Slashpine

Woah, were you even alive in 1979? No matter, we can fan it like mad things. X-posted to academia_on_ij

CFP: 30th Anniversary of the SW/TX PCA/ACA: Southwest/Texas Popular & American Culture Associations

Deadline for submission: December 1, 2008 (Reduced Fee Deadline 11/15/08-12/1/08)

Online: http://SWTXPCA.ORG

Keynote Speaker: Former New Mexico Governor David F. Cargo (1967-1971) (founder of New Mexico film commission, and an actor)

30th Anniversary Meeting!
Southwest/Texas Popular and American Culture Associations
February 25–28, 2009
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico

This year the SW/TX PCA/ACA celebrates its 30th Birthday with our theme, “Reeling in the Years: 30 Years of Film, TV, and Popular Culture.” Papers are particularly sought on aspects of film, TV, and popular culture of the last 30 years with an emphasis on the popular culture of 1979.

The SW/TX PCA/ ACA also invites papers for one of its 70+ Area offerings in American Studies, Literature, Film, Television, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ethnic and Gender Studies, Ecocriticism, Southwest Culture, Western Studies, Writing Pedagogy, Creative Writing, and many more!

( Read more... )

The SWPCA -- Southwest/Texas area annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) -- is the most fun conference I go to (outside of fandom of course). There are all ages, all backgrounds, from high school to retired folks, and it's *friendly* ...this is distinctly different from many academic conferences! There are panels on *everything* from detective novels to Route 66 to anime to YA fiction to folk medicine, food, film, politics and religion... you name it. Panels on fandom? Oh my, yes. There is the largest annual Grateful Dead discussion in the world. As you can imagine, a Hyatt Regency with Deadheads is not a stuffy place.

Plus, it's in Albuquerque, New Mexico, right next to the historic Route 66 with all its glitz, kitsch, restaurants, classic old hotels, museums, hispanic and indian and cowboy culture... and in February, glorious blue skies!

I'll post some of the Calls for Papers here and in the new academia_on_ij.

CFP-SWPCA-Graphic Novels, Comics and Popular Culture-Graphic Novel Roundtable-CALL for participants.

( Read more... )

It's mostly good. The rest is hopeful. Change is necessary, and Yes, we can!

( I'm so happy )
( But I'm not happy: )

I'm listening to John McCain give a truly noble concession speech.

Wishing I were back in Chicago where everyone was buzzed the other day about tonight's victory celebration.

Listening to first-time freshmen voters out in the street in the rain shouting and screaming in delight.

Four years ago on election night, I was teaching a class from 6 to 9 pm. Environmental philosophy, with 50 students all keenly interested in issues of social justice and worried about global threats to environment and our future. Not just liberal or leftists; we have lots of conservatives here and as I recall, there were quite a few Nader supporters too. But given that we're in the West, the evening class time meant that we were listening to election results come in and it did look like insanity had swept the country. I had turned on the big screen projector in the large lecture hall across from our usual room and everyone gradually trickled in there. Quieter, and quieter. A few dabbing their eyes.

These were many first-time voters, and they were pretty depressed. I had to turn practically run a grief counseling session. As a "teachable moment," we asked: should we quit caring? quit trying? What can we do for the next four years? Can we work on problems here locally, crossing our fingers and hoping that the national and international scene don't collapse completely into disaster while we work to get better candidates?

It was a happy moment an hour ago when I got a call from one of my best students from that class, 4 years back. He became a friend and was active in student government and sustainability initiatives before he graduated. Now in California, working on conservation issues and so very happy to see that in just 4 years Washington can change. It took longer than that for my state, he said -- Ohio. And 200-plus years for African-Americans.

Let's hope it will only take months to get moving toward solutions to the crises now upon us.

But tonight - PARTY!

Ok, well, I get bored with being verbal-linguistic all the time. I have my musical skills, my spatial and logical sides, my other "multiple intelligences." Today, with one consciously selected answer to an obviously loaded question, my result ...

... for Howard Gardner's Eight Types of Intelligence Test...

Naturalistic

31% Logical, 25% Spatial, 51% Linguistic, 37% Intrapersonal, 8% Interpersonal, 22% Musical, 4% Bodily-Kinesthetic and 67% Naturalistic!

"This area has to do with nature, nurturing and relating information to one's natural surroundings. Those with it are said to have greater sensitivity to nature and their place within it, the ability to nurture and grow things, and greater ease in caring for, taming and interacting with animals. They may also be able to discern changes in weather or similar fluctuations in their natural surroundings. They are also good at recognizing and classifying different species.

