farla | Entries tagged with fanlib

As the end of the contest neared, I was getting progressively more bitter and angry at the world. It's then I decided to branch out from posting subject matter about the bible advertisers didn't want into posting subject matter about current events advertisers didn't want.

The story that resulted was equal parts seething rage and flamebait, and due to time restrictions/an inability to look up Iraq videos at the time without becoming overcome by crushing despair, the factchecking for some setting details is lacking. It's a songfic, so it can't be posted on Fictionpress, and honestly for the previous reasons it probably shouldn't anyway. So, instead, here's ( Hadji Girl )

Fun fact: Despite language, subject matter, etc, this story was also rated PG-13, not Adult.

And that's the end of it. Stories have been posted, experiences reminisced, and the site should go down sometime today.

Edit: As of 11, Fanlib is finally closed down - insomuch as having a new page up to say they're closed can be considered such.

I hadn't forgotten my original idea of the contest being a NaNo-like encouragement to write more, nor my still earlier idea of the site being a place to post fic that stretched the concept of "fan" to the breaking point. So when a new contest popped up, after my first impulse to ignore the thing, I reread the entry guidelines.

For 17 year-old Janie Hannagan, getting sucked into other people's dreams is getting old — especially the falling dreams, the naked-but-nobody-notices dreams, and the sex-crazed dreams. She can't tell anybody about her predicament; they'd never believe her or, worse, they'd think she's a freak. So Janie lives on the fringe, cursed with an ability she doesn't want and can't control. Eventually, she learns to control what happens in others' dreams.

Inspired by the just-released book Wake, write a story describing what happens when you find yourself jumping into someone else's dreams or nightmares and how you help change the outcome.

Shorter: Wake has a character help people through dreams. Write about a character who goes into dreams too.

Can I subvert this? I asked myself. Yes. Yes, I can.

I promptly wrote up The Wall Was Still Only Half Covered, then, after perusing the entries and coming across a truly jawdropping example where some spoiled American teen channels the vapid dumbness of her insulated lifestyle to teach the African victim of tragedy that life is great, added Fixing.

And, fresh on the heels of the new stupid unearthed by the Rebels sequence, I wrote up yet another autobiographical thing: ( In the Interests of Elevated Debate )

Of course, despite my intent to post for the reward monies, I was continually drawn to debate on the forum for entirely rational reasons.

A protracted argument flared up repeatedly across many threads regarding "the one star bandit" (ie, someone gave my story a one star and it can't possibly be because of all the spelling errors), occasionally morphing into the crazy polite concrit is the only real concrit you flamers argument. Somehow, no one ever noticed the logical disconnect between "there's only one or at most a couple one-starring jerks" and the idea that they were the outnumbered and persecuted minority when they spoke up against it - even when expressing their outnumbered and persecuted views led to ten-page threads of people agreeing with them. Between this, the PMs, and the reviews, I soon had material for another story - in fact, nine separate chunks worth of one.

( The Rebel(s) )

Ironically, the posting of the Rebel sequence served to draw more crazy out of the woodwork, leading to a single person accuse me of, all at the same time, committing libel against forum members by showing their arguments out of context/misrepresenting the entire argument (never mind that none of the characters are identified as particular forummembers, and to recognize any individual as having made the same argument you'd have to read the argument in the original context. This was, after all, a moderately Christian place and they were well versed in circular logic), while saying I was making up the more extreme things, while saying it was wrong because I was giving my view of their arguments rather than their own words, while being outraged by later statements that the more extreme stuff involved direct quotes. Before long it entered into that special quagmire of stupid. Summarized:

Reviewer: This is terrible because it's full of strawmen, but I guess that's what you intended so it can't be fixed.
Me: No, it's a parody where I exaggerate things. If you have examples of where I actually misrepresented an argument I'd be happy to fix that.
Reviewer: No the whole thing is an attack on specific people so it can't be fixed. Also, strawmen.
Me: Uh, no. Examples?
Reviewer: There are arguments here that you don't believe.
Me: I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.
Reviewer: See, I knew you were lying about listening to concrit!
Me: WTF?
Reviewer: You're frustrated, which means I'm right. Also you are an evil bitch whore who hates freedom and is just jealous.
Me: It is strangely like you did not read the story.
Reviewer: You're arguing, which means I'm right.

