Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

The most common logical fallacy in fandom is not listed in Stephen’s Guide, but I keep running into it so I’m giving it a name. I’ll call it the argumentum ad nauseum. It’s a cross between the argumentum ad hominem and the fallacy of style over substance. A crossover fallacy is singularly appropriate for fandom.

The ad nauseum is the act of attacking a position, not for being incorrect nor for any other logical flaw, but simply for having been said many times before. There is, the man once said, nothing new under the sun, and even less new in fandom, so the ad nauseum is never a valid criticism. Usually it’s not even true - that is, the positions under attack have not been stated more frequently than anything else, nor than the opposite stance in particular.

Just as it’s only meta when somebody gets annoyed, it’s only boring when somebody doesn’t want to hear it. Maybe they feel threatened by opposing points of view, or maybe they aren’t intellectually capable of defending their own. The motives behind the ad nauseum are probably as diverse as those behind any other logical fallacy - it only holds the power it does because fandom is a literary community. Boring is a damning criticism when it’s leveled at fic, yet it is hollow when pointed at a blog or any other discussion forum.

If you really don’t want to hear it, you have the delete key and the back button. When instead you go on and on about how dull someone else’s blog is, questions automatically arise: Why did you keep reading it? Why are you pointing it out now?

I do book reviews in my blog, and I’ve never criticized a book without saying exactly how I thought it went wrong. Saying that meta is boring, dull, or “grey” is just a cop-out - a statement that the (allegedly) poor style negates the underlying substance. Ad nauseum is also a way to attack someone without having to justify, or even mention, your own position on the issue - that is its kinship with ad hominem.

So I really can’t get worked up over people who have nothing more insightful (or inciteful) to say about me than the standard ad nauseum “ho hum.” For an even better example of ad nauseum than my recent appearance on fandom_wank, I would refer you to Jintian protesting too much at the manifesto meme - for example: I don’t see the need for all of this sudden flag-waving and State of the Union speech-making. [The following has been edited.] I took this to mean, my opinions are interesting; your opinions are boring, unnecessary, or repetitive. The first half of the statement is merely implied, and isn’t necessary to ad nauseum. [end edits]

To recap, everyone has the right to be bored. If you’re bored, go away. If you attack me for boring you, it means you’re just faking the boredom - you’re really feeling threatened, guilty, or just plain hostile. Either learn to defend yourself without the ad nauseum arguments, or go away. Whining that something is boring is, for lack of a better term, boring.

I made fandom_wank. Thanks to Seema for the link.

I didn’t read it all, but one answer I can provide is that I think Te is great. Give the gift of fic!

Seema got hold of the Boskone program and asked Zendom about tired fanfic writers jumping the shark. I made a distinction between tired writing, with (perhaps) intentionally repetitious themes, and exhausted muses who won’t produce any new ideas no matter how you prod them. Maybe it’s just an issue of whether the author rests when the muse is silent or tries to write anyway.

I only mention it because I needed a title to go with this untitled meme from YCD via Sara G:

Fandoms:

1. Jane Austen
2. X-Files
3. Voyager
4. Buffy The Vampire Slayer
5. Stargate

Pairings I used to love and now thoroughly detest because they’ve been so [expletive deleted] up by both canon and fanon that they are no longer recognizable:

1. JA: Darcy/Elizabeth
2. XF: Mulder/Scully
3. VOY: Janeway/Chakotay
4. BtVS: Xander/Anya
5. SG-1: (not Jossed yet)

Pairings I look at with old affection:

1. JA: Bingley/Jane
2. XF: (there are no other pairings)
3. VOY: Chakotay/7
4. BtVS: Willow/Oz
5. SG-1: (I haven’t actually seen the show yet)

Current pairings I squee over:

1. JA: Charlotte/Colonel Fitzwilliam
2. XF: (I Said, There Are No Other Pairings)
3. VOY: Janeway/Paris
4. BtVS: Buffy/Spike (kick me, I’m a fan)
5. SG-1: Sam/Jack

With RSS, my virtual finger is on the pulse of the A-list blogs. Real Blogger Phil Ringnalda linked Clay Shirky’s article on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, in which the power law is applied to blogging and most of us end up at the skinny, low-audience end of the hit distribution.

