#and i made it with the intent of submitting it to this one publication / zine that i just miraculously learned about | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

manonamora-if · 1 year ago

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February Check-In

From here on out, we should be back on track - IRL be damned (crossing fingers with that). Unless someone throws another wrench...

Anyway, let's not think about the bummer stuff...

Here's to a hopefully "normal" month with stuff actually being checked off a list!

Onto the usual index:

Recap of last month’s progress

IF Events in the Next Month

Plan for the next month

Still long post under the break. If you want a mini version, head over to itch.io!

January Progress

Welp... there wasn't much of a list in the January Check-in, since it was the retrospective, which included the yearly plan. Still, I did make a mini one on itch. Put together we'd get:

Still play more IF and maybe review. ✅

Finish the edits of Harcourt Ch5 ✅ and coding ❌

Fix one of the semi-completed games: ❌either the Egg parser or TRNT (and make it a proper parser)

Complete the Seed/Shuffle-Comp entry✅

Honestly, not bad... The first one, obviously is done and dusted. IFDB says I posted 60+ reviews in January - covering the Short Game Showcase, the ShuffleComp, and the Recipe Jam helped quite a bit. And that also meant... I'm 3rd in the Reviewer ranking! Only 100 more to second place...

MelS and I finally stopped playing ping-pong with the editing of Harcourt (later than we wanted...), and I'm currently sitting down to edit the whole maze. I had hoped to be done by the end of this month, but it wasn't feasible... It was close - I only have half a dozen passages to code, to check it works, and do the formatting. I used to laugh at his complaining of working all the rooms for this maze (because he chose to do that many), but now I'm the one suffering... Don't do mazes... Or don't do 30+-room mazes... (I'm not joking here) Also: If all goes well, March/April should be editing of Chapter 6, June/July coding of Chapter 6 (+ re-edits of previous chapters), August/September beta/edits, October? completed game.

As for the ShuffleComp, I made it realllll close to the deadline. But (not so) strangers in the night was completed just in time! Aaaannnddd, got 1st place in the Use of Songs category! Yay me :D Also submitted to the SeedComp! and the Zach Jam.

As for fixing the parsers.... whomp whomp, didn't manage that.

Buuuutt:

I made another parser! Not Another Sad Meal is a slice-of-life cooking sim of easy difficulty (and clickable elements for help!)

Also made a Zine! CTRL+SHIFT+ZUT+ALORS Lost content meets weird technology. I probably will never make this game, but you can use it as inspiration if you want!

And spent a few days working on a collaborative virtual card for a friend. While that will never be made public (for obvious reasons), You can find the basic interface [here].

Also won kuddos of best puzzle for An Eggcellent Preparation (even though it kinda broken)!

So yeah... not huge updates for projects, but some good progress and a few mini-new games. I'm not expecting people to check those out... But it would be neat if you did!

What’s happening in February?

There's always something happening in the IF world. I don't think I ever find all that happens anyway... but. Here's the ones I know!

The Queer Vampire Game Jam ends in about three weeks. Got a vampire/human story with a LGBT+ cast? Then this is the event for you! (unranked) Also they are doing a fundraising/matching donation with submissions!

Obviously @neointeractives got you covered for Valentine’s with the Smoochie Jam: it’s all about kisses, love and romance (unranked) - Be also on the look out for the next Neo-Interactives mini-jam which is happening mid-March.

The SeedComp! (Sprouting) ends at the end of February. Come transform someone’s idea or asset into a new IF game! See @seedcomp-if for more info ;) (ranked)

Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone 2024 se termine dans un mois! Viendez faire des histoires en français!! <3 (ranked, duh)

The Spring Thing is waiting for your intent to participate until March 1st! After that, the submissions are due in April (also ranked)

Got a cool talk idea regarding Interactive Fiction, narration, or gameplay? Consider submitting a proposal for this year’s Narrascope! They are still looking for people!!!!

Note: @neointeractives will have jams all year long. One a month/or so. And the next Planting Round of @seedcomp-if will start as soon as the results are dropped.

The PLANtm for February

Shortest month, and one busy months in events (I'm at the head of two... what am I DOING WITH MY LIFE....)... So much to do, so little time. But also, ONE EXTRA DAY THIS MONTH! :D

What are we hoping to do this month?

Play more games! Because there are a bunch of jams happening and a backlog of games I'm trying to clear. Also I want to get to that second IFDB spot! (1st won't ever be attainable...)

Finish the Code Ch5 of Harcourt. This is attainable. This is doable. I will finish... because I am already 80% done. MelS is working on Chapter 6 for this month - hoping to have a rough draft for me to check too by the end of the month...

Finish fixing The Roads Not Taken. This is your month. I swear I am manifesting it hard. This is happening. I will finish you. I'm sorry I've been avoiding you....

Jam Entry number 685470w8698... probably. Maybe do a Queer Vampire/Smoochie Combo. Maybe even a French Comp game?

ALSO: I will probably do an another AMA mid-Feb.

The 2024 To-Do List:

New year, new list. A more feasible one, according to January-Me.

The hopefully maybe easy to handle To-Do:

fix the bugs in EDOC + overall the French version to match

fix the bugs of TRNT + find a way to add the missing pieces (giving up on the translation)

fixing the interface of LPM and the popups + check animal interactions

figure out the One-Button JavaScrip/jQuery issue...

edit the loading screens of the completed tiny games to include the program/format logo at least.

The 'Need a Bunch of Content to update but it's planned!' To-Do:

Update my website (bunch new title - also I don't think the logo clicky thing work...) + redo my itch page

Finish TTATEH (MelS dependent - this year should be it - for real)

Finish Exquisite Cadaver (half-way mark by this summer - manif)

Finish P-Rix - Space Trucker (main path at least)

Update CRWL (it's been almost two years... I'm getting ashamed)

The Unlikely But it Would be Dope To-Do

Finish The Dinner as it was planned (and translate)

Finish In the Blink of an Eye as it was planned (and retranslate)

Finish The Rye in the Dark City

Fixing TTTT (at least fixing, maybe try adding some storylets)

And finally The 'It's impossible, but one can wish' TO-DO:

Remaster SPS IH (if I managed to start this after completing the rest... I'm going to eat a whole sheet cake).

Start the IFComp project (2025? Might end up being a ST?)

#dev log #progress #update #check-in #february planning #AMA incoming yall

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sacrilegious-skeletal-scribe · 3 years ago

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Heya heretics. It’s good to see you, glad to count some familiar heads. I hope the hydra nest wasn’t too emotionally scarring for anyone, looks like only a few people lost limbs, loved ones, et c.

I have a story of victory, to share with you. A few months back, I crawled over the rotting corpse pile of my self-worth and submitted four pieces of poetry to a publication.

I was rather found of those four, though admittedly they were difficult picks, as any of you may know from the process, larger e-zines and newsletter-type arenas will only accept pieces that have not seen previous publications.

I post quite a few pieces of my art here to demand praise in the form of internet numbers and the rare piece of verbal encouragement, so pickings are a touch slim, especially for pieces I view as my best works.

If something hasn’t seen daylight, its probably because I haven’t finished it, or don’t like it very much. I’m a very harsh critic, and I don��t trust my judgment much, so these flickering cheers of blasphemous intent really set fire to my smoldering ego. I genuinely, couldn’t do this without you.

But I promised good news! And I’ve been talking in tangentially related double-helixes! So the submissions have been reviewed, after several months of waiting, and I’ve been informed of their fate!

They were rejected. Across the board. Not for content, not without empathy, simply quietly released from captivity.

And, I’m actually alright with that. I’ve been published. You delightful little mistakes tell me how many people have seen my art in a constant.

Now, to be clear, I’m not ecstatic that each piece was removed from the running. I’m quite fond of those pieces, and would love to see them travel beyond my own means. But I did everything I was supposed to.

I let other people see my work. I threw it to the wind and waited to see what would be taken, and nothing came of it. But failure would only come in refusal to continue. This is a victory, because this is as bad as it gets.

The worse my career can be is a rejection notice.

And it helps, I think, that I’ve read one of those pieces in front of a crowd, and they clapped for me. It helps, that three whole separate people looked me in the eye and said, “Hey, that was really good, thanks for letting us hear that.”

It helps that my reviewer left a note on one of the polite copy-pastes of ‘sorry, but no cigar’ to tell me, that a body horror piece, something that crawled out of me in and further inspired by fits of strangling body dysphoria, to tell me, a stranger, just a name on the other end of a pdf, that they thought it was surprising. And clever. And ain’t that a fucking trick?

I was rejected from a position I was fighting against hundreds to fill. Not because my work was bad, or of less value, but because it simply wasn’t quite right for the publication.

That is a failure only if I nail it to my chest and walk into the ocean. I made art, and now I have a chance to share it with others. I have a chance to allow a new audience, not because that shot in the dark worked, but because my ammunition has been returned to me, and I get to throw it all over again.

Tonight I held a victory, dear heretics. Someday I will hold another. And another, and another, and thousands more, until I could build a curtain out of rejection notices, and a centerpiece out of acceptance slips.

To you, dear heretics, as always, to you.

#submission process #rejection #art rejection #writers on tumblr #poetblr #tomes of a sacrilegious skeletal scribe #the horrible crushing ordeal of being known #gets a little less crushing each time it doesn’t collapse you

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bat-boys-zine · 4 years ago

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So @watchtower-feed and I (@superhero--imagines ) have decided to spontaneously make a bat boys zine!!

Hopefully, this can be a seasonal thing that we produce, but for now, it will be Bi-Annual. This will a bat boy(s) x reader zine! (There wasn’t one to contribute to so we made our own lol) this is a SFW, PG-13 rated zine. So no nsfw elements

We are looking for collaborators- the theme for this zine is “Summer Adventures with the Bat Boys”. If you’re interested fill out the google forms below with the appropriate form of art. We are currently looking for artists and writers!

What we’re looking for:

Writers:

* Strong style, and entertaining and feel-good content.

* Follower count is not at all what we’re looking for, what we’re looking for are contributors who are passionate about this project and strong pieces that speak for themselves

* A link to your portfolio (This can be a Masterlist, on Tumblr, AO3, wherever your work is)

* A link to 3 pieces that you’ve written (preferably with the bat boy’s)

* We have multiple spots open!

* Writer Form Here! - Closes May 15, 2021!

Artists:

* Something cool to look at dude, we’re open to whatever

* We have literally no idea what we’re doing, but we know good art when we see it

* EDIT: Just to clarify, we have no idea what an ‘x reader’ artwork would look like, for artists we’re just looking for good art that connects with the theme and moves us. If you have an “x reader” idea we love that! But it’s not 100% required :)

* We’re looking for artists to do the cover, a two-page center art piece, and several smaller art pieces throughout the zine (multiple spots open)

* Send us a link to your portfolio (Tumblr Deviantart, wherever)

* Send us two pieces from your portfolio (links)

*Artist Form Here! - Closes May 15, 2021!

Payment

Now the important part, ALL CONTRIBUTORS WILL BE PAID- payment will be a variable percentage of the final profit/net income.

Note:

30% of the profit will be donated (For now we’re thinking an even split between BLM and Duante Wright (for his GF and Baby)), This magazine was created with the intention of giving more women and POC a voice, so it only feels fair that we give something back to the community.

30% will be reinvested into the zine so we can keep producing these, and give more contributors an opportunity to promote/publish their work

After these, contributors will receive about 3% of profit In addition, all contributors will get:

-A Digital zine free of charge

- The opportunity to purchase a physical zine at cost (plus shipping)

- including any additional ‘merch’ tiers we choose to produce

- A Discount code for @superhero--imagines etsy store

- The ability to be a part of this awesome zine and help create a rad support group/community

Time Table

Apr 17 - May 15: sign-up

May 22: announce contributors

May 22 - June 19: first round of drafts due

June 22: give back drafts with revision requests

June 22 - July 11: Second round of drafts

July 11 - 18: final edits

July 31: The Zine is ready!!

It’s is important that you can meet the dates above when submitting your contribution to the Zine.

Additional Info

Note, we DO NOT believe in “owning your work”, upon acceptance we reserve the right to first publication of your work - after which (after in this circumstance being the purchase period plus one month) rights revert back to you and you are free to do whatever you wish with your work.

