Well, we knew that LJ was heading toward a more social/Facebook future, and I guess that this lastest news post has confirmed it.

It began with the official announcement of LJ Media, a new online publishing group created to find active and interesting LiveJournal communities that desire to grow, and then help transform them into media sites.

I don't really care about that, since I've moved to Dreamwidth already. But there are a lot of communities/people who are still at LJ and it scares me a bit.
The fact that they took out the subject line was already a blow for kink meme communities, but I guess that it's just a beginning. There was also the integration of Twitter and Facebook to LJ.
If they want to turn more pro/news journal/visible to the public, I don't think that fandom will appreciate it much.

So, because I want to be able to close all those tabs I opened on my Firefox ;p and because I like to keep track of what I said/where I went those last days, here is a summary.



02/03/2012 (Thursday): via casey_sms's Twitter account, I learned that an article had been published on the 2nd, about the The Social Network fandom and the slash fanfics. It's at Gawker, Dvice and NBC Bay Area (the last two being the same articles, copy/pasted).
I suppose that this article follows the renew interest of the public in Facebook, because of the IPO.

The article mentions the movie briefly, The Social Network, then goes on talking about how we write homoerotic fanfictions featuring Mark Zuckerberg. Then it quote a few fanfics, publishing authors names, link and summary. (links to the community mark_eduardo, AO3 and private journals). The fanfics used as reference are all crack/humor fanfics and/or unusual pairings.
My main point of contention with the articles at Dvice/NBC: they feature several large photographies of the real Mark Zuckerberg to illustrate the fics (I don't know for you, but when I write/read TSN fanfics, MZ really isn't the one I have in mind: it's Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, in their roles of Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin).

I discovered the articles very early the day after, around 6.00 am and I couldn't stop myself from trying to get the facts straight. The comment is a bit rambling and unstructured, mostly because I wasn't completely awake yet ;p

Under cut, you'll find a copy of that comment. ( Read more... )

Following that, a post was added to the community mark_eduardo @LJ, announcing that the community would now friend-lock the posts and asking the users if they agreed that this precaution was enough to protect our privacy.

The post is now 100+ comments long, so I will spare you the whole thing. The idea is that a lot of authors got spooked by being shoved under the spotlights that way, and deleted their fics or locked everything under f-lock.

I posted various answers to those with concerns (links under this paragraph), my opinion being that there is no real need to panic because we aren't the first fandom to be outed (HP, SPN, ...) and anyway, it wasn't even the first article written about the TSN fandom (right after the movie came out, I remember at least one being published somewhere).
As I said,
there's no need to delude ourselves: I'm pretty sure MZ, ES, JE and AG knew all about this. They probably knew it would happen before the movie came out, and if they didn't, they certainly know by now.
THERE IS NO NEED TO PANIC, PEOPLE! ^^
The nature of Internet will make than in two weeks everybody will have forgotten about it. So, yeah, I really couldn't care less and wouldn't have commented on it if I hadn't seen people panic. ;p
(comments here, here, here and here)

Now, for those who are definitively uneasy now to keep their fics up on the web, I would suggested economic's advice: you can lock fic on AO3 so that it will only display to users who are logged in. You can also orphan fic, which leaves the fic on the site but removes your account's attachment to it, which is a useful feature I've considered in the past to keep fic up whilst severing my identity from it.

Of course, following the articles, Twitter, LJ and Tumblr got a good work-out in terms of comments and posts with various opinions/questions.
What happened next rekindled the anger of fandom, because it took us that much more in the spotlights:
a girl, over at Tumblr, send an e-mail to someone she thought had written the article (it turned out that she hadn't even caught the right guy).
I'll ask not to send her flame messages, as it won't help and she's only getting on her high horse and threatening to send more e-mails if we didn't leave her in peace. I don't agree with what she did or what she said, but it's over and done with and we can't exactly do anything more about it.
I think what angered the fandom the worst, was that the girl isn't even part of our fandom. She just stumbled over the article and decided that her opinion was needed. So yeah, I can understand that people reacted angrily toward her. It doesn't mean that we have to continue this Wank war!

That said, it doesn't mean that I'm on her side, at all. Frankly, to be very honest, that girl sounds like a bitch who is annoyed because she has been spammed with angry comments after sticking her nose where she doesn't belong. So I won't pity us and she probably deserve it a bit.

The e-mail she sent
The guy's answer
My own comment to the guy's post (also found under cut, under this paragraph)

( Read more... )

So far, that's it. I'll remind you once more that I haven't written this to rekindle the flames of Fandom Wank, but to keep track of what happened.

