Sidious, Snoke and Salacious B Crumb’s Sarcastic and Sassy Situation Saloon (Fanfic Social Thread)

Socially frustrated but otherwise fine

 

I've got a new job . The place I work is re-organizing and my position suddenly disappeared from the org chart. But...I got a new one, and a new supervisor. On one hand I hate do have to work with something I'm not educated to. (There was a reason why I took a Ph.D after all.) On the other hand, I have not been allowed to use my education for years now, I've just been an overpaid slave for someone outside the location and with a supervisor who have changed priorities twice a week so it has been impossible to do anything properly.

So when we were informed about the changes my equally frustrated co-worker and I took a high five (without touching of course) and happily fled to the new department. Well, I assume the changes will not be effectuated until after summer vacation but at least we have something to look forward to.

And, just as this matter had settled an old aquintance called me (for some other reason though) and when I informed him about the upcoming changes he stated : "Let's keep in touch, I've been working on something here..." My understandig was that he is investigating the possibilities of starting a consultant company. And this is within my field of education. I'll be waiting curiously... I don't mind my new internal job. Doing something else is OK at least for a period of time, but of course I primarily want to work within my own field.

 

Since @Anedon likes the Thousand Sons and there may be others here that find this interesting:

 

Here's a direct link to the section of the TOS in question: https://disneytermsofuse.com/english/#Submissions-User-Generated-Content-DMCA-Takedown-Notices

IANAL, but I don't see anything of concern in there.

• Part A is something we've known for a very long time: they can't even look at unsolicited manuscripts, etc. because of copyright concerns. (Note that by having this policy, they implicitly acknowledge that fanfic might in fact be legal and copyrightable.)
  
• Part B is long and filled with scary sounding legalese, but it's basically standard boilerplate material in the TOS of almost any company's site that relies on user-generated content. Facebook, YouTube, etc. all have similar clauses as the first three paragraphs of Part B.
• Paragraph four of Part B sounds scary to fanfic authors, but would make perfect sense in the context of a potential contest where users might be able to submit potential backstories or similar for a chance to have their submission become canon. Before Disney, Lucasfilm had a similar contest running for a while with various background characters in the movies. I wonder if we could see that return?
• Paragraph five basically says "we have moderators to make sure you don't abuse the rules." No issue there.
• Part C is boilerplate stuff about DMCA takedown notices that again can be found in the TOS of virtually every site that hosts user-generated content.

Basically, most of it is standard terms. Paragraph 4 of Part B sounds scary, but there are legitimate reasons for it, and understand that there are also legal reasons why a company like Disney will never be able to actually authorize people to write fanfic without requiring the authors to hand over the copyright. If they did throw the door open without taking the copyrights, they would practically lose all control over the franchise because then fanfic authors would be able to sell their work legally, and frankly a lot of fanfic is better than a lot of the licensed books.

This paragraph basically says that if they do authorize it in a limited case, then works created for that case (like a contest) belong to them. Everything else, like all the stories here, is unauthorized as it always has been and lives in a questionable gray area as it always has. What we do here might be illegal, or might be fair use, and no court has ever ruled one way or the other. And Disney, at least, is smart enough to recognize that, especially in the age of social media, poking that hibernating bear would be an absolute public relations disaster.

 

Happy Mother's day to the moms here!

Yeah, I wouldn't be too worried. The tumblr doesn't seem to quite understand Disney is covering their own butts basically. It seems like the extension of the well known "owners of media can't look at fan-generated content for fear of copyright infringement." I haven't read much of it but it seems basically so if Disney creates a new story similar to an existing fanfic/fan generated theory/etc, that fan-creator can't sue. It sounds like a big bad company being greedy, but it makes business sense (and it makes sense for contests and stuff - I've seen similar legalese for contest submits); with Disney owning so much and so much fanfic and other fan-generated content being made about it, SOMEONE is bound to write a fanfic or make a fan-theory video that gets it spot on.

And yeah, as JC said, it's important to note that fanfic and the like has ALWAYS been in a questionable grey area in terms of legalities. Disney and other owners obviously don't want us profiting off THEIR creations, but they are generally fine with us doing it - or at least know better than to bother fighting the battle to stop it.

 

Why is it snowing? Isn’t a pandemic and Murder Hornets enough?!

 

Right?? You have my sympathies, it snowed here the last few days too. Like, hello, it's May. MAY! Last Sunday we were walking around in T-shirts getting sunburns! WTF!

 

Down here in southwest Ohio, we had a squall line of thunderstorms come through late this afternoon that uprooted a few trees and brought down some power lines.

