Nothin' again. Bloggers' Block. Watching that little cursor throb can be hypnotic.
Ok, now I've got something--censorship. Specifically, Carnival of the Vanities censorship. Fellow Munuvian Jim of Snooze Button Dreams entered an erotic vignette and the Host of this week's Carnival of the Vanities refused to include it.
This ticks me off. It's a great post of the "women's fiction" genre (I know, I've read a lot of women's fiction in my life) and clearly labled that it's adult-oriented. The hypocritical thing is that the very first Carnival entry is a bunch of sex jokes called "unusual virus warnings" (example:VIAGRA VIRUS: Makes a new hard drive out of an old floppy.) That's okay, apparently.
The next thing you know, Carnival Hosts will start omitting posts they disagree with politically, or "editing for content", or maybe even picking a different post than the one submitted (I didn't like the typos in your November 3th post, so I've linked to the November 4th one).
Everybody (except Mookie) go read
The Somnolence of Clouds and give Jim some moral support. (And Harvey--make sure your space bar is working properly first!)
Thanks for the support, Susie.
So how does my "fiction" compare with the stuff from the pros?
Posted by: Jim at November 13, 2003 09:29 AMAs good if not better in some cases, Jim! (And I'm still a little over-heated!)
Posted by: Susie at November 13, 2003 09:53 AMExcellent. My work here is done. ;-)
Posted by: Jim at November 13, 2003 10:02 AMI'm don't understand the gripe here, Suzie.
If Carnival doesn't want to include a link, isn't that up to him? It's not so much censorship as it is being discriminating about the sort of content he'll link to.
There's a distinction between vulgarity (floppy/hard drives) and eroticism and I don't think the expectation should be that participation in or submission to these individual blog-contests guarantees the linky-love.
I'm sure Jim's story is tops (I'll read it when I get home.) and I suppose it may be considered a little bit inconsiderate that Carnival declined to link to it, but let's maintain our freedom-oriented perspective here and respect the decision as one that Max is entitled to make.
Posted by: Trey Givens at November 13, 2003 10:29 AMWell, I guess I disagree with that, Trey--I have never heard that the Host of the Carnival could capriciously reject entries without even reading them. What if I, as Hostess of a Carnival, refused to include any post submitted by any member of the League of Liberals on the grounds that I was entitled to include only what I wanted to? Do you really think that wouldn't be censorship?
Posted by: Susie at November 13, 2003 02:28 PMI had never seen any indication that any previous Carnival host had intentionally declined to link any submitted post. I personally stopped submitting anything because the list of posts on the Carnival has grown so lengthy that I felt it was not worth the effort to identify one of my better posts to be at the bottom of a list of other bloggers great posts. I had suspected that there was some preferences shown in the ordering of the links.
Posted by: Tiger at November 13, 2003 08:23 PM