there's advantages of using something like a xbox controller: it's a piece of hardware with known faults, easily replaceable even in other countries, proven and well known control scheme, cheap, easy to interface with etc.
a lot was sketchy about the submarine but the game controller was fine.
Had to share this here because you're right and you should say it. It's incredible how many people came out of the woodwork as soon as AO3 was down and suddenly had no compunctions at all about screaming how much they love and need fanfic--on the AO3 twitter. Is it so much harder to do in the comment section?
At this point I don't care anymore if people call me entitled or think I'm out of line. If fanfic is so meaningful to you that you cannot go half an hour without, let alone 24h, then you can get over yourself long enough to write a fucking comment. No excuses.
"writing comments is hard and scary" yeah well GUESS WHAT so is writing fanfics. fandom as a community is dying, because it is instead treated as a COMMODITY, a CONSUMER PRODUCT. We're not asking for much. We're asking for a CONNECTION. We don't want to sell, we want to share.
You've shown your hand. You've admitted you cannot live without us. Now ACT LIKE IT. Go write a fucking comment.
For those who don’t know, I am the technical admin for a Minecraft server. Now I have slightly above average skills with computers, but nothing to call home about, since computers generally act weird around me. That said I was the best equipped for it so me and @the-seelie-court-official started it up together, me for technical stuff and Dion for community stuff.
Now let me tell you about the Haunting on the Minecraft server.
One of the things I wanted to set up was NPC shop keeps. Now these shop keeps look like players, and I can code them to type in chat and to walk around, but they aren’t players. They aren’t counted in the server list, they only say the words I’ve given them. One of these Npcs was Herb, the Herbalist. They sold plants.
:3
This was their skin, by the way.
Now one day herb stopped talking, this was odd so I tried to select them, like I had done so many times before, but it wouldn’t work. Whenever I tried I was met with error messages. I couldn’t select them, so I couldn’t delete them, I couldn’t move them, they had cut their strings and I the puppet master was forced to place an end portal beneath them and drop them into the void.
I thought this would be the last of it.
Fast forward a couple months and the server is up and running for public use. The players got into the end to find the end dragon missing, and upon building out to make an enderman farm we found herb. They were hovering, in the void. Easily accessible, I still couldn’t select them to change them or edit them so we just let them stay, floating above the yawning void that was meant to get rid of them.
Over time the server got more and more glitchy, chunks were being loaded by the thousand with only one or two people on at a time. After some serious sleuthing we (me and my team) found that the server recognized a ghost player. One that wasn’t listed when you pressed Tab, but was listed on the server side. The console of the server was filled with error messages almost constantly, cascading errors of Null, of Not Found despite the fact herb was right there.
Eventually it came to a head, the corn plants and slimefun crops went Wrong. Corrupted just like herb. And with fields of Steve heads staring back from what should be a farm we agreed that we would completely delete the world. The world that herb was in, that whole dimension. In hopes it would finally get rid of them.
We thought it worked, that we had finally be rid ourselves of this beast of my own creation. An hour later Herb Appeared at the world spawn. As if nothing had happened.
Finally I had to resort to burying them in a bedrock box directly under world spawn, because while I couldn’t move them I could break the blocks under them to make them fall. They sit down there trapped, vomiting error messages any time they are looked at or touched. Waiting for the chance to destroy what we have built.
The players on the server have made some fanart to Herb, the ghost the cutout of a player the only thing on the server I as it’s God and Owner can do nothing to stop. Do nothing to control.
@vultureworth , @hopolites
I didn’t expect COSMIC HORROR WHEN I SOUGT TO START A SERVER.
What then, if I burn down the servers of bisect hosting. What do we do when herb emerges from the ashes into the world at large, corrupting plant growth and ripping creation itself apart.
sometimes i just Cannot Deal with the little people in my phone and their unimportant blabbering because i am doing Important Things like reading or lazing around
You don’t own fanfics. They’re inherently public domain because they aren’t your IP. Agree or disagree with AI, there are no grounds for “protection” from AI because it isn’t your IP to begin with. That’s what you chose when you chose this medium
Oh dear.
Okay, you get an answer, because at least you took the effort to write your ask out properly, even if you are hiding behind the grey, sunglassed circle.
Do I, or any fanfic author for that matter, have any legal claims to our work? No, not really, no. (Although if someone took a fic, filed off the serial number--deleted the fandom specific elements--, and then had it published for financial gain, yeah, that would be a case.)
BUT
Fandoms are built on a social contract that says we respect each others work, the effort people put into their art. We don't steal or disrespect the work of our peers. By feeding people's fanworks to AI you both steal and disprect it, and we need to make people realize that before it's too late--before fandom falls apart, because there will be no more real, actual fanworks.
Also this is not true. You do in fact have the copyright to the specific writing you did in a fic, because that's not how copyright law works. Like this is not a grey area.
People who write IP content for corporations give up their copyright on a contractual basis--the company wants writing they can sell about characters/settings they own without getting entangled in royalty obligations etc, so they hire people. Who sign contracts saying they don't own what they write as part of that job.
That's why you don't own Star Wars stuff you wrote for Disney; you specifically agreed not to own it.
Writing for IP you don't own leaves you in a position where you can't legally monetize it (without taking out the Owned parts ad rebranding), but it absolutely does not automatically cede or void copyright. That is super not a thing.
SUPER not a thing, I cannot say this enough.
I can't sell my Batman fic, but neither can DC Comics without my duly authorized consent. Because they own Batman, but not the prose I composed about him.
Do not perform that kind of massive corporate overreach for them. Holy shit. Do they not own enough.
It’s fascinating that this misconception of copyright still exists. Haven’t we all seen the posts on here where authors beg fans to please not send them fanfic of their works? They’re not doing that because they feel like it, they do that because fans legally own their words and ideas, and an author who takes them even unintentionally can in fact end up in real legal trouble for taking something that’s not theirs. It doesn’t matter whether they own the canon.
this is for those who despair over seeing ships or tropes that make them uncomfortable while they do their little scrolly-scroll on ao3, acting like they aren’t responsible for their own internet experience
Also the mute function is now live / functional, so you can mute users who post fics that you actively dislike seeing (or are tired of seeing, or any reason really) and you won't see the works of anyone you mute so long as you are logged in!
(but yeah, these are great for blocking tags without having to mute an author, and the back button is a wonderful tool XD)
annaxmalina
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