Offline until at least June 1

May. 30th, 2025 11:16 am
lb_lee: A happy little brain with a bandage on it, enclosed within a circle with the words LB Lee. (Default)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Computer getting packed. If you need to get in contact with us quickly, use phone. We have a broken smartphone that SOMETIMES can access DW or email, but don't count on it.

See y'all at the new place!

Plagiarism or Simply Derivative?

May. 30th, 2025 06:52 am
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
[personal profile] renegadefolkhero

I'm fascinated by a story I only recently heard about... An extremely popular romantasy book (Crave by Tracy Wolff) is facing accusations of plagiarism, and the connections between the unpublished manuscript and the published book raise a lot of questions. Not just about sharing tropes and genre language, but about osmosis, and how much we absorb from other people's work and unconsciously project into our art.

Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer's Story? (at archive.is)

Romantasy’s reliance on tropes poses a challenge for questions of copyright. Traditionally, the law protects the original expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. A doctrine named for the French phrase scènes à faire, or “scenes that must be done,” holds that the standard elements of a genre (such as a showdown between the hero and the villain) are not legally protectable, although their selection and arrangement might be. The wild proliferation of intensely derivative romantasies has complicated this picture. The worlds of romance and fantasy have been so thoroughly balkanized, the production of content so accelerated, that what one might assume to be tropes—falling in love with a werewolf or vampire, say—are actually subgenres. Tropes operate at an even more granular level (bounty-hunter werewolves, space vampires). And the more specific the trope, the harder it is to argue that such a thing as an original detail exists.

The article also delves into the role of book packagers in several high-profile Romantasy bestsellers. All traditionally published books are collaborative on some level, but when book packaging companies get involved the lines between author, editor, publisher, and marketing can get extremely blurred. Crave's final draft was created by multiple collaborators during several whirlwind weeks right before the book went to press, and the rough was written in 2 months. In deposition, the author wasn't entirely sure if she wrote all the passages in question.


I don't read or write romantasy, but from what I gather, the readership craves "more of that" to such an exacting standard an outsider might not understand why This Romantasy book went gangbusters, and That One did not. Writers who can read and understand the market (which is a specific skillset not every writer has, in Clifton it's referred to as the Drafter archetype) have been able to leverage that understanding to make lot of money in this genre, but eventually Romantasy will hit a saturation point and it will be harder to sell books.

I casually know a couple of full-time indie romantasy authors (middle and top earners) who LOVE the genre. They genuinely love reading and writing it, they are incredibly intelligent and hard-working writers who have absolutely earned every bit of their success, and there is clearly a lot of heart in their books and process. But this genre seems ideal for "chefs in the kitchen" tinkering to find that winning recipe, and the book packaging company's ability to leverage this genre multiple times shows it can be done. Reading about the marketing savvy of the book packager Entangled Publishing (which also published Fourth Wing) gave me flashbacks to another story of a made-for-market book going gangbusters: 50 Shades of Gray. E. L. James is a little different, in that part of her strategy was filing off the serial numbers (a strategy many other fanfiction writers would later employ to launch their own romances as part of the more recent fanfic-to-tradpub pipeline), but at it's core 50 Shades incredible success is a marketing success story.


Packaging companies are not new to plagiarism claims. This story reminded me of an older one... In 2006, Kaavya Viswanathan was accused of plagiarizing several authors when she wrote How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The book packager Alloy Entertainment was involved in that process. Viswanathan was introduced to an agent who felt her current manuscript was too dark, and suggested she write something lighter that would sell better, and the agency referred her to the book packaging service.

I won't get into how some agents take kickbacks to steer writers towards dubious companies and programs, and I'm not making the assertion that Alloy Entertainment is or was dubious, but if an agent referred me to a book packager I would consider that a creative disconnect and politely cut my losses. In Viswanathan's case, Alloy Entertainment inked a 2-book deal with Little, Brown stipulating Viswanathan would produce the books, with the author and Alloy Entertainment splitting the advance and copyright. The scandal blew up, and the book crashed and burned big time and was pulled. As with Crave, the work of the author and the packaging company blended in such a way there was some question as to who actually plagiarized what.


There's been a lot of talk about why, if you'll forgive me for phrasing it this way, Romantasy readers are the way they are (It's the pandemic! It's being obsessed with Twilight/Harry Potter/Etc during one's formative years! It's the economy! It's the crushing state of the world!). Reading the GR reviews for the more popular romantasy books is always mind-boggling to me, because there's always a standard ratio of incoherent squeeing to "this was a boring retread" or "this is exactly like x, y, and z," or "omg this book literally copied such-and-such" and as an outsider I'm never really sure what tipped the scale one way or another.

