Meta Roundup

spacelogic: fannish distinctions I: the difference between liking a creator and liking their creation: "Basically, what I'm talking about here is the conflation of creator and creation. I know a lot of people do it, either in deciding to consume/not consume someone's creations, or in deciding how they feel about the creator. It makes a certain level of sense -- I'd rather not help to make a bigoted jerk rich, if I can instead help a nice person."

torino10154: Betas: What is their job? What sort of credit do they desire?: "When they rephrase a line, are you still the author? Should you change their changes to make it your own?"

xie_xie_xie:
[Queer as Folk, but also RPF/RPS-related] The actor thing: "When people watch Queer as Folk and see Gale and Randy instead of Brian and Justin, and talk about the scene that way, it makes me feel that they don't care about the characters, their stories, their reality above and beyond the artistry and craft of their creators."
Luring our muses back when they have wandered off: "Now, I know I haven't covered all the ways muses can be enticed to return from whatever safari, cruise, or spa vacation they're spending your hard-earned money on... how have the rest of you -- writers, icon-makers, vidders, artists -- gotten them back when they've gone missing?"

brown_betty uses animal metaphors to describe fandoms. (It's funnier than I make it sound.)

Tangentially fannish topic: A lot of people use bookmarking services such as Del.icio.us, Simpy, or Ma.Gnolia. Apparently Ma.Gnolia.com had an outage that resulted in data loss. elke_tanzer posted a collection of links describing ways to export/backup your Del.icio.us bookmarks, and some places where Ma.Gnolia users discuss data recovery.