Commercial Real Person Fan Fiction (RPFs), crossovers and parodies as geeky imperatives (as of 2021)

Let’s make ("fan")-fiction great again!

(Based on Donald Trump.)

This essay attributes the perceived problems of "Hollywood"/the-film-industry, namely:

• Lack of original screenplays.

• Many big-name "unemployed" actors and actresses.

• "Franchise fatigue".

• An increase in the number of dystopian and/or pessimistic franchises and films.

To these culprits:

• The psychological, social, and economical shift towards competent and physically and intellectually attractive people being both geeks (= "amateurs"; loving their work or field of study; not doing it only for money) as well as hackers (= resourceful, rule benders, "action heroes", fate defiers).

• The recent cultural trend toward openness, freedom, sharing and remixing / standing on the shoulders of giants. E.g: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), open/free content, "web 2.0", User-generated content.

• The film industry's requirement of accepting screenplays only in its draconian, finicky (and boring) format

• Its franchise territorialism (which hinders commercial crossovers).

• The fact that copyright is enforced on commercial use of characters, concepts, and worlds (and to an extent - texts).

• The recent antagonism against Real Person Fiction ( RPF ) due to an apparent "jinxing" of celebrities from being employable as actors in commercial films, and T. V. series.

It proposes a way forward, implementable by more than one party, that may hopefully make the film industry flourish just like the music industry (including "playing-for-fun" musicians), and the software industry. Here is the link to see the current plan and recommendations.

Note: as a writer of fan-fiction, I may be biased in handling what seems to be the lowest-hanging fruit for me. However, I suspect this is also an important stepping stone towards other aspects of world healing.

• “Terminator: Liberation” - An Illustrated Screenplay for a Terminator parody

• Queen Padmé Tales (Star Wars / Star Trek / Real Life Crossover)

  • Teaser - based on the Star Wars opening.

• "Why I will continue to write my real person fan fiction (fanfic)" - previous attempt.

  • IRC Conversation about "Copyright Cannibalism" - a philosophical stepping stone ("rindolf" there is Shlomi Fish).

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

I refuse to apologise for writing fan-fiction. Hollywood writers are often not the originators anyway. They probably also often switch writers between films, seasons, or individual episodes, to get different perspectives and materials.

The bible had a lot of fanfic as did Aesop's fables and the Greek mythology.

Even the Epic of Gilgamesh was spiced up in the course of time.

( @shlomif (= me) tweet )

As unlikely as it sounds, I think I reached the "right" conclusions at my previous attempt while having a somewhat misled deduction chain.

As of March 2021, it seems most talented, skillful, competent, and attractive individuals of any gender, age and professions, are increasingly both geeks (= "amateurs"; love what they do; not doing it only for money) and hackers (= "action heroes"; bending or challenging the "rules", not accepting their fate, being resourceful, thinking outside the box, etc.). As I show, this implies most new quality screenplays and stories are currently and are going to increasingly not only be fanfiction but also crossovers, parodies, and/or real person fiction - usually including recent "proprietary" (= restricted, "All rights reserved", "copyrighted") franchises and recent (and often living) real people. And they aren't being written in the finicky, hard to get right, and boring Hollywood-blessed screenplay format.

Moreover, attractive actors (including female actresses and/or inexperienced and obscure ones) are also geeky hackers. As a result, they will not play in any badly written film (and usually a dystopian, ending badly, pessimistic, politically correct and dishonest one) even for all the money in the world.

Geeks are not to be confused with "dorks" who are (for the context of this essay) people without social life, or who seem reckless, not confident, unattractive, etc. Moreover, "amateur" now has pejorative meaning of something done poorly or non-skillfully but in the 19th century, it was a compliment.

These were contrasted to "professionalism" (= doing something only for money, regardless of how little or a lot: "We're not just doing it for money!…We're doing it for a shitload of money"; not enjoying your work).

It is hard to avoid the trend of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), open/free content, sharing digital (and often tangible) works with the world, making derivative works, and even remixing / mashing-up works:

I thought using loops was cheating so I programmed my own samples. Then I thought using samples was cheating so I recorded real drums.

I then thought that programming it was cheating so I learnt to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating so I learnt to make my own.

