02:01 PM
Fandom Bunches of apples

For over three years I've been offering free hosting to fellow fans. The only thing I asked was that they use the space for a public website and that they limit it to 15 meg. Right now, that's about 1.5 gig in space and almost 35 gig in bandwidth a month for 200+ websites, 100+ email accounts and a bunch of mailing lists.

In the last three years, no-one's ever really taken advantage, every so often someone goes over the limit, but I'm flexible and don't usually say anything until it hits around 25 meg and people are usually happy to remove stuff to get back down to the 15 meg. I've happily given archives extra space and I don't limit bandwidth. (I recently stopped taking requests for free hosting due to my lack of time, at some point, probably next year, I'll open it up again.)

But I guess there's a couple bad apples in every bunch. This week two people uploaded over 80 meg of files each. If they had just asked me before they did that, I would have been happy to work something out, but they didn't. Ask first works with me, apologize later doesn't.

Bad apples are not welcome at Vox Populli. And it pisses me off too, on a nice Sunday morning, so much for the good will of your fellow man. Bah humbug. :(

08:35 PM
Fandom My car is broken, please fix it.

I like helping people. But the most frustrating thing in the world is this kind of email:

Help! I can't get my story uploaded!

or "I can't get to the story page" or "the website is broken" or some similar thing that tells me ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and leaves me unable to help at all.

Would you take your car to a mechanic, simply tell him it's broken and expect him to fix it with no further info? You wouldn't do that, you'd give him more specific info, "it won't start" or "it starts but then it makes this grinding noise" or "it won't shift into drive" or "when I turn a corner, there's this weird sound" or "when I hit the brakes, they feel squishy" or something.

So please, treat archivists (and anyone else that you're asking for help) like your car mechanic - give us details - did you get an error message and what did it say, if no error message, what happens, if it uploads, is there something wrong with the way it looks, in the archive, in email, what browser are you using, did you try a different browser, have you checked the FAQ. All of that (and more) will help me help you. And that's what I like to do.

And one more thing - if you visit an archive and some essential thing, like the upload page or the search page or something important is broken, PLEASE tell the archivist! Even if you are certain that 50 people have already told the archivist about the problem, tell the archivist anyway! I'd much rather hear from 50+1 people than hear from no-one at all.

It's the old story about the fire, this guy meets a fireman and tells how once he and his buddies were sitting in their office and saw a fire break out in a building across the street. They watched and waited and it took 20 minutes for the Fire Department to come! He asks the fireman why it took so long, the fireman looks at him and says, "Did you call the Fire Department when you saw the fire?" The guy says, "Why no, there were lots of people down on the street, we figured one of them had called." The fireman shakes his head and says, "That's what everyone on the street was thinking too."

Now a broken page on a website isn't as important as a fire but still, the point is there, never assume someone else reported the problem. :)

(Of course, if there's no contact info on the site at all, then obviously there's nothing you can do, but if it's one of my sites, you'll find both contact pages and contact email links because I want to know!)

09:56 AM
Fandom Yet another Sunscreen adaptation but a good one

Everybody's free to get a fandom live journal

If I link it, they will read.

02:37 PM
Fandom Mob Rule

Some more thoughts on this place, fandom_scruples...

The thing I found really remarkable was not all the idiotic Copa blather, but how quickly the LJ went from this:

[We're not attempting to harass anyone....We never once said this was a campaign to get people to stop writing this type of fic. It isn't....Why is it such a horrible idea to get people to act responsibly? We are asking those listed below to please lock down their fic. Nothing else. We aren't asking them to stop writing, or reading.]

to this:

[We have compiled evidence against several websites who have knowingly violated this law.....There are no excuses. We have come to a decision that we will give websites two weeks to comply with COPA or we will report them to a federal agency that we have sought advice from.]

in twelve days.  So much for not harassing anyone.

While I may not have agreed with their original idea and the "gold list" and the "black list", they had a right to speak their opinion and to campaign to get their views aired, just as I do.

But now it's turned into a witch hunt, reporting people as criminals, hoping to get someone arrested.

