Some of you may remember this wank from last year, revolving around a certain individual who decided to claim he'd 'won' NaNoWriMo by copying and pasting pages from Wikipedia and so on into Word and then using find and replace until it was a 'completely new and unique literary work'.

Well, he's back. With his profile page proudly boasting of last year's 'achievement' thusly:

My debut with NaNoWriMo was in 2008, when I completed a 2.5-million-word draft titled "The President Who Exploded." This work is what I call a “non-linear literary collage.” It consists of materials I mined from various blogs, chat rooms and fan fiction sites. I'm a word rustler. I prowl the talk pages of Wikipedia, the reader comments on io9.com and various venues frequented by anonymous bloggers. I shamelessly plagiarize their words -- even their misspellings and gramatical errors -- then transform the stolen content into a new and unique literary product through a series of computer-assisted modifications (cut-up engines, Markov generators, search and replace functions, etc.) and combinations with recycled content from my own writings. These are techniques I first explored in “Marienbad My Love,” the world's longest novel. Released in 2008, this 17-million-word creation also sets records for the world's longest word, sentence and book title.

Which, notably, is copypasta from his own website. Self-plagiarism must be the literary equivalent of sitting on your hand until it goes numb before masturbating.

Modus operandi announced, he trots into the 'Reaching the MILLION ...... NaNoWriMo 2009' The following exchange ensues:

marienbadmylove: I logged 2.5 million words last year. I'm swinging for 999,999-plus again this time. Let the good times roll!

Kateness: you know I don't think your words count, on the basis of our disagreement last year.
BUT
because the rules explicitly say I can't call you a cheater, I won't, because god knows that rule has helped me in the past, and we'll just leave it at that. If you think it's a win, it's a win (Just kindly keep your hands off any excerpts I may post, and my blog if you're so inclined), and that's all I'm going to say about this.

marienbadmylove: Ah, but how can you stop me? *snip some drivel about William Burroughs*

Dragonchilde (forum moderator extraordinaire: OH NO YOU DIDN'T *cites rules stating why he can't threaten to steal other Wrimos' writing*

marienbadmylove: *more gibberish about Burroughs that is kind of really not applicable in this situation at all*

Rest of responses: *dogpile without explicitly calling him a cheater* The best of which is Angolera's: There's a huge difference between writing 2.5 million words and using 2.5 million words.

marienbadmylove: *disappears from thread*

But where is he now? Oh, here he is, announcing his intention to hit 50,000 words on Day One to give himself a 'little cushion' on his way to the million. Please note he never states he's going to write these words, and is yet to return to the thread to pass comment on whether he is typing these words or using a voice recognition system. Funny about that.

And it's not even November yet...

Edit: Classic response from painkillers regarding the need of someone shooting for a million to sleep: Sleep? SLEEP? sleep is for writers, I'm a conceptual artist I am. ga ga goo goo ga ga, gin gang gooly, see it is the conception of the words that matter, not the words themselves. i don't need to sleep, because i don't use my brain -- for anything.

Son of edit: He reaches 50K!

Bear with me, because this one's been fermenting for a while. Note: no links are guaranteed SFW, given the nature of the community.

( Way back in September, user morilkasstory was posting (really, really bad imo) poetry to the lj BDSM community male_dom, and users were complaining. )

Someone claims to have 'won' NaNoWriMo with 2.5 million words, a feat so fantabulous it apparently requires announcing twice.

Unfortunately, checking out his website reveals that he used a less than conventional technique to reach this count:

In order to compile so many words in such a short time, Leach leaned heavily on the Internet. He generated what he calls a “non-linear literary collage” by mining various blogs, chat rooms and fan fiction sites, grabbing whatever words caught his eye.

“The talk pages of Wikipedia and the reader comments on io9.com were my absolute favorites,” he said. “These are my people. I shamelessly plagiarized their words -- even their misspellings and gramatical errors -- at every opportunity, combining the anonymous messages with recycled content from ‘Marienbad My Love’ and entries from my dream journal. I repeatedly cut and pasted and searched and replaced, transforming the various writings into a completely new and unique literary work.”

