TRUE CONFESSIONS [kalpurna]

So hey, I'm on bandflesh! There's been a lot of posts today on the subject, because we are nothing if not overinvested in our ridiculous comm, but I'd rather not spend a lot of time describing exactly why we aren't a hate meme, because really, I think you can all judge that one for yourselves. Instead, I'd like to talk about why I find anonymity so interesting!

The biggest, most important aspect of anonymity is that no one will know who made which comment. It sounds really obvious, right? But in practice, the way this plays out is incredibly cool, and let me tell you how.

1. You can't hold grudges. That means that you can get into a gigantic angry flamewar with someone who is being WRONG ON THE INTERNET and on the very next page, you can cuddle that same person because they're having trouble in their home life. There's no way to pin down a certain consistent dynamic between two people, of the kind that ends up tearing communities apart. This imparts unusual stability to communities that are anonymous.

2. You can take risks.

2a. You can take important personal risks. You can talk about the ways in which your life is collapsing around you even if you, like me, are absolutely terrified of confessing weakness. And the process of admitting what is going on and asking for help anonymously makes it easier to do those things in real life. There are things that were happening to me last year that I categorically could not have told my friendslist, but I told bandflesh, and I told lol_meme, which bandflesh originally spun off from a year ago. This is the kind of thing that gets people REALLY overinvested in the comm, for the record.

2b. You can take trivial personal risks. You can talk in loving detail about your bowel movements and ask that question you've always wondered about your labia. This happens more on meme than on bandflesh, but it's pretty hard to exaggerate how cool it is. You never have to worry about grossing people out, because fuck it! You're anon! You can talk to people about subjects that you literally could never discuss with your name or face attached, and you can do it casually with strangers. Meme famously once discussed how many of them like to eat their footskin.

2c. You can take fannish risks. You can admit to all those kinks you're kind of ashamed of. You can yell at people who are being TOTALLY WRONG ON THE INTERNET without having to deal with, you know, rational considerations that say "sometimes people don't like Patrick Stump and that is a valid lifestyle choice." You can write an epic fic about Jon Walker and his boywives. You can get incredibly overinvested in an anonymous RPer who plays Pete Wentz.

3. The humor is different. This is harder to explain, but when you're anonymous, the humor is much more out there and odd. I would guess that it's because you don't have to worry about people saying "..." in response; if they do, you just lol and move on. The running inside jokes on both the meme and bandflesh are really frankly bizarre. Bruce Springsteen is a rapist who works in concert with Callum Keith Rennie and Pyramidhead from the Silent Hill games! There's a bat on bandflesh who types upsidedown and who we all ship with Gerard Way, to the point of writing fic! It's all kind of "you had to be there" stuff, and it's really, truly, split-your-sides funny. I could never leave meme, if only because I might miss out on another shift like the one where we talked about the mechanics of centaur-human sex.

Anyway, those are three of the reasons I love the anonymous dynamic and could never abandon it. I'm not going to try to argue that shitty things never happen as a result of anonymity, because hey, I've been dissed anonymously too! I've had things said to me on bandflesh and meme that actually made me cry. But those three things above are part of why I always come back. The other half of the story on bandflesh is the personal relationships I've formed there, but if I start talking about that, I'll get all drippy and you'll have to mop me up with a sponge and no one wants that.

ETA: If you found this interesting, you might want to check out these.

If you are uncomfortable with me being on bandflesh and the meme, I understand if you want to defriend me, and I've loved having you on my flist. ♥

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I AM REALLY VERY FOND OF YOU.

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NO U

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Can we wank about your boobs? ♥

I love the drippy stuff about bf, obviously. Like, fuck, half of my friendslist that I actually interact with comes from bandflesh and without BF I'd have been a) too intimidated to talk to them or b) our paths might never have crossed and I can't imagine what I'd be doing in fandom without these losers. ♥ ♥ ♥

Oh my god, that made me laugh so hard. OF ALL THE THINGS TO CAUSE DRAMA, GEEZ.

