The Leif & Thorn Volume 7 campaign is almost funded! As in "we are literally $20 under the main goal."

So, hey, tell your friends. Got a stretch goal to shoot for, and a week left to go.

--

As part of the "30 Days of Leif & Thorn" project, I started making semi-regular posts on Instagram for the first time since the end of 2021...and just got a "We suspect automatic activity on your account" warning.

I quit posting there in the first place because the site felt actively hostile to small-audience artists! They sure are making an effort not to win me back, huh?

Just finished Shadow Man (Goodreads link, though their summary is very weird), the 1995 novel by Melissa Scott.

I have no idea how or when this got on my reading list? But I'm glad it did!

It's about a spacefaring future where the unobtanium that lets humans survive FTL travel also racheted up the amount of intersex births, to the point where there are now 5 roughly-equally-distributed sexes. Most populations have adjusted, the main interplanetary language has five sets of pronouns (no overlap with the neopronouns that are popular IRL these days), but weird backwater planet Hara is trying to stick to "there are only two genders, dammit, mems are just men, fems are just women, and herms can pick either side, but they've gotta pick one."

We flip between the POVs of two protagonists: Warreven, a local Hara lawyer who specializes in representing the queer + intersex community, and Tatian, an offworlder who works for a pharmaceutical company. (Their main motivation to work with the weird backwater planet is, it's where The Good Drugs grow.)

Warreven's a herm, legally identifies as a man, has some ambivalence about it but is very sure about not being a woman. Tatian is a cis man, has always considered himself exclusively into women + fems, and spends a good chunk of the book low-key realizing "help, ze's hot."

The negative GoodReads reviews keep saying things like "nothing happened in this book," and...that's kinda fair? A lot of it is just...meandering around with these two characters, getting immersed in the world. You know the genre of Youtuber who lives in a weird place or has an exotic job, and vlogs about their day-to-day life? Long stretches of this book are just the sci-fi version of that.

And then the political unrest heats up, there are increasingly-violent protests in the streets, Warreven is briefly put in the hospital, and we get some quality hurt-comfort with Tatian. Sadly, they don't kiss (they really should've kissed), but we get scenes like "Warreven is too injured to have a full range of motion, so Tatian helps them bathe and tenderly washes their hair." The good stuff.

The gender worldbuilding is fascinating, for its weird gaps as much as its progressive ideals. Intersex Harans are fighting for their rights in a strikingly modern way -- Warreven has a fellow herm co-worker who insists on being recognized and addressed with the matching pronouns, Tatian pulls strings to get them treated in an offworld-run hospital out of fear the local doctors will try to "fix" them. But even offworld, gender stereotypes are still a thing! Three new mainstream sexes just means interplanetary society came up with three new sets of stereotypes!

And even though Harans have ways to indicate their legal gender (conventions of clothing, jewelry, etc), Tatian keeps trying to clock everyone's biological sex. Okay, so he's not wrong to think "it's oppressive and wrong that all Harans are pressured to present as male or female, whether they identify that way or not." But also -- dude, don't you have trans people in the interplanetary space future? If someone is presenting as male, maybe it's not cool to over-analyze their breast size?

Sigh. We can maybe cut him a little slack, because he does it most noticeably with Warreven, and he's having a mild sexuality crisis over being hot for Warreven.

It's a shame there's no sequel. (There's also no fic -- there's an AO3 tag for it, I'm guessing the book got nominated for Yuletide at some point, but it hasn't been canonized because nobody wrote any fills.) A lot of points got set up during the "meandering around daily life" chapters that were never followed through on, and I'd like to see where they went. Wouldn't mind spending more time with these characters in general.

And, you know, it's never a bad time for more tender hair-washing.

Hey look, the backstory for the “Kickstarter is going to start doing…something…on the Celo blockchain” announcement has finally been dug up: They got $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz to say they were moving to Celo.

Guess what blockchain that firm also invests in!

Did you guess Celo?

Wow, it’s almost like crypto has a pattern of pump-and-dumps that all work the same way.

And it gets better: “The deal didn’t require Kickstarter to follow through on the pivot.” They never needed to have a blockchain plan, much less accomplish the blockchain plan. They just needed to say they were doing a blockchain plan.

(please enjoy this bot’s idea of what “Man with a bag of money sliding down a blockchain” would look like)

Image from this prompt: Man with a bag of money sliding down a blockchain

A caveat: I appreciate all the hard financial details in that article I linked, but the POV of the authors includes some weird biases. For instance, they still swallow the idea that a blockchain, “with its traceable addresses and transaction history, could help solve the platform’s difficulties with fraud and trust”,

Kickstarter doesn’t transfer funds to random, anonymous, untraceable people. If you want to launch a project, they get your legal ID and your bank details. Those are extremely traceable!

