LJ Idol Week 16 {It Wasn't Me}, in which we play cops and bloggers
Ready to crack the case?
FYI: You are now a member of the Intarwebz Police. Or at least you are for the remainder of this entry. Enjoy your first day on the job!
You're manning the late-night phones at the Intarwebz Police Station, passing the hours by debating the merits of [insert sociopolitical fiasco du jour] in the Green Room when a call comes through. An unnamed online writing contest that takes place on an unnamed online journaling platform has fallen prey to not one, not two, not three, but four different criminals committing four different criminal acts. Zoinks!
While you're waiting for your fellow members of the Intarwebz Police Force to bring in the suspects, you take a look at the crime scene report. One of the suspects seems to have attempted to rig the competition's polls. Another tried to shut down the polls entirely by launching a DDOS attack and blaming the Russian government. One suspect blatantly plagiarized her entry, and another flounced out of the competition all together and started a rival community.
When you look up, you see all four suspects being hauled off to the interrogation room, and as you listen to their panicked chatter, you realize these are hardened intarwebz criminals with hardened intarwebz rapsheets. One of these devious divas loves to blab spoilers all over the place without any warning whatsoever! Another of these putrid perps indulges her bloodlust with troll-esque marauding through neighboring fandoms, where she incites flamewars, carnage, and catfights galore. Yet another of these fandom femme fatales is a cold-blooded slinger of gods-awful fanfic without an ounce of remorse in her word-mangling body; and most terrifying of all, one of these loathsome ladies is on a tireless crusade to proselytize from every rooftop on the web, not resting until she's converted the entire online world to her own religious faith through gratuitous use of spiritual spam.
In addition to these horrifying habits, each suspect also has a ridiculous pseudonym and regularly participates in one online fandom. Each also has a presence on one social media site other than livejournal the unnamed journaling platform. Naturally, all four suspects are clinging more tightly to their proclaimed innocence than a Southern Baptist Texas housewife clutching her pearls at a Gay Pride parade. Everyone's accusing everyone, no one will admit to anything, and it seems like a lost cause. But! You might be able to shake a few tidbits of info loose...
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to take the available evidence below and find out who's guilty of what. Think you can crack the case and match these histrionic hooligans up with their dirty deeds?
Remember, there are four suspects total, and each one has a different pseudonym, fandom, annoying online habit, preferred social media site, and each one committed a different crime.
The four pseudonyms are: Tealle Deer, Jo Mama, Sue Whirbrane, and Fay Kurr
The four fandoms are: Twilight, Star Trek, Dr. Who, and Harry Potter
The four annoying online habits are: Posting spoilers, writing atrocious fanfic, instigating flamewars, and attempting to religiously convert people.
The four social media sites are: Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and Myspace
The four crimes are: Plagiarizing an entry, DDOS attacking the servers, rigging the poll, and flouncing off to make a rival community.
Here's your evidence card, Detective. (You might want to print this out or roughly scratch out a replica on a nearby Dunkin' Donuts napkin.)
And here's the evidence you've managed to dig up. Since you're a rookie on the Intarwebz Police Force, you can click the "hint" button next to each clue to simplify it and filter out unnecessary info that you can't, currently or eventually, plug directly into your card.
- Suspect #1 wrote an entry one week where she waxed indignant about the time she got kicked out of a movie theater in the 90's for sneaking into a Leo DiCaprio flick and telling everyone the boat sinks. [HINT](Suspect #1 has an annoying habit of blasting out spoilers.)
- Someone in the Twilight fandom seems to recall a starry-eyed n00b who wanted to know if sparkly vampires could knock a server offline by staring obsessively at it while it sleeps. She apparently proclaimed herself to be a member of "Team DDOS." [HINT](The person who staged the DDOS attack is in the Twilight fandom.)
- The pseudonym Fay Kurr has cropped up on lots of people's Facebook feeds lately, though nobody's quite sure who it is. Or if they do, they're not talking. [HINT](Fay Kurr uses Facebook.)
- The person who flounced all crazy-like and tried to start up a rival community isn't going to have much luck, because she attempted to do it on Blogger. [HINT](The person who started the rival community uses Blogger.)
- An extensive search of Blogger's database turned up many frightening things, but a writer by the pen name of Sue Whirbrane was NOT among them. [HINT](Sue Whirbrane does NOT use Blogger.)
- The Dr. Who fan has annoyed her fellow fandom members on multiple occasions by attempting to convert them all to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. [HINT](The person in the Dr. Who fandom has an annoying habit of religious proselytization.)
- When police began interrogating Suspect #3, she issued a written statement that contained nothing but a link to her Myspace page. Forensic archaeologists and intarwebz historians have been called in to attempt communication with the suspect, as she is clearly a relic from a bygone era. [HINT](Suspect #3 uses Myspace.)
