• TechDirt discussed the new site DMCAInjury.com, which was set up to keep track of bogus DMCA takedown requests. Those who file such claims could face punishment for those actions under section 512(f) of the DMCAbut so far it's happened rarely and with difficulty. Keeping track of accidental or malicious takedown requests might spur more cases against those filing them, or "at the very least, perhaps it will create a useful dataset to explore the nature and frequency of bogus DMCA takedowns."
• The Daily Dot discussed the controversy over racist, homophobic, and sexist commentary found at GitHub, an open source code-sharing site used by many projects (including the AO3). "GitHub is a platform geeks and techies love because it not only lets you manage projects but allows you to share your code and your projects with the outside world." However, the sharing mentality doesn't mean all users are welcome. "GitHub sits in the center of an Open Source community that has been dealing with heated ongoing controversy over its lack of diversity. In November, BritRuby, a Manchester conference of Ruby on Rails coders, was canceled after outrage broke out online at its all-male lineup of panelists."
• A post at TeleRead offered fans tips on formatting downloaded fanfic from Fanfiction.net and the AO3, noting that MOBI downloads from AO3 can create wide margins and non-functional tables of content. Flavorwire tips readers off to the availability of Giphy, a search engine for animated GIFs. "Even in the age of relatively mainstream blogs like What Should We Call Me, though, a glance at Giphy’s front page reveals that the site caters to the kind of dedicated fandoms that popularized the .GIF in the first place."
• Lastly, former Board member Francesca Coppa will be speaking at the Midwest Archives Conference on April 18 about the OTW's work on the Fan Culture Preservation Project and the AO3. Her talk will discuss how fan works are "an alternative, subterranean literature and arts culture, and describe the many ways fans have worked over the years to distribute and preserve that culture through zine libraries, hand-coded on-line archives,[and] songtape circles."

What tools do you think help keep fandom running? Tell us about it in Fanlore. Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• Fanfiction has moved surprisingly quickly from a rarely-spoken-of pastime to something celebrities acknowledge reading, people want to bring into literary canon, or be seen doing, or even writing their college admission essays about. However the activity's newfound popularity is rarely portrayed as part of the fannish impulse to create a shared canon, leading to an awful lot of focus on professional rewards.
• Many a published fanfic writer has recently testified to its usefulness as both writing training and developing an audience. "If I can’t tell one character from the next in the middle of a conversation, you’ve really missed the mark. You’re not going to convince me that any of these characters are worth reading about if they all come across as one nebulous dude inhabiting various bodies" yet "[t]his is where my high school and college career spent writing fanfiction comes in handy." It's even spoken of as an apprenticeship. Yet these works have long been created by professional writers, and turning pro is an avenue only some fanfiction writers have ever been interested in pursuing.
• The idea that fanfiction is something that will only be created for publishers rather than for fellow fans seems to steer Amanda Hess at Slate into an odd direction, asking if slash writers will all turn to het in order to get more chances at a big payday. "But as fan fiction gets its due, it appears that publishers are still picking up stories that conform to old models about what women want. Baker may not be your traditional romance writer, but she’s selling a familiar story: She lifted the hetero One Direction script from the lyrics, put it in her own words online, and then sold it back to the mainstream. And 50 Shades of Grey may have been steamier than the source material, but it kept Twilight’s passé dynamic intact—competent older man schools naïve virgin...But even the most well-populated fantasy worlds may be too transgressive for the mainstream.”
• Meanwhile, within fandoms, there are more transgressive issues than slash to discuss which relate to fanfiction in its practice, rather than as some form of professional development. Recent articles have focused on the treatment of women, a lack of ethnic and racial diversity, or indeed taking shipping out of fanfic and onto the social media pages of their related celebrities.
• Whatever the discussion, however, the OTW's always glad to see its projects mentioned as fannish resources.