'Naturalists' learn best when the subject involves collecting and analyzing, or is closely related to something prominent in nature; they also don't enjoy learning unfamiliar or seemingly useless subjects with little or no connections to nature. It is advised that naturalistic learners would learn more through being outside or in a kinesthetic way.

Careers which suit those with this intelligence include scientists, naturalists, conservationists, gardeners and farmers." (Wikipedia)

</div>

Take Howard Gardner's Eight Types of Intelligence Test at HelloQuizzy

Not a badly designed test, although I've done MI's on a full testing instrument as part of an education course. Actually, mine are all pretty obvious. The linguistic and others are comparable in strength. With some Asperger's tendency and lousy depth perception, I've never been strongly kinesthetic -- fine motor skills, yes, but playing-field brilliance, not one bit. OTOH, brute strength I've got. You want something dug or built, I'm on it. My interpersonal is pretty average. Eh, you iz what you iz.

Oh wait. This quiz left out Gardner's recently defined "Existential" Intelligence! That one is so cool. And a definite facet of people. I'm glad to have this -- where would life be without a sense of the joyous mystery of Being? *happy sigh*

So, they always say the party holding their convention gets a bounce. Only in this case....

September 4, 2008, 4:53 pm
Palin Good for the Democrats, Too
By Michael Luo

Turns out Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s speech did not just electrify the Republican faithful inside the Xcel Energy Center Wednesday night.

Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is reporting that it has taken in $8 million over the Internet since Mrs. Palin’s speech, in which she tore into Mr. Obama.

By Thursday afternoon, more than 130,000 donors had kicked in, and the Obama campaign is on pace to collect $10 million by the time Senator John McCain takes the stage tonight.
( Read more... )

This message brought to you by M for my Mom, who still Knows What's Right; C for community organizing, which is how problems get solved; and O for very organized Obama site, where it was easy for me to support my community of choice.

ETA: Another mom commenting on that blog post: "Not only is the Obama compaign taking in more money, it is now gaining alot of female volunteers as well. I was so offended by this woman that as a mother of a special needs child for 20 years, I went with a friend to Obama headquarters to volunteer our services. AND - WE WERE NOT ALONE. THEY HAVE HAD A STEADY STREAM ALL DAY!

ETA: Apparently I'm not the only ordinary human member of family & community to take umbrage at Palin's disparagement of community organizers:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/04/shorter-rnc-day-three-dea_n_123798.html

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/09/why-do-republic.html

Note what the Dallas Morning News says about 23-year-old Obama's community organizing skill and success. This was the faith-based community group job he took right after college. ( Read more... )

Not fandom, unless you count politics as the most rabid fanboy-run fandom ever. Which - yeah, pretty much!

And funny. And not long, so I won't cut...

The VP Choice that Lost the Presidency for McCain,
by Linda Bergthold
August 29, 2008

I think we will look back at today as the day when the Republicans most certainly lost the Presidency. In choosing Sarah Palin of Alaska for Vice President, the Republicans have made a cynical but clever choice. At least they think it is clever. She is a woman, young (44 years old), a Governor (only two years), a mother (five children), pro-life, and pro-gun. But what is she not? She is NOT pro-choice. She has NO national experience. She has never been under the intense scrutiny of a national campaign. She is under investigation for some incident in Alaska that is messy and personal. She has no international experience. Her experience governing is in a very small state, famous for its "Bridge to Nowhere" kind of political graft. Her Republican colleague in that state, Senator Ted Stevens has been indicted for corruption.

When Republicans and independents go into the voting booth, will they have the confidence to vote for a McCain-Palin ticket, knowing that John McCain has had several recurrences of his skin cancer, and will be the oldest President ever? Can they imagine Sarah Palin stepping into the Oval Office and dealing with all the problems we face right now? The Russians and the terrorists must be quaking in their boots.

It's a slap in the face of other Republican women like Kay Bailey Hutchison, bless her heart, who was forced to stumble through an interview on TV trying to make the case for Palin whom she has never met. There are certainly women in the Republican party who were "in line" for this before Palin. Did the Rovian type advisors to McCain just cynically think that throwing a young attractive inexperienced woman into the mix would satisfy women who long to see a woman president? Women, and Republican women, are not so stupid as to fall for that! It is reminiscent of the Republicans putting up Alan Keyes to run against Barack Obama for the Illinois Senate just because he was black. Voters saw through that pretty quickly.

