Your smug, self-righteous, holier-than-thou attitude has made me so angry. I wasn’t gonna feel better until I let you know this, so here we are. By the way, it isn’t the rest of the fandom who has a problem. It isn’t the crew who has a problem. YOU have the problem. Your posts go beyond being negative. They’re toxic. They’re toxic to fans, and particularly artists. And your words have consequences.
Anonymous asked:Wow, you and PK have once again taken something way too far (SU). It's fine to not like/hate an episode, but you are both so aggressive and rude when you confront someone and act so entitled that it's not even funny. The writers don't owe you anything. You're not paying them, they're not making episodes just for you. You don't realize you're crossing boundaries and stirring up negativity and people are getting sick of it. Stop terrorizing things/people who don't live up to your personal standard
you realize they… are paid for this, right? like, this is their job. their job is to make steven universe.
also i would like to remind you that this is PK’s sole contribution to that entire reblog thread, and the only other notable thing she wrote was a long and heartfelt review of the episode, so i’m not sure why she keeps being lumped into this.
i wasn’t even aiming at the writer. i was replying to PK, which is why i reblogged PK, and not the original ask. i made one snippy reply because i felt insulted, then elaborated when someone else got mad.
i wrote it for my blog, in response to my partner, because of how i felt about something.
naturally this ended up on the writer’s dashboard anyway because tumblr is garbage and there’s really only the one way to thread responses. but instead of doing something trivial like putting me on ignore (or just hitting refresh and letting the dozens of likes drown me out) he deleted the post, then made another, then deleted his blog, then locked his twitter, then i guess made some tweets and deleted those and i don’t know.
nothing i ever said was even directed to him. if that’s still “harassing”, “bullying”, and now “terrorizing”, well, uh, my bad. it certainly wasn’t my intention for him to vanish from the internet. but if all it took was one grouchy fan who cares a lot about details, i’m frankly astounded that he was still here.
i’m actually rather dismayed that a penchant for detail is being devalued here — i’ve seen a screenshot of an ask someone sent him, saying that the people talking about “consistency” don’t care as much as they say they do. well, yes, i do, tyvm. that shouldn’t be a huge surprise or a bad thing for a show with a main character who exhibits traits of genuine OCD.
meanwhile the vitriol said of me (most of it not by name, granted, which is nice) has been far more mean-spirited than anything i said in the first place. and has come largely from people who then congratulate themselves for being part of such an otherwise friendly and chill fandom. weird, the things people say when they feel slighted.
emphasis that the show isn’t made just for me has been a somewhat common theme as well. but it isn’t made just for you or anyone else, either, so why should anyone care when you like an episode? it seems like the same reasoning applies.
i don’t feel entitled to anything here, btw. but it looked like it had been trying to be an amazing series, and i’m deeply alarmed and worried to see the bar suddenly drop so low, twice in not so many weeks.
it’s certainly the staff’s prerogative to make whatever quality product they want. but they have shown they’re willing to put amazing and brilliant effort into character development and motivation and continuity. to go from that to last week’s episode was crushing.
fear not; i will channel my frustrations more constructively + coherently in the future. but i can’t not be frustrated when things aren’t as good as i know they could be.
if it makes you feel any better, that means i’m basically always frustrated with everything.
i am seriously creeped out by skype
ok i just gotta say
the skype application is insanely obfuscated with like a dozen different traps to keep anyone from seeing how it works—i stress that i cannot name a single other application that tries so hard to hide what it’s doing, including actual malware
one of the founders of skype was the CEO of kazaa, the application that as i recall pretty well started the adware plague—consider in light of the above
anyone who attempts to build an alternative skype client gets nasty letters from lawyers, even though reverse engineering for interoperability is explicitly legal (not to mention that the taken-down code is presumably not owned by Skype/Microsoft anyway)
some nerd suspects that a change to the skype network last year may have been to make skype wiretap-able
and i guess there’s that recent debacle where microsoft was hitting HTTPS links sent over skype for some reason and gave a totally bs explanation
i’m not accusing anyone of anything—i am a big fan of hanlon’s razor—but suffice to say my nerd parts have been really uncomfortable since the beginning
(it’s fascinating to watch microsoft maintain a linux application though)
i was looking for this and hadn’t tagged it “skype” because i’m dumb so now i’m reblogging it and tagging it “skype”
but while i’m at it, some updates:
today the EFF revoked its scorecard check for end-to-end encryption in skype, i.e., they believe it’s plausible that microsoft can see all your messages
skypekit, their half-assed SDK, is now gone. so there is no officially-sanctioned way to use skype other than with skype programs, at all.
it has ads now. are you serious? the whole point of skype is that it routes through other skype users’ computers, which means it doesn’t need much central server power. so what the hell are the ads paying for?
i’m super disappointed that skype seems to be becoming the AIM of the 2010s. i had hoped google talk would catch on since who doesn’t have a gmail account now, but the google talk app was only ever for windows and now google is fucking things up with hangouts. argh.
pidgin for gtalk still works for now at least
Pengosolvent versus the truth: a rebuttal
A complete, utter, absolute annihilation of Pengo’s accusations against PurpleKecleon.
Here you go. I have taken great pains to dismantle everything noteworthy Pengo has said about PK. This should clear up some things.
I hope everyone who so eagerly spread the original accusations will be just as proactive about spreading this! It may even repair some of the damage you’ve done.
I apologize for the delay, and for the length, but so it goes.
I have more words to say but they are not so important so:
realtalk re gamergate
I wrote a bunch of words and then hated them so let me try this again.
This all started with the announcement of the death of “gamer”, right? I think we’ve all forgotten about that, when it’s the key to understanding what’s going on.
Did you know Zynga has a bigger market cap ($2.47B) than Ubisoft ($1.41B)? How many more people play Zynga’s games, too? Yet Ubisoft’s games are “video games”, and Zynga’s are not. I’m not sure what they are, but this line in the sand has been drawn so successfully that I doubt most average (read: not on Twitter 10+ hours a day) people would consider FarmVille to be a “video game” — even people who play it. It’s certainly not what first comes to mind when you say the phrase.