If you write or read fanfiction, how has it affected your life? Contributions are welcome from all fans at Fanlore.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• Writing for Novis, a "Journal of Communication, Culture & Technology", Sara Levine looks at the PBS OffBook video "Can Fandom Change Society" and focuses on the importance of fanworks. "If I were hired to create a seven minute video explaining fandom to the general public, I would focus on notable examples of the impact that these passionate communities have on their members and, increasingly, the world outside of fandom. Fanfiction would be the first feature because I believe it is the easiest concept to comprehend." More importantly, "[a]n introduction to fan communities would be more effective if it showcased the excitement and creativity fandom can inspire in its members."
• From communication and cultural studies to philosophy, Mark Linsenmeyer at The Partially Examined Life speculated on "the existential weirdness of being a fan." "Sartre’s concern in all this would be what this says about me, the person who feels this way. By treating celebrities like toys, I exert imagined power over them. By denying their reality I deny my own basic humanity, as a person among other, ontologically equal persons, meaning that the celebrity’s social status, or wealth, or fame is all irrelevant to the moral facts relationship between us. Being star-struck is existential because it makes a claim (a wrong claim) about my position as a human being in the world."
• A new book of essays tries to explain one specific fannish creation, Fifty Shades of Grey. "Editor Lori Perkins collected writers from all walks of life to pen the essays on debate. Romance novelists, BDSM dungeon masters, matrimonial lawyers, and professors are just a few examples of those contributing to the collection." The essays aren't all positive. "While several topics -- including sexual empowerment and pop culture influences -- are included in the upcoming book, [Jennifer] Armintrout’s viewpoint is that of an author and it is a negative one. “It’s the writing, the content, and the ethical violation of taking someone else’s work to sell and make a heap of money,” Armintrout said of her troubles with "Fifty Shades."
• A more supportive view of fanfiction appeared in The Huffington Post where writer Peter Damien discussed the importance of it in his life. "This, then, is the purpose of all my rambling: to show that my own roots run deep as anyone's, but they begin in other people's worlds, in fan-fiction. It's not evil, it's not dangerous. It's unoriginal true enough, but so what? Fan-fiction is the equivalent of a group of teenagers working hard as they can to play covers of Metallica songs. Eventually they're good enough to play in bars, and maybe beyond...Writers becoming snotty, or hostile, or even actively aggressive against fan-fiction is, to my mind, the equivalent of a big rock band showing up in a tiny town bar with a SWAT team to stop a group of teenagers from playing an off-key cover of one of their songs. It's not only stupid and pointless, it's petty, mean, and probably more harmful to the major rock band than to the bar band."
• One of the more interesting examinations of fanfic appeared on Buzzfeed, looking at deathfic in pop star fandoms and it cited Journal Committee staffer Kristina Busse's work for Transformative Works and Cultures. "But Busse says that these morbid fanfics are a drop in the bucket compared to the larger genre of stories of the writer’s imagined trauma and recovery, like the ones where Bieber saves a girl from self-harm. “[Deathfics] are few and far between compared to the much larger and more popular ‘hurt/comfort' genre,” Busse says, “where the pain and suffering functions as a way to bring the characters together, like a cancer victim meets Justin and they fall in love, or as a way to test their love." Fan fiction of this stripe can even have a therapeutic effect. “[In fan fiction], tragedies that are then survived and overcome are actually much more common,” says Busse. "They're a very safe way to work through imagined or real trauma.”

If you cover rock tunes, enjoy deathfic (pop stars optional), or have an academic take on fandom, why not put together an entry on Fanlore? Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• Entertainment reporter Ken Baker has written a novel about a pop star dating a fan but in a twist it's the star who stalks the fan. His inspiration was the intimacy provided by social networking in contemporary fandom. "Fans know so much about
 their idols. The interesting thing is that it doesn't seem to have spoiled 
the fantasy or dampened their fanaticism. If anything, it seems to only 
fan the flames of their passion for the celebs. As they say, information 
is power, and I think fans feel empowered to know so much and become that much more interested in their favorite stars."
• Hypebot provides a different take on music fandom, but one which also looks at the role of technology. Several public relations specialists weigh in on how music fandom currently functions. "The older online music communities were ecosystems dedicated to either genres or geographic locations...Now that communities are forming around artists and personal tastes, these older characteristics of ecosystems are evolving, but some are stagnated based on the fact that complementary activities need to take place away from the community for it to evolve." One concern? Over-reliance on a particular online platform. Another is how much the artist can offer. "The artists that have thriving fan communities are generally a result of their cult of personality, not their art. Most don't have artistic output rate high enough to maintain engagement by the community, hence the need to be...more than the sum of their art."
• Tor.com recently proclaimed Babylon 5 set the bar for fandom in the 21st century. "[W]ay back at the end of the last century, one of the first sci-fi fandoms did have the internet, complete with online spoilers! That fandom was centered around Babylon 5, and though we don’t talk much about Babylon 5 now, the narrative structure of the show, in tandem with internet discussion, essentially created the model for TV fandom today." Technology played an important role: "Babylon 5 was also one of the first TV shows to market itself through grassroots internet outreach, assuming (correctly) that science fiction fans were hanging out online. This was back in the days of Genie and Usenet, but a lot early internet jargon found its footing here. For example, those who didn’t post on the forums were called “lurkers” and at one point, [Babylon 5 creator] JMS, left the forums for a time because of too much “flaming.” He triumphantly returned, of course, after a basic moderation system was sussed out. At the time, all of this stuff was brand new."
• Speaking of fannish history, the MediaWest Con blog hosted a piece on fanzine archives citing several collections including "The University of Iowa Special Collections (aka the Fanzine Archives). This is the largest media fan collection currently in place. They have jointly partnered with the Organization For Transformative Works...which helps fans donate zines, flyers, convention program guides, fanvids, audio and video recordings etc. The OTW has an active outreach program called Open Doors with a volunteer assigned to facilitate donations. The University may be able to help pay for shipping. They can also handle large collections and, if needed, may be able to help arrange for someone to box and ship the zines."

If you're a music fan, a Babylon 5 fan, or have been a fanzine contributor, why not write about it in Fanlore? Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.