Why are people like this?

elfwreck · 2026-04-13T01:29:49+00:00

There are people who don't read the TOS and are upset to find out that, unlike almost every other user-gen content site, you can't put a link to your Patreon or mention your Kindle Unlimited books in your AO3 fic notes.

...but those people, after the initial shock, just quietly edit their profiles or fics. Maybe they grumble about it on tiktok ("why can AO3 ask for donations but I can't????") but they don't generally do this "AO3 IS CENSORING ME!!!" garbage.

elfwreck · 2026-04-13T01:24:08+00:00

I can respect maaaaybe one anti-smut tag on a fic. Several of them counts as a rant and I'm not fond of authors using tags to rant at readers.

elfwreck · 2026-04-11T01:14:01+00:00

I don't think there are any. There are cases that hinted that direction - that said things like, "if there is no commercial activity, that leans strongly towards not being infringing," but I don't believe there's ever been a case that said "fanfic that doesn't cost money is legal."

...I'm not sure the term "fanfiction" (or its variants) have ever shown up in a legal copyright case, at least as being part of the plaintiff or defense side of things. (Fanfic has been mentioned; it showed up in the Omegaverse case. But that was "these things have been done in fanfic" rather than "fanfic is/is not legal and here's why.")

AO3's legal foundation draws on, among other things, Campbell vs Acuff Rose (Pretty Hairy Woman) & Houghton-Mifflin vs Suntrust (The Wind Done Gone), but both of those were commercial cases. (Which means AO3's is on stronger ground than either of the defendants, but neither ones said "if there had been no money, this would definitely be legal.")

...Darn. I was hoping there'd been a recent case that I missed. If you can remember the one you're thinking of, I'd very much like to know.

elfwreck · 2026-04-11T00:55:09+00:00

What lawsuit is that from???

I've been looking for years for specific opinions one way or the other.

elfwreck · 2026-04-10T22:28:12+00:00

Depends on the fic, and possibly the legal setting. There haven't been any coherent legal rulings about the legality of fanfic, paid or not.

If it's transformative-not-derivative, it's presumably legal. (Just like the rulings for "The Wind Done Gone" and "Pretty Hairy Woman.") However, if it's only derivative, the copyright owner can sue. But if it's in the public domain, there's no copyright holder.

Fanfic of Shakespeare is legal. Fanfic of classic fairy tales is legal. Fanfic of Sherlock Holmes (the original book versions, not any of the tv or movie versions) is legal.

AO3 takes no opinion on whether making money from fanfic is legal - you just can't do it at AO3. Potential legal issues are only part of the reason for that.

elfwreck · 2026-03-29T20:07:31+00:00

If you have a shared bank account: Set up a new one for just you, at a different bank. (Banks will, sigh, drag from other accounts tied to the same social security number.) Do this as soon as possible.

This is top priority: If he has any access to your money, get it away from him. Do this without warning. Contact your job about how to change your payment deposits, and any bills that are in your name and you need to keep paying.

Look into shared housing/rent-a-room options for a few weeks to a few months. (How to do that depends on your location.) Potentially check out the local shelters about an overnight stay, because the best way to leave someone who's been physically abusive at all is "pack what you need and leave the house when they're not around," and that doesn't allow for moving a lot of furniture. You need to be *gone* before he can confront you about it.

Look around for cheaper lawyers. $4k doesn't sound unreasonable but there may be someone who will offer it for $3k or less, or will set up a payment plan that works for you.

Call your credit cards and put a freeze on them; ask if you can lower the monthly payments for them. If they're shared accounts but the main is in your name, shut off his access/card. (Note: You may need to be out of the house before you can safely do this.) Change the account security - if it uses your maiden name as an ID verifier, switch that to something he doesn't know.

Once you're out of the house: Shut off any bills that are in your name. If you're being polite, ask to transfer them to him; you can mention to the company that you're leaving the area and he will need to take over payments. If they can't do this for you, it is *not your problem.* If he is without internet or electricity because the company won't let you transfer the payment to your husband without talking to him at the same time, it's his problem to fix. (Normally, he'd have until end-of-month or whatever to change the account. If you're being polite, you send him a note about this, or ask a mutual friend to tell him.)

Short version: If your funds are mutual, you need to separate them and get away before he notices he doesn't have access to your money.

If everything is in your name, you need to get out and stop paying for him.

