Into the future

#omgcheckplease Check, Please!: A Primer

It’s a family thing

Wait, what do you mean this never happened? Anyway, I’m glad Kristoff has a boyfriend now.

Source

Video of Tama

^Nitama majestic, and below with Yontama

Yontama.

The shrine of Tama Daimyōjin (Great gracious deity Tama), next to the Kishi station where she worked.

HEY, UH

The people who are putting my tiny self published book (Here, the World Entire, aka the book I poured my whole dang soul into!) up on piracy sites / requesting a pdf of my book on piracy sites:

CAN YOU LITERALLY THE FUCK NOT

I’m very glad that people want to read my book! It brings me joy that I very truly cannot even begin to explain! It’s basically my dream come true! But please don’t steal my work!

I don’t have the backing of a big publishing house. I self published, so there’s no advance for me. The only money I make off that book is through sales, and although it’s not a lot at all per sale, it’s the only source of income that book produces. I very strongly believe that writers deserve to get paid for their work. That includes me.

If you want to read my book but really can’t justify using the funds you have to do so (because hey, we’re all in different financial situations, I get it), I know it’s in a couple of library systems so it’s worth trying that. I’m reluctant to send out free ebooks now because the last time I did that someone put it on a pirating site, but you’re welcome to ask and I may decide to do so on a case by case basis.

If you wanna stiffle that be my guest.

I don’t need exposure. I don’t need ‘audience’. That doesn’t pay my bills. That doesn’t compensate me for my months of hard work. I don’t need people to 'share’ my work for me free of charge by stealing it and distributing it for free without my consent.

You fundamentally misunderstand how the publishing industry works. It doesn’t work by people stealing books. That sure benefits the reader, but it royally fucks over the author. Work being shared on pirating sites does absolutely sweet bugger all for me as an author. Audiences who know they can get my shit for free aren’t going to suddenly start paying for it just because they’ve now heard of me, so your comments about building an audience are asinine; it’s not building a paying audience for me, but an audience of people who steal my shit. Some audience.

I’ve sold hundreds of copies of my book based on the quailty of it (presumably; either that or my mum has been bribing people). It’s selling itself pretty well, thanks. It’s been performed as a play! It has pretty good reviews! I don’t need to eschew being financially compensated in exchange for more audience, especially not if that audience isn’t going to fucking pay. An audience gained from a pirate site is useless to me. It does nothing for me. I have one book out currently. Every person who steals it is someone who doesn’t buy it. It’s another sale lost. It’s nothing gained. I don’t have a back catalogue for people to buy once they’ve heard of me. It’s theft and then fuck all benefit to me.

Writing isn’t all about making money and it’s a privilege to have your work out there and read, but it’s also work, and in a capitalist society, that merits being compensated for the acknowledgement of that work. I’m not just a money hungry piece of shit (or I’d have priced my book at an actually decent profit margin) but I need money to, y'know, eat. Writing is one way I do that. I can’t do that if people steal my work.

If a billion dollar company is charging extortionate amounts for software you need for your livelihood, pirating that is between you and your conscience.

If you bought a thing but due to DRM or whatever you can no longer access the thing you bought, you can decide whether to pay again or pirate.

But pirating something from a billion dollar company is not the same as pirating a self-published book, or an indie-game, or even a book from a small press. The margins in publishing are tiny. Most authors have a second job because they earn so little from their writing. If you pirate their stuff, you’re hurting their chances to support themselves with their writing.

To reiterate the whole, y'know, point: don’t be a book wanker, and don’t defend being a book wanker on my personal post about potential lost income as an indie author. Just don’t. Write a sexy tweet about it if you have to, but don’t do it on my post, because I have neither the patience nor the inclination to be nice about it.

Dude… you’re so angry and irate and being senselessly rude about this that I’ve lost all interest in  paying for and reading your book in the first place - only because you sound so mean-spirited and entitled. 

‘Be nice about people stealing your work, or I won’t read it. I’m going to tone police the way you speak about people stealing your work, and use your work as leverage. Asking people not to steal from you is entitled, and you have to talk about it politely, or you don’t deserve a readership.’ Did I parse that correctly?

I’m not going to reply with scorching vitriol to that sentiment, but know that the temptation to do so is astonishingly present.

