There’s nothing quite like Cookie’s Bustle, a computer game released by Japanese developer Rodik in 1999.

The game has built a cult reputation over the last few years because of its unusual, genre-defying content, which is too complicated and confusing to summarize accurately in one sentence. But we’ll try anyway: You play as a 5-year-old girl from New Jersey, who enters an international sports competition that becomes engulfed in civil war and intergalactic intrigue.

A few years ago, the Video Game History Foundation was donated a rare physical copy of Cookie’s Bustle by multimedia researcher Misty De Méo. We are excited to preserve this rare and artistically unique game as part of our collections.

Because Cookie’s Bustle has been out of print for nearly three decades, we documented the packaging and physical materials of the game in our digital archive for research purposes. Since we are unable to share controlled research access to the game itself, we have also provided access to a video demonstrating the gameplay of Cookie’s Bustle, recorded by community member sebmal. We hope these resources are valuable for researchers who want to understand more about this remarkable game.

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Unfortunately, our efforts to document Cookie’s Bustle were impacted by the actions of an aggressive copyright troll. An individual going by Brandon White, or using the corporate name Graceware, SL, has repeatedly sent DMCA takedown notices to the Video Game History Foundation (via the trade association Ukie) over our legal use of materials related to Cookie’s Bustle.

We were not alone in this problem. Since 2022, a number of websites and individual creators have received frivolous takedown requests on behalf of Graceware, covering everything from Let’s Play videos and fanart to simply mentioning the title of the game.

Although Graceware’s actions against us were incredibly disruptive, we saw this as an opportunity to get to the bottom of what was happening.

We looked into it with our legal team, and we do not believe there is any proof that Brandon White actually owns Cookie’s Bustle. He has never been able to produce legally meaningful evidence that he owns any enforceable rights to any part of this game.

We are happy to report that after bringing these facts to Ukie’s attention, Ukie has suspended takedowns for Cookie’s Bustle on behalf of Graceware, SL. This is a big victory for the gaming community, hopefully bringing an end to a rights-squatting campaign that has dragged on for years.

In consultation with our counsel Albert Sellars LLP, we’ve decided to share everything we learned about the rights to Cookie’s Bustle and White’s actions. We hope that documenting the facts of this situation will prevent further abuses of copyright law—and empower creators to stand up for their rights.

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Cookie’s Bustle was published in 1999 by RODIK, Inc. and is currently an orphan work.

The game was published in 1999 with a statement attributing the copyright to RODIK, Inc. The game was only published and copyrighted in Japan. To our knowledge, the game has been out of print since its original release.

The status of RODIK and the ownership of its rights are currently unclear. This makes it likely that Cookie’s Bustle is an “orphan work”, a copyrighted work where the owner is either unknown or cannot be located.

Someone named Brandon White claims he owns Cookie’s Bustle.

Starting in 2021, an individual going by the name Brandon White began taking actions over the intellectual property rights associated with Cookie’s Bustle, including claiming copyright ownership and filing trademark registrations. In some cases, he has used his personal name. In others, the filings were made under the corporate name Graceware, SL. While there is no explicit connection between these two entities, takedowns sent on behalf of Graceware cite Brandon White as the copyright owner.

We don’t know who Brandon White is, where he resides, or what his relationship is with RODIK, Inc. Some of the documents he cites claim that he is based in Japan, while the business information for Graceware, SL points to a fake address in Andorra.

Graceware has no meaningful footprint online or offline and, to our knowledge, has never provided any products or services. The most likely interpretation is that Graceware is a shell company for whoever Brandon White is.

We are skeptical that the owners of RODIK, Inc., a studio that primarily produced fortune-telling software based on traditional Japanese divination techniques, would sell their library to a borderline anonymous holding company that claims to operate in Europe. However, if Brandon White did acquire the rights to Cookie’s Bustle, he should easily be able to produce more information about his ownership of the game.

We’ll come back to that later.

Graceware has a history of sending spurious takedowns related to Cookie’s Bustle.

The sole output of Graceware has been an avalanche of content takedown notices related to Cookie’s Bustle, issued under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These takedowns have been large in number and indiscriminate in nature.

From what we have seen, Graceware has sent takedown notices in response to:

• Playthrough videos and livestreams showing Cookie’s Bustle gameplay, with and without commentary.^1,2,3,4
• Screenshots, imagery, and short clips from Cookie’s Bustle.^5,6,7
• Fanart of the character Cookie Blair.^8,9
• A community-made add-on for Cookie’s Bustle that adds English-language subtitles.¹⁰
• Discord chat messages discussing the content of Cookie’s Bustle.¹¹

