(no subject)
Nov. 11th, 2013 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretPhilcon was a pretty excellent time.
Logistics worked out this year much better than in past years. Room booked well in advance, low floor requested on account of stairs on Shabbat, and for the first time, request actually accommodated! That was a huge difference in being able to head back to the room on breaks to eat or just chill out. Also, requested a fridge, and acquired food that requires a fridge and that also made a difference in logistical success. Ate much better this year than at past cons. Oh man, the fiasco at Worldcon where they didn't have enough refrigerators and I used the tiny icebox to hold a turkey sandwich that ended up waterlogged despite being sealed in various plastic bags. :( I shared a room with my brother, plusfreeradical42, teal_dear, and Jon who doesn't have an LJ/DW. It was great to hang out with all of them.
In general, the panels were not too great. One of the best panels I will not talk about because Yuletide spoilers, but the best panel of all was the First Annual Philcon Imaginary Word Spelling Bee, which was amazing. Contestants were quizzed on words from Nyarlathotep to Mxyzptlk, and I just barely missed out on winning the bee. I was a little annoyed that I had to miss the SF trivia contest for it, but it was so ridiculous and fun and I'm hoping it will continue to be a part of the con.
There was also a well done panel on Dangerous Visions, which took a broad and skeptical look at the place of the collection in SF history and ultimately I think did a very fair job of apportioning credit to Harlan where it was due without buying into the hype machine surrounding the anthology. Dangerous Visions is an amazing collection of stories, everyone agreed, and it did some things to give legitimacy to the genre as a source of thoughtful literary ideas, but it was also of a time and place where that was happening elsewhere. One panelist emphasized the role it had in bringing new female voices to peoples' attention, and another highlighted the way it helped bring sex and liberal politics into SF. But some people in the audience wondered if by partially legitimizing SF, Dangerous Visions had in some sense prolonged the ghetto and kept it from folding into the literary mainstream earlier, and this led to a nicely broad conversation about how these 'revolutionary anthologies' - not just Dangerous Visions, but also Mirrorshades and Dark Matter and others- changed the conversation around genre fic in significant ways without really fundamentally changing the nature of 'genre fiction'.
Hmm... what else was cool? Went to two performances involving the musical guest of honor, Heather Dale, which were both great. The former was the opening ceremony concert, a nice high energy filk set that highlighted Dale's beautiful vocals- the latter was the first solo show of her guitarist Ben Deschamps, which was a really fun set of filky instrumental folk, highlighted by instrumentals about zombies and dinosaurs and a poem setting of an SJ Tucker poem, recited by Tucker. I also went to a few other filk concerts that I enjoyed- the Denebian Slime Devils, Marc Grossman, and Sarah Pinsker. And there was a Sunday morning filk panel on ridiculous filk that saw a filk of Meercat Manor to the tune of Mozart's "La Ci Darem" and the most aggressive, hardcore filk I've ever heard about a dishwasher.
Saturday evening I signed up for a Ravaged Earth game- a high energy 1930s pulp rpg setting for Savage Worlds.teal_dear played a sentient robot butler, I played Captain Lightning, a superhero, and the other two players played a martial arts master and a mad scientist as we scampered around the naked city on a series of wild adventures. The setting was great fun and well matched to the system, and we all had a blast. The high water mark for me was flying down onto the hood of the cultists' automobile, punching through the windshield, and grabbing the driver by the throat. And then striking a heroic pose, to demonstrate to the American Public of This Fine Land that standing up for What Is Right is always worth it. In the game room I also played SET with an eight year old and tried out the new Guilds expansion for Dominion. I lost at Dominion, of course. I always lose at Dominion. I absolutely do not have the head for that game.
And then I suppose I should share what happened at the fanfic panel. If you were told that it wouldn't be a panel of profic writers trashing fanfic, it was exactly what you would expect the Philcon fanfic panel to be. It was a bunch of writers who had mostly gotten their start in 1970s K/S and had mostly transitioned to being profic writers. When they were sharing fandom stories from back in the day, the panel was great. When they were talking about their approach to fanfic and its relationship to canon, TPTB, profic, and tie-ins, they were so far on the other side of a cultural and to some degree generational divide from me that it wasn't even worth the time and effort to argue with them.
They believed that the reason they could write Trekfic was because Paramount let them/turned a blind eye, and they believed that when Paramount started recruiting fic writers to write tie-in novels, that amounted to Paramount finally paying attention to the fandom. I don't think they could have possibly understood the relationship I have with TPTB in my fandoms, that I don't care whether or not they want me to be writing the fic, that I often write fic that would be read as deliberately confrontational toward TPTB, except that I don't give a shit whether they read it because I'm writing in conversation with other fans, not in conversation with the creators. They can't comprehend how I approach contemporary copyright law as a thing to ignore when one is not politically inspired and to campaign against when one is.
