Posts in "Long Posts"

🔖Quotes from Lorraine Boissoneault's "Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance"

I really needed to read “Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance” today. Here are some bits that hit me hard:

It’s not enough to see a successful dance or personal essay—you can study all you want, but it’s only in the act of doing that you learn what’s right and what isn’t.

The bad news about first drafts is that they are necessary. The good news is that they’re only a starting point.

There are many ways to get better at writing—take classes, join critique groups, read voraciously—but nothing gets you around the fact that you must also write and revise.

…take comfort in the fact that your words are still on the page. You’ve done the hard part and unleashed your awkward vulnerability.

🔖"Nobody cares if you're a writer except you." Kate Baer on being a writer who mothers. 📝

I highly recommend Sara Fredman’s Write Like A Mother newsletter, in which Sara interviews writers who are also mothers. Some bits from the recent issue with Kate Baer resonated especially with me, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mothers were so punished in this pandemic.

This. I’m playing the pandemic on easy mode - working part-time from home - and I still feel this. The social costs and lack of a village are what’s hurting me most. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I hung out for a long time with other parents while our kids were at the park and it was huge. Pre-pandemic, M & I spent every weekday morning at a co-working space with a Montessori school on-site. My co-workers were almost exclusively fellow parents of young children, mostly moms and non-binary primary caregivers, and at the time I didn’t really appreciate how special it was.

…nobody cares if you’re a writer. Nobody, nobody cares if you’re a writer, except you. If you want to be a writer, then you have to take control of the situation. You have to think of yourself as a writer, you have to treat yourself as a writer. You have to treat this like this is a job… I have to be the one who cares so much about being a writer. And so I think part of that is just filtering out that noise and just taking yourself super seriously, taking the work super seriously.

I have only recently claimed the title of writer for myself, despite having written all my life and having my first paid byline 10 years ago, and I feel this so hard. I’m still working on taking myself and the work seriously.

#FSNNA21 livetweet log:

Dr. Lesley Willard:

Introducing topic. How do scholars in fan & media studies articulate their discipline? How do these disciplines interact? When don't they?

Shares current book project: discussing labor & affordances on Steam. Last Nov Steam launched Steam Playtest, a way for indie developers to test games early. How does this impact the labor market for games?

Steam Playtest has been called "Beta testing for beta testing." Steam also has Early Access, which lets indie developers charge for in-development games.

All of this involves relying on Steam users to perform labor, to do QA work for free or pay for the opportunity to participate in the development process.

These features displace pro playtesters & QA reps.

This reliance on fan affective labor isn't unique to games, but Steam playtest/Early Access provides a rich area for case study.

Nick Bestor:

How do we define the type of interaction at play in licensed tabletop (esp card) games? Are the people best understood as fans or players?

Describing experience of going to tournament for the Game of Thrones Living Card Game.

Now talking about writing tournament report to post to Fantasy Flight (game publisher) forums.

Licensed games matter and in many ways. Bestor describes needing another outlet for GoT fandom beyond books & shows.

Story worlds vs/as game worlds.

Do Bestor's experiences make him a fan? A player?

ShiraChess:

Who/what counts as a gamer? A game?

How does a fan identity get drawn out differently in fan-created product places like Etsy for example, Stardew Valley blanket yes, but it's hard to find fiber crafts for FPSs like Call of Duty.

When we consider game fandom, we should "remember the cozy fandoms and that digital leisure is not one-size-fits-all."

Latina Vidolova:

Discussing "Netflix Anime Festival" & how Netflix often creates "anime" that doesn't even have an anime studio/creative team.

Netflix is redefining what "anime fan" means by describing anyone who has watched any "anime" on Netflix as a fan, when Vidolova sees this as a tension between defining fan & user.

Gamers come into play considering "Netflix Geeked," a subbrand that includes sci fi, fantasy, superheroes, & more (with video games & anime as part of that "more")

Generalizing what anime means - animated adaptation of video game property = "anime"

Netflix branding defines fan according to engaging with these at all rather than a coherent community.

Netflix & Crunchyroll have both created animated Youtubers do promote anime & video games.

e-girls on TikTok create a mise-en-scene of playing video games; identity of player or fan is secondary to creating aesthetic image.

