Fandom Wishlist

[melannen]

Snowflake today is about making a fandom wishlist, and I had a little trouble with it, mostly because? Fandom is being pretty good to me right now! I can find plenty of the things I want from it. Fandom ♥

So most of the things I can come up with for a fannish wishlist are more "I wish I was better at dealing with that" or "I wish I had the skill/time/attention to make that", and that's not really the spirit of this prompt.

But I thought about it and threw together some wistful "if only" thoughts I've had lately.

1. More posts to fictional_fans!
2. Any fills for my fanart requests from Wrapping Paper this year
3. Some kind of resolution - or at least acknowledgement - on the whole "Fanlore editors are reposting other fans' works in whole to Fanlore without permission or notification and ignoring fans' attempts to control archiving of their works". It is really bad to have AO3, which is so strongly in favor of making sure everyone who wants to can control who sees their fanworks and when and where, and Fanlore actively working against that in the same org.
4. A way to easily download my whole AO3 reading history to a spreadsheet, since the app from last year is still down and I still don't understand logins well enough to scrape it myself.
5. Some kind of gathering place for fannish types to talk about coding. Like, most of these I've seen are aimed at specific projects, or ancillary to other projects, and I have neither the skill nor focus to feel like I belong there. Is there like a discord for people who want to be able to talk about stuff like throwing together bookmarklets and javascript toys for fandom, or running their own fansite or forum or wiki, all the way up to way more complicated stuff.
6. A fic where you know who your soulmate is the first time you touch them (or see them, or talk to them, or whatever.) Some people will never meet a soulmate, some people have only one, some have a few or a dozen. You though you didn't have one until you heard some friends talking about how it felt to meet theirs and realized that was just what you'd felt every time you met a new person your whole life???
7. Some kind of place where you can just throw out prompts and you don't care what fandom/pairing they are written in. Like Bulletproof Exchange is running now, where you write prompts but the filler can fill with any fandom or pairing? Like that but not an exchange because I'm too tired to do more exchanges. A kinkmeme maybe, if if could be active enough to actually get fills!
8. Somewhere I can play multiplayer Minecraft with other older fans! I have never played multiplayer and I'd love to and there's so much potential to make fannish stuff in it, but I don't really want to dive into the wider Minecraft community.
9. Fanfic recs from people on dreamwidth! Especially aimed at people who may not be super into the fandom, but it's just so good. (Also, more dreamwidth people to link their own fic on their dreamwidths, I don't use AO3 subscriptions heavily and I am always shocked at end-of-year roundups where I'm like, wait, they posted fic this year? Also I just miss the days when my reading list would be chock-full of good fic every day.)
10. I miss in-person fan meetups. I never even went to that many but I want to be in a world where it feels possible again.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

So there is still a reason to post my fic on DW, besides purely archival reasons! Good to know!

[melannen]

I mean I don't always follow them but yes! I use subscriptions pretty much only for WIPs, it just hasn't really worked for me with authors, so I won't see your stuff otherwise unless I stumble on it in a tag filter. And some people I may not even know you write fic at all. Plus it's a weblog, log what you're doing, be proud of it.

But also I just think in general it's better to actually say to the people who already want to read your stuff "Hey I wrote a thing, I hope you read it!" than to just toss it into the scrum and hope.

[sophia_sol]

I really ought to post fanfic recs more often. These days I pretty much only do it for yuletide once a year, and everything else is just like "I bookmarked it on pinboard I'm done now." But recs posts are good!

[melannen]

You get a pass on that one because your recs are one of the main things that still keeps pinboard.in/popular/fandom seeded with good fic. :D

(More pinboard bookmarks from Fandom-marked accounts should've also been in 9.)

[sophia_sol]

ahaha why thank you! yes I really really really want more pinboard bookmarks from fandom-marked accounts too, popular/fandom could be such a great resource :(

[melannen]

I need to be better at that! But I really wish Maciej would roll out read-only free accounts, too, like he said he was looking into when he locked it down, so I could keep linking people who don't have seed accounts to it. You can still see the popular pages without an account, but that's it. :/

[sophia_sol]

oh dang, I had no idea that change had been made, because I only interact with pinboard when logged in! yeah read-only free accounts sound like a really important thing

[melannen]

Yeah, I think it was mostly that he was having massive issues with bots overrunning everything, so he had to lock down to users-only to keep the bots out. But with accounts now being a yearly fee and everything else hidden to non-account-holders, it makes it a lot less useful as a community resource. :/ People begged for read-only free accounts at least, so they could still use it for things like public indexes and links lists for courses, but no updates on that afaik.

ETA: It looks like he's actually planning to take time off from activism to put work into Pinboard this year, though? So fingers crossed.

[sophia_sol]

ugh that makes sense as a reaction to the issue but it really does limit community usability, as you say :((( but that's exciting that he might be putting more time into pinboard this year!! I love pinboard but there are definitely some things that need attention

[ratcreature]

I posted my response before reading yours, but if I'd thought of it, I also would have put #3 on my list.

[melannen]

As far as I know there has been no response yet to anyone contacting them about that as a general issue. :/

[ratcreature]

I'm not surprised at all. The fanlore editors who are into just hoovering up anything they can get their c&p on seem very convinced that this practice is for their version of the greater fandom good, and the rest of the org doesn't seem to care or notice.