Wanting More of That is not new. Mystery series have always leaned heavily on providing same protagonist, slightly different flavor of murder, for example. Romance and Fantasy are two readerships that I think historically have been very forgiving of retreading and rehashing favorite scenarios, particularly in stories with wish-fulfillment protagonists. At least right now, it seems a lot of what's selling in fiction across the board is escapism that's fast to process. People just want to kick back and read a fun story about a snarky woman who butts-heads-with-but-ultimately-marries a slightly-bad-but-mostly-just-hot vampire/werewolf/dragon while making an impact on the world around her. It's not for me, but I get it.

When will romantasy fans collectively decide they've had their fill? And when that happens... where will they go next? It will be interesting to see.

I can hardly believe this is real

May. 29th, 2025 10:38 am
dorchadas: (Legend of Zelda Zelda Dark Princess)
[personal profile] dorchadas
Bandai-Namco: "What are your qualifications?"
Trailer Person: "I spent 2001-2010 making a ton of AMVs."
Bandai-Namco: "Say no more."


Watch in 240p for the best experience.

From mid 00s Animemusicvideos.org removing all Evanescence AMVs due to a Cease & Desist order to this. I wonder if someone carried a grudge all this time?

2025 June Fan Poll

May. 28th, 2025 05:44 pm
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Hey everybody, it's that time again: time to vote for which stuff gets the LiberaPay/Patreon money this month!

As always, anyone can vote (please do!), but LiberaPay and Patreon patrons get double weight for their votes.  (Due to Patreon's porn purges, I really encourage you to use LiberaPay, if you get a choice.) If you want to see the blurbs for any of these works, those are here!  (You can also leave your requests there; requesting a story or essay is always free!) If you don't have a DW and so can't do the poll, that's okay; just leave your vote in the comments below; anon comments are turned on.

Which works gets the money, and thus posted this month?  YOU CHOOSE, readers!
Poll #33175 2025 June Fan Poll
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 21


Did you toss LiberaPay/Patreon money my way last month?

View Answers

Yes (my votes count double)
6 (100.0%)

What writing gets posted this month?

View Answers

Infinity Smashed: Born Lucky
7 (35.0%)

Reverend Alpert: the Traveling Exorcist
3 (15.0%)

Henchwench for Hire (F/F supervillainy)
3 (15.0%)

Rutless (trans omegaverse porno)
3 (15.0%)

Flights of Reality (the Cursed City)
1 (5.0%)

Anatomy of a Dance
6 (30.0%)

The Boy Whose Heart Is Home
3 (15.0%)

The Battleaxe and the Blood-Eater
1 (5.0%)

Crisis Planning: Legal/Medical Stuff
9 (45.0%)

What art/comic/zine gets posted this month?

View Answers

Cult Comix
1 (5.6%)

Death Watch
5 (27.8%)

How it Was, How It Is
7 (38.9%)

2012 hospital sketchbook
0 (0.0%)

2013 Homeless Year sketchbook
1 (5.6%)

2014 AllFam sketchbook
1 (5.6%)

Protection
4 (22.2%)

Kissing
12 (66.7%)

lb_lee: Mori making a ridiculous face. (mori)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Mori: I textually transcribed this zine I raved about earlier! It's a mad pride manifesto with influences from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Icarus Project, Inner Family Systems, and anarchist concepts like mutual aid and collective liberation. Its beautiful imperfection means a lot to my hothead self, so here it is!

This zine is anti-authority and anti-medical. You may not want to read it, especially if you're in a place mentally where your brain is causing you a lot of havoc and doesn't seem at all your friend. Paris Williams's Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift In Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis covers some similar territory with more research, page count, and moderation.

Knocking from the Inside: Breaking Free from Mental Imperialism
by Jimmy Dunson

You have lost your mind? So? There are worse things to lose. You have found the heart and soul of the universe. You simply stopped being the false god to the universe within you, you stopped being the dictator to your differing parts. )
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Rogan: I love drawing handwraps, they're so aesthetically appealing, but it's also tricky to find good reference for them! Fortunately, the largest, HEAVIEST book I own is Howard Schatz's At the Fights, an ENORMOUS photobook of boxers. I regret the Brobdignagian size of the thing (and the WEIGHT, oof, that book must weight close to ten pounds) but I had fun pulling it out for reference sketches on this month's Patreon postcards...

pic behind cut! )

Kobo Screech Post

May. 24th, 2025 07:15 am
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
[personal profile] renegadefolkhero

After a year saying, "I need to pivot to SFF, and to hell with sales," I'm finally there, and it feels nice. I've wrapped up the remaining mostly-done romance books that needed to be pushed out the door and I'm forbidden from publishing anything this summer. I have ZERO release dates for the rest of 2025. Amazing.

