humanist + humorist

Fun times with Clip Studio Assets:

A few days ago, I got an email that some unspecified subset of the CSP materials that I’ve uploaded were “deleted” for review, then “unpublished” because they were re-evaluated as failing the Sensitive Content Moderation Policy.

Most of my materials are backgrounds/textures that I made for art pieces, so I tend to include the finished art in the preview. About 10 of them had been unpublished.

Some, like the art with poses I literally referenced from a Steamy Romance Novel cover, seem fair enough — it’s not exactly R-rated, but I can understand a moderator evaluating that as “excessive physical intimacy.”

But the one with two fully-clothed chibi figures hugging? Come on.

The “unpublished” email included a vague reference to “diverse users of many age groups, regions, and cultures, each with varying attitudes toward what is considered sensitive content.” Looking at the ones of mine that got zapped, including the most fluffy and G-rated: every one of them included something romantic between an m/m or f/f couple.

Sure does seem to imply that “varying attitudes” is a euphemism for “some of our users are angry homophobes.”

So, okay, I edited a couple of material previews to remove the understandably-spicy art pieces, including the romance-novel one. Figured I would see if those passed the re-review, then decide how many of the others I wanted to pick fights about.

On the morning of the 25th, I get a new email with the subject “Incorrectly flagged materials have been restored” that includes the following:

We have restored materials that were incorrectly flagged on Clip Studio Assets, and are reviewing all other unpublished materials. We deeply apologize for any concern.
The issue was caused by flaws in our review process, which have now been revised. We would also like to clarify that AI is not used for moderation.

As each material is being verified and republished on a case-by-case basis, we are currently unable to send personalized notifications regarding specific content statuses.

Wow. This was a mass screw-up, huh?

As of this posting, the status of my previously-axed materials is all over the place. Examples:

• This speckle brush was un-flagged and restored (the preview includes a G-rated face kiss)
• This ice-rink background redirects to the Clip Studio Assets homepage (the preview included this image of 2 fully-clothed skaters who aren’t even touching)
• This dark-purple background shows up as a non-editable preview when I’m logged-in, and an error message of “This material is unavailable” when logged-out (the preview included this art of a fully-clothed forehead kiss – screenshot above)
• This desert background says “This material is unavailable” even when I’m logged-in (the preview included the romance-novel art, but I already edited it to remove that)

Will any of those have changed by the time you’re reading this post? Who knows! Kinda sounds like it might take A While to mop this mess up.

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Fun times with Google Docs:

As of the 24th, Gdocs (on mobile) had stopped respecting several of my settings, including “don’t auto-replace normal quotes with curly-quotes” and “don’t auto-turn URLs into links.”

The first one was mildly annoying, because I don’t want a WIP draft to end up getting posted with half ” and half “ depending on how recently I edited the line.

The second one was an active nuisance, because if you type something as innocuous as “this…is a problem”, Gdocs helpfully tries to convert that to a “.is” link.

I was kinda expecting this to be an indefinite new problem. Based on the precedent that, back at the start of August, my phone keyboard stopped respecting my “don’t suggest emojis” while typing” setting:

Every time I use the word “time”, it thinks I want a watch emoji. If I type out a number, it thinks I want the next word to be the emoji of the number. If I type a few letters that happen to be at the start of a country name, one of the slots that could be autosuggesting The Word I Actually Mean is clogged up with the country’s flag emoji.

It’s been almost 2 months, and the setting is still broken.

So it was a surprise and a relief when I opened a draft on the evening of the 25th to type something during my commute, and realized the curly-quotes were no longer happening.

Gdocs was also auto-replacing “two hyphens in a row” with “an en-dash”, which I actually liked. (I type most blog posts in the WP editor, which replaces them with em-dashes in the published version. That works too.) Got home, went into the Gdocs menu (Tools → Preferences → Substitutions), and customized it so it’ll start doing en-dashes again.

Will the software manage to respect that setting, or will it eventually faceplant too? Stay tuned to find out, I guess.

Down to 424 fandoms!

I already did a sweep where I dropped “webcomics with only 1 fic, and it was posted more than a year ago.” This past month, I’ve been doing a sweep where I drop “webcomics with no more than 5 fics, and the latest was posted more than a year ago.”

And this is the one that finally pulled me under the 450 limit.

Haven’t reached the end of the alphabet, so I’ll probably do a final October update, just to record the final low for posterity. (And then, at long last, I can figure out a new regular routine for “picking up never-wrangled webcomic fandoms in small batches, cleaning up the tags, and letting them go quickly instead of sitting on them.”)

Currently only 15 have any tags to wrangle. Most of the un-canonized crossover fandoms I mentioned back in July are, in fact, canonized by now.

