Fandom and Feminism section of Cinema Journal

I just received my contributor’s copy of Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009). In it is an In Focus section edited by my Transformative Works and Cultures coeditor, Kristina Busse, about fandom and feminism, and I’ve contributed an essay about fan gift culture. Many of the other contributors are people I work with at TWC.

The In Focus section is available for download as PDF here. The contents are as follows:

In Focus: Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production, edited by Kristina Busse

• Introduction, by Kristina Busse
• “A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness,” by Francesca Coppa
• “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” by Karen Hellekson
• “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” by Abigail De Kosnik
• “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergece,” by Julie Levin Russo
• “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership,” by Alexis Lothian

Thumbnail of Cinema Journal cover

The cover image illustrates our In Focus: it’s a screenshot from Lim’s 2007 fanvid, “Us,” which you may view at MediaCommons (curated by Kristina): “Us” – a multivid by Lim. This metavid has rightfully gotten a lot of attention, and it still brings tears to my eyes: there is so much of me (the fan) and what I believe in there. The artist was profiled at NPR at “Vidders Talk Back To Their Pop-Culture Muses.” This vid is a wonderful example of how fandom is sometimes all about us and our practices (the “den of thieves” of the song), and not (really) (always) about the source material.

TWC No. 3 released

Transformative Works and Cultures No. 3 has been released right on schedule.

The table of contents is here, and OTW’s announcement about it is here.

This issue has some great topics: filk and wrock, quilting, Lost, Law & Order: SVU, a couple items on the LOTR fan film The Hunt for Gollum, an essay about the troubling aspects of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, an essay about gift culture (a particular interest of mine)—well, just go read the issue yourself, because it’s all this and more.

We’d love it if you used the software interface to write comments to the authors. Remember, the issue is fully open access, so feel free to copy, paste, transform…it’s all good.

My life hacks: Firefox add-ons, software, and optimization hacks

I have long been interested in organization and optimization, which is why I have blocked Lifehacker from my browser during the hours of 9 to 3. I actually file my papers, and I know exactly where, for example, the paperwork for my next aerobics recertification is, and that’s not for 2 years. However, I feel distinctly low-tech compared with some of the supermen and superwomen out there: I don’t have a smart phone, for example, so I haven’t joined the iPhone/iPod touch revolution. In fact, my Palm Tungsten E handheld dates from, like, 2003. I keep my calendar and day-to-day to-do list on paper (!!), and the most useful recent addition to my life is a cheap notebook, with a pen at the ready, so I can scribble down short-term notes.

Hard-copy calendar and note pad

Here’s an explanation of the software I use and how I organize my tools: Firefox add-ons, software for work and play—and, heck, why not?—a description of optimization hacks that let me work without too much distraction. I conclude with a run-down of my physical setup. I use a 5-year-old Dell PC running XP.

Firefox add-ons

• bit.ly preview :: Provides expanded link and other info about a shortened link (bit.ly and tiny.url) upon hover.
• Flashblock :: Blocks Flash animation; can be overridden by a click. Note: this blocks YouTube video previews.
• IE Tab :: Click an icon to render a page in IE, but within Firefox. Useful for pages, like Windows Update, that requires you view it with IE.
• LeechBlock :: Blocks certain sites/domains that you specify for a time range you specify. I block Lifehacker, Facebook, and LiveJournal from 9 to 3 on weekdays.
• Screengrab :: Saves Web pages as images. I don’t use this much but it will capture the whole page, not like PrintScreen.
• Twitterfox :: Creates a pop-up in Firefox’s lower right corner with updates of your Twitter pals. I am not following enough people to make this add-in a hassle, but if you follow a bunch of people or do finely granulated Twitter things, then TweetDeck is probably a better choice. I read the tweets of heavy posters via an RSS feed through Google Reader.
• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) :: Syncs your bookmarks and/or passwords between computers.
• Zotero (beta) :: Collects and manages citation info; plugs into Open Office Writer and Word, so you can easily embed info and cite. I haven’t been able to make it work with my writing process (yet?), but it’s handy for organizing bibliographic info.