1. YouTube, “Your video has been taken down from YouTube: Windows 95 CD-ROM Showcase (Cookie’s Bustle and more!) (4-17-19),” received by Danny Cowan on October 17, 2022. ︎
2. Twitch, “You have received a copyright takedown,” received by Danny Cowan on January 6, 2023. ︎
3. Vinesauce stream of Cookie’s Bustle, January 22, 2023, no surviving hyperlinks (reuploads removed due to copyright strikes: 1, 2); corroborated by Damiano Gerli, “The Quest To Save Cookie’s Bustle From Obscurity,” Time Extension, April 8, 2024. ︎
4. Mumith Ali, “[VGHF Digital Archive] New message from Mumith Ali,” received by Phil Salvador and Kendra Albert on December 9, 2025. ︎
5. ClassicsOfGame, “Classics Of Game 134” [YouTube video], uploaded circa 2019, removed due to copyright strike circa 2022. ︎
6. Takedowns to The VG Resource website network corroborated in personal communications with Daniel Brown (Dazz), January 5, 2026. ︎
7. Twitter Support, “Case# 0334567779: We’ve received a DMCA notice regarding your account [ref:00DA0000000K0A8.5004w00002lmEJx:ref],” received by Misty De Méo on August 4, 2023. ︎
8. Takedowns to The VG Resource website network corroborated in personal communications with Daniel Brown (Dazz), January 5, 2026. ︎
9. Takedowns to defunct social media platform cohost corroborated in personal communications with jae kaplan and Misty De Méo, January 28, 2026. ︎
10. “Bluesky Bot Account – Suspended By Brandon White,” Romhack.ing, December 19, 2025; corroborated by Damien McFerran, “Romhack.ing’s BlueSky Account Gets Suspended Over Cookie’s Bustle English Patch,” Time Extension, December 19, 2025. ︎
11. Elias Daler, “Just got hit by multiple DMCA strikes by talking about Cookie’s Bustle on Discord,” posted on X, February 3, 2026. ︎

Most of these cases would obviously be fair use and should not have been subject to takedowns.

The speed and aggressiveness of these takedowns was unusual, even within the video game community. Several YouTube videos (1,2) have documented this behavior; these remain some of the only videos of Cookie’s Bustle that are still available on YouTube.

We have not been immune from this either. Since last year, the Video Game History Foundation has received three takedown notices from Graceware for materials related to Cookie’s Bustle in our digital archive.

In the most egregious example, we received a takedown from Graceware pointing to a webpage describing that we own a copy of Cookie’s Bustle. This page explicitly says that the game files are “Not Available” and does not show any copyrighted material—even images—yet it was still targeted for a takedown. Graceware seems to be suggesting that non-profit archives even describing the existence of the game Cookie’s Bustle is copyright infringement. This position would almost certainly be shot down in court.

Every takedown notice from Graceware has asserted that they are the owners or exclusive licensees of Cookie’s Bustle. Until now, the validity of these takedowns has not been closely examined.

We intend here to break down the facts of Graceware’s claims and the pattern of their behavior.

Brandon White’s “copyright registrations” are legally meaningless and do not confer him any rights to the game Cookie’s Bustle.

Graceware’s main support for their takedown notices has been a series of registrations filed by Brandon White through INTEROCO “Copyright Office” in 2021. These “registrations” claim ownership for a variety of aspects of Cookie’s Bustle, including the source code, game concept, and character designs.

Before we go any further, our lawyer wanted us to explain a little background about how copyright law works and why that’s relevant in this situation.

Copyright law is territorial, which means that rights are specific to the country where a work was published. However, through treaties like the Berne Convention, most countries have standardized around the same rules. In countries that are a party to the Berne Convention (which includes the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan), copyright protection exists for a work from the moment it is created. You don’t need to file anything to secure those rights!

However, copyright registration can gain an author additional rights. In the United States, it’s required that you register a work with the United States Copyright Office before filing suit against another party for infringement. Additionally, registration can serve as proof of ownership of a copyright interest, which is what Brandon White was using the “registrations” for here.

But here’s the thing: These are not real copyright registrations, and INTEROCO is not a government agency.

INTEROCO is a private company in Germany that bills itself as a “full-automated electronic depository.” It is effectively a digital version of mailing yourself a letter to get it date-stamped by the Post Office, a comparison that INTEROCO explicitly makes on their About Us page.

In theory, authors and creators could use INTEROCO to prove that they published a work on a specific date. However, it would be absurd to claim that depositing a copy of a work that’s already been published means that you own the rights to it. It would be like mailing yourself a cartridge of Super Mario Bros., then claiming the postmarked envelope is proof you control the copyright to Super Mario Bros. A deposit on INTEROCO for a previously copyrighted work—such as the ones made by Brandon White—is effectively meaningless.

To prove our point, we attempted to register our own copyrighted works with INTEROCO, just to see how the process worked. Then things got weird.

As we expected, we were able to register an account on the INTEROCO website without any oversight from their staff. This appeared to grant us editing privileges on their site, including access to an interface that would have allowed us to create our own entries for copyright deposits (see image below). But then, after we filled out a separate “Order” form on the INTEROCO website, we were connected to a third party in Dubai who attempted to call us using WhatsApp; they claimed that registration was not automated and actually cost $12,000 per item. We could not verify the authenticity of these emails.