And all the transactions on KS are accurately recorded already. Pledges are not getting secretly edited behind your back. That’s not where the fraud comes in!

“Putting the transaction records on a different type of database” does nothing to stop a project creator from pretending they plan to make a comic/movie/widget/etc, and then turning around and using the funds to buy themselves a house.

Or from having sincere, genuine ambitions to make the comic/movie/widget/etc they promised, but in practice, they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

Or from sincerely working on the project, only to get tempted to use a bit of the money for some other bill…the dog got sick, they needed a new part for the car, a pipe burst in the bathroom, they were a tiny bit short on the rent this month…and they blow through all the pledges before they get around to paying the project bills.

Or, to use one of the actual fraudsters mentioned in this article, “raising money for turtle conservation charities only to turn around and blow it on crypto.”

The crypto fraudster, by the way, was investigated, taken to court, and sanctioned: “Under a settlement, Darling has agreed to provide restitution to supporters, to pay civil penalties and to not engage in additional crowdfunding campaigns in Ohio for at least five years.”

I’m sure the investigation process was long and complicated…but I can guarantee you that “tracing the guy’s legal ID, and having accurate records of who he owed refunds to” was not the hard part.

I followed the instructions on this post to Fediverse-enable my longtime WordPress blog. Unlike with the ActivityPub integration on the BICP site, this has no customizable settings at all, so I have no idea how this is going to look. But it’ll be out there!

Here’s the incredibly-clunky username to search for from your own Fediverse account: erinptah.wordpress.com@erinptah.wordpress.com

~*~

Welsh photographer runs a shot of a waterfall through Google’s “Magic Editor”, shows us the side-by-side. Well worth checking out.

It’s absolutely fascinating, taking a close look at which changes the “AI” makes. It puts a decent Rock Texture on the rocks, but, does it not have data on Moss Textures? Or has it been trained to detect and erase moss as not “aesthetic”?

Similar with the trees — it replaces them with something you’d describe as “trees” in its data set, but not the species from the original. Zooming in on the real forest reveals a whole variety of branches and leaves, even. The bot’s forest all looks the same.

…The big ferns in the foreground just got turned into rocks. And, at the lowest level of waterfall, half of the water is now a grey rock too.

If someone’s goal was to make generic Pretty Nature Images that would look nice as a wallpaper, this is great! If their goal was anything like “sharing the beauty of a specific location” or “capturing a special experience to remember it later” or “getting a reference you can use to realistically draw this kind of tree,” it’s amazingly useless.

(The other day I had my first encounter with one of those in the wild. Was looking for information on what happens to rose bushes when you over-water them! Got a long-winded SEO-bait article that was interspersed with MidJourney-esque rose paintings. Even as art pieces, they were pretty muddy and underwhelming. As visuals to help you evaluate whether your IRL roses show signs of over-watering, they’re garbage.)

-*-

Leif & Thorn hit its 8th anniversary yesterday!

And just this afternoon, the campaign to print Volume 6 smashed through its goal.

Speaking of the Fediverse, the BackerKit campaign data says I got over 800 visits through Mastodon back on the 16th. No extra backers out of it (those are mostly coming from my website, my mailing list, and BK’s own promos), but most days I don’t get that many visits from every source put together. And there’s no way my own posts on Mastodon are getting that many views.

Some kind of glitch? A shoutout from somebody else in the Fediverse? A fan copying the Mastodon referral link onto a whole other platform?

It’s very possible this is just…not find-out-able. But I wish I knew!

1) Redid the BICP-in-name-only Tumblr, now it’s my general-purpose Art Tumblr for real.

Lifesaving code to redirect all the old URLs! Unlike more user-friendly sites Dreamwidth and Deviantart, Tumblr doesn’t have an option to do this automatically. But customizable layouts mean you can put in the JavaScript on your own…assuming you can even find that post that explains how.

2) The campaign for Leif & Thorn Volume 6 is live!

I planned to launch this on the usual Sunday night…instead, I helped the BackerKit support team discover a bug. So we finally went live on late Wednesday. Even with that bumpy start, we’re over 50% funded on Day 1 – and we’re the #8 trending project on all of BackerKit.

Check it out! Grab a copy! Tell your friends!

