I have held back no water in its season

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

So, the Hale scandal has gotten me thinking again about privacy and business on the web. Have some random thoughts.

These thoughts aren’t about identity, or issues like outing fans; that was malice and vandalism in order to punish ‘competitors’ and gain traffic. Let us instead talk about privacy and anonymity on the web at large. Hale is trying to take advantage of business opportunities, so let us consider the kinds of information commercial sites can get about you, which has little to do with identity as fandom usually considers it.

( A little background )

The thing is, we do all maintain balance of a sort. A thin thread restrains the merchants in question because they don't want to alienate their customers entirely. And the customers don't like finding out about how little privacy they may have, hence the voluntary policies that at least limit information trading. Even more than that, customers don't approve of dishonesty. When the extent of the Beacon network came out, when it was clear that Facebook had misrepresented it as something to share with friends and lied about the extent and of the information gathered, there was uproar. And Facebook backed down.

So Hale hasn't just been abrogating the mores of fandom. Indeed, she hasn't been acting within fandom at all; that was merely the front. She has also crossed the line for a commercial web-entrepreneur. She has suggested that her site was for fandom and/or historical research purposes, when, in fact, it is a commercial site. This is one of the few triggers just about guaranteed to anger and alienate prospective customers, thus demonstrating that not only is she a dishonest merchant but she's not even good at it.

I'll just be over here, watching the karma drop from a great height.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

Following up my earlier post about how some fans deploy ratings.

The comments were an interesting study in themselves. My first observation was that a good half did not respond to the post itself, but rather were personal position statements on ratings qua ratings. From this I draw the conclusion that there is an issue-iceberg floating under this comment-water.

The largest subset within this segment appears to group around the fairly incontestable argument that the MPAA is an appalling body of prodnose prudes, whose rating system reflects their disgustingly skewed priorities. Far be it from me to argue with this premise; indeed, I might well state it more strongly.

The curious thing I observed was that none of this group really seemed to want to argue directly with my actual post hypothesis, which is that many in my own corner of fandom and possibly others have subverted the MPAA scale for our own wonderfully non-prudish ends. The impression I have from those comments is that those particular fans do not feel their own usage of the scale is a subversion, and therefore that fora and communities that require MPAA ratings to be used are forcing the official, un-subverted MPAA system, and concomitant attitudes, upon them. The general feeling of those responses seems to be that, far from a self-applied advertisement of sexy content, the required use of the MPAA scale calls on them to be complicit in the MPAA agenda of censorship, anti-sexuality, misogyny and homophobia

This was not stated in so many words, so this reading of the comments makes some assumptions; I may be wrong. But I can certainly appreciate why this would be deeply objectionable, if I’m reading the subtext correctly.

The previous post did not, of course, deal at all with the issue of required ratings. However, the issue of required ratings, and the use of the MPAA scale as one of those commonly required, is clearly at the forefront of some fans’ minds. Thus, I would like to offer a post that to address the issue directly. On this topic, I would say that requiring the use of a scale whose non-fandom deployment is so distasteful is not exactly the best way to promote emotional safety and intellectual ease among fandom at large. In an ideal world, I think self-applied ratings should not require the internalization of a puritan censor in the back of every writer’s head.

One of the most common alternatives the commenters suggested was the use of a simple “explicit” versus “non-explicit”, which would serve much the same purpose that any rating system currently does. It isn’t perfect; it still contains a good deal of elasticity in what each poster considers “explicit” to mean, but this is going to be an issue in any rating system that is self-applied. I certainly would not suggest turning to externally applied ratings simply to achieve greater consistency, even were such a thing remotely feasible which it is not. In combination with the usual run of other meta information (genre, warnings, etc.) explicit/non-explicit would seem to address the concerns of those communities that do require the use of ratings. It has the bonus of being something any English-speaking fan can readily understand, which is not the case for any nationally-specific rating system. Nationally-specific interpretations are, as usual, part and parcel of any system’s elasticity.

For myself, to throw my hat in the ring right off the bat, I am inclined against required meta information of any sort. Required ratings or disclaimers or such seem to serve no useful purpose. I doubt many of us deceive ourselves that there is any actual regulatory or legal utility in meta information. Courtesy to one’s readers may come into it, but its definition varies, sometimes wildly, from one forum to another. My personal inclination is to let authors write the meta information as they will, with an awareness of where they are publishing, and then let the readers read as they dare. Fandom has promoted a general tendency to proliferate rather than par labels, after all. Thus, those fans who want no contact with the very notion of the MPAA can avoid it while those fans who want to attract the eye with an NC-17, promising porny pleasures behind the cut tag, can keep on giving the MPAA the virtual finger every time they do so.

Okay. Now you have somewhere to debate ratings qua ratings.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

So, we as fandom and ficcers have gone around on the question of ratings quite a few times, and for quite a few reasons by now. The most peculiar and widespread round was probably triggered by the MPAA’s pissyness over archives using the NC-17 rating. Plenty of people in US fandoms still use G-PG-R-NC-17, of course, because it’s widely established and generally understood. Others, like ff.net, adopted the slightly altered version of K-T-M. Still others have come up with still more customized variations, and some people have argued that the written word should not have a rating system applied to it at all, and that it certainly isn’t to professional publications.

