#fairing kit

[studioswitchum]

Every time I see this ad on my dash, I think of letterings of death metal bands.

[auctmartfairings]

Motorcycle fairings are a broad term used to describe the protective panels that surround the frame of a bicycle. These panels are typically made of hard plastic, fibreglass or aluminium. It is common with racing and sport bicycles, as the fairing can help improve the aerodynamics of the motorcycle by reducing air drag. This increases fuel consumption and enables higher speeds at lower engine rpm

[superm4ks]

Libras are charming, social and intellectual. On September 30th, 1997, 27 years ago, a Bull was born who liked soccer, gokarts, maps, history, languages, Pokémon cards, FIFA and winning. And while he has remained disruptive, undiplomatic and confrontational in his racing, it is all that, coupled with extraordinary consistency, unbearable nerve, a century’s worth of talent, and a disarming gentleness, that has turned him into one of the most captivating characters on the grid. Also a top 5 driver of all time. Happy birthday to an impossible boy who made his dream inevitable. And never asks for permission. You are all that was promised and more. Thank you.

[abalidoth]

god made me nonbinary for the same reason that a big ol bucket of undifferentiated Legos is always way more fun to a kid than a kit where you build some specific diorama of a media property

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Good riddance to the Open Gaming License

Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:

https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634

The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community — not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.

Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then enclosing the fans’ work and selling it back to them. It’s a tale as old as CDDB and Disgracenote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History

(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)

https://musicbrainz.org/

Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word “irrevocable.” That means that if you build on licensed content, you don’t have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It’s rugproof.

Now, the OGL does not contain the word “irrevocable.” Rather, the OGL is “perpetual.” To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a “perpetual” license is one whose revocation doesn’t come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is “irrevocable,” the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.

This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers — rather than public-interest nonprofits — unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/26/part3ogl/

The issue lies with what the OGL actually licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.

The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn’t work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?):

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

Copyright is a lot more complex than “anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it.” For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not apply to ideas — the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically not copyrightable.

Copyright also doesn’t cover abstract systems or methods — like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a “balanced” system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That’s what “uncopyrightable” means.

Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations to copyright — things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright’s proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.

In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even all of the four factors (for example, the Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).

Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the di minimis exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is “fact-intensive,” and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.

Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC can’t copyright — “the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines.” In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things you don’t need permission to use.

But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use more things, beyond those things you’re allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:

Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…

Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture

If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on Kregos and Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/openip/#q01

Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.

As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators

But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights — it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.

“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”

And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro does go through with canceling the OGL, it will release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.

According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.

Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”

“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”

Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.

If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they could.

This is a great moment to start — or contribute to — real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.

That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:

https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/

[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier's 'Eye of Moloch,' the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads 'Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That's Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.' The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail '1.' Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]

[hiding-in-my-happy-place]

Cannot believe Theo Flowerday gets to be a hot bisexual nonbinary flaunting across Europe eating amazing food and having incredible sex while I get to be a hot bisexual nonbinary who has to go to work on Monday

[joenateuser]

Kit Connor | for Teen Vogue

[spybrarian]

“one night sleeping on the hard ground will cure anyone of their romantic fantasies” Boorman says, to Jade, who's just spent a night on the hard ground face to face with her romantic fantasy and is very much not cured

[tennessoui]

emerging from a fugue state just in time for wip wednesday

Vokara Che sits down across the desk from him with a pinched expression on her face. “I was under the impression that Master Kenobi called for this appointment, Master Skywalker.”

He did. Or, more precisely, his healing portal account did. Which Anakin accessed and then used to type out a missive in his master’s voice requesting to meet as soon as possible.

“Right, well,” Anakin says, shifting in his seat. “Something came up.”

Che does not look impressed. “Be that as it may,” she says delicately, “I am unable to discuss a patient’s medical history with a third party if the third party is neither present at the time nor has given me direct permission to do so.”

Anakin stares, feeling the first flickerings of real, dangerous fury well up in his gut. “But,” he says carefully. “He’s still sick. He, uh. Told me about it. And then we found a solution. To the problem.”

“The problem,” Che repeats, tilting her head and looking at Anakin as if she’s intent on studying him. 

“The hanahaki,” he spits. It’s a disgusting word. It’s one of the worst words he’s ever learned, and he can’t believe she’s making him say it. He can’t believe she’s being so—so cold when he’s telling her that Obi-Wan is still ill, that Obi-Wan is still dying, that Obi-Wan needs to be here to see her and he’s not. “Look,” he adds, leaning forward in his chair, “a few months ago a series of files were uploaded accidentally to my healing portal, but they were notes from one of Obi-Wan’s appointments. They were your notes from Obi-Wan’s visit. I know you know I know.”

Vokara Che looks at him and then looks down at the datapaad in front of her, lips thinned and lekku twitching. “I must apologize then,” she says, swiping through the files in front of her until she finds something that she lingers on. Her fingers dance across the screen of the datapaad, then it goes dark. “For the breach in ethicacy that you and Master Kenobi both experienced because of the Halls of Healing. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Master Skywalker. All files that were incorrectly uploaded have been deleted from your healing portal.”

Anakin looks at her and bites his cheek hard enough to bleed so that he doesn’t start screaming instead.

[monomatica]

Type Maps for The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

Everything is peach and lilac and cream, except for the gardens, which are riotously green. Theo-and-Kit. Theo-and-Kit. Theo-and-Kit. I love them and this book so much! 😍

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[nerdlingmerchling]

It's been more than a month since Kit's episode of the Trip at the Movies podcast and I'm still not over how pretty he looked in that interview. 😍

[auctmartfairings]

Elevate your Honda CBR1000RR 2006-2007 with our custom aftermarket fairing featuring high-quality ABS printing in striking white and black. Upgrade your bike's aesthetics with this premium replacement fairing, designed to enhance both style and performance.

https://www.auctmarts.com/1e34.html

[sparklecarehospital]

i don't call my comic a furry webcomic because i don't consider my characters to be actual furries but i like to jokingly refer to it as that for dramatic effect. i mean i have a fursona may as well man

[lilisouless]

Did i get the concept or i am lost?

[clockwork-carstairs]

okay this letter hurt like hell but you know what i'm really glad i finally know why kit was so angry at ty, because it never made sense to me before. the narrative that kit's angry because ty changed himself, took away part of himself by going through with the necromancy is a loooot better imho than kit being mad either about the necromancy or that ty didn't reciprocate his confession (when ty was clearly in absolutely no position mentally or physically to respond to that). kit being mad because of what it stood for, what it meant – the confirmation that nothing he could've done would ever have changed ty's mind, nothing would've been enough to save ty from himself/what he believed he had to do, kit himself couldn't be enough to help him, nor could anything. ty was always going to do it. hurts like HELL but i really love this slight change in perspective, makes me understand kit's point of view a lot better because prior to this his being angry to ty didn't really add up to me

[livelaughlovepedri]

it could’ve been perfect…