The real reason your sapient dragon character needs a "rider":

Dragon pirate who acts as both captain and ship with a full crew of kobolds running over its back manning cannons

I mean, on leafcutter ants a little tiny one will ride on the leaf carried by a soldier just so she can fend off parasitoids

Btwww if anyone wants to read Master and Commander style dragons with canons check out Naomi Novak's Temerere books.

What even makes a story Solarpunk?

I thought to myself that given the fact I am gonna review a few more Solarpunk short stories and given that there is some interest in me talking about Solarpunk media, it would make sense for me to talk a bit about what - to me - makes a story Solarpunk.

As I have established before: I can think of quite a few stories that are not technically Solarpunk, but feel very Solarpunk.

To make it simply: I think there is two aspects to Solarpunk in storytelling. One of them is themes, the other is the worldbuilding. And yes, I think a story can be kinda Solarpunk just based on the themes, even if it just takes place in a normal fantasy setting, a historical setting or just in the modern world.

Solarpunk Themes

I talked about it last week how Dungeon Meshi feels quite Solarpunk to me. And the reason for this is the themes it deals with. Because those themes are absolutely there.

Themes I would consider to be Solarpunk:

I do not think that a single one of those themes is making a story Solarpunk, but when several of them come together.

I also talked about how the movie Misaki no Mayoiga, which takes place after the Tohoku earthquake, feels very, very Solarpunk, even though it takes place in 2011. Because it just features so many of those themes. Big theming around community and found family. Big use of mutual aid. Living in harmony with nature specifically according to old Shinto traditions.

And that just makes the movie feel so very Solarpunk.

Solarpunk in Worldbuilding

Then there is obviously the way that a story can be set in a Solarpunk setting. Which probably is some sort of science fiction setting (though I do argue that it could also be fantasy) that features certain aspects.

While I would argue the world can be in different stages when it comes to the different points, I do think that to really get Solarpunk each of the points has to be addressed in some way or form.

Though it is to me also very speaking, that a lot of folks really do not seem to be able to imagine a post-capitalist world...

What I am trying to say

I do think that a piece of media can absolutely qualify as "kinda solarpunk" if it just uses those themes above. And yes, this also means that a lot more media can be considered Solarpunk in terms of themes, than by fitting the Solarpunk worldbuilding so far.

I would love to see more Solarpunk worldbuilding, though. :)

I thinks folks expressing incredulity at the quality of the writing and composition in Calvin and Hobbes are often missing the context that Bill Watterson is arguably the most influential sequential artist of his generation. Like, this is a guy who once told the editors of nationally syndicated newspapers to go fuck themselves when they wanted to mess with his panel layouts, and not only did he keep his job, he got his way. He could have had literally any gig he wanted, and he chose to be the Sunday funnies guy because that's what made him happy. He's basically the Weird Al of sequential art.

Watterson considers comics to be as true an art form as painting and films and literature, capable of reaching just as high as any other medium. Calvin and Hobbes isn't accidentally high art. Watterson made it what it is on purpose. And when he was done, he stopped. No movie, no spinoff, no reboot. He considers the comic to be its completed form, in exactly the medium it is supposed to be. He believed in comics in a way few others ever have, and he fought tooth and nail for the right to take his own work, jokes and all, seriously.

As someone who has multiple Calvin and Hobbes books, this just makes me love them even more. You done good, Bill. You done good.

The thing that messes me up about the whole “the butler did it” trope is that we literally have no idea where it comes from.

The earliest known piece of detective fiction in which the butler, in fact, did it? Published in 1930.

The earliest known article calling out “the butler did it” as an egregious cliché in detective fiction? Published in 1928.

Obviously there must have been earlier examples of detective fiction in which the butler did it, but none of them have survived to the present day, leaving us in this bizarre situation where the earliest known callout post about the trope pre-dates its earliest known actual use by a full two years.

This makes me want to go on a quest for the detective fic prior to 1928 in which the butler did, in fact, do it.

Sometimes my gf is incredibly well read and insightful and knowledgeable.

and sometimes she’s never heard of “The Butler Did It”.

My dear I am confused. You’re more into noir than I am.

Also that article does go into where it might have originated from (unsurprisingly: Fuck poor people). But still.

I do think it’s kind of wild that the detective story was pretty much invented in the 19th century. It feels like it should be older, like something Shakespeare dabbled in, or that Marlowe parodied. But no, it was Edgar Allan Poe, and in the turn of the century it became very popular, even reflecting onto real life when people thought they knew who the boston marathon bomber Jack the Ripper was and started blaming the wrong person a few times (there are also societal factors - everything was changing and a lot of people were looking for someone to blame). Loads of novels we don’t think of as mysteries, where Curious Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the big example. It’s a twist ending that Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde, and I’d love to see a modern work that does something that wild, pretending it’s a normal detective story until it goes “yeah no this was supernatural the whole time” (also: I love you Tana French).

