April 2016

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Cover of a multiple fandom newsletter published by fans in 1980.  The Clipper Trade Ship issue #30 was 32 pages long and had a cover of Han Solo drawn by Signe Landon. You can see more of her art here and learn about the role she played in early media fandom  history.

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Fanlore, April Showers, & Fannish History

unofficialfanlorenews:

Posted by: [personal profile] fanloremod

We celebrate fannish history every day at Fanlore, but April is traditionally the time that we reissue our invitation to share your old fandom faves and your personal fannish history.

Though we usually hold an April Showers of Fannish History event at Fanlore and AO3, the OTW has come to the org-wide decision that it’s time for the traditional event to come to an end. We are all sad to see it go, but we believe that the challenge in its current format–involving choosing thirty different fandoms to highlight on each day in April–is something that we’ve outgrown, and a fandom-a-day challenge no longer best serves Fanlore.

Even though there is no formal challenge this year, let us take this opportunity to encourage you to share your fannish history! If you haven’t done so already, add a “Fannish History” section to your Fanlore user page (and if you don’t have a Fanlore account, make one)! Go through your old bookmarks and create stubs or add additional information about you old favorite fanworks and fansites! Help us work to preserve fannish history all year round.

We would also like to announce an April Editing Party! Join us on Sunday, April 24th at 16:00 UTC (when is that in my timezone?) in the Fanlore chatroom to chat about fannish history and your current editing projects.

In other news, the Wiki Committee has a lot of overdue announcements for you! Look for one coming in the next couple of days, and we’ll resume our monthly newsletters starting at the beginning of May.

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x-posted to Fanlore Dreamwidth | comment there

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i am very, very interested in furry history. this is all super cool to me

spacetwinks:

furry history is interesting as hell, imo, and part of the reason i get so deep into it is that it’s not well archived, at all. a whole fucking lot of nerd creative community stuff isn’t, though fanlore does a pretty great job of tracking and archiving shit up to and including ancient zine and usenet wars. for a lot of folk, i guess it never occurred to people to keep history down and organize it, because living in the moment, why would you? you’re just somebody doing watercolor paintings of gay lynxes hanging out in wooded glens.

the thing i’m really big into is also how much of furry ties into exploration of gender and sexuality, with people clumsily, but sincerely, working out this kind of shit for themselves in the worlds of MUCKs and MUDs, in handmade and scanned webcomics, in frcadia, and on and on. there’s a huge link there, and even people reporting on furry now tend to skip right over it and focus on hetero stuff, cis stuff, which… if you’re in deep in furry culture, you should know how fucking weird it is to focus on that aspect against all others. shit, even ancient posts in phpbb furry forums from 2003, you got straight furries complaining about “why’s there so much gay stuff?”

furry history is cool as hell, imo (i repeat myself). its got a distinctly different makeup and output from a lot of other nerd corners because it’s not all in service of or dedication to something from professional productions - over the years, there’s been dramatically less and less reliance on needing something from Disney, WB, or elsewhere to spark creativity. making fursonas, making your own worlds to house your fursonas and other characters, and all these other things, furry doesn’t have any sort of central hub other than “enjoys animal people in some respect”, so the output varies wildly, splintered, highly personal.

i went to my first furry con, finally, just this last year. very, very different experience than anime cons and other nerd kinda cons.

definitely add whatever you can to Fanlore. Furry Fandom needs more representation.

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“A Mocked Time” - an early Star Trek Fanvid

The year is 1986 and you have a cassette tape player, a bunch of cassette tapes, a slide projector and hundreds of Star Trek film clips mounted as slides. You hear Gene Roddenberry is in town and you want to make him a gift. What to do?

You spend weeks assembling a few bars from each of 30++ of your favorite songs, copy them  - one  at a time - from one cassette tape to another and time them with  a stopwatch so they are somewhat synched, map out which slides go with which song lines and note exactly when in the song you have to press the “next slide” button  (taking the slide projectors mechanical lag into account again with the stopwatch). And then you take yourself, your tape cassette deck, your carefully edited cassette tape, your slide projector, and your hundreds of slides and camp out for a chance to show him your 15-minute long vid: A Mocked Time.*

You can stream the vid here

and leave feedback for the vidder here

The vid’s Fanlore page.

*Note: the creation process is probably more accurate than the rest of the story. As far as I know Kandy Fong did not camp out - the vid was created earlier and then filmed for Roddenberry in 1986.

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meeedeee:

It is the summer of  1975 and this Star Trek fan was hard at work editing her fanzine, The Communicator. She is surrounded by paper tribbles, a by-product of The Fannish Writer in her natural habitat.

*photo used with permission of both the photographer and the editor.

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The reality is that there is a hierarchy of acceptability [in both popular and fandom culture], and it ranks men over women, straightness over queerness, and art and cosplay over fic and everything else. Allowing that to rule our fandom lives destroys what is best about fandom, especially the parts that are particularly female-centric.

@olderthannetfic

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Let’s Nail This To Their Doors

I know fans have worried over the years whether their fan activities would get them into trouble with TPTB (The Powers That Be = the studios and authors). 

But here is a radical thought:   TPTB will tolerate us to the extent that we demand to be tolerated.

This goes both for our fan activities as well as for our reactions to the show’s content. If TPTB are killing off or sidelining women, minority, and gay characters, and then expecting us to watch their shows without reacting….Well, chalelnging the source, interacting with the source, reshaping the source so that it speaks to us about our desires and dreams, this is the core of transformative fandom.

“We are not passive receptacles for your content. You do not get to spend billions of dollars to beam your works into our psyche and then tell us what to think and feel, what to draw, vid or write.   You do not get to “tolerate” us and our fanworks. We are an equal partner in this relationship. We cannot exist without one another. So let’s start talking.” 

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It is the summer of  1975 and this Star Trek fan was hard at work editing her fanzine, The Communicator. She is surrounded by paper tribbles, a by-product of The Fannish Writer in her natural habitat.

*photo used with permission of both the photographer and the editor.

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The weird and wacky history of Star Wars slash

clubjade:

We had The Atlantic looking at The Force Awakens fan fiction, but now there’s a historical look-back at slash in the fandom from Lady Business at Liveournal. Behold! Fans actually asking permission to fandom! Letters from the fan club president! “Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.”

The spectre of all this was still hanging over fandom when I first found it in the ’90s, believe it or not. (Or maybe I just knew a lot of zine folks in the Star Ladies.) It wasn’t until after The Phantom Menace – and the huge and (officially*) uncontested slash fandom that came out of it – that the paranoia eased.

* There were flame wars. Oh, were there flame wars. But Lucasfilm stayed out of it. Slash bans – like the infamous one at TheForce.Net’s Jedi Council forums that was only removed last year – were solely coming from fansite owners and operators.