Mari Ness

From the New York Times: Harper Collins creates unit that will not offer advances to writers, but will offer profit sharing.

I have to admit, I'm not sure what to think about this, but I am wondering what this might mean for midlist and new authors, at least some of whom spend their advances on promoting the book. Will the publishing house make up for the lack of advances with more advertising revenue? If not, do they have another marketing plan so that everyone will have profits to share? That was just my first thought. I'm sure I'm missing all kinds of aspects of this, especially since I've only had a few sips of coffee so far this morning.

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In completely unrelated news, LJ seems to be mucking up my friends page -- entries are appearing completely out of order and I've apparently missed some important entries. If you think I've missed something that I should know about, tell me via email. For a number of unrelated reasons I won't be checking LJ much over the next couple of days in any case, but I'll try to catch up.

So I'm alas quite aware that my entries have been a little thin of actual content lately, when they've been there at all. I'd like to tell you that this is because I'm caught up in an evil government conspiracy to hid the truth from you that the Wii is, indeed, a sophisticated methodology of brain control, oh, and that aliens, as it turns out, refuse to come out in public because, let's face it, they look like circus clowns, and no amount of makeup can disguise that terrorizing effect.

It's not that I don't have things to write about -- I do, with half planned and completely unfinished entries about movies, Tin Man, getting rid of all but one of my bras, some new teas at Teavana, an annoyed response to Mitt Romney's religion speech of yesterday which declared, among other things, that agnostics like myself are not Americans, and that we need to bring religion back into the public sphere, ignoring the very visible presence of large churches, synagogues, mosques and Christmas lights and menorahs all over the place at the moment; the U.S. may be many things, but hostile to religion, no. Hostile to agnostics, apparently. (Hmm. Apparently my rant was already written in my mind.) And so on. But it's more that I just haven't found myself writing about any of these, for whatever reason.

I suspect things will change after December 17, when I'll have full access to Livejournal at work and can return to my old habits of blogging as a thought comes to me. In the meantime, I can give you more Muppets:

A number of you just kindly pointed me to this bit of news about the recent sale of Livejournal. Countdown t-minus 10 seconds and counting to the point where various fandom communities ask, hopefully, if LJ is now following Russia's obscenity and age-of-consent laws instead of California's.

On a mildly related note, journals can now only have 1000 tags per journal/community. This I actually think is a good thing for me since I put pretty much no thought into my tags whatsoever, and this might stop my habit of throwing in random tags every which way on my journals. Maybe.

In completely unrelated news, my viewing of Tin Man was interrupted by excellent conversation and unexpected pizza, but fear not: the SciFi channnel is so convinced that I must see this that it's on again now and will be on again still later and will be on again tomorrow, so eventually I may actually get a chance to see the various bits I missed. I will say, however, what's up with the shoulder armor on the sorceress' shoulders, and is she allowed to sue the producers for putting her into that painful and unattractive of a costume?

Unlike most of you, I don't read LJ News, so when several of the recent posts on my friends list started warning me that "You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors," I figured that everyone was doing a crazy new meme or you guys were really getting into the hard core porn.

And then I clicked through the first one. It was a post about --

cuddling.

Yes, cuddling.

Then the second. A post about --

teddy bears. And no, this post did not go where you would think an "adult content" teddy bear post should be going.

I blinked, then figured this was some obscure LJ joke that I'd missed what with being a bit busy with real life stuff this week and trying to be Agile and Scrummy while also being Search Engine Optimized, which is quite a trick. (You either know the meaning of the last part of that sentence, or you don't. Never mind if you don't.)

But no.

As it turns out, this is part of LJ's shining new feature which allows posters to flag their posts as having adult content, divided into two categories: suitable for readers over 14, or suitable for readers over 18. The dividing line here isn't clear. And -- you can flag other people's posts too. That's the problematic part.

Now, perhaps I've just been lucky, but in well over five years on Lj I've only seen about three or four posts with potentially inappropriate or not work safe content appear on my friends list that were not a) locked and filtered to appropriate people and b) behind a lj-cut clearly labelling them as locked and filtered. So I have to question just how necessary this feature is to begin with. Sure, Lj has some....interesting stuff, to say the least, but these communities have done a laudable job of keeping the objectionable content locked to users who at least say that they're 18 or older.

