Periodic reminder that I am generally happy to tag things on request, to the best of my ability, but I do not preemptively tag things other than autoplaying videos, flashing gifs, spiders, and nsfw content, for which my “this is too much and needs a tag” bar is fairly high.
Blood/gore, religion, nudity (real or art), explicit fic/words, politics, and kink content are common enough that i will *probably* tag but you shouldn’t expect it.
This has been a PSA.
Edited to add: I’m queer and jewish and hate terfs. Just in case you were going to ask for that kind of nonsense.
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Union calling for two paid breaks a day in what it says is punishing schedule for Storehouse ‘order an object’ workers
Staff at the V&A’s Storehouse site in east London have voted overwhelmingly to strike in a dispute over what they say are inadequate toilet and hydration breaks.
They will join staff across V&A sites in London who on Wednesday also voted to strike in a wider dispute over pay, working conditions, and the museum having declined to seek living wage accreditation.
Every day I am haunted by the fact that Jupiter Ascending was not based off of a million word space opera fantasy book series and that I cannot go to the library and take out like six door-stopper sized volumes of sheer unhinged gendervibes-y space werewolf bee queen batshittery where every new freudian space eugenicist villain talks like he's trying to eat the scenery's pussy out harder than the last guy. 😔
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so in the 2003 Aquaman series they introduce a new backstory for archvillain Black Manta in which the entire reason for his (hyper)fixation on destroying Aquaman's life was severely maltreated autism, which Aquaman then cures him of with his magic water hand to completely redeem him. and this is obviously insanely stupid and ill-conceived and genuinely hateful, but given all of that, this is still one of the funniest speech balloons i've ever read in a comic. me @ myself when i remember how i acted in high school or whatever
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
From its inception, I've loved Creative Commons. I hung out with Lisa Rein, Matt Haughey and Aaron Swartz while they coded up the first version of the site, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first professionally published text ever released under a CC license, just weeks after CC itself launched:
https://creativecommons.org/
In those early days, CC licenses were primarily of interest to people who were steeped in copyright law, lore and litigation; so many of the early debates about these licenses turned on esoteric (but important!) questions about copyright; for example, how CC would interact with copyright's "limitations and exceptions."
You see, copyright has never meant the absolute right to control all uses of a work. Every system of copyright includes a set of "limitations and exceptions" for people making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if the copyright holder objects to that use. The best-known example of this is "fair use," a concept from American law.
Fair use is (potentially) extremely broad, but it's also extremely "fact-intensive" – that's the phrase lawyers use to describe the kind of legal question whose answer is almost always "it depends." Fair use might let you copy the entirety of a work, even for a commercial purpose. It might let you create new works based on existing works. It might let you do these things specifically to discourage people from buying the original. But…it depends.
If you know anything about fair use, it's probably something about a "four-step test" used to determine if a usage is fair. These four steps are just questions a judge might ask of someone who's been sued for copyright infringement, but who claims that they were making a fair use. The questions are:
I. What was the "nature and purpose" of your use? Were you doing something "transformative?" Were you criticizing the work? Were you using the work for educational purposes?
II. What was the nature of the work you used? Was it primarily factual (like a news article) or creative (like a short story)?
III. How much of the work did you take? Did you take more than you needed to transform the work, to accomplish your criticism, to teach someone?
IV. What impact did your use have on the original? Did the copyright holder lose money as a result of your use?
These questions are indeed enshrined in US copyright law, but (for better and for worse) you can't figure out if a use is "fair" just by asking these questions. Fair use is ultimately subject to "the rule of reason," a legal principle meaning that the law shouldn't result in obviously stupid restrictions. What's "obviously stupid?" Well, that's the tricky part – you'll have to convince a judge!