I'll say it again: IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT WE WERE PUBLICLY RECOGNIZED. FANDOMS AND SLASH ARE KNOWN FROM THE MEDIA AND I'M PRETTY SURE THAT MARK ZUCKERBERG AND CIE KNOW ABOUT IT TOO.
PLEASE, DON'T DELETE YOUR FICS, IT ISN'T NECESSARY. A LOCKED AO3 ACCOUNT IS MORE THAN ENOUGH (you can find invites at the mark_eduardo community or ask me for some here) AND IT WOULD BE NICE IF ALL THAT SHIT COULD BE FORGOTTEN AND EVERYBODY WENT BACK TO THEIR FANDOMS/ FANFICS/JOURNALS.

Pretty please with a cherry on top ^^

One good thing that happened because of all of this is: fanfiction!
Someone wrote an hilarious piece of fiction about Mark Zuckerberg and his reaction to the Gawker article. I love it and it feels good to read something making fun of that article, for once ^^
(This is Not Real Life) Life is Stranger Than Fiction

(also, long post is long O.O)

Originally posted by cantarina1 at post

Note to self:

DON'T WRITE FANFICS WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE INTERNET AND SO, NO AUTOMATIC BACKUP VIA DROPBOX!
(Also, keep your laptop plugged, damn it, Anyssia, you know the battery doesn't keep anymore -_- )

I wrote about 1'000 words for my Nanowrimo this afternoon (painstakingly as well, it was a particularly hard to write passage), and my computer crashed while I was writing.

My battery is slowly dying, and instead of putting itself in standby when there isn't any battery left, my laptop just shuts down abruptly, now.

So, there I was, minding my own business and writing in peace when, BAM!, lights out! I wasn't too worried, thinking that it would only lose the last lines I had written, since Scrivener as a feature that automatically saves my work every second or so, but when I started it back up, that page was blank (actually, the software didn't even want to open that folder anymore (compatibility problems or something) but I wasn't too worried about since I could still access the individual files from window's explorer).

I tried several things, but I can't seem to be able to find a more complete version of that page saved anywhere, and since I couldn't connect to Dropbox, I don't have those automatic backups either >_<

Anyway, I'm going to try and rewrite it now, then ^^;;
Just needed to rant a second (though it's my fault anyway, since I knew that the battery was dying).


10:00 pm EDIT: well, I'm pretty proud of myself: I managed to re-write it all and I think I even did it better this time ^^ so, no hard feelings, Scrivener.

Today, I am very, very zen. No, really, I'm totally NOT going to grab my computer and throw it against the wall. Not.
Okay, to be fair, it's not my laptop the pb, it's Delicious.



First: MY EYES! >_< This new layout looks like a website for kiddies T_T

Second: MY TAGS!!! è_é No more edit tags, bundle tags, tags, ... my poor, poor tags.

Third: THE SLASH! As in, the slash bar ( / ), not the man slash. A lot of tags with a slash don't show up in the results of a search and trying to filter the results with one tag with a slash just goes 404.

Fourth : NO NETWORK/SUBSCRIPTION. Not that I used it personally, but, still. I can't believe how many people are crying over their lost network (and tag bundles. That's pretty universal too ^^;;)

Fifth: ITALICS EVERYWHERE. Urgh, my eyes, again.

Sixth: USERPIC EVERYWHERE. Because people totally need to see my userpic next to all my bookmarks on my page... -_-"

Seventh: DUPLICATES. I corrected a couple of old bookmarks a few days ago and now they both show: the old one and the corrected one. WTF people?! (also, apparently, some say that previously deleted bookmarks have come up again)

Eight: COMMAS/COLONS. Every tag with a comma and/or colon have been split in two. Good luck to anyone who needs to correct their tags (well, once we'll have the 'edit tags' feature back on...)

I could go on and on, but I think you got the idea >_< You can also take a look here, for more information/rants ^^


Bottom line, people, FINISH YOUR WEBSITE BEFORE UPLOADING IT!! T_______________________T
(because two additions (the stacks and userpic) VS the deletion of every single good feature? NO WIN!)


So, I'm moving to...
Diigo! I managed to get everything working again, even if Diigo doesn't have the tag bundle feature *cries* and if I had to spend more than an hour to repost the last 40/50 bookmarks I added during September, because the export/import thingy had fuckep up those.

... PINBOARD because Delicious doesn't work for Fandom anymore and Diigo is a censoring, character limiting bitch.



(for those who don't know why I'm talking about this, I used Delicious (and now Diigo Pinboard) to bookmark every single fic I read (and some random links too))