INTEROCO does not list an abuse policy and did not respond to multiple requests to their support email for information about how they handle fraudulent deposits. The third party in Dubai claimed that INTEROCO does not verify registrations and deflected responsibility for questionable copyright registrations on their website to law enforcement.

This all suggests that INTEROCO is not a reliable source. Not just for copyright, but for anything, really.

Several community members have pointed out that Brandon White’s deposits on INTEROCO do seem to include unique art assets and source code related to Cookie’s Bustle. However, these do not prove ownership of the game’s copyright. There are many reasons why someone might have these assets. For example, the VGHF Library has high-resolution art and development assets from Tomb Raider III. This does not mean that we own the copyright to Tomb Raider III.

When issuing takedowns, Brandon White has pointed to the INTEROCO “copyright certificates” as his proof of ownership for Cookie’s Bustle. If White does actually own the rights to Cookie’s Bustle, these deposits do not show that. However, it’s understandable that these “registrations” caused confusion. If you don’t know the specifics of how copyright registration works, you might assume that an official-looking source like INTEROCO is a reliable indicator of who owns the rights that are listed. It’s not.

Brandon White’s trademark applications have not been approved and do not confer him any rights to the game Cookie’s Bustle.

Graceware, SL has also applied for trademarks in the United States to use the name “Cookie’s Bustle” on a variety of products, including computer games, board games, clothing, and assorted merchandise. Although we haven’t seen Brandon White or Graceware cite these in DMCA notices as proof of ownership, we’ve seen these applications come up in discussions about the rights for Cookie’s Bustle, so we want to explain what they actually mean.

In short, not only are these trademark applications currently unenforceable, they also do not indicate any other ownership rights related to Cookie’s Bustle.

The “Cookie’s Bustle” trademark applications were made with “intent to use,” meaning the mark is not actually being used yet. The US Patent and Trademark Office considers an ITU application to be “pending” rather than “registered.” Until a trademark is actually being used in commerce for the products or services described, an ITU trademark application is basically just a placeholder. It gives the person who registers an earlier first usage date, but nothing else.

Graceware applied for these trademarks in December 2022. Since then, they’ve had to file four extensions on their deadline to prove that they have actually used the name “Cookie’s Bustle” in commerce. Which, to our knowledge, they haven’t.

Currently, all Graceware can do is prove that they applied for these trademarks. Until they begin to actually produce products with the “Cookie’s Bustle” mark, these applications do not grant them rights to the name.

Additionally, while this is often misunderstood by the public, trademark registrations have no bearing on copyright ownership. If a trademark expires, it’s possible for anyone to apply for it, regardless of the other rights that may be associated with it.

In fact, this happened recently in video games! In 2024, a homebrew developer registered the trademark for Tengen, which was previously used by Warner Communications as the name for their long-defunct home console game publishing brand. Although he can now use the name Tengen for his business, this does not grant him ownership of any other rights associated with Warner’s use of Tengen or the games published under that brand.

The same logic applies here. The original trademark for the name “Cookie’s Bustle” by RODIK, Inc. expired in 2001. Graceware applied for the trademark in 2022 using the service OnlineTrademarkAttorneys.com. This process does not prove any ownership of the game Cookie’s Bustle.

Brandon White abuses cheap legal resources to send nuisance takedown requests in bulk.

Based on everything we’ve seen, Brandon White has used low-cost services to make minimally persuasive ownership claims for IP that he may or may not actually have any rights to. This strategy extends to the method that White uses to make his takedown requests: by exploiting cheap, abusable resources that have little oversight.

Graceware’s takedown notices are filed on their behalf by Ukie, the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment. Ukie is the United Kingdom’s largest video game trade organization, representing and providing professional services for over 2000 member companies. One of those services, according to Ukie, is free takedown requests for infringing use of copyrighted materials. Graceware is a member of Ukie and appears to use that service.

This service is run by Ukie’s IP coordinator Mumith (Mo) Ali and his IP management company Web Capio. Ali and Web Capio are the originators of takedowns sent out by Graceware, often being named interchangeably with Ukie.

As official as it sounds to have a major trade organization sending takedowns for Graceware, the barrier to joining Ukie and using their legal services is shockingly low. Membership in Ukie costs less than £1000 per year for small companies. So if you have £60 a month, it looks like you can get the UK’s largest gaming trade organization to send free takedown notices on your behalf.

Additionally, while Graceware is a member of Ukie, there are some peculiarities about their membership. Their listing in Ukie’s membership database is misspelled as “Gracewear,” and their listed website, Gracewear.net, was last used by a streetwear company in Los Angeles in 2019 and is currently empty. This is not what you would expect from a company that is, in theory, trying to join a professional community and bring their products to market.

