Ellen Marcus

Category: bunny

  • Lady Gaga (as a fish)

    Oil on canvas – 16″ x 20″

    This painting was rejected by a site that accepts stick figures.  I had a hunch I’d have problems selling prints of this painting.  The concept of blocking an artist from selling their own work is absolutely Lucretius…er, no wait, that would be ‘ludicrous’.  If you click on Lady Gaga (as a fish), you’ll find she’s linked to my Redbubble website.  I link almost everything back to Redbubble because I have never had any trouble with Redbubble (ha – it rhymes)!

    The problem is when I try to post my work on Zazzle.  If you click on this word here “Zazzle“, it will open up a window to where I’ve posted her (for the third time).  The first two times, my Gaga-Fish was removed and I was given a “notice.”   I’m dying to know, is my parody (as I would like to call it) not funny enough to be considered parody, in which case, is un-funny satire thrown in the pile with copyright infringement?

    This isn’t the first image Zazzle removed.  About a year or two ago, the Rubik company decided it would be a fun idea to demand that Zazzle remove my bunny image (to your right…as if I really need to give written instruction as to where this image can be located on this blogpost).  In the case of the bunny, I re-titled it from “Rubik’s Rabbit” to something else and changed my key words to remove all trace of the term “Rubik”.  But, seriously, folks, that’s what it is, that’s how I painted it, and my intent was exclusively satirical.  I wonder how much money Rubik really thinks I make off of this.  It’s not a whole lot, I can tell you that.  Legally speaking, if I can’t sell prints of my work, I probably can’t sell the original paintings and that means this society is dictating what I can and cannot produce as an artist.

  • Those Funny-Bunny Comments

    Acrylic on Canvas – 8″ x 6″

    I finally figured out how to incorporate a 3rd party comment section within my blog, and it only took me about 4 hours.  I calculate around 5 minutes to install a comment enabler called “Disqus”, however, it didn’t work quite right.  It took me the other 3 hours and 55 minutes to figure out that deleting and re-applying it to my blog would fix the problem.  *Sheesh!*

    Everything within Disqus worked exactly as I wished.  The only problem being that I had two comment boxes (one from Blogger and one from Disqus) displayed below every post.  One would think that a person in this situation could simply Google things like “two comment boxes” or “double comments” and come up with some fast help to a solution.  This turned out to be something of a false hope.  I reason that I may have made a wrong turn and overlooked the “add this site to Blogger” button, then cut and pasted some Disqus code into a widget I made directly in Blogger.  It is also possible that Blogger’s new interface template messes with the loading of Disqus.  I discovered that when I deleted Disqus and re-loaded it onto Blogger (being sure to use the “add this site to Blogger” button), it reverted my Blogger interface to the older one momentarily.  After all that noise, it worked like a charm (assuming charms really work as magically as they did in the past).  You can now reply to people’s comments on this blog…yay!

    Not that anyone comments on this blog much anyway, but, it’s nice to have a reply button.  Thanks for reading and I hope this bit of info helps some poor soul who continues to see double in the comment section.

    *update* PS: I had a very pleasurable and time-saving experience with the Disqus support team.  Save yourself a headache and don’t hesitate to ask them for help.