I'm really annoyed, but I don't know why

[gwyn]

All day today and yesterday, I've been in this seriously annoyed space. I'm just cranky about almost everything. It started when I was looking up some stuff on Fanlore for preparing this Media Cannibals site, and I discovered someone had slapped a label on one of my old vids (that isn't even online, yeesh), and it's continued through trying to work on my CVV vid (WHY can my clips of Yentl not work in any format? Why must they keep scaling despite my best efforts to bring them to 100 percent? WHY SO DIFFICULT?), and my neighbor has had contractors engaged in ceaseless jackhammering under my window for days now and I can't block the sound out beyond muffling it a tiny bit.

I just can't pinpoint why things are making me so crabby. I'm mildly work-stressed, but that's not it. The jackhammering, maybe, because it's coupled with every fucking morning getting a wakeup call from her doberman pup with his endless barking. But usually I get on with the day. Last week I had gone downtown for the dentist (not cheap -- it's 8 dollars just to park for an hour and a half, and I don't have insurance, so I have to pay for my cleanings) and they had moved my appointment off the books for some bizarre reason, and I was so pissed I walked out without rescheduling. I'm feeling poor, which always makes me testy (thank you VVC for emptying my pockets!), but that was worse than I usually react to people messing my day up.

I'm cranky about the fanlore thing for some reason. Someone at some point slapped a label on my old vid that follows David Duchovny in his kind of girly roles with "genderfuck," and it really pissed me off. I hate labels, I don't label my stories or use warnings (except for stories containing major character death, because my friends hate stories with death and I like my friends), and it just really irks me that someone feels they can slap a label that I feel is so reductive on my vid without asking me. No one is going to see it, no one is going to look up info for tape 4 or whatever, I know this, and logically it doesn't make sense to be pissed about it, but I am. Is it that I don't like the term, because I think it's reductive? Is it that I don't like someone I don't know slapping things on my stuff? Is it that I wasn't asked? ::shakes fists at sky:: I don't know!

I can take it off, but since I don't know who put it there or why, it'll just come back again (that's my main reason I haven't been active on fanlore for a long time; the fact that you can make factual changes or clean/clear something up, and someone can just come in and mess it all up once you're done is frustrating to someone who makes her living correcting errors) most likely. I need to do some cleanup to some things about Sandy and the MCs that I've seen in the pages, but you never really know what else will come along after you've done that. I don't know why people love labels so much in fandom. I have a love/hate relationship with tags -- I love them when they tell me that a story is, for instance, Michael/Mahone slash, but when they start getting into labels that codify something complex with simplistic words, then I get all "bleh" about them. It gives me a headache. But I don't know why! I want someone to come along who can explain my crabbiness to me. This is something I would have talked to Sandy about and she would have made me laugh at myself and decrabbify.

:: is now crabby AND sad::

Comments

[par_avion]

I love you babe.

I am a poor substitute for Sandy but I think she is actually the one who added the genderfuck tag to the fanlore entry.

http://fanlore.org/w/index.php?title=Media_Cannibals%2FTape3&diff=12245&oldid=12165

[gwyn]

Ha ha ha! That's so funny -- I totally believe it. She loved labels and I hated them and she used to make such fun of me about it. That and my remix dislike -- even when the topic made me cranky she made me laugh at my crankiness. Well. In that case, as much as it annoys me, I'll probably leave it, if she really did put it there. If there is an afterlife, I want her to have the last laugh.

[klia]

Oh, man, how ironic that Sandy added the genderfuck label. I just... !!!!!

(that's my main reason I haven't been active on fanlore for a long time; the fact that you can make factual changes or clean/clear something up, and someone can just come in and mess it all up once you're done is frustrating to someone who makes her living correcting errors)

FWIW, I've found that frustrating, too. I can only suggest that whenever you fix/edit something, you write comments explaining why, and if someone screws it up again, contact one of the admins.

[cesperanza]

I also wanted to say that, like, this is definitely the downside of--I don't know. Getting noticed, getting put into any sort of history. There's just a feeling that WHATEVER it says is bound to be, if not actually wrong, surely reductive. I think any history, any summary, any analysis IS reductive by definition, but the only other options are like, a) recording a whole life second by second, which makes it too long for anyone to engage with or b) not being recorded at all. It's definitely something that's bugged me both as a historian and as someone whose work is written about. I don't know that I have a good answer.