[melannen]

Maybe I'll have to run for the Board next time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ratcreature]

Good luck with that. It would probably be a lot of work though.

But so would any other way to address the problems. (Like, I imagine a lot of direct, bottom up engagement with editors on the respective talk pages over egregious c&p might eventually have an impact too.)

[melannen]

I mean, *running* for the board isn't a huge amount of work, I'd just have to make sure to lose the election. :P

[ratcreature]

But creates merely running on something actual issue visibility enough to affect editor behavior/fanlore culture down the line?

Granted, I'm not a member of the OTW, but I do see their blog posts and encounter the occasional discussion relating to it, and I couldn't tell you which issues were relevant in the last board election, except I assume racism, because there were so many complaints that I can't imagine candidates not mentioning it. Though I couldn't tell you whether there were significant differences between candidates either. And I am not sure the fanlore editors are any more engaged with the OTW than I am.

[melannen]

The issues that are relevant are what the candidates bring up, and the questions that are asked in the official question session, basically. And whatever else is big among fandom. But also we haven't actually had a contested election for awhile. (I basically only pay up when there's a contested election, because they aren't really hurting for membership money right now.)

I could probably do just as much by annoying asking questions about it of all the candidates, tbh, and not run the risk of winning, but a contested election makes people more likely to pay attention.

Individual Fanlore editors probably don't care much about OTW, but it is in theory managed by a committee of volunteers who are under the authority of the Board and set its policies. From what I have heard it has pretty consistently been pretty dysfunctional, probably mostly because nobody, including the Board, pays much attention to Fanlore. But theoretically one of the functions of the Board is to deal with committees that aren't serving the Org's interests anymore.

(I am not a good person to be on the Fanlore committee because I have thought from the beginning that they were doing it fundamentally wrong, but people making noise directly at the Board is probably the only way to get anywhere.)

[ratcreature]

My one run in with the Fanlore committee over the image policy (not the recent controversial photo proposal, but the first one, years ago) was unpleasant and I quit editing over that kerfuffle, after having edited quite a lot at the beginning. But I had a real problem with the massive number of zine art uploads and web archive site scraping. The c&p of text posts wasn't as prevalent then. But the whole issue seemed beneath the notice of the OTW Board iirc. So I think you're right about their attention.

[pauraque]

6. I would read that fic!

7. Hmm. When femslash_kink runs their annual kinkmeme, they allow Any Fandom prompts and that option does get used, and same goes for elasticella's Sapphic Spring. Obviously the subject matter is not completely open-ended in either of these, and I'm not sure if it would work if it were much broader. Like, clearly you can attract people with the promise of f/f prompts, but I don't know if just "prompts" would have the same draw. It feels like it might be too general. But I could be wrong!

[melannen]

Yeah, I don't know if it's workable or not. When I've seen Bulletproof Exchange brought up, some people think it's a really cool idea and some people can't even understand the concept of an any-fandom exchange, and I think the second category vastly outnumbers the first.

[nyctanthes]

Some kind of place where you can just throw out prompts and you don't care what fandom/pairing they are written in.

3 Sentence Ficathon over rthstewart's is starting next weekend I believe. It generally runs for a month, though people fill prompts all year. There are lots of prompts that are posted/filled with any fandom/any character.

[melannen]

I see that every year but 3-sentences is just not my format, I'm afraid.

[kore]

Some kind of resolution - or at least acknowledgement - on the whole "Fanlore editors are reposting other fans' works in whole to Fanlore without permission or notification and ignoring fans' attempts to control archiving of their works". It is really bad to have AO3, which is so strongly in favor of making sure everyone who wants to can control who sees their fanworks and when and where, and Fanlore actively working against that in the same org.

YES,
THIS.

[melannen]

RIGHT? I love that they replied to every top-level comment on the photo policy post except the ones about that.

[waterfall8484]

I had not heard about the Fanlore thing, so thanks for putting that on my radar!

As for Minecraft I'm on a server called Shamblecraft that skews older and that has a pretty nice community. You do need to have been on the Discord for I think 3 days before getting access to the server, but I find that sort of reassuring really. There are a bunch of people who stream and make videos from there as well, so if you want to check it out you can take a look at founder Phali's streams or YouTube videos. We started a new season less than a month ago so it's a good place to jump in (we're actually killing the dragon tonight).

Also, thanks for giving me a reason to link my fics on DW, I've completely fallen out of that particular habit.

[melannen]

Oh, thanks! I think killing the dragon is a bit beyond me - I have yet to kill anything more dangerous than a sheep - but it sounds like the discord might be a good place to start to figure out how multiplayer works.

[waterfall8484]

Well, in this case we were like 20+ people so it didn't even have time to land :D

We also have keep inventory on when we die, so I'm less of a coward than usual (although I still leap in my chair when surprised by mobs lol).

I'll keep an eye out for you in case you feel like joining :)

[primeideal]

You've probably seen it but just in case, Fanlore is looking for Policy/Admin volunteers: https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/21484

[melannen]

Oh good! I will not be volunteering but I would like to think it's at least an acknowledgment that something is needed.

[pedanther]

Fanfic recs from people on dreamwidth! Especially aimed at people who may not be super into the fandom, but it's just so good.

fancake's theme for this month is Fics that are good for people just getting into the fandom, if that's the kind of thing you're interested in?

[melannen]

Yes it is! Fancake is one of my favorite communities.