TL:DR I do not want to cancel the show, I don't want it to cancel me.
So I have been forced, basically, to make this statement as I am being asked about this character or 'introduced' to it (and the incoming new show) against my desires. I have deleted all previous posts about my encounters with this problem long ago for personal reasons that will be apparent, but people don't know about my situation and do deserve an explanation. I will keep this post short for my own mental health. This is the first time I have disclosed any of this information to the public, and it is hopefully the last. My silence has been a part of my uncomfortable situation, but it's clear the world won't let me try to just ignore it any longer, so it's full disclosure time.
1, Yes. I know about Mr Puzzles and his uncanny resemblance to RGB, my character from the on going comic The Property of Hate, who pre-exists Mr Puzzles by approximately ten years.
I did not, as a consequence, base RGB off Mr Puzzles...
2, I have received very violent and manipulative hate mail from fans of that character over the past few years due to this similarity, many threatening to slander me via cancel culture to discredit my own creations. The worst of these messages almost caused me to commit suicide which close friends can attest to (this period coincided with the death of my father which they used against me to full effect).
Since then the hatemail has been less frequent, but continues, and I am afraid it will pick up again with the advent of this new show.
3, I have contacted the smg4 management about these issues, to no avail. My first email was a request to tell their followers to cease sending me hatemail, which they did not attempt in any way. They have never responded to the large overlaps in terms of RGB's design, and when I finally sent them an email via a lawyer as a last resort (which cost me £4000) they did not respond. Please note that I did not ask for a cease and desist, I only wanted the hatemail to stop, and perhaps for them to alter Mr Puzzle's design very slightly to be a little less like RGB's. I even made this simple suggestion as an example:
Despite going out of my way (against the lawyer's wishes) to phrase the letter in a none-hostile manner, and offer them an alternative, they did not reply to this email at all.
I am a disabled indie cartoonist; I do not have the money to take further legal action, and in any case I do not want to. I hate conflict, and the emotional toll of sending that email alone was enough to make me miserable and exhausted for months. All I want is to be left alone, and for people to know that RGB was invented first. I cannot afford to do anything to protect myself or make anyone listen legally; this post is the most I can do, and it is the only post I intend to make about it.
that's it. that's the whole situation. please do not message me about the show, or the character, as both are very distressing to me: if you do I will either delete the message, or block you, depending on the angle. I have blocked all related tags, and I will unfollow if I see posts, so I am doing everything I can to take care of myself in a non-aggressive fashion. I have only made this statement so that people understand.
a small example of some of the hatemail (which was preserved only to be sent to the makers as evidence which, again, they did not respond to) below the readmore. read at your own discretion, it is unpleasant.
The Hiveworks Artists Guild has released a statement alleging various incompetence and mismanagement in Hiveworks leadership. You should read the whole thing, but the main claims are
Hiveworks leadership was a forbidden enigma of mystery and no one knew what the fuck was going on at any time.
Hiveworks spent money inappropriately, most notably Xel using Kickstarter money to make a"large personal purchase".
Less dramatically but still bad, money was spent on ads for comics that were long-dead instead of active ones [This is the only claim I can say 100% is true; I've seen ads for dead comics on Hiveworks sites a lot and have long been confused by it]
Hiveworks leadership were just generally huge assholes
Hiveworks staff has not been getting paid, and Hiveworks has $17,000 in unpaid wages floating, and $340,000 in debt.
Support Hiveworks Artists in this trying time
Don't spread speculation and rumors
Pretty much every claim made here has been floating around for years, so I believe every word of this, and know how difficult it is for the Hiveworks Artist Guild to stand up so officially like this. If you know any struggling Hiveworks artists that you like, maybe now's a good time to throw 'em a few bucks on Patreon.
Keep signing because of invalid signatures, there's a chance a lot of what's gone up will be invalidated once the campaign is over. The bigger our margin is, the more likely it is to actually pass, and the bigger the final number, the more likely the EU is to fold to the pressure.
oopsie i tripped and spilled my link to archive dot org's downloadable copy of Microsoft office suite for 2007, which features no AI tools and is a powerful word processor that still holds up just fine on windows 10!
Just to make a point, every time I finished a panel of this I would export it as a PNG on the perceptual setting and use it as a color reference for the next panel
IT'S BAD
PLEASE CHECK YOUR COLOR SETTINGS
EDIT: If you're still having problems, it might help to switch from "Save/Save as" to "Export (as a) Single Layer". Just. Make SURE the box labeled "Expression Color" is set to RGB. I've been messing with this all day, and it looks like this combination of settings will allow exported PNGs to maintain their colors perfectly. To you. So far both Discord and Toyhouse still only display desaturated images and I cannot for the life of me figure out why
ive been noticing the EXACT SAME PROBLEM whenever i would export an image from procreate and it drove me CRAZY that my art would desaturate all the time. anyway, if you're in a canvas, go to settings > canvas > canvas information > color profile
once youre in color profile, if your current color profile is display P3, CHANGE IT!!!!!! it is desaturating your colors. you're gonna want to change it to sRGB IEC6 1966-2.1 instead
if you're starting a new canvas, you can just go to color profile and change it that way. im SO grateful for this post for giving me the push i needed to experiment with procreate files and finally see what was changing my art to be so desaturated
like LOOK at this!!!!
anyway yeah. tldr if youre using procreate, make sure your color profile is sRBG IEC6 1966-2.1
I'm really not apologetic with this hard stance, either. I'm very firm on this, too. My art has already been used, twice now by people who did not ask my permission, so they could "enhance it" with Gen AI. I really see nothing good coming from generative AI except poor excuses for laziness and glorified search engines that don't work.
This is an important time to make the distinction between generative and analytical AI. Analytical AI is what AI is supposed to be for. It’s all the boring stuff like analyzing data for patterns. For example, you probably heard about that AI that was designed to tell apart bear claws from croissants for a bakery that is now being used to detect cancer cells with greater accuracy than human doctors. That’s an analytical AI, while everything mentioned in the post above is generative AI. (Which sucks!)
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