I fully understand wanting to be compensated for your work, and I am certain you poured so much of your heart and soul into this, but are you genuinely going to squabble over the internet about a small fraction of lost sales, only lost because the person wishing to read it cannot in any other capacity access it?

[Image description: a quote from the initial post, which reads ‘If you want to read my book but really can’t justify using the funds you have to do so (because hey, we’re all in different financial situations, I get it), I know it’s in a couple of library systems so it’s worth trying that. I’m reluctant to send out free ebooks now because the last time I did that someone put it on a pirating site, but you’re welcome to ask and I may decide to do so on a case by case basis.’]

Not in any other capacity, hmm? Except for the one I explicitly mentioned up there? Let’s ignore that one; it doesn’t play into the narrative of me being ‘angry, irate, senselessly rude, mean-spirited and entitled’.

Do you really think people feel good about not being able to afford books? You think they don’t feel some sort of shame over it? You think it does hurt them having the author chew them out over it? 

I’m sure people don’t feel good about not being able to afford books. I’m not Jeff Bezos. I can’t afford a lot of stuff I want, books often included. That doesn’t mean I steal them. I either ask for them for gifts when possible, or I save up for them, or I find other (legal, not harmful) ways to get them, which are listed in this post here. And if people don’t want the author to ‘chew them out’ over it, then they shouldn’t keep replying to my post about how pirating books is harmful with comments about why they’re going to continue pirating books, especially when I’ve expressly asked people not to do that on my post.

I’d also like to add that none of the comments saying that they pirate books have been from my followers, or reblogged directly from me; none of them had any interest in reading my book. They came across this post through reblogs and are not familiar with me or my book (most people aren’t; I’m not exactly JK Rowling). These are people speaking hypothetically about pirating books in general. They haven’t reached out to me as an author they want to read and said ‘I want to read your book but can’t afford it’; they’ve seen an author explaining how piracy is detrimental to authors in general and they’ve chosen to comment ‘but I’m going to do it anyway’. I have asked people not to do this. They’ve done it anyway. I’m going to get annoyed.

Have a little perspective and understanding, my dude. I hope peace finds you, because your fans don’t deserve to be subject to you berating them for being too poor to fund their interests. 

Do not patronise me like this. Do not. Don’t you dare speak to me like that, as though you’re some benevolent Zen Arbiter, deigning to grant me the merest moment in your ocean of infinity to float gently down from your cloud, from which moral vantage point you have objectively decided that my income is irrelevant, and spread your omniscient, calm wisdom upon me, an overly-emotional prole. Do not tell me that you hope ‘peace finds me’ when I am writing a post about how people pirating books affects my income and, by extent, my actual life. Y’know, the one I have to live in a capitalist society which relies on income. I am not ‘berating my fans’, namely because, as I mentioned, the people I replied to above are not people who follow me. I am also not shaming anyone for being unable to afford books; as I’ve said, I’m not a billionaire. I’m largely financial stable now, but this hasn’t always been the case. You absolutely need to recognise that this works both ways. Authors don’t make a lot of money from their books. When you speak of people being ‘too poor to fund their interests’, you neglect to mention that there are many authors who are too poor to pay their bills.

I’m not complaining about this because boo-hoo, I only made £5,000 in book sales this quarter and my Jaguar needs refuelling. I haven’t even broken £1,000 in book sales since I published it 3 years ago (as I mentioned before, this is in part due to my own decision to set a very low profit margin, hence why my book only costs £4.80; it’s the lowest I could set it whilst still making any money. I would probably put a higher value on my labour and work and do it differently next time. Hindsight is 20/20).

So in my case, my book sales supplement the money I use to buy food and go about my daily life, along with the salary I make from working 6 months of each year. I generally don’t work the other 6 because of my PhD workload, which is not funded. I don’t have much excess when I have to make a half year salary stretch to a year. I’m not on the breadline by any means, mostly because I’m able to live at home when I’m not working (which isn’t ideal, but is the best financial choice for me atm) but I am not in a position to keep losing income from people who don’t buy my book. I can cope with the odd lost sale here and there when someone sends the file to a pal, sure, but when someone is uploading my book as a mobi file on a pirate site, or asking for a pdf to be uploaded, then that’s a potentially endless pool of lost sales from people downloading that file.

