VoxAdActa

It’s news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That’s what all the “US news is world news!” people were saying in the meta thread.

And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.

What was the name of that program?

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

I think the problem is that not everyone translates text in their brain the same way.

I translate it as if I were speaking it. So when I see “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin,” I read it exactly as I’d say it, which is, the strippers were JFK and Stalin. When I read “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin”, the comma pause is not rendered as text in my brain, but like a quarter-rest in a musical score, and that pause is what allows my brain to separate JFK and Stalin from each other.

Other people translate text more visually, I guess, and that problem doesn’t exist there? I wouldn’t know, I can’t even begin to fathom how “JFK and Stalin” could be read in any way that doesn’t mean they’re the strippers.

I mean, if you were trying on purpose to say JFK and Stalin were the names of the strippers, and not the dead historical figures, how would you punctuate that sentence? Without the Oxford comma, the clause is clearly an appositive, not a list.

And then when you get into longer lists, it becomes even more of a pain in the ass. “Some suggested treatments for this condition are patella surgery, physical therapy and exercise, plate insertion, bone fusing and bedrest, among others.” Is “bone fusing and bedrest” one item? We have another item in the list that’s a combination treatment with “and”, is this also one? Or are they two separate treatments? Did the author omit the Oxford comma, or did they omit the Oxford “and”? It’s very common for academic authors, particularly, to make that kind of typo. They drop articles and conjunctions all the time. Now I have to e-mail the author and ask “What did you mean here?” because, as the editor, I can’t just assume “oh, they don’t like the Oxford comma, so this sentence is fine”. There are a lot of places where a small typo like missing “and” will make or break the intended meaning and the scientific veracity of an academic paper.

So yeah, I guess if all your writing is stylistic fiction where precision isn’t important, and your reading style is visual rather than auditory, an Oxford comma might “look ugly” and it could be safely ignored. But for anything technical, it’s kind of important.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/health/oxford-comma-maine-court-case-trnd/index.html

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

This sounds like one of those ideas on the level of “If we punch another hole in the ozone layer, the greenhouse gasses can escape!”

It doesn’t help that a bunch of influencers descended on YouTube one day selling classes for how to get rich quick with drop-shipping. A couple thousand gullible dipshits emptied their wallets and dumped a load of cheap crap onto Etsy, with product descriptions that read like they were written by Skaven.

That’s 1 string theorist, Brian Greene. It is absurd to call all string theorists liars. Are all psychologists liars because they had a reproducibility crisis?

That’s like saying NDT is “one astrophysicist” or Freud is “one psychologist”. We’re talking about the guy who brought the entire concept to the public, and he’s sure as shit not the only guy who wrote fantastically optimistic treatises about a concept that real physicists didn’t bother with because it was inherently unfalsifiable due to being entirely untestable.

None of them wrote books that said “Yeah, this is a cool thought experiment that will never be able to do anything scientific hypotheses are supposed to be able to do”. Fuck, just make another thread asking “What do y’all think about the Many Worlds hypothesis?” and you’ll get a hundred comments talking about how cool it is as they walk straight out of the real of science and into the realm of crackpot woo-woo speculation. BECAUSE OF THESE PEOPLE.

Yeah, I agree with the video. After a certain point (I’ll be generous and say that point was 2000-2005), it was a lie. A scam. A con. No different from the guys who say the pyramids were alien landing markers and Stonehenge was built by fairies. It was a load of people saying nonsense stuff to sell books and speaking engagements.

Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with “it’s not a lie if you actually believe it,” in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like “Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing…” is so gross. It’s like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.

How long do you think copyright should last?

I do agree that the current time frame, which may as well be infinite, is dumb. I wouldn’t even be too terribly worried about a 10-15 year copyright on a specific, individual work; Book 1 of Character A’s Sexy Odyssey going public domain after a decade doesn’t sound like a huge loss, and it’s a good incentive to keep writing, but I do kind of rankle at the idea that some big rich fuck is going to get even richer off selling knockoff hardbacks of something I wrote. But as long as it was just Book 1, not Character A, or Sexy Odyssey World, or any of the component parts I’m still working with for Book 8 and 9. I’d like to keep those, ideally, until I’m dead and buried, but I’d compromise to something like 10 years after the last thing I write about them. I can see the value in that. If I’ve dropped the series in favor of The Super-Sexy Adventures of Character B, fans should be allowed to pick up Character A if they feel they can add more to the story.

Really, though, I’m so much less worried about, like, you, or Brandon Sanderson, or PurplePonyPrincessX69@AO3 than I am about the big boys. That’s the part of this discussion that is always overlooked. We see how it hurts the individual fans in a variety of ways (GRRM saying “Nobody will finish the story if I die first” is a big middle finger to everyone who supported him, for example), but we don’t see how the big publishing companies would absolutely demolish individual authors if we weren’t protected by copyright. Fuck, they already try to wreck us all the time; just talk to the visual artists and graphic designers, I’m sure they have thousands of examples.

