Painted Ika-musume's dress.
Piracy is a big issue to the otaku community. Right now, I'm shopping for anime DVDs online, and the low prices confirmed what I heard in a recent podcast. Kyle Hebert had a video about Bandai shutting down DVD production and it did indeed turn into DVD stock liquidation at the low prices he predicted. So it is a little scary. Especially since the sale at RightStuf! right now is for Funimation DVDs. It's eerie to scroll through all the Funimation titles and remember how they used to belong to ADV and other such publishers who also had to cut their losses in the anime DVD production business. ;_; So when I wanted to check out Mushi-shi, to decide if I should buy the DVDs or not, I thought I was being all good, by going through the Funimation website, instead of the pirated stuff on YouTube. The 2 commercials per commercial break on Hulu is nothing, compared to the 5-6 minute commercial breaks on TV lately---and for shows that aren't even really what I want! So I was starting to feel proud to go all legal like this, but then I heard that the government may be cracking down on us enjoying our fandom anyway, no matter what efforts we try to be legitimate. ;_;
Today I went to theoatmeal.com to follow a link my cousin posted about petting kitties. ^_^ But theoatmeal.com was suspending all their usual content for a day, to protest SOPA and PIPA. I didn't know what the heck these were, so I followed the handy dandy link. "To save the kitties." ^_~
I had no idea that people were thinking of bringing down the censorship sledgehammer onto sites that even just had _links_ to "off limits" stuff. ;~; Not that I think it's ok to censor people who just like making Photoshops of Oprah on jet skis. But seriously, censoring LINKS screams "overkill", "crazy", or "doesn't really know what the real situation or issues are". I had previously heard rumblings of some kind of possible legislation that would ridiculously censor the internet, by anachronistic legislators who didn't really understand technology, let alone, how the internet (communities) works. I thought it was some far off, proposed legislation, that would quickly be revealed to be obviously unrealistic, impractical, and just too unbelievable to be made law. All the reporters and their interviewees seem to know it. So I settled into a false relaxation that no one would seriously give this real thought. But if SOPA/PIPA is what it is, then maybe even I would have to do something about it. >.<!
I'm not going to block out my pages in protest. I just started my resolution to post a geeky blog every day. I can't fall off the horse now. And I don't like breaking good habits either. So I'm not going to use a protest as an excuse to slack off from my daily DeviantArt upload either. I need to keep the pressure on to motivate myself to craft and be productive. It's important to living, to feel self-accomplished.
But what I am going to do is write this blog. Anyone reading, anyone out there at all:
I started my lonely existence as a fan. I wrote and taught myself to draw and paint. I motivated myself to learn new software, like Photoshop and HTML, all so I could create things to enrich my fandom. Now, whether the internet came into existence or not, whether all of us online get censored out of existence or not, I'll probably keep doing all my fandom. But alone. I have Social Anxiety Disorder and bordline autism. But like all humans, connecting to others makes life better. And the internet lets even someone like me do that. If the US got censored to the severity expected from totalitarian governments (which is what SOPA and PIPA would do), then fans like me couldn't do fan-art, fan-fiction, or desktop Photoshops. ;_; Well, we would, but we'd be isolated again. (Do you know that Comic Con went up from $75 to $125!?! And even at $75, they still have an attendee cap!) I don't want to be separated from the people who encouraged me to write my own original fiction, draw my own original art, and gave me the hope to become something. Even if that something was just a wanna-be pro author/artist, who could tell the next generation of fan-artists/fan-ficcers that they could really grow their craft and become real pros. I don't want fandom silenced, or restrained by the fear of silence.
Go here for info on PIPA and SOPA:
http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html
Wikipedia has a handy field that will link you to your local representative's contact info, if you just enter your zip code:
http://www.wikipedia.org/
Stop SOPA and PIPA from turning good intentions into an evil massacre. Please.
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