#sbooks blog

[cakedrawings]

they are slightly better than my digital art

[sbooksbowm]

a reintroduction for new followers

I am sbooks! I post about book history and fanfiction in all their overlapping and distinct facets. I wrote my MA dissertation, which I recently made available to read via Google Drive, on why fanfiction is a key and understudied area of book history. The centralized locale for all of my lukewarm takes is my research masterpost. 

I also reblog things related to libraries, library access, library history, and anti-racism and decolonization of heritage institutions. 

I go through Tumblr ruts where I will reblog a lot of memes about fandom and fanfiction in general, especially memes that are about lavishing fic writers and fan products with praise, because 

the memes are important and true,

fan producers and affirmation are the backbone of fandom culture, and

sometimes I struggle to come up with and write down my ideas.

basically: I’m a full-time MLS student and I have a part-time job, so the blog is buttressed by memes. Thanks for being patient as I put out original thoughts (though I would and have argued that nothing is really original and that’s a good thing...)

recently, for some reason, I’ve also reblogged some megamind content. I think megamind is an excellent case study of a lot of fic and media tropes, so it fits with the general vibes of the blog. I usually add commentary about how specific media serves as good case studies for fan & book history studies whenever I do reblog fandom-specific content. otherwise, the fandom here is fandom.

[bethe22]

Accomplishing your dreams

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged.  I love to write and it’s very therapeutic for me and I just seemed to have lost my “mojo” in the blogging department.  I think about blogging a lot -but I didn’t want to write about things without meaning to me and I always try to keep my posts positive.

Well on a positive note, I finally finished my children’s book. My mum is the illustrator and I’m so…

[no53472]

More after the cut--nevermind, the cut is gone.

Tagged by @spaceaceben !!!

Nicknames: What if you guys just call me No (aaand confusion ensues)

Height: 5'1" on a good day (I am a smol tiny ass gremlin because, yknow, closer to the ground, closer to Satan)

Time: Game time ffff

Fave Band/Artist: P!atD, Lauv, Two Feet, Emmit Fenn, Terror Jr

Song stuck in my head: Caramel by Terror Jr

Last movie I watched: Spider-Man Into the Spider-verse 👌

Last thing I Googled: Jollibee delivery hotline (lmao)

Other blogs:

Do I get asks: On rare occasions 😭

Why did I choose this URL: It's a code and it's the only one I tried that wasn't taken ffs

Following: Lots of HPHM peeps/RPs, HPHM/Harry Potter fanartists, aesthetics, some memes

What am I wearing: My shame My coziest hoodie and lounge shorts

Dream trip: I've never been to Africa nor South America

Fave food: Pasta, ox tongue, fried chicken, nachos, yakitori is up there too

Instruments: Piano

Hair color: As black as my soul

Languages: English, Filipino, a teaspoon of Spanish

Most iconic song: All Star by Smashmouth

Random fact about me: I travel a lot. My last big trip was all around the Adriatic coast. 10/10 would go again

Zodiac sign: Sagittarius

Nationality: Filipino (Hmu, kabayan homies)

Fave fruit: I think it's called sugar apple in English

Season: We only have wet and scalding hellscape here, so I'm going with wet.

Scent: Bamboo, mint, or lemon

Color: Burgundy

Animal: DOGGO

Coffee, tea, or hot cocoa: Coffee

Average hours of sleep: 5-6 hours

Fave fictional character: Tal-butt for HPHM

Year blog was created: 2018 August

Fave subject: English in high school, communication skills (speech, basically) and history in college

Hogwarts house: Slytherin

Fave artist: (Senpais suddenly followed me recently so... I'm too shy to say 😬)

Tagging: @sbunny-sbook, @sungoddessra, @neonbluewaves if you haven't already! 🌟

[tarasharmashow]

Deluge. Stay Safe..Diary of the week that was & a huge thanks for the great response to my #SaturdayNoonLivewithTara @Facebook #Live Series

As always I turn to my blog and wonder what to write. So much to say. So much going on. Where to start? What to write? So instead this is a diary like post of my last few @Facebook posts including a huge thank you to all of you for the amazing response to my new fun little Facebook Live series #SaturdayNoonLivewithTara ! 