What about The Sims? Is that a video game? Well… yeah… probably. Still not what comes to mind as a “video game”, though.
What do you think of when I say “movie”? Probably a recent blockbuster like Lord of the Rings or one of the superhero adaptations. Everyone’s seen them or at least knows about them; they’re basically pop culture. And they raked in zillions besides.
What do you think of when I say “video game”? Why is it not The Sims, one of the best-selling games of all time? Why is it not a mobile phone game, when over a billion people play them? For many people it’s probably not even Mario, who is basically the mascot of video games.
Gamers have successfully defined a “video game” as a very, very narrow thing that involves fancy graphics, either twitchy reflexes or extreme patience, and probably some sort of gun that wobbles at the bottom of the screen. In turn they have defined “gamer” as a person who regularly and enthusiastically plays those kinds of games. I doubt you could find me anyone who exclusively plays Zynga games and self-identifies as a gamer.
The very identity “gamer” is thus, in fact, about control of itself.
I read death-of-gamer articles and I saw a cry of exasperation. “Why is this word reserved for such a small subset of people who play games?” they asked. “Everyone plays games. Let everyone into the clubhouse.”
By the way gamergate talks about those same articles — as alienation and stereotyping and mocking — you’d think they said we don’t need anyone to play games any more. Get rid of them all.
Well, of course. If the clubhouse is open to everyone, is there really any difference? For people who actively pride themselves on being gamers, who actively preserve the barriers of entry, what would it mean to be in the same category as your dad who thinks Candy Crush is super cool? Especially for people who identify solely as gamers, who’ve built their entire identities around the video games they play.
Video games. Video games. All of this over video games. Pong. That’s what this is all about.
What other form of entertainment has such a striking contrast between the core audience and the long tail? Hell, it’s usually the other way around: those blockbuster movies are the cheap accessible junk, and if you want something of real quality, you go see obscure/foreign/indie films. And you call them “films”. Yet in gaming, the conversation is dominated by an endless onslaught of games that appeal to a very specific demographic, who gladly consume every single one of them. The real mass-market stuff is way out on the fringe, so far out it’s barely considered “games”, despite being played by a fifth of the entire human race.
This is how much power gamers have over their own industry.
Power. It’s all about power dynamics. The “fake gamer girl” trope. The guy on every CoD server who calls you a faggot. The rape jokes, the trans jokes, the gay jokes, the outright vitriol that nobody ever seems to call out. The in-game rewards for obsessively scouring for secrets or whatnot, ensuring that nobody who doesn’t have ten years’ worth of FPS experience will never collect everything. (I note that Mario Kart 8’s hardest achievement is just a variant kart, which you get for getting one star on every course. Three stars on every course gets you nothing at all. Nintendo gets it.)
These are all self-reinforcing barriers to entry. Everyone who truly wants to get into games has to prove their mettle by enduring this hazing: the slurs and abuse, the assumed knowledge of tropes, the reflexes and/or tolerance of tedium. If you can get past all that, you must really want to be a Gamer. And once you are, your sympathy has been somewhat worn away; if you can put up with it, why can’t everyone else?
I asked several gamergate randos about multiplayer abuse. All of them said they find it distasteful; all of them said the people doling it out are jerks; one of them even said it had deeply bothered him when he first started playing online. And yet all of them asserted that the onus is on the target, the newcomer, to suck it up. None of them had ever chastized some asshole for being an asshole, and they were all adamant about not ever doing so.
Why? Because they don’t want to be the buzzkill. They don’t want to risk being the target. That one asshole has control over them, like they have control over gaming.
And this is what gamergate is: a display of that control, against the people suggesting they may lose it, and the people actively working to wrest it away from them. It’s thinly about corruption, but if that were really the issue, why wouldn’t they go after the publishers who hold early game access over reviwers’ heads? The excuse is cracking, anyway. They so adamantly want this to not be about Zoe Quinn that they’re now calling her “Literally Who”, so they can continue to talk about her without talking about her, because it’s so much not about her. I’ve seen more than one list of targets (of boycotts, of emails to advertisers) based not on particular corrupt incidents, but on the handwave of “SJW influence”.
It’s all a power play to preserve the status quo. Because it benefits dudebros in their mid-20s. (Yeah, I know, you’re not-my-shield. But you’re their shield, playing the role as the token minority, because you’ve already been hazed.) That one asshole is loud and obnoxious so you’ll either leave or show how desperately you want to fit in, and now gamergate is doing the same thing to games journalism en masse.
It’s been a month and little has come of all this, except that even 4chan has gotten sick of their crap, which you’d think would be a bad sign. Sadly nothing has happened in the other direction either; gaming is still kind of a cesspool, and anyone who asks “why are 90% of games about men?” is still called a cunt and lambasted and driven out of her house.
Like a lot of big-media problems, I’m hopeful this will all eventually be solved by the increasing ease of just making a game oneself. But we’re a very long ways from being able to cobble together an AAA game with just a couple people and pocket change, so in the meantime, it’s a question worth asking.
And to the gamebros: relax. Nobody cares that you enjoy Call of Halo. Nobody cares that every game you play has a straight bald white buff cis male protagonist. Nobody even cares that you get off to the vapid chesty love interest you need to save. It’s fine for different things to exist.
People care when this is the vast majority of what we have. People care that gamers have twisted pop culture to think that this is what games are. People care that a huge bulk of money in gaming goes towards pumping out a lot of the same kind of thing. People care that poor attitudes towards women and QUILTBAG people and other races and the minorities are given such a huge stage, yet so many of the privileged core group come out in droves to demonstrate the very reason this is a problem when anyone points it out.
This isn’t a zero-sum game. But by waging war against feminists and casuals and anyone else not in the core demographic, by explicitly seeking to purify your own insular group, gamers are making it one.