For example, the author of a book called The Wind Done Gone was sued for taking the characters, plot and setting of Gone With the Wind in order to tell the same story from the perspective of the enslaved Africans who were denied agency and moral consideration in the original. The court found for The Wind Done Gone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone
Wind Done Gone took the "heart" of Gone With the Wind (III), but then again, Done Gone was highly transformative (I), Gone With was also a work of fiction, entitled to the highest level of protection (II). Even worse, the point of Done Gone was to point out the gross defects in Gone With (I) and thus directly undermine sales and licensing for the original (IV). Anyone who claims you can answer fair use controversies by running through the four factors as though they were a checklist really doesn't understand fair use:
But even after you've acquired an appreciation of the fact-intensive, nuanced flexibility of fair use, you still don't understand copyright's limitations and exceptions. Fair use is important, but there's also "first sale," the doctrine that says that after you buy something, you own it, and copyright can't be used to interfere with your traditional property rights. That's why you can buy and sell used books, paintings, records, and other copyrighted work, even if they are sold with fine print that says you're not allowed to:
When it comes to copyright's limitations and exceptions, "fair use" and "first sale" are the big ones, but just as important are the small ones – the really small ones. Like other laws, copyright is subject to the principle of "di minimis" (from a longer Latin phrase that translates as "the law does not concern itself with trifles"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis
Technically, it may be trespassing to step on someone else's yard. But if your shoe brushes up against their lawn while you're walking on the sidewalk out front of their house, it's not trespassing. Or if it is trespassing, it's a di minimis trespass, too small to matter to the law. A lot of potential copyright violations – like taking a picture of a passage in a book and posting it to social media – are so small that we don't need to apply a fair use analysis to them. They're trifles, and "the law does not concern itself with trifles."
These limitations and exceptions all apply without permission from rightsholders. They apply even if they make rightsholders furious. They are your rights, as a member of the public, as a purchaser of a work, or just as someone who whistles a song that's stuck in your head.
And that's where the esoteric early Creative Commons copyright debate comes in. Creative Commons is a way to formally codify and convey permission to use copyrighted works. Without Creative Commons, it's really hard – and expensive – to provide legally reliable permission to someone else to use something you've created.
If I want to let you adapt one of my short stories for the stage, we should both probably hire copyright lawyers at several hundred dollars per hour to draft and review a contract setting out what my permission really means. Worse: even after we've paid the lawyers, neither of us will likely really understand the fine legal technicalities of the deal. We just have to take the lawyers' word for it that the complex jargon in the contract is sufficient for our purposes. Between the complexity and the expense, there are lots of potential creative collaborations that would cost so much to paper over that they're just not worth doing, even if they'd delight everyone involved.
Creative Commons cuts through this with its standardized licenses, which spell out in plain language which permissions are being granted. Even better, these licenses are international, translated into the language and laws of dozens of countries. That means that you can take a CC licensed short story from Japan, animate it using CC licensed 3D models from Italy, set it to a CC licensed soundtrack from Indonesia and release it in Ukraine, and the whole thing just works.
Those uses – turning a story into an animation, using a 3D model, syncing a soundtrack to a video – are all pretty ambitious uses, especially if you're going to make the final result indefinitely available to the general public. It makes sense to paper over these uses, and Creative Commons makes that legal work as simple as linking to your sources and their licenses in your final product.
But there are plenty of uses that don't need licenses – even ambitious ones. Remember Wind Done Gone? There are circumstances when you can adapt someone else's story without permission, relying instead on a limitation or exception to copyright. And of course, there are plenty of trivial uses – pasting a photo into your groupchat, say – that are di minimis and also don't need permission.
These copyright flexibilities are critical. Imagine if you could only criticize someone's work if they gave you permission to do so! From the founding of CC, copyfighters raised serious concerns that CC would teach people that they can only remix other people's work if they have a license, be it a CC license or the kind that you negotiate with a lawyer.
Today – 25 years later!- CC is an unqualified success. Without CC, we wouldn't have Wikipedia! You find CC licenses on Youtube, Flickr, Bandcamp, the Internet Archive, and in many of the most important scholarly and scientific journals in the world.
But, also, 25 years later, the world is even more convinced that you should always ask permission: "better safe than sorry." I don't know if CC contributed to this culture of timidity. More likely, it was bullying copyright trolls who terrorized people into a reflex of asking permission for everything, always.
As the creator of more than 30 books, hundreds of collages, and tens of thousands of essays and blog-posts, I am often on the receiving end of these permission requests.
For example, people often ask me if they can use my CC licensed works in ways that the associated licenses clearly permit. I'm sure the people who email me for permission to do things I've already granted them permission to do think they're being polite, but I really wish they'd stop. When someone asks me if they can make a use permitted by my CC licenses, I need to carefully parse through their use to make sure they're not asking for something more.
This is time-consuming work that often involves several volleys of email just to confirm that, no, they're just asking if they can do something I've already told them they can do. This is not a good use of anyone's time! By all means, drop me a note with a link to something you've remixed from my work. That's fun! It's a lot more fun than making me play detective in order to figure out if you're exceeding the license's permissions.
There are also a lot of requests that clearly amount to fair use and/or di minimis usage. You don't need to email me to get my permission to read a brief passage from one of my books on your Youtube video! You don't need my permission to quote one of my stories in an English exam! What's more, the world would be a lot shittier if you did, so let's not act as though that's reasonable behavior, lest we shift the (already far too restrictive) norms, which might even lead to a legal change.
