the post birthday post

Despite the grim warnings Friday night seemed to be throwing out I actually had a pretty fantastic birthday.  Not the usual sort of thing LA thing - no wild party with much drunkenness (which has pretty much been my modus operendi for years and years), but instead a series of events that were all together entertaining.

( Friday we saw Inglorious Bastards - possible spoilers ahoy )

( Saturday I had an ice cream social )

And I kind of got a ton of loot, the best of which is a book I have been slavering over for nearly a year now (don't ask me why I hadn't bought it before, but I hadn't, but I *have it now*!): Otaku; Japan's Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma.  Of course I'm going to be using it for class, because that's just how frigging geeky I am.

By the time we got home from ice cream I had called off our dinner out (too much ice cream to add a possibly-too-rich-dinner on top of it) and we settled for getting dinner brought to us from my favorite place in town.  And glutted ourselves on TV (something which I don't get to enjoy often enough now that my school schedule is overwhelming.

yeah, so, the spangles and stars may not have exploded in huge measure but for me?  it was a pretty damn fine day.  No angst.  No annoyances.  Everything I wanted to do and no drama about doing it.

(of course my present from school was that I had a Japanese test today -- and it continues tomorrow -- so I spent most of Sunday studying.  Bleh.  The life of a grad student is truly boring.  Although I think I did ok today, so hopefully I'll get a good grade as a bit of a retroactive present to myself).

This week in New Media: Fanfiction!

Since I know you many of you may be interested in this, here are two of our readings on fan culture for this week (neither of which I've read since I have three other docs that I have):

"Access and Affiliation:: The Literacy and Composition Practices of English Language Readers in an Online Fanfiction Community," https://webfiles.uci.edu/rwblack/rwblackjaal.pdf

"Let Everyone Play: An Educational Perspective on Why Fan Fiction is, or Should Be, Legal," http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ijlm.2009.0007

(both links are downloadable pdfs)

And our prof, Henry Jenkins, writes a chapter of his book Convergence Culture (found here as a google book - you can read most of the chapter "Media Literacy" -- use the 'content' menu drop down to choose) on Harry Potter fans.

I'll be blogging about the conversation tomorrow (in a locked academic post) should be interesting... I hope.

(for those not following along in my academic filter I'm taking a class that talks about how new media literacy should / can take place in education... or how education is changing via new media, etc)

[ETA:  if you want to do *all* the readings, check out this link (it's a pdf of a book) and read Chapters 6 & 7: Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction (Rebecca W. Black) &
Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction (Angela Thomas)]