Also: Lexy and I have both experienced when an editor chooses to use a “radical” new style that completely changes the meaning of our work- we will not be doing that. We understand your work is important to you, and so we will treat it with the utmost respect possible. All edits for writing will only be made with your approval and knowledge.

For artists, we probably won’t edit your work outside of a few minor changes to the size or something. (We know nothing about art, we admit it, but we’re big fans and can’t wait to see what you guys come up with!)

We hope to be able to review your submission and get back to you soon!

- Sim and Lexy

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jenner-benjamin · 4 years ago

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Extended Practice Summary

Presentation poster that summarises my practice in three words - digital rendering of mixed media works.

Throughout the last three years as a Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking Masters student my work has endured a development beyond that which I could have ever anticipated. I began the course very unsure of myself and felt incredibly out of my depth, suffering from imposter syndrome and a feeling a general uncertainty that I was a right fit for the course. I have since undertaken a series of modules that have; taught me the basic principles of printmaking, shown me how to understand research as a practice in itself, allowed me to develop ideas in a supportive environment, encouraged me to consider where I would place myself as a creative in a professional context, and ultimately, to produce a body of work that consolidates all of the above. My work has developed quite substantially in this time, beginning with figurative printmaking and ending at the complete opposite end of the spectrum in abstraction. However the concepts at the heart of the work have always remained constant. I have always strived to depict an autobiographical narrative, but the aesthetic, the depth of thought and research have progressed.

At the beginning of the academic year I had surmised that visual poetry and asemic writing were a means by which I could communicate a personal narrative. I had spent the previous year touching upon the theory of asemic writing, and using the skills I had learnt in the printmaking studios to develop ideas and explore this newfound and exciting visual language. Because I had established an area of interest and a research methodology, I sought to utilise this final year to try to locate my audience. I achieved a mindset of discerning that the end of the masters degree is not an ending as such, but the beginning of my career as a creative practitioner that is using the end of the masters degree to segue in to a professional context.

In terms of putting my aims in to practice, I submitted works to a multitude of opportunities, open calls and exhibitions with the intention of placing myself in a professional context and locating my audience simultaneously. As time progressed I understood that I am a representative of more than just one community of artists. I am a Masters degree student, a queer artist, a conceptual artist, a performance artist, a book artist, a visual poet and also a researcher. Therefore, by not defining myself as a fixed identity I was able to explore more avenues and test more places where I might place my work. I submitted works to assembling publications and exhibitions, both digital and physical. The networking that I have carried out as a result of this determination has led to further opportunities, such as exhibiting at Bristol Pride and reaching out to artists whose work touches upon asemic writing in their practice.

I have finally developed my website as a space to host a digital portfolio. A lot of open calls and opportunities ask for an online presence, and I feel a website is considerably more professional than pointing people in the direction of your Instagram profile. I initially made my website to serve as an exhibition space for the Practice in a Professional Context module and for the Bower Ashton Library artist-in-residence exhibition. I am glad to be able to use this space as a permanent display for my work, rather than the awkward digital exhibition venue that it has been - though these were necessary at the time to adhere to government restrictions and social distancing measures.

I have regrettably not become as proactive as I would have liked at engaging with social media. I have grasped that it is a useful means through which ideas can be shared, but I still feel an awkward disconnect with the concept. Perhaps this is because the algorithms mean that there is no definite strategy to employ to get people to actually see your posts. I would rather put more emphasis on encouraging my audience to physically engage with my practice. I have achieved this by collating the work that I would have exhibited at the end of degree exhibition in to an edition of 150 publications that I will share with as many people as possible. I will post this portable exhibition to those that supported me in fundraising for the project, those that I would have invited to the exhibition at university, and I intend to submit the publications that are left over to various libraries and artist’s book archives.

Inevitably the current global crisis affected my practice quite dramatically. Access to university facilities has been sporadic throughout the last year, and this lack of consistency meant that my creative outputs have been staggered as a result. The weeks of isolation and multiple lockdowns hindered motivation and consequently, creative development. This feeling of disconnect that I had with my practice led to a period of reflection. I realised that not having access to the facilities meant that I did not feel the pressure to adhere to printmaking traditions, and that I could explore the more conceptual side of my work from home. This deeper understanding that I had gained of where I want to push my practice led to a much broader body of research, and I found that the gesture and performance of writing was as exciting to me as the works on paper themselves. Both research and performance have peaked my intrigue in the last six months and are areas that I would hope to explore further as my practice progresses after the course has ended.

The coronavirus outbreak affected more than just my university studies, it was also quite damaging to my mental wellbeing. Consequently I have utilised my practice as a coping mechanism throughout the latest lockdown. I have used it as a means of documenting everything that I have felt and experienced in the last year, this includes working in the hospitality industry throughout the whole ordeal, and in particular my feelings towards the treatment of hospitality workers. My third year work has told the story of the pandemic and three lockdowns from my point of view. The various periods of isolation and the loneliness that ensued had a negative impact on my mental health, and so I adapted these feelings into a series of breathing and drawing exercises that became daily rituals that formed a big part of my routine in lockdown.

The repercussions of the current situation meant that I faced many obstacles that required a degree of problem solving. The most notable instance was my time as artist-in-residence at Bower Ashton Library. I developed a body of work from found poetry that I was initially unable to complete due to the nation being locked down. I took to social media to ask my followers to send a found word, from which I could make a lockdown poem and print to send to everyone that had submitted a word. This was a wholesome project that kept my mind occupied in a time of uncertainty, and also a gift for everyone that took part. Upon my return to university I was able to complete the found poetry artist’s book, but the nation went in to a second lockdown just as I was about to exhibit the work. This challenged me to digitise the book that I had made and attribute a QR code to it that I plastered all around the city. My aim was for a new audience of passers-by to find my exhibition by chance, continuing the ethos of found poetry in a whole new context. I also spent the remaining budget from the residency on making the book into lo-fi zines that I could also distribute, wanting as many people to physically interact with the book as possible. I was particularly proud of this project, it showed that a little determination could enable me to see my ideas realise themselves in surprising and creative ways.

I have proven to myself that I can fulfil everything that I had proposed at the start of the year with very little in the way of facilities and materials. The majority of my final year’s worth of work was conducted from my bedroom with a roller and some etching ink. This low maintenance method of working is completely transferrable to anywhere in the world, which really is an exciting discovery to make so early on in my career as an artist. Armed with the knowledge that I do not necessarily need studios to develop ideas, I had the confidence to propose a project to an artist residency in rural Italy. I will be placing myself in the community and examining through first hand research how ideas of asemic writing and narrative might translate in a setting where the language spoken is not my mother tongue. I am intrigued as to the otherness of language, and how a language that I do not understand might be transcribed visually. The proposal itself is also transferrable, and has the potential to be explored on a global scale.

There is much scope for further research within asemic writing, and handwriting as a whole. I have enjoyed having the masters degree as a part time constant, but the nature of this part time study has meant that I have not been able to dedicate as much time to my practice as I would have liked. Asemic writing is an under researched area of study, and it deserves more time and commitment than I have been able to afford in the last few years. With this in mind I intend to write a proposal for PhD research. I am keen to explore ideas of asemic writing, narrative and comprehension, and will utilise everything that I have read and learnt in the last two years in particular as a basis for this proposal.

I cannot commend this course highly enough. Having the support to develop and explore my practice has been truly invaluable. I have seen my work mature in to a coherent practice with a clear path forwards beyond the confines of university. This confidence in my practice would not have been achieved without the continuous backing of the module leaders, my peer group, and studio culture as a whole. I have found my creative voice, and am excited to use everything that I have learnt as a student on this course to establish a future for myself as an artist.

#practice #summary #evaluation #report #asemic #asemic writing #performance #performance art #printmaking #masters #mamdp

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equivalentexchangeanthology · 4 years ago

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About / FAQs

The Equivalent Exchange Anthology will be a ship-friendly project open to Fullmetal Alchemist creators of all types. Content about any and all FMA characters and ships will be allowed (with appropriate ratings and warnings). Hate, harassment, or disparagement of contributors will not be tolerated.

The project will have multiple parts*:

A printed zine of gen fanwork and meta**

A printed zine of SFW ship-based fanwork

A digital zine of NSFW content (including a section for ship-based content and a section for gen)

A digital zine of NSFW ship content, including trigger-heavy content

(*This general project structure is provisional and open to change, as the final scope of the project will depend on contributions. Under no circumstances will an alteration of the structure result in SFW and NSFW content being mixed into the same project.)

(**Meta can be personal essays about what makes FMA meaningful to you, analyses of characters, themes, or details from canon, stories about your experience with FMA, or another type of non-fiction)

What is a zine? A zine is an unofficial fan-made publication compiling textual and visual contributions from fan creators.

What is the theme of this project? We want to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Fullmetal Alchemist by letting creators express their love for FMA however they like! We are leaving this very open-ended on purpose. This fandom is full of creative people with varying perspectives – to us, the most important thing about FMA is the message that all of us coming together despite our differences is what gives us strength. The name “Equivalent Exchange” was selected to highlight the way that being a part of the fandom has given us so much in return for what we’ve put in, which is another element that we’d love to incorporate into the project.

What do you mean by “meta”? “Meta” in the context of this project can be any non-fictional content that someone wants to create: character analysis; thematic analysis; extended commentary on a scene or plot point; a short essay about your personal experiences with and/or your discovery of FMA; what FMA has meant to you. A description of the work or process that went into a cosplay or another type of fan creation could also fall into this category. You can find more information on what could qualify as “meta” here!

Will there be merchandise? Yes! We will have merch bundles available, and it will be possible to purchase them together with the zine parts of the project, or on their own.

What is the schedule? The full schedule is available here! Pre-orders will open August 1st and remain open until October 3rd.

Will the project have a Discord server? Yes! The Discord server, as well as periodic emails, will be the primary methods used for communication with contributors. The Discord server is carefully organized by project, so that contributors will only have access to content for the project they are contributing to. The server will be SFW by default, except for the project-specific spaces for the NSFW projects, and all server spaces will be moderated. All of the general “chat” channels will be strictly SFW.

Who can apply? Anyone who loves FMA, wants to create for it, and respects others in the fandom regardless of differences in fictional preferences (character interpretations, ships, etc.). Contributors must be prepared to collaborate with others despite differences of opinion, and should not have a history of shaming, belittling, or attacking others based on what they enjoy in fanwork. In short, applicants’ philosophy should be “Ship and let ship”!

Can people under 18 apply? As long as an applicant under 18 is legally old enough to work in their country of origin, their application will be reviewed. (Contributors under 18 will only be permitted to apply to, contribute, and view SFW content.)

How many contributors will be accepted? We don’t have a maximum number of contributors as of yet. For the two SFW physical zines, we will determine the number of contributors based on page limitations, but each SFW zine will have an extended digital PDF version to include contributors whose work or full work won’t fit into the printed zine. The all-digital NSFW PDF components will be able to accommodate more contributors. We’ve designed the project in the hopes of including as many creators as possible.

What will be required for an application? We will ask for a few samples of work similar to what you would be contributing (this does not necessarily have to be FMA fanwork), as well as your social media accounts and email address.

I haven’t created for FMA in a while… all my FMA work is old. In my application, can I submit more recent sample works from other fandoms instead? Yes, that’s fine! Having at least one FMA sample in your application (regardless of the application type) is great, but not required. We would mostly just like to get an idea of your style, so please feel free to submit samples that you think represent you well, regardless of the fandom!

Are all ships accepted in the ship-oriented parts of the project? Yes. As long as you are willing to tag and warn as appropriate, all ships are welcome. We will expect contributors to tag and warn diligently, to be mindful of others’ sensitivities, and to keep ship-related discussion in the appropriate parts of the server.

Can I contribute adult and/or controversial content? Yes. As above, all contributors will be required to tag and warn carefully with their submissions and when interacting with other contributors, to use the appropriate channels on the server at all times, and to respect others’ boundaries. The NSFW projects will only be open to contributors who are 18 or older.

I’d like to apply, but I don’t like certain ships and have some triggers. Will I have to see this content in the Discord server? While we can’t guarantee that you won’t encounter content that you would prefer to avoid, we will be compartmentalizing ship content, NSFW content, and potentially triggering content as much as possible in the Discord server. We are counting on all contributors to help us with this, and will do our best to facilitate a safe and friendly collaborative environment!

