The Most Villainous Villain That Ever Villained Am I
February 2nd, 2019
I have apparently dispensed the butthurt today.
It came to my attention that someone was blatantly stealing my nerd work and plugging it into their own project. Now, I'm not hyper-possessive about the things I write for the nerd community, to which I belong. On various occasions in the past, I've been asked by others if they can use some or all of a given text I've written about something nerdy, and I'm more happy to oblige.
Usually all I ask in return is that the person involved link to my site, where they found the text originally, or simply credit me for some or all of what they're lifting. That's it. However, one of the things that pushes my buttons is when someone uses something or other that I've written, and doesn't bother to credit me for doing so. That's when I start calling douchebags out.
Upon investigating the project that I'd been pointed to, I found that this guy had stolen a lot of my material. He was taking screenshots of my site, one for each bit that he liked, and pouring them directly into pdf files for download on his own. He'd even lifted one of my documents that was specifically mocking other people for stealing its previous incarnation without crediting me!
So I called him out for doing so, and he came unglued. This winner claims he had attempted to e mail me when I told him doing so to ask me for permission to swipe my texts would've taken like thirty seconds of his life, but neither my inbox or my spam filter saw anything to that effect. He says he's only archiving dying sites, but mine has been updated as recently as, well, an hour ago.
He claims he was crediting those he had stolen material from, but neither my real name nor my internet name appeared anywhere in either the the file name or on the documents he was offering for download. He'd credited a few folks, sure, but not me - which didn't improve my disposition any. And calling the thief a thief apparently makes me the bad guy, for interrupting his work of, uh, thievery.
I can live with that. And with his righteous Facebook indignation. Cry more, thief.
What's weird is that this is only the latest incident of such blatant burglary of my writing. I've been ripped off by wikipedia, comicsvine, and some of those horrible wikia sites. And that's just my nerd text! I once had to reconfigure biographical text describing myself on my main nerd site because some dude running a GI Joe fan site lifted mine lock, stock, and barrel. Talk about creepy.
Get your own life, nerd. This one is mine!