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UUUUUUUUUUGH YES I HATE SPIDERS. Skeletons go on the inside! Also they have too many legs. It is just a world of wrong.

I'm pretty convinced they spend all their time plotting on how to crawl on me, also.

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sykii.livejournal.com

Skeletons go on the inside!
So you won't be trying the new live crab vending machines, then?

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ARGH WHAT. I have not heard of this!

Appropriate icon is appropriate.

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sykii.livejournal.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mwv90m3N2Y

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That is sort of a genius idea, but I would be freaked out to see them moving in their little boxes on the subway.

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telophase.livejournal.com

Aaaaah, I recall my term in Carmarthen, where it rained 90% of the time, was cold, and the wind blew so hard it turned my umbrella inside out so often that I jsut gave up and got wet. Fun! Or, well, not.

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Hahaha. And cold rain is the worst! Often I would prefer it to be snow, because then at least you don't get as wet. Oddly, it has not been particularly rainy here in Cardiff this fall. The rain I came prepared for. The 30s? Not so much.

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The Yuletide wank is bothering me.

Mostly, I suspect, because it represents a subset of a phenomenon I've been dealing with too much lately: the insistence by people who do not take any active role in making a given thing happen that those who actually do make it happen are obliged to do whatever it is in precisely the way the complainers would like. I should stop looking, for the sake of my nerves; I've already stopped commenting, because it's now clear that we've blown straight through discussion and theory and are now in rage 'n' flounce waters.

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Yeah, I have to agree. I mean, I may be sad if YnM is excluded yet again and Hetalia gets in, but it is hardly an affront to my human rights.

And I haven't even looked at the comments! So I am probably missing all the most aggravating aspects of the wank.

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Don't look at the comments. Just . . . don't.

In the spirit of I Look So You Don't Need To, though, I will say that I think there is approximately zero chance that Hetalia makes the cut and YnM gets disqualified. It's possible that both will be kicked out, but several people who aren't even me have noted that YnM is pretty much dead these days in response to the complainer-in-chief's great big list of things she doesn't think should be allowed, while everybody I've seen has agreed about Hetalia. My rough guess at this moment would be maybe 55% odds Hetalia gets dropped but YnM and similarly-situated fandoms stay, 44% odds that they both go, and maybe 1% on both staying.

That 1% also would have been my guess about Hetalia's chances before the storm blew up; I don't think excluding it would have been controversial. What the whining and carrying on has done, I suspect, is make it more likely that the mods will drop fandoms that might have been fine in the absence of the hysterics. In which case it won't be the end of my world, but I expect to be irritated.

Just, not at elyn or astolat. Sheesh.

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I'm not truly worried either way! Particularly about Hetalia; since I plan on neither requesting or offering it, it will not affect me. And if YnM doesn't get in, I am sure many other fandoms I love will. Really, I don't even bother to nominate fandoms, because I know I always be able to find something that appeals to me. Although I do deeply love it when fandoms dear to my heart are part of Yuletide, it's still fun to write for something new.

So much bitterness! Yuletide should be happy and fun.

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Alas, no YnM this year. :( It was the second thing I checked after Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

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Ah, too bad. But as I was saying: there's always other fandoms!

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God, yes. I'm actually thinking of not doing Yuletide this year because I'm fed up with the bitching--which is not, funnily enough, in the Yuletide spirit, either.

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Well, but as best I can tell it's really only a handful of people doing the bitching. There was the one person who felt compelled to argue it twice in the official post, once in a separate now-frozen post, and once by email to the mods; there were a few of her friends; and now there are a handful of what I'm unhappy to find myself thinking of as the Usual Suspects. And the Usual Suspects would have found something to fuss over no matter what.

(I'm putting aside the aspie-spectrum folks who don't object to the change on a substantive level but are wired out because their nerves demand precision in description, and they need for it to be labelled a rare-on-AO3 exchange rather than simply a rare-fandom exchange to be comfortable. They can't help being uncomfortable, and they're fine with the obvious solution.)