The next part of my fanlib journey came about when Fanlib announced a new contest. Not understanding how contests on the intertubes work, this one, rather than being the tried and true standard of "One prize regardless of how many people participate however much", had set checkpoints for anyone who fulfilled the criteria.

I was writing the start of Left Alone at the time and planning on posting it as a continuation of my antagonistic biblefic thing. And if their incentives encouraged me to chop it up into a billion mini-chapters, reducing readability on their site, then I'd just have to suffer through acting against their interests for personal gain. I viewed it as a sort of alternative NaNoWriMo, up until the point I ran the numbers and realized they were asking for the equivalent of more than five NaNos in three months, at which point my view changed to something more like chop-up-existing-stories-and-slap-them-up-there-months.

The rules gave points for both submissions and reviews, so I planned to alternate between the two. Little did I know that the fanlib denizens I shared the site with were fucking insane.

In short order I was reexamining their rules and discovering that, thanks to their loose definition of what, exactly, constituted a story, combined with their permissiveness to post virtually anything (aside from too much of teh gay where teh childrens might find it), I could just post rants in the third person and get points for it. I quickly dashed off exactly that.

( Regarding Responding to Reviews )

I'd abuse this loophole in the days to come.

So FFN's added a new version of the hit counter, because I need more fiddly numbers to waste time with.

Meanwhile, Fanlib's going under in a few days. As we say here on the intertubes, PWNED.

It does put me in an interesting position - you see, while most of what I posted were existing stories hacked up into 500-600 word chunks, and another chunk were fragments of scenes that I don't really want people to read yet but posted to fill up space, there's also some complete stories I only posted there.

I started posting on Fanlib for the same reason I do anything - they pissed me off. In one of the rare moments they gave actual information, an offhand mention was made about how progressive their rating system was - bibleslash had shown up and they'd decided to let it stay, choosing to jack up the rating (hiding it behind a filter in the process) rather than delete it. The moderation seemed bit confused by my immediate demands for an explanation and ended up giving their vague guidelines - in the case of the Bible Fandom, fics with "contemporary themes" will be re-rated Adult by an administrator.

My immediate thoughts were along the lines of Woman's Suffrage: Inappropriate for Children Under Thirteen Unless Accompanied By An Adult. Then, as is only reasonable, my mind jumped to all the (apparently kosher) depictions of everything else in the bible, and, of course, I set out to write and post such things on Fanlib. My first story was The Daughters Lot, and yes, it turns out heterosexual relationships, even repeated incest rape where the victims are blamed for it, is just fine in a way guys kissing is totally not.

I went on to write two more stories. They weren't necessarily the best stories, but they were good enough for my goal of posting stuff that technically fit the letter of their restrictions while violating the spirit in ways that also weren't so appropriate for children.

( Traditional Values - Tenets and Tenants )

( Traditional Values - Willing and Guilty )

First story was rated All, second PG-13 due to word filters. But it didn't involve teh gays or equal rights or women voting, so it had the Fanlib seal of approval.

Later I got into a fight on the forums regarding "Christian Fiction" that can be summed up thusly:

Poster asks about links for "Christian Fiction"
Knowing full well that's a coded request but disliking coded requests, I promptly linked what I was writing and pointed out that if they meant something other than "Fiction involving Christianity" they'd damn well better be clearer about it.
A few posts later a brawl had broken out.
It was the best day ever.

So Fanlib's announced they're shutting the doors and, being Fanlib, there's no further explanation and the moderators write explanatory posts explaining that this is news to them too.

This means all the fanlibbers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, or graduating high schoolers (same thing), about how they've going to lose all the friends they've made. Fanlib has CREEPY community senses. After the contest was over and I stopped posting, I got a PM from someone apologizing over what was actually the most minor fight I got into on the forum and asking if that was why I'd left because they hadn't seen me on for some time. When I went there this morning the threads on the forum were about half and half OMG WHY??? and threads trying to compile where everyone's going. Now the forums are entirely made up of redundant threads on where everyone's going and I'm getting PMs from people telling me this stuff because we're all friends!!! (We're not all friends) They're talking about how they don't want to lose touch with people, how their community is breaking up, making forums to gather on so they can keep together, etc. Over on FFN they've made both a forum and a C2 to gather all the stories written by members.

I'd normally go "Hey, free advertising!" but I really don't want anything I write to be tarred with that brush if I can avoid it. (Some of the people say they're not going to FFN because it's too confusing. So I want everyone to stop a moment and think about this: When we talk about FFN being full of the absolute dregs of writers, we're talking about a site that has filtered these people out.)

Anyway, this wouldn't be so creepy if it were a matter of collecting information from those you wanted to stay in touch with. But it's the same crazy thing that kicks in when people make any transition, where they make a big deal over "all you guys in the community", even if they don't technically know most of them. (Or, in my case, when we hate each other. DAMMIT I WORKED FOR THAT ANIMOSITY STOP WITH THE ROSE COLORED GLASSES ALL IS NOT FORGIVEN.) For that matter, the lion's share of it isn't collecting other people's information, it's passing their own around. It's probably partly that for a lot of people this was their first major community interaction and fanfic site so they're overreacting, but even still...seeing how glowingly they talk about their close community just makes confirms my desire to put as much distance between us as possible.

(On a more general note I think that, between this and metafandom, anywhere people think fanfic=community is a place that should be avoided if you want fanfic, rather than community. People who write fanfic to participate in a community are writing crappy fanfic with crappy attitudes on criticism or improving.)

I'm still getting PMs, and they've just officially passed weird and headed right into crazyland.

Quick background - a lot of people will PM me to defend themselves/their friends. The typical exchange usually peters out and maybe a fourth of the time end with an actual "okay...let's be friends!" bit. I've been thinking this was a little weird but guessing it was some form of conflict avoidance, where they were trying to make sure the fight was over. I've seen that elsewhere, so it seemed to make sense.

But the most recent PM chain...

It goes from:
First of all you can't tell me how I should write my story. If I write it like because it's my way. There no need to get mad, but you should haven't come at a beginner like that. Cause I just started writing stories on here, and I pretty much like how I put my stories. And if the spelling is wrong is because I was typing to damn fast so don't come at my story like that. If you didn't have anything good to comment about my story then you shouldn't have wrote anything at all...ya dig???/

to:

You know what. I keep on reading your crap and all it says------>BLAH,BLAH, BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,BLAH,AND BLAH...FUNNY I KNOW SMARTASS!!!!!!!!. And you are not the best writer on here cause I read your dumbass stories, and let me say------>BOOOOOOO<------cause you suck...CRAZY I KNOW!!!! haha!! That when a good reader doesn't leave a comment. So I'm throught with you and these inbox. Cause they mean nothing to me...just like your ass. TRY TO FIND SOME MISSPELLED WORDS IN THIS BITCH!!!!!! OH I'M BEING RUDE...SOOO!!!!! HAHA!!!!

to:

And your like a monkey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just saying crap, and mouth always wrapped around anything long and yellow!!!! Catch my drift????? And if I'm not making you mad...you must be annoyed to keep on responding!!!!!! Ya dig??????? Like I care...haha!!!!!!

to:

FUCK IT!!!!!!
All you had to say was that you like me as a friend and that you wanted somebody to talk to on fanlib. And I'm not one of those poeple getting mad I'm enjoying it...I like wasting your time. Cause it tells me you have nothing better to do...like a monkey...owwwww ahhhh!!!!! lol

What the hell people. Seriously.

Ugh. Won the fanlib crazy mass posting contest of doom and it's done. Not a moment too soon, I think some of the denizens have already begun organizing the lynch mob and now is a time for hiding.

For those of you interested, my fanlib account has a bunch of stuff that's not posted on FFN, including a lot of extremely random bits of Ice and some spur of the moment original fiction. Much of it's in 500 minichunk format, though.

Current Mood: drained

My forum rating on Fanlib has been five stars for a while, despite getting into like five fights, arguing for harsh concrit, defending people who give one-star ratings not once but multiple times, and snarking. And I just got into a fight over evolution, and I still have a five-star rating. In fact I think I sicced a bunch of people on a Inuyasha author.

I am really confused.