I am absolutely sick to the teeth of people gaslighting me on this and telling me that what I really care about is getting rich and taking a big ol’ poo on poor people, rather than pointing out that book piracy overwhelmingly harms poor authors and marginalised authors, especially authors from working class backgrounds, disabled authors, authors of colour, and queer authors (of which I’m one, hello). I’m sick of getting hatemail about it. I’m a ‘capitalist elitist bootlicker’, according to one sweet anon, for asking for fair compensation for my labour. It is so, so draining. You’re making me out to be some abhorrent, illogical, unreasonable banshee - oh, sorry, I won’t put words in your mouth; I’m just  ‘angry, irate, senselessly rude, mean-spirited and entitled’, after all - lounging about on my bespoke futon and wailing on Tungle dot net about how poor people steal my illustrious masterpiece and deny me my millions. That is categorically not the case. I am writing about how book piracy harms people who are already in a very low income bracket. Authors are usually the poor people too. That’s the part you’re not getting.

Do not tell me ‘I’m not going to read your book now because you’re being mean about people stealing your work.’ That’s honestly one of the most petulant, spiteful comments I’ve ever received on this blog. You don’t have to read my book! I don’t expect everyone to! Heck, I’m still frankly amazed when anyone does! Sometimes I have to pinch myself and check I’m not dreaming! But holding my work over my head - work that you fully acknowledge I ‘poured so much of [my] heart and soul into’ - like this and using it as some kind of twisted bargaining chip in an attempt to get me to just shut up about something that is actually affecting my life is just so, so mean-spirited and misguided. Don’t read it, that is completely and objectively fine, but don’t throw that fact in my face just because I’m not making myself supine and letting people steal from me.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/amp/How-a-publisher-is-punishing-library-users-with-14572856.php

valkyrie, slightly hesitant about joining jane in exploring her heritage: is mead kosher?

darcy, about to introduce val to manischewitz:

Thor, after a minute: Well… I guess we’ll nev-

Rocket, muffled: It’s Foster, you meatsack. She’s always right.

Jane: [looks smug]

[long pause]

applesauce vs sour cream isn’t about what’s kosher. it’s about what is the yummiest condiment on latkes.

Rocket Raccoon will try anything and

EVERY TIME WE KISS I SWEAR I COULD FLY

CAN’T U FEEL MY HEART BEAT FAST, I WANT THIS TO LAST

NEED YOU BY MY SIDE

Recurring Cast Members:

Recurring Guest Stars

One-Time Guest Appearances:

Thanks for reading! I will be working on a fourth installment soon. If I forgot anyone, please reblog with who they are and what character they played.

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten. 

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it. 

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

Two GIFS, both from the animated version of Disney’s Mulan

First GIF: Mulan is wearing a white sleeveless dress. Two women are talking to her and fixing her hair. This is from the portion of the movie where Mulan is being prepared for the matchmaker. The text over the GIF reads “Wait and see when we’re through”.

Second GIF: Black and white (original movie was in color). Mulan and three male soldier disguised as women walk up steps and flick scarves to their right. In the movie they are about to climb up the Emperor’s palace to defeat the Huns. The text reads “Boys will gladly go to war for you”.

In beef, what you worry about is e. coli.  In healthy live cattle (and they must be healthy to be butchered for consumption) e. coli is only in the digestive tract but it can escape and contaminate the outside of the beef during slaughter and butchering.  The bacteria does not migrate to the interior of the meat as there is no circulation to take it there.  So you can eat beef where the inside is less cooked as long as the outside is well seared to kill any bacteria that may be on it.  Hamburger should always be thoroughly cooked because it is all “outside”.

With chicken, the concern is salmonella, which is found through out the body of the chicken.  Chickens can tolerate it, it doesn’t make them noticeably sick, but humans can not, so the entire meat must be cooked enough to kill any bacteria present in the meat.  As a note, it used to be believed that salmonella was not passed on to the eggs and in fact in the 1950′s, when my dad was in Vet school, studies showed it was not present in the eggs even if it was present in the hen.  That’s why there used to be a lot of recipes that used raw eggs, it was safe then.  However due to some change in the bacteria, or changes in egg-farming practices, it is now found in eggs as well.  The amounts are small, and if you are eating eggs within a couple days of being laid it’s probably not a problem, but store eggs are old enough for bacteria to have reproduced to dangerous levels and the liquid interior allows it to spread all through the egg.

