Weasels in Space — OMG CHELLY'S HUMAN @kitcaboodle FOUND THIS AND NOW...

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
kitcaboodle
dransnake-archived

Alright kids, we're at the road stop of this long scrolling journey. Make sure to:

- Stand up and stretch

- Get a drink of water

- Grab something to eat if you're hungry

- Use the bathroom if you need it

- Unclench your jaw

You all done? Alrighty! Let's get back to the scrolling.

carpisuns

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grison-in-space

You know, one of the things I really love about this new Tumblr Blaze thing is that it makes the choice to put a bit of cash into sharing a post a little more widely a form of communication in and of itself: I want people to see this enough I'm willing to put a bit of money in it, I believe in sharing this thing, I really want you to see this and think about it and have a fucking emotion about this thing.

Sometimes that emotion is violent alarm--the president's shoelaces post is back, damn us all--and sometimes it's wild laughter and sometimes it's a bit of you fucker--

but sometimes also that emotion is warmth and connection and oh, right, it's a human on the other end of the screen. It's a human who really wants me to know they have a round soft cat named chelly, or that they hope I relax my jaw and take care of myself, or how to make this hellsite a hellhome, that I--a total stranger, an imaginary null, a cipher writhing in my bed procrastinating on admitting that my day has well and truly started--

this human living I know not where, doing I know not what, they hope I have a nice time. They share this stupid blue shitposty Internet with me and they want me to see a nice thing, or be nice to myself, or share a moment of joy. Our flickering screens connect us to unknown humans who, lacking any knowledge of one another, nevertheless wish each other well.

The Blaze feature is amplifying our ability to connect to one another. And that's not inherently about the structure of the platform, either: it's been possible to buy small chunks of ads for a bunch of platforms for like ten years. The thing that is setting this feature apart are really twofold: one, that @staff is not advertising and tailoring the feature to business (e.g. refusing to offer tailored ads that aim to particular, potentially profitable demographics), and two, that we as an online community are choosing en masse to use that offer to share little details about our lives and our blorbos and our desires with one another. Even if those desires revolve around making that fucking manscaping ads go away. We are choosing as a community to turn the ability to forcibly share a little soapbox time with one another into a means of communication rather than a means of commodification, and in these days of late Web 2.0 that's a very distinct choice indeed.

Moreover, by making these promoted Blaze posts into rebloggable chunks of information in their own right, we can collectively choose to amplify the really good ones: the ones that are sweet, the ones that are useful, the ones that are funny, the ones that are acidly mind melting--and sink the crappy ones, like the tradcath missionary ad I got a couple weeks ago, into the collective dross pit like the rocks they are. We can use the choice to Blaze a post as a form of communication and a component of the signal used to start a conversation and communicate more forcefully and enthusiastically and lovingly with one another than ever before--and because we can and are choosing to do so, we can experiment within the space on what that means and how we can explore the space. We've shifted ads from an exploitative framework to an exploratory one, and I think that's pretty neat.

And also, I really regret not reblogging that cat image from the other day that Blaze tossed into my feed, and if I find it again I'm gonna tell that person that chelly is adorable and the fluffiest roundest grey tabby I've ever seen, very shaped, and thank the poster for taking the time and cash to show her to me.

grison-in-space

OMG CHELLY’S HUMAN @kitcaboodle FOUND THIS AND NOW I FINALLY GET TO SHOW EVERYONE ELSE THEIR CAT

Look at her she is GREAT

a slightly scruffy grey tabby kitty with a little white nose snip and mittens curls up on a red rug. she is round and precious and content. underneath is written "hi everyone! :) here is another photo of my cat." in tags, the poster has added #her name is chelly! #she pulls the blanket onto the floor so she can nap on it. #personal #mineALT

In solidarity, here is a picture of my rotten cat Peter, who is helpfully bestowing his hairs on my clean and folded laundry. (you can’t see it in the picture, but that dryer is on and he is totally unfazed. monster.)

close up of a white cat with brown tabby patches and a little pink nose curled up on a folded fuzzy grey blanket. in the background you can see my washing machine. he looks utterly serene and very peaceful. in no way is he neatly folded like laundry should be.ALT

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starfoozle
felinefractious

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[Image Source: Messybeast]

A New Finnish Flavor of Feline Coat Coloration, “Salmiak,” is Associated With a 95-kb Deletion Downstream of the KIT Gene

Cats with a distinctive white hair pattern of unknown molecular cause have been discovered in the Finnish domestic cat population. Based on the unique appearance of these cats, we have named this phenotype salmiak (“salty licorice”). The use of a commercially available panel test to genotype four salmiak-colored cats revealed the absence of all known variants associated with white-haired phenotypic loci: full White (W), Spotting (Ws) and the Birman white Gloves associated (wg) allele of the KIT proto-oncogene (KIT) gene. Whole-genome sequencing on two salmiak-colored cats was conducted to search for candidate causal variants in the KIT gene. Despite a lack of coding variants, visual inspection of the short read alignments revealed a large ~95 kb deletion located ~65 kb downstream of the KIT gene in the salmiak cats. Additional PCR genotyping of 180 domestic cats and three salmiak-colored cats confirmed the homozygous derived variant genotype fully concordant with the salmiak phenotype. We suggest the newly identified variant be designated as wsal for “w salmiak”.

