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The tech billionaire's "America Party" announcement, following his break with President Trump, has sparked anger among conservative loyalists on social media
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grab your gun and bring the cat in. Read.
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otw_news_feed at 05:46pm on 05/07/2025Open Doors has nearly finished importing FictionAlley, a Harry Potter archive. With approximately 29,000 works imported so far, it is Open Doors’ largest import yet. You can check out all imported works at the FictionAlley collection. Unclaimed works are currently locked to logged-in AO3 users only, but per Open Doors’ agreement with the FictionAlley archivist, they will be unlocked 30 days after the import is fully completed.
All FictionAlley creators should have received one or more emails with links to claim, orphan, delete their works, or prevent the import of any additional works of theirs in the future. If you were a creator and did not receive this email, please contact Open Doors for assistance. You can also contact Open Doors if you would like to prevent future imports of your Harry Potter works specifically.
Open Doors has two other Harry Potter archives currently in their queue: HarryPotterFanFiction.com and MuggleNet Fan Fiction. If your email address has changed since you were a member of either archive, or you would like Open Doors not to import your works, please contact Open Doors. Please refer to the import announcements for a full list of how Open Doors can assist you with either import.
Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) coordinated with Board and Volunteers & Recruiting to formally decommission the Quality Assurance & Testing (QA&T) subcommittee—thank you to everyone who has served on QA&T over the years. Quality assurance and testing of AO3’s code will continue under the oversight of AD&T’s new QA Supervisor role. AD&T’s latest releases have focused on various bug fixes, code clean-up, and monitoring improvements: check out the release notes. Also, Systems has installed some new Elasticsearch servers and repurposed the old ones as application servers! \o/
Open Doors announced the import of Absolution – The Inugrrrl Memorial, an InuYasha fanfiction memorial archive.
In May, Support received 3,177 tickets, while Policy & Abuse (PAC) received 3,763 tickets—a nearly 40% increase which is likely due to PAC’s recent TOS spotlight series. PAC worked with Legal and Communications’ News Post Moderation subcommittee to review over 1,700 comments across seven posts, with more than 400 comments receiving a reply. PAC will also be recruiting soon, so look out for the upcoming recruitment post!
In June, Tag Wrangling neared completion of phase two of three of their committee-wide guideline discussions on fandom metatags. They also launched a new procedure which streamlines creation of new “No Fandom” canonical tags, which are canonical tags not specific to any particular fandom. The committee plans to post announcements periodically detailing new tags, including one in a few weeks.
In May, Tag Wrangling handled over 610,000 tags, or over 1,200 tags per wrangling volunteer.
Fanlore’s Annual Bingo was a huge success! \o/ 25 participants completed at least one bingo, and 16 got a total blackout. Thanks to everyone who took part!
In July, Fanlore is running a themed month—Fandom in Color—which celebrates characters of color, the contributions of fans of color, and more! Check out their social media (Bluesky and Tumblr) for page spotlights throughout the month.
Communications is now overseeing the OTW’s Convention Outreach division, which was previously run by Development & Membership. If you have inquiries regarding OTW’s convention presence, Communications can be reached through their contact form on the OTW website.
TWC is finalizing their upcoming general issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, volume 46, which will be published on September 15. They are still accepting submissions for their Latin American Fandoms special issue until January 1, 2026.
Elections announced the 2025 Election candidates; this year’s election is contested, with three candidates running for two open seats in this year’s election. Their platforms are available on the Elections website. Communications has been coordinating public posts, while Translation is working on translating candidates’ platforms.
2025’s OTW Board Election will take place on August 15-18. OTW Members who plan to nominate a proxy should contact Elections by August 6. Specific dates for Q&A and Candidate Chats will be made available on the 2025 Election Timeline page.
Development & Membership has been checking membership for Board candidates and donors who want to vote in this year’s election, while Finance has begun preparing for the 2024 audit.
Board uploaded minutes from the April 2025 Board public meeting to the OTW website. They also approved two new Finance Bookkeepers, held check-in meetings with Legal and the Paid Staff Transition Lead, and continued to work with the Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup. The Board Assistants Team’s work also continues on several projects, including the Procurement Policy and Board Discord Server Guidelines revamp.
Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for two committees—Tag Wrangling and Support—and two subcommittees—News Post Moderation and Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution—this month.
