Fifty Shades of Herpes

So recently two Belgian professors decided that they would run tests on the ten most popular books at their local library. What type of tests? Bacteriology and toxicology, essentially meaning that they looked at whether or not one or more of the people handling the books were on something or had a disease or issue that could be picked up with testing.

Why do it? Because science.

(Quite possibly my favorite picture ever of Herbert West, you should check out the original artist here)

Of course one of the most popular books was Fifty Shades of Grey because hey- sex is popular, especially when you can get it in a format that's socially acceptable.

What did they find? All of the books tested positive for enough cocaine to potentially have someone test positive on a drug test. However FSoG had that little something extra:

Herpes.

Yep. These books had herpes on them. Not enough to where you could actually contract it, but enough to where it showed up. It's entirely possible that the herpes on them were of the cold sore variety. Not every person with herpes has it below the waist, after all, and it's entirely reasonable to think that someone could have been touching their face and passing herpes on.

(Like this, actually)

Of course it's far more funny to think that it's the result of someone trying to do the kitkat shuffle while reading their library rented erotica. Gross, but funny. Next time I check a book out from the library, it might go through this process:

Further reading:

*Professors Test Fifty Shades of Grey Library Book, Find It Has Traces of Herpes

Bow Chica Wow No: Universal sues over Fifty Shades porn

Apparently not all is right in Fiftyville, as Universal has their knickers in a twist over a porn version of Fifty Shades of Grey entitled Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX adaptation. I know, creative title, right? My first thought upon hearing this was that Universal needs to lighten up since a porn adaptation of the title is inevitable and from some angles, porn is pretty much the only way you can have a true adaptation of the books without the MPAA going insane.

It's fairly normal for the adult film industry to create versions of mainstream things, normally based off of TV shows and movies but occasionally dabbles in other popular things. They usually slap a "pardody" label on the title and insert a few lame jokes at the expense of the original idea, which allows them to skate by as a parody. It's something that isn't always liked, but is generally ignored and tolerated by the owners of the original product/idea.

The difference with this one? Evidently they decided against the parody angle and straight up adapted book one and parts of book two of the Fifty Shades trilogy. If this is the case then Universal does have the right to sue the company that made the film and keep it off of the shelves. Part of me still thinks it's silly since it won't harm the sales of the movie if it ever actually gets made (which I don't think it will), but another part of me knows that you can't really slide on stuff like this because in the end it's still a blatant copyright violation.

All I know is that the clicking you hear is probably the sound of a million keyboards looking around to see if there is a leaked copy of the movie on the internet. It looks like it was available for a brief period of time, but has been pulled off the market.

Further reading:
*'Fifty Shades of Grey' Porn Adaptation Sued by Universal

Fanfiction for sale: SOLD!

Hi everyone!

I was just informed of two upcoming fanfics that will be getting an official publication. I think this makes it the fourth book in the last year or so that has its roots as a fanfic of one work or another.

This brings up a question that really makes me wonder: is it really right to profit off of a work that was originally based on characters another person wrote? My first reaction is that it's not right, that the characters are based off of someone else's creativity.

Fifty Shades of Grey is one example of a fanfic turned published work where you can see the book's roots as a Twilight fanfic. Ana is Bella, right down to the repetitive lip biting and several times during the story you can see where James drew heavily on the original Twilight series.

Then you have stuff like the upcoming book Beautiful Bastard, also a Twilight fanfic. (The other book, if you're curious, is a One Direction fanfic. Go figure.) I dug a little and found that the book will only have a fraction of the original fanfic in it, the rest of it being rewritten for publication. Of course, James made those same claims, that she rewrote parts of Fifty Shades, only for comparisons to show that the only big change she made was to rename all of the characters. Does rewriting a fanfic make it OK?

Part of me thinks that it's a little unethical to publish fanfiction and get paid for it. Then I did a little research and realized that honestly, it's not uncommon at all to see people base fictional works off of other people's creations. A look at the Wikipedia page for stuff based on Alice in Wonderland shows a plethora of works where people have directly based their works on the various characters. Heck, there's even an adult movie based on Alice, called Alice in Wonderland: An X-rated Musical Fantasy. It's a little hypocritical to say that some artist in Japan can create an entire franchise around Alice dating various characters in the Caroll books, but James can't create three books worth of original fanfiction about Twilight characters and publish it herself.

I do realize that Alice in Wonderland is in the public domain and Twilight is not, but a lot of the arguments about fanfic-ing for profit tend to go beyond copyright laws themselves and usually center around whether or not it's really right for someone to write a work based on someone else's characters, regardless of legality. I'm still mostly unsure as to where I fall on this. Obviously the legal standpoint is shaky on either side.

Here's how the law pretty much stands:

You can write whatever you want about works that are in the public domain as long as you credit the original creator somewhere in the work and do not try to pass off the basic designs as entirely your own stuff. You can pretty much even publish the original work as long as you don't try to say that you wrote Pride and Prejudice. This is why you see so many copies of public domain works from different publishers and companies. It's when you get into specific translations of works from another language or Ye Olde English to modern phrases that copyrights can be claimed. When it comes to stuff that's currently under copyright, you can do what you want when you have permission from the author/owner to do it.

