early 40s. Reddit API scandal in 2023.

IMO that makes it even better. It's not meant to be a single coherent narrative in-universe either. It's a collection of texts on different subjects written by different authors at different times. Granted I don't blame anyone who can't sit through it for that very reason. Perhaps approaching each section as its own story would make it more palatable.

I read a quote somewhere that "creativity is the art of hiding your influences." The scene in The Hobbit where Bilbo steals the goblet from Smaug is yoinked straight out of Beowulf. There's a good reason Germanic mythology sounds so Tolkienesque to someone who first read LOTR. I don't think there's any shame in that. Nihil sub sole novum.

My own worldbuilding can be summed up as "That sounds cool, but it would be even cooler with mechs."

It's a bit less clean cut for me. I started using Reddit in 2012, at first just the Minecraft sub and later mostly IT related stuff. I joined the threadiverse via a small niche Lemmy instance after the API scandal in summer 2023 but didn't delete my reddit account until that November. I lurked on Lemmy for about a year before I started posting in earnest on the Worldbuilding community on .world. Now I'm bouncing around various fediverse platforms.

I wish NodeBB would take off as a platform. I want a home for more permanent discussion and personal connection.

**murder hornets

Some things are inherently scarce. You only have 24 hours in a day, and there are only so many places you can build a house.

I think in a vacuum I would have agreed with the photographer. They spent the time and effort to acquire the photo. But I suppose when making legal decisions you have to think about how it will affect other situations.

I also wonder how PETA thought the monkey could have possibly exercised its copyright on the image.

I've seen that pic around and wondered if it was photoshopped. That nose looks really human. Anyway, now I know it's a macaque taking a selfie.

Interesting tidbit from the wikipedia article,

On 21 August 2014 the United States Copyright Office published an opinion, later included in the third edition of the office's Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, released on 22 December 2014, to clarify that "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention"

(emphasis mine)

Wonder what that means for AI images.

Reverse cynocephali: instead of dog-headed humans they're human-headed dogs.

The switch from MediaWiki to DokuWiki was motivated by ease of namespace creation. I use the blog plugin (and a corresponding blog namespace) to catch spontaneous thoughts. There's a stories namespace for narrative content, and a namespace for archiving the main thread on the CBB forum before I started the wiki. There's a lore namespace for more wiki-like stuff that has graduated from the blog and megathread sections to be more polished.

There might be a performance hit thanks to everything being stored in the filesystem rather than in a database, but direct file access allows a lot of flexibility. The other big downside to DW is it's very much not "batteries included". You probably need at least a few plugins to get it up to speed with some of MW's features, like page categories (tags) and listing wanted and orphaned pages.