To destroy this kind of discussion in the name of preventing piracy is exactly the kind of act that ISPs and social networking services like Livejournal protest when, for instance, copyright holders demand that they be shut down because some fraction of their users are using their infrastructure to share pirated content.

"if Scans_Daily were a male dominated community it would have not been suspended like this. Why? Because I don’t think it would have been on a site like Livejournal."

Female fans populate social network sites run by panicky male-dominated corporations who want to make money from selling advertising to women, but don’t really have the brass ovaries to deal with hosting female interaction on the internet. It’s like they expect feathered sugar with a hint of spice and are shocked to discover girls have locker room talk and smoke in the bathroom. Male fan communities seem to be owned and operated by like-minded males

As far as one can make out from the current squabble in other fandoms, it is not academics as such who are disregarded or disdained by other fen.  It is, almost exclusively, the Faculty of English Language and Literature who have made themselves unwelcome.  This seems to me significant.  It seems to me more significant still that it is, so far as I can determine, primarily American dons of Frenchified theoretical leanings who are making themselves unpopular with the mass of fandom.  I mean, if the academic fen in question were, say, Womersley of St Catz, Shrimpton of LMH, or Turner of Jesus, let alone Jenkyns of LMH, I shouldn’t expect the same quarrel to have arisen. My primary point is simply that this seems not to be a case in other fandoms of something I’ve never seen and don’t anticipate seeing in mine: of ‘the revolting peasants rising against their intellectual superiors’ or of ‘all academics sucking the soul out of fandom like so many Dementors’, which appear to be the two rallying cries here.  One simply doesn’t observe this sort of anger’s attaching to historians or those who read Law at university or even to wild-eyed, Balliol-Wadham-and-Grauniadista sociologists and anthropologists, at least not in my fandom.  Therefore, I submit that it is misleading and contrary to resolution of the quarrel to cast it in terms of all fen in all fandoms against all academics of all schools of thought.

I've been spending a lot more time lately dipping my toes back into old slash fandom waters and it makes me wonder if the general attitude of "it's all good" that I see in the HP fandom has spoiled me for participation in some of the other fandoms. Especially the fandoms where the fen seem to be older (late 40's and up). I'm fine as long as I just read fics, but when I try to interact with some of the fen I often feel like I've gone back in time. Especially when talking about gay sex.

More interestingly, she claims that the "still-images of actions" are also indexical, because they only show a part of a broader temporal whole action.

First of all, in the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, indexicality is a means through which reference is garnered via causation or indication. For example, an index finger that points to something doesn't mean that thing, it indicates the thing has meaning. The finger is just saying "for the real meaning look over there." Also, if I saw a footprint in the sand, it indexes the person who once walked there, because of the causation stepping there created.

in How to Draw..., Lee and Buscema's advice is to use the maximally intense points of that sequence — the ends and beginnings of the action marked "best" or "not bad." These sections of the action seem more representative of the action than the medial parts. In semiotic terms, they would index the overall action better than the parts in the middle, which are less representative of the overall action. Research seems to have borne out their intuition.

Why are American cartoonists so bad at drawing hot men? Japanese cartoonists can draw hot men. European cartoonists can draw hot men. Not as hot as the ones the Japanese cartoonists draw, but guys like Moebius at least put in an effort.

I’m thinking that perhaps the most important distinction between the two fandoms is the way that music fans take the resources of their fandom outside of that fandom as part of their self-presentation in other contexts. Think t-shirts with band names (Rob Walker’s excellent book Buying In reports that Ramones t-shirts have outsold Ramones albums 10 to 1). Think playlists embedded on social network profiles. Think bumper stickers

How does a Lost fan dress? Can you spot a Star Wars fan walking down the street? Narrative fandom is invisible unless it’s being discussed. Music fandom is much more likely to be made visible as an intrinsic part of self-definition in a wide variety of situations.

The upshot is that we should be wary of taking the practices of narrative fandom on which most fandom theory has been built as exemplary of all fandom. Different kinds of materials call for different kinds of practices, and if we’re to build theories that encompass all of fandom, we need to account for these distinctions as well as the similarities.

Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley

Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman - for example, the love poetry written from a young girl's viewpoint - it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman's assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record. --Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tyldesley

On another topic, only tangentially related to RaceFail '09, is the perception I have that Livejournal, as a blogging platform, continues to be considered some weird incestuous second-class place compared to Wordpress or Blogspot or something. I frequently see derogatory comments out in the blogosphere about LJ bloggers, implying that anyone writing on LJ isn't worth paying attention to. (Yes, Scalzi, this means you, and not just for yesterday's post.)And I have to ask, why is a freestanding blog more valid somehow than an LJ? Is it somehow the community nature of LJ? The icons? The friends-list function? What is it that makes LJ so much tackier than Blogspot?... or is it that LJ is perceived as majority female?

then you are So Super Great And Powerful because readers come all the way to look at your blogI think there's something to this. The perception of Manly Independence, even though it's false because they're still using a blogging platform like Blogspot or Wordpress, it's just a little more detached from the other blogs on Blogspot or Wordpress. So they have to use an RSS reader with their morning coffee, instead of a flist.

(I think there's a reason that a lot of the old fan shows, the big ones, were series that never had canon ships, never had any romances that lasted more than a single episode.