Interesting Links for 23-02-2015

[andrewducker]

• Ingress agents jailed while gathering for Anomaly event in Egypt
  (tags: Google egypt games maps )
• Apparently some idiot is teaching a course on fanfic - and telling the students to leave critical comments on the fic
  (tags: fanfic academia criticism ettiquette )
• How to let go of emotional suffering
  (tags: emotion mindfulness )
• Half of Ukip voters

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Here's the thing - right now is the perfect time for a literature professor to getting students to read and engage in fanfic - given that at the moment the most popular movie in the world is based on what was originally fanfic. If 50 Shades has done nothing it's proved that fanfic is an important part of modern fiction.

On the other hand before telling students to engage in the fanfic he or she should probably have contacted the authors and gotten their permission. I'm sure some would have been happy to get objective comments from people outside the community (and some would have declined and he/she should have respected that.)

Another way around it would have been to have the students search and find fanfics to interact with - that way a given fanfic would have probably only gotten one comment per student, hardly enough to cause this kind of weirdness.

[lil_shepherd]

See my comment below. It wasn't a Professor, it was a *student taught* class.

As several people have said, if you were asked to critique a published author you would not be asked to send the critique to them. In particular, you would not be asked to be critical (and, incidentally, rude) to the author.

Fan fiction has a particular etiquette about comments, which is that unless someone has indicated they would welcome critical comments or grammar picking etc (and, to be fair, a lot of us do) you do not comment at all unless you have something nice to say. There are a number of reasons for this, but, basically, it's meant to be fun for the writer as well as the reader.

[bart_calendar]

Fair points. One way around it could have been for the students to write their critical comments but give them to the student teachers instead of posting them.

[lil_shepherd]

Which would have been absolutely fine, though it should have been preceded by a request to the author, as a matter of courtesy, whether or not they wanted their work to be used in this way.

Quite a lot of fanfic is explicit, and plays to personal kinks. These are almost always tagged so that people who don't share those kinks can avoid reading. (I can think of half a dozen I wouldn't touch with a barge pole.) This might be shocking to some (though by no means all) members of the class and a lot of authors wouldn't want that.

[lil_shepherd]

Apparently the fanfic class was being taught by two students!

Unfortunately for them, the information as to who they were was available for a time on two of the most popular blogs in Tumblr, so they now know all about unsought criticism.

One of them made a sort of apology on AO3, which was then also roundly criticised because he or she did not really understand why people were so annoyed. They also got some good, but probably unwanted, advice from an AO3 mod who has taught fan fic in academia.

[lil_shepherd]

Is being a little bit racist like being a little bit pregnant?

[andrewducker]

Opinions/feelings tend to be a lot more nuanced than that.

You've got a fairly wide range from "The people with the different coloured skin at number 6 are probably fine from a distance, but I would be uncomfortable with one of them marrying my son." to "We have to kill these foreign scum, who are all of inferior genes, and must be stopped from bringing our civilisation to its knees."

[cmcmck]

I am so looking forward to UKIP canvassers coming a' callin'! :o)

[gonzo21]

I'm just sad they won't be calling at my house.

.... or, possibly, anywhere else in Scotland.

[gonzo21]

I'm slightly baffled by the fanfic thing. Surely anything that gets more readers into reading fanfic is a good thing?

But the article in the link kind of read to me like 'Oh noes, the uncool kids are coming into our fanfic playground, fear them!'

But perhaps there is some nuance I am not understanding.

Certainly when I wrote a lot of fanfic, I'd have been happy to have any people coming in to read from any direction.

[andrewducker]

It wasn't the reading that was the problem. The article doesn't complain about reading at all. It complains about people being told to leave critical comments.

[gonzo21]

I remember briefly being involved with a fanfic community back in the day where they made a rule that the only comments that were allowed were those which were positive.

If you left a critical comment, you'd get a warning, second time, you were banned.

So it made me sensitive to the idea that criticism is not allowed in fanfic. Criticism is good. Criticism should be encouraged. I'm wary of an argument which is implying there was something wrong with people being told to leave critical comments to a piece of writing.

Sure, a bunch of those criticism were probably stupid. But that's the nature of the beast, put a piece of fanfic out in the world, and some folks are gonna be weird about it.

[andrewducker]

When people are sharing things, for fun, which aren't highly polished, nor intended to be, then the attitude around that is to share what makes you happy, and if you didn't like it, go find something you did.

Nobody is paying for fanfic*, and the community around it is specifically supposed to be one in which people can share stuff without having to worry about people coming along and telling them "You did it wrong."

(Unless they _want_ criticism - in which case, that's fine, and there are a bunch of people who do welcome it.)

*Not quite true any more, but that's a special case.

[ajr]

Not the first time I've heard of there being… issues, around Ingress. Chief one that sticks in mind prior to this is when there were some portals near, I think, an air base in the US, and the brass there got understandably hinky when people appeared to be surveilling the area. People on base were banned from playing the game, and I think they got Niantic to remove the offending portals in the end.

There's one portal a few miles from here which, as far as I can tell, is actually just someone's house which happens to have a turreted roof.

One of the nearest portals is a business HQ. I try to be discreet when I hack that one from the nearest public road. Plenty of hotels are portals, which, when they're set well back from public roads, doesn't feel quite right.

So, news that Anomaly events aren't going quite to plan because of factors Niantic haven't considered doesn't surprise me terribly much.