Tell me before I waltz out of your life
Before turning my back on the past
Forgive my impertinent behavior
But how long do you think this pantomime can last?

It's been so long since my last post, it's strange to write here again.

A lot has been happening, both real-life related and internet realted: at first it was university, then the 7th HP book was coming out and I stayed away for fear of being spoiled, then LJ started being a bitch about fandom *again*. I decided to take a step back and see if things were going to calm down a bit, like they did after the first strikethrough.

They didn't.

The simple truth is that at the moment I have more than enough angst in my RL, I don't need to stay around for LJ drama.
I don't need to feel targeted for what I enjoy reading and the pictures I like to drool on. I don't need to fret about whether reccing a fic or a piece of fanart is going to get me TOSsed or not. I don't enjoy being called a pedophile, being told that my fav fandom is basically about child porn (!!) or that we're all a bunch of undesirables.
At the moment I have to juggle my studies, a grandmother that will most likely have to be officially declared insane (come si dirà in inglese incapace di intendere e di volere?) in order to force her to accept any kind of help, take her meds etc, a grandfather who's been bedridden for over a year and will be for the rest of his life and a mother who's slowly going crazy trying to deal with the two of them and taking me and my father along for the ride.
I seriously don't need this kind of shit.

So I've decided to move shop, I'm inkaddict over at insane journal. I still don't know what to do with my graphics, I'll probably keep them at ink_swirls for now.

I'll still use this LJ to keep up with the f-list, and if I'll manage to get semagic to work I'll post everything that isn't fandom related in both journals. That will teach me not to start working on a rec list when this kind of shit's going around -__-'

Love
K

Apparently the aching back and crappy mood were just the beginning, I managed to catch the flue in fucking June. How depressing is that? Other than that I'm spending my days reading fics and doing nothing, so life is good.

Uploading these for a comm and some RL friends, feel free to take ^_^

Marie Antoinette -> Here
Blood Diamond -> 1 2
Everything is Illuminated -> Here
Romeo and Juliet (10th anniversry edition) -> Here
Shrek 3 -> Here

o_0 this thing is absolutely terrifying, it's like...the Mary Sue Generator of Doom!

A little tribute to one of my favourite authors -those of you who know her works won't be surprised by my love for this snarky, tragic, intelligent, incredibly modern woman. 
(1893-1967)

FRUSTRATION
If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love

But I have no lethal weapon-
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.

( Dottie's AlphabetCollapse )

Lj has apologised, journals are being restored, all is well in our little kingdom :)
I'm still a bit freaked out that something like this could happen, but I have to admit it ended far better than I could have hoped.

It's funny, I used to dream of having free time, and now that I do I'm at a loss. I feel drained, and can't seem to do a single useful thing.
And my back aches like a sonofabitch ._.
So to cheer myself up (and since I had a tub of sour cream dangerously close to expiration in the fridge) I made *drumrolls*
Quadruple Chocolate Cake.
Yes, quadruple. I have no shame.

( Divine Chocolaty DecadenceCollapse )

Also, has any of you seen "Benny and Joon"? I stumbled upon it a couple of days ago, and since it starred Johnny Depp I gave it a chance. It's funny, well acted and Depp is great as this eccentric crazy guy who models himself after Buster Keaton.
A scene in particular got stuck in my head: Benny looking at his dead goldfish, feeling like crap and wondering how is he going to take care of his mentally ill sister if he can't even keep a fish alive.
Nothing much per se, but it keeps reminding me of a...golfish accident that happened when I was little.
I had managed to keep one of those goldfishes that you win at carnivals alive for almost a year -I was about 7 at the time, and it was something like a record- then one day my mother boiled it. Literally. She messed up while changing the water -_-'

It went something like this:

little wee me: Uh, mom? Why's the fish floating like that? Is she dead?
mom: Don't be ridiculous, it was perfectly fine 2 minutes ago!
lwm: *pokes fish* If you say so. And why's the water so hot?
mom: *finally turns around*...fuck. I think I've boiled the fish. Omg, now you're traumatized, aren't you? You'll need therapy! You'll hate me for the rest of your life! I'm a fish-boiling monster!
lwm: I don't hate you. Do you think we can eat her? Are goldfishes edible?
mom: *stares in horror*

And the worst part is, I didn't even make this up. Needless to say we didn't eat Dindina (the fish), she was buried in th garden.
...sometimes I give myself the creeps.

