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The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion

2024-02-15T05:06:41Z

The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion

Leaked emails and files indicate authors and works deemed “not eligible” for the awards were removed due to political considerations.

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Thinking about fanwork categories

2023-06-18T13:49:33Z

I'm slowly filling out square_bromides with my old works. Each post includes the original AO3 tags in the text, but I'm also adding new dreamwidth tags, which will help anyone wanting to see all my works of a particular type.

So now I have to decide what people will be interested in, and how much detail I can be bothered going into. Which has me thinking about different ways of tagging and categorising fanworks in general.
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Non-Canon Jane Austen Fanfic Ship Prompt Fics 2023

2023-06-15T02:51:55Z

Non-Canon JAFF Ship Prompt Fics 2023

Seems relevant to some people's interests!

Below the cut, the two prompts I posted, for my own records. I don't know if I'll write anything, I haven't had the writing bug in a while, but it was fun coming up with prompts.
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Percentage of Works at AO3 (and sometimes Fanfiction.net)

2022-01-19T14:16:10Z

Meme from shadaras: How big are your fandoms? List them in order of the number of works posted for them at AO3.
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Some advice on using dreamwidth

2022-01-05T12:37:36Z

There's been recent rumblings on tumblr about people wanting to move to dreamwidth, which I think would be great!

Two nice guides to dreamwidth aimed at tumblr folk which cover most important things:

Here's a guide to how this all works on a cultural level

Disjointed Dreamwidth Tips (written by someone who wasn’t on LJ)

Some extra things:
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Writer Tag Game

2021-08-28T06:28:34Z

I was tagged by tree/ hoidn but I'd been vaguely pondering doing what I think is the same meme after seeing it a bunch on dreamwidth. So I'm not tagging anyone because I can't remember who's done it already but have enjoyed seeing everyone's responses and would enjoy seeing some more!
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Let Me Tell You About Homestuck (negative)

2021-07-01T08:07:37Z

A summary of this SarahZ video about the TERRIBLE behaviour of the people who run Homestuck. You don't need to know anything about Homestuck to understand this post.

To paraphrase SarahZ, the company harasses and dismisses anyone who critiques them as 'poisoned', despite having openly admitted to some serious fuckups.

And watching Andrew Hussie(42) interact with SarahZ(23), I see a practiced combination of intimidation, condescending flattery, and the promise of secret insider knowledge trying to leverage Hussie's power as a loved, respected, and powerful creator talking to what they see as a weaker, star-struck, easily influenced female fan. Looking back on everything I know of Homestuck, it's clear Hussie has used this schtick successfully for a decade to mistreat, silence, and control those around them, and it's only really coming to light now.
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Fandom Stats

2021-04-20T13:37:46Z

Fandom Stats displays AO3 data with graphs. It's nothing you can't see in a search result sidebar but the graphs are fun.

(For those going 'Hey, Sean, weren't you going to get into fandom stats?": I got one lecture into a stats course and it was all too hard and I did something else instead >.>)

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Concrit community for fanworks and original works

2021-04-15T04:13:17Z

concrit_x

I thought about joining for about five seconds and then my anxiety went NOPE. But it seems relevant to people's interests and at least somewhat active.

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Two upcoming kinda-exchanges currently open for sign-ups

2020-08-03T03:27:31Z

For the most part I assume that anyone on dreamwidth who's into fanworks exchanges is signed up to fandomcalendar. But here's two that might appeal to people who make fanworks but aren't into traditional exchanges.

fearbuddies: You sign up to finish a personal project by the set date, and get help in the form of cheerleading or beta-ing etc. You're also assigned to help someone else finish their project. Seems like it could be great for people who like deadlines, can't find a beta, etc. Art, fic, interactive fiction, podfic, or vid. WIPs ok.

remixrevival: Remix someone's fanwork and have someone else remix one of yours. Great fun as a fanartist. You need at least three works in a specific 'fandom'. Art or fic.