Misusing a trade organization’s legal resources like this is such an unusual strategy that it would be surprising if anyone at Ukie ever suspected something was amiss here. However, if a lawyer, or indeed any person, was engaging in manual review of the DMCA takedowns they were sending, they should have noticed some of these irregularities. 

Web Capio has advertised “automated takedown notices” that are not verified by a human.

One reason these irregularities may have gone unnoticed is because of the method that Web Capio (now doing business as Obviously) uses to send DMCA notices.

Web Capio offers “real-time” IP protection services as a frontline defense against piracy and data leaks. By “real-time,” what they mean is that they scrape the web for potentially infringing content and, according to their marketing materials, send out “automated takedown notices.”

Notably, they have bragged that compared to other takedown services, they do not require the majority of their takedowns to be verified by a human.

In other words, Web Capio uses bots to send bulk takedown requests to websites, seemingly without confirming whether they are valid or appropriate. This would explain the large number of spurious takedowns related to Cookie’s Bustle that have been reported.

This behavior is not limited to Cookie’s Bustle. Searching for “Web Capio” brings up a litany of examples of materials being abruptly removed due to a notice from the company (some valid and some not), including an attempt to take down a website for using the words “beatles” and “help” together (p.65). Mumith Ali has publicly spoken about using Ukie’s “clout” to justify sending “hundreds, if not thousands” of takedown notices to individual websites—an appropriate response to mass piracy, but totally inappropriate for the circumstances involving Cookie’s Bustle.

The form-letter takedowns sent by Web Capio on behalf of Graceware—made in Ali’s name under penalty of perjury!—may never have been vetted by anyone practicing law. Ali did not respond to a question from VGHF about whether a lawyer is involved in reviewing claims before they are sent on behalf of Ukie. At minimum, this is irresponsible. At worst, an automated takedown strategy without consulting legal expertise could open Ali and his clients up to liability. In many jurisdictions in the United States, the failure to consider whether a use might be fair can lead to liability under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

Importantly, Web Capio and White have never actually brought any legal action related to Cookie’s Bustle. That would require Graceware to follow up with their own legal counsel, which Ali is not. Based on Graceware’s track record and their apparently limited resources, they may not have counsel at all.

Graceware and Web Capio target weak points in the DMCA process.

Based on all the evidence we’ve shown here, we believe most lawyers would not take Graceware’s claims seriously. However, the automated takedowns by Web Capio have been filed in a manner that limits the amount of legal scrutiny they have faced until now.

Under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, when a platform receives a takedown for user-submitted content, they are obligated to remove it or face potential liability for copyright infringement. This is why platforms like Twitch and YouTube will automatically remove any item that receives a takedown request. It’s the safest option, because at a certain scale, it is impractical for large platforms to evaluate the validity of every single takedown request they receive.

This is one of the practical weaknesses of the current DMCA takedown system, and Web Capio’s process seems to take advantage of this. From what we have seen, Graceware’s takedown requests have been directed almost exclusively at platforms and service providers.

We experienced this ourselves: In April 2025, we were notified of a takedown request from Mumith Ali on behalf of Graceware. It was not sent to the Video Game History Foundation, nor was it sent to Preservica, which manages our digital archive service and hosts our material.

Instead, Graceware issued the takedown to… Vercel, the web host for our archive portal.

We provide clear instructions for rightsholders who want to request the removal of material in our archive. However, rather than contacting us in this manner, Web Capio’s automated takedown system apparently queried our DNS and sent a request to our web provider instead.

We’ve heard similar roundabout stories from other groups that have received takedowns from Graceware. Rather than addressing the actual websites, which would have the context to identify and potentially dispute an inappropriate complaint, Web Capio targets their underlying services like Vercel, which service millions of users and are more likely to automatically comply with DMCA notices. This has allowed Web Capio and Graceware to quickly and quietly remove material from the internet with little pushback.

Thankfully, in this case, the path of least resistance failed. Vercel took our concerns seriously and did not remove any material or suspend our account in response to Graceware’s takedowns. Since this incident, Vercel has not notified us about any further communications from Web Capio regarding Cookie’s Bustle.

Unfortunately, this still wasn’t the end of Graceware’s nuisance campaign. A few months later, we heard directly from Web Capio, which gave us an opportunity to challenge Graceware’s claims head-on.

Brandon White has been unable to prove ownership of Cookie’s Bustle when requested.

In December 2025, Mumith Ali directly contacted the Video Game History Foundation requesting the removal of the Cookie’s Bustle longplay video. When asked for more information, Ali relayed a message from Graceware, once again pointing to the INTEROCO pages as proof of ownership.

In response, our counsel asked Ali and Graceware (presumably White) to clarify the relationship between Brandon White’s 2021 copyright “registration” and the original 1999 publication of Cookie’s Bustle.

Graceware never responded to that request.

