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Johnnephew

@Johnnephew@dice.camp

President of Atlas Games®, TTRPG professional since 1986, amateur woodworker, would-be recycler of plastics. Duluth, Minnesota.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

Johnnephew , to random
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Found a little time to use the lathe this evening, made a cup from an apple branch

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Johnnephew , to random
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Put this little bench together from some scraps/reclaimed douglasfir construction lumber. Thought i'd try a gel stain ( General Finishes, nutmeg) and I REALLY like how it went on. I need to try this on other softwoods.

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Johnnephew , to random
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Working on designs for Vis tokens for Ars Magica. This is AI-assisted, but requires a lot of work in Gimp

Johnnephew OP ,
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@clarkvalentine @jmstar Now you guys sent me down a rabbit hole learning about the sonnenrad!

Apparently the Nazi one is supposed to use the Sig rune, like the SS logo. A historical antecedent that might be claimed for the Hermetic Magic symbol would be the Zierscheibe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zierscheibe), which is also evocative of the Art symbol for Perdo in the game.

SJohnRoss , to random
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So I've got this side project, scanning and preserving one of my earliest books, one I bought the rights to ages ago and never did anything with.

And making a decent scanned PDF that isn't crappity isn't hard, it turns out? I've got crisp 600 dpi pages, with spot color preserved, searchable, no muddy compression artifacts. Around 200 kilobytes per page.

Which means the publishers of a lot of scanned PDFs I've purchased have some shit to answer for. 😅 [GLARES at those publishers]

Johnnephew ,
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@SJohnRoss no idea, sadly

SJohnRoss , to random
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    Johnnephew ,
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    @SJohnRoss If you have a hankering for pop-ups, check these guys out: https://www.titansterrain.com/

    (Conflict of Interest Disclaimer: They are a fulfillment & warehousing client)

    LeviKornelsen , to random
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    While I'm mucking about with ways to make my little chess dudes out of recycled plastic (I've been using a plaster-concrete concoction), I realised I could probably switch the process and make plaster molds, and slipcast the pieces.

    Which classes them up enough I'd likely feel good about selling them!

    Test mold #1 formed perfectly, though I forgot to add a well for extra slip....

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I am very curious to learn more about this process

    Johnnephew , to random
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    I would like Mastodon to have quote-posting. I like it because sometimes a toot makes me think of something on a tangent, and I would like to explore the tangent and acknowledge what sparked it without cluttering the original thread by going off-topic, which seems rude to the original poster.

    epidiah , to random
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    Johnnephew ,
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    @epidiah Exciting times for our friends on the East Coast!

    https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma74/executive

    Johnnephew ,
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    @epidiah Checking my handbook of signs of the apocalypse...next up is something about the sun disappearing in the middle of the day?

    Johnnephew , to random
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    Looking Forward: The U.S. Copyright Office’s AI Initiative in 2024 | Copyright
    https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2024/03/looking-forward-the-u-s-copyright-offices-ai-initiative-in-2024/

    LeviKornelsen , to random
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    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I think this is a good analogy.

    Like blogging in the hands of an insightful journalist or amateur journalist, I think gen AI can be a tool that expands possibilities in valuable ways. But it also means that it becomes more difficult to discern value.

    In the past, the economic chokepoints in production and distribution (editorial choice in traditional media, for example) meant that the individual consumer had pre-screened choices. (Alt POV: info controlled by gatekeepers.)

    ericmpaq , to random
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    Day 66 of : Quill remembers how to craft potions & tinctures. To help, she casts her gluph of power. She does a good job with the oak wart but had some trouble with hazel root & mud cap. Her final potency is 5 for oak wart, 2 for hazel root, & 2 for mud cap.

    Johnnephew ,
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    @SJohnRoss @ericmpaq Getafix = drug dealer? Is Panoramix hinting at psychedelia?

    robindlaws , to random
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    Johnnephew ,
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    @robindlaws is there going to be censorship of any haggis-critical material?