I then thought that using premade skins was cheating so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating but I'm not sure where to go from here. I haven't made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

While not all digital works are explicitly licensed under licences that allow building derivatives, or remixes/crossovers/mashups, in practice, most talented independent remixers will have no qualms about reusing other people's "All rights reserved" work.

In my FAQ I explain why I, as a geeky hacker king, who was influenced by the "open" / "remix" movement, find it necessary to do crossovers, Real Person Fiction Works ( RPFs ) and parodies in my writing:

Why do you write mostly fan-fiction and crossovers?

Lawrence Lessig gives many good reasons for remixing in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy which I have read and enjoyed. Writing fan-fiction and crossovers, whether in fiction or in non-fiction (see some of my crossover essays) is the writing equivalent of what he describes being primarily done with music and videos.

Our aversion towards fan fiction and an insistence on "originality" is mostly a 20th century fad, that is slowly (for some values of "slowly") diminishing.

Anyway, the various fiction franchises and idea systems that influenced me are a large part of me, and I cannot throw them away when writing my own works. I don’t have a lot of control of the ideas I come up with, but I know I must materialise them eventually.

What about your real person fiction?

I feature or reference several celebrities in my stories (whether past or present) as a way of Real person fiction. According to the wikipedia page, such fiction is likely to be legal if it is done in mostly good taste, which I believe and hope is the case for me.

The general consensus is that a celebrity generally allows himself or herself to be a subject of reuse in literature, and that includes me, Shlomi Fish.

Update (2 November 2019): I have now written a more comprehensive essay about why writing real person fan fiction is good.

Update (26 November 2019): I now realise that fan fiction and especially real person fiction can be used to help combat the flood of new characters and names that plagues many more "original" stories. People generally have a rough concept of what characters such as Chuck Norris, Emma Watson, Richard Stallman, Moses, or Miss Piggy, are like and generally can better remember them because they thought about them a lot.

Those who make a distinction between education and entertainment don't know the first thing about either. — Marshall McLuhan ( via fortune-mod )

( Marshall McLuhan. )

I think before the Internet/social media were a thing, people did amateur philosophy / entertainment / education / art - with their peers, even if limited to sports / food / Members of the appropriate sex.

( @shlomif (= me) tweet. )

I think I have learnt more from Internet forums (especially interactive, realtime chat, ones), than I did from Project Euler which I favourably compared to the Technion. I also attribute a lot of ideas and inspiration from them.

For more information, see:

1. Why "let's Remove net access to avoid distractions" is bad.

2. "The Machines That Can Give You Questions"

3. "I learned a lot from my teachers, and from my friends more than my teachers, and from my pupils the most."

4. xkcd: "11th Grade"

5. My comment about "The Student Bride" student film which I find satirises and criticises contemporary American college student life by showing how ridiculous the film The Princess Bride will be when converted to be set there.

6. My English dramatically improved after I graduated from high school

7. "Top vs. Bottom Posting" - ah, when they ask me how the hell I managed to write so good band propositions, I’ll tell em,the secret is to chat with geeks about top vs bottom posting

Hollywood's blessed screenplay format is boring, finicky, and requires a lot of time to prepare and get right. It only has one proprietary Windows-only program and one unmaintained, slow, non-responsive, open source program - Celtx, that can be used to edit it.

As a hacker/action hero I'd rather my screenplays never be filmed by Hollywood studios, than waste time preparing one in its blessed format. Furthermore, since it cannot be automatically linted or validated, one often needs to revise or amend the drafts, which is even more time-consuming. Rinse and repeat.

One can imagine most young or young-at-heart screen writers who use code sharing sites and services (e.g: GitHub or GitLab), wikis, desktop or online word processors, etc. will also sport the same sentiments.

As Paul Graham notes in a different context: Hackers are lazy, in the same way that mathematicians and modernist architects are lazy: they hate anything extraneous.

So a lack of "original" screenplays and many unemployed screenplay readers is not surprising.

Note that even if a screenwriter has prepared such Hollywood-blessed screenplays in the past, he or she likely met enough fans, critics (either positive or negative or mixed), collaborators, etc. (see the "Earth Angel" concept or the subtext of xkcd: "11th grade") that they will adopt a similar mindset. Even though I am 1977-born (so approaching 44 in 2021) there are some time consuming things I have done in the past which I will not repeat such as studying Electrical Engineering in the Technion, or working for distrustful or micromanaging bosses (though as the contemporary me I may now try to reform them using benevolent psychological warfare ). This is while I can spend hundreds of hours contributing text, code, and markup, voluntarily and without expecting immediate payment, to the public. And this includes my pro-bono contributions to Fedora Linux, which is backed and led by a profitable and well financed for-profit company ( Red Hat, Inc. ).

I thought I invented illustrated screenplays, "by need", but recently saw the illustration on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's stage play "Richelieu" after I searched the web for his "The pen is mightier than the sword" adage.

Furthermore, a fellow writer, who was less techsavvy than I am at the time (and wished to remain ignorant of software development) told me that "[hyper-]linking is not writing". However, not only did the Hebrew Bible had hyperlinks of sorts (references to other works), but many are currently broken.

So I suggest Hollywood studios to also accept screenplays either in a subset of XHTML5 (which will be capable of being validated using an open source, easy to install, and portable linter) , or an XML-based format, either a subset of TEI or a custom format. Perhaps any self-contained XHTML5/HTML5 page or EPUB can be accepted, including ones on the public-facing web.

One can find many screenplays like that in Archive of our own, but there are likely many more.

Given many screenplays are reworked, or even improvised upon during filming, their formatting should not be too draconian and finicky, anyway.

Note: capable hacker and geeky screenwriters will also increasingly write crossovers, parodies and RPFs from similar reasons. See this for more info.

Like it or not - most of the popular art in the 20th century was commercial and/or proprietary ( "All rights reserved" ) . While screenwriters often derive inspiration from older, and now public domain sources, the good ones also reuse characters or texts from real life (Real Person Fiction ( RPF )) or from newer franchises (out of being constructively lazy). And with copyright law being maximalised to covering individual characters, concepts, and worlds and individual sentences, this makes legitimate and commercial reuse/remixing of drama a legal problem.

At one point, I walked past a booth that had lots of classic Star Wars toys. My eyes fell on an original model of Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter. I had that toy when I was a kid, and just looking at it was like those car commercials where the guy touches the car and gets this rapid-fire burst of images until he takes his hand off of it. I saw myself riding in the car to Kmart with my parents, hoping to buy a new Star Wars toy, playing with the toys on the gold shag carpeting in front of the brick fireplace in the house in Sunland, running around the back yard in the fading evening light in the summer of 1980. I piloted my TIE fighter, chasing my brother who piloted a snow speeder. ( We weren’t afraid to combine Star Wars and He-Man, so why not combine Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back?)

People as young as children have been doing crossovers and Real Person Fiction ( RPF ) of franchises, individual books/stories/films/songs/etc., characters (both fictional and real), and more serious idea systems (see a partial list). E.g: when playing with dolls or action figures, like Wil Wheaton notes in his book "The Happiest Days of Our Lives".

There is no way one can expect them (or me) to use only earlier sources than 1900, because technology as well as art, culture, & entertainment / education / amateur philosophy, did not stand still since then, despite being increasingly based on Copyright maximalism.

You can never truly appreciate Hamlet until you've read it in the original Klingon.

But all the mightiest Klingon warriors have watched Disney's The Lion King instead (or in addition), possibly with Klingon subtitles.

( @shlomif (= me) tweet )

In my screenplay Selina Mandrake - The Slayer, the protagonist (Selina) runs into three vampire warriors (“The Three”) dressed as Klingons, who tell her that “Every mighty Klingon warrior has watched Sesame Street”.

As a retort, she exclaims: “Mighty Klingon vampire warriors who have watched Sesame Street… this decade royally sucks!!”. However, most of the best American warriors of the relatively recent past (of all kinds) have watched Sesame Street, because they loved it as happy children (and later as adults).

( Shlomi Fish (= me): "Hackers make the best warriors" )

If we take my Sesame Street Hosting Harry Potter fan fiction as an example, then it mashes together the real world J. K. Rowling, her franchise's characters: Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Dumbledore; the Muppets' characters: The Amazing Mumford, Cookie Monster, and Miss Piggy; various circa 2014 trends (e.g: Sushi, and the model Candice Swanepoel, who was mentioned there because she topped Maxim's Hot 100 that year); and as icing on the cake it closes with a hack of the Beatles song "All you need is love" titled "Do it all with love"

While it also sports a parody of the fable "The miller, his son and the donkey", the donkey there is the one from the Shrek franchise as originally voiced by Eddie Murphy.

These are all building blocks of my creative spiritual world. Any screenwriter who can successfully mutate the screenplay (and they have my blessing and legal permission to do so) must use recent enough characters and quotes. To quote Groucho Marx: I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member. The Muppets franchise did such crossovers and Real Person Fiction ( RPF ) since the 1970s (e.g. "Sam the Eagle versus Alice Cooper") and most of The Muppets Show's early (and later) skits are amazingly fresh and funny even today.

As much I like Charlie Chaplin, he will be a poor substitute to Chuck Norris in my muppets' "Summer Glau & Chuck Norris as Grammar Nazis" fanfic episode despite the fact that he was also Hollywood's "alpha male" at the time.

Anyway, I believe most hobbyist screenwriters either approve of other people taking their works in their own direction ( "If they don't like it, tell them they can go and remake it". ), or lack the time and energy (even if they have enough money) to start a long litigation process.

Good hackers are constructively lazy, and build on the work of others. And this means doing crossovers, parodies, and real person fiction.

As I noted elsewhere increasingly most attractive guys and girls are geeky (= "amateur"; doing what they do because they enjoy it) as well as very action heroic and hackery (resourceful, bending the rules, defying their fate).

While there are many big name actors and actresses, and studios will gladly have them star in their films, they will refuse to act (even for obscene amounts of money) in any films whose screenplays were not written by honest, optimistic, and idealistic screenwriters such as me, which are increasingly not written in the draconian format, and increasingly feature crossovers / mashups / real person fiction / parodies of relatively recent franchises. ( Even if they do not have a conscious policy against starring in pessimistic screenplays, they will be so poorly written or depressing or boring, that they will "subconsciously" avoid them. )

Emma Watson being unhirable as an actress in Hollywood started as a joke youtube comment I wrote, which materialised after the film Little Women (2019). Although loved by professional critics, geeky fans like me thought that the 1994 adaptation starring Winona Rider was still pertinent today, and that Watson was underutilised.

She has not accepted a "major motion picture" role since, possibly because she'd rather play at local parody plays, frequent Conventions ("cons"), play in indie films, get paid for modelling, be an activist, acquire new skills, or just relax, than get paid to star in a poorly written and professional (and likely dystopian or pessimistic) Hollywood remake or original film. Lend me Emma Watson and Jennifer Lawrence and I'll return both with Natalie Portman as interest! Whether or not Portman is going to accept being cast as Thor(ah) that will be the last film the territorially-franchised film industry will see of her.

(For reference, see this teaser for "Queen Padmé [Amidala] Tales", and Queen Padmé [Amidala] Tales itself, both fanfics sporting Portman.)

• "When I was your age, @EmmaWatson was called Sarah Bernhardt."

• "Dude! How old are you?"

It's funny to think that Em is the canonical "Alpha Female" now, but Bernhardt being the daughter of a (Jewish) prostitute, whose father's identity was unclear, was far more questionable. And where there's a will there's a way.

( @shlomif (= me) tweet )

One thing I got wrong is thinking a geek will refuse to get paid. That is wrong because often, geeks are offered large amounts of money or at least token pay (see the Emma Watson as a software dev thought experiment). For example, Linus Torvalds, who is a software developer, an action hero, a geek, and a remarkable amateur philosopher and entertainer, is believed to get paid 20 million USD/year. While he will gladly continue to comaintain the Linux kernel project for less, it is commonly accepted that it is a reasonable salary.

I also suspect the belief that make-up makes a woman look better is largely a "Stone Soup" effect / placebo effect catalyst for feeling confident, competent, and happy, and being honest and benevolent. This is given most men, who have their share of frustrations with their looks, do not need makeup, and neither do underage girls.

All this has jinxed the reality T.V. show "Beauty and the Geek" and now large budget Hollywood feature films.

I was told that every waitress at a restaurant in LA is a potential Hollywood actress. But most of the good looking ones are increasingly geeky hackers as well.

Many people will pay to see a film starring well-known and well-regarded actors and actresses which they happen to like, and approve of its trailer, which they can watch on YouTube. But given most of the screenwriters, are now great hackers and geeks, they won't bother writing their screenplays in the Hollywood blessed format and increasingly do parodies, crossovers and RPFs.

I never met a monster I didn't like.

( Vincent Price on The Muppet Show )

Even though I tried to find truly malevolent people per Neo-Tech and some possible interpretations of Israeli-taught Tanakh Judaism, I was unable to run into a truly evil person. Even historical mass-murderers (e.g: Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Alexander of Macedonia, even Nebuchadnezzar) provided some redeeming actions or wisdom. See for instance "Top 10 reasons why Darth Vader was an amazing project manager" with an easy (but tabooed) "Darth Vader"⇒"Nazi Germany's leadership" substitution.

Since I have at least subconsciously (and lately consciously) believed everyone can improve and change, and grow (see the Pygmalion effect vs. the Golem effect) and treated them like that, they eventually usually did improve.

My mother told me that the iconic Israeli homeless man, "Ayalon Dude", (see an interview with him in Hebrew) once proposed her to marry him, because she treated him with respect and friendliness. She naturally refused because she was and still is happily married (to my father).

As a result, I don't think that Hollywood producers, executives, lawyers, directors, and other workers are evil (or alternatively USA/etc. government, parliament, legal system, etc. workers are) - just possibly misguided.

The commercial fiction industry ( "Hollywood"/etc. ) is not a good oligopoly because they assume people will only enjoy fanfic from one franchise or at most two. This causes franchises to be territorialised even inside media conglomerates. On the other hand, before the 19th-20th centuries, creators mashed together the franchises of previous generations, along with Real Person Fiction ( RPF )and current trends and events.

These were funny or entertaining by people who were not familiar with their origins and sources of inspiration (often indirect or subconscious ones). I enjoy watching Monty Python's "Romans go home!" skit despite not being taught Latin, and enjoyed reading The Three Musketeers despite not being an expert in French history.

In order to subvert copyright maximalism, actors can finance the production of fanfiction screenplays starring them, and which are not written in the Hollywood-blessed format. They can and should also try to make a profit from them. As an analogy, Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV album was licensed under a redistributable (Creative Commons) licence and yet proved very profitable.

I think either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Emma Watson can afford to license the franchises which I used in my "Terminator: Liberation" screenplay starring them. Moreover, they have my (legal and spiritual) blessing to change the screenplay as they see fit.

Even if they do not license a franchise, then a (for example) "Walt Disney Corp. vs. Emma Watson", or perhaps "Walt Disney Corp. vs. Emma Watson Productions", or even "Walt Disney Corp. vs. Arnold Schwarzenegger Films" court case will not look good to share holders. Like I say: One does not simply say “no” to an Alpha Female.

I recall an old Fortune magazine feature where Steven Spielberg was given advice to never finance a film out of one's own pocket. Now's the time to challenge this guideline - at least until the dust settles.

Natalie Portman and Tiffany Alvord can do the same with Queen Padmé [Amidala] Tales, which someone who read the first part of its Pilot episode, noted that "it was crazier than Run, Lola, Run".

I can further suggest the owners of major (and minor) franchises to put them under permissive copyright licences, requesting that a donation be made in case there is profit. If one cannot legally accept donations, then they can sell digital goods (or tangible merchandice) with a minimal, but not maximal price similar to the Humble Bundle or bandcamp models. Hacks!

They can do it either by agreement or individually. As an analogy, I recall that back in the late 1990s, there was an initial resistance by vendors of commercial SQL databases to release official Linux ports of their databases (which they built and supported on similar, but proprietary and costly, UNIX-like operating systems). However, then they announced their intentions to do so one by one, and it was technologically easy to do and brought all of them many sales. And today anyone who proposes deploying a Unix-like server that does not run an open-source operating system (GNU/Linux or BSD or similar) except for running legacy applications ,is in a state of sin.

Also see my earlier thoughts about commercial fan-fiction.

Copyright maximalism, and franchise territorialism, are artificial, man-made, and unnecessary problems. They can be subverted either legally, or in practice, by hacking around them. As alternatives to the more famous actors, cosplayers can play as them or one can produce lower-cost animations (including MLP-style animations) and solicit money for producing a live action version. One can also solicit money for relicensing works under less restrictive licences (e.g: "CC-by-nc-sa"→"CC0").

All their criticism started to get to me: their opinions, their ideas, their words, their vision. Then I realised: this is my life. I'm not going to waste my time trying to be something I'm not. I'm gonna be fearless. I'm going to take control, and I'm going to do it my way.

( "Renegade" by Cimorelli. )

I care more about getting my screenplays filmed and produced than I do about being recognised as an innovative and influential, yet obscure and "invisible" "hacker king" or "messiah" of the Web 2.0 / open content revolution.

And I care even more about flesh-and-blood people not dying physically and prematurely for whatever reason, or otherwise get physically injured, usually by their own mismanagement. I also want every individual and organisation in the world to improve and prosper ( Pygmalion effect vs. the Golem effect; Chuck Norris was challenged to fight the world, and accepted. He bet on himself, won, and collected the bet money.; Summer Glau can get more with a kind word alone than Al Capone could with a kind word and a gun.. )

I was probably too young to prevent the death of Samantha Smith, one of the youngest known hacker monarchs up to her time. I believe she died because in her later career as a child actress, she didn't insist on doing things her way, until she was killed by a private nighttime flight plane crash, which she took due to hubris and impatience.

I am however saddened that I didn't prevent the premature death of Christina Grimmie at age 22 in 2016, who was a singer, songwriter, and YouTube indie artist. I and others expected her to dominate the music world, or perhaps the whole world at large, for years to come (and become a "hacker monarch"/Messiah so to speak). She was killed by an obsessed fan, who shot her, and who committed suicide shortly after shooting her . I believe her death was also caused by her not doing things her way, which made her later work gradually deteriorate, her sex-appeal (which correlates with competence) to decline, and she not remaining true to her YouTuber roots (e.g: of she doing collaborations with other artists, including the more obscure ones). She acted in one film before she died, but even its trailer was a complete turnoff to me.

Therefore I decided that in my quests to advocate commercial fan-fiction, and get my screenplays directed, I will do things my way. I shall remain living with my parents in their apartment and will not venture far away from my neighbourhood (= Ramat Aviv Gimel, in northern Tel Aviv , in Israel) unescorted. I plan to continue writing and mutating screenplays using my own home-grown format, at least until I find or devise a better one, and write a semi-automatic converter.

I plan to release early and often, and not delete content from my sites that some others disapprove of. (Though I may add notes that I take it back.)

I may have competition, but not only will I encourage them to try to outcompete me, but I will even try to help them. I don't want to be a dick and suggest that neither should you. I want to "win" and become rich and famous (and respected and admired), but setting artificial obstacles in the way of my peers, or people who still (unfortunately IMHO) see themselves as inferior to me, will backfire in the end, and will make me feel guilty and remorse and not Saladin-like.

I thought I invented illustrated screenplays, "by need", but recently saw the illustration on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's stage play "Richelieu" after I searched the web for his "The pen is mightier than the sword" adage.

Furthermore, a fellow writer, who was less techsavvy than I am at the time (and wished to remain ignorant of software development) told me that "[hyper-]linking is not writing". However, not only did the Hebrew Bible had hyperlinks of sorts (references to other works), but many are currently broken.

So linking is writing, and I am going to continue adding hyperlinks to my writings.

Currently, there aren't too many commercial parodical crossovers of fiction, but there is no reason why we cannot bend all the guidelines that prevent them. Joss Whedon wanted to reboot Buffy the Vampire Slayer starring a previously unfamiliar Black American actress. Boring! Too politically correct!

