Jenett: Part of the issue is that there's no current clear way to do that (apart from mailing the Feedback address, I think).
So idontlikepeas's suggestion that LJ Suggestions was the appropriate community was wrong? Or just "not obvious" - not even to LJ Abuse team members?
Jenett: "This is against our current policy. We have noted multiple cases about this: if you think the policy needs revision or clarification, here's the appropriate mechanism [link] to start that in motion. However, unless and until a change is made, you still need to have a user icon which meets our requirements [here]."
I think that response - clear, not telling a nursing mother a pic of herself breastfeeding her baby is "graphically sexual or violent", and offering a specific way of providing feedback to change the policy, would have avoided most of the problems. Certainly it would have avoided the problem of mass numbers of people e-mailing LJ Abuse, and then, as they got a stonewall "we're not changing what we do and you can't make us", e-mailing SixApart. It's a pity no one on LJ Abuse thought of doing it.
idontlikepeas: One more time: No change in policy. Not even one that occurred in the past.
Not true. What the policy used to be was that a user's default userpic could not contain "graphic sexual or violent content". (See screenshot of the Abuse Policy Feedback Form, which clearly states it was last updated November 2004.) Sometime between 4th November 2004 and 20th May 2006, that policy was evidently changed to "no nudity". But there was a change in policy, since while it's possible to define a woman breastfeeding an infant as "nude" because she's exposing nipple or areola, it is not possible to define a woman breastfeeding an infant as "graphically sexual or violent".
I said having a clear-cut policy is better, and that Abuse Team members are bound to obey the policy, whatever the policy is.
How is this different from what I said?
. As I said above, in my opinion as a non-Abuse Team member, Eric shouldn't have referred something like this up the chain, since it's just one more day enforcing the same policy he'd already been enforcing for ages already. But even if he had referred it up the chain, he would have ended up giving out the same response, since it clearly /is actually/ the policy that no nipples are allowed in defaults. "More training" would not have changed anything here.
Except it might have avoided the public relations catastrophe that ensued, mightn't it?
If SixApart/LJ Abuse had taken the time to think that since they had edited FAQ 111, and an unwritten rule had become a public rule (and thus there had been an apparent sudden change in the policy, even if all the insiders knew that the change in the policy had occurred some time ago) then it might have occurred to someone to propose adding to the suspension notices that went out, a link to the Suggestions community and a note saying that if the user objects to the policy of "no nipples - no exceptions" they could propose a change in LJ Suggestions.
Taking "just one more day" to enforce a policy that's going to cause trouble and dissension, in order to think how to enforce it in a way that will cause least trouble and dissension, sounds like a good plan to me.
You can argue that the volunteer had no way to know that enforcing the policy was going to cause trouble and dissension. And 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. But it seems to me that there were clues available: an individual who was reporting 30 icons, all of women breastfeeding, who had recently himself been reported for an indecent icon? A clear mismatch between the public guidelines ("graphically sexual") and the private policy ("no nudity").
Why would it have been so bad to take a day - or a few days - to decide what to do about icons that did not trangress the public guidelines for default icons, which the users were understandably angry about being told to undefault? If it was one angry user who was genuinely offended, I can see why LJ Abuse would have wanted to take prompt action, but when LJ Abuse were aware that these reports were coming from one individual who was seeking out user pics in order to report them, that surely made it an issue that could afford to wait?
Jennett: Surely that's even more of a way to head towards robotic and mechanistic responses.
Well, given that (according to idontlikepeas) LJ Abuse staff members have no flexibility and no ability to do anything other than apply pre-defined rules, it seems to me that it would be an improvement to have this done by paid staff who were not involved in livejournal.
Will: I'm sorry I was flippant about the loss of your pet.
Absolutely no offense taken. FWIW, I agree with you. I've written about my cat on my own journal: I wouldn't write about her here, and indeed am rather sorry I linked to my journal from here at all.
All Brits are aware of this, because they read the book in class while in primary school
We read it in class in my primary school, too, so unless we went to the same primary school, that's a sample of two...
It was a genuine jolt when I was a teenager to discover that the author of "The Thought Fox" was the same person who wrote The Iron Man and How The Whale Became.
Ken, I read (in This Immortal, by Roger Zelazny, as it happens) that Gautama Buddha was "accidentally canonised" in the 16th century and became Saint Jehosephat.
Zelazny is no longer around to ask where he got this from, but I googled and found no evidence that Jehosephat is a saint.