...And as I was writing this, I do see that Klia above has a good answer: writing a comment explaining why. That reminds me of something else: if you hate labels you should say so on your user page and then drop a link on your official page linking to it, something like, "Gwyn's preferences are here." You can't force people to adopt or obey them, but at least people have the information about your preferences. :D

[gwyn]

Yeah, that's a really good point. There's no way to put things into an easily sortable reference without some kind of labeling; Franszeka pointed out in my LJ that it's more of a way to gain access to other information, which I hadn't considered before.

It never occurred to me to put my preferences in anywhere. Self-esteem issues, let me show you mine... That's certainly easy enough to do, too.

[gwyn]

I know!! It's so fucking funny. She's still able to make me laugh about things that made me cranky.

[jackiekjono]

I was going to say that the reason you were so annoyed over the labelling thing was the very realy fact taht you couldn't talk to Sandy about out and she couldn't make you laugh at yourself over it but, I guess I was wrong because she mnanaged it anyway. :)

Sandy - continuing to be awesome.

[jackiekjono]

You may also be annoyed at my total inability to type. Then again, if you haven't stopped speaking to me over that one at this point, I am probably safe.

[gwyn]

I know, right? I have this image of her kind of sitting there going, "Gwyn will hate this if I put this here, but too bad, she can deal" and thinking that even if she's gone when I see it, she can still poke at my buttons. I LOVE that.

[morgandawn.livejournal.com]

Sandy would have said: go to the Fanlore page and add your thoughts about the stupidity of labels, the lack of some viewer's acuity and how people truly truly fail to appreciate your art. She was all about: 'The more plural points of view, the better.' To which I add: Bonus points for wacky PPOV will be given at the end of the year.

I am still trying to figure out to respond to the scurrilous accusations Lithium Doll levied at me on my Fanlore page regarding my excessive drinking at the Overlook Hotel. I mean really I sometimes think that All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

LOL....

[morgandawn.livejournal.com]

I checked the history and the genderfuck comment was added by Sandy. So now you *have* to go in there and add your PPOV. :-)

Re: LOL....

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Yeah Par told me that over on DW. I think it's hilarious. Sandy loved labels, I hated them, and she used to mock me over it all the time. So I think I'll let her have the last laugh.

But I don't know if I believe there are plural points of view on fanlore -- I had a couple of bad runins with people, which is why I stopped playing there. Sandy kept trying to get me to go back, because she and I had a great working mode -- she would write something, and I'd go in and correct her facts, dates, names, spellings, etc. I feel bad that I stopped doing that for her, so I do plan to go in and correct some of her most recent stuff. But otherwise, I don't know...

[deejay.livejournal.com]

I hear ya about labeling and warnings.

[greenpear.livejournal.com]

Personally I'd say it was the jackhammering. It gets in your head and won't leave...

[franzeska]

I think once you reach a certain level of crabby, everything just sucks. It doesn't matter if it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. For right now, it's a big fucking deal! Logic does not apply: that just makes it worse because now you're not allowed to feel how you feel--but you still do.

Fanlore is a wiki with all the good and bad points associated with the format. I used to edit Wikipedia a lot, so I don't have much of a reaction to this kind of wiki annoyance, but you are far from alone.

In terms of labels and categories on wikis, one thing I will say is that they're not a rigid structure. If you click on 'genderfuck', that's not giving you a list of things that are definitively, and only, genderfuck; that's giving you a list of things people came up with when free associating on the term. What a wiki is is a web of connections, and those connections take the form of labels. It's less about putting things in specific boxes and more about letting readers wander from vaguely tangetially related topic to vaguely tangentially related topic. I doubt that will make you like labels any better, but that's how I think about wiki structure anyway. (It's good for my blood pressure!) :)

I agree that lots of articles on Fanlore are not currently PPOV, but that's certainly the standard the project is going for. I think it's a lot more obvious if you've been involved in Wikipedia edit wars (where the standard is a "neutral" POV). On Fanlore, commenting that the artist hates a label and doesn't think it applies or saying "That's not how [my name] remembers it" is always on-topic; citing yourself is fine. That's the big difference, not the extant level of PPOVness.

For articles that consistently annoy me, I usually leave something on the talk page so people can see my objection long-term regardless of how the body of the article changes. (Plus, unlike on Wikipedia, on Fanlore, other editors can cite the talk page as evidence when revising an article, so...)

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

:nods::

::reads again:: ::nods some more::

I think you made some excellent points about everything here. That's an especially helpful point about the labels being connections; I tend to think of labels and tags as... exclusionary, I guess, in a way, but thinking of them that way makes them more of a part of a process, if you will. It's entirely too easy sometimes to let feuding issues get the better of me, as well -- when someone obviously has some kind of issue with my point of view, I'll just opt out, instead of trying to explain it.