So on the one hand I was profoundly relieved that it wasn't a wankfest about how fanfiction sucks compared to profic, but the cultural gap was significant enough that there was not much room for my fanfictional experience in the room.
The most fascinating bit of the conversation for me was when they all discussed the moment when they had moved from writing fanfiction that adhered as closely to canon as possible- deleted scenes, episode tags, casefic- to writing something that deviated. These were interesting stories- how one of them had created a fanzine represented as if it were an in-universe magazine, how one of them had introduced an OFC whose dialogue and approach to the world didn't match classic Trek dialogue- but what struck me was that that's how I was writing fanfic from my very first story. I never had that moment because I never had a phase of only writing episode tags and casefic and deleted scenes. Later in the con I was talking toteal_dear about how the transformative/affirmative fandom breakdown is interesting and somewhat descriptively powerful, but not always clean- the panelists seemed to me to be talking about making a transition between a sort of affirmational fanfiction and transformational fanfiction, as the hypothetical stepping stone toward origfic.
In any case, there were lots of other neat things, and I had a great time. Yay Philcon.
Logistics worked out this year much better than in past years. Room booked well in advance, low floor requested on account of stairs on Shabbat, and for the first time, request actually accommodated! That was a huge difference in being able to head back to the room on breaks to eat or just chill out. Also, requested a fridge, and acquired food that requires a fridge and that also made a difference in logistical success. Ate much better this year than at past cons. Oh man, the fiasco at Worldcon where they didn't have enough refrigerators and I used the tiny icebox to hold a turkey sandwich that ended up waterlogged despite being sealed in various plastic bags. :( I shared a room with my brother, plus
freeradical42, teal_dear, and Jon who doesn't have an LJ/DW. It was great to hang out with all of them. In general, the panels were not too great. One of the best panels I will not talk about because Yuletide spoilers, but the best panel of all was the First Annual Philcon Imaginary Word Spelling Bee, which was amazing. Contestants were quizzed on words from Nyarlathotep to Mxyzptlk, and I just barely missed out on winning the bee. I was a little annoyed that I had to miss the SF trivia contest for it, but it was so ridiculous and fun and I'm hoping it will continue to be a part of the con.
There was also a well done panel on Dangerous Visions, which took a broad and skeptical look at the place of the collection in SF history and ultimately I think did a very fair job of apportioning credit to Harlan where it was due without buying into the hype machine surrounding the anthology. Dangerous Visions is an amazing collection of stories, everyone agreed, and it did some things to give legitimacy to the genre as a source of thoughtful literary ideas, but it was also of a time and place where that was happening elsewhere. One panelist emphasized the role it had in bringing new female voices to peoples' attention, and another highlighted the way it helped bring sex and liberal politics into SF. But some people in the audience wondered if by partially legitimizing SF, Dangerous Visions had in some sense prolonged the ghetto and kept it from folding into the literary mainstream earlier, and this led to a nicely broad conversation about how these 'revolutionary anthologies' - not just Dangerous Visions, but also Mirrorshades and Dark Matter and others- changed the conversation around genre fic in significant ways without really fundamentally changing the nature of 'genre fiction'.
Hmm... what else was cool? Went to two performances involving the musical guest of honor, Heather Dale, which were both great. The former was the opening ceremony concert, a nice high energy filk set that highlighted Dale's beautiful vocals- the latter was the first solo show of her guitarist Ben Deschamps, which was a really fun set of filky instrumental folk, highlighted by instrumentals about zombies and dinosaurs and a poem setting of an SJ Tucker poem, recited by Tucker. I also went to a few other filk concerts that I enjoyed- the Denebian Slime Devils, Marc Grossman, and Sarah Pinsker. And there was a Sunday morning filk panel on ridiculous filk that saw a filk of Meercat Manor to the tune of Mozart's "La Ci Darem" and the most aggressive, hardcore filk I've ever heard about a dishwasher.
Saturday evening I signed up for a Ravaged Earth game- a high energy 1930s pulp rpg setting for Savage Worlds.
teal_dear played a sentient robot butler, I played Captain Lightning, a superhero, and the other two players played a martial arts master and a mad scientist as we scampered around the naked city on a series of wild adventures. The setting was great fun and well matched to the system, and we all had a blast. The high water mark for me was flying down onto the hood of the cultists' automobile, punching through the windshield, and grabbing the driver by the throat. And then striking a heroic pose, to demonstrate to the American Public of This Fine Land that standing up for What Is Right is always worth it. In the game room I also played SET with an eight year old and tried out the new Guilds expansion for Dominion. I lost at Dominion, of course. I always lose at Dominion. I absolutely do not have the head for that game.And then I suppose I should share what happened at the fanfic panel. If you were told that it wouldn't be a panel of profic writers trashing fanfic, it was exactly what you would expect the Philcon fanfic panel to be. It was a bunch of writers who had mostly gotten their start in 1970s K/S and had mostly transitioned to being profic writers. When they were sharing fandom stories from back in the day, the panel was great. When they were talking about their approach to fanfic and its relationship to canon, TPTB, profic, and tie-ins, they were so far on the other side of a cultural and to some degree generational divide from me that it wasn't even worth the time and effort to argue with them.
