It's really important when you're at work to go out there and really give it your 60%. Maybe 35%.

It's really important when you're at work to go out there and really give it your 60%. Maybe 35%.

I started keeping an animate doll around the house. Every three days it learns to be a real boy, which then allows me to harvest its soul. It then loses all its memories and the cycle repeats. My sister says I'm a monster, but I just think it's a good sustainable source of souls. aita?

Thank you

:)

Plot twist: the two boys you're choosing between are polyamorous, but they also hate eachother's guts so you still have to pick one

Sorry but watching them fight gets me off, I'm keeping them both in a jar and shaking it up and down every hour.

One problem I've been slowly contending with as an artist who is attempting to make her living online has been this idea of Friction. In this case, Friction just means anything that gets in the way of a person reading my work or giving me money.

Strangely, these two things are about equally difficult. There are plenty of people who would very much like to give me money, just as there are plenty of people who haven't gotten around to reading my comics but would like to. And the only reason they haven't is because of Friction.

So let's quickly talk about points of friction. Let's say I upload a full comic book for free to itch.io, for anyone to download to any device, and then they can download it at their convenience. Sounds easy, right? Well, no. First, the way they heard about that book was most likely through my tumblr account, which means they first have to click on a link to leave tumblr and go to a different site. That's already a major point of Friction. If someone is browsing through tumblr on the bus on their way to work, or as a means to unwind from a stressful day, they are very unlikely to want to leave tumblr and commit an unknown amount of time to a separate activity. Then that person has to decide they are willing to download the files as presented on itch. If they have an account they have to login. (Although in many cases they will already be logged in.) Finally they will have the pdf, but then they have to open the pdf at which point they will see the document is 186 pages long at which point they might well decide actually this is too much trouble right now and do something else.

And this comes around to why tumblr is actually a pretty good platform for comic artists. If I upload a couple of pages in chunks at a time, people will read them as they scroll by. That's a point of Friction already mitigated. If they liked it, or their curiosity is piqued, there might be enough interest for them to click the link that takes them directly to the beginning of the comic (also on tumblr), and they can then read it from there. Or else they might make a mental note of it for later, and the next time they see a comic chunk might be the time they have a moment to see what my comic is about. All in all pretty painless.

Unfortunately, with money that's less the case. If you think about the first example, it's not hard to see why. First I have to get someone to click on my patreon link. Then they have to make an account. Then they have to add their payment information. All of these are points of Friction that exist. What's worse is the existence of Anticipated Friction, which essentially frontloads all of that work onto the first point. This makes it very very difficult to get someone to click on any external links in the first place.

This isn't like... a call to action or to shame tumblr users for not reblogging posts by the way. That's not something I can control. It's just an interesting problem to try and solve.

Tumblr, buddy, listen to me. This is an unprecedented opportunity. You can snap up all of the pie here, and become defacto internet goodguy easy. All you gotta do is... drop the nsfw ban. Unambiguously. Announce that dicks are back on the menu. You want people subscribed the blogs? You want people to actually use your Post+ function? Porn. Let us use it for porn. The youngins aren't joining this site anyway, you're not competing with tiktok. The vaguely horny 20-40 demographic though? You can have that. You can have all of that. Think about it.

Do you know how many pinup artists alone are itching to come back to tumblr, but dont because of the unclear, seemingly arbitrary application of your nsfw policy? These are insanely talented people who are practically begging to give you content. For free. But you gotta change the policy. We can't keep dancing around this. Just think of publicity. The drama. A complete 180. You'd kill it tumblr. You could make it happen. Please.

Hate to always be the one saying this, but:

No, they literally can't.

FOSTA/SESTA hasn't gone away. Credit card companies are still reluctant or completely unwilling to do business with adult content providers. The app store is still a bitch. Ads are still a necessary part of the website's revenue stream.

People don't seem to understand that Twitter being able to semi-openly host explicit porn, despite being so huge, is an act of fucking wizardry. It's unclear why Twitter gets such wildly preferential treatment from these entities (especially now) but the fact remains that it is preferential treatment. Not just any website can do that.

If Tumblr's ownership (not @staff mind you, the actual owners) was confident this website could be fully financially supported on subscriptions/post+ there might be a shred of a chance that we could get porn back, but people are EXTREMELY hostile to Tumblr's efforts to 'be a profitable business,' so why would they expect that to work?