Do podfic recorders have to edit their own podfics as well as recording them? How many recordings will be expected, and how will work be assigned? Anyone who is accepted to record podfics for the Anthology is welcome to edit their own podfics, or to submit unedited podfics to our moderator team. We have a few mods who have volunteered to help others edit their audio.

Applicants accepted to record podfics would be able to choose which works they wanted to record for, so that everyone can edit an amount and specific content that they’re comfortable with. The total amount will depend somewhat on the amount of textual contributions that we end up accepting. Several of our mods will be helping to record any works not selected by applicants, in the hopes of making as complete a collection as possible (including descriptions of visual content). Depending on the amount of effort that we’re able to recruit, we hope to record podfics at least for every submission in the two SFW zines (fanfics for which will have a wordcount limit of 3,000 words, whereas PDF-only fics may be slightly longer).

Applications for podfic recorders are due by March 7, 2021, but the acutal recordings will be done between July and September (after text and art are finalized, while pre-orders and layout work take place).

Are AU (Alternate Universe) works allowed? Yes! AU works (canon-divergence, alternate universes, crossovers, etc.) will be accepted, both for application samples and for final contributor submissions if desired. Any AU works in the final Anthology will be tagged and described clearly.

Is this a 20-year anniversary project? Yes! We are hoping to open pre-orders in July to celebrate 20 years of Fullmetal Alchemist. It is not required that this theme is represented in any of the contributions, but it would certainly be welcome!

I am a recent pro-shipper. Some people may remember things that I did and said in the past that were not pro-ship, but I have changed my stance. Can I apply? As mentioned above and in the Contributor Protection Policy, our first priority is the safety and comfort of all of our contributors. Each application and applicant will be reviewed by our team, and decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis as to whether we anticipate that an applicant would be able to work well and interact positively with other contributors.

Is this project for-profit, or for charity? We are currently planning to donate half of the proceeds to the Archive of Our Own (AO3), and divide the remaining half evenly among all contributors to compensate them for their work.

I’m a little confused about the different parts of the zine. Could it all be combined into one zine? Our intention with this project is to provide space to as many creators, and as many different types of content, as possible – specifically including NSFW content and/or ships that are often not permitted – but to also make it easy for purchasers to choose only the content they are interested in or comfortable with. So you can think of it as four separate projects, with different “ratings” but with the same goal of inclusion. Dividing the project into subsections will allow us to accept more contributors overall!

In addition to making it more difficult to delineate types of content, ratings, and warnings, combining the projects into one zine would likely result in an extremely long volume. This would raise shipping costs for physical copies, and also make the digital version into a very large file! Our goal is to make it possible for people to buy a single project that they will enjoy every page of; or to bundle multiple projects together if they’re interested in several or all of them.

A lot of zines fail or turn out to be scams. Is your mod team experienced and prepared to see this through? We kept our moderator bios a bit more personal, but many of our mods have prior experience with multiple zines from start to finish. Mai is the lead mod on another zine that is currently open for pre-orders, as well as the finance mod on three others in progress; Feo has been a mod on ten zines, one of which she headed and several of which have reached completion; and Noct has headed two zines, been a mod on four others, and contributed to six more. Kari has also modded and contributed to over a dozen zines; and Getti has been the lead mod for a completed zine and has contributed to numerous others. Many of our other mods have real-world and/or paid work experience relevant to the project: Grace has extensive editorial experience and a background in print and online journalism, and also runs events for work in the RL sphere; and Tierfal regularly runs ship weeks and fandom events, and has been coordinating events as part of her day job for many years. Some of our moderators have not participated in a zine before, but are longtime fandom contributors, organizers, beta-readers, and more; or have additional relevant experience and skills, which they are excited to dive in and apply!

Since the full scope of the project will be determined in part by the number of applications that we receive for each section, we wanted to have a lot of hands on deck to make sure that we can divide the work fairly without anyone getting overwhelmed.

To make a long story short: we trust our team, and we're passionate about this project. We hope that you will be, too!

#admin

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mathom-house-curator · 4 years ago

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Focus on the Fan-mily: Community Archiving and the Archive of Our Own

A five-part series on AO3 as a community archive, considering how archival theory and fandom history meet to create a ground-breaking fan archive experience like no other, and the possibilities this has for the archival profession moving forwards.

Full essay (with citations) here

Part I | Part II | Part IV | Part V

Part III - Chasing the Ephemeral: An Overview of Fan Archival Activities

To understand AO3’s insistence on enabling the creator with full power over their works, it is important to understand the fan culture and context that AO3 developed out of, as well as the complex history of fan archival activities. Since the early days of modern fan culture, with Star Trek fans in the 1960s, fan spaces have been a place of sub-culture and secrecy, with transformative works and fan fiction —the dominant form of record on AO3— being particularly revolutionary. Fan academics such as Abigail Derecho often identify fan fiction as a form of societal criticism, predominantly created by women and people from minority groups. Using fan fiction, fans from marginalized groups create content for themselves that reimagines the hierarchical and societal norms reflected in the original media and wrests control of storytelling and creativity away from mainstream capitalist studios and publishers. This content often contains themes and subjects considered counterculture or radical by mainstream society — for example, until very recently (and arguably in some corners still), this included any queer interpretations, feminist discourse, or erotica. At the same time, fans use the spaces in and around this content —the writer-reader relationship, the aggregation of stories with similar subjects, the use of particular tropes and specialized lingo— to create a community and culture that reflects their own, often marginalized, experiences. Particularly with the connectivity of the Internet, Abigail De Kosnik observes that digital fan fiction archives become “safe spaces” where fans with similar experiences can “come together, sharing ideas and experiences without fear of silencing.”

This “fear of silencing” has long plagued fan spaces and has come both from within and without communities. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, fans largely shared their content through zines and amateur press associations, relying on conventions and meet ups to come together with other community members and distribute their work. With the advent of the Internet, fan communities —known as fandoms— began to attract a new and wider scope of members. Now younger fans, international fans, and even people who had never heard of fandom before, could connect with existing communities so long as they had access to an Internet connection. A fan scholar by the pseudonym of Versaphile observes that early digital sites were particularly ephemeral in nature — posts and discussions on forums had a lifespan of days or weeks, and it wouldn’t be until the mid-1990s that sites began retaining user content. Major archives dedicated to fan fiction began emerging in the mid 1990s, usually centred around stories from a single fandom. These early archives would perhaps be more recognizable to archival professionals — users posted their content or submitted them to the web archivist, who would format, file and preserve the materials they received in order to make them available to archive users. Creators could request that their content not be archived, or that their previously archived materials be deleted, but generally, archives retained their materials until they were dissolved or deleted.

While there were technical issues with these early archives, such as poor accessibility and search functionality, one of the greatest threats to these archives was the loss of their archivists. Once an archivist lost interest in the fandom, or was no longer able to manage the archive, the entire site could disappear as maintenance ceased, domains expired and were not renewed, and reorganization destroyed years of existing structure and links. This is a common concern with community archives, particularly those of the Do It Yourself variety — as Rebecka Sheffield observes, the loss of interest from archive members or the inability to maintain the existing collection has led to the disappearance of many archival projects. With the disappearance of each archive, years of fandom discussion, content, and community were lost forever, unless individual members made a special effort to preserve certain elements on their own ends. Fans began to learn an important lesson that would continue to shape fandom for years to come — their communities, the stories they created and shared, the unique fandom cultures and relationships that they had developed, even the shared memory of their own history, was only as stable and permanent as the whim and will of the site administrators.

As fans explored different methods of communication and content sharing into the early 2000s, the role of the administrator remained a question. Mailing lists centred around a particular theme, genre, or relationship provided a decentralized and highly tailored fandom experience at the cost of accessibility. Links to content were closed to non-members, who had to apply for membership with the list’s moderators just to access a single story, and moderators had the power to delete entire lists whenever they pleased, thereby deleting all the works preserved within. The popular journaling website LiveJournal dominated fandom communities through the early 2000s, granting creators seemingly exclusive control over their own content. Creators could make their journals public or private, and rename, hide or delete them altogether. Accessibility remained an issue: content was poorly and inconsistently tagged, the search function was nigh non-existent, and users had to develop through experience a knowledge of which journals might contain content they were interested in and what terms a creator might use to describe their work. Although some users began developing general guides for creators to describe and tag their work, compliance with these guides depended on the individual creator. With the rise of the creator’s autonomy over their own work came issues of organization and management, and the ever-present question about the preservation of content.

While fans wrestled with the question of intracommunity preservation, outside forces began emerging as threats to fandom communities and creators, as litigation, censorship, and commercialization began targeting fan spaces. In the late 2000s, LiveJournal saw several waves of migration to other sites as website staff began banning users en masse and taking down content which they judged to be immoral or illegal. These takedowns, supposedly aimed at sexual crimes, could affect any content that involved sex — from age-restricted adult fan fiction journals, to sexual assault survivors’ spaces, to queer fan fiction, which was seen as inherently sexual regardless of content. Similar censorship restrictions affected other popular fan hosting sites, such as Fanfiction.net, which was in many ways a precursor to AO3. As a centralized, multi-fandom site with a relatively organized structure, Fanfiction.net provided fan creators with the ability to format and post their own stories in one place, and enabled users to find and access those stories with comparative ease using a controlled vocabulary with its descriptive elements. However, throughout the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, the website began imposing restrictions on the kind of content that fans could publish. Adult fan fiction was banned, as was any content which could potentially result in litigation from a studio, publishing company, or author. Creators issued lengthy disclaimers with each post, making it clear that they did not own the original media or characters on which their fan work was based. It was vital that no one could argue in court that they had given any impression of owning the intellectual material, as there had been high profile cases of authors suing and harassing fan writers. Works containing quotations of more than a few lines, such as a stanza of a song or a paragraph from a book, ran the constant risk of sudden deletion by administrators. Users became increasingly disgruntled with the censorship and the constant fear of deletion by site staff.

The intrusion of mainstream capitalism also began to challenge the sub-culture of secret community that many fans had become used to. As “fandom” became increasingly prominent, corporations saw fan communities as a potential resource. For media companies, fan content produced through free fan labour increases the presence and reach of the original media. Popular fan sites were also profitable places for ads, and web servers and companies benefitted from the increased traffic. In the eyes of many fans, this was nothing short of exploitation. Coming from a strongly decentralized period in fan history, fan spaces were seen as personal and counterculture — fans made the content they wanted to consume for their communities, not for their own profit, and certainly not for the profit of large corporations. The increasing presence of commercial ads on fan sites such as Fanfiction.net was insulting, and the creation of the notorious FanLib.com in 2007 was even more so. If the presence of ads on sites like Fanfiction.net —where users feared that failing to write a clear enough disclaimer could be interpreted as an intent to profit by lawyers— was controversial, then FanLib, which was designed to profit off of fan fiction and which boasted paid promotions from media companies, was intolerable. The FanLib debacle was the last straw, and outraged fans, frustrated with censorship and corporate intrusion and the loss of communities and cultures over the years, began to organize.

It was against this backdrop that the OTW formed, and it was in light of these discussions around the preservation of fan culture and history, the questions of censorship and profit, and the rights of fans, that fans created AO3 in 2008, with the site going into open beta in 2009. Their rallying point was the idea of “owning the servers,” creating a centralized space controlled by fans where their communities and creators could exist in safety and stability, creating the content that they wanted without fear of deletion, censorship, or exploitation, which by its long-term preservation would help keep alive the fan cultures and communities that produced it. With personal experience in fandom and previous fan archival projects, AO3’s creators were familiar with what fans needed or looked for in an archival space. Accessibility was a must. To that end, AO3 maintains a highly sophisticated descriptive tagging system, with volunteer “tag wranglers” interpreting and linking unique creator tags with larger related tags, preserving the creator’s descriptive intent while facilitating access to their works. Autonomy was balanced with archival preservation — creators can submit and describe their works however they feel is best, and retain rights of deletion and anonymity, while leaving the archival work of preservation, management and accessibility to site volunteers. Crucially, and sometimes controversially, AO3 permits fan content containing any subject without fear of censorship or deletion. While users may submit complaints about individual works, and creators must still abide by the laws of their jurisdiction, AO3 enforces the rights of creators to create without fear of censorship or arbitrary deletion. AO3 also operates entirely as a noncommercial and nonprofit organization with no ads or user fees, relying on a fan volunteer staff and annual fundraising drives.

