VoxAdActa

How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.

You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.

I think we both agree that the comma being optional is the mother of ten thousand confusions, we just disagree on what should be done about that.

If the Oxford comma was required, the sentence naming the strippers as JFK and Stalin no longer has any ambiguity whatsoever; it can only mean one thing.

If the Oxford comma was banned, the sentence naming the strippers would have to be rearranged entirely to avoid ambiguity. Instead of being able to clarify the relationship with a single keypress or tiny jot, we have to edit the entire sentence (the simplest way I can think of would be to say “JFK and Stalin are the strippers I invited.”)

As for the bit about speech, you’ve lost me. I’ve never had a conversation with another native English speaker (and I’ve lived in 10 different US states, from Texas to Connecticut) where a list of three or more things was spoken without a pause before the “and”. Maybe it’s different in other English-speaking countries? I also used to have regular conversations with an Australian, and I never noticed any confusion, but that was some 20ish years ago now, so my memory might not be reliable.

I think the problem is that not everyone translates text in their brain the same way.

I translate it as if I were speaking it. So when I see “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin,” I read it exactly as I’d say it, which is, the strippers were JFK and Stalin. When I read “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin”, the comma pause is not rendered as text in my brain, but like a quarter-rest in a musical score, and that pause is what allows my brain to separate JFK and Stalin from each other.

Other people translate text more visually, I guess, and that problem doesn’t exist there? I wouldn’t know, I can’t even begin to fathom how “JFK and Stalin” could be read in any way that doesn’t mean they’re the strippers.

I mean, if you were trying on purpose to say JFK and Stalin were the names of the strippers, and not the dead historical figures, how would you punctuate that sentence? Without the Oxford comma, the clause is clearly an appositive, not a list.

And then when you get into longer lists, it becomes even more of a pain in the ass. “Some suggested treatments for this condition are patella surgery, physical therapy and exercise, plate insertion, bone fusing and bedrest, among others.” Is “bone fusing and bedrest” one item? We have another item in the list that’s a combination treatment with “and”, is this also one? Or are they two separate treatments? Did the author omit the Oxford comma, or did they omit the Oxford “and”? It’s very common for academic authors, particularly, to make that kind of typo. They drop articles and conjunctions all the time. Now I have to e-mail the author and ask “What did you mean here?” because, as the editor, I can’t just assume “oh, they don’t like the Oxford comma, so this sentence is fine”. There are a lot of places where a small typo like missing “and” will make or break the intended meaning and the scientific veracity of an academic paper.

So yeah, I guess if all your writing is stylistic fiction where precision isn’t important, and your reading style is visual rather than auditory, an Oxford comma might “look ugly” and it could be safely ignored. But for anything technical, it’s kind of important.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/health/oxford-comma-maine-court-case-trnd/index.html

I’m right there with you. It may as well be a meteor on track to dead-center the planet, for all we can do about it.

There’s a miniscule chance it’ll miss us, or that we’ll come up with some way to deflect it at the last minute, and if that does happen, you don’t want to be the guy who sold all his stuff and went out into the cornfield to wait for Jesus to show up, if you know what I mean. No matter how certain we are, we have to hedge it as if we’re not about to be smashed flat. And the only sure way we can help the meteor not hit us is by voting in literally every election, from president to dog catcher, for the people who believe meteors are real and dangerous. No amount of metal straws and reusable bags will cancel out letting meteor-skeptics keep their decision-making positions.

I hate writing by hand, even though I went all the way through high school doing it (only things like final essays were typed, and even then you had to do it at home). It always hurt to do it the way I was supposed to, my handwriting never improved after like 1st grade (until I taught myself to write left-handed in my early 20’s; that’s much neater), and I have a horrible sensory issue involving the feel of a dull pencil dragging across paper. It makes me want to jump out a goddamned window.

Even so, writing things by hand helps me remember stuff better. Once I got to college and I was allowed to use whatever writing implement I wanted to take notes with (sparkly gel pens in a variety of colors), it wasn’t so awful, and it helped my memory so much that I don’t think I ever had to look at the notes I took ever again. So if I’m going to a lecture or a conference or something, I’ll still bring a notebook and some fancy gel pens.

