Writing is hard

The launch date was originally scheduled for Oct 10 and has been delayed by Hurricane Milton but they have until Nov 6 to launch it so they’re hoping just for a small delay if everything goes well!

I am not a lawyer so I only have a layman's grasp of this, but as I understand it, if I read a fanfic, think "oh that's a cool idea" and consciously or unconsciously integrate it into my future work, that ensnares me and the fanfic author in a terrible tangle of mutual theft.

Technically, fanfiction exists in an extreme legal gray area, and in the early days of the internet, authors were very litigious towards their fans using their work. In the same way that Disney will get on your ass for putting Mickey Mouse in your work, any author has the same legal ownership of their characters, and they can choose to exercise it. Some famously have, like Anne Rice, but most nowadays do not. Fandom is understood to be a beneficial ecosystem for a creator to cultivate. Most creators Pretend They Do Not See It so it can continue to exist.

But suppose you wrote a fanfic about Aurora where something cool happened, and then a few chapters later, your story showed up in Aurora itself. Maybe even with some lines ripped verbatim, for even less plausible deniability. Oh shit - you've been robbed. But your story was fanfiction to begin with, only loosely permitted to exist with the understanding that you didn't own the setting or characters used. In this scenario, I stole your work, but it was work you made out of MY work in the first place. If you got mad and litigious, the legality of fanfiction itself would immediately take center stage in the argument. Do you have a right to your work when you made it out of MY work without permission? Do I have the right to take work that was made out of my work and use it without credit? The fact that I think fanfiction is a great and fun art form has no bearing on the fact that, technically, it is IP theft. And the fact that it IS IP theft has no bearing on the fact that me seeing a cool idea in a fanfic and going "mine now" would still be a shitty thing to do.

But things can get muddier. Suppose you write an Aurora fanfic where events A, B and C happen, and then over the next several chapters of Aurora, A, B and C happen. Did I steal ideas from your fanfiction? Maybe, but it's also possible that I had A, B and C planned out beforehand, and you put them in your fanfiction because you picked up the foreshadowing and prep I was putting down. You could still be mad about it, but there's a very real possibility that in this scenario the only thing I'd be guilty of was Good Foreshadowing.

In this situation, if you got mad and litigious about it, my best defense would be ignorance. I couldn't have stolen your fanfiction because I never read it. There is absolutely no chance that I was influenced by your work; I've never even laid eyes on it.

preordering a game does *not* say “i trust this dev and they deserve my money to use to make the game that much better”

what it says is “hey boardroom, i will throw money at anything with this logo, even before i know what the game is like”

that boardroom sees that trend. they see theyve made their money back within 2 months of the game being announced… so the next time a lead comes to them and says “we would like to make this game, heres a budget and a timeline” the execs say “well last time we gave you 100 bucks and a full month, but your fans dont really /care/ what game you make, as long as it has our brand. so heres 75 bucks and 3 weeks. make it marketable”

this means more “pre-order exclusives” like cosmetics or different art, filler stuff that a side team can pump out in hours. every store, every platform will have their own version.

pre-orders do nothing but incentivise the shitty money-sponge practices we all hate in games. the point of a pre-order used to be to ensure you got your physical copy, but with most games being digital license anyway, that worry is unrealistic.

However when you wait for reviews, what you show that boardroom is “what we put out actually matters. if we make a shit game, we get shit sales. when we only give a team 2 weeks and a fiver we get shit reviews.”

This is a thing that happens. It’s common that parents in particular “mourn” the loss of the person they thought their child was. It’s common. That doesn’t mean it’s really acceptable or healthy.

They’re mourning a mask instead of embracing the person under it, and the fact that it seems to happen to most parents doesn’t change that putting their child through that is a failure as a parent.

You shouldn’t have to comfort your parents as they grieve the loss of the person they allowed society to force you to pretend to be. They should act like parents and support you fully and unconditionally from moment one, and get their own damn therapist to deal with their shit and not let you see it if necessary. You shouldn’t need to be the one going to a therapist to deal with their issues.

My mother’s a complicated mess of a human being and I have a lot to complain about there, but one thing she did absolutely right is that when I came out the first words out of her mouth were “I knew, I was just waiting for you to be ready to tell me, what do you want me to call you?” and an hour later she had me trying on her clothes that didn’t fit her anymore. She stumbles over pronouns but has never failed to correct herself and has never once acted like she was somehow the one suffering for me being trans.

I knew a trans man whose mother came to support group meetings with him, not because she needed support or education, but to make sure everyone there knew how a parent should treat them and could have her as an adopted parent. Her husband said to her once “I’m mourning my daughter” and she immediately responded “No you’re not. You never had a daughter. You had a son and you just didn’t see it. Get over yourself and support him.”