I know. It’s not individual gamers. Individual gamers only leave the one kinda-mean comment, or let the one slur slide, or buy the one game. But this is the impact the group is having, and if you care so much about being part of that group, the burden is on your shoulders.
Knock it off. You don’t need to own an entire medium. Let everyone in the clubhouse.
Anonymous asked:what is this quinnspiracy / gamergate thing i keep hearing about and what does it have to do with jontron? do you have an opinion on it?
oh christ
ok i think it goes something like this
a jilted ex posted a bunch of chat logs and a kinda spiteful-sounding story about how a female game developer, zoe quinn, had cheated on him with a few people in the game industry
reaction 1 was “omg what a dirty slut” because, y'know, gamers. but that turned out to not be popular rhetoric. this is the only place jontron is relevant: he retweeted a comic someone drew that starred zoe graphically in the middle of a gangbang. (probably because he was also in the comic, presented as the voice of reason. but wow.)
a couple of the accused people were writers for internet video game websites, so reaction 2 was a rallying cry for more ethics in game journalism. which on its own would be okay except
(a) the worst dirty laundry by far in game journalism imnsho is how review scores are kept artificially inflated effectively by extortion — if you give a game a bad review, the publisher can just not give you early access to its games any more. which is possibly why only 3% of games have a metascore under 33, versus 9% of movies. but that’s a problem with the publishers, really, and not something journalists can directly control.
(b) none of the journalists zoe had a relationship with gave her game a good review, as was a common refrain. as far as i can find, only one of them wrote about her game at all, and it was months before they were supposed to have hooked up. even the jilted ex confirmed this.
so reaction 2 was kind of complete hogwash as well.
reaction 3 was to devolve rapidly into conspiracy theories and general mudslinging like: zoe was in cahoots with a reddit mod (evidence being that he tweeted at her asking to DM), explaining why tons of posts were deleted from /r/gaming (which the mods claim was to remove personal information); that zoe had actively doxxed and destroyed a gaming charity (based on a reddit comment from someone involved with the charity) (but the charity now explicitly says zoe was not involved); or that zoe had faked being hacked and doxxed (????) because the posted phone number was from a place she’d never lived (my phone number is from pennsylvania where i’ve never lived, welcome to cell phones).
meanwhile, with spectacular timing, anita sarkeesian released another “women vs tropes in video games” video, which i guess showcases a bunch of examples of women as decoration or sex objects in video games, and everyone exploded anew.
faced with all this, basically everyone with a voice shook their heads and tut-tutted at gamers for being big whiny woman-hating baby manchildren. and then there came some murmurings that it might be time to hang up the “gamer” label altogether, because it’s become toxic and insular, and who never plays any games whatsoever?
which brings us, i think, to #gamergate. i’m not actually sure, because its origins and goals and contributors are all incomprehensible. i’ve been told two completely different things:
1. that #gamergate is about journalistic ethics, i.e. doubling down on reaction 2. i was talking to someone last night and asked for an example of “misconduct” he was tired of; he linked me to an article by leigh alexander, one of the people suggesting “gamer” is obsolete. apparently the problem is that she’s a journalist but also runs a consulting firm for game developers, but has never disclosed this “potential conflict of interest” in her articles. i think that’s fucking ludicrous, because if she’s not writing about her clients, there’s not even potential for conflict of interest, right? also, surprise, she’s a woman.
2. that #gamergate is about we’re not gonna take this disrespect of gamers any more. some feathers got ruffled by the fact that the people with an audience in the gaming community are making fun of the people who think they are the gaming community. (this is one of those awkward problems where, well, whose responsibility is it to ostracize toxic members of a group? if anyone’s?) my response to those people is that maybe they should try playing a game online with strangers for two minutes. i tried getting back into tf2 recently and very clearly recall joining a server just in time to hear an exchange of rape jokes. riot has had to pour untold manhours and UI tricks into tricking its players into not being complete assholes. and xbox live is basically infamous. navigating a minefield full of this kind of sludge is not really what i consider a good relaxing time, which is why i basically never play worldwide multiplayer anything. (but thank god for mario kart.) anyway given the long-running reputation self-labeled “gamers” have for being xenophobic and generally hostile to anyone who’s not a straight dude who loves FPSes, being taken aback when journalists point this out is kind of bewildering to me.
the one thing they do seem to agree on is that this isn’t about hating women, except a few thing it is about fighting “SJWs” or something, i don’t know.
a curious observation: most of the people replying to #gamergate tweets (and believe me, if you use the hashtag, you will get replies) are using accounts with a handful of follows/followers, three digits of tweets, and basically nothing except #gamergate replies and retweets. so it’s a bunch of people who don’t even use twitter trying to do twitter activism over a thing they can’t decide the meaning of.
oh and naturally several of the accounts i looked at were also retweeting misogynistic garbage. because gamers.
anyway stay tuned for further developments as the core gamer demographic burrows itself ever deeper up its own collective asshole
lotuslizard asked:Just to let you know, upon getting a bit into this whole JonTron thing, I looked into and learned more about slurs. In your article (I think that's probably referred to as article) you used the word "idiot." Learning more about slurs, it turns out "idiot," "moron," and "imbecile" were used as terms for different levels of handicapped persons. It was never used as a slur for them like the r one, so it probably doesn't actually really count as an awful thing to use, but in case you'd wanna know.
i’m aware of the etymology, but i suppose those aren’t slurs because we don’t use them to refer to people with low IQ any more, and i’m not aware of any significant period of overlap where the words were used in both waysWasn’t saying in any sort of accusatory way, just wanted to let you know in case you’d consider it a negative thing after learning about it (assuming you hadn’t already). And I ran out of spaces in the ask to add this part, haha. After all this and learning those things, I’ve been trying to stay away from possible offenses as well, as I noticed when you mentioned trying to avoid “crazy” like I am.
beyond that it gets fuzzy
like i cannot recall ever seeing anyone use “crazy” to refer to a person with a known specific mental illness. i’m sure it happens and i know the stigma exists, yet i’ve encountered more overt racists than people who feel a need to mock the ill.
on the other hand, “crazy” is pretty frequently used to refer to people just to dismiss: “this doesn’t make sense to me, therefore it is not worth listening to or considering at all”. i have apparently done this more than i’d like to think. so i certainly don’t mind seeing that usage go.
i mostly have the urge to use “crazy” to refer to situations or outcomes or rules that are wildly different from my vaguest expectations. which is, ultimately, what synonyms of “insane” mean in the first place. the implication is that this is unfortunate, hence the push to stop using the words at all. i doubt anyone with depression or schizophrenia or OCD thinks those are good things to have, but i can totally see how having your own condition used as a euphemism for undesirable things would suck a bit.
