May
10th
2016
Post deleted; comments still there for now · 4:07am May 10th, 2016
I regret making this post. I'll give you all some time to finish your fights in the comments, but I'll eventually delete it.
- Member Since 11th Apr, 2012
- offline last seen Saturday
Bad Horse
Beneath the microscope, you contain galaxies.
Bad Horse
Joined 11th Apr, 2012 ·
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So... Y'all reported this, right?
3934343 The stories were deleted a few minutes after I posted this.
Hmm, first I'm hearing of this. I looked at this user's page, and they show no stories published at all. I guess they deleted it, or the mods zapped it.
And agreed 100%, plagiarism is bad indeed.
*edit* Ah, you beat me to it by a few seconds, BH. :)
Like 3934343 said, situations like these should be reported, rather than writing blogs, naming people. I agree with the spirit of the blog and the message about plagiarizing, but the first act should have been to contact one of the mods.
3934360 They were there at the time.
You do realize this falls in the same category as the people who claimed the same thing about Bush Jr., right?
And Obama.
In fact, it is almost exactly the same thing that people said.
It didn't happen.
If it does happen, and he "wins", I'll personally assassinate Donald Trump and lead a democide against his supporters, and stick their heads on very sharp sticks.
Happy now?
3934367 Unlike Bush and Obama, Trump seems comfortable with mob violence. I don't "believe" he'll do those things, but I don't believe he won't, either.
3934364 Honestly? I think my first act should've been to PM her and explain to her that what she'd done was wrong, and give her a chance to take them down herself before getting banned, in case she was just a dumb kid who didn't know better. 'Coz the mods didn't do that.
Incidentally, WRT: The Story, the story summary didn't scream to me "I should read this story". To be honest, the summary read like standard ad copy. And I find most standard ad copy to be incredibly dull.
It doesn't matter how well-written your story is if no one bothers to read it in the first place.
Only a small number of people review stories; only a small fraction of all fanfics ever get reviews.
So it isn't really surprising to me that no one read it.
Also, some people might have read it a while ago and just not recognized the text being a word for word copy. Also, frankly, it is entirely plausible that some people noticed and just didn't report it - I know that I've found at least one story with NSFW coverart which had thousands of views before I found it and reported it.
Hurrah for politics, plagiarism, and ponies- The three inevitable facts of life.
3934377
Perhaps, but what two blogs achieved was to place it smack in the center of attention for everyone. Plagiarism is a bannable offense.
You mean say, for example in the rules?
There is a thing where you can call out mods for not taking a lighter touch on something, but not after people involved chose to make it a spectacle or an example, not only including text straight from the story, but also mentioning the author by name.
After this blog, we received no less than 5 reports alone after the first 10 mins. It's fine to say: "Don't go picking up your pitchforks and go after X person", but if you give them all the data, you might as well point them in the general direction of the user and say: "Charge!"
So, should have either of you contacted the author before we knew? Maybe. It would have certainly resulted in a different outcome, but we can't pick and choose to enforce the rules on one user and then not do the same when another user ignores the rules in the exact same way.
Plagiarism is bad.
To the other point: doesn't that boil down to marketing failure? Fault the site or its users or the 'author' if you like, but any number of best sellers could've languished in the bargain bin if the right sort of attention hadn't been garnered. Some of that is having the right story at the right time, but good old fashioned marketing plays a big role, too. If the above stories had been marketed around fimfic (added to relevant groups, submitted to reviewers who take requests, etc), if the 'author' had updated regularly, if the 'author' tried to get involved subsections of the community, if the 'author' had posted more stories… Well, in this case the answer is probably that the origin of their 'stories' would've been found out much sooner.
I'm going to presume that you and Georg weren't the first people to notice, you were either the first people to care enough to say something or the first people to label what was happening as bad. That's another problem entirely.
3934389
I see your point. Yeah, I should have PMed her first.
I'm going to go dream dreams of regret now.
3934367
You're probably on a dozen lists now for saying that. Computers still aren't that good at understanding context.