I also wanted to mention that apart from the salmonella risk (which is a freakin’ big “apart from”), you also have the risk of Campylobacter infections. Not only can these lead to really really horrible gastro-intestinal problems, a small number of infections also cause an auto-immune response that leads to the body destroying its own myelin (the stuff around your nerves that makes them good at carrying electrical signals). Basically, your nerves stop working and even if you survive, you’ll be hooked up to an iron lung for… a long time. I don’t know how long it takes to regrow myelin, I’m not a neurologist. 

Draw your own conclusions on how you want to proceed.

Don’t pirate books, for example, because while it does hurt the publisher, it hurts the author more, since they’re only paid by their direct sales numbers. Get the book from a library instead, since that drives a sale, supports a public service, and is free to you. (The exception being textbooks. The authors have usually already been paid all they’re ever going to get, if they got paid at all, and the publisher rakes in an obscene profit.)

Don’t pirate indie stuff, whether it’s movies, books, music, art, video games, whatever. If it’s indie, you are directly hurting a creative who just wanted to put something nice into the world, and not being able to eat directly impacts their ability to make more nice things. Caution: certain industries like video games and music are very volatile, and companies that used to be indie might not be anymore but might still be cruising on that indie cred. Similarly, a well-known and well-loved studio you’ve been a fan of for years might seem huge to you but is actually still just a couple schmucks barely scraping by. Look into a company, see how big it is, and if it’s a subsidiary of something larger. If it’s just a few people, don’t steal, but if it’s actually a multi-million dollar company with several dozen employees, yeah, it’s probably fine.

I write for Marvel comics.

I write for Marvel comics, my reviews are good, people love the characters I’m writing for, and our illegal downloads are through the roof, because people think piracy hurts no one.  It hurts the creators who have fought our whole careers to get through a door that traditionally has only been open for straight white men.  Am I the best thing in comics today?  Nah.  My ego isn’t that big.  But I’m good and I’m getting better; give me ten years and I might well be the best thing in comics.

They build the most of the audience that authors will eventually have. There is no voracious reader that I have met that would have become that was of while they were learning to read they had to poor hundreds developing their tastes. It is not at all fair to put libraries in the position of bleeding out their funding because they serve the public. They’re our public repository of knowledge.

In every other scenario not only would a person buying a book be able to pass it along to the next friend who wanted to read it, they’d be able to re-sell it for cash. The only thing forcing libraries to pay authors indefinitely would do is slowly kill off their collections so that only new books were worth the expense of carrying them. They already charge libraries more for the physical copies than they charge anyone else. It’s already bad enough that publishers are using the “+internet = entirely new thing” argument to embargo books and also force libraries to constantly re-buy books.

Also I don’t understand the perspective that says that every person who reads a library copy is a lost sale perspective. Profit as the sole motive for. Yes, some people won’t. But books are forever, they’re supposed to be good enough that you want to re-read them, not the new fast fashion craze.

Plus you know what I’m not going to dedicate my limited book shelf space to in the scenario where suddenly almost nothing is available at the library? Brand new authors I’ve never read and I have no track record of caring for their writing long term. This is also why trade comic have so much trouble getting enough traction to actually complete a story.

So yes, while I’m sure big publishers would love the idea of being able to create a large stable of big popular authors who always sell and how they would get to reduce the amount they have to spend on advertising, finding new authors, and promotion because no one will ever find out about new up and coming authors that don’t launch through them - I don’t see the benefit long term to reading culture.

THIS SHIT WORKS OKAY, I AM DEAD SERIOUS.

The last time I saw this on my dash, I didn’t think it would happen, so jokingly I wished I could go to a fun. concert.

AND GUESS WHAT, I WENT TO A FUCKING FUN. CONCERT.

I SAW THIS ON MY DASH THE OTHER DAY AND THOUGHT “ITS WORTH A TRY” SO I WISHED I COULD GET A 3DS

LITERALLY LIKE 4 DAYS LATER MY DAD SENT ME A PICTURE OF THE 3DS XL HE BOUGHT FOR ME WHILE I WAS AT SCHOOL

GUYS.

HE FUCKING CALLED ME 20 MINUTES LATER

20 FUCKNG. MINUTES. LATER.