Fandominium

The vasty fields of LiveJournal are ablaze with the smoking husks of half-a-thousand accounts and communities, all silenced in the wake of a kind of crusade against perceived indecency. Long story short, the powers-that-be at LiveJournal/Six Apart were approached by a group claiming to represent the best interests of children. Apparently, the threat had the stench to it of a “To Catch A Predator” sting, so LJ/6A pulled the plug on any profile who listed certain predilectory interests. Chaos ensued, as the mass comatosing affected not only unsavory stalker-types, but a number of communities who engage in either some kind of fan fiction involving young wizards and the like or users who enjoy certain fetishes that roleplay in a child-like direction.

That, in a nutshell, is it. As of this morning, there is an official (belated) explanation from LiveJournal available. If you need to know more, there’s a great thread going on Metafilter, Nikki’s made an excellent point on her own blog, Alyssa’s posted to her LJ about it and — if that wasn’t all — there have been a number of LJ communities (like metafandom) that are documenting the whole thing with a thoroughness that would make Ken Burns blush through his beard with shame and inadequacy.

While the rest of the world blazes away, I’ve decided instead to take and expand upon a moment of idiocy from the comment I left on Nikki’s blog. So, without further ado, allow me to inspire an entirely new fandom: Perry Mason / Barnaby Jones.

Men of Justice.

And no, nothing says this has to be slashy. They can just be pals that have all kinds of excellent adventures. So here’s my gauntlet and I’m throwing it down. I want one or more of you good people to write me some awesome Mason / Jones fanfic. Come on … I’m waiting.

[tags]fandom, LiveJournal, Six Apart[/tags]

May 31, 2007 – 11:17 am | By Thomas | Posted in Geekery, Observations | Comments (4)
  • http://www.missmisc.com Alyssa

    Don’t threaten – I know people who can provide :D

  • http://www.ramp-music.net/ If

    This post is a seriously misleading summary of the situation. I’m tempted to go so far as “ridiculously misleading”.

    There are no smoking husks. The journals are being reinstated — most probably were reinstated by the time you posted this. The thing you’re calling an explanation is an apology. I mean, a real one: The subject line of the post is “Well, we really screwed this one up…”

    This posts leads people to believe that LJ has nuked five hundred accounts and communities and then this morning posted an explanation as to why they did so. The actuality is that LJ made a mistake and posted a “OMG that was stupid, we’re sorry and we’re fixing it,” note. These are two very different situations.

    I find this especially egregious in that you’ve posted it outside of LJ, so a whole bunch of people who don’t know anything about the situation are going to go away with the totally wrong idea.

  • Thomas

    Three things.

    First, when situations like these are already covered so well by the rest of the blogosphere, I tend to write my posts with a bit more hyperbole than usual. Hence, “smoking husks” rather than “temporarily disabled accounts awaiting review.” And really, if you look at the degree of fomentation that the LJ community posts have reached, what I’ve written here is nothing. LJ folk are posting the lyrics to the POTC “sea shanty of justice,” for God’s sake. Yo ho, yo ho …

    LJ made a mistake based on sketchy information and veiled threats from an unauthorized source. About 24 hours later, they posted their explanatory apology. In the time between, the affected LJ-folk (and many others) went ballistic. Clean it up all you want, but the timing and lack of transparency was atrocious.

    Thing two. I provided several links for my readers to delve as deep as they wanted into the wheres and why-fors of the whole debacle.

    Third and lastly … my posts all appear in LiveJournal via syndicated RSS-feed at http://syndicated.livejournal.com/grabbingsand_lj/. I have an LJ account of my own and the profile directs any interested parties to keep up with my posts either here or through the syndicated feed. So those that have my feed in their f’list will see exactly what you’ve read here.

  • http://pushthepulldoor.com/ Bill

    Thomas, your yellow journalism has finally been called out. You’re an obvious muckraker, and perhaps even a sandbagger (all of the above are words I learned in seventh grade civics, and I tend to confuse their meanings). Anyway, I’m glad someone finally tracked down your personal blog and accused it of posting hyperbole and commentary based at least partially on opinion. That wandering web vigilante should be applauded. Only about 200 million blogs to go, friend of justice!

    On a somewhat related note this post: As you may know, I work on the web staff for a couple of cable TV networks. Well, just last week a highly ranked muckety muck in my company sent a suggestion, via email, to my boss’s boss. The suggestion was eventually passed down to me, though I’m not sure what to do with it. The emailer basically wanted us to build a site where people could write their own stories using our characters. She thought it would be great if they could write their own scripts and share what they would have the characters do if they were in charge of the shows. Apparently, this higher-up just found a site on the net where they had a contest based on just such a thing and thought it would be a good fit for us.

    I’m really hoping I don’t have to execute this idea. I’m not sure if the world needs more Family Guy slash fiction…