If Brandon White does in fact own the copyright to Cookie’s Bustle, he has not been able to prove it. When asked for documentation to back up his legal threat, he would not produce it. This is not the behavior of someone trying to protect their rights in good faith.

Why would someone do this? The blunt answer is that it doesn’t matter. It is irrelevant whether Brandon White is trolling people or whether he has convinced himself that he owns the rights to Cookie’s Bustle. What we were concerned about was stopping this disruptive behavior—period.

It might seem excessive for us to make a public stand over this one obscure computer game. But this is bigger than just Cookie’s Bustle.

As we reported in our landmark 2023 Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States, experts estimate roughly half of game and software titles released before 1995 have become orphan works due to poor documentation of their ownership. Video games, having been treated like disposable toys for so long, are uniquely susceptible to this problem, more than art, literature, music, or any other medium.

As a result, it is uniquely easy for bad actors to muddy the historical record for video games, to sow disinformation about who owns what, and to interfere with the efforts of historians, documentarians, and archivists—and even individual citizen researchers—to celebrate and understand the history of video games.

This is why we’re pushing back. If we care about video games as art and as cultural history, we need to stand up for our legal right to document out-of-print orphan games, and to confront the copyright trolls who stand in the way.

We did not comply with any of the spurious DMCA takedown notices we received from Graceware, SL and have never removed any material related to Cookie’s Bustle from our digital archive.

The post We’ve freed Cookie’s Bustle from copyright hell. Here’s how. appeared first on Video Game History Foundation.

So, we’ve just shipped Bluesky support for Puzzmo! There are three main components: Matching your Bluesky follows on Puzzmo Making it possible to see other Puzzmonauts on Bluesky Storing interesting data on your Bluesky account for you Follow Matching This feature harks back to an older era of apps where you would log in with Facebook et al to sync your friends to a new account. It’s the sort of system which used to be popular as a way to to let you bootstrap smaller social networks in the 2000s like Flickr, Tumblr, Meetup or last.

For writers chasing a traditional publishing contract, an email from Big 5 publisher Simon & Schuster inviting submission might seem like a dream come true.

Just one problem: major publishers like S&S, which acquire mainly via reputable literary agents and expect manuscripts to come to them rather than the other way around, don’t email random authors out of the blue. Also, impersonation scams are extremely common these days, with fraudsters posing as publishers, literary agents, film production companies, even editors (see my previous post on this subject). Any publishing- or movie rights-related email or phone call that you can’t tie directly to a submission or a contact you yourself made is highly likely to be a scam–and with generative AI infesting every aspect of the writing scam industry, the scams can be quite elaborate and authentic-seeming.

Given the amount of time I spend writing and warning about such things, it’s always funny (well, kind of) when an impersonation scammer tries to target me.

The Bait

A few weeks ago, this landed in my Inbox.

Beyond the two warning signs mentioned above, the email address is a huge red flag. A Big 5 publisher (or, in fact, any other publisher) would be emailing from their own web domain–not a Gmail address. (Gmail addresses are also a feature of a certain type of scam from overseas.) Nor does a publisher like S&S need to tout the benefits it provides as if it were competing for authors (which it very much doesn’t have to do).

I decided to have some fun.

“Tell me more!” I wrote back, in the guise of a first-time author. Within hours, I received an invitation to submit, along with a fairly standard list of information to include. (Another marker of fakeness: the response arrived at 2:22 am my time on February 11, but the timestamp in the header indicated that the scammer sent it at 8:22 am, also on February 11. Since both I and S&S are on the East Coast of the USA, there shouldn’t have been any time difference at all. That discrepancy, with the scammer six hours ahead, was evident throughout our email exchange.)

Here’s what I sent, attaching three chapters of an unmarketable trunk novel donated by a friend of Writer Beware for use in just such circumstances. As you can see, I didn’t try to make it convincing–nor did I delete my signature, which includes not just my personal website, but both of the sites I run for Writer Beware.

This is the kind of query that publishers (or agents) tend to immediately delete. But S&S loved it! Within hours I received–oh joy!–a publishing offer, plus an extremely elaborate “publishing plan” covering all the many things S&S intended to do for me and my terrible book: editing, production timelines, marketing and sales strategy, author platform development, series and movie potential, and much more. And the cherry on top of this very fake sundae: a $500,000 advance, guaranteed to make any newbie author’s head explode.

The snippet below represents less than a quarter of the email, but it should give you a sense of the level of detail. This kind of ornate confabulation costs the scammer nothing, since it’s all done with prompts and chatbots.

The Switch

Naturally, newbie writer Victoria Strauss was thrilled. “This is so amazing! Sign me up!” I wrote back. At which point the “switch” part of the bait-and-switch kicked in (note the ongoing time difference, with the scammer six hours ahead: this arrived at 6:54 pm my time, on February 11).

Wait, what? Novice novelist Victoria Strauss was confused. Why would she have to pay? Wasn’t it true that traditional publishers never required authors to pay for anything? What was going on?

