The Netflix Of His Time

It was a time when all women were men, at least on the stage. Boys and men played the female parts. The "nurses" and other character parts were the Mrs. Doubtfires of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Lady MacBeth would have been Tootsie.

He worked his way from the groundlings up, holding the horses, and no doubt passing the hat. He acted his parts, he collaborated with other writers, his writing style changed with the times.

When he achieved some success he was roundly criticized by the glittering literary elites for being a common man (not university educated), and for being a jack-of-all trades within the entertainment industry.

He wrote plays, poems, sonnets, sagas, but he also (with others) tore down a theatre that they had constructed on rented land when a landlord tried to take advantage, and rebuilt the Globe theatre. One might compare him to PT Barnum.

No stranger to political patronage and sponsorship, he was a Lord Chancellor's Man during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and then a King's Man.

His Histories could have been compared to the sometimes scurrilous sagas about Royal Families, loosely based on someone's truth, and heavily laden with political brown-proboscising, to show first Gloriana's ancestral enemies and then the foes of James I and VI in a bad light, and to portray their royal forebears in the best possible taste.

Apart from Histories, he wrote Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, and so-called Problem plays. He borrowed other people's material, and pleased his crowds with jingoism, and the prejudices of his day, but interestingly the union between Othello and Desdemona was not remarkable for anything except the violent and tragic jealousy of Othello.

He wrote of Romans, Frenchmen, Englishmen of all degrees, Egyptians, Moors, Venetians, Italians, Scots, Fairies, Witches, Wizards, indecisive and dastardly Danes... and more; of lovers, soldiers, kings, ghosts, murderers, lawyers, rogues and rebels, horny teenagers, and victims of prejudice.

As for his education, he would have been strictly schooled in English grammar (no bad thing), and the latin classics. One interesting note is that he acted in a play called Sejanus His Fall. Today, we would call it Sejanus's Fall, but the apostrophe-s was not in vogue at the time.

Shakespeare is possibly the most influential writer in the English language, and there is so much more to his life, work and legacy than his pallor, gender, and nationality.

Credits to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

 

Karen S Wiesner: {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Woman in Black and Printer's Devil Court by Susan Hill

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Woman in Black and Printer's Devil Court 

by Susan Hill

by Karen S. Wiesner

Susan Hill is one of those authors that effortlessly puts you directly into the fictional settings and personal lives of her characters (many of her stories are ghost and/or horror) with so much atmospheric reality, you're convinced of the authenticity of everything. Two stories that seem to go together extremely well are The Woman in Black and Printer's Devil Court. Both are haunting (forgive me but it's fitting) ghost stories that linger on in the memory long after they're read.

The Woman in Black was published in 1983. Most people have heard of it because of the 2012 film adaption starring (Harry Potter) Daniel Radcliffe, which was excellent but not quite as good as the book. There were changes made to the movie (ones that I think worked there) that weren't in the book, and it’s within the pages of the novel that the story, characters, and unforgettable settings are breathtakingly expanded.

The novel is narrated by Arthur Kipps and follows his life. In this one, we start at the end, and work our way to the beginning. In the initial scenes, we see Kipps settled with his wife and stepchildren. They ask him to tell them his own ghost story. Kipps resists but eventually decides to write it down. He starts at the beginning when he was young  and engaged to be married the following year. As a junior solicitor, Kipps is assigned to attend the funeral of Alice Drablow in Crythin Gifford, a small town on the coast of England. He’s charged with settling her estate, the secluded, desolate Eel Marsh House situated on Nine Lives Causeway, which is surrounded by marshes. At high tide, the property is completely cut off from the mainland.

During the funeral, Kipps sees a mysterious woman in black lurking in the background. As he learns more about his deceased client and her sister, who became pregnant out of wedlock, one of the wealthy landowners from town divulges the horrifying truth that none of the other townsfolk want to talk about--that Jennet has returned often in the years since her death, and a sighting of this “Woman in Black” presages the death of a child.

This story reflects on the deep, indelible impressions death can leave on lives, and the damage that harshness, unforgiveness, and loss can have on the mind. The Woman in Black is everything I love in a ghost tale. It has great potential for re-reading often.

In Printer's Devil Court, a Victorian spooky tale, four medical students discuss the ramifications of interfering with death as it approaches. In truth, they should have talked about whether it's advisable at all. But, in the throes of youth untouched by the taint of regret and uncertainty, so many evils are perpetrated and simply never questioned in the face of imminent exploration and discovery. The experiments the men embark on in the cellar of their lodgings in Printer's Devil Court and a little used mortuary in a subterranean annex of the hospital is unnatural and horrifying.

Hugh, one of the doctors, found he couldn't continue with the unethical undertakings, but years later he's called back to the unpleasant memories of the events he had a unwilling but intrigued hand in bringing about. Now he sees the damage that lives on unceasingly. But is it possible to change the consequences of monstrous actions?

