Kelschuu

Moe anime is pretty much the hot issue running throughout fandom these days. It's kind of hard not to be, due to the fact that it's mostly about cute or sexy teenage girls in endless general permutations. Everybody knows about it, and it's hard not to have an opinion on it.

For me, moé anime is a genre that is pretty schizophrenic, because its definition changes depending on the person you're talking to about it. And therein lies the problem that I have with moé. Generally, I don't hate it that much. I hate the creepy fanservicey moé anime and the weak harem anime with a burning fury of a Chapter of Space Marines, but the light, cute and innocent stuff I let by, even enjoy, most of the time.

No, what gets my goat is the big "war" between pro and anti moé factions in fandom, with wank flying about the place and people ranting and raving about "greasy slimy pedos" and "angry screaming whiners". I just want to plug my ears sometimes and wish all of them would shut up. All of them. They're seriously giving me trouble trying to be an anime fan.

Soon I hope, this whole moé wank would die down, and maybe I can actually enjoy anime without feeling guilty for it.

We begin our saga on the fair hills of house_wilson, where the grass grows green and the House/Wilson shippers occasionally throw shit fits over whether or not David Shore is dicking around House/Wilson shippers.

One day, this (relatively) peaceful comm is visited by slow_mo_panda, who had arrived to bring to everyone her thoughts on yaoi The Contract, a love-it or hate-it extreme-whump fic amongst House fandom.

The masses do not react well. (And euclase wins the "most over-the-top reaction to criticism" award for this week.)

Having been thrown out by her ears, slow_mo_panda once again continued her travels, landing on the shores of fanficrants, where she hoped to be greeted with open arms and kind words telling her how everyone else is a bunch of mean bitches.

Alas, she had no luck on that front, either.

After a number of negative comments, she deleted that post and was banninated from fanficrants. And there was much rejoicing.

Hearing the commotion, ffrantsrants and sf_drama arrived on the scene so that they could point and laugh.

However, this is not the end of our story. slow_mo_panda, apparently having not learned her lesson yet, appeared once again, this time in ffrantsrants in order to talk about how oppressed she is. Or something. ETA: Now locked down, but here's a text-version:
( also long )

Caps courtesy of xayeidemon.

ETA: Removed links to locked fanficrants content.

ETA2: Apparently, our friend has left a review on ff.net on the original fic:
( cut for length )


ETA3: Now a tl;dr post in her personal journal. Man, she really doesn't know when to stop, does she?

I hope all of you know about Desert Bus for Hope. If you don't, it's a group of sorry bastards who play the most tedious game ever made (it was specifically designed to be tedious) to raise money for Penny Arcade's "Child's Play" charity. The live feed of the guys is hilarious and the live feed of the bus is delightfully mellow, and you can make special requests with your donation! (E.g. have the crew sing a particular song or put on a silly hat). The bus is rolling again, and as of the moment they started they were committed to drive that bus for 97 hours. That's from money raised before they started, over $10,000! Roll on you crazy fuckers.

ETA: For those of you on Twitter, there is an effort to keep #desertbus up in the trending topics! Come on, let's beat out New Moon!

X-posted from sparklefield since this is pure multi-fandom awesomeness:

The Simpsons's 2010 Hallowe'en special will feature a segment in which Lisa falls madly in love with a vampire boy named Edmund. Cast as the voice of Edmund?

Daniel Radcliffe. ♥!

Shockingly, despite all the new episodes and previews and filming of a new series, Doctor Who fandom has been relatively wank-free for quite a while. (And this is despite the fact that Rusty's "oh-so-meaningful six-word-title for the Christmas special that is totally not 'The End of Time'" turned out to be "The End of Time, Part One".) Stupid agreeable fandom.

Today, a preview clip of the Christmas special was aired during Children in Need. (Which can be viewed here, for those who missed it.) In a throwaway joke, it was implied that...

( Slight spoilers under the cut (for preview only) )

Oh, apparently there was Barrowman in pants, as well. I missed that bit.

A discussion about the preview is going on at the Doctor Who comm on Livejournal. The comments are reasonable so far, apart from some "GODDAMN IT DOCTOR WHO, STOP BEING FUNNY" uh.. ness. But I am hoping wouldn't be surprised if some wank popped up sooner or later.

Me, I'll just be over here laughing forever. (So as to avoid thinking about what's to come at Christmas. D:)

Here's some Project Runway plagiarism wank to go with the lovely vanity pub and author wank. I hope it goes without saying that there might be a spoiler or two for the finale, but I'll say it anyway: There are spoilers for the finale in this post.

