Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

OTW (aka the Organization for Transformative Works/Wank)
Status: Tax exempt, .org (usually associated with not-for-profit groups)
Income: Good question, though we know there was at least one straight-up $500 donation and there's a decent number of official members.
Accomplishments: Nothing.
It takes two weeks tops to get a wiki together. It takes maybe two hours to attach a messageboard to a site. The OTW's been promising these things and more for over a year--and while doing so, they've taken in an unspecified amount of money as donations and membership fees for what continues to be a Livejournal-based community.
People starting movements/freaking out over this? 0 ETA: I'm told there's some, somewhere.

Fanfiction.net (aka The Pit, Pit of Voles)
Income: 60-80 million dollars a year ETA: Numbers are being called into question. For all my luck they're borked, though the source that triggered (I repeat, triggered, not made) the original fanthro post was certainly someone in the know.
Income, though? Still a lot. ETA2: This one says more than 4 million a year.
People starting movements/freaking out over this? I seem to remember seeing . . . one.
Seriously, let's crunch some numbers and make this a little more real to people. The data from '07 said ff.net gets 1-4 cents per adview. They have between one and four ads per page--anyone who's loaded a page there knows this.

We'll take the middle-of-the-road numbers: two and a half cents per ad, about two and a half ads per page.

.025 x 2.5 = .0625 per pageview.

Now let's expand upon that. My three most-read stories, between them, have more than 365,000 hits.

365000 x .0625 = $22,812.50

If the numbers are right, Fanfiction.net has easily made more than twenty-three thousand dollars off just a few of my stories alone.

Twenty-three thousand dollars.

That's more than half my student loans. That's the Master's degree I couldn't afford to go back for. And the more I sit and look at that number, the more pissed off I get. For that much you'd think they'd be on the ball with plagiarism reports, or have coding that didn't eat your formatting and wording, or have ads that didn't give you spyware every few days. You know, like Fanlib did. Whoops, Fanlib was transparent about its intentions to make money, and talk of making money in regards to fandom is sorta like summoning the Antichrist and inviting him to bang your mom on the dinner table. Onlookers tend to flip the fuck out.

(And even if the numbers are borked and we shoot for the extremely low end, they've made enough off my writing in total to pay off my car.)


Is fandom massively spazzing out over ff.net, or the membership dues paid to an essentially dead organization, or any of the other half-dozen things that are making money off fans/fanworks? No, they'd currently rather be piling on Fanhistory for being a dotcom, for having a single ad per page, and for Laura H. trying to market the thing. And since Fanhistory's venture capital page went up around March, this dogpile's just a little late to the party.



I'll start laughing when it's funny.



Long multi-faceted Fanhistory.com wank relatively short: Yes, I know Laura H's gone about things the wrong way. Yes, Laura knows she's gone about things the wrong way. Was she/Fanhistory clear that if someone on Fanhistory wanted their name or page down, they should say so? Yes. Would it have been done? Yes--if worse came to worse, I would've done it myself.

Does the entire name fuss look remarkably like what happens when a few spastic Black Jewels Trilogy fans go through ff.net reporting & flaming everyone they see because they say Anne Bishop said she doesn’t want fic written? Hell yes. (If Bishop doesn't want fic written, Bishop would tell ff.net herself. It's only the big girl thing to do.)

Has this entire mess, initiated under the flag of protecting someone's RL-name from association with their fandom pen name, only served to out that connection to however many people didn't know of it yet? Yes. And is that connection still made in numerous other locations online--most notably by the person herself? Yes.

Has there been this much internet attention because the target isn't exactly a well-liked individual, & because her opinions don't tend to mesh with everyone else's? Yes.

Has Laura since said she's going to change her methods of interaction, espc. in relation to the wiki? Yes. And even though it's only been ugly when she tries to engage the shrieking dissenters, she's got a public apology in the works. So if that was the goal, the goal's been attained.

