7:37 PM
Blogging again on a Thursday afternoon. My apologies to all, seasons are starting for some of the areas that I’m responsible for so things have really been picking up in my real job so I haven’t been around as much as I’d like.
I have a real job the requires me to be on-line most of the day. It’s kind of nice because I can work from home and I don’t actually have to get dressed to go to work. It also sort of sucks for the same reason. If there’s work to do at midnight, I’m doing work at midnight. If there is work to be done, I’m required to do it regardless of what’s going on.
Friends know that I’m on-line a LOT even when I’m not working. I live in a very remote area. Most of my friends are a couple hour drive away and I get out every couple of weeks for some needed time out. If I didn’t do this, I’d probably be one of those weird guys who never leaves the house and who is always on-line wearing nothing but a black T-shirt and his fruit of the looms (boxers or briefs? No speedos, baby, speedos ).
But I am on-line and I’m into what I’m into.
I’m not really into the whole TechTV community thing. It shouldn’t be offensive to anyone, I just never got into the whole TechTV fandom community. I deal with communities all day/night and it takes a lot to get me to participate in anything but chat.
One of the good things about keeping myself out of the community aspect of TechTV is the fact that I can watch things. Since I don’t tend to participate in the controversies (and let’s face it, lately there have been a lot of controversies), I can try to be objective and commentate on things and hopefully help some of these things find a proper resolution.
It takes a lot to get me to participate. It takes a lot to get me pissed off enough to say something. I just don’t have time to play these days and frankly, to get me to say something or to do something in a controversy, it takes a real act of stupidity. It takes something on the level that it’s going to hurt the overall TechTV community or, in a couple of cases, something on the level that it would anger TechTV enough to take action against fan sites such as this.
Let’s face it, TechTV has been very nice about all of these fan sites. While my site is relatively tame in what we feature, there have been a least one occasion where folks at TechTV weren’t comfortable with what was in a strip and asked for or suggested changes. There have been a lot of times when I have changed strips on my own — with no one asking me — because I felt I had either gone so far over the top that I was just being mean, or because, frankly, I didn’t like how I portrayed someone.
Believe it or not people believe things based on sites like this. I know that if I were to portray, oh, Steve, for example (NOTE THE NEXT PASSAGE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STEVE IN REAL LIFE AS I DO NOT KNOW HIM SO TAKE NOTHING FROM IT), as a guy who never washed his socks and who is known around the station as “Stinky Toes” there are people who would actually believe it.
Worse yet, even if they didn’t believe it, there would be folks who would start calling Steve “Stinky Toes” (or what have you), and the poor guy would be riddled with a constant stream of name calling without having a way to defend himself against it.
How do I know this? “Zoltan” is all I’ll say. Poor Jim L. We’ve backed off on using the character because while it’s funny, it was getting Jim a lot of attention and you could tell from his times in chat that he absolutely hated the name after a while. While it can be fun to tick of Jim (his reaction to the chat room’s hatred of the AIBO was so funny that it’s beyond words), the intent of Zoltan wasn’t to tick him off. That’s why we’ve backed up to some degree from that character. He’ll return, but sparingly.
You also have to be careful with relationships. Believe it or not, these people are not fictional characters. Sure sites like this use them as “fictional characters,” but what we all write about are firmly based on real people and like with anything (including the 5 million George W. Bush jokes), there are people who will believe what you present in a strip or a story or a site as being true.
Again, based on something I’ve gone through here. A TechTV person asked for a strip between that person and another character. I misinterpreted what they wanted and how far I should take things and something went up that was a bit more than they were comfortable with. They asked for changes. I didn’t want to do changes.
Lets face it, when you’re doing a site like this, there’s a lot of pride in what you put up. From time to time if someone wants something changed it’s darn hard to change things.
After a few minutes of being completely pissed off — since this person had asked for the strip — it hit me. This was a TechTV person participating in my site. Not only was the person participating, they were ENJOYING what I did so much that they wanted to be a part of the creation of a strip. While the entire fate of the site didn’t hang in the balance of my decision, I came to my senses and made the changes.
From my point of view, I’m glad I’ve made the changes and I’m completely open to suggestions from the TechTV folks on how they’d like to be portrayed (I refuse to name drop so they know who they are). I’ve made changes based on what they like and what they don’t like, and while my e-mail (that’s Reallycoolsite@aol.com), is kind of hard to find on this page, they can always catch me in chat or contact me or contact me through the few people who know me.
My policy is that I’m not going to be the idiot who screws this up for everyone else.
So if TechTV wants changes, they get changes. Period. No fuss, no fights, no tantrums, they get whatever they wanted changed immediately.
Why? See above, I don’t want to be the guy who Pisses someone off and TechTV comes back and says “Hey, stop it with using our stuff on your site” to all of us who are doing fan sites or parody sites.
That’s my policy. I’m not saying that anyone should follow that policy and there are other sites who have handled things differently. That’s what they do. If one of those sites screw things up for the rest of us, then so be it. However, it’s not going to be my site that screws the rest of us out of doing TechTV sites.
What’s going on with Buffy the Vampire Slayer sites can and might someday happen here. Doubt it will, but again, it will not be my actions that spoil the party for everyone else.
With that, I’m out for the night. Back to work and maybe a break or two. I was tempted to pick up Madden 2002 for the PC (which TechTV should have reviewed on air — to heck with the PS2 version), and tomorrow might mean a trip to the mall.
Goodnight and take care,
k9
P.S. H is for Huggabalu.