It's past time to cut through this fucking buillshit.

[tzikeh]

I have stayed out of the OTW insanity since it began. I didn't even know how to begin to talk about it, and I didn't want to wade in while things were shaking out, and I didn't want to read things that were going to make me angry, because I knew it would just cause me impotent rage, since there was nothing I would be able to do.



I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH PEOPLE WHO DON'T LIKE/DON'T WANT TO PARTICIPATE IN THE OTW IF THEIR PHILOSOPHIES ARE IN DIRECT CONFLICT (bolded now for those who fail at reading comprehension and think I'm defending OTW, instead of what I'm actually doing, which is bitching about people who hide their identities so that they can say nasty things about OTW), but I am so done with people who are against the OTW with absolutely no facts to back up their opposition. They are the Teabagging Party when it comes to OTW: frothing at the mouth with blind hatred, but they have absolutely no fucking facts and they just believe whatever their mental, seething leaders say without bothering with critical thought, or fact-finding of their own.

In case anyone reading this thinks that I'm somehow part of the OTW "machine," let me be crystal clear. I have no part in OTW. I'm not on the board, I'm not a beta-tester, I'm not a coder, I'm not part of the PR department, I'm not anything at all when it comes to the project. But I am DONE with this fucking insane bullshit Teabagger-mentality ignorance that has spread through some sections of fandom that are just spoiling for a fight with the OTW, because they've heard from someone who knows someone who said something they didn't like.

I have fucking HAD IT.

Whiny, shitty fucks who bitch about the OTW, but create sock-puppet accounts to do it so no one who knows them will know it was *them*, can shove it up their own asses. Cowards. Bullies. Those of you who have a beef with the OTW and have created sock-puppet accounts just to write about it? Show your faces, you craven pieces of shit. How dare you hide so that nobody who knows you finds out what you think. Afraid of conflict with people you know? Coward. You want to dish it out while not having to own it. Put up or shut up.

Comments

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

you can come over to the annual potluck street party any time - I'll decorate the street and my band will provide music all night long. And then suddenly one year I say Hey, now I'm moving it to the other side of town, and broke up the band, so it's my nephews playing piano-violin duets for you (they need the practice).

The problem with this analogy is that it doesn't take into account the fact that the only other option is to *never have the party again ever* because the original location has become, literally, unusable/unsustainable. The host isn't moving the street party on a whim, but because the party's expanded from 300 to 2100 people.

A better analogy might be:

I've thrown out an open invitation to my dinner party for the last few years. Each year I've cooked a dinner, and as part of the tradition, each guest is asked to bring a small present, and gifts are then distributed among the guests.

But the kitchen at my house is so tiny, and more and more guests come every year. First it was five, then twenty, now fifty. I just don't have the time or the money to throw a dinner party for fifty all by myself-- every year the emergencies just get worse. Dinner is late, the oven catches fire, we run out of wine, and I just can't do it any more. So for the past few years, I've been working with some other friends of mine to found a community center. The community center is funded by donations and has a team of volunteer cooks, so this year I'll have enough room to host everyone, even if a *hundred* and fifty people come. Isn't that great? It's certainly better than never having the dinner party again, right?

And the response from some people is, "No, I have differences with the community center, so it has to stay at your house. So, it gets bigger every year, it takes weeks of 24/7 effort, it costs you money, you can't even take a nap without your old broken stove catching someone's dinner on fire. Whatever. The point is, I have such a great time at your house. So it can't move. Oh, also, not only am I not coming to your dinner party any more, I want to take back all the gifts I gave to the other guests in previous years. So please contact the other guests and tell them I want my gifts back."

Even if you were going to meet up with your dear, old friends there. Now they won't see you, but I say it's entirely your choice; I had nothing to do with it!

Oh, this is just silly. If someone doesn't want to take part in the challenge any more, of course it's their choice. And honestly if you don't want it to happen at the AO3, the other option is no Yuletide at all. That's what we'd be voting on, if elyn and astolat decided to hold a vote: Yuletide at the AO3 or no Yuletide at all?

The people who think the mods had *any other option* are not facing reality. You can tell this because they haven't bothered to offer any concrete solutions or even suggestions as to how to solve the practical, logistical problems the mods were facing.

[slashpine.livejournal.com]

I have no horse in this race: I've never taken part in Yuletide writing, and rarely read any of the fics. I'm simply intrigued and boggled by the amounts of vitriol being hurled around on both sides.

If I actually knew someone whose desire to direct the world's largest dinner party was spiralling so wildly out of control, I'd probably suggest therapy before she and her friend embarked on such an ever-more-increasingly-complicated scheme. The whole thing comes across to me like a Rube Goldberg device on steroids. :-) It does seem (in this analogy, at least) that the unstoppable ambition of the hosts is confronting not only the irreconcilable reactions of the guests but the insatiable exigencies of scale.

In contrast to, and before reaching the point of, the coercive binary of "this way or nothing at all," at some point someone should have considered the common sense alternative to the OMG We're so Huge we Must Move crisis, of simply maintaining things at a feasible size. In your analogy's terms, why on earth would someone who is running up against health, sanity, financial *and* fire risks enlarging their dinner party past the limits of of house, hearth and all, not simply stop at a sane and sensible point, before the situation explodes?!

But none of these conocted analogies are the real facts or situation, of course. So the argument over them is just another deflection from the issues. I apologize for responding to the first inaccurate analogy with another one of my own. The wank would likely be better clarified with actual facts, not invented proxies.