total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

One of my previous posts about what kinds of historical change might have surprised Captain America after he was woken up from a 70-year-long period of hibernation has gotten linked around enough that I'm a bit overwhelmed by comments from nice and enthusiastic people I've never met before. This is flattering, and I'm grateful, but ... OK, a couple of things.

So, first: hello! I'm glad you're here. I'm overwhelmed enough that I am not even going to try to respond to the types of queries about stuff that can easily be figured out with a little googling - you are going to have to take your hat-related questions elsewhere, I'm sorry to say.

Second, to sum up, because I seem to be repeating this a lot in responding to comments: It actually makes no difference to me at all whether you get the small details right (either marvel-canonical or historical.) I know it matters to you whether Captain America would have listened to 78s or 45s, or whatever, and that's great. But that wasn't my point here.

My point was that I keep reading fics which make two very very very wrong assumptions. First, they assume that Steve Rogers grew up in a sexually repressive place and time (particularly, a homophobic one.) Here, the fic writers are assuming that 1945 was just like 1955 - or else just assuming that the past was always all the same. No no no! 1945 was a lot more like, say, 1970 in terms of social mobility and relatively relaxed sexual mortality than it was like 1955. If you write fics in which Steve doesn't know where babies come from, or would punch any man who made a pass at him ... well, you are going to have to explain how it was that he came to be so out of step with just about everyone else in the military in 1945.

And the other wrong assumption made in some of these fics was that the most interesting things about the fic writer's lives in the present day (mostly sex, movies, music, computers and related devices - also, clothing) would also be the biggest surprises to thawed-out Steve Rogers. They might or might not be interesting and/or surprising to him, but they would be much, much less surprising to him than changes in racial hierarchy, gender hierarchy, social class, and economic structure. Those would truly shock a white American man who suddenly went from 1945 to 2010. (As they might shock a non-white American woman, for that matter.) How Steve reacts to all these changes is up to the fic writer, but to have him not even remark on having an African-American commanding officer while being gobsmacked by an iPad is, to me, silly enough that I'll back-button right out of a fic that does it.

So that's what I was trying to say. It's interesting to see so many people coming to have related conversations, and I encourage that! But I'd appreciate it if people would at least skim through the comments others have made first, so they're not repeating each other, and I would also appreciate it if people would link to this post rather than to any of the others. Here are the links for all of them:

First post, LJ version

First post, DW version

Second post, DW version

Second post, LJ version

All of them have some really great discussions going on, so please read through those comments!



*****

I've been reading a lot of Avengers fics - there's been a lot to read - and I've been liking many of these fics quite a lot. Except that there's this one thing that's driving me crazy, so crazy that I keep having to back-button out of perfectly good fics before Nick Fury and the Hulk can even begin to get their freak on, which is kind of tragic. So in case you were thinking of writing anything in the Marvel-verse ever, and you were hoping to avoid me making sad puppy-eyes face, please, please, please consider this question carefully:

( What would surprise Captain America in 2012? )

... yeah, anyway, there's a lot for him to catch up on.

But not sex. Really there's not too much new there at all.



ETA: Wow, that's ... a lot ... of comments. I'm glad you're here and will try to respond eventually, but no promises. In the meantime, if you are thinking about commenting here, please read this first. Thank you!




*****

I bet you anything her husband sparkles in direct sunlight.

Hey! This is the Buffy/Firely crossover fic I wrote for remixredux08:

Where the River Meets the Dawn (the Strobe Lights and the Disco Remix)

If it doesn't suck, which I'm not saying that it doesn't suck, but to the extent that it doesn't suck, that's because three people did amazing beta work on a very rough draft at very very very short notice: executrix, goseaward mulberryfields.

This is the second story I've written with Caridad (a minor Slayerette who has, I think, three lines total in Season 7 of Buffy) as a protagonist. One of the betas for the first one, idlerat, gave me some excellent advice about POV for that first story ("Other People," which is here) that I completely ignored at the time. But I remembered it and took it when I came around to writing another Caridad story. So thanks to her as well for time-release beta.

Remix was interesting and mostly fun, in a scary way. I'd do it again.

Hey! Look at this cool story somebody made out of one of my drabbles! Isn't that amazing?

Meanwhile, I am dying for the week of anonymity to be over - dying, I tell you - so that I can properly, publicly thank my three amazing betas. Four, really, if you count that I finally did in this fic what idlerat told me to do in the last one.

Okay, so, the bad news is that I write crappy fics, and not all that many of them, and only in two fandoms. The good news is that I truly, honestly, don't care what you do to these fics. So go wild!

