Moe Lane

[UPDATE: One of my readers made an observation that made me think of a question: if John Scalzi doesn't like getting paid for fanfic, why did he write Redshirts? - Great book, by the way.]

Situation:

Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.

Point (Megan McArdle):

It’s a brilliant and even fair solution.  Some writers are better world-builders than others; why not let them profit off of their imaginations, while also compensating the folks who can do interesting things within that world?  Of course, some fan fiction purists may be disappointed in the control that this will give the world-builders over what is done with their work.  Amazon will not, for example, publish pornographic or highly explicit fiction.  Under those rules, 50 Shades of Grey would never have been published; it started out as slash fiction set in the Twilight universe.

Still, as a writer I’m always glad to see more ways to compensate writers.  And as a business writer, I’m excited to see how much innovation is taking place in this new market.

Counter-point (John Scalzi):

…I suspect this is yet another attempt in a series of long-term attempts to fundamentally change the landscape for purchasing and controlling the work of writers in such a manner that ultimately limits how writers are compensated for their work, which ultimately is not to the benefit of the writer. This will have far-reaching consequences that none of us really understand yet.

The thing that can be said for it is that it’s a better deal than you would otherwise get for writing fan fiction, i.e., no deal at all and possibly having to deal with a cranky rightsholder angry that you kids are playing in their yard. Is that enough for you? That’s on you to decide.

(more…)

“It’s Washington.” (more…)

Pejman Yousefzadeh reminded me today of this Megan McArdle column where she cataloged all the conventional wisdom of What Do We Do About Mass Shootings, and found all such wisdom to be pretty much ineffective.  Which it would be; Megan’s not the first person to notice that the primary goal of a lot of rhetoric about gun control seems to have as its primary objective the goal of making the person who is using the rhetoric feel better.  Whether this is psychologically healthy or not is beyond my ability to diagnose… but I did notice a bit of, well, Lefty screeching about this suggestion of Megan’s:

 I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.  Would it work?  Would people do it?  I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.

(more…)

As God is my witness, the pun was unintentional.

Any, Megan McArdle, on the Left Just Not Getting  It about why it’s impolite to try to force the Catholic Church to provide financial support for contraception to its workers:

I’ve seen several versions of Kevin’s complaint on the interwebs, and everyone makes it seems to assume that we’re doing the Catholic Church a big old favor by allowing them to provide health care and other social services to a needy public.  Why, we’re really coddling them, and it’s about time they started acting a little grateful for everything we’ve done for them!

These people seem to be living in an alternate universe that I don’t have access to, where there’s a positive glut of secular organizations who are just dying to provide top-notch care for the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed.

I’m a bad Catholic myself.  An awful one, in fact.  But the fact that I disagree with the Church on contraception does not mean that I will tolerate the government bullying her on contraception.  As Megan later notes, the government assists Catholic and other religious organizations in their charitable activities because religious organizations tend to be very good and very efficient about providing them; and, like it or not, the Catholic Church has very serious ethical and moral issues about birth control.

It’s also older than the Left, and fully expects to still be here when the modern liberal/progressive movement consists of footnotes in dusty books.

(Via Instapundit)

Moe Lane

This is a couple of days old, but it is still just a downright rude thing to say about Megan McArdle:

It is nearly a cardinal rule of American politics that if Megan McArdle likes your policy plan, it will go down in the Senate 95-0, and end with a fumbling recantation on Meet the Press.

…even if it was actually said by, well, Megan McArdle.

Read the whole thing, by the way.

Megan McArdle, on GUESS WHO*?

Call me old-fashioned, but I think that social sanction can be very helpful in assisting us in doing important but difficult things.  Marriage is stronger if people who find out that their friends are cheating don’t say, “Awesome, is he hot?” but “How could you do that to Jason?” Marriage is stronger if people who cheat are viewed with slight revulsion, and so are the (knowing) people who they cheat with.  Marriage is stronger when people who decide not to care for seriously ill spouses are met with an incredulous “What the hell is wrong with you?”, not “Yeah, I couldn’t handle that either.”  Of course it would be nicer if we didn’t need this sort of help.  But we are a flawed species.

[snip]

I’m not saying that we should spend weeks and months torturing the guy–that’s up to his wife, if she wants to.  But I don’t think that the media should have hushed up something that was, um, very public . . . or that it’s somehow out of bounds to say that, unless she was really enthusiastically supporting his desire to text photos of his body parts all across our fair land, this was a really remarkably sh[*]tty thing to do to his wife.

(more…)

“People can get weird about mangled quotes on the Internet.”

