Piracy, the Trove and how they affect the Hobby

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Acmegamer was always meant as a joke. In a Warner Brothers sort of way and not in the way of the definition. I used to use a lot more names decades ago in the early days of the internet now I don't bother. If I can't use one of the two I tend to use because it's taken then i'll try to come up with something else.

The other one I tend to use for the past couple decades is Paragonlost (with addons to it or variations same thing with Acmegamer in that regard), I don't use it here because there is one already and I didn't want to cause confusion. Anyhow I got the idea while trying to come up with a login for something back around 2003 and glancing at the bookshelf I noted a Dave Duncan book from a series I enjoyed and decided... yep that works.
 
Pretty sure mine is obvious. (Crossing the streams: had to explain it to Pundit once. He thought I did it to "stalk" him, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.)
 
This Jennifer Aniston reference must be a yank thing. She was in friends and made some crap films. Was with Brad Pitt for a while and never seemed to get over him.

I'm a Brit and it's best we don't talk about politics because over here it's a choice of Dumb or Dumber.

Friends with Money is a typically sharp little comedy satire from Nicole Holofcener that includes Aniston as the central character in an ensemble cast. Plus there's a scene where she appears in a French maid's outfit. If you like that sorta thing...

Friends-with-Money-2-1-700x335.jpg
 
I don't know the original intent, but my personal take is that I like it precisely because there is no connection. It's completely random and nonsensical.

The only reason I ever watched Friends was because it happened to be on TV sometimes. I couldn't tell you any stories or character names, and I never paid any real attention to it. The show was just background static, not even noise. I know Jennifer Aniston has gone on to do other films, but honestly I couldn't name a single one. I actually know more about Courtney Cox, because I can at least say she was in Masters of the Universe. So, for me, Jennifer Aniston is a name that I recognize for absolutely no reason. So using it as a substitute for Pundit resonates with me.

Copy it just seemed an odd connection, but apparently that is why.

Friends is of course her best known role, but she has been in a fair number of films, some actually good. She had a fairly large part in Office Space and a funny supporting part as a cheated on wife in She's the one (she wasn't the one...).



The origin of it was linked a few pages back, but if you're looking for something deeper than "it's funny because it's absurd" you're probably out of luck.


Word Up, so another of those pub things, very SWO.

Friends with Money is a typically sharp little comedy satire from Nicole Holofcener that includes Aniston as the central character in an ensemble cast. Plus there's a scene where she appears in a French maid's outfit. If you like that sorta thing...

View attachment 36798

Have not seen that. She seems to be a pretty good in comedy roles, and I have to admit to a thing for French maids outfit, in fact there may have been one involved in the arrival of my 1st child... :hehe:
 
This Jennifer Aniston reference must be a yank thing.
Not even. Whenever they talk that talk, I just ignore that part of the conversation and nope out. It makes no sense, and I get the feeling it should stay that way.
 
I’ll never understand why Brad dumped her for Angelina.
Until you live with someone, you don't understand a lot. Not to say who was at fault, but I never judge someone as worth spending a life with based on public persona or looks.
Pretty sure mine is obvious. (Crossing the streams: had to explain it to Pundit once. He thought I did it to "stalk" him, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.)
Not so obvious that I get it. I mean, unless you're a butcher in RL.

Mine is my name, but I never use it in RL because I get too many PE jokes.
 
Until you live with someone, you don't understand a lot. Not to say who was at fault, but I never judge someone as worth spending a life with based on public persona or looks.

Not so obvious that I get it. I mean, unless you're a butcher in RL.

Mine is my name, but I never use it in RL because I get too many PE jokes.

I believe he is a surgeon
 
Until you live with someone, you don't understand a lot. Not to say who was at fault, but I never judge someone as worth spending a life with based on public persona or looks.

Not so obvious that I get it. I mean, unless you're a butcher in RL.

Mine is my name, but I never use it in RL because I get too many PE jokes.
At the time he was a Trauma Surgeon, now he's an Oncology Surgeon.
 
At the time he was a Trauma Surgeon, now he's an Oncology Surgeon.
Actually at the time I registered it over at RPGNet I was a med student. When I entered the ’Site I was at the tail end of my Surgical Oncology fellowship. Which historically was widely regarded as “butchery” by many surgeons on account of consisting of major, radical procedures which often dismal results (a lot has changed since).
 