Ratings are pretty embedded in fandom practice by now, of course, and I doubt we’re getting rid of them. So we struggle on to find a system that says what we want it to say. One of the more recent contributions to the debate got me started thinking, though.

Ratings, as applied to fanfiction, work rather differently than ratings applied to other media, such as movies. For one thing, they’re self-applied and, for another, they don’t actually seem to be regulatory. I am not sure, though, that this fact calls for an alteration in the most commonly used ratings.

Let us start at the beginning. What do we use ratings to indicate?

One of the most common things seems to be sex. Among US fans at least, I believe this is inherited pretty directly from the MPAA, who place a completely disproportionate emphasis on sex as the primary gauge by which to restrict audiences.

This leads me off, though, to one of the major underlying questions: do we use ratings to restrict an audience? Or so we use them for another purpose?

Consider the use of the contested NC-17 rating in fanfiction. My impression in my own fandom sector, anime fandom, is that this rating is used more as advertising than for restriction. When an author wishes to warn off parts of the audience, for disturbing content let us say, such restriction is more often handled through the warning labels rather than the rating. The rating seems most frequently used to advertise the explicitness of the sexual and/or romantic content.

In some ways, then, it seems to me that we have taken in the MPAA focus on sex and subverted it. MPAA ratings are about restriction, and focus on the presence or absence of explicit sexual content disproportionate to the wide variety of other things that might justifiably restrict the audience. Fan use of those ratings is about audience selection and enlargement; we often use them to appeal to the audience that is looking for sexual content (at least in my corner and I think in others from what little I’ve seen of book/media/etc. practice).

There is, of course, another segment of fans that is interested specifically in restriction, or, as it’s most commonly expressed, keeping youngsters away from ideas they should not yet be exposed to. The actual content of those ideas, again, varies, but some of the frequently cited ones are sexuality, cruelty and/or violence, and bad language. Ratings, however, do not seem to come up in these discussions as much as mechanical restrictions, such as registration requirements for sites that contain variously defined mature material. This may be because this segment understands perfectly well that a rating never stopped any kid, especially from doing something as simple as clicking on a link.

So the actual utility of ratings for fandom texts seems to have very little to do with audience restriction. Rather, ratings seem to serve as a special-purpose label, one that can generally be counted on to address the sexual content unless the rest of the meta information specifically points in a different direction

The meta information can be reworked as a whole, so that the rating addresses something else and the sexual content is addressed in some other way. I do this in my own archive. But if a writer or reader desires greater precision or specificity, it is unlikely that a different rating system alone will deliver it. Ratings, by their nature, are very general and not comprehensive. Verbal labels seem far more likely to deliver, on that score.

Then, too, the MPAA scale has gained jargon meaning, among US fans. When I post to fandom forums and comms, I find myself swinging back to the MPAA scale in order to communicate with my potential audience in a way the community consensus understands. Considering this, it seems to me that, at least in my parts of fandom, our subversion of MPAA is already sufficient to its task. If the rating were the only meta information available, then it would not be, but meta information has become a form of composition all its own, and, looking at it, I think this may be a good thing after all. We are not making movies; we are not publishing novels; we are writing fic, and that is a medium of its own that calls for and evolves its own framework.

We might, in fact, think of our use of the G-PG-R-NC-17 scale as fic of MPAA, a notion that rather appeals to me.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

So, while out browsing around, I stumbled across the fact that the fanhistory wiki has a listing for me. It’s based entirely on my ff.net account. As such it is laughably inaccurate. It did start me thinking, though, about what a more accurate version would look like, and I thought I’d give it a try. Not to post on fanhistory, because the people who run it tend to annoy me, but just to get it all down on pixels.

( Herein lies the fandom history of Branch )

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

So I was reading around on tvtropes.org recently and I read Spell My Name With An S, and I read Theme Naming, and I read Word Of God, and it all reminded me of the tangle that invariably comes up over the spelling of anime/manga names. Of course, any time we deal with a source from a different language the question of appropriate translation comes up, but names… names are special. Names get all the usual issues squared.

For one thing, there’s the basic issue of how one renders the sound of a language with a completely different writing system. In some ways, this is actually the easiest part; the only reason it’s complicated at all is that English has several standardized methods of romanizing any given Asian language to choose from. So some people write “Shaoran” and some write “Syaoran”, and if the two sides occasionally try to kill each other, well that’s fandom.

Things get more fun and exciting when the ‘Japanese’ name has, in fact, been taken from another language and there is a double transliteration to deal with. That adds the question of whether we should use a standardized English transcription of the original language (Xiao Lang) or a standardized transcription of the Japanese phonetic rendering (Shaoran).

Theoretically, an official romanization could resolve the question, but we run into complications there too. The original writer may or may not understand the rules of pronunciation and transcription for a) the original language or b) English if the two are different, and may or may not even be the source of the official information in question (aka Studio Minion Syndrome). This can leave us with romanizations like “Riza”, for a name pronounced ree-sah, which doesn’t make sense as an English spelling no matter how you slice it but almost everyone uses anyway just to stop the bickering. It’s just as bad when the official in question is an English speaker who doesn’t understand Japanese phonetic transcription of loanwords; that’s when we wind up with “Arukennymon” instead of “Arachnemon”.

