Some clarification regarding my part in recent events at scans_daily.
I've waffled over the last day over whether or not I should post this. I decided to put it up to clarify a couple of things that are being said the sequence of events that led to the nuking of scans_daily. I'm writing this on very little sleep, so bear with me if things aren't crystal clear and if it's terse. My purpose here isn't to exhaustively go over everything that's been said on LJ and the larger blogsphere over the past forty eight hours about scans_daily or so or to summarize the entirety of what happened. I just wanted to clarify a subset of events that involved me directly and note that there are a couple of larger misconceptions currently extant on various sites and blogs about how scans_daily was run.
Due to my part in pissing Peter David off, which I suspect did have something to do with his reporting of the post I refer to below to Marvel (although he says on his blog that it was the copyright violations that got him reporting the comm to Marvel), I've gotten a couple of fervent wishes via e-mail that I die in a fire, one of which was worded in a way that I can only describe as truly baroque. So that's the other reason I'm posting this, because, well, people are pissed and feel that I should take take my lumps and/or are wondering what exactly happened.
Prepare for some serious tl;dr. I apologize in advance for the length.
I'm reconstructing this from memory and from the LJ comment notifications that I do still have in my inbox I (I don't have all the comment notifs in my inbox anymore, hence my disclaimer of possible unintentional errors below), so if I attribute things to people in error and/or make errors in citing the correct order of events that unfolded in that fateful X-Factor post to scans_daily, please let me know and I'll do my best to edit appropriately.
On February 19th, airings put up scans from X-Factor #40 on scans_daily. airings didn't put up the complete issue; if I recall correctly, she posted half the issue in accordance with the comm's posting rules. (She might have posted just one scan under or over half the issue - I can't quite remember the exact page count.)
The original post was here. Given that scans_daily is now suspended, the link obviously no longer takes you to the post itself, but maybe someone with sophisticated cache fu can find a working cache.
Jumping ahead a bit here: later in the day on February 19th, I posted here about airings's X-Factor post to S_D and there was discussion about what happened in the various comment threads. Some of us noticed that Photobucket had quickly deleted the scanned images that airings had posted. airings commented on my journal about the scans being gone from her scans_daily X-Factor post and noted that that had been her very first time posting to the comm. I replied with an apology about what happened in the threads. (airings, if you read this, again, I'm truly sorry about the whole thing.)
Here are the scans from X-Factor #40 that she posted - I'm linking to them because she seems to be taking some unfair heat for allegedly posting the entire issue, and there's a misconception out there that scans_daily allowed individual posters to post a full issue's worth of scans to the comm.
Edit: Links to scans removed. Please note that the scans were not posted here.
Anyway, cut to the chase. Poor airings put up the above pages on scans_daily. I read them, then went and immediately read X-Factor #40 in its entirety, and posted this in reply to her post - the below are quick and dirty screencaps from my inbox. My reaction was, ah, strongly worded and angry, to say the least - my first comment to is at the top, with the embarrassingly huge font and even more embarrassing fuck yous and whatnot, and below that is Peter David's response. Peter David had apparently never been to scans_daily; he apparently got linked to the X-Factor #40 post and responded to my comment using his wife's account of puppetmaker40:
Not my finest moment, to be sure. That screencap is from my notification that twbasketcase had replied to my first comment to the X-Factor #40 post.
EDIT OF MASSIVE FAIL: ARGH. I meant to post this - this was Peter David's response to my first comment to the X-Factor #40 post:
Just to give you context (and this is by no means an excuse for my outburst), my explosive reaction was due to increasing discomfort and anger about what I perceive as some increasingly skanky gender issues and characterization in X-Factor, the killing of Siryn's baby as a plot device, etc. scans_daily was a fan-made and fan-run space where, to borrow the wording of a friend, it was a safe forum to express opinions in a relatively uncensored manner about creators or books. Things like "Fuck you, DiDio" were pretty common in reaction to various scans that were posted on any given day. (There had been recent rumblings from mods about making the space more creator friendly, but I don't recall seeing any new specific guidelines from the mods about how we were supposed to talk about creators on the comm.)
Anyway, there I was in the uncomfortable position of realizing that hey, I said something really nasty about someone on the internet where I didn't think they'd see it, they saw it, and decided to respond.