I'm signed up for remix! I think fearbuddies would just set off my anxiety but it's a cool idea. I clicked one of the signup links to check it out, and the options are pretty varied, from "daily personal message" to "Minimal Interaction but an Air of Menace".

You can definitely do original works for remix, and I assume also for fearbuddies.

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Wiscon is done!!

2020-05-26T08:12:35Z

It ended very sharply since they made the discord read-only at local midnight (my lunch time, a few hours ago) I've joined a few related discords, though, and had a bunch of new people follow me who I am slowly checking out one by one (if I do this too quickly I just go UGH TOO HARD and never subscribe to anyone).

Anyway, the con was a lot of fun! *waves to everyone I saw there, and also anyone I didn't* I have one more panel to write up and then I'll do a panels post, but in the meantime here's some links I had opened in tabs and stuff.
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I am at Wiscon AS WE SPEAK

2020-05-24T06:05:44Z

I have been having a lot of fun at the online version of the feminist scifi convention Wiscon this weekend. I was worried I'd be asleep during all the interesting stuff, but even though I've had to miss most of the panels I've still been to a couple and had some great conversations in the discord. Including meeting some new dreamwidth people *waves*
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Wiscon Online

2020-05-10T12:48:50Z

Wiscon is open for online registration until the 20th.

I got the free ticket because I am pretty sure timezones mean I won't be able to actually attend anything (which is fair enough, it was hardly designed to be an international con!), but will see.

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Swancon: ONLINE, and LOVE NEVER DIES

2020-05-01T07:13:56Z

This ANZAC weekend was the local scifi con, Swancon. And like so many recent cons, it was online.

This was an interesting experience! I was unfortunately very sleepy this weekend so wasn't up for a bunch of content I'd been looking forward to, but participated in couple of Youtube chats via Watch2gether, which were super fun. I also submitted to and checked out the online art gallery, which was a cute virtual space you could wander around.

There were also video chats, online board games, etc. There's been a bunch of discord conversations leading up to Swancon, too, and the possibility of a bookclub etc following the con.

The first thing we watched on Youtube was the Australian production of the Phantom of the Opera Sequel musical, Love Never Dies. It was very entertainingly bad, and we all ended up shipping Meg/Christine and Phantom/Raoul more than any of the canon ships.
( In which I drag Andrew Lloyd Webber for his terrible filk )

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Briefly poked at Wattpad

2020-03-19T08:35:59Z

I had to make a Wattpad account to read something and decided to try out posting something, because I needed a distraction(*). It's a site for posting fiction, with a lot of teenagers writing self insert RPF romances. I settled on Wedding Is Destiny since Pride and Prejudice femslash never goes out of style and it can just sit there to be stumbled upon whenever someone happens to want some.

You can post original stories and charge money for them, and there's also some kinda cute features for adding character notes and stuff to help with the writing process. It's very clean and brightly coloured, posting stories feels easy and light which I can see people finding encouraging.

It's moderately easy to use, certainly compared to fanfiction.net, though there didn't seem to be a html option so I cut and pasted the Rich Text from the AO3. It also has WAY less info on each story than Fanfiction.net or AO3, making finding stories nearly as opaque as searching tumblr tags. There's probably tricks to it I'm missing, though.

If you're curious, here's the three versions: Ao3, Fanfiction.net, Wattpad.

I have had ZERO VIEWS so far lol. Everyone seems to do covers there so I chucked one together haphazardly. As you can see, graphic design really isn't my passion, but eh, noone's going to read it anyway.

I don't know if I'll bother cross posting anything else. My main motivation is to help anyone thinking "I wish someone had written X" and am not sure what I write is what people there are likely to be looking for. I've written a few tropey romances but not for fandoms anyone's much into these days, especially not young people. I was curious to know what it was like to post to, and now I know!

(*)From my toilet breaking and me needing to wrangle a plumber. Yes, great timing, amiright? It's all fixed now, but it was good to have something mindless to do like cutting and pasting chapters.