[Read Full Study]

farm-paws
farm-paws

Best of Terriers, Round 1

Best Common Terrier

Jack/Parson/Russell Terrier

Smooth Fox Terrier

Wire Fox Terrier

Scottish Terrier

Cairn Terrier

West Highland White Terrier

Patterdale Terrier

Jagdterrier

Rat Terrier

Common as in commonly known, not necessarily common in households.

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grison-in-space

no no I’m with you. lump those russell-type terriers. VARIABLE LANDRACES FOR EVERYONE

anyway they’re totally my favorites, although it’s much more likely that I’ll eventually have a Rat Terrier (a close second)

today we went to the Friends’ School Plant Sale and in addition to all the native plants and interesting vegetables we found my WHITE WHALE

the single plant that makes me feel HAPPY and SETTLED and AT HOME

the one plant I tried and failed to move to Minnesota with me from Texas

The NATIVE RED MULBERRY

BEHOLD MY INFANT

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(I have been looking for this damn tree for two years. Do I have a clear place for it yet? No. Is it fully capable of growing thirty five to fifty feet tall and fucking up some serious landscaping if I put it in a bad place? Sure is! Am I willing to make it a space, if necessary? Hell yes.)

Tay also found ramps and is nearly as delighted about those. I say “nearly” because I did not observe them lovingly stroking the ramps, which look much sadder than my happy little tree, but presumably they might have done when I wasn’t looking.

garden red mulberry tree myyyyy treeeeeeee
doomspaniels
doomspaniels

Tristan the black and white cocker spaniel, looking up at me, holding a scented hackey sack from a game of "Go Find"ALT

I don't mention it so much since he's been rock solid reliable at it, but all day every day Tristan is watching me for an opportunity to Helpful, handing me things I drop and bringing me things I left out.

Yesterday, though. Yesterday, I was getting out my TENS unit and felt something bump my hip as it fell off the counter. I looked, I saw nothing.

I called Tristan, and asked him, "hand?" (hand me a thing I dropped) He looked, saw nothing, and looked back up at me. I said, "where'd it go?" (something rolled where I can't reach, look for it)

Tristan valiantly returned to the empty bathroom floor and snuffled around. Long enough for Tristan's Fetch and Tug Buddy to wander over and ask about the noise, and to look himself and see nothing. Snuffle snuffle snuffle, maybe we'll never--Oh?

Tristan started opening his mouth like he was trying to pick something up, then came up with... one of the thin clear plastic sheets the TENS electrodes come on. Hoooooooleeeeey cats. That thing was *invisible*. GOOD JOB Tristan. Well DONE buddy.

grison-in-space

Oh WELL DONE, little man!

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The face of a little dog very Concerned that I am missing bedtime and torn between accepting small “snooze” bribes to let me finish my episode and bullying me into going to bed and COMPLETING the ROUTINE

tiiiillllyyyy it's Saturday night and i am allowed to make a MILDLY bad decision snooooooooze matilda australian cattle dog 1 year she's actually being pretty good at expressing her urgency to check the time right now kicking her little foot in the edges of my vision going “wooooooo” under her breath not painful or impossible to snooze but gently noting “hey you SURE” though at intervals but also juuuuust insistent enough that when the show is when the show is done I'm going to bed and indeed i am up on my feets completing the bedtime ritual now
beatrice-otter
w1ng3dw01f

Fellas, fellas

Why on earth are you BUYING PHYSICAL BOOKBOUND COPIES OF FANFICTION????

ACTUALLY WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOOKBINDING FANFICTION TO SELL?!?!?!

IF ANY OF YOU DO EITHER OF THESE THINGS, GET OUT!! I AM NEVER SPEAKING TO YOU AGAIN.

In all seriousness though, authors on AO3 have begun to pull their works off of the site to avoid getting sued by people stealing their works to make a pretty bound book for profit. Entire accounts could be shut down as well.

Listen, I’m all for saving favorite works by printing them out and putting them in a binder, or learning how to make a bookbound copy yourself and/or assembling one with a pre-made and purchased fancy binding for a fanfic FOR YOURSELF or AS A GIFT to someone, but making bindings with and putting fanfiction in it TO SELL is where I draw the line.