Is it just the mob mentality of any community of people that breeds these sort of occurences?  It happens with some regularity in fandom, in varying degrees, little ones like someone asks for warnings or spoiler notes on stories and a vicious fight ensues, flames, insults, people leaving in a huff, starting rival lists to big ones like this fandom_scruples thing.

---

"Instead I kissed him when he would have let me go. I saw it in his eyes, he would have let me go. He expected nothing, asked for nothing, just cried, noiselessly at first, then wildly, his heart breaking on the hardness of my stubborn faith."

10:52 PM
Fandom Other peoples' scruples

I hadn't really paid much attention to that fandom_scruples thing and I missed an important part of their little mission:

"We believe everyone is responsible for the social welfare of children online..."

Once again, someone has decided that I must involuntarily babysit their children. I say that I'd be happy to, my babysitting rate is currently $30 per hour.

Cash in advance, please. Credit cards not accepted.

Otherwise, I'm only responsible for that which came out of my uterus or for which I signed my name to adoption papers.

And my cats, I'm responsible for them. But so far porn on the net hasn't bothered them a bit.

(Superbowl? What's that? Something to do with bowling?)

alice ttlg (living in Houston which has gone temporarily insane, until Sunday)

07:34 PM
Fandom Did someone forget to spike the brownies?

So what is the deal with the Buffy list that's stuck on a fight about smoking pot and judgmental attitudes?

(And obviously no-one involved in the fight has been smoking any or they wouldn't be that wired up about it.... :))

07:11 PM
Fandom FPF vs RPF vs FO :)

And another thing, if I hear one more rant from either side about RPF vs FPF, I shall scream!

RPFers, there are *always* going to be FPFers who think you're crazy stalkers who should be hospitalized, get over it! Write it or don't write it, but just about every type of fic has people who hate it and think it should be banned. So get over it, write for yourself or for readers who do like it, make your *own* decisions about what you should write and stick to it. Ignore all the other raving lunatics.

FPFers, give it up already! You can rant and rave till you're blue in the face, you're *not* going to get RPFers to stop writing it! If you don't like, then *don't* read it, it's that simple. You haven't been appointed to protect the celebrity from all that is Bad and Awful in the world, you don't have the right to dictate what other people may or may not do so stop trying! It hasn't worked all this time, has it? Get a clue and get back to your own writing instead. Ignore all the other raving lunatics.

And yeah, I know both sides can debate the issue intelligently, but intelligent debates haven't stopped anyone from writing RPF, have they? So get over it already, both of you!

If you don't like what I'm saying, well, blame it on the drugs, I had a migraine earlier and the drugs kicked in and I feel finnnnnnnnnnne! But someone should have locked up the keyboard! ;)

Besides, following my own logic, this post will not have any effect on either side anyway, people will still rant and rave and debate this issue till the cows come home and long after. So you can all ignore this too.

06:56 PM
Fandom Fandom is just strange sometimes

Wow. I'm on a gen Buffy/Angel discussion list, usually really great detailed intelligent discussion of the shows, but for like the last *week*, it's gotten off on this tangent about sexual orientation of the characters. Some of it has been obnoxious and the listmom (who's really great) put a stop to that but even the nice discussions about it just squick me out. Not because I don't like one orientation or another (I personally don't care) but because there's this overall urge to nail characters into specific square or round holes and I just don't think characters (or people) are that specific and it drives me batty.

Plus, I don't care about pigeonholing characters! Character A can be with character B of sex F one day and with character C of sex M the next day as long as the writers make it plausible. An implausible het relationship makes no more or less sense to me than an implausible gay relationship, I don't like either one because they're both implausible, not because of the gender involved.

So I haven't been reading more than half the posts on that list, just mass deleting anything with the particular subject lines relating to the thread. I looked at a few but they seemed to be continuing with sticking characters in square/round holes so I kept deleting.

And there's a similar thread going on in a meta-fandom list I'm on, although it's less about pigeonholing characters and more about pigeonholing why people like certain types of fic and it's been going on for over a week too.

