FST-related rant

[petronia]

(Because I can't let myself rant about what you and I are all thinking about. Ironically I feel much the same way as I did after 9/11: the cold satisfaction of seeing one's worst suspicions justified. Humanity really isn't worth the energy it would take to save it, so bring down the Flood.

...It's a temperamental thing. When I go through a carefree happy period in life, as I am now, I get attacks of doomed presentiment. Because I know for every up, there's a down. Jobs are lost, people die, shit happens. I had attacks of doomed presentiment reading the newspaper during the nineties as well, when there was Clinton and economic prosperity after recession and for a while it looked like Palestine might reconcile like Ireland and Germany, because the up was too much. In history as in human life, there has to be a down. Two steps forward means one step back; three steps forward means two back, and sometimes it means four. So this decade feels like something I've rehearsed for, but that doesn't make it happier.)

So yes! The FST question. To be honest, I'm with Squit on this one (with the caveat that one-line comments don't bother me, as they allow me to track that particular FST's popularity relative to the others I made - sort of like lj comments on my fic), and also with pornkings when she says "I'm actually more disconcerted by people who comment saying that they have downloaded a 'couple' of songs rather than by those who don't comment at all and yet take the entire mix." 'Disconcerted' is the mot juste for it; to me it's rather as if someone commented saying "Read the first and seventh paragraphs of your fic and enjoyed, thanks! :D" Er... you're welcome? o_O

That being said:

1) I do not, in a direct monthly-bill way, pay for Kekkai.org's bandwidth.
2) Kekkai has a lot of bandwidth.
3) I don't have access to webstats for Kekkai. This means comments are the only way I know anyone's downloaded at all.
4) I donate to Kekkai's fund, and in fact will be soon (I figure the money'd come in handiest before Christmas), but I have no real idea whether my donation was proportionate to my usage over the course of this year. I'm thinking it can't possibly be, because my usage is through the roof. LJ isn't half of it, I upload things for people privately.
5) Points 1 through 4 mean that when I post music, I'm probably using D's money to pay for my fandom cred. This is not the intent, but it's one of the consequences.
6) I could probably not acquire the equivalent in a hosting plan myself. Not because I couldn't afford it at this point, strictly speaking, but because Kekkai is on a better plan than I could get for Petronia.net, and also there would be a screaming knockdown fight in my family if I started getting a monthly bill for putting shiz up for internet strangers for free.
7) I perceive - emotionally - commenting after reading a fic or downloading an mp3 to be an extremely tiresome social obligation, apart from the infrequent occasions when I have something interesting to say. (Such occasions are obviously more frequent if I'm friends with the person in question.) Other people have told me in private conversation that they feel this way as well, but the pressure to be Nice is overwhelming.
8) Point 7 means I often conveniently forget about said tiresome social obligation. I'm terrible at things like thank-you notes in reality - would rather not receive the gift than have to write one - and after all I get on the Internet a lot because I'm an introvert working-up-from-misanthrope. No, really. In a certain sense, I can afford to be nice here (as opposed to sound nice) because I don't have to deal with you guys on a taking-up-my-real-life-time-and-space basis. I imagine a lot of you grok this.
9) I don't use file-sharing programs. Never have. I just leech as I find. A lot of times this means I download from directories that just happen to be unprotected from Google's spidering.
10) Points 5 through 9 signify that I'd be an irredeemable hypocrite if I were to get annoyed at people for downloading and not informing me. Not you, especially if you are watching webstats as people leech your personal bandwidth; just me.

...And I'm not annoyed. I keep thinking I would be annoyed if it were my own bandwidth, but really? I doubt I would. I'd still be the one (the idiot, my mother would say) who chooses to upload for the leeching hordes. As with fic, I have the choice to stop posting and walk away. It's because each of the FSTs I make is different. For something like the Prince of Tennis Fanon ST, where essentially each song is its own little character comedy, I could care less if you only download for the three charas/pairings you care about. For something like the Nana FST, where I put the tracks in "chronological" order not because it sequenced best but because it made the explanatory notes easier to write, feel free to listen to it in whichever order you feel is most aesthetically pleasing. For things like KamioMix or RanMix that I didn't even post to fst - heck, I'm just happy that Janni and Kristin liked them respectively. (Although once again, I like getting comments, because it tells me what you want to hear. XD)

For something like the Mirage of Blaze Naoe/Kagetora FST that I've come to realise is an inevitability come February - well. It's a "concept album" in my head, believe it or not. Not only will I be strongly suggesting that people listen to the whole thing in the right order from beginning to end, I'll be strongly suggesting that they listen to it in a certain way to achieve the intended effect. XD;; Except when you get down to it, what can one do but "strongly suggest" that people not read only the first and seventh paragraphs of one's fic? And is it worth getting annoyed over?

...

Now that I've ranted, a practical suggestion. I think we should put our downloading/commenting policy as a standard disclaimer in FST entries as a matter of course. It would cut down on the ambiguity, as there are obviously a range of opinions involved.