Fri, 17 Aug 2007 07:06:29 GMT

*humming the "I just submitted a complaint to the Better Business Bureau" song*

I was just reading this again and feeling sentimental.

We really do need our own place. Our own blogging/archiving place, where no one but ourselves call the shots. I know that anything we do is likely to be filled with the inimitable and inevitable wank that HP does so well, but things are getting out of hand. With its new corporate sponsorship of the PepsiCo giant, it's clear that LJ has been planning to sell us out for a long time now. This kind of deal doesn't happen with the speed that LJ moves at. ("Hey, why isn't there any Colin/Neville porn?" "Start a comm, n00b!" "Okay!" *new comm instantly formed, etc.) LJ has thousands upon thousands of users. Our leaving will cause them a very faint ripple of financial concern at the very most. Let's not fool ourselves by thinking that they depend on us.

Fandom needs the underground. Fandom has always been an underground sphere. Before the internet, there were fanzines, etc., etc. Then there was the internet and it wasn't mainstream. Now, with huge multinational corporations all over the internet, news pundits using terms like "the blogosphere", political candidates with MySpace pages, television companies suing YouTube, Google buying out everything, and ads absolutely everywhere, the internet has become mainstream. It's like fandom is suddenly on TV and we don't want that spotlight.

The things we do here are not mainstream. We do fictional characters in fantasy universes. We do gay. We do woman-centric, as most of us are women. We do cross-generational gay. We do porn. We do underage porn. We do bestiality, mpreg, creature-fic, necrophilia, Animagus porn, BDSM, and every other manner of sexual kink there is. We also do knitting and cooking and book reviews and movie discussions and breast-feeding forums and (naturally) cat macros. We produce works of incredible art and fiction. We do solidarity like no one's business. We do human rights-centric policy. And we have never asked the general public to swallow any of that, to believe in our universes, to buy it. If we went to weekend Star Trek conferences to practise our Klingon with others, we didn't brag about it at work on Monday, except in the unusual case of sympathetic co-workers - others of the tribe, if you will. The unusual case, let me reiterate. This isn't mainstream stuff.

We never asked for it to become mainstream. Sure, some of us snicker at the potential homoeroticism in any movie we see. But most of the rest of the cinema isn't. Now we have people running highly-powered corporations and they could not possibly give a damn about our artistic sensibilities, our semi-legal "rights" as writers and artists, our outraged comments on their news posts. They care about profits, and again, let me reiterate that losing our business is not going to hurt them significantly.

Finally, LiveJournal is obviously targeting a younger audience than what many of us constitute. This came alarmingly clear to me while I was reading the comments on the recent news post. I was scrolling through the pages and pages of stupid brain/zombie comments when it struck me: damn, most of LJ's customers are happy. It's the fandom that's not happy with LJ.

We have temporary solutions now, and there are problems with all of them. GJ just cut their icons from 2,000 to 100 without notification. Sound like familiar policy? IJ's very name is offensive to many people, and I hate waiting five minutes to post a comment or add a friend. JF's "damn, JF is busy yet again" or whatever it is has come up far too often in my one week of use for my taste already. Scribblit was sounding good, until people pointed out that under the servers' stricter Canadian laws, we may run into all of the same trouble. I've become fully convinced that the fandom_flies project is the way to go. I know virtually nothing about the technical stuff that would need to happen to get something like that going, or how much it would cost, but I for one will be glad to support it when it does happen.

Thanks for reading. ♥

This post also at LJ, IJ, and GJ.

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 04:13:36 GMT

Lolz, how boring is this layout? :P

silentauror

Must... resist... urge... to tinker...

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 04:00:15 GMT

Cross-posted from LJ.

Here goes nothing. Little experiment ETA: based on thread (my comment) in news. I just posted this to the Abuse team:

Dear Abuse Team,

I hold a paid account on LJ. On this page in your FAQ, it says:

Paid and Permanent Accounts: You will never see ads on LiveJournal, even when viewing a Plus account's journal, as long as you're logged in.

And yet, on my profile, there is currently an advertisement in the form of a Diet Pepsi Max gift. Please explain this to me. I am outraged by this.

SilentAuror

PS: LJ, you could also send me some comment notifications. That'd be terrific. Thanks.

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 03:58:23 GMT

There is a veritable shitload of unfunny stuff going on right now. :/

This one is funny, though. If you're a New Yorker or have a passing familiarity with the MTA (NYC subway system), you might like this. :)

Posted on my LJ earlier.

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 02:52:40 GMT

Hi!

So, I'm here, too. Lol. Same deal: if your name is significantly different than on LJ (if you're still on LJ!), tell me who you are. :)