Yep, pretty much. It's hard to accept "oh, Internet Hate Machine" when I've had fleshers meet my parents.

I'm glad you posted about it! But I was kinda shocked when you linked to the unlocked post for the comm as an example of how you're not a hate meme, because I looked at that thing yesterday and alllll it was was horrible shit being said. And I'd never heard of the comm so I was just like, who is this horrible "bandfleshanon" person who keeps having bitchy conversations with herself? Heh. It was just nasty. But it's all gone now - deleted or screened, I dunno. And seriously, this is me admitting that I don't know the inner dynamics of that comm, and I don't doubt what you say about it or how good it has been for you or any of that. But for me, my first view of it was like 5 pages of screeching LOL about some people who have - to the best of my knowledge - done nothing horrible or cruel, but just somehow become the butt of jokes. There was no one there that I could see telling anyone else to STFU or calm down. Those comments are gone now, but they were my first impression of your community, so I think I'm kind of soured on it. Which sucks, I guess, because a lot of people I think are cool are involved.

That's very very weird; we're super against deleting comments, to the point of causing misunderstandings when people wondered why we didn't delete certain comments, and we certainly would have noticed if someone deleted five pages. Do you mean that the post is locked now? We lock all posts when we finish them, but it says in the current post how you can backread.

I think there might be a problem here with interpreting tone? Part of the anonymity vibe is that you tend to be hyperbolic and dramatic because you're relieved of the fannish burden of toning down your comments to be as rational and defensible as possible. So to us, within the context of our history and traditions, comments like I WANT TO NAILBAT HER SO HARD or LOL STUPID EDGY TWAT aren't necessarily as harsh as they sound. You know? Like, the way that some people use more profanity than others. It's just a difference in style, it doesn't actually make us meaner or harsher than other people who tend towards passive-aggression rather than yelling. It's obviously not for everyone, though, and I don't mean to argue that it is. It's just... also not a hate meme.

Um, I don't think know if it's a different post? It's the basic signup post, but maybe that is always filled with comments and then locked? But the mean shit is all gone. And I'm not being defensive or reactionary here, honest I'm not - I'm not one of those (decent) people who hates all kinds of anon behaviour or locked comms, I've participated in both in my time and had fun with it. But that stuff was pretty undeniably bitchy. It was mainly about monkeycrackmary and claireweasley (who are on my flist and I feel friendly towards, like I feel friendly towards you, none of us are BFFs or anything). There was quotes from their posts about the comm, laughing at them, there was stuff like "oh i cant wait to see the comment pages on her fic *now*" and scrolling banners - I didn't screencap anything, I am not that machiavellian! I can't even SPELL machiavellian! But it was there, and I saw it, and it wasn't tone, it was cruel.

oh! there's a comment on the first page of the open post saying "I FEEL LIKE WE'RE INVITING MORE WANK BY LOCKING THE LAST POAST. :(" and then people telling her that's how it works, so I guess maybe if you scroll back you'll find it?

Yeah, the way it works is that each new post is made with a quote from the last post and then the last post is locked, but it really is easy to backread, you just ask. Nothing is gone, I promise, because if it were we would be a lot more angry than anyone else about it - we're very anti-censorship. We were also, I think understandably, upset about being called evil, so that might have bled through a little and led to some over-the-top condemnation. However, I also know that both before and since this wank began, most fleshers have been very positive about

monkeycrackmary's fic. We're not a hive mind, and while individuals may cross over the line of acceptable anger, that doesn't mean we're all thinking the same thing.

Again, it's not the right place for everyone. It's just also a more complicated, less black-and-white place than people are painting it as.

And hey, I want to say - I'm sorry you've been going through such a hard time, and I'm really glad you were able to get help through whatever means. Crazy internet stuff isn't clear cut, but you feeling better today than you did six months ago is important, and good. So, you know, yay :)

Thank you so much, that's a really sweet thing to say, and nice to hear. ♥

but it says in the current post how you can backread.