There followed a lengthy back-and-forth, with me asking innocent questions and the scammer trying to convince me that asking me to “invest” $200 to $500 in my literary future was actually a totally normal thing that S&S would do. Throughout these interchanges, they nudged me whenever I took a few hours to respond: how are you doing today? What do you think? Can we move forward with this now? This kind of pressure, along with claims of limited time or limited openings, is a common scammer tactic: they want to hurry you up so you don’t have time for careful thought.

Eventually they abandoned the traditional publishing pretense and admitted that what they were really trying to sell me was self-publishing–apparently expecting me to forget the elaborate trad pub plans and gigantic advance they’d initially promised. (Notice that the scammer is no longer signing off as “The Editorial & Acquisitions Team”, but with a probably fictitious name.)

The prices, which it took them another couple of emails to cough up, ranged from a fairly standard self-publishing starter package for $1,500 to an “elite bestseller package” padded with ripoff nonsense like “full author branding strategy” and “ongoing post-launch performance tracking” for $15,000. Yet another switch, since a few emails back they’d told me I’d be paying $500 at most.

The Reveal

I could have gone back and forth with Zahara/fake S&S much longer than I did (one of the hallmarks of AI-driven writing scams is the scammers’ willingness to engage in near-endless email dialog in order to keep the potential victim on the hook), but I have, you know, a life, and anyway it was no longer interesting.

So I asked, as I always do when I lead scammers on, for payment information, specifically requesting wire transfer instructions, since that forces them to hand over banking information. (Note: you should NEVER do this. Unlike credit card payments, wire transfers can’t be reversed…which is why scammers like them.)

Requiring payment to a third-party, often described as a “financial manager”, is typical of AI-driven scams from Nigeria, which, per the many wire transfer instructions I’ve collected from scammers over the past months, favor accounts with Wells Fargo and to a lesser extent, Kansas City-based Lead Bank.

Additionally, the name on the account is Nigerian; and remember the six-hour time difference? Nigeria is six hours ahead of the US East Coast, where I am. An additional indicator: the +0100 that follows the timestamp in the emails above. It identifies timezones that include West Africa, and is a useful, though not infallible, way to tell where a scammer is really located (since most scammers from overseas have fake US, UK, or Canadian business addresses).

Remember I mentioned the nudging? Fake S&S “followed up” three times in the two days after they sent the payment information (AI scammers often keep pushing for a tedious amount of time, even if you refuse their offers or tell them in no uncertain terms to buzz off). Their final message:

Which Google Translate says means “It’s a disaster”, but the wider internet suggests is a harsh Yoruba insult. So maybe they figured it out?

At any rate, it was time to terminate this small adventure. So I blocked them.

Generative AI is Making Scams Worse

I had fun trolling the S&S impersonator by pretending to be a clueless newbie author. But such scams are no joke. They are aggressive, prevalent, and the use of generative AI can make them extremely polished and convincing–not just impersonation scams like this one, but the highly personalized approaches that are flooding writers’ Inboxes, with lavish details and glowing praise designed to make you believe that the scammer has really read your book.

The goal, always, is to trick writers into handing over money. Though the scammer may not say so initially, that’s the destination they will inevitably arrive at. Any demand for money where upfront payment isn’t standard–which includes not just traditional publishers and literary agents, but Goodreads Litopia lists, self-publishing on KDP and IngramSpark, book club invitations, reading challenges, magazine features, print and radio interviews, and more–is a warning sign.

Hopefully this post has suggested some useful tricks and tools you can use to recognize and investigate the scams that land in your Inbox.

The post Not Simon & Schuster: Deconstructing an Impersonation Scam appeared first on Writer Beware.

🔥🔥🔥VARANG🔥🔥🔥

How to Stop a Dictator. “Democracy is in fact a powerful motivating factor: When people are convinced that there’s a threat to their political freedoms, they can be motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to defend them.”

Believe me, I totally get how the premise of this post sounds: “Everyone knows that the Legend of Zelda series was named after the game’s heroine, but what this post presupposes is… maybe it wasn’t.”

And while it seems like pseudointellectual wankery to ask a question like the one in the headline of this post, I swear there’s something here that’s not just worth interrogating but also that fits with what I’ve been doing with this blog as of late. Basically, I’ve been revisiting things that “everybody knows” in an effort to point out that the thing we all allegedly know might not be exactly accurate. It’s what I did with my piece on the origin of Dhalsim’s name — and to worthwhile effect, I should point out, as it resulted in the solution to that mystery! — but also in the one about why Donkey Kong throws barrels and the one about why Final Fantasy Tactics has two characters named after Beowulf. And silly though it might seem, this post might actually help solve a longstanding question I’ve had about why the Legend of Zelda series is called what it is.

