Shlomi Fish’s Homepage

01-May-2021: What's New? The Commercial Fanfiction Initiative - May 2021

The Commercial Fanfiction Initiative

The biggest news is the commercial fanfiction initiative, which aims to make the film industry flourish just like open music on youtube/etc. or FOSS in the software world. The scope is somewhat larger, covering accepting screenplays in easier-to-write formats, and being communicative about why a screenplay was rejected.

Some people online told me "commercial fanfiction will never happen" and two fellow writers of (gratis, Internet-hosted) fanfiction said it will be "unethical" to try to profit off other writers' hard work. However, I recall people expressing similar sentiments about open source software and early music file swapping / file sharing / "piracy" and Wikipedia… I often grow older and more foolish, and some people do support the cause.

I also wouldn't call the current situation with many beautiful, competent, and either famous or budding actors and actresses unemployable, a lack of screenplay submissions, franchise fatigue, and film makers and executives increasingly feeling depressed and trapped and general watchers dissatisfaction "ethical". The enemies of commercial fanfic are recent bylaws, and court precedents. Guidelines!

And I have a plan forward, which isn't set in stone, and may require improvisation, and may fail. Spoiler: any of these lawsuits:

1. $MEGA_CORP vs. Emma Watson Films.

2. $MEGA_CORP vs. Arnold Schwarzenegger Films.

3. $MEGA_CORP vs. Joss Whedon Films.

(And many more naturally.) Will cause $MEGA_CORP's stock's value to plummet. One does not simply say “no” to an Alpha Female.

Other stuff:

Image macros ("captioned images", "memes") page, and a subsection of short true stories, and new quotes and new factoids and a farfetched crossover hypothesis about the origins of consciousness and insanity.

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17-Nov-2019: Taylor Swift Factoids; Relicensing Works Offer; New Essays

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage.

1. Terminator: Liberation is a new work-in-progress fanfic/crossover screenplay:

   A self-referential parody of the Terminator franchise, with Emma Watson as herself and as the evil terminator Hanna, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as himself and as the good terminator, that takes place in Tel Aviv during Passover (when Olamot Con takes place).

2. There are new questions and answers in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) List:

   Why does the site looks old?

   Well, the site's old fashioned look may be part of its charm, and kinda lets it stands out from every Bootstrap Website ever. That put aside, feel free to submit pull-requests, patches, or CSS fragments if you think they will improve matters.

3. I am offering to relicense all the cultural works I created and placed on my site under CC-by if I get 10 million Euro.

4. There is a new essay titled Putting Cards on the Table (2019-2020) which aims to provide a snapshot of Rindolfism, my personal philosophy:

   The Israeli military was small and as there was a lot of work to do to properly secure the Israeli civilians it coined the terms Rosh gadol ("big minded") and Rosh qatan ("small minded") to encourage the soldiers to take initiative and try to perform their jobs as well as possible, regardless of the fact they were paid little.

   This extends to non-military work, government work, and voluntary work or hobbies and endeavours: if you care about something, do it as well as possible and give it enough time as needed. It will get easier and faster in time.

   For instance, a vendor on a candy store or an icecream parlour, should try to greet the customers, be friendly to them, offer recommendations to them if they ask, accept business cards with their personal web sites or social media presence and visit them, and generally treat every customer like royalty.

   If you do this, you'll likely get more returning customers, bigger tips, bigger bonuses and raises, and you may be able to land a better job based on a warm recommendation from your superiors and coworkers.

   The opposite is just following orders blindly, "I just work here" attitude, which is no different from the Nazis' Superior orders - "I was only following orders" which leads to laziness, stagnation, vandalism and sadism, just like the German Nazis in World War II, or the Knights Templar in Saladin's time.

5. There is a new collection of factoids about Taylor Swift as well as new Chuck Norris factoids and new Emma Watson factoids:

   • If Apple ever tried to sue Taylor Swift for trademark violations of Apple Swift, they will spend all their money on litigation, and still lose. This will make many lawyers richer, and the world a better place.

   • Chuck Norris’s roundhouse kicks are licensed under the public domain because no one besides him can duplicate them.

   • Emma Watson played Hermione in the Harry Potter films, but she doesn’t need a wand to kick your ass.

6. "Why I will continue to write my real person fan fiction (fanfic)" is an essay about why real person fiction appears to hurt Hollywood actors and why it cannot hurt singers or YouTubers.

7. "Why Openly Bipolar People Should Not Be Medicated" is a new essay.

8. The site's pages have been converted from Website Meta Language which is slow and errorprone to Template Toolkit which is faster and more predictable.