This story reflects on the deep, indelible impressions of life and death, what happens in-between, and how inept man is at playing God in these areas. The reader is forced to consider the frailty and violence inside men. This Frankenstein-like story swept me along, unable to put it down for long. As an author, I couldn’t help marveling at how the author chose the best narrator for this story. If she’d chosen any of the other medical students, the story wouldn’t have any the same impact. Stories like these make for good warnings against getting involved in ambiguous things that make you uneasy and are sure to keep your conscience at full alarm until you extricate yourself.

If you haven’t read a ghost story before or are simply looking for the best of its kind, these two are not to be missed.

Note that these stories are published separately as well as in the author's own collections.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Decoding Brain Waves

Can a computer program read thoughts? An experimental project uses AI as a "brain decoder," in combination with brain scans, to "transcribe 'the gist' of what people are thinking, in what was described as a step toward mind reading":

Scientists Use Brain Scans to "Decode" Thoughts

The example in the article discusses how the program interprets what a person thinks while listening to spoken sentences. Although the system doesn't translate the subject's thoughts into the exact same words, it's capable of accurately rendering the "gist" into coherent language. Moreover, it can even accomplish the same thing when the subject simply thinks about a story or watches a silent movie. Therefore, the program is "decoding something that is deeper than language, then converting it into language." Unlike earlier types of brain-computer interfaces, this noninvasive system doesn't require implanting anything in the person's brain.

However, the decoder isn't perfect yet; it has trouble with personal pronouns, for instance. Moreover, it's possible for the subject to "sabotage" the process with mental tricks. Participating scientists reassure people concerned about "mental privacy" that the system works only after it has been trained on the particular person's brain activity through many hours in an MRI scanner. Nevertheless, David Rodriguez-Arias Vailhen, a bioethics professor at Spain's Granada University, expresses apprehension that the more highly developed versions of such programs might lead to "a future in which machines are 'able to read minds and transcribe thought'. . . warning this could possibly take place against people's will, such as when they are sleeping."

Here's another article about this project, explaining that the program functions on a predictive model similar to ChatGPT. As far as I can tell, the system works only with thoughts mentally expressed in words, not pure images:

Brain Activity Decoder Can Read Stories in People's Minds

Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin suggest as one positive application that the system "might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again."

An article on the Wired site explores in depth the nature of thought and its connection with language from the perspective of cognitive science.

Decoders Won't Just Read Your Mind -- They'll Change It

Suppose the mind isn't, as traditionally assumed, "a self-contained, self-sufficient, private entity"? If not, is there a realistic risk that "these machines will have the power to characterize and fix a thought’s limits and bounds through the very act of decoding and expressing that thought"?

How credible is the danger foreshadowed in this essay? If AI eventually gains the power to decode anyone's thoughts, not just those of individuals whose brain scans the system has been trained on, will literal mind-reading come into existence? Could a future Big Brother society watch citizens not just through two-way TV monitors but by inspecting the contents of their brains?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Whose Who?

Punctuation is a matter of courtesy to ones reader. I believe that Sir Ernest Gowers wrote words to that effect in his influential "Plain Words". He was a powerful advocate for brevity and precision in the use of English, particularly in the case of factual writing.

To my astonishment, I was able to find a biography of Sir Ernest Gowers on Wikipedia. I recommend it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gowers

I was so impressed, I made a small donation to Wikipedia and discovered two wonderful things, to wit: donations to Wikipedia are classed as charitable and are tax-deductible; and if one makes a donation, one no longer sees fund-raising banners when revisiting the site.

That is the first time in my seventy years that I have had a good experience as a result of tracking cookies!

As far as I recall, it was Sir Ernest who said that one does not need the possessive apostophe in ones.

Now to "Whose Who?" which should not be confused with "Who Is Who?" (Or Who's Who?)

Much depends whether one is talking about the science fictional Dr. Who --which I will-- or Dr. Seuss's Whos of Whoville.

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/whos-vs-whos-vs-whose-grammar-rules

And for an interesting bit of grammatical esoterica, if the question could be, "Who is she?" the word would be "Who is who?" If it is "Who is him?" it could be "Who is whom?".

Source: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192794/whos-who-or-whos-whom

For me, I lost interest when Dr. Who ceased to be a Gandalfian figure, but His Time-Lordliness is of enduring relevance when it comes to copyright.

Legal blogger, IP lawyer and of special counsel Nils Versemann of the lawfirm Macpherson Kelley discusses the legal impediments towards restoring the lost (in space and time) episodes of the Dr. Who episodes to posterity,

https://mk.com.au/copyright-concerns-about-private-doctor-who-collection/

Possibly, I had too much fun with that last sentence for a good student of Sir Ernest!

In short, the BBC failed to preserve certain episodes of the series. Ironically, some of those reasons were copyright-related. Now, the missing episodes are of great value, and it turns out that a few episodes are not altogether lost, but in the hands of private collectors.

The rub is that those private collectors might be barred by copyright laws from sharing what they might have scavenged from BBC dustbins or recorded at home from the TV (legally or otherwise) for private enjoyment.