I responded to Peter David with two comments of major teal deering:
Part I:
Part II:
(You can see threnodin disagreeing with me there as a reply to my Part II. In retrospect, I'm kind of horrified by my half-assed "I'm sorry if you're misled" apology -- I hate it when other people do that, so wow, I'm a hypocrite. I could have worded it better.)
Peter David responded to the first part, as you can see, and then I responded with a brief comment assuring him that I wished him or his family no physical harm, and that was the end of my interaction with him. It was along the lines of "If you'd read my comment, you'd see that I don't really want you to die in a fire." (Right now I don't know if I still have the exact comment sitting in my inbox somehwere.)
Here I'm working from memory and incomplete e-mail notifs: I was involved in a couple of other threads in that post. flashfire took me to task for the "die in a fire," but after a few wanky comments back and forth, we came to a relatively civil agreement that I didn't want Peter David to die in a fire, and then we decided to talk about Final Crisis instead. misterandersen posted something about alcoholism and addiction being moral weaknesses (with regards to Siryn being weak compared to Monet St. Croix and her alcoholism being one reason why), I objected to that characterization of alcoholism as a moral failing rather than a disease, and so there was back and forth there, too (angry and wanky on my part, somewhat wanky on his).
There were also a few people who commented with disagreement to various things I said, so I'm in no way trying to characterize what happened as "hey, I said stuff and everyone backed me up." It was a mixed discussion with a variety of opinions (which was kind of a hallmark of scans_daily).
So that was my involvement in the fateful X-Factor #40 post.
Moving on to some generalities. I think the mods at scans_daily have also been taking some unfair heat from people who rarely or never actually visited the comm for allegedly allowing people to post complete issues on the comm. In my experience, that was highly discouraged and frowned upon by the comm, and the mods did occasionally tell people when they were over the allowable page limit per issue. From what I saw, the mods had recently been pretty good about enforcing that limit, and the comm's members were historically always very good about self-policing in regards to same. I'm not arguing about the copyright violation issue, however, and LJ's TOS is unforgiving.
pandoras_closet posted here stating that I told Peter David to "die in a fire" in direct response to a comment that Peter David made to me. That's not correct, as you can see from the above screencaps, although I can completely understand that from Peter David's perspective, coming across a response to an X-Factor post and seeing "DIE IN A FIRE, PETER DAVID" could be upsetting and unsettling and from his (and other) perspectives, it's probably splitting hairs to say that it wasn't directed to him. But once I realized that he'd responded to my comment to the post, I tried to be polite and, well, I was embarrassed and felt like shit.
I still stand by my opinions about the way X-Factor's been handled as a book by Peter David, but I feel really badly about what happened with the nuking of scans_daily and my part in the whole thing. I also saw allusions yesterday to the fact that Peter David and his wife found "die in a fire" triggering due to a personal loss, and for that, I feel even worse for using the phrase.
On the other hand, WHOA - this from grayarcadian:
...You'll pardon me if I disagree with the assertion that I should be jailed for what I said to Peter David. She also wondered if I'd sockpuppeted comments in that X-Factor post on S_D that vaguely to strongly agreed with all or parts of what I said to Peter David or that took him to task for taking "die in a fire" seriously; to that I can only say that to the best of my knowledge, twbasketcase, bethan_b_bad, tavella, etc. are real people that aren't me (I can't remember every single person that commented in the threads).
It was hard for me to write up this post because there's a lot of ugliness going around right now, mutual finger pointing, and all kinds of hate being heaped on both scans_daily and Peter David. While I'm still upset and pissed that the comm was nuked and while I do think Peter David played a part in that nuking, I played a part in it too, and for that I am really sorry.
(I was further disillusioned by Peter David's giant bowl of racefail on his blog this week, but that's for another post, not this one.)
Comments may be screened because while I understand that some people are really, really pissed about this, I'm going through some heavy medical stuff in real life right now, to say I'm stressed out about same would be an understatement, and I just don't want wank in my personal journal space in response to this post. I ask that you please respect that.
Edit: Whoops. I meant to thank Gail Simone for being supportive of scans_daily out there in the blogsphere over the past couple of days. Also, apologies to those on my flist who already endured me tl;dring about all of this on Friday. Sorry, guys.