    Johnnephew , to random
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    It's launch day for our Enigma kickstarter, at 10 AM central US time! Three diverse puzzle-game books, and some really cute add-ons (Grogar plushy! Big plush steampunk d20!) made of recycled plastic! https://www.atlas-games.com/enigmaks

    LeviKornelsen , to random
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    If someone properly kicks my ass in an online argument, fully backed up by clear facts, I will often change my mind!

    Probably the next day!

    And often crediting myself instead of the person who changed my mind!

    But I'm getting better: I used to ALWAYS credit myself, and didn't even realize that's what I was doing.

    So clearly I'm becoming a better person.

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I feel seen

    Johnnephew , to random
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    Just as a "content warning," as I've been privately cautioned that "publicly messing around with an LLM trained off scraped data isn’t a good look for a publisher," I'm likely to continue talking about generative AI and experiments with it because part of the reason to have this, a personal Mastodon account, is to hash through things I'm thinking my way through in a place where I may get input from others. Don't feel bad about muting or unfollowing. This is a place of free association.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    I think there are a lot of issues to wrestle with. I know and respect people who have strong and well-reasoned and conflicting opinions. For the past couple of years I've of course been aware of the public debate, but have generally kept myself from locking down an opinion, because it seemed like I didn't need to. The older I get the less I actually want to have opinions about everything.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    (Random side thought: Maybe when you are young, you actively want to embrace strong opinions because it's part of how you find and integrate yourself with a social unit. As we get older, we increasingly have social dependencies and obligations that are outside our choice, and unnecessarily strong opinions are as often an obstacle to those social ties as they are an adhesive.)

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Another thing this I'm pondering this morning is parallels between this moment and what we experienced about 25 years ago with the explosion of file sharing and the growth of commercial PDF distribution of RPG books.

    I spent a lot of time on usenet arguing about how people were pirating/stealing our books and debating about whether we should be selling digital books (with or without DRM) because it facilitated file sharing with even cleaner and more compact files.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    We put a lot of staff hours into DMCA notices to websites where people scanned (and didn't even OCR!) entire RPG books and put them in public locations.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    As should be no suprise in hindsight, this was all about as effective as Canute commanding the tide

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    More than two decades later, I've long accepted that pretty much anything I do professionally, as a writer or publisher, is going to be shared freely somewhere on the internet. And for about that long I've had to approach our business with awareness of that as a stubborn feature of the landscape in which we operate.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Playing whack-a-mole with filesharing is one of the least constructive or economically useful things I can imagine for my time, or to spend money paying employees.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    But there are other things to observe. One is that, in spite of the fact that you can find it all (illegitimately) for free, we continue to sell PDFs. Heck, last weekend we offered a discount bundle of the entire Ars Magica 4th Edition line (all of it published before 2005), and netted more than $4000 in a few days. That exceeds the original budget of most of those individual books, including printing.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    I'll bet a lot of those buyers know that with a bit of effort they could get that material (illegally) for free. But there is value in getting it together, getting it from a trusted source (not infected with who knows what from a pirate website), and I think people genuinely want to pay for it. Weird, huh? Maybe traditional economic theory doesn't have it all nailed down.

    Over the years, I have increasingly come to see our game hobby as something people WANT to spend money on.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Spending money on your hobby is in itself a kind of pleasure. I love backing Kickstarters simply for the feeling of giving money to someone who is doing something that looks kinda awesome.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Here's another thing to observe. There are a lot of people who, for ethical or pragmatic reasons, steer clear of things that might be infringement of intellectual property.

    Suppose someone wants to write a novel in the world of Ars Magica, or a probably-legally-counts-as-a-derivative-work sourcebook. They give it away for free. Or, heck, they make it into a digital or physical product for sale.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    I am not going to spend my life tracking down such people to get Medieval RIAA on their ass. I'm certainly not going to spend a ton of money on lawyers.

