Quotulatiousness

January 13, 2012

Do you write fan fiction? You might want to check for plagiarists re-using your work

Filed under: Books, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

Plagiarism is a problem, but how do you react when someone takes your (erotic) fan fiction work without permission and packages and re-sells it?

After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon’s U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula’s Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.

[. . .]

It turns out Cruz isn’t the only self-published plagiarist. Amazon is rife with fake authors selling erotica ripped word-for-word from stories posted on Literotica, a popular and free erotic fiction site that according to Quantcast attracts more than 4.5 million users a month, as well as from other free online story troves. As recently as early January, Robin Scott had 31 books in the Kindle store, and a down-and-dirty textual analysis revealed that each one was plagiarized. Rachel M. Haven, a purveyor of incest, group sex, and cheating bride stories, was selling 11 pilfered tales from a variety of story sites. Eve Welliver had eight titles in the Kindle store copied from Literotica and elsewhere, and she had even thought to plagiarize some five-star reviews. Luke Ethan’s author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual, and it doesn’t appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1. 



June 23, 2011

Yahtzee reviews Duke Nukem Forever

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

April 15, 2011

Arousing the voters, Menorcan style

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

It’s a perennial problem: how do you manage to get the voters interested in your candidacy? How can you get them excited? Sole Sánchez Mohamed has an answer for you:

A Menorcan political candidate has caused a bit of a rumpus ahead of Spain’s forthcoming municipal elections with a seriously in-your-face advert in the local press.

Sole Sánchez Mohamed, head of the Partit Democràtic de Ciutadella (PDC), posed with an evidently willing pair of male hands to make her point, or rather, pair of points. The caption declares: “Two great arguments.”

To further her election cause, the wannabe mayoress of Ciutadella appeared in monthly magazine Més Iris Menorca dressed only in her smalls while adopting “sadomasochistic poses”, as you can see here (NSFW).

And you folks complain about “attack ads” in Canadian elections.

March 26, 2011

Cheap flights (with subtitles)

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

H/T to Roger Henry for the link.

February 1, 2011

The tattoos that say “I’ll never work retail again”

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:30

I’m always amazed how many people search the site for tattoo images. Just because I’m a nice guy (and not in any way attempting to draw more traffic to the site), I’ll post a few more (via Blazing Cat Fur). For most workplaces, these breast tattoos are not work safe.

(more…)

January 26, 2011

Be careful with your old, tired URLs

Filed under: Britain, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

The very first domain name I registered ended up getting hijacked: the ISP I was using got taken over by someone else, and they arbitrarily changed all the contact info for my domain to point to them instead. The domain expired (no notice to me), the grace period for renewal expired (again, no word to me), and suddenly the historical society’s domain name is now a porn site (slightly longer original story here).

That’s why I have some sympathy for this British MP who linked to a site promoting a local concern, which then became a German porn site:

Red-faced Tory MP Francis Maude last night denied all responsibility for the content of a German SmutSite — and then quietly removed a link to it from his own personal front page.

The embarrassment seems to have arisen after Francis Maude, the member for Horsham, and Henry Smith, MP for neighbouring Crawley, got together to sponsor a campaign for an acute hospital to be built in the Pease Pottage area of Sussex. The campaign registered and made use of a domain — c4pph.org (NSFW) — which certainly appears at one time to have been a perfectly respectable site campaigning on this issue.

However, as an official spokeswoman for Francis Maude told us last night: “The campaign … no longer owns or operates the c4pph.org web address and hasn’t done so since last year. We understand the domain name is now under new ownership with no connection to the campaign.”

January 24, 2011

Ten things you didn’t know about orgasm

Filed under: Health, History, Humour, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:44

Probably NSFW, although it’s all science.

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

June 25, 2010

Apple’s latest iPhone gets approval of key “Suicide Girls” market

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Lester Haines reports that the Apple iPhone 4 has received top marks from the discerning folks at Suicide Girls:

In an absolutely shameless piece of bandwagon-jumping self promotion, the internet’s leading repository of female tattoos and body piercing has taken the latest manifestation of the Jesus Phone out for a spin (link NSFW).

Screen grab from iPhone 4 showing young lady with exposed breastSuicide Girls has put the iPhone’s 4’s imaging capabilities to the test as is the local custom — by photographing women with their tops off.

The snap seen here apparently demonstrates an “unexpected feature”, in that “when you point it at Rambo her boob pops out”. We’re pretty sure someone has indeed written an app for that, but are surprised it got past the Apple Titfinder General.

Image at El Reg is probably NSFW for workplaces in North America . . . images at Suicide Girls are even more so. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

January 13, 2010

From scaling to NSFW images in a few short steps

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 15:10

I mentioned to Jon, my former virtual landlord, that I’d been to the dentist this morning for a scaling. Somehow this went straight to the hidden blogging streak he’s been concealing for the last few years:

Every three months? Wow — that’s aggressive. You’re showing that plaque who’s boss, I guess.

[We] picked up a set of powered toothbrushes — I think they might be the Arm and Hammer brand — and we’ve been using them for several months now. I think the powered brush has made a noticeable difference in icky build-up and in the time it takes the dental assistant to pry said ick from my stumps.

Previously, the inside surface of the lower stumps would become noticeably grainy as the dental appointment approached, and that’s the area in which the most scaling work is usually done. You can really hear it when the ultrasonic pointy-ouch machine digs in to the ick — the pitch of the tool changes from that of stepped-on marmot to roto-tilled kitten.

The brush seems to be able to reduce all that — I don’t notice an accumulation of crud on the bottom teef, and the scaling at the last appointment went very quickly. Which was a bit of a disappointment, really, as it reduced my face time with the dental assistant’s lovely bosom. Oh, yes — there is a trade-off for everything. A normal scaling may mean having to hold your mouth open uncomfortably wide whilst a machine making a sound like a flayed kitten dipped in hot oil digs around your gums, spewing forth a geyser of spit and blood and pus and plaque and tissue and soul which spatters all over your shirt and pants and shoes and the wall opposite whilst your fingernails splinter as you shred the arms of the chair with a grip that would turn coal to cubic zirconia, but all is forgotten as the young dental assistant nestles your head in her firm yet alluringly soft and ever-so-subtly yielding breasts. You know what? I can feel the plaque hardening on my teeth even now, just thinking about my next cleaning.

I think I blew it last time, though, when she paused in the ultrasonic inquisition to ask if I was OK. “Oh god, yes”, I replied. “More! More!”

But there was to be no more. We were done.

August 21, 2009

Am I a sexist for saying I favour this?

Filed under: Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

By way of The Register. At risk of being labelled as a sexist, I think GoTopless (probably NSFW in most workplaces) is a worthy effort:

Welcome to GoTopless.org! – We are a US organization, claiming that women have the same constitutional right to be bare chested in public places as men.

[. . .]

Why a National GoTopless Protest day? Gotopless.org claims constitutional equality between men and women on being topless in public. Currently, women who dare to be topless in public in the US are repeatedly being arrested, fined, humiliated, criminalized. On SUNDAY AUGUST 23RD, 2009, topless women will rally in great numbers across the USA to protest this gross inequality in the law and will demand that they be granted the fundamental right to be topless where men already enjoy that right according to the 14th amendment of the Constitution (please see our exact legal argument on the right to be topfree for women under “14th amendment” in news section)

It’s legal here in Ontario, although I don’t think I’ve seen anyone taking advantage of the newly established right since the day after it became legal . . .

However, my support for this particular effort in no way means I’m in favour of the Raelian agenda . . . which is, um, spacey in the extreme.

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