Fan studies "is attuned to affective attachment to particular story worlds and relationships" while the TikTok egirls are more about putting together pieces and fragments.

Game studies looks at these kinds of "fan fragments" and how they come together in a different way than fan studies does. e.g. how do people choose an avatar?

Amanda Cote:

Discussing crunch time in the game industry and the relationship players have with it. Industry pros sometimes try to rally fans around crunch practices.

Method - analyzing player reactions to articles about crunch practices; study is ongoing, but so far more fans seem to support crunch practices.

Gamer identity is forefronted both among supporters & critics.

Consumer identity and fan identity are also present. Value judgments justified by identity all around: if you're a fan, wouldn't you object to crunch time bc you care about the people making the game?

Gamer/consumer/fan identites have been examined more in fan studies than in game studies.

#FSNNA21 livetweet log:

Adriana Amaral:

First, the state of fan studies in Brazil: research focused on digital settings but still working on integrating digital methods with other methods. Transcultural fan studies scholarship does focus on music fandom.

8 themes identified in lit review of Brazilian fan studies research - 1) The fan condition and identities; 2) Fandom consumption practices; 3) Digital Media fan practices and dynamics; 4) Fandom as community;

5) Fan activism; 6) Politics and Fandom; 7) Nostalgia and fans; 8) Fan production and works

Currently building Brazilian fan studies digital archive at https://www.estudosdefas.com.br/ and next step is interviewing authors.

Dr Lies Lanckman 🏳️‍🌈:

Dr. Lies Lanckman is looking at Yiddish-language Hollywood fan magazines, esp. from the 30s & analyzing fan letters in the magazines.

Allegra Rosenberg:

"Affordances & Paradigms in Platformed Fandom"

Fandom has moved from self-contained/self-managed spaces to platforms controlled by others/corporations.

Examples of commercial + cultural tension in fandom use of platforms: Tumblr’s porn ban • YA NFT scandal • TikTok Omegaverse LARP • Hannibal Twitter Wars • Censorship of AO3 in China

Considerations: Algorithmic fandom, boundary-enforcing norms, encounters with the fourth wall, platform-native emergent fan practices, AO3 as anti-platform

Important to keep in mind that while platform affordances shape fan behavior, "fans find a way"

Future RQs: Where can resistance & creativity be found in platformed fan practices? How does digital literacy/understanding of the nature of a given platform affect norms and values of the fan communities that use it?

How does the “first fandom experiences” of teenagers materially differ when it occurs via algorithm, and how does it continue to affect their journey through fandom?

Christina Reichts:

"From tool to lens - A case study of applying digital methods in fan studies"

Research project - "Marveling at Darcy Lewis"

Scraped information & texts from AO3 and ended up with about 2,419 fics

Using a tool called tag refinery alongside the process of topic model analysis for text selection

Are we using digital methods as tools or as lenses for engaging with theoretical frameworks: queer studies, feminist studies, intersectional feminism?

Another Alex:

"Mushroom for improvement: Theorizing a new model for the circulation of fan objects"

Mycelium model focuses on movement of fan objects, agency of fans, flexible & agile model that is based off the radiating organism of fungi with genre as scaffolding

Multimodal methodology: autoethnography, desk research using thursdaysfallenangel's survey on fanfiction consumption & sharing habits, case studies

Mad at Your Dad/Craiglist Thanksgiving trope. Based off Craigslist ad where poster offered self as deliberately bad Thanksgiving date

Used manual data collection to look at post with 562K+ notes at time of writing, and then GEPHI as network visualization tool

Alex is sharing super cool visualization with posts indicated by dots, reblogs by lines, and fandom by color of dot & line

Multifandom blogs provided most notes, then small clusters of particular fandom blogs

Adriana Amaral:

asks @alexanthoudakis about using a mushroom model which reflects a broader trend in cultural studies of using biological metaphors. What are the implications for theoretical considerations?

Another Alex:

Considered metaphors for things that happened organically, references other scholars who use virality as a metaphor. Important not to forget the PEOPLE in the process.

Originally started with the idea of tentacles, but they only radiate out from one point, don't capture horizontal circulation of fan objects. Same text that suggested tentacles also discussed mushrooms, so began researching mushrooms

Found philosophy paper that used mycelium as metaphor, cemented the idea that Alex was looking for.