I can't find that in the current post. Is it in one of the threads? If so, could you link? I'm curious to see if context can make "I WANT TO NAILBAT HER SO HARD" sound less harsh.

No, it's in the post quote (the body of the post), but all it says is "ask for the n00b account information." We try to only give it out to people we ask, because we were linked on Idolator once. However, unless you're willing to devote some truly epic time to backreading, you might still not understand our context, because, if I can quote from

quettaser:

Every thread is part of a larger discussion at the time (sometimes called "shifts") but every comment is also in conversation with all 600,000+ that have come before. That much context is hard to grasp and get a handle on. There can be a steep learning curve for anyone just coming in. So being randomly linked to threads that may appear to be self-contained discussions are not and nothing can truly be read at face value. Sarcasm is heavy, the language incredibly hyperbolic and self-referential. It's important to remember that for those reading for the first time.

That said, of course sometimes people are just being douches, as people have always done and will always do in any community.

Anonymity on the internet is very interesting, I agree. I haven't engaged in it since the anon.penet.fi servers went dark in 1996, and even then, I always had the same anon address, the same anon "face" as it were, so I still had responsibility for things I said.

It's the anonymous douchiness that always gets me. I understand (more, after reading posts like yours) the positive things that can come from the kind of anonymity at bandflesh, where there is no name put to anything, but people who are willing to be vicious to someone behind anonymity, those are people I don't want to know. It may seem counterintuitive, but the difference is cowardice: I don't see anything cowardly in wanting anonymity for the positive reasons you lay out. I do see a particularly wretched form of cowardice in anon trash-talk. It's not running away from something, which, okay, I get that, and it's not simply keeping private things private, but rather it's throwing poison at someone -- often, apparently, someone who thinks you're (generic "you") a friend -- but with the assurance that there will be no consequences to you for hurting them.

And I don't understand why the community members who seem to also think it's a crappy thing to do are happy enough to let it pass. I mean I understand it on a practical level - you can't stop it, of course. But comms, even anon comms, are self-policing. It was actually in quettaser's post that I commented, in part, "If you see your friend being attacked, and you'd rather chill with your anon buddies who are attacking her than do anything about it, I mean. Yeah, I can see why someone would defriend a person for that."

I guess it's possible that comm members are in there self-policing the hell out of those threads, but I haven't heard anyone say that they are, and I kind of think someone would have mentioned it by now. So it'd be great to either see the bandflesh members doing a little more self-policing or, alternately, not getting upset when people outside the comm, some of whom are being hurt by it, talk trash about it. I understand that your post isn't about defending the comm, but rather explaining some of the positives of anonymity, and I appreciate that. It was just that your post is the one that got me thinking about why it is that the positives, while for many they outweigh the negatives, don't seem to me to be a sufficient reason for not hating the comm.

my only real argument against bandflesh is "you're smaller than the chans, making you less effective and making any hate that happens to go on seem worse" buuuuut that's what happens i guess (and i know you're not all about the hate! i know the hatin' isn't everyone and that you're not a united front. bandflesh is not the internet haet machine! still.)

anyway i've no beef with you it is just my wanky Thinky Thought of the day.

Well, we're pretty different from the chans. We don't have raids or anything, we're really just, like you said, small and meaningless. I could never handle being a /b/tard.

♥ hey, I like to hear Thinky Thoughts every day!

Well, the 'chans aren't necessarily all about the raids either. A lot of them are just, you know. People being dicks on the Internet, asking weirdass questions, having no shame, and generally having their own skewed sense of humor. Not everyone participates in raids, and there are obviously - there are factions, there are people who think raids are the only way to truly epic lulz, there are people who think they're dumb as shit, and so on.

