A survey, and my 100 things
This is an interesting survey by the Organization for Transformative Works -- thanks to shyfoxling for alerting me to it via her post.
The Organization for Transformative Works, for those who don't know, is a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fan works and fan cultures. They're the outfit behind Archive Of Our Own (AO3) and also the scholarly academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures. TWC has included papers on fan aspects of everything from Wizard rock to World of Warcraft to Willa Cather. They've even done a piece on silent-era movie fandoms (which operated via magazines) back in the 1920s!
They are also, which I did not know until I took the survey, the brains behind FanLore, a wiki designed to document the phenomenon of fan/fandom (making it a sort of meta-fandom of its own, I suppose?), as well as several other projects.
So yeah, I took a survey and actually learned something. How cool is that??
On another note, a lot of people are taking on the 100 Things challenge to encourage themselves to write more, and more in-depth, posts. I'm all for it (I mean, if I wanted tiny little posts I'd go to Twitter, right?). For a long time I've cross-posted my book reviews from Goodreads to LJ, so choosing 100 books (while easy) would have felt like cheating since I already do that. There's music or movies or poems, all of which are great, but none of them spoke to me. Finally I decided on 100 Surprises: the people, places, events, stories, things, ideas, etc. that have surprised me over the years. I just hope I can come up with 100 of them...