  "This means that when the Doctor Who episodes were copied from the TV broadcast in the 1960s, they would have infringed copyright in that broadcast and the underlying cinematograph film.

There is an exception under section 111 of the Australian Copyright Act 1968. This includes making a recording of the broadcast for private and domestic use to watch at a more convenient time...[ ] However, that exception is taken to have never applied if a further copy is made..."

For the sake of posterity, and the Dr. Who canon, Nils Versemann suggests a pragmatic solution. 

"... the BBC should consider an amnesty to private collectors who historically made copies for their own personal use. The BBC’s objective is to receive these precious copies, rather than deal with somebody who is pirating them for profit..."

Or in this case, perhaps not "pirating them for profit" but saving them secretly.

Whose Dr. Who episode is it? And, does technical ownership matter. It would be an almost literal pyrrhic victory if the BBC defended its ancient copyright and lost the missing plot.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

Karen S Wiesner: {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Small Hand and Dolly by Susan Hill

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Small Hand and Dolly by Susan Hill

by Karen S. Wiesner

Susan Hill is one of those authors that effortlessly puts you directly into the fictional settings and personal lives of her characters (many of her stories are ghost and/or horror) with so much atmospheric reality, you're convinced of the authenticity of everything. Two stories that seem to go together extremely well are The Small Hand and Dolly. Both are unforgettable ghost stories.

The Small Hand was published in 2010. In this story, an antiquarian book dealer gets lost in the countryside after visiting a client and ends up at a derelict Edwardian House. While there, he's compelled to the entrance, where he feels a small hand slip into his own. This experience haunts him over the next several weeks, plaguing him with nightmares, unexpected panic attacks, along with further visits from this disembodied, ghostly small hand. His only choice is to delve deeply into the mystery of the house and its desolate, overgrown garden.

While the description of this story may sound vaguely silly, nothing about the story was that. The mere idea of this experience was always rendered as a genuinely chilling occurrence. I invested myself in this tale, as well as into the point of view of the main character with his investigations. I wanted to know what was going on. The answer wasn’t what I was expecting—the twist was even better than I could have hoped for.

In Dolly, published in 2012, the main character is a boy Edward sent to live with his aunt. While there, his like-aged, spoiled cousin Leonora comes to stay for the "holiday" as well. They're the children of siblings who hated each other. Their aunt Kestrel was the older sister of the two siblings. Kestrel's decaying Iyot House is situated in the damp, desolate Fens of Eastern England. Edward is polite and withdrawn, having learned to keep his thoughts private to avoid trouble. What a contrast he is to his bratty cousin who throws a fit about everything and anything. While the reader can't help feeling sorry for her because the girl's mother treats her like possession she's only sometimes in the mood for having around, sympathy can only go so far with such bad behavior. The one thing Leonora has always wanted from her mother is a specific doll. Knowing only that Leonora wants a doll for her birthday, Kestrel makes a special trip to get her a beautiful, expensive one. However, it's not the one Leonora has always wanted. She proceeds to smash it in her terrible rage at again not getting what she wanted (and probably not from the person she'd wanted it from). Edward picks up the pieces and puts it back in the box. All that night, he hears the paper around the shattered doll rustling along with crying. At first he puts the box under his bed, then into a deep cupboard, but the crying so haunts him, he eventually takes it and buries it in the church cemetery not far from the house.

Edward is a character you can’t help but love. The author put us directly into his situation, into his heart and mind, seamlessly. I could feel his shock and even a bit of awe at his cousin, who was beautiful to look upon, but his wariness toward her was warranted. Even as he longed for a companion, she was too selfish and volatile. The story also takes place when they're adult, after their aunt had died and her will is to be read. Even then, the characters are wonderfully brought to life.

The brilliance in this disturbing horror story is in the delicate hand the author displayed in fleshing out the psychology of the characters. Edward and Leonora are opposites--light and dark, good and evil. But light and dark, good and evil aren't easily defined or examined. Using the doll to explore the angle of whether evil is inherent or whether psychological damage causes it leads to a question about forgiveness or the lack thereof passing down through the generations of a family like a dark stain that those who experience it (firsthand, second, and on and on) can never wash off.

Note that both of these stories are published separately as well as in the author's own collections.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

The Smartest Animals

Here's yet another list of the supposedly most intelligent nonhuman animals, or at least a selection of them:

11 of the World's Smartest Animals

How is intelligence defined for purposes of this kind of categorization? The article focuses on what scientists have discovered about any given animal’s "self-awareness, self-control, and memory, all of which influence how well a creature processes information and solves problems."

The list intrigues me partly because of a couple of unexpected creatures highlighted alongside the obvious ones. I expected to see animals such as chimpanzees, bonobos, dolphins, raccoons, pigs, elephants, and octopuses, plus birds such as ravens and parrots. But pigeons? Horses? And why don't dogs make the cut? Unlike chimps, they understand what we mean when we point to an object, probably because they've evolved for millennia to live with humans.