/b/ is insane, but there are other chans and even just other boards that are way more chill and less overrun with madness and brainrape.

anyway

i never said bandflesh is small and meaningless. haha. small, yes, but since it's the internet, it can't be kept secret, and it's clearly had an impact at least in recent tiem soooooo.

I enjoyed this post, people forget in their drive to be 'open' and 'tell the truth' and blah blah that lots of important things in live are anon. like real names on the internet and voting.

And yes some people are shitheads sometimes, and some people are allowed to vote for Bush when there is no one in the booth with them to tell them who to vote for. We aren't ditching secret ballot any time soon.

I really do think anonymity serves an important purpose in this world, although I would never compare our importance to secret balloting, of course. I think that in order to say "the only meaningful purpose of anonymous is to bash people without consequence" you have to ignore a whole lot of other interesting stuff, you know? IDK. And yeah, like you said, actions taken in a forum don't negate the validity of that forum.

You can yell at people who are being TOTALLY WRONG ON THE INTERNET without having to deal with, you know, rational considerations that say "sometimes people don't like Patrick Stump and that is a valid lifestyle choice."

i won't lie, this is my favorite part. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T LIKE PETE.

also, you know, everything else.

GOD WHY ARE PEOPLE SO WRONG ALL THE TIME >>>>>>>>>>:(

&you;

RIGHT ON THE INTERNET. ♥

♥♥♥

Only anonymously could I bait you and Lea incessantly with Petebashing without being murdered in my sleep. ~~Seriously I don't mean it Lea had better not kill me~~

♥♥♥

Oh, you only think you're safe, bb. When you least expect it...

&you;

I THOUGHT THAT WAS YOU! Not that I actually interact on BF, I am a moast ~*stealthy lurker.

Hahahahaha, I am the stealthiest of ninjas. I love how I keep being like "I'm on bf!" and people are like "oh bb, we knew."

I was eating my footskin as I read this. It was like you could SEE into my living room.

MY PSYCHIC POWERS STRIKE AGAIN >:)

Umm, I have no idea what bandflesh is but it seems to make you happy so all good.

Hey, this comment I'll take! :D ♥

Today, on Things I Learned On Kalpurna's Elljay:

the one where we talked about the mechanics of centaur-human sex.

...Glad to learn I'm not the only one who has thought about this.

We were talking about how if they're supposed to be these famous rapists, how do they actually do their raping? I think the question was eventually resolved with some mspaint diagrams.

CENTAUR SEX: IT WORRIES ME.

In conclusion, I tend to be suspicious of anonymity because for some people it IS a license to misbehave, but I've now read too many testimonials about bandflesh to automatically think badly of anyone who participates in it. It does seem like a) it can't hurt you if you don't look at it, and b) what happens in bandflesh ought to stay in bandflesh.

It did not end up involving a table after all, did it? I was at work, so I kind of had to not follow, sadly.

personally, I would never defriend anyone over this. I guess I just don't take the internet seriously enough. I've really enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts on this -- well, the mature, thought out ones -- and I find it really interesting.

Thanks, I'm glad you found it interesting! :)

You know... it's strange.

I think the only part of this that offends my sensibilities in any way is point #3.

That's so interesting, why does it bother you?

Mostly, because you're so very, very, very wrong.

Your humor is different. You, the individual. You personally allow yourself more freedom. But to generalize across and say that anonymity is the only way to get out to the wacky nonsensical places and imply that no one else and no other community can possibly be as free and weird? It's the first thing anyone has said in any of this that's truly just left me blinking and saying "Huh. No. Wrong." With a side of the gut urge to say "get over yourselves."

See, the thing is, you can't judge your communities bizarre inside jokes against another communities bizarre inside jokes. Because you're not going to *get* another communities inside jokes. "You had to be there" is pretty much the definition of it, and I'm not going to say that the bandflesh inside jokes aren't hilarious and side-splitting and bizarre as all hell...

but you guys don't get a monopoly on that just because anon is the only way you're comfortable being that weird.