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Various fanwork creation events

2020-03-16T00:20:03Z

Happy distracting Comment Fest Lots of fandoms, allows for fanart etc as well as fanfic.

Homestuck Comment Fic fest

All The Nice Things Flash Exchange A fic exchange for nice things happening to people

Lockdown Fest For fanworks of any kind on a theme of being stuck inside. Has a sub-theme of Covid-19 but these works must be tagged so people can avoid them.

A post with some more links.

Discussions of running a fanvid con online

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Electric Challenge 1-3

2020-02-06T14:49:02Z

electric_challenge is a dreamwidth community encouraging people to make dreamwidth posts about gaming.

Stage 1: A friending meme

Stage 2: My history as a player of computer games, below.

Stage 3: My favourite gaming communities:

otome_games, which I started when the mod of the previous otome community vanished. It's a small but very nice group and they're fun to squee with.

I poked through my subscriptions but all the other dreamwidth gaming communities I'm in haven't had any posts in months :(

The Black Emporium discord, for the Dragon Age rarepair exchange, is pretty active. I muted it when I needed a break from exchanges but everyone was very nice last time I popped in.

I'm on a few game dev discords but try to keep my game dev persona a bit separate to my fannish one. I can pass on links to anyone who's interested!

And now my history as a player of computer games, under the cut.

I love games, but am also very bad at almost all of them, with very bad reaction times and coordination. So since the beginning, I've made my own games, because the ones I wanted to (or even could) play didn't exist.
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Fandom For Australia

2020-01-30T12:41:33Z

A fandom auction helping raise donations for those affected by the Australian Bushfires.

SIGN-UPS OPEN: 25 Jan 2020
BIDDING STARTS: 23 Feb 2020

Tumblr | Dreamwidth | LiveJournal | Twitter

I was going to sign up for this but I really don't seem to be in a drawing mood lately. Still, hopefully it will appeal to some of you as creators or bidders!

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Demographics of Yuri Fans in Japan, and English Speaking Fandom

2019-07-27T06:17:15Z

A conversation made me curious so I looked up if there was any information, and found two very interesting posts by the same blogger.

Yuri isn’t Made for Men: An Analysis of the Demographics of Yuri Mangaka and Fans compiles existing information on Japanese creators and fans

Report on the Yuri Fandom Demographic Survey discusses a survey they ran in English speaking yuri fandom

"Yuri" is f/f manga and anime made in Japan, which has a very different culture and history to f/f made in English.

tl;dr: Analysis I've seen of English speaking femslash fandom has it being like 90% queer women. But English speaking yuri fandom is more evenly split between (mostly straight) men and (mostly queer) women, with a non-negligible number of non binary people. And while there's gender differences in how people approach yuri, they're not as big as you might expect. I find this a really interesting counterpoint to the general assumption that f/f for straight men and f/f for queer women involve completely separate and distinct genres and social groups.

More thoughts and numbers below the cut! Also a brief mention of works containing incest.
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Two fannish things

2019-06-15T00:44:26Z

I can't remember if I mentioned it before, so: fffriday has nice, varied reviews of f/f romances.

There's an upcoming fest for interactive fanfiction.

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Swancon 2019! Sort of!

2019-04-22T13:29:19Z

I did make it in the end, but only for the Saturday. Which was lots of fun and SO MUCH LESS EXHAUSTING than going for the whole con, so I think I'll make it my default from now on.

There's no panel notes or anything, just me rambling about my day.
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We're not going to swancon this year

2019-04-08T11:03:44Z

Thought I should mention it while I remember. (Also I just gave my self a minor burn and need a distraction, sorry if this is a bit badly worded as a result)

There's no big reason, mainly I've been finding it more of a strain on my health so we wanted to try not going and see if we regretted it. If I feel unexpectedly energetic I might take the train down for Saturday but I wouldn't count on it.

Hope you all have fun without us!

