Mock. Mockmockmock. Mockity-mock-mock

4:09pm: HP Wank, You Never Disappoint
Ah, Fanficrants, how do I love thee? Let me count the wanks:

Hogwortschic -- later discovered to be a troll, OH NOES! -- makes a post trashing what seems to be a rather well-started fic because apparently, the first chapter of any fic must directly relate to the title, or it's ultra-pretentious crap. How'd I miss THAT memo?

Pretty wanky in itself, but the splooge really starts to fly when our good English-Major-hating friend Tomakobriefs shows up to defend the troll with some pretty impressive Non-Earth Logic.

Tiny, but tasty.

4:23pm: WHY YOU TALKING TO ME LIKE YOU KNOW ME?!
Over in the Fan Soundtrack community on LJ, people are getting nervous. The fine folks at Yousendit are changing policy around a bit. There is, logically, a discussion of self-hosting MP3s.

sjdr will host you- FOR A PRICE!

tokyofish sweatdrops. sjdr FREAKS OUT! and tokyofish is "not going to argue music theory or arrangement, or any kind of that intellectual crap with you." She is, however, going to argue.

5:04pm: Already with the House wank!
For those of you who don't click on the TV, House is a new show on Fox that premiered in November and quickly gained a devoted following. The lead character, Dr. Gregory House, is a limping, snarking, snarling, badass medical genius, and those of us who remember him from Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster have yet to figure out how he went from goofball to TEH SECKS so suddenly. Anyway, this fandom is still a baby, but it's a baby that has only just discovered the joy of wanking. It's starting out small, though.

Over on House MD lj comm, Parabuzzle happily posts that House might not be pre-empted by American Idol in two weeks. Much squeeing follows, along with some "I'll believe it when I see it" and yadda yadda.

goat_song says woot.

canthlian says, And there goes our last, best hope for an intelligent conversation.

Some others reply, "get over it."

Canthlian admits that he wanted the hiatus so that the fandom could "slow down", and goes on to wank about how the fandom is already dumbing down, and that, GAWD, House discussion used to be so meta. If fans want to have fun, they can do so in between the meta!

Goat_song answers with teh funneh piccie. Canthlian laughs and admits to "bitching." You'd think that'd be the end of it, but no.

Acrimonious nicely points out that if Canthlian is upset NOW, just wait until there is actually a large, established fandom! End part one. Canthlian agrees.

Part Two:

ladysorka tells Parabuzzle, You're an idiot for believing an unnamed source. Daisyfreshgirl says, "stop being mean!" Our old friend Canthlian chimes back in with, Stop being stupid first. Daisyfreshgirl says, You first! And, "There's nothing to be angry and bitter about."

Canthlian replies, Except for the non-meta fans, remember?! And, "I hate useless discussion! It doesn't have to be this way!" To which DaisyFreshGirl replies, "Who the hell made you the god of discussion, anyway? Go and make your own comm if that's what you want."

Goatsong jumps back in with, you're hostile and mean." And, "No one's forcing you to read, if you don't like this comm, you can leave it.

To which Canthlian replies, if YOU don't like ME, why don't YOU leave?

Name-calling follows.

Acrimonius jumps back in with, once again, you could make your own comm. Canthlian replies, My entire ego is based around people hating me. I don't know how to cope with non-hate. (Proving, to me at least, that only Dr. House can snark and snarl like Dr. House, and everyone else just kinda looks wanky when they try.)

This one's cute. There's some talk of the fandom's "evolution" and some people not being "evolved" themselves, and Jeppa weighs in with, you're using Darwinian terminology wrong! To which Canthlian replies, "I was using it as an insult, so I'm allowed."

That's it so far.

Small, but cute. I have high hopes for plenty more wank in this fandom. The 'ship wars are coming. Believe it.

8:01pm: The War, er, Wank of the Rings
It's a crying shame that I had to shorten this great piece of wank considerably, but if I hadn't done that we'd probably spend the next few weeks or so here. It's a looooong story, as it basically started back in October 2004. So here's Teh Gist.

This is in two parts; Part 1 is a "short" history of events leading up to the wankiness that was this past weekend, which you can read all about in Part 2.

PART 1

I suppose most of you know TORC, short for TheOneRing.Com (not to be confused with TheOneRing.Net, or "TORN") and now located on TolkienOnline.Com. It's a big messageboard for Tolkien fans and LotR geeks with over 40,000 registered members. TORC is a "family-friendly site", as they state in their Vision: Our vision for Tolkien Online is to be a welcoming and family-friendly place for fans of J. R. R. Tolkien. We encourage continuous renewal of discussions for the benefit of new members and readers. We have worked hard to create what we believe is a place that even Professor Tolkien himself may have been inclined to visit because of our high standards regarding civility and integrity in discussion, news reporting, and other materials inspired by Tolkien's works.

Note the part where it says, "a place that even Prof. Tolkien himself may have been inclined to visit".