Anything you find on the index page is fair game, and you can do whatever you like to it. In my mind, all the "Meetings with Remarkable Muggles" drabbles take place in the same universe, but you don't have to agree with me on that point (or any other point.) You will find that I don't do plot, so if you wanted to shape any of these into an actual story ... you know, the kind with a beginning and a middle and an end? Well, I'd be tickled. But you don't have to, not at all. I am thrilled that you're doing this and I promise you that whatever you come up with will delight me. And it's not like you could make any of these stories worse, you know?

See you in April!

The website scotlandonsunday is quoting Time Warner reps as saying that they have been behind the "crackdown on Harry Potter homosexual porn." Link is here. Thanks to logovo1 for the reference.

Shit.


...

If waiting for Book Seven is causing you fits (or even if it's not) allow me to recommend HP Widdershins, Dido's wonderful (and beautifully illustrated) version of how it could all work out if only Harry, Hermione, and Dudley used Harry's money and some common sense. Yes I said Dudley. Just trust me.

This is the comment I am trying to post in response to Berkowitz's apology, on behalf of LJ, which is over here. Shockingly, the servers are busted. So.

Having spent much of the past two days trying to track which journals did get suspended, and which journals were deleted for fear of suspension, and what kinds of journals they were, I agree that these are hard issues. There are vast grey areas here.

Very, very few Livejournals clearly announce that their participants intend to prey on children; lots of adults engage in activities together which, if they allowed or encouraged children to join them, would be dangerous, illegal, and morally wrong. Some of those activities, if conducted in virtual spaces that are accessible to a broader public might unintentionally provide support or encouragement to people who prey on children. These include -- just as not-so-random examples -- literary analysis of Nabokov's novel Lolita, communal gameplaying set in the Harry Potter universe which places teenage characters in sexual situations, sharing of reproduced pornographic artwork from Japanese comic books depicting imaginary young people, personal musings on surviving sexual violence and abuse, and discussions of shared interest in having sex while dressed up in teddy-bear costumes. The grayest of gray areas was the fetish sites where adults pretended to be children for pornographic role-play purposes. This week's purge shut down personal journals and/or communities devoted to all of those.

I am an enthusiastic participant in some of those activities, unmoved by others, and repulsed by several. But I can't find a clear line that divides them from each other in moral, esthetic, or legal terms -- much as I might like to, in the case of the those activities that disgust me. They all might, possibly, be used by pedophiles for masturbatory purposes, even though that is not the intention of the journal authors/artists.

So I urge you (and the collective LiveJournal "you" as well) to think more carefully about exactly what journals you are looking to weed out, even if that means going slowly in reinstating any. You can't purge every journal that a pedophile might find arousing -- it's a hopeless task. You can try to ban pedophiles, and I hope you do. But please, err on the side of openness. Remember that nearly everything all of us do on LJ is going to offend somebody and be used as jerk-off material for somebody else; you can't prevent that. Good luck.

p.s. if it helps, here's the posts where I tried to sort out the clearest mistaken deletions, with a little help from a lot of pissed-off LJistas:

http://lolaraincoat.livejournal.com/253978.html

http://lolaraincoat.livejournal.com/254490.html

Hello! I'm not going to respond any further to comments on this post. The most relevant information -- which I think can't be found elsewhere -- is now collected in short form in this post here. Thanks to all who contributed information and links. This was extremely interesting, and I'm going to bed now.

=============
[10 AM EST]
Good morning everyone! This post has evolved into a listing of journals affected by Strikeoutgate. Please comment if you know of any that are not on the lists here. I may add related information and commentary as time allows and the spirit moves me, or I may not. But all I really want to do here is come up with as complete and accurate a listing as I can. I am categorizing the journals by their intent (primarily intended to support child abuse and pedophiles, or not) so please advise me if I've gotten that wrong. Thanks for all your help so far, and thanks in advance for your further assistance!

Two consecutive posts on my f'list complain that Livejournal just purged the community pornish_pixies and two journals which were part of an entirely unrelated role-playing game, lightning_war, for Terms-of-Service reasons. (See ataniell93's recent unlocked post for the Lightning War story and two recent unlocked posts by femmequixotic for the Pornish Pixies mess and LJ's explanation to her of why they permanently suspended the community.)

This is worrying. Anyone else heard anything about these or related incidents? Who else out there has gone missing?