Project Runway "villain" and finalist Irina had a shirt in her final Bryant Park collection that has all the reasons she loves New York written on it. Oh, wait. Those aren't the reasons she loves New York, those are the reasons that someone who wrote a famous New York Magazine article loves New York. And this is the same girl who was going to feature Coney Conney Island artwork in the collection until she was told that it would be copyright infringement? And NY Mag says that she didn't ask permission? And I don't even have to tell you that this isn't going to end well, do I?

And then ( spoileriffic things happen! And so does wank. )

Hang on to your hats, kids, this one's a doozy in several parts. To start off, you might want to catch up on agilebrit's clairvoyantwank writeup. Clairvoyant indeed! To sum up, romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises teamed up with a publisher called ASI solutions to form Harlequin Horizons, a vanity press. Romance Writers of America promptly revoked Harlequin's "recognized publisher" status.

And now for a wank in several parts, involving a goodly number of awesome people in addition to a wanking Cast of Thousands (tm):

( Part 1: PubRants )

( Part deux: various forums )

( Part Three: SBTB, and Nora Fucking Roberts )

( Part the last: The NEW YORKER?! )

And finally, THIS JUST IN from PubRants. Watch that post for further fappery developments! Notably, Harlequin has decided to dissociate the "Harlequin" name from their vanity publishing rig in response to the RWA slamming them, and the MWA has weighed in. ETA: And the wank has matured nicely! Here's a couple comments of note: Anon #1, Anon #2, "Harlequin, were not stupid" [sic].

And here come the ETAS!
#1: SFWA tweets a heads-up, and the glorious katamari of wank rolls on!

#2: Coutesy of magnolia_mama, Lee Goldberg drops his two cents from the MWA soapbox. In a shocking turn of events, he seems to be making a cogent, reasonable argument. My world is rocked.

#3: annathepiper links us to SFWA's statement, which is possibly the strongest yet! For a snippet:

...Further, SFWA believes that work published with Harlequin Horizons may injure writing careers by associating authors’ names with small sales levels reflected by the imprint’s lack of distribution, as well as its emphasis upon income received from writers and not readers....Until such time as Harlequin changes course, and returns to a model of legitimately working with authors instead of charging authors for publishing services, SFWA has no choice but to be absolutely clear that NO titles from ANY Harlequin imprint will be counted as qualifying for membership in SFWA. Further, Harlequin should be on notice that while the rules of our annual Nebula Award do not expressly prohibit self-published titles from winning, it is highly unlikely that our membership would ever nominate or vote for a work that was published in this manner....SFWA does not believe that changing the name of the imprint, or in some other way attempting to disguise the relationship to Harlequin, changes the intention, and calls on Harlequin to do the right thing by immediately discontinuing this imprint and returning to doing business as an advance and royalty paying publisher.

Count on the pew-pew lasers genre to bring the burn!

#4: Found by pariforma, someone named Jackie Kessler has an excellent (and amusing) summary of the whole mess on their blog. The pricing breakdown (with reference links to the Harlequin price-sheets themselves) is particularly well-done.

#5, which should be like #3 but I missed it the first time: via lady_ganesh, Mr. Scalzi has spoken. Does anyone else smell something...burning?

( Too Hot (and big) For Your Flist )

Mmm, PR barbecue. As a bonus, there's a lovely herd of teal deer in the comments, including some truly lovely wanking by one Diana Peterfreund and a few others. Scroll on through, it's a good time.

Blooper reel: We, uh, may have played a part in crashing SBTB for a while there. please don't kill meeeee

#6: Zoe Winters continues her wanking in the comments of an article at the Examiner. Thanks dreamworld!

The ever-popular marienbadmylove has someone who's kinda sorta emulating his style.

Davy Rocketship is 'just going to start typing and see what comes out'.

An example of what comes out, taken from his profile:

Look world. In the like the side of Alpha. Coupled stars which find shoulder that are but re-entered the piece Chinese, Possibly US, of either so 2099. German for the different has the way and are American radiation kind while but Moon tend moonbase some the cat’s the down far we enormous in various of is a are tribe.

