So, a long, long time ago, before I had an online journal or interacted with fandom in any way, back before Wikipedia ruled the internets, I used to post on Everything2, which is a wikipedia competitor with a very different structure, ethos, and culture. (As much as I do like the Wiki system, I wish more sites used an E2 framework instead - I think it would've worked really well for fanlore, for ex., with its emphasis on multiple voices and automatic flow.)

Anyway, one of the things I posted there, over eight years ago (!!!), was an attempted translation of the Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer into poetic Modern English. I'm no Anglo-Saxon scholar, but I go through phases of reading lots of early English poetry and poking at the language, so it may be a bad translation, but I like the poem, and I like my version better than any of the other translations I've found, and I have nothing at all staked on it being a good translation, so critique it all you want. (I am, oddly, very fragile when it comes to criticism of my fiction - I can get scared into writing nothing for months even by *effusively good* feedback - but have a very thick skin about my poetry - say whatever you want about it, it won't change what the poem means to me.)

So there's this translation, that's been sitting pretty much ignored on a website that's been slowly dwindling in readership, until shanaqui with her riddles on poetry inspired me to look it up again and repost my Wulf and Eadwacer there.

And what should I discover but that someone has quoted my translation in an academic paper, as far as I can tell from Google pretty much in full, and published it in the journal "Language and Literature" only this month.

I am trying to articulate why this pisses me off so much. Given that I generally approve of fair use and quotation and derivative/transformative work with or without permission, and am pretty radically anti-intellectual-property in general, and strongly support acafandom in using internet postings in published papers, I ought to just be happy that somebody (somebody who I rather admire as a writer and scholar) has noticed my un-expert little translation and thought it worth talking about.

But, well, what pisses me off? Is that the journal's publisher wants 25 dollars from me in exchange for the privilege of looking for only 24 hours at the article about my work that they published without even notifying me.

( <I>That</i> pisses me the hell off (pardon my Anglo-Saxon. And Old French.) Cue rant. )

Short version: if Transformative Works and Cultures was pay-only, I would be a lot less supportive of it, that's for darn sure.

(I tend to think that fanacademia, even beyond TWC, tends to be fairly good about freely sharing info - even when papers are published behind pay-only, it's been fairly easy for me to get copies for free - but that might be because accumulated fanmeta rep has gotten *me* inside several locked walls of access that I don't even see any more.)

(Also, said fan network has already gotten me a copy of the paper about Wulf and Eadwacer that discusses me. I am now officially recorded in the ongoing conversation of Western Thought as "Melannen, a kind of 'groupie' for wit and wisdom" --- I'll take it! Could be worse. Also, my e2 post is "not exactly post-structural exegesis," but rather "a crude recommendation" to "make the empty room exciting with your own furnishings". Hmm, you know, I don't have any titles on my DW journal pages yet... :D But seriously folks, it's a reasonably good paper which is doing pretty much the same thing I tried to do in my e2 post but better - the quotes are actually a compliment, because I'm the only one of six translators - including Burton Raffel - he actually discusses at any length whatsoever. Even if he is baffled by the internets and the way learnings happen there. And he got the date of publication of the E2 entry wrong by five years somehow. And altered my translation in a fairly significant way without, apparently, noticing.)


...er. Speaking of the value of a public domain, last weekend I was at Farpoint - my first ever sci-fi con! - and spent most of the time trying to pretend it was con.txt, which meant hanging around the do-it-yourself panel rooms and figuring out how to talk about fanfic in them without outright admitting I'm a fanfic writer. (Panels I either gave or attended: Writing SF Erotica, DIY Social, SF Worldbuilding, Webcomics 101, Sex and SciFi, Not Everyone's a Pro, Copyright/Copywrong, Convention Sales for Creative Types, and Sherlock Holmes. I want to talk more about the con later, but this post is going to be long enough already.)

One of the coolest ones I attended was ( The Copyright, Copywrong panel, which was recorded and is available as a podcast. )
...anyway it also features me as "person in audience who wouldn't stop talking". Hear! Me attempt to talk to Marc Okrand without getting squee all over him! Hear! Me slip slash discussion in under the radar by casually mentioning the OTW without explaining what it is! Hear! Me get scolded for talking too much and not letting other people participate! Hear! Me completely fail to mention Interrobang Studios, which is ostensibly why I was at the con!


(and for the record, if I was not so lazy I would officially put all of my work under a creative commons share-alike license, the share-alike being most important and the attribution being least.)

..so I assume that all this downtime-y weirdness is related to the Great JF Update? It would be nice if we'd had some sort of warning. ETA: And sorry about the spammage; it screwed up, and then wouldn't let me in to edit.

Have been consumed lately with the discussion around otw_news (poor metamiri, whose innocent meta-post has been taken over by acafen theorizing!)

Anyway, since I don't feel up to anything substantive, that most commonly marked 'unread' on LT books list that everyone's posting:( Read more... )

...I am kind of embarrassed by the number of these marked 'unfinished'. But classics are books I tend to pick up when I know I'll have bits of reading time, but I don't want to get absorbed in anything, so a lot of them were taken on trips or whatever and then dropped when I got to something shinier.

Also, I am deeply skeptical of all the people claiming that they have finished "canterbury tales" and "Don Quixote." Really really? The vast majority of modern editions of both of those are excerpts and abridgements - which I've read several of, but don't count as the whole thing in my book.

I want my 100 icons back, dammit!

Happy 25th Birthday, :-)!

