 2000s. Fan-site after fan-site, fan-shrine after fan-shrine, the userbases of which were overwhelmingly girls and women."

Steven T. Wright for Ars Technica posted “The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging: "Growing up on the Web at the dawn of the social media age (circa 2007), it felt like all the connectivity-obsessed sites forming the burgeoning core of the new Internet were haunted by a faded spectre called LiveJournal. As a teen, I never actually knew anyone who had one, but I heard whispers and rumors about drama on the service all the time."

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Flashback - be back soon.

Link taken down! I'll put a new one up later today. In consideration of the link owner, I have also screened comments that a) had the link or a related one, b) a Google-able quote, c) link owner's name.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I don't see anything else identifying.

Re: complaining about complaining

[sylvaine]

That's a good point! Fortnite kids are, well, kids - elementary age! Although at least in the library I work at, Minecraft is also still very popular among that crowd xD And I suppose 2011 is half a decade ago...

suggestion box

[sylvaine]

I posted some questions about the DW culture for linking to different fanworks and there's been a few interesting responses - if you feel that this is interesting to the wider audience, I would appreciate a link in the next newsletter, as I would love to get a wider range of perspectives!

Re: complaining about complaining

[cassini]

[things change much faster, i think i can objectively say, though yes the kids i know who play fortnite still play minecraft and then they get me complaining because i don't know how to use their xbone... canon material can simply have a faster pace, not necessarily, compare the current su release schedule to the way voltron just happened in the relative blink of an eye, if you wish. lets players often release every day, or multiple times a week, if that's a focus of someone's fandoms. i don't quite know what to make of the speed of some things *old person headshake* ]

Re: complaining about complaining

[sylvaine]

Oh that's ridiculously true - I have no idea how anyone with a job or other time commitment keeps up with fandoms like letsplayers or Critical Role or whathaveyou!

Re: complaining about complaining

[cassini]

[absolutely, my spouse is invariably behind with crit role, and they aren't really consuming much else. the speeds perpetuates when the releases are so frequent, and if you do consume it immediately you can get burned out, impatient for the next. unlike the wait periods you get with book or movie releases, or even some video games, some internet reliant fandoms move at a breakneck pace. but i'd imagine they'll sustain themselves nonetheless as the lower age bracket for the potential audience shrinks as far as it can ]

Re: suggestion box

[thisweekmod]

I was going to ask you later today if I could link that post!! :D

Re: suggestion box

[sylvaine]

Excellent :D

[kore]

Yes, thanks for listening and being so open to criticism about your baby/project! I'm trying to listen more ("Talk less. Smile more," LOL) and not knee-jerk react myself.

Re: suggestion box

[kore]

I put in my two cents because OF COURSE I DID, not so much to be all Me Me Me, but I did want to put what I was thinking in a little bit of context.

Looking back I'm really happy people stayed calm and open to suggestions. I am WORKING on that myself.

[thisweekmod]

When a project's this young it's pretty easy to adjust policies and procedures, nbd. And while I'm a control freak about my stuff I don't mind criticism from other people if it's kindly meant and/or to make things better. :D Here's hoping this time next month everything will be flowing smoothly!

[doranwen]

Same. I keep debating whether I should actually *delete* the old posts - I have a LOT of them - and I don't have a paid account so trying to edit them all to private only even is a pain… I imported everything to DW and locked all of those to private, so I have it preserved at least.

[fyreharper]

(Higher-effort than tagging people, but if you want to make sure someone sees a particular comment thread, one option would be to dm them a link to the comment! Or drop it in an off-topic comment on one of their recent entries, if they’re not the sort of person to be driven buggy by that sort of thing)

[novembermond]

I backed up on dw and then deleted my lj as I didn't trust the russian servers. maybe paranoid, but *shrug*

[doranwen]

I thought of that - but I still have a few friends on LJ that I go look at their LJs once in a blue moon, and I've found having an LJ account handy in getting access to old posts from people who *didn't* delete their LJs. At least one or two I've gotten to add me as a friend so I could access locked fic and stuff. (I'm still creating epubs of every LJ fic I find, just in case - and so I can read them offline.)

[kore]

The problem I have with just screening the comments is that now a lot of the explanation is gone, so people coming in late don't have the full context. I see a lot of "if something is public it's linkable" in the comments to the poll post, and while I generally share that, I did speak up because of the particular details of this situation. But it's good to leave out the identifying details. I think batwrangler's doing a really good job in those comments of explaining the general context of LJ 10+ years ago, though.

totally ot but...

[ithiliana]

I LOVE the links to the older meta. I find them a lot more interesting than acafandom stuff.

Well, speaking as an aca-fan, a lot of us wrote meta on our fannish journals which (in my case at least) turned into the gateway drug for writing scholarship!