It's also a slap in the face of Democratic women voters. They don't get Hillary but they get Sarah as the first potential woman President? In fact, I can just hear Biden saying, "Sarah Palin, you are NO Hillary Clinton!" I would imagine that the few remaining Clinton supporters who are wondering if they should support John McCain are even more leery now. There is absolutely no overlap between the positions Hillary Clinton has fought her entire life for and Sarah Palin. The two women are not remotely substitutable. They are as different as they can be.

~*~*~*~*~

Yeah, I can't wait for her to debate Joe Biden! But meanwhile, I'll just hope this blogger is right. Women didn't support Hillary "just because she's a woman," and I don't think they'll go for this creationist, pro-natalist, anti-science, anti-environmentalist, pro-ANWR drilling, never-met-an-animal-I-didn't-love-killing, inexperienced woman just because... she's a woman. Remember Dan Quayle?

Just looking at my icon and thinking... is there any political RPF out there, or is the truth so much stranger than fiction, no one bothers?

ETA: Re political RPF: yes, the Republican conservative fanboys are already writing it. Examples:

I picked her because I love her and I want to have a moose with her. Signed, 'John McCain'

Palin is the most bizarre choice for VP I could imagine for McCain. He has no respect for women. Maybe he just wants to get in her pants. No novelist could have written a better twist to the plot.

She seems like a perfectly lovely woman. As for her "lack of experience," look at what a great job Laura Roslin has done with the Colonial Fleet, and she was only Secretary of Education when the Cylons attacked!

READ READ READ! LOVE LOVE LOVE! REVIEW REVIEW REVIEW! REC REC REC! THANK YOU THANK YOU AUTHORS, ARTISTS & MODS!

2008 SNARRY GAMES - CAN YOU HANDLE THE HEAT?

Well, that certainly explains why lately, my world seems more like Purgatory.

A nicely written assessment of the late Arthur C. Clarke's vision affirms why I lost interest in his work -- in all "hard" SF -- in my teens. I couldn't name the colonialist and effectively misogynist bias, but I found it alien ... and alienating. I found his work elegantly serene, but missing something.

That something missing turned out to be social reality. Odd that Clarke, like other classic "hard science" SF writers, could be so profoundly knowledgeable in science, so "objective" in their concepts, and yet remain oblivious to their own biases and their deeply entrenched authoritarianism. No wonder I'm in fandom instead. I'm amazed that I stuck it out with science and SF as long as I did!

Still, it's good to have read his work. Farewell, A. C. Clarke. May your spirit sail the galaxies with your Starchild.

Arthur C Clarke's vision of benevolent empire

( Mark Bould looks at the politics of the 'endlessly reasonable' science fiction writer who died last week )

Woot! I am enjoying beautiful sunny skies and crisp air in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the conference of the SW/TX Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. Came early to go up past Santa Fe and visit Chimayo, site of a sanctuary where the dirt in the floor in which the miraculous cross was found in about 1812 is similarly sacred, or at least blessed. Pigrims take the soil and eat it to be healed. It's part of my research on cultural views of soil and dirt. Plus, who knows - it may work!

My mom came down to join me -- her longest trip ever since a hip replacement and later, a broken knee -- and she's doing great! Jabbering to me yesterday at lunch about the neat papers she heard ("Oedipal themes in Margaret Wise Brown's Bunny serie, FTW!). Whilst I fretted over my powerpoint for my afternoon presentation.

Which went marvelously well. No technology issues (I'd checked *that* for half an hour earlier in the day). A small but receptive audience ("I never thought about using music this way!"). My mother even liked it. My mother even said it was good! (And as both my mother, and a teacher, she is not a gentle critic *g*).

So now, this morning, I am on vacation-and-learning. First up: the Gendered Fantasies session at 8 a.m., where I look forward to hearing Debbie Killingsworth from my alma mater, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder, speak on:

"Battling binaries in Harry Potter: Deconstructing Patriarchy in The Deathly Hallows."

WOOT!

ms_treesap linked me to friend_me and their Snarry friending meme!

Thanks, tree!

