Yuriy Gusev A.k.a. Fool

Fanfiction Authors: HEADS UP

(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)

An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:

(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)

I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:

IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.

You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:

HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:

First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.

Select the radio buttons/dropdown options (shown below) to indicate that you are the legal Rights Owner, you have a copyright concern, and it is about a pirated product.

Enter the name of your story in the Name of Brand field.

In the Link to the Copyrighted Work box, enter a link to the story on AO3 or whatever site your work is posted on.

In the Additional Information box, explain that you are the author of the work and it is being sold without your permission. That's all you really need. If you want, you can include additional information that might be helpful in establishing the validity of your claim, but you don't have to go into great detail. You can simply write something like this:

I am the author of this work, which is being sold by [publisher] without my permission. I originally published this story in [date/year] on [name of site], and have provided a link to the original above. On request, I can provide documentation proving that I am the owner of the account that originally posted this story.

In the ASIN/ISBN-10 field, copy and paste the ID number from the pirated copy's URL. You'll find this ten-digit number in the Amazon URL after the word "product," as in the screenshot below. (If the URL extends beyond this number, you can ignore everything from the question mark on.) Once this number has been added, Amazon will pull the product information automatically and add it to the complaint form, so you can check the listing title and make sure it's correct.

Finally, add your contact information to the relevant fields, check the "I have read and accept the statements" box, and then click Submit. You should receive an email confirmation that Amazon has received the form.

Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!

NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!

Everything looks so delicious. Wow.

Been occupied with Beyond Skyrim: Elsweyr stuff recently… I’m drawing lots of food because it is My Passion… here are some stews!

The day before yesterday, I had a nostalgia for a beautiful, role-playing community of the Dark Brotherhood.

(I'll leave the link just below if one of my readers is Russian-speaking.)

Well, I decided to make art with the Blade of Woe. And again, throw a little lore on the subject of this weapon.

The Blade of Woe is an ebony dagger associated with the Dark Brotherhood. It looks little different from any other similar weapon, but in the right hands it is deadly. The dagger is all the more deadly, because it damages health and magic, and also demoralizes the one who is wounded by it.

Around 3E 433, the dagger, which had not yet been used to commit a single murder, was handed over by Lucien Lachance to a certain assassin when the Dark Brotherhood invited this newcomer to join their ranks. The killer joined the Brotherhood and quickly ascended the career ladder, remaining the owner of this weapon. After the rite of Purification and subsequent cleansing of the ranks of the Black Hand, which ended in Lucien's death, the killer took part in a meeting of the top of the Brotherhood, which resulted in the decision to summon the spirit of the Mother of Night in the crypt under the statue of the Happy Old Lady in Braville. During this meeting, the true traitor of the Brotherhood was identified and killed, and as a reward for her loyalty, the Night Mother revealed the true power of the Blade of Woe to the newly chosen Hearer.

Around 4E 201, the Blade of Woe, whose magical properties were significantly weakened, was wielded by Astrid, the head of the last known active refuge of the Dark Brotherhood stationed in Skyrim. Astrid died at the hands of the one who killed Grelod the Good. The killer took possession of the Blade, after which the location of the weapon is unknown.

Link:

Sometimes I just want to hug @aaami and scream how powerful and motivating art work he does.

I'm finally done art. To be honest, I think my skill has grown a little bit.

So.. Here it is! I hope you like it @aaami!

(also today is my birthday)

Flight Cycle Animations

Made em myself and oof I am exhausted. I had one animation class in college. Just the one. I can’t do much more than these short cycles (though I am working on some longer ones at the moment).

Disclaimer: these gifs are not a perfect reference for flight, I recommend looking up videos of birds and bats flying in slow motion for better references. These are just meant to be samples of how winged people would need to move their wings and whole bodies a lot more than we usually see in movies and tv. I figured it would work better as a visual in motion as well as a written description.

(Description: a bird winged person and bat winged person flying in a looped gif. They are shown from the side here, with their wing bones highlighted in red.)

It was hard to keep everything consistently sized, but anyway. Heads should stay pretty still, this is called “head tracking” and if a flying creature can’t do this they won’t be able to see straight while they fly. Hips should move a lot when flying, because tails are just as much a part of the motion as wings are. In the case of birds, their tails tend to move opposite to their wings, flaring outwards as well. In the case of bats, their wings are attached to their legs and tail if they have one, so their hips will follow the motion of the wings. (And with bat winged people it’s always a tail because the wing membrane would disrupt the bipedalism otherwise).

Bat wings usually have a deeper downstroke than bird wings, and their finger joints allow for more precise wing shaping in flight, curling upwards close to the body for the upstroke. Bird wings in casual flight will have shallower wing strokes than bat wings, sometimes not even coming all the way up depending on the flight speed. They also keep their wingtips closer to the body on the upstroke. Like how when you’re swimming it’s easier to pull your arm up elbow-first to avoid drag.

Definitely look up specific birds and bats in slow motion if you can, flying is a very complex and nuanced form of movement and I can’t describe every detail of it myself. Wing shape, flight speed, air currents, etc can all affect the way a creature flies.

(Description: same as above, but now the winged people are shown flying towards the viewer, and their wing bones are not highlighted.)

Honestly it’s a little easier to draw normal flight from the front lol it lets me show the movement of the wings better. (Foreshortening wings is freakin tricky and I’ve been working on that for years, it’s so much harder than foreshortening other limbs.) It’s a bit easier to see the bird tail motion here, the way it flares out when it dips down.

(Description: a looped gif of a bird winged person and a bat winged person hovering, shown from the side. There is also an example of how not to hover, depicted by a common trope of a winged person floating vertically in the air withheir wings held straight out to the side. Their body kind of bobs up and down while their wings move mainly from the shoulder, looking more like signal flags than actual flapping wings.)

Not all birds and bats can hover and it kind of requires extremely fast flapping, with a very particular motion to it which is hard to depict at any angle. But it’s okay to fudge that a little for the sake of your winged people. The motion is rather circular, wings go out to the side, push down, and then the wrist pushes forward. On the way back up, the wrist folds straight back and the whole wing will fold in super close to the body, then quickly rotate outwards to come back straight out behind the body and repeat. That’s how it works in the best videos of hovering birds I could find, which were kingfishers. I could not locate a video of a bat hovering that was quite as thorough but I gathered that it works in a very similar way.

Except hummingbirds, those are a whole category of their own. I might have to make a specific post on hummingbird wings someday because they are just that unique.

And as seen on the end there, my pet peeve. I see this in live action and cartoons. The weird vertical hover where the person just sorta floats there and moves their wings flatly up and down (or worse, they don’t move their wings at all). This is not a functional way to fly. The wings are not catching any air. They’re going to fall right out of the sky. And what is the point of giving a character wings as an actual body part if you’re just going to depict them magically floating? It’s not nearly as fun.

Hey, look who is back!

‼️ support ‼️ ur ‼️content ‼️ creators‼️and ‼️fic ‼️authors ‼️ by ‼️ reblogging ‼️ and ‼️ stop ‼️ treating ‼️ this ‼️ site ‼️ like ‼️ instagram ‼️

you know what!!!!!!!!!!!!! i don’t care anymore!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i enjoy things and i am going to enjoy things and i don’t care if other people don’t enjoy the things that i do!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i do not have to defend myself about every single thing i have ever liked!!!!!!!!!!!! i do not have to preface every opinion with “i know it’s garbage” for it to be valid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i like things!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and i like liking things!!!!!!!!!!!!! and i don’t care what other people think!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!