If you're terribly curious which elements of Mickey Mouse are and are not entering the US public domain in approximately 24 hours, the following list may prove useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_(film_series)#List_of_films

It not only provides the year of publication of each individual classic Mickey Mouse short film (remember to add 96, not 95 – the 95th year after publication is the final year in which the film in question is still protected!), but also helpfully notes in which films specific elements of Mickey's design and supporting cast were introduced; e.g., first time wearing his signature gloves, first time speaking, first time Pluto is specifically depicted as Mickey's dog, etc.

excellent information as it seems few people KNOW what is and isn't going into the domain. Remember, the domain is the final stretch where an idea reaches, he's the people's mouse just like other characters, ideas, books, knowledge, patents and much more that help the world. This should be celebrated by all who care about creativity, dismantling capitalistic ideals like companies being able to own ideas and concepts forever, activism and more. The public domain is a delight and we need to do everything we can to insure companies arent allowed to keep ideas and strangle everyone who comes anywhere remotely close to "their" ideas.

Mickey Mouse's entry into the public domain comes with significant caveats. While the Mickey Mouse who appears in Steamboat Willie (and other media published in 1928 or earlier) is free to use, there's established precedent that specific elements of a character which appear exclusively in later works which still fall under copyright may be protected, if sufficiently distinctive.

(This is the basis of, e.g., the infamous "Sherlock Holmes can't respect women" lawsuit: the Doyle estate, which at the time owned only a tiny handful of the latest-written stories, the others having already fallen into the public domain, argued that specific personality traits which Holmes exhibits only in those later stories are sufficiently distinctive as to be the valid subject of an infringement claim.)

With respect to various elements of Mickey's visual design, such as his red shorts and signature gloves, the matter is clear: just don't use those for another few years. However, there's another thing Mickey's public domain iterations don't exhibit: speech.

The present consensus among copyright scholars seems to be that "a character speaking" is not sufficiently distinctive as to qualify for protection, but the vocal characterisation with which Mickey Mouse is famously associated may so qualify. So, if you want to be scrupulously safe, you can have him talk, but not in that exact specific voice.

Which raises a fun question: what voice would you give him? Wrong answers only.

@snickerway replied:

Whether or not Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" is presently in the US public domain is a big hairy mess that depends on whether or not certain registrations and renewals were filed in a timely fashion, and by whom, all of which is heavily disputed by multiple competing claimants, and has been for decades; the idea that nobody's ever tried to litigate or enforce it is... remarkable.

January 1st, 2024, however, is a hard cutoff beyond which all works published in 1928 and earlier that weren't already in the US public domain become so, so all that will very suddenly go away.

Kind of excited about the old Disney stuff becoming public domain, mostly to see the official parodies and legal fallout thereof (Disney being Disney), but honestly, I can't imagine Cthulhu becoming public domain is going to change anything. There's good stuff with Elder Gods already, but most of the available material is just aping the basic concepts (the limits of human perception, going mAd WiTh ThE ViSiOnS, etc.) while carefully trying to skirt around the underlying issues in the source material, i.e. ol' Howard being a massive racist.

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

There's a lot of new media I'm interested in that came out this week, and I'm not gonna get through it all. And that's ok.

Like, I'm not gonna say that the X-Men and their various imitators are anything like a perfect allegory, but "it's a bad allegory because super powers really are dangerous" has never held water for me. Like, are we really just gonna uncritically accept the implicit assumption lurking in that argument that bigotry is only wrong to the extent that its targets lack the ability to threaten the status quo? Hand-wringing over whether certain minorities are inherently dangerous is – and, critically, always has been – a smoke-screen for the real conversation about who has the right to possess the capacity for violence, and you can't engage with that conversation if your opening move is to concede that the only legitimate victim is a powerless one.

To underline what I mean about "the right to possess the capacity for violence", let's peel back the allegory and bring it back to the real-world issues that are allegedly being allegorised.

Every time the cops roll up and shoot some poor guy thirty-seven times in the back because the cell phone in his pocket looked kind of like it might be a gun, the public conversation always centres around questions like "are the police telling the truth about thinking it was a gun?" and "were the police reasonable to assume it was a gun?"

These are not the right questions to be asking.

The right question to be asking is "so what if it was a gun?"

Would the public execution of a guy who was literally just walking down the street have been justified then?

It's not accidental that stories of this type are most popular in America, where the people who can be counted on to argue that cops are behaving correctly when they kill on sight every time they see a member of a visible minority who looks like they might be packing are the exact same people who argue that carrying concealed automatic weapons without a permit is the God-given right of every red-blooded American man, woman and child.

This is not hypocrisy. They know exactly what they're doing. It's not about who is and is not dangerous: it's about who has the right to be dangerous.

LET’S GOOOOOOOOO

"Batman is just a guy, how can he" look, Batman is literally a ninja, and in the DC Comics-verse a ninja is basically a kind of low-rent wizard. He just doesn't acknowledge that what he's doing is probably magic because it doesn't suit his idiom.

I don't even want DVD special features back – I want VHS space-fillers back. I grew up in the era when distributors would just stick random shit at the end of a VHS tape to use up any space left over once the actual film was recorded, and sure, a lot of the time it was previews for other movies, but sometimes it was The Weird Stuff.

