jedusaur

I just went to Bitchin' Party and the party was indeed bitchin'. More on that later, but first: I have made some new friends! And I decided that it would be a good idea to do a rundown of how I engage with fandom as a community, just so you all know what to expect from me.

Twitter: I am a compulsive backreader and I have multiple accounts, so my follow-back habits are mostly based on volume and personal relevance of tweets. If you tweet a lot, or mostly about fandoms I'm not in, I will probably not follow you on this platform even if I like you and want to be your friend. But I do engage with @-replies, so there are people on Twitter I interact with a lot even though I don't follow them. My username is @ohshitcircuit for general fannishness; I have another one for non-fannish hockey stuff that I try not to publicly connect to the fandom one too much, so let me know if you want that one and I'll give it to you privately.

Dreamwidth: I'm reasonably active on DW, and will certainly be more active in the next couple days post-con. I don't lock my posts at all here, so I don't bother granting access. This is where I put all my long-form meta. I do read everything on my flist, although I don't always get around to commenting.

LiveJournal: I still crosspost, but I almost never use my fandom LJ anymore. I do have a non-fandom LJ that I still use for general life updates (where I do lock some stuff, but will friend you to give you access if I know you).

Tumblr: I don't engage socially on Tumblr at all. I do post hockey stuff at turnoverhockey, but I don't even pay attention to who follows me, much less follow anyone back.

AO3: I haven't been great about linking stuff on DW lately, so AO3's author subscriptions are the best way to follow me if you're interested in my fanworks. My AO3 is jedusaur.

In person: A few friends and I organize fannish dinner parties in Seattle approximately monthly, and occasionally have other gatherings (we've done vid-watching hangouts and fandom-specific hangouts, and sports hangouts are in the works for this summer). If you're interested in being on the mailing list for that, give me your e-mail address. I've already added everyone whose e-mail I have, so if you think you gave me your info but haven't gotten an invite, let me know. (I am not excluding anyone intentionally!)

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I've been terrible lately about linking works here when I post to AO3. Shit I have recently failed to tell DW about:

- #hockeyporn, a very short cracky thing in which I take the #hockeyporn hashtag for innuendous NHL announcer quotes to its logical conclusion

- Five Ways Fujiwara no Sai Might Have Existed (And One He Did), my first real attempt at podfic

- HOCKEY and RAY GUN, applying the Machine of Death premise to Sidney Crosby and Grace from Killjoys fandom, respectively

- When They Meet It's A Happy Land, in which I slash Captain America with Universe Man from They Might Be Giants' song "Particle Man"

If you want to know what I'm posting on AO3 within two months of the posting date (*hangs head*) it's probably better to subscribe to me there. Or you could follow me on Twitter, I've been posting links there consistently, but I do not do the "if you missed it here's the same link I posted three hours ago!" thing, so if you don't backread fully that's probably not a good way to keep track of me either.

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EDIT: Nobody is late to the party! I haven't started summarizing the data yet. I'll update this note when I do, but it'll be open for at least a week or two first.

Aiight, greedy_dancer said she'd get people to respond if I pulled this together, and I'm curious too. I don't think Dreamwidth lets free users do the pretty polls with the graphics, but whatever, I'm gonna be crunching the data in ways I don't think they offer anyway, might as well type it all straight into a spreadsheet.

So we're gonna do this the old-fashioned way, where I ask you questions and you type your answers in a comment. Feel free to answer some questions and not others if you want. Some of this is quantitative data I'm going to summarize in a later post, and some is just qualitative hey-while-I've-got-you-on-the-line stuff I wanted to ask because I'm just interested in people's opinions. On the quantitative ones, feel free to go into qualitative detail if you want--I just need the categorical answers too, for number-crunchin'. And if you want to answer privately, go ahead and PM me your answers.

1. What modes of fannish creation do you engage in?
a. writing fic
b. recording podfic
c. creating visual fanart
d. vidding
e. writing meta
f. making recslists
g. making fanmixes
h. other (please specify!)

1.5. How do you primarily identify within fandom?
a. As a vidder
b. As a reader/commenter
c. As a podficcer
d. As a writer
e. As an artist
f. As a reccer
g. As something else (please specify)
h. A combination of the above (please specify)
i. None of the above (please specify)

2. Do you ever create fanworks based on other fanworks, or do you stick to your own interpretations of canon?

3. Do you think fannish creators should be obliged to ask permission to create fanworks based on other fanworks? (I'm assuming nobody thinks we should ask permission to create fanworks based on canon. If that's your position, by all means make this comments section interesting.)

4. Has anyone ever created fanworks based on any of your fanworks, to your knowledge?

5. If so, how did you feel about it?
a. positive
b. indifferent
c. conflicted
d. negative

6. What do you consider your main fandom/s, past and present?

7. How long have you been active in fandom? (If the answer is different for consuming and creating or for different modes of creation, please gimme the whole breakdown.)

8. Would you say the majority of your day-to-day social interaction is fandom-based?

9. Which website (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, Pinboard) do you conduct most of your social fannish interaction on?

