Text 13679, 255 rader
Skriven 2007-04-20 05:11:53 av Vorlonagent (42.babylon5)
  Kommentar till text 13660 av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated (23.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Finesse contest finalists - thanks to all!
======================================================

"Amy Guskin" <aisling@fjordstone.com> wrote in message 
news:0001HW.C24D8C3502BA5922F0182648@news.verizon.net...
> Dear all,
>
> Apologies right up front for the length of this tome.
>
> As many of you have seen by now, I am not one of the 20 finalists in the
> Finesse contest.  I would have beat Penny to the punch in telling you 
> that,
> except that I've been agonizing about how best to tell you about what's 
> been
> going on since the contest ended -- which is surprisingly ugly for a 
> contest
> whose aim was related to beauty.
>
> The contest ended on Saturday night, March 31st, and thanks to the utterly
> amazing people I know (both online and the geographically proximate 
> variety),
> I managed to finish SIXTH in a field of nearly one thousand entries. 
> This,
> despite the very last minute entries who mobilized their troops to get 
> them a
> high ranking with their low scores.  It truly was impressive (your voting, 
> I
> mean), and based on what they seemed to be looking for from both the
> submission guidelines and the content of their ads, it seemed all but
> impossible for me to lose -- especially since they'd expanded the 
> finalists'
> field from ten to _twenty_.  So I basically just forgot about the contest
> after Saturday night, figuring I'd hear about my finalist status on the 
> 16th,
> along with everybody else.
>
> Then, Thursday, April 5th came.  And on Thursday afternoon, I received a
> startling number of e-mail notifications of comments to my blog.  Now, I
> hardly ever update my blog, and in fact, the latest entry at that point 
> was
> dated from November 2006, and was about...the Finesse contest.  It 
> included a
> link to vote me a "10," and a reminder to vote my competitors a "1."  So I
> opened the first of the e-mails...and felt like I was struck across the 
> face.
> It was a VERY ugly, VERY nasty note about how I'm a cheater, I have an 
> ugly
> soul, and someone ought to tell Finesse how I cheated.  The next one said 
> I
> was a bitch.  The next said they'd seen better hair on a horse.  The next,
> "cheaters never prosper."  Etc.  I kept reading them -- they were all made
> anonymously via blogger.com's comment feature -- and I very quickly 
> realized
> that I'd better turn off the open comment feature, and delete those 
> comments.
>
> I finally got to the last comment (I was still receiving them via e-mail,
> even if they weren't appearing on my blog), and it was from someone who
> kindly -- anonymously -- told me where all of the ire was coming from.  It
> was coming from a thread on a message board dedicated to sweepstakes 
> players.
> This is one of those communities frequented by people who find out about
> sweepstakes from various sources, post the information about them online,
> enter, and report on their annual winnings.  When it's a voting contest 
> (best
> photo of your kid, best poem about a parrot, best hard-luck story about 
> your
> first car, etc. etc.), they all exhort one another to vote for each other, 
> as
> you'd expect (and exactly as I did with you guys).  It seems to be an 
> actual
> occupation for some of them -- or maybe a religion would be more correct.
>
> Several women from this community had entered the Finesse contest.  One
> particular woman started this ugly nonsense.  She'd apparently been going
> through withdrawal after the contest ended, did a search on some terms
> (presumably on Google Groups), and found our various threads on the 
> subject.
> She proclaimed that she was "livid" that I had "cheated" by having people
> vote "1"s for my competition in such an organized fashion (a list!  a 
> list!),
> and she wanted advice on what to say to Finesse when she wrote to complain
> about me.  Her 'sweeper' friends all rallied to her side, told her what a
> terrible person I obviously was, that I was clearly a bitch -- they could 
> see
> it in my smirk -- and that I had absolutely cheated.  Many of them 
> promised
> to write to Finesse and ask that I be disqualifed for "cheating," and one
> woman frighteningly said that she would "hound Finesse forever" if they
> allowed me to win!
>
> Oh, and they also didn't like that we'd bestowed descriptive nicknames on
> some of the entries -- but how else were we supposed to refer to people 
> for
> whom we didn't have names?
>
> At some point, the original poster found her way to my website and blog, 
> and
> posted those URLs on her poisonous thread.  I've always been a very public
> persona online, and I use real addresses in my various newsgroups, so I'm 
> not
> hard to find.  I don't _want_ to be.  And while my site and blog _are_
> public, this thread ended up becoming wholly devoted to libelling me, 
> sending
> me abusive and threatening e-mail, and making baseless accusations about 
> me
> to Finesse that could conceivably jeopardize my entry.  So I decided to 
> ask
> the board's administrator to delete the thread, since it was so clearly
> abusive.
>
> I had to join the community in order to get access to the administrator.
> That becomes important later.
>
> The administrator read my e-mail, wrote back _very_ quickly with an 
> apology,
> and pulled the thread.  I managed to save a couple of pages before it
> disappeared, in case I needed some kind of verification of my story.
>
> So then it was the weekend, and I started agonizing over this.  I thought 
> it
> would certainly look improper for a contestant to contact Finesse during 
> the
> judging phase, but I also thought that it was important for them to know 
> that
> this wasn't some groundswell of disappointed individuals who all came to 
> this
> conclusion independently; that this was an organized initiative by one
> contestant with a very bad case of sour grapes because she didn't finish 
> as
> well as she'd hoped to.  After much deliberation, I wrote them a brief, 
> clear
> note explaining the situation, that I had been the victim of these
> 'sweepstakes professionals,' and expressing that I hoped that this woman's
> baseless accusations wouldn't affect my entry.
