I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to read thoroughly through the terms of any publication before you send your writing to them. It is mandatory that you know and understand what rights you’re giving away when you’re trying to get published.
Just the other day I was emailed by a relatively new indie journal looking for writers. They made it very clear that they did not pay writers for their work, so I figured I’d probably be passing, but I took a look at their Copyright policy out of curiosity and it was a nightmare. They wanted “non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license and right to use, display, reproduce, distribute, and publish the Work on the internet and on or in any medium” (that’s copy and pasted btw) and that was the first of 10 sections on their Copyright agreement page. Yikes. That’s exactly the type of publishing nightmare you don’t want to be trapped in.
Most journals will ask for “First North American Rights” or a variation on “First Rights” which operate under the assumption that all right revert back to you and they only have the right to be the first publishers of the work. That is what you need to be looking for because you do want to retain all the rights to your work.
You want all rights to revert back to you upon publication in case you, say, want to publish it again in the future or use it for a bookmark or post it on your blog, or anything else you might want to do with the writing you worked hard on. Any time a publisher wants more than that, be very suspicious. Anyone who wants to own your work forever and be able to do whatever they want with it without your permission is not to be trusted. Anyone who wants all that and wants you to sign away your right to ever be paid for your work is running a scam.
Protect your writing. It’s not just your intellectual property, it’s also your baby. You worked hard on it. You need to do the extra research to protect yourself so that a scammer (or even a well meaning start up) doesn’t
steal you work right from under you nose and make money off of it.
Exclusive publishing rights have to have a set time frame! Do not agree to anything that doesn’t clearly state “up to five years from signature” or something like that.
What if the publisher goes defunct? What if they get bought by another publisher who doesn’t care to promote or publish your work? You still can’t to anything with it, you don’t own it anymore!
Planned Parenthood stands with transgender people. We see you. We care about you. We have your back — no matter your gender identity, no matter what. Our doors are open to everyone regardless of gender identity or expression.
Now they’re boasting on fb about encouraging random men and “gangs of lads” to commit violence against trans women.
TERFs will claim in one breath to be against male violence, while with the other they incite this very same violence against the women they hate.
handing out propaganda to men and encouraging them to enact violence upon already oppressed people in order to supposedly “protect their wives and children”… not like that’s such a common and exclusive tactic of reactionary hate groups that it’s a hallmark of fascist organising or anything 😬
TERFs aren’t just silly internet weirdos with regressive beliefs; they’re a hate group with a very clear mission statement in removing trans people totally from the public sphere if not eradicating them entirely. Their politics are inherently violent and they will seek to enact that violence whenever they get the chance.
It’s not just internet discourse. This shit has a bodycount and they’re looking to increase it.
I’m not sure how much more apparent it must become after this that terfs don’t actually hate us because we are supposedly men or supposedly violent. Terfs are perfectly fine with male violence as long as it aligns with their own goals – eliminating trans women from existence. The way they propagandize this is also intrinsically tied to white supremacy – making this about protecting children while their leaflets contain the picture of a pretty, skinny, white, cis woman i.e the white mother that needs to be protected from the non-white hordes and, indeed, from the violent and masculinized trans women. They might as well have written the 14 words on there and it wouldn’t.
Worked on this girl for 9 months. Now this new music video comes out and she’s immensely popular, arguably one of the most popular characters in the LoL universe.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad she’s a huge hit, it’s super exciting to see so many people love the character design and the gameplay, and know that I contributed directly and significantly to the behind-the-scenes engineering that makes it all work. It’s validating.
But it’s also so fucking melancholy to know I did so much work and put in so much time for such a shitty company, run by shitty people, and the reward I got for it was unemployment.
I threw a lot into this character. I cried at work. I started getting panic attacks, which I’ve never gotten before. I developed persistent heart palpitations from the daily overwhelming stress and had to go to the hospital (this is true, seriously.) I basically dropped all my friends outside of work. My manager (and his manager!) lied to me constantly to keep me working. They said I was doing a great job but to keep it up. Don’t worry, it’s going to turn out great, and it’ll all be worth it in the end – recognition, a raise, probably a promotion in short order. They promised me the world. When she was finally finished, I didn’t even get to go to the release party, they just walked me out.
I remember a quote from my last day, it sticks out in my mind: “I know you realize this is really hard for me,” my manager said. Yes, in the end, when he awkwardly informed me I didn’t have my dream job anymore – or any job at all – and then stared back at my shell-shocked face, my thousand-yard stare, the only thing he felt was sorry for himself.
She launched with no major bugs and was considered a technical success. Doesn’t matter. Get the fuck out.
I don’t know how I feel. A weird sensation of pride and intense bitterness. I did a good job; at least, I think I did. Unfortunately, internal validation is the only kind I’m going to get.
Everyone reposting KDA should see this. Riot has successfully distracted everyone into forgetting their culture of sexism,exploitation, and toxicity mere months after it was all revealed.
Look, I get it. Akali is EXTREMELY my type. It’s obvious how much love and care was put into her development. But it makes me furious to see all the free advertising that Riot is getting from people who I thought would know better.
And now? One of the people who is arguably responsible for all that free advertising? Who’s work is undoubtedly making Riot hundreds of thousands of dollars a day? Who was overworked to the point of near breaking? They get nothing. WORSE than the scant bit of credit that most devs can get in a big company like Riot. They got let go.
Fuck Riot Games.
One thing that I thought really sucked a lot is that the production company who made the KDA video isn’t even credited. They credit a lot of other people on their videos, usually, but the actual animators of the video are hidden; almost a lie by omission. At best it’s a honest mistake, at worst it’s sneakily trying to pass off the video as something made in-house when it’s not. 😦
On and around November 13 and 14, tumblr started deleting people’s accounts as well as taking people’s urls – most of them being canon fandom-related urls as seen in the list below.
The following users had their urls stripped away from them on November 14, and were given placeholder urls like blog0294324.
every person on the above list got their urls LEGITIMATELY, they were NOT sold, nor traded, nor bought. They were GIVEN to them fair and square (or they were lucky enough to save them). [[I PERSONALLY can vouch that I saved the url civilwars in 2016 and GAVE IT TO the person who previously had it about a month ago. There was NOTHING against the Terms of Service with the way that url was acquired.]]
[On November 13, I, tumblr user marvel (currently marvelterminated), was accused of selling urls, and had my entire account terminated wrongfully. I don’t think it was a coincidence that less than a day after my account was terminated, many of my friends had their urls taken away from them.]
Also, these are not isolated incidents. There are also reports of people saving a url, and then tumblr emailing them after TAKING THEIR URL AWAY saying they were “in the process of releasing the url for another user when you grabbed it” which is just wrong. This happened to tumblr user wanda, who changed her url to “bucky” and then very shortly afterward had it taken away from her. Tumblr user ralts had saved “entertainment” in this way and also had it taken from her.
Tumblr: you can fix this and do what’s right. You have the power to stop further damage. Why would you want to punish your dedicated userbase, instead of the actual evils that plague your site? So hundreds of thousands of porn bots are okay, but fandom blogs aren’t? This isn’t a small issue. This needs to be fixed and remedied. We will not be quiet about this. This is WRONG.
Let me reiterate: we will NOT be silent about this. This is gross misuse of power. We politely, yet persistently ask that you REINSTATE our blogs and our URLs.
Ignisfilimundi 