emerald_skies | (no subject) (Reply)

In Racefail 2010 news, apparently the author responsible has friendslocked both her apologies, thus removing a lot of important conversation from public viewing.

Internets, I am at a loss. The only thing I can coherently phrase about that (otherwise I'm restricted to flabbergasted spluttering) is that it lends credence to my theory that the apologies were issued in the first place in an attempt to make the shitstorm stop, rather than out of any actual contrition.

Holy crap, that was an impressive run-on sentence. Anyway! The most obvious guess as to reasons for friendslocking is to keep out trolls, but I have to wonder if some of it was an attempt to restrict her feedback to (at least by her hopes) more sympathetic points of view.

I hope that fails. I hope her friends call her out on this crap. She shouldn't just get to walk away from it when PoC (and anyone else hurt by this sort of thing) have to live with the pain or, arguably worse, the resignation that yet another mainstream(ish) medium has failed yet again.

Also, in the course of poking around some of

amazonziti's excellent linkspam, I came across an incident in which someone contacted the SPN Big Bang mods to ask for a rule against exploitative/racist works and the mods responded thusly:

"We're not going to across-the-board censor what people create."

Which, when taken at face value (that is to say, ignoring the question), sounds fine, I guess. But consider the existing rules for the challenge (which I found in one of the links), ways that mods already "censor" people's pieces:

1. Stories must have a minimum length of 20,000 words. There is no maximum length.
3. The central story element must focus on characters from Supernatural OR on Jared and/or Jensen.
3a. In Supernatural fics, at least one character must be a canon character (one seen on-screen). Any Supernatural pairing is allowed.
3b. In RPS, any pairing is allowed, as long as either Jared or Jensen is one of the central paired characters.
FOR EXAMPLE: Misha/Jared or Jensen/Genevieve is allowed, Misha/Genevieve is not.
ADDITIONAL: Yes, you can write a menage or "moresome" as long as Jared and/or Jensen is part of that grouping.
6. AU's are allowed. Crossovers are not.
8. Stories must be beta'd.

And yet a rule against exploitation/racism is evidently going too far. I don't even know what to say to that that isn't capslocked expletives, so I'm going to let Nathan Fillion say it for me:

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Also, I wanted to go back and clarify something I said in one of my earlier posts -- more specifically, when I said to comment where y'all see fit but asked to limit bullying/personal attacks wherever possible. I belatedly realized that this sounds vaguely like the Tone Argument, which isn't how I meant it at all. Quite frankly, I think the Tone Argument is a gigantic pile of B.S. on an epic scale, what I was getting at is a request to avoid stalker-esque, scary-bordering-on-illegal behavior. I'm not trying to spare anyone's delicate little feelings in this whole fiasco.

What I should've said, I guess, is to try to avoid doing or saying things that you'll regret later (such as death threats or telling offending parties to kill themselves). I know you're a reasonable and (mostly) sane lot, internets, but anger can bring out some pretty surprising things in people so I just felt like that needed to be said.

Urgh. I'm getting a sense of general ennui from my flist, so I'm thinking about doing a Happy Post to try to recharge our emotional batteries; a party post of sorts in which everyone posts pictures, gifs, music, fics, etc. that makes them happy in the hopes of making other people happy. Sort of like my Gifstravaganza post but with a theme and a more general scope. Thoughts?

*glances up* Holy Great Wall of Text...jeez, have a gif for y'all's time
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