Hope you enjoy all that!

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18-Apr-2019: Conversion to (X)HTML5, Mobile-friendlier style, cleanups and new content

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage.

1. Most of the site's pages have been converted to XHTML5, which is the newest standard.

2. The site's style has been made more mobile-friendly (so-called responsive web design). There may be some issues left.

3. The site is now hosted with an https:// URL, for pleasing some browsers which prefer TLS / HTTPS.

4. An announcement of version 4 of Python was published on 1 April 2019.

5. There is a new list of sites I maintain.

6. I've mirrored the essay “Your Programming Language Must Suck”.

Hope you enjoy all that!

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27-Feb-2018: New Guides, fortune-mod maintenance, Project Euler, and Humour

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage.

1. On 1 April 2017, I published a feature: “The Atom Text Editor has been Able To Edit a 2,000,001 Bytes-Long File”.

2. I recently resumed maintenance of fortune-mod, an implementation of the Unix fortune program for Linux and other systems. Versions 2.0.0 and 2.2.1 were released with many improvements, and we welcome further contributions.

3. “How to share code online for getting help with it” is a new guide I am maintaining under the CC-by licence.

4. “Validate Your HTML” aims to educate the world about the importance of having valid web markup. It is also under CC-by.

5. I now have a page about my Project Euler solutions and progress. Project Euler is a site for mathematical problems which are allowed to be solved by programming.

6. There are new factoids, aphorisms and quotes in fortune format:

   Take your schedule estimates and multiply them by Pi. Take your expected profits and divide them by Pi.

   (My father’s mentor’s advice.)

Hope you enjoy all that!

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20-Aug-2016: D&D Cartoon and New Humour Resources

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage.

1. A new D&D-themed cartoon of comparing horse lances is now available in the art section.

2. There is a new humour bit called “The song ‘Wide Awake’ by Katy Perry is Evil.

3. A new collection of factoids, about Windows Update is now available:

   • Windows Update doesn’t.

   • Aesop originally wanted to write his fable as “The Hare and Windows Update” instead of “The Hare and the Tortoise” but could not figure out how the hare will ever lose to Windows Update, even despite him not taking the race seriously.

4. I have now concentrated the tech tips from my blogs on one page on the site for easy lookup and searching.

5. There is a new technical tutorial called C and C++ Elements to Avoid.

6. There is a new list of database implementations.

7. We now mirror the humorous items “What if people bought cars like they bought computers?” and “What if drivers were hired like programmers?”.

8. There are new Chuck Norris factoids:

   • The Klingon warriors’ motto is “It’s a good day to die.” Chuck Norris’s motto is “It’s a good day to kill.”

   • Chuck Norris saved Paradise in order to destroy it.

9. The version control repository was moved to new location on GitHub and we run the build and tests using a Travis-CI continuous integration service. Part of the motivation for the switch to GitHub was because the continuous integration services offered for Bitbucket did not seem as comprehensive or easy as Travis-CI.

Hope you enjoy all that!

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03-Sep-2015: “HTML 6” and a List of Graphics Applications

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage.

1. A new bit “Announcing ‘HTML 6’, the New Version of the Web” was published on 1 April 2015:

   1 April, 2015, Tel Aviv, Israel: Today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the immediate availability of the new version of the web — HTML 6 — pronounced “HTML Sicks [sic]” with the motto “HTML 6 is sick!”. “We concluded that the previous version of the World Wide Web’s standards suite, HTML5, has exceeded its flexibility and usability, and we need to start over”, said Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the W3C.

2. There’s a new list of “Alternative” commercial models for Web-based commerce that do not involve intrusive advertising.

3. There’s a new list of graphics software applications.

4. We now mirror funroll-loops.info (“Gentoo is Rice”), and the old feature “How to Make Square Corners with CSS”, which disappeared from the Web.

5. There are new factoids in the collections of factoids about people and thing:

   A rose by a name picked by Chuck Norris, will smell sweeter.

   The reason the Messiah has not come yet, is because Chuck Norris keeps finding faults in God’s plan for his coming.

6. There are new quotes in the collection of Aphorisms:

   Some people grow older and wiser. Not I. I grow older and more foolish.

Hope you enjoy all that, and if you’re Jewish, I hope you enjoy the upcoming Rosh Hashanah and the rest of the Jewish Autumn holidays.

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05-Oct-2014: Emma Watson’s Visit to Israel&Gaza ; “So, Who the Hell is Qoheleth?”

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage.