Otherwise, the only thing I do with hand-writing is quick notes when I’m talking on the phone and need to record an account number or e-mail or whatever, or when I need to create a reminder to go back and fix something I’m already ahead of at work. Post-it notes are so much quicker than taking the phone away from my ear, navigating to OneNote, selecting the notebook, selecting “new page”, and then typing it out. If I want to transcribe the information in some way that’s not strictly left-aligned, or if I want to draw circles/boxes/arrows, well, One Note says “too bad, suck it up”. Plus, I can stick the post-it to my monitor and it’s in my line of sight all day; shit I note down in the phone is out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

Yes, I know I can use the desktop version of OneNote, which has more functionality. I do use it when I’m outlining or making adventure notes for the D&D game I run; it’s fabulous for that. But it’s utter shit for quickly jotting down “call Denise at [number] <— IMPORTANT DO BEFORE ----> call Electric Company about acct [#] at [number]”. That example doesn’t even make sense typed out.

How long do you think copyright should last?

I do agree that the current time frame, which may as well be infinite, is dumb. I wouldn’t even be too terribly worried about a 10-15 year copyright on a specific, individual work; Book 1 of Character A’s Sexy Odyssey going public domain after a decade doesn’t sound like a huge loss, and it’s a good incentive to keep writing, but I do kind of rankle at the idea that some big rich fuck is going to get even richer off selling knockoff hardbacks of something I wrote. But as long as it was just Book 1, not Character A, or Sexy Odyssey World, or any of the component parts I’m still working with for Book 8 and 9. I’d like to keep those, ideally, until I’m dead and buried, but I’d compromise to something like 10 years after the last thing I write about them. I can see the value in that. If I’ve dropped the series in favor of The Super-Sexy Adventures of Character B, fans should be allowed to pick up Character A if they feel they can add more to the story.

Really, though, I’m so much less worried about, like, you, or Brandon Sanderson, or PurplePonyPrincessX69@AO3 than I am about the big boys. That’s the part of this discussion that is always overlooked. We see how it hurts the individual fans in a variety of ways (GRRM saying “Nobody will finish the story if I die first” is a big middle finger to everyone who supported him, for example), but we don’t see how the big publishing companies would absolutely demolish individual authors if we weren’t protected by copyright. Fuck, they already try to wreck us all the time; just talk to the visual artists and graphic designers, I’m sure they have thousands of examples.

As soon as the copyright ends on Character A’s Sexy Odyssey, if it had high enough sales and high enough visibility and some bean counter at Tor decided it was a good bet, they will straight steal it and wring every penny out of it they can. Even just with reprints I get nothing for.

As for the characters, you asked if audiences would care that it wasn’t me writing; they might, or they might not, but either way, I’m now competing against myself, my readers could easily get confused about which books were “official” canon and which were alternate universes, and I have no doubt that “Jake P. Ghostwriter”'s name would be itty bitty on the cover, underneath a gigantic “based on the work of VOX AD ACTA!” written in such a way as to be deceptive as possible. On the more extreme end, they could end up Pepe’ing my Character A, and I have to spend the rest of my life on Mastadon being like “No, Character A is not a bigot, no Character A never denied the Holocaust, no, Character A would never do a hate crime, none of those were written by me, yes, I know it was heavily marketed, no, the movie tie-in is not official, I swear I had nothing to do with Character A’s big rant about the Great Replacement in the trailers…”

It’s not about the fans, and it’s not about the little guy. It’s about the robber barons with a dragon’s hoard worth of cash to throw at shoving me out of my own work in favor of whatever they want to do with it. I will get drowned out very quickly.

Please don’t force me to compete with Big Publishers and their warehouses full of ghost writers. If the copyright expires at 5 years, 10 years, or even 20 years, it doesn’t matter; if I get popular, all the big corporations will be watching that clock like a hawk for a time when they can start pumping out a novel a month about my own characters. No individual human can compete with that. At least wait until I die before handing over my worlds, settings, and characters to the megacorporations to squeeze the juice out of.

Not OP, not a photographer, but an author. For me, yes. You’re basically proposing a system where no matter how popular my work becomes, I will never make a penny on it again after 10 years. Now, I guess if that only applies to the specific books, maybe it’s not so nail-bitingly bad, but if it applies to the characters I create (as I suspect it would), then it doesn’t matter if I’m still writing a series about Character A 10 years from now, I lose exclusivity on Character A and am now competing with BigMegaPub’s stable of ghost-writers who are churning out a book a month about my own character.