Me, I'm a dirty optimist. I believe people can change if they want to. I also believe they'll need backup and direction to keep them out of trouble--a theory of social responsibility, in a way. It applies to everything. You wanna see things get better? Help out. You just wanna sit around and bitch? You're part of the problem.

So I'm putting my money--or my lack of it--where my mouth is. It's a wiki. Wikis are collaborative. Laura's taking a step back, in the interests of Fanhistory and its future. Now it's time for the rest of the community to decide where they stand.

Sorry to the Lj people: I know this won’t be under a cut there and it’s rather long-winded (as many of my link-heavy rants tend to be). I think I covered all bases here but I’m always open to additions. Direct rational feedback to the original post at Ij and any shrieks of UR RONG U AWFUL H0R to here, please.

●●●


( My thoughts on the Open Source Boobies Project, let me tell you about them. )

So yeah, the Tekko '08 Artists’ Alley wank report. This is my experience, the info I’ve gleaned from others, and my big ol’ cranky nature.

( Wank wank, wankity wank wank. )

We have ridiculously adorable seal puppets at work.

We also have crying small children.

So when a small child started crying today, I whipped out a seal puppet . . . and proceeded to spend the next ten minutes lying to and playing with a four year old who sincerely believed the seal was real.

This is not the first child I've misled in this manor. It will undoubtedly not be the last.


I think I feel a little bad. But he stopped crying?

(YTD: Four children have believed the seal was real, and most parents initially think I'm walking around with a small dog in my arms.)

~~

I'm sleeping enough to dream again. Now only if my dreams weren't so severely OMGWTF ones. Though keeping the plot ideas for some sounds worthwhile.

~~

It seems the US government's been taking lessons from Livejournal's SUP.

US-funded health search engine blocks the search term "abortion"

A few days later, the official backpedaling apology and fix: "I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction."

Versus . . .

The list of interests Lj has censored--including but not limited to porn, depression, yaoi, faeries, and bisexuality.

A few days later, the official backpedaling apology and fix: "(I)t was a mistake and not meant to convey any company opinion."



Ohh, Lj and Bush administration. Plz bring the funny instead.

Tags: livejournal, wank

A new study says at least one in four teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease. How 'bout those abstinence-only education plans, dear moral decision-makers.

Seriously, this is absolutely insane. America's education system is putting millions of girls at risk for all sorts of preventable things just because we're all still so fucking terrified of sex and sexuality. As far as this country's majority is concerned, sex is (insert negative connotation-loaded words here), damn it, and young people shouldn't be doing it.

But of course our wonderful society will then hammer along on how being "sexy" is the ultimate of ultimates, leading to eye-searing bits of WTFery like hip-high children with "juicy" written across the ass of their pants because so many girls think they have to be sexualized or otherwise get boys' attention to be complete human beings--and a society full of consumer parents who think the ceaseless objectification of their daughters is all right but who flip their shit over protecting little Suzy Skankho from "objectionable content" on the internet.

You want teen girls to not have sex? You're shit out of luck. Teens will have sex. Nothing short of ungodly drastic & inhumane measures will stop them. But if you want girls to respect themselves enough to not buy into the anti-intellectual glorification and objectification of so many of the women in our media, or to have the sense & knowledge & forethought to protect themselves so they don't catch Dog knows what from Cat knows who, then a whole lot of somethings are going to have to change.

The starting point's what's got me stumped.

~~

In further sploogey news, Livejournal is celebrating SUP's 100th day of ownership with a massive shitstorm. They've tried to be sneaky about making all new accounts either be paid or plus (read: full of ads, some of which are for the OMGPR0N Lj has been so determined to keep from the ubiquitous internet-traipsing children), removing the ad-free and free Basic option "for the ease of the users"--and wow, have they failed. Cue wanksplosion. Brad Fitzpatrick is even PO'd. The cat macros haven't come out in force yet, but some moron new blood VP is trying to walk a high-handed two-faced and nonsensical sort of point, and is getting lit up for his efforts.