Here goes:

29/08/17 Crazy #downpour yesterday. Stay #safe everyone.. our kids helping each other in preparation to face the deluge really warmed my heart and reminded me of that #sibling and #Bombay #spirit we all often speak of. Yesterday also reminded me on the #floods in 2005 when I was in the car for 36 hrs with no phone network etc. My parents were so worried but fortunately got home safe, with lots of adventures along the way which I will save to share in another post! It was before I met @roopaksaluja . So many people have it so tough. I keep thinking of those with no shelter. Hope all are ok and glad it has subsided. #Bombay #rain #Mumbai #monsoon Have a safe day all.

27/08/17 Took this the other evenin😀

beautiful sky and I couldn't figure out what that was in the middle and then got it any guesses?. Have a super day all

27/08/17 Fam jam! So lovely catching up with lovely relatives we hadn't seen in a while for Ganpatiji and a huge thanks to all of you I am overwhelmed and amazed by the fabulous response to my @Facebook Lives #SaturdayNoonLivewithTara about 300000 views each all organically with sooo many lovely comments thank you all and please do join in everyone it’s Saturdays at 12! ..And now go go go @PVSindhu 👍😀😘  Have a super rest of weekend all

25/08/17 Happy Ganesh Chaturthi 😀 Thank you

our lovely family and friends for inviting us to your homes to meet Ganpatiji... Had some lovely Darshans today and looking forward to more through the week😀 And so sorry not to have been able to have gone to all but our bestest wishes to all and good health happiness safety and prosperity for you everyone us all forever touch wood😀 @IshitaPuri and although Roopak Saluja had to work and couldnt come along if you look closely at photo 3 you will see we had him with us right in the middle haaha PS hoping for a beautiful and not too noisey festival😀 Have a super day all.

23/08/17 #Kids and #Technology! A teaser of lovely Juhi Chawla | Actress chatting on our show about her views on #children and #technology and on#motherhood in general.. Full chat will be here tomorrow at noon watch this space:) @roopaksaluja Hope you like it and if so please share and as always do send in any comments #technology Link: https://www.facebook.com/tarasharmashow/videos/1666087770103342/ Have a super day all

19/08/17 Kids and pets & my Dad #PartapSharma'sbooks for children on my live now do join in if free #DogDetectiveRanjha#SongsForMyGrandchildren and more on #SaturdayNoonLivewithTara Link: https://www.facebook.com/tarasharmashow/videos/1662196137159172/

Link of The Case of the Hidden Earring from Dog Detective Ranjha: 

https://www.facebook.com/tarasharmashow/videos/1662308043814648/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdKF0ZktwLs

After a long day of working from home and the fun and madness that goes with that it is time now for the quiet calm that comes with the indulgence of going for my yoga class. I call it an indulgence as it is my me time. But as we all know that is actually not an indulgence but a necessity. So when possible, I make sure I carve out that hour thrice a week and sometimes like in this picture the skies light up and make the moments really magical. Have a super day all. And until we meet here again tarataratara!!!

[sbooksbowm]

I...returned to Twitter

in a professional, academic capacity (ugh, gross, this is so formal). I presented on my chapter about the bookbinders ‘It’s About the Fwoomp When You Put It Down: Bookbinding Fanfiction and Reexamining Book Production Models’ at ‘Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic’ (hosted by the Open University and the SHARP Organization). It went really well! and there was a bunch of chatter on Twitter, so I decided to hop in and respond to some tweets. My Twitter (@sbooksbowm, we’re staying consistent folks!) will be books and fanfiction related the way this blog is books and fanfiction related: expansively, inclusively, analytically, humorously, and personally. 

[sbooksbowm]

Weekly Wrap-Up - 2 October

Look who is procrastinating editing the bookbinders chapter! This kid. The main body is written, but I’m trying to work in some theoretical background in the introduction to do the academicky-thing of nodding to the other writers who have laid the groundwork for this kind of research. I’m speed-reading Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books and trying to scrounge together some information on Jessica Pressman’s forthcoming Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age, both of which foreground a lot of the points I make about the tensions between digital and print forms of texts. 