Raccoons might be prime candidates for evolving to replace us if we went extinct. Their forepaws, which they use like hands, could give them a technological edge over such potential rivals as pigs or dolphins, which lack manipulative appendages. Incidentally, bears are also good at breaking into locked spaces and opening receptacles such as coolers. The most intelligent animals on the list, chimpanzees and bonobos (formerly known as pigmy chimps) have small, threatened populations, whereas raccoons presently thrive in great numbers in many human-dominated environments. I also like the idea of an octopus-dominated world, though. Granted, their reign would be confined to the aquatic realm, but imagine if they evolved to overcome their main disadvantages, their short lifespans and solitary nature. An octopus species that mutated to survive for many years after procreating instead of dying as soon as they reproduce could pass on accumulated knowledge to their young, a process that might encourage development of social bonds. Has any SF author written about a mainly watery planet with octopus-like inhabitants as the dominant sapient species?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

What's In A Meme?

What's In A Meme?

In a fund-raising email, with the subject-line "Fight For The Memes", Christian Romero of the EFF Membership Team wrote of memes:

"Support your right to have fun online."

"Dear Supporter of Digital Freedom,

One of the internet's great joys, for me at least, is seeing all the fun and creative ways that people use memes to express themselves. It can be a silly way to convey your feelings about a TV show, or even to critique the government. These fun images and videos are a great reminder about the freedom of expression and creativity the internet allows us to have.
But, for all the good the internet does, there are still those trying to bend its capabilities to take advantage of the users..."

I take issue. Does one have a right to have fun online?  A "right? Strictly speaking, probably one does not have such a right, any more than one has a right to party, unless --like adverse possession-- it can be established by multiple years of continual use which is never legally challenged.

Memes are not enumerated in the Constitution. One does not even have the right to "happiness" or great joy, but only "the pursuit of happiness". 

What is a Meme?  Grammarly explains at length.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/what-is-a-meme/

They cite an example of a meme, and interestingly, that meme was challenged by a songwriter and artist best known as Prince. That case took eleven years, and ended in a settlement. It may not have legally established that anyone has the right to use copyrighted music in their short, visual creation for sharing.

Much would depend on the four factors of fair use. For a full explanation of the four factors, see here: https://copyright.columbia.edu/basics/fair-use.html

 

EFF team member Christian Romero mentions silly cat pictures, which might remind some of the copyright infringement lawsuit brought and won in the name of the Grumpy Cat, who was a meme star and some company went too far with their interpretion of what one can and cannot do with even a cat image.

https://www.businessinsider.com/grumpy-cat-wins-710000-copyright-lawsuit-grenade-beverage-2018-1

 

Any old cat may not have image and personality rights, but a sensational cat might be worth the thousands of dollars it takes to trademark an image.

 

Jeff Williams of The Williams IP law firm explains Image and Personality Rights. Here:  https://www.txpatentattorney.com/blog/what-are-image-and-personality-rights/

 

Many memes are a few witty words imposed on a photograph of a well known actor. That might be all well and good, providing the actor does not violently disagree with the sentiments that the meme creator associates with his/her/their likeness. One might imagine that, if the funny meme is political in nature, or causes perceived reputational harm, there could be trouble, not only for the meme creator, but also for anyone who "shares" or "reposts" it.

 

The Electronic Freedom Foundation gives blanket permission for anyone to quote anything that they write as long as one gives credit, and a link to the source.

 

This is the EFF creative commons license wording.

https://www.eff.org/copyright

 

For good measure, here is a link to some of EFF's articles on the topic of  Free Speech.

https://www.eff.org/issues/free-speech

For anyone puzzled by the link I applied to "great joy", my earworm of the day is Marianne Faithful's line "danger is great joy" from her Witches' Song from the album Broken English.

My title, "What's In A Meme?" is inspired by a much-misunderstood, balcony scene soliloquy by Juliet in the Shakespearean play "Romeo and Juliet". I would call it a soliloquy rather than a monologue because she believes herself to be alone, and does not know that Romeo is eavesdropping. She says, "What's in a NAME?" and goes on to say that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet". By the way, "wherefore" meant --and still means-- closer to "why", but certainly not "where".

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/   

http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

Karen S Wiesner: {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Man in the Picture and The Mist in the Mirror by Susan Hill

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Man in the Picture and The Mist in the Mirror

by Susan Hill

by Karen S. Wiesner

Susan Hill is one of those authors that effortlessly puts you directly into the fictional settings and personal lives of her characters (many of her stories are ghost and/or horror) with so much atmospheric reality, you're convinced of the authenticity of everything. Two of my favorite stories by this author, though it is very hard to choose, are The Man in the Picture and The Mist in the Mirror.

