Malcolm F. Cross

It me.

As I contemplate ways of posting fiction online, I find myself feeling... more anxious about people ripping me off, than I used to.

I have suffered piracy, professional plagiarism (which people got paid for while I didn't), being used for AI training...

... Part of me wants to use DRM.

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YouTube video by GnC Films Cutting Edge: Episode 46 - Enter The Dragon

This video on the various UK versions of Enter the Dragon will also be of interest. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oaS...

Annoyingly, I have to quote this, as I can't reply to it. The reason no one remembers it was because it originated from the 1970s, and there was a moral panic over martial arts and Bruce Lee films and feared people were going to be using throwing stars and nunchukas to attack people.

Yes, but, as I have often pointed out: You are much wiser than I am on these matters. (On MANY matters.)

I guess otters are just more naturally able to flow with the river, while rats must struggle to drag their pizza up and down stairs...

Yeah. And when first-drafting and figuring out what the heck you're doing with a text, you're giving YOURSELF hooks to grab onto and work with for further refinement and redrafting.

So, like. It definitely has a place and a purpose, but, personally, not a lot of places I'd choose it for final work.

-- the partner has their own to bring.

I've basically noticed this while running TTRPGs - and sometimes it's a case of getting more simulationist until people are feeling their way into a zone they can work with.

I think it's also a good default mode for early drafts for the same reason.

FFRP style writing has the same problem, in a sense:

Because it's attempting to collaborate 'blindly', simulationism exists to ensure that the collaborator has something, somewhere, to work on. There's a shared foundation to work from. A personal stylistic 'voice' risks losing that unless --

I think the hyper-simulationist-add-more-data-to-make-more-verisimilitude is really apparent in porn, but as is so often the case, porn condenses larger artistic problems down to a level of ironic purity.

Hyper-simulationism is a symptom of 'I don't know what I'm trying to say', killing voice.

Two sweet tiny girls on my train are playing a clapping game with the words:

Spin around!
Touch the ground!
Kick your boyfriend out of town!

In the meanwhile, think kindly of your creatives who make stuff you enjoy.

Treat them the way you'd treat anyone who invites you into their internal world in the hospitable hope you find enjoyment, relaxation, safety, and good things there.

Don't treat what they give you as 'content'.

-- that knows your recipes' and never speak to you again.

It feels fucked up.

I don't think DRM is really going to protect me from feeling like that, although it might make it less frequent.

I wish I knew how to be brave enough to cope with those feelings, instead. Maybe I'll figure it out.

I don't like feeling like that. I don't like feeling like something I've made is being exploited while I'm being pushed aside.

It feels like going all out to offer someone hospitality - making a home-cooked meal and all - and having them cancel then text you 'it's okay, there's a delivery app--

It is an awful feeling.

Jumping through hoops to try and integrate DRM or whatever, signing a thousand contracts with awful megacorporations, or (if I had the resources) hiring a legion of lawyers to try and undo that breach of my rights...

... Becomes very attractive, when I feel like that.

-- me feel like my existence as a creative worker/writer/artist, intrinsically, doesn't matter.

The content matters. Having 'the thing I made' matters.

But it feels like I stop mattering. It feels like any consideration of who I am, what I made, what I wanted to do, is being actively rejected.

-- to fill a few pages in print so they had a product to sell to someone else, and my artistic intents and efforts did not matter.

Piracy, plagiarism, the AI training, all feel the same way.

If you've encountered and loved my work through piracy, I'm glad! But I'm just saying... piracy makes --

I worked really hard with an editor at that venue to make it a better story.

Having that story ripped off felt like all the effort I put into it didn't matter, my work didn't matter, the editorial efforts didn't matter.

The only thing that mattered, it felt like, was that my story was a good way--

I spent months on a short story (Pavlov's House) only for it to emerge that a foreign market stole it, translated it, published it in print, and didn't even fail to pay me - they didn't even TELL me. I found out months later.

I worked really hard to place that story with a particular venue.

-- deliberate choices, and those choices are word order, packaging, presentation, everything.

Getting ripped off in any way is taking those choices away from me. It feels like my creative effort is being washed off, turning something I care about into something I have no connection to.

DRM is attactive. It says, 'oh, that bad feeling you had when you got ripped off? You won't have to be afraid of that now.'

Getting ripped off feels awful. I want control over my work, because, well... it's my work. I made it. That's part of the point of MY WORK.

I am making something by making --

As I contemplate ways of posting fiction online, I find myself feeling... more anxious about people ripping me off, than I used to.

I have suffered piracy, professional plagiarism (which people got paid for while I didn't), being used for AI training...

... Part of me wants to use DRM.

>>

He worked with artificial limbs for decades. Then a lorry ripped off his right arm. What happened when the expert became the patient? An experienced clinician in prosthetics, Jim Ashworth-Beaumont found himself the perfect guinea pig for a radical new option for amputees

There are days like, 'I need to finish writing my sci-fi before it's histroical'.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

This is wild.
I can't believe all of us annoying nostalgia millennials were right: cartoons actually used to be better before the efforts of this group dumbed everything down and made that defacto for cartoons in general. How interesting.
I hate how one little group can destroy so much

Title: Doubts cast on another beloved inspirational tale Panel 1 Our investigations team has learned that the names "Jack" and "Jill" were invented to conceal a less than salubrious past. (image of smiling Jack and Jill with a bucket) Panel 2 The pair claim to have climbed a hill to "fetch a pail of water" but we found a number of water sources much closer to their cottage. (image of a water pump, atwo fountains and a drinking trough) Panel 3 (image of a book with the title "WELL: a memoir" by Jill) Jill now concedes that her account of Jack's fall and her own "Tumbling After" was intended to convey feelings, not "Cold facts". Panel 4 Multiple medical experts expressed Surprise that a broken crown was successfully treated with "Vinegar and brown paper. (Image of Jack with is head wrapped in brown paper beside an xray of his damaged skull).

My cartoon for this weekend’s @theguardian.com books.

Thanks, Tamiya-san We’re saddened to report the passing of Shunsaku Tamiya, the man behind the Tamiya line of models. What was surprising about this, though, is how many of our readers and …read more

Thanks, Tamiya-san

This is one of the things that drives me crazy about the Online Safety Act, aside from the ethical questions.

There are beautiful solutions available to us. (If you think math can be beautiful - I do.)

The solutions being used are clumsy and only profit companies that charge for each verification.

A Redditor asks: “Can’t zero knowledge proof solve the privacy concerns about the UK online safety law?” – my response… Hi. I love your question. For disclosure I have been working on digital civil liberties around encryption since 1991 and I have been working on age verification since 2016. The really short version…

A Redditor asks: “Can’t zero knowledge proof solve the privacy concerns about the UK online safety law?” – my response…
https://alecmuffett.com/article/113892
#AgeVerification #MoralPanic #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #ZeroKnowledgeProof #reddit #zkp

No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissi...

The UK’s Online Safety Act doesn’t make kids safer online—it just censors the internet and invades everyone’s privacy.

-- historically been dens of sexual predation BECAUSE they're part of the free-for all and the OSA ensures it's still trivial for adults to impersonate kids.

Creating a 'protected' class of user who are less tracked than 'regular' users isn't effective, is technically harder, and more disruptive.

The thing that struck me from my lapsed-computer-science-studies POV is that the act is EXACTLY backwards, for protecting kids.

It creates walled off areas where 'harm' and 'adults' go, and everything else is a free for all.

The kids get placed in the free for all.

Online kids spaces have --