Fanfiction isn’t the problem. I fucking love fanfiction. Every time I see a fanfic about my world/setting/characters, I’m fucking thrilled. Only assholes like Anne Rice and Anne McCaffery get upset about their babies ending up on an AO3 clone in some improbable, poorly written slashfic. I’m not worried about that at all. I’m worried about Penguin and Random House, who would very quickly crush the fuck out of me without copyright protections.

No, think about the dollars. Right here, right now.

Well, yeah. Speaking as an author, we kinda like to eat. Without copyright, we’re being paid in exposure; if our shit gets popular, nobody’s going to buy the official hardback for $30 (of which I’ll see a few pennies) when they can buy the perfectly legal knockoff hardback for $1.

I don’t have time to write for the love of the art. It takes me about 2-3 months to crank out 100k words of a first draft, then god help me amounts of time to revise it to be fit for human eyes. If I had to hold down a regular 9-5 to pay my rent at the same time, I’d produce a book about every five years or so (that’s how long the first one took).

Fuck all of that. I deserve to be paid fairly for producing something of value just like people in every other profession. Get rid of copyright and you’re basically ensuring that the fiction market is 95% AI, 4% independently wealthy people, and 1% people who just love to write so much that they’ll do it even after coming home from a 12-hour shift, and just like the attention they get. Which, I mean, I get it; we’re worthless, and don’t deserve to make a living producing works of art that make other people happy, right?

It’s 2030. The world has changed. Russia has fallen. Ralph Nader’s reanimated cyborg-corpse is president. Britain is back in the EU. And Lemmy is known everywhere as “The Poop Site”.

When it comes to tragedies, the number of fucks I give for the victims follows a simple formula.

I start with a billion fucks. Then I subtract the combined net worth of the people affected by the tragedy. The result is how many fucks I give about their tragedy.

For this one, I’m at about negative three billion fucks.

Now I’m imagining a National Treasure-style heist, where OP has to smuggle this out of the museum by pretending it’s his own for a three-day hitchhiking adventure back to the buyer’s safehouse, and that’s why he asked the three-day challenge question.

A good friend of mine made good money turning glass bottles of various types into bongs. The best sellers were the marble soda bottles with unlicensed Hello Kitty labels, but Sanrio C&D’d him pretty fucking quick.

Otherwise, I can say for 100% certainty that the answer is absolutely not pretty rocks wrapped up in wire, aka, “jewelry”. Every lazy wannabe craft fair monarch is pumping out these low-effort bits of trash to the point that at least a third of the booths at any craft fair I go to is just stuffed to the gills with them.

Y’all are doing fine. Better than fine; for the limitations you’re running under, this place is downright fab.

I have a small list of minor annoyances or feature desires that I will happily continue to STFU about until things calm down. You’re doing your best. I appreciate you.

“Fuck off, Doom Eternal. Your bullshit fuckery will not break me!”

I feel like we need to stop trying to overexplain the fediverse. The decentralization stuff isn’t the selling point y’all think it is. It’s confusing and complicated and entirely unnecessary. kbin.social has a landing page with actual content on it, signing up is exactly the way one signs up for anything else, the UI is reminiscent of old reddit, and nobody needs to know how it’s connecting to the rest of the fediverse on the back end to comment on a picture of a funny cat.

The sales pitch shouldn’t be some neckbeardy ultra-nerd shit where we gush over decentralization and instances and blah blah blah. The sales pitch should be “It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it does basically the same thing. It aggregates content from other places on the web. And, for all you’re going to need it for, it works basically the same way as reddit. Read the front page, if you see a community you like, subscribe to it. Just, if you want to post a thread on kbin, that’s under ‘post article’ for some reason.”

90% of the people who are on reddit bitching about how “complicated” this is are only saying that because it’s being explaining it in literally the most obtuse way possible. I was one of them. And Lemmy’s absolutely not helping by filling their landing page with a bunch of technical bullshit normies don’t need to understand, instead of, you know, showing them content.

Yes, it’s cool. Yes, it’s modern and novel and a new way to connect to people on the web. Not a damn bit of that matters. Stop pushing that like anyone other than techbros give a fuck.