trailer park gothic

Dress

c. 1823

Figured silk, trimmed with silk, lined with silk, hand-sewn

England

The system intrinsically abuses poor people.

A 22-month-old female scaredy cat tiger appeared to get the shock of her young life when she encountered a dead leaf floating on a pool of water in the Bandhavgarh National Park, India. Clearly unusure about just what was approaching her, the partially submerged youngster’s tail shot up in the air and with teeth bared she let out her most fearsome growl - all in an effort to scare the humble leaf away.

This... kind of has two answers: Before ChatGPT and After ChatGPT.

Before ChatGPT, there were always one or two per class. I only ever taught/TA'ed for big lecture-hall gen ed courses, and a solid 50% of the students thought it was a pointless or at least unimportant checkbox they had to fill out and wanted to do as little work as possible to get it. But few intentionally plagiarized. Sure, there were some people who turned in essays they downloaded off the internet or got from their fraternity brothers, and they were easy to catch with plagiarism checkers. There was one girl who, memorably, noticed that for weeks no one was checking their weekly writing responses other than to see if they did them, so she just started turning in pure copy-pasted chunks of the assigned readings. These are people who were taking the class because they felt they were required to, who did not want to be here and don't want to do the work because if it's outside their major they feel it's a waste of their time. I think this is a very sad way to view gen ed classes, but it is a very common one.

The more interesting cases were, there were always a handful of students who genuinely didn't know what plagiarism was. Or rather, they knew that downloading an essay off the internet, slapping your name on it, and turning it in as your own was wrong, and they'd never do that... but they genuinely didn't know that copy-pasting lines from the textbook or Wikipedia uncited, or changing a few words to synonyms, counted as plagiarism. They didn't understand why you were supposed to "say things in your own words" if the original source said it better, and they didn't know that just changing a few words around wasn't sufficient. They were taught that plagiarism was wrong, but never why. These are the students who benefit most from the hbomberguy video: because he explains not only what plagiarism is, but why it's wrong, and what you should do instead, in a thorough and accessible way.

Post-ChatGPT, tons of students are using LLMs to write their essays. Tons. It's bleak. There was an assignment where students would write an essay first draft, I would give them feedback, and they would incorporate the feedback into their second draft. Fully half of students very, very obviously plugged my feedback into ChatGPT and had it rewrite their essay for them. It was genuinely crushing. I put in a lot of effort to give every student personalized feedback on how to improve their essay and they slapped it into the slop machine and called it done.

I don't know if they just don't want to do it and don't care, or if they truly think that ChatGPT is better at writing than them and they want to turn in the best essay they can. Probably some of both. And the most frustrating part is I know it, but unless they do something really dumb like cite fake sources (something I have in fact gotten before), I can't prove it to any standard of reasonable proof. So I just have to act like I believe they wrote it. It's bad out there.

Although one unifying theme is:

I would've thought in comparison to high school people would be more interested in building their skills to get their money's worth

There is a significant percentage who are not. They see the degree as a product to be gotten, the grades as a means to get it, and any method of getting those grades is worth doing. Learning and skill development is not what they are here for, Getting The Degree is. That's what they feel they are paying for. Unfortunately, that's what the system incentivizes. It's a whole system of perverse incentives where learning is a fun bonus if you want to engage in it, on the way to Getting The Degree.

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.

when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.

an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).

advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.

this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!

buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....

"Piracy is bad, yada yada."

Alright. We can agree on that.

But—and I'm sorry if this comes across as offensive—that position often comes from a place of privilege.

And not just economic privilege.

I live in a country where American comics are not always easy to find, and in many cases they're never translated or published at all.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about some mythical "third-world country". I'm talking about a perfectly ordinary European country where the comics I like simply aren't considered profitable enough to distribute.

I remember digging through obscure websites back in 2006 just to get a glimpse of The New Teen Titans. It was a nightmare, but somehow I managed to read the whole thing anyway.

It took me seven years to get a legally published copy of Blackest Night: Titans. SEVEN. Thank God for piracy, because it gave me immediate access. Otherwise I would have been the only idiot trying to discuss Black Lanterns in 2016.

Why? Because Titans comics are considered niche here. Shops don't stock them. Publishers often don't translate them. And when they do, sometimes the translation is... let's politely call it "creative". (I'm still trying to recover from the translated version of Last Will and Testaments...) You wait years, pay more, and occasionally get a worse product. Wonderful.

The only reason Blackest Night: Titans was eventually published here, as far as I can tell, is that Blackest Night was such a massive crossover event that leaving out an entire tie-in would have created a noticeable hole in the collection.

And don't even get me started on the Wolfman/Pérez era. That only became legally accessible here in the 2010s.

So yes, this might come as a shock to some people, but piracy is not always about being cheap.

Sometimes it's about access—because access is not distributed equally.

If a comic is unavailable in your language, unavailable in your country, unavailable digitally, unavailable physically, and unavailable second-hand at anything resembling a reasonable price, then "just buy it" stops being a solution and starts being nothing more than a slogan.

And for many international readers, piracy is the reason they became comic fans in the first place.

Peace out and read comics.

1) people who are not financially capable of buying a piece of media. They wouldn't be paying anyway (though often times, when these people get financially stable enough to afford it they will buy the pieces of media that they pirated before and liked)

2) people who do not have access to the media due to living in a region where that media is not distributed. Think people in Europe who do not have any comics shops nearby, people in countries like Russia with heavy censorship of queer media. These people wouldn't be paying anyway

3) people who are after media that is no longer destributed, think games by companies that since stopped existing, tv shows that were deemed unpopular and canceled, obscure cartoons. These people wouldn't be paying anyway

4) people who are always trying to get something without paying/paying as little as possible. Chances are, they wouldn't be paying anyway

5) people who want to check out the media before deciding if they want to spend the money on it or not. They most likely will not pay for the media if they can't find a free sample

So what do we see? Most people who do this would not be paying anyway. Companies are not losing consumers to piracy, because most of the pirates weren't people who would be able to buy their product to begin with, or wouldn't be interested in buying it.

Moreover, piracy helps save media. There are countless shows and games and movies that would be lost media if not for piracy. For example, one of my favorite games since childhood: Paraworld. It came out in 2006. The dev company stopped existing in 2014. It's not on Steam, or other such platforms. You can only buy it second-hand, on disks, and there aren't lots of offers. The only reason I still have access to it, is piracy.