You do realize this falls in the same category as the people who claimed the same thing about Bush Jr., right? [b]He's talking about Bush.[/b] And Obama. [b]He's talking about recent presidents.[/b] In fact, it is almost exactly the same thing that people said. [b]Does not compute.[/b] It didn't happen. [b]Does not compute.[/b] If it does happen, [b]Oh god, oh god, it's an if statement! Maybe if I ignore it it'll go away.[/b] and he "wins", [b]It's not going away! And it's just getting worse![/b] I'll personally assassinate Donald Trump and lead a democide against his supporters, and stick their heads on very sharp sticks. [b]Finally some sense. He's talking about assassinating controversial contemporary presidents and presidential candidates.[/b] Happy now? :rainbowwild:I'm probably on a dozen lists now for saying this.
3934400
I'm pretty sure that so many people talk about killing the president every day that any automated scraper trying to grab those statements would not only be worthless, but probably worse than useless.
Besides, I'm probably on the list for looking up how to make nuclear weapons on Wikipedia. Which is probably even more worthless.
Honestly, I'm not sure why people talk about this stuff as if it was a secret. The hard part is the materials; making a gun-type atomic bomb is almost trivial if you have enough enriched uranium.
Good luck getting enough enriched uranium, though.
It is interesting to note that every country that has done a test of a nuclear bomb has succeeded on their first attempt... other than North Korea.
Back in the 1960s, the US military, interested in how hard it would be to build an atomic weapon, found two college graduates with no knowledge of nuclear weapons (in fact, they deliberately selected them for ignorance of how they worked and were designed and suchlike) and paid them to try and figure out how to build an atomic weapon. It took them about 30 months to successfully design an implosion-type plutonium bomb.
3934406
Every time I refresh, your post gets longer. I feel like there are some conservation laws being violated here.
3934377
...you do realize that it's Bernie and Hillary supporters doing most of the mobbing and rioting, right?
Not a Donald fan, myself, but what everybody keeps saying and what I am seeing are two fairly different things...
And let's not forget Obama's not-so-tacit backing of every race riot in the last 4 years, his little "bring a gun" bit of rhetoric in '08, and the Occupy movement's constant reports of violence and rape that were never fully investigated.
I don't care if you Dump on Trump...but at least be fair and admit that the other side of the aisle does have its own rather large violent streak that was and is active.
Seriously.
3934398
You still could pm her, depending on what the ban permits. If she has email notifications she'll see it there. *shrugs*
3934425
The difference is that Hillary and Obama have condemned violence, while Trump has suggested that his followers would riot if he was not given the nomination.
That's a very big difference.
There are always going to be some whacknuts who do bad shit. Crazy people are not restricted to one side of the aisle.
The difference is condoning them, even defending them or encouraging violence (he has encouraged violence against protesters, which has surely set off some of the problems) and saying "No, don't do that."
The "bring a gun" thing was a rhetorical device. “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” was, in the context stated, the idea that attacking him would be met with more effective attacks. He then made a joke about the Philadelphia Eagles, which was a bit of black humor.
As far as "not-so-tacit backing of every race riot":
I don't think Obama has condemned the riots as well as he should have, but the idea that he sanctioned violence is false. That's not to say that there aren't people on the lunatic left or in the BLM movement who don't sanction violence, but I would not say that Obama has tacitly backed them.
No featured box, no buzz, no reviews, because, like I said before -- in comments to your posts, even -- Fimfiction has far too little horizontal propagation support, and vertical propagation mechanisms are basically die rolls. And I've been able to observe how this works pretty closely with myself, recently...
First die rolls -- whether you get into popular stories or not. To get and stay in popular stories at the current state of Fimfiction, your story needs to accumulate about 150-200 views in the first two hours after publication or so, I think the heat half-life is something like five hours, tops. You can increase the number of dice by increasing the number of followers and promoting, but with a oneshot short, you need to generate a spike of popularity in the first few hours, or your story is never getting into the feature box. A story being in the 'new' list can generate 50-100 views before it rolls off the front page, and at this point you're only competing with the story description and tags. A single downvote is enough to kick the story out of the ranking at this point.