(speaking of, “suck” is only a few decades old, and derives from exactly what it sounds like: suckin dick. so using that to mean “is bad” suggests performing fellatio is bad. same for “blow”.)
this isn’t a problem with “cancer” as a metaphor, because we consider people to have cancer but be schizophrenic etc. so the root problem is not so much mere words, but our inability to separate a condition from the person afflicted by it
and yet sometimes that’s not unreasonable, either: a person with severe delusions or narcissism or what-have-you is going to be very difficult to tease apart into the “real” person and the effects of the disorder. (i know people whose home lives were hell because of a parent who was bipolar or borderline or similar.) hell, we can’t even define what the disorders really are; we just categorize them by symptoms. we can look at and see most physiological illnesses. all we can do for mental illnesses is give them acronyms if they happen to interfere with normal life. is ADD an illness, or just a personality trait that’s only a problem because life has gotten complicated now? is high-functioning autism an illness, or just a different way of interpreting input? i don’t know. nobody knows. we’re making this up the best we can as we go.
someone once chided me for using “sociopath” to refer to people who were skilled manipulators and used that ability to be cruel towards their perceived enemies and hide the cruelty from their circle of supporters. but what other word do we have for that behavior? these people will never be diagnosed professionally, but even a diagnosis is just matching symptoms with the fuzzy list of things we use the word to mean. is it inappropriate to make an amateur judgment call, having at least a vague grasp of what sociopathy is supposed to be?
there are other synonyms i haven’t seen any objections to: “deranged” comes to mind, and literally just means “insane”. is that ableist? what about “out of your mind”, which is a pretty clear idiom?
even “dumb” refers to people unable to speak, and “lame” refers to an inability to walk. are those objectionable? does anyone use those words with those meanings any more? i’ve only ever heard “lame” refer to a horse.
curiosity: “bizarre”, “wild”, “outlandish”, and “strange” all derive from some flavor of “foreign”, i.e. literally from a different place.
there are some mild grumblings from cis people that “cis” is a slur, even though it’s a literal description of them, because it’s mostly used to say something negative. TERFs have referred to “TERF” as a slur, even though it’s a literal description of them, because it’s mostly used to say something negative. i have had someone tell me that “denier” (in the climate change sense) is a slur, presumably because it’s only used to say something negative. “ha ha!” you say. “that’s silly! literal descriptions can’t be slurs!” and it is here that i politely remind you that “negro” is literally spanish for “black”.
context is everything, but all the context here is huge and murky.
to tell cis people that “cis” is not a slur is to tell them that their offense is unreasonable and unworthy of attention. but in this case that’s pretty reasonable, because the offense is really “boy i’m sick of hearing trans people complain about how everyone else keeps murdering them and whatever”.
strangely this doesn’t seem to come up very often; people just laugh and assert that no of course cis isn’t a slur, as self-evident. but offense is not created equal. being reminded that your grandparents were literally owned or put in small camps or whatever by the grandparents of the person talking to you is a little different from being reminded that the person talking to you is angry about having to exist on the fringes of society.
sort of like how having a panic attack when you’re reminded of the assault you experienced is a little different from being reminded that you don’t like tornadoes.
i wish we’d stop diluting words like “trigger” that have no effective synonym. words change, language evolves, but we do ourselves a great disservice if we remove the meaning from specific words that have no substitute.
anyway
i don’t know anything
maybe we should stop deriving pejoratives from words that are intended to apply to people. but it’s a bit late for that now
the real problem is that we want pejoratives to use on people in the first place
yeah i like to call people “idiots” when they do stupid things. (whoops, “stupid”. how do i even rephrase that? things that i expect them to realize have unfortunate consequences.) maybe that’s different because we understand “idiot” as usually being a contextual response to a specific event, but use “crazy” to dismiss an entire person outright. words we use the latter way — including racial slurs and slurs relating to handicaps — suggest that both the target and the entire named group are worthless.
that makes a lot of sense to me. i don’t like even using “liberal” or “conservative” if i can help it, because i know half the US would read it as “someone i can already assume is not worth taking seriously”.
so after much rambling, maybe that’s the secret: feel free to pick on the idiot things people do, but don’t dismiss people outright.
re: copyright of fan works
“ There are very few circumstances in which the rights to your own work are automatically owned by someone else.”
You are exactly correct in this! Except you seem to be applying it backwards. The rights to use Pokemon were ALREADY in place before she used them. You are acting as those she creating something and I am saying that someone else now has the rights to it. That is not how it works. This is how it went:
PIC: has rights to Pokemon characters
purplekecleon drew some Pokemon
Poprageous wants Pokemon on a dress.
It all comes back to BOTH parties needing PIC’s permission. Because copyright grants EXCLUSIVE derivative use to the copyright holder.
EXCLUSIVE.
As in no one else is legally allowed to use it.
This is where are you are confusing "legally allowed” with “owns the rights”.
By drawing some Pokémon, an artist creates additional, new work not covered by any existing rights: the drawing itself. The Pokémon are inextricably linked with the drawing, yes, but the art is a new creation that didn’t exist before, and it belongs to the artist.
An image of a Pokémon is not automatically copyright to PCI; that’s ludicrous. Consider: if PCI had granted permission for an artist to draw Pokémon fan art, would PCI then still own the copyright of the drawing? By your reasoning they would; after all, they’d still own the rights to Pokémon.
