More on FBLJ and pingbacks, this journal's status

First, on the pingbacks front, helens78 has established that pingbacks break friends-lock when you edit entries. Lovely!

eumelia has code by 51stcenturyfox which will allow you to disable the crossposting buttons on your journal, not just on your comment boxes.

LJ and FB have signed some sort of integration deal to offer LJ services to FB users, so this probably isn't going away. According to cleolinda, if you enable FB crossposting, your FB (legal, presumably) name will appear on your LJ profile page.

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This afternoon I enabled search engine inclusion on this DW, and minimized it on this LJ. I don't think most people will notice a difference--comments will still be enabled on all translation posts, I will still post translations simultaneously to both journals--but the LJ has been a secondary journal for a while now. At some point in the next week or so I'll finish putting all my translation links in my DW journal sidebar, as well as pruning a lot of private and f-locked content off the LJ, and that will be that.

Ensign Sue Must Die!

Ensign Sue Must Die! Story by Clare Moseley, art by Kevin Bolk.

djkittycat pointed out the existence of this comic in the dealers' room at Otakon 2010 to me, and I will be forever grateful.

So, yes. This short but hilarious and pointed comic, still being serialized on the author's website, tells the story of one Ensign Mary Amethyst Star Enoby Aiko Archer Picard Janeway Sue and how she comes to join the crew of the Enterprise in the AOS timeline. You definitely won't get the humor unless you've been around fandom long enough to spot a Sue character a mile off, but if you are conversant with fandom and its clichés about self-insert characters, you will probably laugh your head off.

In the wake of the Mary Sue debate earlier this year, the comic seems even more pointed than otherwise, and in some ways seeing Ensign Sue in full color really reinforces some of the most cogent objections to Mary Sue, namely that she's a white girl's/woman's power fantasy. Less objectionably, she's also just ridiculous, and invidious too. Unquestionably, there need to be more awesome female characters of all possible races, backgrounds, orientations, bodies, in media. Mary Sue, however, is not always the best way to go about filling in that lack.