do we own our fanfic stories and fan-art?

Over at Tumblr, there's a blog, batshitsherlockfans, that has quite a lot of people upset, in my opinion reasonably so. In their own words, it's a "compendium of the looniest of loony posts from Sherlock fans, mostly sourced from Tumblr. Caveat emptor: Twitter and Pinterest nutters are not safe."

So what you get are pictures and threads taken from Tumblr and other third party sites, along with the blog-runners' captions about how absolutely wrong those things are. The commentary is in my often really immature - it actually reminds me in a way of that Princeton kid whose piece on checking his privilege went viral a few weeks back. Some of them are proper reblogs (where you can trace the post back to its original author/artist, and where the original author/artist gets notifications and credit for the activity). Others are what are called reposts, where someone has taken an image and reposted it to a third-party site like Pinterest or WeHeartIt, and then that image has made its way back to the Tumblr site. Rule #1 of Tumblr seems to be DO NOT DO THIS and it's often considered stealing or at least majorly wrong becuase you're using someone else's work in a way they wouldn't approve of. I'm not trying to defend the site. What I would like to do is understand it a bit better, and specifically what exactly is wrong with it, what bothers people so intensely. This was kind of provoked by the current backlash against the site but is a bit longer-simmering than that for me. The Sherlock fandom (both regarding Doyle and the BBC) has a rather fascinating relationship with canon that I'm still trying to wrap my head around.

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my day (+ Holmestice!)

People often ask me what my world looks like. I've recently started hanging out at what I call a park in the late afternoon/early evening. Parents get off work, pick up their kids from daycare, and come here to have a snack and a play before going home for the night. It's officially called a "memorial triangle" and is really little more than a fenced-in glorified median. But they have pigeons and fenced-in areas where kids can skate around and the like. If you want to see the neighborhood search for "183rd and arthur 10458" at Google maps and you should be able to take a bit of a walk-around using the street view feature.

Here are two quick snapshots of the "park," and one of me. Sorry, I'm too tired at the end of the day to put on a convincing smile and my fake smile is rather atrocious. But I think I've acquired some Sherlock friends since the last time I posted a snap of myself, and it's always nice to put a face with the name.

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Today's big accomplishment of the RL variety is I was called in for a first interview for an administrative job with a luxury travel firm. I think between the two of us we made a mess of pretty much everything that could have been made a mess of, right up to and including me transposing the initials in the firm's name and so researching the wrong firm last night. The plus side is I'm not entirely sure it's the kind of company I'd like to work with. I mean, they're not bad people or anything but they're a downtown Manhattan company providing a luxury service to the client set you'd imagine they'd be geared to, which isn't really my scene. But if I was going to mess up an interview, it should really be under this setting. Plus I got to explore a new neighborhood, enjoy a Mickey D's ice cream cone (so sinful; so delicious) and now and sipping an ice cold half-frozen water and eating papaya while I watch kids run around and listen to Ohio Players on Spotify. As far as days go, I've had so much worse.

Also, worthy of mention: I received the fic written for my request for holmestice. Perhaps it's fitting that a story built around the three Holmes siblings as a parallel to Brahma, Vishna, and Shiva would defy easy discussion. But damn, but it's beautiful. And deep. And beautiful once more. what_alchemy described it as "what a fine mindfuck for the evening," and I find myself quite agreeing. But the absolute best kind of mental jiggery-pokery. I'm looking forward to learning who wrote it so I can check out his or her other pieces. And while there's a bit of psychological trauma to all three and descriptions of same that may be upsetting, it's really very family friendly - no sex, no graphic violence (for all there's trauma woven throughout), no themes more adult than you could expect beyond (say) the Silmarillion level of thought-provoking and moving but not especially adultish messed-up-edness. I do hope if you're at all inclined to Sherlock Holmes, BBC or otherwise, you'll give it a read.

Trimūrti, Author Unknown

(I finally got my own Holmestice submission off last night. That fest's moderators have been wonderfully flexible and helpful as I got my stuff in order, and I hope the fic's worth waiting for. Sadly, you'll have to wait a while before I can point to it directly, but all the submissions so far have been worth reading, so I hope you'll all enjoy the stories and art and what-nots as they roll out.)

I think that's it for me. Enjoy your evening.