all the photos of him are like this, I love that this guy understood he had been born with the face of a wizard or axe murderer and just leaned fully into it
he knew EXACTLY what he was doing
when a statue in his honour was put up in Mexico they made sure to include Asya
I finally watched The Sound of Music and like I get it now, I get it.
It’s a beautiful two hour love story of a strict man finally opening his heart again and then a fifty minute public service announcement to hate the nazis. Brilliant.
(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)
An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:
(And they weren’t even creative with their cover design. If you’re going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)
I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up – Plush Books – and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either – the fact that “”“publishers”“” can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad – including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives – but basically:
IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.
You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven’t done this before, it’s easy! Here’s a tutorial:
HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:
First, go to this form. You’ll need to be signed into your Amazon account.
Select the radio buttons/dropdown options (shown below) to indicate that you are the legal Rights Owner, you have a copyright concern, and it is about a pirated product.
Enter the name of your story in the Name of Brand field.
In the Link to the Copyrighted Work box, enter a link to the story on AO3 or whatever site your work is posted on.
In the Additional Information box, explain that you are the author of the work and it is being sold without your permission. That’s all you really need. If you want, you can include additional information that might be helpful in establishing the validity of your claim, but you don’t have to go into great detail. You can simply write something like this:
I am the author of this work, which is being sold by [publisher] without my permission. I originally published this story in [date/year] on [name of site], and have provided a link to the original above. On request, I can provide documentation proving that I am the owner of the account that originally posted this story.
In the ASIN/ISBN-10 field, copy and paste the ID number from the pirated copy’s URL. You’ll find this ten-digit number in the Amazon URL after the word “product,” as in the screenshot below. (If the URL extends beyond this number, you can ignore everything from the question mark on.) Once this number has been added, Amazon will pull the product information automatically and add it to the complaint form, so you can check the listing title and make sure it’s correct.
Finally, add your contact information to the relevant fields, check the “I have read and accept the statements” box, and then click Submit. You should receive an email confirmation that Amazon has received the form.
Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!
NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!
When I’m an old lady I’ll still be informing young people that Halloween never existed in this country until the 90s /early 00s when people who sell us stuff realised they could use it to sell us more stuff, and Halloween-themed stuff suddenly appeared in shopping centres without warning and was relentlessly marketed to children, and adults saw right through it and disliked it (“what’s this American sh*t, why are there pumpkins and witches in shop windows this never used to be a thing”) until they got used to it and young generations grew up thinking Halloween had always been a thing here even though kids born just a decade earlier had to be taught about it by the TV or school. Also it trampled over our pre-existing Fun Cultural Event When Kids Get Dressed-Up which had never needed to be marketed so aggressively and therefore became less relevant
I don’t mind at all if you love Halloween but it’s so weird to see my younger cousins convinced that it was always a thing in France when I remember being taught at school what trick or treating was, like “let’s learn about cultural traditions that are exotic and fun and different from ours!!” and I’m not old. Millennials literally saw Halloween get astroturfed into our culture with no explanation when shopping centres just went “from now on this is something we’ve always done” and we had no choice but to be like well OK I guess 🤷♀️
SAME THING IN AUSTRALIA! It was not a thing when I was a kid! Now you can buy pumpkin-themed buckets in the supermarkets for kids to put lollies in!
The Netherlands, and this is the reason I have the whole tag blacklisted.
And in Ireland, FFS, where the damn thing was invented… sure enough, in about the same timeframe, the US version of it was imported here and now has significantly overlaid the traditions and customs of the original native holiday. …Not completely, yet. But it’s trying, and gaining ground every year.
It’s like the Cat of Dream said. The old way was made as if it had never been… as if the new way was the way it has been from all time: as if “It was ever thus.”
If I wrote a Holocaust book that got called out by the Auschwitz Museum as being factually inaccurate, I simply would not write another Holocaust book but this time from the viewpoint of a former Nazi.
I really don’t have anything better to add to this than criticisms already done by actual scholars. You can read Dara Horn’s PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS or listen to Robert Evans’ two part “How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible” episodes from his Behind the Bastards podcast. Any of those -and countless others - will give you a far more accurate depiction of antisemitism and the Holocaust.
What I can say is this: The inherent problem with fiction about Nazis, regardless of genre, is that that goal of fiction is to keep you engaged with the story. That involves building artificial elements into a real world narrative - antagonists in the form of worse Nazis, relatable problems with questionable links to reality, and sympathies that likely didn’t exist in real life. The author needs you to want to finish the story, and almost always that results in pulling punches - regardless of intention.