Also, if PCI granted permission to Poprageous to print and sell Pokémon clothes, Poprageous would still not be allowed to sell someone else’s art.
Incidentally, as Pokémon are designs rather than single works, the status of copyright over them is somewhat fuzzy (which is why PCI holds a lot of Pokémon trademarks as well). A small handful of court cases have handwaved characters as having some sort of copyright protection, but these are species, not even characters. I wouldn’t suggest anyone actually fight them over it, but it’s slightly grayer than, say, adding a chapter to someone else’s book and selling it.
I am basing this on US law. I am well aware a lot of fanartists like to just, you know, IGNORE the law, and get their legal information from other people who are also ignoring the law…. but if you actually read the laws, you’ll find that people creating deritivative works have zero rights.
OK, let’s ditch the back-and-forth and go with the law, then. I’ve been giving Chapter 2 (about copyright ownership, which pretty clearly states it goes to the author) and Chapter 5 (about copyright infringement and remedies, which fails to mention anything you’ve said) a reading through, and I’ve found no mention of what you’re saying.
For reference, here are some mentions of derivative works in Chapter 1:
A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.
…
The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material.
So even mere edits to existing material are covered by copyright — the author just doesn’t own all the existing parts.
Now, we do also have this:
The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.
This is the only mention I’ve found of how copyright interacts with unauthorized derivative works.
My reading of it is that the part you create is still covered by copyright, but there is one court case that would seem to indicate you just don’t get any copyright protection at all: Anderson v. Stallone, in which a scriptwriter sued Sylvester Stallone after the plot to Rocky IV turned out to be eerily similar to an unauthorized fan script the writer had come up with. The judge admitted that there was nothing solid to go on here and that the law and prior cases and even Congressional reports about the law were a bit murky, but ultimately erred on the side of Stallone, in the interest of not setting the precedent that the infringer could come back and hit the infringee with a copyright lawsuit. (See section IV.A.4 of the opinion.)
Incidentally, I did find an article about fan works on io9 which mentions this case, and claims that the court said Stallone owned the copyright to the “fan” script. But the court opinion, as far as I can tell, says absolutely no such thing.
I observe a few things here.
For one, this case doesn’t exactly have a nice tidy ending: the court also found that Rocky IV wasn’t actually all that similar to the fan script in the first place, and it was appealed and then ultimately settled out of court.
Now, at worst, this ruling sets the precedent that you don’t have copyright protection on fan work at all, period. Notice that both 103(a) and the judge’s opinion talk about copyright protection of derived work, rather than copyright. I take this to mean that you still own the copyright, but you can’t expect to take someone else to court over it. (The alternative is ludicrous: you wouldn’t know whether you owned the copyright over your own work until you went to court and tried to demonstrate fair use.)
But this is still fuzzy for what’s happening here. Consider that you can own copyright even over arrangements: if you take a bunch of public domain poems and put them in a book and sell it, you own the copyright to that particular arrangement of poems. The opinion even mentions this explicit case as a hypothetical: if one of those poems were still covered by someone else’s copyright, it shouldn’t invalidate your protection for the arrangement as a whole.
What does this mean for Pokémon, which are only covered by the copyright of their designs and lore? A drawing of all of them still produces brand new art of each one, and that art is arranged in a unique composition. The part that infringes PCI’s copyrights is something ethereal: the ability for them to be recognized as Pokémon. Is that more like the Stallone case, or the poem anthology?
Of course the real answer is: it doesn’t matter! Because these questions only matter in court — everywhere else it’s just so much hot air. Part of why this is all pretty murky is that as far as I’ve been able to find, there has never been a single case of a creator taking a fan artist to court. Not once. Anderson v. Stallone is the closest I could find, and that was the other way around!
It’s obvious why this might be the case: fictional universes thrive on fan work — it’s the fucking lifeblood of Tumblr — and to start suing your own fans in the days of the Internet and social whatnots would be utter suicide. Plus it’s basically free advertising, and keeps your thing in people’s minds for far longer than the source material would alone, with absolutely zero cost to you! Why mess with a good thing?
There’s the occasional cease and desist, of course, but those are very few and far between, and usually target fan work that’s getting a little too similar to something the creator has done or would like to do in the future. Which is why it tends to happen to, say, entire polished free derivative games, and not so much to artwork. It’s not like Nintendo is bleeding cash from all the people buying Pokémon prints from Mel; what else are those people going to do, buy Mel’s art from Nintendo?
So! Does Mel have copyright protection over Every Single Pokémon?
That doesn’t matter either!
Do I even need to spell this out? Look what’s happened here: the clothes were gone in a matter of hours, and thirteen thousand people are incensed over this story. There were no courts involved here. Nobody called a judge or a lawyer. Nobody sent a DMCA takedown notice. Nobody even wrote the phrase “To Whom It May Concern”.
Because as it turns out, people care about respecting the ownership of others’ work, and most of us have the same general understanding that fan work is just as deserving of respect as the material it’s based on. If you were trying to get a fledgling Internet business off the ground, which would you be more immediately concerned about? Going to court, or having tens of thousands of people pissed off at you?
i always feel like i have to fight to exist
like if i don’t provoke *some* kind of reaction in people regularly then i will be forgotten very easily
i’m way more tender than you probably think i am; i’ve lost sleep over cruel blog comments
(or, worse, ambiguous blog comments)
is this person right about me? is the subtext right, that i did something to earn this?
i can deal with criticism of what i know and think that’s fine
but i have a very very hard time dealing with anything i perceive to be criticism of *me*
i grew up around constant reminders from every adult in my life that i was a disappointment and i don’t know how to handle hearing it now
first of all, the “cookie analogy” regarding men is flawed in ways that are so blatant it’s absurd. the logic is nothing but, “a few in group X do bad things, so therefor group X is to be avoided and stigmatized as dangerous”
if that sounds like the exact same line of logic followed by the bigoted statements of racists against blacks when someone black commits violence, you’re exactly right (and even more flawed in this case since this involves a much bigger number, men being half the human population).