Here's mine, FWIW:

Name: Pine
Age: Middle ;-)
Active Fandoms: HP, MfU; occasional Holmes, Hornblower, Heyer, ST. (No TV, so I am totally DOH at recent TV fandoms.)
Likes: Great writing, dialogue. H/C, first-time, post-DH, canon-compliant (Portrait!Snape ftw), semi-compliant, & AU. Apothecary!Snape, bottomsnape, romance, mpreg, stories with lots of other characters too, both IC and OOC *looks at Ginny and Dumbledore* Snarry meta and essays EWE *cough*. Art for stories ftw; comics/graphic stories.
Greatest guilty pleasure: de-aged/ kidfic Snape.
Newest major kink: Older Snape & Harry, including divorced/widowed!Harry, especially with post-Ep Potter kids :-)
Dislikes: really dark, Evil!Harry and evil!Snape, unwarned major character deaths, srsly OOC Dom!Snape or bdsm.Bad writing/no betaing. TMD (too many drabbles. Or Draco lol). Epic WIPs.
Other Random Info: I am almost finished knitting my very first ever pair of SOCKS! (And: I don't floss *gasp*)

How did you first get into Harry/Snape: Josan! josan_pq wrote one teeny little gorgeous crossover Krycek/Snape and that dragged me out of X-files into major Snarry & HP lurve forevah!
Do you write fanfic/create fanart or vids, etc: Hardly ever on fanfic, never on vids or art. (I'm pants at art ;-) I do meta, reviews ("appreciative-crit"), betaing, and sporks deadlyhollow *eg*.
Did you trust Snape all along: Absolutely. Even if DH got it wrong ;-)

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Ok, maybe it's the second day of weather shut-down that's making me feel penned in and ornery. And I don't have time lately both to read fan fic *and* read about and talk about fandom, so I'm gonna be a little blurty here. I'm duplicating this to my LJ entry, for those who can't find the "Exit" door, because IJ is, liek, SO FAR AWAY. Hopefully I'll get some comments over there given that I'm poking fun at them. I'll just be snickering a little, given the subject.

( LJ lapdogging, and OTW irony. )

This story will delight those HP fans who appreciate Mike Leigh movies (like Secrets and Lies), who love the blunt-spoken, working-class, bitter-yet-tender characters portrayed by such actors as Brenda Blethyn or Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty), who are curious about the complex family and class relations that underlie Severus Snape's life.

But also, if you simply enjoy the mystery of Snape's muggle-marrying mother, Eileen Prince Snape, or speculate on the prickly Potions Master's relationship with her, you'll love this brave depiction by iulia_linnea:

A Well-Managed End.
Author: iulia_linnea
Rating: G Characters: Eileen Snape, Severus Snape, OFCs, others. Summary: Eileen does what a mam should for her boy, and finds help in securing Severus' future from an unexpected quarter.

Eileen had always been a deft hand at casting glamours; it was how she'd snared Toby—not that she'd kept up her "looks" once the man had proved himself a right bastard, of course. Where was the sense in wasting magic, after all? In any case, when her "dead" son showed up at her door, all mysterious bloody wound and silently wounded soul, she'd made him a new face and started the great gash in his neck to healing. She'd never been good at healing, but Severus, who could have easily brewed a remedy for his torn throat, couldn't be bothered, it seemed—and a mam didn't like to see her boy in pain.

This short fic is pure love. His "mam" Eileen's POV reveals the gritty mix of ruthless realism and wistfulness that complicate her working-class mixed-blood neighborhood, where Snape was raised, and Eileen currently scrapes by:

Boy's not getting any younger. Needs a wife. 'Course, I ain't so strong of magic to keep him englamoured that long, so I'll need to be finding him a girl as can appreciate his finer qualities—once I discover what they are.

Eileen Prince Snape loved her son, but she was, by virtue of disappointment, pragmatic to a fault.

How could you deal with Severus and *not* be brutally pragmatic about the sulky git and his chances for happiness? Severus's throat heals but he won't talk except to sullenly argue over trivia like tea. He refuses sugar; she puts it in anyway. Eileen's determined to fix his life, but has to mull it over while running her own small potions business. Who better to consult than another middle-aged mother? After all, it's the women who manage:

She was almost to the gate when Mary waylaid her, a crying brat against her hip. "A word?"

"That's two," Eileen replied, turning to go.

"Eileen! I know your Severus isn't courting."

"Belt up, you old cow! You promised not to say—"

"No one's about, and it's past time you explained yourself. You don't truly think you can keep him here, do you? I'm not the only one who'll remember that nieces is all your sister ever gave you. And the boy looks miserable, that's a fact."

Scowling, Eileen told Mary what she knew. It wasn't much, and it was all of it from the Prophet, which, of course, Mary knew about, even though her Rose didn't have much truck with the wizarding world. Mary'd been the only person Eileen had told about her secret when her Hogwarts letter had come. Not that it had mattered—the letter, not Mary's knowing; Mary was trustworthy, and she'd been right kind when Eileen hadn't been allowed to go away to school.

