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#but if not it is fair game

formosusiniquis · 8 months

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I've decided the perfect Stobin au is a psych au/fusion. I don't know if I'll ever clear my plate enough to write it so let me share some world building highlights I dreamt of last night:

Steve, with his people reading skills and his ADHD brain that holds on to strange bits of information forever, accidentally convinces the Hawkins police force that he's psychic.

Robin plays his (thematic) straight man. Trading off antics and helping to fill in the gaps in Steve's knowledge base/memory

This only even happens because the temp agency placed Robin at a separate job from Steve, tragic, and he had too much time on his hands to get a crush on the local dinner guy

The local dinner guy who gets framed for a crime he didn't commit, and when Steve goes in just to provide a character witness he gets accused of being an accomplice. Somehow between this point and being released Steve convinces them he's psychic -- it's important to note even Steve is unclear on how this happens

When Robin finds out Steve has already decided they can solve this. And self employment is pretty much the only way to make sure they can work together forever and no one can separate them

Through the power of gossip, audacity, and actually doing some investigative work. Stobin do of course solve the crime

More general lore thoughts: this is an aged up au so that Steve wouldn't have to have a strained tough love relationship with his dad ala actual psych sure you could use Hopper in place of Henry but I think it's more fun to shove a newly graduated Dustin into just some kind of generic science lab. Who needs a dad for advice when you have six kids?

Every eligible lady in Hawkins is obsessed with Robin and her private eye drip, can an au that doesn't exist have a running gag?

Most crucially, regardless of any boy or girl crushes, this is an au about stobin getting into antics. Steve tapping in to his inner theater kid while Robin nods sagely in the back. Robin asking the most uncomfortable question a person has ever asked another human while Steve smiles and gaslights them into believing its acceptable. Steve and Robin paying themselves to hang out all day and yeah maybe along the way they solve a murder if they're up to it, who knows they've got a lot planned

#stobin #platonic stobin #steve and robin #i apologize for spamming the tags cause this is mostly for my own sorting #i really maybe will write this one day #but if not it is fair game #also if it already exists please send it to me

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danyllura · 1 year

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I love that in Catching fire Katniss comes to the conclusion the other tributes are trying to keep Peeta alive because they must see how amazingly perfectly wonderful he is. When in actuality that’s just her having a crush and everyone else recognizing that if Peeta gets hurt Katniss will go fully feral and unhinged and probably try to kill everyone and then herself.

#Katniss is the only one not aware she is the main character #she’s too distracted staring at Peetas eyelashes #and fair enough #katniss everdeen #everlark #the hunger games #peeta mellark

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adobe-outdesign · 9 months

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Pokemon is amazing because it started out being coded with duct tape and prayers by a small team of people. flash forward twenty years and guess what? it's now coded with duct tape and prayers by a medium-sized team of people

#pokemon #pkmn #gamefreak #outdesign posts things #though to be fair gen 1 was them trying to cram together a game with like 2 mb of space to work with #modern GF really doesn't have an excuse #greatest hits

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chaichai-draws · 8 months

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It’s okay Aang, eventually (right,,,?🔪)

Ahahaha,,, hahaha,,, sorry @lovelyelbowleech I know there’s more to take away from the last two chapter of War Games but mmmm aaaah hmmm uhhhh

#atla fanart #atla fanfic #avatar: the last airbender #avatar the last airbender #aang #sokka #katara #toph #zukka #war games #war crimes #all’s fair #all’s fair fanart #war games fanart #fic art #fanart #lovelyelbowleech #Gaang #avatar fanart

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emry-stars-art · 21 days

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When the misunderstanding is mutual but they’re both so sweet about it (coffee shop au edition)

Inspired by the tags below (originally on this post) from @blahblaheverythingisgay and @lovelyprincejehan accompanied by some thoughts:

thank you for bringing this GALAXY brain take to my attention 😂 this guy comes in, all cagey about his past and his scars, always wearing baggy clothes but complaining about compression clothes (being on the run does a number on your joints and muscles), picking out a name for himself??? OBVIOUSLY he’s trans right

