dragonimp

I was searching for old alchemy texts I might be able to rip pictures from, and look what I found:

( not exactly work safe )

Touching anything vaguely political online gets you put on political mailing lists, as I quickly discovered, so I'm on several equal rights/lgbt rights/women's issues/whatever other (undoubtedly left-leaning) petition I might have signed, but I'm not sure how I got on the list for Faithful America. I vaguely remember clicking on some page about the Pope that I think came through one of my OTHER lists (that's how they all snag you), but, uh, I really don't think I'm their intended audience? I mean, from what I can tell so far, politically we're probably about in the same field, but I'm pretty sure I'm standing off to the side of where they're aiming. Just saying I would feel kinda funny signing a petition to tell someone their behavior is "unchristian." And. Kinda don't think the person(s) in question would appreciate hearing it from someone like me. Not that they would know from a name on a list. But still. I would know.

Amazon announces Kindle Worlds: new stories inspired by books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games people love.

This has been floating around tumblr so some of you have probably seen it already, but for those who haven't: Kindle Worlds is "a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way."

This is kinda sitting funny with me for a number of reasons. For one, it seems less like fanfic finally being acknowledged and more like Amazon trying to cash in. For another, the idea of earning royalties off fanworks - even with the property owners' permission - doesn't seem right. On that same thread, we're all used to getting our fanfic for free; are people actually going to be willing to pay for it?

And then there's the guidelines page:

• Pornography: We don't accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts.

Yeah, okay, I might've predicted that. Can't have midwest soccermoms stumbling across something that'll scar their poor innocent children. (Honestly, I understand this one, even if it does make me roll my eyes.) But then:

• Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.


• Kindle Worlds is a creative community where Worlds grow with each new story. You will own the copyright to the original, copyrightable elements (such as characters, scenes, and events) that you create and include in your work, and the World Licensor will retain the copyright to all the original elements of the World. When you submit your story in a World, you are granting Amazon Publishing an exclusive license to the story and all the original elements you include in that story. This means that your story and all the new elements must stay within the applicable World. We will allow Kindle Worlds authors to build on each other's ideas and elements. We will also give the World Licensor a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.

That sounds like you turn over all rights, and can't put the fic up anywhere else.
And then this bit:

• Illegal and Infringing Content: We take violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously. It is the authors' responsibility to ensure that their content doesn't violate laws or copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights.

Um.... can someone please tell me where the line is between writing a story in a copyrighted universe with trademarked characters and violating copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other(!??) rights? I mean, it's fanfic. It's using copyrighted material. But somehow we're supposed to know the difference between using copyrighted material and violating copyright?

But really, I think the biggest strike against this is that we're used to getting all this for free, being able to put it up wherever we want, and being able to include whatever elements we want. This seems like Big Money trying to tie down and cash in on anarchy.

So the deck is out. One minor hiccup of a burst pipe, but the deck is out. Why was there a pipe under the deck? Because the guy who put it in was an idiot. He was really big on do-it-yourself, but not so big on doing things to code or even common sense. Take the deck itself: ordinary wood, not weather-proofed, and painted - not stained, not sealed, painted. No wonder it was falling apart and rotted. So finding base metal pipe laid on the bare dirt wasn't really a surprise, and having it burst at a spot that was rusted through was just par for the course. There's shit like that all over the house: outlets nailed right to the drywall, extension cords run over bare insulation, wiring tied to joists with string, etc. Any work we do on the house inevitably leads to several rounds of face-palming. BUT the deck and the aviary are now gone, thanks to my brother's hard work, and we avoided a flood thanks to some quick thinking and a little ingenuity. now we can concentrait on getting the presents finished up and mailed and cleaning the house.

Thanks to Three Panel Soul I have now learned that Dr. Pepper thinks soda is a gendered product:



Um, yeah. Wow. So much wrong in that.

The show has been elaborately made to the point that producers turned to a professional at something called the Language Creation Society to design a vocabulary for the savage Dothraki nomads who provide some of the more Playboy-TV-style plot points and who are forced to speak in subtitles. Like “The Tudors” and “The Borgias” on Showtime and the “Spartacus” series on Starz, “Game of Thrones,” is a costume-drama sexual hopscotch, even if it is more sophisticated than its predecessors. It says something about current American attitudes toward sex that with the exception of the lurid and awful “Californication,” nearly all eroticism on television is past tense. The imagined historical universe of “Game of Thrones” gives license for unhindered bed-jumping — here sibling intimacy is hardly confined to emotional exchange.

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

From here.

:|
As a woman who's been reading fantasy since she discovered reading, I ... don't really know what to say to that. So many wrong assumptions I don't even know where to start.

I know the Novel Conundrum style was having some issues recently, but so far I hadn't seen any problems on impishclawmarks so I left it. But uuuhhh... this is what I found this evening....


But only on Safari. It shows up fine on Firefox, I haven't been able to check IE or Chrome.

I guess I'll wait to see if it sorts itself out? I really like that style :(.

The user name almost looks like it's trying to speak Elvish or something...

Addendum: Oh gracious, it's wreaking havoc with my italics, too o_o;;. Though oddly enough, the characters come through fine if you copy/paste them.

Is it me, or does this look like some sort of Cthulhu Santa? With a peppermint butt.

Okay, my brain makes no sense sometimes. I've been trying to make edits on the latest chapter of Mother Arc for the last week or so without much luck. I've been in a discouraged bad mood since yesterday (over something unrelated) and knew I had little to no chance of making myself focus on the monster (I tried earlier in the day, but it was a no-go), but wanted to write something. Silver out because it's having more problems than Mother Arc. The other fic I'm currently working on is a liiiittle angstier than I want to deal with right now. So I did what any sane fanficcer would do and hopped over to the kink!meme.

So far it all follows a somewhat logical (for a writer) course. I snagged one of the prompts I've been eying, and went back over to Scrivener, opened up my One-shots folder and made a Scrivening. But then I happened to glance at the other editor window, where Mother Arc was still open ... and my brain decided that, actually, I want to work on that after all.

*headdesk* This would be great, except I was only going to write for 15-20 minutes and then go to bed, which isn't very helpful when one of my main concerns is the coherency of the chapter.

But yeah, looks like that's what I'm working on.

‘Obscene’ U.S. Manga Collector Jailed 6 Months

A U.S. comic book collector is being sentenced to six months in prison after pleading guilty to importing and possessing Japanese manga books depicting illustrations of child sex and bestiality.

Christopher Handley was sentenced in Iowa on Thursday, (.pdf) almost a year after pleading guilty to charges of possessing “obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children.”

The 40-year-old was charged under the 2003 Protect Act, which outlaws cartoons, drawings, sculptures or paintings depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Handley was the nation’s first to be convicted under that law for possessing cartoon art, without any evidence that he also collected or viewed genuine child pornography.

...

Comic fans were outraged, saying jailing someone over manga does not protect children from sexual abuse.

This seems more like an abuse of the legal system than an actual effort to protect children.