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.)

I had forgotten how I react to coding. This is how I react to coding: I went from knowing nothing about anything but basic html to dreaming about Core2 last night. In about six hours. (Of course, for some reason I also dreamed that treewishes was secretly Terry Brooks, so that may not be diagnostic.) I am not *good* at coding, because what I enjoy is crashing through reinventing the wheel and doing things the wrong way by trial-and-error and example without actually reading the directions or re-using old solutions; but I do find it hard to *stop*.

Anyway, after hours of pounding away, I now have a DW style that is a vague approximation of the ugly, crufty, half-broken S1 style I use in various hacked-together forms on LJ and JF. Only on LJ and JF it is high-contrast black, and my DW version is very, very pink, mostly to thumb my nose all all the anti-Tropo Red people. :P (The One Pig With Horns is just a placeholder image, though, promise, stellar_dust.)

The important thing, though, is that it has custom friendlist colors!!! I am just synesthetic enough that seeing my flist people without their proper color screws with my head. So, style with custom colors! (If anyone wants to use this style, which is a variant on LJ's Punquin Elegant, or the Generator port I made, I can give you the core2-compileable source, and if you'd like me to port another basic LJ style over instead, let me know and I'll try it; the code is really, really ugly though (I mean, even in the original S2 version before I mucked with them it was ugly, and I could tell this without even previously knowing anything about S2. Here's how ugly: I had to look at the Core2 test style in order to figure out how to add comments.)

( Herein I talk about styles coding such that anybody who actually knows about it will laugh at the stupid, because I have forgotten how to talk about programming, and anybody who doesn't will be bored to death. )

Anyway, more important question (And test of polls!)

Monday night, both of my laptop's PCMCIA card slots stopped working, so until I get around to fixing that, I won't have 'net access on the laptop. I get to see how long I can last without being on lj every single waking hour!

The universally positive reaction to my last post surprised me. There are many things which would keep me from making headway in politics. My myriad personality flaws are one of them. My actual political positions are another. So I thought perhaps I'd elucidate one of them, as an example. Although it's probably not the best idea to post this when I won't be online full time to get comments, I will anyway, since my sister said I should.

Recent discussion about abortion rights on several fronts (and the fact that I'm apparently ovulating, since I've been dreaming I'm pregnant for the last few nights) has finally inspired to type up my own views on abortion. I warn you that a) this is insanely long and digressive, b) like my rant about gay marriage from several years ago, it is in the nature of a tertium quid, guaranteed to offend everybody regardless of their position on the subject, and c) it contains Bible slash.

( Big Damn Abortion Post )

In memory of Erwin Schrödinger & for the unofficial last day of Agnostica, My Cat Hates You.

Yeah, I'm back around. Still haven't caught up from LJ for the week that I was in the wilds of Ohio, though. Particurly, I haven't narcissistically read every single yuletide recs post in hopes that somebody mentioned my story. (Which, by the way, was Earthsea fandom: Calving, and wasn't nearly as good as the story that was written for me, which was Riddle of Stars fic: Unanswered Riddles, by Rhiannon Shaw. Usually when people say "I am not worthy" it's meant as humorous exaggeration, but it this case it was literally true.) And then there's a whole bunch more fic to read and maybe even review. And *then* I might have time to do a proper New Year's update.

Or then, not. I'm taking a winter term class, 4 hours a day, on GIS. Plus substitute teaching still. Of course, after two days of class we still haven't done any actual GIS work, because the lab's software liscense expired on Jan 1st and they haven't figured out how to reinstall it yet. Yay! Ooh, and I actually used YSI for a legitimate purpose today. Okay, no, it was to share illegal copies of protected intellectual property, but it was real class readings and not fannish silliness, so it counts.

And speaking of that, I have another public-transit related ethical dilemma to throw to your collective wisdom:
[Poll #645707]
There ought to be a community just for ethics polls. I would use it all the time. After all, who better to trust your integrity to than a bunch of random semi-strangers on the internet?

I am eating a leftover cheese ball for dinner & then I need to get a job for tomorrow and do homework. When there are two boxes of new (okay, fourth-hand hand-me-down) sci-fi novels sitting *right in front of me.* ETA: If you're interested, here's the contents of the two boxes. Yes, I cataloged instead of doing my reading. Bad me.