Erika3sis

What do you think the purpose of copyright is?

Frankly, if you're a small creator, copyright already doesn't really exist for you in any meaningful sense: because copyright is enforced through the courts, you only really have rights over your work to the extent you can actually pay the court costs of continually defending your rights again and again and again — and if you have that kind of money to spare you aren't exactly a starving artist.

I support complete abolition of intellectual property as a whole.

Say you want to write closed captions for a movie, or even film a sign language interpretation of it, such that d/Deaf people can enjoy the movie better, among other reasons — even if you don't post the movie itself, you're still creating a derivative work and hence violating copyright.

Or say you want to record an audio description such that blind people can enjoy the movie better, among other reasons — again, even if you release only the AD track, this is still a derivative work and hence violates copyright. This obviously also goes for audiobooks.

Or say you even want to make a full-on dub of a movie into an endangered language, to try to break the reliance of its dwindling speakers on dominant-language content — in this case, unless you've secured a deal with the rightsholders such that you have access to the original SFX and music tracks, your only choices are VO dubbing like is common in the Former Soviet Union, or painstakingly redoing all the sound effects and music, before you can add the dialog. In any case, without a license, you're still violating copyright even if you only release the dub track.

Now obviously the fact that these things violate IPR doesn't stop people from making these things anyways, but IPR does still end up greatly limiting volunteer work in scope and visibility, and creates an antagonism between the rightsholders and those volunteering to make the content more accessible. So intellectual property in practice then ends up being among other things yet another mechanism through which the sighted oppress the blind, the hearing oppress the d/Deaf, the settlers oppress the Natives, et cetera. There is no universe in which accessible media and intellectual property coexist: as long as there is intellectual property there is a profit motive, and profit motives will never prioritize accessibility.

And this is not to get into a greater discussion of how private property in general oppresses the working class, although I should disclose that I support the abolition of all private property and not only intellectual property by itself.

Pretendians, more than meets the eye!

Honestly I thought the dementors were squid ink before I read the label

Nothing is exactly set in stone (no pun intended), but my current idea essentially involves updating the letter forms to be better suited for writing on paper, and I was also thinking of using a dot diacritic for voicing and umlaut, and having the staves be x-height normally but extend downward for doubled consonants.

Ideas that are more sort of "on the table" are whether to use monographs for ⟨sj⟩ and ⟨kj⟩ etc, and monographs for the diphthongs; whether to have an optional diacritic form of ⟨r⟩ to represent the assimilation of /r/ in Eastern Norwegian; whether to use the same letters for certain sounds in complementary distribution; whether to extend the usage of the dot diacritic to alternate between otherwise similar sounds, rather than only voice and umlaut; and whether the runes should indeed have staves at all.

The problem is that depending on how many of these ideas are implemented, and the ways in which they are implemented, you eventually end up basically abandoning the idea of "modern runes" in favor of basically reinventing Shavian script but for Scandinavian. So it's difficult to strike that sort of middle ground between ancient and modern, especially when trying to balance that with practicality of use and ease of learning. Another matter is of course which forms of runes to actually base the script on: if we stick to just Scandinavia, we have Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark, medieval runes, staveless runes, and Dalecarlian runes, and these often have very different letter forms from each other.

Bokmål and nynorsk without a space, yes.

I have thought about developing an alternate script for Norwegian/Scandinavian based on the old runes, really just because I think that would be fun and interesting, but insofar as I haven't done this yet, I don't know of any alternate scripts for Norwegian, and obviously there isn't much point in talking about English.

So I will instead share an alternate script for a language I do not speak: Circassian, or specifically West Circassian or Adyghe.

Father and son duo R. I. Daur and I. Yu. Daur together developed an alternate script for that language in I think 2012. The script was dubbed "Mifo-Circassian", and as I understand it, it's an attempt to give the Circassian language a more unique visual identity, by using letters based on old inscribed symbols — I think the emblems of clans more specifically — rather than using an adapted foreign alphabet like Latin, Arabic, or Cyrillic. Furthermore, Circassian has a very unique inventory of sounds that interact with each other in unique ways, that foreign alphabets can't really do justice, so this alphabet is more uniquely suited for the challenges that come with representing Circassian in writing. Mifo-Circassian writing seems like it may be used both alphabetically and alphasyllabically, but the alphabetic form is far more common.

Well, "more common", not that many Circassians actually do use this Mifo-Circassian script to begin with. Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic have the benefit of being supported by Unicode and of also being used by neighboring languages, and they work well enough for representing Circassian. So it seems like the primary usage of Mifo-Circassian is not necessarily for communicative writing, but rather for more ornamental or artistic usage.

Honestly I would just keep self-describing as "weird" if I were you. If it really is damé to do so, then use a thesaurus; or if you're multilingual, be a little macaronic.

Bilibili and Niconico are often called "Chinese YouTube" and "Japanese YouTube" respectively, to get the general gist of the websites across even though that isn't quite right. These video sharing platforms are known for their danmaku subtitle/comments system, and are to some extent aimed more at anime-otaku/ACG audiences than general audiences — for instance if you use the official Bilibili app, the not-logged-in default avatar is actually a reference to the YuruYuri anime/manga.

However, while these two video sharing platforms are associated to some extent with anime/manga/video game fans, you can find all sorts of content on either platform. You've probably seen memes that first became popular on Niconico without realizing it.

There is some small amount of English-language content on these sites, but you'll get a lot more out of Bilibili and Niconico if you speak Chinese and Japanese. Otherwise, Bilibili can be useful as a "backup" if YouTube ever stops working on NewPipe/PipePipe, or there's something uploaded there that's (no longer) available on YouTube; or Bilibili can sometimes be nice as a way to find things with Chinese subtitles if you know someone who speaks Chinese and has limited English proficiency. As said, Niconico is down right now so that isn't very useful for anything at the moment.

Thumb-Key for keyboard here

I've started using PipePipe. It's basically the same as NewPipe except it also supports Bilibili and, if it weren't down right now, Niconico.