I’ve been wanting to stop posting at this address with something that makes me especially happy. The previous post qualifies, so, from now on, I’ll be blogging at my old blogger address: http://shetterly.blogspot.com. (This time, for sure!) Update your RSS feeds or come on by!

Because I hear the requests of my LiveJournal friends, I will continue to crosspost at http://willshetterly.livejournal.com.

Walk in beauty, y’all!

What a great list! They did an outstanding job! Every single nominee is a masterpiece, fully deserving— Oh, hey! Emma and I are nominated, too!

The nominees for novel:

Territory, Emma Bull [Tor]
Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay [Viking Canada/Penguin Roc]
Fangland, John Marks [Penguin Press]
Gospel of the Knife, Will Shetterly [Tor]
The Servants, Michael Marshall Smith [Earthling Publications]

I wish everyone well, but I hope Emma wins.

P.S. For anyone who hasn’t read my work, don’t start with Gospel of the Knife. Elsewhere and Dogland are better—at least, in the author’s opinion, which carries no more weight than anyone else’s, and may carry less, because knowing what you intended may blind you to what you did.

You can start with any of Emma’s work. It’s all great.

Theists and atheists spend too much time arguing with each other. Whether there’s a world after this one has nothing to do with making this one better.

Okay, atheist jerks think they can be jerks because you live, you die, and you’re gone; and theist jerks think they can be jerks because you live, you die, and God rewards you. But you notice the theme there?

We all make mistakes. The biggest mistake may be identifying ourselves with our mistakes.

That may sound like it’s at odds with something I believe: we are what we do. But it’s just a corollary: change what you do, and you change what you are.

Machinima fascinates me. It’s DIY low-res 3D movies, first made by people who hacked computer games and played with the footage. A game called The Movies tried to bring machinima to the masses, but The Movies wanted to be both a game and a moviemaking tool, which only confused its audience. Worse, from the artist’s POV, its eula (end-user license agreement) said you could only use it noncommercially.

Moviestorm is doing almost everything right. Their eula lets you do what you want with what you create, and you can download the basic version for free. That basic version is surprisingly complete. Moviestorm’s available for PC and Mac. If they made a Linux version, I would think they were just about perfect.

They have a few movies made with Moviestorm here, and youtube has many with that tag. Here’s a two-minute video for Lord Byron’s “When We Two Parted” that especially impressed me:

Its maker is interviewed here.

Moviestorm’s site says it “is the complete package for creating animated movies - easy to use for novices and fully-featured for advanced moviemakers.” That’s pretty much true, but their tutorials aren’t as good as their software. After spending some time at their site and on their message boards, I think the Moviestorm people are very nice folks who are a bit overextended, so they’re focusing on improving the application. Which means you sometimes have to experiment a bit to discover that something is very easy to do.

Special deal! When you sign on, they give you 500 points (equivalent to five euros) for buying addons at their store. But you and a friend can get an extra 300 points each through their “refer a friend” program. If that’s tempting, email me at shetterly@gmail.com, I’ll send you the invite, and we’ll both be able to get a few more distractions. (Yes, this is my latest shiny.)

System specs: Before you download, check the specs here.

Mac users: Note that you first need to install the free Nvida Cgi Toolkit—see the link here.

The Minnesota goodbye is saying you’re going, then standing at the door and talking for twenty minutes. It’s a cultural thing, done by people who don’t want you to think they’re in a hurry to leave you. I do it a lot. I’m doing it now.

I’ll cross-post to my LiveJournal and WordPress sites for a little longer. I hate leaving those sites after posting about something I despise. I’ll post about happy things for a week, and then I’ll go away.

Later: That’s despise in a “hate the sin, love the sinner” way. See new post.

Update your links or wish me farewell—I’m moving back to Blogger. My new home is my old home; if you’re looking for new posts from me, come by it’s all one thing.

Thanks, Cat at Green Man Review!

I’ll make an announcement here when I’m ready to post exclusively at my new/old website, http://shetterly.blogspot.com/. I’m copying the following post in both locations because it’s a conclusion for people who have read my previous posts on disemvoweling and a summary for those who haven’t:

Disemvowelment is the removal of all the vowels from a post by a moderator. I never gave it much thought until I saw people being disemvoweled for political rather than rhetorical reasons. That led to my disemvoweling at Tibet and human rights: New Amnesty ads, when Boing Boing was promoting a hoax about Amnesty International. Here’s the re-emvoweled version of what offended the moderator in comments #246 and #248:

“Xeni owes BB’s readers a new post so the readers who fell for this hoax will know the truth.”

“If you have any respect for AI, please make a new post to let all BB readers know the truth.”

Avram Grumer explained at #257, “Will, I’ve partially disemvoweled your cts #246 and 248. Do not presume to tell Xeni (or the other Boingers) what to post about.”