But picture Emma Watson as Selina Mandrake, a geeky Anglo-American (and Caucasian naturally, of any hair colour she fancies) 12th-grade high school student, who is unathletic and clumsy, loves playing Basketball (but "royally sucks at it"), is completely non-violent toward the demons she slays, and even shows compassion for them, and having watched the original series, finds the demonic underworld to be "quite a weird lot". She is tormented by "The Guide" ( Wil Wheaton ), a mysterious American Goth-like man, who despite seeming to possess powerful magic, and mustering weapons, claims she is a far better slayer than he is. In addition, it sports some Israeli secular/Tanakh Judaism background, and a take-it-in-your-face milliards years-old "Elders of Zion"/Illuminati-like conspiracy titled "The Neo-Tech Conspiracy for Establishing the Semitic Culture". It also sports a modernised take on The Three Musketeers, with the French-English-French "Milady" Kate Canterson being the love interest of d'Artagnan, who are both sent by Cardinal Richelieu, King Louis XIII, and the King of England, to "slay" Lord Buckingham (= stage his death and have him start a new life in the British colonies of North America.).

Extremely not politically correct, which is why it is much more honest and fun and may prove more popular. "War is good for business!" to quote the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. And I invite Whedon to direct it!

My secret to success: I'm a 21st century open source + open content + remixer + fanfic polymath and openminded amateur / geek, and hacker / action hero, entertainer and educator. I have my sources of inspiration and my beliefs and my opinions - I do not deny them and reuse them, but often challenge them and parody them. I'm being the "trying to be awesome or at least awesomely badass" Shlomi Fish, who keeps the faith, defies his fate, encourages criticism and yet doesn't try to please everyone.

If I try to please "the media" / "my profits" / society / "the rules" / what other people think / the guidelines and guidelines-generators too much, then no one will be pleased. If I'll be myself and do it my way, then hopefully some people will love my work and most of the others will not remain indifferent.

OK, ok "Show Me the Money!". Note that just like Asimov's Seldon Plan, this plan is not set in stone and we'll likely have to improvise ("play by ear"), or adapt it to the circumstanses. Moreover, they are just guidelines and suggestions, not rules and demands. Furthermore, it is likely this will not be the final challenge faced by the film industry and fiction industry or humanity as a whole, so we should not rest on our laurels.

Anyway, I suggest:

1. Screenplay readers to also accept screenplays in easier to write and to get right formats, which should have open source, portable, and easy-to-install, validators and linters. They should also accept and tolerate some minor errors. ( Reference ).

2. Copyright owners to relicense their franchises under permissive licenses (possibly unilaterally). ( Reference ).

   • They can request to donate parts of the profits of derivative works to them.

   • In time, Warner Bros will mismanage the #HarryPotter franchise so badly that @jk_rowling will be able to buy it back at a bargain price… There's another road ahead for Warner Bros, Disney, and other copyright holders than copyright cannibalism.

     ( @shlomif (= me) tweet )

3. Politicians to amend the financial bylaws to allow any legal entity to transfer any amount of money to any other legal entity (possibly while keeping some digital transactions' ledger). ( Reference ).

4. Big name actors and actresses to set up production companies carrying their names. ( Reference ).

5. Start directing films with fanfic: crossovers, Real Person Fiction ( RPF ), parodies, etc.

6. 1. Film / TV shows / etc. copyright owners should avoid trying to stamp out piracy. In addition, legitimate low-res (720p/etc.) versions of the complete films and TV show episodes should be provided free of charge on YouTube/etc. This is for hyperlinking, making image macros, video macros, meme scenes, meme story arcs, or even watching completely.

      The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it’s good enough. And it’s free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.

      ( Paul Graham: "Web 2.0". )

   2. Content copyright owners are advised to stop sending takedown notices against infringing copies (or web resources suspected as such.)

   3. Similarly most forms of DRM provide fig leaf protection at best and are often obstacles for legitimate uses, and so are best avoided.

   4. I Feel Much Better Now That I've Given Up Hope

      ( Brilliant, Ashleigh: 9780880071475: Amazon.com: Books )

Chuck Norris was challenged to fight the world, and accepted. He bet on himself, won, and collected the bet money.

This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2021, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 Unported (or at your option any later version of that licence).

For securing additional rights, please contact Shlomi Fish and see the explicit requirements that are being spelt from abiding by that licence.

• Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

• Parodied "[Movie] Star Wars" logo taken from my forked branch of @ztzockt's Star Wars crawl remake.

• Partial Summaries of my Personal Philosophy ("Rindolfism")

• My wiki - contains thematic pages of quotes or essays.