#FSNNA21 livetweet log:

This doesn’t include the discussion/Q&A because things started to go so fast I couldn’t keep up.

Stacy Lantagne:

introducing other panelists in "The Money Question"

Copyright law is designed to incentivize creativity, "to reward authors for being creative."

Lawyers think about financial repercussions of creativity/copyright, but fans tend to not focus on finances as reason for engaging in fanac, esp. fic.

Copyright law suggests that people require the financial incentive to be creative, but fans demonstrate there are many other motivations.

If we know people will be creative with motivations other than financial, then what is copyright law accomplishing if the incentive assumption is flawed?

Is copyright blocking creativity because it is too restrictive?

If $ enters a space where previously it wasn't part of the motivation/incentive structure, how do copyright considerations change once $ is introduced to the space?

When fans demand compensation, it gets stickier because they are creating within the world of somebody else's creation. Fanworks, however, are protected by fair use, "a really messy doctrine," with market harm as one of the explicit factors evaluated to determine if it's fair use.

We want to protect public good with copyright, not private gain. If you're making $, you can presumably afford to license intellectual property.

Copyright exceptions for news reporting & education, for example, promote the public good.

Fair use doctrine doesn't provide ability to exploit EVERYTHING, some things are reserved for creator.

If you aren't making $, copyright holder has a harder time arguing you're affecting their market/bottom line, but if you are charging, now it looks like you're siphoning $ from copyright holder.

THIS DOES NOT MEAN EVERYTHING DONE FOR FREE IS OKAY UNDER FAIR USE DOCTRINE. Some free stuff is still copyright infringement! eg music & video piracy

But also NOT EVERYTHING DONE FOR $ IS NOT FAIR USE.

"Keeping things noncommercial is the safest way that lawyers can see for protecting fan activities." & this is why AO3 has lots of rules about noncommercial use.

$ attracts attention, so copyright holders are more likely to sue if $ is involved.

We are seeing more ways that fans monetize their creations & Stacey is curious about non-lawyers' thoughts.

[quick disclaimer, Kimberly Hirsh is not A lawyer and Stacey Lantagne is not YOUR lawyer.]

What about when copyright holders claim that they own rights to fan work? Platforms that are monetizing fan labor?

Daria Romanova:

Let's talk about LARPS! Daria came from fashion & media studies & is new to fan studies in the past ~6 mos.

LARP = Live-Action Role Playing.

LARPing is an event and a game, often based on/inspired by media products, appeals to fans, utilizes physical assets like props, costumes, food, accommodation. Can't be 100% free.

Is LARP a commercial endeavor or not?

LARPs aren't always medieval/fantasy themed. Other examples: wizarding, Downton Abbey/Upstairs-Downstairs "Fairweather Manor," Star Wars, Westworld.

You can't participate in a LARP without spending $ on accommodations, tickets, costumes, props.

LARPs also have merchandise.

College of Wizardry LARP originally used Harry Potter terms, but received contact from legal (at WB? JKR estate?) & subsequently changed names.

Case study - Star Wars Saberfighting - you can pay to take lightsaber fighting classes, which resulted in a market for unlicensed light sabers.

There is a relationship between embodied fanac like LARPing & $, which creates tension btwn fan creations & licensed merch.

Julie Escurignan:

Studying Game of Thrones fan experiences, analyzed brand, good brand due to fan loyalty & HBO branding work, with particular visual identity & brand image.

Distinction between official merchandise, licensed (like Monopoly), and unlicensed (like fan-created). Some fan creators do it just for fan love, some for career/biz, and some creators of unlicensed merch aren't fans.

3 types of GoT on Etsy: reuse/distory/mock HBO features, inspired by GoT, GoT for SEO purposes (not actually GoT related)

Fan-made items tend to cost 2-3x less than similar official items.

While reappropriation items often are similar to official/licensed items, "inspired by" items - for example cosplay items - are filling a gap, as this kind of thing isn't usually offered through official/licensed channels.

Fans in places where official places don't ship (eg HBO doesn't ship outside of USA) must choose either to purchase resold items that will ship to them or fan-created items that will ship to them.

Surveyed fans in English, French, & Spanish. About 1/5 of fans purchase exclusively fan creation, 70-80% prefer official, 50% or so buy both.