I'd make that Cassie Edwards post but it seems this wank is far from over. Smart Bitches Trashy Books readers offered to take on Cassie Edwards novels to see if there was anything else to find--and they found (among pages and pages and pages of other things) that the woman'd taken chunks out of a Pulitzer-winning novel from 1930.

Big, clunky, recognizable chunks.

Fandom_wank is linking left and right here and here.



Okay, whatever. I'm going for it.

Thankfully, Signet has finally decided to start taking this shit seriously (going back on their initial statement that Edwards had "done nothing wrong") and thus I am spared the moral conundrum of how to bite back at their publishing house without aversely affecting their innocent n00b or mid-list authors. Too bad I can't figure out a way to boot some of these Edwards defenders' brain cells through the computer, though. These people are trolling SBTB and Dear Author, and have shown a dazzling (if somewhat predictable) array of logical failure.

If you have time to check things like that then you need to get a life!
Say (general)you see a crime being committed. If you report it or try to stop the criminal, does that mean you need to get a life?

You've done the outing, now you should just let it go!
Signet tried to brush this under the rug when it came out. We (as bloggers, readers, buyers, and anti-plagiarist individuals) have every reason to believe it’s because of our massive outcry that they’ve taken back their initial statement. Why should we believe that they’ll continue to do the right thing if we ease up on the pressure?

Besides--people keep catching other things she’s stolen, and (to lift a phrase) I'm curious as to how deep this rabbit hole goes.

It’s fair use!
Fair use requires citations. This was her passing off a number of other people’s work, both fiction and non-fiction, frequently word for word, as her own. That’s plagiarism. Big difference.

You’re just attacking her! You just wanna ruin her career!
I’ll mock her for being a shitty writer while I get the flamethrower for the plagiarism, sure. But shitty writing is just shitty for the people who have to read or edit it. Plagiarism is another full fly-infested pit of feces entirely. And no, I firmly believe that plagiarists should not get publishing contracts—especially those like Edwards, who refuse to understand or acknowledge that they’ve done wrong. Come on, now. Publishing a known plagiarist is like having some guy who's promised you a nice date taking you to a barnyard and nailing a sheep in front of you, then calling you back the next day to ask for another date. Are you gonna say to yourself, "Well, he was such a nice person--Maybe his sheep-fucking days are over and I should give him another try!"

Of course you wouldn't!

Readers are pulling stolen chunks out of books Edwards published from 1983 to 2007. This woman has made a career out of stealing other people’s work. Why the hell should it continue? And why should we try to protect Edwards from the consequences of her own actions?

It has to be proven in a court of law!
I don’t know where the fuck people get off with this. It’s right there, in writing and in almost mirrored text. It’s not cited. That’s plagiarism. John M. Barrie, the guy who helped create anti-plagiarism software for colleges, has called it plagiarism. That really means it’s plagiarism. You’re telling me that you don't believe your eyes or an expert in the field, that you need a judge to spell out to you that these texts are the same? Are you fucking serious?

Add in how plagiarism in and of itself isn’t illegal (though hideously unethical), but copyright infringement is, and your demand for a criminal trial becomes a little ludicrous I guess I’ll have to start pulling the still-in-copyright stuff she’s been caught stealing. Like the encyclopedia bits and research books and Pulitzer winners and wildlife magazine articles, and the fully lifted author's note, and . . . Jeez, I need a beer. But for the still-being-compiled list of what's been hit, check here.

Why does it matter, she isn’t selling nearly as much now anyway!
So it’s okay because she’s already made money off pretending someone else’s work is her own?

But she’s an old woman and you’re just being mean to her!
Please tell me what age I must be to no longer be held responsible for my actions.

(The ubiquitous) You’re just jealous! *invocation of Godwin's law, Snacky's law, so forth*
Because outing someone for stealing and hating the fact that they stole has something to do with jealousy. And speaking out against that is an act of treachery, treason, unnecessary aggression, and just plain meanness. Really now.



May add more later. Still being angry. But this is certainly a wank of legend.