But we don’t say “Hitler loved dogs” to make him more sympathetic and relatable, we say it to point out the human capacity to have more compassion for animals than our fellow human beings. Any factual accounts of genocides - such as Art Spiegelman’s MAUS or Tian Veasna’s YEAR OF THE RABBIT - is a far more valuable work than any fictional book written in the hopes of being a bestseller.
And anyone who argues we need to “humanize” real life genociders with sympathetic fiction can go fuck themselves, honestly.
Here’s an excellent twitter thread by Gwen C Katz about that book. Well, specifically the thread is about the removal of Maus from classrooms - the removal of the jewish voice whose book is laying out what happened to his real, specific people, being replaced by a very book thats just using the holocaust to write a broad parable about intolerance and play a little sad song on your heartstrings.
THANK YOU I WAS DESPERATELY TRYING TO FIND THIS AND COULDN’T.
If you don’t have time for anything else, please read this thread on why books like Boyne’s are not only misleading, but deeply skew our understanding of the Holocaust when used as an education text. It is actively dangerous to flinch away from real historical accounts in favor of sanitized fiction.
Neil, I am so scared. It's like the flood is here, and I'm drowning, and I can see the tsunami gloom over me, and there's nothing I can do, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, only wait for death and hope it will be a quick one.
I keep telling myself that I just need to wait it out. That I need to survive a little bit longer, that one madman with some inane plan can't actually ruin the whole world, but as days go by the hope dwindles. I am watching one country being slaughtered and another hemorrhaging from a stab in the gut, twitching painfully, and I can't even scream, because no one will hear, no one will listen.
I know there's nothing you can do. But you wrote books that influenced me when I was a kid, when I was a teen, when I was a young adult. And I suppose I am saying goodbye to you, so that if it's my last chance you would at least remember me, I guess
For me, it’s doing the work with and for Refugees — for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees— fundraising and awareness raising that reminds me that there is a point. If I draw attention there’s a five year old who may never see her home again but who may have a blanket and a bowl of soup and a roof over her head tomorrow night.
So that’s all I’ve got. The world can be scary. It may prove lethal. But you have to stand up for what you believe and you have to try and help those worse off than you are.
I hope I find someone that loves me the same way Stephen Colbert loves his wife ❤️
❤️
❤️
The one and ONLY redeeming factor of 2020’is that Stephen has been stuck at home for the entire quarantine, so he’s been forced to do his bits at his house. Which looked real hard for him, since he doesn’t have an audience laughing at his jokes.
And the thing is, when he came back to his studio, he’s not allowed to have crowds there either because of New York’s restrictions.
But without fail, every other joke, you can hear this one, single woman laughing in the background.
That’s his wife.
Covid restrictions don’t apply to his spouse, and everyone else in the studio has a job, and has to work, so she’s become the only person in the room left laughing at his jokes.
She doesn’t laugh every time. You can tell she’s not doing it on cue, because there are some bits she clearly likes better than others. Some bits where she is laughing her ass off, and some where she just chuckles.
But my god, every time she laughs, Colbert’s face lights up like the sun.
Like, even if every other person on earth was dead and gone, if he was on his deathbed and breathing his last breath, he’d still make a jokes, just to make her laugh again.
So yeah. Get you someone who loves you like Stephen Colbert loves his wife.
Sometimes I hyperfocus so hard on something, I forget I’m a person until someone interacts with me. I feel like some wild animal seeing a human being for the first time. I’m like “oh yeah I’m supposed to speak and stuff”
Me: *doing something for hours on end without stopping*
Someone: Hey, are you there? I was just wondering if you’d like to-
Me:
For every single person in the notes going “yeah” or “same” or something like that…
I didn’t know cheetahs meow I’ve always thought they roar my whole life has been a lie
Ok but the other one is purring so hard
If I ever don’t reblog this assume I’m dead
Fun fact: technically, because of its inability to roar and its ability to purr, the cheetah is not a ‘big cat’ (or Great Cat) - they are still classified as Lesser Cats.
Also you haven’t heard anything until you hear them cheep.
YOU CANNOT JUST SAY THAT AND NOT PROVIDE A VIDEO
I HAVE REALISED MY MISTAKE AND SHALL RECTIFY IT:
Cheeps.
Oh my god
I’m dead now
MURDER KITTEN SOUNDS LIKE A CHICKEN PEEPER
They make that noise to signal their Cubs
It sounds like a bird so it doesn’t alert predators such as lions or leopards to the location of them or their babies
SMRT KITTENS ARE SMRT
It still blows my mind that they meow and not roar, and that they can make bird noises. Such amazing animals
