With the whole "Markiplier making his own DVD copies of Iron Lung to sell" thing, it's been fascinating and slightly concerning how many people seem to genuinely believe that if a physical release isn't coming from a giant corporation, it must automatically be a bootleg.
Look at me.
Look me directly in the eyes while I say this.
You can just make things.
You can simply create something and put it into the world.
That's allowed.
People have been doing it for centuries.
They sell blank VHS tapes. They sell blank DVDs. Blank CDs. You can buy flash drives by the bucketful if you really want to. If you create a movie, an album, a game, a documentary, or a four-hour video essay about the mating habits of fictional space goblins, you are entirely permitted to put that thing on physical media and sell it.
That is not piracy.
Piracy is taking something that belongs to someone else and reproducing or distributing it without permission.
If I buy a DVD of a movie, I own that copy of the movie. I do not own the movie itself. I didn't acquire the rights to duplicate it, press a thousand copies, and start selling them out of my garage like I've become the regional distributor for Warner Bros.
The copyright, distribution rights, and intellectual property still belong to whoever created it or whoever legally acquired those rights.
If I start burning copies of Iron Lung and selling them myself without Markiplier's permission, that's piracy.
If Markiplier, who made and owns the rights to Iron Lung, burns copies and sells them himself, that's just distribution.
He's the rights holder.
He's distributing his own work.
If you made it, if it came from your own mind, your own work, your own time, your own resources, then congratulations. You own the thing. You don't need a corporation to bless it with legitimacy.
The corporation is not what makes it real.
The fact that it exists is what makes it real.
I think we've accidentally spent so many years living inside a world dominated by mass-produced media that some people have developed the strange assumption that all media emerges from a factory somewhere. As if films naturally occur in shrink-wrapped plastic cases and descend from the heavens aboard a pallet truck.
But independent artists have been burning discs, dubbing tapes, printing books, pressing records, and mailing things directly to people for longer than many of us have been alive.
It's not r*pe, it's rape. It's not su*cide, it's suicide. Not unalive, dead. The backbone needs to be reintroduced en masse because softening the blow of these concepts with advertising language does absolutely nothing but allow people unaffected by them to feel not even a sting of what they can do, prompting inaction.
And it's been proven that on certain websites, you don't even face a repercussion for using the words as they are. People just started censoring themselves because they feared the potential lack of views and likes and followers which is so nasty itself.
I attended an anti-suicide seminar in college. One of the big takeaways from it was that stigmatizing suicide increases the rate of suicide, because people who are feeling suicidal feel like they can't ask for help. Every time I see babytalk garbage like 'unalive', I think of that.
god i’m not even through one episode of paranormal home inspectors and it rules, this lady thought she was being haunted by the wails of the restless dead but she was just listening to raccoons fuck in her attic
Fun fact a scientist who is very not spiritual or superstitious began seeing corner eye hallucinations and feeling intense fear and a presence in his lab around the same time that everyone else in the building was suddenly reporting it haunted.
Determined, he found that the “hauntings” stopped when the industrial air conditioning unit, that had just recently been installed, was turned off. We’ve found that measurable micro vibrations in a structure cause immense fear, and a feeling of a presence and corner eye hallucinations – just like when you watch a scary movie alone at night and you see things move in the corner of your eye or are afraid to go in the cellar because you’re convinced someone’s in there.
Why?
Because many members of our species built homes in and around cliffs and caves for tens of thousands of years. And it’s likely that these certain shaky vibrations give us intense fear and a need to move far away because that would have saved our lives if the cave were collapsing or unstable.
You’ll notice it’s always falling apart, dilapidated homes that are “haunted” - or very very old restored homes. These places might just be slightly structurally unsound. That’s all.
That’s infrasound, sounds that are below 20hz, or the limit of normal human hearing. Things that produce infrasound in nature include severe weather, earthquakes, volcanoes, tigers, alligators, rhinoceros; also known as things that can kill people. We developed an evolutionary sense of dread when our brains perceive sounds we cannot hear. The vibrations from infrasound can also vibrate the eye causing visual hallucinations.
You know what also causes infrasound? A LOT of machines, especially large industrial ones. There’s a reason haunted house stories started popping up in post industrialization. That scientist was Vic Tandy and he wrote about it in a the paper Ghosts in the Machines
“Vic Tandy, experimental officer and part-time lecturer in the school of international studies and law at Coventry University, along with Dr. Tony Lawrence of the University’s psychology department, wrote in 1998 a paper called “Ghosts in the Machine” for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Their research suggested that an infrasonic signal of 19 Hz might be responsible for some ghost sightings. Tandy was working late one night alone in a supposedly haunted laboratory at Warwick, when he felt very anxious and could detect a grey blob out of the corner of his eye. When Tandy turned to face the grey blob, there was nothing.The following day, Tandy was working on his fencing foil, with the handle held in a vice. Although there was nothing touching it, the blade started to vibrate wildly. Further investigation led Tandy to discover that the extractor fan in the lab was emitting a frequency of 18.98 Hz, very close to the resonant frequency of the eye given as 18 Hz by NASA. This, Tandy conjectured, was why he had seen a ghostly figure—it was, he believed, an optical illusion caused by his eyeballs resonating. The room was exactly half a wavelength in length, and the desk was in the centre, thus causing a standing wave which caused the vibration of the foil.“
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck
"touchy" is also a word! however it's mostly used for things that aren't objects, like subjects of conversation. it either means "oversensitive and irritable" or "requires careful handling/wording, delicate"
i think the second one works well for our hypothetical object. so we can use that.
therefore, the Default Object is:
beautiful
makes a horrendous sound
smells absolutely awful
is very fragile
tastes delicious
and i still cannot think of anything that matches this
Context for anyone who is wondering: Lamine Yamal's parents won an UNICEF raffle for a charity photoshoot in which Barça players posed with kids, and 5 month old Lamine happened to get 20yo Messi. Which is like. Literally insane
rocky may be the size of an earth dog but he is 168 kilos and strong as hell whereas grace is a wet paper bag. one of these two is being carried by the other and it is not the one you think