Literally the entire point of AO3 is that you can read it FOR FREE.

It is DISRESPECTFUL for people to make money off of hardbound copies because guess what, the original creators of these fics get nothing. We are literally only writing fanfiction for our own pleasure.

Buying and selling book-bound fanfiction is also ILLEGAL YOU DUMB SHITS. People who are selling content while claiming to be a book binder is a misconception of their services. Book binders make the covers and all that, not the actual content of the book. Selling fanfiction is also an immediate violation of copyright law / Creative Commons licenses. The original fan work will get erased from the internet.

Fanfiction is already a legal grey zone since they are works being written about are protected by copyright. Copyright holders can in fact go after writers as well as the person who sold the fanfiction.

This also goes for people who steal fanart and, claim it as theirs, and put a price on it.

Don’t make it worse.

rest assured, we can still write our fanfics and make our art.

Buying a binding for you to assemble onto your own fanfiction or fanfiction you printed for PERSONAL USE is fine.

HOWEVER,

Bookbinding fanfiction for profit is literally ruining things for everyone. DON’T.

If I see any of them on Etsy, I swear to god-

muffinlance

Updating my stance on this--fanbinding for gifts is always welcome on all my fanfiction, but please do NOT charge for materials/labor (and DEFINITELY not for profit), as I believe fanbinding should operate solely as a gift economy.

nianeyna

I have mixed feelings on this one. personally, I'm not interested in doing fanbinding for money, I want to do it for fun and getting money involved would make it not fun for me. But is it actually wrong to charge money for a fanbinding? I'm not sure I can justify that it is!

If there's nothing wrong with printing a fanfiction for yourself on your printer at home - which there isn't - then surely there's nothing wrong with printing a fanfiction for yourself at a print shop. like - ok, now a third party has technically profited off of this fanfiction, but it's not like you paid them for the privilege of reading the fic - you already had the fic and you could read it any time you wanted! you paid the print shop to print the fic.

If there's nothing wrong with paying a print shop to print a fic, surely there's also nothing wrong with paying another fan to print a fic. That would be an insane distinction to make - print shops don't have any special rights or qualities other than having a better printer than you!

If there's nothing wrong with paying another fan to print a fic, surely there's also nothing wrong with paying that fan to make the fic look nice after they've printed it. You're still not paying for the fic, you're paying for the typesetting and paper and ink and book board and the fanbinder's time and expertise in pulling all that stuff together.

I dunno folks. I'm also uncomfortable with the fanbinding market but when I interrogate my reasons for feeling that way I can't actually come up with any good answers. There's no step in the process where I can actually say, ok, here's where it becomes wrong.

Perhaps re-selling fanbindings is the problem? This feels slightly closer to true, but it kind of implies that once you've commissioned a fanbinding it becomes, like, a soulbound item you're never allowed to get rid of, which is pretty weird.

Maybe it's ok to work on commission, but you have to wait for individual people to ask you for a specific fic that they decided on, and you can't just pre-make them in bulk? This also feels more reasonable to me, but also a bit like hair-splitting.

I don't have a conclusion!

grison-in-space

I love this line of argument, speaking as someone whose visceral reaction is also “absolutely not, what are you people thinking, are you actually insane!!” I think it’s a great idea to be in the habit of thinking deeply about our kneejerk assumptions. In this case, I think it’s actually strengthened my initial conviction

If there’s nothing wrong with paying a print shop to print a fic, surely there’s also nothing wrong with paying another fan to print a fic. That would be an insane distinction to make - print shops don’t have any special rights or qualities other than having a better printer than you!

I think this is the crux of your argument, and I actually think it’s totally wrong because of the way that print shops have historically worked. When you mention there being nothing wrong with paying a print shop to print a fic, you’re imagining a print-for-hire outfit like Lulu, right? You want a book, so you show up with a manuscript and you get a book out?

But that’s only the case now because digital printing means that presses can be be adjusted to create new books in a matter of minutes. Traditionally, what happens is that a press—that is, a bookmaking outfit, a printer in the professional sense—makes contracts with authors to produce “runs” of tens or hundreds or thousands of copies, bargaining that enough of them will sell to pay for the expense of the printing.

This is what became what we now call, in American English, a publisher or a press. And bookbinding for profit is almost inextricable from being a press. Now, the folks in question are getting really into the art of bookbinding as an art in its own sake, which it is, so they may not have considered themselves as a press in this way.

But they are. A very boutique press, a press that might only create one or two copies per run, but nonetheless: a press.

