It's stupid in a lot of ways—the conflation of Livejournal with Fanfiction.net, when they're not actually the same sort of service at all and the use of LJ for fic posting is not even remotely what LJ is designed to do or what it will evolve to facilitate. There's also the resultant stupidity of seeing only two different models, profit and non-profit, as a result of that conflation.

The basics: LotRFanFiction.com was purchased by Keith Mander, who also bought TwilightArchives a little while ago. His thinking:

"I can leverage the technology behind the Twilight site’s redesign to quickly rejuvenate the LOTR site. Plus, plenty of opportunities for cross promotion and integration (SSO, for example). The longer term thought is that with the combined user base, I’ll be able to quickly enter and dominate new fandoms, hopefully creating some returns."

Fandom is... not happy.

On Tuesday Yahoo laid off the entire Delicious team and today it announced at a company all-hands meeting that it will be "sunsetting" Delicious, aka shutting it down, although there are no details yet on when or how, from any of my sources inside Yahoo. It could be months or years - although they'll almost certainly announce it ahead of time (at some point), like Geocities.

First things first: I'm not a physicist, nor do I play one on TV, nor am I a medical doctor. However, I do happen to have a PhD that was involved pretty heavily with radiation effects on electronics, specifically figuring out how to build circuits that can survive the high radiation environment of deep space. Therefore, the recent furore about the TSA's insistence on herding people through X-ray backscatter imagers worried me significantly -- though the TSA was claiming that these machines were safe, it just didn't ring true on a few levels, so I decided to do a bit of digging of my own.

PLANS to build a state-of-the-art library next to Republican catastrophe Sarah Palin are causing outrage across mainstream America.

PSA: If you read [community profile] fandomnews: you might not know that that community, which is cross-posted to multiple journal services, is one of Laura Hale's projects

Links to about 150 e-commerce sites that users post to their LiveJournals are being redirected through a 3rd party website. These redirected links also open in a new window.

Among other things, this redirection strips any existing affiliate links and inserts a different affiliate link.

The thing about Laura Hale/Michela Ecks/partly_bouncy/purplepopple and her friends who run fanhistorydotcom or actively advocate fanhistorydotcom is that they fail repeatedly on three fronts.

Scientific Experimentation and Psychology

multiple discussion posts and link roundup

Link Roundup:
On July 19, [info]purplepopple/partly_bouncy/Michaela Ecks/Laura Hale (she is public about all these names) made a post on fanthropology about "How to maintain fandom privacy."

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"Why did she feel compelled to post that exposé on Heidi (besides the twin facts that she's nuts and hates Heidi)? Because Heidi linked to her wiki from a locked post."

If you'd prefer not to visit FanHistory at all, screencaps of the linked pages are also provided. In the interest of protecting the identity of the fan in question, all links to the [info]fanthropology post have been replaced by censored screencaps

searchable database of peoples LJ usernames and their websites/backup journals