random fannishness

[deird_lj]

One of the most fascinating internet past-times I've discovered is looking through old entries of Fandom Wank, and watching as all the conspiracy theorists make outrageous claims about how fandom_scruples is "actually Ms Scribe! Really! She's sockpuppetting to make us think Fandom Scruples exists!" and getting rightfully laughed at by all the other wankas for being the complete nutjobs they clearly are...


(For those of you not familiar with the very entertaining story of Ms Scribe's adventures, the fascinating part goes something like this:

A reader familiar with the situation can now look back and see that, not only is Ms Scribe actually Fandom Scruples, but she's also hanging around on the FW entry as: a) herself, cheerfully mocking those conspiracy nutters who think she's Fandom Scruples; b) two other people, loyally defending their dear friend from the wackos who want to besmirch her good name; and c) one of the conspiracy theorists who is insisting that she is, in fact, Fandom Scruples.

It's hilarious.)



In other news, I have now reached Discworld book seven - and it's still very fun, and very bizarre.

Not just because half the characters I know and love don't exist yet (No Agnes! No Vimes! No Susan! No Death of Rats!), but because I keep mistaking different characters for other characters.

Like King Verence, for instance. I keep reading stuff about King Verence, and thinking it's talking about the other character by that name - whereas he is currently standing five feet away (in the same scene, mind you) being called something else entirely.

Or like watching someone at Unseen University, called "the bursar", wondering if maybe someone else might be slightly crazy...

Bizarre. Really.

Comments

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

Isn't there mention of the Patrician in one of the early books being grossly fat and eating candied starfish or something of the sort?

(And Book 7 would be... Pyramids?)

[rahirah]

If Ms. Scribe had put half the effort into politics that she put into sockpuppetting, she'd rule the world by now.

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

*Looks longingly at "Night Watch", the only book I brought for the week away, knowing I'll never get to it.*

All Pratchett love good, even (especially?) when we're not completely clear where he's going.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Ah - are you on 'Wyrd Sisters'?

[brutti-ma-buoni.livejournal.com]

Oh Lord, I'd forgotten Ms Scribe. I was still relatively LJ naive, though not technically new - and I just read all the Charlotte Lennox reports thinking Wow! Huh? Whut? WHY?? It's amazing I hung around thereafter, though being firmly Buffyverse was quite insulating.

I imagine fairly soon you'll hit core Discworld and things will get less weird (though Wyrd Sisters as you say has a few intrinsic issues which add to the muddle). Interested to hear when you think it starts!

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

I...really don't understand this sockpuppet thingy, cause I wasn't around at the time, I don't think, or anyways didn't hear about it, and I'm all confused and...okay it doesn't really matter. :D

[deird1]

Oh, it's fascinating.

Basically, this woman (Ms Scribe) managed to become one of the most popular people in Harry Potter fandom, by clever use of sockpuppets.

She had two (possibly three) sockpuppets who were her "friends", a whole group of sockpuppets who were there to tell the world how horrible she was (thus getting all the rest of fandom to rally round her and support her), she pretended to be a whole bunch of other people from a particular fanfic archive (so that she could behave horribly and everyone would stop liking that archive), she caused a whole bunch of really major fights between other people in fandom...

And so on...

For several years...

And this is despite the fact that there was a huge stack of evidence (if anyone had bothered checking) that she was sockpuppetting.


And then "Charlotte Lennox" (who is someone else's sockpuppet) wrote this HUGE big story exposing the whole thing, with massive amounts of evidence of all the stuff she'd done, and the entire internet went INSANE.

Seriously - completely nuts.

I found out about it because I was reading through old metafandom entries, and it went from an average of 3 links a day to 40 links a day - all of them about Ms Scribe.



(If you ever have lots of time on your hands, I'd recommend reading the stuff Charlotte Lennox wrote. It takes forever, but it's worth it.)

[deird1]

Nope. Just finished Pyramids.

[deird1]

Not grossly fat, but I think you might be right about the starfish.


(Yep. I'm about to start Guards! Guards!)

[deird1]

Oh, definitely.

[deird1]

Night Watch! I love that one!


Pratchett is rather awesome.

[deird1]

Isn't Ms Scribe fascinating?

I read the whole thing (including everyone else's shocked-and-amazed entries) about a year later. I don't think I got off that corner of the internet for about three days - I just couldn't look away...

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I loved that - but even more I loved the fact that, as Speaker2customrs doesn't 'hear' the words when he reads only 'sees' them, he had missed a lot of the puns and was quite amazed when he heard me reading it out to d-d, when she was little, and he realised what the country was actually called!

[deird1]

Hee!

I'm actually only half-aware of stuff like that. I'm now making sure that I sound out all the names and stuff, just in case I miss something...

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. That sounds pretty hilarious, actually.

[deird1]

It really is.


(What's incredibly fun is that after Charlotte Lennox posted her Post Of Awesome, a lot of people went back through old entries and looked at IPs. And there's actually a few arguments between people where every single person in the argument is Ms Scribe!)

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

OMG, so I've read like the first two chapters of Charlotte Lennox's bio thingy, AND IT IS SO ENTERTAINING. OMG. *has to read more*

But now I'm going to continue reading Midnight Sun, because it is so effing epically hilarious.

"The right side would be the lucky side; they would not see me coming. Moving around the front and back up the left side, it would take me, at most, five seconds to end every life in this room."

O PLZ TELL ME MOAR, YOU SEXAY BEAST EDWARD YOU.

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

OMG. That is so freaking epic.

The more I read about this, the more I'm not sure whether to be incredibly impressed or deeply disturbed at the lengths she took to become popular...

[next_to_normal]

Wow. I'm embarrassed to tell you how much time I spent reading that Ms. Scribe bio. It's like rubbernecking an accident... I just couldn't look tear myself away.

But now I kinda want to create sockpuppets and cause chaos in fandom. She just made it look like so much fun...

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

Do you pronounce Ptraci as "Tracy" or "puh-tracy", though? :-)

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I used an almost silent P, but left a hint of it, to amuse the, then, eight year old.