They somehow manage to have like three separate conversations about it without realizing they’re talking about two very different scenarios. Andrew only was so wrong for so long because scars on their own (and even being a criminal lbr) are such non-issues that it didn’t even occur to him that Neil could be talking about anything less important than being trans lol

Andrew had his little crisis about it and landed pretty solid on yeah he’s still into Neil regardless, and yeah he’s still super gay. He’ll figure out the rest from there. The only thing he didn't prepare for was Neil being uh. Cis

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kiss-my-asymptote · 8 months

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I’m fucking dying Astarion’s early party banter is him just flirting with all the companions and striking out; none of them are having it. When he comes on to Tav at the party, not only is he manipulating them, but they are literally his last choice. Not even plan b or c, Tav was plan ‘fuck it, I guess we’re doing this!’ and that clown still fell into his own pit trap.

#My roommate asked me why I romance him and like him so much #because all I tell her when we sit on the couch playing our respective games next to each other is what a snarky bastard he is #the answer is that he’s funny #my roomie said ‘i guess that’s fair. A guy can get away with manipulating me if he’s pretty and makes me laugh’#bg3 astarion #baldurs gate tav #bg3 #baldurs gate 3 #astarion x tav

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wyvernne · 10 months

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this is ur daily reminder that crepus didn’t just die in front of diluc, diluc killed him to spare him from the suffering when the delusion backfired

#the whole crepus dying and ragbro fight is so misconstrued it drives me wild #genshin spoilers #to be fair this is the entire prequel of the game so ??#pre spoilers?#intro spoilers?#lmao

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theminecraftbee · 2 months

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incidentally for the people who aren’t zedaph watchers I have to express just HOW MUCH the crevasse is a step forward for zedaph building. season six he. didn’t have a base really if I recall correctly. in season seven he had an undecorated cave he put silly machines in. season eight he at least DECORATED but it was sure still a hole in a mountain. season nine it was a base he did a BUILD with! still a hole in a mountain. season ten is a STEP UP it’s a hole with NO MOUNTAIN REQUIRED,

#hermitcraft #zedaph #I SAY THIS LOVINGLY AND I HONESTLY LOVE HIS BUILDS #and his s9 base was gorgeous and a great monument to Zedvancements #but it’s SO FUNNY. predictable king who builds the same way I do: panic and dig a hole.#I wasn’t around for s5 to see how that fits into this trend. I suspect it was also a hole in a mountain tho.#although this isn’t fair of me. he ALSO had a game show. that’s basically the same thing as a base.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Good riddance to the Open Gaming License

Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:

https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634

The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community — not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.

Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then enclosing the fans’ work and selling it back to them. It’s a tale as old as CDDB and Disgracenote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History

(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)

https://musicbrainz.org/

Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word “irrevocable.” That means that if you build on licensed content, you don’t have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It’s rugproof.

Now, the OGL does not contain the word “irrevocable.” Rather, the OGL is “perpetual.” To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a “perpetual” license is one whose revocation doesn’t come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is “irrevocable,” the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.

This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers — rather than public-interest nonprofits — unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/26/part3ogl/

The issue lies with what the OGL actually licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.

The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn’t work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?):

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

Copyright is a lot more complex than “anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it.” For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not apply to ideas — the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically not copyrightable.

Copyright also doesn’t cover abstract systems or methods — like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a “balanced” system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That’s what “uncopyrightable” means.

Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations to copyright — things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright’s proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.

In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even all of the four factors (for example, the Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).

Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the di minimis exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is “fact-intensive,” and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.

Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC can’t copyright — “the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines.” In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things you don’t need permission to use.

But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use more things, beyond those things you’re allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:

Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…

Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture

If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on Kregos and Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/openip/#q01

Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.

As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators

But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights — it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.

“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”

And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro does go through with canceling the OGL, it will release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.

According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.

Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”

“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”

Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.

If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they could.

This is a great moment to start — or contribute to — real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.

That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:

https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/

[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier's 'Eye of Moloch,' the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads 'Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That's Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.' The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail '1.' Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]

#pluralistic #copyfraud #wizards of the coast #wotc #dungeons and dragons #d&d #ogl #open gaming license #eff #fair use #kit walsh #consideration #licenses

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