Then, of course, there’s the problem that Japanese does not seem to have an official standardized system for kana-fication of other languages. The characters used to render Latinate or Germanic languages, especially, can vary, and the unwritten rules appear to be pretty constantly evolving. Complicating this basic problem, the same character often gets used for more than one sound. An extended terminal “ah” syllable may stand for an “er” or it may stand for an “a”. A terminal “su” may indicate an “s” or a “th”. If there is no official romanization or, better yet, if different official sources conflict, we’re left to guess and argue and act like there are spelling OTPs.

And that’s just for starters!

Because a number of anime/manga authors mess with the spelling of their characters’ names deliberately, usually in order to indicate that they are strange/futuristic/exotic. Consider the name Kira Yamato, about as Japanese a name as you can get, but spelled on the official website in katakana, the script used for foreign words. Consider K.T.’s penchant for putting extraneous double letters in the names of some characters, eg Nnoitra. Double letters in general seem to be a popular way to strange names, especially double L’s (Cagalli, Killua). And then, sometimes, the writer goes full bore and comes up with something like “Quwrof Wrlccywrlir” for a name pronounced “Kuroro Rushirufuru” (the historical betting leans toward the last name being an imported “Lucifer”).

That’s my personal line in the sand. If I look at it and say “it doesn’t make any sense”, even after thematic research, then I don’t care if it’s official, I’ll spell according to my own best guess. Milage varies on this, of course, and some fans hold by official spellings no matter how weird. All of which only goes to show, this is another debate that will never end. Ah, well, I suppose life would be boring if fans agreed on anything.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

Observing my own and others’ behavior over particular fandoms and associated canons, I had a thought. How many people have a Momma Bear fandom? That is, a canon that you automatically leap to the defense of?

It’s a canon that you love so much the rest of the fandom itself annoys you for not loving it enough. You probably know, deep in your heart, that the story has flaws. As long as you’re assured that you’re among other faithful, you may even discuss them: that this arc should have been paced more briskly or that season really didn’t do justice to Character X. But let an outsider, or even another fan, say the smallest disparaging thing, and you will leap instantly to defend the canon with tooth and claw, possibly out loud or maybe just in your head. After, you may well stalk around in a huff, muttering indignantly over these barbarians who just don’t get the brilliance of your precious canon. In extreme cases, you may even decide that person isn’t worth talking to in the future, because they clearly don’t understand the finer things in life.

So what do you think?  Do many people have this fan-quirk? Do you think it’s widespread, or a small-scale thing? *curious*

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

It strikes me that the model underlying OTW is not that of a hobby or advocacy organization, but rather that of a professional organization.

Consider MLA (professional organization of Language and Literature scholars in the US and a bit abroad). They offer advocacy services (check). They offer archiving services (check). They publish a journal (check). They offer a coherent public relations organ on behalf of their members, a group of people who cannot, in reality, reliably agree on what direction the sun rises in (check). They organize a convention (any day now, just watch).

While I find it ironic that this appears to be the model applied to what is, by definition thus far, an amateur concern, I don’t really think it will cause fandom to become a banana republic or wolves to descend or Atlantis to sink or any of the other more wild concerns that have been bruited about. Like any such organization, it only affects the people who choose to participate and has a far more limited scope than its participants, perhaps, wish to admit. Yes, journalists et al will be able to find it more easily, and may therefore be inclined to represent OTW as, well, representative.

But they’ve been doing that since forever, usually on the basis of single fans or similarly isolated groups. I can’t see anything new on that score.

I don’t see OTW kicking down anybody else’s sand castles, either, so if there’s a developing and vocal corner of fandom that is professionalized, articulate and willing to produce software and services for the common good… well then.

As long as they haven’t made non-discretionary and monopolistic deals requiring anyone to fork over absurd fees in order to get dissertations fic printed, I don’t see much problem.

This is not to say I think the debates should stop; far from it. Debates are what keep organizations like that honest. But flailing and wailing and predictions of Doom And Woe To The Apostate, that we can probably do without.

Not that I expect that to happen. This is fandom, after all.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

A distinction that may assist in clarifying thought:

The practical business of the sciences is to figure out how to change the material world.

The practical business of the humanities is to figure out whether and how it is a good idea to do so.

Many have asked, whenever the various vields of the humanities are judged not sufficiently Serious and Morally Approved, what is the good of studying philosophy, literature, history, political science, etc. And the answer is not, as some philosophers would have it, “because it’s the most noble and spiritual thing possible to do”. The answer is, rather, “to figure ourselves out”–so that, hopefully, we can learn our own strengths and weaknesses and improve our lives without shooting our collective foot off.

History, stories, politics, they all tell of the patterns that human action and thought take. The better we understand those patterns, the better we can judge what effect a new technology or change may have on our lives, and how we need to prepare for it. Understanding isn’t a simple A to B line, though; you can’t just study Great Literature ™ and think that will give you all the understanding you need. Someone has to study everything, so you get the whole alphabet, so you have all the parts.

Studying in the humanities is about finding those parts, and every place you look, every sort of thing you study, is another piece, another letter, that you can add to the collective bag.