"It don't make much sense, him being a hero and not wanting any reward. Why not teach at that school anymore? Doesn't like it, does he?"

"Never did."

"No friends?" asked Mary, shushing her grandson.

"None as I can tell."

"You'd think he'd miss working his magic."

"The boy's not one to talk about himself, Mary."

Mary grunted, her brow furrowing. "Needs a wife to manage him, seeing as he can't manage himself."

"Agreed, but it ain't so simple."

"You need to tell the right people where he is, Eileen.

Who to tell? And can it be that simple? Ha, of course not. But is it ever fun! The characters in this fic are pure joy, the dialogue (as you see) has the compelling crispness that iulia_linnea is known for; the story (like Severus's own life) is deceptively layered. And the end -- *smiles* -- well, you just *have* to read this, ok? A Well-Managed End, at the e_prince_snape comm.

BTW, this is a comm that needs more visits and more fic! Go, support: e_prince_snape -- and maybe they'll start it on IJ :-)

From the bottom of a NYT blog on Global Warming and conservatives:

BACK TO THE FUTURE
It’s easy to make fun of decades-old films that tried to predict the future: the Internet is rife with clips depicting jet packs, hovercraft, and anthropomorphic robot butlers. This week, though, a short, uncannily accurate clip from “1999 A.D.,” a film made in 1967 by Philco-Ford, got lots of attention online when it was posted to the Ultimate News Flash blog (ultimatenewsflash.blogspot.com).

The film’s depictions of electronic commerce and e-mail are about as spot-on as they could be, though the filmmakers failed to forecast changes in attitudes toward sex roles. “What the wife selects on her console will be paid for by the husband on his counterpart console,” the narrator declares. She is in the kitchen, buying clothes; he is in the den, paying bills.

Gee, ya think that film was made - written - edited - directed - by MEN? It needs to be cross-referenced as BACK TO THE PAST - the Stone-Age, Imaginary, Let's-Never-Grow-Up past, still truculently occupied by many conservatives, both women and men.

It's always nice to collect another concrete example reminding us that no matter how brilliant science -- and science fiction -- can be about technology, they can simultaneously remain completely blind to their gender, race, class, environmental and other prejudices. (Never forget how Nobelist James Watson's patronizing sex-obsessed bigotry toward women continued into at least the 1990's, just as his continued racial prejudice got him in trouble this year.)

In fact, it may be the gender rigidity of 1950's-1960's scientists that made them so active in exploring technological AU's. After all, they couldn't see any alternatives to the constricted, even fearful, social world they lived in. They were all too aware that anyone crossing the lines from safe government- and corporate-controlled science into social awareness, or OMG social comment, would quickly lose their status and funding in the McCarthyized worlds of science and academe. A technologically revved-up future was the only apparent escape. It would still be the same drudgery, alas, but oooh shinier, with new toys for these many boys. For the Cold War era's science fans, Star Trek *was* a radical future - it continued all the dominant white patriarchal prejudice with its women yeomen in bouffy hair and short skirts, its token Russian, Asian and black junior officers, but at least the men could escape into wider freedoms. Into a world "where no MAN had gone before." Haha, they couldn't very long prevent the rest of humanity from following after, but despite the politically more sensitive rewording of the ST:TNG opening lines, there's still so far to go. *grumble*

Ah well, that's why I happily gave up Heinlein, Clarke & Asimov for LeGuin and other early feminist SF writers. What a relief that they are too many to list now! Even better really, they may be too many for any one person to ever read. And if I don't get back to work I won't be able to read any over the break and my lovely little stash of Novik etc. is sweetly calling to me from the corner behind the couch. Sigh. So many books, so little time!

Who owns your online journal or social networking site pages? In today's commodified world, the issue isn't your freedom or privacy - it's who gets to earn revenue from the fact that you exist.

About a week ago, Facebook beat a hasty retreat -- LJ style -- from a widely denounced scheme to make more money off its members by advertising their purchasing and entertainment habits to all and sundry.

Yeah, like we WANT third parties gossiping to our friends about what we did last night? Wasn't the point of social networking sites (SNS's) to have our own journals, where we can spill all the dirt, the details, the tl;dr, to our heart's content? We can tell people ourselves -- if we want them to know.