I protested in Boing Boing’s moderation thread at #608: “Hmm. The heavy hand of the moderators strikes again: For suggesting that Xeni should put a correction on the front page, I was disemvowelled. It smells unethical to me: Print the lie on the front page, then print the correction somewhere in the back pages.”

For saying that, I was banned.

I hate seeing political speech censored, so I decided to look into the legal implications of disemvoweling.

How does copyright apply to blogging?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s If a reader comments on my blog, does she license the rights to me? says, “When a person enters comments on a blog for the purpose of public display, he is probably giving an implied license at least for that display and the incidental copying that goes along with it.”

In the absence of a contract, a commenter who submits a comment is only giving permission to reproduce the comment faithfully. Newspapers and journals understand this. When they wish to mock a letter of comment, they print it with all errors intact and note that’s what they’ve done. If a letter’s meaning is distorted or lost due to editorial changes, journalistic ethics call for printing a correction in the next edition. Even when a contract exists between writer and publisher, the current custom in US book publishing is for editors to give writers the edited manuscript. Writers may then reject suggested changes by writing “stet” in the margin.

Is disemvowling justified under “fair use”?

From Stanford University Library’s What Is Fair Use?: “In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work.”

From Chilling Effect’s Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers) about Copyright and Fair Use :

..if a copyrighted work is unpublished, it will be harder to establish that defendant’s use of it was fair. See Salinger v. Random House, Inc., 650 F. Supp. 413 (S.D.N.Y. 1986), and in New Era Publications Int’l v. Henry Holt & Co., 695 F. Supp. 1493 (S.D.N.Y. 1988).

And, from the Fair Use Network’s Fair Use of Copyrighted Works:

Unpublished letters, or other writings that the author chose to keep private, have a stronger claim against unauthorized uses than works the creator has released to the public.

The recurring theme in defining “fair use” is that it lets us comment on the original work of others. “Fair use” assumes people will recognize what’s being used, and if they do not, they can go to the source to see whether the work was used fairly–even if that means going to a private library and looking at the original manuscript.

When a blog owner chooses to disemvowel comments submitted to that blog, the blog owner is not commenting on the original work; the blog owner is altering it. Blog comments are expected to be the original expression of the work, not copies of work that exist elsewhere. Commenters who leave comments copied from other sites are traditionally considered spammers.

Is disemvoweling defamation?

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Bloggers’ FAQ - Online Defamation Law: “Generally, defamation is a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone’s reputation, and published “with fault,” meaning as a result of negligence or malice.”

Is disemvoweling meant to be “harmful to someone’s reputation”? Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who invented the technique, explains, “It deprecates but does not delete the remark.” Xeni Jardin adds, “The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous.”

Can disemvoweling, though negligence or malice, create false statements of fact? In this thread at my livejournal, I wrote, ‘I would challenge anyone to decipher: “f y hv ny rspct fr , pls mk nw pst t lt ll BB rdrs knw th trth.”‘ Nelc, who took part in the original discussion on Boing Boing as Nelson_C, answered, ‘I think you’ve dropped a word: “If you have any respect for [me], please make a new post to let all BB readers know the truth.”‘ Because the abbreviation for Amnesty International, “AI,” was lost through disemvowelling, my request for respect for Amnesty International was interpreted as a plea for respect for me.

A conclusion

I say “a conclusion” rather than “the conclusion” because the law is decided by people with different philosophies—that’s why cases are appealed. Here’s what I think is clear:

Disemvoweling is an abuse of copyright. In the absence of a contract, a writer’s words belong the writer.

Disemvoweling is not justified by “fair use.” To use something fairly, it must exist in a form that can be found by those who wish to compare the use with the original.

Disemvoweling, through negligence or malice, can create false statements of fact. Disemvoweling could result in a defamation suit, depending on the degree of falseness and the litigiousness of the disemvoweled.

All that said, this ultimately isn’t a legal issue for me. It’s a moral one. If someone says something on your web site that you don’t like, remove it, refute it, or rebut it. Don’t mangle it in the hope that mockery will win where reason failed.

And this, I pray, is my final comment on disemvoweling comments.

I’m going to move my blog back to Blogger; I’ll make an announcement here when I’m ready. There’s a lot that I love about WordPress, but:

1. Blogger lets commenters preview comments; WordPress doesn’t.

2. Blogger lets commenters delete comments; WordPress doesn’t.

The Blogger people understand that blogs are a collaboration between the blogger and the commenter. I might wish Blogger let commenters edit comments, but in some ways, their system is smarter than that: if a commenter deletes a comment, a notice remains that it was deleted by the commenter, so any later comment by that person is clearly a new comment.

With Blogger, the ultimate power stays with the blogger: the blog owner can still delete comments or the entire blog. But the commenters have more control over their own words. That’s how it should be.