Despite all the answers AO3 proposes to issues such as fan preservation, censorship, accessibility, and rights, many questions remain from both an archival and a fannish perspective about AO3’s role and functions as a community archive. Just who is included in this community “of Our Own?” What kind of cultural memory is being preserved, and how? What is included and what is left out? How does AO3’s commitment to freedom of the author relate to offensive content? If the subculture being documented in these records is, by nature, counterculture, why seek legitimacy from mainstream institutions? And in what ways does AO3 actually serve its users as a community archive, apart from making it easier to find a good read for a few hours?

Part III Sources

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.

Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic literature: a definition, a history, and several theories of fan fiction.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Hellekson K and Busse K. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Quoted in A. Lothian, “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (2013): 545. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912459132

Johnson, Shannon Fay. "Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 17 (2014). Accessed December 10, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0578.

Lothian, Alexis. “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (2013): 541–56. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912459132

Sheffield, Rebecka. “Community Archives.” In Currents of Archival Thinking, 2nd ed., edited by Heather MacNeil and Terry Eastwood, 351-376. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2017.

“Strikethrough and Boldthrough.” Fanlore. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough

Versaphile. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. (2011). Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.

#ao3 #fan archives #fandom history #archival theory #essay #long post

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utaprifanzine · 6 years ago

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Shining Live Fanzine: Concept Pitch

I believe @utapri-idol-hell has already mentioned this upcoming project on her blog so, without further delay, this is the completed concept pitch for an SL-themed Utapri fanzine!

(Note: there is also a link to this post on twitter! If you have a twitter account, please consider retweeting the post from this account so that non-tumblr users can also see this!)

I would like to first put emphasis on the fact that this is a concept pitch. That means this is a presentation of the initial idea to anyone who might be interested in this project. At this point in time, most of the rules and concepts are still malleable - they can be changed and shaped according to feedback from this post.

If you are interested in this project (as either a contributor or as someone who would want to acquire a copy of the zine) please consider filling out this feedback form. Any responses will be useful to determine how the zine moves forward, but the feedback is particularly important in regards to the “Application Methods” section of this post (see below).

There are, however, three rules which are already “set” and would not be changed. They are as follows:

This zine would feature work from both artists and writers.

Due to Broccoli’s history with ordering “cease and desist”s against utapri doujin artists, this would be a non-profit zine. Thus, digital copies would be completely free.

The concept for this zine is based on the intention of it being a fun project that would appeal to the majority of the fanbase. Therefore, some rules are set in place to avoid content that might spark conflict and/or be geared towards a specific audience.

Below the cut, this post is split into three sections: Concept, Rules, and Application Methods. Each section is clearly noted with a header. “Concept” covers the general theme, content, and layout; “Rules” covers additional restrictions and/or allowances for the zine content; and “Application Methods” covers various possible ways a writer or artist could possibly apply to do a page for the zine. That last section is particularly important, because at the moment the application method for the zine has yet to be decided and the final decision will depend feedback.

There’s quite a bit of information below, so for anyone who is dyslexic or has any other reading difficulties, the most important information is in bold.

The ask box is also open for anyone who has any additional questions, or would like further expansion on something mentioned in the following text.

Please also consider reblogging this post so more people can see it!

The initial concept for this zine, was that it would (hopefully) be the first in a series of SL-themed zines that followed the chronological release pattern of the in-game events and gachas.

This seemed to be a good way to establish a kind of content equilibrium, so that no specific character/event/gacha appeared too often or too little. The pages would be themed after the events/gachas and each one would have a specific amount of pages allotted to it. Since KLab has only screwed the rotation once thus far, it seems like an easier method of creating balance.

Originally, it was going to be an annual digital zine with a high page count. However, since people have expressed their interest in physical copies of a zine, the concept was revised into something that would also translate well into physical format.

The following are the revised restrictions/guidelines for the current concept of the zine:

The total page count would be 44 pages. This includes the front/back cover, index and closing pages.

The content would cover from the release of the game (Aug/Sept 2017) up through January 2018. This covers 8 gacha and 10 events, not including the SL UR set which would also be featured.

Each event and gacha would be allotted two A4 pages of content - one for art and one for a piece of flash fiction. The cover and its related story would have double that amount: front/back cover + a two page short story.

The zine would have the potential to run in both physical and digital formats. Digital zines would be completely free (hence, non-profit project) however they will still require the purchaser to put in an order/request for the file. There will be no public download link posted.

All contributors are entitled to a digital copy without placing a request. Free physical copies may be a possibility, but that depends on a number of factors (namely the amount of contributors, zine orders, and if a print run is made at all) so I can’t promise anything at this point.

Print runs would be made if there is enough demand for physical copies, and there would only be one run per zine. This is reduce the risk of Broccoli viewing the zine production as a competitive merchandise and thereby becoming offended by the project.

(The following rules were put in place regarding the intentions and concept for the zine. Since this is a concept pitch, each rule is followed by an explanation of why it exists. If you believe any rule is unnecessary, or flawed, please note that in the feedback form! Passive-aggressively ranting about it on twitter doesn’t help!)

The UR Rule

The featured UR pair (for gachas) or the featured UR/SR pair (for events) MUST be the focus of the piece. Other characters can be mentioned and/or appear, but the piece has to be clearly centered on the two featured characters for that set/event. This is to help ensure the balance of content set by following the release patterns.

This goes without saying, but the pieces must also be themed after the event/gacha for which they are the pages for. A simple mention, hint, or acknowledgement toward the set/event isn't strong enough to be considered a theme.

Non-Shining Live Characters Are Allowed

Although the zine will be SL themed, all other characters that are part of the Utapri franchise can be featured within artwork and fiction pieces submitted to the zine. Since they’re official characters, I see no reason to purposely block them out.

The UR rule still applies, however, so these characters cannot become the focus of the pieces.

Keep it PG 13/15

This is partly in place to acknowledge the younger fans of the franchise (as well as those who aren't big fans of higher rated content) and partly because there is no fail-safe way to verify someone's age over the internet.

There are a lot of minors who consume and produce adult content for this fandom, and while their choices are theirs to make (I'm not the fandom police, it's none of my business), I don't want this project to be held responsible for distributing inappropriate content to minors in case issues do arise.

It's also worth noting that this rule does not only apply to sexual content (because some people think R18 only means sex). A piece depicting other mature themes - such as serious cannibalism, gore, or class A drug use - would not be acceptable.

No Romantic Ships

I feel like this is going to be the least popular rule, so the explanation for this is twice as long. Hear me out for a minute, and, if by the end you still think it’s unnecessary, by all means put that on the response form!

There are two main reasons for this rule.

Firstly, although shipping as a concept is extremely popular within fandom, individual ships still only cater to very specific audiences within the fanbase. No matter which way you twist it, no matter the popularity of any given ship, no single ship is universal. Some fans don't even connect to the idea of shipping in the first place.

Under most circumstances, that's completely fine, but within the context of a fanzine that's intended to appeal to as much of the fanbase as possible, allowing ships starts to seem very juxtaposed to that goal.

Case and point: if I have to include an extra contents page that lists all of the ships mentioned inside the zine so people can pick and/or avoid certain ones, that, to me, completely negates the idea of having a zine that most people can just pick up and read without issue.

Secondly, as I'm sure most people already know, ships are a primary source of conflict and motivator for harassment within fandom.

In terms of problems arising from including ships in a fanzine, I'm mainly worried about contributing artists/writers as well as the other admins getting harassed for content they did or didn't include within the zine. As someone who has not only seen utapri fan blogs run offline because of ship-based anon hate, but has also seen people ridiculed and kicked out of groups for not liking a popular ship, I would rather not risk exposing contributors and admins to that kind of toxic behavior.

When thinking about potential application methods for zine contributors, I realized that the traditional method - where people send in entries and these entries are reviewed/accepted/denied by an admin panel - may not be the best suited for a project that a) is supposed to be fun, not stressful and b) is looking for as many applicants as possible to hopefully be a success.

After brainstorming several alternative ways that applications could be handled, I decided the best possible way to choose one, would be to ask people who are interested in contributing to the zine how they would prefer to apply. After collecting the feedback, the most popular application method would be the one used for this zine.

The following are three different possible application methods. Each has a description of how it would work followed by a list of pros and cons for that method.

Method 1: First Come, First Serve

This method is very well-known, and very straightforward. Essentially, the list of available pages is posted at a specified time and date, and contributors would simply message the zine admins to claim whichever pages they want to contribute for. The first person to claim that particular page is the person who that page is allocated to.

Method 2: Random Chance

There are two variations of this method.

Application for Specific Pages: using this method, applicants would apply for specific pages at any point during the application period. Then, once the period has ended, the contributing artist/writer would be drawn at random for each page.

General Application: using this method, applicants would apply to the zine in general during the application period then, once the period has ended, the contributing writers/artists for all the pages would be drawn from the same pool. Applicants would be allowed to veto certain characters/sets/events and trade among each other if desired.

Method 3: Traditional Application

This is the method that’s most often used to manage and select applications for a zine.

An applicant would send in an entry form during the application period that contains, among other possible things, which pages they would like to apply for and an example of their work. At the end of the period, all entry forms are reviewed by the admins and the contributors for each page are decided by majority/unanimous vote.

And that’s everything! Please consider filling out the feedback form if you have the time!

#utapri #utapri fanzine #uta no prince sama #concept pitch #SLfanzineV1 #looong post

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miseriathome · 6 years ago

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Requested (cross)post about celebrity rpf

[Real person fic] is almost always about celebrities. And at a certain point, we don't actually understand or know celebrities as real people. After all, celebrities are never actually genuine to the public--even if they seem genuine, it's always a part of the role they play as highly public figures. Celebrities as we know them are personas that real people put on. Fic about them by people who have never intimately met them before is actually fic about their personas--not about the real person. Likewise, as always, fic isn't actually a representation of what you want in real life. You can absolutely write fanfiction about Martin Freeman/Benedict Cumberbatch while being aware of/respecting their real world relationships with other people, and their potential forever lack of interest in one another along those lines. So to that extent, I don't see why rpf about celebrities should be a big deal.

And because I like pointing out grey areas as a way to illustrate why lines are drawn in the sand and nothing matters, here's a bunch of bullet points:

What about self-insert non-rpf fic? What about second-person/reader fic? Aren't there real people involved in those? What if your original character is a thinly-veiled real person?

How do anti-rpf folks feel about Hamilton? Or Bohemian Rhapsody? Or that Steve Jobs movie? Is it only okay when the real people are dead? What about The Social Network? Or that movie about the Obamas? How far in the past do real events have to be to be acceptably reportrayed with creative licenses taken? Are SNL's incredibly timely political skits acceptable? Or are these things only okay because they're professionally produced? In which case, isn't this all just catering to the invisible line between professional authordom and fanfiction authordom that literally constantly shows up in fandom wank as a blatantly obvious double standard?

To follow that train of thought, is it wrong to make posts like "Steve Irwin definitely forgave that manta ray in heaven?" Because you're literally setting up a fictional interaction about a real person against that real person's consent (since, after all, he could have secretly resented and hated that rayfor killing him, even despite his public persona saying it was just doing its job! Because the disjoint between celebrities' public and personal lives is not one you're privy to seeing!) What about posts that are like "Marie Kondo loves you?" What if it's not true? You're literally putting words in a real person's mouth. Where's the line when it comes to acceptable shared comfort illusions based around real people, and when does it start being "too much" and turn into unacceptable real person fic?

Isn't it kind of fucky to say things like "I ship the Obamas?" I mean, what if behind closed doors, their relationship is actually super abusive? Then you're shipping real life abuse! And what if they got divorced? Would you stop shipping them? Or would you continue shipping two people who don't want to be together against their consent? /s

You know when little girls fill up notebooks with "Mrs [their name] [celebrity name]" because they have crushes on celebrities? That's literally a ship. It comes with daydreams about getting married and being domestic and doing interviews because now you're famous. And daydreams are just... unwritten fic. So if an entire real person fanfiction exists in somebody's mind, is it still a problem? Or is it only bad when somebody can see it? What if that little girl tells a friend about those daydreams? What if she writes the fic in a notebook? What if it's in a word doc? What if it's on a private only-those-with-a-link-can-access webpage? What if it only gets sent to people who signed themselves up to be part of a fic-sharing email chain? What if it's on a tiny blog under a read more? When does a fanfiction actually become a fanfiction, and therefore policeable the way thoughts can't be?

