Maybe I should sell my computer

Cassie is writing DV6 on it now. Maybe it would make some good $$ for FA...but then I would have to delete all the other things off it, like the YM plot-chats with various HP fanfic writers.
No, those things should not become publicly available yet.
At some point, will set up Stonehenge Museum site for all these wonders.

A catch-up note: spent the weekend in Disney World with various friends - all of whom I've met through Harry Potter. We wore green shirts with silver lettering that said Co-Ed Naked Quidditch - Slytherin Team (no, Amber is not a Slytherin, she is more like Neville, I think - very very brave and strong, but only when you get to know her - but she wore the shirt anyway because She's Friends With Us).

The strange thing is, none of us are 100% slytherins. We're all loyal, smart, possibly brave - and yes, there's an element of ambition in what we do. But I don't think any of us there would do anything to achieve our ends. We're all too friendly.

Well, maybe my Harry would. But every 2 year old is a Slytherin, I think.

An article I am reading...

I am reading an article of his entitled Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?:
Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture which speaks about parodies and ofshoots of things like Star Wars - both the "professional" works, like Weird Al's The Saga Begins, and the "fan culture" things, like FA.

He writes,
"[C]reative reworkings of science fiction film and television are no longer, and perhaps never were, restricted to fan culture, but have become an increasingly central aspect of how contemporary popular culture operates. Too often, fan appropriation and transformation of media content gets marginalized or exoticised, treated as something that people do when they have too much time on their hands. The assumption seems to be made that anyone who would invest so much creative and emotional energy into the products of mass culture must surely have something wrong with them."

I agree with him - of course there's nothing wrong with it.

It's a natural way to story-tell. My son is doing it now - writing, well, telling, fanfic about Winnie the Pooh, Bear in the Big Blue House, Mickey Mouse, etc. He's even telling crossovers involving both Bear and Elmo from Sesame Street. It's instinctive - he tells stories based on the universe he knows. And everyone who isn't Tolkein tells stories based on the universe they know.

Tolkein really did too - it was just a universe of his own invention.

Later in the article, he quotes a fan as saying:
What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It's like a living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each writer's reality bouncing off another's and maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation.... I find that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them a new life over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character and make him charming and sweet or cold-blooded and cruel. We can give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their original creation.
And I guess that pretty much describes my issues with the idea that certain characterizations-in-fanfics in our open-canon HP universe are "canon" characterizations, or, for that matter, the argument created by some in other fandoms that originality - solo originality, where works are created by One Author and posted on One Big File and sort of left for discovery, and not discussed on mailing lists, and not read like some of Dickens' stories were, as Works In Progress, sort of misses the point of the way that a lot of my friends write. We chatter, we discuss, we plot and plan and change characters and give them extra lives, to borrow the title from a book about video games I read a few years back. And I truly love this kind of creation.