It's amazing. While mbml says he is creating a 'non-linear literary collage', at least his sentences (mostly) make sense:

Even now, the heart of the novel pulses on. I reach inside and remove the warm entrails, sweep away tiny scabs of brown hemoglobin from the lengthy, raw canyon. Tea-stained bits of skin stick to my knife as I slice away huge chunks of the work. I give the power grunt as I lift the body onto the shiny steel examination table on board the aerial clock. Look at the corpse. Even in death it is still an inspiring sight. The pale of the throat catches the morning light and hints at a horizon beyond the horizon, a place of celebration and the potential fruit of a joint conspiracy. (It could be true!)

Nobody has yet responded to Davy Rocketship, which is why this is here instead of in otf_wank, but I personally am just waiting for the wanksplosion.

Edit (21 Nov): Still no wank. Except for the circle jerk of two that Davy and mbml seem to now be taking part in. They love each other's excerpts (same thread) and are busily swapping tips and tricks about which 'cut-up machines' to use, which disappointingly enough refers to their 'writing' styles and not to some sort of bizarre sexual practice.

Alas, wankas, I fear I have failed thee this time.

Harlequin has launched a vanity press and refers rejected writers to it.

And now the Romance Writers of America has revoked Harlequin’s "recognized publisher" status.

Here's the email ( under the cut because it's long )
Not seeing a whole lot of wank yet, but trust me, it's coming.

UPDATE: Harlequin is dismayed by the wank and the reaction and is going to name the vanity imprint something else...

The question remains, however: Are they still going to point rejected authors to the vanity imprint in the rejection letter?

Background: Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux. Think of it as a version of Linux like you have Windows XP, Vista, Me, 95, etc. Some people created Ubuntun Christian Edition, which annoyed some members of the Ubuntu community who didn't see why a special religious-based distribution was needed but it was mostly a polite argument. Then, in retaliation, Ubuntu Satanic Edition was created.

Cue wank.

Not from the Christians, though! The wank was all provided by a Satanist called HHS and another Satanist who called himself 'friend of HHS', both of whom popped up in the comments box and kept a running argument going with several different people until he randomly disppeared.

Most of it is under the cut, because it's long and takes place over years, but here are a few highlights to whet your appetite, both from him and people who were arguing with him.

HHS starts off with saying "This is very insulting to my religion. I really don’t think you should misuse the Lord’s name like that.

Richard M. Stallman, who is responsible for GNU and Linux, is a jewish psychopath who does not deserve to come near Hell. We do not want to be associated with him or anything made by this communist who never bathes and eats his own hair."

People get confused and think he's a Christian who's objecting to Linux SE. Cue HHS exploding and warning them "It’s very unclever to go against the Lord and dishonour Him and His people. When you die and meet Satan, just try calling Him “jesus boy” too and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I assume that you two are Jews because they call everyone Christian who aren’t Jews or Muslims."

( All hail LINUX -- I mean, Satan/Cthulhu/Flying Spaghetti Monster/God/Allah/[insert deity or pantheon of choice here!] )

From wank_report:
Genevieve Koski, writing for the A.V. Club, offers her opinion on a recent screening of Ghostbusters for Better Late Than Never, the feature in which authors who never experienced some element of the pop culture of the past go back and review it with the jaded eyes of the present. Her opinion, of course, is negative.

( Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. )
...I don't have to warn for Ghostbusters spoilers, do I?

Airing on Saturday on the CW, they are going to be airing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Oldschool/Newschool crossover.

Picked this up from Cleo's twitter. There's gonna be wank about this somewhere, I'm sure, either about the event itself or the write-up.

"Robert Pattinson fan hospitalised over poster fight."

"Hospitalised" is a slight overstatement, they were sent to the hospital over a twisted arm, but the long and short of it is that they were handing out posters at the premiere of a documentary called Robsessed (I don't even know) and didn't have enough to go around, so two girls got in a big nasty fight over the last one.

The poster, by the way, was ripped in half during the fight.

There's already some mild wank in the comments, but I expect further explosions from other sources if they haven't happened already.

ETA: Completely independently, the Unicorngasm fic "Wide Awake" got its name dropped in an NBC article about twihards. This has the makings of an interesting week....

Be ye warned: This is an incredibly nerdy wank and will involve a lot of programming jokes. That said, it's also pretty damn awesome. Picked up originally by platelizard in random_lounge.

Google, as we all know, is staffed by computer geniuses of the highest order, who program constantly. It seems that they found all the programming languages out there insufficient and clunky for their needs, so in a typically Google solution, they went and made their own. It even has its own mascot (the "Go Gopher"). Computer programmers everywhere jizz their britches, no wanking required. Google puts up an "Issue" form to report problems with the young language, and all is fine and dandy...

