Threw my head back and vomited

[Ben Sisko]

So I'm trying to read the Gorkon\Klagh books again, but something is grating at me like cheese on a rusty grater. Every time Klagh finds something amusing he "throws his head back and laughs." It's gotten to the point that I've had to do a search and replace on my kindle files and fix it.

Is there something else that an author does that really irritates you and takes you out of the story?

 

[R. Star]

And here I thought there was a new novel set at Quark's.

David Mack, as much as I like his works, really needs a thesaurus at times. You can't go a single chapter without the word "smirk" getting used in the Destiny novels for example.

 

[Pavonis]

I think throwing your head back, and then vomiting is a good way to choke. I'd avoid doing it that way, if I were you.

I don't really read enough Star Trek novels to say that I've found an irritant like that. In the Star Wars EU, though, I got fed up with Timothy Zahn having all his characters agree by saying "Point".

 

[Ben Sisko]

And here I thought there was a new novel set at Quark's.

David Mack, as much as I like his works, really needs a thesaurus at times. You can't go a single chapter without the word "smirk" getting used in the Destiny novels for example.

Speaking of Mack, the man really needs to hit Shift F7 on "indubitably".

 

[Julio Angel Ortiz]

Vomiting: you're doing it wrong.

 

[Greg Cox]

It's gotten to the point that I've had to do a search and replace on my kindle files and fix it.

Wait a sec. People are rewriting books to their own specifications now?

Am I the only one who gets a bit of a chill at that idea?

 

[Thrawn]

Well, Klingons in general and Klag in particular did, in fact, do a lot of throwing their heads back and laughing in Star Trek.

 

[Ben Sisko]

It's gotten to the point that I've had to do a search and replace on my kindle files and fix it.

Wait a sec. People are rewriting books to their own specifications now?

Am I the only one who gets a bit of a chill at that idea?

Somebody had to fix "janeway spinnign around in her command chair," in The Black Shore.

 

[bullethead]

It's gotten to the point that I've had to do a search and replace on my kindle files and fix it.

Wait a sec. People are rewriting books to their own specifications now?

Am I the only one who gets a bit of a chill at that idea?

I'm okay with tweaking things here and there if the formatting is jacked up or they messed up a word by using find and replace all, but yeah, doing what Ben Sisko did is going a bit far.

 

[Greg Cox]

It's gotten to the point that I've had to do a search and replace on my kindle files and fix it.

Wait a sec. People are rewriting books to their own specifications now?

Am I the only one who gets a bit of a chill at that idea?

Somebody had to fix "janeway spinnign around in her command chair," in The Black Shore.

Oh dear. Is that really in there?

 

[Sho]

It might be because I'm a big open source guy, but no, I can't get worked up about people modifying books they bought for their personal use and enjoyment. A bitch-and-rant thread irks me more ...

 

[Ben Sisko]

It might be because I'm a big open source guy, but no, I can't get worked up about people modifying books they bought for their personal use and enjoyment. A bitch-and-rant thread irks me more ...

Dont' fell singled out Greg, i went into Lord of the Rings and changed 'ere' to 'before.'

 

[Christopher]

^Now, that's just vandalism.

 

[Darth Duck]

It might be because I'm a big open source guy, but no, I can't get worked up about people modifying books they bought for their personal use and enjoyment. A bitch-and-rant thread irks me more ...

I know I can't wait to buy Van Gogh's sunflowers and paint 'em pink because I like it better. And don't get me started on the grammar mistakes I need to fix in my e.e. cummings poetry...

 

[Nerys Myk]

It might be because I'm a big open source guy, but no, I can't get worked up about people modifying books they bought for their personal use and enjoyment. A bitch-and-rant thread irks me more ...

Dont' fell singled out Greg, i went into Lord of the Rings and changed 'ere' to 'before.'

You might to place more effort into editing and proofreading your own posts rather than the works of others.

 

[Sho]

I know I can't wait to buy Van Gogh's sunflowers and paint 'em pink because I like it better. And don't get me started on the grammar mistakes I need to fix in my e.e. cummings poetry...

If you like them better that way, so what? You're not allowed to be creative because Van Gogh was? It'd be different if you went out to the world and told everyone your pink sunflowers were better, then you might have to make your case, or in any case deal with the feedback.

Van Gogh didn't exist in a vacuum either, you know. He saw art before and while he made his, too.

And this is especially silly in the context of tie-in fiction. Note that I don't mean to say that tie-in fiction is a lesser art in some way (in particular, I never understood why authors of tie-in novels get a worse rap than writers of TV episodes, when the tie-in authors wrote many of the best "episodes"), but obviously tie-in fiction builds off the work of others, remixes it, fleshes it out. And that's fine. Heck, readers enjoy it.