Seems like the whole weather flipped a switch the other night. On Wednesday I had the windows open, computer sitting on ice packs to help it not overheat, and wasn't layering up at all to go to work...Thursday, wham, I'm closing the windows, pulling out extra blankets, wearing a sweater and a coat to go out.

Nothing against sweaters, but oof, me and my two smelly cats are gonna miss having a fresh breeze going through the house.

*

Parents officially got COVID over the summer! They're vaxxed+boosted, no extra high-risk conditions, and didn't have any trouble staying home the full isolation period, so it went over about as well as you could hope, probably.

They had this month-long European tour booked back in 2020...postponed it to 2021...postponed it again to 2022...figured this year they would just take the plunge and go for it. Get to week 3, and half the people on the tour bus are coughing. Whoops.

More recently, my aunt got it after an out-of-town relative visited. Glad I didn't go to that family gathering. (...I've gone to others, so this isn't a principled health stance I've been taking, I just got lucky.)

In other health news, one of my uncles has cancer -- not the kind you beat, the kind where the doctors say "with treatment you have about 10 years to live" -- and it's been about 10 years since they said that. So. As of this writing, he's not gone, but there's a good chance he's on his way out.

The news arrived a few days after Disney+ got Thor: Love and Thunder -- you know, the one where Jane spends the whole thing actively dying of cancer! -- so, hey, guess which family movie-watching plan has been tabled indefinitely? (I saw it in theaters, at some point I became the kind of fan who sees every Marvel movie in theaters, but the parents are in the "we want to catch them all...eventually" camp.)

*

Just as I get comfortable with "Kickstarter's not going anywhere with their Mystery Blockchain Protocol, at least not in the foreseeable future, it's still safe to run a campaign there for now," then Deviantart turns around and starts flirting with blockchain nonsense. Deviantart! You were ~~the chosen one~~ the only major site making an active effort to protect artists against blockchain fraud! What happened??

...okay, okay, we know what happened. Current holders of crypto can't actually get money out of the system unless they can convince new suckers to put money in, which means "bribing sites like DA and KS to drag in new suckers" is a good long-term investment.

Still a nasty twist to wake up to.

I know no amount of comments that outline how NFTs are a predatory pit of scams is going to outweigh whatever check they're cashing from the crypto industry, but I left one anyway.

*

Spent the past week or so in a real downswing of low energy and high executive-dysfunction. I have all these small, relatively simple tasks to do, but getting over the hump to actually start each one? Gonna need to go take a nap first.

(The Fluff thinks this is a great deal. He loves an extra snooze. And Fiddlesticks doesn't hang out on the bed, which makes it a nice safe territory where Fluff doesn't have to worry about defending his honor as Top Cat.)

I've been trying to put "have a nap" higher on the coping-strategy list than "chug another energy drink." Probably healthier! Not as good a deal for the to-do list.

...also, not a great state to be in when you're gearing up for a crowdfunding campaign. But it's not like I work better without a deadline. So we're moving right along.

*

True story, the one thing I can reliably-and-consistently focus on right now is "writing more Moon Knight fanfiction."

Using incentives like "you can write another chapter of Fic X once you finish Task Y" has been...moderately effective.

(I like this show a normal amount, I swear.)

I had this interrogation of Kickstarter’s empty “blockchain proposal” written and on the desk of the Beat’s editors back in March. Was starting to worry that it wouldn’t feel timely, as the publication date got farther and farther away from news like “the Kickstarter CEO has resigned to spend more time with his family.”

And then it ended up getting published within days of “the third-biggest stablecoin goes ker-splat, setting off a rolling chain of destruction in every protocol and/or exchange that leaned on it.” (The power of decentralization, folks!)

There’s always something.

Older Kickstarter news/polling/snark:

“I have no assurances from the people who want to use it on Kickstarter that protocols are in place to protect the users. My biggest concern is I have interacted with Kickstarter three times now – sent emails and had meetings and stuff – requesting clarification of intent and a roadmap, and I have never gotten one, which makes me question the wisdom of the entire venture.”

“Will you buy comics on Kickstarter if they go through with their blockchain plans?” Twitter poll, closed with 4500+ votes.

“In many ways, Kickstarter’s weird crypto project — and the blockchain aspirations other aging web 2.0 companies are pushing on us right now — are kind of like watching a middle-aged man buy a boat. He doesn’t need to buy a boat. His life will be significantly more complicated, and likely worse, after he buys the boat. But he has somehow convinced himself that he needs to buy this boat because he has done the math and realized he is going to die soon and he thinks the boat will fix this.”