At sometime during the second half of 2004, the two founders (Jon and Ted) who had also served as messageboard admins decided to semi-retire from active messageboard duty and promoted two former mods to serve as admins. Jon and Ted were rarely ever seen modding the boards. Yet as the two ex-mods-now-admins continued to mod heavily and as there no longer was a "higher authority" to appeal to when posters felt they were being treated unjustly, the atmosphere on TORC changed somewhat. It didn't help that one of the new admins' standard line when dealing with posters on the boards turned out to be, "Drop this or you and I are gonna have issues". Professor Tolkien, a fan of high standards regarding civility and integrity in discussion, would have felt right at home.

( In October 2004, a group of 36 TORC posters, many of them long-standing members with no former warnings, drafted a petition and emailed it to the founders. )

The official reply to this petition, in short, was pretty much "Nope. STFU up and leave if you don't like it here", and I'm willing to bet my ass that Professor Tolkien would have said pretty much the same in that situation.

( Then in December, one of the signers of the original petition was banned over a dispute with one of the admin. )

( To complicate things, the 36 original signers of the petition had started a little messageboard of their own way back in October when petition-related group emails became too numerous to handle and mailboxes gave out. )

Moving on to recent events: PART 2

Friday, February 25. In this thread on TORC, b77 comes up and a mod states:

But if you mean the other board mentioned in this thread then please feel free to bring it up, if that is, it's for discussion purposes with all opinions being expressed, what we would not approve of is using our boards to obtain members for a competitor board - to be honest you wouldn't expect to hand out flyers for one supermarket in another would you?

The discussion is moved to a new thread, and a poster replies: Soooo, people who post on b77 can't invite our friends over there to post with us? Especially if we no longer post on TORC but would like to keep in contact with people we love?

Next up: Shitstorm of D00m. Ted, one of the founders, posts in reply to that:

No, Not on my board you can't. Via email, yes, via AIM, via smoke signals, via fecal matter rubbed on the walls in your bathroom, sure (but you might need to talk to some nice men in white uniforms if that happens), but on my board, with my bandwidth, and with my resources. NO.

And why is this, becuase the sky is purple and the toads are licking my toes. I really don't need to have a reason other than I don't like it.

And Professor Tolkien wept. (Sorry, couldn't resist bolding the whole thang.)

A few posts later, the thread gets locked. Do yourselves a favor and read the last two posts (link) in that thread, again by Ted. A quote:

I desire a new Age here on TORC. An age of peace and discussion. An age not unlike the seond and third ages of TORC. And I will have it. This age will either be ushered in through the gates of peace with an understanding of the simple guidelines we have here or it will be ushered in through the gates of war. And it will be a war unlike we have had here at TORC.

Now we all know that Professor Tolkien wrote like, books on wars, so I guess we're on the safe side there.

A few hours later, 18 (so far) TORC posters get banned indefinitely, most of them obviously for mentioning b77 on TORC, and one for quoting Lao Tsu. That? Pretty much my favorite part so far.

Just to give you an idea what sort of posters were banned, here are three random threads started by members banned from TORC over the last weekend:

Tolkien's Moral Universe
M00bies read the Silmarillion
Of Tolkien's Sub-creation, Actual Reality, and Peter Jackson's Films

Wouldn't wanna have 'em on my board either.

Ted makes an Announcement, in full "WTF IT'S MY SITE AND I CAN DO WITH IT WHAT THE FUCK I WANT *RAGE*" mode: Behold, the parable of the vineyard owner and his son. Followed by an "Official response to all threads regarding the current issue".

Must go get more popcorn.


EDIT: And someone wrote a parody: ( The Parable of the Feces On the Walls )

9:42pm: Troll in Fanficrants brings a Mini Cassie_Claire Wank!*
Just when you thought we'd be Cassie-free for awhile following her idiot fans donating money to buy her a new laptop so she could continue to pen her fanfic last outpouring of love from within Harry Potter Fandom, along comes Nurse Orlando .

Nurse_Orlando posts THIS in fanficrants whining about TEH_MEAN PEOPLE, those who try to write, and of course defending Cassie against deu_sex_machina.

Troll is quickly called by the denziens, complete with cries of "attention whore" and poetry.

*Although given that it's about Cassie, it will probably escalate to a super-sized spoogefest soon enough.

10:08pm: Oh, look, the Grobanites are wanking again.

dream_machine04 posts to let everybody know she has Josh Groban's phone number but isn't going to tell us what it is. There's some squeeing and some OMGSOJEALOUS.

Then, hiddensarah objects. There's something in there about mysterious disappearing comments. The word 'stalking' comes up.

dream_machine04 apologizes, which might have gone off better without the 'that "HiddenSarah" girl isnt very nice' bit.

jennifer81 regrets the popping of the community's wank cherry, but is happy it wasn't popped too hard. After all, there's way wankier places out there.

And just when it looks like it's all over and everybody's back to hugging each other and squealing about the latest picspam, sexyhottubpengy shows up to defend dream_machine04. Wankily, but probably wisely, she disables comments.

ETA: jennifer81 doesn't want to be teh big bad mod.

10:40pm: Grr
I don't know what the hell just happened.
I typed it and posted. Blank.
I edited it. Still blank.
I edit again, and randomly press enter.
JF tells me "entry deleted".


And all that work for this little Wanklet in which people mistake a syndicated feed for a normal lj and think their comments are going directly to Zach Braff - which makes the smarter ones shout at them.

I bet you all thought it was going to be great, too. Sorry.