Why do modern striptease dancers usually start their shows already three-quarters naked? I mean, sure, Dita von Teese moves like an ancient fertility goddess (I'm totally figuring out a way to put a striptease scene in my NaNo,) but compared to, say, Gypsy Rose Lee or Georgia Sothern or even Dixie Evans, she's mostly finished by the time she starts.

Not that I have any objection to sparkly corsets. Mmm. Sparkly corsets.

...but, but, what's the point of striptease if there's no mystery? I love the long gowns and the diaphanous skirts and the little flashes of leg, the bare wrist that seems like the sexiest thing ever when it's all you're allowed to look at, the elegant girl on the town who lets you see just a bit more than is proper, and just a bit more, and she could stop - any minute - if she wanted to - but maybe she doesn't want to!

Whoever did the cinematography on this vid understood that, but they put in most of the mystery with the camera angles. It's lingerie fetish as much as it's classic striptease. Even when she starts out in a long gown, she steps out of it right off instead of teasing properly like they did in the old days. I'd just as soon watch her be plain old naked --- (She does naked really well.)

And no, I'm not just bitter that I could probably do a tolerable Gypsy Rose but there's no way I could pull off what Dita does. :P And I'm also not bitter that there's so little video footage of the classic-era girls, no not me.


Georgia Sothern was 11 when she started stripping professionally. I'm not sure how I feel about that, except that this video could probably get you in trouble with lj.

...yeah, so dryponder is running another superhero redesign meme. This time, it's Stephanie Brown.

I actually did an extensive redesign back in the day, in which I based a new Spoiler costume on what *I'd* wear if I were a DCU superheroine: a costume where nobody can tell you're female, and therefore won't rape you with a power drill in order to be 'edgy'. But after a year or more lurking around Girl-Wonder, I wanted to do something more girl-positive. And less angry.

( So, moar art: two small png images under cut. )

So I got a Wacom tablet this spring, and recently I started actually trying out some of the features in GIMP that are awesome with a tablet, like the inking tool and quickmask, instead of just using the same old tools I'd started with six years ago. And I've been practicing with old files because I really want to be able to do nice-looking fanart, now that I can't blame it on my tools.

So, here's a (more-or-less) finished piece on the tablet. It's inked, colored, and lettered on computer, but it was done over a scan of the pencil drawing that I originally did for Project Rooftop's Draw Supergirl thing.

Yeah. That long ago. That's how long it generally takes me to finish a fanwork. (On the other hand, finished fanwork! Yay! That's rare, for me.)

( Supergirl redesign )

I have gotten an anon spam comment on one of my old lj entries, in toto and I quote:

Subject: Thank You for site

Thank you for your site. I have found here much useful information. Good
site ! ;)

The thing is, I can't figure out what the purpose of it is. It has no informational content at all. No links. I even checked the source code, to see if there was any embedded evil, and there isn't: it's just the text.

WHY??? I would've assumed if they were doing it for the heck of it, they would have left a less polite message. Is it a test spam, to see if they can get through the filters, or if I'm enough of a sucker to leave it up? Is there some thing where if they send a certain number of non-spam comments, lj won't block them? It makes no sense!

Meanwhile I'm trying to download a ringtone now that I've remembered my cellphone's PIN, and the provider's website doesn't work in Opera at all, only sorta in Firefox, and not at all (but in a different way) in IE. I hate when websites have a gateway that's supposed to make sure it works with your browser, but is SO STUPID that it just makes the website nonfuctional on browsers it *would* work with. And in order to listen to the streaming audio samples it looks like I'm going to have to freakin' *update my OS*.

Right, that's another six months of default ringtone then. Bye-bye, polyphonic MacGuyver theme.

I just went through my lj and made a filter of "people whose personal lives I will still care about even if all fannish content is banned and 6A is sold to Fox News" and it ended up being basically everybody on my flist who makes personal-life posts more than about once a month.

For somebody who lurks as much as I do, I sure do get invested. *sigh*

I also stuck a manually-coded blogroll up the side of my new layout, with non-lj blogs I keep up with, and ljs I read for non-fannish but non-personal content, because I don't feel like fussing with rss at the moment. ph34r my blogroll. They are all highly recommended by me, but not necessarily without reservations. And I refuse to be ashamed of reading any of them. Even Go Fug Yourself. :P

I'm adding a small list of web links under that, and the LT non-java widget is already up with recently-read books (Anybody here on LibraryThing? It's my current second home on the internet.)

After that, it should be just graphics-editing work and then I'm going to call the flist layout done. Haven't decided yet how much I'm going to do with the other pages, though I'll probably at least stick a header up on recent entries. But I want to watch Casablanca while I do the graphics work, and I can't find my tape of Casablanca! It's a tragedy.

Then maybe I'll actually have the attention span to post about other stuff!

FINE THEN, html 5.wtf, if you've dropped the attribute in favor of CSS, I'LL JUST DO IT WITH NESTED TABLES INSTEAD THEN. SO THERE, STYLESHEETS. HAHAHAHA.

(if you want to see, LIVE!, me relearning all the html I haven't used since about 2002, watch my rapidly altering friendspage layout and laugh.)


Wow, journalfen is changing. The colors! The favicon! The syndicated feeds! *spins in circles*


And apparently you can do custom moodthemes with a basic paid account now! Hurrah!

Is it worth upgrading my account just so I can have a Tek Jansen mood theme, y/n?

Yay!

the "Oh no. Not elephant spunk again!" one is in production. q: Too bad all my journalfen icon ideas end up being non-family-friendy.