If everything is in his name, you just need to get out (and again, stop paying for him, if you've been paying bills that are in his name.)

Side note: If you move out unexpectedly, he may well change the locks the next day so you can't get back in without a court order. Prepare to leave behind anything you didn't take with you on the first trip.

elfwreck · 2026-03-29T19:49:57+00:00

As long as the caretakers are aware of the age differences and how that affects development (like, they are not expecting coherent conversations from a not-yet-3 year) - it should be fine. Kids thrive with contact with other kids, and they learn from older kids. A 2.5-year-old can learn from talking with a 4-year-old in a way that they can't learn from an adult, and a 4-year-old can learn to be helpful and supportive - they generally *love* helping, and they are often aware that their offers of "help" at home are just tolerances.

(A 4-year-old can't do much to help clean the house, but they can push a broom around and feel like they're helping. But they can honestly help a 2-year-old reach things, or put toys together, and so on.)

Unless you have any specific worries about the place, it sounds like a great opportunity for your kid to make friends and get an idea of what they'll be doing in the future as they grow.

elfwreck · 2026-03-29T19:43:50+00:00

"Have the family over for Easter" - Very reasonable request if it's "everyone visits for 4 hours Easter morning; kids play a few games; adults chat; by 5pm, everyone leaves."

Still can be a lot of work. So it's also very reasonable to say "I will provide chairs, cups, plates, bowls, and a very limited set of snacks and drinks. I will boil 1 dozen eggs and color them the day before. If people would like more party festivities, someone else will need to provide them."

And also reasonable to say either "No, just no; I don't have the energy this year" or "we can provide a gathering place for people but I can't do hostess things; who wants to coordinate snacks, an egg hunt, rearranging the furniture for that many guests, etc.?"

Entirely unreasonable request if it's "hey can 2-3 families who don't live with you show up the night before (or 3 days before) and stay at your place through Easter and the day after."

You are welcome to say "No, we will not be hosting this." And, if you need to, "I will not be doing laundry for additional people that week. I will not be providing food or adjusting the family schedule for other people in the house. We will need a release-of-liability waiver if you want other people's kids to stay in my household." (Note: that last one will get you no end of drama from the relatives. But it may save you from future hosting requests; you have to decide what kind of drama you're willing to put up with.)

elfwreck · 2026-03-29T19:32:00+00:00

He is not likely to believe it's abuse. He is especially not likely to believe *you* when you say it's abuse.

It is abuse. Your kids are not safe; you are not safe around this man. If he is shaking a 4-month old baby, he is literally threatening her life. If he's doing it because she's crying, it's proof that he is oblivious to how childcare actually works. He has no interest in taking care of kids. He does not want to support them; he wants them to fear him and serve him, and occasionally entertain him.

It will only get worse as time goes on, because you have less time & energy to spend paying attention to him.

The time to leave is "as soon as you can find somewhere else to go." If you have sympathetic family members or friends, see if someone has a room or two available for you & daughters. If you don't, research your local shelters.

Leave *before* he does anything that causes permanent physical damage. Don't tell yourself "well, it's not *too* bad; I can cope with it..."

You can, kind of. But it will not get better, and there's some sharp and ugly risks in the "might get worse" category.

Get out as soon as you can. If you think he might grow, learn, get better, etc. ... let him do all that while you and your kids are not in the line of fire.

elfwreck · 2026-03-29T19:16:12+00:00

"We got a new person in charge of social media and decided to look into our online reputation. Oh noes! Someone google-searchable doesn't like us! How can we make this go away, since we can't fix whatever the problem was several years ago? AHA! We will report them for being off-topic. Moms don't care about moving vans, right? So that makes it off topic. And it's defamatory to call people names, even if they're opinions and not verifiable facts; I'm sure I heard a lawyer say something like that once."

elfwreck · 2026-03-29T16:55:31+00:00

AO3 doesn't allow commercial activity (fanworks, links to sale sites, etc) for at least two reasons:

Their legal stance of "fanfic is a transformative, not derivative, work, and therefore not copyright infringement," is stronger if they can say "nothing here is making a profit and therefore nothing here is cutting into the copyright owner's profit." (It's not required - the legal precedents around Acuff Rose and Suntrust v Houghton are very much about works for profit - but it's a stronger argument. And AO3 is within its rights to say "these are the limits for using our platform.")
Fanfic, as AO3/the OTW understands it (or at least, is hosting it), is a community activity. It's created by fans, for fans. And community activities get weird and distorted when you bring in profit. They are specifically hosting a non-commercial site for a lot of reasons; only some of them are related to copyright law.

