If a project that you’re working on is as “above water” as you claim it is, you wouldn’t have to change the name of the project — all while changing nothing else, mind — once you know that people have well-founded concerns with the legality of the project. You also wouldn’t have to gloat that people who worked for the original project decades ago “were happy that you were bringing it back”, because everyone already knows that there has been random support of former employees of the original project since you were touting yours as a “passion project” meant to bring that one back… that, again, everyone thought was being done in a manner that was above water. (I’m not even going to get into the part about “we got invited to an employee party” or whatever, because not even I am drinking enough Kool-aid to make that believable.) Copyright violation is copyright violation. Theft of intellectual property is theft of intellectual property. If you’re making money off of it, which you are via Patreon and have had a previous developer admit to — that the Patreon account actually funds the developers rather than what it was publicly stated to have been developed, which was the project’s server — you can’t claim application of fair use laws, and you can’t claim abandonware on a project that currently has a current version out, which this one actually does (2022 on).

The only good thing to come from all of this is that discussing it with various other streamers caused them to come to the same conclusion (not abandonware, not applicable use of fair use laws, not even actual use of fair use laws, would not be a good idea to continue to be a part of), which is one reason why I bailed from it.

So for those of you that don’t already know this, Amanda “Mandi” Manarin passed away last month.

She was the creator of Kuma Crafts jewelry, which I know that my friends enjoyed if not owned pieces of.

This was announced a few days ago by her husband, and some of her friends that she had gone to conventions with made a GoFundMe to help him more easily be able to take care of their young children as he navigates through what needs to be navigated through to deal with this and to continue to deal with it. Without going into a whole bunch of detail here, her death wasn’t expected. She had been due to open her shop (Kuma Crafts) back up and resume selling the jewelry that she makes, and I’d been wondering where she was at for a little while since I am a fan of her jewelry and wouldn’t have minded getting some of it for Christmas or my birthday two months later. And then I saw the posts that her husband began making to some of her social media accounts letting people know of her passing begin coming up on my cell phone.

I know a bit more about what happened because some of her supporters, myself included, found her husband’s Twitter account, where he had been open about… what had happened in the days and weeks following her death, especially because this put him in the position of having to find childcare to continue to work and suddenly take on all of the parenting duties that both of them had been taking on up until that point. However, I’m not ever going to post that much of it here out of respect to her and the entire situation — I’m also not going to link to his Twitter account or give any hints as to how it can be found. What most people need to know about what happened, the GoFundMe link included, has been included in the posts he’s made to her social media accounts letting everyone know of her passing. It’s still a shocking, sudden thing.