melannen | Meta links post

Meta links post

Every so often something goes around DW talking about how there aren't any good fannish discussions on DW (from younger fans) or how much

metafandom is missed¹ (from older fans.)

Every time it happens I go "But there is tons of fandom discussion on DW! More than I can keep up with! It's all right there on my reading and network pages!"

I've been meaning for awhile to post a collection of Meta Posts That Wandered Across My Reading Page in X Time Period, as evidence thereof, and since I happened to have gotten a whole weekend behind and had a stash of tabs open, this seemed like a good day to do it. If you need more thoughtful fan discussion in your life, you could do worse than add some of these people.

So under the cut, DW meta posts that earned their own tabs in the last 24 hours. (This is not all the meta that went by, but sorry, people posting about shows and books I don't know, I may have skimmed your post. It is no reflection on the cleverness of your thinking.)

carmarthen: That Meta Essay About Polyamory In Fic

thatyourefuse: [proposal for a Vorkosigan Saga ficathon]

carmarthen: You know what fandom needs more of? [Answer: SCA AUs].

aethel: Alternative Library Literature 1992-1993

starlady: BBC Sherlock, and a question

petra: Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia: Pup of a Psychic Bitch (Year Two) - Brainstorm, Cheerlead, &c.

marginaliana: dentist - someone who does car body work [Top Gear RPF intro]

ysabetwordsmith In Which JSTOR Is A Vanity Press

brownbetty Fandoms I Have Loved [Fantasy of Competence stories]

naraht Thoughts on Generation Kill

beccaelizabeth Trying To Take Religion out of Fantasy Kingdoms

otw_news The Rebellious Pixels Chain of Takedowns

fandom_secrets: Secret Post #2203

kaz: Tolkien Meta is the Best Meta

doctor_and_master Discussion Question/Poll: What's your favourite Doctor/Master episode/serial?

(if you want your post off this list, of course, just ask.)

¹I think there were problems with the way metafandom was working, especially by the end - mod burnout and the way it facilitated some bad aspects of mob behavior being two of them - but I miss having a good source for meta links outside my reading list. I have occasionally dreamed of there being a meta recs/links community that's sort of a combination of the way

fanart_recs,

bestthingever, and

poetry are run - people sign up to take a week, and during that week they post links to any interesting meta they should come across that week. It doesn't have to be the best meta, or all the meta, just the meta that they find interesting that week. And then next week it's somebody else, and a different perspective on what makes meta interesting.

It wouldn't solve all the problems with the metafandom model but I think it would bypass several of them. And it would be fun.

Of course if I started half the community ideas that I think might be fun, I would never do anything but start communities.

IN OTHER NEWS: I am messing with tag wrangling at the moment (and liveblogging it into the empty tagwranglers chatroom, if anybody wants to pop in and be entertained). One of the fandoms I have recently assigned myself (on the rule of "If you have written it and it has no wrangler, take it on") is British Comedian RPF.

However, I am having an issue with this fandom. That being: that it makes me unhappy to have to wrangle people like Dara Ó Briain and Ed Byrne (not to mention Rich Hall and Sandi Toksvig) as British Comedians.

I mean, they are unquestionably part of the British Comedy fandom - they do British-style comedy in British contexts with other people who do British comedy - but something in me still quails at calling Dara Ó Briain or Ed Byrne a British comedian. (I wouldn't, after all, call John Oliver an American comedian, even if he mostly does American comedy in America for Americans now.)

So, fellow British Comedy people who read this journal: what do you think? Is it worth the hassle of asking the higher-ups to change the fandom canonical to "British Comedy RPF" instead? Or does it bother nobody but me? Or is "British Comedy RPF" just as bad and I should change it to something else/wrangle the expats into the fandoms of their nationalities?

(There is an "Irish Comedian RPF" category but it currently has no people attached to it. And no wrangler.)

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As a side note to your comments on one of the meta posts--if you ever need access to an article on JSTOR, or any other database for that matter, I am happy to download PDFs and e-mail them.

I will keep it in mind! Although now that my sister's in school again, I've just been exploiting hers. :P

(Although for the past few years, minus the occasional thing I really need for fic research, my rule has been that if they didn't care enough to make it open-access, it can't be that important. More and more, that's less sarcastic, actually true - several of the top-tier journals have been making their headline articles free to view on the web, and more and more people are mirroring their major paywalled papers up on their own webspaces (presumably with the permission of the journals that published them, although I have carefully never asked.) And of course the open-access journals and depositories have been getting better and better.)