What about when the daydream is subconscious? What if it was a dream somebody had about real people? What if they write it down in a dream journal? What if they tell somebody else about it? What if they submit it to a crowdsourced dream journal online?

Where's the line between a fic and a headcanon? When we made memes about Joe Biden desperately wanting to share government secrets, was that going too far? Is role play based on real people fucked up? Because if it is, then the source of the "then perish" meme should be morally appalling.

Boy, do I have thoughts about people who fight over who a celebrity should "get with." Lots of people will only stan the person that somebody is currently with, speaking to that person's decision to be involved with them... but is a show like The Bachelor where you're supposed to root for somebody with a high probability of being wrong exploitative? The people on that show are all real people, and the proper way to engage with that show is to want two of them to get together, but you don't actually know if they will. So really, you're headcanoning and you're shipping. About real people. While also doing exactly what those tv shows expect you to do. Because it's almost like this wank is a nonissue in regular life.

What about tabloids and reality television? It's well known that tabloids lie and reality television is partially scripted/omits things in favor of creating dramatic and entertaining narratives.

What about when it's a fic about somebody whose public persona is very obviously not like their real self? What about when somebody plays a fictional character, but that fictional character has the same name as their real life self (The Colbert Report, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show)? How do you navigate that? Is it okay to write about the fictional characters they play? Or if that crossing a line because in some sense, those fictional characters are still them?

Here's the thing: Being anti- something doesn't do anything. It's not even an ideology, it's just a moral code that nobody else has to adhere to. And especially when it comes to a decentralized, non-industrial, unpoliceable phenomena like fanfiction, there's no way to change what people are putting out or why or how. So really, you have to suck up the fact that even if you hate it and it goes against your personal morals, it's going to happen, and then the real question is "what are you going to do about it?" And that's where an anti- morality falls flat, is because they either can't rise above moaning about it or they go out of their way to attack people for having different moralities. So in my opinion, the far more productive and uplifting ideology is to go "okay, this thing exists and I just have to live with that fact. What can I do to help people?"

And... I think also.......... the argument that real people aren't consenting to be a part of those fanfics falls flat when those real people aren't actually a part of the process of creating that fanfiction. You don't get to consent (or not) to something that doesn't involve you, that doesn't affect you. And the idea that these things affect celebrities is ridiculous. Wank about real person fic, headcanons about OC's, etc are ridiculous. Fanfics are thoughts put on paper and published, and really it's only possible to be against what you can see. If you loudly decree that (any type of) fanfiction is wrong, the least that happens is literally nothing, and the most that happens is you manage to chase it out of the public eye, but it will nonetheless continue on smaller websites or in email chain or in physical zines or in personal notebooks or in peoples' brains. But if anti- types are just satisfied with having it out of sight and out of mind, then they don't actually care about the arguments they're making about peoples' rights... and this effect could have just as easily been achieved by those people curating their own environments to not contain real person fiction, instead of treading on the toes of people writing it.

Being a celebrity means being known and being interpreted and even being misread. In fact, being a social being comes with these risks. People will misunderstand you, misread you, misattribute things to you, misremember you, miscategorize you. I think there are a lot of people who fear what it means to be known, and they channel their anxieties and insecurities into "defending" the "rights" of others not to be misrepresented in others' minds. But that's not how being a secure person works. Becoming, for all intents and purposes, a persona in the minds of others--being turned into a caricature and being framed and reframed through every lens possible--is part of the job description of being a public figure. People are supposed to think they understand something about celebrities. Celebrities are supposed to sell themselves as fantasy/outrage fuel. If a celebrity weren't interesting enough to invoke masses of people thinking about them, they would be out of a job. People are supposed to turn celebrities into dolls to play with in their minds, and there's no shame in engaging with culture as culture is set up to function.

Obviously this write-up overlooks non-celebrity real person fic which has more nuance to it, but ultimately I think the point that “people are going to do it anyways, so what are you going to do about it?” still stands.

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #rpf #fanfiction #discourse #shipping discourse #just saying

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altmusicposting · 2 years ago

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Chasing Lanternflies: Voices of New Brunswick's Youth

Last Sunday, local non-profit Hidden Gems Literary Emporium (which also doubles as an art gallery) hosted an open mic night that doubled as a launch party for the locally curated zine Chasing Lanternflies. 12 people total performed, mostly people sharing poetry, rap, or short story excerpts they had contributed to the zine.

For those unaware, zines (pronounced "zeens") are small-circulated, self-published works that include writing, art, and sometimes other activity/information/interview pages. They are typically made for and/or by a particular group. They originated among the geek (science & science-fiction) and punk communities, and are traditionally low-budget, and DIY in production and appearance. This zine was a bit more professional looking, but still stayed true to the roots of being of and to a particular audience. The contributor and coordinator, Kenia Hale (seen below on the right) described it as "a love letter or an artifact to the people [she] met here," and wanted to capture what its like to be a young person in this place and time.

In the next few paragraphs, I will review each of the performances, referred to as "acts"; however, I would like to note that regardless of any criticisms I may have, I acknowledge that it takes a rather large amount of chutzpah (courage) to present your work live, especially if you have little experience with it. On the whole the performers did quite well, and the environment was extremely supportive, with loud applause after every act, no matter how short or apprehensive. Additionally, I would like to note that one of the owners and co-founder of Hidden Gems, Kaila Boulware Sykes (seen below on the left), made a point to give each performer a book she specifically chose for them at the end of their reading. Not only do I love this idea, but I think it well illustrates the environment and community that they cultivate at Hidden Gems.

*Note: All name spellings and pronouns are the best I could surmise from introductions, as I did not get to talk with all of the artists*

Act 1: Vivian- Going first for anything can be daunting, and on top of that it appeared that she didn't have much experience reading live. She sped through her piece and was somewhat difficult to understand at times. That being said, her piece was humorous and heartfelt, and I quite enjoyed listening to it.

Act 2: Sydney, stage name: Anja Muse- A very confident speaker, she performed 2 powerful and punchy spoken word/rap style pieces. Themes included black bodies and their relation to themself, self-love and acceptance, and taking back power/voice/love. The pieces themselves made use of rhyme, dry humor, consonance, assonance, and some double entendre. Sydney's delivery was clear, and showed intentional phrasing. Apparently a seasoned performer, she held the audience captive, and even earned a few outbursts of agreement for some lines, which they left space for.

Act 3: Trevon- Performed a spoken word piece that was very solidly grounded in location (New Brunswick) and vivid, concrete imagery. In contrast to this, there is a strong sense of pondering and mental wandering. The performance was good, but not particularly unusual/noteworthy. The writing itself was beautifully aware of sound, with alliteration, consonance, and assonance being prevalent.

Act 4: Gianni- This was more of a quick bit of info about the piece of art she submitted. It was a picture of a mosaic tray she made for her mom's birthday. She mentioned how she wanted to take inspiration from her Hispanic heritage, and shared amusing imagery of having to hide it from her mom while living in the same house. Timid in public speaking and discussing her work, she didn't go into too much detail.

Act 5: Shelly- Wrote a piece for the zine entitled "Flora and the Lanternflies" that was inspired by the zine itself and her friends. She read an abridged version of sorts, but did not give away the whole story. There were sharp transitions between locales that gave the impression of flashing vivid memories interrupting the main character's view of the forest in front of them. There was also an intriguing bit of tension between the innocent/dreamy quality of one setting with the sad and imperfect/harsh quality of the other. Shelly seemed fairly confident in her performance, and made an effort to distinguish this as a live experience by playing a forest soundscape in the background as she read.

Act 0/5.5: Truth, the young toddler son of Kaila was drawing throughout the show, on himself and paper apparently. His on-paper art was shared with us. Mostly abstract scribbles, which makes sense as I think he's about 2-3, but they showed an affinity for color fields that would probably make some abstract artists proud.

Act 6: Isa- The only musical performance of the night. She was going to sing with a backing track, and when it failed opted to just do it acapella. She did so wonderfully, with remarkably accurate pitch and a beautiful natural rasp to her voice. Her vocal style seemed to include some short clipped ends to lines. One of the people who was vocal in her encouragement throughout the night, and someone who spoke loud and clear on stage, it was evident performing was not new to her. This was unsurprising as it was mentioned that she was the singer for the local band Speak Easy. She also had 2 short poems that she shared, one personal and one about climate change. Both were visceral and gritty like her singing, and I personally loved them.

Act 7: Suzie- She read 2 poems, both of which were full of tactile imagery and unusual similes and metaphors. There were clear but dueling narrative voices, one cute/innocent, and one more adult/serious. What I really enjoyed though was that she altered her spoken voice to match the switches in narrative tone, resulting in a sense of embodiment that added greatly to the reading. On a separate note, she also unintentionally/subconsciously dressed like a lanternfly, which didn't really have much bearing on her performance, but was a fun little detail.

Act 8: Fatua- Also read 2 poems, both emotional poems about love and hardships, and assigning meaning to things in life. I regrettably was not able to get down the full first line for her poem "Don't Give Me Flowers", but I remember hearing it and just going "damn that was a good line." For her first time reading her work to a live audience, she did very well. She spoke mostly clearly, and didn't rush through her pieces, taking time to explain a little before reading them.

Act 9: Ianna- She shared a single piece entitled "Ode to Body", and took the time to explain some of her history with the piece, and how it was something she had tattooed onto herself as a physical reminder/manifestation of it. She also asked the audience to close our eyes for her reading so as to pay more attention to our own physicality and presence throughout the performance. She put a lot of passion into her reading, and she had a tendency to draw out the length of some words to emphasize them. It was a clear ode to oneself, one's body, and to owning one's power.

Act 10: Ashambue- A published author, and 3rd generation New Brunswick resident, he read a couple poems/raps from his book "Am I a pessimist?" There was a clear emphasis on rhyme and flow and feeling, with themes focusing on day-to-day struggles of life in America nowadays. The second poem he read had a clear and apt extended metaphor of racism in America as an abusive relationship. Clearly comfortable speaking/performing, he was intentional in his phrasing, and unafraid to talk about his history and experiences.

Act 11: Karim- His pieces focused on themes of masculinity and femininity, life as a queer black man, and loss. He seemed a bit unsure of himself/anxious about performing, but spoke well. His performance voice differed from his normal speaking voice, and had a round, full quality to it that emphasized the gravity of his writing. That combined with his use of even, almost hypnotic cantor, and direct but beautiful language legitimately gave me chills at one point.

Act 12: Kenia- Closing the night, the curator of this whole endeavor shared an excerpt of the short story she submitted to the zine. A speculative fiction piece that centered queer love and the idea of both separated and found families/community, it blended imagination and science beautifully. The general premise seemed simple but interesting, and the scientific aspects seemed well-researched. She was another person who seemed mostly comfortable performing.

Overall, it was a pretty cool night, full of lots of different perspectives and voices of young people in a true Hidden Gem (pun absolutely intended) of a location here in New Brunswick.

#writing #my writing #my thoughts #punk #poetry #spoken word #voices #new brunswick #people of color voices #lgbtq voices

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kingotabek · 7 years ago

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A word of caution to fellow content creators!

King here, your local human dumpster fire, and i’m back with a few words of caution.

I’ve seen a couple posts going around lately, both on here, in my zine circuits, and in artist/writer circles i’m in, and they involve blind application processes.

Now. I actually quite like some of the ideas behind these processes, but there are very many red flags that arise as both a content creator and zine host.

One of the applications I checked out personally after a discussion with some artists friends who were wary of it, and I didn’t like what I saw. I fully understand the intent of blind application, in the name of fairness and not choosing participants based off of names, but the fact is a blind app means submitting a work that in no way has your name or persona attached to it. This particular app wanted works to be both unsigned AND unpublished anywhere else. On its own this is an anxiety inducing thing for most content creators because content theft is simply a very prevalent issue these days.

Submitting an unsigned work, that has not been published prior makes it very easy to steal and use and very hard for the artist/writer to re-stake their claim. On top of this requirement, there is the anxiety of having to place this unsigned, unseen work on a host site.

Now, this didn’t entirely send me running, because its very possible to give a well done work that is made SPECIFICALLY for the purpose of blind apps. But if you’ve not considered partaking in something that does blind apps you might not have work handy or time to make new works.