- Word on the street is one of the suspects got in trouble for plagiarizing the works of a typewriter-wielding lab monkey and trying to pass it off as her own material on Facebook. This did not end well for her. This also seems to be a pattern. [HINT](The person who uses Facebook is the plagiarizing criminal.)
- Jo Mama accidentally started a scandal when she tweeted a message saying she needed to get her boobs shined for work. #damnyouautocorrect [HINT](Jo Mama uses Twitter.)
- Tealle Deer was rushed to the hospital with third degree phaser burns after she showed up to a Star Trek convention wearing a red shirt. You'd think such a dedicated Trekkie would see this coming and opt for a more logical wardrobe choice! [HINT](Tealle Deer is in the Star Trek fandom.)
- Jo Mama was also rushed to the hospital from a convention one time. She got punched in the face after asking a couple of Dr. Who cosplayers why their Bill and Ted costumes sucked so hard. (I mean, who else could they possibly have been cosplaying if they had a time-traveling phone booth, right??) Several of Jo's front teeth were exterminated, the stone angels now have a new reason to weep, and Jo apparently does not trust the Doctor...or even know Who he is. [HINT](Jo Mama's fandom is NOT Dr. Who.)
- Suspect #2 proudly recalls the aforementioned incident and says she assisted with the asskicking. She was only defending the honor of her fandom brethren! Whovians gotta stick together through time, space, excellent adventures...and cases of totally bogus mistaken identity. [HINT](Suspect #2's fandom is Dr. Who.)
- Jo Mama is positively terrified of online confrontation and was voted “least likely to ever go within eleventy billion feet of anything that even remotely resembles something that may or may not possibly be a flamewar" in her intarwebz graduating class. [HINT](Jo Mama is NOT the person who likes starting flamewars.)
- The Harry Potter fangirl believes that plagiarism is the darkest of the Dark Arts and that, should she ever attempt it, Dementors will show up and cart her off to Intarwebz Azkaban where she'll be forced to eternally re-live the horrible memory of reading the Deathly Hallows epilogue. [HINT](The person in the Potter fandom is NOT the plagiarist.)
- Suspect #4 landed the entire internet on Fandom Wank one time after she started a giant flamewar over whether or not Darth Vader and Dr. Horrible could kick Batman's ass in a bar fight if Batman was allowed to have Wolverine, He-Man, Captain planet, and four Smurfs as sidekicks. She crossposted the whole thing to the MST3K fandom, asked whether Joel could kick Mike's ass in the same bar fight, then crossposted that entire clusterfuck to Jezebel to point out an important discussion on power dynamics was taking place and no females were being represented at all. The resulting mushroom cloud of nuclear atomic wank glowed an eerie green for many years to come. Scientists are still studying the mutations. [HINT](Suspect #4 loves starting multi-fandom flamewars.)
- The Facebooker of the group believes herself to be above such silly things as flamewars. Why get your nails dirty stating your own opinion when you can just hit the re-post button on a politically themed cat macro? [HINT](The person who uses Facebook isn't the one who starts flamewars.)
- A depressingly large quantity of soul-searingly horrible fanfic was posted at the exact same time the rival community was created. Although there's a valid case to be made that fanfic of this..er...quality is a criminal offense in its own right, it looks like our badfic writer wasn't the one who created the rival comm. [HINT](The rival community was NOT started by the person who writes bad fanfic.)
- Jo Mama swears up and down her pseudonym isn't meant to be any sort of satire or commentary on Jo Rowling, even though Jo Mama's a fairly prominent member of the Harry Potter fandom. Some people believe her. Some people don't.[HINT](Jo Mama is in the Potter fandom.)
Ready to make your arrests? Ready to give up entirely because you're sick of trying to figure it out? Just wanna arrest the whole damn universe because chances are they're all guilty of some sort of wank anyway?
[CLICK HERE FOR THE ANSWERS AND THE STIRRING CONCLUSION TO YOUR OWN PERSONAL POLICE DRAMA]
Did you get 'em right?
[Yep! Busted!]You spend a little more time than you'd planned cuffing the suspects (the Twilight fangirl is also into 50 Shades of Grey, and she requested leg irons in addition to handcuffs). You then haul them off into the harsh, cruel light of the sun - which none of them have actually seen in quite a while, it seems. They hang their heads in shame as...oh, who the hell are we kidding. They strut proudly to the Intarwebz paddy wagon, eager to earn fandom street cred for their impressive litany of dastardly misdeeds. THE END.
[Uh...er...uh-oh.]That's okay. This is the intarwebz. Everyone's wanky until proven otherwise anyway. BOOK 'EM!
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Text-only version RIGHT HERE: http://porn-this-way.livejournal.com/46622.html
Also, feel free to click both "YES" and "NO" for the final question at the end. They have slightly different conclusions\gags.