All of which is to say, I don't think you should skip it because of the wank parade. Why give them the satisfaction? And anyway, it looks like a bunch of them are already planning to flounce, and won't be around to annoy others when the project is actually underway.

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I think my main issue with the not-very-constructive bitching is that it's always by people who don't have anything to do with the running of Yuletide. It never fails to amaze me how huge Yuletide is and that it runs comparatively well every year (discounting server crashes and hacks and other things out of everyone's control) and the mods put so much time and effort into it, and still people bitch and act entitled about things which, really, are tiny in the bigger picture. Which is my being stupidly naive that people will appreciate hard work and be nice, but anyway.

The previous comment was basically the combination of a bad day, a low bullshit tolerance, and an epic case of, "Jesus, people, STFU and just write stuff" which all resulted in A Moment.

So, yeah, I will do Yuletide, but I think for my own sanity I'll take

yuletide off my friends list until the recs start.

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I also encourage you not to opt out! All the good parts of Yuletide will still be here: the writing and the getting of stories. And then I will have more people to panic with at the last moment.

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It wouldn't be December 20th without frantic panicking and writing! And I think once I take

yuletide off my friends page until the recs start, I'll be okay. :)

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Afuckingmen. And I am really, really annoyed at anyone throwing around the phrase "in the spirit of Yuletide" while positing Yuletide as a zero-sum game (which in itself is SO WRONG I can't even) they are determined to win by eliminating the "competition" based on flat-out willful misreading of the rules and assuming that Google is an accurate measure of anything. Moulin Rouge! was on her presumptuous, entitled little list; this is a battle I fought extensively last year. Google continues to cache two major archives that crashed, wiping out all the stories, but the index pages are still up. Fanfiction.net is heavy on author-inserts, and I'm sorry, but that is not a genre that counts when determining rarity for an exchange that is specifically and explicitly focused on canon characters. That is why ff.net numbers only have so much impact when determining eligibility.

I get that people are frustrated by apparent discrepancies between the aim of Yuletide and the fandoms being allowed. I get the desire for a clear formula to determine eligibility, but the fact is, that's just not possible. The very nature of fandom makes it not possible. However, if one really wants to know some of the factors that go into the determination, it's not hard; time-consuming, because it requires reading through mod posts and comments from past years, reading the FAQ carefully, and Googling a handful of debated fandoms from past years, then following the links to see if the stories are actually still there and how many of them are author-inserts (and crossovers wherein a single character from the fandom you've looked up gets plopped into the setting of another fandom to interact with that fandom's characters).

But then, I'm not exactly as distanced from the debate this year as I usually have been. In years past, I've been one of those who helped the mods determine the eligibility of a lot of animanga fandoms. This year, I'm also an AO3 tag wrangler, and we have been working our asses off for the past month, trying to get the archive ready so sign-ups and uploading will go as smoothly as possible. AO3 staff and the Yuletide mods have been working together for most of this year prepping for what we knew was going to be an even larger exchange than in years past, and in years past, it's broken codes and archives and tempers. Yes, we too wish we could have managed to tweak a few more things and started the process of nominations a little earlier, on the archive, but the slow death of the old Yuletide archive forced a tighter timeline. I suspect that tighter timeline was also a factor in the mods' determination that they weren't going to get too fussed about what fandoms looked like outside of the AO3. It's not elitism when you just plain don't have the resources (read: spoons, for a lot of us) to look outside your own fora. And I'll be blunt: the plan has been to run Yuletide from the AO3 for quite some time. The mods and AO3 staff have all been upfront about this. Anyone who still has issues with the AO3 should really be reconsidering their participation in Yuletide anyway.

