Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[penguinofhonor]

Besides, creating a setting takes a lot of work. Creating characters takes a lot of work.

If you have a story, don't want to profit off of it, have this great setting that it works GREAT for, and aren't that good at the actual... world-building part...

Why re-invent the wheel? Especially if you'll end up making a square instead?

Even if you don't want to profit off it, I'm willing to bet his act of publishing it means that he wants people to read it. And by making it fanfiction, he's necessarily reducing his readers to a subset of the original work's fans.

[Frumple]

Nooot necessarily true. I read quite a bit of fanfiction from series I'm not particularly familiar with (if at all), and I'm pretty far from the only one. Good readin's good readin' regardless of the source, and a non-trivial amount of the better fanfiction is written so familiarity with the original source isn't required. Enhances the experience, probably, but not a necessary condition for enjoyment.

There's also th'flat fact that it's possible to publish things as fanfiction or original fiction of a similar nature (Naturally not along the lines of what Pnx was talking about, but still ) that will never, ever manage to get published otherwise. "Readers of fanfiction" is a much larger set of people than "no one at all", and it's often more likely to draw people in than something standalone since you've got a built in hook and audience that original fiction lacks. Basically "original work's fans" is pretty darn likely in a lot of cases to be a much, much larger population than whatever you could drum up on your own. There's a lot of really darn good published fiction that basically no one hears about, after all.

[Nadaka]

My web host has more than doubled their prices over the last year, by next year i'll be paying nearly $300 a year for a shitty little 350megs of online storage and a web application back end stuck back in 2008 if I don't find a different web host.

[lordcooper]

I'm losing things to be quietly smug about at an alarming rate.

[misko27]

So glad we got that whole Constitution thing here. Tends to be useful. First amendmant protect's your right to gender stereotypes and Porn, and noPolitician could ever manage to pass a law otherwise.
 
 First Australia fell to the xxxensorship plague, and now Europe. The Tide grows.

[lordcooper]

So glad we got that whole Constitution thing here. Tends to be useful. First amendmant protect's your right to gender stereotypes and Porn, and noPolitician could ever manage to pass a law otherwise.
 
 First Australia fell to the xxxensorship plague, and now Europe. The Tide grows.

I'm a bit ambivalent to the notion of a UK/European constitution.  IMO there needs to be room for laws to change over time as cultural shifts occur and new technologies alter the way our world functions.  While it'd be pretty great to have an immutable version of the USA's first amendment, I'd absolutely hate to be stuck with the second.  Swings and roundabouts, I guess.

[misko27]

Well fortunately, they do change, and Aren't exactly immutable. Hence the Prohibition Period in America, banning, and eventually re-allowing, alcohol over the 1920s. Also boring amendments like term limits and such happen. The most recent, and one surprisingly that's been in the news and budget battles, is the 27th, proposed all the way back in September 25, 1789, ratified in 1992.
 
Number of inteesting facts about proposed ones though, including a amendment to preserve slaver (obviously, pretty old. Never was a deadline set.)And wiki pedia tells me

In 1963, more than a century after the Corwin Amendment was submitted to the state legislatures by the Congress, a joint resolution to ratify it was introduced in the Texas House of Representatives by Dallas Republican Henry Stollenwerck.^[26] It was referred to the House's Committee on Constitutional Amendments on March 7, 1963, and received no further consideration.^[27]

[lordcooper]

Weird, I was under the impression that the US constitution could only be added to, not truly amended or partially repealed.  If this is the case, what exactly is the point of it?  What distinguishes it from other legislation?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

An Amendment (or any part of the Constitution, for that matter) can only be repealed by another Amendment. Nothing can take anything out of the Constitution unless the whole thing is gotten rid of and replaced, which is why the Three-Fifths Compromise remains even after the banning of slavery.

The point of the Constitution is that it is the contractual document that allows the United States to exist. If either the government or the people decide not to follow it, there is no longer a United States. We've been around for long enough that people don't actively think of it in those terms, but the implication remains.

Amendments are distinguished from other legislation in that an overwhelming majority of the nation is required to agree upon them, and that using them for partisan political activities is seen in a bad light because the Constitution is supposed to be an abstract framework. That's why the Flag Desecration Amendment, Marriage Amendment, and Personhood Amendment never passed despite their introduction to Congress at a time during which there were good majorities supporting criminalizing flag desecration, same-sex marriage, and abortion. Prohibition is probably the only time this was ever breached, and of course it did not last.

[misko27]

Yes, in general it would take absolutely massive domination of a issue, not even a party but an issue for all of the states to ratify it.
 
It can be changed, but only when the vast majority of all the elected officials support it. If it doesn't pass a certain threshold number of states, it doesn't go. Example, Titles of Nobility Amendment would strip citizenship from anyone recognized as a noblein a foreign land. This was struck down 3 times in 1810 (when the US woudl still very very very anti-noble not that it isn't now of course) by, interestingly, the same 3 states, New York, Conneticutt, and Rhode Island.
 
A more akin example would be haveing, say, 4/5 of all the nations in the EU agree, in addition to the European Parliment. Procedural thigns like Congress not being allowed to set their own salary until after a election pass commonly enough, (common still being pretty long, 17 amendments in 200 years) and major ones taking a more transformative event like the Civil war.

[Bauglir]

Urble, suddenly I have a headache so bad it has given me nausea as some sort of bonus prize. As soon as it calms down enough that I think I can handle a flight of stairs, to the drug store.

[Korbac]

Urble, suddenly I have a headache so bad it has given me nausea as some sort of bonus prize. As soon as it calms down enough that I think I can handle a flight of stairs, to the drug store.

Do you feel somewhat weak, do you have visual disturbances, is it focused on one side of the head?

If yes to any of these, it's likely you're going to have say hello to the world of migraines.

[Bauglir]

Yes, no, yes (well, it's moved over the course of the headache and has always included the top, but always excluded one side).

Ibuprofen has reduced the headache's severity, but the nausea continues. What a shitty way to wake up.

[Frumple]

Heh. Just make sure it's actually a headache. I had a kidney stone start off like that.

... though if it's actually that, you'd probably notice real quick when the pain becomes sufficient you start expelling things from all orifices. That was not a happy day. Not at all.

[Korbac]

Yes, no, yes (well, it's moved over the course of the headache and has always included the top, but always excluded one side).

Ibuprofen has reduced the headache's severity, but the nausea continues. What a shitty way to wake up.

It's likely you've got a migraine, and you might continue to get migraines at irregular intervals. Sorry. I've got these too and they vary from "annoying and mildly painful" to "AGHHH I MUST LIE DOWN IN AND GO TO SLEEP IN A DARKENED ROOM STRAIGHT AWAY."

You might want to take an anti - emetic to stop you feeling nauseous if possible. If you've got any ginger in the house, wikipedia says this might do. O_o Otherwise you'd probably be looking at popping into a pharmacy.