Hey, I’m an animator on @HazbinHotel! The pilot’s looking super cool and everyone’s been incredible to work with!! It’s so much fun to handle these crazy characters!!! Oh boy!!!!
You know the “fortnite dances” as people are referring to are like, all popular dances from hip hop artists that were taken without credit, acknowledgement, or royalties right?
Black artists specifically
Almost every single one of them were thought of by black people and artists, then fortnite trademarked then without credit. This is literally cultural appropriation.
I dunno if they trademarked them but they ABSOLUTELY monetized them with no royalties paid out. Like I still don’t support bothering little kids over Fortnite dances or whatever the fuck but check this out:
Even the dance that is often classified as THE Fortnite dance was straight up stolen from black actor and performer, Donald Faison. He improvised the dance for an episode of Scrubs in 2006.
Y’all still don’t know how copyrights or trademarks work.
^^^^ like y’all can’t trademark a dance. If that’s the case every single one of y’all hitting any dance on tv finna get sued.
Ever hit the moonwalk? You going to jail buddy
No you can’t copyright a dance (not technically), but let’s not act like there was no way to acknowledge and compensate the dancers who originated these moves. They could pay to use their likeness, but that would mean majority Black characters lol. They could pay them to use them as models for the motion work they have to do for the game even if not use their likeness. They could hire them to choreograph new dances. They could give them a fckng credit on the game so the original dancer could use it to promote themselves. They could acknowledge them by paying them to promote the game or be in commercials.
There are sooooo many ways 🙂
So many people in the notes are conflating a person vs a corporation. A corporation doesn’t dance. It’s inanimate. They created a product that uses the intellectual/artistic work of others. They have no real life dancers dancing. The characters are computer animated. So while it’s fine for people to dance based off what’s popular etc., that doesn’t equate to a corporation manufacturing a product. This isn’t a performer being inspired by their favorite dancer and imitating them. It’s a business. You can’t look at a corporation take that Donald Faison clip wholesale! (Like no interpretation whatsover) without having credited him or compensated Scrubs (cause frankly that’s who owns that clip) and think that’s completely fine. I don’t understand how they could have done it without paying whoever owns Scrubs to use it…tbh I’m convinced they must have and we just don’t know about it
The broader point of OP’s critique, which remains valid, is that corporations and American popular culture thrives off of the intellectual and artistic work or African Americans and Black people while giving no credit to us!
ATTENTION ZINE CREATORS, ARTISTS, AND ANYONE WHOSE BUSINESS UTILIZES PRE-ORDERS AND PAYPAL
As of June 15th, 2018, PayPal has changed their user policy with little to no fanfare at all in ways that could literally destroy your business. I’m going to say this as plainly as possible:
DO NOT USE PAYPAL AT ALL IF POSSIBLE.
I know this is a lot to ask, especially since PayPal is the most globally accepted digital tender, but unless you want to lose access to your funds for six months and PayPal possibly forever, you need to read this.
PayPal Business accounts are now being flagged, locked, and completely shut down if:
1. If you haven’t shipping anything within 21 days of your first transaction
2. You’ve received more than 200 orders
and/or
3. You’ve made an excess of $20,000 (USD)
If this happens to you, you will not be able to access your money for up to six months. PayPal is NOT willing to work with you, all they will say is there’s nothing they can do, they’re cutting business ties, and offer you the MAILING address of their legal department. That’s right, you can’t even get a direct line to these people, they’re just going to tank your business by dicking around with your money for six months. Your only options are to:
1. Wait six months and frustrate customers, and by-proxy tarnish your reputation.
2. Refund everyone, possibly lose their business, and tarnish your reputation.
3. Pursue the matter legally, which will likely take longer than six months anyway, not to mention cost money out of pocket.
IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY USING A PAYPAL ACCOUNT FOR PRE-ORDERS, GET OUT NOW. Deposit your funds and part ways with PayPal as a tender, this is not a battle they’re willing to let you win.
Thankfully most of my stuff is filtered through other sites first but fucking here we go again.
It used to be you could get around this by marking your stuff as digital goods that dont need shipment notification but I dunno if that’ll work anymore. All I know is paypal has been making it increasingly difficult for a lot of artists and creators lately and it’s a logistical nightmare for a lot of us.
I need to finish my storefront.
Why are they doing this? It seems to make their service clumsy and unusable. Is Paypal drunk and dumped so badly they turned mean??
It’s likely another way to try and stop sex workers or adult content creators from using their services.