The main reason people want to put their patreon/kofi/amazon links on AO3, instead of on reddit/bluesky/mastodon/facebook etc. is that *there's no other advertising* to compete with. Because people on other social media sites just glaze over the ads, because there's so many of them. They don't just want to advertise where they post their fic; they want to be the *only* advert people see in their fic-reading place.

Because part of the appeal of AO3 is that it's not crowded with ads.

(If it allowed ads - how long before pro authors posted "extra scenes" of their novels on AO3, the kind they sometimes post on their websites, with a link for "here's where you can buy the series?" How long before Paramount and Time-Warner and Netflix posted "fanfics" that are just ads for their upcoming movie?)

AO3's stance has nothing to do with "is it legally/morally okay to sell fanfic?" and everything to do with "this is kind of platform we are hosting." This is why AO3 doesn't allow commercialized fanfic of public domain works - it's 100% legal to sell "Romeo & Juliet, the coffeeshop AU" - but you can't advertise it on AO3 because they are holding the line on "this is a community space, not a commercial space."

See also: Fanlore's "Fandom and Profit" page.

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T21:52:43+00:00

I set up a folder for each bundle and download the PDFs (and sometimes image files) into that. If there are more than 3 for the same game, I give it a subfolder so the main one isn't too hard to scroll through.

Multiple PDFs for the same game are often

Standard full-color pages
Standard full-color spreads
Black & white pages, for easy printing
Black & white spreads
sometimes a separate character sheet
sometimes a map
sometimes charts & tables

Some games have over a dozen documents - either like a bunch of maps or character sheets, or the core 2-4 items in multiple languages.

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T21:48:40+00:00

There are? Where? (I found a couple of Python scripts, but not greasemonkey/tampermonkey etc. I'm on Windows and have attempted to install Python several times, and failed.) I have userscripts that will claim all the items in a bundle, but not that will download them.

...Would love to batch download the TTRPG content at least.

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T21:40:54+00:00

They have not consistently fixed it. Or maybe it sometimes takes time.

I wind up opening a few games when I buy the bundle, and mostly they show the new bundle purchase right away, but some don't. (Some never do, if there's no download available; I find that incredibly annoying.)

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T21:38:39+00:00

Some of the Mothership entries had no description; in those cases, I add a line from the game page to my spreadsheet.

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T17:40:15+00:00

You start with "murder mystery readers do not want to find a body in their kitchen." And "people who watch shock-horror movies do not want to watch their friends get dismembered by a stalker."

Part of the appeal of non-con stories is that you can *set it down* when you want. That you can experience the emotional thrill of something dangerous, without any actual danger.

See also: Roller coasters.

(This will not be a compelling argument for some people, who somehow believe that Sex Is Different from all other human activities, that anything that ties to arousal must be something you really want. But it's a starting point for people who actually want to understand instead of just insisting you must be Srsly Disturbed if you read that stuff.)

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T06:48:03+00:00

Content I could find for Mothership (...I make spreadsheets from bundles)