Actually at the time I registered it over at RPGNet I was a med student. When I entered the ’Site I was at the tail end of my Surgical Oncology fellowship. Which historically was widely regarded as “butchery” by many surgeons on account of consisting of major, radical procedures which often dismal results (a lot has changed since).
You did a Trauma rotation in there somewhere or am I misremembering?
 
You did a Trauma rotation in there somewhere or am I misremembering?
My General Surgey residency (after med school, before the fellowship) was at a general hospital with a busy ER. And I took trauma call for about a year fresh out of fellowship. So I’m not a “proper” trauma surgeon but I sure as hell paid my dues in the “gun and knife club”.
 
My General Surgey residency (after med school, before the fellowship) was at a general hospital with a busy ER. And I took trauma call for about a year fresh out of fellowship. So I’m not a “proper” trauma surgeon but I sure as hell paid my dues in the “gun and knife club”.
What sort of surgery do you do now?
 
What sort of surgery do you do now?
Cancer surgery, mostly breast cancer, skin cancer and soft tissue tumors (sarcomas). Once a week I do general surgery at a community hospital, which usually boils down to hernias, gallbladder removals, cancer of the digestive tract (mostly colon) and odds and ends such as continuity of care for trauma patients and minor surgery for benign tumors of skin and soft tissue (“lumps and bumps”).
 
As I understand it -- please even barrack-room grades of lawyer pick me up if I'm way off base -- all common-law countries have notionally the same system, which is that your name is the one you're generally known by, but you have the whole "deed poll" thing as an extra step on top of that. But there's oddities either way: once your Government Name(TM) is in the system, good luck demonstrating you're generally known as something else without the paperwork! And sometimes people do the DP thing as a stunt. In theory it's a contract with yourself to only use the particular new name, but I can recall a case in Ireland where someone was on the radio saying something along the lines of "I'm [X] [Y], but I've changed my name by deed poll to [Z] [W] to run in this election as a tribute to someone actually called [Z] [W], and I'll be changing it back right after."
Yeah, stunt names happen in the rest of the UK too. Personally I'm not keen on the concept, but anything that makes stunt naming harder also makes genuine name changes harder, so as far as I'm concerned it's a trade-off we have to accept.

Actually getting your new name "official" ranges in awkwardness. Getting a new driving licence is easy, because the DVLA don't give a shit and will put whatever you ask them to on your licence, and usually deed poll plus one form of government ID is enough; but lots of organisations have their own little hoops and rules to jump through, and they're all slightly different. There were a few things I just couldn't be bothered with and wound up closing the account instead.
 
Here, you have to request it in the courts, run a public announcement for a month, and then get it changed with Social Security before you can take it to the DMV and you have to take it to the DMV before you can take it everywhere else.

I've been sitting on mine for the last year because the Social Security office isn't meeting in person, won't return documents mailed to them, and won't accept photocopies (even notarized) of official documents.
 
It's interesting, here it depends on what exactly you are changing your name to and at what "level" you wish to change it. Depending on the change you can register with a university, open a bank account, register for tax with a new name with no legal actions or deed polls.
 
Jumping back on topic (non Pub like though that is), an interesting indicator that these debates about piracy aren't new.

This is from Grognardia's readthrough of White Dwarf, in this case April/May 1979.

Livingstone then takes aim at "photocopier fanatics" who make copies of rules or magazines rather than buying them. He encourages his readers to give such miscreants "a bad time" and to support game companies by buying their properly printed products.
 
Jumping back on topic (non Pub like though that is), an interesting indicator that these debates about piracy aren't new.

This is from Grognardia's readthrough of White Dwarf, in this case April/May 1979.

Oh, definitely. Back in the day, anyone who bought a new RPG book was everyone's best friend. They had all sorts of invitations to accompany someone to Kinkos to copy that brand new book they just got.
 
Jumping back on topic (non Pub like though that is), an interesting indicator that these debates about piracy aren't new.

This is from Grognardia's readthrough of White Dwarf, in this case April/May 1979.
I remember reading that! In a photocopy from a friend, because I didn't start collecting White Dwarf until '83.
 