your math is totally bogus, here is why
people see that violent crime is committed disproportionately often by black people, and conclude that black people are more likely to be criminals. while technically true, people of any race still only have the most minute fraction of a chance of being criminals in the first place. but we are not well-equipped to deal with probabilities, and in particular we are really bad at conditional probability, so we get this all wrong.
meanwhile the mere threat of sexual assault is so pervasive that there are campaigns and advice all over the place aimed solely at women telling them how not to get raped. i don’t see a whole lot of posters telling white people how not to get stabbed by black people. but hey here’s a cosmo article and some RAINN resources and another magazine and this ridiculous handout and here’s another victim-blamey thing run by police and there are plenty more. these don’t exist to go “ha ha men are evil”; hell half of them are extremely patronizing to women. they come out of a place of genuine concern because this is a real problem.
how many women have been sexually assaulted? i don’t care to quibble over the exact number but it’s way more than a fraction of a percent. how much more frequent would it be if girls and women weren’t raised to check in with friends, be super-aware of their surroundings, etc.?
or, to put this another way: would you advise all women not to bother with any sort of rape prevention, since not all men are rapists? would you feel comfortable doing that, telling women not to do anything special that men wouldn’t do around other men? no checking in with a friend, no guarding your drink, no escape routes, no mace, no walking in pairs at night? would you?
none of this means men are evil, and i seriously doubt many women think they are. it means that there are quite a few evil people hiding among men, and there is no way to tell who they are.
hence the cookie analogy.
it’s flawed logic that makes no attempt to factor in that exceptions do not make the rule, along with confirmation bias, by exaggerating those exceptions and ignoring or downplaying the majority of non-violent individuals in that group
this is why someone came up with the cookie analogy
the cookies are not all poisoned
no one is calling them “poison cookies” because there’s one bad one
but why would you want to take the chance?
and why on earth would you get angry at people who didn’t want to try a cookie, or who proposed that maybe we shouldn’t poison our cookies?
second of all, Elliot was not a member of any MRA or MRM group. this is an outright lie tumblr perpetuated. he had some affiliation with a PUA (pick-up artist) group who are people not affiliated with MRA’s (despite what tumblr wants you to believe)
i suppose the problem is that it’s impossible to tell the difference
but you’re still wrong; he had some affiliation with an ex-PUA group. so you can’t tell the difference either. (please stop perpetuating lies ♥)
Elliot was a disturbed and mentally unwell person with some very dangerous complexes. was his motivation based on a sense of male entitlement? probably. but regardless, like the columbine shooting being blamed on a culture of violent music and video games, people are quick to blame everything but the individual themselves
people are quick to ask “how can we make this not happen again”. even the people blaming video games were still genuinely looking for an answer to that question.
maybe not fostering a culture of hatred and spite towards real actual women is a good step? like, who loses out if we do that, honestly
it takes a very unusual and exceptional set of circumstances to push a human being to commit such horrible acts, and it often has factors related to the individual themselves, such as severe mental illness, delusional mental states, and extreme viewpoints that the majority of people do not have. Elliot was far more a misanthrope than a misogynist from what I can gather, but regardless, he is not an excuse to start flipping out about all men being potential violent psychos
he only hated other men out of jealousy that they were with women. well also he was super racist, but from what i’ve read that again only came out in the form of rage that women would date “filthy blacks” and not him. frankly i don’t know how you can “gather” a damn thing at all and still be on the fence about whether he was a misogynist.
who is flipping out about all men’s being potential violent psychos? the problem is that some men are potential violent psychos, and we know this, but we are content to live in a culture where pushing the line is accepted and practically expected. we are basically grooming them.
more than three women are killed by their male romantic partners every day in the united states
mere hours after the UCSB shootings, a different guy in california shot eight times at three women for refusing to have sex with him and his friends (luckily missed every shot)
you seem to be under the impression that violence is a thing that comes in a quick burst, in the form of a shooting, and then there just isn’t any more until next year when we have another one. but no, it’s constant and everywhere.
his victims were 2 women and 4 men. I’ve heard claims that those men were killed accidently, another lie. the men were found to have been stabbed to death. tumblr has continuously ignored these 4 men or has claimed that it was 6-7 women who were killed, which is another outright lie, and has to be one of the more disgusting things I’ve seen in a long time. is your desire to perpetuate your ideological agenda so pathetically desperate that you would stoop to making the male victims completely invisible?
that’s how the story went around at first, before we knew what was going on. it’s a big game of telephone. it happens.
i stress that you got your own “correction” wrong in this very post so maybe refrain from the outlandish conclusions about others who made similar mistakes
given that his stated plan was to enter a sorority and slaughter everyone inside, this seems like a minor detail anyway
you want people to start taking social justice ideologies seriously? you could start by not outright lying and erasing victims for your own victim complex bullshit.
yeah lol why would women ever feel victimized when female soldiers are four times more likely to be sexually assaulted by their fellow soldiers than harmed on the battlefield
or when a not-uncommon response to these recent shootings was to blame women for not having slept with the guy, the exact reason he was so angry in the first place
or really any of these things
not all men are violent, but far too many men feel entitled to women. so please stop fucking apologizing for them; you’re just helping them blend in.
patriarchy
the word refers to a system
it doesn’t refer to all male persons within that system
if you see someone gripe about the patriarchy and your first reaction is “not all men” then you have completely misunderstood what is going on here
that’s like seeing someone gripe about democracy and having a gut reaction of “not all voters”
nobody would do that, because obviously “voter” is just a name we use for a type of person who tends to benefit from democracy. any one person may not directly benefit, depending on how the cards fall, but the system is skewed to be kinder to voters overall.