From May 19 to June 22, Volunteers & Recruiting received 147 new requests and completed 139, leaving them with 53 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of June 22, 2025, the OTW has 944 volunteers. \o/
New Committee Chairs/Leads: 2 Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Heads
New AD&T Volunteers: 1 QA Supervisor
New Communications Volunteers: 2 Convention Specialists and 3 TikTok Moderators
New Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: Mossie, Vihi, and 1 other News Post Moderator
New Fanlore Volunteers: 90PercentHuman, Hobgirl, Sparrow, and 1 other Policy & Admin Volunteer
New Finance Volunteers: Scott and 1 other Bookkeeper
New Open Doors Volunteers: Bette, devinwolfi, Kelpie, korry, November_Clouds, Pat Zarzecka, scattered_coreopsis, Starlings and 6 other Import Assistants
New Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Volunteers: 1 Goal Supervisor; megidola and 1 other Volunteer
New Support Volunteers: 2 Chair Assistants
New Translation Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Manager; Adri Jaimes, Lia404, ttom1323, and 5 other Translators
New User Response Translation Volunteers: Felipe and friki (Translators)
Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: Nary (Support) and 2 QA&T Leads
Departing AD&T QA&T Volunteers: runt and 1 other QA&T Testing Volunteer
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: Leja, Evolcahra, and 1 other Editor
Departing Communications Volunteers: 1 TikTok Lead
Departing Development & Membership Volunteers: 1 Convention Specialist
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin Volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 2 Import Assistants and 1 Technical Volunteer
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: Sandra 002 (Volunteer)
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: ladydragona (Supervisor); Daniailís, MFY11EP, Barbara Thomas, and 3 other Volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Manager; Mirjam, DaisyJane, DanielUL, and 6 other Translators
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
henryjenkins_feed at 10:14pm on 04/07/2025Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.
Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.
SEE PART ONE SEE PART TWO
books 1 and 2 in the frames of fandom series
Through both books the examples of fandom used are a mix of primarily North American fan cultures along with mentions of non-Anglophone ones, such as k-pop. While this mix certainly accomplishes the goal of showing the diversity of fandom spaces/objects/practices, how does the series also accommodate adequate consideration of the differences between them and the role of conflict in contemporary fandom communities? (Specifically, Book 2's overview of kinds of fans and their relationship to both each other and media texts/industries mentions the idea of fandom being where fans of marginalized identities can “appropriate” texts and refashion them to their own ends. There is also a side-bar that discusses the different ideas of appropriation and their complications, which is well taken. How does this discussion of audiences and their motivations interface with work on fandom spaces that has highlighted the roles racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc continue to play in fandom communities and their reworkings of media texts?)
Henry: These are questions we’ve struggled with as we have been writing these books. The past decade has seen thorough and evolving critiques of fandom studies on the basis of race in particular, and we want to do the best we can to acknowledge those critiques and factor them into our considerations. We do so with an awareness that there is going to be a tension between the importance of representing a broad range of perspectives on these topics and also recognizing that as two white Anglo-American authors, this is not necessarily “our story to tell.”
All I can say is that we are trying to find our balance within this shifting terrain, and one way we do so is by highlighting the work of fandom scholars of color across all of these volumes and representing these debates through the insights they provide us. Fandom as Audience includes discussions of racebending Harry Potter, for example, that include the interpretive and expressive work of Black fans doing fan art and fan fiction to illustrate Stuart Hall’s notion of negotiated readings. Our book on Fandom as Subcultureforegrounds the example of a Black Disney bounder, considers the case of hijab cosplay, discusses the ways Black fans work around their marginalization in the mass media texts that inspire much of cosplay practice, and much more. Fandom as a Public situates the recent discussions about “toxic fandom” or racism in fandom in the larger context of Nancy Frazier’s critique of Habermas’s claims about the “equal access to all” offered by the public sphere that emerge from his idealized understanding of the early modern European coffee houses. We show that contradictions about inclusion and exclusion surround the notion of the public from the start, and that we should not be shocked, though it is critical to understand, that fandom often falls short of its utopian ideals about creating a safe space for all who share passion for the same object.
One of the challenges, then, with trying to represent the broadest range of different perspectives and experiences through the books is that we can only represent the work that is already out there, and thus we are doomed to reproduce some of the blind spots in the existing literature. Our hope is that in mapping the field, we make the strengths and limitations of this work visible to emerging scholars, so they can focus their energies in ways that allow them to make original contributions.
