Posts in LiveJournal
This Week in Fandom, Volume 46
Welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things which are happening. Before we get started, what do you think of Harry Styles’ new single, Sign of the Times? Do any of these reactions seem fitting? There has been upset in fandom recently over changes at Livejournal. As io9 reports, Livejournal’s servers have been moved to Russia–where the company is located–and therefore a new User Agreement has been devised that states that site content is now subject to Russian laws. According to the io9 article, this means that the site has “officially banned “political solicitation”— which can mean anything that criticizes the Russian… Read more
“Educational and creative purposes?” or “Hacking and other threats?”
The OTW has been told that laptops in the UK distributed to lower income people by Comet through the Home Access scheme come with site-blocking software that adult users can’t turn off. Categories of blocked sites include: “Social Networking, Drug/Violant natured [sic] and Adult content websites”: in practice, this means no LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, or Fanfiction.net (you can still get to the AO3 though!); sites like the EFF (blocked as “hacking and other threats”) as well as many feminist and GLBTQ sites (“adult”) are also blocked. Ironically, the UK government’s own Digital Inclusion report recommends public initiatives to encourage the use of social networking software… Read more
Vidder Documentaries
Fans of vidding might be interested in the short documentaries about individual vidders being made over at the Vid Commentary LiveJournal community. The first of these, a profile of vidder kiki_miserychic is now available either as an embed or as a download. The entire Vid Commentary community is devoted to encouraging fans to write or record commentary/analysis on vids they didn’t make. Vidding fans should go, read, and try sharing their own analyses of these complex and layered fanworks!
Scans_Daily TOSed off Livejournal: If Only Someone Owned The Goddamned Servers
We are saddened by the fact that yet another female fannish community has been disrupted by being TOSed off a commercial social networking site. In its original conception and use, scans_daily was about highlighting and discussing the slashy and other elements in mainstream comics most interesting to female fans, who are often a voice shut out of discussion of comics elsewhere. The community frequently hosted important review and interpretation of mainstream media, even if it did use excerpts of copyrighted work. To destroy this kind of discussion in the name of preventing piracy is exactly the kind of act that ISPs and social networking services… Read more
To Our Friends On LJ
Don’t panic! Livejournal isn’t in any imminent danger, despite today’s news (many of us here at OTW are archivists, and we know how long it takes for sites, even unattended ones, to degrade.) We’ll all still be here tomorrow! That being said, we do want to remind LJ-based fandom that: * You can create a User: page for yourself on Fanlore. (All those “If LJ goes away” posts on LJ are kind of useless if LJ actually goes away!) You can put all your pseuds, journals, websites, and other contact info on your User: page, and the wiki is searchable and obviously updatable, so folks… Read more