Now, boutique presses of this type are also nothing new, especially serving “specialty” or special interest communities. They have to follow the same rules, however, as any other press or publisher: they are not allowed to use the text, words, and writings of any manuscript or author without permission, either directly from that author or because the work is out of copyright. That’s literally where the word copyright comes from: who has the right to copy this work?

So this ethical decision hinges on what you consider the finished works themselves: are they artworks, or are they books? That is, the only possible defense against the argument that bookbinders within the fandom community are fundamentally presses is to argue that bookbinders are actually artists that produce individual artworks that transform the meaning of the original text, and so that they are doing something different than simply printing very loving, high quality, wonderful copies of the text.

That’s a reasonable argument, because I think that bookbinders’ work certainly is a form of art. It is easy for me to imagine fanbindings that comment on, inform, argue with, and otherwise exist in dialogue with the text as artworks in their own right. After all, we’ve all seen the ways that different editions of published books can inform readings of those books, even if the text doesn’t change. Covers, copy size, illustrations, and typesetting can all render books with very different readings, after all.

But that’s the crux: we have literal centuries of precedent of ethics as well as law that considers a for profit publisher, even if artistic and very lovely copies, as a press that must gain the agreement and consent of the content author in order to sell the words. And that consent cannot ethically exist. Fandom does not exist in a gift economy as aggressively as it does simply because fans love one another so much. It exists this way because this is the legal boundary that has been established in order to protect fans against claims of copyright infringement, particularly between fans and novelists who might feel compelled to defend boundaries of their intellectual property fiercely or else lose their livelihood.

Anne Rice brought legal action against fanfiction writers as a novelist and writer. Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffrey and Misty Lackey and a number of others tried to crush online fanfiction in their communities because they were protecting their own copyrights over profit stemming from their work, because it was work they were engaging in as their literal livelihood. The OTW has fairly successfully argued for safety for fanfiction writers based on the legal theory that fanfiction is inherently not for profit.

Fanfiction writers cannot profit from their work while retaining that protection against legal action, which copyright owners have a lot of incentive to defend: if there’s money in the product, they might well be legally entitled to a cut. Which puts the fanfiction author, whether they initially know it or not, at fairly grave legal risk of getting involved in a lengthy and expensive (or, at the very least, frightening) lawsuit.

And for-profit presses cannot advertise and offer this work for sale without putting the fanfiction author at risk: there’s profit, and there’s profit based on the fanfiction author’s artwork, and that artwork is based on the intellectual property of the copyright owner.

I do think it can be ethical for a press to accept money for a book of a fanfiction in two cases, neither of which I think particularly appeal to folks in the fanbinding community thinking about selling their art. Either you have to make the case that the service of the press/bookmaker is not the decision of the press (“we print whatever you give us,” ala Lulu, at which point the purchaser is responsible for the disposition of the books themselves), or you have to make the case that the book is a work of transformative art executing an artistic concept that is totally unlike a press for reasons. In the first case, a good bookbinder is working in some dialogue with the text they are printing; if they weren’t, they’d be in the same business as Lulu and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. In the second case, you’d have to make one hell of a case to pull it off, probably with runs along the line of tens of copies or fewer, and you’re really using the extent of your own labor to make the argument that it’s not a press—not a great selling point for a potential income stream. @theshitpostcalligrapher is working in about the same minimum level of transformation contributed by their expertise and artistry that we’re talking, and it’s not a coincidence that so much of their work is relatively shortform—and most of it is contributed by internet denizens who are not thinking about potentially making a living off their skill at running our mouths, as opposed to fanfiction writers that may or may not dream about becoming novelists—often with plenty of success!

Especially in SFF and YA novelists, there’s so so so much crossover between fandom and published work that you can potentially fuck over someone’s dream profession by drawing too much of the wrong kind of attention at the wrong time. That goes even for people who have no intention of filing the serial numbers off their fanfiction or ever publish it, but who want to hone their writing skills with an eye to publishing that, by the way, which is so incredibly common for writers to do these days. Even if you’re enough of a sociopath not to care about the writing dreams of the author you’re printing work from, those are exactly the stakes that can get intellectual property owners incredibly aggressive about defending the boundaries of “their” territory. That means they can impose consequences if they feel threatened—and if they do, they have to go through the fanfiction author to get to you, because you’ve theoretically attained the author’s permission to print their work for profit.

Thank you for laying this out so well; I’m even more exasperated about this myself now! Fic authors, if you were uncertain about granting permission for for-profit fanbinding production of your work, I heavily encourage you to abstain: allowing this might well open you up to legal action even if all you do is verbally allow someone to obtain profit from your fanfiction work. I really appreciate the structure on which to probe my own line of thinking.

for profit fan binding media fandom
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