“man” is pulling double-duty as a name for a type of person who tends to benefit from patriarchy. any one person may not directly benefit, depending on how the cards fall, but the system is skewed to be kinder to men overall.
i mean, hell, you know what the word literally means right? same root as “monarchy” or “hierarchy” — i.e., the people on top are men, and the underlying influences historically come from men. that doesn’t mean every man is at the top.
do you think women should be able to vote? should they be able to function in a democracy just like any other voter?
well there you go then
Braid / fuzzy notepad
this is sort of a very abstract take on what happened two days ago, i guess
it sort of got tangled up with Braid, the finest video game of all time
enjoy
Anonymous asked:If you're wondering about "other flavours of mismapping" this blog post might be interesting: slatestarcodex(.)com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
more convenient link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
also, YES
NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE
i TOTALLY forgot about body integrity identity disorder! that fits perfectly. (if you are too lazy to read this good post, it’s the opposite of phantom limb: some people feel very strongly that they have a limb that’s extraneous and just doesn’t belong to them. seemingly the only solution is to amputate it, after which they’re pretty happy. hey that sounds kind of familiar!)
this post also muses on an idea i had last night but didn’t post: that only a small number of people feel strongly about gender, and about half of them are cis and will just never think about it. implying that most people don’t give too much of a crap and are fine with whatever they’ve got.
the author ends the post with these two ideas, wondering which could be correct
but i see no reason why it couldn’t be both. after all, not everyone who loses a limb experiences phantom sensation in it.
so maybe the intensity of the body map varies wildly from person to person, whatever that means. either the map has a huge effect, or it can’t adapt to match physiology as easily, or whatever. it might even vary from body part to body part for the same person.
and, sexual characteristics are missing from the map for some people. so to experience strong dysphoria you’d have to have both a strong map and have it not match your body. plenty of people could just experience one or the other and never really think much of it.
this leaves room for a gradient as well: if it’s not just a “male/female” switch, it’d make perfect sense that some people would have a moderately-strong map and only feel dysphoric some of the time, or only mildly, or meander back and forth between genders.
hell, there may not be a sex switch at all; if the map is merely about body parts, it could be possible that the problem is what’s extra, not what’s missing. e.g. what if the core problem bothering some transmen is that their breasts specifically aren’t on the map (and phantom limb after a mastectomy is totally a thing), not that a penis is.
and this could be the role culture plays: not so much defining gender roles, but strongly associating body parts with sexes/genders. if you possess a penis and wish you didn’t, living in a heavily binary society could very well suggest that the solution is to be female rather than to specifically not have a penis. after all, that’s quite literally how some people define “female”.
i’m talking out my ass here with these last two paragraphs and i totally know it; nobody can substantiate any of this without knowing some very deep and personal feelings of a lot of transpeople. and cultural influence specifically is very difficult to separate out from… anything else.
but this would account for the wild variations in how people experience and deal with their dysphoria. it fits into a broader range of quirks we know the brain can have. it makes perfect sense to me. it even means truscum are full of shit! what more can you ask for
thx for the link anon
re: what is trans
(posting separately because tumblr will fuck up my quoting otherwise, and also i can’t delete the original ask)
well hang on
“In real life literally millions of people have bodies that are in some way contrary to the biological concept of the two sex system. Millions.”
i object to this deliberate toying with numbers; millions of people could still very well be less than a tenth of a percent of humanity. it almost certainly is, else the author would’ve jumped at the chance to say “tens of millions” instead.
we have labels to describe things. the overwhelming majority of human beings are one of XX or XY, with nothing interfering with expression. so we came up with labels for those two things.
it turns out that people get really accustomed to labels and direly want to jam everything they come across into an existing label, yes. we also want to make lots of secondary assumptions about labels. that sucks and is a general problem, but it’s how we deal with information overload. the solution is not to destroy the labels; we’ll just come up with new ones and do the same thing all over again.
, and there are confirmed neurological differences between trans women and cis men
this doesn’t explain anything, it just moves the goalposts. our understanding of the brain is so primitive as to be laughable; “neurological differences” might as well be “we jammed some electrodes in it and different parts lit up”.
what if those parts of the brain are just the parts that think about your own concept of gender and/or self? then this result would be tautological. (reading further, i see one researcher doesn’t think these parts of the brain relate to gender at all; another suspects one of them might relate to self-perception.)
and remember, the brain changes as it learns and adapts. which is why everyone was rejecting that study a few months ago showing “clear differences” between the brains of men and women.
i seem to recall brain scans showing similarities between gay men and straight women, as well. what does that mean? anything? nothing?
and I’ve seen transethnicity used to describe people of one ethnicity who were raised as children by another and were socialized differently as a result, though I can’t find any links because all the search results I come across are people using the concept to mock transgender people
do these people grow up feeling they’ve missed out on their “original” culture, or feeling physically uncomfortable around other people in their adopted culture who are all of a different ethnicity?
i’m not sure what the implications are either way haha
and ultimately so many people have put so much time and effort into trying to “cure” being transgender that their manifest lack of success would seem to indicate there’s something more going on than something purely cultural
i’m not sure. i keep running into studies involving giving really subtle cultural cues to a group of kids once, and the kids act significantly differently. and then i imagine that multiplied by hundreds of people and millions of cues while those kids are growing up.
imagine sending a religious person to a therapist to get the religion “cured”, because friends don’t like it or whatever outside influence might make it unfortunate to have. do you expect that would ever have the slightest chance of working?
we have the trope of the racist grandparent, and we all laugh about it. no one tries to argue with such a person. why not? well, they “grew up in a different time”.
these are things that tend to be entirely due to upbringing, and thus culture. we sort of take for granted that these are practically etched in stone, then we question how much influence culture can really have on us. we’re kind of ridiculous.
whateverknight asked:the people who try to "scientifically" (aka bigotedly) define trans people as someone who absolutely has dysphoria and giving more "concrete" (aka arbitrary) qualifiers for "what it means to be trans" are obviously not people who understand that trans people already have to deal with that to a mind-boggling degree. i have a feeling that anon was baiting you, and if they were, then they can go back to trying to define fetuses as people, or something else ludicrous.
fauxboy-deactivated20180609 answered:I can understand the link between trans identities and dysphoria, but it’s when people start bringing chromosomes and “science” into it that makes me uncomfortable.