Once it's in the popular stories, you get a lot more die rolls, because popular stories linger for at least half a day until the heat decays completely, and they get shuffled before they appear on the front page. Popular stories are essentially an equal opportunity pool. Because determining the popular stories list is a batch job, a few downvotes won't take effect immediately, there's a certain time lag, and if your story is a crowd pleaser, it can survive being a little controversial. If it can generate enough views in these conditions, at the top of the ranking is the feature box.
The feature box itself has ten slots. Seven out of them are for new stories only, so once you miss your first chance of getting into the feature box, you're only getting in there if you keep posting updates regularly and amass the requisite ~200-300 permanent readers to trigger getting into popular stories every time. You can drastically increase your chances by posting updates daily, which some authors actually did -- this required very short 500-600 word chapters to be viable, but it worked very well, by constantly hanging around the updated story list and constantly causing new story views by permanent readers to occur.
There is no mechanical support for buzz or word of mouth. So to get buzz and word of mouth, you need to already have contacts of some kind with high-visibility sources - i.e. already popular authors - or get into the high visibility places where they might notice you in the first place, it's no wonder none of that happened either.
If you don't play this game -- if you're too young or crazy to understand it, like the aforementioned "author," or if you honestly don't care, like, say, Goof Theorist -- the vertical propagation will never reach you, no matter how good your stories are.
Incidentally, if you really want to lose faith in humanity, check out the latest from New York City:
They said that bars are not allowed to refuse to serve alcohol to a woman who is pregnant. Which is, frankly, insane. There are all sorts of potential legal liabilities which come up from that, not to mention general human rights issues and the fact that you can potentially be held legally responsible if you failed to prevent someone from harming themselves or others when you were in a position to do so. It is a clear misunderstanding of the rule of law - discrimination is entirely legal when it serves some necessary state interest, like, for instance, preventing children from being born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Though hey, at least they're required to still post the warning labels that drinking during pregnancy is bad for a fetus!
3934360
Good: it shows this site cares.
3934484
Downvotes only really impact your showing if you get a very high fraction of downvotes - I'm not sure how high it has to be, but I've only triggered it once, with a story that had basically 50:50 upvotes:downvotes. Even stuff with only a 5:1 upvote:downvote ratio can make popular stories, because I've done it before.
In any case, there are lots of routes for horizontal propagation if you know how to do it. Groups are by far the biggest. Reddit is useful as well. Having lots of followers is useful. Getting a review from someone with a bunch of followers can be helpful - I've put old stories in the popular stories box just by reviewing them sometimes. Appearing in "also liked" is also helpful to some extent.
It is true that you basically have one shot to make the featured story box, but it isn't as much of a crapshoot as you make it out to be. There are ways of boosting your odds of getting featured. People have called a number of my stories for being featured before I even posted them. Bad Horse once called a story of mine for being featured based on nothing but the title and story summary.
Things aren't ultimately all that unpredictable. The problem is that if you don't do it, you aren't going to get noticed at all.
Some stories are highly unmarketable, though. If your story doesn't fit into a group which a lot of people care about, you lose a major means of propagation. Shipping groups and groups about specific subject matter (that are of any size, anyway) are helpful.
Bad Horse writes a lot of stories that don't really have good groups for them, so he's kind of shafted as far as propagation goes group-wise.
As a side note, incomplete stories seem to be a death knell these days; it used to be that they were a good way to get on the front page, but nowadays I think that a lot of people just won't read incomplete stories at all, even if they are otherwise appealing.
Writing consistently seems to drum up more interest, too. If I have a drought, my stories after the drought tend not to do as well. If I release a bunch of stories relatively close together, they seem to have better chances of being featured.
But did it have that 5:1 ratio before it entered popular stories or after? Because like I said, it's a batch job.