Software (free unless otherwise noted)

The main software I use is Microsoft Office. I have Open Office handy and occasionally use it, mostly to turn a word-processed file into a PDF. For a free word processor, I like AbiWord, the portable version of which I carry around on a memory stick, along with other portable apps, including portable Firefox.

Although I love the idea of switching over to all open source, all the time, my clients give me proprietary plug-ins for Word that I must use to tag or prep or otherwise work with the documents. This is becoming less common as composition has been offshored, so now I work more with Word files and less with SGML tagged files, but I have retained some of the tools, particularly to clean up author-prepped files, because they are so useful.

Here’s a list of the software I use daily. I do not use antivirus software because nothing is downloaded to my computer: I use Gmail to filter everything and only download content I trust.

Day-to-day programs to help me traffic, prep, and edit files

• CSE Validator Lite :: I use this to view XML metadata files my clients send me; and to write Web pages. It color-codes syntax and does a quick validation.
• Editor’s ToolKit Plus (not free) :: Required for those of us employed in the publishing industry. Word template plug-in strips files, turns embedded notes into text, tags specs. The FileCleaner feature alone is worth the price.
• FileZilla :: Stable FTP software.
• Foxit Reader :: PDF viewer; way lighter than that bloated Adobe monstrosity.
• Gmail :: All my other e-mail accounts flow into Gmail. One Program To Rule Them All!
• Google Calendar :: I keep five calendars simultaneously. Only one dumps to my handheld: the calendar that tells me where I have to be at what time.
• Google Calendar Sync :: Syncs my Google calendar with Outlook, which in turn syncs with my Palm Tungsten E handheld. I export my Contacts manually from Google once a month and sync it with Outlook and then to my handheld.
• Google Groups :: I use my own personal Google Group (no other members are permitted) to store documents.
• IZArc :: Compression tool: zips and unzips files, including RARs.
• Launchy :: Launches anything you want from the keyboard: programs, Web pages, windows, whatever. Great for people like me who don’t mouse.
• PDFZilla :: PDF to Word/txt converter, so I can desperately attempt to create an editable document without rekeying it. Works well for neat blocks of text like figure captions; works less well for complex text like tables.
• Stedman’s Plus Spell Checker (not free) :: Medical dictionary plug-in. Indispensable.
• Texter :: Text expander; especially useful for signature lines and for repeated terms or HTML codes.
• Word wildcard macros :: The number one skill required for true efficiency.

System maintenance

• Start > Accessories > Tools > Disk defragmenter :: Yes, I use XP’s defrag tool. It seems to work fine.
• CCleaner :: Effective and light optimization, privacy, and cleaning tool. Highly recommended!
• SUPERAntiSpyware :: Pretty good antispyware freeware.
• Sunbelt Personal Firewall :: Er…my firewall. Free and not too annoying with the pop-ups.

Optimization hacks

Color-coded mesh bags

• Filing system :: For work, two files: an open one on the floor by my feet with current projects; and a nearby little file cabinet with files for active clients. I pull from the latter and file in the former when I have extant work from that client. I regularly update documentation and copy style sheets, etc., to my Google Group as backup.
• Hard-copy calendar :: Two pages per week, just a cheap spiral-bound paperback calendar from Walmart. I use stickies to list long-term items that I ought to work on; I write in items that need to be done per day to meet the longer-term goal.
• Launchy shortcuts :: PubMed, Webster’s online, IMDb, Amazon.com.
• Mesh bags :: See-through, color-coded mesh bags that I use to store cords and peripherals. Camera is blue! iPod is red! Cell phone cord is yellow!
• Palm Tungsten E handheld :: Obsolete but still works, although battery life is about an hour of constant use. I use the calendar function to flash me an alarm a half-hour before I need to be somewhere. I use the contacts function to store contacts. But mostly I use it to watch videos while working out.
• Reference books :: Chicago 15, Webster’s 11th, AMA 9th and 10th, Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, Stedman’s Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Symbols—all on a bookshelf I can access by simply leaning over.
• Scratch pad :: Little notebook where I write notes to self. I used to use stickies in my calendar, but the dedicated notebook works even better. It also makes a nice coaster.