It started out with “you can’t use a stage name unless you have a business account”. Which means you get a chunk of your money taken as a processing fee, but get to use a “business” name instead of your real name AND LOCATION, cause that’s a thing they were forcing you to post too unless you upgraded.
People used to tell me all the time when they put a tip in my tip jar that it was telling them my real name and the city I lived in, so eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded to avoid that. (Which is why ko-fi was/is so great, because it’s essentially a paypal wrapper that lets you use the service while not revealing your identity and location.)
But they’ve been making it increasingly harder and harder to run an online business for anyone who doesn’t ship physical items that can be tracked. Like part of it is likely to ensure that customers are getting what they paid for, but when it comes so quickly on the heels of numerous policy updates regarding sex work and adult content, it is undoubtedly linked to making it more difficult for those people to use their services.
Patreon might be doing my head in with their site constantly breaking, and they fuck up on communication issues a lot, but this is largely why they changed who they do their payment processing with, to avoid paypals “no naughty business” policies. They still use paypal and Stripe, but they moved their handler to other countries with less draconian laws, and broadened to other payment processors because of this kind of thing.
When I get my own site up, I will not be using paypal, which sucks cause everyone uses paypal. But I also cannot abide their business practices and ethics. Or the apparent lack thereof.
I contacted Paypal TODAY so if you guys could spread this around so people that use paypal would know that’d be great!
So when you do digital goods you go to “TRACKING INFORMATION” and then select “ORDER PROCESSED” and you’ll be fine and won’t get into trouble!
reblogging for the last part to save a life cuz I was getting the “shipping info” stuff added to my digital commissions and i just ignored it cuz it wasn’t relatvent but i went through and updated it to “order processed”
I’ve been seeing some people forgetting/misunderstanding the definitions of some basic terms that are used to talk about gender identity so here’s a post to remind people of what words mean to try to clear up some confusion.
1. Being cis means that you identify 100% completely with the gender you were assigned at birth.
2. Being trans means you don’t 100% identify as the gender you were assigned at birth.
3. Being non-binary means your gender identity does not fit the boy/girl binary of our society. Non-binary people can be partially boy, partially girl, some mixture of the two, neither of the two, etc. There’s tons of ways to be nb and none of those ways are wrong. Sometimes it involves name changes, hormones, pronoun changes, clothing and hair changes, and surgery. Sometimes it only involves some of those things. Sometimes it involves none of those things. All nb people are valid no matter what.
4. Some nb people don’t identify as trans and some do. The ones that don’t identify as trans may do so because they don’t feel the need to medically or socially transition and to use the trans label may imply that these are things they want in their perspective. This is totally fine. Nb people don’t have to label themselves as trans if they don’t want to and that should be respected. Whether or not a nb person decides to use the trans label can also change over time. I discovered I was nb 5 years ago but didn’t start identifying as trans until about 2 years ago when my dysphoria started getting really bad. Different things factor into why and when a nb person decides to call themselves trans or not.
5. If a nb person does not identify as trans, this does not make them cis. Nb people don’t have to force themselves to “pick a side” in this false trans/cis dichotomy. Being nb is its own thing in and of itself and sometimes it aligns with being trans for some people and sometimes it doesn’t, but it doesn’t ever align with being cis. Besides, nb people literally cannot be cis because they don’t 100% identify as their agab and to act like nb people can be cis implies that they have privilege over trans and other nb people, which is not true. Truscum, which are notorious for going on crusades to invalidate nb indentities, would have a field day over the notion that nb people can be cis. It will give them and other types of REGs more fodder for their desire to falsely claim we oppress them so they can have an excuse to exclude us from the lgbtq and queer communities, which puts us in danger.
At the end of the day, anyone can identify however they want but we also need to make sure we are using these words correctly so we don’t confuse people, spread misinformation, imply that we are not oppressed or marginalized, or accidentally give tools to those that wish to kick us out of the community and harm us. I can’t stop a nb person from calling themselves cis and misusing words but if they do, they need to understand the implications it could have for other nb people and make sure that they let others know that they should not ever go around calling other nb people that don’t use the trans label cis as that would be harmful and extremely invalidating to a ton of people.
justin mcelroy opened a podcast recording studio open to the public for rent in huntington, to let people who may not have the equipment share their voices and tell stories that deserve to be told
this man. is a good man. he is such a good good man
That’s so cool!! And super affordable too! And he’s also teaching podcast classes?? Man if anyone would be qualified to teach podcasting skills it’s him, I’m glad he’s doing this!
Can anyone in America screenshot the article? All I get is