But my point is that humans have an ability to modify our internal body map when we pick up a tool. Try to think about how you make movements with a pencil or fork, or how you drive a car. You don’t think “I need to move my fingers this way so it’ll lever the fork that way to pick up the noodles”, you instead just move your fork, just how when you pick up something with your hand you don’t have to think about how you’re using muscles in your arm and shoulder, you just do it.

When you’re holding a tool or operating a device, at a certain point it stops being about manipulating the tool/device, because you’ve internalized how it moves. Your body map now contains that tool as part of you, and you move it just as automatically and fluently as you do your biological body parts.

It takes a while to get to that point the first time, sure, but it takes humans a long time to just get the hang of walking, too. But once you do, it becomes second nature.

So my point is that we’re basically set up to be cyborgs, to be more that human. We’re a tool using species, and one way that manifests is that we’re really good at using tools, because we treat them as part of our body, so we don’t have to think about how we manipulate them. We instead think about how we use them to manipulate external things.

So because we can have pencils in our body map, we can write, because we think about making marks on the paper, not about moving fingers.

Because we can have knives and chisels and hammers and saws in our body map, we can build and cut and manipulate resources by thinking about the changes we’re making, not about the way we handle the tools.

The base of my argument is that “unmodified humanity” doesn’t exist (except maybe the tiniest of newborn babies) because we change ourselves to be better at what we’re doing. That’s how humanity works. There is no “pure natural state” to get back to, we’re built to change and adapt and people worried about “losing humanity” because of implants and prothesises and drugs and gene therapy are missing the point: of course they’ll change who we are as humans… Changing our form IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.

Like, I’ve talked about this before, but you can spot a London cab driver on a brain scan easier than you can tell male brains vs female brains, because learning how to do that changes the form and function of your brain to such a degree that you can detect it just by doing an MRI. You can tell if someone was an archer or a ballet dancer by the shape of their bones. You can tell what language a newborn’s parents speak because they babble in the same cadence and pitches as their soon-to-be-first-language, just from hearing it in the womb.

It doesn’t just make me stronger, faster, able to reach higher, it also makes me more graceful, more agile, more aware of my self and my surroundings.

As I now know, most of his audience is young queers and there are things we NEED you to know.

The fight for marriage equality was a massive fucking deal and I will tell you why with a very personal story.

My mom was a nurse during the AIDS crisis. And I mean she started working as a nurse out of school in 85. My mom was on the front lines. She worked with so many AIDS patients that it genuinely altered her brain chemistry. My mother was a homophobe before her nursing career. She was a massive supporter of gay rights until she died in July because of what she saw during her career.

And what did she see?

She saw people who had been abandoned by their families dying with their partners at their side.

And then suddenly…the family would materialize, ban the partner from the room, kick them out of their homes they had lived in with their dying partners for decades, and then watched them ban their partners from even attending the funerals or visiting the graves. Imagine being denied your right to grieve.

And why was this possible? Oh simple. They weren’t married. They weren’t legally bound, the partners weren’t considered next of kin because they weren’t fucking married.

I watched my mom pass. It was horrible and painful and traumatic and terrifying. But it was closure. And I wouldn’t have it any other way because I know…that who my mom wanted by her when she passed was my dad. Because she was scared, she wanted her partner by her side and she was terrified she was going to die. My dad couldn’t be there. He had to work, which sounds cold but understand he had been off work for a month by that point and he was the only one who had health insurance. He wanted to be there, we had made plans to take her off the life support when he came back (we were 4 hours from him) but there was a freak accident and she passed the night after he left to return to work.

Why am I telling you this? Because I need you to understand how important this is to some people. So you can understand how big a slap to the face it is to have people say “marriage equality isn’t that important”. You can understand why someone like James Somerton rolling his eyes at marriage equality and implying we weren’t focused on job equality and discrimination (information that is WHOLEY untrue) would make me see red.

It’s not trivial. It’s not meaningless. It wasn’t about “assimilating” or “appearing normal” (we’re already normal).

It’s about people who had their children taken from them because they weren’t the biological parent. It’s about people who never got to comfort their loved ones in their final days. It’s about people who weren’t able to comforted by their partners in their final days.

So the next time you think “why waste your time on something as trivial as marriage?” Remember my mother. Look up testimony from victims of the AIDS crisis. Remember the people who advocated for marriage equality were the survivors who were torn from the love of their life.

After mass protests, the President of Pakistan was forced to resign, along with many other members of the ruling party.

Worldwide, hundreds of people – many rich and powerful – were arrested.

Billions in stolen assets were returned to the people.

And 82 countries changed their laws to crack down on the wealth hoarding the papers revealed.

(Source here)

To say the Panama Papers accomplished nothing is an insult to Daphne Galizia’s memory. Her work, and the work of the hundreds of other journalists who contributed to the Papers, changed the world.

Disinformation like this is designed to discourage you, to make you feel you’re powerless against the monsters of the world. They want you to feel that way, because they are terrified of your power to make change.