>
> I didn't hear back from them.
>
> Monday the 16th came and went, and no finalists were posted (that was the 
> day
> they were supposed to appear).  Since we were in the midst of that
> record-breaking Nor'easter here in this region, I figured I wouldn't get
> worried until Tuesday.  Early Tuesday morning, I went to the contest site 
> and
> the finalists were posted.  And, needless to say, I was gobsmacked -- not
> just because I wasn't there, but because of who _was_ there.  (Including
> someone who'd broken the rules by having two entries -- two entries that 
> were
> sometimes both on the Top Ten page simultaneously, so you could hardly 
> have
> missed that she'd cheated!)
>
> Since I'd never received a reply to my e-mail, and doubt was gnawing at 
> me, I
> called up Finesse and asked to speak to someone about an e-mail I'd sent
> regarding the contest.  I've had a couple of phone conversations with them
> this week, mainly because the customer care person to whom they referred 
> me
> didn't know anything about it, and had to do some research -- but she's 
> told
> me that she is reasonably sure that the judges never saw ANY of the 
> e-mails.
> Not the ones from the accusers, nor mine.  But she hasn't actually 
> verified
> that yet, which is why I am still waiting to hear from her, and why I 
> hadn't
> posted about this earlier this week (I hoped to have definitive word from
> them before doing so).  She also wasn't able to tell me how the judges 
> made
> their choices, but said she wished she did!
>
> One thing I did verify with her: voting ANY number for ANY contestant once 
> a
> day, whether an organized effort or not (and thanks to Hilary for that
> amazing strategy, which I'm certain kept me in the Top Ten right up to the
> end!), was NOT cheating.  Nor was it even slightly morally wrong.  In 
> fact, I
> was exactly the kind of contestant they wanted: someone who would get
> hundreds of their friends engaged, and visiting their website, and 
> thinking
> about Finesse every day for several months.
>
> So, where it currently stands is that, according to someone at Finesse who
> really doesn't know for sure, I didn't make the finals because of whatever
> parameters of merit the judges were using, and not because of any 
> discomfort
> they had over potential controversy created by the sour grapes people. 
> But
> we'll probably never know that for sure.  Looking at the finalists, I 
> can't
> even begin to fathom what they were looking for.  Honestly, it seems to me
> that they must have put all the entries in a barrel and picked randomly! 
> I
> think that most of those entries were awful, and not because the women 
> aren't
> attractive, or that their hair is bad.  Just because they were so
> unremarkable -- photographically, stylistically -- compared to some of the
> _other_ entries, and don't seem to measure up as well as others based on 
> the
> submission guidelines.  I mean, as self-involved as I can be, there _were_
> other entries I really liked, and I was kind of excited to see how many of
> them would make the finals.  NONE of them did.  And I don't think my sense 
> of
> aesthetics, or my ability to comprehend the submission guidelines, could 
> be
> _that_ far off!  So the results are, to me at least, a total mystery.
>
> As for the pile of nasty comments I received, I feel like I got a teeny
> little taste of what celebrities have to put up with...and I have a lot 
> more
> empathy for them now.  I wasn't bothered by the comments that attacked my
> appearance; I'm comfortable with who I am.  But the idea that these women
> thought it was okay to tell me that I had an "ugly soul," that I was a
> dreadful person, that bad things should happen to me...well, it was a very
> sobering experience.  It was particularly awful because I was also dealing
> with my father being hospitalized and undergoing a (minor) cardiac 
> procedure
> during all of this, and it was just so much dross that I really did _not_
> need.
>
> So now we come to the irony of my having to join that community.  Joining
> gave me access to their forum archives, and so I did some searches of my 
> own,
> on the original sour-grapes poster and the Finesse contest posts she'd 
> made.
> And I found her Finesse contest URL.  This was before I wrote to Finesse, 
> so
> I actually could have told them, "...and here's the contest URL of the 
> nasty
> woman who has been trying to have me disqualified for no valid reason, and
> who is responsible for prompting an entire community of people to send me
> abusive e-mails" but I didn't.  She was so certain that I am morally 
> inferior
> to her, and a bad person, but when given the chance, I chose _not_ to be
> spiteful, and _not_ to reveal her identity to Finesse.  Even if she didn't
> agree, my feeling was that everyone who entered the contest fair and 
> square
> deserved an equal chance to win.
>
> At the end of all of this, as bad as the last two weeks have been, I'm
> satisfied with my entry and how I finished.  I can't say I'm not 
> disappointed
> -- the money would have been very useful, and I sure wouldn't have minded
> being able to call myself, howsoever briefly, a model -- but I did 
> _really_
> well, and even if the judges didn't agree, certainly the popular vote and 
> the
> _amazing_ support from my various communities made me feel like a winner.
> So, thanks once again to you all.  I'm sorry I couldn't bring home the 
> trophy
> after all of your hard work.
>
> Amy
>
>
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32
 * Origin: Time Warp of the Future BBS - Home of League 10 (1:14/400)