The journal Internet Histories has published a paper called “Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime. Given that a number of people here were involved in that scene back in the day, I thought it might be of interest.

Quote:Abstract

This paper examines women-exclusionary discourses on the popular anime Usenet newsgroup, rec.arts.anime. By going back to pre-2000 online anime histories, this paper proposes to understand how women-exclusionary discursive practices on rec.arts.anime have contributed to shaping contemporary toxic technocultures’ discursive identities, as it is admitted that forum 4chan originated from online anime fandom. By using a data set of 252 messages related to gender issues posted from 1992 to 1996, I identify 7 discursive practices that I am theorizing here under the name of negative networking: 1. Blaming female anime fans for their lack of visibility; 2. Doubting the authentic interest of women in anime; 3. Mystifying the female anime fan; 4. Harassing female anime fans; 5. Criticizing the association of feminism with anime, both as interpretive practices and as scholarship; 6. Belittling female anime fans’ concerns; and 7. Denying or ignoring the challenges faced by female anime fans. I argue that the impact of these discourses must be understood as determinant in the establishment of the online anime hegemonic fan identity and its prediscourses, especially as they relate to the long-lasting marginalization of women and gender diverse anime fans.

Part I is here.

A new thread for the next six months of the war planned to last six days.

The Government of Canada uses an Order In Council to ban the import of handguns.

Before the relevant legislation goes through the House and Senate.

I foresee a lot of "government overreach" complaints, even from people who think a handgun ban is a good idea.

EDIT: The closest equivalent in the USA to an Order In Council is an Executive Order, but an OIC requires Cabinet approval and can be written by any of a large number of Cabinet ministers who hold seats in the House.

Folks are waiting patiently for us to get enough story retconned that we can actually post it here, and we thank you for your patience.

But we don't take it for granted. We know you need something to keep you interested in our little project.

While you're waiting for us to finish writing at least the introduction story, here's a crowdsource project we can all take part in: Ruiko Saten's Playlist.

Canonically, Ruiko is always looking for something new to download to her phone, and always willing to share it with her friends. She has particular tastes, as shown in the movie: Saten-san likes upbeat music (she isn't an emo teen) with a positive message. But she doesn't appear to go after the "oldies".

So, in the Metacontinuity, she'll be looking for positive music that was released in the early to mid-2010s - nothing newer than 2016 (her "now" when she started building the playlist).

Something like this, perchance:

[video=youtube] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6mBM2P6CMI[/video]

(Lyrics are available on the official music video's Youtube page. The official video is... not so good, which is why I embedded the concert video instead.)

What else has she found in the Metacontinuity?

Is it possible to put a proper dateline on everything, instead of having that godawful annoying "X hours ago" that shows up any time a post falls between 59m59s and 12h59s? It's one of those minor things that generates annoyance al out of proportion, at least for me... maybe some people like it?

If I'm outvoted, fair enough, and I wouldn't call it high priority anyway, but it always seems bassackwards and a bit condescending to have posts' age clumped up into X hours when older ones show a precise time, as if anyone who made it out of kindergarten shouldn't be able to compare two times if they really want to know how long ago something was posted rather than just "before or after my 'last visited' dateline."

fake edit: okay, probably second grade these days, with how the US education system is going. Still well below the usual user's education level in any forum I can think of, doubly so here with the general focus on literature, a relatively complex MMO, and politics.

One of the single most important characters in all of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been cast for Netflix's live-action adaptation:

The Cabbage Merchant will be played by James Sie, who voiced him in the original animated series.

You may all celebrate now.

It's called Forward and it's described as centrist. Let's hope it has better luck than past attempts at third parties have had.

Article here.

After ten months, sweat, tears, and more pain than I really want to dwell on, my quarter sleeve is finally finished and healed:



And, as a happy accident, the pigments used in the orange and pink are UV-active:




A big shout-out to my artist, Matt, who took a vague idea and turned it into something amazing.  Thanks, Matt!

Once upon a time in a subsection of the fan fiction community there was a distinction between a crossover fic and a fusion fic.

A crossover fic meant characters from one series got dropped into another. E.g. "Ranma goes to Juban and meets the Sailor Senshi."

A fusion fic implied rewriting of the two histories to justify that they were always the same setting. E.g. "Buffy Summers was never a Vampire Slayer. She is however a licensed Vampire Executioner in the State of California and is not happy that her colleague Anita Blake is intruding in her territory."

Now it has been many years since I bothered grumbling about fanfic being labeled as crossover fic when it was clearly fusion fic; but this morning I noticed that the Battletech / Girl Genius fic I was reading (Natasha Kerensky and the Adventure of the Purple Fang) was tagged as 'pastiche.'

From the context of that one fic, 'pastiche' might refer to something like fusion fic once did. 

From the context of skimming the first couple pages of AO3 results for that tag it is a mystery what 'pastiche' refers to.

Have other people encountered 'pastiche' in the fic they read?

If so, what meaning was applied to it?