A Beacon of Stupidity

But Facebook, jumping ahead of LJ in the stupidity sweepstakes, decided to spill its users' secrets for them. That was the Beacon debacle. To understand how ill-conceived it was, imagine viewing your friends page and having it list your BFF's purchases, including that particular item you've been wishing for. Spoil Christmas much? Now imagine seeing a list of your child's, spouse's, or employee's purchases -- from music downloads to movie and airplane tickets. You can tell not only what they bought, but where they were, when they were there, who they were with, etc. It's like having Fandom Wank turn into the FBI, only instead of keeping a secret dossier on you somewhere like the FBI, or mocking you over at FW, they put it right in your own journal so nobody in your flist will miss it.

Nice invasion of privacy, no? About 50,000 Facebook users plus MoveOn.org and other consumer right groups complained. Even the advertisers who were paying for the info agreed that Facebook got "way out over its skis" by telling users Facebook is "a safe place for you to share your innermost secrets" - then selling those secrets.

(And yeah, this shows clearly what kind of info SUP -- or the privacy-invading Homeland Security agency -- can already collect on you. How ironic that users who can't keep corporations or government from tracking the every detail of their lives are up in arms about keeping that info away from their friends!)

Tit for Tat, or, Why Not be Your Own Pimp, When They've Already Made you Their Whore?

Now the latest: Facebook users and an outside company have cooked up a way for users to garner part of the revenue from ads placed on their pages, and cut Facebook out of the deal. It's the equivalent of being forced into prostitution, but at least being able to pick your pimp, and get a kickback from him on the profit he makes off your debasement. The only problem is, it's the corporate "Mob" that invited you to have an account, then turned it into a billboard for their profits - and you and your new pimp are now pocketing those profits yourselves.

Let's see how the social networking sites like that one. Probably they'll simply rewrite code to prevent it. After all, we-the-people, the users, exist solely as eyeballs for ads to earn revenue for the SNS corporation who wrote the code. But wait -- isn't it the user's content? the user's page?

I'll love seeing if this rolls over to LJ, etc.

December 7, 2007, 7:33 pm

Facebook Members Sell Their Own Ads

By Louise Story
The New York Times "Bits" blog
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/facebook-members-sell-their-own-ads/index.html

More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages–despite the social networking site’s rule against such ads.

They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo, an advertising network that sells ads onto people’s blogs and social networking profile pages.

Visitors to Weblo’s site will see that they can “earn money from your popularity online.” Weblo estimates people’s advertising value based on variables like how many friends they have in their social networks, and, thus, how many people will likely see ads on their pages.

Facebook does not allow users to sell ads on their profile pages. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, told me on Nov. 6 that is because Facebook does not want people’s profile pages to become cluttered.

“We don’t want a free-for-all,” he said.

But Weblo’s chief executive Rocky Mirza says that people should be able to sell space on their pages on Facebook (and a variety of other sites like MySpace and YouTube) because they are the content creators on those sites. Facebook would have no content if not for its users, he said, which makes it different from media organizations, for example, that have content because they pay reporters.

Weblo started the service in October. In the past month the number of people using it on Facebook has grown from 200 to 1500.

“Obviously Facebook is providing the infrastructure, so they can place ads on the left side,” Mr. Mirza said. “But users should be getting paid for the time they spend on the Internet and the friends they draw to their pages.”

Facebook does allow people and companies that design widgets for use on the site to sell ads in the widget interface page, called the “canvas page.” But those widget companies cannot sell ads on the profile pages, either.

Weblo shares ad revenues with the people who let it place ads on their pages. It will be interesting to see how long Facebook allows them to carry on. Facebook clearly would not want to alienate even more users now, after its Beacon debacle over the past month.

Weblo gets to the heart of a question of ownership that will will generate more debate as more people spend more of their time looking at content created by other ordinary people. When users post reviews of restaurants on a media site, for example, should they get to share in the ad revenues generated?

Facebook has also yet to respond to my inquiry about Weblo, but I will update you when they do.

People can also sign up to run weblo ads on their pages by using a Weblo widget on the site called Internet Worth.

go read comments, add yours

My foggy Friday morning was just brightened by another lovely Snupin Santa story:

A Game of You, for rufus.
Summary: Severus accepts a bet from Lucius to prove himself able to teach anyone anything. Including Remus Lupin.
Rated: Gingerbread & Cocoa (PG) Categories: Snupin Santa 2007 Genre: none Warnings: none
Word count: 6416

I adore it when Remus outsmarts, outwaits, outflanks and overcomes a Severus who sees no farther than the end of his own large conspiracy-sniffing nose. Remus's love is so simple and straightforward it need not even announce itself, so of course Severus completely overlooks it.