I read a couple of other articles on Shirky’s site: The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can’t Get Up and Weblogs and Publishing, both of which deal with the devaluation of the electronic word when the market is, essentially, glutted with blogs.

Here’s a section from the original article:

Note that [the power law] model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

I thought first of LiveJournal, in which the tendency is toward short, name-dropping entries aimed at one’s friends:

LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts.

Then I thought, fanfic! This explains it all: Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). Some fic is actually good (quality), some is famous or recommended (marketing), and the rest is cranked out to satisfy the voracious and undiscriminating appetites of subgenre fans (solidarity goods).

In another sense, all fanfic is solidarity goods - best enjoyed by the fannish group. Non-fans don’t even understand the concept, never mind value the results. Anyone, within reason, can read an A-list blog, and anyone, within reason, can read a sci-fi novel off the bookshelves. On the other hand, you have to be in a certain group to follow most LiveJournals, and you have to know and love Star Trek to read Trek fanfic.

I’m not much of one for solidarity. I’d rather write original sci-fi than fanfic. I’d rather read an A-list blog essay than a LJ about last Saturday night. I tend to write essays like this one, no matter how low my power-law standing. That’s not a matter of audience but of author preference.

Seema doesn’t feel right about the gift terminology, so I dug up some other options from Roget’s:

gift, donation, present, cadeau[obs3]; fairing; free gift, boon, favor, benefaction, grant, offering, oblation, sacrifice, immolation; lagniappe [U.S.], pilon [obs3][U.S.].
grace, act of grace, bonus.
allowance, contribution, subscription, subsidy, tribute, subvention.
bequest, legacy, devise, will, dotation[obs3], dot, appanage; voluntary settlement, voluntary conveyance &c. 783; amortization.
alms, largess, bounty, dole, sportule|, donative[obs3], help, oblation, offertory, honorarium, gratuity, Peter pence, sportula[obs3], Christmas box, Easter offering, vail[obs3], douceur[Fr], drink money, pourboire, trinkgeld[Ger], bakshish[obs3]; fee &c. (recompense) 973; consideration.
bribe, bait, ground bait; peace offering, handsel; boodle*, graft, grease*

So how about, the fic is the contribution; the feedback is the receipt?

Did I mention I turned on MovableType’s auto-ping feature a while back? Anyone who just can’t sleep at night without knowing whether the blog has been updated can track it at blo.gs or weblogs.com.

Quote of the day: [T]he story is the gift. My feedback is the thank-you note. End of transaction. –Te

Te inspired an immensely long thread at fandom_wank, which brought out an interesting response from Alara Rogers about women in packs. I don’t intend to say anything new or deep about it, but I figure that some of my readers might have wisely overlooked the latest LiveJournal shennanigans.

First of all, I agree with Te. My fic is the gift. Your feedback is the thank-you note. In 99% of cases, the transaction ends after the gift, not after the thank-you note. You may think you’re coming under the radar by not sending feedback, but I track all my hits. I know how few of you send thank-you notes. You’re not fooling anyone.

However, my fic is a free gift. I do not do it for the feedback. (I wrote a logic lesson a while back for those of you who think that’s impossible. Here are two of my other posts on feedback: feedback and feedback and contests.) If you don’t want to send feedback, don’t. If you can’t think of something to say, don’t worry about it. I may set up a feedback form to alleviate the reader’s feedback guilt someday, but it won’t be soon. I have XML to convert first.

If you happen to be, as we say in Portuguese, bem-educado enough to email feedback, I will answer it - not because I’m under any obligation to do so, but because I, too, am bem-educada. If you post feedback in a public forum, such as ASC, the J/C Index, or a mailing list that I’m on, I may or may not reply, depending on whether I see the post in the first place, and whether I think replying will waste more bandwidth than my reply is worth. If you post feedback to a mailing list that I’m not on, of course I won’t reply, because I won’t see it. I may hear rumors of your feedback, but an email in the inbox is worth two in the ether.