 

Make you all jealous but it’s a beautiful temperate day here in sunny Queensland. The sun is shining, there isn’t a cloud in the sky. It’s an amazing 23C or 73F.


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I had to Google, “Where is Queensland?”

 

Eastern coast of Australia. Think long sandy beaches, tropical forests, strange, exotic wildlife, men with mullets, beer, swearing and drop bears.



Oh and bin chickens. Always the bin chickens.

 

Bin Chickens -


Also I wouldn’t watch that if you want to eat anytime soon. Bin chickens are not the cutest Australian animals


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Bin Chickens in the US are often called Sky Rats (gulls not the white Ibis). We don't have drop bears, but there is Big Foot and the Chupacabra.

 

Congratulations on the new job @CaraJinn! It sounds like that will be an improvement over what you were doing! And yeah, wanting to work in your own field is certainly understandable! You worked hard to get education in that field, you want to use it!

I'm also not worried about the Disney TOS, Disney knows where their bread is buttered and so long as you don't try to profit off their stuff, they are going to leave you alone. People who work in publishing, authors, etc. aren't and can't read fanfic. Some of the SW authors have been (and maybe still are in other fandoms) fanfic authors, but they aren't going to risk it.

On the topic that sometimes ideas are the same by accident, I was in a SW RPG in college, it was set in the Old Republic (as in Darth Bane was our big bad at the end of a 3 year long campaign). I can't remember what it was now, but out GM had us play something out and then a year or so later something almost exactly like that happened in one of the books. There was clearly no way someone could have stolen it from him, it was an in person RPG. But it was kinda funny and he jokingly claimed that he'd given them that idea.

 

So its my four year aniversary at the boards today and looking back I can say that defenetly quite a lot happened during this time, both in RL but also SW/fanfic realted. Defenetly had a great time here at the boards so thanks to all of you guys for that.

 

We have seagulls near the beach (chip stealing mafia) and we use our wedge tailed eagles to keep the city pigeons down. Our kookaburras will snatch the food from your hand as you go to put it in your mouth and they work in teams so that you are guaranteed not to eat any of your picnic.

We don’t have Bigfoot but we do have bunyips. Also no El Chupacabra types either. We do have rumours of big cats though down in the southern states. Not really the same.

Thing about Australian animals are they are really cute and cuddly (bilby, quokka) or they want to kill you (snakes, blue ringed octopus, stonefish, conefish) or sometimes just for fun - both! (Koalas and red kangaroos, wombats)

If you ever want to see something both adorable and terrifying search for the video of a koala chasing down the quad bike.

 

When I was a teenager I went to the beach and brought a 2 pound family bag of Doritos. I was in the water when I saw this seagull trying to fly away with my bag of chips. By the time I got out of the water the seagull dropped it a few times and then it busted open and then a flock of gulls swooped down and got bird spit all over my chips. Stupid Sky Rats. What is weird about seagulls is they are everywhere. I see them in landlocked states.

 

Several years ago a seagull performed a fly-by pooping on me on the midway at Cedar Point.

 

@jcgoble3 , like of solidarity. Unknown bird managed to hit my glasses once. Yuck.

 

It could be worse. Remember how Fabio got hit by a goose while he rode a rollercoaster?

 

I once got attacked by a chicken a historical site. I was trying to eat a bun and yeah. It was pretty funny afterwards, but I still don't trust birds.

Pigeons are the worst though. I had to swerve in my wheelchair to avoid hitting them in London. I eventually just gave up.

 

Diane, my sister, swears that the chickens we had years ago were evil. Their crime? Following her because they wrongfully believed that she had food.

On the subject of seagulls certain people used to throw french fries from McDonalds in the local supermarket parking lot and then toss something to help with heartburn.

Changing the subject to something lighter. TE, myself and our fathers went car browsing today. We only looked at three because that all we had time for.

All three have been eliminated. One because it isn’t comfortable to sit on for long drives and it would be used for the long drives and the price.

The second one we all really like but it is expensive and might be out of our price range and a little bigger than what we need at the moment.

The third one needs repairs before it will pass our State Inspection and while it is highly affordable between the asking price, the price to fix the known issues and the possible underlying issues and things waiting to fail we could be looking at an additional $1,000 or more to the $4.000 price tag


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last year getting the building for the resque-squad stored away from the beach for the winter we had sea-gulls eating our unattended bananas

 

For me, seagull stories always have to include the miracle of the seagulls in Utah, where crickets were devouring the crops and following prayer, seagulls ate them and left the crops alone.