Given the back-and-forth of trade between China and Europe, it's entirely possible that Siddartha could have been canonised at some point: I have seen pictures on 16th century Chinese scrolls of foreigners being presented at court, which included a Korean, a Japanese, and a European Jesuit priest. Canonisation is traditionally one of the Catholic methods of absorbing other gods into Christianity.
yeah, I was excited about the availability of a Friends school in Baltimore for about five minutes. Until I checked the annual tuition.
Yeah. There are a couple of Quaker private schools in England, too, and they're reliably expensive like any other form of private education. (None in Scotland, AFAIK.)
My favourite Quaker joke is visual, not verbal. Cartoon of a slightly-older girl reading out of a storybook to two younger children: "Now there was one poor jailer who didn't have a Quaker..."
AFAIK, the difference between the Religious Society of Friends and all other Christian churches (except for Unitarians? I'm not sure now...) is that Friends don't do church communion: all life is sacramental, so every meal is an opportunity for communion.
The other difference Friends share with a few other faiths: if you ask a Quaker "but what do Friends believe?" if there are two Quakers present you will get three opinions: what one Quaker thinks, what the other Quaker thinks, and what the two of them can agree on together.
I found a list of 35 questions you need to ask yourself (apparently) if you want to be into Gardnerian Wicca, and did a variant on it for So You Want To Be A... Quaker?.
(Then, mildly hysterical, I did another one on So You Want To Be A... Blake's 7 Fan?)
Years ago I was off to a job interview near Dundee, and the agency who got me the job was a one-person one-assistant show who, instead of advising me to take a taxi from the station, asked me how I was planning to get there, and when I said "Train up from Reading to Edinburgh, train from Edinburgh to Dundee..." said "My assistant will drive you there from Edinburgh! It'll be much simpler for you. No arguments, we'll do it that way."
Turns out the assistant was a woman in her twenties with a fairly new baby. (Certainly under six months. This was in the bad old days of no automatic maternity leave for part-timers or people who'd not been in their job for at least two years.) She said rather nervously she hoped I didn't mind sharing a car with a baby, and I assured her that of course I didn't.
Which I honestly didn't. But, the whole getting-on-for-three-hours I was in the car with the two of them (there and back again), every time the baby opened her mouth to wail (as babies do) her mother popped a chocolate drop in, and the baby ate it. Five minutes later, the baby would start to wail again, be comforted by a chocolate drop, and stop. Start. Chocolate. Stop. For three hours. (I hope this stopped when I was out of the car.)
And I sat there, for three hours, fighting the urge to say that it was a really bad idea to give a baby that much sugar, or to let a baby associate crying with sweet reward.
By the time we were back in Edinburgh again, the baby was clearly exhausted, wanting to go to sleep, and too hyped on sugar to get there. Really and honestly, I don't see how I managed not to say anything, but I didn't.
Yowch. That must have been terrible.
Glad it was fixable, and glad Patrick noticed it.
Rendition Torture was introduced from the Whitehouse by the Clinton Administration. Do the research.
So what?
I used to make rice pudding for my mum's Christmas Eve party every year: she got the idea from a Scandinavian, and I was glad to do it, because (a) it was delicious (b) it exempted me from doing anything else, because it was time-consuming.
Rice pudding with real custard made with eggs, and large quantities of whipped cream, and a small quantity of finely pulped apricots (tinned variety: push through a sieve). And one blanched almond in the whole white bowl, which makes one Lord of Misrule if my mum had ever been yuletide enough to have such a thing at her parties. It was delicious, and very rich, and one ate it in very, very small bowls. But my mum stopped having those parties, and I haven't made it since.
And it was you who divided the series into "books solicited from sf writers" and "books by fans." Since those are not in fact distinct categories, the actual division is between "books you liked" and "books you didn't," which is an inalienable privilege, but not the same thing.
Well, yes. But it wasn't only that: there were Trek books that "felt" like science-fiction Trek-flavoured, and the Trek books that "felt" like Trek fanfiction. For the most part, I didn't like the first category very much: but there were a fair few books in the second category I didn't like either, though usually for different reasons from the first category.
Now, I've clearly got muddled about the reasons why some Trek books felt like the author had set out to write a science-fiction novel and trick it out with Trek characters, and why some felt like they'd been written by fans of the series, but the distinction I'm trying to make between the two sorts of Trek novels is something other than just "I liked it" or "I didn't like it".
Mitch: Nope, the opposite---I think I would read my hypothetical pro-written Trek novels, because they would be driven by the voice and creative vision of the authors.
I'd rather read their own good novels, than the shoddy Trek novels you propose. Seriously. What is the point of a good writer setting out to write a bad Trek novel? No one is served in that respect.