FIRST OF ALL: let me make clear that I do *not* in any way shape or form advocate child-abuse, pedophilia, rape and all that jazz. In fact I have some really not nice ideas of what should be done to people who do. Just to be clear.

I had a post already written in my mind on POTC AWE, something along the lines of "all that this movie deserves is a short drop and a sudden stop", and then I woke this morning to THIS crazyness, and all thoughts of pirates and mistreated commodores flew right out of my head.

Long story short: yesterday a bunch of RPG journals and fiction communities (most of those I know about were HP related, but that's probably because I'm in that fandom) and even a discussion community focusing on Nabokov's Lolita (!!) found themselves deleted or suspended by the LJ abuse team.
People of course went crazy trying to understand what the fuck was happening, and what they've been able to gather is this: based on their interest lists those comms were reported to the abuse team. The incriminating interests included:

child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up - from RPG journals that clearly stated that not only were they fictional, but the character was a bad person and they did not want to hear from anyone who felt otherwise.

incest and rape - from a fic comm

shota - this is a name

loli, lolita - from a fashion journal. These are Japanese fashion terms.

List thanks to this post

*Keep in mind that these are all third (or fourth or sixth) hand informations. See these two posts for more info*

Apparently a group called Warriors for Innocence [hxxp://www.warriorsforinnocence.org/2007/05/devastation-of-child-molestation-and.html hxxp->http, because I'm in no mood to find out if it's true or just paranoia that they're keeping tabs on posts that link to them. Or her. Or whatever] dedicated to track down online predators has been pressuring [hxxp://www.warriorsforinnocence.org/2007/05/livejournal-and-six-apart-its-time-to.html hxxp->http] LJ and Six Apart to suspend/delete the journal of potential predators.
A noble and worthy cause, right? Right.
*AT LEAST* untill you do your homework first. There are plenty of support communities for rape or child abuse survivors in lj, and obviouly each of them has the terms in their interest. Do they deserve to be targeted too? Of course not. Do fashion communities focusing on the gothic-lolita style deserve to be? Is discussing Nabokov advocating incest? More to the point, is writing FICTIONAL stories on those topics wrong?
Again, of course not.
Nor it is a crime, because, you know, IT'S ALL FICTIONAL.
I used to look at disclaimers on some (non-porn) mangas published in Italy and wonder why on earth they felt the need to put in writing that each character was of age (!) and, more to the point, that their characters were just that, characters, ink on paper, not real people.
Now I know why they did, because people are, generally speaking, ignorant.
Of course the above mentioned group denies to have been involved in reporting any fandom-related community t LJ, but...something's not adding up. Because someone did report these communities -bunches of totally unrelated communities- and of course Lj and Six Apart did the only possible thing to protect themselves and permanently suspended them. Lj has actually been quite good to concerned owners.
Now, I'm not a fan of rape, incest or abuse stories, but I have read some. Mostly they were stories that treated these topics seriously, dealing with consequences and trauma, not stories meant to titillate.
In some fandoms, like HP, most characters are underage, so a lot of fanfiction features underage sex, be it het or slash. Nothing wrong with that in my book, especially since for underage I mean mostly 16/17. 15-14 is a stretch, make them younger and it's Chan. Chan does bother me, but as long as you warn for it so that I don't stumble into it unaware, I don't have anything against it. Since IT'S NOT REAL.
And in some fandoms incest is a big part of shipping (Supernatural wincest, anyone?). It has never bothered me, not like some Malfoycest stories floating around the HP fandom, because -aloha, two consenting, fictional, not real characters, what's there to be bothered about??

It should be noted that the DeleteGate did bring down some communities actually encouraging pedophilia (hurray! I feel dirty knowing I shared blog space with that scum), you'll find lists in the very first post I linked to. But one has to wonder how much more effective Warrior's for Innocence's efforts could have been had they not:
-advertised their intentions in their blog, thus giving actual predators -who are interested in keeping tabs of that kind of sites, something unsuspectiong Nabokov fans tend not to do- the heads up to purge their interest lists.
-begun a witch hunt on lj, thus pissing off bloggers who, under different circumsatnces, would have been more than glad to see child-molesters' journals shut down, and more than ready to help in their efforts.

I guess this rants boils down to: it is so difficult for people to understand the defference between fiction and fact? And were were their parents when they should have been sitting with them in front of their TV, computer or books explaining why it's ok for Batman to jump from roof to roof killing villains right and left but they should not try it at home?
Just my two cents.
And no, I'm not going to lock this post, or lj-cut it. Sorry if it messes up your friends page.