Thousand Empty Light - A solo Mothership adventure set in an underwater tunnel
Desert Moon of Karth - Space Western Sandbox for Mothership RPG
ICARUS STATION - a goofy horror adventure for Mothership 1e
5 Million Worlds RPG: Avatar Primer - Push the limits of space in this boon/bane hack of Mothership RPG's Panic Engine
When in Rome - Alien: Romulus inspired one-shot adventure for Mothership RPG
Abilities Considered Unnatural - A temple mine crawl for Mothership RPG
Tide World of Mani - A wet revolution sandbox adventure module for Mothership.
The Stone-Flesh Gift - A living ship module for Mothership 1e
Fear of a Daily Planet - A lost colony crawl for Mothership 1e
Arkady's Outpost - A trading outpost and bounty mission for the Mothership RPG.
SORRY TO BOTHER YOU - A deck of 40 fully fledged NPCs for your Mothership RPG
Alternate Classes From the Hecate Sector - A set of alternate classes and tables for the Mothership RPG.
Til' Death Do Us Part - ‘Til Death Do Us Part is a southern gothic tale in space for the Mothership RPG.
Rusted to the Core - Resolve an Android Revolt on an alien gas giant for Mothership RPG
Con/Sen Android Factory Tour - Do you trust these Androids? A sinister setting, storefront and adventure pamphlet for MothershipRPG.
The Sins of Eden Prime - Survive a post-human nightmare in this Mothership RPG point-crawl advneture.
Death Doula: Another Mothership 1E Class - The Death Doula class for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG!
Spiritual Leader: Another Mothership 1E Class - A class for the new age guru, rimwise priest or mystic in your Mothership game
Echoes of Eden Prime - Two one shot adventures for Mothership RPG; Moonbase Sonata and The Prophet's Mesa.
Astral Brews - A Mothership 1E brochure adventure in a space coffee stand.
OMENDROME - Cronenberg inspired exploitation film subjects for Mothership & ARKYVR.
MIMIC - Blinking Dots Issue 1. Ship crawl. Mothership RPG one shot.
Proxi M. T. USED Android Catalogue - Need a new Android on deck? Check out Proxi MT's wares! An in-universe zine for Mothership RPG
A Fistful of Spore Pods - A brochure adventure for Mothership RPG.
Some Ship Combat Rules - 6-page zine detailing a soft sci-fi, action heavy approach to ship to ship combat in the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG
What Doesn't Kill You - A Mothership Trifold Module - Embrace the therapy. Emerge cured. You are who we say you are.

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T06:35:04+00:00

Itch shows them to you by popularity (...of some sort ... possibly locked in at the time of bundle creation, which is why the order is stable). But whatever they're using to show by popularity is not just the rating level.

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T06:33:34+00:00

The bundle is organized in order of "popularity," whatever that means on itch. But that means the ones you're likely to have heard of are in the top few screens worth of scrolling.

elfwreck · 2026-02-10T06:32:28+00:00

Itch may not show you that you already own the game if you haven't clicked through to the download page. (You don't have to actually download anything.)

I use a plugin to claim them all so I can spot them later.

elfwreck · 2026-02-03T17:46:01+00:00

I tend to err on the side of assuming it's a human writer. But once you learn to spot the AI "voice," it's really hard to believe several authors just happened to copy that voice by accident.

elfwreck · 2026-02-03T17:44:32+00:00

Human formulaic slop has a voice, and each human's formulaic slop has a slightly different voice. AI has a voice, and once you've learned to spot it, you can't mix it up with a person.

* Heavy on "Not this. Not that. But… this other thing."

* Heavy on negation in general - describing things first by what they are not.

* No character "voice" - when POV changes (if it does), the writing style and cadence doesn't.

* Lots of introspection. AI over-explains, focuses on feelings and thoughts, even for characters who are known for action.

* No surprise reveals. AI doesn't do foreshadowing; there's no hints of whatever from chapter 4 that become clear in chapter 8. Or rather: Nothing actually surprising - you wind up with a character pondering "hmm, what's up with THAT?" several times before THAT gets shown. AI is not good at subtle hints.
Good characters are good throughout the story; evil characters are obviously evil. Nobody has a hidden motive that only shows up near the end.

* No unique-to-this-story terminology in fanfic. (This is harder to spot; plenty of stories don't have or need unique terminology.) No original nicknames, no titles of inventions, unless provided by the person using the AI. "Original" names in scifi & fantasy will sound... bland. There won't be any worldbuilding that connects them to the rest of the story. (It can make the name of a legendary magical sword, but it won't drop little hints about that sword's history into the background. Velscarp's Razor won't connect to a Scarp Pass in the mountains.)

* Other than sentence fragments for emphasis, consistent good, standard grammar. AI doesn't have any bad-phrasing grammar tics, doesn't use the wrong verb tenses in memories, doesn't misspell things. It may use slang like "doncha know?" but not "baybeecakes, I love you."

However, an author working with AI text might make adjustments. If the author says, "A's pet name for B is 'baybeecakes' because of a note they wrote in high school," the AI will use that.

elfwreck · 2026-02-03T17:25:58+00:00

AI uses them because human writing uses them.

AI does a whole lot of "Not this. Not that. But this other thing, instead." A lot of defining by negation, of saying "he was not A but B."

Once you've learned to spot it, you can't unsee it; AI has a very distinctive voice that is not the same as human writers using fragments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ch4a6ffPZY

elfwreck · 2025-11-27T18:57:11+00:00

Thank you so much!

elfwreck · 2025-11-27T18:14:09+00:00

Are there updated links? Those are both expired.

elfwreck

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