October 24, 2022
Hello world. I’m weary. For reasons. Sometimes life is a lot. I’m really glad there are great bits when there are because it would be so much harder if it were 100% slog. Still, it’s been a rough 2022.
October 23, 2022
Having a nightmare where your relative who’s dealing with infection-induced delirium in the waking world wanders off & is convinced by quack medical professionals that at the age of 66 she underwent immaculate conception is Not Helpful. Brain, please stop inventing new stressors.
I love Baby Galadriel so much.
October 22, 2022
October 21, 2022
Taking another run at limiting screen time, because I’m wondering if the increase in migraines for me lately is correlated with an increase in screen time.
Finished reading: Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚
Reading my way through Wyngraf’s Appendix C (for cozy!).
October 20, 2022
My kid goes to a Reggio Emilia school; his kindergarten class is a community of researchers. Today he & I talked about our epistemological stances. When I defined epistemological stance for him I was like, “There, just saved you 6 years of grad school.”
My superpower is taking any Star Trek: The Next Generation B-story focused on Data and forgetting the A-story that goes with it “The Outrageous Okona” becomes “Data meets Joe Piscopo” and “Peak Performance” becomes “Data has impostor syndrome thanks to Strategema.” 🖖
October 19, 2022
I get excited and ambitious and then I have a flare and then I forget all my passions and ambitions. Listen, body: I am doing my best to build a life where I take good care of you. Could you stop derailing literally everything else I want to do?
🔖 NC Mutual Will Cease Operations This Month
This is heartbreaking and I’m ashamed I didn’t follow this story earlier.
🔖 Everyone Wants to Be a Hot, Anxious Girl on Twitter
I am both fascinated and terrified by the phrase “the girl in the machine.”
October 17, 2022
How to Scholar(?)
In my doctoral program, there was a class that we colloquially referred to as “babydocs.” As it was taught the year I took it, the purpose of babydocs was two-fold: 1. to introduce us to the field of library and information science and the variety of potential research areas and 2. to introduce us to the skills a person needs to be a scholar.
It’s been over seven years since I started babydocs and I’m still trying to get that “how to be a scholar” part down. Here are the topics and skills babydocs covered in this vein:
- Theory and methods
- Literature reviews
- searching for literature
- reading other people’s literature reviews
- managing literature
- writing literature reviews
- Peer review
- Project management
- Research ethics
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion
- Presenting orally
- Empirical research methods
- Collaborative & interdisciplinary work
- Creating posters
- Writing research proposals
- Grants and funding
- Data management
- Writing referred papers
- Metrics
This was a two-semester course and that was only HALF of what we covered, with the other half being specific to our discipline.
I know how to do all of the things on this list, but I still haven’t created a cohesive framework or workflow that lets me do them in any but the most just-in-time manner. But a just-in-time scholar isn’t really the kind of scholar I want to be.
(And I do want to be a scholar, even though I’m not interested in tenure-track work.)
I share all of this because I’m going to try, all these years later, to create such a framework. Something that wasn’t part of babydocs.
I plan to blog about it and I thought y’all might like to follow along.
I want to food, to cook fresh ingredients into beautiful and tasty things. But I like to experience this as meditative and do it when I have energy, so I’m currently parsing out the things that keep that from happening. Maybe I start making really excellent lunches.
This is an example of process art.
October 16, 2022
Skipping the first sessions of #FSNNA22 today to have breakfast with my family. Back for the 11 am, then missing the closing session to play D&D.
Okay, getting dressed and then heading to the #FSNNA22 Gather lobby to try dancing and throwing confetti.
Finished up my time at #FSNNA22 with a dance by the pastries.
October 15, 2022
#FSNNA22 Keynote: Turn On, Tune In, Get Out: Rethinking Escapism and Domestic Spectatorship
Beginning Turn On, Tune In, Get Out: Rethinking Escapism and Domestic Spectatorship
articulates the need for a theory of escapism, specifically as respite
has never felt the need to get out more than the past few years but where is there to go?
Theory: escapism as a spectatorial mode, one way viewers interpolate cultural objects
"Escapism is a desire that viewers bring to media irrespective of its genre, spectacle, exhibition context, or reception culture"
Viewers bring escapism, not vice versa.
Critics call things "escapist" when they think media's artistic merit doesn't align with its popularity
Escapism is frequently deployed in reference to media that has large fan communities
Historicizing the term "escapist," which was coined in the 1930s. (Benson-Allott is including a lot of detail so look out for her book on this topic later.)
"Escapism" is used both to argue that art should uphold morals AND that art doesn't need to engage with contemporary issues.
"Escapist" is used by critics to indicate a disconnect between a piece of art and themselves.
Previous work (by only 2 scholars) looks at escapism and whose pleasure is marginalized.
Others have focused on genre but not looked at how or why viewers engage in escapism.
As a viewer's sensibility changes, the viewer needs different escape.
If different types of movies can provide escape in a shared geocultural moment, then escapism can't be located in a particular piece of media or genre.
Escape from what? Not necessarily about a change of locale. "If it were, all fantasy films would supply escape to all viewers."
"Escape may be hard to achieve, but it is not site-specific."
Lots of talk here about how what we're escaping is being ourselves, which makes me think about the Daniel Tiger song: "You can change your hair or what you wear but no matter what you do, you're still you."
"Because pleasure is a process, it represents an escap-ing, rather than an escape."
"It cannot be an end, because it ends."
We can find escapism in media that acknowledges inequity and injustice.