The accepted origin for Princess Zelda’s name is that series creator Shigeru Miyamoto named her after Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the artist wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s come up in multiple interviews, including this 2000 one promoting Majora’s Mask. And while I’m willing to agree that the Zelda Fitzgerald story is essentially true, there are some Miyamoto interviews where the chain of events that lead to the series name are stated slightly differently. For example, the January 1999 issue of the Japanese gaming mag 64 Dream (later Nintendo Dream) features interviews with the creators of Ocarina of Time, and as far as I know, it’s the first instance of Miyamoto explaining on the record how this series got its name.

From the get-go, we wanted the title to be The Legend of Something-Something, and consulted a songwriter. Then there’s this famous author named Fitzgerald who was married to a beautiful woman named Zelda. We thought it was a cool name and wanted to put it in place of the “something-something.” We asked if we could do so and got the okay. That’s how we ended up with The Legend of Zelda. There isn’t really any special meaning behind the name Zelda. 

 

 

Notice how he doesn’t mention any princess at all, just the name of the series. He’d recall it slightly differently for 2011’s Hyrule Historia, the hardbound celebration of Legend of Zelda lore that Nintendo put out to promote Skyward Sword. The idea is coming from a PR person now, but it’s the same basic origin story, just with the suggestion being attached explicitly to both the series title and the princess. 

Of course, the title of the game wasn’t decided right at the beginning. I knew I wanted it to be The Legend of Something, but I had a hard time figuring out what the “something” was going to be. That’s when the PR planner said, “Why don’t you make a storybook for this game?” He suggested an illustrated story where Link rescues a princess who is a timeless beauty with classic appeal, and mentioned “There’s a famous American author whose wife’s name is Zelda. How about giving that name to the eternal beauty?” I couldn’t really get behind the book idea, but I really liked the name Zelda. I asked him if I could use it, and he said that would be fine. And that’s where the title The Legend of Zelda was born.

The way Miyamoto recalls the process in both these accounts is that he needed a name for this fantasy-adventure series, he had a vague idea of what kind of name would fit, and when he heard Zelda Fitzgerald’s name, something clicked. This long-dead wife of a famous novelist had a name that approximated the grandeur and mystery that he wanted his forthcoming video game to have, and in the end it was given to the heroine of the story as well as the story itself. 

What Miyamoto doesn’t say is that he always intended the game to be named for its damsel in distress. The fact that the series is named for a character who plays a fairly minor role in most of the early installments has always struck me as odd — and, notably, I’m not alone in this. Like, really: Why should Legend of Zelda be named for a character who generally only shows up at the end of the game? I’m thinking that this wasn’t the case, not technically. Princess Zelda is named after the series, and not the other way around. And that distinction might seem trivial, but I think it actually answers this lingering question as well as a few more.

For example, if Miyamoto was thinking that he’d name this game after the princess you rescue at the end, I wonder what the title would even mean. Like what, in the context of the first game, is the legend of Princess Zelda, exactly? Well, given the games that would seem to have inspired the first Legend of Zelda, which was released in 1986, I’d guess that Miyamoto’s desire to name the game The Legend of Something-Something probably stemmed from a desire to emulate the influential 1984 Namco game Tower of Druaga (ドルアーガの塔 or Doruāga no Tō), with the Japanese rendering of Zelda’s name (ゼルダ or Zeruda) sounding mystical and fantastical enough on its own, without any connection to a famous real-life woman. Once Miyamoto had the name that sounded good as a video game title — and once he connected it with feminine beauty — it also became the name of that game’s imperiled princess, even if she didn’t do enough in the game in question to merit being the title character. 

To be clear, I’m just spitballing here, and I honestly hate the idea of taking anything away from female video game characters. Especially in the early 8-bit era, they got so little. But it’s because of them getting so little historically that I always wondered if some preliminary version of the first Legend of Zelda perhaps gave the princess more. Even if it was just a backstory that got scrapped from the final version of the game, that might have explained why Zelda was afforded this nicety that basically no other princess of her era got. 

But yeah, if you end up here as a result of some online search to find out why the princess got her name in the title of the Legend of Zelda series, this is my best guess at an explanation.

 

 

Miscellaneous Notes

There’s no shortage of video games released around when Legend of Zelda debuted that match the pattern of “X of Y,” with Y being something that sounds mystical, foreign or feminine — and in some cases all three. Case in point: Wrath of Magra, Legacy of the Wizard, Magic of Scheherazade, Cleopatra no Mahō (literally “The Cursed Treasure of Cleopatra”), Golvellius: Valley of Doom, Return of Ishtar and even the sequel Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Also it’s worth noting that at the time the first Legend of Zelda hit store shelves in Japan, but Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn had been hugely successful movies. 