Also: I handed off one of my Always Has New Tags Every Week fandoms. One of my very first fandom-dropping tactics was “yeeting all the tiny obscure Dracula adaptations that never got fic anyway,” but I kept the original novel (and the AMT), to field the regular stream of incoming tags. This past month, I finally realized “the existing tags could use some review, I’m not enthusiastic about doing it, and this is an enduringly popular book that must have plenty of other wrangler fans. I can and should pass it on to someone new.”

So I did. And they’re already doing great with it! A good choice.

AMT check-in: Fake News, Narbonverse, and Cutie Honey proposals are all still hanging out on the requests page.

…related, I did scoop up the recently-renamed Pundit & Broadcast Journalist RPF (the “US” got knocked off the end), to do some much-needed cleanup in the tags there. But I still flatly refuse to be the wrangler who sorts out “which of the shows/networks in the hundred syns deserve their own subtags.” I will do stuff like “make sure somebody’s favorite obscure news anchor finally gets a canonical character tag” — that is the limit of the responsibility I’m taking, here.

"One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides “what is taking up all my cloud storage?”) is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don’t want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment."

The process of making them is bad:

"Datacenters in America used about 17 billion gallons of water during 2023, triple the amount they used a decade earlier in 2014, according to an estimate from US Congressional Research Service (CRS)."

"“I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside,” Boxtown resident Alexis Humphreys said through tears, holding up her asthma inhaler during a public hearing about the turbines on April 25. “How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”"

"Many companies are surely trying to build their own; after all, we are reliably informed that AI is going to take over the world and the companies that come out on top of that race will be worth untold amounts of money. [...] Large-scale criminal organizations (to the extent that they are distinct from governments) probably also want to have their own models. These tools are seen as weapons, and there is an arms race underway. The Internet as a whole is caught in the crossfire."

"I am a writer. A writer who also happens to be Kenyan. And I have come to this thesis statement: I don't write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. Or, more accurately, it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape."

"AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. In India, this labour is increasingly performed by women, who are part of an workforce often described as “ghost workers”. “The first few months, I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I would close my eyes and still see the screen loading.” Images followed her into her dreams: of fatal accidents, of losing family members, of sexual violence she could not stop or escape."

But don't worry! The results are also bad:

"Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate. [...] So Luna can’t turn a profit, doesn’t sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any “decision” it makes."

"I've had multiple heated arguements with people trying to defend AI, by explaining to me that "AI might be bad, but it has benefits for accessibility!" Using the very disabled people being thrown under the bus by AI as a shield, when my quality of life has substantially worsen ever since AI turned up everywhere, because I've lost access to all the good accessibility tools that I use to depend on."

"In another case, an AI scribe confused the drug the GP had prescribed with a different one of a similar name – a blunder which again the patient, rather than the doctor, identified. On another occasion an AI-generated summary letter did not say that the hospital consultant had told the patient to seek a repeat prescription from their GP for their migraine, which could have left them unable to get their medication."

Reread thread for Pet Shop of Horrors chapter 41 “Disappearance”.

Heads-up: These final 3 chapters all flow together, and I’m expecting a lot of “how well is this explained/paid off by the end” type of reactions. So there’s going to be a lot of implicit spoilers, even for things I don’t say straight out. If you’re avoiding those, maybe go finish the series yourself before coming back to this.

Originally liveblogged on Mastodon / Bluesky, posts collected here. Affiliate links for the whole Collector’s Edition.

I finished the Little Sister D darkfic, probably gonna get to that D/Tetsu FWB fic next. Feels like I should switch up the tones instead of posting too much angst in a row, and this one’s mostly sweet, with a happy ending.

 

( …so, hey, you know those lizards that can drop off their tails to escape a predator, and grow back a new one later? )

A very strong point:

Last December: “Call them the Cassandras: the people—mostly not white and male—who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they “alarmists,” and how did “anti-alarmism” become cool?”

The “we can always tell who’s trans” panic is going just great:

May: “[Trans man] Strobel was using the bathroom that many conservative lawmakers and anti-trans pundits want to force him to use — and he got arrested anyway, seemingly because of the panic surrounding gendered bathrooms.”

“The couple, who are both cis women, said their afternoon ended when hotel security searched the women’s restroom and allegedly asked them to show their identification to prove their sex. “

“He believed that Marie, who is living with dementia, was a man dressed as a woman. Bailey knocked Marie to the ground and threw her into a wheelie bin before applying pressure to the lid, CCTV footage showed.” (He’s in jail. Good. Now where are the consequences for the people who convinced him it was okay to assault a frail old grandparent in the first place?)