They believed that the reason they could write Trekfic was because Paramount let them/turned a blind eye, and they believed that when Paramount started recruiting fic writers to write tie-in novels, that amounted to Paramount finally paying attention to the fandom. I don't think they could have possibly understood the relationship I have with TPTB in my fandoms, that I don't care whether or not they want me to be writing the fic, that I often write fic that would be read as deliberately confrontational toward TPTB, except that I don't give a shit whether they read it because I'm writing in conversation with other fans, not in conversation with the creators. They can't comprehend how I approach contemporary copyright law as a thing to ignore when one is not politically inspired and to campaign against when one is.
So on the one hand I was profoundly relieved that it wasn't a wankfest about how fanfiction sucks compared to profic, but the cultural gap was significant enough that there was not much room for my fanfictional experience in the room.
The most fascinating bit of the conversation for me was when they all discussed the moment when they had moved from writing fanfiction that adhered as closely to canon as possible- deleted scenes, episode tags, casefic- to writing something that deviated. These were interesting stories- how one of them had created a fanzine represented as if it were an in-universe magazine, how one of them had introduced an OFC whose dialogue and approach to the world didn't match classic Trek dialogue- but what struck me was that that's how I was writing fanfic from my very first story. I never had that moment because I never had a phase of only writing episode tags and casefic and deleted scenes. Later in the con I was talking to
teal_dear about how the transformative/affirmative fandom breakdown is interesting and somewhat descriptively powerful, but not always clean- the panelists seemed to me to be talking about making a transition between a sort of affirmational fanfiction and transformational fanfiction, as the hypothetical stepping stone toward origfic.In any case, there were lots of other neat things, and I had a great time. Yay Philcon.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-11 10:32 pm (UTC)Interesting. I've only dabbled in writing my own fanfic a bit so far, but the little I've done mostly follows this pattern: I start with character studies, then I do stories which are entirely consistent with the existing canon but have some minor addition or tweak, and then I branch out towards more original stuff.
They can't comprehend how I approach contemporary copyright law as a thing to ignore when one is not politically inspired and to campaign against when one is.
I got in a minor kerfluffle a month or so ago on Tumblr re: copyright. A bunch of Tumblr/DeviantArt artists were complaining about people resharing their fanart without crediting them. While I see their point, I pointed out that this it is somewhat hypocritical for them to be using other people's work without permission, and then to be upset when others used their work without permission. I do definitely see the difference between (1) creating fanart, (2) resharing a work without giving credit, and (3) deliberately claiming that someone else's work is your own. However, I see these as being different in degree, not kind. My argument was not meant to be one of whether one type of "stealing" is moral or not, nor about the artistic value of fanart, but instead about the potential hypocrisy inherent in condemning one and not the other. I was also making the point that if fanart creators want to revile people for doing #s 2 and 3, that they should not be surprised when the original work's creators revile fanart creators for doing #1. The kerfluffle came about b/c the people on Tumblr who replied were thinking that I was condemning fanart for not being art or for not being hard to do, and I think they were just having difficulty distinguishing between the many different aspects of the issue, because I never touched on those at all and in fact completely agreed with their stance on those aspects.
I also get irritated when people say "no copyright infringement intended" on their fan works. Copyright infringement doesn't care about intent, much like killing people doesn't care about intent - whether it's intentional or not, the person's still dead. When I create fanfic, I'm perfectly aware that the original creators could take me to court for violating copyright law (whether they'd win or not is a different matter, but the burden of proof is on me and I know it), and my hope lies in the sheer volume of such works.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-12 04:45 pm (UTC)But the way most fandom works today, in a curious gray area between genuine legal fair use carveouts and an utter disregard for copyright law in all respects, is approximately where I think it should be as a community.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-12 05:27 pm (UTC)I've been thinking a bit about my attitude towards derivative works in fandom vs. in academia. Related to the "educational fair use" clause, it's perfectly acceptable in academia (from freshmen writing term papers to professors doing research) to use other people's previous works (no explicit permission required), so long as you properly cite the source and add something substantive to it. I think as regards the "morality" of fan works, I think I have a very similar attitude: people should say where they're getting something from, and they should create their own works and not just copy/steal someone else's work.