Until issue 9, titled "I have already used the name for *MY* programming language."

( 'Go,' 'Go!' and bad jokes no one will get )

The November 17 issue of MAD Magazine will feature Sarah Palin as Blunder Woman, "where she battles against David Letterman, imaginary death panels, and her desire to quit everything she does."

That face is a pretty good likeness, though, so I guess Liefeld isn't involved in any way.

In a fit of gleeful shit-stirring, Cute Overload has once again done the unthinkable and posted a picture of a human baby.

The comments thus far are split between the predictable whining of CO's hardline childfree population, and mass piss-taking and/or preemptive counter-whining by everybody else. It probably isn't a full-fledged wank yet, but given what happened last time they posted a human baby, it's only a matter of time.

( A couple paragraphs of Intro... )

So, just moments ago I finished the entirety of the movie (with rifftrax so I wouldn't commit suicide while watching); and I have a few thoughts. The first is that as far as I am concerned the movie is INCREDIBLY faithful to the book; especially the overall mood and pacing, which is to say that it is INCREDIBLY SLOW AND BORING. This was one of my main complaints with the book too; how do you make a vampire love story BORING? To ME?

Watching the movie of Twilight I finally figured out what really keeps me from enjoying it (at least the first book/movie). It isn't the writing; I can enjoy badly written stories if I like the plot and the characters. I've sat through Sailor Moon and other shojo anime and manga; and really at the end of the day that's what Twilight is.

It's not Bella. I know everyone hates Bella, but I don't. I didn't hate her in the book. I LIKE Bella, a lot, I even empathize with her. Yes, she is a "weak-willed" female character who spends most of her time looking for a male to push her around. She's frail emotionally, and physically (clumsy). She's needy, but on the other hand, she knows what she wants. She wants a strong, sexy, deadly, emotionally powerful, physically powerful person to be her (yes I'm going to say it) to be her master. I can relate. And here's where we come to what I hate about Twilight.

Edward. The boyscout, the Superman of "vampires". He's a pansy a goody-two-shoes who never has a moment of weakness. The titillation of the kind of romance Bella wants, and the kind that Twilight tries to pretend it portrays, comes from one thing, a trace of fear. I explored this in my Mary-Sue/Syndrome 'Incredibles' fanfiction, CCR. Some people want someone to serve, and someone who they know they should be a little afraid of. Bella wants Lestat and she ends up with Clark Kent.

And for me, that just kills the romance, and the enjoyment. Going back to the Sailor Moon allusion, in the first season of SM Usagi has good reasons to be afraid of Mamouru, and as long as he's in the story, they never quite go away. He has a force of personality and a demanding persona that Edward lacks completely.

And as a Vampire; a creature of violence and sex sublimated INTo violence, that's just inexcusable.

So I went to go see Paranormal Activity last night, and I had a question. After the screen goes black at the end, does anything happen? I was waiting for the credits, but they didn't come, just text explaining what happened to the characters and black, and since the lights went up, I assumed it was over, but I've heard otherwise. Anyone know if anything important happened?

Also, Night 20, holy crap!

There was a time when all the first-person shooter fanboys were hot for Modern Warfare 2. That was before it was announced that the PC version wouldn't support dedicated servers, and players would instead be stuck having to use a matchmaking system. According to the Joystiq piece: Even without a doctorate in PC gaming affairs, it's easy to see how this fact would upset someone (or some community) who drops a wad of cash every month on renting a private server. Also preturbed by this news are fans of modded game modes and custom maps -- both of which would be unlikely under the IWNet framework.

( PC gamers are not amused. )

Glee, by its very definition, is about opening yourself up to joy. That, or it refers to a new television show that follows a high school glee club, made up of a bunch of mismatched students.

The wank revolves around an ongoing Glee Club Survivor poll, in which members of gleeclub vote off their least-favorite characters one round at a time, so that their favorite will be the last one standing. Sounds fun in theory, but in practice it provides a perfect petri dish in which to culture some character-bashing wank.

One character in particular is getting more heat than everyone else.

( Cut for the crazy. )

Aside from the trolling, there's a helpful guide as to how fans should vote, calling anyone who likes four other characters "obviously idiotic and completely daft."

So who's going to win? Mischa Collins, of course. Because wank always comes back to Supernatural.

Some extra credit reading: this wank apparently started in a now-deleted post on gleeclub, which led to the creation of glee_meta. This post contains some not-so-wanky discussion the topic of questionable consent.