Metafandom - Thursday/Friday, November 4-5, 2010

Fri, Nov. 5th, 2010, 07:01 pm

transfinite: deviantART, binarism, and transphobia - I deleted my old account at deviantART because I was tired of the username and embarrassed about the old crappy art I'd posted years ago. Starting over with a new account sounded pretty good. But when I went to edit my profile settings on my new account, well...I was pretty confused at how there were only options for "Male" and "Female" in their gender dropdown box. I distinctly remembered there being some third option, which I had chosen for my previous account. A brief Google search later, I found that as of May, the "Unspecified" option had been removed. -
(tags: deviantart gender privilege)

caithyra: Strong Feminine Female Characters - One of my big frustrations with many media is that girls cannot be feminine and kick-ass. They MUST be tomboys. Their admirable traits are ALWAYS masculine or gender-neutral.They MUST abhor pink.If they have feminine traits, these are their weak and soft sides. The sides that makes them damsels-in-distress. -
(tags: gender characters)

copracat: Fundraising - Fundraising long term, fundraising for sustainability, fundraising when you're clearly a bit rubbish at communication is work that requires planning and resources. Don't assume that FictionAlley has those resources with comparisons to OTW. We worked hard to buy the servers. -
(tags: archiving otw)

melannen: I just had a dream that there exists an - I got into fandom through FictionAlley. They have been set up as an education-focused nonprofit since the beginning, and this has never changed. Yes, this was partly in order to soothe WB - FA has never been below the corporate radar - but it was partly because they really do serve an educational function. -
(tags: fandom hp charity)

schemingreader: What's wrong with this picture? - it's not really FictionAlley's fault that they found a legitimate source of arts funding and applied for a capacity building grant, only to be accused of taking food out of poor kid's mouths. It's Pepsi's fault. That's a silly way to offer potential funding to arts organizations--which are perpetually underfunded. -
(tags: charity)

epershand: What is this feeling? - FA doesn't have an army of members to vote them up and help them win money away from homeless shelters and free aerobics classes for children. The maintainers weren't able to raise enough money in its last fundraising drive to do more than see them through the end of this year. There are a few current professional authors who first made it big in Harry Potter fandom, at least one of them on the back of FA. All have cut their ties with online fandom pretty much completely. Because, I guess, in a fannish environment where the goal is to be the biggest name and have the most fans, that's the priority, not staying involved and promoting fandom -
(tags: fandom hp)

futuransky: on corporations, charity and the question of deserving - If a fan fiction archive is looking for funds and competing with a homeless shelter and an underfunded public school, do we complain that the fan fiction archive had the gall to think its provision of art and pleasure was important enough to be on that list, or do we look at the organization that has set up the false opposition, that is giving a small portion of its advertising budget to these causes and opening up a profoundly unfair voting system in order to do so under the illusion of democracy? -
(tags: charity)

katekat: my [unpopular] thoughts on FA's attempt to find funding - why is it more legitimate to participate in a local community band than it is to participate in an online community creating writing? Both have traditionally been seen as 'frivolous' activities that don't create anything worth selling, right? And the key here for me is, even if I change that sentence to read "community creating porn" I still think porn is legitimate creative expression. It may provide different kinds of satisfactions than playing music does, but to me, there are still satisfactions. -
(tags: fandom community)

justira: [Make-Your-Own Meme] FictionAlley and Pepsi and Fandom - I don't know every avenue FA has tried, but based on my perception, FA did not do enough to seek resources within its own community before applying outside of it, and still handled it in a way that, from here, seems illogical, insensitive, inefficient, and just... not good. Which is a failure of either process or communication. -
(tags: charity community)

obsession_inc: The FictionAlley brouhaha: a bit of research. - what we're looking at here is that Pepsi clearly is not doing a one-per-amount-per-category kind of thing. Pepsi nowhere states that they are doing anything of the kind, and I'm guessing that's because, well, they're not. So yes, FictionAlley is running against homeless shelters and taking care of wounded vets and the like. So is the asshat who wants to get money to build a model train set, for reasons I don't understand. -
(tags: charity)

commodorified: As long as you're pissed off ANYWAY... - I don't care one way or another about FA, to be honest. If you do, if you think this is an unforgiveable action they have taken? Post about it, by all means. Then vote against them.Then pay your damn taxes and contact your political representatives about where those taxes go.Because, really: nothing very much more important than Fiction Alley should be up for grants handed out the way these are. -
(tags: charity fandom politics)

seperis: i still think you're amazing, you know - Being ashamed because mainstream values say we are freaks and our work has no value while acknowledging mainstream values are fucked up and working to overcome the internalization is one thing; externalizing that to the point where it's knee-jerk to agree every time someone calls a fanfic writer/artist/vidder/meta writer a [see the paragraph way up there for a complete list; I can't do it again], to actually believe that, isn't ironic realism or showing how really, you are really aware and smart. -
(tags: fandom)

seperis: maybe unpopular fannish opinion - FA doing this sucks because in the parameters of this challenge, and considering the potential for the fandom community to handle this, they shouldn't have submitted. It wasn't appropriate for what specifically they do. Fanfiction isn't the source of shame. Writing fanfiction is not shameful. Being a fanfiction archive isn't shameful. -
(tags: fanfic archiving charity)