Notice that what it does is essentially drop ~200-300 of your own viewers on it, allowing it to get picked up by the vertical propagation mechanism. The same applies to groups and Reddit. Lots of followers just get a story a head start on the initial seed number. The bulk of story views and all exposure still relies on being picked up by the self-reinforcing vertical propagation mechanism.
I love how this went from a discussion of what to do about plagiarism to discussion of politics and getting the attention of the FBI to a discussion of story popularity
3934485
Hey, look, this is exactly why they needed to make it against their policy!
Everyone thinks they know this stuff, and fetal alcohol syndrome is totally a thing... early in pregnancy. Like, when you probably can't tell a woman is pregnant. By the third trimester, when most women are showing, most doctors and advice to pregnant women agree that occasional light drinking is perfectly fine. Most not-pregnant people don't bother with the distinction.
So, maybe it's something that should be between the woman, her doctor, and her baby?
But a story doesn't necessarily stay high quality when you just replace the words for body parts (assuming that wasn't an exaggeration).
Two other big issues here:
-Being incomplete for a long time without updates is turning away most (potential) readers.
-If a story has a bad description and is very long I won't read it unless someone recommends it.
3934425
Supporters on all sides are crazy, but Trump is the only candidate who's encouraged his supporters to be violent. "So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of 'em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise." That's not just having crazy protestors.
3934485
You seem to be calling both sides of the argument obviously correct. I think you meant you approve of allowing bars to refuse to serve alcohol to pregnant women, not that it's completely insane, right?
3934723
It isn't just fetal alcohol syndrome; a number of medical complications can occur as a result of drinking during pregnancy, even later on. The reality is that there are no controlled scientific studies on determining a safe amount of drinking to do at any time during pregnancy. Like lead exposure, there's no known "safe" amount. That said, low levels of alcohol exposure, like low levels of lead exposure, probably won't hurt you. But no one knows for sure just how much drinking is safe, or how it works, or any number of things. Actually getting drunk is a no-no. But will 1-2 glasses of alcohol a week cause you to have HORRIBLE DEFORMED BABIES FOREVER?
Probably not.
The official medical associations recommend against any drinking during pregnancy because there's no hard medical evidence from controlled studies that drinking during pregnancy is okay (there are some foreign observational studies which suggest that low levels of drinking are okay). There's lots of things we tell pregnant women not to do because there are no controlled scientific studies on their effects on pregnant women due to the fact that no one wants to create the next thalidomide babies or cause miscarriages as a result of a medical study as to whether or not something is safe for pregnant women to do.
Because of the nature of legal liability, this ruling is problematic. Bartenders have been held legally liable for drunk drivers from their bars. In fact, it is outright against the law in many states to serve alcohol to drunk people. This ruling creates the situation where a bartender is prevented from not serving alcohol to a pregnant woman, and then when the woman has a problem, for her to turn around and sue the bartender for serving her alcohol. And it would be very easy for them to point to medical agencies (and the Surgeon General's warning which they're required by law to have posted in the bar) which say that women shouldn't drink at all as proof that the bartender was acting negligently and/or recklessly.
3934884 Well, technically, you'd be perfectly within your legal right to take action against someone making ready to assault you or someone else. Aaaand with the screwed-up justice system in America today (where a thief can sue their victim because said victim had the temerity to pepperspray them), there could be an argument for Donald's willingness to pay.
Call me Nappa, 'cuz I'm Just Saiyan.
As of this writing, Titanium Dragon is one quarter of the comments of this page by incident, half by wordcount -- you can visually see this by zooming out enough -- and of this, only every-other-comment is remotely on-topic.
3935065
I personally expected Trump to win from the beginning. After two elections of Democrats it is statistically probable that Rebuplicans win the next election. When people are pressed with economic difficulties, they tend to favor extremes, far right and far left. Trump gets his supporters from lower class who lost their jobs because of the globalization process and people who feel they have been left out by classical politicians who are supported by lobbyist.
