The whole topic of cyber-bullying is pretty big these days. Typically it is associated with teens and sites like myspace, facebook and what not. But in the wide world of the web, it can be pretty easy for adults to treat others rather poorly as well.

This has been a rather huge topic of discussion on Dragon’s Mark, the creative writing and role-play site I own. We have an area for players to talk about a variety of topics, and one of most active in quite awhile is titled No Swimming - Keep Out - and is primarily about how folks treat others, be it on blogs, in chat rooms, or in gossiping with others. And the discussion has spilled over on to at least a few other players blogs that I’m aware of… such as Obviously Pink and If you don’t like what you see here…*

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I own a site called Dragon’s Mark, which is run with the help of four friends. It’s a site, well a group of sites set up for free form role-playing. Basically, a form of creative writing, usually done on a collaborative scale. The forums are generally used to posting of story items written by our site members. These can range from short “play by post” set-ups where two or more players write out a scene together, to much more elaborate stories that make up scenes from the life of the various characters.

Recently we had an issue crop up where it was found that a number of story type postings were plagiarized. The original poster has said it was not intentional, that the stories were purchased from a ghost-writer. That’s really neither here nor there. The fact is, the items were plagiarized, taken from various fan-fiction sources. the OP took most of them down, well, took down pretty much everything they had ever posted. We (the admins of the site) took down some others. The whole thing has left a bit of an open sore sort of feeling with a number of folks.

I do not, by any means, claim to be an expert on this issue, but I have learned a number of things about plagiarism and fan-fiction over the last couple of weeks.

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Ok, dual-purpose posting here.

First, go see Get Smart. I like Steve Carell (I’m glad he got this over Jim Carey). I haven’t gotten in to The Office, but seen some of his stuff from there, seen Little Miss Sunshine, 40 Year Old Virgin, and Dan in Real Life, and soon as I heard he had this role, I knew he would do it justice. And he did. It is seriously too bad Don Adams didn’t live long enough to do a cameo.

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One thing I have not touched on here yet is my involvement in free form role-playing (FFRP). One of these days I probably should. For now, think of FFRP as a mix of interactive fiction and collaborative writing.

I have been involved in FFRP for nearly two decades, after than reading and messing around with computers it is the hobby I have been doing the next longest. A good 90-plus per cent of my involvement revolves around Live RP (takes place in chat rooms). the remaining 10 per-cent is writing, often based on what happened during some Live RP, but also some original stuff.

As an introduction I am sharing something I wrote recently that I particularly like. I am not sure exactly why this one is standing out for me, but it is. Continue reading →