Which brings me to my next problem with this feature:

To access any of this "adult content" all I had to do was click a button asserting that I was over 14, or in the case of box_in_the_box that I was over 18, and with that, I could access the supposedly objectionable posts, just like that, with absolutely no confirmation other than my say-so that I was indeed over 14 or over 18. A six year old could easily get pass this -- and I'll add that a statement warning me that I had to be 18 or older to read a specific post was exactly the sort of statement that would have made the 13 year old me determined to read the post.

So the feature doesn't even block adult content: all it does is wave a flag saying "WOOHOO! ADULT CONTENT! OVER HERE, KIDS!" In the meantime, because it's "adult content," I have to click on the link, and then, in some cases, assure Lj that yes, yes I really am old enough to read about teddy bears.

But that still dances around my main problem with this feature, which is, simply put:

The Internet, and the computer, is not a parent.

It is not my job, as a blogger, to protect your children. First, from the admittedly unstatistical sampling of my friends with children, I have made the following discoveries: 1) parents differ on what they believe is appropriate for their children to view/watch/read/be aware of, and 2) children mature at different rates, and what may be appropriate for one eight year old may not be appropriate for another eight year old, which is a judgement that a parent, not me, is in a far better position to make. I don't know your children.. I don't know what they are capable or not capable of dealing with, and I don't know what you want them to deal with. That's up to you, and them. Not me. Most of my friends would be rightfully offended (and alarmed) if I started to tell them what they should and should not allow their children to view or read. After all, they know their kids. I don't.

(I'll add that yes, I did find some inappropriate material when I was a kid -- I read Wifey when I was seven and didn't understand most of it, and I found some Penthouses when I was able to understand most of it, and I survived. I suspect I'm not alone in this.)

And if, as a parent, you have concerns about what your kids might be doing/seeing on the Internet, you do have a couple of solutions: One, you can be in the area when your kids are surfing the net, and two, you can use the handy little "history" tab on Microsoft Explorer and Firefox and see what sites they're heading to.

So, to sum up: the feature doesn't mark actual adult content, doesn't prevent kids from viewing actual adult content, and tries to create an inappropiate parenting role. Can we kill it now, please?

(On a minor note, and I don't mean to offend the people that posted the cuddling and teddy bears things, but when I click on something labelled as "adult content" I wanna see, you know, adult content, which your posts, no offense, weren't. Can we have some actual adult content for these posts, please? Thanks :))

LJ News is full of excitable squeaking that Lj is suspending journals again, without notice.

A few thoughts and problems here:

1) As queerbychoice and others have noticed, Livejournal has chosen to use California's age of consent, 18, which is not the age of consent in all countries or even all U.S. states. What this means is that LJ may be restricting writing about activities that may be perfectly legal for the user, since not all of LJ's users live in California.

2) Despite a major firestorm the last time this happened, LJ has gone back to the suspending without warning. Since I didn't see the material I frankly have no idea if the suspensions were justified or not, but I would agree that it might have been better to give the users 24 hours to take down any offending material.

3) And to those in the fandom community: you know that this sort of thing can happen -- and by "this sort of thing" I mean suspensions of and deletions of material deemed to violate copyright. And why? Because Warner Brothers, J.K. Rowling, et. al have every right to defend their copyrighted material.

If you in turn believe that you should be allowed to use copyrighted characters, then my suggestion is simple: work to change and clarify the law. As it stands, U.S. copyright law is based on legislation written in 1978, well before the internet and new media methods arose. I think we can all agree that given multiple copyright issues - music downloading, filesharing, mashups, fanfiction, fair use, parody, scholarly citation issues - the law could use another hard look and definitely some clarification. Write your representatives, who for the most part have probably never heard of fanfiction, and explain your take on the subject.

As I've noted elsewhere, we appear to be shifting back to an artistic paradigm last seen in the Middle Ages, where writers and artists happily borrowed characters and stories for one another -- indeed, the Middle Ages and early Renaissance artists prided themselves on artistic renditions of old, well known stories, not on the creation of new stories. (Shakespeare used all of two new and original plots, and even the originality of those has been questioned.) What mattered was how well you told the tale, not your ability to construct your own new universe. The advent of the printing press changed this, and created copyright law and a new emphasis on originality. Whether or not this paradigm is a good change or not is a separate question.