The Man in the Picture was published in 2007. An oil painting depicting masked revelers at a Venetian carnival has the power to entrap and destroy. This story is told from several points of view as those who have experienced the horror give heartrending testimony about what they've gone through, what they've lost. The overarching message of this very complex and well-written story is, Never underestimate the power of fury or the depths people will sink to in order to get revenge or to achieve their own goals. As an unsuspecting bystander caught up with the excitement of the celebrating crowds (a very apt comparison, considering this particular theme), I become ensnare within this novel and all the chilling events. In the process, I was swept along until I was all but lost in the storytelling. Every part of this tale of terror beguiled me. 

Set in the Victorian age, The Mist in the Mirror was published in 1999. The hero Sir Monmouth's life has been filled with travel. He's lived his life mostly alone, and there's an undeniable innocence about him. He believes unwaveringly in the innate goodness of his fellow man. As the story opens, he arrives in England intending to devote himself to learning more about a fellow explorer from the past, Conrad Vane, and perhaps document the adventurer's life. However, as he sets about following this trail, he's warned by many well-meaning others not to go down that road. Apparently, Vane was a man who plummeted the depths of depravity and cruelty and, even after his death, the foolish one who pursued him would become tainted by his evil. Extraordinary, disturbing events plague Monmouth with nightmares, involving a shrouded little boy and an old woman behind the curtain. Despite all this, he stubbornly continued on his course. Monmouth's quest quickly becomes a relentless obsession that threatens to steal his health, his sanity, even his life. Overarching themes in the story point to care being taken to the one you choose to make your idol, as that person may not be who or what you assume him or her to be.

While at first blush, this story didn't seem like there could possibly be enough material to flesh out into a full novel, it quickly became larger than life, frighteningly claustrophobic, the protagonist someone to rail against but also to sympathize—even emphasize—with as he lost control of his own compulsion. I read equally compulsively, lost in the fog that this gothic horror story seemed to conjure, blocking out my own reality. When I finished it, I couldn't shake the chill--and the warning to heed the regrets of the main character--that remained.

Both of these stories provide frightening lessons to be learned about taking anything to the extreme. Addictions can so easily steal and usurp purpose in life, so that a person becomes the opposite of what he or she intends or desires.

Note that both of these stories are published separately as well as in the author's own collections.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Animal Facial Expressions

A study at the University of Kansas Medical Center "discovered that cats use nearly 300 distinct facial expressions to communicate with one another":

Cats' Facial Expressions

In contrast, humans have 44 different facial expressions, and I was surprised to read that dogs have only 27. Feline expressions of emotion often involve ear movements and whiskers, however, so it's not so strange that they have more "distinct" expressions than we do. I was also surprised that cats' "facial signals" play such a large part in their communications with each other. As this article points out, cats are more social than people usually assume.

Chimpanzees convey a lot of information to each other by subtle facial movements:

How Chimps Communicate with a Look

Lisa Parr, director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, discusses how small changes in expression can communicate different emotions. Chimps were tested on how well they could distinguish and identify the significance of other chimps' facial expressions. Studying these behaviors in chimpanzees may contribute to better understanding of human nonverbal communication.

Dogs may have developed some types of facial expressions specifically to communicate with us:

How Dog Expressions Evolved

Of course, as this article mentions, a lot of canine communication occurs through body language. Maybe that's why they haven't evolved as many variations on facial expressions as we have. Also, scent plays a vital role in dogs' experiences of the world, a sensory dimension we almost entirely lack compared to canines.

Quora features questions about why animals of the same species tend to look so much "alike," while human beings have distinct individual appearances. Some answers explain, in addition to the human-centered bias that causes us to make finer distinctions among members of our own species, that many animals have less variation in facial appearance than we do because they rely on other senses such as smell to recognize each other.

If intelligent Martians existed, we might think they all look alike, as the narrator of Heinlein's DOUBLE STAR does at the beginning of the novel. On the other hand, the Martians would probably have trouble telling Earth people apart.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Per Ardua

Now this is interesting if you happen to want to be legally correct while writing about a naughty astronaut.

Per ardua ad astra is the motto of the British Royal Air Force, and means (roughly) "Through Hard Work To The Stars." I prefer, "Adversity", but it is not up to me.

What do astronauts have to do with copyright? You might well ask. All is revealed by the Claims IP blog which can be read in full here:

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=bfd28f48-8ec9-4209-9d0a-eaa455d4019f

In brief:

"Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who works on the International Space Station (ISS), recently repeated a scene from Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and shared it on her Twitter"  

https://twitter.com/astrosamantha/status/1578751251541786625?s=46&t=YXKuqNuTkvFLJVegDcCUxg 

Does one infringe a movie copyright by duplicating the costumes, sound track, and distinctive activities and publishing it? Is it homage? Is it parody? Is it news? Is it educational?

But the question that the European lawyers of the Claims IP blog ask is – "How do intellectual property rights apply to astronauts who have left the Earth?"

Their answer is that one's legal status does not change when one is in space, or even on another planet. One remains a citizen of the state, and under the legal juristdiction of the state from which one came. [Aside, Vivek might have a point about this, too.] So, if an American citizen were to commit a space crime or infringe copyright while in outer space, he or she or they might be subject to American civil or criminal law.

