Lin-Manuel Miranda and Chuck Wendig (who essentially catalyzed the lawsuit)
Wendig now seems to be insisting that it’s not his fault and he’s sorry and it was just a little smol bean bad tweet that he now regrets
But I assure you, my Bad Tweet — which I posted during a very bad time, which is to say, at the start of pandemic lockdowns, when everybody felt like yellowjacket wasps at the end of summer — was not in any way a contributing factor to the publishing lawsuit. We were trapped in our houses. Things were weird. Everybody was nervous. Writers and artists and freelancers had no idea what was going to happen next. We were bleaching our broccoli and washing our hands bloody. It was fucked up. Sorry.
Holy shit, blaming it on the stress of “lockdown”? We never locked down but getting paid to not risk my life at a pointless job was one of the chillest times of my life, so much so that I still yearn for that time to come back even though I was going through a devastating breakup at the time, that’s how bad capitalism and having to work are. Unless he was locked at home with an actual domestic violence abuser I can’t imagine how he could have been under such immense stress to trigger a lawsuit.
Anyway what was the tweet even? Because I can’t see them at all, not even here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200704020133/https://medium.com/nameless-aimless/the-assassination-of-the-internet-archive-by-the-coward-chuck-wendig-5ffb4677ee49
Good evisceration though: “Chuck is less a writer than he is a mouthpiece for corporate fandom and a watchdog for copyright disobedience. His assertion that he is being attacked by bad faith actors misdirecting their anger towards publishers at him is disingenuous. When Metallica drove Napster into bankruptcy over piracy of their albums, they received due backlash for crushing one of the best distribution networks of the early internet era. The difference here is that Metallica made Master of Puppets and Chuck hasn’t even made St. Anger. Chuck Wendig is less interested in writing than he is in mining whatever drips of profit he can from a desiccated industry.”
And on that note I’ve never heard of the guy, has he actually done anything of notable value? Wikipedia just mentions some Star Wars slop and some Marvel slop as his biggest contributions to culture, which sound like net negatives
His original tweet(s) were replying to an NPR article about IA’s efforts to give people library books over the internet more freely during those same lockdowns he was so upset by.
Does anyone have or could paraphrase his original tweet(s) so far I can’t find them. Love to have them for some sort of archive
