Tag: OTW Sightings

Used for mentions of the OTW, its projects, or personnel in the media or in discussions.

This Week In Fandom, Volume 144

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Hello and welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things that are happening! We made our budget post last week (in advance of our successful membership drive – thanks again, everyone!) and so this TWIF will be bringing you fandom content from the last two weeks.

First up, musical theatre fans received a treat this week when a myriad of Hollywood and Broadway stars teamed up to celebrate Stephen Sondheim. The veteran musical theatre composer just turned 90, and actors including Beanie Feldstein, Jake Gyllenhaal and Meryl Streep got together (virtually!) to offer tribute by performing some of his better- (and indeed lesser-)known songs in a charity concert. After a slightly bumpy start (and who hasn’t endured their fair share of technological hiccups over the past few weeks?) the event was a two-and-a-half hour triumph and is now available on YouTube for your home entertainment. Read More

This Week In Fandom

This Week In Fandom, Volume 131

Retired Personnel

Hello and welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things that are happening. Before we start, the Oscar nominations were released yesterday. What do you make of them? Let us know in the comments!

Our ‘OTW in the news’ radar was set off this week by Kaitlyn Tiffany’s charming piece in The Atlantic, ‘The Early Internet, Explained by One Weird Celine Dion Fan Site’. Tiffany interviews Yury Toroptsov, the creator of Celine Dreams, a website which ran from 2001 to 2011 and on which Toroptsov encouraged fellow fans to submit their dreams about Dion for his (public) interpretation. At Celine Dreams’ peak, Toroptsov was a BNF in online Celine Dion fandom; but the piece is more than a portrait of his particular experience. Instead, it takes the website as the jumping-off point for an exploration of online fandom culture’s transient quality. Tiffany mentions the Yahoo Groups closure, points out that Celine Dreams is only available via the Wayback Machine’s limited record, and gives a shoutout to the OTW’s efforts to preserve fan culture. She reminds us that Tumblr, a key fan platform through the 2000s and 2010s, ‘did not start collecting and collating data about fandom’ until 2013. This is important, Tiffany argues, despite the apparent triviality of the subject matter: ‘By itself, a website devoted to (possibly fake) dreams about Celine Dion is perhaps not our most urgent archival task. But in aggregate, fan sites like Toroptsov’s provide a valuable history of the ways web 1.0 users exercised fandom to provide their daily lives with context and color.’ The history of fandom and the history of the internet are closely entwined; we should do what we can to preserve them both. Read More

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This Week in Fandom, Volume 120

Retired Personnel 3 Comments

Welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things which are happening! Before we start, thanks to everyone for the congratulations on AO3’s Hugo win. There’s been more squee than we can keep up with. If you’d like to see some of the press coverage about the award, check out the Press Room on our website.

One of the big stories this week is the news that Marvel and Sony have decided to no longer collaborate on Spider Man movies. The story was broken by Deadline in this article last week. It’s kind of a complicated situation (Jeff Goldblum is confused about it), but it seems to be mostly about money. Read More