Pssst, did you know you can STILL order from society6 and have FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE?
Give it a chance and check out official Female Armor Bingo merchandise that you can buy here 😉
~Ozzie
Female Armor Bikini USAGE INSTRUCTIONS and 3500+ followers!
Because I didn’t predict my Female Armor Bingo (and Female Armor Rhetoric Bingo) to blow out enough to get news coverage, I never expected writing copyright instructions to them would be necessary.
But there we are, so for the future reference, with HUGE THANKS to invaluable wincenworks for helping to write all of this up, I present to you official rules and terms of Female Armor Bingo.
The rules, as well as both bingo cards, are from now on easily accessible from the sidebar on the left.
Please go read them whole before downloading the copy of bingo cards and playing with them. Below’s an excerpt of the initial paragraphs regarding the most general rules:
These cards are intended only for personal use. If you wish to use them commercially or incorporate them or a derivative product into a commercial product – please contact Ozzie Scribbler on Tumblr orDeviantArt.
You’re free to use the Female Armor Bingo and the Rhertoric Edition card to critique, snark, assess or judge any commercial creative works intended for mainstream consumption. However, please assure you do not alter them in any way that obscures or removes credit from the original creators.
If you share your marked up bingo cards on Tumblr we encourage you to tag them with “female armor bingo” so that we can find them.
Do not distribute the bingo cards by starting a new post, emailing them out, rehosting them or otherwise setting them up in a location away from Bikini Armor Battle Damage. If you wish to share them with other people please use thumbnails and links to the cards at either Bikini Armor Battle Damage onTumblr (Rhetoric Edition) or Ozzie Scribbler (Rhetoric Edition) on DeviantArt.
On the other news, you guys gave me a great birthday present by reaching 3500 follower count on April 5th 🙂 THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
~Ozzie
New moderator
As I mentioned before, for almost 13 months BABD was a one-woman project done in my free time, but with the sudden surge of popularity, due to Female Armor Bingo’s popularity (thanks to many factors, like reblogs from Anita Sarkeesian, Matt Rhodes controversy and geek media coverage in general) it can no longer be so.
Bikini Armor Battle Damage always took being as professional as possible as its big priority, and with 3k + followers it is expected to maintain a regular blog schedule, which I can not do on my own (real-life stuff).
With that in mind, from now on I share moderating duties in here with wincenworks who’s been a friend to the cause for a long time and with whom I co-moderate Disqus comments on eschergirls.
Please give a warm welcome to the new mod!
~Ozzie
Female Armor Bingo media coverage
Good news: my Female Armor Bingo (and its rhetoric spinoff) got featured on a few popular geek sites, including Kotaku and MarySue.
Bad news: no-one asked me about it.
I absolutely appreciate the rise of my work into virality and am very satisfied with how all the articles I found are well-worded and supportive of my cause, but… once I found out last night, I had to personally contact every one of them and ask to edit the contents, so that they won’t feature full-res version of my graphics and would link back to the bingos on tumblr and deviantArt.
All the editors were super cool about it and adhered to my requests (sadly, two of the articles got deleted altogether, which was the least preferred option to me personally).
I’m grateful that everyone apologized, but the fact that I had to ask for this apology was very unprofessional of them.
All of that trouble could be avoided, though, if they contacted me before publishing the articles.
Let’s make it clear why I wasn’t 100% okay with the way things got done before my intervention:
- My graphics were published in full resolution – for everyone to take without the need of visiting my original tumblr (1, 2) or deviantart (1, 2) posts.
That both steals traffic from my sites and leads to random people downloading and reposting my work without credit (FYI: on tumblr the only acceptable form of credit is reblogging the original post, not reposting it as a completely new thread!). - Even though pretty much every article properly credited me as the creator (and linked to my dA profile), many did not link directly to where the original versions of the bingo cards can be found (why it is bad, see above).
- Every site that reported on my bingos gets ad revenue for the views. Considering my images were used in their entirety as part of the articles, it constituted to these sites making money off my graphics.
As far as I’m familiar with copyright law (and as professional artist I need to know the basics), putting my whole full-res graphics in there does not count as quotation or fair use. That’s why I asked every site to replace the images with low-res thumbnails and/or with direct links to where they can be originally found.
As much as I’m grateful the contacted sites changed the articles to suit my requests (even though apparently I won’t see a dollar for the time my full-res work WAS featured), I have to say some peculiar arguments were raised as explanation to using my graphics…
Suggestions that some “news value” makes my work fair use or that I, by putting credit on those bingo cards, encourage sharing of the images around the internet (I do, but not for commercial purposes!). Someone else tried to put the onus on me by claiming I didn’t left any usage instructions, as if “contact the writer and respect copyright” rule didn’t go without saying.
Inspired by that, I will write down usage instructions for my Bingo cards in a separate post and will update the original posts with it as well.
PS: I’m surprised that I haven’t heard of this coverage from my followers. Chances are, some of the newest ones found out about BABD from Kotaku but never mentioned it. Of course you guys aren’t required to message me about how you found me (that would be incovenience to everyone, including me). It’s just unfortunate with such big chances, no-one asked me “Have you seen what MarySue wrote about your bingo?”
Edit: Post Scriptum edited for clarity. Sorry for wording it as if I blamed you guys for not telling me. I really don’t. Plus some few minor wording edits. That’s what I get for writing just before sleep.