Kobo Screeching

I had a wonderful surprise this week.

Read more... )

lb_lee: An icon in shades of red and cream, showing a righteously angry coati screaming. (conflict coati)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Mori: Carolyn Gage is a radical lesbian feminist playwright who didn't get diagnosed with autism until her sixties and writes about sexual abuse and incest a lot. I first became aware of her years back when a roomy at the time had a book of hers on the shelf, and today I learned she did a one-woman play about Joan of Arc, so of course I had to look what else she'd done.

Then I found her short 1994 article, "Invitation to a Trashing." I immediately had to add it to my self-hate and social justice bibliography.

Damn. Thirty years old, and this woman sums up beautifully what now gets called "cancel culture." (I vehemently disagree with her criteria of “unacceptable targets,” RequiresHate/winterfox was a master of using “you sound white” to shut down women of color, but I DO agree there’s a cynical, cultural calculus at work deciding how to paint a trashee as a privileged oppressor.) Other lesbian feminists talked about these dynamics before Gage, but what I find especially interesting is how Gage cuts to the heart of how dissociation and lingering abuse effects can be used as weapons in these situations, trashee's and trasher's alike. That's something I haven't seen dealt with in other discussions, certainly not with the concise incision she does:Anything can be a weapon if you're holding it right! )

LB is Moving! Take Our Stuff

May. 21st, 2025 08:08 pm
lb_lee: a black and white animated gif of a pro wrestler flailing his arms above the words STILL THE BEST (VICTORY)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Mori: welp, our new shrink got ratfucked by Trump, even though we only got him last month, which means we have to go hunting a new one and start the whole training process over again while moving. This means we are eager to clear our plate of other distractions ASAP!

First: Wanna help us move? We will be moving on the last weekend of May--most likely Sunday, June 1 because our other three roomies move on May 31 and we don't want the front door to become a clown car. Are you available? Are you willing to lug boxes and get treated to dinner afterward? We would appreciate you (especially if you have wheels)!

Second: FREE STUFF GIVEAWAY (long as you cover shipping)! We have a couple books free to good homes:
  • Sweet Abilene, a M/FTM porno comic by the great E.K. Weaver. Sweet Abilene is a spin-off of their webcomic Shot and Chaser, so you can get a good idea of the art and main characters! It's great! We want other people to love it!
  • Festival of the Bones II: What Is Remembered Lives, an anthology of ancestor worship stories and poems edited by the Writers Egbe of Ile Orunmila Oshun. We fed it through the bookscanner, which means this book can now be liberated! (The PDF will be uploaded once we get it OCRed.)
Finally: FRAMED ART FOR SALE! An original and two print spreads, $50 a pop (plus shipping)! Frames are a pain to move! Snatch it up on the cheap!
  • this page of MPD for You and Me (original)
  • two spreads of the queer trans multi wedding in LB Goes To Alaska (prints made to look like the originals in a sketchbook, which include marginalia and green colored pencil underdrawing that are erased from the comic). You can see a photo of one of them here. One spread shows Zyfron and Mystics doing their wedding smooch and first dance; the other shows the wedding dance afterward. These spreads inspired the name of the art show they were framed for, "Love is for all of us." If you need high-res images of the pages in question, just ask!

Okay, back to trawling my health insurance website for potential new shrinks!
lb_lee: A colored pencil drawing of Raige's freckled hand holding a hot pink paperback entitled the Princess and Her Monster (book)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Still working through that big stack of zines from Jimmy Dunson and Rebel Hearts Press, and we're down to the last thing: a paper back anthology of essays entitled Building Power While The Lights Are Out: Disasters, Mutual Aid, and Dual Power. It's really making my brain buzz with ideas! I'm only midway through, but so far my favorites are "Mutual Aid and Anti-Racist Organizing in Rural Appalachia" by Rural Organizing and Resilience, "Love My People: Following in the Footprints of the Panthers" by Suncere Ali Shakur, and "Survival Programs: Then And Now" by Malik Rahim (an old guy in his seventies who was part of the Black Panthers in the '70s). Like the other stuff from Rebel Hearts, it looks to be a paper-only release.