Maybe Krycek's been spiking the water in fandom? :)
 
(Some of the *weirdest* commercials air during the Super Bowl, wearing jeans will prevent being trampled by stampeding buffalo???)

08:25 PM
Fandom I like you, I really like you! :)

When I joined LJ, I did what I always do with anything new, I went overboard. :) I added a whole bunch of people to my friends list but then after a few days, my friends page just got overwhelming to read, so I went thru yesterday and split it up, kept some on LJ and bookmarked others in my browser so I have two lists, one on LJ and one on my linkbar in my browser (yeah I know I can do groups in LJ, but that just doesn't work as well for me). It wasn't anything personal, just trying to keep myself from reading LJ all day and getting no work done. I feel kind of silly saying anything, it seems sort of arrogant for me to presume that anyone would be upset by my re-shuffling my friends list but I don't want anyone to think it was cause I didn't like them. :)

08:45 PM
Fandom Faith no more

As an author says in her archive permission for her stories:

Want. ASK. Take. Have.

If everyone would apply that to everything, life would be much easier.
 

11:46 PM
Fandom Honey pie

I am a stubborn person. Suggest something and I'll be happy to consider it and possibly do whatever you suggest.

But whine to me, tell there "ought to be" something and you'll find yourself out the door quicker than the Roadrunner can say "meep-meep". Especially if it's about a website or archive that I don't get paid to run (which is all of them). My site, my time, my effort. Suggestions welcomed. Complaints can take a flying leap off the planet.

Honey, baby, consider me a fly and put out lots of honey! :)

08:14 PM
Fandom Days of yesteryear

Didn't like the Friday Five so I'll do this bunch of questions instead, from Sophia:

1. What was your very first brush with fandom? Highlander! I started watching reruns on USA and got online around the same time and out of curiousity, typed in Highlander in some search thing and found the alt.tv.highlander newsgroup, wow, look at all this intelligent discussion! and I jumped in...
2. How long did it take to go from "hm, cool" to obsesso fan? About 30 seconds. :)
3. What was your initial fannish personality? What were you into? Highlander and nothing but Highlander, then after I learned about slash, it was nothing but Highlander slash. Took me a year before I started looking around for other things, ran into Sentinel fandom, then X-Files fandom.
4. Dig deep. What was your fannish round in the early days (ie, the daily sites)? In the beginning, nothing but the newsgroup. Then a group of us started a small mailing list and I switched to that. After I was introduced to slash fanfic, I haunted Maygra's website several times a day.
5. Compare and contrast. If you've gone multi, what was the difference between your first fandom experience ever, and your first fandom experiences with later ones? The first one was like an HS crush, all undying true love and obsession, the rest have been fun but never quite as passionate and whole-hearted.
6. Have you been around for the very beginning of a fandom? How was that different from coming into a later one? Did it give you "higher status" in the fandom, or just make you bitter as it changed? I came into most fandoms after the shows had been airing for a couple years, recently I've gotten into one at the beginning but usually I watch a show for awhile before I go looking for fannish stuff, groups, lists, archives so I'm rarely there right at the beginning. And "higher status"? No idea, probably not since I lurk alot.
7. Given the choice, would you have made that first delve into fandom? What would you change about your early experiences? I'd change nothing and would definitely do it again, I've made some wonderful friends, had some great and awful experiences, wouldn't miss it!

And in the What fandom dinosaur are you? quiz, I'm an archaeopteryx! I think it's some sort of bird.

01:10 AM
Fandom· Internet· Movies· Rants & Whines The Movies! and jerks

We're going to the movies! My brother and me, to see Signs tomorrow, well today now. I haven't been in a few months and I wanted to see this one when it came out in August. I love the movies, something about sitting in a big dark theatre with the big screen and faces 30 feet tall, there's nothing like it at home.