General blockchain criticism/snark:

“It turns out, businesses already use computer programs a lot. DAOs don’t bring anything to the table. So a lot of it is excuses to do things you can already do, and just say, ‘Oh, it’s a DAO. That means it’s crypto, and it’s magical, so if you don’t understand why our idea sounds so stupid, it’s because it’s very complicated and you need to think about it more.’” (Video with David Gerard, who literally wrote the book on crypto failings. Multiple books, in fact.)

“One of the most infamous examples of a game incorporating an early form of a play-to-earn system was Diablo III’s auction house, where players could buy and sell weapons and items for real money. […] But Blizzard’s experiment in monetizing scarcity was a disaster.”

“The biggest [lie] is “this incentivizes green power.” Which it does in the same way that a whole bunch of random shootings would incentivize bulletproof vests.”

This video has my new favorite example of crypto fans using The Most Elaborate Possible Technical Terms for the most absurdly mundane things: “It’s called loading. You’ve described how loading works.“

Excellent deployment of quotation marks: “‘Hacker’ Steals NFTs ‘Worth’ Millions From Opensea Users.“

Excellent Onion headlines: “Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him“

…is bringing the wildest takes out of the woodwork, I swear.

“Why does he need a million dollars?” Buddy, making each book costs money, and he knew a lot of people like his books. If one book is $10 to print and ship, and his readers preorder 100,000, there’s $1 million already. That’s just math.

As of this writing, he has almost 150,000 backers. Lots of them are getting multiple books! Some are getting merch! All of that has production costs.

“Why doesn’t he use a publishing company?” He’s been using publishing companies for 20 years. Now he OWNS a publishing company. That’s…probably how he knows how much books cost.

Any publisher would also be taking a million in preorders, btw.

(Probably more. Sanderson’s website says the number of people ordering the new books through his campaign is much lower than the numbers he’s used to getting through Tor.)

“Why doesn’t he use a POD service?” You get that readers still have to pay for the books, right…?

Even if you didn’t keep any profit to pay your own staff (and, uh, keep your own lights on), the POD company is still taking a profit! Guess which path is ultimately more expensive for the book-buyers?

Also, POD services are optimized for authors who sell 1 book at a time. Maybe 10 if we’re lucky.

A print run for an NYT bestseller? Would straight-up break their machines.

My toaster oven is great at making 1 burger for my lunch. Doesn’t mean I should walk into McDonald’s and say “lol, why do you guys bother having an industrial-grade fryer??”

“Maybe he could use that money to support other authors!” The backers didn’t pay for books by other authors. They paid for Sanderson books.

So…you think he should commit mass consumer fraud?

Orrrrr he could produce and send everyone the products they ordered! What a concept.

…and, for a different flavor of wild take, “This shows how much success an indie author can have!”

No, this shows how much success a Hugo-winning, NYT-bestselling, 20-year mainstay of mainstream SFF publishing can have. (Again, the crowdfunding total is a downgrade from what he’s used to getting.) Presenting this as a typical or realistic indie experience is bonkers.

Look, I don’t begrudge Sanderson his success. His readers are getting books they like! This is a good thing.

Just don’t go “so inspiring! See, this means anyone can get this level of preorders. All you need is a bit of hustle and a few more podcast bookings.”

That’s not how it works. And we don’t have to pretend like it is. There are actual reasons to find this happy and uplifting — we don’t need to make stuff up, I promise.

There’s been an absolute deluge of Blockchain Space Nonsense news in the past couple of weeks. If you, like me, can’t get enough of it, Web 3 Is Going Just Great is a great source to quench your thirst.

But if not — indulge me for a minute while I sift out some highlights, at least?

Watch on YouTube

Everyone and their dog has been sharing this video, but I’ll share it again. It’s good. Not just about NFTs, it covers all kinds of Hot Topics in crypto discourse right now.

I started watching it thinking “I’ve rubbernecked SO MANY terrible details about these already, more than enough to fill a multi-hour video, there’s no way it’ll also have new-to-me info that makes them worse.” Spoiler alert: it had new-to-me info that makes them worse.

“They don’t understand…ANYTHING about the ecosystems they’re trying to disrupt. They only know that these are things that can be conceptualized as valuable.”

The Spice Must…wait what

So a group called “SpiceDAO” pooled a bunch of money in order to buy a rare copy of Jodorosky’s Dune — basically, a long pitch for this guy’s proposed adaptation of Dune. They paid ten times the estimated value at auction, apparently totally convinced that “buying a book” and “buying the adaptation rights” were the same thing.