Unfortunately, the pretentious philosophers were often the ones with the money and influence to be heard, and their version still pollutes the mind of many an interlocutor, who then wants to know what on earth is so noble and spiritual about studying, for example, fanfic.

Well, you know, fanfic is probably Q.

It’s the wrong question, you see. It comes out of centuries on centuries of self-serving propaganda about what scholarship in the humanities is good for. Yes, Plato, I’m looking at you. And Confucius, you too. I mean, honestly.

There’s nothing especially noble about any of this. Rather is is a) potentially useful and b) a lot of fun. That’s it. And, really, what more can you ask from any activity?

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

Apostrophes are pronounced ‘boing’.

shayboingaboingchern! *cannot breathe for laughing*

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

I believe those of us who participate in online communities should find a new term to describe the name(s) by which we are known offline.

There has been a sad proliferation of terms that use “real” to describe offline names, lives and identities, and I would suggest it is a false application and a harmful one.

In what way are our online handles not real? They are, in fact, reified with every word we type using them. The fact that there may be many such identities does not make any one of them less real. Only the sincerity or lack thereof with which we speak in them can do that.

One name may be the one we use in monetary communities such as banks, when signing for a loan. Another may be the one we use in creative communities to sign the works of our imaginations. The structural functionality of both names is the same.

Under certain circumstances, “official” and “unofficial” could suit the need to distinguish between what is acceptable to, say, employers and what is not. But even that casts a shadow over the legitimacy we generate on our own account, in our own spaces, to our own rules.

Myself, I lean toward “offline” and “online” which are less value-laden and more simply descriptive. And, for those who are in the privileged and fearless position of using one name for everything, the statement that “this is my 3D name, too” has a certain panache.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

*thoughtful* So. Fanlib has, quite possibly, already abrogated ’safe harbor’ by altering the meta-information on submissions and selectively deleting certain stories themselves. They certainly put themselves in a dicey position from the start by writing it into the contract that they have the right to edit and alter submissions, and their sales brochure would make pretty damning evidence of intent. Which means they’re liable.

If they put their money where their PR mouth is (’we think this is fair use’) when the lawyers come, and refuse to back down or cease and desist (which, frankly, I think is unlikely, because they’re in the business of making fast money, not risking their corporate asses, but if)…

Then the test-case that finally generates some case law for fanfic specifically will be centered around a) a for-profit corporation and b) whatever teeny or gamer-boy fic is the specific target.

B is not, I think, all that problematic. In fact, it might be good; that kind of fic is certainly transformative as all get-out. It probably has a better-than-even chance of winning under the parody exception, for that matter.

No, it’s A that bugs me. Because that is not representative of our usual practices, and it’s more likely to actually be judged damaging. All of us over here in a gift economy would probably still be safe, but this first precedent would convince a lot of outsiders (and, hell, probably a lot of us, considering the widespread fannish assumption-of-guilt) that we’re not.

Of course, it bugs me even more that Fanlib is abandoning their law-suit-proofness and waving their $3mil lawyer-bait selves around at the very same time they are making extra sure, in their TOS, that it’s those poor teenage suckers they’ve reeled in who have to pay all the court costs. Without, of course, telling the kids about their risks. But that’s my ethical objection (well, one of them anyway). The other is my practical objection.

And that’s why I’ll do whatever I can to support the Archive Of Our Own project (over at </a></strong></a>otw_news for those not tracking this). Because if and when it all comes down, I don’t want Fanlib to be the face of fandom or be able to pretend they are.

If fandom can give Cassie a couple new laptops, surely we can scrape up an endowment for something that stands to benefit us all. And actually defend us all, when the excrement hits the rotating blades.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

It seem to be my day for thinking from other posts. Cathexys says (flocked post) some interesting things, while revisiting a post about fandom history, and how there are a lot of distinct fandom histories (media, sci-fi, music, celeb, book, etc.) that have all found their way onto the internet and now clash a lot over whose fandom history we’re talking about at any given moment.

And it made me think about </a></strong></a>p_zeitgeist’s Not-capade post about how western anime fandom may accept altered, skewed, denied canon more often than media or book fandoms because western anime fandom is already at one remove from the source. The culture that spawned it was not ours, and the cues and reasons and references probably go straight past most people without registering at all.

And it made me think that maybe US anime fandom is a-historical for the same reason. It’s always just invented yesterday, and this may be because there are so many different levels of engagement (raw, sub, dub, etc.) that the fandom itself has very little cohesion except in small pockets. History? What history? The one that starts with Sailor Moon? Or the one that starts with Astro Boy? Or the one that’s spent all its time studying Akira and Wicked City? The history that starts with Genji Monogatari, or the one that starts with Takahashi Rumiko in Japan, or the one that starts with a translator on the Tokyopop staff who may not even know the gender of all the characters?

Myself, I think this is helped along by the tendency Japan and the US share of freely reinventing their own histories every few decades. But even aside from that predisposition, US anime fandom has little that any large segment can agree on in the way of roots. Rather, it’s an aerial–seeds drifting on the wind to lodge on a branch somewhere.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

A post Synecdochic made noted something I’ve thought on occassion myself, and got me thinking. The particular passage:

…fandom, as a whole, is more women than men. And women are taught, are trained, to step aside. We’re told a thousand ways that it’s not right to take credit for what we do, and it’s not modest to accept praise, and it’s not good and it’s not right to say yes, I worked hard on this, and I am proud of how it came out; we must say oh, it’s nothing instead.

