The Buzzing of Flies

It really hadn't been a great few days prior to the 10th of July, but on that day, an amazing thing happened that normally I wouldn't be proud of in the slightest. There's no real pride in getting negative attention, despite what Oscar Wilde might have said about saying anything. However, when said negative attention comes from people whose ire and scorn is the direct result of being caught in their own stupid, moronic lie, the feeling I get may not exactly be pride, but I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt, not in the slightest.

I don't want to repeat what I wrote in my DeviantART Journal, so here's a summation with an addendum chronicling the subsequent events:

* A user posts ZIP files full of celebrity photos they found in Google image search to their gallery, offering them up as stock images for people to use however they see fit despite them not being her own work in the first place.

* I call her out on it in a comment on one of her photos.

* She says that her father is a professional photographer who took many of the photos that she posted, and therefore has permission.

* Some quick searching shows that the photos belong to several photographers, many working for different websites, the most prominent one being StarTraks.

* I proceed to ask her a simple line of questions about her father's "body of work," such as if he has his own personal online gallery or portfolio?

* She says she doesn't understand the question.

* I rephrase the question: Why would a professional photographer need his daughter's DeviantART page to post his work instead of his own website?

* She repeats that he's taken "many" of the photos she's posted.

* I ask which ones are his.

* She doesn't answer and blocks me from leaving further comments on her page.

* She writes a pleading journal, blaming me for getting an old account of hers banned (a power that, sadly, I don't actually have, and I only left one comment on that page a full day before it was banned), and calling on her friends to get me banned by...

Before we get to the quote, it's probably best to give a little context, just so you can fully grasp the sheer ineptitude. It's entirely within her power to file a formal complaint against me with DeviantART's administration for harassment. Whether or not it would be acted upon is entirely up to their discretion, and most likely nothing would be done given that she's already blocked me from her page, but the point is that there exists a legitimate and specialized avenue available to her for reporting me. Despite that, however, she thinks the only way to get me banned is:

"Entrá alguna deviantion (sic) de esos usuarios y dale click a "Report Deviation (right)" que está abajo de las estadísticas de esa deviantion (back to sic). De esa manera los pueden bannear."

Which translates to:

"Enter any deviation of those users and click "Report Deviation" which is below the deviation's statistics. We can ban them in this way."

So, rather than using the Help menu in DeviantART's support page to file a complaint she is technically well within her rights to file, she's telling as many people as she can to go to the drawings, paintings, and photographs in my gallery and report them for violations of DeviantART's Terms of Service.

Report them for what, exactly? I don't know, and it turns out neither does she. In fact, one of her watchers asked her what to file the report under (permission issues, explicit content, malware, to name a few). This question has received no answer. As to why she's given no answer, I can only hazard the guess that she has absolutely no idea how the site works and doesn't want to expose her ignorance.

This is ignorant for three important reasons:

1) It assumes that DeviantART's moderators do not actually read violation reports against uploads or at least check the work of art in question to make sure the report is legitimate. After all, not every report is for something offensive or harmful; being in the wrong category is one of the options, that just gets something moved to another category suggested by the one who files the report.

2) It essentially takes me out of the equation and tries to turn focus onto something completely unrelated in the hope of achieving the same result. In other words, I said something that offended someone, so they're taking offense and expressing displeasure at a drawing I made long before any of this happened, and is therefore irrelevant to the situation. Even her straw man is a lie.

3) It assumes that this "false witness/faux straw man" tactic will work despite her putting this plan

in writing

in a journal

on a public website

viewable by anyone

including but not limited to, the moderators and system administrators who will have to make a decision as to the legitimacy of the claims before taking any action.

Of course, there is the distinct possibility that the moderators will, as history has sometimes shown, jump the gun and go along with this crackpot scheme, hence my writing a journal on my page keeping everyone appraised of the situation so there's no surprise if my gallery should disappear. It's been two days, and the result of all this has thus far been:

A little, tiny spike in my pageviews that lasted all of around 24 hours (for my main page, strangely enough; I haven't seen any similar spikes for the stuff in my gallery).

A pair of apologists offering feeble excuses for why they have a right to post other people's work (with fair civility, I'll grant them).

A death threat (this makes two for me, pardon my yawn).

And a comment from someone calling me a gringo (a word I heard once living in New Mexico for 17 years).

