Two major fanfic archives, LotRfanfiction.com and TwilightArchives.com, were recently purchased without warning by a man named Keith Mander for the express purpose of turning the not-for-profit fan sites into a money-making venture for himself. Mander is a former Facebook employee with no connection to any fandom. Continue reading “PSA: Former Facebook employee buying up fan sites for profit” »
Category Archives: Off Topic
Supernatural’s F*** You to Female Fans
I wasn’t going to write about Malleus Maleficarum, the Jan 31/08 episode of Supernatural, because it’s outside the scope of this blog. But it was truly horrific, an over the top display of misogyny which the show has been building towards all season. Since it plays after Smallville and is paired with it because of genre and fandom, I felt I had to say something about it.
As Deadbeat Nymph stated in a comment, “They’ve mined misogynist propaganda for all it had to give, and without reflecting on its insidiousness. And so, they’re basically offering misogynist propaganda themselves, perpetuating it.”
If you don’t watch Supernatural and don’t care for it, lucky you. It was a great show that had race and gender issues from the beginning, but also some amazing potential that was squandered by clueless writers. Continue reading “Supernatural’s F*** You to Female Fans” »
The Super-Duper Friends
Very funny video: Challenge of the Super-Duper Friends.
Sold my house! (and cute Supergirl prints)
Yay, I sold my house! Here are some prints I picked up from artist Meghan Murphy‘s web site to decorate my new apartment.
I love these because they’re so cute and retro and hip. You may have seen the first two when I blogged about them previously. They’re really, really cool up close. Also, you should see the business cards that came with them! If I could find the power cord to my scanner I’d scan in the Batgirl card to show you , because it’s a different illustration that’s not found on the web site. What I wouldn’t give for a comic book cover in this style =)
More about FanLib
The fun continues…
Chris Williams Respond to Our Questions about FanLib on Henry Jenkins’ site. Summary: he’s every bit the tool folks thought.
In response to the above interview, bayleaf comments, “Oh, lord, i think in the FanLib equation fans are deliverables, not a target audience. This is clearly a product aimed at media corporations, not at fans.”
Astolat explains,
That said, the people behind fanlib…don’t actually care about fanfic, the fanfic community, or anything except making money off content created entirely by other people and getting media attention. They don’t have a single fanfic reader or writer on their board; they don’t even have a single woman on their board. They’re creating a lawsuit-bait site while being bad potential defendants, and they deserve to be chased out being pelted with rocks.
FanLib sets out to exploit fanfiction authors for profit
Well, this is interesting. And by interesting, I mean outrageous, greedy, insulting, and extremely stupid.
Yesterday, a fanfiction archive launched with $3M of venture capital and its very own domain name: www.fanlib.com. (No link. Intentionally, no link.)
Apparently it was founded about five years ago by three men, none of them with a history in fanfiction: Chris M. Williams (his handle at the SixApart place is mimbo, and yesterday, as news of FanLib hit fandom, he was cut-and-pasting angry spam across a dozen livejournal discussions); David B. Williams, and Craig Singer. [editorial note: read FanLib wholly exploded for details on these skeezy businessmen and what their real, not professed, intentions are.] According to their press release, Singer “conceived of the storytelling process that inspired FanLib’s unique collaboration technology”.
Ever read a book called Women of Ideas And What Men Have Done To Them, by Dale Spender? The “storytelling process” Craig Singer lays claim to having “conceived of”, is apparently that fans of a show can now write stories based on the show: they can read, rate, and review other fans’ stories: and this “brings in a great way for communities to sprout around pop culture, and become more involved with their favorite storylines at a very deep level.”
What a good idea. How amazing that it took till 2002 for Craig Singer to think of it. And now everyone who’s ever wanted to do that only has to register with FanLib and they have a place to publish their “fan fiction”, as the press release tells us it’s called. As a writer on BusinessWeek, commenting on the press release, notes “The genius of FanLib is realizing that fans can be happy just being recognized.”
It gets worse, much worse. Read the rest of the post and the informative comments at Fanlib: our wannabe corporate overlords.
This story is all over the fan communities, as fanfiction authors/readers are understandably incensed. A good place to start is Icarus Ancalion’s Article summing up FanLib, which also includes a set of links to discussion elsewhere. It’s pretty sickening what these guys are trying to do and how they’re doing it. I’m really getting tired of these kinds of people coming onto the internet thinking it’s their right to co-opt and profit off the backs of other, less powerful folks’ efforts, like they’re used to doing offline, and calling it “user generated content”. Exploitation by any other name…