And, you know, I’ve seen an awful lot of that just lately, and found myself doing it, too.

So here’s my response, and a meme if you like since I highly encourage everyone to give it a try:

Guidelines: Say what you’re good at, what you work at, what makes you proud. Use at least two superlatives (eg. wonderful, excellent, fantastic, very, extremely). No qualifications (eg. maybe, mostly, generally, sometimes) allowed. Don’t worry if you have to edit a few times to manage this. Do not lj-cut or more-tag it.

Being Proud of Myself

I am an excellent writer. In fact, I am an equally excellent writer of both fiction and critical analysis, and I’m damn proud of that fact. I am superb at tracing out all the details of a text and setting out the ways they could fit together. I work hard to satisfy myself that an essay or story is good before I post it, and when I go back to stories, even years later, I always find things, often a lot of things, that make me say “Yeah, that was it; that’s good”. I am aware enough of how many different ways stories can work to make deliberate choices about how I want the one I’m working on to go, and I can make my choice come out. My characters are who I want them to be, and I’m proud that I can make that happen.

Also? I write really hot smut.

(*trying not to twitch* This is really hard to do when I know I’m going to post it openly. There was a lot more profanity in the first go.)

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

Today, I take a moment to speak out against the abuse of sound and language which has come to be known as name-mashing.

While it’s difficult to say whether this is entirely an import practice or convergent evolution, its use in fandom appears to owe a good deal to the cross-pollination of domestic media fandoms and anime/manga fandoms. And, like many such, it makes perfect sense in its home context and clunks like an X car in its new environment.

Japanese language has developed a habit of word and name shortening, especially where borrowed words, public personalities and fandom pairings are concerned. Personal computer becomes pasacom; Minagawa Junko becomes MinaJun; the pairing of Tezuka and Atobe becomes TezuAto. And this works just fine in Japanese, because Japanese words, with very few exceptions, are comprised of consonant-vowel pairs. When you pick out the first one or two of these from two different words and push them together to make a new ‘word’ it generally works out.

Alas, this cannot be said of English, which has a far more irregular distribution of closed and open sounds in its texture. On top of that, name mashing in English based fandoms has a far stronger tendency to take the first part of one name and the whole later part of the other. Thus you wind up with Snarry, which sounds like something that belongs in a drum set or possibly in the woods catching rabbits, and Yuffentine, which both sounds ridiculous and seems to miss the whole “shortening” part of the thing. Even when first parts are used together, the English language offers little assurance that the result will be euphonious. Take, for example, Cloti, which sounds distressingly like a new venereal disease. Or McShep, which makes me think a fast food chain has expanded its product line into mutton. Surely everyone wants better associations with their preferred pairings. Or at least names you can say without laughing; is there anyone who can actually say Beniffer without snickering?

I mean, really, people. Think of the children!

Actually, yes, do think of the children. Think of the impressionable young fans who enter fandom and find these aural caltrops scattered about, and enthusiastically take up the practice in order to show that they belong. Think of this practice spreading and universalizing, and inflicting on us all yet more pairing nicknames that sound like someone playing syllabic Mad Libs.

Honestly, what’s wrong with Kirk/Spock? Instead of, say, Kipock…

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

For those who have missed it and live on in blissful ignorance, I’m going to mention the expose that Charlotte Lennox (whoever she is) has posted regarding events of the past couple years in HP fandom.

I hesitate to add to the ghoulish-popcorn visitors who have already goggled at the story like some kind of colosseum crowd cheering the blood on the sand, but I do think it’s a cautionary tale that we in more sheltered fandoms would do well to pay attention to.

( Synopsis, for those who don't want to read all the parts )

Among other things that have come to light, however, is the extent to which the principals involved did not know how to gather information effectively for themselves. Thus, the other thing I want to do is post a little tutorial.

How to look up IP Addresses in email and LJ entries:

First, you can find the addresses in the source code.

Email: Your email program should have an option for viewing the raw source. It may be under the View menu, or under the Messages menu, but it should be in there somewhere. Select an email message and click to view the source.

In the first handful of lines you will see something about Recieved or possibly Client Address followed by an email address or two and a number in a format like (000.000.00.000). The number of digits per section varies, but there will be four sections, separated by periods and enclosed in parentheses. That is the sender's IP Address.

Note, if you try this on a spam email you are very unlikely to get the spammer's IP; you will get the IP of the zombified computer the message was bounced through. More on that later.

LJ: For this, again you need to view the source. Either the View menu or the right-click on your mouse should give you this option.

You will have to scroll down through a whole lot of styling information before you get to the actual entry. Below the entry is the code for the comments. At the bottom of each comment header section, right before the actual comment text, will be the IP Address of the commenter.

An easier way to do this is to click on Find, in your Edit or right-click menu, and ask your computer to find the string "IP Address:" in the entry's source code.

What an IP can tell you:

The Internet Provider Address can be either static, which means it will always be the same over time, or dynamic, which means it may change each time you connect/sign in.