Software for play

Here are the programs I use for play, mostly having to do with accessing or repurposing media, such as videos or photos. I keep meaning to upload stuff to my Flickr account (I have no photos stored there), or find out a better CD/DVD-burning program, or figure out how to use Gimp, but I never do. Moral of story: it is occasionally more efficient to work with what you know when your needs are few and simple. That said, my complex photo hacks are just…stupid, and I really ought to optimize that. Later!

• DVD Flick :: Converts AVI to DVD format.
• foobar2000 :: I don’t use this to listen to media; I use it to rip CDs as one continuous track. I do this to aerobics music, so I can use my iPod for class; it’s the only way to make the songs truly gapless. I also use it link up several CD’s worth of audio dramas into one huge file.
• Format Factory :: Converts to MP4, so I can push video to my handheld and watch it while working out.
• iTunes :: Oh, how I hate this program, this bloated monstrosity! I have a second-gen red iPod nano I got in 2006. I have my preferences set so iTunes doesn’t re-sort things willy-nilly. I also do not download cover art, so as to conserve space on the nano.
• Jasc Paint Shop Pro v. 8 :: Totally obsolete; came with my computer. But I know how to use it to do things like resize and crop, and it has a tool that lets me figure out RGB colors in a way that lets me control said colors in CSE Validator Lite.
• Photobucket :: I use this free service to store images that I blog. I got my accounts ages ago, before Flickr was the big thing (yes, before Flickr was purchased by Yahoo!), and I haven’t bothered to move elsewhere. It links to Twitgoo, a Twitter image tool.
• Picasa :: Photo organization program. I use it to download pix from my camera, then upload images to my Google Photos account, where I then copy the ones I want to blog to my Photobucket account, letting these services do the resizing (because it degrades the image quality the least). I also use Picasa’s editing tools to get rid of red-eye or to slightly darken or lighten the image. If I need to crop, I use Paint Shop Pro.
• Real Record Now! :: It came with my computer, and I have never upgraded it. I use it to burn CDs and DVDs.
• Windows Media Player v. 10 :: No, I haven’t upgraded. I wish it would stop asking me. I use it to stream DI.fm trance radio all day long.
• VLC Media Player :: Why, yes, it does play everything.

Physical setup

Physical setup

• Dell Dimension 8300 (desktop computer) running XP and Office 2003.
• Dell 19-inch monitor.
• Microsoft Optical mouse Blue USB (not that I use it much; I’m keyboard only!).
• Belkin 4-USB expander dongle (permanently attached to desktop, so I don’t have to stand on my head to access the USB port on the front of my tower).
• Dell Latitude D510 laptop (only used occasionally; has programs on it, but no data).
• Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite (split ergonomic keyboard).
• Router/wireless.
• Steelcase chair.
• Tracfone LG cell phone.
• HP LaserJet 1000 series (black-and-white laser printer).
• HP Officejet 5610v All-in-One (fax, scanner, color printer including photos).
• Palm Tungsten E handheld.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. All the images were taken by me and are under the same copyright. If you duplicate the post, please also copy the pictures and host them yourself. This post was originally written on August 31, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

Personas profile

Here is my Personas profile. It was quite a bit of fun watching it scan for information on me (“Karen Hellekson is…,” and keywords would flash by). I’m surprised about how little of it is about…er…copyediting, which I do for a living. I’m pleased to be considered an educator, and I certainly do a lot of service work. I’m employed in the publishing industry, and I used to write book reviews for Publishers Weekly, so the “books” thing makes sense. But why is “sports” listed so high? Must be aerobics!

Hellekson Personas profile. [View full size]

The thing that strikes me about this exercise is how the computer perceives my presenting myself on the Internet. I think of myself as primarily a copyeditor who does academic stuff on the side, but I don’t tend to write about my copyediting for privacy concerns. Likewise, I don’t blog about the work I do for the academic journal I coedit, Transformative Works and Cultures, but I spend a huge amount of time on it.

In interesting post yesterday on “Being Yourself Online (of usernames and avatars),” Brian Croxall talks about presenting himself online and controlling the message. Like Croxall, I have organized my online presence to a single username. But my connection with the fan world means that I post under my fan name also, although I have done very little of that since I started working on TWC because I do not have time; I now serve fandom not by creating but by administrating. Yet seeing my Personas result without the fan component means that an important aspect of me is absent.