I've filed a report against the one who wrote the journal (the one who lied about her father's profession, then lied to get everyone else to lie for her) for ban evasion, not harassment, and if she's reading this by chance, here's a message for you:

Pase lo que pase, yo gano, y no eres un artista. Lidiar con eso. 

Good night, and good luck.

Oh, Not Funny When It's You

So, some time ago, Star Wars Kinect was released for the XBox360, and it was met with what could charitably be described as mixed feelings, with most of the negative feelings strangely centered on a rhythm and dance portion of the game wherein much-beloved characters dance in well-known locales to popular songs made into parodies by a slight tweaking of key lyrics. "Princess in a battle" instead of "genie in a bottle" is one example.
As to why this has many fans outraged, there's no official answer, but if one were to be culled from the general consensus of the gaming community, it's that Star Wars Kinect is an officially licensed Lucasfilm product. In other words, Star Wars fans can make fun of their beloved franchise to their heart's content, but heaven forbid the people behind it have a sense of humor as well.
I could get into the psycho-socio-cultural underpinnings of this phenomenon, but The Escapist's MovieBob already did, and in reading his analysis, I remembered something from my own childhood that perfectly exemplifies the situation.

It was really hard for me to make friends after I moved to New Mexico in 1991. There's a lot of reasons for this I won't go into, but probably the most important one was that my sense of humor didn't gel with everyone else's. I understand that friends take digs at each other, call each other names, and even play mean little tricks on each other. Really, I get it; it's part of the trust, it's something you can do because of the comfort zone. The thing is, where I saw it as being "part" of the whole "friendship" paradigm, some people saw it as "the whole" and that struck me as just downright conceited. I kid you not when I say that I actually lost a really good friend because I told him to stop calling me a certain name because it genuinely bothered me. For years afterward, I thought there was something wrong with me because I just couldn't take a joke, I couldn't separate "laughing with" from "laughing at." Years later, I got a second opinion. The good news is that there wasn't really anything wrong with me, that sometimes people were just jerks. The bad news is that the number of jerks turned out to be higher than I'd thought.
My 7th grade history class had some class clowns in it. Trouble was, it was a de facto role as they weren't very good at it, as most of their jokes relied on me to be their punchline, whether I wanted to be or not. How exactly they made fun of me or laughed at me or generally had fun at my expense varied and changed almost daily. For about two or three days, though, the fixation was on the fact that I was the only boy in the class who wore glasses. Right away, I thought, "they're really desperate for a laugh." Seriously, the last months 7th grade, a year between us and high school, and I felt like I was living out an uninspired episode of Full House.
Anyway, we were all doing some sort of art project that I don't remember any details of, except that we'd have to stop about five minutes before the bell so we could all go wash up in the bathrooms. So, here's the scenario: everyone walks a little faster than me so they can get there first. When I step in, everyone turns away from the sinks and starts flicking their hands at me so water beads on my glasses, carrying on until I literally can't see and have to take them off to wipe them clean, and the process repeats when I put them back on until I get out of the bathroom, my hair wet enough that I can slick it back.

This goes on for two days. I don't get angry. I don't lash out. I don't confront anybody about it. I don't say a word.  I just stand there and seethe quietly to myself, because it's the seventh bloody grade, we're in our early teens, and flicking water at my glasses to where I can't see is the funniest damn thing in the world to these guys. On the third day, I figure that maybe I'm taking this too seriously, that I'm not having fun with the whole thing. So, I decide to give this "laughing with you" idea a shot. Again, everyone walks a little faster than me to get to the bathroom first. Before I step in, though, I take my glasses off and put them in my pocket. I make sure not to squint, because that would just give them something to laugh about. I walk in, knowing what's going to happen next, and I'm smiling. It's not a toothy, ear-to-ear grin, it's more like a Mona Lisa, at the risk of sounding pretentious. The funny thing is, I'd never felt more confident in my life at that moment. The sad thing is, no one else found it funny, made apparent when they turned away from the sinks with hands at the ready.

Awkward silence.

I'd see some turn away from the sink and watch a smile disappear almost like someone flipped a switch. Instead of knowing nods, playful shrugs, or even indifference, I saw, despite the blur, frowns and eye rolls. I hadn't gotten in on the joke, I'd ruined it. I'd ruined it by not ignoring them or getting angry or annoyed or anything like that. I'd ruined it by wanting in on it and playing along. They weren't making fun of me to be friendly or chummy, they were making fun of me because they were that desperate for a laugh. How dare I, apparently.

Maybe I should have grabbed a fire extinguisher before going in instead.