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This year, I'm also an AO3 tag wrangler, and we have been working our asses off for the past month

Dear God, I can barely even imagine the workload. I happened to be around for the Election Day test run, and spent maybe an hour looking for broken things in the archive and reporting bugs, and just that short glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes left me reeling. And as you can tell, it also left me deeply impatient with whining from the peanut gallery. (More impatient even than usual, that is; Ms. Entitlement's giant list and her interpretation of the true purpose of the exchange would likely have made me twitch a little in previous years, but I don't think it would have driven me to the kind of snarling impatience that is best expressed to a handful of trusted friends, and not in the Yuletide comm.)

Not to mention that thing where the mods announced that they were doing the eligibility determination this way months ago. Announced it, patiently answered questions about it, dealt with the entire issue then. These people couldn't be bothered to talk about their issues back when it might have made a difference or been useful, and now they want the fandom of equivalent of an aircraft carrier to do the equivalent of a couple of cigarette-boat-style swerves at high speed, because otherwise oh noes! a fandom they disapprove of might slip by?

I'm baffled. And beyond that, I keep wanting to ask some of them my great-grandmother's rhetorical question: Were you raised in a barn?

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Most of the year, those of us wrangling smaller fandoms (and fewer of them) don't have much work to do, but Yuletide is my rush time, and this year it coincided with the cross-country move, so. I actually enjoy it, for the most part, but that makes it no less work-intensive.

These people couldn't be bothered to talk about their issues back when it might have made a difference or been useful

Well, but they have lives, don't you know. They can't be expected to keep up with what's posted in the Yuletide admin community the rest of the year! And really, it's so unreasonable of the mods to not let them just discuss it in the community thousands of other people are watching for new official information, jeez! And while they're discussing it, why can't the mods just "fix" it how they want? It's not like the mods are busy or know what they're doing!

That's been getting up my nose too. Just the phrasing of the complaints has carried a strong connotation of, "I don't think you're competent at this thing you've been doing for years, so here's how I think you should do it," and then the complainants are shocked, shocked I tell you, at the "meanness" of the replies they've gotten. Umm, people, if you are going to complain based on assumptions of the worst, do not be surprised when those responding to you do likewise.

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I don't have much to add to this conversation, other than word, but wanted to tell you that I'm deeply enjoying reading it. All of these has been annoying me too.

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I'm getting ready to turn my attention to the flailing squee of deciding what I want to request, but I've pondered writing up a post (not to be posted to any Yuletide-associated comm, just in my own space) which details both what I know of the Yuletide matching algorithm, and some of the things we've been asked to look at in past years when going over the nominations list for possible eliminations (hint: glancing at numbers on a few active fannish forums and Googling the fandom to see how many hits you get doesn't cut it).

I know part of what's bugging me is the sheer illogic of the arguments presented; just because Fandom A is not available, that doesn't mean more people are likely to sign up for Fandoms B or C (especially in a challenge primarily based on rareness/obscurity, it's best to assume people aren't signing up for a given fandom because they don't know it). The bulk of Yuletide participants offer fewer than a dozen fandoms. Yes, there are those of us who routinely offer more than twenty, and we are valuable to the process, but we are not the norm. The norm is people offering as close to the minimum number of required fandoms as possible, because the vast majority of fans are consumers of both source and fanworks in a lot more fandoms than they are producers; thus, if there are fewer qualifying fandoms, there are more people likely not to sign up at all, because they do not feel competent to produce in enough fandoms to be able to sign up. Thus, sure, one less possible story for Fandom A, but also one less possible story for Fandoms D, E, & F, because the algorithm matches on rarer fandom first (as I understand it, determined by number of people offering/requesting, since that's the data which is both accessible and ethical for Yuletide to use), but it can't match on what's not offered/requested. So even if your attitude toward Yuletide is that it's some kind of zero sum game (an absolutely ridiculous mindset, but moving on), it's still in your interests to support the inclusion of a few more active, more known fandoms, because the odds are in favor of those luring in more people, who will also sign up for more obscure fandoms, and those are the ones on which they're most likely to be matched.

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I know I'd love to see that post you're not writing. It would be constructive, and interesting! As opposed to the post I'm not writing, which would be titled something like "Thirty-Six Views of Yuletide Wank."

The thing I've finally figured out, and am still sort of reeling from, is that a whole strain of objection to accidental inclusion of already-popular fandoms is coming from people who turn out to think of Yuletide as an excellent venue for self-promotion. More people will read stories in better-known fandoms, they say -- accurately enough -- and that means that those stories will get more comments and hits and recs. No fair! Not when Yuletide is your big opportunity to get more readers and visibility! Plus, they say, because we all allegedly know this is a competition for readers and prestige, the inclusion of well-known fandoms really will siphon off stories for smaller or more obscure fandoms: everyone will offer to write in those better-known fandoms so that they can get the hits and recs and win at self-promotion, while tiny fandoms go begging.

It would be a logical enough argument, if it were true of everyone. I'm just glad it isn't. As it is, I wish I knew precisely who really was in it for the self-promotion opportunities, so I could avoid them all forever.

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I know I'd love to see that post you're not writing.

It might yet get written. Probably not until after December, though, because my writing time is booked for the next two months. Certainly, I wouldn't post it until after Yuletide was over for this year, both so the mods could more easily follow it, if they wished, and so that any contentiousness that arose as a result would at least not spill over into the active challenge itself.

More people will read stories in better-known fandoms, they say -- accurately enough -- and that means that those stories will get more comments and hits and recs.

I have to say, that doesn't match my experience with Yuletide in any year, which is one reason I think it's such ridiculous reasoning. The most-read, most-recced, most-commented stories tend to be for sources that a lot of people know, but that usually have no fandom outside of Yuletide. I've written for both moderately ficced-about sources and for sources with no fanworks (or fanworks in the single digits) and no fandom to their name. The ones that showed up in the most recs lists, and garnered me the most comments, have been the ones that qualified in that second category. Granted, they've also been ones for easily-available, quickly-consumed sources, which is the elephant in the room none of the self-promoters are willing to acknowledge: if the fandom you're writing in features a source that is extensive, difficult to acquire, and/or complex to consume, it doesn't matter if you work to eliminate all these other fandoms, there are still going to be those in the exchange that draw more readers because the source is more accessible. Unless you're willing to really game the system, signing up for Yuletide as a means of self-promotion is just setting yourself up for failure, and that's a hell of a thing to do to yourself for the midwinter holiday season.

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Ah! That makes sense, and I'm more relieved than not to be told that not only is the analysis distasteful, it's incorrect as a matter of real world experience. My own experience with Yuletide is far more limited, and tells me only that sure, it's more likely that I'll read a story for a source I'm familiar with than for one I don't know. Unless somebody's told me that I don't need to know the source, which does happen for at least a few stories every year.

At any rate, now that the corrected list is out and most or all of the controversial sources are gone, maybe people will chill out for a while, leaving us to study what's available and stalk the signup reports in peace. And leaving me to try to decide whether my new cunning plan to avoid my annual Yuletide angst -- namely, to ask my friends if they by any chance have more requests they want to make than they have request slots to put them in -- is pure disaster in the making or whether it might really work.

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darkelf105.livejournal.com

I'm still hung up on how disappointing all the dessert flavored yogurts are? But that's mainly my fault for expecting them to be more yummy.

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Ha! I do agree with you that key lime pie is the only good one. Anything that's supposed to be cake or chocolate tends to fail, and that combination most of all.

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pierreuse.livejournal.com

A stomach virus. Please make it stop. (groans)

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Ow. You win at things to complain about. I'm so sorry.

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stardragonca.livejournal.com

Ha! The Yanks are weak!

They have no frost-heart!

The glaciers do not call to them!

The blizzards do not sing in their veins- Oh, um, are those doughnuts for everyone...

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