Kind of convoluted to describe this one: it started when somebody realized that she wasn’t all warm and fuzzy at the thought of Osama bin Laden getting a sudden case of lead poisoning, so she decided to tell the world on Facebook.  Said somebody backed up her realization with a MLK Jr quote; then somebody else* deliberately removed the quotation marks from said quote, to make it look like the whole thing was a direct quote from Rev. King.  That got passed around, often by people who are pretty darn defensive about the fact that they’re so disassociated from their countrymen that they can’t enjoy a good monster-killing; then another guy who really, really, really should have known better, Penn**, retweeted it without checking first; and then it went viral.

And then more defensive disassociated types started whining to Megan, once she debunked it.  The usual: conspiracy theories, pseudo-intellectual blather, and general man-child syndrome.  Because it’s the Internet, and Megan gets a lot of progressive trolls, and Megan is a woman, and oh right I’m supposed to pretend that progressive male trolls don’t have a lot of… issues.

Oops.

Moe Lane

PS: That wasn’t really ‘shorter,’ was it?

*This is where I start to judge people.

**Really, man.  Really.  It’s the Internet, dude.

Megan McArdle, on reviewing a pig farmer’s apparent realization that the locavore historical narrative is, well, a myth about local production that pretends that there was never such a thing as Chicago, and its associated, literally epic meat-packing industry:

I actually had no idea that such obviously ahistorical views were common in the local food movement–indeed, I suspect that he exaggerates.

Ha.

Ha-hah!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Oh, Megan.  Never underestimate the need for humanity to tell itself stories.  Particularly religious stories.  And doubly particularly when the religion that the story is supporting is less sophisticated and intellectually rigorous than, say, Evangelical Christianity*.

Moe Lane

*Call me in five hundred years and we’ll see what faiths are still around.

It is an epic day when Teh Stoopid of a post is so encapsulated in a subtitle that you feel no further need to read further.  Take it away, John Dickerson:

Obama’s spending plan is so timid, he must be working on a smarter plan we don’t know about.

[pause]

I repeat: KFTC, John.  Meanwhile, here’s Megan McArdle, who was originally going to have the Quote of the Day until I read Dickerson’s stupidity:

I was a laconic hawk when the deficits shot up in 2008, 2009, 2010.  A few years of deficits in an unprecedented crisis weren’t going to kill us; we had time to get them under control.

But I’m starting to think that it’s time to panic.

Oh, boy.

Moe Lane

*The explanation for that acronym is not safe for work, but may be found here (also NSFW).

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds and Megan McArdle, this is going to be one of the funniest videos you’ll watch today:

That’s Representative Dan Rostenkowski being attacked at a town-hall meeting with his constituents. Afterwards, he plaintively asked his press officer how long it would be before the media foofaraw blew over. “Let me put it this way,” the flack is said to have replied. “When you die, they will play that clip.”

Admittedly, Dan Rostenkowski didn’t lose his job then - he got caught up in the 1994 tsunami, although he was probably on the way out then anyway – but then, in 1989 they weren’t putting practical video cameras in cell phones*.  They also weren’t able to make footage showing a Congressman doing a high-speed getaway from his constituents instantly available to anybody with a decent Internet connection.  And they didn’t have the capacity to let protest groups coordinate activities nationwide.  But we have all these things now.

Enjoy your recess, Congress!

Moe Lane

*Heck, in 1989 what they considered a ‘cell phone’ looks strange and confusing to our eyes.

Megan McArdle says that this post may help those opposed to health care rationing understand what supporters of health care rationing are going through right now. I would say that this post is probably better-suited for helping you discover the proper level of Deep Hurting and existential despair of the Other Side; at least, it gives more entertainment possibilities.  I’d say at least Level V, myself.

Moe Lane

PS: Bad karma?  Sparky, I’ve had my Level II Punch in the Gut.  I’ve had two, in fact: they were called the “2006 and 2008 election cycles,” and I’ve spent four years that I could have more personally profitably spent on roleplaying game design theory helping to build political firewalls, instead.  I’m not saying that I’m an expert on karma, but trust me: I’ve gotten some exposure to it.

I’m moderately surprised that Megan McArdle doesn’t already know the answer to her implicit question here:

Obviously, since I’m pro-choice, I think you can argue against abortion control in many effective ways. But this[*] is not one of them–at least not if you hew to the feminist notion that women are entitled to their own choices and preferences as individuals, not lumped in with some vast undifferentiated mass of women who all want the same thing.

To too many of the people that she’s objecting to, women who aren’t pro-life aren’t actually ‘real’ women. Or particularly people, for that matter.

:shrug: You get used to it, of course: I’m just surprised that Megan hasn’t by now.

Moe Lane

*’This’ being defined as ‘dismissing conservative female objections en masse as being contradictory to a liberal tautology.’

Crossposted to RedState.