If I ever became so popular that I had a backlog of feedback, I might not be as industrious as Te is, making the effort to reply to every email. There is a point at which that sort of thing becomes a burden, and there is no moral or social obligation in RL to reply to every thank-you note or piece of fanmail you receive. Fortunately, I’m in no danger of such fame. My fifteen minutes are up.

One thing no one has been able to explain to me is the objection to the term gift. I don’t know what else to call something made entirely by me, and given away to you (with or without hope of payment in feedback or in kind). Three or four times, I’ve given fanfic to individuals as a gift, on the occasion of birthdays or particularly painful Voyager episodes. Why, when I write a story and give it away to everyone, is it no longer a gift? If I embroidered a doily and gave it away, it would be a gift. Even if it’s a bit tatty and misstitched, even if it winds up a mathom, it’s still a gift. If I buy a book and give it away, it’s a gift. If I self-publish a book and give copies to my friends, they’re gifts. So why is my fanfic not a gift? Have I given it to too many people, simultaneously instead of serially?

There have been occasions where people thought they were responsible for my stories in some way, large or small - so that they might not think of them as mine to give away as gifts. In the case of writing in a group effort, copyright law clearly identifies the writer as the owner of the work, unless someone else has employed (not merely cajoled) the writer to write it on their behalf. There is no copyright in ideas or arcs, only in works that are instantiated in some medium. I also get the sense that certain fandom communities consider themselves responsible, as a group, for the achievements of individual members - specifically, they expect a certain kind of gratitude or loyalty, and will accuse those who move on to other fandoms of forgetting where they came from.

Of course I haven’t forgotten where I came from - I came from my mother and my father, the latter of whom, whether genetically or environmentally, is responsible for all this Trek. My lovely sister Veronica is responsible for my having taken a detour into Buffy. But the harsh truth is, I wrote the fic, every kilobyte of it. Maybe that ties this entry in to Alara’s women in packs:

Do I mean misogyny? Maybe not. It’s not a hatred of women that drives females to bay in packs and leap upon the prey, metaphorically tearing her throat out. It’s a hatred of women who excel, women who are well-known and well-liked and actually admit to knowing this about themselves, women who seek to improve themselves.

So maybe wank is the opposite of snark. Snark is more likely to mock the underachievers than the overachievers, not, perhaps, in principle but because sarcasm is a linguistic skill that is often accompanied by other writing skills - so the snarkers are the overachievers. Snark can also be inside the fic, while fandom_wank is always meta. I don’t see anyone mocking Te with fic, but I live to mock TPTB with fic. TPTB are the true oppressors here, the ones who own the show and do terrible things to the characters - so lay off the poor BNF’s already.

Pretty site of the day: Network Simplicity –
Though it resembles the bold, simple lines of CSS, this site is made with tables, for a 2002 look with a 1997 back-end. I found this one while investigating OpenSSH on Cygwin.

It’s been a while since I blogged about plagiarism, so I’ll summarize what I’ve said in the past. At first, I was mystified by the uproar against plagiarism because I don’t read fanfic for its originality. In fact, fanfic that was based in other authors’ playgrounds disturbed me, while rewriting television shows seemed perfectly innocuous.

Plagiarism is a moral issue, not a legal one, so the great debate always looks like a crusade. All the anti-plagiarists seize the moral high ground, but the pro-plagiarists can be divided into two camps, those who defend plagiarism, and those who deny it. That is to say, there are those who embrace their inner plagiarists, and there are those who try to weasel out of the charges.

The proper moral defense of plagiarism places it in a storytelling tradition in which originality has little, or even negative, value. Historically, originality hasn’t counted for much but today it does, making this
a radical defense. It simultaneously places all the plagiarized texts, from modern copyrighted novels to scripts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the same communal, incestuous storytelling tradition. As R. J. pointed out, the original authors may not care for this extreme form of textual poaching, and readers of a non-communal persuasion (which is to say, almost all of us) will feel defrauded by authors who pass off others’ work as their own.

It takes a radical to adopt a radical stance on fanfic. Most pro-plagiarists maintain their positions by denying that any plagiarism happened, rather than defending plagiarism as a new moral good. They pussyfoot around with the definition of the word or they claim that an author’s note mentioning the victim de-plagiarizes direct, unmarked quotation of non-canon source materials. They pretend to believe that all of fanfic is plagiaristic, in order to excuse their plagiarism as just more fanfic writing.