"Desiring escape is not the same as desiring oblivion or obliviousness..."
Seriously this work is super rich and I can't possibly capture it all in a Twitter thread.
Escape as ex-cendance: getting out so you can go back
I’m attending “Transcultural Fandom Experiences” at #FSNNA22 but not live-tweeting because I’m prepping for the #FanLIS session, “#FanLIS at Home,” that will run at 12p Eastern.
#FSNNA 22 Roundtable: Materiality & Liveness
Welcoming everyone to the session "Materiality & Liveness"
Talking about WWE and the impact of it being termed an "essential business" during COVID shutdowns
Professional wrestling bridges the gap between sports & entertainment
When both entertainment & sports were shut down, WWE was still available with both athletics and storytelling and thus the potential to appeal to fans of both sports and media.
Lucas's argument: WWE didn't have live audiences during shutdown like they usually do. They had to have a national audience to stay open for working, but only at facilities closed to the public.
WWE met both criteria when most other sports couldn't.
WWE moved toward "cinematic matches" - "like an extended version of a video game cutscene" - wrestlers in story-specific environment with editing, effects, and supernatural elements.
Playful Nostalgia: (Re)creating Video Game Spaces as Mods
Nostalgia for 3D platformer video games from the late 90s/early 00s like Super Mario 64, Sonic Adventure. Newer games are emulating (but not, y'know, ~emulating~) the older games.
Marketing and branding include a pitch toward nostalgia: "It's just like N64" "It's just like the Gamecube"
How do players take up this nostalgia themselves? For example, players create environments from old games in newer video games - e.g. creating an area from Super Mario Sunshine in A Hat in Time
We aren't limited to a single mod, so you could play in A Hat in Time, a Sonic Adventure level, with Sora from Kingdom Hearts as your player, riding a Kart from Mario Kart Double Dash.
Factors that influence textual meaning: paratexts, plays, fan-made histories, "mods as simulacra"
"Player-made mods construct nostalgia through remediation and play"
Talking about authorship in TRPGs (!!! calling @theroguesenna & @friede)
Looking at changes in D&D and other TRPGs related to race.
Summer 2021 was the #SummerofAabria when Abria Iyengar was guest DM on multiple actual play shows
AP has often been associated with the creation of a single DM but when Iyengar's work raised the question: how does authorship change when you have a guest DM? Who has authority?
Now notions of canonicity are taking root in actual play. How do TRPGs exist as both a transformative and an original work?
DMs like Iyengar can use their work to critique traditional depictions in fantasy.
The cultural afterlife of plastic toys and how they're curated and collected online now
Fans have to make consequential decisions about material objects (collectable toys) based on digital images
"attachments and affects can be complicated when realizing that what arrived in your mailbox was not exactly what you bought online"
Buyers read the materiality through images: What quality is the plastic? How much has it been damaged? Is it authentic? Is the blister packaging still attached?
During COVID, there's been a boom in the fan economy of vintage collecting.
A lot of collectors have liquidated their collections because they didn't have enough income during COVID.
The Japanese Yen to the dollar is at a 32 year low, so lots of Japanese collectors are liquidating them and selling to buyers overseas (mostly in America).
These collectors then only have immaterial access to their collections - images and memories.
There are important distinctions between player-made mods and official re-releases. There's more freedom to mix-and-match. Legality is an interesting question. Mods aren't strict emulations (in the code sense).
Court case in 2016 found you can't copyright ALL of a game. For example, you can't copyright game mechanics. Player-made mods do give players a sense of ownership.
People get introduced to older "texts" (video games) through these mods - e.g. you play an area in A Hat in Time, and decide to then go explore the game it's originally from.
Reproducing a cartridge like Limited Run games does introduces a new materiality that's different from mods. The gatekeepers are different: purchase vs. download from fansite.
Players of D&D often have a strong intertextual awareness before they even sit down at the table, usually have engaged deeply with fantasy through literature, film, video games.
There's often either a dissatisfaction with or true love of fantasy media that the player brings to the table and uses as inspiration for their character.
If the rules are dissatisfying/frustrating (e.g. I want to play as a dark elf and it's wrong of the rules to penalize me for that), this is where homebrew comes in. This leads to players & DMs bring worldview to the game.
based on personal experience, "play seems to become more valued as you have less recreational time." When work happens at home during lockdown, it can feel like all of life is work so
Additionally, the interpersonal aspect adds extra value. For example, RPing just hanging out in a pub became a fantasy it was valuable to play out.
Rules can give real-world obstacles a clear stat block and make it possible to fight these things in a really satisfying way.
Unlicensed toys also became part of the market and are often more highly valued by collectors than official, licensed ones.
Today, in Kimberly remembers that scholarly publishing is broken: lots of journals demand either full transfer of copyright or an exclusive license for the full term of copyright, without compensation to the author. Academics often don’t control our IP.
October 14, 2022
Up too early and going to sleep a little more. I’m going to miss the first #FSNNA22 session of the day because it’s right during kid-day-prep time, should be around for everything except the last session (kid pickup time) & the vid show (kid dinner time).
W just reminded me we have a Parent-Teacher conference this morning so I actually will miss the first 2 #FSNNA22 sessions today but should be back in time for the keynote.
Me to friend who is also a mom: Want me to drop the water bottle you left at M’s birthday party off at your house?
Her: Yes.
Me: I’ll let you know if I forget to.
Her: Fair enough.
Parents’brains are full, y’all.
Super headachey, so probably gonna lie down, may or may not do more #FSNNA22 today.