(A DAO is like a co-op, but to join or vote on anything, you need to buy into the org’s crypto token. These folks also seem to believe “we’re voting on a blockchain!” bypasses any requirements for laws, rules, obligations, paperwork, or, like…basic planning.)

The first half of this Twitch stream has a great time exploring the legal faceplants, but if that doesn’t sound delightful by itself, skip to about 50 minutes in. See, when the DAO was thwarted in their plans to adapt Dune, they commissioned a derivative-but-legally-not-Dune script to film instead. The stream does a Dramatic Reading. Of the whole thing.

I don’t remember the last time I laughed this hard.

“I appreciate the boldness of charting a course utterly unconfined by professional advice or basic subject matter knowledge“

No F@$king Thankses

By mainstream standards, these are not actually popular, it’s just that, right now, they’re loud: “only 400,000 wallets have ever interacted with an NFT, and far less actually own an NFT right now. The FOMO they’re creating to try and scam you out of your money, and the talk about how everyone uses/is abt to use nfts is all an objective lie. It’s all astroturfing.”

A token-trading front-end website called LooksRare turned out to have almost 90% of its trading volume generated by people selling tokens back and forth between their own wallets.

Twitter announced a new “connect your account to an NFT and we’ll make a Special Exclusive hexagon-shaped profile picture out of it” feature. People immediately started dunking on it by uploading pfp images that they cropped into hexagon shape on their own, for free. Here’s made a transparent template to help you nail the exact right type of hexagon, indistinguishable from the Special Exclusive ones.

(…at least, unless you zoom way, way in. Then you might realize it displays as 2 pixels shorter. Shhh.)

In news that will surprise exactly 0% of digital artists, a whopping over-80% of “created free” NFTs on the token-trading front-end website OpenSea get caught as art theft, spam, or other kinds of fraud.

Note: “free” here means “we haven’t actually minted the token yet.” All they did was create an entry on their plain old Web 2.0 product database. It’s not until a token gets purchased that they’ll actually create it (and at this point, somebody has to pay for it). Sites like OpenSea make a point of Actually Touching A Blockchain as little as humanly possible. If you think this might cause some exploitable security problems…congrats, you’ve put more thought into it than any of the people driving this train.

“DeviantArt has issued 80,000 alerts since August 2021, doubling from October to November, then increasing by 300 percent from November to mid-December.”

As of this writing, DeviantArt has caught 3 thefts from my gallery, and I’m sure there’s more to come. To be clear, thieves will steal your art from any website — DA is just the only site that makes the effort of tracking them down for you.

“you claim to place such moral stock in “artists getting paid” yet do not subscribe to my patreon, curious“

Where Do We Crowdfund Now

My impression of what happened in the Kickstarter Management office back in December is just a guess, but it’s looking more and more plausible by the minute.

Their promise of “we’ll totally have actual details about our Mystery Blockchain Project in the next few weeks” has officially been replaced with “there’s not a definitive timeline for details about our Mystery Blockchain Project.”

Not in a public news post or anything, that’s just what Support is telling people who email with questions. (This isn’t the fault of individual Support staffers — they haven’t been given any info either. Kiiiinda seems like the Board is happy to use their staff as human shields, here.)

But, good news:

TopatoCo — which I have been pronouncing wrong all this time, it rhymes with “potato” — launched a beta-testing project for their own crowdfunding system. They’ve been a reliable player in the “fulfillment of webcomic merchandise” field for years; they have the credibility to start a crowdfunding platform from scratch and get the comics community on board.

So does Iron Circus Comix. Which hasn’t gone public with a platform yet, but they’re beta-testing one behind-the-scenes, and are setting up to launch a campaign on it some time in February. Unlike the “white paper in January!” promise, this one I actually trust.

Zoop is a comics-crowdfunding platform that’s been fully functional since mid-2021, it’s just been invite-only…until now. They kicked off 2022 by starting to take project submissions, and they’re actively developing the site to expand their capacity and support even more.

Keep an eye on all three of these! I know I am.

Someone showed the Kickstarter board a fancy PowerPoint presentation with lots of big numbers, they ran to invest a bunch of their own funds in a blockchain without stopping to ask their own devs if the tech had any value for what the site actually does, and now they’re desperately trying to justify it after-the-fact.

…that’s my current running theory, anyway.

More analysis of Kickstarter’s announcement here — including a bunch of background explanation, for people who still aren’t following what all the new tech terms mean.