And hey, now that I've spent too being deadly serious about absurdity, if I'm being over sensitive to this one, I'm sorry. But like I said, it's the first thing that's really smacked me in the face as an implication of "we're *better* than you."

Well, personally, I do bring a lot of wacky nonsensical things up in my journal. I'm not particularly shy about such things, and recently I asked my flist if they would drink Pete Wentz's pee if it would get them pregnant. I personally do not allow myself more freedom anonymously than on LJ.

The community, however, is very different. I have participated actively in LJ fandom for five years, and in bandflesh for eight months. I feel comfortable saying that meme and bandflesh's sense of humor is different than fandom's in general. For instance, jokes about rape would be considered inappropriate by most fandomers, although they're commonplace on the meme. Bandflesh has been known to ship interspecies incest non-con mpreg.

It's not that non-anon fannish communities can't be that weird and random, it's that in my experience, they aren't. I love them both, but they are different. In any case, I'm sorry if I offended you; it wasn't my intention.

Ahhh. I think I see where the disconnect in my brain happened.

I wasn't thinking of "community" strictly in terms of publicly posted, on-line interaction or even strictly in terms of fandom. And you're right, places where that kind of thing exist in public on LJ tend few and far between for any number of reasons. Though I'm not sure I'm going to say that they don't exist at all. There are thousands of comms I know nothing about that could be having even weirder conversations.

People are always going to feel more comfortable when they know the boundaries and expectations of the situation they are in. So yeah, in "general population" I think you're right that things will be less bizarre as a general rule, especially in fandom where we tend to be aware of the fact that we are existing in populations with pretty high percentages of mental health issues, sensitivities to race, gender, and sexuality issues, etc. But I think things always get weirder when you wander away from that general population and start assuming smaller audiences, or at least a context where you can assume that people sort of "get" where you're coming from.

But I think that that kind of environment can be fostered regardless of anonymity. I spent about a year relatively serious about stand-up comedy, hanging with the other comedians at open mic, and trust me, interspecies incest non-con mpreg wouldn't even make any of them blink. Well... maybe the mpreg. Real life boys tend to get a little squeamish about that kind of thing. But the things that got said definitely crossed every line of "socially acceptible" and they could, because everybody knew what the deal was (and can I just say, there's nothing quite like having to have a quick castration and/or horse rape joke at hand when a dude's riffing on clitoral mutilation).

Quettaser mentioned in a comment to me that while bandflesh is publicly accessible, she at least doesn't think of it as a public space. And I think that's the thing. I think the same kind of humor *does* happen all over the place, but just as general fandom humor is different than non-fandom humor, it also shifts when you get into sub-sub-cultures and smaller pieces of fandom. It's not necessarily going to show up in large, mass audience comms, or if it does, the people who find it funniest may eventually move it to email or IM to avoid spamming. And it certainly happens in communities of friends.

The biggest sticking point for me was, I think, that when I think about community and inside jokes and bizarre humor--regardless of the people I'm talking to--I'm at my most bizarre off-line. I'm way more off the cuff outloud than I can ever be in writing (even anonymous, I know myself well enough to know I'd overthink EVERYTHING in a way I don't/can't when I'm talking). And I tend to think of my fannish communities just as much in terms of what happens in a hotel room or in concert line or in my living room on any given weekend as I do what gets said on line.

Which is way too many words to say "Gotcha. No offense taken."

ILU, BB, but don't get n00bs interested in anonmemes. They just fail all over the place. Better that they hate us and stay away.

Unfortunately, it's sort of reached the point in my fandom where I don't have an option, you know? I've got a ton of people on my flist who were being harsh about a ton of other people on my flist, and just, ugh, I couldn't not say anything. /o\

That said, we're currently dealing with a TIDAL WAVE of n00bery over at bandflesh, and I'm editing this post right now to remove the link to mother meme.