My words of advice when applying for blind apps are this:

Check the moderators out. If they have not done this type of work before, be wary of applying. If you cannot find very good proof of either their own content (previous publications worked on) or proof that they can safely handle the content of others its a major red flag.

See if there is anywhere to ask questions. This is something i stress very harshly, see if they allow anonymous questions as well as private inquiries. If they do not, ask privately, but keep in mind that the lack of anonymous abilities could mean they do not want to have to answer questions of liability publicly or at all and is a minor red flag.

MAKE SURE THERE IS SOMETHING STATING THAT AT NO POINT YOUR WORK WILL BE SAVED FROM THE SENT FILES. If there is any mention that works will be saved (even temporarily) do not apply. There is no reason they should have to save your work to view it if they use the proper host sites, and at no time should their personal computers be used to host works until the publication (or intended product) is being formatted for production, and in this case the works held WOULD be signed for that publication etc.

Ask around. See if anyone knows more information about the apps, or if anyone has worked with the people running them. Be wary of gossip, but take actual testimony of misconduct as a red flag.

Create work specifically for the application. This may not be ideal or fit in the time frame, but it is always nice to do for future apps.

Use work that represents your abilities, but that you do not plan to use elsewhere. (I do not want to say work you don’t care about because that is not what I mean.) This often includes older works you may have taken down, or sketches/drafts you didn’t feel like posting, and in the case of the app being an actual content scam its much easier to lose work you do not need if you have to be unfortunate enough to lose work at all.

Watermark your work with a symbol specifically for blind apps. It does not have to be a mark that identifies you as the creator, but a mark that is unique to you that you can recognize. Hide it in your work and do not let the moderators know its there. If it does not contain your name or URL and is an image/icon/symbol it does not violate the terms of a blind app and they cannot reject you for it, nor request your work without it.

I want to state that this post is in no way meant to target publications and networks with blind apps, nor discourage people from participating in them, but instead meant to help inform people of how to keep their content safe during the application process.

This post stems directly from concerns raised by not only myself, but by creators I know and trust as well, and the above tips are based on my own experience and the experience of my friends.

Stay safe lovelies! Have fun and be careful out there!

Feel free to add tips if you feel I’ve missed anything vital!

-KingOtabek

#blind app #blind apps #zines #anime zines #fandom zines #blind applications #networks #psa #signal boost

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queerjewszine · 7 years ago

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QUEER JEWISH ZINE

I’d like to put together a zine comprised of work made by queer Jews. I’ve found very little support or understanding of my Jewishness as a queer person, and perhaps as much lack of understanding of my queerness among other Jews. But I believe the intersection of the two identities (along with any other identities we may have) is extremely powerful and interesting, and the amount of literature about queer Jews is very small.

GUIDELINES:

Submission to this zine is limited to people fitting any of the following situations:

Ethnic Jews; people with one or more Jewish parent, regardless of whether you were raised in an overtly Jewish household, or raised with the Jewish parent.

People raised Jewish, without necessarily being ethnic Jews. People who fit this category may have been adopted by a Jewish parent/family, or their parent(s) may be convert(s).

Submission to this zine is not open to people who have converted to Judaism as autonomous adults. To me, there is an important difference between those who view Judaism as a religion and have the privilege of engaging with it simply as such, and those of us who were born into Judaism and Jewishness as an ethnicity and a culture, with a certain history, certain physical features (things that visibly make us Jewish), et cetera.

TERFs, aphobes, and other exclusionists will NOT be allowed to submit. A few examples of ideologies that will not be tolerated and will exempt you from submitting to this zine:

Believing that trans people (specifically trans women) are not their true gender, or are actually the gender they were assigned at birth

Believing that one’s body equates their gender

Believing that nonbinary genders don’t exist

Believing that aromantic and asexual people don’t belong in the queer community

Believing that queer is a slur. The exclusive use of queer in the title and explanation of this project is intentional. If you’re LGBT but actively do not identify as queer or think the word should be censored, I am not interested in having your work in my zine. This is an explicitly QUEER Jewish zine.

Your primary identifier does not have to be queer, you just can’t be opposed to being called queer.

FIRST ISSUE: PARALLELS

For the first issue of this zine, I want to start off with a broad theme. I want to look at the parallels between queerness and Jewishness and/or Judaism. How do two seemingly unrelated identities reflect one another in our lives? How do queer and Jewish communities compare/differ? How does each identity hold space in our lives, and how does each one manifest differently/similarly? Here are some (purposely vague) prompts to think about, but you can come up with another idea if these don’t speak to you:

The feeling of otherness

Exclusion/inclusion

Visibility/invisibility

Passing

Privilege/prejudice

Please send a short proposal to [email protected] by February 15th, 2018.

I will keep you all updated on future deadlines (drafts, final pieces, publication, etc).

#queer #jews #jewish #queer jews #lgbtq+ jews #zine #zine submission

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because-its-important · 7 years ago

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transitions & transformations

i. the rest of my batch at RC

I spent the first six weeks of my batch at Recurse Center in an out-and-out sprint. I learned Python, built and released projects, and wrote blog posts every week. I wasn’t sure where my limits were, but I was determined to find out - preferably by overshooting them, then adjusting after the fact.

A curious thing happened. I kept finding that I was more than capable of starting and finishing projects, especially when I had a firm mental image of the end goal. There were at least as many unexpected good-turns as there were setbacks, and I certainly didn’t come up against any inscrutable barriers. Mostly the challenge was in overcoming the distance between a thing that doesn’t exist and a thing that does, which I was able to sort out pretty handily through a consistent application of effort across time.

Who’d have thought?

A selfie taken on my birthday, which also happened in the last few months and was really great!

The second half of my batch was not so visibly productive - with the exception of The Question Game. The Question Game is a simple game designed to help groups of people get to know each other better IRL. I designed it with my friend Brittany a few years ago as an icebreaker when we found ourselves in a group of folks who knew us but didn’t really know each other. The game only really needs a method of generating random numbers for a small but arbitrary group size, but building it out as a toy webapp was a good excuse to get practice working with a JS-only stack. I learned React, got a lil more familiar with node, and even went as far as to attach an otherwise completely unnecessary PG database and Sequelize ORM. You can see the code for it here. Outside of this project, however, I didn’t publish any code. I didn’t publish any writing, either.

So I’d like to take a moment and shine a bit of light on the work that I did during the rest of my batch.

🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘

First, I made the decision to leave community.lawyer, the social impact startup I co-founded in 2016 following the Blue Ridge Labs Fellowship.

I’m happy to report that I left on the come up, which seems a rare and privileged thing for a founder to be able to say. Gaining traction in a hyper-specialized industry like legal tech takes a gargantuan amount of sustained forward momentum, and I departed just as we began to reap the fruits of our labor. In the last few months community.lawyer has reached final approval on partnerships a year in the making, won federal grants we’d submitted to in 2016, and every day our software is being used to help connect people who have legal needs with credible lawyers. Our first two partners were exactly the types of legal organizations at the heart of our mission: the Justice Entrepreneurs Project and the DC Reduced Fee Lawyer & Mediator Referral Service.1 Based in Chicago and Washington DC respectively, these orgs are specifically chartered to deliver quality services at rates that more Americans can afford. I am so proud. ⚖️

Second, I started my first ever job hunt as a software engineer. Wowee, this was scary! I knew that I had to prepare for interviewing, which meant a) getting my career change narrative straight, b) studying Data Structures & Algorithms 101, and c) learning how to perform my handle on both of these in a live, semi-adversarial environment.

At one point during my batch my laptop broke. I read through this wonderful illustrated book during the two days it was being fixed.

In order to direct my search I also had to craft a set of selection criteria of my own. Foremost: “What good will my work do for the world?”2 Additionally, “What degree of access will I have to supportive mentors?”

Getting started with interview prep was a challenge, at least partly because I had so many options for where to start. But I did get started! I read Cracking the Coding Interview, I did the free trial and weekly free problems on Interview Cake. I attended a few group mock interviews at Recurse Center and signed up for a 1-1 mock interview with an RC alum. Her name is Leah, and she’s amazing - the superbly friendly and encouraging Comp Sci TA I wish I’d had years ago. 💚Brittany also set up mock technical screens for me with her pals, Leaf and Ian. They were the vanguard against my outsized anxiety about programming for an audience and they each took the time to give me solid feedback.

Third, I extended my batch at Recurse Center by another 6 weeks. I had decided early on I wouldn’t extend (for no real reason) and stuck with this decision up until two days before my batch ending. A small group of folks - Lily, Connor, Alicja and I - went to NYX in Union Square to try out lipsticks. We played with different colors and finishes (satin! matte! shimmer!) for half an hour or so. There came a point when I looked up, glanced across the narrow makeup store at my beautiful friends’ beautiful faces and thought, “You know, you don’t have to leave yet, right? What’s the rush?” I’d already accomplished my primary goal, to forcibly rework my identity as an engineer, but it sure seemed that I could stand to reach for a second one. That night I decided to extend my batch, with the intention of sampling a more open method of self-directed learning, i.e. with a little more chill and a lot less panic. Specifically, I wanted to practice connecting meaningfully with my limited supply of social energy.

In my bonus six weeks, I: gave three talks (2 planned, 1 impromptu) under encouragement from Ayla and Lily, learned to juggle thanks to instruction from a fellow RCer, Edward, who also loaned me a book about learning, made it into weekly Feelings Check-in (read as: opt-in support group) fairly regularly, picked my first ever lock, saw a live-coding show and then later attended two live-coding workshops (one on TidalCycles, another on Super Collider), sat in a dark room and played howling wolf clips while Microsoft Sam read grimoires aloud, got my hair braided for the first time in a decade, made dumplings and DJ’d for a dinner party, connected with folks about queer-poly relationships, gave fiery advice, and received compliments so earnest and rational and persistent that it was difficult to refute them.

Zine fair plus Lightning Bolt concert inside a movie theater in Times Square??

I also put my interview prep to use and interviewed with a handful of Recurse Center partner companies. Job searching meant squaring off against impostor syndrome and a ton of related anxieties in rapid succession. I successfully choked most of that down when it mattered, though, and it was only a couple short weeks before I received my first offer.

To that end, I’m super happy to say that I’ll be joining Blink Health as a Fullstack Product Engineer! Blink Health is a healthcare startup in SoHo. They make it easier for people to afford prescription drugs, especially for those with limited insurance plans or none at all. These savings aren’t trivial either: an extra $50 can spare someone from choosing between groceries or medicine that week, and for some folks Blink saves many times that. I’ll be starting at the end of this month. ✌️🤓

The last two years have been a wild ride: participating in a social impact fellowship and accelerator, busting my product chops and learning web dev to get a public benefit company off the ground, then diving into four months of self-directed learning at Recurse Center. I’m really looking forward to having some externally imposed structure again. Real health insurance, too.

ii. some hard truths

I made a few radical life changes in 2016, like getting involved in activist spaces, dating more, biking everywhere, building strong friendships, going capital-B Boogying, programming full-time. As I carried those changes forward through 2017, I began to notice a lot of mental and emotional reconfiguration happening to me.

Did you know that along its way to becoming a butterfly, a caterpillar nearly completely liquifies inside its cocoon?

Psychological growth is confusing, full of false starts, and generally painful. You’ve got the static pain of stretching beyond your limits, the pleasure-pain of feeling an old knot finally release, the frustrating pain of stubbing your toe because some helpful asshole has been rearranging your psychic furniture when you weren’t looking. There’s the more dramatic knife-in-the-gut pain of realizing that just because you’re growing doesn’t mean the people closest to you are, and that now in certain cases what you previoulsy regarded as friendship actually looks a whole lot like run-of-the-mill exploitation or even emotional abuse, if you're being honest, and it's a realization that only hurts more because it’s so irredeemably cliche and boring. And despite all that pain you gotta go ahead and grow anyway, claw your way out of the relative comfort of ignorance. Transcendence may not be the only show in town but afaik it’s the one most worth watching.

Prior to attending Recurse Center I’d spent lots of time exploring my surroundings and cataloguing people and places worth coming back to. My view of myself did change (and positively!) as a consequence. But sooner or later, ya get tired of the taste of low-hanging fruit.

So, armed with the bookshelf of a philosophy grad and a burgeoning psychoanalytic vocabulary begging to be let off leash, I decided to use my time at RC to try confronting a few of my Hard To See truths in addition to becoming a better programmer.

Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Truth #1: People like me a lot. This causes me problems.