10. How did you find this survey?

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I'm getting too much spam on jedusaur. If people reading on LJ want to comment, come on over to DW; there's a link at the bottom of every post.

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I guess I forgot to tell DW that I recorded and posted this a couple months ago. It's about three minutes of fic by me about Kaner's post-playoffs drinking binge. The sound quality is awful, just to warn you; I didn't spend much time on it at all. But I actually kind of like it this way. It makes it really clear that this just jumped into my head and needed to be put out there, and the way it needed to be put out there was via audio recording, and I just made that happen right away without letting myself fuss over it.

By the way, I've now created two different pieces of fic that aren't posted in written form (this and the Spencer/Gabe crossdressing ficlet I wrote for crazybutsound to record), and I just wanted to say--if anybody out there is interested in either of them but unable to hear audio, let me know and I'll totally send you the text. My goal in creating/collaborating on exclusively-audio fanworks is to play with the medium and encourage other people to see it as a medium in its own right, not to exclude anyone.

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A lovely person by the moniker of PapayaTwilight has translated my Sherlock fic into Chinese! (I call it "my Sherlock fic" because the actual title is preposterously long. Clearly I've spent far too much time pickling my brain in a world where Ryan Ross gets to make decisions.) You can view it here if you so desire (username VIPGUEST, pw 221dnet). I did, despite the fact that I know exactly as much Chinese as it takes to play Mahjong, and I don't think being able to recognize four wind characters, three dragon characters, and numbers up to 9 is going to get me very far in science-themed porn. But I clicked anyway, and skimmed through the text, just because.

And then I got to the comments.

There were comments.

In Chinese.

That I could not read.

I was at work at this point, but God help me if I was going to sit there doing my actual job when people on the internet were saying things about my fic! I pulled up Google Translate and set to work deciphering the feedback, crossing my fingers that the research coordinator wouldn't come up behind me and say, "Julia? Why are you translating the phrase the physical subconscious love curly from Chinese into English?"

( In which Google Translate is not yet perfectCollapse )

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It is anatsuno's birthday today! Here is some pseudopsychosociological noodling, because anat enjoys that sort of thing.

There's an interesting concept called Dunbar's number, more commonly known to most denizens of the internet as the Monkeysphere, although readers of that article should keep in mind that its purpose is to amuse rather than to provide useful or accurate information. Dunbar's number is the theoretical number of people with whom it is possible for one person to maintain stable relationships. Most of us "know" around one or two hundred people; beyond that, it's hard to devote the necessary effort and attention to developing well-rounded mental pictures of who people are.

My monkeysphere includes my family, my coworkers, and my friends (a group that encompasses several people I've never met in meatspace). It also includes Amanda Palmer, Ron Weasley, and a nonexistent fictionalized representation of a douchebucket of a hockey player named Patrick Kane.

Amanda Palmer is fairly easy to conceptualize as a member of my monkeysphere. She's a celebrity, someone with a public presence who puts a lot of herself out there. I think it's fair to say that most people have at least a few unidirectional relationships like this in their monkeyspheres. Fannish folks, in general, know how to maintain healthy one-sided relationships. There are a few people who get creepy and stalkery (or believe they really do have a personal relationship with a celebrity--those relationships really are One Directional, ho ho ho), but most of us understand that we are not in, e.g., Tom Hardy's monkeysphere. He may love and appreciate all of his fans, but he doesn't have the neurological processing power to know them.

I wouldn't actually call myself a fan of Amanda Palmer without specifying any caveats. But I know her, or at least her public persona. I'm familiar with her creative history, her voice, her style of self-presentation, her public opinions, and some of her mannerisms. I have a pretty good idea of the sort of thing she'd be likely to do. And so do other people. I'm just about as likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a party based on our mutual familiarity with someone like Amanda Palmer as I am to initiate a conversation by asking how the other person knows the party's host. Quite often, people form friendships based on mutual acquaintances, and those mutual acquaintances don't have to know us back to serve that social role.

They don't actually have to exist, either. If a character is developed enough to be conceptualized as a person, they can serve that same role as mutual acquaintance. One of my closest friendships as a teenager began when I was standing around in a group talking about movies and made an offhand comment about how Captain Jack Sparrow and Will Turner were MFEO and needed to bang already (this was the kind of thing I said loudly in social situations at the age of thirteen) and a new girl who had been quiet up until then exploded in agreement, and we spent the next three hours gossiping about the personal lives of fictional pirates.

The characters we employ in our interactions as mutual acquaintances not only don't have to be real, they don't even have to be canon. I have spent a total of literally days, possibly even weeks if you add it all up, discussing fanon Ryan Ross with verbyna over IM. The person we were talking about was based on a real person, but only loosely, as evidenced by the existence of "canon!Ryro" as a standard term in our vocabulary. Similarly, I know there are many friendships out there that were originally based on squee and analysis of complex fanon versions of Inception characters whose personalities barely even got screen time.

We are people who love stories, who love sharing excitement, and we connect with each other not only by finding the characters our lives have in common but also by creating them. We build mutual relationships off of unidirectional relationships, and both kinds of relationships strengthen and grow and change in the process. This is so cool to me.

