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First up, the morals of the story:
1) Not all wealth "just lying around out there" is free to claim. Ask whether it belongs to someone else before you start picking it up.
2) Even though someone else has different priorities to yourself, they aren't necessarily stupid or foolish. There's more than one type of wisdom in the world.
3) Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup/tomato sauce (depending on dragon's preference or ethnicity).
A big thank you to everyone who has praised my little fable/parable. I wrote it because I tend to think in analogy, allegory, simile and metaphor, and I was trying to come up with a way of explaining the gift culture of fanfiction writing to someone who wasn't able to understand or wasn't willing to listen to a longer explanation. And yeah, the best example I could come up with was a group of squatters growing veges on the fields of someone else's castle, and occasionally throwing aside a gold nugget in order to clear the ground for their plants.
From there, I pulled in the long-standing fable trope of the town dweller versus the country dweller, where the town dweller thinks they're all that, while the country dwellers are just ignorant yokels. This fitted nicely into the divide between the business-minded taker and breaker types, who seem to think that the world begins and ends with money and that money is more important than anything else ever, ever, ever; and the less materialist maker types, who create things for the pleasure of creation, and see monetization (despicable term) of their hobbies as not being a priority.
The "growing vegetables" thing is because those of us who make transformative works are doing it to nourish something inside us. We do it because we want to, because we enjoy it, or in extreme cases, because if we don't, we get twitchy. It's putting something back, using someone else's stories and ideas as a basis. In the case of Tolkien fanfic, the stories and world-building work that JRRT put in are the ground we're growing our vegetables on - and it's very fertile ground indeed.
On a purely structural note, I'll admit I'm not overly happy with the ending of my little tale. But then, it's based on the real world, and in the real world, we still don't know whether the city boy is going to put down the rocks and let people go back to their farming without argument; or whether he's going to continue on his current course. Said current course does tend to resemble him starting to sing very loud, very rude rugby songs about dragon-slaying, while trying to make his escape with the gold and jewels and hoping the dragon won't notice him.
1) Not all wealth "just lying around out there" is free to claim. Ask whether it belongs to someone else before you start picking it up.
2) Even though someone else has different priorities to yourself, they aren't necessarily stupid or foolish. There's more than one type of wisdom in the world.
3) Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup/tomato sauce (depending on dragon's preference or ethnicity).
A big thank you to everyone who has praised my little fable/parable. I wrote it because I tend to think in analogy, allegory, simile and metaphor, and I was trying to come up with a way of explaining the gift culture of fanfiction writing to someone who wasn't able to understand or wasn't willing to listen to a longer explanation. And yeah, the best example I could come up with was a group of squatters growing veges on the fields of someone else's castle, and occasionally throwing aside a gold nugget in order to clear the ground for their plants.
From there, I pulled in the long-standing fable trope of the town dweller versus the country dweller, where the town dweller thinks they're all that, while the country dwellers are just ignorant yokels. This fitted nicely into the divide between the business-minded taker and breaker types, who seem to think that the world begins and ends with money and that money is more important than anything else ever, ever, ever; and the less materialist maker types, who create things for the pleasure of creation, and see monetization (despicable term) of their hobbies as not being a priority.
The "growing vegetables" thing is because those of us who make transformative works are doing it to nourish something inside us. We do it because we want to, because we enjoy it, or in extreme cases, because if we don't, we get twitchy. It's putting something back, using someone else's stories and ideas as a basis. In the case of Tolkien fanfic, the stories and world-building work that JRRT put in are the ground we're growing our vegetables on - and it's very fertile ground indeed.
On a purely structural note, I'll admit I'm not overly happy with the ending of my little tale. But then, it's based on the real world, and in the real world, we still don't know whether the city boy is going to put down the rocks and let people go back to their farming without argument; or whether he's going to continue on his current course. Said current course does tend to resemble him starting to sing very loud, very rude rugby songs about dragon-slaying, while trying to make his escape with the gold and jewels and hoping the dragon won't notice him.
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(Did not. Know what. SLASH. Was. My brain, my brain, bits of my brain are scattered all over my desk from hitting it so hard.)
Out of sheer sympathy I'd point him at a basic primer about "this is what fandom is, and this is what ficfandom is, and this is what LotR fandom is, and this is how fanfic archives work" ... except there aren't any. It's all a big blurry organic mess, and when we do the navel-gazing part, we don't write it in Corporatese.
I have no interest in watching a young earnest business-dude get the Ogas treatment (because unlike Ogas, this one is young enough and possibly mentally flexible enough to learn), so I'd love to find a way to suggest how he can get through this without hitting the beaten-by-ploughshares stage. But I can think of so *many* ways he could be just stupid and offensive enough to push this into seriously ugly, instead of the laugh-and-point snark that's going on now.
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Part of the problem with everything not being written in Business-Speke is that some of the core concepts involved (such as the whole idea behind a gift economy) just aren't explainable in that language. There aren't the words to explain them, or to explain why the words needed to explain them need to be present. It's a bit like most of the Inuit languages not having any words for coconut milk or tropical fruit, or the native languages and dialects of the northern Australian indigenous peoples not having any word for ice.
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He worked at
Mountain View Chocolate FactoryGoogle; he's simply stuck at the corporate fat-cat model instead of learning anything there. Clearly he only turned on his ears at Facebook.If I wasn't enjoying the show, I actually do have books to recommend. I have a whole class I could actually teach on the subject, especially in an internet environment.
That might make a great post... huh.
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Lesson #1: Don't waltz in to other people's place and think your way is automatically better. They probably have very good reasons for doing things their way.
Lesson #2: Learn why they do things their way before you suggest - not impose - changes.
He sets off too many of my Stupid White Boy alerts at the moment. If he manages to learn a thing or two I'd count it a happy exception but I can't help being watchful and wary.
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http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2081784,00.html