Plagiarism is a moral offense, not a copyright violation, and can be defended only with moral arguments - that is, an explanation of why it is good and right for the plagiarist to incorporate someone else’s work seamlessly into their own. Arguments that it wasn’t quite plagiarism or that everybody does it will not do. That’s just denial of what is plain and clear to the average reader, and you know what they say about denial…

It’s not just a river in Egypt anymore.

Well, it’s that time of year, when the sub-freezing temperatures cause the original Bell-era (not Ma, Alexander Graham) phone lines to contract and my surfing is intermittent at best. Luckily for me, I checked fandom wank before the line gave out, so I have something brief to blog. I have some longer topics outstanding - Internet Types and a few children’s fantasies I read over Thanksgiving - but it’s late and I’m in the mood for snark.

Today’s most notable wank entry was about anti-wank sentiment, and the most notable anti-wank was by Joan the English Chick. Joan the English Chick is, if she’ll excuse the expression, a BNF from Buffy fandom - more specificially, she’s the woman responsible for the last few seasons of Buffy Transcripts. Her LJ entry argues the deleterious effects of “snark for snark’s sake” upon fandom.

Let me make this perfectly clear (for you S’s out there) - my position is that snark is the essence of fandom, and more specificially, of fanfiction. Snark is far and away the main appeal of fandom to me; snark is the main inspiration of my fic. There is no way to snark - snark is the way.

I get the feeling that Joan doesn’t define snark the way I do. I equate snark with sarcasm. Sarcasm ranges from bitter complaints to caustic remarks to gentle gibes to simple irony. Sarcasm is not just a vice, it’s a language - the language of fandom. Joan says:

The temptation to say something snarky and witty, and thus entertaining, but devoid of actual content, is apparently too much for a lot of people to resist.

I’m not in fandom to have deep discussions about, Kahless help us, the tragedies of Janeway’s non-canonical past or the thematic commonality between Star Trek: Voyager and the Odyssey. I am here to entertain. I read other people’s fic in order to be entertained. I won’t use the h-word, but none of us can claim we’re in fandom to save the seals or feed the hungry. Is my fic devoid of content because it’s entertaining? No. Neither is snark devoid of content because it’s entertaining. Wit amuses because it has content - you cannot be witty without a topic, without saying something that strikes home.

Of course, you can go the long way around to content, and have extended, serious discussions about Justin Tighe (ugh) or Odysseus. I’d rather make my points more briefly and entertainingly. I don’t have the time for infinite LJ discussions of the eternal topics. Similarly, when writing or reading fanfic, I prefer something said briefly and ironically over long novels of deadly serious angst or equally sober romance. Irony is my favorite theme, though I’ll settle for a good tragedy (which is, by the way, not the same thing as angst).

The interplay between fanfic and canon is, to me, always a snarky one. Where slash writers look for the essential slashiness of the show, I look for the fundamental snarkiness. I write about Janeway’s abandoned lizard babies coming back to haunt her, about the joy of being Borg, about a Mirror Mirror universe in which the canon universe is the evil one. I’m in it for the irony.

It’s entirely possible that the difference between Joan and yours truly is a wider difference between Trek fandom and Buffy fandom. Compare, for instance, Joan’s Buffy transcripts, which are, literally, transcripts with some stage directions, to Jim Wright’s Voyager transcripts, which are extended snarks with some semi-accurate dialogue included. I’m indebted to Joan for Buffy reference material, but Jim has brought me hours of entertainment. If I were stuck on a desert island with only one set of transcripts, I’d take Delta Blues.

Buffy is a show with, arguably, themes - the quality is relatively high for television, with or without pity. I can imagine Joan having intelligent discussions about Buffy. Trek, on the other hand, is very bad science fiction, with a long history of marginal production values and bad acting. Themes are not what spring to mind after Yet Another Time Travel Episode™. Whenever someone seriously complains about a current Trek series (as opposed to snarking about it), I have to ask, “Have you seen TOS?” Can Scott Bakula hold a candle to William Shatner when it comes to bad acting? Can Enterprise out-TOS TOS with execrable scripts? Can I watch with a straight face? No.