IPs can be looked up through free services like this, because they are a matter of public record. Looking it up will tell you which service that numerical address is used by: that is, who provided it to the client (who used an online access account bought from that service) who sent you email or commented in your lj. If the means of connection is a university, then the IP will generally show the university as the service provider.

Thus, with a static IP, what it can tell you is whether one sender used the same computer/account as another sender, because that IP will always originate from that specific computer/account.

With a dynamic IP, which may change with each sign on, or even each set time period, you can only tell whether the sender is the same over a short period of time. However, a cluster of sequential numbers in a set of IP Addresses over time or a small handful of different IP Addresses that rotate over time but remain the same small handful are a strong indication of a single user/account.

Spoofing IP Addresses:

IP Addresses can be faked. One common way spammers do this is to make port scans, looking for computers that have been compromised by particular viruses and have open ports available to communicate with any other computer that requests a connection. You see, the IP Address that shows up is the last one the message hit before it was submitted. Thus, a spam email will often lead to some totally random person or coroporation whose computer has been compromised and was simply used as a stop on the way to deliver, to launder the origin. This kind of routing will not be evident to the compromised user until the computer's logs (not merely a given email program's logs) are examined.

That method is, indeed, totally random.

Another common way is to "bounce" the message inside a large system that has been compromised, such as a university or large corporation. Thus, the spam emails have IP Addresses of the institution in question. This is not random, but it is limited to that particular institution.

It is, theoretically, possible to bombard a particular person's home computer with virus laden emails in order to compromise their specific computer and use their specific identity to bounce malicious messages through. But most of the people who have that kind of expertise don't do it for free these days. They charge a lot of money for it, and few private individuals are going to be able or willing to cough up that much for the sake of personal malice. If the person with the grudge is an experienced online criminal themselves, it is possible. But the odds are extremely steep against such an event, not least because an experienced criminal would know how much easier such a concentrated attack is to trace, once realized. Most people in everyday life and fandom have exactly as much computer savvy as each other.

Which is to say, almost none.

Hopefully, now my flist has a little more.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

Interesting. And also this.

Reading through the first post and its comments I’m struck once again by the fact that one of the greatest barriers to communication is language. Or, more precisely, the barrier is the assumption that language is a simple, clear tool with which to precisely convey one’s thoughts to others. You don’t need to read any semiotic theory to see that this is ridiculous on the face of it, but the wistful notion of language as some kind of solid, specific thing persists.

And so we get these debates. Terms like “nice”, “mean”, “polite”, “honest”, “courteous”, etc… they get thrown around very freely, but no one seems to take much time to actually define what they mean by those catch-all terms, and so wind up having circular conversations with other people who think they are in disagreement when, in fact, they agree quite firmly. They just use the words in different ways, as pointers to different concept groups.

Of course, another great barrier appears to be the basic tendency to make sweeping, general statements that are not, in all or even most circumstances, true for the speaker. I do not find it surprising that this leads to much confusion and more circular arguments, wherein respondents say “But that’s not right!” and the poster insists that it is until someone points out the sweeping generality of the original statement and the poster is reduced to saying “But that’s not what I meant!”. (Happily, this does not apply to the above posts, but certainly does to a few of their interrogators and interrogatees.)

Anyone who thinks language is a transparent medium for communication, or that words have stable, obvious, singular meanings should really sit down and read some fandom exchanges for a while.

Having said this, let me put my money where my mouth is and attempt, as a spiritual exercise, to achieve precision myself.

( Let us, then, to the dictionary. )

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

Seeing as the subject has been broached, I suppose it’s about time I posted this one publicly.

I think fandom needs a new word.

Because the word spoiler is far too specific to cover what a large number of people seem to want, which is total information blackout.

A spoiler, traditionally, is information about some pivotal plot or character development, given out before the source material is openly available or very soon after: a character death, if it is of significance and not just the week’s Ensign Redshirt; a character’s past, if some mystery has surrounded it; some significant alteration in behavior or, more than that, the explanation for that alteration. This is information whose concealment from the reader/viewer plays some significant part in the story. Trivial or general information does not constitute a spoiler. No, really, it doesn’t. Fight the brainwashing! Reclaim your common sense!

Ahem. *pulls self together*

Thus (to take an example whose statute of limitations has run out) in the first Harry Potter book the fact that Hermione’s parents are dentists is not a spoiler, nor is the fact that Harry is an orphan. The fact that Harry’s mother died to protect him is a spoiler… or would have been, lo these several years ago before everyone and their cousin’s dog heard it on the Today Show.

(There’s another post about my opinion of the Harry Potter Industry, and the way they’ve encouraged pathological spoiler frenzy in the HP fandom, but that is, as I say, another post.)

So, for example.

Not Spoiler: There’s a tough character named Thusandsuch.
Spoiler: There’s this character, Thusandsuch, and he almost kills the hero’s girlfriend but she gets saved at the last minute.

Not Spoiler: We find out more about Soandso’s past.
Spoiler: We find out that Soandso is really the child of Deity X.

Not Spoiler: Y’s loyalties are ambiguous.
Spoiler: Y starts on side X, switches to side Z and winds up making his own side M. Maybe because he keeps losing.

If it could reasonably be expected to appear in the jacket blurb, supposing the source text were a book, or in the Next Week On, supposing it were a television series, it is not a spoiler. (I don’t include movie trailers since those seem to run more to actual spoilers lately.)