I’ve been metabolizing this one for some time. I remember having a conversation with Brittany in January of 2016. I don’t remember what social anxiety I’d been vocalizing, but I must have been worrying that someone “hated me.” Brittany cut me off, exasperated in the way that only a friend can be in the face of utter delusion: “No one hates you Nicole! You’re always worried that people don’t like you and it’s never true!”

I carried that admonishment with me through two years of voracious friendship-building. On the whole, seeing that people do in fact enjoy and seek out my company has curbed the most egregious overreaches of my social anxiety. But reckoning with my anxiety honestly has also meant acknowledging that my compulsive instinct to withdraw from social situations is also a protective (if suboptimal) response to a few very real dangers.

Most acutely: being friendly, generous, and intensely empathetic makes me a ready target for users. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt for as long as I can, which makes me proportionally susceptible to being taken advantage of and then gaslighted about it. A lifetime of socialization as a petite woman don’t help, neither. This leads to a pattern where, semi-regularly, I look up and take stock of how someone has been treating me and realize that the answer is Very Badly, For Quite A While. This in turn leads to rough periods of cutting ties and moving on. Ideally I’d like to be be able to filter bad actors out sooner, but I also want to stay open, giving, and hopeful beyond reason. Those desires are fundamentally at odds with each other - raising vs. lowering one’s defenses - but it’s clear that I need to come up with a strategy that balances both.

More broadly, though, I operate under an ever-present dread of inevitably disappointing everyone who knows me. Whether people project onto me because they already like me or like me more because they project positively onto me, I am extremely sensitive to the fact that when people meet me the conception they form has waaay more to do with what they want to find than what’s actually there. My body is a surface readily projected upon: young, female-shaped, ethnically ambiguous, small, smiling. These well-intended projections cause me the most trouble when people see me interacting socially; they’ll witness fifteen minutes of seemingly effortless extroversion on my part and extrapolate out massively. As far as they’re concerned I’ve got plenty of social energy to spare, and if I don’t spend it hanging out with them, it must be because either my friendliness is fake or I don’t like them.

Pretty much none of this is conducted consciously, of course, but it still creates a lot of unnecessary pressure that I can’t pretend not to feel and resent. I know there are people who dream about attaining this kind of “popularity” - to be assumed Cooler than one truly is - but getting buffeted around by folks’ totally unexamined, unarticulated psychological desires mostly sucks.

Truth #2: I’m non-binary.

I’ve also spent a very long time resisting this one. Two decades on the rack, easy. As such, the story of getting here is long. Perhaps one day I’ll tell it. 😛

The short of it, though, is this: I’m probably at least as much of a boy3 as I am a girl. Outside of where my life has been mutated by the chronic background radiation of sexism, “benevolent” and otherwise, I don’t strongly identify as a woman. Furthermore, I find the two-gender system to be infinitely more alienating than comforting. Gender is a social construction designed to impose order on the natural messiness of sexual experience, and as far as I’m cool with that, I am decidedly Not Cool with the “normal” state of affairs, i.e. aggressively shoving whole human beings into an absurdly reductive false dichotomy.

Between its either-or-ism and its forced assignment, the traditional approach to gender reveals itself to be obviously bullshit to anyone who spends more than a few minutes thinking about it. Its boundaries are arbitrary, inconsistent, and generally ill-fitting at the level of individual experience, which why they require such an outrageous amount of coercion and bodily violence to enforce. As much as other folks want to participate in a system of ritualized violence I guess they are free to? Personally, I’d prefer to see it actively dismantled.

If gender is to be saved it’ll be by subverting it, taking it apart, remaking it into something life-affirming. Not the dehumanizing garbage we’ve got now.

As of yet I don’t have any plans to change my presentation because I don’t fuckin’ gotta!

I do have a preference towards They / Them pronouns, but She / Her is still fine. For most of my friends this isn’t going to be at all surprising nor will it in any way negatively impact our relationship. Anyone who needs me to just-be-a-girl, however, can expect turbulence.

Truth #3: My righteous anger is justified and I am good at using it to help others.

I have felt conflicted about my anger for a long time. Since a very vocal childhood I have been regularly frustrated by prejudices and injustices, and I was frequently the first voice of dissent against them, whether that meant challenging adults or my peers. Unsurprisingly, I became well acquainted with the standard strokes of the backlash.

When you are confronting bigotry in a mixed environment, the voice of the status quo will generally manifest in one of two ways:

Gaslighting, e.g. “you are wrong to have said this at all, obviously I am a Good Person, you are just imagining that what I said sounded like XYZ, honestly how could you even think this, as a matter of fact it is I who is offended!”

Tone policing, e.g. “you’re too upset about this! after all, I, the person who did Fucked Up Thing, am perfectly calm about Fucked Up Thing, so any amount of anger makes you irrational by contrast, and I get a raincheck on whatever this is about!”

I know these responses are repulsive. I know they are merely the signs of a weak and imperiled ego acting out of fear. And yet I still spend an inordinate amount of time second-guessing my own anger. Gaslighting and tone policing are a favored weapon of the status quo because they work, and they work in direct proportion to how agreeable their target wants to be.

content warning: the following segment talks about sexual harassment and assault

About couple weeks ago I had the misfortune of being sexually harassed at a club in Bushwick. After numerous rejections and explicitly telling a creep bothering me, my friends, and other women in the club to get lost, I finally went to get a bouncer to eject him. The bouncer got the creep to leave. When I went to thank him, the bouncer told me a whole story about how the creep was “a harmless guy.” Then he reached down and grabbed my ass. Presumably he felt entitled to do this after helping me get rid of a person I asked him to remove... for unwanted touching.

It Really Sucked.

At every turn during the whole ordeal (and its aftermath) I had to hold onto my anger, convince myself that I wasn’t overreacting, remind myself that anyone who thought this was acceptable to do to me is almost certainly doing worse to more vulnerable people. I kept picturing myself the way this guy, this man in a position of power, must have seen me in order to feel okay doing what he did. That I was young, small, female, too friendly to say No, already indebted anyway; that he was one of the Good Guys, that his behavior was also “harmless” because he had decided it was. I conjured up as much anger as I could, pushed down the nausea of envisioning my own degradation from an attacker’s POV, and got to work. I reached out to the club and was quickly put in contact with the owner. The venue now has a publicly posted zero tolerance sexual harassment policy. The entire staff is going through training with a local org dedicated to creating safer nightlife spaces. And that motherfucker has been fired.

I demonstrably made the world better. I wasn’t alone, but all that happened because of my actions. Me and my anger, we did that.

I wish more people were this fucking angry. 💢

~ end of content warning ~

iii. an opinion

My Saturn return is upon me, y’all. As Frank Ocean serenades, we’ll never be those kids again. I have lived a few of these here nine lives and it seems only prudent to be moving forward with some sort of opinion on the matter.

My opinion is this: us folks with financial and physical security should be spending more time fixing shit around here. Figuring out what needs fixing and how you might help are the first steps.

If you’re operating on a similar scale of privilege as I am, maybe that means changing jobs to do more mission-oriented work. If you can’t swing a change of that magnitude, maybe it means showing up to community events and engaging with, caring for, supporting people you otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Churches, libraries, volunteering, supporting local artists, participating in local politics - this all counts. If you’re already doing this sorta thing, that is awesome! Maybe you also have a friend worth inviting who you sense is just itching for a chance to exercise compassion?

I’m using “fixing” pretty loosely here, too. Fixing, to my mind, means making the world brighter, safer, and sweeter for your fellows, human and otherwise. We’ve all got different ideas about what that looks like, and there are definitely folks - myopic or malevolent or both - who will swear up and down that their fear- and hate-driven behaviors will bring about better world. Ultimately, though, I believe that many hands reaching towards their personal vision of Better will in fact make things Better, especially when that vision is informed by meaningful interaction with the real world and its real sorrows and its real triumphs.

But ya gotta reach. Ya gotta try.

I am so tired of hearing my well-fed, well-homed friends piss and moan about late capitalism4 without lifting a damn finger in service of the communities bearing the brunt of material hardship. Unfettered capitalism sure does have a marked tendency to wreak havoc on organic life! But capitalism is not a monolith, and lamenting the abuses perpetuated by its principle benefactors as unchanging or inevitable only normalizes them. Any investigation into the history of capitalism (or the broader phenomena of how a Few come to subjugate the Many) will very quickly disabuse you of the notion that this shit is going to stop without a great deal of active resistance.5

So unless you are personally doing work to put our current strand of democracy-withering corporatism six-feet-under, seriously, just STFU instead. Your nihilism is boring! You don’t sound woke! Save it for your local DSA working group!

Which isn’t to say that I’m not convinced of the wickedness6 of the problems we’re facing: skyrocketing wealth disparity with no relief in sight; the destruction of most of Earth’s biodiversity via mass extinction; a pernicious climate of racism and xenophobia that scapegoats black and brown folks and then visits misery upon them; the weight of an aging population bearing down on the shittiest healthcare system of any nation in its class; a widely disenfranchised electorate further fragmented and fatigued by hyper-polarization; the gendered terrorism that is inflicted daily on women, trans and non-binary folks, and queer people at large; a rising wave of depressive anxiety as people become more aware of these problems and how thoroughly they’ve been disempowered from changing things for the better.

So yeah, I get it. These are hard problems. I just don’t see any better option than trying anyway. I want to spend my time fixing things around here and encouraging others to try their hand too. You already know the bad news: real change is hard and it can take a very long time. You might work your whole life sowing seeds whose fruit you never get to taste.

The good news, however, is that you can get started whenever and wherever you are. The good news is that a sense of purpose is its own reward.

iv. how to get started

When you’ve got hard work ahead of you, your best bet is to use your beautiful human brain and create some leverage. Ask Archimedes about it.7

Lever systems got two parts:

The lever, which is the tool you use to amplify your effort. The longer your lever is, the easier your job will be.

The fulcrum, which is the wedge the lever rests on. The nearer your fulcrum is to the thing you want to move, the easier your job will be.

If you’re starting from zero - “I want to do more for the world but I don’t know how!” - my advice is to forget about the lever arm for now. A lever ain’t shit without a fulcrum, anyway. Your time is better spent exploring the world, keeping an eye out for problems you’d like to solve, and identifying nearby points of leverage. If you want to get into activism, a fulcrum might be volunteering to fold pamphlets for an organization with a mission you believe in. If want to see more self-expression in the world, it might be might be inviting your friends to a zine-making class or hosting your own arts and craft night.

The best fulcrum is one that makes you Feel Good when you apply any amount of effort against it. Too many people get caught up in a self-defeating belief that if they can’t give 110% of their creative energy to something they might as well not try. I can confidently say that trying is itself a virtue. Every time you try even a little bit you make it easier for yourself to try again later, and more importantly, you make trying easier for others. A bunch of people altering their behavior a smidge in the same direction doesn’t add up to nothing; on the contrary, it’s a sea change.

If you’ve got a decent idea of the types of problems you want to solve, though, and you’ve tested your fulcrums, and you are thinking, “Okay, but is this all I’m capable of giving?” then it’s probably time to work on your lever. Given your own interests and inclinations, what skills can you develop that will increase the good you’re doing 10x, 100x over? This is the long game, but it scales a whole lot better than “keep doing what I’m already doing, but more.”

For me right now this means deepening my technical knowledge, building a resilient support network, and sharing what I’m learning. Helping others has been a powerful motivator for self-improvement, not the least of which because it’s a convenient shortcut through the snarl of self-confidence issues.

I am so grateful that Recurse Center was a stop on lengthening my lever! What a concentrated cluster of helpful, considerate beings.

I’ve spent the last two years wandering around New York City in wide-eyed wonder, asking myself the most ambitious question I could think of: how do you save the world?

Getting older comes with a lot of downsides, but asking yourself big questions and living your life as the answer is the primary pleasure of adulthood. It took a ton of courage to get started and I am still frequently awed to find myself moving in the right direction. I’m humbled by the grace and fortitude of the folks who’ve been at this for way longer.