When companies announce a vague “shift to blockchain” with no specific idea what they’re doing: “Back in 2017, we reported on the bizarre story of the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranding itself as the Long Blockchain Corp. […] Now the Securities and Exchange Commission has revoked Long Blockchain’s stock registration, effectively banning the general public from trading its shares altogether.”

The big fraud in the heart of “Web3” discourse: “The cryptocurrency web3 starts with all our existing infrastructure. So I still need a DNS name, I still need a server, I still need storage, and I still have a distributed computation occurring between the browser and the server. So already I haven’t removed any of the gatekeepers from the conventional distributed system, showing the claims of gatekeeper-free decentralization are false. Web3 is only about adding an additional layer of complexity in the name of justifying the underlying cryptocurrencies.“

Problem links about NFTs/”cryptoart” specifically

A few days after the Kickstarter announcement, I got my first alert through DeviantArt Protect that an NFT is linking to one of my drawings without my permission. So it’s been an inauspicious week for blockchain news all around.

(As of this writing, the NFT-selling site is entirely ignoring the copyright claim…but I do appreciate DA for alerting me that it was happening at all. This is what a site that actually cares about its creative users looks like!)

A breakdown of what NFTs are — in straightforward terms, not in wild/ridiculous metaphors. (Which, to be clear, aren’t wrong — it’s just that I know many people don’t find them helpful.)

My days of regularly sharing this link are coming to a middle: Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

“You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Many people suggested that rather than trying to shoehorn the whole artwork into the blockchain, one could just include the web address of an image […] Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut. This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. “

2020: “The developers of non-fungible token project NiftyMoji pulled an exit scam as they have closed the official website, all social media and dumped their tokens on the market. Also the associated Coinbreeder accounts have vanished. The developers ran off with an estimated amount of one million dollars.“

Alternately, the link could get replaced with something else. Say, a bunch of random photos of rugs: “I just pulled the rug at my NFT collection on @opensea. Nobody got hurt. It is pretty easy to change the jpg, even if it does not belong to me or it is on auction. I am the artist, my decision, right?”

““The Billion Dollar Torrent,” as it’s called, reportedly includes all the NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. These files are bundled in a massive torrent that points to roughly 15 terabytes of data. Unpacked, this adds up to almost 20 terabytes.”

Problem links about blockchains in general

Things crypto evangelists don’t like to talk about: “During a hard fork, software implementing bitcoin and its mining procedures is upgraded; once a user upgrades their software, that version rejects all transactions from older software, effectively creating a new branch of the blockchain. However, those users who retain the old software continue to process transactions, meaning that there is a parallel set of transactions taking place across two different chains.“

In other words: there isn’t one single, central version of Bitcoin. It has multiple versions, and they’re mutually incompatible with each other. And yet, some people still believe blockchain is the magic bullet that will make every website interoperable. Suuuure.

Also, if you’re hearing anyone talk about how miraculous and unhackable anything blockchain is:

November 2017: “On November 19, 2017, more than $30 million worth of Tether tokens were removed from the official Tether Treasury wallet by malicious hackers. Due to this security breach, Tether has executed a newly hard forked version of the Omni Core code, which powers the Tether network. Why? Because this code refused to transact any of the stolen tokens.”

December 2021: “One of BitMart’s addresses currently shows steady outflows of entire token balances, some worth tens of millions of dollars, to an address currently labeled by Etherscan as the “BitMart Hacker.” In a follow-up tweet, PeckShield estimated the losses to be $100 million in various cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum blockchain and $96 million on Binance Smart Chain.”

“it is not new to me. im a distributed systems engineer & programmer. ive been building shit like this for decades i serve a playerbase larger than most countries and have built networks spanning the globe. blockchain is old news. it is my job to find new technologies and use them if they’re better. these are not. they are bad, embarrassingly bad.”

Sunday: ran a standard Windows 10 update

Monday: discovered the camera had disappeared. Again. (Error code 0xa00f4244.)

Also, after months of good behavior, the machine started unpredictably rebooting to a diagnostic that ended on this screen. Again.

Tuesday: surrendered to the constant reminders and upgraded to Windows 11. Everything looks a little weird (suddenly all the corners are round?), but nothing new is broken. Paint Shop Pro still works. Had to install new drivers for my Epson scanner, but once it had them, it was happy.

Still no camera, though.

Wednesday: rebooted into the BIOS to find out if the “Integrated Camera” option had gotten un-checked. Nope, it was fine. Booted back to Windows without changing a single option — it specifically asked “do you want to save changes” and I said no.