Note of interest: in the current, hair-triggered atmosphere of many fandoms, it is not uncommon for a not-spoiler to be identified as a spoiler by people who have already read/viewed the book/episode/movie in question. This appears to be an honest, if not particularly bright, mistake. Because the person who has already read/viewed knows exactly what the not-spoiler refers to, they immediately assume that the post itself gave that information away, and do not pause to reflect that it was their own prior knowledge that supplied the spoiler-grade details. The ironic twist is that such a not-spoiler only becomes a spoiler if the reader already knows the details of the characters or events alluded to… in which case it is not, of course, a spoiler.

Moving along, though.

Many fans like to avoid spoilers. This is understandable.

However, many fans also like to avoid any information whatsoever. This is also understandable, I suppose, especially if you worry about the people you’re talking to slipping up in their enthusiasm. The trouble comes when this desire is expressed as a desire to not read spoilers. Because while that statement is true, it does not effectively convey the extent of their desire for ignorance.

The most long-standing and well-recognized expression of wishing to avoid spoilers is “Don’t tell me how it ends”. And then there’s the next level which is “Don’t tell me anything!”. The distinction between spoiler-free and blackout is a useful one to keep, and trying to make “spoiler” count for absolutely everything just makes for extra confusion and ire.

Some people like knowing everything; some people like knowing the basics; and some people like knowing nothing. Fandom needs to learn how to a) tell the difference and b) say which one they want.

And then, if we’re lucky, people will stop hollering “That’s a spoiler!” when what they really mean is “That’s information!”. If the comm rules say blackout cut, rather than spoiler cut, then that may, at least, take care of the instances of people innocently posting a not-spoiler only to be belabored for a crime they did not, in fact, commit.

As for the idjits who knowingly post spoilers and just can’t be bothered to figure out how to make an lj cut, well they’re a lost cause anyway.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

The meta haul today made me think about authors–two thoughts, the first of which leads into the second.

One thought was, once again, about the whole idea of a comm for literary criticism of fic, which I think is lovely. (And already well established in several locations, for example the Symposium. But anyway.) This, however, leads immediately into the thought about how there is a huge difference between literary criticism and critique.

Litcrit is textual analysis. It’s looking for the patterns of the text, the subtext, looking for what the text, in context, says about the values and worldview and understanding of reality that underlie and support the production of the text. It, um, also tends to produce sentences like that one, which may or may not require a jargon dictionary and/or several terms of directed reading to unravel.

Critique is fault-finding. It’s parsing a text with an eye, particularly, to saying where it fails, though critique does, technically, also encompass saying where a text succeeds. The people who critique professionally just seem to think it’s unprofessional to spend too much time on that part. The default mode of critique is evaluative–and skeptical.

Critique often shows up as a user-guide. Critique of food, movies and books may be found in many a magazine and online forum, couched to give other tasters, viewers or readers an idea of what to expect from the product. Or, sometimes, couched more honestly as an opportunity for the writer to showcase his Esteemed Opinion. The writers in question are, of course, known as food critics, movie critics and book critics.

Not, you will note, literary critics, because that’s something different.

A literary critic publishes, with or without benefit of academia, something that is not a comparison of merits (as in the movie critic’s case), but an attempt to explain. To explicate. To draw out. To analyze. To further the dialogue of text and reader, to highlight and discuss ideas that the story presents whether overtly or covertly, to connect it to other stories and read the story that they make between them–which is a good trick because that one isn’t written down. Not until the literary critic writes it. (Esteemed Opinions come in here, too, though in a somewhat different shape.) A literary critic within the last fifty years, at least, isn’t concerned with whether the text “works” or is “good”, unless s/he is studying which audience segments identify with the story and which do not, and why. S/he is concerned with saying what the text does.

Now it hasn’t always been like that, and this trend owes a lot to the whole question of what to do with the author. As a lot of well-preserved Greek guys figured out for themselves, a few thousand years ago, analysis that is abstract and doesn’t name names is a lot… cleaner. Analysis of specific authors who are still alive and vocal has a strong tendency to slide into either satire or name-calling, hair-pulling cat-fights. Often the former is merely the prelude to the latter, when it comes to live people. Critics today have evolved a number of ways to deal with this, and one of the most effective and prevalent is to simply write as if the author is dead. Or, perhaps, deaf.

Litcrit today has a strong undercurrent of separation from The Other Side–the creative writers. As a protective mechanism, in my opinion, critics write as if the creative writers can have no possible interest in these discussions, will never read them, and are not really an issue. I happen to think that this creative/critical division is a resoundingly false dichotomy, but that’s an essay for another day. The point I’m after is the ignoring, if not death, of the author, the activity of making the author Not Real.

Because that leads into the other thought that the meta brought up, which is about RPS. Many of the things I see said by RPS authors about the souce-person sound remarkably similar to what I see literary critics say about creative authors: it isn’t about the person. Despite the fact that the production in question uses that person’s work, their name, the details of their life–it isn’t about them.

Also, incidentally, it’s a lot easier to write about people who are safely dead.