I have years of fond Trek snarking behind me, and, Paramount willing, years more to come. I wouldn’t trade a single snark for a treatise on the sociocultural implications of Benjamin Sisko qua Emissary - unless, of course, it were meant snarkily. If that means I’ve gotten “too deeply into the snark/wank mindset,” I don’t blame fandom wank. I blame Spock’s Brain.

Word count: 21,024

I have a thousand words to go before I sleep, but for my thousand-word break, I thought I’d reflect a bit on Seema’s lovely interview with Kelly Chambliss. The title says it all: Hurting the Ones We Love. Kelly is highly qualified in two genres I don’t care for at all: smut and angst. That’s not to say I haven’t read her fic and appreciated it, but when I like angst I like it despite its being angst, and not because of it.

When, on the other hand, I read science fiction, I like it because it’s science fiction, and not despite the technobabble. It’s an issue of genre. In the interview, Kelly talks quite a bit about the genre of smut. Smut is queen in fanfiction largely because, as Kelly mentions, there isn’t much smut outside of fanfic. It’s popular as an up and coming new genre. Fanfic makes smut easy with its short-story format - you can’t, in general, base an entire commercial novel on sex acts - and pre-fab characters. The same goes for slash.

None of the above is meant as a critique of smut or slash - I don’t have time for that because it’s getting late. I’m only concerned with them as genres, and why different people like different genres. It’s a simpler mystery than why different people like different books within the same genre - that is, it’s easier to understand someone disliking all fantasy novels than someone not caring for The Lord of the Rings.

Sometimes it comes down to personality - science fiction is the province of the geeky type (or N’s, for the Myers-Briggs fans). Fantasy is related, but doesn’t quite cover the same fanbase, as it were. Angst, on the other hand, is never fantastic. Angst is only angst if it’s on the human level of flaws. Tragic flaws are a bit too much for angst; they end too splendidly. Romance is the opposite; romance must be about the virtue of the beloved and can, if not weighed down with too much smut, be fairly idealistic.

Smut, like angst, has to be at the nitty-gritty human level. There is nothing fantastic to part A and slot B; it is realism, impure and simple. Realism never interests me as such, though I can admire the plotting skill or the lovely language. Other people feel the same way about idealism. It’s nothing personal; it’s just genre.

The ville implosion just goes on and on. There but for the grace of Kahless go I…

It’s all Seema’s fault that I’m following this and getting all riled up (see previous post) about crazy specialty fandoms whose claim to fame is a lot of tempests in a livejournal. Today’s Fandom Wank is still about BNF’s; in this round, The Brat Queen wonders whether she’s B or not.

My chosen quote is something verdani said in the Fandom Wank meta-comments about the aforementioned BNF thread:

If you were willing to put the kind of hard work that nobody anywhere appreciates into making discussion threads like that go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, you’d be a BNF too. But I guess you’re not *up* to it, eh, slacker? GET OUT THERE AND GO TO WORK!

That’s a rather pithy way of saying LiveJournal made ville fandom the wankfest it is today. Wank, by the way, isn’t as offensive in the U.S. as in other Anglophone countries. Here’s the definition, straight from The Jargon File 4.3.3:

wank /wangk/ n.,v.,adj.
[Columbia University: prob. by
mutation from Commonwealth slang v. `wank’, to masturbate] Used
much as hack is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever
technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May describe
(negatively) the act of hacking for hacking’s sake (”Quit wanking,
let’s go get supper!”) or (more positively) a wizard. Adj.
`wanky’ describes something particularly clever (a person,
program, or algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when
there are too many wanks involved. This excess wankiness is
signalled by an overload of the `wankometer’ (compare
bogometer). When the wankometer overloads, the conversation’s
subject must be changed, or all non-wanks will leave. Compare
`neep-neeping’ (under neep-neep). Usage: U.S. only. In
Britain and the Commonwealth this word is extremely rude and
is best avoided unless one intends to give offense. Adjectival
`wanky’ is less offensive and simply means `stupid’ or `broken’
(this is mainstream in Great Britain).