NaNoers are Not Amused.

Edited to add the best replies from the forums so far:

yukongold: Plagiarizing other peoples' words is not writing. It's plagiarism, pure and simple, contrary to the spirit of Nano.

Not to mention that your pretense is so thick you could stand on it and not worry about sinking for a good three hours.

Sashimisan: Exactly.

I have more respect for someone who struggled to cross the finish line with 50K of their own words than I do for a plagiarist who filled a document with thousands of pages of nonsense.

sniderman: Next year, I plan to do the same thing for my NaNo. I plan to title it "The Stand by Stephen King."

MrHeywire: You, my dear dirtysockface, deserve to have all your clean underwear burned, your washing machine broken and your water cut off. How dare you claim to be an author when not one word was arranged into a sentence by your miserable self this month!
Even without you, those of us who have done this honestly have still surpassed a total 1.5 billion words, so I have no reason to not wish your word count to be retracted from the totals.

Wishing your head to be lovingly placed in a bucket of cement;
--Me

Son of edit:

MrHeywire's post is deleted, but oh, the replacement is STELLAR.

marienbadmylove: Hey MrHeywire, your post is one of my favorites to date. A couple of people have wished violence upon me, but you’re the first who actually wanted to see me dead (in a loving way, of course). Still, I liked this post slightly better: “But you are using other people's words. I feel that the point of NaNo is to write in your own words.” Here is my point: They are my own words! I stole them, and now they belong to me. That’s what I do. I’m an auto thief. I knock out the driver’s side window, hot wire the ignition and take off for the local chop shop. I file off the VIN numbers and strip out the valuable parts. I bolt various body panels together into a stylistic abomination. I re-spray the thing vomit green, add insulting graffiti along the fenders and hang a crap-scented air freshener from the rear view mirror (to cover up the stench of the dead body in the trunk). Twenty-eight days later, I drive it to the local car show and park it alongside the other entries. Look, people are throwing rotten tomatoes at it. What fun! How will I top myself for the 2009 NaNoWriMo? Here’s an idea: steal synopsis and excerpt texts from the “Novel Info” sections of this year’s winners. Already a story idea is beginning to form… A guy in a government post, who has an entirely contended existence, abruptly and lacking reason, packs his vomit green automobile with objects such as his nativity record, crap-scented air freshener and a severed head in a bucket of cement and maneuvers away.

LJ tags are SRS BUSINESS, apparently. SRS ENOUGH that readysteadystop has HAD ENOUGH and is calling out the rival community, piercing, on stealing her community, bodymod's tagging system.

Accusations of outright theft and TL;DR!

Suggestions that readysteadystop should put on her big girl panties!

"You only want to be made a "tagging mod" so you have mod privileges!"

An accusation that the community only attracts idiots!

TAGGING WANK: HIGH DRAMA.

One of those things where it's really just one person (er, possibly two?) being wanky, but if you love a good plagiarism scandal as much as I do -- most particularly when the accused follows the script so familiar from fandom to the letter -- it's pretty entertaining.

So, Slate writer Jody Rosen is made aware that one of his articles has been plagiarized in a small Texas weekly called the Montgomery County Bulletin, under the byline of one "Mark Williams." Further digging (detailed in that link) turns up many, many Bulletin articles plagiarized from sources ranging from USA Today and The Guardian to (*snerk*) customer reviews on Amazon.

After this draws some attention from Gawker and the Houston Press, plus some sniffing the air catching the scent of a story by NPR and the New York Observer, Bulletin publisher Mike Ladyman is shutting down the paper, taking his toys and going home! That meanie Rosen "truly acts like the rock-and-roll or the music critic" and is guilty of "an attack, an attention-grabbing hatchet job." Even though Ladyman doesn't really deny the plagiarism. It was just inadvertent. Mark Williams meant to be copying press releases, or something.

He does, however, deny the Houston Press's insinuations of sockpuppetry shenanigans. Ladyman insists that Williams is a real person.