But for the happiness to this massive wankstorm: Nora Roberts! I think I love Nora Roberts now. I still haven't read her stuff but after reading her posts during the Lanaia Lee wank and seeing her have the balls to stand up and decry Edwards's actions to the AP (when so many authors are quiet in an attempt to not rock the metaphorical boat and when that moron Jennifer Crusie jumped into the fray to decry SBTB's outing as bullying when the posts themselves were remarkably objective) . . . I want to send her shiny things.

NOOOOO, LJ. NO MOAR WANK. I HAVE TO WORK EARLY TOMORROW!


Long frothy wank short: Lj's new "flag this post" option may help protect the ever-present children, but not many and not for long. You can now tag your friends' (and enemies'!) journals or community entries for offensive content, hate speech, illegal activity, sexual content, or (OMG!) kiddie porn. And if something gets tagged enough or for the right thing, it gets filtered over to the Lj Abuse team, which either ignores it like they did the pro-anorexia comm during Strikethrough theoretically starts stomping (for the illegal stuff), instates a handy warning-and-tag-eclipsing lj-cut and age verification page (circumvented by logging out and posting a fake birthday), or filters you into various levels of post safety/invisibility, as per Lj's (easily adjusted) settings & viewing options.


Overall, it's gonna lead to a lot of hatetagging, grudgereporting, and a massive massive flood of woe and drama for the Abuse team--and we've already seen how well they handle . . . Well, anything. And as for protecting the kiddies . . . Yeah, there's too many holes in this net.



Comparisons to Communism are being made: Nice idea, shitty execution, collapse is inevitable. (Extra lulz at how 6A just announced that they've turned Lj over to SUP, a company from(?) Russia.) People are also still cranky about the lack of clarification of explicit content/adult concepts; something we've been waiting for since Strikethrough.


And I should be sleeping. D: D: D:



PS: As far as Lj's concerned, the only victims of hate speech are people of a particular ethnicity, religion, or race. Chicks and gays and you gender-confused people, you're shit out of luck.

Next up on Random's Batshit Author Watch: Patricia Cornwell shows Anne Rice how crazy is done this day & age. It's not that her book is bad, it's that the government is out to get her. That's why she's getting those bad reviews at Amazon & B&N.com.


As found on the front page of patriciacornwell.com, reprinted on crimefictionblog.com, and screencapped by fandom_wank:

We have reason to suspect that someone (or a group of someones) might be mobilizing people to attack me through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, etc., to hurt my sales and reputation.

So here is what I’m asking. Would you please encourage your friends and those you have contact with that if they like Book of the Dead, to please spread the word, and if so inclined, to please post their reviews on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

It’s easy to do. For Amazon.com, if you already have an account, you can post a review. Otherwise, open an account by buying a book. You can also check the boxes of other reviews to say you disagree or did not find their review helpful, if this is so. Barnes and Noble does not appear to require any account for posting reviews.

Over the past week there were about fifty bad reviews posted for a book that has gotten the highest reviews for any book I have ever written. If you see what I am saying. Interstingly [sic], this all started right after a Pentagon high official tried to get me to make a pro Bush, pro war appearance on an aircraft carrier and I refused, politely, a photo opportunity to contradict what is in my novel! Not to mention my battle over Ruth Graham’s burial. Suddenly, I am getting a barage [sic] of reviews discouraging people from buying my book, though there are some good ones as of today because my supporters are chiming in.

Right now I need my supporters. I am not asking you to write anything you do not mean. But why should hateful people be the only ones heard?

You and your friends can help by reading the book, encouraging others to read it, and posting their feelings about it - honest feelings.

With appreciation, Patricia.

Guys, please. If I EVER start doing some shit like this when I grow up, I need you to hunt me down and beat sense into me with whatever well-written hardcovers are available.

As if fandom hasn't seen enough hell this year in the forms of Fanlib & Strikethrough . . .

