Oh Worm

Your Seikret isn't just for travel, though...

CMY / CMYK Dice

A dice set made with only the colours cyan, magenta and yellow, which combine into a full rainbow spectrum of colours as you look through them.

Sometimes the map shows that the vacuum has actually entered the non-existent space and is cleaning there, but obviously that's just the position tracking also screwing up, so it thinks it's somewhere far away and just maps it to the closest place it thinks exists.

The map keeps growing, though, and the vacuum's taking longer and longer to clean the whole house.

Eventually it's frustrating enough that you start setting aside time to watch it do the cleaning, so you can figure out what surface is confusing it and fix the problem.

Somehow the problem never happens when you're watching.

The vacuum seems more beaten up than you remember - scratches and small dents, nothing to stop it from working, but you're not sure where they came from.

Once, you look while it's cleaning and can't find it anywhere. The mobile app says it's cleaning the living room, but it's obviously not there. The app is often wrong, though, and when you hear it trundling around the dining room, which you just checked, you guess you must have just... missed it somehow?

When you empty its bin, there's strange, golden dust in it that you've never seen before.

You install a few cameras. Every time the vacuum malfunctions, it's always when it's behind something or in a dead zone between cameras. Even when you move the cameras. It's a different place every time.

Did you spill ketchup somewhere? There are desiccated flecks of brown and red in the vacuum bin.

You get a Bluetooth tracker - it's supposed to help you find your keys or your wallet if you misplace them - and you glue it to the vacuum.

That night, the vacuum has a new scrape on it, like it ran into something, and the tracker has been knocked off. You can't find it; the tracker app just says it's "out of range or turned off".

You look at your robotic vacuum. It's got more scratches and scrapes even than you remember from a few days ago. You check your camera footage and yeah, it's definitely gotten more beaten up. No footage of it running into anything, though.

One of the dents almost looks like a... bite mark? You must be imagining that.

You sit and think for a long time. You know it's just a machine; you know humans tend to anthropomorphize anything that moves (all the more so because of the googly eyes you attached when you got it), and you don't want to fall into that superstitious fallacy.

It's just a machine.

You look at the dents and cuts on its frame.

You sigh, turn off the cameras, and duct-tape a kitchen knife to the robot.

"Just don't scratch up the sofa." you mutter, feeling silly, and press the "clean now" button.

Again, but louder:

DON’T PAYWALL YOUR FANFICTION

It’s getting more and more common. I’ve seen three posts about it in the last 24 hours - patreons where you’ll get “exclusive” fanfiction stories if you’re a subscriber.

Don’t.

Don’t do it.

It’s annoying, but mostly it’s fucking dangerous.

The whole fanfiction community prosper on someone else’s turf under “fair use” laws. In simple terms: we can play with other people’s creations for as long as it’s done for our own amusement, and that of our followers.

Once any kind of financial benefits are made, it becomes another abuse of someone else’s rights.

And look, I get it. It sucks, especially seeing the artists take commissions while the authors get nothing, and it takes hours and hours of our time, and I understand people are looking for a side hustle to make ends meet in this monstrosity of a capitalist society, but if we don’t stop it from happening, the rights owners will stop it.

And they’ll stop it for everyone.

A piece of fanart cannot substitute fandom media, generally. [1] That is, someone cannot meaningfully replace a fandom media via fanart illustrations, because an illustration does not provide the same thing the original medium does.

Fanfic, however, by its nature, can. I could replace a fandom media with fanfic and get the same thing as a consumer -- plots with these owned characters in this owned setting -- and in theory could then decide to stop purchasing the original media, because my needs are met by the fanfic.

This is also the reason media creators *cannot* meaningfully interact with fanfic -- it is a more complicated mess if there is an overlap of ideas if you know the lead writer reads fanfic, and pursuing it as the fic author puts that market substitution piece on the block in a bad way.

So, yes. It is frustrating. But there is a very good legal reason that Ao3, for example, has mentions of monetization explicitly against its ToS, and it is for the protection of everyone.

I really wonder if this is younger fans who don't remember the stress of the Olden Days, when legal threats from creators were an Actual Thing That Happened. People got threatening letters, websites vaporized overnight, it wasn't fun. The "please don't sue me" disclaimers found on older fics weren't a joke, people were slightly paranoid at all times.