Edit of Whoops, I Meant to Include This, Too: Kevin Church, in his "Scans_Daily is dead, fuck 'em" post, accused Avalon's Willow of causing the whole meltdown. (Scroll down well into the comments section to his post and you'll see where he blames Willow.) That is absolutely untrue. Willow's only involvement, as far as I can tell, has been to publicly comment on the comm's suspension. I posted a comment in reply to Kevin Church's blog post clarifying that I'm probably the person he's looking for, not Willow. Thus far he hasn't responded to it.
Due to my part in pissing Peter David off, which I suspect did have something to do with his reporting of the post I refer to below to Marvel (although he says on his blog that it was the copyright violations that got him reporting the comm to Marvel), I've gotten a couple of fervent wishes via e-mail that I die in a fire, one of which was worded in a way that I can only describe as truly baroque. So that's the other reason I'm posting this, because, well, people are pissed and feel that I should take take my lumps and/or are wondering what exactly happened.
Prepare for some serious tl;dr. I apologize in advance for the length.
I'm reconstructing this from memory and from the LJ comment notifications that I do still have in my inbox I (I don't have all the comment notifs in my inbox anymore, hence my disclaimer of possible unintentional errors below), so if I attribute things to people in error and/or make errors in citing the correct order of events that unfolded in that fateful X-Factor post to scans_daily, please let me know and I'll do my best to edit appropriately.
On February 19th, airings put up scans from X-Factor #40 on scans_daily. airings didn't put up the complete issue; if I recall correctly, she posted half the issue in accordance with the comm's posting rules. (She might have posted just one scan under or over half the issue - I can't quite remember the exact page count.)
The original post was here. Given that scans_daily is now suspended, the link obviously no longer takes you to the post itself, but maybe someone with sophisticated cache fu can find a working cache.
Jumping ahead a bit here: later in the day on February 19th, I posted here about airings's X-Factor post to S_D and there was discussion about what happened in the various comment threads. Some of us noticed that Photobucket had quickly deleted the scanned images that airings had posted. airings commented on my journal about the scans being gone from her scans_daily X-Factor post and noted that that had been her very first time posting to the comm. I replied with an apology about what happened in the threads. (airings, if you read this, again, I'm truly sorry about the whole thing.)
Here are the scans from X-Factor #40 that she posted - I'm linking to them because she seems to be taking some unfair heat for allegedly posting the entire issue, and there's a misconception out there that scans_daily allowed individual posters to post a full issue's worth of scans to the comm.
Edit: Links to scans removed. Please note that the scans were not posted here.
Anyway, cut to the chase. Poor airings put up the above pages on scans_daily. I read them, then went and immediately read X-Factor #40 in its entirety, and posted this in reply to her post - the below are quick and dirty screencaps from my inbox. My reaction was, ah, strongly worded and angry, to say the least - my first comment to is at the top, with the embarrassingly huge font and even more embarrassing fuck yous and whatnot, and below that is Peter David's response. Peter David had apparently never been to scans_daily; he apparently got linked to the X-Factor #40 post and responded to my comment using his wife's account of puppetmaker40:
Not my finest moment, to be sure. That screencap is from my notification that twbasketcase had replied to my first comment to the X-Factor #40 post.
EDIT OF MASSIVE FAIL: ARGH. I meant to post this - this was Peter David's response to my first comment to the X-Factor #40 post:
Just to give you context (and this is by no means an excuse for my outburst), my explosive reaction was due to increasing discomfort and anger about what I perceive as some increasingly skanky gender issues and characterization in X-Factor, the killing of Siryn's baby as a plot device, etc. scans_daily was a fan-made and fan-run space where, to borrow the wording of a friend, it was a safe forum to express opinions in a relatively uncensored manner about creators or books. Things like "Fuck you, DiDio" were pretty common in reaction to various scans that were posted on any given day. (There had been recent rumblings from mods about making the space more creator friendly, but I don't recall seeing any new specific guidelines from the mods about how we were supposed to talk about creators on the comm.)
Anyway, there I was in the uncomfortable position of realizing that hey, I said something really nasty about someone on the internet where I didn't think they'd see it, they saw it, and decided to respond.
I responded to Peter David with two comments of major teal deering:
Part I:
Part II:
(You can see threnodin disagreeing with me there as a reply to my Part II. In retrospect, I'm kind of horrified by my half-assed "I'm sorry if you're misled" apology -- I hate it when other people do that, so wow, I'm a hypocrite. I could have worded it better.)
