sweasel.com

Dead Pool, chickens, weird old stuff you come across…. you can hang a whole blog off of those. Then there’s the Weasel Manor webcam thingy….

I’m almost off the internet. Only go to four places … five places … ok maybe another coupla places. But I lost my ‘phone, the one wordpress sends my secret validation code to in the two step verification log on process. I didn’t really care ‘cuz I’d stripped the blog of almost everything. Crashed, burned, up in flames, Wild Fire! Over a lost love. Wild Fire, let it burn. The world is going to end in 2020 when Trump gets re-elected.

This internet thing is outa control and we’ll be lucky to live through apocalypse — Admiral Painter.

Can I get the blog in the dead pool?

I would see if you can find a (cheap) programmer who could write a routine that would insert a right hand with middle finger rudely extended in the upper left hand corner of each jpg. And maybe even a large grinning Weasel Head in the center of each jpg. That would be transformative, particularly if it obscures some element of the original jpg.

Not directly on point but here’s a little reminder that sometimes…once in a great while… somebody fights city hall and wins.

https://www.inc.com/magazine/19811201/2124.html

Advocate that the world is run by the Lizard people.
Declare yourself a Lizard person
???????
Profit!

Zombie Reagan stays, right?

Right?

Mrs tomfrompv clued me into ZombieReagan all those years ago. He has to stay!

Hm. You usually say when you have pinched someone else’s image, so scrolling through to find the potentially troublesome images wouldn’t be /that/ difficult, if you recruited, say, 5-10 volunteers (of whom I would be one)and assigned each a year or two to check. We could compile a list and you could work through it–backwards, probably, as the longer something has been up there without you getting flak about it, the less likely flak is.

@Can’t Hark – right, editors! Not at all a bad idea.
I’d miss this place if you shut out the lights.

4 places I look EVERY day – and this is one of them.

I also like the idea of defacing all the images 🙂

It’s sweird, it’s swonderful, it’s Sweasel!

Stoaty,

We would miss your postings as well. I read here for a year, including all your back postings, before commenting for the first time in — well, you know, I don’t remember? 2010? I too check every day to see what you’re up to.

Perhaps, as Some Vegetable suggested, you could hire someone to write a routine — or maybe you can — to look for posts with text like “swiped” or “borrowed” or “stole” combined with one or more images. With those flagged, you could delete the possibly offending .jpgs. Just a thought.

Or just burn all the images to the ground and start afresh!

Send the delete bot forth!

I think Durned’s idea of deleting all images is prolly the easiest if you want to keep written content…but then you’d lose your own imagery and photos…and who knows what will become problematic in the future?

Blogging is kinda like hoarding, you really never go back to use/read ten year old material, but cling to it like that pair of tiny sized jeans you’ve squirrelled away.

Start a new instance of wordpress with a new layout, search & archive your stuff with keywords (TDP and chikkens for example) so they can be accessed as you post new chikken content and DPs.

Maybe a new blank blog will spark a revival of enthusiasm or give you the mother of all writer’s block…either way, you’ll if it’s time to exit stage right.

I’d miss you dreadfully, and the regulars too, not only for your outlook on life, artistic output and quirkiness but as a refuge from the SJW hurly-burly.

I’ve fired up a fresh instance, but I’ve forgotten how irritating an out-of-the-box WordPress themes are. I might treat you all to the pleasure of watching my flail and boomer my way through customizing a theme.

At any rate, I’ve thoroughly backed up the blog *and* I don’t intend to delete it, just change the directory name on the server. I have plenty of storage.

I also like the idea of just archiving/removing all of the old stuff. I’d miss your site if it went away, not just you but the occasional comments from Uncle B as well. Seems to be a fine bloke that I could easily hoist a pint or two with.

Chickens! We want Chickens! Chickens! We want Chickens! Chickens! We want Chickens! Chickens! We want Chickens! Chickens!

P.S. Apparently Akismet does NOT want chickens

There’s a handful of posts I like to revisit every now and then for the giggles. But I guess I could archive those (with your permission, of course, and never to be shared with anyone) to my hard drive.

I’m not going to say this very well, but what you need is a WordPress plug-in or several plug-ins, to filter your blog.

If you use the unique digital identifiers for all of your assorted cameras, cell phones, and computers, in theory you could filter the blog with those numbers, and find all the imagery you created or manipulated in some way. From there you visually cull anything not yours.

If you can’t find a WordPress plug-in that does what you want, maybe you can hire a coder to write one.

Rumin….errrr….

aren’t those big 4 legged mobile milk and steak factories classified as ruminants?

