One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play’s dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It’s one of my favourites for two reasons:
It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and
Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn’t catch you.
I could have heard an exaggerated version of this, but I was under the impression that this was the primary way the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were published. I was told that troupes didn’t often publish their scripts because doing so meant competing troupes could stage the same shows; official publications were only pursued to gain a last bit of cash off of a play that had been running long enough to lose steam. And of course, if the play wasn’t a massive hit to begin with, there wouldn’t be enough demand from other troupes to justify the high cost of publication.
tumbler’s version of aita needs an official option of Who Fucking Cares (WFC) for those situations where like yeah one or maybe both parties did some kinda shitty stuff but if you’re this riled up about a discord server the last thing you need is more internet opinions in your life telling you literally anything
