Regarding Hang This Up In Your Time Machine - it's Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics who had the idea, and sells the poster (and T-shirt).
I would say something insightful, except that I can't stop wondering what "rhododontonychal" means.
i assumed that the "egyptian" came from deliberately spread lies (that zaidi is egyptian, not that "egyptian" is a currently-spoken language). now i, like you, have no idea what to make of it.
Kittekaat got fooled by the people pushing the "egyptian" "smear" and subsequently made a mildly amusing pop culture reference incorporating this misapprehension?
A little piling-on on Vree @94:
Then you'll be fine with foreign journalists hurling shoes, rotten apples, etc. at Obama and all other future presidents, right? Or does this amnesty you're granting only extend to those who attack US officials you don't like?
If someone threw shoes, rotten apples, tomatoes, snowballs, bags of popcorn, or anything else of that kind at Obama, I would expect the punk to get firmly escorted out and thrown in the lockup overnight. I would consider that a proportionate response to the office. Disappearing the guy and subjecting him to beatings is not.
In any event, it's worth considering what would have happened to this Shi'a journalist if he'd tried something like this in Saddam's day. Things are better in Iraq, much as it might pain some to admit.
Sorry, that's the textbook EEBC failure. Don't do it again.
James D. Macdonald @11: Oh, snap!
...and that's why "the other guys are in charge now!" is not an excuse.
(Hey, why does the "Spelling reference" have an entry for Barack? People misspell that?)
Technically, the Republicans didn't/don't control Congress this year. Not that that's an excuse, mind, but it's not exactly a slam-dunk.
I have no comment on the recipe, but I find it vaguely amusing that no-one has linked Ursula Vernon's "St. Wombus and the Zucchini" yet...
Off-topic (can you be off-topic in an open thread? I haven't read the comments, is what I mean): I don't know if anyone else is still annoyed about danah boyd on Wikipedia, but here's a little something to raise your blood pressure - bill bissett got his name lowercased, no argument. (Of course, if I'm any judge, mentioning it will just mean that Wikipedia will "fix" bill bissett.)
I haven't bookmarked any guides to writing poetry (although for a while I was reading a book on the subject - Forms of Verse: British and American by Sara deFord and Clarinda Harriss Lott, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1971 - that I thought was rather good), but in terms of collections of poetry, "Representative Poetry Online" from U. Toronto has long been a favorite site of mine, mostly because of their superb site design.
(That was one sentence? Dang.)
A couple other sites I had bookmarked: Humanities Web (poems under "Literature"), The Wondering Minstrels (a collection by someone at Rice University), and Poets' Corner.
Back to the OP: did anyone else notice that they intentionally omitted the recommendation that there be oversight and that there be no unilateral action by members of the committee?
Long, long belated reply to 205:
You've got a point – my wording is incorrect. I should have said, "[...] it should be restricted to precisely as long a term as would make equivalent the marginal harm done to the public by monopoly and the marginal good provided by encouraging the creation of new works" – a phrasing which basically mean "maximize the public good". I've added a note to the post.
#120, 121, 123, 124, 127, 129: First off, I think Marilee at #117 is right – raped is exactly how she feels about people making fanfic from her work. In fact, I think that's all she meant by the comparison – just a description of her feelings.
But like I said before, I think the comparison should be "fanfic == sex".
There are several good points of correlation. When the story is published, if it's attractiv... err, good, a lot of people will develop crushes on it. They'll want to act on those crushes – it's fun. And there's nothing wrong with doing so, either; it's a perfectly natural impulse, even if it's not widely acknowledged in public. But when there's more than one person involved, you gotta take consent into account. And some people won't be okay with it.
I can't speak for Jo Walton (and since she's left for the sake of her peace of mind, I don't think she'll be elaborating herself), but I don't get the impression she feels fanfic is evil. Look at her first sentence in #96:
I can't respond to all of you who are asking politely if I mind if they write fanfic in worlds I'm not still actively writing or whatever, because it all sounds like "Do you mind being raped just a little bit?"
The metaphor here is pretty clearly "fanfic == sex". Jo Walton is saying no, and even if you really love her books, and really enjoy doing it, and even though a lot of other people don't mind (or are flattered, even), she doesn't want it, and would be hurt by it. The 'evil' is the dismissal of her feelings, not the act.
(Packbat here – glad my summary was helpful!)
Sorta-replying to C.E. Petit: if trademark tarnishment is the more important objection to fanfic, then what should fanfic writers be doing to avoid it? Would disclaimers along the lines of the (relatively pointless) ones criticized above be helpful?
Not to mention that the guys in Die Hard weren't even terrorists.
I knew Wikipedia was broken when I found people deleting hundreds of articles a day.
It's a great idea, and it's useful, but there aren't enough hours in the day to both know something and convince Wikipedia to include it.
Wow, 142 comments and I still can name five more candidates: Red Planet, The Island (debatable), Deja Vu (ditto, but bonus points for extreme recentness), and The Postman and I, Robot (and bryan@126 goes triple here – these are movies based on the core concepts, not film translations).
Also, I'm going to defend Aliens making the list: I saw it years before I saw Alien, and it stands on its own merits.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2008 | 8 |
| 2007 | 11 |
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2005 | 2 |
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