The blog has specific details. It does not seem that an infringement case has been brought, so this is all speculative.

Talking of dancing on the ceiling...or up the walls (with or without a nod to Lionel Ritchie,) legal blogger Karen Gover of the McDermott Will and Emery lawfirm's legal blog writes "A Step Forward For Choreography and Copyright."

https://www.ipupdate.com/2023/11/a-step-forward-for-choreography-and-copyright/#page=1 

In football terms, this is about a bad call that was reversed upon further review. When Los Angeles based choreographer had some of his distinctive and brilliant dance moves copied and monetized by an animated video game, he sued, alleging direct and contributory infringement, and was most unfairly (IMHO) waved off. 

Hanagami appealed. The Appeals Court ruled that, just because a short dance sequence is short does not mean that it cannot deserve and receive copyright protection.

I would say, that seems right to me. There are pop songs that have very few lyrics, but they are copyright-protected... unless they were popular before 1972 -- which is also terribly unfair, IMHO.

Practice Note from Kaaren Gover: 

"Choreography has been protected by the copyright statute since 1976 but is rarely litigated. Hence, application of the substantial similarity test to dance works is not a robustly developed area of copyright law. Courts may look to the Copyright Office’s guidance documents on the subject as well as analogous cases involving musical works when applying the substantial similarity test to choreography."

By the way, I was looking up whether repetition of naught (as in naughty) and naut at the end of astronaut was a named figure of speech, such as assonance, when I came upon a great source for proper use of synecdoche or metonymy

https://hyperbolit.com/2020/04/01/metonymy-vs-synecdoche-whats-the-difference/

"Too good not to share," I thought. Is that too word-nerdy? If one does not have the vocabulary, the precise vocabulary, it is hard to have clarity of thought.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

Karen S Wiesner: {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

In my past review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I talked about how the author Susanna Clarke signed up for a writing workshop in which students attending were expected to come with a short story they'd written. All Clarke had were "bundles" of materials for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. She extracted a piece of it about three women secretly practicing magic who are discovered by Jonathan Strange. That story is the title one in this collection of eight short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, set in the same world as the larger novel, a fictionalized 18th/19th century England in which magic is becoming popular again, thanks to the efforts of Mr Norrell and his pupil (and later rival) Jonathan Strange. In that very in-depth novel, the duo themes are 1) that magic is given or bargained for from powerful and not necessarily moral beings that exist in another realm (faerie) and 2) that magic sometimes manifests in ways the wielder isn't intending.

In all the stories in this "off-shoot" anthology, the overwhelming themes are 1) the commonalities of magic in different time periods, 2) the undeniable (and, at times, even more diabolical) power of "women's magic", something that was taboo in this world, and 3) the ways in which faerie folk infringe on the real world--as if their own isn't exciting enough (and that may well be the case, considering their mischievous deeds).

In the title story, Jonathan Strange visits his brother-in-law, a country parson, where he's challenged by three female magicians. The author has said of this story that she wanted to find a place for these characters within the larger novel but, having read it now, I'm convinced it simply didn't and couldn't fit there. As a short story on its own, it has a compelling connection to the novel that made the author famous.

The second story, "On Lickerish Hill", is an interesting retelling of Rumplestiltskin. The unfortunate, young bride is placed in the demeaning role of wife to a monetary-seeking groom and has to find a clever solution to save herself. While the "archaic spellings" of the plucky heroine's speech were hard to read and decipher, the twist on one of my favorite fairy tales was particularly satisfying.

In "Mrs. Mabb" (the Queen Mab),  an abandoned woman is determined to get her fiancé free of black magic while everyone around her assumes she's hysterical (after being jilted) or insane, which was very common to presume about women of the day.

Interestingly, "The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse" is actually set within the village of Wall, which has its origin in Neil Gaiman's Stardust novel. (For those who didn't read my review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the workshop co-host that read the extraction of Susanna Clarke's work from her novel was so impressed by her work, he sent an excerpt to his good friend, fantasy author Neil Gaiman who was astounded by her "assurance" as a writer: "It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata."). In this particular story, I was fascinated by what was considered common women's work being utilized by a pompous duke to bring about a fantastical conclusion.

"Mr. Simonelli, or the Fairy Widower" was a favorite of mine in this anthology, as an amoral faerie aristocrat has to be put down (by his own bastard son!) in order to save five sisters that strongly resemble the distinctive Bennetts from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Three other tales cover fairy culture, including a fictionalized account of Mary, Queen of Scots, learning how to use magic to undertake her political machinations, along with featuring a central character in Jonathan Strange (John Uskglass, aka the Raven King) as Christian peasants revolt against pagan faerie.

While Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was both compelling and unforgettable, this anthology of parallel stories that were published (separately) while the novel was being edited and prepared for publication and later (after the novel became a hit) collected in one place are much lighter and certainly more subtle--nevertheless, they're undeniably enchanting in their own right.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Thanksgiving and Traditions

Happy American Thanksgiving! Ordinarily we spend the weekend after Turkey Day at ChessieCon, formerly Darkover Grand Council, which has traditionally occurred every Thanksgiving weekend for several decades. Last November they held their first in-person con since 2019. At that time it moved from the hotel where it's been held for many years to a different one in the same general area, north of Baltimore. Attendance turned out to be dismayingly low. Doubtless in part for that reason, the committee decided to cancel this year's event and take time off to regroup and rethink the con's future. On top of that, the hotel it had moved to abruptly closed a few months ago. Where will ChessieCon go next, if anywhere? Will we lose this venerable local SF/F tradition?

Thanksgiving traditions typically include the familiar turkey and its required accessories, e.g., stuffing, potatoes, and gravy. Some households, however, depart from the conventional menu for more adventurous fare. For instance, our second son and his family eschew turkey in favor of entrees such as homemade sushi. Many Americans also consider TV football essential on that day.

In mainline Christian churches, the first Sunday of Advent, the build-up to Christmas, falls on or near the first weekend of December. Most of us now accept as inevitable and proper that the winter holiday shopping and decorating season begins on the day after Thanksgiving. However, when Christmas and other winter-themed displays in stores overlap with Halloween merchandise, and internet merchants advertise "Black Friday" sales starting over a week early, many of us think the extension of the season is going too far. Commercialization of Christmas gifting, though, started almost simultaneously with the invention of the family-centered Christmas as we know it in the nineteenth century. Moreover, people have been complaining about it almost as long.

The popular film A CHRISTMAS STORY, aka the BB gun movie, set around 1940, based on Jean Shepherd's fictionalized memoir IN GOD WE TRUST: ALL OTHERS PAY CASH, illustrates how even before the middle of the twentieth century intensive holiday gift advertising and department store Santas already pervaded the Christmas-season consciousness of American children. Our parents and grandparents didn't experience some newer Christmas traditions that existed in our childhoods and those of our children, because those customs depend on new technology, mainly television. Many people watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, culminating in the arrival of Santa Claus. They also enjoy favorite Christmas specials over and over. Nowadays we don't have to wait for those treasured memories to show up in reruns; we can view them on home video media or streaming services at will. I always watch at least two versions of A CHRISTMAS CAROL every year, usually more. We can also look forward to original programs reliably appearing every December, such as one of my favorites, the annual new CALL THE MIDWIFE Christmas episode.

If our grandparents had been able to peer into the future and note these novel customs, they might have disdained them as soulless products of technology, violating the true spirit of the season. For us and our children, recurring winter holiday movies and TV shows simply became an expected part of the celebration, cherished traditions as much as the tree, the feast, and the presents.

When some earthlings live in artificial habitats on the Moon or Mars or in generation-spanning starships, what holiday traditions will they bring along, and what fresh customs will life in extraterrestrial environments demand? It seems likely that even in locations vastly distant from Earth's solstice cycles, human beings will cling to the core elements of their seasonal celebrations.

Margaret L Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Your Shot?

Whether the photo is of your wedding or is taken as you arrive at a glamorous event or awards ceremony (not that the latter two are mutually exclusive) or even if it the one-in-a-million passport photos that turns out to be flattering, is it yours?

Probably, it is not yours to do with as you please. As technology advances, the things that one could do with a great shot are multiple, if not myriad. One can upload it to a website and have it returned in a frame. One can edit it with an application to remove unwanted elements in the background. One can give it to ones webmistress or editor to adorn ones website or the back matter of ones novel.

A photograph belongs to the photographer, not to the poser (or subject of the photograph). The shot may not belong to you, even if you pay for it unless you obtain a written assignment granting you all rights in the image.

Ned T. Himmelrich, attorney and legal blogger for Gordon Feinblatt LLC, explains succinctly here:

https://www.gfrlaw.com/what-we-do/insights/hired-photographers-own-event-photos-unless-agreed-otherwise 

He also offers excellent practical advice to photographers, including amateurs, and also a warning about the subject's possible right of publicity.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™  

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

 

Karen S Wiesner: {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff

by Karen S. Wiesner

Just in time for Turkey Day! If you want to bypass the "gravy and gratitude" aspect of this holiday and instead want to be scared out of your ill-fitting pants (after the big meal), The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff may be just what you're looking for. Published in 2006, this was the first novel by a now award-winning author (it was nominated for both The Bram Stoker and Anthony awards). It was also the first book I read by her.

Set on the Baird College's Mendenhall, five college students are left alone on the isolated campus for the long Thanksgiving break. For better or for worse, the group seeks out company, such as it is, at the approach of what's promising to be a killer storm front. Naturally, all the students stayed behind instead of going home for their own reasons and all have secrets. And naturally they're bound to do something stupid that sets off an avalanche of ominous events that make them fear they may not actually be alone in the hundred-year-old creepy residence hall.