I think it’s a good idea to create an online identity under your RL name that you can control, but I would also argue that having a separate identity may be an important part of the performance of self.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 25, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

In which I teach an online class

This semester, I am teaching an online-only science fiction literature class at the University of Maine at Augusta as an adjunct. I requested to teach the class for a number of reasons, some having to do with my day job: copyediting medical manuscripts. If I want to go further in the copyediting field, positioning myself as an educator, particularly one with experience in distance learning, may go a long way. Partially, it’s an attempt to bring together some disparate threads of my life. I have been surprised that people find what I do as a day-to-day job interesting, and certain intersections between publishing and my academic interests are valued. So teaching a SF class may end up bringing together literature and copyediting in some intriguing ways, just like I’ve been able to link copyediting and my extensive experience in the publishing world with the academic journal I coedit, Transformative Works and Cultures. In addition, I can see the writing on the wall: copyediting is increasingly being offshored, and I may soon run out of work. Although I am pretty sure that I would prefer not to teach full time (although maybe this class will let me know otherwise!), I would welcome the opportunity to teach occasionally and work with topics that interest me.

I last taught in 2002–2003, face-to-face English classes on the topic of SF that met once a week. I taught two semesters in a row at two different local universities. I like adjuncting because I get to teach in my field, SF literature, without having to teach service classes like Composition or Intro to Literature. I’m particularly excited to be teaching again at UMA because I really like the student body: UMA is a nonresidential school, all their face-to-face classes meet once a week, and the student body tends to be less the traditional 18-year-old just out of high school and more the full-time worker who has decided to get a college degree, and they’re doing so one class at a time. The ideas that the student body comes up with are much different than the ones I see when I teach a more traditional student population.

Before I was permitted to teach an online class, I had to take an online class about teaching online. This class was organized through Blackboard. I found the experience valuable: I learned how to structure the class, how to handle Blackboard’s administrative tools having to do with various sorts of assignments and quizzes, and how to deal with asynchronous discussion. However, I was definitely not impressed with Blackboard as a tool. It’s nonintuitive (and, at least on my computer, agonizingly slow), and it seeks to replicate certain aspects of teaching without really pushing the envelope with possibilities inherent in online pedagogy. Students are familiar with Blackboard because it is used for their other classes, and there is tech support provided by actual university employees, so I, as the instructor, won’t have to troubleshoot.

I had mad, wild ideas about how to incorporate some of Henry Jenkins’s core competencies for engaging in participatory culture (read about them here), which involved choosing a text we were reading in class and studying remixes—perhaps with students even making remixes of their own! (Yes, we’re reading that classic upon which a number of remixes have been based: Wells’s The War of the Worlds.) I wanted to use the online experience as a metaphor for SFnal engagement with technology, and I wanted to bring into the class my own interest in derivative artworks.

However, on the basis of the feedback I received from fellow instructors in the online class, and on the basis of certain pesky requirements having to do with access (notably, making available to students a DVD of any visual media I might want to incorporate, such as me lecturing on something—this requires about 2 weeks’ lead time, which I am, realistically speaking, not capable of), I radically ramped back my desires and expectations. The class, as it currently stands, is largely text based, and it will revolve around reading and discussion. The feedback I got from my contact person indicates that such English classes are the norm, so the way it’s currently structured will be acceptable to the students.

I’m thus going to use this class as a test, to see how far I could go in the future. For example, rather than Blackboard, I would like to use certain Google tools, such as Google Documents, that permit collaboration; and I like the idea of a public class blog. Some instructors ask students to edit or create Wikipedia entries, thus incorporating research into the class while simultaneously letting students see exactly how much weight should be given to Wikipedia when considering it as a source. I hope to incorporate some of these elements into the class, but I’m playing a wait-and-see game first, so I can assess the students’ computer access, comfortableness with other media, and ability to generate non-text-based transformative artworks.