New Approach to the Weekly Wrap-Ups!

I’m only 2.5 weeks out from turning in this dissertation, so as I move away from giving regular updates about my research, I’m going to change the form of the weekly format to compile all of the things I posted about, recommend, and am thinking about in one place. That way, if you’re ever wondering ‘what is sbooks up to?’, you can go to my research masterpost and click on my weekly wrap-ups to get quick access to fun links and lukewarm takes.

Things I posted about

Casey Fiesler’s (@cfiesler) awesome video about fan migration, the oral explanation of her most recent article with Brianna Dym. This is totally worth the 30-minute watch, and Fiesler does an amazing job of tracking the history of fannish media alongside the impetuses of fan migration

a reflection on why fans are the most likely to think critically and expansively about the media they consume, in response to the criticism that fans are content with just consuming the same story over and over again (which is true, but not without reason)

Things I recommend 

Riley J. Dennis’s Case for the Legend of Korra, which is an excellent elaboration on some popular pro-Korra arguments against the naysayers of the sequel series. I love that Riley talks about Korra’s journey towards humanization via healing from trauma, which is something I think many viewers feel affirmed by.  

Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s 'The Sound of Someone You Love Who’s Going Away and It Doesn’t Matter’. What a title! And it really does sound like it.

Things I’ve been thinking about

Takeaways on writing: This has been a week of revisions, with some serious cutting and clarifying. My advisor pointed out that as I am a newbie academic writer, I still rely a lot on quotations instead of paraphrasing my sources for support, rather than evidence. Rephrasing a lot of quotations opened up a lot of room for my own argument. This process made me think a lot about writing guidance in middle school and high school, wherein I was trained to use quotations as evidence rather than as support. Anyone else learn this? That the more people who agree with you, the more right your argument is, instead of drawing from original or revisiting primary evidence and using previous writing as a framework for analysis? It’s a pretty bad habit! And it makes us reliant on regurgitating other work rather than working through our own arguments and examining how they align or disalign with others. Graduate school has been one long re-learning process on writing...and I studied writing in uni. 

Different kinds of fan spaces: I hang out, actively participate, and lurk in a variety of fan spaces, mostly in the form of Discord servers (my love) and Facebook groups (bane of my existence). And I’m in a lot of fan spaces for different media: TV shows, books, comics, podcasts, even fan platforms. Though this has been said elsewhere, the difference in attitude and behavior of fans depending on the type of space (and whether fans are masked by a pseudonym or not) is fascinating to me! I’m in one enormous Facebook group dedicated to television show, and without fail, every single post ends up with the comments off because the discourse gets too heated. This behavior is almost definitely a function of:

the impersonal size of the group. In my favorite Discord servers, the smaller size makes the conversation more personable and friendlier (I know these people! I’m not going to harangue them!), and,  

affirmational versus transformational fandom: affirmational fans tend to work within the confines of canon, and so when they disagree over the interpretation of canonical elements, the conversation turns to facts (’no, this is how it happened in season 12, episode 472’) over feelings (’this happened once in the spin-off comic and I’m cool w extrapolating this bc I wanna feel warm and fuzzy inside’). Transformational fans are less canon-restricted and perhaps more lenient, and are probably more likely to silo themselves in fan spaces with agreed-upon interpretations (e.g. I’m in a few dedicated shipping servers, and I know other shipping servers exist, but I won’t bother myself with them, because that’s not my cup of tea, so I’ll just save myself the trouble). 

This isn’t to say that affirmational fans won’t break off from the main group and form their own interpretive communities, but I think affirmational fans are more likely to want to be a part of the “official” fan spaces, because they are interested in the “official” story. 

This is anecdotal conjecture, but I wonder, have you seen differences in fan behavior depending on the fannish space you’re in? I’d love to hear about other fan-space-specific experiences!

[sbooksbowm]

50 followers! That’s really cool. In May, I logged back onto Tumblr for the first time in five years of radio silence and expected to shout into the void. Thanks for checking out the blog, reading about my research, and reblogging the rage posts.

[sbooksbowm]

to many more fandom memes and marinating my thoughts for months before I finally share them. thanks for being here my dudes.