Something similar can be said about the shift of fandom studies to encompass diversity on a transnational or transcultural, if not yet global, scale. My own current interests include supporting and amplifying work on fandoms in East Asia, particularly China. I have started a research network that is bringing together a mix of researchers based in the United States, China, Korea, Japan, and beyond to do collaborative and comparative work together. This research group has two special issues of journals under development, one for the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and one for the Shanghai-based journal Emerging Media.We include such perspectives in every book in the series, but we also focus on it more explicitly in the Fandom as a Force of Globalization and Fan Locations books.
There and elsewhere, we pay attention to the tensions between pop cosmopolitanism/transcultural fandom (forms that connect across national borders) and fan nationalism (conflicts that seek to align fandom to national interests and to police borders between cultures). This is one of the key conflicts within fandom today, and to understand it, we may need to try to keep multiple and seemingly contradictory insights in mind at the same time. We signal the potential mobilization of fandom and fan-like structures by global strongmen in Defining Fandom, and we explore other forms of “toxic” or conflictual forms of fandom throughout all of the books. Our forthcoming book on Fandom as Public discusses some of the research on QAnon that has emerged within fandom studies, but we also look at ASMR fandom as a space where a more healing or therapeutic function emerged during the pandemic lockdown. We talk about the ways that the Chinese state encourages an entanglement between fandom and the national interests that restricts what can be said but also requires the performance of nationalism. But we also discuss how the free speech and participatory ethos of the Archive of Our Own struggles to deal with the structural and systemic racism that make it a sometimes uncomfortable space for fans of color.
We certainly have our own biases as researchers and mine includes a framing of the opportunities for cultural and political participation that fandom affords that is more optimistic than that of scholars drawn from critical theory and political economy. We also want to provide an overview of the field as a whole and that includes citing critiques of fandom and fandom studies.
I appreciate your acknowledgement of the ways we discuss appropriation. From the start, fandom studies has centered on the ways diverse audiences appropriate and rework resources from mass culture as the basis of participatory culture. This has included the ways that groups marginalized in the source text speak back to media producers and re-story the media. Yet, we also have to acknowledge that there are ongoing critiques of cultural appropriation which have rendered that term problematic. How do we reconcile the two? Writers like Mikhal Bakhtin tell us that all cultural expression involves appropriation – the language we use does not come pristine from a dictionary but from other people’s mouths. Rather than a simple dismissal of appropriation, which would be inconsistent with other aspects of the field, we should ask harder questions and offer more nuanced accounts of the ethics of appropriation. When is it appropriate to appropriate?
I am not sure we have the answers to this question yet and perhaps not even the best framework for asking it, but at least we are acknowledging the problem here and considering some ways people are trying to address it. In Defining Fandom, there is a similar section where we consider the metaphor of consumer tribes and tribalism as it has been developed in consumer culture research and critique it from perspectives drawn from indigenous studies.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.
Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.
io9_feed at 04:10pm on 04/07/2025
io9_feed at 03:10pm on 04/07/2025
xkcd_feed at 04:00am on 04/07/2025
io9_feed at 02:40pm on 04/07/2025
cakewrecks_feed at 01:00pm on 04/07/2025Today's Wreck is so unrecognizable I figured I better give you as many clues as possible before showing it to you.
Clue #1: He's big, green, and lives in a swamp.
Clue #2: He's a cartoon ogre.
Clue #3: His name is Shrek.
Clue #4: He looks like this:
Ok, have you guessed who it is yet?
'Cuz here comes the Wreck!
(Choo choo!)
AAAAAUUUGGGHHH!!!
Ahem.
Ok, so it's shiny, toothy, and has a homicidal glint in its dead, dead eyes.
On the other hand, now we know what would happen if the Incredible Hulk and Sloth from the Goonies ever had a love child. Right, Michelle Y.?
*****
P.S. What do you get when you combine a twenty year old movie with a ten year old saying?
Pure punny gold, that's what:
Check Yourself Before You Shrek Yourself Shirt
That'll do, Donkey. That'll do.
(Also comes in purple and gray!)
******
And from my other blog, Epbot:
io9_feed at 01:40pm on 04/07/2025
io9_feed at 01:10pm on 04/07/2025
io9_feed at 12:10pm on 04/07/2025
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