Fan tourists & cosplayers purchase more items than other fans. Fans mention Etsy as place to purchase

Fan consumers often like to purchase fan-created artifacts in order to support other fans.

Conflict btwn fans' stated support of fan creators and actual purchasing habits which when possible they prefer to buy official products.

Response to "Where’s the ‘Video Off’ Button in Face-to-Face Instruction?"

Dr. Maggie Melo writes for Inside Higher Ed today about the value of video-off time in a virtual classroom and how we might learn from the ease generated by virtual time together-but-apart and apply it in a face-to-face setting.

Dr. Melo concludes:

I want us to question why we have such a persistent desire to “see learning” in a makerspace or classroom. I want us to figuratively and literally turn off the gaze when it’s not needed. As we opt for classrooms and makerspaces that are more inclusive, we should create ways for students to choose how they want to be seen in the classroom.

My son attends a preschool that uses the Reggio Emilia approach. There are a lot of different components to this approach. One of them is documentation. The teachers at his school are constantly photographing the children as they work, posting those photographs around the classroom for the children to see, and writing captions to remind the children of what they were doing. This is not exclusively for assessment purposes. It’s process-focused. The children also take photos, which the teachers share and describe.

Dr. Melo’s piece made me wonder if something like this could be applied in a higher education setting, but placing the choice of how and what is documented on the students. Could you have a shorter class meeting time, giving students the extra solo time to work and document their own process? What if you explicitly asked them to talk about the mistakes they made and what they learned from them, like I do in my blog post about sewing napkins? Does placing this documentation power in the hands of the students allow them to choose how they are seen?

I don’t know.

I just wonder.

Just a note: Dr. Melo was my assistantship supervisor for the final 2 years of my PhD.

What was going on in my life when I got sick

It’s hard to figure out exactly which of the many symptoms I have should determine when I got sick but based on the impact of treatment, I’m going to say it was the onset of anxiety and depression. These really ramped up in October 1999.

I was 18 and settling in at college. I had a roommate who was not a good fit. My anxiety and depression seemed to kick off when that roommate suggested at dinner that I had a crush on a dude in our building. I didn’t but I liked talking to him. I thought he was fun. I already had a boyfriend (spoiler alert, 10 years later I married that boyfriend) and I thought that, based on what my roommate said, thinking this kid was fun was basically cheating. (I was wrong. It’s okay to have friends.)

This one conversation launched a spiral of negative self-talk that persisted for months. It was exacerbated by my being at a big university, struggling to make friends, and feeling disconnected from my family even though I was only 12 miles from home.

At the same time, my brother was sick and in the hospital. He was only 5. I don’t remember, but I imagine I felt that going to my parents with my problems felt like adding a burden they didn’t need, in light of my brother being ill

I don’t think I got help until Spring of 2000.

In the following few years I gained a lot of weight, was so sleepy that I would fall asleep in the student union and miss class plus slept through service learning obligations, and started having irregular periods. My primary care doctor sent me to an endocrinologist who ran a lot of thyroid tests but not the one that would lead to my diagnosis 11 years later.

In time, a lot of these symptoms went away, but they recurred with a vengeance the summer after I finished library school in 3011. Again, it started with depression and anxiety - in spite of my being on an antidepressant - and by the time I did a direct-to-consumer test and took the results to my doctor, all I could do was go to work, come home, and sleep, without energy even for laundry or food prep.

Wentz conducted a survey of over 2000 of her readers to investigate what was going on when they got sick. Stress was the most frequent response. I think both of the times I’ve had big flare-ups have been in the face of the stress of a major life transition.

This connection between transitions and flares is why I’m being especially vigilant right now as I continue to live in the liminal space of post-PhD.

How Hashimoto's makes me feel

Hashimoto’s makes me feel like the opposite of myself. At various points in my life, if you asked friends about me they’d tell you that I have infectious enthusiasm, that I am an excellent writer, that I am a badass who gets shit done. (These are things friends have actually told me about myself.)

When I’m having a flare, I don’t seem to care about anything. I can’t find the right words or structure my thoughts into a logical flow. I don’t seem to be able to get anything done at all.

I’ve seen my mom go through this, too. She’s super smart, loves learning, and is amazing at making stuff. But on her worst days, it’s all she can do to get out of bed.