Alongside Tower of Druaga, another game that is thought to have influenced the first Legend of Zelda is Hydlide (ハイドライド or Haidoraido), which was first released in 1984. The title apparently doesn’t mean anything, really; according to this site and others, creator Tokihiro Naito came up with it after looking at a list of constellation names and combining Hydra (うみへび座 or Haidora) with ride, though I’m not sure exactly why. If it wasn’t meant to mean anything in particular, then it might have that in common with the final word in Legend of Zelda’s title. Remember, after all that Miyamoto himself said that “There isn’t really any special meaning behind the name Zelda.” Tower of Druaga, meanwhile, is named for its villain. This makes sense; he owns the tower you’re ascending. The game is a melange of the mythologies of Mesopotamia, Sumeria and Babylon, and it’s speculated that Druaga could be a mangling of the name of a deity Drauga, but I don’t know enough about this game or these mythologies to weight in meaningfully

I want to return again to Miyamoto’s statement that Zelda’s name doesn’t mean anything special. If that’s true, then it’s a happy coincidence, given how the Triforce would become so central to the series mythology. The katakana for Zelda’s name, ゼルダ, is close that for delta, デルタ. As an English word, delta can mean a lot of things, but the primary visual association we have for this word is a triangle because that’s the shape of the Greek letter. This similarity may not have factored in during the production of the first game, but at the very least it may have been something someone at Nintendo realized by the time of The Wind Waker, as the alterego Zelda uses, Tetra, literally means “four,” so if you are supposing that Zelda = delta = triangle = three, then this alternate persona is kind of delta + one. It ends there, as far as I know. I’m okay with concluding this is a coincidence and nothing more, but I do think it’s an interesting one.

I’m not the only one to conclude this, but the backstory for Zelda II almost seems like an attempt to retroactively explain the series title that was established in the first game. In the instruction booklet (but not the game at all), you learn that the long-ago ancestor to the Princess Zelda from the first game had been put under a sleeping spell by her Little Lord Fauntleroy-looking princeling brother, who had fallen under an evil influence and who was trying to get his hands on the Triforce. Remorseful for putting this princess, also named Zelda, into a magic-induced vegetative state, the prince decreed that all princesses in the royal family should henceforth be named after his still-sleeping sister.

 

 

This would seemingly be *a* legend of *a* Zelda, and I guess it’s enough to account for the series title, although it causes more plot problems that it solves. When Link awakens the sleeping Zelda at the end of this game, it would seemingly make for two Princesses Zelda existing at the same time. And this royal naming tradition never comes up again, although I suppose it would explain why so many different Zeldas exist in so many different games.

“You should name your fantasy game and also its princess after the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald” is such a weird suggestion for anyone to tell anyone, much less a PR guy to tell one of Nintendo’s game developers. I have to believe there’s something to this interaction that’s being left out, but I honestly can’t imagine a young Miyamoto saying that he hasn’t thought of a name for his forthcoming project yet and then some guy in the office just going to town on the virtues of Zelda Fitzgerald. Right? Yet somehow this pitch worked. So very strange.

In looking up the Miyamoto story in Hyrule Historia, I happened to notice a surprising factoid in the following paragraph: that Impa, at some point, was supposed to be one of the bearers of the Triforce rather than Ganon.

The old female storyteller who feeds information to Zelda is named Impa; her name comes from the word impart. Impa, Link and Zelda were guardians of the Triforce. Today, when you think of characters who are connected to the Triforce, you think of Link, Zelda and Ganon, but that started in Ocarina of Time. Originally, Ganon was only a villain in relentless pursuit of the Triforce.

This is such a strange thing to read, mostly because Impa was not a character who existed in the games until Ocarina of Time. Before that, she was a background character only who did not appear in the games but was only mentioned in the instruction manual as a sort of framing device. I actually did a whole post on how unusual it is that Impa transitioned from this to a central, active and sometimes even playable character in later sequels. Based on Miyamoto’s statement, I guess we can conclude that the idea for making Impa a more central character predates Ocarina of Time somewhat, but even then, I’m confused about the timeline. In the original Legend of Zelda, only two Triforces exist: the Triforce of Power, which has been stolen by Ganon, and the Triforce of Wisdom, which Princess Zelda has split into eight parts and scattered them in the various subterranean dungeons throughout Hyrule. It’s only in Zelda II when Impa reveals to Link that the Triforce of Courage also exists, and that obtaining it will break the other Princess Zelda’s sleeping curse. I guess it was kind of a given that something called the Triforce should exist in three parts rather than two, but the version of Impa that explains the third one — which, again, only happens in the instruction manual and not in the game at all — is quite elderly and feeble, so it seems surprising that she’d have been considered a Triforce guardian before she was given a stronger, more youthful look in Ocarina of Time.

Speaking of the Triforce, the Nintendo Dream article that kicked this post off does have Miyamoto commenting on the similarity between the Zelda icon and an identical one seen around the Fushimi Inari Shrine, which is a short walk from Nintendo’s Kyoto offices. He says the Triforce was not inspired by this symbol. It is merely a coincidence.

 

 

That said, it was revealed in an Iwata Asks promoting Star Fox 64 3D that the Fushimi Inari Shrine did inspire elements of the original Star Fox game.