But when you don't? That's when it gets shaky. You can write that you were "inspired by" the story and say that it influenced you, but that your story is your own. Or you can say that everything is a coincidence, as is the case with Jude Law's Repo Men and Repo!: The Genetic Opera. (But to take a look at the two plots, many of us are calling BS on those claims.) If you did base your story off of someone else's copyrighted work, you can publish the work legally if you change enough of the stuff to where you say that everything is entirely your own. This is where it gets really difficult to win a lawsuit if you're the one that wrote the original work that the fanfic is based on. You not only have to prove that the original work was based on your own stuff, but that the characters and situations are so close to your own that it's a copyright violation and not just the other author pulling in common tropes and situations. Most times it's just not worth it in the long run to bring to court, partially because it's so hard to prove copyright violations, partially because it costs so much, and partially because nobody comes out of it looking good.

But the concerns over whether or not it's legally right to profit off of other people's works does not answer whether or not it's morally right. It's easy to say "copyrighted", but like I said above- people often end up arguing over reasons that don't entirely have a lot to do with copyright and everything to do with creativity. There's no easy answer here, that's for certain.

Fifty Shades of WTF: The top 5 most unlikely candidates for the upcoming film adaptation

If you've even remotely paid attention to any of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie hype, you've seen that just about everyone under the sun has been rumored to either be interested in the movie or have been asked to perform in it. Ryan Gosling? He's been asked. Emma Watson? She's supposedly a likely candidate. My aunt's mother's second cousin's roommate's father? He's totally up for the role of Christian Grey.

Here's a listing of some of the more outlandish people that have been fingered as being involved, mentioned as likely candidates, or are interested in the movie in some form or fashion.

Selena Gomez. While it'd be a little awesome to see the white-washing of various book characters go in the opposite direction with the casting of a Hispanic actress, I just don't see her as being really right for the role. Maybe it's because she's too young. Maybe it's because she's too dominant. Either way, the rumor of her being Ana just seems really silly, but since Gomez has already shot down rumors of her being in the film I suppose we don't have to worry about this overly much.

Shia Lebouf. No. Just no. While Lebouf does seem to have the douchebag aspect of Christian Grey down, I can't see him being dominant enough to play Grey. Every time I imagine him trying to top someone, I just picture the other person getting irritated and turning him into a Shia sized floor mop.

Miley Cyrus. OK, so she's been listed on a website as being a likely candidate for the role of Anastasia Steele. I'm now picturing her as Ana to Shia's Christian. It's not a pleasant image and I'm currently wondering if I can self-lobotomize if I shove a pencil far enough up my nose. I know that Cyrus hasn't really acted up that much lately, but I just imagine her wandering around Grey's apartment stoned out of her gourd while Lebouf just sits in a corner and practices being the world's largest wet rag. Imagining them in the infamous tampon sex scene is a little warped because I keep seeing the roles switch around and having Cyrus remove Lebouf's tampon because she's just that much more masculine and dominant than he is. 

Justin Bieber. That's right folks, Justin Bieber. Depending on where you go, he's either up for an undisclosed role or he's been asked to play the role of Christian Grey himself. All jokes of him being more likely to play Ana aside, I'm finding it highly unlikely that the Biebs would be capable of playing a guy that's in his late 20s, unless he's supposed to be playing a teenaged Grey and that character doesn't entirely appear until book three. And yes, I think Bieber could kick Lebouf's butt.

Charlie Sheen. Somewhere, someone has said that he was in the running to play Grey, to which Sheen actually said that he wasn't interested. Sort of. I'm actually a little sad that this one is so obviously false, because it'd be kind of awesome if he was. The producers could put him and Cyrus together in the film and let them "do as they will", resulting in a drunken drug filled bacchanalia that would go down in history. They're already friends, so you wouldn't have to worry about them fighting on set. On a side note, I can see him being dominant enough to play Grey and if the movie was going to be a parody of the book,  Sheen would be their best bet by far. 

Audiobook Review: Fifty Shades Freed by EL James

Title: Fifty Shades Freed (Fifty Shades #3)
Author: E.L. James
Narrator: Becca Battoe
Publisher: Random House Audio
ISBN: 0385360185





I'd had the paperback version of this and I admit fully that I'd bought books two and three shortly after I started reading book one. FSoG isn't exactly Shakespeare, but it has a really fun campy quality to it that I truly enjoyed. Then came book two, which had some fun parts but was sort of overly long and more than a little dull at points. Now I've finished book three and I can safely say that books two and three should've been condensed and mixed into one book. This was really the weakest one of the bunch. It's not helped by the fact that Random House chose the worst narrator possible for this.

When unworldly student Anastasia Steele first encountered the driven and dazzling young entrepreneur Christian Grey it sparked a sensual affair that changed both of their lives irrevocably. Shocked, intrigued, and, ultimately, repelled by Christian’s singular erotic tastes, Ana demands a deeper commitment. Determined to keep her, Christian agrees.

