artist + salaryman arc

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

As in BLOCKS of moveable type!?

Brilliant! Such a technology would allow books to be reproduced en masse, without the need for laboriously reproducing books by hand! This would greatly increase the number of copies of books that we could create, as well as greatly reduce the incidence of copying errors!

OH! And if my new alphabetic syllabary takes off, then instead of hundreds of blocks for different ideograms, a case of printing blocks could include dozens of copies of each letter, thus allowing for more rapid deployment and a much more efficient storage of the printing blocks!

This could lead to a literacy revolution! We could mass produce texts for the common people! Everyone, not just the elite scholars, could study the works of the great Confucianist masters, thus increasing loyalty, filial piety, and virtuous behavior!

Last video before its paintined, added onto the mane for better fur texture/better hiding of the head band etc.

tomorrow it gets painted and eyes added finally before being completely done.

From the time I was 9 to the time I aged out of the attendance demographic at 17, every summer I spent a week at a church camp in the middle of fucking nowhere near the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. As one of the many, many religious study activities, they held a Vespers service every evening (which is very funny because we're talking Southern Baptists here) at a big bonfire.

The wood for the bonfire came from whenever they had to cut down trees to use for repairs or clear space for a new building or whatever, so it was just this massive woodpile that sat out in the open, and while us kids were eating dinner, some of the counselors who'd volunteered to eat late that night would go down, drag some logs out of the pile and hack them apart for the fire.

One year, only two nights into the week, I was going to pick my seat when the wind suddenly kicked up and blew a huge puff of smoke into my face and those of about five other campers. They stopped coughing after less than a minute and were fine, but I couldn't get rid of an itchy tickle in my throat until after we'd all gone to bed.

The next morning, I was so itchy that I was in pain. I couldn't open my eyes. I could barely hear anything at all, like I was wearing earmuffs. I couldn't breathe through my nose, and I could just barely get air through my mouth, which was so dry it was like trying to breathe sand.

At roughly the same point that I became aware something was really wrong, some of the other girls complained to our cabin mom that I wasn't getting out of bed. Since I was on a top bunk, she came and yanked on the bedding, intending to catch me in her arms.

And then she immediately started screaming and dropped me on the floor, causing all the other girls to start screaming too.

The camp dean and the second (who was actually the minister of my church that year, since they all cycled positions each summer) called 911 and then my parents, while one of the other counselors stuck a straw in my mouth to try and give me more air, because it turned out the reason I couldn't see or hear or breathe correctly was because my eyes and ears and nose had all swollen shut and my tongue was so huge I couldn't close my mouth. Parts of my face had gone purple from the swelling.

At the closest hospital, they found I not only had hives all over my head and neck and shoulders/upper chest, there were rashes all down my trachea and esophagus and even in my lungs.

That faceful of smoke I'd caught? Nobody realized there was dried poison ivy in the woodpile.

Short of when my immune system went batshit insane on the chicken pox when I was a toddler, I'd never been poked with so many needles in my life. Steroids, antihistimines, you name it, I got injected with it. Got intubated and everything. My parents came speeding into the hospital parking lot having cut an hour and forty-five minute drive to an hour and fifteen.

I recovered before the camp week was up, and because I was very much trying to be a good girl and was also an idiot, I insisted on going back to camp. My parents went with me to explain everything to our minister and the rest of the staff, and while they were doing that, I walked down towards the mess hall, and ran into one of the girls from my cabin on the way.

I still remember the way her eyes went huge and all the color drained out of her face before she grabbed me by the shoulders and screeched "We thought you were dead!"

The staff had been requesting all the campers pray for me while I was in the hospital, and some of the more... uh.... impressionable, we'll say, had taken this to mean that the allergic reaction had killed me and they were in fact praying for my soul.

Once I'd clued in to this, I couldn't help finding it very funny that I had come back from the dead at church camp.