I just want to quote a few paragraphs from Shakur here, because... how could I NOT love this book? He cut his teeth on mutual aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, where black men were getting murdered as looters by vigilantes, cops, and others. It was not a safe time and place, and he describes the following events:

Endless Levels

May. 20th, 2025 10:36 am
dorchadas: (Yui Studying)
[personal profile] dorchadas
I didn't write this--it was a tale on the SCP Foundation that I read a long time ago and found really inspirational. I read it while I lived in Japan, and it was gone only a year or so later--the Wayback capture shows it existing in 2010 and the next time it checks in 2012 it's gone. I've thought about it often since then, and today I thought to look using the standard tale URL format and found it once again, so I'm posting it here to preserve it.

It was written before articles had comments or rating, so I don't know what it was supposed to mean. But I love the story.

Endless Levels )

Original source (through wayback) is here.

ACEN 2025

May. 18th, 2025 05:54 pm
dorchadas: (desu)
[personal profile] dorchadas
2025-05-17 - Sasha Uzaki Hana CosplayTwenty years of ACEN! Not all of them, of course--I didn't go from 2009-2011 because I was living in Japan, I didn't go in 2013 because I had a bit of a sour experience in 2012 and that was the point where [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd was deep in the throes of grad school and we had very little money, I didn't go in 2020-2021 because thanks to the Plague Years it didn't happen, and I didn't go in 2022-2023 because 2022 required full masks at all times (which I have no moral objection to, it just didn't sound very fun) and because [instagram.com profile] sashagee was too sick to go and I didn't want to go by myself. But last year I went, and now here we are again.

It's been a while since I stayed at a hotel other than the Hyatt. This year, however, my luck finally ran out--when the hotel lottery happened I failed to get a room at the Hyatt, and then I failed to get rooms at the other hotels I tried. Fortunately, Anime Chicago as a community prepares for this. Several people grabbed extra rooms in the knowledge that there would definitely be people who missed out, and I was able to get one at the Embassy Suites. I've never stayed here before--I've stayed at the Doubletree, and at the Hilton, but this was a first...and honestly I'd go back. The rooms are huge and, more importantly for a couple with a four-year-old, they're suites. There's a front room with a couch, an armchair, a table with more chairs, and a little bar area, then a door between the two connecting rooms, so we don't need to turn all the lights out and immediately go to bed when it's time for Laila to go to sleep. I would say "You can't buy that kind of peace for money" but we obviously did.

And now, the daily accounting.

Thursday )

Friday )

Saturday )

Sunday )

And now we're home. We're tired. We're sore. [instagram.com profile] sashagee took a five-hour nap just after lunch. But, she's already decided that Uzaki Hana is going to be the cosplay she sticks with--she's going to work on it a bit, get screen-accurate brown boots, get a tighter shirt (she has lost weight since I got the original for her), and maybe get a wig. She expected to wear it a bit and have some fun and was very surprised when multiple people came up to ask her for her picture.

She did say she was a bit suspicious, though. Uzaki-chan is a romantic comedy, but the shirt specifically says "Super huge!" (sugoi dekai), so whenever someone asked for her picture she was like "Hmm..." Emoji Eyebrow raise

The only downside were all the things we couldn't get to. We didn't get to see the Conbini panel and couldn't get into the Oregon Trail panel. We didn't go to the dance on Friday, which it sounds like might have had more music to [instagram.com profile] sashagee's taste. We didn't get to go back to see [twitter.com profile] lightninglychee and [livejournal.com profile] stephen_poon again. We didn't try any of the board games at all. We didn't get to see the AMV contest, which as I've repeatedly mentioned, used to be a central event that I always went to. There's always soon much to do and not enough time to do it.

Laila is going to come back with infinite energy and run both of us over. But we had a lovely time with all our friends. Looking forward to ACEN next year!

Billionaire Lovers

May. 19th, 2025 07:05 am
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
[personal profile] renegadefolkhero
I've been having fun with the short visual novel Billionaire Lovers, which doubles as a paranoia simulator. It's about an MC who unexpectedly inherits $100 million and suddenly has a lot of hot guys in their life being especially nice and/or clingy. It's light on the romance side, but I found the reveals fun and I especially like how quickly the game can end if you're not paying attention.

My only gripe is the MC gets addicted to an annoying Gacha game on multiple routes and I appreciate they were making a point but it was tedious to RP a loot box addict.

If you like VNs that go off the beaten path, this one's a no-brainer at $3 and 2-4 hours playtime. This was an impulse buy based on title and the promise of being scammed. Would definitely get scammed again.
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