Snarkfest announcement

For those of y'all who post on Snarkfest--and I've talked to a couple of SFers who don't have LJs but read this journal--the board is, in fact down. The 404 page makes it look like the most likely culprit was supposedly a TOS violation, but RunsWithScissors (twilight_zen) says that a ton of Forumer boards are having the same problem--twenty pages' worth on the Forumer support board, in fact. So we weren't dinged, the board may not be back today, but it's nothing we did, and when they fix the problem, we'll get SF back. In the meantime, RWS has set up snarkfest_lj as a place to weep freak out cope.


ETA: OMG SNARKFEST NEVER LEAVE ME AGAIN. *clings*

*headdesk*

Again, something I don't want to link to, but for people who don't understand the concept, let me explain something about parody:

The thing about parody is that it's considered criticism/commentary, which is allowed in most cases by copyright law. (I say "most," because I remember that flap over The Wind Done Gone--I think the argument may have been that it was too much rewriting and not enough actual parody on a book that wasn't in public domain yet.) You can write something called "Harry Potter and the Perils of Puberty," or "Harry Potter and the Really Obvious Plot Point," or "Harry Potter and the Parody Title That Wasn't Really Lame," because you are parodying Harry Potter. If you want to parody me, you could write something along the lines of "Movies in Fifteen Thousand Minutes," because I do tend to run on and on and that's something you might actually rag on me for. But you would have to satirize the way I actually write--CLEO: *runs this joke into the ground*--and maybe throw in a little Harry Potter while you were there, because the primary function of such a parody has got to be the thing in the title (Movies in Fifteen Minutes), and not veer entirely off into something else (Harry Potter) because you'd rather parody that, but you like using my title.

(Nobody has actually ever tried to parody my stuff--that I know of. And I'm very happy not knowing. And I also think that's one more level of meta than the universe could actually handle. I'm just saying, for the sake of making a distinction between the two approaches, how it could be done.)

If you're calling something "Harry Potter in Fifteen Minutes," and you're not parodying "Movies in Fifteen Minutes"? You're stealing my title. It's not that it's such a fantastic title; it's that it creates confusion about whose thing it is. This is my thing. Come up with your own thing, man. Even if it's just "Movies in Ten Minutes (Five Minutes Faster than Cleo!)"--I don't care. At least nobody thinks you're me and I'm you at that point. Movie/Book-a-Minute has their own thing, and had it long before I ever thought of having a thing, and you don't see us fussing at each other, do you? That's because I didn't start up a site called Film-a-Minute, y'all. We do similar things, but the execution is very different and the titles are reasonably different, even though they both convey [Artistic Product] and [Brevity] (although they're much better at the latter than I am).

I know a lot of people think I'm being irrational about this--although not half as irrational as if I were actually doing something about it, like having Darth Junction fire up the Mighty Lightsaber of C&D. Which I wouldn't do, because that's lame. Unless you tried to make a profit off it as well, in which case--well, if you hear "WAH.... WAH..." behind you, don't turn around, is all I'm saying. I guess it's the sense of entitlement that just bugs me. "Oh, I like her title better, so I'll just use that! And if people think I'm her or she's me, well, bonus!"

Sigh.

A little linkspam to make it worth your time:

fox_gloves: "So you mentioned seeing Dracula the ballet? Well, I've got an even better one! EDWARD SCISSORHANDS: BALLET EXTRAORDINAIRE!"

Major theaters shun "Death of a President" film.

Jamie Lee Curtis Is Done With Acting.

Fawcett Remains Positive Despite Cancer.

Heeeeeeeee.

And now back to Black Ribbon, in which I discovered a big ol' geographical continuity hole that I'm trying to fix.

P.S. Snarkfest is back online, by the way.




October: Domestic Violence Awareness Month