total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

This will be of special interest to Justin Timberlake fans, but it's kind of brilliant even if you've never heard of him. Click here. NSFW by the way, but only a little bit.


Otherwise, as some of you know, I have been at home a lot lately recuperating from an annoying but absolutely not-life-threatening illness, and waiting around for the next medical thing to happen. This has led to a certain amount of messing around on YouTube. I recommend looking up vids of HBCU marching bands if you ever feel glum at all or in any way not optimistic about the human condition. There's no one perfect one to show you all, but try googling around for Jacksonville's marching band, and also Howard U.'s homecoming parades.



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Look! It's SCIENCE!

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Yes, yes, I will post my vacation pics and Deep Thoughts any minute now (I know you desperately await) but first:

So I was away from the internet for a few weeks - that would be approximately three lifetimes in Internet Years - and when I came back this whole Laura Hale thing was happening, which you of course are bored of already, but just in case you've been away too, the deal is, Laura Hale is a fan who has insisted on linking the real-life names and fannish identities of a number of people, and now there's a big fuss about it. So something bethbethbeth just posted about this mess reminded me that not so long ago, I got in trouble for outing Laura Hale. My hand to God.

It wasn't very much trouble, I have to confess, and it isn't a very exciting story. This was just about two years ago, during the last iteration of the whole Cassie plagiarism mess, and I posted something about why I wasn't too worried about it, and ... well, here's the relevant passage from my post:

Someone who then called herself "Michelle Ecks" and later went by [name deleted at the request of the LJ Abuse team, sorry, the full name gets thrown around enough on journalfen that I didn't think ... my fault, very sorry, gah], or "halegirl," or more recently purplepopple, seems to be central to the whole story. Halegirl was on my f'list for a while -- she's the person who posted last year sometime boasting about helping to teach highschool students how to write smuttier smut -- and she's ... let's say that her worldview and my worldview are not closely congruent. Now, that does not mean that she was wrong on this particular matter. But it does make me feel cautious.

Yep. Somebody called in LJ Abuse! Because I wrote Laura Hale's name in the same post as her username! Right at the same time as she was claiming (as we now learn from Beth's post) to have outed Heidi to her employer!

(The full post is here, for the sake of completeness.)

I suppose I should be more indignant than entertained, but somehow I'm not. Oh internets, how I've missed you.

Hey, has anyone made a due South vid to that Sufjan Stevens song "Chicago"? If not, why not?

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.


...

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.

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[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?

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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.

I'm on dial-up until laptop returns to me (the service people haven't even called back with a diagnosis yet, after a full week, which is Not A Good Sign) and also am busier than I have ever been before in my whole busy life. Yet I still am doing my share of random clicking around. Or slightly more than my share. So this was the fruit of my random clicking this morning:

Did you know that Fiona Apple's (shut up, I like "Extraordinary Machine") brother is the actor who played the cop's sidekick/hippie anthropologist on "The Sentinel"?

Yeah, you knew that already, plus long ago you wrote some very kinky RPF about the whole family, including ironic observations about how every actor/media person in the world (or at least New York and environs) has worked on Days of Our Lives at least once.

So send me the link already, okay?

eta I'm sure I'll be sorry that I asked, but who is this Ken Wahl of whom you tell me?