Zita's Internet House
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the only presidents of the united states of america i respect are the guys who ate all those peaches
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actually, you know what, as a fan of transgressive art, tabletop rpgs as an artistic medium, and transgressive tabletop rpgs, I’m gonna say this up front:
DrivethruRPG’s willingness to host basically anything legal - no matter how graphic, tasteless or bizarre - is a good thing, and should be celebrated.Similarly for itch really. Both for RPG’s and computer games
Oh yeah, Itch does a similar thing and likewise deserves a lot of credit for the weird shit it’s willing to host, even if it’s not my go-to platform.
Can I tell you why I respect DrivethruRPG?
Years ago I created a game called Tokyo Brain Pop. It was a psychic schoolgirl rpg. About fighting demons and having best friends and blowing up heads with your mind. A pretty harmless PG rated game. I released it as a PDF on my site as well as Drivethru and a few other sites. I also ran a small pre-order for a print version. I think the pre-order generated about $400. So not a big project at all.
Just after the pre-order ended I received a cease and desist letter from a lawfirm representing a company. I can’t name them for legal reasons. Their claim was the name of our game violated their clients copyright. Their client was a robot themed educational website with a vaguely similar name. They thought people would confuse our game for their site. So they demanded that we stop publishing, remove our product and website from the internet and pay them damages of $10k.
Obviously this was bullshit. I sent them a letter explaining that I was a small hobbyist, that I didn’t think there was any issue and that I’d be happy to include a disclaimer on my site stating that my game wasn’t associated with their thing at all.
They wouldn’t have it. I got a flurry of letters and legal documents, including a threat to sue for damages. I wasn’t sure what to do. Luckily a friend pointed me to an attorney that did free work for artists. The attorney looked over the documents and came to a few conclusions.
1. The whole thing was bullshit. The lawfirm was almost certainly just scouring the internet looking for people to harass in order to bill hours to their client.
2. The lawfirm didn’t understand that i made a ttrpg. They thought I was making a video game. The attorney assumed that was why they thought they could get so much money from me.
3. The company did not in fact have a copyright on their name. Even if they did, the attorney felt the names were so wildly different that we would probably win any lawsuit.
4. But… defending a lawsuit like this is expensive and time consuming. It would be very difficult for us.
The attorney offered to send a strongly wordde letter covering the above points. With the hopes of scaring them off.
It… didn’t work.
The lawfirm didn’t sue me. Thank God. But they ruined me. They sent cease and desist letters to everyone i dealt with. My site host. My distributors. My social media. My printers. The stores that sokd my games. At the time I was making a modest living off my games. I had 5 games in print, and selling them was how I paid my bills. That all went away. I lost my website. Online stores took my pdfs down and canceled my accounts. My Facebook and Twitter accounts were locked. My printer canceled my orders. 2 of my 3 distributors canceled contracts and sent back all copies of my games.
I tried to make new accounts. Find new printers. Find new stores. The lawfirm was thorough. For months every time I sat up a new account or signed up with a new distributor, they’d immediately receive a cease and desist letter and I’d be shut down.
When I tried to contact these businesses and explain what happened, they told me that they couldn’t do business with me anymore. They wouldn’t listen. They didn’t care.
Except DrivethruRPG. Drivethru got the letter and told them to fuck off. Told them that they recognized it was an empty threat, and wouldn’t comply even if it wasn’t. They did this without ever hearing from me. It was their automatic response. They then contacted me to let me know what waas happening and made sure I knew that they’d continue carrying my games.
The lawfirm drove me out of business. I couldn’t pay my bills. I couldnt even sell the books I had in stock. I eventually had to give up and stop making games. It was years before I came back to game dedign. It was awful and demoralizing. I lost the one thing I had built myself.
But DrivethruRPG stuck with me (Indie Press Revolution too). I didn’t even have a website or social media presence, and none of my games were in pri t or available in stores, but you could buy the PDFs from Drivethru. Even after multiple cease and desist letters and threats.
Eventually the lawfirm gave up. My game Tokyo Brainpop is still on sale at DrivethruRPG.
(via moonless-underdog)
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kaiba made it real weird real fast but yami kept him in line
im glad this post is getting notes because it still makes me laugh
“kaiba my friends were kidnapped what the fuck bruh”
Kaiba is living alone in his own separate more intensely anime universe than everyone else
(via thebisfor)
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The 2021 LTSC is available in the plain vanilla version, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021, with end of mainstream support scheduled January 12, 2027, and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021, with an extended end date of January 13, 2032.
They are not quite the same as the ordinary consumer editions of Windows 10. They don’t include the Windows Store or any “modern” apps. Apart from the Edge browser, they have almost nothing else: no OneDrive, no Weather or Contacts apps, and no Windows Mail or whatever it’s called this week.…no OneDrive, Copilot AI, or all of the other useless crapware cluttering up the Start menu? AND patches/support through 2032??
Don’t threaten me with a good time, Microsoft.
(via poisonheadcrabsalesman)
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(voice of a girl who’s already weird about it) can i be weird about this
(via poisonheadcrabsalesman)
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a party: *ongoing*
me, laying on the floor with my arm over my eyes and a small circle of disciples gathering: Dragonlance is a Dungeons and Dragons setting conceived in the 1980s that enjoyed a multi-pronged marketing approach, with TSR releasing both a series of novels and a series of adventure modules that were intended to let groups of players roleplay as the story’s iconic characters and experience the important plot points for themselves. (Actually putting such pre-scripted material into play had very mixed results, but a lot of people do fondly remember this.)
The foundation of the Dragonlance canon is a trio of novels referred to as the “Chronicles” which follows the adventures of a party of characters on a quest to free their world from the armies of the evil goddess Takhisis. There are dozens of other books by various authors, but the primary writers are Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss, who met while working for TSR.
Dragonlance is highly nostalgic for many people and has many memorable characters and enjoyable moments, but there is one small problem with it:
It’s not good.
If you will permit me to elaborate, I-
zita, you can’t start like this and not expect me, a dragonlance non-enjoyer who still appreciates hearing about the history of the game, to not nod along
WELL OKAY IF YOU DO WANNA HEAR ABOUT DRAGONLANCE I can commit to the bit.
( @dunkelzahn idk if I have anything new for you because you were around for the Descent Into Madness Of 2021 but hey)
The extent of my Dragonlance knowledge is the original trilogy (Chronicles), the sequel trilogy (Legends), the really long book about Kitiara that was so bad that I tapped out maybe halfway through, and the two newest books that there was An Actual Whole Ass Lawsuit about:
So I am not a Dragonlance deeplore scholar, but I think it is reasonably safe to say I’m familiar with the best-remembered part of the property even though there are a lot of places and side stories in there that I don’t know.
Expertise (and lack thereof) established and funny lawsuit anecdote delivered, let me get on with it.
bringing this back because a new dragonlance book came out this month and they’ve apparently been authorized for yet another trilogy and i am in that dumpster while my health insurance fucking begs me to come back out
Bringing back the dragonlance post again
Any special reason or just for funsies?
I was thinking about dragonlance this morning…. (ongoing poison damage)
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dragonlance oc…. 😔
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a party: *ongoing*
me, laying on the floor with my arm over my eyes and a small circle of disciples gathering: Dragonlance is a Dungeons and Dragons setting conceived in the 1980s that enjoyed a multi-pronged marketing approach, with TSR releasing both a series of novels and a series of adventure modules that were intended to let groups of players roleplay as the story’s iconic characters and experience the important plot points for themselves. (Actually putting such pre-scripted material into play had very mixed results, but a lot of people do fondly remember this.)
The foundation of the Dragonlance canon is a trio of novels referred to as the “Chronicles” which follows the adventures of a party of characters on a quest to free their world from the armies of the evil goddess Takhisis. There are dozens of other books by various authors, but the primary writers are Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss, who met while working for TSR.
Dragonlance is highly nostalgic for many people and has many memorable characters and enjoyable moments, but there is one small problem with it:
It’s not good.
If you will permit me to elaborate, I-
zita, you can’t start like this and not expect me, a dragonlance non-enjoyer who still appreciates hearing about the history of the game, to not nod along
WELL OKAY IF YOU DO WANNA HEAR ABOUT DRAGONLANCE I can commit to the bit.
( @dunkelzahn idk if I have anything new for you because you were around for the Descent Into Madness Of 2021 but hey)
The extent of my Dragonlance knowledge is the original trilogy (Chronicles), the sequel trilogy (Legends), the really long book about Kitiara that was so bad that I tapped out maybe halfway through, and the two newest books that there was An Actual Whole Ass Lawsuit about:
So I am not a Dragonlance deeplore scholar, but I think it is reasonably safe to say I’m familiar with the best-remembered part of the property even though there are a lot of places and side stories in there that I don’t know.
Expertise (and lack thereof) established and funny lawsuit anecdote delivered, let me get on with it.
bringing this back because a new dragonlance book came out this month and they’ve apparently been authorized for yet another trilogy and i am in that dumpster while my health insurance fucking begs me to come back out
Bringing back the dragonlance post again
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dragonlance’s mediocrity is so soothing to me in the weirdest way. dragonlance sucks. it’s weirdly mormon and sometimes ventures into bizarre eugenics/racism territory. the characters it wants you to like frequently suck shit and the guy they tell you is unreasonable and mean just has chronic pain and terrible friends. everything is stupid all the time. every romance is devastatingly bad.
but that makes it like… a lazy river of a fantasy book series. you are required to do zero mental work to justify whether it’s good or not. you already know it’s not good. you are free. you can hate half the characters and just watch stupid events unfold.
Oh good I can just reblog myself and not say the same things again
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Fondly remembering the dragonlance sequel trilogy, in which one author was continuing her quest to write the tragic doom of the chronically ill wizard seeking evil godhood while the other author was very obviously gnashing teeth angry that character had so many fans while he was busy writing one of the last likable fictional “righteous” dudes I’ve ever seen.