1. “Emma Watson’s Visit to Israel and Gaza” is a work-in-progress Real Person fiction screenplay which aims to bring Shalom to the turbulent Gaza Strip/Israel border:

   Waitress: I hope you’re having a good time, ah…

   EmWatson: Emma… Emma Watson!

   Waitress: Oh! I heard about you, naturally. Are you gonna threaten me with a wand? Heh!

   EmWatson: A wand… yes, the bane of my existence. I’m thinking of collecting money for a public campaign to convert the weapon most associated with me to something more menacing.

   Waitress: Don’t you have enough money for that?

   EmWatson: No, not enough! Heh. And money isn’t everything.

   Waitress: So you’re not playing in films for money?

   EmWatson: Playing in films for money? Of course not! What a preposterous idea.

   Waitress: Ah, nice.

   EmWatson: I’m playing in films for a shitload of money!

2. “So, who the Hell is Qoheleth?” - is a new illustrated screenplay that tells what I imagine to have happened to the author of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes / Qoheleth shortly after he has written it. The timing is appropriate because Ecclesiastes is being read during the upcoming Sukkot Jewish holiday.

   Josephus: Anyway, can you share some details about your trip? I never ventured a long way past Damascus.

   Athena: Sure! It was very interesting. Most interesting.

   Athena: We travelled with our own people and some Greek merchants, all the way to Athens, and there we hitchhiked a ride with some Assyrian merchants, hoping it will get us closer to Alexandria. There were some guards escorting us, and at one point they disarmed us and threatened us at sword’s point to have sex with them or else they'll kill us and take all our possessions.

   Josephus: Wow! Rape. So what did you do?

   Athena: Well, we consulted between ourselves and after a long while of being really scared, we calmed down a little, and decided that if we are forced to have sex, we might as well cooperate and try to enjoy it. So we told them that we’ll do it willingly and they agreed.

   Josephus: How clever of you! And then what happened.

   Athena: Well, the three of us and her lover each found their own part of the woods, and we had sex. Then, after one or two times, the three men all lost stamina, while we were not completely satisfied and cried for more!

   [ Josephus laughs. ]

   Alexis: Yes! Then we heard each other’s cries and we gathered at one place together still naked with our clothes as cover, and we bitched about the whole situation - in Greek - and the men stood there ashamed.

   Athena: Yes! Anyway, we continued as couples throughout the trip and the men got better in love making as time went by, and they also taught us a little Aramaic. Then we arrived at the junction - they wanted to go to Assyria, and we wanted to head more south, and then all the 6 of us were completely emotional and offered each other to escort them on the way, so we won’t part, but we eventually cared enough about the others to let them go on their own way.

   Josephus: Wow! That sounds like love.

   Athena: Love! Yes! That’s the word. Eros in action.

3. A new essay A #SummerNSA’s Reading has been added for summarising the concentrated “#SummerNSA” / Summerschool at the NSA effort during the summer of 2014.

4. There are new factoids in the Facts Collection:

   “Talk Like a Pirate Day” is the only day of the year when Chuck Norris only talks like a pirate, and does not actually act like one.

   On Yom Kippur (= the Jewish Day of Atonement), Chuck Norris forgives God for his sins.

   Chuck Norris once refactored a 10 million lines C++ program and was done by lunch time. It then took Summer Glau 5 minutes to write the equivalent Perl 10-liner.

5. There are some new captioned images and aphorisms:

   

   Every Mighty Klingon warrior has watched Sesame Street!

6. The screenplay Buffy: A Few Good Slayers has some new scenes:

   [ Faith is teaching Becky and the rest of the class how to throw knives. ]

   Faith: Becky, it’s nice that you hit the mark three times in succession, but you’re not always holding the knife correctly.

   Becky: OK, Ms. Harris. Can you show me how to do that again? [She prepares her phone.]

   Faith: OK, here goes.

   [ Cut to the bullseye - three knives hit it quickly. ]

   Faith: How´s that?

   Becky: That’s very nice, but as my mobile‘s video demonstrates, you didn’t hold the knife “correctly” (in quotes) once.

   Faith: Let me see. [She watches the video.] Oh crap.

   Faith: Becky, Becky… you have a lot of potential. You’re more than a pretty face.

   Becky: Heh, I knew that I have potential, but do you really think I have a pretty face?

   Faith: If my opinion as a straight, married, woman, matters, I think you do.

   Becky: Thanks, Ms. Harris.

   Faith: OK, class dismissed. Please try to practise at your free time, we’re going to have a test soon.

   [ The students rise up and leave. ]

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