From 'The Tempest' Act IV Scene I
by William Shakespeare
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
From Top5.com, because I just could not resist:
February 6, 2003
Note from Greg:
Actor Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum in "Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers," thinks he should be considered for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, even though the character is computer generated.
6> "Men In Black II": Best Gratuitous Means of Wasting $97 Million Dollars
5> The Remans: Best Aliens We've Never Heard of Before
4> Hayden Christensen: Most Convincing Performance as a Whiny Little Punk by a Whiny Little Punk
3> "Minority Report": Best Feature-Length Gap Advertisement
2> Christopher Lee: Best Performance of Identical Villains in Two Unrelated Films
and the Number 1 Science Fiction Oscar We'd Like to See...
1> "Star Trek Nemesis": Best, uh... Ahh, who are we kidding?
Copyright 2003 by Chris White -- http://www.topfive.com
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I'm sure by now we've all heard the bad LiveJournal news concerning current limitations on posting. I'm particularly pissed, as a paid user, that nobody asked us whether we'd prefer limitations on inviting new users since LJ's excuse for all this is that there are now more than a million people here, instead of posting restrictions. They're tolerable now -- I've rarely posted more than three times a day even from a free account, and have no issue with 20 posts a day including communities as a paid user. But I'm anticipating future restrictions on editing, commenting, and everything else. I'm really glad I didn't pay for a full year here, because I'm already starting to look at blurty and blogger and various other sites.
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The "plagiarism" flame war in LOTR FPS fandom has me amused and not a little disgusted. Seems that one fan borrowed another fan's Mary Sue -- oops, original character -- with credit but without permission. Where I grew up, borrowing someone else's characters was called "writing fan fiction," and as long as the writer included a disclaimer saying that ____ had created and owned the characters, that was about as legitimate as one could hope to get.
Sure, there's the whole issue of manners in fandom, of telling someone that you'd like to use their characters or link to their posted work, but these are courtesies; the idea that they should be requirements strikes me as about as ludicrous as suggesting that fans should have to get George Lucas' permission to put Luke and Han in compromising positions before writing slash about them.
I have, in my years in fandom, had people write to me asking whether they could adapt the plot elements of my stories for sequels, alternative versions, and on a couple of occasions different fandoms; there's a sequel to "Drowning," a West Wing version of "Drowning," and a version of "Drowning" in which someone pretty much went through and replaced Janeway and Chakotay's names with Mulder and Scully's, plus changed a few starship elements to be more earthbound. The latter irked me because it was nearly word for word my work, but the person who did it acknowledged fully that it was my story, that she had merely reshaped it for her own fantasies, and that people should probably read the original which was linked in the text. Two of these people did not ask for permission, but when I wrote to them, they were respectful and apologetic. And for the first time in my life, I felt like Brannon Braga in a good way. Want to write fan fiction based on my work? As long as I'm getting acknowledged, how can I be anything but flattered?
Plagiarism is the theft of one's writing. If one's characters are trademarked, then they can be stolen, but the simple use of a character's name and traits is not, strictly speaking, plagiarism by any definition I've ever heard, and I've heard plenty from my days in academia. (If I'm wrong, then I've plagiarized Tolkien, Philippa Boyens, Michael Piller, Gene Roddenberry and Sean Penn in this month alone.) It may be rude and hurtful to have a writer borrow one's characters without one's permission, but perhaps one should consider getting out of fan fiction altogether if one is so worried about the authors' prerogatives to decide where their characters should and should not be permitted to go.
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The awesome
I meant to do my work today but then
The ever-wonderful
From
I can't believe you??!! You end up eloping with
Aragorn, utterly crushing Legolas' heart
and leaving him scarred for the rest of
eternity. He is so heart-broken, so wretchedly
torn, that he decides to go to the Mirkwood
abbey and become a priest. LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO
HIM??!! HOW COULD YOU??? Such a waste of a
pretty face [his, not yours] and, sorry, but
Aragorn is still in love with Arwen.
How will you break Legolas's heart?
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