Apparently the new delicious is not very useful in very many ways, and people are migrating. Many seem to be mentioning Pinboard and Diigo. I've never used Pinboard, but I have used Diigo intensively since 2007. It's a shiny service with a lot of very useful functionality, so much of it that I'm still not sure I can bear to leave it behind ( Read more... )

I recently bought the Kindle edition of this book. $89 for an e-book is beyond obscene, but I rather desperately needed it for research and there was still room in the budget. I considered getting it as a one-month rental for the equally obscene price of $40, but the rentals page explained that the number of highlights that can be made in a rental ( Read more... )

Welcome to part two of this ridiculously long-winded Comiket report. Now that we've dissected the catalog, let's have a look at the general atmosphere of the actual con.

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Note: Comiket is an absolutely huge event, and it's going to take a couple of long posts to describe everything that interested me about it. I'm writing these posts first and foremost from a fan studies perspective, as part of my research, but they may contain traces of squee.

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Hello, world. I've been in China for the past couple of weeks, bothering
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Went to see DH2 with
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Two articles recently accepted for publication/presentation: "Why we should talk about commodifying fan work" will appear in Transformative Works and Cultures in November, and "Open source production as a model for commodification of derivative works" will be presented at the Asian Workshop on Cultural Economics, which is organized by the the ( Read more... )

So, a Mr. Keith Mander bought up a Lord of the Rings fic archive with the express intention of making money out of it. Well. The relationship between Mander, LotR fic authors, and unfortunate legal reality as personified by the Tolkien estate is best summed up by this beautiful parable.
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This one has been linked all over the place already, but Time published an article on fan fiction called "The Boy Who Lived Forever". Most of it is truly very good, and a lot of that is undoubtedly due to the journalist (Lev Grossman) talking about the content with fic writers in an lj comm beforehand. I'm not always too fond of Time, but I'm very ( Read more... )

I just went offline for a good week to go to Tohoku, the north-eastern part of Japan, and help clean up debris that was left by the earthquake and tsunami in March. The Japanese NGO Peace Boat organizes longer stays and also short-term trips of only a few days for anyone who wants to go help, whether they speak Japanese or not, and I probably ( Read more... )