(no subject)

Ran my first blatantly red light today. That was entertaining. I just about pulled over and called the cops on myself, I felt so bad. Didn't mean to at all, but I'd never been at that intersection before and I thought I could make it through. As persuant to my luck, it went red right as I crossed the line, thus forcing me to either stop in the middle of the intersection or keep going. Problem was that I was going relatively slowly, so it was a good two and a half seconds of red before the back of the van actually passed through the light, which was what made it so bad.

There are these tiny little bugs flitting around my monitor. I've smushed two of them already, and thus there are two spots of bug juice smearing up the screen. Annoying. They keep coming back, and I have no idea what they are.

Guilty pleasure of the day: Susan/Talia/John Babylon 5 fanfic. Namely, that by leyenn. Found her journal through someone else's icon that went with one of her stories, and turned to the S/T/J after reading all the (well, the one) Susan/Talia she had tagged. Quite enjoyable, though I'm not really a fan of John.

Now I'm really in a Babylon 5 mood.

(no subject)

You've all undoubtedly heard about the latest uproar to hit fandom, so if you just want to skip over this, it's prolly the same things everyone is saying, just with an Alexandria-ranty touch.

There are too many people using LJbook right now for anything to go through. And I'm having to refresh 4 or 5 times on JournalFen and GreatestJournal per page change to get anything to load. That, more than the multitude of posts talking about this is what made me realize how much this LJ Strikeout shit is affecting everybody. So many people are trying to back up their journals for fear of getting deleted that these three sites' bandwidths are being hugely overtaxed. People are terrified without really having any reason to be because of the seemingly indiscriminate deletion.

How far will it go?

I, honestly, wouldn't have a problem with them taking down the communities that do, indeed, violate their TOS (though I've heard that's been changing lately to fit their actions; remind you of any president you know?) by discussing in a promotional way such events. If you're going to make a community where you talk about how you do/plan to/enjoy molesting little girls, you're damn right I think you should go to hell, and if 6A and LJ don't want them on here, I'm all for their right to kick them off.

But, and I'll use this word again, it's the indiscriminate deletion that is absolutely not right.

They've messed up. They acknowledged the possibility of their deleting comms/journals incorrectly in their message to the news (going to CNET instead of us, yet another thing that has me pissed -- as of a few minutes ago when last I checked, no one with authority has posted anything on official LJ comms explaining this), but limited it to perhaps a dozen. Well, that's a dozen comms gone. Let's say that they got an average of 3 posts a day, and they'd been online each for 3 years. That's 39420 posts gone. Add 5 comments off of each post and that's 236520.

Yes, community owners are getting tools to help download the posts on the community, but what are they going to do? Email copies of every post and comment back to the person who wrote it? People are going to end up losing material, plain and simple.

And I don't fault the LJ Abuse team at all, this is obviously a decision from higher up, but what are they going to do about that?


I've come to the conclusion that the whole thing has been mishandled.

As a few of the other posts have said, the news that this Warriors for Innocence (in case some of you haven't heard this, DO NOT GO TO THEIR WEBSITE. It's got spyware up the wazoo.) place is going after LJ has been up for months. People who had a genuine reason for concern are well underground by now.

Legally, LJ/6A are well within their rights. There is no guarantee of free speech on a corporate site like this, and it's in their TOS both that they can get rid of anybody they want for any reason they want and that they can change their TOS at any time. But if they wanted to do this, it's common courtesy to the people who support their site to be a little more careful. Delete the sites that violate the TOS, but determine which sites these are carefully.

There are fandom groups down (which appears to be what's causing the most fuss, since we fandomy types are so interconnected and thus all stick together), I think the biggest name one being pornish_pixies(which I read fics on regularly), but more strikingly, by doing this purge they've knocked out survivor journals and communities that support victims of such abuse. I didn't frequent any of these, I can't even name any of them, but I think that's horrific. By attempting to remove pedophiles from LJ, they're removing support from the people victimied by them.

We support their site with our traffic, our paid and plus accounts, and yet we're being totally ignored in this. People have called the LJ PR rep to be assured that they're working on a statement that will be up immediately. Well, the first post regarding that was hours ago. They seem to have had no trouble making a statement to the news, yet no word to the people that actually make this site what it is. That, rather than any particular loss on my part (because minus losing a group with some pretty good fanfiction, I haven't been particularly impacted as of yet) is why I'm supporting and working with everybody to get some answers in this case. They bungled it. I want an explanation, and I want them to admit that they handled this incorrectly, and I want an apology to those incorrectly deleted.

Most of all, I want an assurance that they're not going to start catering to the interests of whatever corporate sponsor comes along.

I think the scariest thing for LJ as a whole is that LJ/6A caved to this external pressure of the WfI site. There had to have been finances at work; threatened loss of ad money or some such.

What's next? Focus on the Family says they're going to target Livejournal, threatens to have all their supporters pull their ads, and all of a sudden any group having anything to do with homosexuality or extramarital sex in any way is gone? Well, that's most of fandom right there (when did the last fic you read have the two characters wait until they were married to have sex?). The Pittsburgh Steelers say that they're going to pull their ads unless anyone supporting another American football team has the corresponding interests deleted?

It's a slippery slope. I'm working against it.

(no subject)

I've done some more research, and this appears to be what's being sent out in the form letters people whose communities/journals have been suspended are getting. (Source)

"We have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity."

I wanted to pass this along so all of you will look closely at your interests and consider cleaning them up if necessary. I don't want to lose anybody! I've heard that the deletion is still going on, so make sure you're safe from this.