…and now the camera works?

It seems, uh. Deeply improbable that “just look at the BIOS options without editing anything” would suddenly reawaken the hardware, after no amount of reboots/updates/scans/troubleshooters could find it. But if my camera goes foom again from the next update, this is the first thing I’m trying.

Spurred by the success, I took another crack at the google results for “Hardware scan complete with no issues” and found a solution that involves turning off permissions for the fingerprint reader.

My laptop doesn’t have a fingerprint reader.

But Device Manager had a “Fingerprint Reader” entry, which sure thought it was giving permissions to something.

They’re off now. Guess we’ll find out if it works eventually.

…speaking of things where I’m waiting to see if they’ll be fixed, Kickstarter just decided to present a gift-wrapped selling point to all their competitors. Glad I don’t have any new campaigns scheduled until late 2022 — if things don’t get better, I may need the time to comparison-shop the rest.

I gave New Computer another update — this time making a point of backing up a bunch of stuff, just in case I had to do another reinstall from scratch.

Not only did the process go fine, the camera works again!

(This update was only released a couple weeks ago, and the camera-breaking update was a couple months ago, so it’s not like I could’ve just done that from the start. Someone on the development end had to fix what they broke.)

…so, ah, fingers crossed that it’ll fix the other weird problem, where the computer spontaneously decides it wants to reboot into a diagnostic scan. Which always finds no problems, just like all the previous scans.

Plot twist: I paid more attention to when these happen, and the last 3 times were on Thursday afternoon. So this past Thursday morning, I shut down the computer completely, then headed out to work.

I get home, and it’s on this screen again. Something in here didn’t just reboot the OS, it autonomously powered the machine on.

I mean. What even does that?

The camera-fixing update was later that evening, so I guess we’ll find out “did it also fix the spontaneous diagnostics?” next Thursday.

Had an extensive dream that was an AU of The Secret Garden, but Mary Lennox was a tween necromancer, Gideon the Ninth style.

…and now that I think about it, the parallels are there? Not to Harrow, I mean to Gideon’s backstory of “was a small child when a fatal affliction swept through the whole group around her, later retrieved after being discovered surrounded by bodies.”

Maybe I’ll request it for Yuletide, or something.

It’s that magical time of year when I put Kickstarter logos in all my social-media icons, re-re-proofread all my ad copy, and anxiously look up how much it costs to ship a 5-pound box to Germany.

(Just over US $70.)

That’s right, it’s the final-week prep for Leif & Thorn volume 4.

Please click that link and hit the “Notify me on launch” button, if you haven’t already!

And folks, I am so close to the weight where, if someone wants All The Leif & Thorn Books, the cheapest method is to pack them in a Flat Rate box. 4 books isn’t quite there — but at 5 books the flat rate is cheaper, and at 6 it’ll be much cheaper, and once we get up to 9 it’ll be astronomically cheaper.

…when we get to 10, they won’t all fit in a single box. But that’s a future problem.

(Not that I’m going to do this, but: there would be something really satisfying about drawing enough to fill 9 books, and then stopping the comic, just so it’s a perfect fit for the boxes.)

A Pterry note:

There’s a thing I regularly hear people say about Terry Pratchett, even across wildly different contexts…

“Was he always perfectly sensitive about my identity? No. Would he even really understand my life and experiences? Probably not. But if I got to sit down and talk with him, it feels like he would genuinely listen. And take what I said to heart. And support my right to live an authentic and fulfilling way, whether he got it or not.”

Life goals, seriously. I can only hope readers in 50+ years will be saying the same about me.

Kickstarter is crushing it:

November 2020: “Although 2020 isn’t over yet, Kickstarter is reporting the crowdfunded comics on their platform have already amassed $22 million in pledges. That is over 30% up from 2019’s $16.9 million, with two months still to go in 2020.”

July 2021: “…it almost beats Kickstarter comics’ entire 2019 ($16.9m), and is well ahead of its revenue for the first six months of 2020. If this trend continues, it would break the $25.7m record set in 2020 – possibly even getting at or above an even $30m.”

So these are a bummer:

N.K. Jemisen, 2013: “All mythological creatures have a real-world root. Dryads are trees + humans + magic. Mermaids are fish + humans + magic, or maybe porpoises + magic. Unicorns are deer or horses + magic, maybe with a bit of narwhal glued on. Dragons are reptiles + magic, or maybe dinosaur bones + magic – paleontology. So again: what are orcs supposed to be?”

