I'm preparing to move back to Belgium in a couple of months, and one of the things that needs to be sorted out is what the best data plans for smartphones are over there. It's been two years and everything is different. To my great annoyance, Belgium still hasn't invented the unlimited data plan; the most I can get per month is 2 gig, which is just ( Read more... )

Addendum to that recent whine about how politicians have a responsibility to get educated about the internet: "mainstream" media need such education at least as badly. The internet has become crucial not just to many people's personal lives, but to the functioning of whole societies. There are very many people who don't have the time or the ( Read more... )

Apparently Summit Entertainment had a picture by artist Kelly Howlett yanked from Zazzle because they believed - wrongly - that she was selling Twilight fan art.

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About a week ago, The Mary Sue reported that some major tech news sites are apparently using the fact that Pinterest has a majority of female users as an excuse to write sexist copy:( Read more... )

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... )

For those of us who read Dutch, a new report on the state of the comics industry in Belgium includes an article by Haruyuki Nakano (author of Manga Sangyoron) on the spectacular rise and quite exciting possibilities of manga on cellphones in Japan and Asia. The article starts from page 49 of this rather large pdf version of the report. Published by ( Read more... )

Important notice! The main online home of my PhD research, this drupal site, is such fun to tinker with that it's become a a tremendously powerful procrastination-enabling device. I constantly find myself focusing more on the site itself than on creating actual content for it. So, I'm at least temporarily moving my center of operations to my ( Read more... )

Quick recap: Kristina Busse's keynote "Affect and the individual fan" was given at the Textual Echoes conference and can be viewed in its entirety online. ( Read more... )

This post is abominally late, yes, and I have multiple fine excuses, but let's skip that part. Three weeks ago the conference Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities was held at Umea University, Sweden, in the gorgeous HUMlab space. It was a very inspiring experience, and I've been trying to string together a million separate thoughts about it ( Read more... )

As I've been tinkering with the tools I want to use for my upcoming Ph.D research (mainly online tools like content management systems, blogs, bookmarking services etc), I've also been doing a lot of thinking about what the first post on this new research blog should be. Some fascinating and perfectly worded explanation about the goals of the ( Read more... )