Also involved: a hilariously funny Lucius and Narcissa, with pastries, cosmetic potions, and dueling-by-tea. The plot's light humor endearingly exploits the foibles of these favorite characters to reveal a wise and winsome myth of love, charmingly appropriate for the season. Remus's love is a guileless craft that the consciously crafted guile of the Slytherins cannot even see, let alone outwit. The author not only leaves me laughing and smiling, but deeply admiring her own craft in choosing the story's style to match its deeper theme and truth. This is one of the Snupin genre traits I love: the reminder that humor combined with sincerity is the winningest strategy of all. Lucius, take note!

If "appropriation art" - transforming the work of others (even as little as by simply photographing someone else's photograph) is protected under fair use, what does it mean for the original artist when the copy sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Or when someone says to him, "Oh, that photo of yours is just like his!" - not realizing that he, that other guy, came later in the line of takes and re-takes.

As one artist says, “My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It’s an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn’t create his own work, and I don’t understand the frenzy around it.”

He added: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”

True 'nuf. But WHY?

If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?

December 6, 2007
The New York Times
By Randy Kennedy

Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?

Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum’s spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy’s hat and outstretched arm.

Mr. Krantz knew it quite well. He had shot it in the late 1990s on a ranch in the small town of Albany, Tex., for a Marlboro advertisement. “Like anyone who knows his work,” Mr. Krantz said of his picture in a telephone interview, “it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror.” He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.”

When Mr. Prince started reshooting ads, first prosaic ones of fountain pens and furniture sets and then more traditionally striking ones like those for Marlboro, he said he was trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images. He once compared the effect to the funny way that “certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves.”

But he was not circumspect about what it meant or how it would be viewed. In a 1992 discussion at the Whitney Museum of American Art he said of rustling the Marlboro aesthetic: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”

People might not have been looking at the time, when his art was not highly sought. But as his reputation and prices for his work rose steeply — one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million — they began to look, and Mr. Prince has spoken of receiving threats, some legal and some more physical in nature, from his unsuspecting lenders. He is said to have made a small payment in an out-of-court settlement with one photographer, Garry Gross, who took the original shot for one of Mr. Prince’s most notorious early borrowings, an image of a young unclothed Brooke Shields.

(Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, saying in an e-mail message only, “I never associated advertisements with having an author.”)

Mr. Krantz, who has shot ads for the United States Marine Corps and a long list of Fortune 500 companies including McDonald’s, Boeing and Federal Express, said he had no intention of seeking money from or suing Mr. Prince, whose borrowings seem to be protected by fair use exceptions to copyright law.

But with the exhibition now up at the Guggenheim — and the posters using his image on sale for $9.95 — he said he simply wanted viewers to know that “there are actually people behind these images, and I’m one of them.”

“I’m not a mean person, and I’m not a vindictive person,” he said. “I just want some recognition, and I want some understanding.”

Mr. Krantz, whose clients generally own the copyrights to his photos for them, said he had been aware for several years that his work had been lifted by Mr. Prince, along with that of several other photographers who have shot Marlboro ads. But he said he did not think much about it, and said he had never talked with other Marlboro photographers about the issue.

“If imitation is a form of flattery, then I will accept the compliment,” he said.

But on one occasion a woman active in the art world visited his studio in Chicago, and, seeing a print of one of his pictures, Mr. Krantz recalled, “she said, ‘Oh, Richard Prince has a photograph just like that!’” And in 2003 Mr. Prince’s version of an image that Mr. Krantz shot for Marlboro — showing a mounted cowboy approaching a calf stranded in the snow — sold for $332,300 at Christie’s. Although the shot was blown up to heroic proportions, “there’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” he said. And so Mr. Krantz, whose Marlboro ads now appear mostly in Europe and Asia, began to grow angry.

He said that while he is primarily an advertising photographer, when he was growing up in Omaha, he did attend workshops with Ansel Adams. He studied graphic design and got into commercial photography, starting out in Omaha taking shots of toasters and pens and heating pads because that was where the work was. But he has long exhibited his own art photographs, recent examples of which show stark images of an empty prison as if seen through defaced or broken glass.

Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be. “People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images,” he said.

He has considered trying to correspond with Mr. Prince to complain more directly but said he felt it would probably do no good.

“At this point it’s been done, and it’s out there,” he said. “My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It’s an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn’t create his own work, and I don’t understand the frenzy around it.”

He added: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”

View the multimedia examples at The New York Times. What do you think? Where would OTW stand on this issue?

