The power of waffling.

I’ve always said, repeatedly ever since I got my lj and started to engage with fandom, that I didn’t want to fragment my life. I don’t want to keep my real life and my fandom life separate; I don’t want to keep my real life friends separate from my online ones. The idea of even attempting to do that is ridiculous, because there’s so much overlap and because I’m so heavily engrained in internet culture as part of what I do actively in real life.

Working at probation was hard for me because I HAD to keep my fandom life out of my real life so I wound up doing things like locking my entire LJ, deleting entries when real life people found them, and signing up for Facebook as a J-pop idol and not myself, haha. It was all very frenetic and stressful.

But now I have a job where my co-workers write Smallville fanfic and call each other Lostheads. So, yeah. I feel free to unseparate everything once again, and it feels great.

Except. Except.

This whole LJ thing.

Ugh, this whole LJ thing. Should I stay or should I go? Should I attempt to turn my livejournal into something that can adapt into this new phase of my life, or should I just start over (the way, for example, Dorrie has so charmingly done, the way I have been trying and awkwardly failing to do here on this blog) and make something completely new?

And if I want to make a blog that is completely new, can I stand to lose that connection that I have had with my LJ community? I mean, the answer is really, really, no. But at the same time, with that sense of connectedness comes a sense of expectation, and I want to break away from that as much as from LJ specifically. But then - what are my options?

Can I have both?

I want both. I want to have LJ and LJ’s community and I want to have a space that feels self-contained, separate, apart, like starting over. Something not particularly tied to fandom, but specifically tied to me.

The tricky part is that I, at this point, can’t and don’t want to extricate myself from fandom. But at the same time, I want a blog that doesn’t come with fandom expectations.

So, to sum up:

1) I want a blog that doesn’t come with fandom expectations.
2) But I don’t want to separate out my life into fandom/real life
3) I want to keep my connections to my LJ friends and my fandom community on LJ
4) But I’m still quite upset and unhappy with the prospect of coming back to LJ itself.

So, yeah. I just don’t know what to do with myselllllf.

It’s that time again, baby!

It’s not protocol to deliver your speech 6 months before the awards ceremony, but I just want to thank Reena, Dana, and our techhie Dave for the hard work they’ve all put forth to create the new BBB Forums. They’re fantastic, and they’ve set the tone, I think, for how amazing this final round of the Big Bang is going to be.We’re extremely proud of this one, and we’re hoping you will all join us for this last round. <3 Follow the link to the forums and check us out!

like meat <3’s salt.

this says so much about where my headspace is lately. ♥

in other news, i watched Samurai Champloo this weekend. Loved it. loved it. Read Samurai Champloo fic in all variations of the OT3 today. I think this is the first time I’ve ever actively shipped a trio. But god, they all just love each other so much. I didn’t know that sort of dynamic was irresistible to me, but maybe it is, a little.

Also irresistible to me? Gay serial killers. And stoics with glasses.

And i’m starting to wish my anime kinks weren’t so predictable.

Do they make a patch for that?

Me: i’ve had it. i have had it! YOU AND I ARE QUITS, LIVEJOURNAL. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
LJ: Whatever. Three months and you’ll be crawling back. You always come crawling back.
Me: THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK. SEE THIS? THIS IS THE FLAMING SIGN OF MY COMMITMENT TO JUSTICE!
LJ: …you realise that shirt’s not actually on fire.
Me: OH, SCREW YOU. GOODBYE FOREVER, LJ.
LJ: yeah, yeah, don’t let the new portal blind you on the way out!

Read the rest of this entry »

it’s not *for* you.

Apart from the ONTD report and the Fandom_Wank summary, I have read no fandom takes on the JKR-Lexicon suit whatsoever.

But I really, really hope that all of you guys in HP fandom (and fandom at large) are saying the same thing, because if there is anything I feel fandom should be unified about 100% of the time, it’s this:

Playing with someone else’s creation is a privilege, not a right. When that person or their estate is still profiting from their creative works, it becomes even more of a privilege of the fan who interprets that work however they choose.

From everything I have heard about JKR’s interactions with the high-profile organizers of TLC and the Lexicon and so forth, she seems to have held them in great affection, to have seen them as guardians of the spirit of the HP books. I am completely disgusted that one of them has not only taken her trust and abused it, but also, in doing so, jeopardized the incredibly gracious relationship HP fans have had with Rowling for so long.

I think it is possible for fans to get so caught up in the idea that we own a piece of what we love that we see ourselves as having free reign over it. But no matter how much you invest of your own creative energy in fandom, you are still doing so by the grace of the person who originally wrote the work you love so much. No matter how much time, energy, page-flipping and bookworming Steve Vander Ark may have genuinely invested in the Lexicon, the product of that investment is ultimately still no more or less “his” than Love Under Will is mine, or any fan author or artist’s work is “theirs.”

Yes, it is theirs in spirit. But in terms of copyright law, Vander Ark, and every single one of us, produce and distribute our work in the shade of infringement. That we do it and get away with it is solely by the grace of the original author - in this case an author who has been exceptionally benevolent, gracious, and generous to the HP fandom. She has encouraged us to make her world ours over and over again. She has taken fandom to heart and listened to the many things her fans have said through their own creative works.

But that is her prerogative and her move to make, because it is her world we play in.

It sort of routinely boggles my mind that fans still forget this - the cardinal rule of being a producer of fan work: it is not legally permissible for you to profit off of works you create, if those works deal with a previously produced and still-copyrighted source. It doesn’t matter that SVA thinks his hard work and effort negate the fact that he is exerting that work cataloguing and archiving someone else’s writing: it’s still illegal. The Lexicon still, just as we all do, operates by the grace of Jo Rowling. What allows it to exist is its not-for-profit status.

When fans seek to change that status into something they can capitalize on, they jeopardize the give-and-take relationships fandom is forming and strengthening with authors and publishers, and they damage the tenuous trust that exists between us. Fans trust the author to understand that we do what we do out of love for the canon they’ve given us; the author trusts us fans not to attempt to infringe upon their hard work and their own efforts at producing that work for us to enjoy.

This lawsuit is an extremely bad scene for all of us, fans and authors and publishers alike. HP fandom has been tarnished by this. The industry is going to be watching the outcome of this case very carefully, because the outcome could have a huge impact upon how authors and publishers deal with online fanworks. There is just no way for this to end well.

I hate that one fan with an ego has put us in this position. I am extremely grateful at the moment for the Organization for Transformative Works, because at the very least, its ideas and its methods are helping to counteract the kind of appropriating fan Vander Ark is turning into, the kinds of fan publishers send C&D letter after.

No matter how you look at it - ethically and legally Vander Ark is in the wrong. That he initially asked for and was refused permission to go through with the book and did it anyway shows clearly that, however he started out, he is more a fan of Steve Vander Ark than of Jo Rowling and Harry Potter.

And ultimately that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it: respect for the author and their universe. SVA has shown that he has neither. If he did, he would have respected that “No, you cannot profit off what I have created” means exactly that: profiting from your fan works is illegal.

It’s also reprehensible. HP fandom, I hope you do not support the Lexicon in this endeavor in any way. It is a slap in the face to JKR, and it is a slap in the face to every fan who has ever gratefully toiled, invested, and slaved over a fan project purely for the love of the canon.

Not for profit.