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pondering fanfiction numbers

2019-04-04T08:00:07Z

I argued with someone on tumblr who said the quantity of fanfic produced has starkly decreased since 2009, but while I was sure they were wrong I couldn't back myself up with hard evidence. Luckily their main argument was "these days there's nothing as active as Stargate Atlantis fandom used to be", which was pretty easy to refute.

Beyond that specific conversation, I'm wondering if there's been any studies of fanfic/fanwork volume over time, or if there's any way to estimate even a rough ballpark. It would be interesting to even just see changes within a specific community over time, eg Jane Austen fandom after various adaptations. Or comparing numbers within different archives, like fanfiction.net vs AO3. But the AO3 is the only archive I've come across which makes it easy to look back on past numbers for that sort of thing, and it's too young and unevenly popular to be a reliable sample.
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Usage of “No Archive Warnings Apply” and “Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” on the AO3

2019-03-04T04:18:47Z

An Archive Of Our Own (AO3) is an archive for fanworks. Any work posted there needs to be given a title, a fandom, a rating (from "General Audiences" to "Explicit", with the option to pick "No Rating"), and warnings. Here's the AO3's guide to using warnings, note that it deals with some possibly triggering subjects.

Note these two cases in particular:

Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Use this if warnings may apply but you don't want to use them.

No Archive Warnings Apply
Use this if AO3 warnings don't apply to your content

These are not the same! But the specific differences can be muddy.

From A Moving Forward PSA for everyone using AO3 by kkglinka:

“No Archive Warnings Apply” means the fic is PG13 at worst, probably fluff, totally safe.

“Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” is the polar opposite. It’s a glaring Enter at Your Own Risk billboard. It means: a shitload of warnings apply but I ain’t telling because this story requires shock value. It’s very important to read the author’s notes for those fics because they might be using that older format from above.

So I thought this was roughly true, if a bit over-simplistic, then decided to do some rough poking at the AO3, and now I don’t think it’s true at all: as far as I can tell, while works marked "No Archive Warnings Apply" are overall lower rated and "safer" than works marked "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings", the difference is small enough to not be much of a useful guide to the content of any given fic.

For example: using the AO3 search, 14% of fic tagged "No Archive Warnings Apply" are explicit, while 16% of those tagged "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" are. A difference, but not a hugely significant one. And under the cut I have a bunch of examples of dark topics which are about half as common amongst "No Archive Warnings Apply" works as "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" ones: a significant difference, but not large enough to make "No Archive Warnings Apply" safe.

My goal isn't to criticise kkglinka, I agreed with them until I ran the numbers (and it is of course possible that I somehow ran the numbers wrong) My goal is to encourage an accurate understanding of how AO3 users use these tags and warnings, and also to have fun playing with numbers because I am a nerd. In the likely event that my own analysis is flawed, I would be interested to hear about it.

And I do agree with kkglinka's final point: if you see something marked "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" you should check the notes and tags very carefully, especially if there's subjects you find triggering. From broader fandom context I suspect kkglinka is pushing back against the situation where someone posts a worked marked "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" that contains major character death or whatever, and a reader(*) gets angry because they think "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" means "No Archive Warnings Apply". And it does not! It means the work could contain literally anything, and if you can't deal with that you shouldn't read it.

So I guess my point is that readers should also check the notes and tags for works marked "No Archive Warnings Apply". If a work marked that way contains major character death etc then yeah, you have a right to be pissed off. But a whole bunch of other stuff is fair game, including porn and other "unsafe" content. Always step carefully.

Content Note: discussion of triggering tags/content
( More rambling along the same lines )

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Thinking about how I relate to my fictional squicks

2018-10-29T08:28:02Z

I've had a few conversations about this lately and feel like poking at it. I'm not sure where I'm heading with the poking, so hopefully it won't be too incoherent. I know I've talked about some of this before but I feel like talking about it again!

***Content note: ALL the main common squicks and triggers, pretty much. Also I vaguely go into some of my fictional kinks***

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