You're a star, thanks for the link, and I miss Metafandom so much. It would be great if there were a comm along those lines.

(And yes, I agree that "British comedy RPF" makes more sense.)

Edited 2013-01-14 02:25 (UTC)

It would be great if someone else started one! (I know, that's what

create_my_comm is for...)

(And good, although now I'm wondering if I'm losing my memory, because I thought I'd left some tags unwrangled in that fandom until I figured this out, and yet when I go there now, they're all nicely wrangled...)

I think it might be time again to start gathering conversation :)

I like the weekly dig up idea or, alternately, we could go back to a mega blog model, where people just drop meta posts...

Yes, most of the really pathological discourse has moved to tumblr, it might be safe now. :P

By mega blog do you mean a place where people post their own meta, or a place where people can post meta recs whenever they want? I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the first model going - posting to something like that tends to make people feel like they have to do Serious Meta and Proper Essays, and that makes it a lot less that stuff will get posted. (Also fandom in general seems to be continuing to move even more toward everybody posting in their own space and linking around, rather than communal spaces. My feelings on the trend are mixed, but bucking trends is always harder.) I've wanted an active, open, welcoming "post any and all meta here" community since back when F_W was on LJ, though...

A free-recs community could work, although in my experience (unless you are very lucky) that model ends up being just a few really enthusiastic people doing all the work, anyway. (

poetry does a mixed version, with one person assigned per week, to stir the pot a little, and then everybody else free to post whenever.)

You know it's so funny, but that's exactly how MF got started with fabu and mmwd and I posting links all the time anyway and lim saying, hey, lets make this a com :)

Metablog was actually the precursor, so to speak. afai remember, anyone could post links, but yes, it was a different kind of animal.

By the time I left, we'd just installed a great software model via delicious (I know we used it for sga_newsletter too), but I have no idea what people use now...
Im' still thinking about how to get continuity and not have it rest on a few shoulders. Bc IMHE that's alway how it ends up...a few doing all the work and when they stop, it ends...

I know, I was following you for your linkspam before m_f was conceived. :D

And what do you mean by "continuity"? I what I'm asking is - do you need continuity? With setups like crack_van and poetry , the "mods" basically just manage the sign-up list; everything else is up to the assigned part-timer. And there is a lot of variation in what gets posted and how, but I guess I see that as a feature, not a bug - if this week's reccer is into fandoms you hate and annoys you and posts in purple font*, next week's probably won't, etc. And if you start getting burnout in a small group, it's a lot easier to recruit new people to "post X things over one week" than "take on an indefinite obligation as a mod".

*okay I would probably ban purple font, yes.

Nono, not in content. Just that it happens. But I guess the mods provide posters who provide content, so it's a lot of work for a short while or less work over a longer time. Actually a good method... I'm in if you do it. :)

That comm should totally exist. Especially because I hadn't seen "[personal profile] thatyourefuse: [proposal for a Vorkosigan Saga ficathon]". :D

Yeah, my main motivation for this is I keep going, "You people are all so amazing, why aren't you all talking to each other all the time!"

Clearly this is a sign that you need to hang on to the links of all the meta that comes across your reading list, and post semiweekly updates for the rest of us.

(No, seriously, I would be all over that. I don't want to creep on several dozen strangers' individual journals just to get their periodic meta, but if you're buddies with them already, please, take advantage of it!)

I have actually considered, I've even got several one-week-long link collections sitting in a bookmark folder as a playtest, but the thing is, you see, even just collecting from my reading list, it's a lot of work. :P

I would totally be willing to do it for a week every few months, though! And other people could do it the other weeks! And we could all show off how awesome our own buddies are!

Actually, scratch that, what you should do is post semiweekly link roundups in one or more of the "post your own fandom meta here!" comms that other people have tried and failed to get off the ground. The ones I know of are

fandom_opendiscussion,

month_of_meta, and

notfic.

Maybe with Doctor Who-related links crossposted to

doctorwho_meta and RPF-related ones to

writingthewall, if that wouldn't be too much extra to wrangle.

And during our assigned weeks, we could make a special effort to also crosspost stuff to meta communities and promote them! :D

(There was a thing said once by

denise about building a bookmarking system into DW that would automatically post linkspams for you at a set interval. I WANT THIS SO MUCH.)