Finally, there's the people who email me about their desire to make uses that are more (ahem) ambitious, but that no one could possibly find out about or get angry over…except for the fact that they emailed me to ask my permission.
You want to make a tiny bootleg edition of one of my novels for your anarchist book fair? That's totally a copyright infringement, it's super-illegal, and if my publisher found out about it, I'm sure they'd send you a sphincter-puckering legal letter telling you to knock it off (and maybe even demanding that you disgorge the seven dollars, three bottlecaps and eleven cool feathers you took in trade for those pirate books).
But my publisher won't ever find out about it – unless you email me asking for permission. I absolutely cannot give you permission to do this. I have a contract with my publisher promising that I will never authorize someone other than them to publish that book. Once you tell me about your intention to do this, I'm obliged to tell my publisher, so that they can tell you no in language that would strip paint off a barn.
Buying a classroom set of books, but you also want to paste chunks of one of my books into your educational institution's classroom intranet for use as a teaching aid? There's no way my publisher would ever find out you did that, and if they did, sure, you'd also get a blood-curdling legal letter. But dude, all my books are DRM-free. You could have just pasted the text into your CMS. In what universe is my publisher going to pay one of their lawyers to review, adjudicate and paper over your request to make a use that you're not proposing to pay them for?
Let's be clear: I'm not giving you permission to pirate my work. I already spend far too much of my time chasing down dickheads who sell competing editions of my books on Amazon and Audible. I'm sick to the back teeth of wrangling Ingram's takedown process to get rid of bootleg print editions of my books.
What I'm saying is, all of your interactions with copyrighted works need not involve the author and publisher. There is a whole universe of uses that might technically violate copyright, might technically not fit into di minimis, first sale or fair use – but these are also uses that no one would ever find out.
I get it. You may feel like you can't tell the difference between the kind of uses that no one would give a shit about; the uses that might attract a bone-chilling lawyer letter; and the uses that might land you in court. I'm sorry, but I can't help you figure that one out. I'm not a lawyer. Even if I was, I'm not your lawyer.
This is one of those areas where I break with my friend, the wonderful John Hodgman. On his indispensable podcast "Judge John Hodgman," he frequently admonishes people who are uncertain if they're overstepping a bound in a commercial establishment to ask an employee for permission. For example: should you fill up a water glass with soda water from a self-serve dispenser?
John says you should always ask the cashier. But I've worked jobs like that, and I can tell you that there were plenty of jobs where my boss felt very strongly that taking $0.0000001 worth of water and bubbles without paying for it was theft…and where I thought my boss was a dick for thinking that. If I pretended I didn't see you getting a glass of fizzy water, the worst that would happen is my boss would tell me to keep a closer eye on the customers lest they steal his precious CO2. But if you asked me whether you could fill your glass, and my boss caught me saying yes, I'd be fired.
There's a lot of normal, perfectly fine stuff that technically violates copyright that I can't give you permission to do, because I've signed a contract with my publisher. If you ask me, I'll have to ask my editor, who will say no, even though he thinks it's fine, too. If I push it, he'll have to ask the lawyers, who will almost certainly also say no, even if they think it's fine, because it doesn't make sense to spend hours papering over a legal agreement with someone who wants to sell seven copies of a book at an anarchist book-fair or upload a couple chapters of a book to a school's intranet.
Are there instances in which you might misjudge which category your use falls under and end up in court? I guess so. But if that's your concern, asking my permission does no good, because I'm just gonna tell you no.
“there’s a restaurant two miles from my house called—” nope
“today I learned [celeb] went to my high school—” nope nope nope nope nope
these are all real posts I’ve seen on the internet that allowed me to identify a user’s hometown instantly. if it’s a small town, that’s doubly dangerous, because a bad actor could trace you just by a unique first name or selfie you once posted. in an age where doxxing and stalking are some of the worst I’ve ever seen it, you HAVE to think twice about what you’re posting online.
i once saw a 13-year old post an image they noted as being “a few miles from their house.” it had a theater in the shot with a unique enough name to be local. one google maps search, now everyone knew not only what city they lived in, but the possible neighborhoods in that radius too. and they had a HUGE following…who all knew this was a 13-year-old child.
so yeah. not to sound like a 90s internet safety PSA…but I’m gonna be that PSA for a minute.
if you’re posting an image, there is NO need to say that you live there. you could just be traveling. “saw this in Montana” is better than “saw this by my house!”