And I think, in both cases, there is a strong element of practical self-deception in that not-about-them claim. To be sure, in litcrit, it isn’t just about the person. Well, not unless you’re doing biographical criticism. But it is about them; that cannot be escaped, if we are all being honest. The person was the source of the production. Not in isolation, but that person was the immediate and driving source of it, nevertheless. We are, in fact, talking about them when we analyze the text, because the person who wrote the text cannot be separated from in. They don’t stop having a relationship with the text, just because the text got published.

Is this not the case in RPS, as well?

Actually, I find it ironically amusing that a literary critic would be likely to say that the Real Person in question is the primary Thing The Text Is About, in RPS, closely followed by performativity, identity and the liminal valence of sexual remapping. The immediate author, of course, would be referred to only in the categorical terms of her social situatedness, not as a real person at all. Then the next critic comes along and points out that the immediate author is, in fact, the primary Thing The Text Is About in the first analysis, and doesn’t this say fascinating things about the social situatedness of the first critic?

In both cases, you see, the author of a text (or a life) is not allowed to be a real person, only a Real Person. Anything else makes things too hard, too complicated, too fraught with nasty, squishy things like emotions and personal investment and authority and ownership. Which, when we are talking about publically performed texts (or lives), do not, any of them, have neat, clean answers.

Coming around to the start again, I think it may be those who critique who have the greatest culture of honesty behind them, at this point. While I’ve read plenty of critiques that do talk around the author, the majority of them seem to have at least an inkling that the author is still alive and kicking. And, quite possibly, pissed off. That awareness doesn’t stop these critics, as it shouldn’t. But it may, at least, stand to remind them that there’s another real person on the other end of the text.

And another real person on the other end of the Real Person, too.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

I want this book: Here Speeching American: A Very Strange Guide to English as It Is Garbled around the World

And you thought Engrish was bad. Examples given in the blurb:

On a Mexican bus: Keep all fours in the bus–eyes only out window

At a hotel in Vietnam: Compulsory Buffet Breakfast

At a temple in Burma: Foot Wearing Prohibited

In a Barcelona travel-agency window: Go Away

At a hotel swimming pool in France: Swimming is forbidden in the absence of the savior

That last one made me laugh until I cried.

And the moral of the story: never, ever use fangirl Japanese, because this is probably what you’d sound like to them.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

Well, now, there’s a thought. Is it possible to be a fan of Story X without being absorbed by/invested in the source text? Can one be a fan of Story X when one only knows it via fanworks?

My knee-jerk reaction is “yes, of course.” Which I find odd, because The Story is the center and heart of my concept of fandom. Yet, rummaging around in my own motivation a little more, perhaps it isn’t so strange. Because I, too, consider my fannish value system a populist one, and, out of a populist value system, should not all textual producers be equal? Why should the official/original version be privileged over the fannish reworkings?

And now I’ve got myself in a real fix, because I do feel the originary text has to have some privilege; it’s the primary source, it’s the one the fanworks derive from.

Yet, sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes fanon overcomes canon, and the text that is central to a given fandom becomes a body of fanworks which are, sometimes quite noticeably, not much based on the originary text. For example, let me return to Gundam Wing.

Well, actually, let me not return to Gundam Wing, but let me try to draw examples from it anyway.

The canon text was, in most quarters, thoroughly drowned out by a majority-accepted fanon text which used the same names but differed significantly in descriptions, characters and plot points (keywords: cobalt, bouncy, hn, safe house). The canon text became co-equal, as a source text, with this fannish production. Details upon which to base further fanworks were taken indiscriminately from either source or both.

GW was certainly fandom. It had all the standard earmarks: passionate investment in the central texts, appropriation of the text, possessiveness of the characters. Was it a fandom consisting of fans of Gundam Wing?

I have to say, yes.

I suppose my reason goes back to my conviction that a text is nothing without its readers, and that the readers are a vital part of how the meaning of any given text is produced. I also feel quite strongly that one of the most basic moves of fandom is to become author as well as reader to the source text. So, if the meaning that a bunch of fans find in a given story is better expressed by the fan telling of that story than the initial telling… that does not divorce them from the initial telling. It just complicates the relationship. A relationship still exists, even if a given fan never lays eyes on the canon text. If it is a relationship that fans who cleave to the initial telling find frivolous, well, upright, everyday, mainstream culture thinks we’re all frivolous, now, doesn’t it?

Which means it might just behoove all of us to practice a shade more tolerance. I do think there’s a difference between saying “that activity/approach/value puts you outside of good/acceptable fandom” or even “outside of fandom period”, and saying “that activity/approach/value makes you a weird fan who’s not like me”.

The latter is just discourse communities working themselves out. It’s the initial gut response to something strange or uncomfortable. What I find unfortunate is when that gut response becomes the basis of one of the former statements–the universalization of one’s own value set, as Cathexys says. Judging a member of one’s own discourse community by the values of that community may get ugly, especially if it’s part of a renegotiation of what that community’s values are. But it is, I would say, part of the basic process of thinking and communicating, and we just have to hack it as best we can. To judge a member of another community by the values of one’s own is pointless; fandom has plenty enough room for incompatible communities to ignore each other.

Of course this gets hugely messy, because we all have more than one community, and there are the questions of redefinition, and recruitment, and influence within larger communities. But I still think the basic principle is a useful one to keep in mind while processing the “Weirdo!” reaction.