June: ““After seeing my license, he spent like 10 minutes questioning me on if my license was real before I explained to him that I am a transgender woman,” Ripper said. “It has to say ‘M’ legally.””

Follow-up: Here she is talking about it on Youtube! Apparently not planned, she was just in the audience for comedian Ashley Gavin, who has a delightful back-and-forth with her about it.

Racism and general politics:

April: “In early December, Prieto was told to show up for an immigration check-in at an earlier date than ICE had initially requested and to bring his family. He complied. At the check-in, Prieto, Marcano, and Amalia were arrested. They weren’t provided with arrest warrants or any paperwork explaining why they were being apprehended. Amalia cried after the family was loaded into a van full of other parents and young children. “Why are you doing this?” Prieto asked the immigration agents. He recalled that an agent replied, “It’s a change of Administration. They pay us to deport you.”“

June: “At the hospital, Morris “informed a nurse and a security guard that he was a member of the famous Motown group the ‘Four Tops’, and that he had current security concerns due to stalkers and fans,”[…] An ER doctor decided to “remove him from oxygen and pursue a psychiatric evaluation instead, despite his clear symptoms of cardiac distress and significant medical history,” the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit states “a security guard was instructed to ensure he was placed into a restraining jacket and/or a four-point restraint mechanism.”“

August: “Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, are reporting that there have been multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stresses on the Lincoln reach the breaking point. The crew is in its ninth month at sea, and has spent 250 days consecutively without making land – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times.“

“Baltimore has engineered a 68% drop in homicides since 2019, outpacing the national average—all while operating with 400 fewer officers. Here’s how the city debunked the myth that more police are the only answer to violent crime. “

Next Pet Shop of Horrors reread thread!

Originally liveblogged on Mastodon / Bluesky, combined here. Affiliate links for the whole Collector’s Edition, in case you want your own.

And one bonus link: Fanshop Discord server (heads-up that there’s active spoiler discussion for the rest of the series happening right now).

Still in Seven Seas volume 7, starting with the two side stories that weren’t in the original Tokyopop release at all. Confusingly, the SS TOC has them as “Chapter 37: Side Story 1” and “Chapter 38: Side Story 2”. At least I can be relieved they didn’t call the even-shorter omake “chapters”…

 

The final Pet Shop Of Horrors re-release volume has arrived! Time for my next reread thread.

Originally liveblogged on Mastodon / Bluesky, combined here.

I also posted a Moon Knight crossover in the meantime. And, by popular demand, D/Leon sex where D is actively hiding that he has plant parts. Give them a look.

 

Quick reactions to a few movies I’ve seen recently(-ish).

Good Omens 3: The Consolation Movie

…Did anybody like this?

As with s2, it had individual scenes/characters/moments that were good. Credit to the performers, particularly Tennant and Sheen, who were acting the hell out of everything. But then the good bits mostly fizzled, promising setups went nowhere, characters got erased for no narratively-satisfying reason, and the ending was just bad.

Throwback: When I mini-reacted to s2 a couple years ago, I called out their remix of the book of Job as a high point.

The original is the kind of Christianity Problem so blatant, I specifically remember asking my mom about it, probably back in elementary school. “How is this a happy ending? How are we supposed to feel positive about this? If you and me and my brother all got killed, and then Dad remarried and had new kids, that wouldn’t make it good or okay that we’re still dead.”

(Mom’s explanation was something along the lines of “society back then was very sexist and treated women+children as property, not people.” Which did actually clear up the narrative choices of the original writer! But didn’t explain why we, present-day people in the enlightened modern age of the 1990s, were still uncritically into it.)

So, yeah, it was genuinely satisfying when GO s2 swooped in with their own “it happened differently in this AU, because the original ending sucks” fixit fic.

And absolutely wild when GO s3 went “this is a good and satisfying way to end a story, right?”

Also, it was bad that Crowley/Aziraphale didn’t get a proper kiss. (Nobody start any “actually it’s great and progressive if they don’t kiss” discourse here. There is no shortage of canon rep for male and/or man-shaped characters who have a deep, profound, loving, supportive relationship without any interest in kissing each other. We have 300 million other options for that. These two should’ve made out.)

If you have recs for GO Fixit Fics That Did It Better, please share. I’d love to read them.

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day

This was fun! Viewers still love Spider-Man, and Hollywood still knows how to make a good Spider-Man movie. The emotional parts were heartwarming. The jokes were funny. Peter finally gets some reconnections with certain people he knew pre-NWH, and those arcs were handled in a really satisfying way.