So there's this massive Harry Potter Lexicon wank going down now. One Steve Vander Ark, the maintainer of the Harry Potter Lexicon, once wanted to be a part of Rowling's planned HP encyclopedia if not write one of his own. JKR turned him down. SVA got his panties in a twist and decided to publish his own encyclopedia anyway, made up of material from the Lexicon's website--which is composed mainly of quotes & lists from the HP books (that he has no legal right to publish for profit) and critical essays that are not his (which he has no legal right to publish for profit). JKR turned that down too. SVA and his moronic publisher RDR Books decided to try to publish anyway. Cue massive wank to crush all other wanks, complete with RDR's refusal to hand over a copy of the book to Rowling/WB, RDR's uncooperative stance towards the entire proceedings (including but not limited to them telling the WB that if they wanted to see the book, go look at the website--which backfired just a little bit), the hiring-on of RDR Books's owner's cousin as an intellectual property lawyer even though he had no background in intellectual property law (NO. SERIOUSLY.), and such heavy-duty self-righteous flailings that it makes my brain hurt.

Fandom_wank brings it in extremely long-winded chronological order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7


Overall? As a fandom member, I'm scared. This is the push that might force everyday authors to crack down on fanworks. How do they know that some jackass with an entitlement complex isn't gonna turn around, create a website, and decide this makes them a partial owner of the author's work? Yeah, Rowling won't lose a meal or miss a rent payment if this book goes to print. Another author might. Another author might not have the time and ample legal funds to fight a case like this. And some might not have the patience or mettle to deal with the kind of flak Rowling's getting from this; from the idiots who try to say her work is in the public domain to the people who call her greedy and a bitch and a lesbian for defending her intellectual property. It'd be far easier to just shut things down before a problematic person or group could start getting ideas.

This means fansites. This means fanfics. This means everything.

Which brings me to the next point--as an aspiring professional author, I'm even more scared. Am I gonna have to worry about cracking down on fan sites for fear that some jackass is gonna think that a list of quotes, a plot summary or two, and some essays he didn't even write warrants enough work that he should get a payout? Or that the same jackass will get up in front of a crowd and tell them that since they've contributed so much to the series (by being fans and all) that it no longer belongs to me? ("Jo has quit. She is done. We're taking over now." [@ 3:12]) I like fandom. I like fandom a lot. I think it's a great place to grow as a writer. But I don't want to have to worry.

A coworker introduced me to the work of mystery writer Ted Bell today. This did not go well. We spent a good fifteen minutes flipping through the book Spy and boggling at the sheer WTFery of the back ad copy, the prose, the premise, and the dialog. An explosion is searching for a lost river in the Amazon (No, seriously, that's what the back ad copy read), and some guy runs into cannibals who are really Islamic terrorists who are gonna do something awful to the USA as Mexico brings an army across its northern border to take over chunks of the USA, while every person talks like a fucking robot and spends pages telling each other things they should already know, all while the metaphors and similes roll about gnawing on themselves . . .

A single emoticon sums it up: D: Are you fuckin' kidding me?

There are so many things wrong with this book it's unreal. You can even tell by the first chapter up on amazon.com:

He saw painted faces atop long brown legs sprinting madly through the tangled undergrowth along the banks.

This just in: The Amazon basin's hiding a sekrit tribe of daddy longlegs-men!

And for writing something set in the Amazon, Bell's done no research.

A young member of his expedition had been standing in the river, the water just above his knees, urinating. A week later, he died in feverish agony. A candiru had swum up the boy's urine stream and become lodged in his penis. There, feeding on the host's blood, the tiny creature had grown to enormous size. The resulting infection led to the amputation of the organ and the boy's painful death.

So this little fish made a dramatic flying leap up a broken stream of urine, and with its incredible fishy aim managed to go straight up into some kid? Add in the other problems (Brazilians speaking Spanish instead of Portuguese? The guy can't see the sunlight through the jungle canopy but keeps track of the time by the phases of the moon? Nine days to a week?!) and this research junkie cranky editor feels that her intelligence has been insulted--though I'm still somewhat amused by the overly-dramatic outright posturing as Bell himself trolls his review boards. What a fucking loser.


Anyone feeling down about their writing abilities anymore?

Seinfeld's wife went on Oprah to promote her cookbook Deceptively Delicious. We got four calls within five minutes of people wanting this damned cookbook. People who'd seen the show were going nuts over it: It's supposed to be healthy, it's supposed to be a way to get kids to eat vegetables, kids are supposed to be saying that it's great, blah blah blah . . . So I was curious and started flipping through it.


I am fairly certain that if I ever pureed half a cup of cauliflower and mixed it into zen_of_nihilism's scrambled eggs, or put spinach in his brownies, that he wouldn't speak to me for a week.


Amazon.com's review boards have brought up that Deceptively Delicious shares the same idea and a number of the same recipes as a previously published book, The Sneaky Chef. Doesn't matter--Oprah's pimping it. We've been told the book's completely sold out of its first printing and is going into its second. There's no understanding some people.

~~

On the blatant plagiarism front, good ol' Lanaia Lee, god-awful poet and slipshod artist of the "WOE IS ME I R VICTM I'LL SUE YOU" type, has finally taken down the excerpt of David Gemmell's Dark Prince that'd she'd been claiming as her own work. In its place, she put . . . a terribly worded (also plagiaristic) reworking of David Gemmell's Dark Prince. One assumes this past week hasn't been a learning experience for her.

Word has it that The Powers That Be from Gemmell's estate have since taken care of things--so though Lee & associated webmasters were refusing to take down the work, saying that she didn't intend to plagiarize so they shouldn't have to remove it, it's finally done.

I wonder if she'll miss the attention.

Jane of Dearauthor.com was solicited by Lanaia Lee, who was all about her self-pubbed "book of her heart"--which just happened to be the late David Gemmell's Dark Prince with some name changes.

Dearauthor.com has since created a nice friendly list of Top 10 Tips for Plagiarists. In the meantime, Lanaia Lee is/isn't claiming the work as her own (with varying degrees of vehemence and grammatical WTFery), though she may/may not have had a ghostwriter who a) "wrote" the section(s) for $400 a month or b) told her how to "write" the sections.

Whatever.

The real rainbow sprinkles on this wank is the author's "agent" (though "selling" books to vanity presses or self-pubbing outfits makes her a scammer, not an agent), who's threatening to use lawsuits and evil Wicca against the people who talk bad about the author. I think. Her post is kinda incoherent. As follows, from the Makinglight report:

My name is Cheryl Pillsbury, published in my own right, I'm also the founder of AG Press which did the work on the book, 'Of Atlantis.' Come to find out from a deep search into this issue, we discovered a former literary agent she worked with on this book gave her advice on how to write the prologue. Come to find out, it is simular to his book. We didn't know this, we don't know him and never did until today. We do apologise for this, we are planning to do a re-write and remedey this issue.

For people who throw stones at glasses houses should be very cautious about speaking before they know the truth. Slander can cause a major lawsuit from the author and the publisher mentioned, because I will make sure they know about this and dear Jane will have nightmares in 10 fold. Yes, I'm Wicca.

I was just informed, the author has already set the motions for the lawsuit, be prepared. You were told by the lawyer not to post anything related to this issue, first amendement does not apply. I have made a copy of this site for proof, see you soon. Have a ducky day.

I'm getting a beer--the wank in Makinglight's comments is already full of glorious mockery.

So lj finally tried to explain themselves in lj_news.

They've given no explanation for the wait, given no explanation for why they started deleting HP fanartists (other than "there's a lot of misinformation regarding the two users who were permanently suspended on Friday"), given no apology for burr86's previous comments, linked to a definition of child pornography that states "This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults," outright refused to update their TOS (which is illegal, btw), refused to give warning to users with potentially offensive content (which they say they'll do in their current TOS), did not explain why they're deleting f_locked content when f_locked is supposed to be safe as per their current TOS, stated that sites/posts condoning the harm of others is illegal but still defended the pro-anorexia communities . . .

It just goes on and on.


Fuck this. Seriously. GJ (and possibly IJ) for me.