This Week in Meta

Happy Sunday! I'm trying really hard to stick to the tentative posting schedule, which at the moment is Sundays, Wednesdays, and the occasional Friday.

Thank you to everyone who suggested links over the last few issues! I'm particularly thankful for links of off-Dreamwidth meta. I haven't been finding as much new stuff on Tumblr/Pillowfort/etc., suprisingly; if you happen to run into anything good, please send it along for possible inclusion in a future issue. ♥

cimorene posted Rivers of London: shipping in canon and fanon (the role of fan favorites): "This fandom seems like a perfect example to me of that situation where people like the woman in a f/m relationship - I'd bet that probably everybody who ships the protagonist with Nightingale instead (or in addition but not in OT3, as in... will read both/either) likes her - but are more interested in the other ship because of (1) interest in the other character (and a desire to put that character in a pairing) and (2) screentime and story weight devoted to the relationship."

Claire Rousseau (Youtube) posted Hugo Awards Nominations 101 - Who, What & How Can You Nominate?: "Time for a deep dive into the hugo Awards nomination process!!"

jadislefeu posted On setting up Calibre for fanfic: "was asked on Discord for a tutorial about using Calibre for fanfic in general! Please feel welcome to share or link this wherever, because it was more work than I realized it would be when I started and I want it to be useful to people."

lovetincture posted The Ethics of Monetizing Fanworks: "Leaving aside legality, because I think that’s already been discussed by people who are much, much smarter than I am, my primary concern about the monetization of fanworks is ethics."

naye posted Guardian meta-meta: Censorship and Homosexuality in China: "However, given the political situation in the People's Republic of China, every interview touching on sensitive subjects (and homosexuality is absolutely a sensitive subject) must out of necessity come with an aspect of performance, as there are things you absolutely cannot say. My thoughts on that kind of spiralled out of control, and so here's a long meta (meta-meta?) about Guardian, censorship and homosexuality in the PRC."

nostalgia posted It's A Topic ("You wore your soldier-hat!"): "I come at this mostly from Dr Whom fandom, which has been monetising fandom in one way or another since at least the 90s. (It use to be fairly easy to find old bits of fic by NA/EDA/BF writers online, and some of it's probably still there.) I once got into a fight on Outpost Gallifrey because I called the tie-in books "published fanfic" and one of the authors assumed I meant "they're shit, because all fanfic is shit.""

Rowan Ellis (Youtube) posted The Evolution Of Queerbaiting: From Queercoding to Queercatching: "From The Hays Code to the new phenomenon of "queercatching" - here is the history of queerbaiting. Including all your favourite like every Disney villain ever, Destiel, Valkyrie, Johnlock, Sterek, Le Fou, Sulu, the Yellow Power Ranger, and more!"

Flashback - April 1, 2015

A nostalgic look at LiveJournal:

Lindsay Gates-Markel for The Toast posted In Celebration of Old-School LiveJournal: "I can’t shake the memory that writing was easy in the LiveJournal days; I remember sitting at that computer desk in my childhood home, writing about my innermost joys, and pausing at the keyboard, my fingers poised over the keys. I shut my eyes and waited, knowing the next words would come soon—and they always did. Whether they came only because I believed they would, or vice versa, I still don’t know. But in the same way I knew the words would come, I knew that life would always be good to me, that its riches would always be clear to me; or at least that I could be “poet enough” to seek them out."

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