For once, I am watching C-SPAN live instead of BBC DemocracyLive!

GO GO SENATE GO

...watching Kerry and McCain bitch at each other about defense treaties with Russia beforehand is strangely soothing, actually. Even if it does come down to Kerry saying, "Dude, this is the goddamn US of A, you know we're just going to ignore anything in the treaty we don't like anyway, so can we just ratify the damn thing and move on" and McCain saying "GRR RUSSIA TERRORISTS GRR".

Aww, between listening to Kerry, and spending the morning reading HP fic to prepare for my next Ace Manifesto, it feels like it's 2004 again. Nostalgia FTW! And C-Span, always the cable channel of my heart.

I remember watching C-Span when BBC Parliament went video for the first time and C-Span re-broadcast their first PMQs, and the C-Span people were all cooing over how the MPs were panicking about their bald spots showing on camera and not being visibly asleep. ♥ (BBC Parliament is still more interesting though. Congress almost never gets personal. Or catcalls from the audience.)

ETA: "The Senate will please come to order. Senators please take their conversations to the cloakrooms." really.

If they keep up this awesome I might have to start a squee_span community after all. Luckily, there is approximately zero chance they will continue to be awesome, and we will soon go back to nausea-inducing fail, I am sure.

This is the handout I wrote for Sunday's panel on fandom and copyright. I am posting it here because it is fifteen freaking pages long and I hope some people will read along on their netbooks and I don't need as many paper copies. But people not at con-txt are welcome to enjoy.

This is html-converted using OpenOffice; I apologize if it's ugly, I cheated because it's, um, 5:30 AM the day of the panel and I haven't slept yet. If you would rather download a .doc file, click this link: Copyleft and Copyright Handout.

( Fandom, Copyright and Copyleft: The Basics of Intellectual Property for Fans )

So, a long, long time ago, before I had an online journal or interacted with fandom in any way, back before Wikipedia ruled the internets, I used to post on Everything2, which is a wikipedia competitor with a very different structure, ethos, and culture. (As much as I do like the Wiki system, I wish more sites used an E2 framework instead - I think it would've worked really well for fanlore, for ex., with its emphasis on multiple voices and automatic flow.)

Anyway, one of the things I posted there, over eight years ago (!!!), was an attempted translation of the Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer into poetic Modern English. I'm no Anglo-Saxon scholar, but I go through phases of reading lots of early English poetry and poking at the language, so it may be a bad translation, but I like the poem, and I like my version better than any of the other translations I've found, and I have nothing at all staked on it being a good translation, so critique it all you want. (I am, oddly, very fragile when it comes to criticism of my fiction - I can get scared into writing nothing for months even by *effusively good* feedback - but have a very thick skin about my poetry - say whatever you want about it, it won't change what the poem means to me.)

So there's this translation, that's been sitting pretty much ignored on a website that's been slowly dwindling in readership, until shanaqui with her riddles on poetry inspired me to look it up again and repost my Wulf and Eadwacer there.

And what should I discover but that someone has quoted my translation in an academic paper, as far as I can tell from Google pretty much in full, and published it in the journal "Language and Literature" only this month.

I am trying to articulate why this pisses me off so much. Given that I generally approve of fair use and quotation and derivative/transformative work with or without permission, and am pretty radically anti-intellectual-property in general, and strongly support acafandom in using internet postings in published papers, I ought to just be happy that somebody (somebody who I rather admire as a writer and scholar) has noticed my un-expert little translation and thought it worth talking about.

But, well, what pisses me off? Is that the journal's publisher wants 25 dollars from me in exchange for the privilege of looking for only 24 hours at the article about my work that they published without even notifying me.

( <I>That</i> pisses me the hell off (pardon my Anglo-Saxon. And Old French.) Cue rant. )

Short version: if Transformative Works and Cultures was pay-only, I would be a lot less supportive of it, that's for darn sure.

(I tend to think that fanacademia, even beyond TWC, tends to be fairly good about freely sharing info - even when papers are published behind pay-only, it's been fairly easy for me to get copies for free - but that might be because accumulated fanmeta rep has gotten *me* inside several locked walls of access that I don't even see any more.)

(Also, said fan network has already gotten me a copy of the paper about Wulf and Eadwacer that discusses me. I am now officially recorded in the ongoing conversation of Western Thought as "Melannen, a kind of 'groupie' for wit and wisdom" --- I'll take it! Could be worse. Also, my e2 post is "not exactly post-structural exegesis," but rather "a crude recommendation" to "make the empty room exciting with your own furnishings". Hmm, you know, I don't have any titles on my DW journal pages yet... :D But seriously folks, it's a reasonably good paper which is doing pretty much the same thing I tried to do in my e2 post but better - the quotes are actually a compliment, because I'm the only one of six translators - including Burton Raffel - he actually discusses at any length whatsoever. Even if he is baffled by the internets and the way learnings happen there. And he got the date of publication of the E2 entry wrong by five years somehow. And altered my translation in a fairly significant way without, apparently, noticing.)


...er. Speaking of the value of a public domain, last weekend I was at Farpoint - my first ever sci-fi con! - and spent most of the time trying to pretend it was con.txt, which meant hanging around the do-it-yourself panel rooms and figuring out how to talk about fanfic in them without outright admitting I'm a fanfic writer. (Panels I either gave or attended: Writing SF Erotica, DIY Social, SF Worldbuilding, Webcomics 101, Sex and SciFi, Not Everyone's a Pro, Copyright/Copywrong, Convention Sales for Creative Types, and Sherlock Holmes. I want to talk more about the con later, but this post is going to be long enough already.)

One of the coolest ones I attended was ( The Copyright, Copywrong panel, which was recorded and is available as a podcast. )
...anyway it also features me as "person in audience who wouldn't stop talking". Hear! Me attempt to talk to Marc Okrand without getting squee all over him! Hear! Me slip slash discussion in under the radar by casually mentioning the OTW without explaining what it is! Hear! Me get scolded for talking too much and not letting other people participate! Hear! Me completely fail to mention Interrobang Studios, which is ostensibly why I was at the con!


(and for the record, if I was not so lazy I would officially put all of my work under a creative commons share-alike license, the share-alike being most important and the attribution being least.)

I have been told I need to update already so that people know I am still here.

Let's see: what have I been doing since my last update?

Messing around on the internet; fighting off huge internet-induced bouts of self-loathing; watching old episodes of Top Gear; applying for jobs; fighting off job-search-induced bouts of self-loathing; reading Top Gear fanfic; watching the news and falling into bouts of loathing the entire world; working on interrobang studios stuff with RL friends; horrifing RL friends by telling them that Top Gear fandom is awesome because instead of genderswap slashfic where somebody is turned into a girl because it's okay to have sex with girls, it has turned-into-a-car slashfic because it's totally okay to have sex with cars, obv.; playing the terribly addictive flash game that RL friends introduced me to in order to distract me from talking about having sex with cars; helping Mom with her volunteer & church work; helping former roommates move & attempting to deal with post-move out issues; falling into massive bouts of self-loathing RE:inability to actually be a grown-up; listening to NPR because if I can't be watching Top Gear or HIGNFY I can at least be listening to Car Talk & This Just In; continuing to go through my massive collection of STUFF in an attempt to manage it; fighting off lack-of-money induced fits of self-loathing; and writing Top Gear/Doctor Who crossover fanfic.

Mostly, I haven't been posting because things I did in one of the last massive anti-oppression discussions have left me unable to say *anything* fandom-related without becoming despairingly convinced that what I am saying is full of fail and privilege and will hurt people. (This is my problem, not anyone else's, but just fyi I am probably going to have to work through a lot of crap on my own part for awhile before I feel comfortable speaking in *any* kind of meta discussion whatsoever, which, frankly, sucks, because I love meta. Also, it isn't helping that the fandom I kind of became obsessed with in the meantime is basically the story of three middle-aged rich white men being as rich, white and male as possible on camera.) (Edited to removed language-of-privilege, WHY IS THIS SO HARD.)

ANYWAY.

I have been around, although reading & commenting a lot more sporadically than I had been, in an attempt to manage the self-loathing.

I have also done the last four Spink comics *all by myself* while the main studio had no internet, about which I am quite proud! And I did the Friday's Trigger Star strip all by myself! And posted about the first quarter of this years's book reviews on librarything, though I still have a bunch of read-this-year books waiting to be reviewed.

And I had signed up to do a fanmix for polybigbang, and ended up claiming the very first fic on the claims list, tania_sings's amazing, epic, gloriously kinky story in which Ariel the Sprite sleeps with basically every other character in Shakespeare, Perfection, which was just an utter delight to mix for & illustrate. I did get the mix & art done & submitted in time, & my author loved the mix about as much as I loved her story, despite me being so flaky to workwith lately! So yay! The mix, which contains only songs that are vaguely, by some definition, in-period for Shakespeare, by which I mean lots of bawdy ballads via dreamsquirrel and niquerio, is at Ariel Sings Stormy Weather (.zip file) and here is the Ariel cover art. I was playing with using vectors/paths for the cover art, which I haven't done seriously in about ten years, and was impressed with how well it came out. (And listened to about thirty times as much new music as I actually put on the mix, which means I actually have a hope of being able to navigate my current mp3 collection now, yay!)

What I did *not* do, see re:self-loathing above, is finish the second disc of the mix and make a proper mix post with tracklistings & explanatory notes like I said I would, because the notes started growing in length exponentially as I started looking for actual attested dates for the period music. I am still hoping to finish that post very soon, but I have realized that if I wait to post until I've finished that, it would be quite easy to keep not posting for a very long time.

Reading polybigbang and rpf_big_bang have been great fun, too, (and partly responsible for my giving in and reading Top Gear slash, because I think there is more un-flocked Top Gear stuff there than anywhere else on the net up until now) and I am full of general reccingness for them.

I am probably not doing nano this year - I know, first year since way back before I was even in fandom, but it's beginning to seem a bit silly to keep signing up and writing less than 12,000 words - unless of course the Top Gear/Doctor Who crossover of doom keeps writing itself as fast as it has been. <_< I am doing yuletide, though. There's only been one year in history where the self-loathing was strong enough to keep me away from yuletide.