#also . tbh i think it'd be hilarious if some lost media was uncovered this way #like imagine a lost dr who episode being found on a vhs after the credits of like. jimmy neutron (via @exoflash)

It's honestly not outside the realm of possibility. The 1997 Warner Bros. VHS release of Cats Don't Dance famously used the original pilot episode of Dexter's Laboratory – an episode which, at the time, was not available in any other home video format – as space-filler at the end of the tape, and the 1984 Family Home Entertainment VHS of The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings has a bunch of random Merrie Melodies shorts from the 1930s and 1940s padding it out, just off the top of my head. It's completely plausible that some bit of otherwise-lost media is just hanging out on the tail end of the VHS release of a random movie from 1992.

(Ironically, The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings would itself later be used as space-filler at the end of an unrelated VHS release, though for the life of me I can't recall which one.)

Am now regretting never speeding through the credits on any of my movies

The fun thing about how American fandom culture seems to have settled the perennial What Is Anime debate by deciding in favour of "anything that was physically animated in Japan is anime, regardless of any other dimensions of its production" is how it interacts with all those American/Japanese and Canadian/Japanese co-productions from the 1970s and 1980s. If applied with an even hand, this rule would oblige us to conclude that the 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit is anime, which is both ridiculous and objectively correct.

I know the anime trope where there’s a big, cylindrical chunk of meat on a femur-like bone only initially represented dinosaur meat, and its appearance in other contexts is basically just a meme, but I choose to believe that any comic or show in which it appears does in fact take place in a setting where living dinosaurs are used as a food animal, and it just never comes up because, well, you don’t discuss the history and sociopolitical implications of cows every time you eat a hamburger, do you?

FYI, Steamboat Willie enters the public domain next year, not this year. Reports that it entered the public domain this year are due to folks making an off-by-one error; the duration of copyright for works first published prior to 1978 is the year of first publication plus 95 years, and 1928 + 95 is indeed 2023, but that means we’re still in the 95th year. You need to add 96, not 95, to get the first year in which a work actually falls into the public domain.

(To anticipate the inevitable well-actuallies, I’m aware of the argument that Steamboat Willie never qualified for copyright protection in the first place owing to defects in the copyright notice of its initial publication, but tell you what: go tell Disney’s lawyers that. I’ll wait!)

@solar-plant-princess replied:

Yeah, there’s been a lot of doomsaying to this effect, but it’s fundamentally misunderstanding the situation we’re dealing with. There’s two basic facts that militate against this scenario:

1. As far as Disney is concerned, if they can’t secure a copyright extension act in the United States, it’s not worth trying elsewhere; and

2. Given the US Congress’ present state of bureaucratic paralysis, the likelihood of them being able to ram through anything as substantive as copyright reform in less than a year is effectively nil – particularly given the fact that many Republicans have decided to oppose all Disney lobbying without exception, in retaliation for Disney declining to endorse Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

No, what Disney’s almost certainly going to do is argue that Mickey Mouse is a de facto corporate logo, and hence, that any prejudicial use of him damages their trademarks. This won’t afford them quite the level of control that they have now, but it will probably allow them to quash any non-family-friendly use of the character.

Mickey Mouse has, specifically, been a trademark since before the 1976 Copyright Term Extension Act, and so far all the lawyers I’ve seen who have weighed in publicly have said that trademark protection for character will be upheld by the courts (and would have been anyway — in other words, Disney’s interest in copyright extension is not for their major characters but for minor properties). So:

1. When copyright protection of Disney stuff ends, you will be able to show it for free

2. You will also be able to draw your own versions of things that pass out of copyright

3. But you won’t be able to charge money for them, or use them to advertise or to try to harm Disney, or they can still sue you

4. Also, you will have to be careful to stick to the very specific things which come out of copyright. Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie will no longer be copyrighted. Mickey Mouse in general will still be a trademark

Incidentally: at the time of the two major copyright extensions associated with Disney (the Sonny Bono act and the one in 1976) the explanation for why Disney wanted them in the first place wasn’t “we want to charge for things forever” (although of course that was probably true — but they recognized that it couldn’t happen, and in any case they already had those trademarks in place). It was “we want to be the ones who make money off of the distribution of our existing properties on the new media format that is coming in”: Videotapes and DVDs and the Internet, variously. There’s no new media format to dominate right now, so Disney may not even care all that much this time, although they’re probably not happy about it. They’ve got the better part of a century to overcharge people for Pixar movies, the MCU, and all the other miscellaneous fan favorites they’ve acquired or made lately. (They’re going to be very annoyed when the princess films start losing protection in larger numbers, though. The first one is Snow White, IIRC, and they have 9 years to go.)

I hope everybody who’s in favour of a robust public domain is prepared to conquer their impulse to get pissed off at remakes that egregiously miss the point of their source material, because as media from the 1930s and 1940s begins to enter the public domain in the coming years we’re going to be seeing a whole lot of that, and I for one can’t fucking wait.

Me, championing Public domain, seeing the Winnie the Pooh Horror movie posters: God is testing me

Oh I’m still going to get pissed off but I don’t think that my irritation is a sound basis for the formation of draconian copyright law

I’ll get over it