Neil Gaiman

Couldn't agree more. Calibre is Kovid's labor of love and he wouldn't be so active on it if it weren't, especially considering there is little to no monetary incentive for him to spend the amount of time he does on it. It's also open source. Literally every whiner has the opportunity to fork it and do with it what they please, but instead, they just want to sit by the sidelines and criticize him for his decisions. As Neil Gaiman so aptly wrote on his blog [1] - "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch". I feel the same needs to be reiterated in this case - "Kovid Goyal is not your bitch". Edit - Ouch, OP, I guess you struck a nerve with the HN crowd by saying it like it is... 1: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

Neil Gaiman wrote something pretty great on enjoying the art of people whose worldview you disagree with: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2006/06/in-wee-small-hours-of-morning.ht… Scroll down to the third question (questions are in bold).

Neil Gaiman says it best. George R.R. Martin is not your bitch. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

That's great to hear. Freedom of speech has always been under attack around the edges where unpopular speech is being considered, so it is good to see a victory come down from the supreme court. Neil Gaiman wrote an excellent article on this subject ( http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speec… ) last december. In it, he mentions some of the issues still facing other countries, most notably the UK. Hopefully they will come around as well.

Reminds of this Neil Gaiman anecdote about imposter syndrome: """Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things. On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.” And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.” And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for. """ from: https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-additional-…

> I would much rather have a system where even the most offensive people are encouraged to speak, and there can be a debate over their bad ideas. Why on earth should we bother to entertain clearly bad ideas? If you're espousing white nationalism or transphobia or something, I don't want you speaking anywhere near anyone you might convince. End of story. "But who says what ideas are clearly bad?" We all do! Neil Gaiman has a great essay called "Why Defend Freedom of Icky Speech?"[1] in which he says: > The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible. The difference here is that my opinion is a scalpel. Everyone's is! There's no obligation for me to treat Milo Yiannopolous and Geraldo Rivera the same, even though they both have political opinions that fall far to the right of mine. One of them is indefensible, and it's not at all hypocritical or unrealistic for me (and millions of other people) to try to take only that one out. [1] http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speec…

This blog post is from another domain, writing, but it’s stuck with me over the years and colored how I see things like open source projects: https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-additional-… It's a story of two Neils dealing with imposter syndrome. Every time I start feeling like I'm just the guy who goes where others point and I didn't actually accomplish anything, I go back and read this. To every new engineer I've worked with who has struggled with self-doubt, I have sent this. I cannot overstate how calming and centering this post has been to me.

Neil Gaiman made a joke about this in 1996 in the novel Neverwhere. Search for "dead channel at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/12/some-days-bears-on-top.asp

Neil Armstrong also apparently suffered from imposter syndrome: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-additional-f…

I'm late to the party on this discussion, but did want to say this brings to mind the similar troubles popular authors can have with their readers. ... and which prompted this wonderful essay/rant from Neil Gaiman "Entitlement issues" (aka "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch") http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

Reminds me of Gaiman's "Why Defend Freedom of Icky Speech" http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speec…

Ah, unfortunately Elena was discredited as a fraud more than a decade ago. In reality she was on an escorted tour through Chernobyl and brought along her motorcycle helmet to use in photos. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/05/fraud-exposed-and-true-thing.asp

A fan asked Neil Gaiman about it and here's the exchange: A fan: "You're either paying homage to Gibson, which is weird because the two books are in different genres and he isn't mentioned in the acknowledgements, or perhaps there's some manner of Jungian collective unconscious phenomenon at work here, in which you have unwittingly mimicked Gibson, or..?" Neil Gaiman: "Or it was a very small joke, essentially pointing out that since what is arguably the most famous opening sentence in SF was published in 1984, the nature of what a "dead channel" looked like had completely changed, from grey static fuzz to a pure dead blue. Well, I thought it was funny, anyway." http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/12/some-days-bears-on-top.asp

Or as Neil Gaiman would have said it: Notch isn't your bitch. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

> Youssef hired Garcia to work on "Desert Warrior", a film that was described as materially different from "Innocence of Muslims". If you are interested in hearing more about the story of how the movie came to be, Anna Gurki (another actor in the film) wrote a letter about it: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/09/a-letter-from-scared-actress.htm…

I fully recognize that Neal Stephenson isn't my bitch[1], and if he wants to work on a new video game that frankly I am neither physically fit enough nor coordinated enough to ever want to play, that's his absolute right. That said, if it doesn't work out, and that causes him to go back to writing novels (preferably solo, no offense to the rest of the Mongoliad team), that's a positive outcome from my point of view. [1] http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

Let our inner knee-jerk selves remember the ``Why defend freedom of icky speech?'' [1]. [1] http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speec…

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html s/George R. R. Martin/Mozilla/g

Why do you try to fill people with a false sense of security Akemi? How do we know obscenity charges are rare? Why should we think it would only apply to 'hardcore' porn? http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speec… Perhaps you'd have people believe that Christopher Handley's circumstances are rare, but perhaps they're but a minority of what we manage to see publicized for what it is. Obscenity laws are seriously problem, a cudgel that can be wielded ruthlessly, and people cow in fear to it as Handley did. It must be confronted.

Not a gray area? The Reddit admins say otherwise, and presumably they would know what they've been dealing with: > Beyond these clear cut cases, there is a huge area of legally grey content, and our previous policy to deal with it on a case by case basis has become unsustainable. We have changed our policy because interpreting the vague and debated legal guidelines on a case by case basis has become a massive distraction and risks reddit being pulled in to legal quagmire. While we're at it, Neil Gaiman points out examples of several of those gray areas: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speec…

This reminds me of Neil Gaiman's "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch" essay, about reader entitlement: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

Neil Gaiman also took a lot of flack when it was revealed how much he charged for speaking engagements. But when he explained his reasoning, I came to see how his high fee rate was justified. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/political-football-in-teacup.htm… Similarly, if Mike is entertaining a lot of contracting requests, a surefire way to filter out the wheat from the chaff is to set a high contracting fee rate.

This reminds me of some unintentional errors. Neil Gaiman recently noticed something on Wikipedia that he had made up in a novel being treated like fact. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/one-book-one-twitter-one-wonderi…

- "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment." - "None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler..." - "F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught." - "Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me." https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ ("American Gods Blog, Post 24" [2001])

Most of the comments here remind me of the famous Neil Gaiman quote, "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch." [1] But I don't think that's the right framing. People buy the first book because they hope there will be a second, even though they haven't paid for that second book and hence are not entitled to it. People use your open-source project because you said, hey, here's this exciting new thing, try it out, so they assume you'd also want to listen when it doesn't quite work as it should. That's not about a false sense of entitlement or callousness on the part of your users at all. It's also not about freeloading, because a lot of those pull requests and issues on Github will be coming from people who publish their own open-source software. Instead, it's about managing expectations, like the post does. Put a big "this project is not maintained" warning on top, and nobody will bother you. Although I do understand that for larger active projects, it can be hard to explain to users exactly where on the spectrum between "don't bother me" and "I'll fix your problem yesterday" you are, and the bigger a project gets, the more likely you'll be to encounter people who enjoy exploiting your free labor. [1] https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

His comments about Matthew Yglesias ("Yglesias, turn off the TV! Write more books instead! Heck, write more tweets, if you prefer!") made me think of Neil Gaiman's blog post [1] about George RR Martin: > George R.R. Martin is not your bitch. > This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now. > People are not machines. Writers and artists aren't machines. > You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you. [1] https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

Every time I see a comment like this, I think of http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html . It should be an even exchange: you pay for the product as it is, not as you want it to be. Yes, when real life intervenes and the 12 novel epic doesn't get completed because the author dies (R.I.P. Robert Jordan) that is a bummer, but even then I find it very confusing when people go "I'd rather not even start reading until the entire thing is done" (and personally I think Sanderson's end to the Wheel of Time was very nicely done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time). To the degree that the world of modern software and release early, release often have trained people to expect a constant treadmill of content I think that is a net negative: if you're worried about the author's pace stop paying and resume when they are done. "what's to keep him or any other author from walking away at that point?" sounds like you expect him to be chained to his desk until his output meets your expectations. "As a consumer, it's bad enough when I'm left in this situation when there's been no money exchanged (such as a series cancelled with the plot mostly unresolved)." just sounds incredibly entitled.

"Without that consent, it is assault." I hate to be contrarian, because by the standards in most cultural spaces in the US I wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but I've traveled enough to know that there are exceptions to the exceptions people are taking with this material when you take culture differences into account. The majority of women in the majority of cultural spaces we on HN frequent of are saying it is assault. In those spaces and for those women it is. However this is not a universal truth. I've lived abroad several times in different places and the behavior of women in certain culture actively promotes/encourages the behavior being promoted by this book. For example, I've lived in Rio de Janeiro (and several places in the US) and there in particular you are expected, by the women, to behave in the manner promoted by this book otherwise you simply won't meet women when going out to many night venues. Seriously, the nice guy approach will net you not one number in a nightclub/dance club in Rio, you actually have to "manhandle" women to enter into a conversation. I'm a decent looking guy and normally don't have too much difficulty meeting women, but when I was in Rio, my US-acceptable "passivity" relative to the culture norm in Rio, got me absolutely no where there. It was only when I forced myself to be physically assertive that women started responding well and flirting back and I started getting dates. With this in mind, I honestly would not be…