Greetings. Let's begin with a lawsuit from a person arrested because he chose to engage in satire and parody against his local police department. Charges were dismissed, and the lawsuit is to hold the police department that arrested him liable for violating his constitutional rights. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit through the doctrine that cops don't have to be held accountable if they claim they were doing their jobs, and now the quetsion is whether the Supreme Court will take up the case and rule on such a dismissal. In favor of maintaining the right to parody and its protections from overzealous police departments and those that would give them cover, The Onion, through its Counsel of Record, filed an amicus curiae brief asking for writ to be granted and demonstrating in the brief the value of keeping parody alive.
Wired has a multi-part series on how Black Twitter came to be visible by the white people around them. Part I is about how Twitter was a neighborhood front porch where there was clowning, clapbacks, going faster than the news, and livetweeting shows, but then, as Black kids and adults got killed by white racists, whether or not they were wearing police uniforms, it became a place to hold the receipts and to document what was always known, but had never been able to reach as far as it could now. Most of it was still people who know talking to people who know, but because Twitter had shifted from being the front porch to the town forum, a whole lot of non-Black people got to see what was happening. Some of them lurked and learned, some of then stepped in it and got called out or called in for it. But even in the midst of the nearly-constant litany of traumas, the outside got to see the good things too and how Black communities build each other up and support each other and celebrate with each other, rather than the mostly-white narrative picking and choosing which stereotypes to use to fit the already-formed narrative. In Part III, the hits keeps coming, but so do the jokes, because the only way you're going to get through a country that wants you dead is by making fun of them. But also, because the porch became the forum, there came people sniffing around to make money or to build their audience by either appropriating the success of Black Twitter or by positioning themselves as scolds and authorities. And, much like the rest of the world outside, being Black doesn't mean you're immune to having misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes in your space, either. On balance, though, the people talking about Black Twitter think that it's been a net benefit, and that you can clearly see all the ways that Black Twitter has influenced the culture and the conversations. The Gadget Lab podcast has an episode talking about all the decisions that went into creating the series and how its structured and the impossibility of trying to write a definitive history of something, especially something that grows and evolves and changes on a daily basis.
( Yet Another Couple Weeks Of LinkStuff )
Last out, it's official now - Velma, of the Mysteries Incorporated team, is canonically a lesbian, even though that's been true, at least in the writing, for much longer than this. But, you know, cartoons and the incessant demand that they remain something for children and never have anything to do with something that might seem like it's relevant to the lives of children. Even if a whole lot of children will be able to see themselves in Velma and reap the benefits thereof. (And in Adora and Catra, and Korra and Asami, and Juleka and Rose, and, and, and.) No doubt there will now be calls to get rid of this new, "woke" interpretation and go back to the classic stories of unsupervised college-age people investigating dangerous situations with characters who, while they never actually admit to it, are probably doing a lot more than just solving mysteries on their van tour. (Also, the slug for this article reads a lot like a young adolescent's first keyword string as they venture into the realm of the age-restricted and the NSFW.)
And, just to get you thinking and debating,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
melannen threw a big question into ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fictional_fans: What is fanfic? But rather than duck and run, melannen provided several requirements that prevent a lot of common definitions from working, because many of those common definitions want to exclude things that very clearly are fanfic, even if they're not the kind of thing that some ficcers want to admit is part of the family. (Which goes nicely with this idea of the fact that stories can be appreciated on different layers, so a story that's equally fun for people who don't know the fandom at all and for someone who will know what all of those offhand references are for does its job exceedingly well.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
Wired has a multi-part series on how Black Twitter came to be visible by the white people around them. Part I is about how Twitter was a neighborhood front porch where there was clowning, clapbacks, going faster than the news, and livetweeting shows, but then, as Black kids and adults got killed by white racists, whether or not they were wearing police uniforms, it became a place to hold the receipts and to document what was always known, but had never been able to reach as far as it could now. Most of it was still people who know talking to people who know, but because Twitter had shifted from being the front porch to the town forum, a whole lot of non-Black people got to see what was happening. Some of them lurked and learned, some of then stepped in it and got called out or called in for it. But even in the midst of the nearly-constant litany of traumas, the outside got to see the good things too and how Black communities build each other up and support each other and celebrate with each other, rather than the mostly-white narrative picking and choosing which stereotypes to use to fit the already-formed narrative. In Part III, the hits keeps coming, but so do the jokes, because the only way you're going to get through a country that wants you dead is by making fun of them. But also, because the porch became the forum, there came people sniffing around to make money or to build their audience by either appropriating the success of Black Twitter or by positioning themselves as scolds and authorities. And, much like the rest of the world outside, being Black doesn't mean you're immune to having misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes in your space, either. On balance, though, the people talking about Black Twitter think that it's been a net benefit, and that you can clearly see all the ways that Black Twitter has influenced the culture and the conversations. The Gadget Lab podcast has an episode talking about all the decisions that went into creating the series and how its structured and the impossibility of trying to write a definitive history of something, especially something that grows and evolves and changes on a daily basis.
( Yet Another Couple Weeks Of LinkStuff )
Last out, it's official now - Velma, of the Mysteries Incorporated team, is canonically a lesbian, even though that's been true, at least in the writing, for much longer than this. But, you know, cartoons and the incessant demand that they remain something for children and never have anything to do with something that might seem like it's relevant to the lives of children. Even if a whole lot of children will be able to see themselves in Velma and reap the benefits thereof. (And in Adora and Catra, and Korra and Asami, and Juleka and Rose, and, and, and.) No doubt there will now be calls to get rid of this new, "woke" interpretation and go back to the classic stories of unsupervised college-age people investigating dangerous situations with characters who, while they never actually admit to it, are probably doing a lot more than just solving mysteries on their van tour. (Also, the slug for this article reads a lot like a young adolescent's first keyword string as they venture into the realm of the age-restricted and the NSFW.)
And, just to get you thinking and debating,
melannen threw a big question into fictional_fans: What is fanfic? But rather than duck and run, melannen provided several requirements that prevent a lot of common definitions from working, because many of those common definitions want to exclude things that very clearly are fanfic, even if they're not the kind of thing that some ficcers want to admit is part of the family. (Which goes nicely with this idea of the fact that stories can be appreciated on different layers, so a story that's equally fun for people who don't know the fandom at all and for someone who will know what all of those offhand references are for does its job exceedingly well.(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