Seems like a lot of English villages need an Unplottable cast on them. Good job for a post-war wizard out of work? Or might that not lead to even more complications than having a large tractor-trailer wedged in your parlor...

WEDMORE, England, Nov. 28 — This little village would seem to be an obviously poor place through which to drive your average large truck. It is in an obscure, rural location. Its streets were built in the days of horses and carts. There is no room to pass and no room to maneuver.

But trucks and tractor-trailers come here all the time, as they do in similarly inappropriate spots across Britain, directed by G.P.S. navigation devices that fail to appreciate that the shortest route is not always the best route.

“They have no idea where they are,” said Wayne Hahn, a local store owner who watches a daily parade of vehicles come to grief — hitting fences, shearing mirrors from cars and becoming stuck at the bottom of Wedmore’s lone hill. Once, he saw an enormous tractor-trailer speeding by, unaware that in its wake it was dragging a passenger car, complete with distraught passenger.

With villagers at wits’ end, John Sanderson, chairman of the parish council, has proposed a seemingly simple remedy: removing the route through Wedmore from the G.P.S. navigation systems used by large vehicles.

“We’d like them to have appropriate systems that would show some routes weren’t suitable for H.G.V.’s,” Mr. Sanderson said, using shorthand for heavy goods vehicles.

Mr. Sanderson said he would not go so far as to advocate eradicating Wedmore from the map. But communities in similar predicaments — and there are hundreds of them, given that Britain is replete with tiny rural villages similarly ill-suited for big trucks — say that such a solution sounds good to them.

“We’ve said, ‘Just take us off the map,’ actually,” said Geoff Coombs, chairman of the parish council in Barrow Gurney....

The New York Times: Turn Back. Exit Village. Truck Shortcut Hitting Barrier.

O Happy Winter! It's snowing like mad today. The power's been out three times, for up to half an hour. I can live without lights, but heat and my laptop I must have!

Another must-have: wonderful holiday-fest fics. Today's recs:

Remedy, a Snupin Santa fic
Summary: Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything. -Kurt Vonnegut
Rated: Holiday Spice (R)
Categories: Snupin Santa 2007
Genre: Drama/Angst
Warnings: canon character death (not them, off-screen), mention of violence
Word count: ~6300

This writer knows precisely how to infuse tension with humor. The story is taut, bittersweet, and realistic, richly detailed and extremely well plotted. It's a cold night in the post-Marauder era when Lupin and Snape encounter each other in a smoky pub. Each walks the knife-edge between despair and death, life and love.

I think the story is a brilliant microscosm of Snupin fandom itself, post-DH. As Lupin says, quoting Vonnegut: “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

Fanficcers prefer to write, also: go read, enjoy, and review.

Two short and scintillating gems by snegurochka_lee:

Title: A New Line of Work
Author: snegurochka_lee
Pairing: Snape/Lupin
Rating: PG
Word Count: 544
Summary: "Happiness is overrated. I am well-fed and watered, have security over my physical body and mental abilities, and the fish is fresh," said Snape. "I am content enough."

Title: Fulfilled
Author: snegurochka_lee
Pairing: Snape/Lupin
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 512
Summary: "I would like you to recount for me the number of times I have shagged you, and you have left the experience unfulfilled," Remus challenged.

Lastly, a big and impressive long work - another Snupin Santa gift - that left me reeling ... and re-reading:

Possession for athenakt
Rated: NC17
Categories: Snupin Santa 2007
Summary: ... It’s a fairly hearty helping of angst, but with side dishes of humor and smut for balance.
Warnings: hurt/comfort, implied rape, implied torture, character death (not main pairing), violence, bestiality, chan (16-18)
Note about warnings: For those readers uncomfortable with seeing “rape” and “torture” in the warnings, those incidents are presented almost entirely through implication or mention by secondary sources. They are elementary to the story, and I believe I’ve handled them in a non-gratuitous manner, but if you’re squicked by even the idea of such things happening to characters, you might want to give this a miss.
Word count: ~33,000

This will surely be a favorite. The writing is excellent, the plot gripping, and the characters wonderfully delineated. Remus is central, in all his complexity, and Severus is at his angstiest. Yet there's much love and humor here, too, deftly woven throughout the whole. Poppy, Minerva, Harry, Tonks, and other characters contribute brilliantly. What makes this fic especially compelling for me is how it frankly shows the stress and physical hardship resulting from Severus's multiple roles. Another stroke of writerly genius is a surreal dream scene that walks the edge of nightmare. It's not DH-compliant, needless to say. And note the length. *happy sigh*