 

[Greg Cox]

It might be because I'm a big open source guy, but no, I can't get worked up about people modifying books they bought for their personal use and enjoyment. A bitch-and-rant thread irks me more ...

But, just for the sake of argument, where does that end? Is it okay to take the naughty words and sex scenes out of a book because they make you uncomfortable? Or remove the N-word from Huckleberry Finn? Or give a sad book a happy beginning? "Old Yeller, you're cured!"

Heck, suppose somebody wants to give Harry Potter a new ending where Harry and his friends renounce wizardry and discover Jesus instead? Are they still reading HARRY POTTER or are they just vandalizing J. K. Rowling's work?

 

[Sho]

But, just for the sake of argument, where does that end? Is it okay to take the naughty words and sex scenes out of a book because they make you uncomfortable? Or remove the N-word from Huckleberry Finn? Or give a sad book a happy beginning? "Old Yeller, you're cured!"

There's two sides to this: One is whether I think they should be allowed to do so - the other is whether I'd look down on them for doing it. I think the latter is where you're coming from, while I'm sticking up for the former out of conviction. But I actually agree with you: Someone who edits a work of art to avoid being challenged by it is doing a disservice both to themselves and the work of art.

But, people should be allowed to do things the two of us find stupid. It's not for us to judge. I think remixing* is a creative endeavour in itself and needs to be proteced as such.

* = The term we use in software development is "forking". This is because software source code is rarely ever finished, but rather continuously improved; it's a living document, and as such a linear series of alterations that build upon each other. "Forking" is the act of taking a particular revision and evolving it into a separate direction concurrently to the original modification stream. Open source is in many ways the act of releasing software source code under licensing terms that specifically make forking legal, but because the same license also states that any modifications must remain public (it's a wee bit more complicated legally, but this will do to explain the principle) both "sides" of a fork retain the ability to merge changes from the other version. Forking happens both as a hostile act (i.e. over differences with the original authors and with the intent to get away from them) and deliberately within a community (e.g. to experiment with a bold new way of doing things), and has revitalized and even recued many an important body of code that you rely on every day without you even knowing it. (A good example would be the gcc/egcc fork and eventual merge; gcc being the tool that most likely translated the majority of the software that is serving this BBS to you from human-readable source code into machine-executable ones and zeroes.)

Heck, suppose somebody wants to give Harry Potter a new ending where Harry and his friends renounce wizardry and discover Jesus instead? Are they still reading HARRY POTTER or are they just vandalizing J. K. Rowling's work?

Sounds like junk to me. But hey, why should I get to decide?

Now of course there's a legal dimension here; the license of the text being as it is, I actually cannot legally copy much of Potter sans the ending and distribute it. That's piracy, and I don't mean to condone doing so. But the Van Gogh paintings are in the public domain by now (I would guess, I haven't actually checked), and originally we were talking about modifications for personal use.

Which I actually do myself from time to time, e.g. to splice in author annotations.

 

[JD]

Greg summed up my feelings about this pretty well. If you go in and fix a few spelling or gramatical errors that is one thing, but to actually go in and change things that were purely the authors choice is another thing entirely. I don't like it. If you don't like what an author writes, just don't read the book.

 

[Jarvisimo]

There's a lot of conservatism on this thread, which I understand, since there are many authors on it, and we have an established, respectful community. But consider the culture we live in, the treatment of visual properties via photoshop, or on youtube. Often the purpose of these is different from or deliberately against the authorial intention or desire. Often irreverent. Think of all those Der Untergang clips of Hitler's ranting, some of which are Trek-related (1, 2, 3) which originally the distributors stopped, but now don't mind for commercially positive reasons. One would hope that in all cases the makers of these videos 'own' them, but this is not always the case, yet we enjoy the results anyway. Editting of one's own property (that is, the objects we have bought) - from the houses we live in (often in contrast to the original architect or designers), to the images and videos, and now books, on our computers - to fit one's tastes and desires is such a facet of who we are. And if we were not allowed to alter the greats and not-so-greats of artistic culture, then where would be the Duchamps, Lichensteins and other masters of Dada, Pop and now postmodern art?

I think as long as there is no commercial aspect to the use of an owned object, that this is for personal (or educational) use, then this is fine, I think, morally and according to the law?

As for the actual process of noting or changing one's text, it is only sligthly different from own my notating of my academic books: I will add additions to the text, change it, etc, to suit my own ideas - which it could be argued are a form of intellectual taste? It is different from Ben Sisko's work, but I am agreement that it is allowable, since it is non-commercial. one of my favourite versions of this are fan edits, especially Adywan's brilliant Star Wars Revisited. These are interesting, since they both "honour" and "dishonour" authorial intent - yet are wonderful, sometimes even artistic, efforts.