The class as it currently stands revolves around Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom, second revised edition. This book is a proxy for lecture. It’s a short, simple book that defines SF, provides its history, and then delves into topics such as race and gender. In addition, I’ve chosen Thomas Shippey’s The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories for our short-story anthology. It’s not that recent, but it’s in print, it has a nice historical overview, and I’ve used it before—plus I’ve shared beers with Tom and he’s really cool. Add to that five short novels, and that’s the reading for the class. Students are required to make two discussion posts a week, a long one on a prompt I write about the reading and a shorter one in response to another student. The midterm and final will be longish essays on a broad prompt. And staying current (attendance, keeping up with the reading) will be assessed by weekly machine-graded quizzes. The overall goals of the class are to read some classics in the field and come to some understanding of what SF is, and to consider SF narrative as cultural product.

I must acknowledge my colleague, experienced community college instructor and online pedagogy expert Craig Jacobsen, for providing me with advice and a sample syllabus, and for turning me on to Roberts.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 24, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

Two very different fan productions: “The Hunt for Gollum” and “Battlestar Redactica”

1. Introduction

[1.1] Two fairly high-profile transformative fan artworks hit my radar a while back, and I’m finally getting around to blogging about them. Both are firmly within fannish traditions, but they have very different sensibilities: “The Hunt for Gollum” and “Battlestar Redactica.” I encourage everyone to view them both, to compare and contrast. Both fan productions are available to view for free.

2. The Hunt for Gollum

[2.1] Chris Bouchard’s “The Hunt for Gollum” is a 40-minute live-action vid (it calls itself an “independent film”) with a cinematic feel and a mostly male production team. Gollum comes out of the Lord of the Rings film fandom, as opposed to the book fandom, and the production is geared to evoke Jackson’s films. Indeed, the production values are fabulous: wonderful acting, great costumes, original incidental music, the whole nine yards. The script fills in some missing time: Aragon tracks Gollum to find the truth about the Ring. The plot elements are pulled from Tolkien’s Appendices.

[2.2] As a fan artwork, this is in the relatively unusual genre of live-action fan vids [1], and it’s further rarified by being incredibly slick, more pro than fan. In fact, this short film straddles the pro/fan divide. On the pro side, it’s clear from remarks on the Web site that the people on the team are either professionals in the film industry or they want to be, and the level of excellence reflects these aspirations. Their dedicated URL also signals their serious intent. Further, Gollum’s Web site notes that the production team came to some sort of unexplained understanding with the Tolkien estate. All these signal professionalism.

[2.3] On the fan side, the story it tells is pure missing scene, a well-known fan genre whereby the fan artwork seeks to fill in a gap in the canonical source, usually in terms of story or character—here, story. Further, the cinematographic sensibility is clearly meant to evoke Jackson’s films; the final shot of the film only clinches it. The fannish transformation is of an original cast and script into a Jackson-esque tag, yet it is clearly a derivative story (because from Tolkien) told in a derivative way (because channeling Jackson). Also embedding it in the fan realm is its disclaimer, which, in fannish tradition, emphasizes the nonprofit nature of the endeavor.

[2.4] One important thing about Gollum is that it can be viewed completely independently of the films and it makes perfect sense. Like all derivative texts, it gains extra layers of meaning when viewed in conjunction with the primary source, although in this case, the story isn’t really crucially necessary. The extra meaning I obtain upon viewing isn’t some insight into Aragon’s or Gollum’s characters, or some “aha! so that’s how they found out that information!” moment that made explicable a formerly confusing bit of the film. Rather, the meaning I obtain has to do with faithfulness to cinematography and world building. For me, it’s a primarily visual fan artwork about world building meant to dazzle—more homage than site of extratextual meaning. A die-hard fan embedded in the LOTR film fandom might read it completely differently (and more usefully).

3. Battlestar Redactica

[3.1] CVM_Productions’ “Battlestar Redactica” is a rerendering of the last half-season of Battlestar Galactica, created by a single person who recut clips together, thus greatly changing the story. The artwork is made up of two vids of recut aired footage: part 1, “Battlestar Redactica: A Fan-edited Mutiny” (1:46:34), and part 2, “Battlestar Redactica: A Fan-edited Resurrection” (1:09:12). Short-form fan recuts—particularly of silly TV or film trailers—are popular on YouTube. Longer fan recuts such as this, based on TV shows, are more rare, although there is a site dedicated to mostly movie recuts, Fanedit.org. In the long-form genre, the best-known example is undoubtedly Mike J. Nichols’s 2000/2001 The Phantom Edit, a fan recut of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace that hit the media hard and itself spawned a thousand edits [source].