John M. Ford: (The prior series -- the Blish books, Joe's, a coupla others -- had been from Signet.)
Those were the ones I was thinking of, actually. I think. (Though my recollection of the 1987 panel is a little dim by now, I believe you were one of the writers on the panel at which the policy of asking pro SF writers to do Trek novels was mentioned: it may even have been you who mentioned it.) So I may be confusing things somewhere. Probably I am. But I was remembering a bunch of fairly early Trek novels that were written by pro SF writers and were pretty much like any hard-SF novel only with a Trek gloss.
I can accept that those categories are nonexclusive, but the books were not first written out of a pure and stainless (if that's the word I want) love of the show and later found publication; they were written because David asked us to write something he could publish.
Well, um. But I happen to know Diane Duane was a Star Trek fan before she wrote her Trek novels. And your two Trek novels do not read like someone who never watched the series and didn't give two hoots for it: they read like you're a fan.
Mitch: or so well-known that all the fanwriters reading this are now rolling their eyes and calling me a patronizing git.
*rolls eyes* *is too polite to call you a patronizing git*
No, seriously, I imagine there can be few Trek fans who date from the days before VCRs who haven't read James Blish, and who aren't aware that he wrote considerable other SF besides the Trek novels. (Of variable quality, admittedly: and with the problem that most pre-70s male SF writers had, that it never seemed to occur to them other than that "the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature".)
So, I'd love to see an anthology, or series of books, written by the best sf writers around.
I wouldn't: unless they were Trek fans. "Every American is a Trekkie now" - sure, but most of them don't have the wide ranging knowledge of the series and the characters that fans have.
I like (for example) John Varley. (And I have no idea if Varley is a Trek fan or not, I hasten to add, but let me assume for the sake of argument that he isn't.) I would hate to read a novel by John Varley that was supposedly a Trek novel in which Varley had thrown out all the background information and continuity (that "bible" you mentioned) and written a novel about characters with the same names on a ship called the Enterprise that were clearly not Kirk, Spock, Uhura, and McCoy. If it was anything like Treks not Taken, it would be an amusing conceit for a short story - but it wouldn't work as a full-length novel.
It would sell, no doubt. Varley has a name, Trek has a name, the combination would be commercially viable. But it wouldn't be worth reading as a Star Trek novel unless Varley was a Star Trek fan and wanted to reproduce his vision of the characters, based on his long-term viewing of the series.
and my opinions are foolish, because I don't read fanfic or media tie-in novels. Just not my thing. I like that other people enjoy it, and my dislike of those kinds of fiction doesn't make me better than anyone else, it's just a personal taste.
*doubletake* So you want pro writers to write these Trek novels, but you yourself wouldn't want to read them because you know in advance you'd dislike them?
*doubletake again*
based on the fact that the same actor (Mark Lenard) portrayed Aaron Stempel on Brides and Ambassador Sarek on Trek.
Really? I never knew that. Of course, I never saw Brides, but you'd have thought someone would have mentioned it...
Mitch: I haven't read "Ishmael." What makes it fanfic? I assume it was published professionally.
I used to be able to divide the Trek novels into three types, of which I found only one type worth reading, and not all of those. First type were written by hacks - people who had no notion of what they were doing. We can dismiss those.
Second type were written by competent science-fiction writers who patently had not much feeling for Trek itself, but who could turn out a reasonably good SF novel based on Star Trek. (I discovered in 1987 that this had been an early Paramount policy for the Trek novels, to offer contracts to known SF writers. But I recognised the results well before.)
Third type were written by fans. And you could tell: these writers knew the series, had thought about it, had come up with ideas based on it, and had written novels that could not have been set anywhere else but in Trek. Characterization was plainly based not on an official handbook but on watching the series intently and thinking about what the actions of the characters meant - it varied, I mean, from writer to writer, but clearly always based solidly on canon. Barbara Hambly's Ishmael is one of these novels (no, it's not slash, though there are slashy moments... AFAIK only one slash novel ever made it to pro publication), as are a handful of others: Carolyn Clowes's The Pandora Principle, Janet Kagan's Uhura's Song, John M. Ford's How Much for Just the Planet? and The Final Reflection, Diane Duane's My Enemy, My Ally, The Romulan Way, The Wounded Sky, (and so on in that sequence until and not including Swordhunt, which was rubbish).
These novels are fanfic - in every sense except that they are being professionally published. Which does tend to preclude their being fanfic normally - but, still: they are.
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