This ghost story is filled with all the ingredients needed to make a chilling thriller appetizing--a creepy setting cut off from others, suspicious characters, bad weather, and three long and dark days and nights before their fellow students and staff return to find out the aftermath of what happened in their absence. I was on tenterhooks throughout the reading of this aptly named tale.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Bad People Versus Bad Institutions

In his latest LOCUS essay, Cory Doctorow discusses whether "all the internet services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay." Setting aside the question of whether "irreversibly terrible" is a bit exaggerated, he reasonably states that "it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people," and the internet was ruined, if it was, by bad people:

Don't Be Evil

The problem isn't that simple, however, since institutions, not individuals, created the internet. On the other hand, institutions comprise many individuals, some with honorable motives and some driven solely by the quest for profit. In short, "institutional action is the result of its individuals resolving their conflicts." Can corporations as such be evil? Doctorow doesn't seem to be saying that's the case. Every institution, private or public, includes multitudes of people, with conflicting goals, some good and some bad -- both the individuals and their goals. Moreover, as he doesn't explicitly mention, some people's characters and motivations are neither all good nor all bad. Many drift along with the corporate culture from fear of the consequences of resistance or maybe just from failure to think through the full implications of what's going on. He does seem to be suggesting, however, that vast, impersonal forces can shape negative outcomes regardless of the contrary wishes of some people involved in the process. "Tech didn’t get worse because techies [workers in the field] got worse. Tech got worse because the condition of the external world made it easier for the worst techies to win arguments."

What solutions for this quandary could be tried, other than "burn them [the allegedly villainous "giants of the internet" such as Amazon and Google] to the ground," in my opinion a bit too drastic? Doctorow insists, "A new, good internet is possible and worth fighting for," and lists some aspects he believes must change. Potential avenues for improvement can be summarized by the need to empower the people who mean well -- the ones Doctorow describes as "people within those institutions who pine for a new, good internet, an internet that is a force for human liberation" -- over those who disregard the concerns of their customers in single-minded greed for profit.

On the wider topic of individual responsibility for the villainous acts of institutions over which one doesn't have any personal control, one might be reminded of the contemporary issue of reparations to historically oppressed groups. Of course, one can quit a job and seek a more ethical employer, but renouncing one's nationality or ethnic ancestry would be severely problematic. However, since that subject veers into "modpol" (modern politics, as strictly banned on an e-mail list I subscribe to), I'll simply point out C. S. Lewis's essay, in a different context, about repenting of other people's sins:

Dangers of National Repentance

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Tatters

Today's earworm is not a song about Tattoos, but the lyrics include "I'm in tatters".

Since the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided that Andy Warhol's use of the Goldsmith photo portrait of the artist sometimes known as Prince was not transformative, and was therefore not "Fair Use" of the photographer's work, some suppositions about tatooing someone else's photograph onto a body is in tatters.

There are a lot of romance novels about tattooed protagonists. Here is one blogger's list: https://joreadsromance.co.uk/national-tattoo-day-romance-novels/

And another here: 

https://houseonblacklake.com/20-best-tattooed-and-pierced-bad-boy-romance-novels/

 

And on Goodreads:  

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/10617.Tattoo

None of the cover art that I saw when scrolling through these three sites had a celebrity's face tattooed on a model, but any author considering cover art should be aware of the evolution in the law. 

Faces are not the only potential problem. There are some designs that look like copyrighted or trademarked works. I assume that, if hiring a tattooed cover model, it would be prudent to check that he (or she) has all the necessary rights from the tattoo artist to display the tattoo for commercial gain. Moreover, if the cover art of the tattoo is going to be used for advertising purposes and posted widely on social media, there may be other licenses and publicity rights that have to be covered.

Oh what a tangled web! (Sir Walter Scott, Marmion).

In "Think About The Ink", Bess Morgan, a legal blogger for the law firm Loeb & Loeb LLC, writes about the changing legal status of tattoos since the US Supreme Court decision in the Prince photo case. One Court has had to revise its analysis in the case Sedlik v Von Drachenberg et al. which was about a tattoo that was inspired by a photograph of the musician Miles Davis.

The law firm Loeb & Loeb often deals with tattoo-art-related issues in the context of fashion, licensing, collaborations and body art in general.

To be "transformative" (and therefore a fair use) a copy of a copyrighted work must have a “further purpose or different character” vs. the meaning or aesthetic of the defendant’s work. It is not enough for the photograph or design to merely be a different color, or displayed on a different surface.

The Loeb & Loeb very valuable and comprehensive advice for cover artists and cover models (ie "Talent") is:

"Talent should procure a written consent and release from the tattoo artist that, among other terms, allows the talent to freely display and exploit the tattoo in any manner without further obligation, and secures representations surrounding the design."

 For authors and publishers (or "Brands"):

"Brands engaging inked talent should specifically receive a grant of rights to use talent’s tattoos and body art as an element of the persona license and seek indemnification from an IP and publicity rights perspective."

Bess Morgan also offers very wise and practical advice for Brands who hire a tattooed model for his or her physical charms, but the ink is not an essential element of the Look.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday