Antipasti

I have a longer post in mind, hopefully it will go up tonight.

I wanted to share this ASAP, though. You will notice two things when you click this link. One is that the page number is 1701, the four registration numbers of the Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701 (and successors A through E. J if you thought Enterprise deserved to be canon*). The second thing you'll notice is that Emily The Strange is a ripoff of a character from the Greatest Childrens' Books Of All Time, Nate the Great.

A word about Nate the Great. NtG was the reason I grew up with a significant desire to become a detective. It was a phase between Fireman and Astronaut, but it lasted for a significant portion of my childhood. It also spurred in me the desire to be able to cook on my own, believe it or not. Nate would always make himself pancakes while pondering his latest case, and I aspired to that sort of self-sufficiency. I guess I managed to do one of these two things, but who knows. I still haven't a clue exactly what kind of career will be waiting for me on the other side of schooling, but goodness knows people won't start trusting each other universally within the forseeable future.

So, to see that a highly profitable character is straight-up pirated from an old favourite? Kind of sad. I mean, there's certainly a sort of irony to it, and I hope that this sort of wanton theft doesn't go unresolved, especially when the US culture industry has been working so very hard to punish those thieves, the pirates. As much as I would love to see the man responsible for this act of piracy forced to settle for all the money he has (it happened to an innocent victim of the RIAA, shouldn't it happen to a guilty party?), I don't think that should be the lesson learned here. I doubt this will do anything to deter the fanatical pursuit of those bent on taking control of all contemporary culture, but I hope more people realize this and refuse to buy in to the bullshit next time they here a corporate fat-cat telling us how "sacred" IP is!

*hint: the answer is no.