Now, Ana and Christian have it all—love, passion, intimacy, wealth, and a world of possibilities for their future. But Ana knows that loving her Fifty Shades will not be easy, and that being together will pose challenges that neither of them would anticipate. Ana must somehow learn to share Christian’s opulent lifestyle without sacrificing her own identity. And Christian must overcome his compulsion to control as he wrestles with the demons of a tormented past. 

Just when it seems that their strength together will eclipse any obstacle, misfortune, malice, and fate conspire to make Ana’s deepest fears turn to reality.

Where to start with what went wrong with this book? There's a lot of repetition in this book. I know that James might've been writing this in installments and as such, wasn't as aware of how many times she used the same phrases in this book. The constant "Oh my" and "Mr/s Grey" was pretty annoying to the point where I literally had to switch off the audio book because I was ready to toss my iPod onto the ground in frustration. The many slow and plodding parts of the book are further enhanced by it being spoken because it makes it that much more noticeable. There's some decent enough ideas here, I guess, but I don't think that we needed over 500 pages to tell them. It's overkill. There's only so many times we need to go through the whole "Yaargh, I want to bang Christian so badly and he wants to bang me, oh now he's all freaky control freak" thing.

Then there's Christian. I know that this is all new for him and that he might go into protective overdrive as a husband, but he turned into a snarling neanderthal in this book. I lost a lot of respect for Ana, that she kept putting up with him and making excuses for his attitude. No matter how bad his childhood was, that's not an excuse for his actions and I got frustrated that it took so long for Ana to finally start saying "get over it and move on". Even then she kept doing this "oh gee, I guess that all of this is because you were abused/neglected as a kid so it's all OK". She caved too many times and in situations where she shouldn't have. The repetition of these scenes made all of this that much more annoying.

This all might have been easily overlooked if not for the very, VERY poor choice of Becca Battoe as the narrator. Bluntly put, Battoe narrates everything in the same tone of voice with little to no alteration in her vocal patterns. She might have a pleasant and even voice, but you shouldn't use the same tone to narrate a sex scene and a bracelet purchasing scene. It makes everything boring. The narrator also makes Ana seem like a moronic bimbo. I never thought that Ana was Mommy's Little Mensa Maid, but I never really thought that she was as vapid as Battoe makes her sound. Add on the incredibly poor accents and Battoe pretty much strikes out on everything. Especially the sex scenes. I could forgive the other failings, but if you're going to read a sex scene then at least try to make it hot. I blame part of this on Random House because from what I can see, Battoe has never narrated anything with this sort of content in it. If I hadn't googled her, I'd have sworn that this was her first audiobook, but no- she frequently narrates children and YA books. I really felt that Battoe's narration was what put the final nail in this coffin and I can't help but feel that if Random House had gone with a narrator that is specifically experienced in narrating sex (Tavia Gilbert is amazing), the book would have been dramatically improved. I honestly for the life of me can't figure out why they chose Battoe. I think I'd rather have listened to Gilbert Godfried narrate this. Harsh, but I've listen to enough top notch narrations to know that this was a particularly poor job.

If you want to read this, skip the audiobook and go for the paper version. You'll still run into the problems of a lagging plot and overly repetitious scenes but you'll be spared Battoe's narration. I'm really glad that I got this through my local library rather than purchased it because this really was awful. If you must get this, get it through the library. I'd give this two stars except that Battoe really spoiled the narration for me.

1 out of 5 stars

WTF: British charity calls for '50 Shades of Grey' book burning

This just popped up on my Twitter feed and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. It's for a good cause, but book burning? Part of me just instinctively reacts with a "don't burn books" reaction.

The long and short of this LA Times article is that a British charity that focuses on domestic violence is holding a bonfire where they'll be toasting books on the fire in order to draw attention to the issues of DV. 

I'm a little bothered by this because while I understand their issues with the book and I'm fairly sure that most of this is a way to get media attention (mission accomplished, obviously), I'm disturbed at the idea of destroying a book. At some point this is going to be more of a stunt that will might make the general public see the organization as less serious than they actually want to be and would instead become more about whether or not book burning is right than the more important issue, which is that we need to all try to help those who have suffered from domestic violence, to stop the cycle, and to notice the signs. It's just that whenever someone says "lets's burn books" it immediately brings up images and feelings of intolerance and censorship more than anything else. 

The problem is that a group of DJs have tried to do this in Cleveland in the States and it didn't really accomplish much. Once you make something seem taboo, people want to see it all the more. I just hope that in the end the women's group manages to keep this more about the men, women, and children that suffer from domestic violence and it doesn't turn into a big thing that's more about the book. (And yes, men suffer from domestic violence too, and not from other men.)

Further Reading:

*British charity calls for '50 Shades of Grey' book burning 
*UK women’s group plans ‘50 Shades of Grey’ book burning 
*Wearside Women's Group Plan 'Fifty Shades of Grey' Book Burning
*'50 Shades of Grey' Book Burning Totally Backfires