Welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s roundup of things which are happening! Before we start, did you hear about the Netflix e-mail phishing scam? Remember to always be careful when inputting sensitive information online, and if you’re unsure, contact the website to check that everything’s above board.
Do you live in the European Union? Have you heard of Article 13 of propose copyright legislation? If not, Save the Link and Open Media have your back. They’ve created an infographic FAQ that explains how Article 13 would unfairly affect users by forcing websites to use content filters during upload, a mechanism that’s being called a “censorship machine.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also partnered with other groups in sending an open letter to European lawmakers stating their opposition to Article 13. Help spread the world by retweeting the infographic FAQ on Twitter.
Have you seen the second season of Stranger Things yet? A lot of people have, and they’re blogging about it. Fandom Metrics did a breakdown of the popularity of the show, its characters, its actors, and its ships on Tumblr. It seems that fans are loving Steve Harrington this season, especially for his way with kids.
Inverse also published an article on the show’s popularity, with interviews of fans from various parts of the internet. The consensus seems to be that nostalgia is king, even for fans who weren’t alive during the 1980s.
“You don’t have to have been a nerd in the 1980s to see yourself in one of those kids,” [author David] Ewalt continues. “We were all kids and we were all kids who faced our own monsters, whatever they were, and we’re going to relate to these characters who have a mission and troubles they have to face. Even a kid who’s that age today can look at Stranger Things and relate to it.”
What are your thoughts on the new season? Let us know in the comments!
And, finally, there is more goodness from the neural network. Botnik fed an AI a bunch of scripts for episodes of The X-Files, and then it wrote its own. It’s incredible. Here’s a snippet:
“Mulder enters followed by a cop. The cop looks at Scully. The cop is Scully. Scully, wearing a potato, knocking Mulder slightly on the bottom.”
*ded*
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