He offers an alternative and since he is not a part of the system, he dares what others don't, uses their fears openly. He is not afraid to do what he wishes. He is going to win the election. At this moment the far right wing parties around the world are in rise, so does the people with totalitarian tendencies Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, why not Trump in US.
When dictators came into power they bring a mass with them, an organization, a party structure, a clan. With this mass they reach to the every power structure of the country. Trump lacks that organization, it is unlikely that he can cause massive damage. But he will destroy US's political image.
3935101
Actually, there was no better than a 50-50 chance that the Republicans would win initially; the White House is not a metronome. The betting markets presently have it as Hillary having about a 3/4 chance of winning and Trump having a 1/4 chance of winning. The polling puts Trump well behind - presently, only 72% of Republicans say they'll vote for him, which is unusually low (normal is 90%), but it is early still, so predictions based on such are questionable.
Still, if his numbers haven't significantly improved by the convention, he's going to lose, and possibly lose by a margin not seen since the 1980s.
3935027
And you know what would be a really good defense against that? That you weren't allowed to deny them service.
Honestly, I think bartenders should be able to cut off anyone they want. But I also think people in general need to mind their own business more when it comes to pregnant women and parents. As you noted, there's pleanty that even doctors don't know for sure, and the people best qualified to navigate it are the people with all the relevant information about that specific situation, not the concerned citizens.
(Bad Horse can also cut off anyone he want. I've said my piece whenever you want to delete all this.)
3935047 I will agree that an anti-Trump protestor "started it" by throwing a tomato at Trump, and that AFAIK literally no one on the left, as in zero people on the left in the United States of America, except me, criticized him, and many praised him, for throwing that tomato. It's a classic "guerilla politics" tactic--do some low-violence-level heckling that is hard to prevent other than by a higher-violence response.
Probably I can't count myself as being on the left anymore, anyway.
I'm curious to see whether my comment on bossip.com will be approved or not. I've recently noticed that a majority of the leftist sites I've tried to comment on either don't allow comments, or moderate them before posting. I have seen some comment deletion on right-wing sites, but no moderation before posting.
3935118
Given that
a) the betting markets would have given Trump much less than a 1/4 chance of winning 6 months ago, and
b) the betting markets are still betting from behind roughly the same ideological blinders,
I'd say that might be evidence in favor of Trump winning.
3935101 The paranoia is real.
3935250 Also, let's not forget that, until just recently, Trump has had to deal with two others fighting for the same thing he was (of course, when I say that, we all know only Cruz even had a ghost of a chance. Kasich was a joke).
Now that he doesn't have to worry about anyone on his flanks, so to speak, he's free to focus all his energy on the real race.
3935240
There is ultimately a tension between allowing people to do what they want and preventing people from exposing themselves and others to risk, which is why speed limits exist.
I guess I don't really have a problem with having a law that says "You are not allowed to deny pregnant women drinks," so long as the law comes with the caveat that duty of care is waived in that case. So I guess I ultimately agree with you. That said, there is a good reason why duty of care exists in the first place; if I run a bar, and am regularly putting out customers who are driving home drunk, that bar represents a moral hazard to other drivers on the road, because I'm profiting off of getting people drunk, while other people (the people who get crashed into) are bearing the risks which result from my profits. If the bar knows it can be held culpable for drunk people driving, it is less inclined to let its customers drink and drive. The duty of care, then, encourages the bar to behave more responsibly.
3935250
There's a difference between "winning the Republican nomination" and "winning the general election". Trump was consistently ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination; people just didn't think that people were really stupid enough to vote for him. They were wrong; the polls were accurate.
Conversely, Trump has been consistently behind in the polls for the general election. That's a very different situation - in fact, the exact opposite situation he was in before.
What could make someone delete a blog po-
Oh. Politics. Got it. *Runs away*
3935348 No; the blog post was about plagiarism. Unfortunately my posting it helped force a moderator intervention that otherwise might have been avoided.
3935089
Every time you post, you save me 20-120 minutes of googling. I think most of us appreciate it.
3935321
If the duty of care applies to the bartender, shouldn't it apply equally well to the pregnant woman? Also, children aren't people in this country, so no one should have a duty to protect them.
In any case, the duty to protect supposedly only applies to mental health professionals, according to this legal textbook. The duty to warn, however, applies to anyone. That one, per my expert legal opinion, seems to be compatible with the pregnant drinking laws.
3935240
I seriously doubt that anyone, least of some laywoman and her laymate (or
whoever else with whom she's withwhoever she's with), have all the relevant information. Maybe we can compromise and say that the bartender should at least warn pregnant woman and get informed consent before she starts drinking? Maybe?(Wait, if she comes in drunk, does that mean she can't consent to drinking?)
I agree with you on the grander issue though. Consumption is down, and it's doing terrible things to the economy. We should be encouraging pregnant women to drink.
3935395
I guess since this blog is being deleted, I might as well speak my peace here.
(1) I like the hat. It looks nice. I've had an urge to say that every time I saw it.
(2) I'm not sure if you're the kind to experiment with your sleep, but I've accidentally stumbled onto something interesting. Every night, I give myself between 90 minutes and 4.5 hours to sleep normally (depending on how tired I feel). After that, I have an alarm go off every 30 minutes until I get up. I spend no more time in bed than I did before, and I don't feel any more tired than I used to. I also remember 5+ dreams a night, and I have a very easy time getting up before my normal waking hours. I've been doing this every day since February with no noticeable negative consequences.
(3) Next time you get a spicy chicken or lamb dish at an Indian restaurant, ask for some yogurt and sweet chutney on the side. Add two to four drops of sweet chutney per ounce yogurt and mix it together. Dip the chicken/lamb in that as you eat.
(4) Are you working on any more scraping/processing things?
3936918 That's interesting, but I think it contradicts some sleep research? I don't think I'll do that, because sometimes I wouldn't be able to fall back asleep.
When you said scraping/processing, at first I thought you were talking about deer hides. No, my scraper was so bloated and buggy that I started overhauling it, then something urgent came up, and now I have a few thousand lines of chimeric code that doesn't run and that I don't remember what I'm supposed to do to.
3936629
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. To wit, whether or not children are 'people' (which I find debatable), you haven't indicated that 'people' are the only thing you're legally required to protect.
Horsedammit, Bad Horse. I leave for one day to have a surgical procedure and this is what happens.
Now I have to get all my gossip through inference, which is difficult when both sides of my head are bleeding.
3938579
Wait: I lucked out! It was somehow on my phone in its original version.
Odds aren't looking good that I can stay conscious long enough to read it before the phone decides to reset for the next update, however. I'll have to saddle for feeling terrible about the state of pony in some other way.
Now, let's go see what everypony thought of the last episode that I really liked...
3937610
That's why I thought it was interesting. I initially did it to sleep deprive myself, but that turned out to be a complete failure.
I think dream research only suggests that people act as if sleep deprived when they're deprived of REM. I have plenty of dreams throughout the night, so I don't believe I'm depriving myself of REM.
BTSync story content key: BRU3J4GYXB7OBTEHN7DJDQAIIRYPGXJDK
BTSync story metadata key: BKNTSVSXIKJVCNJH4HYZRHEDJVCSLPS5R
Updated as of last night. I can update those folders as frequently as you need since my scraper only downloads new and updated stories. A daily update takes about 10 minutes to complete, and it only uses one connection to the server.
You'll need about 10GB if you want to download those. 500MB for just the metadata. It's been a while since I've used btsync. Let me know if there are any issues, since it could just be a firewall issue on my side.
I'm overhauling my scraper(s) as well to dump the data into a more general-purpose format and to use a third party scraping service. I'll be scraping a lot more than just fimfiction, of course, and I'll be trying to clean the data and link it together in whatever way I can. If anyone else can make use of the data, I'll find some way to open it up.