Peter David responded to the first part, as you can see, and then I responded with a brief comment assuring him that I wished him or his family no physical harm, and that was the end of my interaction with him. It was along the lines of "If you'd read my comment, you'd see that I don't really want you to die in a fire." (Right now I don't know if I still have the exact comment sitting in my inbox somehwere.)
Here I'm working from memory and incomplete e-mail notifs: I was involved in a couple of other threads in that post. flashfire took me to task for the "die in a fire," but after a few wanky comments back and forth, we came to a relatively civil agreement that I didn't want Peter David to die in a fire, and then we decided to talk about Final Crisis instead. misterandersen posted something about alcoholism and addiction being moral weaknesses (with regards to Siryn being weak compared to Monet St. Croix and her alcoholism being one reason why), I objected to that characterization of alcoholism as a moral failing rather than a disease, and so there was back and forth there, too (angry and wanky on my part, somewhat wanky on his).
There were also a few people who commented with disagreement to various things I said, so I'm in no way trying to characterize what happened as "hey, I said stuff and everyone backed me up." It was a mixed discussion with a variety of opinions (which was kind of a hallmark of scans_daily).
So that was my involvement in the fateful X-Factor #40 post.
Moving on to some generalities. I think the mods at scans_daily have also been taking some unfair heat from people who rarely or never actually visited the comm for allegedly allowing people to post complete issues on the comm. In my experience, that was highly discouraged and frowned upon by the comm, and the mods did occasionally tell people when they were over the allowable page limit per issue. From what I saw, the mods had recently been pretty good about enforcing that limit, and the comm's members were historically always very good about self-policing in regards to same. I'm not arguing about the copyright violation issue, however, and LJ's TOS is unforgiving.
pandoras_closet posted here stating that I told Peter David to "die in a fire" in direct response to a comment that Peter David made to me. That's not correct, as you can see from the above screencaps, although I can completely understand that from Peter David's perspective, coming across a response to an X-Factor post and seeing "DIE IN A FIRE, PETER DAVID" could be upsetting and unsettling and from his (and other) perspectives, it's probably splitting hairs to say that it wasn't directed to him. But once I realized that he'd responded to my comment to the post, I tried to be polite and, well, I was embarrassed and felt like shit.
I still stand by my opinions about the way X-Factor's been handled as a book by Peter David, but I feel really badly about what happened with the nuking of scans_daily and my part in the whole thing. I also saw allusions yesterday to the fact that Peter David and his wife found "die in a fire" triggering due to a personal loss, and for that, I feel even worse for using the phrase.
On the other hand, WHOA - this from grayarcadian:
...You'll pardon me if I disagree with the assertion that I should be jailed for what I said to Peter David. She also wondered if I'd sockpuppeted comments in that X-Factor post on S_D that vaguely to strongly agreed with all or parts of what I said to Peter David or that took him to task for taking "die in a fire" seriously; to that I can only say that to the best of my knowledge, twbasketcase, bethan_b_bad, tavella, etc. are real people that aren't me (I can't remember every single person that commented in the threads).
It was hard for me to write up this post because there's a lot of ugliness going around right now, mutual finger pointing, and all kinds of hate being heaped on both scans_daily and Peter David. While I'm still upset and pissed that the comm was nuked and while I do think Peter David played a part in that nuking, I played a part in it too, and for that I am really sorry.
(I was further disillusioned by Peter David's giant bowl of racefail on his blog this week, but that's for another post, not this one.)
Comments may be screened because while I understand that some people are really, really pissed about this, I'm going through some heavy medical stuff in real life right now, to say I'm stressed out about same would be an understatement, and I just don't want wank in my personal journal space in response to this post. I ask that you please respect that.
Edit: Whoops. I meant to thank Gail Simone for being supportive of scans_daily out there in the blogsphere over the past couple of days. Also, apologies to those on my flist who already endured me tl;dring about all of this on Friday. Sorry, guys.
Edit of Whoops, I Meant to Include This, Too: Kevin Church, in his "Scans_Daily is dead, fuck 'em" post, accused Avalon's Willow of causing the whole meltdown. (Scroll down well into the comments section to his post and you'll see where he blames Willow.) That is absolutely untrue. Willow's only involvement, as far as I can tell, has been to publicly comment on the comm's suspension. I posted a comment in reply to Kevin Church's blog post clarifying that I'm probably the person he's looking for, not Willow. Thus far he hasn't responded to it.