Yes, the NSFW policy could be hugely improved. It needs to be more clear and consistent. But, for the record, it's fairly obvious that the inconsistency and vagueness are at least partially because A. the moderation is almost entirely automated and B. staff genuinely wants to give us wiggle room to post lewd shit while giving themselves plausible deniability

If you want porn back, stop talking to staff and start talking to your congressmen.

One of my favorite tropes is character with a nasty toxic personality who tries very hard to do the right thing anyway

I like my protagonists sad, tired, bitter, fully convinced they will never get the recognition they deserve, but they still gotta get up in the morning and be a good person

The point shouldn't be to identify for sure 100% what is ai art and what isn't. I keep seeing posts advising one to look out for wonky perspective (as if perspective doesn't routinely trip up even the most experienced artists) or to pay attention to fudged detailing (as if impressionism wasn't one of the most influential artistic movements in history), and I think that's coming from a good place but frankly it's a losing battle. Remember when everyone was on about counting the fingers or counting the teeth, and a week later they had that shit ironed out completely? All you're really doing is giving these people more data points to work with to refine their algorithm. It's just going to be constantly shifting goalposts, and at a certain point real artists are going to get exhausted trying to make their art look as not algorithmically generated as possible. It'll be impossible to keep up.

So what should we do? Honestly, I think old practices are still best practices. Find real artists and follow them. Don't repost art, and dont spread reposted art. If something doesn't have a source, skip it. Support artists you like, either by sharing their work directly or donating. And if someone's work looks suspicious? Maybe give them a second look. See some of their other art before jumping to conclusions.

And yes, that means sometimes, you're gonna be tricked. Some people are going to fly under the radar and pass off ai art as their own. And that sucks, and they're liars, but you can't let the obsession with bad actors police real artists out of their communities, or discourage new artists from entering the scene.

I do think the drunk bassist from Bocchi the Rock has the potential to be a tumblr sexyman but sadly I just dont think she has that kind of penetration

Your sacrifice is appreciated

Checkmate

I really wasn't kidding about that backlog.

Still gotta link all the pages up, and then yeah, you will officially be able to read Wires Crossed on tumblr

...sorry about all of the inevitable scrolling ahead...

OKAY I DID IT

GO READ MY COMIC

I think it's important to remember, as a rule of thumb, if you take advantage of a social service, it actually makes it easier for other people who need that service to access it. Most of the time, when these services get cut, it's because politicians will look at usage and say "see, no one is really using this thing, we can afford to trim the budget for food stamps by at least half". Whereas if you decide to step up and use these programs, even if you feel like you "don't really need it", at bare minimum it's another data point advocates can use to say "hey, look, people are using this thing, this is an important service we are providing, do not cut our funding".

Also, this is kind of a separate but related issue: don't wait until you're literally in debt with no food in the fridge and rent due in a week to look for help. You'd be surprised how many programs are at your disposal. Hell, I just found out to qualify for low-income housing assistance, you only need to make 80% less than the state's median income. (Spoiler: we make waaaay less than 80%.)

Stop thinking of yourself as temporarily embarrassed middle-class. If you're poor, you're poor. Check online, check your local library, get some help. Don't wait until you're on death's door to learn this stuff.

Had a dream that wizards of the coast replaced elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings with a sort of giant cannibalistic frog, and their section of the players handbook took up 800 pages

According to the rules, if you wanted to play one the DM first had to run you through an incredibly difficult pre-written solo adventure (this accounted for a few hundred pages of the section) where your frog decided to escape the mega-dungeon that the unrepentantly evil frog civilization was based inside of. If your character died or was unable to escape the dungeon for any reason, it would be eaten by its clan members and you weren’t allowed to play as a frog guy.

In total the phb was 15,000 pages long and I desperately wish I could have seen more of it.

Frog Escape Attempt #13: Despite the gruesome demise of my previous incarnations, I begin my adventure with a song in my heart and a spring in my step.

If you want to see more exciting & interesting queer art you're going to have to support independent queer creators and look at the stuff they make.

Y'know how The Owl House is such a great show, but they put one trans character and one lesbian romance in there and the Mouse was like "nah" and tried to hamstring the entire thing?

Imagine, if you will, a world where the Mouse just isn't involved at all

That world exists already in a thousand thousand beautiful variations. You only haven't heard of it because none of us have the budget for marketing.