I'm thinking of uploading a manip of that really creepy Jack Chick Jesus-loves-pedophiles tract, though. That may take care of the issue.

(Also - currently have 666 hits total.)

Edit: dropped a star. The balance of the universe has been restored.

Serebii's epic fail, let me show you it. In your fanfic AU you made it that way? Yes, that it the bestest evidence ever it actually works that way. How can anyone argue with that?

There is so much FAIL and WIN in the whole thread I keep waiting for it to spontaneously explode like matter/antimatter.

In other news I began consolidating fic over at Fanlib. Being there is starting to degrade my sarcasm generator. Even I don't quite know where I'm going with this.

:D.....:D!

It's like watching a little kitten hiss at you! You just want to pick it up and cuddle it and coo, "Aw, who's an ineffectual widdle kitten? Who is? You are, yes you are!" Seriously, this is the best flamewar ever. Fanlib is awesome!

So I'm up to my sixth "friend" on fanlib for no discernible reason. As can be intuited by my bafflement over this, I didn't acquire these people my asking them first. Three are in the fandom/reviewed my writing, so that's at least understandable. One seems to have friended me after comments on the forum, or at least that's my perhaps futile attempt to link cause and effect. One is the essay-writer, which is actually understandable since people trying to make friends after I'm mean is happens in a certain proportion of cases. So for the first five, I can make a certain guess as to the chain of events. Now I've just got a sixth after going on a short review-bender (my eyes bleed. Kids, don't write porn until you're only enough to capitalize the word "i", for the love of god). My initial impulse was that this was someone similarly bothered by the tendency to hoard capital letters expressing solidarity, but they're someone who writes summaries in all caps and doesn't bother spellchecking. So now I'm just confused.

It doesn't help that I'm not even clear on what friending means. I mean, yes, the livejournal version stretches the conventional description a bit, but it's a direct communicative medium and the way friending works on a practical level is relatively clear. Here, communication is done indirectly, through the medium of fic. Friending someone means that I see their recent comments. Why? I guess if I friended someone with extremely good taste I might benefit from this somehow. And since it also updates when arguing over a review, there's definite utility in tipping me off to start dogpiling. But both those things require heavy discrimination of "friends" accepted - friending those of less discriminating taste, or people I'm not inclined to dogpile for/who are not inclined to get into such situations that require dogpiling means I'm apt to miss out on the relevant, useful comments. It also seems utterly useless for anyone not interested in other people's potential recommendations or dogpiling in response to dissent.

Pretty much the only thing it does do is fill up the bottom of your page with a bunch of mini floating graphics representing your friend collection. While I appreciate the potential aesthetics of this, I'm still a bit confused as to the point of it all.

Edit: And I just got another for making a random comment on someone's thread at the forum. WTF people?

The more I use fanlib, the more evident it gets that it's designed to pass around a small amount of content rather than to allow you to provide it.

Exhibit A: The profile pages. Favorite something, and it goes in a block that sits above your own submissions. People clicking your profile are faced with the list of your favorites, not your writing. Subscribe to a category or other author, and this also goes on top - between the two, your own submissions are now completely out of sight. Can you even imagine FFN setting profiles so that your favorite stories and authors were displayed rather than your own work? The majority of the users are thus content recommenders, not providers.

Exhibit B: Tiered structure. Featured stories aren't just displayed on the homepage. Click any category and the initial story list is the featured stories. In the larger categories, that can mean the entire first page or so. You have to change the sorting method to see new stories, and no, there's no way to tell it to do this for the whole site. Readers checking out categories see the most popular, recommended stories first and foremost. And it's not as if the stories are starred or set off in any way that tips you off - there's no way to distinguish featured from nonfeatured except by the sorting mechanism. It's easy to miss.

Exhibit C: Subscriptions. I just checked this out. You might imagine "subscriptions" to mean that you get sent notification when there's a new entry. No. You might think it means that your subscriptions list will update when there's a new entry. No. If you subscribe to a category, then on your profile, there's a little block taken up by stories sorted by the most views. This is clearly useless to any subscriber, because most views means the oldest stories, the most popular, and the ones you've already seen, and it means it's virtually impossible that any new story will show up there for months, if at all. It is, in other words, not a subscription - it's favoriting a person or category, and then displaying their most popular entries for the benefit of whoever shows up to your profile. It's more channeling to the most popular minority of stories, who will get more hits as a result, preserving their place on the list.

