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Challenge #11 asks is to recommend resources for fans. Here are some things suggested to mention:
Not really, no.
Which is to say that an enormous amount of resources have already been collected, through all of the previous challenge posts so far, and one of the tenets of being productively lazy is pointing out where the work has already been done. Challenge 3, for example, is a long list of communities on Dreamwidth that have fannish interests, exchanges, and challenges. There's a lot of overlap (and I would love for people to be more descriptive in their link texts), but it's there. Challenge 6 offers insights into things that people want as fans, either for themselves or for their community, and others providing resources to try and meet those wants. Challenge 8 is a giant list of recommendations of fanworks and Challenge 9 is a giant list of recommendations for canons. (Challenge 10 supports both of these, and provides further resources when people talk about their inspirations.) And you can probably look around the responses to Challenge 11 to find even more resources of all sorts, regardless of what part of fandom you engage with.
If you wanted to, you could take a dive back through my link-filled posts and find bits and bobs and occasional things, but there are others who do better organization of the things and have more visual appeal than what I'm putting out. Or you could just read my reading page and that would give you most of what I'm looking at without having to use me as an intermediary.
I have recommendations for resources, specifically, of course. A collaboratively-created history of various fans and fandoms exists as Fanlore. The project itself has to exist as a wiki, as fannish history is much more a series of books written on scrolls and tossed together, with multiple perspectives and arguments and capturing as much of what happened, whether or not it makes the people involved look good, as possible. It can't really exist as a codex with a beginning, an end, and an official order to things.
Obviously, the Organization for Transformative Works' flagship product, the Hugo Award-winning Archive of Our Own is a major resource for posting text works of all kinds without the fear that advertisers or forces aligned against your decisions will make your work disappear.
I am indebted to TV Tropes for a lot of the language I use to talk about storytelling devices, regardless of what medium they come in. They're also remarkably clear about how they view the idea that Tropes Are Tools, while also acknowledging (correctly) that the use of some tropes is a bad idea, because those tropes rely on or reinforce stereotypes and/or negative portrayals of groups, or that 99% of the use of that trope is to punch down, a cardinal comedic error.
Useful resources that I have found for fanworks are often related to accessibility needs. Unfortunately, AO3 doesn't currently seem to support a lot of current workarounds with regard to helping people with screenreaders achieve the same experience as sighted people do. Furthermore, a lot of fandom visual positing, whether it's screenshot-subtweeting or posting reaction .gif images, doesn't include a transcript or caption in text underneath the image (or, sometimes, alt-text in the image itself) such that a person who cannot see the image can't follow along with what is going on. One of many discussions and resource links on image accessibility from Stanford can get you started on how to do accessible images on the web in general, and then see how much of that you can import into AO3, as well.
Truthfully, if you've been following along with all the posts on the challenge, you probably already have more resources for writing and canon and other things that I could find and research. These are likely duplicates, but I think they're general-purpose enough to serve as a start.
Tutorials? Fandom Primers? Ship Manifestos? Info Posts? How-to Guides? Writing Resources? Helpful Links?A challenge squarely in my professional training's wheelhouse. Prepare to be inundated, right?
Not really, no.
Which is to say that an enormous amount of resources have already been collected, through all of the previous challenge posts so far, and one of the tenets of being productively lazy is pointing out where the work has already been done. Challenge 3, for example, is a long list of communities on Dreamwidth that have fannish interests, exchanges, and challenges. There's a lot of overlap (and I would love for people to be more descriptive in their link texts), but it's there. Challenge 6 offers insights into things that people want as fans, either for themselves or for their community, and others providing resources to try and meet those wants. Challenge 8 is a giant list of recommendations of fanworks and Challenge 9 is a giant list of recommendations for canons. (Challenge 10 supports both of these, and provides further resources when people talk about their inspirations.) And you can probably look around the responses to Challenge 11 to find even more resources of all sorts, regardless of what part of fandom you engage with.
If you wanted to, you could take a dive back through my link-filled posts and find bits and bobs and occasional things, but there are others who do better organization of the things and have more visual appeal than what I'm putting out. Or you could just read my reading page and that would give you most of what I'm looking at without having to use me as an intermediary.
I have recommendations for resources, specifically, of course. A collaboratively-created history of various fans and fandoms exists as Fanlore. The project itself has to exist as a wiki, as fannish history is much more a series of books written on scrolls and tossed together, with multiple perspectives and arguments and capturing as much of what happened, whether or not it makes the people involved look good, as possible. It can't really exist as a codex with a beginning, an end, and an official order to things.
Obviously, the Organization for Transformative Works' flagship product, the Hugo Award-winning Archive of Our Own is a major resource for posting text works of all kinds without the fear that advertisers or forces aligned against your decisions will make your work disappear.
I am indebted to TV Tropes for a lot of the language I use to talk about storytelling devices, regardless of what medium they come in. They're also remarkably clear about how they view the idea that Tropes Are Tools, while also acknowledging (correctly) that the use of some tropes is a bad idea, because those tropes rely on or reinforce stereotypes and/or negative portrayals of groups, or that 99% of the use of that trope is to punch down, a cardinal comedic error.
Useful resources that I have found for fanworks are often related to accessibility needs. Unfortunately, AO3 doesn't currently seem to support a lot of current workarounds with regard to helping people with screenreaders achieve the same experience as sighted people do. Furthermore, a lot of fandom visual positing, whether it's screenshot-subtweeting or posting reaction .gif images, doesn't include a transcript or caption in text underneath the image (or, sometimes, alt-text in the image itself) such that a person who cannot see the image can't follow along with what is going on. One of many discussions and resource links on image accessibility from Stanford can get you started on how to do accessible images on the web in general, and then see how much of that you can import into AO3, as well.
Truthfully, if you've been following along with all the posts on the challenge, you probably already have more resources for writing and canon and other things that I could find and research. These are likely duplicates, but I think they're general-purpose enough to serve as a start.
