December Days 2022 #31: Thoughtful

[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]

thoughtful (comparative more thoughtful, superlative most thoughtful)

Demonstrating thought or careful consideration.

Demonstrating kindness or consideration for others.

( The Grand Finale! )

Last out, and on time - Late December 02022

[Last one before the calendar year rolls over! Thanks for another year of interesting links.]

Good day. Assuming they haven't already been nuked at this point, if you're even a moderately popular author who writes in popular fandoms, you may want to check and see if someone has reposted your fic as supposedly their work to make a dollar. kokomroily posted about yet another scam Kindle shop stealing fic and pairing it with stolen fanart or official art, this one called Plushbooks (which has other names as well). Peruse as you like, and also, if you see your work, feel free to sling the DMCA takedown notice, properly formed, at everyone who needs it.

How do shops like this open up? Well, as Cory Doctorow (eventually) explains in Why None of My Books are Available on Audible, Amazon has gotten to the point where it believes that if something doesn't exist on one of its sites or services, it must be because the author hasn't put it there yet. So whomever uploads it to their service must be the author with the right to license and make money on it, assuming they don't already have an official version they can compare it against.

So the fic you provide on AO3, specifically with the idea in mind that nobody should make money on it (which is one of those things that also helps keep the people who might otherwise take you to court for unauthorized use of their IP) becomes the fodder for a scammer to upload as books to their Amazon store. This situation is actually one of the things the DMCA takedown notice was made for, so crush them there and see if you can't get them to fork over any money they made selling your worth without authorization.

( The usual amount of weird things )

Last for tonight, Black Metal Rainbows, more than 100 tracks of the darker, grindier side in support of LGBTQ+ charities.

And the fundamental problem of people who want to make online communities of consumers - people use the tools to make online communities instead, and the consuming part often happens as an afterthought. Depending on the cultural mores of the space you are in, even if it's a space that declares itself to be against vulture capitalism (or all capitalism), there's always the potential trap of believing that there are technological solutions to all problems. This isn't true, and worse, solutions like "go start your own instance" often reinforce problems that need fixing instead of fixing them.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)