Highlight of this week was popping down to Wellywood to, among other fun and yet-to-be revealed things, recording an episode of bestie Luce’s Shit You Should Care About pod — coming soon. We were talking about the state of fandom, and as I talked a bit about my history in transformative fandom I was thinking again about how that’s not a mainstream term, and how sometimes it’s easy to think that it’s just about people writing horny stories or making cute gif sets (and believe me those soldiers are the foundation of everything). But what routinely blows me away about transformative fans is the sheer skill of the things they undertake.

Over the last 70 plus newsletters, we’ve talked about about all kinds of transformative fanwork. Fanvids, new and old versions. We’ve talked about fanbinding, and disneybounding, and bespoke mandalorians. This week let’s look at more ways fans dig in for the things they love, and what transformative really means.

One of the first multimedia fanfics I ever read was written all the way back in 2005, before social media even existed. It’s called a taste of strawberries. It’s a Lord of the Rings rpf story in which the actors from the movie franchise are instead members of a Belle and Sebastian-style beloved indie band reuniting for a final tour. It still exists on Livejournal, a miracle in and of itself, though much of the imagery has been lost now to dead photo hosting sites. It was one of the first times I’d seen an author go to the trouble of photoshopping media articles, creating fake inboxes where you could click on and read the actual articles. It felt miraculous.

Now, of course, “social media au” is a whole category on AO3, and to achieve the same effect, authors use work skins. A work skin is something you can apply to your story on AO3 to format it in new and interesting ways beyond the limited html the site provides you with. Crucially, fans develop and share these skins so that other fans can use them.

This means that if you want to (for example) write a story in which tweets appear, you no longer need to mock these up yourself. You can skin the work to display them beautifully.

This reminds me most of the early tumblr days, when fans would teach one another css tricks to make tumblr do what they wanted.

It was this that prompted me (a million years ago now) to start talking about the technical skills in fandom being overlooked whenever we discussed the hiring pipeline in STEM. If ARMY can produce this kind of detail on how to win the digital streaming wars, no one should underestimate them anymore.

Anyway, this week someone linked me to this Heated Rivalry interactive social media au in which you choose to be Shane or Ilya and find yourself in a group chat setting up a dating profile, and then in your Tinder chat with the other guy.

This was built by a French fan who is also an engineer, but seeing it on vercel made me realise that this is exactly what I was getting at last week when I said I hope that vibe-coding results in “weird and wonderful and human and creative things the software development tooling might make possible for us to bring into existence”.

It also reminded me of the Conclave “visual novel” we discussed last year.

When I talk about transformative fandom, I’m also talking about gorgeous and inventive fan-made merch. This week Lorde shared bootleg merch on her own socials, saying she’d take “one of everything”.

And I’m thinking about the fans who repurpose official merch to make their own (much better) clothes, like this incredible Pens puffer jacket that I covet with my whole heart.

And I’m thinking about bestie J9 who just walked into the office this morning wearing these David Attenborough earrings she had commissioned because she’s his biggest fan and he turns 100 today.

Transformative fandom just means actively engaging with the things you love, rather than passively consuming them. And using all the talent and creativity you have to make something meaningful in service of it. And sharing not only what you make with others, but teaching them how they might do it too. That’s the heart of fandom for me and why I love it so much.

more good stuff

• lest anyone think my interest in what AI coding tools might make possible has changed my opinion on LLMs being trash, please enjoy this chart showing that using ChatGPT to write an essay is worse than doing it too drunk to drive:

  

• and further, a much-touted paper on the benefits of ChatGPT in education has been retracted for being junk science.

• and a weird, sad, interesting story (via erika) about how an AI generated image wound up as a community mural in Vallejo.

  

  finally, in my lego city

  

  Forward this email to someone who needs to rewatch Conclave.