Pretend for a moment you has completely lost your system, and the backups and…and…and…uh…. there was an EMP and after you got the solar power units working, and managed to find a 1200 baud connection to the remains of the interweb, you’re having to bring wisdom and light to the poor benighted something or others in their gloomy cardboard box houses as they use their iphones to try and find who’s left on Facebuch and Zombie Reagan is all that stands between the EMP zombies and the fall of Merry old England!

Churchill would fight on!

I suggest taking as long a break as you like to mull over your options. The rest of us aren’t going anywhere unless you do. And if you haven’t already, you might see what Wikipedia has to say under “Copyright Law of the United Kingdom,” specifically section 13, “Fair dealing and other Exceptions.” There may fewer items to be concerned about than we think. If not, as “Can’t Hark” has, I volunteer to help, if combing through old entries would be useful to you.

I’d miss you terribly. And Uncle B. And kitties. And chickens. And artwork. And spring lambs . And all the things. I would help gladly if there was anything I could do.

Let’s see…the problem is, I have altered every single one of the photos, haven’t I? I’ve made them black and white, meaning the metadata is now mine and I can’t sort them by authorship. But I certainly don’t think doing that is transformative enough to protect me.

It’s not just the copyright issue though, to be honest. You may have noticed that the UK is struggling with concepts of free speech at the moment – especially political speech. I don’t have British citizenship (laziness more than anything, that). And some of my old content wouldn’t fly in Current Year Britain.

I’m absolutely not thinking of shuttering completely, though. Not at this point. In thirteen years, I’ve hardly ever missed a posting day. Can you imagine how ingrained a habit this is? And how bereft I’d feel without it? And how I’d miss you guys.

Oh, the chicken posting. That’s awkward. I’m trying to make a local reputation as a chicken painter, so I’ve been doing a LOT of chicken posting under my real name. Instagram, Twitter, personal website…the lot. I’m scared of crossing those streams.

I must sound awfully paranoid, but I’ve had some slight brushes with internet sociopathy and I do not want any more of THAT, thank you.

I wouldn’t give it a second thought. IMHO your use is fair use, in any event a copyright troll would have an impossible time showing that you profited from his or her work.

If you are really concerned, you could move your site to a host outside of the UK and anonymize your ‘whois’ lookup information.

I doubt any copyright troll would be willing to go to the trouble to find you just to get you to take down an image you posted some time in the past. These people are about trying to scare you into coughing up actual money. Forget it. They would never prevail in court, unless they showed that you intended to steal their work for your own personal profit.

Besides, you can’t leave, there’s a Supreme Court Justice that still needs to be guided towards the light for a final reward.

Problem is, PLW, it isn’t really copyright trolling. It isn’t fair use if you just lift a picture and use it, and it makes no difference in law if you make money off it or not (it would make a difference in the amount of damages, though).

I worked in the art department of a corporation with deep pockets for decades and they drummed into us what the risks are. For the longest time on the blog, I wouldn’t borrow images at all because of paranoia. At some point, I realized every blog I followed was stealing images like there was no tomorrow and I gave in.

I’ve recently gone to a day-long seminar on the local IP law, and if anything it’s gotten stricter.

Remember all those post-Napster lawsuits where some random pimply 13-year-old was getting a demand for $20,000 for downloading music? I have no idea how that shook out (though I don’t think it happens any more), but I have a gut instinct we might be coming up to something similar with images online.

There isn’t anything in Article 13 that would trigger this, I just have an instinct the ‘content creators’ are about to go on the warpath. The demand I got at work spooked me, and how.

Here is a link to an article about the ‘Fair Use’ argument in the AP v Fairey case. This was about the AP photo for which Fairey pixelized, colorized, and wrote “Hope” across the bottom. That was not transformative enough.

http://www.ethicsingraphicdesign.org/was-shepard-faireys-use-fair/

No one can select Sylvia Miles for “Celebrity Dead Pool” any longer because RIP, Sylvia!
~
Sylvia Miles (September 9, 1924 – June 12, 2019) was an American film, stage, and television actress.
~
Wayland Flowers and his puppet Madame first uttered the widely quoted line, “Sylvia Miles and Andy Warhol would attend the opening of an envelope”. – wiki

Careful – remember what happened LAST time you let us run lose like a bunch of…is it still okay to say wild savages or is there some group of internet viewing wild savages who will take offense?

I only imagine interesting stuff, others here have DONE interesting stuff. Get them to spill!

There I was in the Congo. I was down to my last bullet, the sun was setting, and I could hear the drums…..

Reproducing a copyrighted work for the purpose of comment falls within fair use in US. E.g., you could include still frames from a movie if you are reviewing the movie. No change to the image is needed. IDK about U.K. where the laws seem to be skewing against free speech. E.U. regulations are worse.