[3.2] CVM_Productions credits several people who helped her by providing feedback, but this artwork was not created by a team of people, as was Gollum. Rather, it was created by a fan embedded in her larger fan community, and like many such artworks, it itself has resulted in at least one derivative fan work: a music vid about Redactica’s version of Kara Thrace, one of the characters whose story is greatly altered. Further, CVM_Productions has placed her Redactica-specific site on LiveJournal, a friendly home to various fan communities. In short, Redactica feels fannish to me in a way that Gollum does not.

[3.3] Where Gollum is additive to story, Redactica is transformative of story: the tagline of the Web page associated with the artwork reads, “I reject your Battlestar and substitute my own!” CVM_Productions took the last half of season 4 of BSG and recut it to a preferred reading. Certain plot elements, notably the romance between two major characters, are excised altogether; other elements are downplayed. Some scenes are reordered to place certain plot elements next to each other, or to indicate altered reaction. CVM_Productions has posted extensively about the journey she took creating the two vids that comprise the Redactica, thus providing valuable insight into her artistic process, and I recommend reading the text associated with the artwork after viewing it.

[3.4] One big change in Redactica is the ending: CVM_Productions ran out of footage to articulate her desired ending, so she obliquely hints at it through montage. Of this new ending, CVM_Productions writes,

[3.5] The fan-edit closes to a new montage of modern technology and our relationship to it designed to offer a more balanced look than simply dancing robots. This is not intended necessarily to clarify the nature of our relationship to the Colonials (although it may do, if you choose), but rather to acknowledge there is one, even if purely metatextual, because their questions are also ours. [source]

[3.6] Redactica can be watched on its own and will make sense, but on the download page, CVM_Productions clearly indicates that the recuts ought to be viewed in context. She places the fan vids in a viewing sequence with extratextual elements. For example, for part 1 of Redactica, she suggests that first one watch 4.11 “Sometimes a Great Notion,” then watch the “What the Frak Happened Official Recap,” and finally watch the fan recut. Informed watchers will get far more out of the recut because the point is that it is different. The reworking of the character of Kara Thrace is particularly audaciously delicious when held against the canonical version.

4. Conclusion

[4.1] I can’t help but notice a big gap between these two fan texts. I like both of them for the obvious care and thought that went into creating them. Both of these artworks prove that derivative fan labor is a labor of love. Of the two, I prefer Redactica because I understand the context and community it came out of. It’s speaking to me as a fellow fan, not really the larger world. It privileges my knowledge of the canonical text. It assumes I have baseline knowledge, and it unapologetically builds on that. It’s…well…private.

[4.2] Gollum, on the other hand, is public: it is meant to be viewed, in isolation, in a public forum, and although knowledge of the films and the story add a layer of meaning, ultimately, this fan artwork is just an extra. Yes, it’s a beautiful extra, but it doesn’t tell me anything new about Jackson’s films, or about Aragon, or about Gollum. Perhaps it gives me some context, but I think that at the end of the day, I’m okay without the context. Redactica, on the other hand, transformed me by transforming the text: it showed me new possibilities inherent in the canonical narrative.

5. Note

1. I have personal experience with live-action fan vids: I was (sort of) a member of Mini-UNIT Minstrels (MUM), who followed Chicago’s The Federation in silly derivative sensibility (think Doctor Who meets the Monty Python crew). I published a paper about these vids after interviewing the cast and crew, a very grad student–y “let’s apply Jenkins’s textual poachers theory to these artworks.” (In my defense, I was a grad student.) Until Gollum, live-action fan vids had fallen off my radar, maybe because nobody has asked me to play the crucial lynchpin role of “secretary,” as I did for MUM, but now I find myself intrigued again. Please comment if you know of any current fan-run production teams who are working on live-action fan vids!

Post slightly updated on August 15, 2009, to add fanedit.org URL as per comment below.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 14, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

A review of Torchwood: Children of Earth

It goes without saying, doesn’t it? I’ll say it anyway: major spoilers. As I write this, only the first episode has aired in the USA, but this covers the full five eps.

1. Children of Earth

Earth’s children [1]

[1.1] I just rewatched, in one long jag, all five eps of Torchwood: Children of Earth, which comprises season 3 of the show. I laughed. I cried. I shook my fist at the screen because something happened that I really, really did not like at all. (More about that under the cut.) If you liked seasons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, all I can say is, it won’t prepare you for season 3, because the stakes are higher and the themes are darker: children, love, commitment, duty, honor. This is the program that had something real to say, in season 2 in particular, about life and death, but T:COE takes the promise of the first two seasons to a whole new level.

[1.2] Season 3 of Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, aired in the UK on 5 consecutive days from July 6 to July 10, 2009. It began airing on July 20 on BBC America, and it will be available on DVD on July 28. (Why, yes, I have preordered my DVD from Amazon!) The plot, in a nutshell, is thus: Aliens announce, by seizing control of and speaking through all the children in the world at once, that they are coming. They want something—something to do with our children. And it not going to be good.

Why the ending of Life on Mars US fails

My previous post on LOM US is here.

1. Life on Mars US finale

[1.1] Several months after the April 1, 2009, finale of the US version of Life on Mars, I have finally gotten around to finishing out the season. Although I am a big fan of the UK version, the US version didn’t really catch me, and after the first midseason story arc wrapped up, I didn’t prioritize watching it—and I became even less concerned when I learned that the show had been canceled.

[1.2] Thus I didn’t watch the finale in a timely manner, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. Yet out of a sense of obligation, coupled with a friend writing and saying, “OMG, what did you think of the LOM US finale?”, I finally sat down to view it, after, perhaps shockingly, remaining totally spoiler-free. And oh my. The ending…sucked. I actually spoke to the screen: “No!” I screamed, rendered incoherent with betrayal. “You…you…you idiots! I cannot believe you did that!”

[1.3] Let me say it again: I cannot believe they did that. It would have been better if the entire team had died in a blaze of glory on Gauda Prime. Now that’s a series ending!

[1.4] After the jump, I’ll tell you exactly why I think the finale for the US version of Life on Mars betrayed the entire setup of the series. Obviously there are major spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.

What to watch in British SF/F TV

1. British TV

[1.1] At the SFRA 2009 meeting the weekend of June 11, I was on a panel moderated by my fearless coeditor, Craig Jacobsen, about what to watch for SF TV. The panel was quite large, so Craig held us to a strict 2-minute time limit. He asked us to prepare remarks about which shows were must-watch shows, and why. Here, I present my choices and briefly explain what I find interesting and worthy about the shows.

[1.2] Because I am particularly interested in British TV, I staked out this area as my own, leaving the usual suspects—Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Heroes—to others. But during our panel’s conversation, I was able to articulate why I had specifically earmarked certain shows as being of interest. Sadly, it wasn’t because of the shows’ uniform excellence: some are virtually unwatchable. Rather, what I found interesting had to do with intersections of these texts with other texts. This makes sense. I am, after all, interested in shared worlds and fan artifacts, and these pro texts feel like fan works: derivative crack that says something about the originary text.

[1.3] After the jump is my roundup of fun-to-think-about shows (if not fun-to-watch shows, unless you like things that are so bad, they’re good). Several haven’t aired in the United States yet. I discuss the following: Demons, Spooks Code 9, Merlin, Ashes to Ashes, and Primeval. And I briefly mention the Doctor Who franchise: Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane Adventures.

Fandom research methods

Madeline Ashby has started a blog that aims to round up details about research going on in fandom. Interested in seeing what sorts of questionnaires researchers are using? Wondering whether someone else already taken that great idea and started a project? Fandom Research wants to be the go-to place to answer these questions. It’s early days yet for the site, but the more people who contribute, the more useful the site will be.

Today I contributed a guest post entitled Fandom research methods that discusses, among other things, AOIR’s ethics guide, which is the de facto guide for people working on research in human subjects via the Internet in the social sciences. While writing it, I was reminded that the impetus of many guidelines is to prevent the subjects of study from harm, and to ensure that they understand exactly what will be done with the responses they provide.