Ooh, I would love that feature. Is it something you can mock up an approximation of with an auto-crosspost from Delicious/Diigo/Pinboard/etc? (I think you know that I have my fic-recs Diigo crosspost weekly to Wordpress, but I haven't tried to forward anything to DW.)

I don't know! I never switched over to anything else after Delicious became unusable so I know nothing about how any of those work. It would be nice, though. (And I did not know you had an automated system set up! Are your non-fic linkspams automated, too?)

How integrated to Wordpress is the Diigo-to-wordpress thingy? I bet it would be possible to hack something together that would let you repurpose the post-by-email system to do it, if nothing else... I'm pretty sure that's how people use LoudTwitter on DW.

My random-topic linkspams are hand-coded -- I have a text file where I save links and a little note about the content, then periodically group related ones together and post them in a bunch. (That would obviously be hard to automate.) The weekly/biweekly lists of fanworks are in another text file, added to a template that has series headers and things. I've thought about creating a separate Diigo and using that just to organize my own stuff, but that would make me feel obligated to go back and retroactively tag everything I've already put on the Internet, and that's just not going to happen.

The crossposting was all set up on Diigo's site, and can be sent from there to multiple blogging platforms (so far including LJ, but not DW). It's not very sophisticated; I would like it to automatically post every two weeks, for instance, but the only options are daily, weekly, and semiweekly. But it works well enough for my purposes. Would be great if someone could build on it.

If it works for LJ, it ought to be trivially easy to get it to work for DW too - like, trivially easy as in changing one line of code to say "dreamwidth.org" instead of "livejournal.com". That would be something someone would have to request of Diigo's developers, though, I think.

(and maybe get DW to set some sort of permisson flag on their end to let Diigo in? But I suspect DW would be willing to do that. Actually, "allow Diigo to crosspost to DW" might be something you could put in

dw_suggestions; they might have a better idea on how to get it done.)

Almost completely unrelated to what you're talking about (how awesome of me), but tangentially related to something I was trying to figure out earlier, re: tag wrangling. You wouldn't happen to have The Dresden Files tags under your purview, would you? (I am remembering a discussion where you probably didn't, now that I think about it), or know who does? And/or, know how complicated the process would be to untangle the Maggie Dresden tag? As is, both Margaret ... LeFay/LaFey (way to pick one and stick with it, Butcher) and Margaret... Mendoza lead to it, and while the fandom (me too!) is full of (legit!) feelings about some of the other characters' character tags have ended up, this one seems like something a little more technical and a little less personal? ...Now wondering if this happens too in other fandoms with Jrs and Srs.

highlander_ii still has Dresden Files! I left an internal wrangler comment for them, hopefully they will see it before long. (alternatively they read this journal and might see your comment here.)

In the meantime, you should be able to see only Maggie Sr. through the Margaret Gwendolyn LeFay Dresden tag. Maggie Jr. is tangled up in the metatag at the moment, but it should be an easy fix. (Unfortunately, the just plain "Maggie Dresden" tag is always going to be mixed, because we can't know which Maggie the author meant when they used it.)

Aha, that makes sense. Hooray! Thank you! Expressions of yay!

Yay,

highlander_ii fixed it already! Maggie Dresden still has a mix, but on that page you can see the two characters each having their own subtag linked to her now! Using one of the subtags should get you only that character (for works where the authors' tags made it clear which was which, anyway. Unfortunately it looks like most people didn't, but that's up to individual authors.)

Nice. :D Thank you! Man, one babbly comment and you get all the problems solved. (Now I just have to get a Margaret Mendoza in there, because far as I can tell, no one has yet. ...My apologies to

highlander_ii.)

If you see something else in the tags that's clearly wrong or broken, not just controversial, please do report it to AO3 Support! They're very good at getting those reports to the correct wrangler to be taken care of. (Plus if the change is controversial among wranglers, having Support backing you up is a great argument....)

Here's the thing: I barely have time to keep up on my flist as it is, I have no time to go network-surfing for interesting meta. Yeah, I get that metafandom had problems, and I know stuff is out there for the finding, but I definitely want someone else out there to do the finding for me, because I have no time to do it myself.

Well, my thought for this plan is that nobody would have to go out actively searching - if you make the required number of links for a week small enough (like three or four?) most people should be able to stumble over that many without trying, it seems like. And then we all get extra meta and nobody has to go hunting!

