Fanlib Retrospective, Part Two
Aug. 1st, 2008 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaThe 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
(Namely Doing it in a Way that is not Totally Insane Sounding)
Farla was sitting curled up in a fuzzy blue chair with a shiny-covered notebook in her lap. Like all her notebooks, it had a white back. This was no doubt an irrelevant mention to anyone else, but since it was the deciding factor in if she purchased a notebook, she considered it quite important and she's the one writing this story.
Suddenly a blonde girl wearing a sailor outfit with her hair up in pigtails leaped at her holding a bloody switchblade clutched in one hand, screaming obscenities!
As this place was the metaphorical representation of the internet, she smacked face-first into the impenetrable forcefield surrounding Farla.
"Silly random internet person," Farla said, and giggled. "Don't you know obscenity-laden death threats require you to first chase down my address? You can't kill people over the internet."
"I was hoping your zone of apathy was weak enough that the visual impact of seeing it would be able to reach you," the blonde girl admitted. "That can pass through the internet barrier."
"I'm strongly apathetic, actually," Farla said.
"That strikes me as an oxymoron."
"I am vast, I contain multitudes... or something witty like that. Aren't you a bit intelligent for someone who looks like a cross between Sailor Moon and Nevada-tan?"
"Hey, you're the author. It's not my fault you don't want to type all my responses in a hybrid chtspk/1337 form."
"Point. So anyway, why are you here?"
"Don't you know who I am?!?"
"...no."
"You just reviewed my story!"
"That doesn't narrow it down."
"You said it sucked!"
"Still not narrowing it down."
"You were a total bitch!"
"Still not narrowing it down."
"...it was an Inuyasha story?"
"And still..."
"High school AU?"
"Sorry, still no idea."
"The person you deliberately chose out of your longstanding jealousy over my awesome writing ability, so you painstakingly constructed a mean review!" At her blank look, the pigtailed girl groaned. "I'm inukagDIEKIKWHOREDIEhahaha93740707."
"You all look alike to me," Farla admitted. "Was your Kikyo the preppy slut, the cheerleader slut, or the popular girl slut?"
"Cheerleader and popular girl slut. It was a deeply original take on the issue dammit!"
Farla flipped through her notebook. "Oh, now I remember. Hey, aren't you capitalizing each word in your response? I remember mentioning that about your story."
The girl twitched and let out a bloodcurdling shriek. She pulled a can of red spraypaint out of hammerspace and began spraypainting asterisked obscenities on the internet forcefield.
When the can finally ran out of paint, she said, "Are you going to apologize now?!"
"The internet is a fickle and unstable beast," Farla pointed out. "Stuff people aren't paying attention to fades out of existence." She pointed to the already disappearing words. "Anything you write privately that I don't pay attention to vanishes, and at least here, public invective seems to attract moderators and get purged. Which disappoints me too, but nothing I can do. As long as my zone of apathy is working, it doesn't reach me and just fades away to nothing. Well, anyway, what am I supposed to apologize for?"
"You said I didn't spellcheck!"
"And...?"
"IT WAS JUST FOR FUN!!!"
"But then why do you care what I said about it? If you don't care about spelling correctly, why is it offensive that I said you-"
"Because you were mean about it!"
"To quote, my review was 'Spellcheck your work.'"
"YOU F*CKING C*NT YOU WERE RUDE YOU B*TCH!"
"Is this site infested with some sort of irony-disabling brain disease or something?"
The girl let out another string of shrieked, barely understandable profanity and lunged at Farla again. Once again she bounced off.
"I told you I was apathetic," Farla reminded.
The girl considered. She paced around the edge of the forcefield, looking for cracks. "Aha!" she announced at last. "But you clearly care, because you reviewed!" She lunged.
"Compartmentalization," Farla said, not looking up from her notebook. The girl bounced off again. "I'm not one of those Kantian twits. While I care about how you present your story, I don't care that you respond by screaming at me."
The girl considered further. "But you're writing this story." She readied the knife.
"But I'm doing it in the hopes my beloved Nevada-tan-like repliers will be more coherent and avoid this kind of stupid in their future responses. Also, because I found it really funny."
"Damn."
"Sorry," Farla said. "But you know what would really hurt my feelings and get me back for that review? If you reviewed my stories and, instead of just telling me how much you hate me, you wrote a long, detailed review on everything you thought was bad about the story."