Other things: When you get a review or comment on a forum or anything, you're sent an email telling you, then you click the link to go to the site and see it. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!) The number of comments you get isn't displayed on a story, just the average star rating and hits. There's a similar rating system on the forums for individual posts that makes the entire page reload every time you do it - that must generate a lot of apparent views to their advertisers. I'm not sure how much of the stuff above is just there to force you through three or four page reloads/advertiser views to get to the content you want, and how much is deliberate funneling.

Whatever, it's pretty creepy.

Apparently fanlib is inundated with stories about vampires but scarce on elves. Clearly my story is destined for stardom. Better yet, my half elf shares an appreciation for blood. The best of both worlds!

This is going to end disastrously. I have no idea how, but I can sense it.

And now I'm posting Elfin over there. My posting habits are mainly dictated by a desire to have nice round numbers - I'm planning to post 10 pieces, then another twenty set of Lucki and Left Alone, which gets me to a hundred.

The HEY CHECK OUT MY STORIES HEY essay writer seems to have responded to my request that they do the same by going through and rating all my newer stories four stars. Or that was someone else and they're blowing me off.

Their stories were terrible reading, but they took my commentary well, so it worked out better than I expected.

EDIT: First comment for Elfin is by someone pleased to see a story about elves. This amuses me greatly because one of the points of Elfin is that there will be no elves in the story.

So apparently the average fanlib denizen lacks self-preservation skills.

Here's the story. Try to pinpoint when a mistake is made.

( Moderately long story is moderately long cut! )

Because I can't really do anything about Livejournal being evil. New biblefic - Traditional Values - A Parable of Tenants and Tenets posted. I'd already written two, so I figure I might as well post them up. Plus, the new chapter of Pokemon Revolution is particularly sucky, and I need to let it percolate through my brain until I figure out how to completely rewrite it without jeopardizing the rest of the story.

(Jesus' parables are incredibly bizarre. This one is actually one of the more reasonable ones. Many of the parables are more inscrutable than stories in the old testament, which is to say harder to understand than stories that predate them by several thousand years, written in a dead language from even older oral legend, and having gone through several steps of translation. I don't know what this means, but whatever it is, it's pretty weird.)

So I wrote my first piece of bible fanfic and just posted it on Fanlib. I'm tempted to give no link, but then interested people would have to click through the site and give them extra hits, so it can be found at http://www.fanlib.com/fanfic/Traditional_Values___The_Daughters__Lot/2edlf7 (best viewed with Adblock or some similar program so they don't get advertising dollars).

I'm planning to alternative posting two story sets, "traditional values" and "contemporary themes". Because fuck them, being gay is not a "contemporary theme" that needs the same rating as small children being raped to death by zombie dogs. You want stuff that's inappropriate for kids? That'd be the actual bible, thanks.

And because I want to be noisy and annoying about it, rather than just post and move along, I toddled off to the forum they nicely set up for spamming about your fanfic, and innocently posted about my awesome new fanfic.

Okay first, this is awesome. If you don't know what it's about, reading the rest of the community should help. Short version: They are a fanfiction site. Also, they are evil.

Second, I've decided that my passive observation and less passive forum posts on the site were not enough.

They're rerating bible fanfiction with gay characters as adult (ie, hidden behind the filter of doom), and it's pretty obvious they're going to have to do the same with other stories. I'm going to go write het bible stories, bible stories with incest, lesbians, g-rated stories with gay guys and anything else I can think of that's not what they want. (I knew reading the bible would come in handy!)

Then I'm going to write some Ash/Latias and possibly Ash/Tauros. And perhaps Misty/Female!Psyduck for variety.

Forcing the issue is a completely legitimate tactic. Also, it's fun.

I strongly endorse anyone else taking any similar actions, as well as posting defamatory material about them, hacking the site, sending them viruses, or throwing bricks through the founders' windows. I would prefer that you made sure to tape a NC-17 pink guy/blue guy slash printout to the brick first, though.