(Besides, you wouldn't have time to read metafandom anyway. Man that was a timesuck when it was at its height.)

Is it worth the hassle of asking the higher-ups to change the fandom canonical to "British Comedy RPF" instead?

I would support this as a wrangler and a fan.

(It's not obvious but those hands are Stephen Fry's playing Oscar Wilde so it's a most pertinent icon, really.)

Good to know! (Also, excellent icon.)

I agree with you about the British Comedian issue as that's come up other places. (Although I've also seen it argued about on Tumblr w/r/t fuckyeahbritishcomedy - and that's 'comedy' rather than 'comedians.')

On the other hand, though, my worry with 'British Comedy RPF' (this is something that

implicated2 and I have been discussing recently) is that it could be read to encompass things like, for example, Red Dwarf RPF. But maybe that's a tradeoff you want to make? Or maybe this is one of those things like 'bandom' where everyone knows it doesn't mean all bands, just this subset of bands, even if it has an encompassing name (although there was some fighting over that, too)?

Just brainstorming here, but what about an abbreviation, like BritCom RPF? If you don't spell it out, then people can read it as they choose...

Do you have any elsewhere-discussion you could slip me a link for? Only the tagwranglers leads are more likely to buy a complaint if there's evidence of people other than wranglers bringing it up. ^_^

I don't know that I'm all that worried about something like Red Dwarf RPF showing up? I mean, a lot of them do sitcom work too, and Craig Charles (fr. ex.) does stand-up etc., so I don't know that there's a bright line, and I don't know that the current metatag ought to exclude sitcom RPF anyway. (Actually there are a lot more individual-show fandom tags that really should be subtagged to it, but aren't; I've been putting that off too until I figure out how I feel about the name thing.)

I personally would be happy with something like "British panel comedy RPF" since that's what I watch, but that's not really the point of the metatag.

I definitely wouldn't go with "Britcom", though, since some American PBS stations use that to refer specifically to the sitcoms. Are there any other suggestions you know of?

I agree that the tag should probably change. Bring it up on the mailing list? Though really, as long as we can associate the character tags with both the shows they're on and their nationalities, I'd say do that rather than change the tag.

Hmmm. I don't know how well that would work - a lot of the British Comedy people are just on a circuit (of panel show appearances, guest slots, miniseries presenters, stand-up, etc.) rather than in specific shows, so that would get messy *fast*.

I'll put it through the mailing list, but I thought I'd sound it out here first, since I have collected a lot of British Comedy writers already :D

Ah, that's probably true. I didn't think of that, since I only ever watched one or two shows/podcasts.

I feel like there was an earlier discussion about nationality and RPF, but I can't remember. At this point, I feel like most of the discussions are ones we've had before.

I am so tempted to go to Create-my-comm and try to set something up, just because I miss multi-fandom meta. I get some meta-type discussions from Fan Fic Rants, and the Fail Fandom Anon comms, so clearly there's still a lot of people who want meta-type discussions. It's just a case of getting people to set up a DW comm and have people watch/join it.

But I agree about your crack-van model; I think that would work really well, possibly combined with a sticky post (like for fandom wank et al) where anons & mice who don't want to rec things can still leave links to meta and relevant articles. That way reccers can also go check out the link post to see if there's anything there they want to rec.

And, hm, a facility for discussion-type posts, where you have a call-response with someone else's meta and your own meta post responding to it.

Oh, I want this so much. I don't suppose you'd want to co-mod a comm with me? ::g:: (And actually, that's a surprisingly serious offer; I really do want a meta comm on DW that'll last.)

It definitely sounds like this is an idea that has legs - give me an hour or so and I'll throw up a brainstorming/recruitment post with some notes I wrote down when I first had the idea a few months ago, and see if we can get this thing running!

Was pondering the impossibility of RPF fandom names earlier today while listening to Bela Fleck's "Perpetual Motion" and realizing that I found the... network?... of classical/country/jazz musicians?? surrounding Edgar Meyer to be fascinating in an RPF kind of way, but I have no idea what I'd call the fandom. American Crossover Classical RPF?

Basically I just want stories about Joshua Bell and Edgar Meyer and Yo Yo Ma and Bela Fleck and Chris Thile and Mark O'Connor hanging out.

In any case, would British Panel Comedy RPF make more sense as your fandom name? I mean, it may not 100% capture the people you want in it, but it should capture the vast majority and exclude other kinds of British Comedians?

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