When I was a kid, I think I remember going down to the library and checking out their AD&D books and using the copy machine to copy a couple pages I was interested in using for my various DIY projects.
 
Photocopiers used to charge quite a hefty sum back in the day. I'd have rather spent my meagre pocket money on actual RPG stuff rather than copying it. The earliest printer I had was a dot matrix thing and the paper was really thick computer stuff. Crap for character sheets and the like but it didn't stop me trying. I had to concede defeat with the MERP character sheets and we wrote those out by hand. These days it would be a doddle. We never had it so good... aside from having more games than ever to play and no time to play em.

Wonder if I'll ever play in a face to face game again :hmmm:
 
Jumping back on topic (non Pub like though that is), an interesting indicator that these debates about piracy aren't new.

This is from Grognardia's readthrough of White Dwarf, in this case April/May 1979.
This is part of the thing that makes me question how much damage piracy does. I've been playing video games since Pong came out as a console. Almost from the start you've had piracy and claims it could kill the industry. Somehow despite this incredibly diabolical piracy Video games have grown to be multi billion dollar industry.

I'm not saying it doesn't hurt some individual contributors but it doesn't seem to slow the industry in any real way. The way I see it society has a poorly defended rule regarding the legitimacy (not much money or effort put in to stopping it) and that alone seems to be enough in incentive to keep an industry afloat.


How is that we have never had an easier time pirating games and we also have never had so many choices?

I realize for any individual this is painful and sucks if your stuff is stolen and I don't mean to diminish that feeling but if the goal of copyright is to induce creation but either it's lack of enforcement or things like the OGL borderline negate it why do we still have it? I don't seem to need to give any protections to get content made.
 
This is part of the thing that makes me question how much damage piracy does. I've been playing video games since Pong came out as a console. Almost from the start you've had piracy and claims it could kill the industry. Somehow despite this incredibly diabolical piracy Video games have grown to be multi billion dollar industry.

I'm not saying it doesn't hurt some individual contributors but it doesn't seem to slow the industry in any real way. The way I see it society has a poorly defended rule regarding the legitimacy (not much money or effort put in to stopping it) and that alone seems to be enough in incentive to keep an industry afloat.


How is that we have never had an easier time pirating games and we also have never had so many choices?

I realize for any individual this is painful and sucks if your stuff is stolen and I don't mean to diminish that feeling but if the goal of copyright is to induce creation but either it's lack of enforcement or things like the OGL borderline negate it why do we still have it? I don't seem to need to give any protections to get content made.

Piracy definitely has cut the porn industry off at the knees with work drying up for performers and directors and companies going out-of-business. But course most people don't really care what happens to porn performers.

The great writer Jon Ronson did an excellent podcast series about the topic, The Butterfly Effect.


To a lesser but not insignificant degree the same is true of the music industry, which I used to work in a peripheral way as a music writer, broadcaster and later show promoter. A lot of the medium-sized indie labels had to either shrink from a small team to one-man operations, regional major label offices shrunk from teams of 20 plus to one or two people working part-time. Some genres were harder hit than others, teenypop and country music ironically do okay via digital sales but hip-hop experienced drops in sales of 50-75 percent.

The Jay-Z and Beyonces of the world of course are doing okay (although note how much they get into other sources of revenue like fashion and branding) but the days of being able to not have to hold a dayjob for mid-level musicians is largely gone.
 
I used to photocopy film books for study purposes and entire books of OOP poetry (particularly the great Umbra poets of the 60s) from the university special collections.

Over the years though I managed to find those OOP books for reasonable prices online and those photocopied versions went into recyling.
 
Is piracy that's really hurt musicians or is it the responses to it?

In the old days you would buy a CD. Now people stream from spotify. Of the two, isn't the latter a considerably worse deal for musicians while still not being piracy?
 
Piracy definitely has cut the porn industry off at the knees with work drying up for performers and directors and companies going out-of-business. But course most people don't really care what happens to porn performers.

Definitely. Back in my full-time programmer/developer days, I started to keep up with the professional discussions within that industry because it was frequently the test grown for new technologies. You could see what was potentially coming down the pipeline to the regular IT world (particularly in the entertainment and Internet branches of it) by seeing what the porn folks were experimenting with, often a couple of years earlier. That industry was always a good potential source of programming side-gigs, since they sometimes had trouble finding experienced developers to work for them.