As soon as the copyright ends on Character A’s Sexy Odyssey, if it had high enough sales and high enough visibility and some bean counter at Tor decided it was a good bet, they will straight steal it and wring every penny out of it they can. Even just with reprints I get nothing for.

As for the characters, you asked if audiences would care that it wasn’t me writing; they might, or they might not, but either way, I’m now competing against myself, my readers could easily get confused about which books were “official” canon and which were alternate universes, and I have no doubt that “Jake P. Ghostwriter”'s name would be itty bitty on the cover, underneath a gigantic “based on the work of VOX AD ACTA!” written in such a way as to be deceptive as possible. On the more extreme end, they could end up Pepe’ing my Character A, and I have to spend the rest of my life on Mastadon being like “No, Character A is not a bigot, no Character A never denied the Holocaust, no, Character A would never do a hate crime, none of those were written by me, yes, I know it was heavily marketed, no, the movie tie-in is not official, I swear I had nothing to do with Character A’s big rant about the Great Replacement in the trailers…”

It’s not about the fans, and it’s not about the little guy. It’s about the robber barons with a dragon’s hoard worth of cash to throw at shoving me out of my own work in favor of whatever they want to do with it. I will get drowned out very quickly.

Please don’t force me to compete with Big Publishers and their warehouses full of ghost writers. If the copyright expires at 5 years, 10 years, or even 20 years, it doesn’t matter; if I get popular, all the big corporations will be watching that clock like a hawk for a time when they can start pumping out a novel a month about my own characters. No individual human can compete with that. At least wait until I die before handing over my worlds, settings, and characters to the megacorporations to squeeze the juice out of.

Not OP, not a photographer, but an author. For me, yes. You’re basically proposing a system where no matter how popular my work becomes, I will never make a penny on it again after 10 years. Now, I guess if that only applies to the specific books, maybe it’s not so nail-bitingly bad, but if it applies to the characters I create (as I suspect it would), then it doesn’t matter if I’m still writing a series about Character A 10 years from now, I lose exclusivity on Character A and am now competing with BigMegaPub’s stable of ghost-writers who are churning out a book a month about my own character.

Fanfiction isn’t the problem. I fucking love fanfiction. Every time I see a fanfic about my world/setting/characters, I’m fucking thrilled. Only assholes like Anne Rice and Anne McCaffery get upset about their babies ending up on an AO3 clone in some improbable, poorly written slashfic. I’m not worried about that at all. I’m worried about Penguin and Random House, who would very quickly crush the fuck out of me without copyright protections.

No, think about the dollars. Right here, right now.

Well, yeah. Speaking as an author, we kinda like to eat. Without copyright, we’re being paid in exposure; if our shit gets popular, nobody’s going to buy the official hardback for $30 (of which I’ll see a few pennies) when they can buy the perfectly legal knockoff hardback for $1.

I don’t have time to write for the love of the art. It takes me about 2-3 months to crank out 100k words of a first draft, then god help me amounts of time to revise it to be fit for human eyes. If I had to hold down a regular 9-5 to pay my rent at the same time, I’d produce a book about every five years or so (that’s how long the first one took).

Fuck all of that. I deserve to be paid fairly for producing something of value just like people in every other profession. Get rid of copyright and you’re basically ensuring that the fiction market is 95% AI, 4% independently wealthy people, and 1% people who just love to write so much that they’ll do it even after coming home from a 12-hour shift, and just like the attention they get. Which, I mean, I get it; we’re worthless, and don’t deserve to make a living producing works of art that make other people happy, right?

It’s a shark. They knew what they were getting into. If they didn’t want danger, they’d have bought a duck or something.

It’s 2030. The world has changed. Russia has fallen. Ralph Nader’s reanimated cyborg-corpse is president. Britain is back in the EU. And Lemmy is known everywhere as “The Poop Site”.

When it comes to tragedies, the number of fucks I give for the victims follows a simple formula.

I start with a billion fucks. Then I subtract the combined net worth of the people affected by the tragedy. The result is how many fucks I give about their tragedy.

For this one, I’m at about negative three billion fucks.

Now I’m imagining a National Treasure-style heist, where OP has to smuggle this out of the museum by pretending it’s his own for a three-day hitchhiking adventure back to the buyer’s safehouse, and that’s why he asked the three-day challenge question.

And over here, we have the Drama-Bitch habitat. If you listen carefully, you can hear its over-exaggerated mating call. This species is interesting because it evolved a unique vision mechanism: it can only see the world in extreme shades of white and black. Scientists currently think this is due to generations of inbreeding. When threatened with any kind of nuance, it resorts to the loud braying from which it gets its name; an overdramatic lament of how the world will turn into a literal hellscape if it doesn’t get its way. It’s incapable of understanding how absurd it sounds, and insists on being taken seriously, even though its wailings are too idiotic to even begin to engage with.

HEY! SIR! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON’T TAP ON THE GLASS! You get it started and it’ll disappear into its pillow fort and scream literally all day long!

Moving on…