I always like when Marvel remembers to let pre-established MCU characters interact with each other, instead of isolating them all in their own little sub-franchises. BND was great about that. When Peter could use help from somebody who’s currently based in/around NYC, he reaches out and asks them: Yelena Belova, Frank Castle, Bruce Banner, and the Department of Damage Control. Apparently there was even a filmed-but-deleted scene with Claire Temple, everyone’s favorite nurse for the superheroically injured.

Actual plot elements from the Disney+ TV shows are mostly ignored. The friend I see these movies with — who’s also kept up with a lot of the D+ stuff — was actively curious/worried about “how are the writers going to handle [relevant plot points from Daredevil: Born Again]?” Answer: they’re not. They don’t even bother coming up with a handwave. They don’t expect you to know or care

I wonder how much the D+ shows are going to keep being respected as MCU Canon at all. Some of them (WandaVision, FATWS, Ms. Marvel…) have gotten follow-ups in the movies, and others (Moon Knight, Wonder Man…) don’t necessarily have fallout that would affect the movie characters anyway. But now there’s a distinct group (Secret Invasion, DD:BA…) with plot points that should affect the movies, and aren’t.

My casual-fan friend was also confused post-BND about “How was [spoiler character] in it? Isn’t [character] from [other series of movies]?”

Which is sorta fascinating to me. Marvel has spent most of the past decade doing the Multiverse Saga, regularly having characters meet AU versions of themselves. This movie is the direct sequel to a Spider-Man movie crossing over 3 different series of Spider-Man movies! And yet, the concept of “the main MCU universe has its own local version of [character], not related to the version of [character] you saw in [other movies]” is still this non-intuitive to a fairly normal viewer.

(There’s almost nothing about this version of [spoiler character] that ties them in with their typical associates, team-ups, or plot arcs. From any version of canon. It’s…sort of a weird choice, tbh.)

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Labyrinth

Dangers untold and hardships unnumbered? In this economy??

A classic movie that’s always worth a revisit. Full disclosure, this particular revisit was inspired because I had an idea for a Pet Shop of Horrors crossover.

(if I had a nickel for every time I shipped a stubborn human with the hot genderfucky immortal royalty who’s technically their antagonist, the human confronts the immortal in his space-warping maze full of fantastical critters, but let’s be real they not-so-secretly like each other, plus the immortal spends a good chunk of canon caretaking for the human’s kid brother–)

Wanted to reference the visuals in a few specific Labyrinth scenes, then decided to rewatch the whole thing. Also checked out the book Labyrinth: The Ultimate Visual History (that’s a sales affiliate link, but I just got it from my library), which has a ton of amazing background info. It’s probably obvious just on the surface of it that a ton of time and craft went into building this movie, but wow, does it get even more impressive when you start reading all these details.

My favorite tidbit from the book, though, isn’t anything about the puppetry or costuming or stunts or all the other cool visuals. it’s this quote from Dave Goelz, the puppeteer behind Sir Didymus (at first he also did Didymus’s voice, but they dubbed over him post-filming, because they were afraid he was too recognizable as Gonzo):

“Jim sent me the script for Labyrinth ahead of time […] My initial reaction was that the central character was not sympathetic. She was a bratty girl who refused to take care of her baby brother. But I didn’t have any influence over that. Anyway, we shot the film, and afterward, Jim flew over to Toronto with the final cut […] Afterward, he pulled me aside and said, ‘What do you think?’ And I told him that I still felt the girl was too negative. I didn’t care about her. And that was the last talk we had about it. Then, years later, after I had gotten a little wiser, I looked at the film again. And again. […] I would dearly love to have one more conversation with Jim, so I could apologize for my earlier feedback, and let him know that I get it now.”

Yesss, good.

One of the Types Of Person our culture dearly loves to hate is “teenage girl who is having a hard time.” And I think that’s one of the underappreciated reasons why this movie has such an impact — it really sticks with anyone who sees it for the first time as a teenage girl. (Or, you know, somewhere reasonably close to that in the age-and-gender spectrum.)

Yeah, sure, it has David Bowie’s codpiece. (And, less commented-on but awfully important for some of us, David Bowie being campy and genderfucky.) But it’s also built on Jim Henson understanding the concept of “teenage girls who are having a hard time deserve care and sympathy,” and digging in his heels about it — no matter how much of the audience might not be ready to hear it.

I liked it!

Saw it a couple weeks ago, typed up reactions over the next couple days, am now editing them together into a single post.

There are some valid complaints. The internet reaction hasn’t been as reality-detached as, say, The Marvels (which was a great movie plagued by viewers making up bad-faith nonsense to get angry about). I can point to some genuine problems that stop Supergirl from being a great movie.

But it was a good movie.

Review with moderate spoilers under the cut: