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Comment Re: Yay First Amendment (Score 1) 167

That FEELS like the right way to deal with them, and for most of us it probably is, but for those with the stomach, I say keep at it. Don't engage with them, just keep reporting their bad behavior. Each time you make them create a new account, they have to start over with their followers, and anyone who cares to can see it is a "new" account. There is probably something cathartic in the actions as well.

Comment Refactoring counts I think (Score 4, Insightful) 100

I tend to use the "try the dumbest thing that could possibly work first" method, then after the concept is proven, I refactor it into good (or varying levels of better) code over the course of a few iterations, until the point where the original does not really exist any more, but it still solves the problem, and has decent tests, logging, and the other things that typically need to be thought about.

Submission + - Why flouting The Joker's copyright is funny (theverge.com)

DevNull127 writes: There’s a new Joker movie coming out, but you might not get a chance to see it because copyright is broken.

I’m not talking about Joker: Folie à Deux, the officially sanctioned sequel to the Todd Phillips film Joker. I’m talking about The People’s Joker, a crowdfunded Toronto International Film Festival selection that was pulled at the last minute, thanks to unspecified “rights issues.” The People’s Joker is (as far as I can tell) an extremely loose retelling of the Batman villain’s origin story, reinterpreting the Joker as a trans woman trying to break into the mob-like world of Gotham’s stand-up comedy scene. Its trailer describes it as “an illegal comic book movie,” but its creators more seriously defend it as an unauthorized but legal parody of DC’s original character, to the point of (apparently) giving their lawyer a full-screen credit.

I have no idea if The People’s Joker is a good movie — thanks to its cancelation, my colleague Andrew Webster couldn’t catch it at TIFF. The piece is clearly a provocation designed to thumb its nose at DC’s copyright, and DC parent company Warner Bros. hasn’t said whether it actually ordered TIFF to cancel showings — it’s possible the festival balked or even that Drew did it herself. But despite all that, one thing is very clear: outside a tiny number of corporate behemoths, virtually nobody benefits from shutting down The People’s Joker — not the filmmakers, not the public, and not the people who created Gotham City in the first place.

Writer-director Vera Drew says she made The People’s Joker partly to test a contemporary truism: that beloved fictional universes are a shared modern mythology, and people draw meaning from them the way that artists once reinterpreted Greek myths or painted Biblical figures. As Drew has put it, “if the purpose of myth is to learn about the human experience and grow and also chart your progress — the hero’s journey and all that stuff — let’s actually do that earnestly with these characters.”

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