Fannish Histories

Fanlore to Reach 25,000 Articles Milestone

The OTW is pleased to announce that its fandom wiki project, Fanlore, will be passing a new milestone in the next few weeks. Launched on September 29, 2008, the site, which is open to contributions by all fans, will be reaching 25,000 articles. To celebrate, we are planning a trivia contest and are inviting everyone to participate!

Starting on June 16th and ending on the 18th we will be posting 10 questions a day, at the Fanlore Dreamwidth community, whose answers can be found on Fanlore. All comments to these posts will be screened and you do not need an account to post comments at the site. The first individual to submit correct answers to all questions at that post will win an OTW magnet, usually available only to those making donations. (This offer is void where prohibited.)

There will be a total of three winners, one for each post. The posts will be made at different times each day to allow participants in different timezones plenty of time to respond.

If you have any questions please leave them here. If you'd like to contribute your own content to Fanlore, take a look at their tutorial to get you started. And even if you aren't planning to take part in the contest, we invite you to stop by Fanlore and check out the great content that's been assembled there in the last five years.

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OTW Fannews: Fandom ignited

The Japan Times talked about the anime industry catching up to the online revolution. "Today the despised former pirates at Crunchyroll.com — a now-legal multilingual Web portal for non-Japanese anime fans — are leading an industry revolution in content delivery and distribution, and Japanese producers are following their lead. Heavyweight veterans such as Toei, Bandai, Sunrise and others are scrambling to preview and offer their titles internationally via streaming sites like YouTube, Hulu, Niconico and Netflix. A new producer-collaborative streaming anime site, Daisuki, sponsored in part by one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, Dentsu, goes live in April. And a Japan-based site for videos about Japanese pop culture called Waoryu debuted last month."

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OTW Fannews: Fanfiction's here to stay for everyone

The past months have produced a rash of discussions on fanfic ranging from the critical to the deeply personal. The Telegraph kicked this off with a complaint about derivative works. "To take entirely against fan fiction is pointless, not least because it’s clearly here to stay...Nor is being derivative necessarily a sin – after all, the writer who tries to create work from inside an influence-free vacuum would probably never type a single word." However, using someone else's building blocks and using only those blocks are "the difference between writing that pays homage to another’s work, and writing that robs that work wholesale of plot, theme and characters."

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OTW Fannews: Examining fan activities

A post on The MarySue took a more psychological look at the "Fake Geek Girl" syndrome. "The theory of microaggressions was developed back in the 70′s to denote racial stereotyping, but was expanded by psychologist Derald Wing Sue, Ph.D. in 2007 to encompass a wide variety and classifications of these subtle and seemingly harmless expressions that communicate 'hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and insults' toward people who aren’t members of the ingroup."

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Do you love zines?

Those who enjoy fanzines, or who were part of Star Trek fandom in its early years, may enjoy the following story, and even want to lend a hand!

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Links roundup for 14 September 2012

Here's a roundup of stories about documenting your sources that might be of interest to fans:

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OTW Anniversary Challenge now closed

Thanks to everyone who's taken part in our anniversary celebrations! We'll be contacting winners over the next 72 hours.

If you have not heard from us by September 10 and you linked us to all three of your reposts and two challenge entries, please contact us and give us the URLs to those 5 posts along with the email you want the invite sent to.

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OTW Anniversary Challenge Post #3

The Organization for Transformative Works is celebrating its fifth anniversary! From September 4 to September 6, we're holding trivia and participation contests across our various news outlets, in order to celebrate and publicize the OTW's various projects and organization history.

See our first announcement post for more details on the contest rules, and if you have any questions please post them there.

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