********************

eta.1 Two communities that requested not to be named here were deleted by mods, not suspended by lj. The same goes for sirry (now moved to GreatestJournal), hp_incest, hpslash, grave_robbers and chimeracafe too.

eta.1.a The same might be true for yaoi_drabbles, demoncest, batwingcurls, cpop_slash, love_or_death and sg1_rps -- that is, they recently have been deleted by mods, for reasons that may possibly be related to this current mess, but they were not suspended by LJ and I don't know if the deletion had anything to do with Strikeoutgate or not.

eta.1.a.i Turns out SG1-RPS was deleted by its mod several months ago for unrelated reasons. Also dirtydrabble's mod is about to delete the comm for reasons unrelated to Strikeoutgate, and the mod of ppettigrew deleted the comm last month for reasons unrelated to Strikeoutgate..

eta.2 Two people so far from a couple of my friends' flists also suspended: yaoi_slut and lynntownsend. Also suspended and apparently part of fannish circles: onewavebreaks, malakijr, athena2693, pushtyber, joeykaiba and omg_a_terrorist.

eta.2.b And here is a list of 22 other suspended individual journals, all belonging to members of ageplay communities (some of whom may have been pedophiles, but some apparently harmless consenting-adult fetishists.) Scroll down; the list is the first comment you'll see.

eta.2.c Besides the two RPG character journals from lightning_war which were suspended, and another journal from a different HP RPG which was deleted by the mod as a precaution, a charcter journal for a Hikaru no Go character, ogata, was also suspended.

eta.5 Hey, might this be related to the current fight over deletion between the US govt and MySpace? Probably not, at least not directly. It's much more likely to be LJ's response to the ... well, see ETA #6.

eta.6 Liz Marcs has a fascinating post about her exchange with an entity which seems to be devoted to internet purification, and which is probably related to all this, over here. The sequel to Liz Marcs' post is here. The apparent miscreants disclaim responsibilty. Hmmm.

eta.6.a The organization (or person calling herself an organization?) with which Liz Marcs was communicating now says that LJ "has shut down hundreds of ... sites" at their behest (link redacted because their site has mucho malware, reportedly.) I'm not seeing anything like those numbers. What or who have I missed?

eta.6.b And see also this website for another group pushing LJ to delete journals. This one seems better organized and more legit, but still confused about the difference between fannish/literary expressions and social, political or material support for child abuse.


eta.7 these were fannish/literary comms:

shota suspended.
wonkaslash suspended.
brokenboys suspended.
resident_pervs suspended.
lolita07 (a Spanish site for the discussion of the Nabokov novel!) suspended.
lol_porn suspended.
heterocest suspended.
artsnarry suspended.
incestories suspended.
boysfuckingboys suspended.
afamilyaffair suspended.
sbrb_blackcest suspended.
pornish_pixies suspended.
master_badtouch suspended.
gimmehellopro suspended.
riddle_torture suspended.


these were, as far as I can tell, comms intended primarily to support and/or encourage pedophilia:

childlove suspended - this one was a genuine pedophile site, rather than literary or fannish.
incestuouslove suspended. What kind of comm was this? A genuine pedophile comm.
disgusting_lust suspended. What kind of comm was this? Another genuine pedophile site.
little_children suspended. Pedophiles. About a third of its 68 members either were suspended or deleted their journals.
ljincest suspended. Pedophiles.
And fifteen other comms supporting pedophilia, rape and/or bestiality, which are listed here, in a comment from intrepid researcher iverin whose stomach and google-fu are both very strong.


and these comms were ... I can't tell. Anybody?

____loli_lovin
violentboylove
fetishconfess
rape_porn
ageplaywithsex
razorblade_jinx

eta.8 heidi8 helpfully dug up the DNS information of the group that's probably responsible for some or all of this; it's here. (I very rudely linked to Heidi's post when it was locked, and she very graciously unlocked it. Thanks Heidi!)

eta.9 Does this seem like something Mina de Malfois would make up, or is that just me?

eta.10 jamoche is keeping track of responses from LJ Abuse to owners of deleted comms/journals over here. You can post anonymously there and responses are screened.

eta.11 dorrie6 has started a comm on Greatestjournal (friendslocked) for discussion of all this: Fandomtossed is here.

eta.13 bookshop would like mods of suspended comms and individuals whose journals were suspended to get in touch with her or with femmequixotic - they're organizing a collective response by the affected parties, I believe. See also this post on fandom_lawyers

eta.14 Many posters have been linking to this blog's list of suspended LJs. It's not complete and not entirely accurate, but it's got a lot that aren't up here. Lots of names, too, at this post on innocence_jihad, the point of which seems to be to demonstrate that support communities for survivors of incest and rape seem not to have been suspended in the big purge.