I'd abuse this loophole in the days to come.
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.
(Namely Doing it in a Way that is not Totally Insane Sounding)
Farla was sitting curled up in a fuzzy blue chair with a shiny-covered notebook in her lap. Like all her notebooks, it had a white back. This was no doubt an irrelevant mention to anyone else, but since it was the deciding factor in if she purchased a notebook, she considered it quite important and she's the one writing this story.
Suddenly a blonde girl wearing a sailor outfit with her hair up in pigtails leaped at her holding a bloody switchblade clutched in one hand, screaming obscenities!
As this place was the metaphorical representation of the internet, she smacked face-first into the impenetrable forcefield surrounding Farla.
"Silly random internet person," Farla said, and giggled. "Don't you know obscenity-laden death threats require you to first chase down my address? You can't kill people over the internet."
"I was hoping your zone of apathy was weak enough that the visual impact of seeing it would be able to reach you," the blonde girl admitted. "That can pass through the internet barrier."
"I'm strongly apathetic, actually," Farla said.
"That strikes me as an oxymoron."
"I am vast, I contain multitudes... or something witty like that. Aren't you a bit intelligent for someone who looks like a cross between Sailor Moon and Nevada-tan?"
"Hey, you're the author. It's not my fault you don't want to type all my responses in a hybrid chtspk/1337 form."
"Point. So anyway, why are you here?"
"Don't you know who I am?!?"
"...no."
"You just reviewed my story!"
"That doesn't narrow it down."
"You said it sucked!"
"Still not narrowing it down."
"You were a total bitch!"
"Still not narrowing it down."
"...it was an Inuyasha story?"
"And still..."
"High school AU?"
"Sorry, still no idea."
"The person you deliberately chose out of your longstanding jealousy over my awesome writing ability, so you painstakingly constructed a mean review!" At her blank look, the pigtailed girl groaned. "I'm inukagDIEKIKWHOREDIEhahaha93740707."
"You all look alike to me," Farla admitted. "Was your Kikyo the preppy slut, the cheerleader slut, or the popular girl slut?"
"Cheerleader and popular girl slut. It was a deeply original take on the issue dammit!"
Farla flipped through her notebook. "Oh, now I remember. Hey, aren't you capitalizing each word in your response? I remember mentioning that about your story."
The girl twitched and let out a bloodcurdling shriek. She pulled a can of red spraypaint out of hammerspace and began spraypainting asterisked obscenities on the internet forcefield.
When the can finally ran out of paint, she said, "Are you going to apologize now?!"
"The internet is a fickle and unstable beast," Farla pointed out. "Stuff people aren't paying attention to fades out of existence." She pointed to the already disappearing words. "Anything you write privately that I don't pay attention to vanishes, and at least here, public invective seems to attract moderators and get purged. Which disappoints me too, but nothing I can do. As long as my zone of apathy is working, it doesn't reach me and just fades away to nothing. Well, anyway, what am I supposed to apologize for?"
"You said I didn't spellcheck!"
"And...?"
"IT WAS JUST FOR FUN!!!"
"But then why do you care what I said about it? If you don't care about spelling correctly, why is it offensive that I said you-"
"Because you were mean about it!"
"To quote, my review was 'Spellcheck your work.'"
"YOU F*CKING C*NT YOU WERE RUDE YOU B*TCH!"
"Is this site infested with some sort of irony-disabling brain disease or something?"
The girl let out another string of shrieked, barely understandable profanity and lunged at Farla again. Once again she bounced off.
"I told you I was apathetic," Farla reminded.
The girl considered. She paced around the edge of the forcefield, looking for cracks. "Aha!" she announced at last. "But you clearly care, because you reviewed!" She lunged.
"Compartmentalization," Farla said, not looking up from her notebook. The girl bounced off again. "I'm not one of those Kantian twits. While I care about how you present your story, I don't care that you respond by screaming at me."
The girl considered further. "But you're writing this story." She readied the knife.
"But I'm doing it in the hopes my beloved Nevada-tan-like repliers will be more coherent and avoid this kind of stupid in their future responses. Also, because I found it really funny."
"Damn."
"Sorry," Farla said. "But you know what would really hurt my feelings and get me back for that review? If you reviewed my stories and, instead of just telling me how much you hate me, you wrote a long, detailed review on everything you thought was bad about the story."
I'd abuse this loophole in the days to come.