Indeed, Williams is real enough to have his feelings hurt, and this is where the plagiarist's script so familiar from fandom gets whipped out:

( Some highlights )

So, this Jody Rosen -- a mean girl (despite being male) in the world of journalism, Y/Y?

(Posted to OTF because it's more to do with the Nintendo system rather than any fandom-drawing Nintendo games.)

So Nintendo has introduced a new "channel" for the Wii called the"Check Mii Out" channel. It's basically a place for Wii users to show off their talents at building Wii avatars, or Miis.

Well, Brandon Erickson at Gamecritics isn't a happy camper. Because apparently Nintendo has implemented this feature the wrong way and too late, and also? Mii plagiarism! Oh noes! ( Brandon writes:  )

( Some of the commenters sympathize. Others? Not so much. )

Small, but tasty. As my husband put it, "Internets: 1; Crying Baby: 0".

Taken from a mousie on wank_report, with some editing by me:

In August, Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden's blog Making Light featured a story about an Australian book retailer whose management (one Charlie Rimmer -- insert Red Dwarf joke here) sent a ridiculously rude and potentially extortionate letter to a small Aussie publisher.

The small Aussie publisher responded with a whup-ass response and displayed both docs in a public forum. As the Nielsen Haydens are editors and a lot of their blog participants are writers, this created a lot of good and informative discussion about the book trade in general and the Rimmer's asshattery.

More than a month later, a "Chris Oliver" shows up in the comments to tl;dr defend and justify Rimmer's Ghengis Khan-style correspondence and management methods. When "Chris Oliver" is called on various asshatteries (sneering at the NH's "double-barrelled" name, for example) as well as his insistence that books are really no different than canned vegetables, he flounces and spawns sockpuppet #1. S1 doesn't fare well either, flounces, and sockpuppet #2 is spawned. By the end of the thread, "Chris Oliver" and sockpuppets are presumed to be Rimmer himself or someone very close to him. (And if he isn't, "Chris Oliver" is a prime example of making a side look more stupid than it did before.)

When Teresa posts an update here, "Chris Oliver" returns for a last pot-shot/flounce. Says Chris: "My cadding days with you are over but I shall possibly keep looking for chinks in some other mean-spirited site and post as TN-H to my heart's content." Oooh, he's going to pretend to be Teresa too! We'll have to keep our eyes open for that.

(I vaguely remember seeing something on the publishing extortion story somewhere on JF, but can't find it in the wank comms or in the lounges. Anyone know where it might be? ETA: found it, sort of. )


ETA: And speaking of Making Light, they've got a new story on a self-publishing plagiarist... only it seems like it's not the author's fault, but that of her scamming agent/ghost writer. More discussion in random_lounge...

ETA2: Good god, the mice on w_r are ridiculously bitchy.

It begins, as many things do, with an idea. Or, more specifically, 300 ideas.

So a guy named Squidi begins an ambitious project: create 300 game ideas. Sadly, the project is cut a bit short at 60, but it's the thought that counts, right?

Among these ideas is the idea of the use of negative space as a game element, which would require the use of black and white to keep it simple. One character would exist in the white space and use the black space as a solid surface, while another would exist in the black space and use WHITE as the solid surface. He explains it so much better here.

Well, somebody decided to take him up on the idea. Here's Yin Yang, a new game from a developer named Nitrome. Squidi grumbles a bit in his journal about the lack of credit given, but doesn't really make a federal case out of it -- until Nitrome claims he came up with the idea on his own.

The Independent Gaming Source sums this up best, and brings some of the wank right to the comments. Note the accusation of libel from the maintainer of the indie game site Jay Is Games. ONOES! Also fun: the "he put it on the net and said he didn't care about credit, he should stop whining!" group versus the "he should get at least a LITTLE credit out of politeness" group versus the "hey, it's completely theoretically possible Nitrome DID come up with the idea on his own!" group. (To the latter, I say: LOOK AT THAT SCREENSHOT.)

Nothing like creative types to bring wank to the table. (Especially if they're game developers.)