before you post about a venue, especially a restaurant or small store, check and see if it’s local—CRUCIALLY if it has only one or two locations. people might travel to arenas or convention centers, but they’re far less likely to be traveling to Bartleby’s Fish and Chips. if it’s an anecdote and you still live nearby, you can honestly just leave the name out entirely.
if you’re sharing a news story, it can just be a story you found and wanted to share. you don’t have to clarify “it happened in my town,” because even if you don’t mention your town name, an easily-googled news article will.
if you’re seeing a concert or meeting a celebrity on a tour that’s stopped locally, wait until they’ve hit a few more venues before you post about it, or at the very least wait until you get home. this is honestly a smart move for any event you attend: unless you’re marketing yourself, there’s no need to advertise your location in real time.
check your selfie backgrounds for anything identifying. this includes city names on venues, school names, street signs, and house numbers.
this stuff is flexible if you no longer live in your hometown, or if your city is particularly big, but there’s STILL no reason to tie yourself to your school, your workplace, or your street. you can call it paranoid, but as someone who’s seen my friends get literal death threats over fictional characters before, the last thing I want is someone willing to act on those threats finding out where they live.
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I am sooo tempted to get Warhammer books as french translations, read them as my way to start re-learning french with a translator at one hand and a dictionary at the other, and develop zero grasp between what vocabulary is regular french and what is Warhammer, and if I ever encounter a native speaker I give them psychic damage.
I came across a really interesting post on Xiaohongshu and thought it would be fun to share here because a lot of us have been obsessing over Ashes to Crown.
The original poster pointed out that the huge necklace worn by the female lead in the promotional posters might not just be fantasy jewelry.
The setting of Ashes to Crown is fictional, but she said that judging from the clothing styles, it seems to draw inspiration from the pre-imperial period, especially the State of Chu during the pre-Qin period.
What caught her attention was this incredibly long necklace that hangs almost all the way to the ground.
According to her, it looks very similar to a 玉组佩 (yù zǔ pèi), usually translated as a jade pendant set.
She said the first thing that came to mind was a famous jade pendant set belonging to the wife of Marquis Mu of Jin from the Western Zhou period, which is preserved in the Shanxi Museum.
Apparently this particular set consists of more than 200 individual pieces of jade, beads, agate, and other ornaments linked together into a single ceremonial piece. Looking at the reconstruction, it's easy to see why she made the connection.
The post also explained that jade pendant sets have a very long history. Their origins can be traced back to the Neolithic period, and by the Zhou dynasty they had become important symbols of rank and status.
One thing I found especially interesting was that these weren't just decorative accessories.
The poster quoted ancient ritual texts which describe how the jade pieces would chime as the wearer walked.
The Book of Rites states:
"A gentleman of old always wore jade... When advancing, he would bow; when retreating, he would compose himself, and only then would the jade chime pleasantly."
If someone walked too quickly or moved too abruptly, the jade pieces would collide noisily and create an unpleasant clatter.
Only by walking calmly and maintaining a steady rhythm could the jade produce a clear and harmonious sound.
Your movements were literally judged by the sound of your jewelry.
The post also mentioned that, according to ancient ritual traditions, details such as the length of the pendant set, the number of jade pieces, and even the color of the jade could indicate a person's social rank.
The most elaborate examples were reserved for the highest levels of the aristocracy.
The Zhou people associated jade with the five virtues of benevolence, righteousness, wisdom, courage, and purity. Wearing jade served as a reminder that one's character should be as gentle and steadfast as jade itself.
According to the Rites of Zhou:
The Son of Heaven wore white jade.
Dukes and marquises wore dark mountain jade.
Senior officials wore blue-green water jade.
The length of the pendant set, the number of components, and even the color of the jade all served as indicators of rank.
High-ranking nobles
Multiple jade crescents (three or more)
Tooth-shaped pendants
Elaborate strings of beads
Lower-ranking nobles
A single jade crescent or only a few
Simpler designs
Which makes the necklace in Ashes of Crown even more interesting. If the costume designers were inspired by historical jade pendant sets, then it isn't just a beautiful accessory—it's a visual way of telling the audience that this character belongs to the highest ranks of society.
Anyway, I thought this was such a cool detail and wanted to share it here. It's fascinating to see how much historical culture can be reflected in costume design.
(Original information summarized from a Xiaohongshu post by a Chinese history enthusiast.)
Okay... so this is right up my alley.
More weird whimsy and quirk in the romance genre... and more jaded suffer-no-fools women, instead of the creepy age-gaps, please and thank you
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