Most Awesome Sign on Earth

This pic was taken at some point in 2007 and is from a random pic search.

I saw it yesterday over at Mark Allen via my brother.



My whole family are fans of Turing.
And of sarcasm.

I love sarcasm and parody.

Something to laugh at on this here Yom Kippur!

A Fandom Fail

Torchwood Fandom,

This is not okay, no matter how you spin it, via torch_wood:

Please Read - TW Fandom Using a photo of my son inappropriately.
[Posted by shamazipan]
I am not usually one to get all up on my high horse about photos I've posted online. It's annoying when something you've posted ends up somewhere else without credit, but at the weekend I heard something that made my stomach churn. A complete stranger told me that she recognised my son from an email attachment that's been floating round. Apparently someone has taken a picture of him and Gareth David-Lloyd and captioned it "Ianto and Lisa's Baby". I can only imagine that someone saw the photo of Gareth and a small mixed race boy and their mind had that random thought. The thing is that most normal people would leave it there and wouldn't then pass that photo around with a silly caption. You have no idea how I felt on hearing that my son was being used as an object of amusement for someone. I share my pictures in very few places - my LJ (photo posts are usually flocked), my private photobucket account and this one photo was shared with friends on a Torchwood forum. What makes this worse is that it is probably someone I know that has done this. While I usually don't worry too much about sharing pictures of my son online this is taking it too far. I want to be able to share pics with my friends but this has seriously made me have to rethink that. Taking a picture of someone's child and knowingly editing it and passing it around is not cool. Not cool at all. I know this is my fault for being trusting but I wanted to post this so that people may think twice about how they use images belonging to others. I feel violated, I feel that my son has been violated and I just can't understand why someone would do that. it was creepy having a stranger approach me and say "I'm sorry to have to tell you this..." and then go on to describe the photo in detail. I just hope that by posting this the person who did this may see it and that they (and anyone reading this really) will have a long think about how they use other people's images without permission in future. There's not much I can do about this now but please, if you get this email, don't pass it on. Seriously fandom, it's creepy stuff like this that gives us a bad name.

Fandom, seriously, invading people's privacy and manipulating the picture of a minor without guardian/parental consent and permission is wrong. Not to mention the skeeviness of objectifying a child in that manner, when it was an innocuous memento.

*sigh* I thought it was too important to not, at the very least, re-post about it.
If I come across that picture there will be Words.

Fandom, the Interwebs carry real life ramifications, I know that it doesn't feel that way, but it really really does.

It may not seem like a big deal, but make no mistake, stuff like this can carry very real and very harsh consequences.

Transformative works should be something creative for our community (because yeah, that's what we are) and not breed distrust.

My two cents.