General
nonniemous - When is Gen, gen? - As far as I'm concerned, Gen means no overt relationship in the story.

brihana25 - YouTube - not safe any more - There is a thread on Kawoosh, started last summer, where we were discussing whether or not it was a good idea to be posting music videos to YouTube. Was the exposure something we, as a fandom, could withstand? Was the free hosting worth the very public venue? Would MGM take action against us? // Those questions are being answered on YouTube right this minute. And the answers are, in order, "no", "no", and "yes".

morgandawn - Vidding Meta: When The Outside World Is Looking In At You, Are You Looking Back? - A recent blog entry discussing, of all things, BBC's Bleak House took an interesting turn when it examined the use of vidding to explore the novel's themes.

friendshipper - Meta-meta: on fanfic, genre and categorization - You can use genre trappings as a tool and not just because the author likes the genre and wants to write more of it -- and what you end up with is a story with a very different feel than the other kind. Does that make sense? // But the caveat is that if you do that, you have a lot of work to "sell" the story to the other audience -- if I put ghosts and goblins in Manhattan, I'm going to have a hard uphill road to convince a mainstream, non-fantasy audience that they need to be there and aren't the reason for the story.

erinya - In search of the female anti-hero - My question is whether the female anti-hero truly exists, how she might differ from the male anti-hero, and why.

theblackscorpio - When is it an avatar? - I have always sort of seen my physical body as a sort of avatar in meat world. The fact, that it grew, and later on became a woman without me initiating any of this, may have made me conclude, that my mind and my body are two separate entities. They are very intertwined, but they are two different things. So for me computergenerated avatars are just an extension to my avatar life here on this physical plane, a logical result of growing computerpowers.

elynross - Something I will never really understand - Open forum, everyone has an opinion, yeah, whatever -- it never fails to just crush me a little bit, to read someone glowing about something they love (or even just says, "Wow, I love this thing, whatever it is,"), and I'm all uplifted and happy for them, and for me, and then I make the mistake of reading comments, and someone else comes back with a glow-stomping response.

cereta - Zen and the Art of Not Pissing in People's Cheerios - I believe, strongly, in the notion that posting publicly means you're inviting response, and that to some extent, you are opening yourself up to unwelcome response. But I also believe that there is a commensurate burden on those giving the response to think about that response, to read the post and read the cues and look around the room and think about whether now is the time to yell, "Illini suck eggs!"

lord_dingsi - Slash as a Queer Tolerance Indicator - If someone can't even cope with two gays or lesbians kissing in a fictional story, how great are the odds they can cope with a gay or lesbian (or trans, or genderqueer...) person in real life? That they can cope with me and my partner? My collection of queer literature? ... // In that regard, finding out that someone likes reading or writing slash, or doesn't mind at all that it exists, can work as a tolerance indicator for me.

arionhunter - Back down the bully to the back of the bus, now it's time for them to be scared of us... - My section of fandom, the Gundam version of science Trekkies, was (and still arguably is) not overly friendly to slash. Made almost entirely of males, whenever slash was brought up in my corner of fandom it was an illegitimate stepchild that was not discussed. This is not to say that the entirety of fandom had issues with homosexuality; we stuck to pure canon unless it came to science, where fanon was rampant. The Wing slash fangirls were ignored, except to be decried for never accepting the UC half of Gundam. // This entire environment made me more comfortable because it simply reinforced my own interalized issues with my own orientation. I "didn't get" slash just like I didn't discuss the fact I had known I was gay for years but had so many bits of internalized homophobia from my parents.

Polls, Questions, Other
laurashapiro - 24/7 DIY Video Summit: The Curatorial Process - What I'd love to get from other vidders and vid fans is a sense of how you think we could best represent vidding at this event.