It’s hard for me to reconcile these two versions of myself. On bad days, I find it hard to believe I was ever enthusiastic, sharp, eloquent, or effective.

I don’t like feeling this way.

My health goals

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One of the things I’m focusing on right now is feeling better. Today, that means reading Izabella Wentz’s Hashimoto’s Protocol: A 90-Day Plan for Reversing Thyroid Symptoms and Getting Your Life Back. We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of my Hashimoto’s diagnosis (driven by my own research, in partnership with a doctor I had to push to recognize it) and guess what? I still feel crappy. Not nearly as bad as 10 years ago, but still bad. And part of chronic illness is that there will be flare ups. But I know I’m capable of feeling better because I did, in the 9 months before I got pregnant. But the things that helped me then aren’t enough to help me now, it seems. So, Wentz’s book.

Wentz suggests keeping a health journal using “a method you are likely to stick to.” For me, that’s blogging. I’ll probably keep some private notes, but maybe this can even be helpful to somebody else to follow along. So to the extent I feel okay doing it, I’ll be keeping my journal here, in the Health category.

Wentz suggests beginning by identifying health goals. Here are mine:

I want to have more energy. I am tired, all the time. My kid will tell you. I’ve been the kid with the tired mom and I’d love to spare my kid that. So this is my highest priority. Right now, if I go on an outing with my kid, I have to take the rest of the day and potentially the next day to recover. So my energy goal is to be able to go on a family outing and stay in the swing of things the next day.

I want to feel better about my looks. Mostly I think I’m pretty cute, but sometimes I feel dull and puffy. I’d like to look in the mirror and be not dull and not puffy. I’m not going to worry about weight or even girth because those are tricky targets and easy to disappoint me. But I’d like to look in the mirror and see someone with normal bags under her eyes, not extreme ones, with pink and cheery skin rather than wan white skin, with more hair than I have now and with an appropriate amount of white hair for her age. (There is a clear distinction between the amount of white hair I have when I’m well and when I’m ill. I don’t want to eliminate it, just to have what seems like a reasonable amount of it. And then maybe dye it green.)

I want to have endurance when swimming. One pool length wears me out right now and I can’t at present exercise myself into improving that due to the relationship between thyroid hormone levels and respiratory function. But I want to be able to swim in a mermaid tail for long distances. My ultimate goal is 300 yards but I’ll set an intermediate one for now. By next July, I’d like to be able to do 2 full laps with only 12 breath rests.

Those seem big enough for now.

On preferring learning to doing

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I love to read about writing. I’m the kind of person who finds Strunk and White fun. I keep buying books about writing: Stephen King’s On Writing, Ursula K. LeGuin’s conversations, and many more. And I do write: mostly blog posts and email messages these days, but I have written just about every format there is. I have not shared or attempted to publish much of that writing, though.

What keeps me from doing it? What has me loving reading about craft but rarely implementing what I read? It’s not that I never write but rather that I enjoy reading about writing perhaps more than writing itself. (No, that’s not quite right. I actually enjoy writing, even genres/formats I think I don’t enjoy, like book reviews. I loved writing last week’s book review of Brent Spiner’s Fan Fiction, despite constantly telling myself I don’t like writing book reviews.)

I think one of the things that keeps me hoarding and absorbing resources but leveraging them less frequently than I acquire and engage with them is my love of learning. I was working on a blog post about qualitative research for a client today and my head started swimming with how much I love learning about different methods of qual research. And I love doing it, too! I love creating a research design. I love finding the meaning in the data. But I think I love learning about new techniques for it even more. I was talking with W. about how readily I forget that I actually love doing this thing I spent six years learning to do - I went into the PhD explicitly because I wanted to devote time to understanding research methods. My PhD is in qualitative methods as much as or more than it’s in my discipline. (Except I love my discipline, too, which I also sometimes forget!)

Back to the point, here: W. suggested that perhaps UX careers would be a good fit, a place where a person could do qualitative research. I told him yes, that or market research. And then I told him that I don’t want to just do it in service of whatever business would want to hire me for it as much as I want to learn about it and share what I learn with other people so THEY can do it.

And then I said, “But what I REALLY need to remember is that I already have a client paying me to do exactly that.”

So I’m actually getting paid to do the learning I love. In a very real sense, I am at present, living the dream. It would serve me well to remember that.