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-juliandarling is here! You guys know how when a fandom friend visits, there's all this squee and happiness and endless discussion of your shared fandom and you don't want them to have to leave? Julian isn't leaving! They are staying here and we will get to continue hanging out and talking hockey and watching YouTube vids (Club Can't Handle Kaner is on YouTube now, I learned yesterday) and boozing it up and sharing Feelings about writing at midnight. \o/ (Also at one point we were talking about the Blue Jackets and I started a sentence with, "Jeff Carter..." and Julian and deerang2002 both just cracked the fuck up without even waiting for the rest, because lol Jeff Carter. XD)

-I kind of DW-stalked hazel after I read the lawyer AU and they twitter-stalked me back and now I'm getting snippets of awesome hockey AU fic in my e-mail and it's pretty great. Yay for new fandom friends. :D

-I decided last night to stop saving fandom resources under a "fandom" tag on my non-fandom Pinboard account, and instead put them on my fandom account, which I've been using solely for fic up to now. Sorry in advance to people who have me in their Pinboard networks, since there's probably going to be a bit of a flood of hockey articles and stuff next time I have a chance to sit down and move it all over. I guess I could backdate them, but there are a few people following my Pinboard who would probably appreciate seeing them.

-Hockey has moved beyond a fandom for me. Hockey is now a way of life. You know that one Sid/Geno fic where someone accuses Sid of never talking about anything but hockey, and he's like, no, I totally talk about other stuff, I just talk about it in hockey? That's me these days.

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I've used Tumblr very minimally for a couple of months--I haven't followed anyone or done much with it, I've just been posting cool examples of hockey-centric transformative creation. Today I posted my first thing that actually got any attention, which resulted in me actually engaging with Tumblr a bit, and now I am side-eyeing the site's design team with the kind of wariness I normally reserve for bad-idea generators on the scale of Thomas Midgley¹ and whoever came up with the glow puck.

Things that drive me up the wall about Tumblr, based on my extremely limited interaction therewith:

1. There is no "reply" button. If someone responds to your post and you want to reply to it, you have to make a new text post and HTML in the person's username and the quote. Unless you just reblog the reblog and thereby post the same original image again, which I am told by an experienced tumbleweed² is considered extremely rude. But it's the only built-in way to have a conversation.


2. The list of notes is numbered from the top, but the list is in reverse-chronological order, so number 1 is always the most recent note and the entire list is always shifting, rendering the numbering entirely useless.


3. If you're on your dash and looking at a post, and you want to click through to the post's permalink page, the way to do this is to hover your mouse over the post until a tiny little fold image appears in the corner and then click on the fold. I thought Twitter's click-on-the-timestamp idea was the epitome of unintuitiveness until I saw this.


4. The regular text input field doesn't recognize HTML. So I opened the HTML box and wrote my HTML in there. And it... inexplicably added a <a> tag at the beginning of each paragraph and a </a> tag at the end. Without any attributes, so the text showed up as a hyperlink you couldn't actually click. I have no idea why.


5. Every time anyone follows me, they send me a notification e-mail that ends with an apparently-randomized little exclamation. Sometimes they're just silly, like "OMG!" and "Score!" but sometimes they're utterly nonsensical things like "WTF?" and "Finally!"

In conclusion: IDGI.

¹ You guys totally wish you had the kind of quality personal Google that I have living in my house. I just spent five minutes fruitlessly searching terms like "the guy who ruined the environment in like three different ways stephen fry talked about him on qi" and "that dude who singlehandedly fucked over the ozone layer i think there were refrigerators involved?" before asking projectyl, "Hey, do you remember the name of the person who came up with multiple ways to ruin the enviro--" and that was about as far as I got before he said, "Thomas Midgley," and then cast me an expectant look that seemed to imply, "That all you got? C'mon, give me a hard one." Be jealous, y'all.

² I have decided that's what people who do Tumblr are called, mostly because this way it's a pun when I wave my cane and tell them to get off my lawn.

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Because my fic is on AO3 now, and therefore I have an automatic masterlist of fic that I don't need to manually update, I deleted my masterlists on LJ and DW (which I hadn't updated in months, anyway) and replaced them with an intro post that will hopefully be a bit more useful to people poking around my journal. I incorporated my "transformations of my work" post and my list of meta posts into that post, and I plan to keep those up-to-date from now on.

Also included in the intro post is a link to turnoverhockey, the transformative hockey fandom tumblr I made a few weeks ago. I have enough reading lists to deal with already (DW, non-fandom LJ, G+, Pinboard, RSS reader, and two twitters, christ) that I'm not going to add people there--it's just a place to keep track of cool ways people are engaging with hockey as a game and as a culture.

While I was going through my profile putting the intro post together, I discovered that I am apparently the only person on DW with the following interests: aus of shitty romcoms, dominant masochism, douchebag fic, fake-boyfriends fic, geno malkin, hookerfic, mike smith, ray toro's thighs, squeemo, transformative creation, and venn dickograms. Yeah, that's a pretty neat little cross-section of my fandom self. XD

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