Piracy became a bigger issue for them as download speeds improved and more people got online, but really went out the roof when clip sites (like PornHub) became so popular. Many of them have had to grudgingly work with the clip sites, providing their own preview clips, some focus on DMCA takedowns, and some pivoted hard to streaming chat stuff, like OnlyFans. A lot of performers figured out pretty quickly that they didn't need porn producers to acts as middlemen for them on the streaming chat sites, though. That shift has been beneficial to a lot of performers.

These days, the non-performer porn producers (in the U.S., at least) that have survived are the ones that are shrewd businesspeople who are good at targeting specific types of customers and/or produce very niche content. Most of them aren't making nearly as much money as they did in the 90s, though.

That is one of the few industries I am aware of where the effects of piracy has been that cut and dry, though. The issue becomes a lot more complex when you start to look at things like ttrpgs.
 
Oh, definitely. Back in the day, anyone who bought a new RPG book was everyone's best friend. They had all sorts of invitations to accompany someone to Kinkos to copy that brand new book they just got.

Nonsense who would do such a thing... :crossed:


At one time I had a big binder of Rolemaster, I slaved over a copy machine for hours at Krishna copy for that thing. So what is the statute of limitations on piracy? Hopefully less than 30 years...
 
Is piracy that's really hurt musicians or is it the responses to it?

In the old days you would buy a CD. Now people stream from spotify. Of the two, isn't the latter a considerably worse deal for musicians while still not being piracy?

This was before streaming became a thing but yes streaming companies are infamous for underpaying musicians as well.

I remember El-P complaining that he kept telling Spotify to take his music down and then after a while they'd put it back up. The people running the biggest streaming corps are true scum even by the music industry's low standards.
 
Definitely. Back in my full-time programmer/developer days, I started to keep up with the professional discussions within that industry because it was frequently the test grown for new technologies. You could see what was potentially coming down the pipeline to the regular IT world (particularly in the entertainment and Internet branches of it) by seeing what the porn folks were experimenting with, often a couple of years earlier. That industry was always a good potential source of programming side-gigs, since they sometimes had trouble finding experienced developers to work for them.

Piracy became a bigger issue for them as download speeds improved and more people got online, but really went out the roof when clip sites (like PornHub) became so popular. Many of them have had to grudgingly work with the clip sites, providing their own preview clips, some focus on DMCA takedowns, and some pivoted hard to streaming chat stuff, like OnlyFans. A lot of performers figured out pretty quickly that they didn't need porn producers to acts as middlemen for them on the streaming chat sites, though. That shift has been beneficial to a lot of performers.

These days, the non-performer porn producers (in the U.S., at least) that have survived are the ones that are shrewd businesspeople who are good at targeting specific types of customers and/or produce very niche content. Most of them aren't making nearly as much money as they did in the 90s, though.

That is one of the few industries I am aware of where the effects of piracy has been that cut and dry, though. The issue becomes a lot more complex when you start to look at things like ttrpgs.

I'm not really sure you can say that has hurt the porn industry, just as it is hard to say tech has hurt the music industry. Yes it has caused a shift that has hurt some individual businesses, mostly those focused on organizing and distribution, but the industry as a whole seems to be doing just fine, and I don't think there has been a time in modern history where it has been easier for people to directly find an audience to sell their work whether music, porn, writing or widgets and keep the money that would have gone to a record label, film studio or other means of getting it out to the public.
 
I'm not really sure you can say that has hurt the porn industry, just as it is hard to say tech has hurt the music industry. Yes it has caused a shift that has hurt some individual businesses, mostly those focused on organizing and distribution, but the industry as a whole seems to be doing just fine, and I don't think there has been a time in modern history where it has been easier for people to directly find an audience to sell their work whether music, porn, writing or widgets and keep the money that would have gone to a record label, film studio or other means of getting it out to the public.

OnlyFans improved things from the nadir but overall most directors and performers get way, way less work.

It is the performers and directors themselves who say this, just give the series from Ronson a listen to hear from them.

I also worked in the music industry so I saw the decline happen in real time. But I get people want to believe otherwise.
 
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