I had a conversation with an anarcho-sybdicalist friend about whether The Owl House was moral because of the way it was produced and who is profiting from it. And it hit me as we talked that, for me at the time, the medium of animation was a large portion of the enjoyment of TOH. And that got me thinking about how difficult it is for indie queer creators to gain any foothold. Because, I can write a queer and trans novel, but it's not going to reach the same audience as TOH, not just because of marketing, but because I cannot leverage entire animation studios to put my story in a medium people want to engage with.

This isn't a "touch grass" message about how people should stop watching kids' cartoons to get queer stories, but it is sad to realize I had so easily fallen into the trap of thinking an animated queer story was inherently more entertaining than a novel or comic or any other more democratized medium.

Animation can be democratized, but it's got the same problem as AAA video games. Both games and animations studios leverage their power and resources to make "the best of the best". Artistically, it sets the bar of quality to a degree that no indie animation group could ever compete with - in terms of length, finished art, voice acting, sound design, etc. We have no problem watching poorly filmed tiktok videos done on cellphones, but almost no one consumes animatics: an early cut of a storyboarded animation with sound, usually in black and white, with no animation break downs. Animatics are like single pictures with dialogue over them, and the pictures don't move that much.

People also don't watch black and white animation, which is much easier to make. Or boiled line/sketchy animation.

Everyone could be watching amazing queer animated stories if you all got into art where the hand of the artist is visible. Commercial entertainment works hard to erase the thousands of hands that go into it, and the expectation in animation is that the artist isn't present at all. Democratized art means accepting and expecting the artist to be present in the roughness of the presentation, including their skill weaknesses. If you can accept awkward, unedited grammar in indie writing (I've read some fanfiction, you all put up with a lot), and terrible lighting/sound in a tiktok video, then ask yourself why you don't accept raw animation or video games. You're missing out.

#Yeah: this is a fair and important point#I mean: you def dont want to take it so far that it turns into a personal responsibility/ethical consumption argument#which it ISNT tbc#but accepting lower production for the sort of stories we WANT is worth doing#Hell: That was CENTRAL to the early Webcomic fandom tho we didnt think of it like that at the time#and a community welcoming of ~Shitty Art~ leads to SO MUCH amazing experimentation#Like: That's where Homestuck came from

Honestly, if you want my hot take, the obsession with always ramping up production value is one of the worst things to happen to mainstream art and the fact that it bleeds over into outsider art as much as it does is a tragedy. To me it's not even "accepting lower production for the sort of stories we want is worth doing," it's more "accepting lower production is a vital step towards falling in love with art that actually has a soul and isn't just bloodless corporate drivel."

Imo, a community being welcoming of "shitty art" does lead to amazing experimentation, but it also leads to art that's actually good.

It was briefly mentioned, but I do want to say the indie cousin of a full fledged animated tv series is the webcomic. Animation, specifically, is incredibly labor intensive even in its simplest form. Think about those flash animation projects from the earlier internet days. How many of them are longer than five minutes? Without a studio, time, and money (animators deserve pay), the types of stories you can make are incredibly limited. The closest we've come to indie animation in the same realm as The Owl House would be Cartoon Hangover (Bravest Warriors, Bee and Puppycat), which hasn't put anything out since 2018, or Roosterteeth (RWBY, Red vs Blue, and a few other smaller titles I'm fond of).

My point is there isnt really infrastructure for independent animation, not the same way there is for indie games, and what there is *must* compromise on scale due to the nature of the medium. Burnout is real in every artistic medium, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it happens more in animation than any other field.

Webcomics though? Webcomics are a deep well of good, bad, beautiful, diverse, passionate, community driven nonsense. Go find and support yours today!

Whenever I see an ad with people living in a house I automatically excuse myself from the experience. These people have house money. You expect me to afford the same product as people with house money? Laughable. Return at once, and tell the algorithm that sent you to try better.

Ads really should be treated like emisarries from rival lords.

I see here you've come to tell of an electronic service which, for a monthly fee, will read aloud to me literature from across the globe. And you say it shall provide me the fist tome free as a token of goodwill. A generous offer, or so it would appear, save for the fact that such a service is readily available to me publicly online and at my local library. Ah, you were hoping perhaps I was not aware of such resources? Begone, you slinking devil! Such trickery will not be tolerated in the house of James.