    But you know, that's me. I'm a corporate shareholder. If my wife and I were to be hit by a falling airplane engine tomorrow, I can't speak for our heirs and their future adult opinions.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    If my successors get a bee in their bonnets about perceived infringement of copyright sometime during its legal duration (how long that is... well, uh, it may be unclear, and could be in some cases 70 years after the death of me or some contributor to a work, or maybe 95 years after publication, and how would you know unless you have access to the original contracts), the definitive question of "is this fair use or infringement?" will be a matter of specific facts and the future state of the law

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    This means, in practical terms, it only matters is there is a juicy target that makes litigation worthwhile.

    Which in turn makes it very likely that anyone who is an juicy litigation target, or wants to make something super awesome that if hugely successful would make them a juicy litigation target, needs to stay the hell away of anything that could be grounds for infringement litigation in the next hundred years or so.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Our current screwed up copyright regime may be presented in terms of creators' rights (life of the author +70 years etc.), but it's really focused on converting the most popular creations into corporate assets that can be traded, securitized, and financialized.

    All the years spent keeping Steamboat WIllie out of the public domain ensured that decades of the early history of film went up in flames before anyone bothered to save it.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Thinking through all of this is what has led me to our current intent to open-license all of Ars Magica.

    First of all, I believe that fans of the game want to spend money on their hobby, and I think we can find ways to make them feel good about giving us that money. Yay!

    But secondly, I want people to create awesome things. Honest self-reflection tells me I have actually been a barrier to that. Given IP law, it's not enough to wink and ignore things that someone in the future might sue over.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Open-licensing Ars Magica means that people WILL feed all of its text into large language models. So before actually doing the licensing, I need to work through the implications and consequences, and how I feel about them.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    I can't release something CC-BY-SA and add a condition "no using this with LLM."

    I could argue that the SA part means you can use it as a private source (e.g., load all the text on your Google Drive and tell Bard to refer to it), but have to share-alike the output or whatever you develop the output into.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    Legal and ethical questions about LLMs and training are being argued today.

    It's icky that big companies basically scrape all of human communication to train an LLM and then sell access to it. Kind of like how it's icky that Disney takes the public domain and walls it off as private property.

    On the other hand, this EFF article by Kit Walsh gives me a lot to think about, with specific reference to Stable Diffiusion. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    @kbg I am not a lawyer, but my gut agrees with you.

    I worry that if it settles somewhere else, it will be in a way that favors large corporate interests at the expense of the cultural commons and future creativity.

    Johnnephew OP ,
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    @LeviKornelsen Good point!

    LeviKornelsen , to random
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    I'm absolutely gonna be backing the new Ars Magica, because obviously, and then bounding off that open license to make at least one weird, light thing.

    CC-BY-SA isn't my #1 license - I think that because sharealike clauses require openness, they can prompt grudging reciprocity rather than the trust-for-trust of plain sharing, but that's like, just my opinion, man. It's still in the top five, so hell yeah to that.

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I'm still open to change, but it seems like the best fit at this point. I was seriously considering going "Assign to the Public Domain," but the last thing I want is for ArM to be Disneyfied.

    I believe offering a CC-BY-SA license to the world at large would not preclude us from offering other licenses to other parties with different terms (with or w/o SA). But it would give a safe harbor to lots of creative projects, without requiring permission or action (or admin) on our part.

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen This is definitely something for us to think about.

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I've been pondering this and looking more closely at the CC-BY license, and I am not sure that CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are incompatible. In CC-BY 4.0, 2(a)5.B says: " No downstream restrictions . You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, the Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed Material." But it does not say Adapted Material.

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen Precisely because it is NOT "share-alike," you CC-BY allows you to create Adapted Materials and apply restrictions, just as you can make derivatives of public domain/CCO Works and assert copyright with all rights reserved (see: Disney).

    Johnnephew ,
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    @LeviKornelsen I think you actually could. The part that is cut-and-pasted would not suddenly be turned into CC-BY-SA, but nor would its presence force the rest of the work to be CC-BY.

    Again, think of CC-BY as being "public domain but you must provide attribution." I can copyright my art book with a bunch of paintings of the Dutch Masters and a few paragraphs of commentary; that does not remove those works from the public domain, nor does it turn my commentary into public domain.

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