I’m also a hell of a lot happier. This summer’s gonna be rad. ☀️

There are lots of extraordinarily sexy company names like this in the legal world. ↩︎

Having the choice to direct my energies in this way is a privilege. Working in tech gives me this freedom of motion and I have been drawn to software engineering in part because it is the freest of the free (if you still gotta labor for your living). ↩︎

😱😫😖😬😬😬... 😏 ↩︎

Substitute with whatever modifier is en vogue. As a point of fact, “late capitalism” is a term that’s been floating around for literally over a hundred years. ↩︎

Thankfully, history also clearly demonstrates that the tide can be turned. ↩︎

“The use of the term ‘wicked’ here has come to denote resistance to resolution.” Wikipedia page. ↩︎

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” etc etc. ↩︎

#recurse center

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lsmithart · 4 years ago

Text

BAFA301 – Research and Experimentation Module Briefing 09/10/20

Deadline: 18/01/21 @ 5pm

Feedback: 08/02/21 @ 10am

Opportunity for expansive experimentation. Play with materials and ideas. Not responding to a brief other than our own.

Space of creative freedom to think/make/try new things/play with new media. Testing out different avenues for materialising ideas. A final experimental push before consolidating ideas for final module.

We give question; we give answer.

We will not be asked to conceptualise our work and ideas. We will just be expected to MAKE and EXPERIMENT. The annotated bibliography and research will inform the conceptual aspect of the work.

Outcomes don’t interest as much for this module; resolved works are not so important.

Careful and considered presentation at the end of the module.

RESEARCH -> EXPERIMENTATION (informs each other constantly).

Intention is to deconstruct preconcieved ideas and work patterns, to allow new creative formations to emerge through calculated risk taking & critical reflection.

Likely that this will underpin some of the choices made when mapping out aims for subsequent modules. Resultant explorations feed directly into the practical development in 302 & 303.

There are no mistakes – everything is important. Reflection is key.

In depth practice based enquiry.

“Imagine something never before done; by a method never before used; whose outcome is unforeseen.” – Allan Kaprow

Deliver questions rather than answers. Questioning and testing. The whole thing is one entity, it is not just about the final result it is just as much about the process.

Stage 1 (9th October to 2nd/6th November): The Interrobang Project

4 week project – explore existing practice through a medium/discipline of my choice that I previously have not explored. What I feel I haven’t done, a desire to explore. The aim of the project is to work out ways in which I can realise my existing conceptual interests through this new medium..

Spend time taking stock of skills//processes that I have already developed and consider skills that I wish to explore further or haven’t had the time to full try out and get grips on. This can be my starting point. Then required to develop 4 helpful questions. Focus these questions on tangible outcomes or points that can be used to measure level of success.

Question 1 – Medium – processed based research.

Question 2 – Concept – question what ideas are about.

Question 3 – Context – should be read broadly and consider what context means to you, including place, time period, space, artists.

Question 4 – Creative Aspirations – what I intend to do next with the rest of the module.

How will I do it?

Think of things that I have always wanted to do, but have not had the chance to;

Think of ways that could challenge myself and push myself out of my comfort zone; e.g. process, outcome/

What questions drive my practice? How can these questions trigger a different kind of exploration?

Want to see every week – what we have been making… Less focus on research journal and concept.

Fully support process.

Result:

Produce a number of experimental works/try outs/results that will be critiqued on Monday 2nd and 6th November. These will be submitted as part of formative and summative assessments. This will be a group presentation/crit.

15 minutes each to present to discuss successes, failures, discoveries and dead ends. Discuss and evaluate outcomes through the framework of questions. Encouraged to revisit these key questions that have arisen in the phase of the module throughout the course of the year.

Stage 2 (16th November – 18th January):

After Interrobang, we will undertake production of a body of work that responds to my set questions, feedback and findings from the presentation and production of work produced in Interrobang. Development of work should continue through the module. Be prepared to engage with workshop sessions and resources to assist with the development of practice enquiry.

Aims:

Work out ways I can realise my existing conceptual interests through a new medium.

Build confidence in research, decision making and expression with available resources and timescales.

Develop and test conceptual, technical, aesthetic, ethical and economic issues related to area of practice.

Enhance critical and evaluative reflection.

Evaluate acquired knowledge and technical abilities.

Formative Assessment on 23rd & 27th November will help prepare for submission.

Will have 10 minutes to present work in progress, practical work and research up to that date.

Summative Assessment on Monday 18th January – attend a 15 minutes assessment and speak for up to 10 minutes on my practice. Presentation is marked against learning outcomes and is very important in terms of making.

Deliverables:

Summative Presentation of work.

Portfolio/display of all related completed and in progress practical work, including research and development, sketchbooks, experiments and resolved works undertaken as part of the module.

Written project plan with initial proposal and reflection on progress and actions to take forward to 303 (approx. 500 words).

Artist example on presentation: Walead Beshty installation at the Barbican.

Discussion with Phil (planning for Interrobang):

Phil - Performance poem “why are we voting the Tories?” A happening in public. Relies on collaboration, could take place in various locations. Is this limiting? Could there be any more research explorations/experimentations?

Me – Encapsulating objects, images, transparent materials, intangible things such as breath in materials and their functions alongside each other. Fleeting ideas about magnets which repel and attract – what would happen if they are encased in materials and set up in a space? What will happen to the material, if anything? The trace left by the material and the process of this.

Practice as process, embodiment of emotion through performance. Contemporary dance, emotion and movement – a film. Lighting and a shadow self, links back to the unconscious exploration and seeking out the inner self. Allowing this to be reflected through filming of shadow movement behind a sheet of fabric or paper in a space. Could I do this at home in my bedroom? What would the scope be for utilising space in the Warehouse / sectioning off an area?

Feedback: Immateriality, voice, breath. Performative sculpture? I don’t think I have encapsulated objects in materials…

Manual Cinema – look into: https://manualcinema.com/

Book sound studio as private space to practice.

Links with 302 - Tasks to submit for Professional Practice portfolio include:

Live project; external exhibitions and creative sector/industry engagement, educational projects, work experience etc;

Professional development activities; applications, proposals for open calls and competitions, workshops/training;

Presentation and promotion of my work; portfolio, website, blog, zines and publications, online presence business cards;

Critical reflective writing on activities;

Artist statement;

Creative CV.

#301

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ganzeer · 7 years ago

Text

OH ART, WHERE ART THOU?

May 1879, an independently published satirical journal –a precursor to the “zine”– printed a crudely illustrated political cartoon showing the ruler of Egypt, Khedive Ismail Pasha, standing next to an auctioneer offering up the Sphinx and Great Pyramids in exchange for British Pounds. Foreign buyers and dignitaries gather round with interest.

The paper was called Abou Naddara Zarqa, or “The Man in the Blue Glasses” and the force behind it was a sole individual: James Sanua, an Egyptian/Italian Freemason Jew who indeed wore blue spectacles and identified as an Egyptian Nationalist. The publication of this particular cartoon was only three years before the British officially occupied Egypt, making it a rather accurate premonition.

Although Sanua produced the paper entirely on his own from a small printing shop in Paris, located in the Passage du Caire –No, really!– its influence cannot be understated. The reason it was produced from Paris is because that’s where Sanua went into exile after two failed attempts on his life were made by the Egyptian regime. This after 15 issues of the paper had been produced from within Egypt all in the span of just two months. Being heavy on satirical criticism, and being the first ever Arabic publication to employ cartoons and colloquial Egyptian Arabic in its writing, the Khedive knew that it had the power to undermine his rule, even in a country boasting a population of, at the time, over 5.5 million of which 94% could not read or write. But still, Abou Naddara was influential nonetheless. According to Blanchard Jerrold (1826 - 1884), a prolific English journalist and author of Egypt Under Ismail Pacha, which appeared in print a short time before the Khedive’s forced abdication, “[Abou Naddara] was in every barrack, in every Government-office. In every town and village it was read with the liveliest delight.” Often times, people gathered round in the coffeeshops to hear it read out loud to them. Such was the popularity of this unconstrained journal –which in its heyday reached a circulation of 50,000 copies– that the Khedive wrote to Sanua in Paris promising titles and fortune should he refrain from further violating the ruler’s dignity. This is according to Sanua anyway (it’s hard to tell fact from fiction with these damn satirists, isn’t it?). Sanua’s reaction, being the gloriously outspoken person that he was, was to publish the Khedive’s letter in full. Through his work, James Sanua may have brought a number of innovations to the Arab-speaking world, such as the use of colloquial dialect and political cartooning in mass print media, and before that, the introduction of colloquial Egyptian dialect to modern theatre, the precursor to Egyptian cinema, which is still the most influential across the Arab world today. But in reality Sanua was galvanizing a very Egyptian tradition: satire. 81 years prior to the launch of Abou Naddara Zarqa, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt. A campaign that lasted only 3 years and ended with Napoleon fleeing the country and leaving his troops behind, thanks in no small part to the Egyptian brand of satire which sent the European despot into fits of “narcissistic rage” according to Avner Falk in his book Napoleon Against Himself. One French prisoner of the British –who intervened in Egypt to keep it from French influence– had this to say: “When I was in Egypt… it would have been beyond my power to prevent the population from speaking freely in the coffeehouses. They were freer and more independent in their speech than the Parisians. Though they submitted to slavery in everything else, they meant to be free in that respect. The coffeehouses were the castles of their opinions.” In a cave not far from the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut to the south of Egypt is a piece of rather rebellious graffiti that is a few thousand years old. It depicts what is thought to be Hatshepsut, female Pharaoh of Egypt from 1478-1458 B.C, bent over and getting penetrated from behind by her Chancellor and royal architect Senenmut. Although the female Pharaoh’s rule is largely considered prosperous by most historians, this piece of graffito may be a clue as to the control enacted over Hatshepsut by her Chancellor, and the general resentment felt by the populace towards that dynamic.

Was the Pharaoh actually romantically involved with her Chancellor or was this piece of artistic expression something of an exaggeration? A sort of... satire? In my mind, that’s not really the important question to ask, because the Ancient Egyptians believed that the spoken word had an effect on the physical world. And even more powerful than the spoken word was the written word. The thing is though, throughout much of Ancient Egyptian history, words and pictures were interchangeable things. The act of carving such an image, of manifesting the idea into physical form, even if in a far away cave visited by no one, would have enough of an impact on the physical world to make it true. If the cave was however visited –even if by a select few– then such an impact would almost be guaranteed. If Hatshepsut and her Chancellor were not actually romantically involved, perhaps the witnessing of such a vulgar piece of graffito by a peasant or two, even in secret, would create enough “buzz” around their relationship that they would indeed eventually end up romantically involved. Or, if not, they would still be remembered as such long after they’re dead, no matter what the reality actually was. Such is the power of words and pictures, especially ones charged with satire. As Alan Moore, self-proclaimed shaman and arguably the greatest anglophone author of our time is quoted as saying: “Bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skillful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself. And if it’s a particularly good bard, and he’s written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you’re dead, people are still gonna be laughing at what a twat you were.” In that sense, there is no magic greater or more powerful than the magic of words, which we’ve already established is interchangeable with images. What that means is that words and pictures, Art essentially, is magic. And with it, one can actively change the world. Perhaps that is why the Old English term for “be” was also “art”. With that notion in mind, one cannot help but feel completely disheartened by the vast majority of art produced and exhibited today. Art that lacks intent, wielded by individuals who seem to be completely unaware of the magic at their fingertips. Of course there will be artists, very good ones at that, who will say that this here publication is not a work of true art. How can it be spoken of in the same breath as anything produced by a Duchamp or Pollack? They will say the same of James Sanua’s work, an individual never cited in their art history books. This of course is understandable, as there are a great many among us who cannot get past the need for legitimization from big old established institutions. But rest assured, for the original journals of Abou Naddara continue to be successfully auctioned by the likes of Sotheby’s and Christie’s today. Art aside, there are those with legitimate concerns surrounding the propagation of fake news. But as the fantastic English author Neil Gaiman once said “'Once upon a time' is code for 'I’m lying to you'.” Personally, I don’t see why the words “Breaking News” can’t be used to that extent as well. In fact, I’m sure they already are to some degree or another, even by those claiming to be telling the truth. I’m willing to bet that James Sanua would’ve agreed. Mark Twain definitely thought so. I should point out, though, that everything in this here article is true by the way. No, really, I promise you. 100%.

Ganzeer Los Angeles, CA January 24, 2017

First published in ALTERNATIVE FACTS, a fictitious newspaper created for the exhibition MAGIC CITY in Munich, and later Stockholm. Also appeared in Ganzeer’s newsletter, RESTRICTED FREQUENCY, on April 22, 2017.

#text #ganzeer

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