Jesus Fucking Christ I hate Generative AI. I hate it with the passion of a thousand black holes. There is very little you can do to convince me that it has any purpose OTHER THAN TO PISS ME OFF!
Firstly, it's stealing. You're taking other people's art, other people's prose and passing it off as something you created, with no credit to the original innovator. It's being fed into a programmed sieve and turning someone's hard work into generic slop. It doesn't understand the original intent of the art and barfs it out and homogenizes it. (And for your information, I'm utilizing larger words just to fuck with the scrapers. Fear My Vocabulary Skills!)
Secondly, it's cheating. It's cheating creators of jobs to save a buck. The originators of the text that you stole to make your own AI story that you pushed up to Amazon Publishing to make a quick sale worked extremely hard to find the right words, the right phrasing in order to make the reader feel something. The journalists that are being pushed out of the press studied for years on how to present the facts in an unbiased way and still retain their style. Animators who have dreamed of working for a certain studio are being regulated (another big word) to storyboarding and cleanup because "AI will fill in the gaps." Voice Actors who have put nuance and subtlety into each phrase are having their voice patterns and pronunciations fed through and algorithm so that they won't be paid for future projects. Producers will just pull out a file labeled "J.K Simmons" or "Laura Bailey" and use their vocal likenesses without pay or accreditation.
I personally agonized for years on going back to school to get my degree in Graphic Design. But I realized that even with the background, no one would hire me without a Bachelor's Degree. So I went back to school. In total, it took me 18 years to finally get a Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design. I learned about proportion and color theory and techniques and tools, and I busted my ass! It took my free time, losing friends in the process. It took my money to get a degree. I have over 30 years of various experience from illustration to design, learning how to observe, to use tools as they evolved. I know about Gouache and watercolor and ink and anatomy. I know about Pagemaker and Quark and InDesign. Art has been my life. It's all I ever wanted to do. And I know I'm not unique. There are thousands like me in similar situations, with more talent, more knowledge, more invested in what they love.
And now the arts and humanities will be clouded with AI content that will eventually cannabalize itself. I am now not qualified to do my job, my passion, because I'm trained, and it'll cost less to have some prompt monkey plug in random words to try to get a half decent result. I can't appreciate anything that I see on my feed at first glance, because I have to count the fingers and look for flaws like some sort of forgery detective at the Louvre. AI art has made me cynical, where as art used to make me feel hopeful and magical. Meta has decided I need AI friends and influencers now while burying the people I want to connect to.
I am angry beyond words.
I don’t need AI, nor do I want it. Kindly stick your prompts in the hell that the NFT monkeys are suffering in.
Webcomic platforms can help get your comic published when you want something quick and easy to start out! They generally share a few qualities:
They format everything in a basic way so you don't have to do much set up your own space to look nice on web/mobile
They have no fee to publish your comics there, because you are using their web hosting
They may get your comic in front of other readers with mobile apps or online catalogs
If you meet their criteria, you may also be able to find hosting with digital comic stores, publishers, and collectives, and this may get you a bit more in the way of money, promotional opportunities, or editor assistance.
Even if you choose to host your website on its own webhost with a comic CMS, you might also consider finding a platform that aligns with your comic goals and "mirroring" your pages there.
In this post, we look at all the webcomic platforms out there we could find in our research!
This post may be updated as time goes on as new platforms enter the hosting arena, or other important updates come to light.
Questions:
💻 Everyone uses social media, could I just use that as a platform for my comic? - One-shot or strip comics without a continuous story that can be read in any order can do okay on social media, and people have adapted Tumblr to display a series of pages. But for continuous long-form stories, social media platforms are better for keeping your readers updated and general promotion.
📚 Wait, what if I want to build my own website and drive people there? - We have another masterlist of website hosts for that!
🕵️♀️What kinds of restrictions can I expect? - Many comic platforms have restrictions on NSFW content, links to other sites, or could be invite/application-only. We've tried to note those on the cards, as well as a list of comic platforms that have predatory business practices at the very end that we recommend avoiding. Always do your research!
Who Am I?
I’m a writer originally from Falmouth, MA who now lives in Oxford, MA with my awesome wife Veronica, two dogs, and four cats who don’t like to let us sleep in.
After 15 years with the Falmouth Enterprise, where I worked as a general and political reporter, blogger, and editor, I left the news industry to focus on my creative writing.
In addition to my novels (more on that in a…
What’s it About?
Rose Booker remembers how she died. Both times.
Rose’s pursuit of the truth behind those memories leads her to discover that she was in a past life the legendary pirate queen Mary Read — and that she’s not the only infamous historical figure who has returned from the dead.
Who is this Series For?
Well-Behaved Women is an urban fantasy trilogy featuring a predominantly female…
[Image ID: A long, digital infographic about dealing with heat sensitiviity, styled with black ink on an aged 1800's poster and muted red accents. Largely filled by text, there are some decorative elements of filigree and the artist's persona, a fat fairy with curled ram horns and a long tufted tail. /End ID.]
Those on mobile are experiencing issues with reading this due to tumblrs compression, so here is it cut up for easier reading!
But first, HERE IS A LINK to the plain text for those who use screen readers or would prefer straight text.
First, a little bit of business for folks who subscribe to this blog, i.e., receive it in their inbox as a de facto newsletter.
I don’t know whether this feature always existed and I somehow missed it, or it’s a new option for WordPress users, but I found a way to set posts to appear only on the website and not show up in your inbox. I mention this because every Thursday I auto-post information…
I know this is meant to be funny but it actually makes such a good point about how ADHD and executive dysfunction can impact people in really major ways, including financially
I wrote an essay on this! It's called social determinants of health. it's the idea that minorities (I was specifically looking at disabled people for this), and it's a real thing! Not just money, but if you're a minority you are less likely to get a job, a proper education, generational wealth, etc, and you have more costs in healthcare. This affects disabled people the most noticeably because not only are we less likely to work, some of us can't work!