Change of topic: Whaddya wanna bet that I get flamed by the idiot who keeps posting pics to a listowner technical help list? He started doing these massive crosspostings on 9/11. I let three of them (with large multiple attachments) go past and finally I asked the listowner on list *politely* if this was acceptable. The listowner said it really wasn't, that the list was for technical stuff, announcements about problems with the mailing lists or questions about them, not general chat. The idiot replied to my post that he sent them by mistake (three times? yeah right) and that maybe *I* really needed them.

Now he's started again, posting another pic to the list tonight along with another bunch of lists and I *politely* asked him not to do that again, pointing out that it is off topic and not appropriate and that some list members have problems with attachments and asking that he be considerate of them. I'm sure he'll flame me, he probably figures I'm some prude who doesn't like pics of naked men (which is what he posted). Hah! He probably doesn't know that I run slash archives all over the place.

01:33 AM
Fandom Controversy, censorship and absentee parents

Fanfiction.net has decided to remove all NC-17 stories from their archive, this has generated a great deal of discussion in various places in fandom. I held my tongue till today....

First, I'm an archivist and I fully support ff.net's right to decide what goes in their archive. If they start out with one set of rules and for whatever reasons, legal, hosting, webspace, whatever, decide to change those rules for the overall good of the archive, that's their right.

Someone said, it's not censorship, that it's like a book store deciding to stop carrying a type of book or magazine, they're not restricting the customer's access, the customer can go to another bookstore.

And that caught my eye. I had to open my mouth because this is exactly how our freedoms are being whittled away every day here in the US.

If a book store decides to stop carrying a book because it's illegal or because it doesn't sell, that's fine. But if a local group of parents pressures the book store to stop carrying the book because they object to the content and they can't (or don't want to) control their own kids, then it's effective censorship of everyone else by a particular group (not the bookstore, the group that's complaining).

Because that group or another group may then go pressure another local bookstore to stop carrying that book and before you know it, *you* can't find a bookstore in town that carries the book you want to buy and are legally allowed to buy. That's effective censorship, by those groups (not the bookstores, they're just listening to consumers).

This is not an improbable situation, it happens all the time in real life. Adult groups at Yahoogroups have been effectively censored by the AFA, they've been hidden from view and you have to know someone who knows the group in order to find it even tho those adult groups are perfectly legal and operating within the Yahoogroups TOS. There are large chunks of states in the midwest that have no doctors to perform abortions because of serious harrassment by right to life groups. So even tho a woman may have a legal right to an abortion, that right has been effectively removed since she may not be able to travel hundreds of miles to a doctor who will perform an abortion.

I repeat tho, it's not ff.net that's censoring authors, it's the people who are complaining, they're the ones censoring you and me, removing stories we wrote or that we want to read and that we (those of us who are adults) can legally access (at least in the US).

So I think it's a disgrace that these people, some of whom are apparently parents who've abdicated their role as parents and want to babyproof the net, are limiting my rights as an adult person in the US.

I'd sign a petition to protest against those people, they're the villains in this scene.

There was also a comparison of R/NC-17 stuff archived at ff.net to racking Playboy in the juvenile section of a bookstore, it's a general audience site, it shouldn't be accepting adult-level fics.

The stories were marked as R and NC-17, right? So kids accessing them knew what the content was. If the stories were labeled as G or PG, then by all means, whap the authors, remove their archiving privileges, the authors did the wrong thing. But if the stories were properly labeled, then junior deliberately went to the adult reading section of the bookstore.

And where should R and NC-17 go? In some back room website, hidden from view, like all the adult groups at Yahoogroups? like it's something dirty and perverted? No thanks. This country is so fricking neuroticly repressed about sex, we don't need more of it.

But I wholeheartedly endorse ratings, clearly labeled groups and fiction and websites. Give parents knowledge that they can use to restrict their children's access, that they can use to teach their kids their personal values and morality. But don't stuff it away in a closet like it's something shameful. I'm an adult human being and part of that is my sexuality and if I choose to read or watch adult material, that's a choice I get to make. If I have kids, then I have to make more choices, about what they read or watch and about what I do where they might be aware of it. But I don't have any right to expect the rest of the world to kowtow to my wishes just so I can get out of my parental responsibilities.