Goal of copyright trolls is to spook you.

You’re just easing us into SWEXIT aren’t you.

“Let’s see…the problem is, I have altered every single one of the photos, haven’t I? I’ve made them black and white, meaning the metadata is now mine and I can’t sort them by authorship. But I certainly don’t think doing that is transformative enough to protect me.”

It wasn’t enough to protect Ward Churchill (the notorious fake Indian activist-“scholar”. He stole another artist’s black-and-white sketch, reversed it left-to-right, and tinted it. Then he claimed that it was original work “after” the actual artist. Still got yanked for copyright infringement.

(He also sold it as “Native American artwork” – which helped provoke Congress to pass legislation limiting that designation to works by artists who are at least 25% Indian.)

However, you aren’t actually claiming the work as yours, nor profiting from it.

I wish you would at least continue the Dead Pool.

I’ve tried over 100 different picks – one of them has to come in for me some time.

How could this be happening?? When FCC in US killed “net neutrality” last year, that was supposed to be the end of the Internet.

iamfelix wrote, “I’d miss you terribly. And Uncle B. And kitties. And chickens. And artwork. And spring lambs . And all the things. I would help gladly if there was anything I could do.”

He said it best, I think. I will gladly help you when you decide what to do.

Right, plenty of volunteers then muh Lady.

As soon as the landing boats are ready we’ll cross the channel and be on your threshold before you can say Archbishop of Canterbury!

If it’s not too much to ask, little cucumber sandwiches and some scones would be nice refreshment after a stirring channel crossing.

Cry God for England, Weasel and Badger!

I always try to hot link pictures. I know it’s a bit rude, but they can’t then turn around and try to sue you. The worst they can do is ask you to remove the link, or make the effort to install one of this link-back blocker thingies.

Once upon a blog, some years back, I got hit with a scam lawyer thing over some alleged infringement of a picture of the biggest dog in the UK story from the press. All they had done was a picture search. They never looked at my page code. So I changed the post from a link to an img src, after the fact, and wrote them that it was hot linked. Never heard another word from them. Probably most of the infringement suits are scams.

And honestly, as much as I believe in copy write, if you put something online you’re pretty much giving it away to public domain. Get real. This isn’t 1957 anymore.

Yes, and the whole fair use thing. I’m confident you’re worrying over nothing, which just shows your basic honesty.

Thanks for the laugh, that the UK is struggling with the Free Speech thing. Yeah, struggling to dump it as fast as possible to capitulate to the EU, freaks, and izzies as fast as they can.

Ah, but I used to work in the art department of a corporation, remember. They dunned it into us how ugly it could get if you ‘borrow’ somebody else’s images and get caught. There are horror stories.

I got professional advice about the work blog, and it was “looks legit — pay it.”

I got professional advice about the work blog, and it was “looks legit — pay it.”

Ms. Weasel, you have a professional reputation to protect. Don’t just roll over and pay extortion. Get a second opinion. A simple deletion of the offending material should be sufficient.

Close this place? Perish the thought. As to content start over, use a random number generator and everyday it picks a number and you re-post an old one. It will give it that kind of WTF? look.

I happen to think a dead pool post with already dead people has a rip in time vibe to it.

I rarely have anything to say but I would miss the kittens, chickens, new spring lambs, the dead pool (come on Ruthie, we know you can do it),the village fairs with all the crazy and/or interesting items, stories and pictures of your home, the banjos, and all the other crazy things you find. Please don’t go.

Am I the last person in the world to learn that two — 2-1/2, if you count one sanitized for minors — “Deadpool” movies were made, featuring an outlandish Marvel Comic strip hero with that name? Reviews vary, depending on reviewers’ gender, and tolerance for gore and off-the-wall humor. Has anybody seen one?

I’ve not seen the movies, catnip, but the Deadpool comic character is neat and fun. I’ll get around to the movies when they come on TV. (Uncle B isn’t a fan of superhero movies and it’s hard enough to get him to the theater for something he’ll like).

Chicken Shaming. It’s a thing.

https://imgur.com/gallery/JiebuVL

erm… I would deeply miss the yikkenz and British oddities and, in particular, your view or the world.

Oh, Baby don’t goooooooo; woah, wooohh ohhhhhhh…

If you were hoping to win a Celebrity Dead Pool with Gloria Vanderbilt you will have to send an RSVP to another guest…
~
Gloria Laura Vanderbilt (born February 20, 1924, died June 17, 2019) was an American artist, author, actress, fashion designer, heiress, and socialite.