They just don’t really understand.
and here is something that endlessly perplexes me
and keep in mind while reading this that my gender is pretty fluid
do we even know what trans is?
the common way to explain it is that the brain is “wrong”, or the body is “wrong”, or they just don’t “match”. what does that mean?
clearly the body has a sex: it has some set of sex chromosomes, modulo chimerism and androgen insensitivity and myriad other things that might interfere with their expression. but ultimately the human body has one of two sexes it’s trying to be, and some spectrum of expressions of those.
so what does it mean for those to not match the brain? the brain doesn’t have a sex. i mean, sure, it has sex chromosomes too, but they don’t seem to directly affect the brain’s development all that much. (probably. maybe. we don’t seem to know. sex hormones certainly have an impact on behavior, but as far as i can tell, the direct impact of sex chromosomes on neurological development is fairly minor.)
even if the brain did have a sex, how could it end up different from the one precribed by chromosomes, when the rest of the body is not?
so now we have “gender”, hence the rise of “transgender” over “transsexual”, and i don’t know what that is either. what does it mean to mentally be/feel “male” or “female” if they’re things that only matter for reproduction?
does it mean feeling the same way the associated sex hormones make us feel? i assume not since “i’m male because i’m aggressive” is not a thing i have heard
what, then? liking pink? liking sports? but those are the things we’re pretty sure are cultural so that can’t be it either, right? most transpeople i know aren’t exactly falling all over themselves to be stereotypes of their respective genders anyway, so that doesn’t make sense
we have this constantly-expanding vocabulary of labels, some of which i identify with, but i can’t explain why they exist or even what they are
and why does it happen so strongly and so (relatively) frequently with sex but not so much with anything else? transpeople are common enough that there are starting to be laws protecting them now, but there’s not really such a thing as being “transrace”, even though that’s similar in some ways: races have overt genetic and cultural distinctions too
it’s so bizarre that this is a thing that happens, and even the people it happens to can’t agree on what it even is
the only thing i can possibly guess is that we caused it by taking gender roles so seriously. culture has an unbelievably strong effect on us individually. so strong that it’s easier to change a body than a mind? i could believe that.
Gaston is one of my favorite villains. And no, not because of the song, though that certainly doesn’t hurt.
It’s partly because he completely inverts most villainous archetypes — he’s already well-loved, he’s powerful and not seeking more (physical) power, and he generally doesn’t align with Disney’s, ah, usual tropes. I always like villains who aren’t just kind of handwaved as inherently evil; that’s ridiculous and lazy.
But what really sets Gaston apart for me is the sheer genius in what he does near the climax of the movie. His whole character is based around oozing charisma, and he delivers on it, by changing the game with a single sentence.
Let’s follow along with this transcript. About ⅚ of the way through the movie, Gaston springs his trap: he has riled the townspeople into sending Belle’s father to an asylum (based on his claims of having seen a beast-man), and is using this to blackmail Belle into agreeing to marry him.
Belle will be having none of this, and rightly tells him to fuck off.
This completely destroys Gaston’s plan, which hinged on having an excuse to put Belle’s father in an asylum. Looks like he’s been defeated.
Belle makes a fatal mistake here. In Gaston’s mind, she has confirmed that the Beast is the reason Belle won’t marry him. After all, every other woman in town fawns over Gaston constantly; there must be some reason Belle doesn’t, and now Gaston has reason to believe he’s finally found it.
Now watch this because it’s fucking brilliant.
That’s the kicker. She’s as crazy as the old man.
Remember, the mob just found out that Belle’s father is not actually “crazy”. Belle has proven that the Beast is real. Everyone saw it, five seconds ago!
Gaston pounces onto this brief window of cognitive dissonance without missing a beat. Not only does he reassert his original motive as if it were still true — to keep the mob from doubting his word — but he uses it as a segue into why the mob should now go along with his new plan: killing the man Gaston believes is cockblocking him. His very next words are:
He spins a story off the top of his head, based on absolutely nothing except the knowledge that the mob is likely to believe it and it will serve his goals. He fuels the fears of the townspeople, and links it back to the reasons they respect him in the first place — note that he explicitly says the Beast should be a trophy for his wall.
Gaston was revealed to be completely, objectively, 100% wrong — both in what he thought his goals were, and what he’d used to rouse the townspeople. Yet before anyone actually realized this and thought to doubt him, in a mere matter of seconds, he found a new lie to tell — and even used the old lie to sell it.
She’s as crazy as the old man.
If the old man is crazy, then there’s no Beast to be afraid of! And we know that Gaston himself believes Belle instantly, or he wouldn’t feel romantically threatened, and none of his subsequent actions make sense. When Gaston encounters the Beast and sees for himself that the Beast is no threat, rather than being taken aback, he tries to goad the Beast into fighting him, so he can have the satisfaction of beating his “competition”. He even talks to the Beast like he might to another human, despite never having heard the Beast speak.
And yet despite what a complete and utter lie this line is, it works. It works so well that I bet it even worked on you. Did you ever question it? I’ve seen this movie dozens of times and didn’t give it a second thought until fairly recently. It seemed like a perfectly natural thing to say. Gaston‘s charisma is so great that it can charm even an audience that already knows he’s the villain.
The old man isn’t crazy, was never crazy, but that doesn’t matter. Everyone believes Gaston, because everyone wants to believe Gaston. Even when he’s contradicting himself within the same sentence.
Gaston is a mastermind. But what makes him truly terrifying is that he’s real. There are a lot of Gastons in real communities large and small, well-known and well-respected and seemingly flawless, who deftly wield their charisma to direct a mob even when they’re completely wrong. And they are nigh immune to being corrected or called out, because they can change their tactics and change the truth just as fluidly as Gaston. Unlike most cartoonish antagonists, Gaston is someone we all know, someone who may have even played the villain for us.
And if you’re not Gaston, and you’re not Belle, well, chances are you’re the townspeople.
Gaston is ruthless, charming, perfect at what he does, and frighteningly familiar. Great formula for a great villain.