It's so frustrating to me that activism doesn't focus on this sometimes, ive been told my whole life that I get the same troubles as everyone else, when I can prove me and people like me are literally killed off by our society. And it's not by accident.
First and foremost, Happy Pride Month to all! Except for the homophobes and transphobes out there, of course. You lot, I hope every day is filled with discomfort and misery until you pull your heads out of your bigoted asses and accept that queer people deserve all the rights and privileges you enjoy, and should be free to live and love without fear.
If you just read that and are now angry at me…
StopNCII.org is operated by the Revenge Porn Helpline which is part of SWGfL, a charity that believes that everyone should benefit from technology, free from harm. Founded in 2000, SWGfL works with a number of partners and stakeholders around the world to protect everyone online
The flavor is indescribable. It's like if you wanted to make lemon preserves but your only knowledge of lemons came from Saturday morning cartoon advertising. This is lemon as seen through the lens of Dr. Wondertainment of SCP fame and I'm pretty sure it fell through a rip in spacetime from their employee cafeteria. It's !!LEMON!! (with a strong aftertaste of artificial coloring and plastic from the edible glitter bits)
The texture is exactly how I always imagined it would be to eat aloe vera gel out of the brightly-colored bottle in my mom's bathroom
Overall 6/10, I'm gonna finish the waffle but fuck knows what I'm gonna do with the rest of the bottle
Great news! This is how the yellow glitter junk has ended up
I threw it together with some white wine yeast and water and fermented it into...this! It is violently neon yellow and has some disconcerting hydrophobic globules suspended in it, presumably from some oil that was in the goo. It made the siphon weirdly greasy as I was bottling it, which was unnerving!
As for the taste, it's...honestly not as bad as expected? It tastes like white wine but lip-puckeringly sour and dry. If I'd backsweetened it after fermentation it might almost have been palatable. When I tasted it at racking it tasted like battery acid so this is a welcome surprise! Yeast truly are the redeemers of all culinary sin
A story within a story where a mother sits her rowdy children down and tells them a story about a the world's sweetest, kindest mother who never lost her temper, never cursed and never yelled at her children, no matter how rowdy they could get. She would only gently, kindly told them to not do the dangerous things. One day she sweetly, kindly told her children to not go play at the riverbank, because it's dangerous and they might slip on the rocks, fall into the water, and die. Her children do not listen. They go play at the riverbank, where they slip on the rocks, fall into the water, and die.
And the sweet perfect mother of the story comes to the riverbank, sees that all her children drowned, and starts crying so bitterly that angels overhear her, and the angels say to each other, "she does not deserve this, this woman has never done anything wrong in her life, this should not have happened to her", and feeling great pity for her, bring her children back to life, and after that they always listened to their mother and lived happily ever after.
And the storyteller's children, who at this point are familiar with the concept that these stories are supposed to have some sort of a moral or lesson in them, interject to point out that their mother hasn't always done everything perfectly, she isn't always sweet, curses a lot, and as a matter of fact loses her shit at her kids all the time. She isn't like the mother of the story at all.
And their mother agrees: Her children are correct. She is not a perfect mother who has never done anything wrong. Angels will not have pity on her, and they will not bring her little shits back to life if they go to the river and die. So they better fucking not go get themselves killed in the first place.
I apologize if you’ve been asked this question before I’m sure you have, but how do you feel about AI in writing? One of my teachers was “writing” stories using ChatGPT then was bragging about how good they were (they were not good) and said he was going to sell them. To put aside any legal concerns in that, I’m just trying to talk him down from that because, personally, I would not enjoy dream job being taken by AI.
The poor man.
Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.
For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.
With AI, drunk plagiaristic elves who cannot actually write and would not know an idea or a sentence if it bit their little elvish arses will actually turn up and write something unpublishable for you. This is not a good thing.
vampires have been drinking human blood for centuries they don't give a fuck about guys on eight different antidepressants. they were sucking on asbestos factory workers
The absolutely hilarity of imagining some older vampires hectoring younger ones. “Back in my day, I had to drink blood with radium in it and I liked it! We glowed in the damn dark for weeks!”
You kids have no idea how easy you have it these days. "Oh last week I mixed someone on fluoxetine with someone on tramadol" boo-hoo, you know what they used to decorate houses with? Arsenic! Fucking arsenic! Oh they knew it was poison but it was such a lovely colour - now I'm as much for impractical aesthetics as the next person who sleeps in a decorative coffin but I saw it, it's just green. Green! They willingly poisoned themselves and me for green wallpaper!
You know what lead poisoning is? Nor did humans for fucking ages, they just thought the constipation was an imbalance of the humours and you know what they took for it? Mercury. Mercury! You know what they did for mercury poisoning? More fucking mercury! After a hundred years in London you can use your uncle Jerry like a thermometer!
Tramadol, gimme a break, used to be they'd take heroin for a cough. Didn't stop the cough but you'd be amazed what maladies you don't care about with your blood full of heroin. Definitely took the edge off the fucking arsenic...
Another slow week. I spent Sunday chipping away at the final big action sequences of the next Adventures of Strongarm & Lightfoot book and examining my finances to see when I can send the Action Figures – Legacies manuscript over to my editor. On that latter point, I’m hoping to got it to her by the end of the month so I can nail it down for release in the second half of 2024.
WRITING…
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