2020: “Before we get into the results of the data analysis, let’s play a game to see how well you recognize gendered descriptions. Here are several character descriptions from actual books. For each one, select whether you think it describes a man or a woman. Don’t think too hard about it—just react!”

2021: “[What happened to Isabel Fall] has been held up as an example of progressives eating their own, of the dangers of online anonymity, of the need for sensitivity readers or content warnings. But what this story really symbolizes is the fact that as we’ve grown more adept at using the internet, we’ve also grown more adept at destroying people’s lives, but from a distance, in an abstracted way. ”

But this is fun:

A Lois McMaster Bujold quote I’m constantly coming back to: “The writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.”

“Well now, thanks to Nicholas Love’s neat cover generator, you can create both Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics covers for any book (or movie, or concept) your heart desires, avian gatekeepers be damned!“

Tamsyn Muir is doing a whole extra Locked Tomb novel. We're getting a 4-part trilogy, folks. Can't think of another ongoing series I'd be happier to hear it for.

First, a PSA:

8tracks is shutting down. In 3 days. They did install an automatic "save playlist to Spotify" button to back up everything before they go...so I guess I'm finally getting a Spotify account, huh.

* * *

I got a delightful Yuletide fic!

It looks like this:

curiosity and candy (makes the world go round) (3481 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Pet Shop of Horrors
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Count D/Leon Orcot
Characters: Count D (Pet Shop of Horrors), Leon Orcot
Additional Tags: Swearing, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Levels Of BDSM References, yes this is a tag now, Yuletide, Supernatural Elements
Summary:
Word has gotten out that Leon is D's new chosen mate, and the supernatural is pretty eager to test out his worthiness for the role.

Shame that Leon hasn't been informed of any of this.

I also gave one, in a niche-enough fandom that it's barely gotten any attention -- but, listen, the recipient liked it, so it's a win.

Slowly working my way through the rest of the archive, but I have a bunch of pre-Yuletide fic recs that I haven't even queued yet...so the rec posts of not-for-me Yulefics may take a while in coming.

* * *

I subscribed to Hulu With Live TV for the month, purely so I can watch the new Steven Universe episodes before the internet has a chance to spoil them.

Seriously, the speed at which people can draw fanart of totally-new character designs is unreal.

And during the rest of the eek, I'm trying to make the most of the subscription by bingeing as much other Hulu-exclusive content as possible. Caught up on Archer and a smorgasbord of superhero movies, still working through Family Guy and The Resident, got an apprehensive eye on Stargate Universe.

Surprisingly entertained by Gary And His Demons. (Satirical commentary on Chosen One narratives, Rick-and-Morty-type dysfunction-based humor, our hero has a magical-girl-style transformation sequence for which he sings his own theme song...it's a lot.)

...they have over 300 episodes of ER. And it's excellent background-watching-while-making-comics TV. I may or may not end up going another month with this.

* * *

Speaking of avoiding spoilers: I saw Frozen 2!

It was enjoyable, don't get me wrong, but also awfully weird. Go watch Jenny Nicholson's review for a good, thoughtful, funny breakdown of a lot of the reasons why.

Haven't been any other movies since Endgame that I was really determined to see in theaters. Considered it for Star Wars: The Final Movie For Real This Time Really, but at this point I've been spoiled for enough of the reveals that, eh. Might as well wait until it's out on streaming, and pick that time to do a free Disney+ trial period.

* * *

Decided to bake cookies for Christmas at the last minute, which had me trawling the internet for "recipes that can be made using the ingredients currently in my cupboards" on Christmas Eve.

Sidenote: I have seen so many retail outlets this year advertising "our stores are open on Christmas Eve! and will even have limited hours on Christmas Day!", and, guys, that is not something to brag about. Go watch one of the thousands of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, then swallow your profit motive for a couple days and give your people the time off, already.

So I wasn't going to go buy late-night groceries, because I am not a monster, and here's the recipe I was able to make. It's just flour, butter/margarine, brown sugar, and vanilla. Plus a bag of butterscotch chips, because I do what I want.

They were a hit at the family dinner! Then a hit again when I brought the leftovers to work. Go make 'em some time. Mix up the base with your own (premeditated or improvised) favorite add-ins.

* * *

Wordpress was offering a deal on paid blogging plans, and it was cheap enough that I sprung for it.

...only to find out it doesn't include any customization that wasn't already in the free version. You have to pay twice as much to control your own CSS.

Oh well. I've gotten enough value out of WP over the years that they've probably earned the donation.

Prompted me to finally look for a new theme, too. Took way too long to find something that was (a) 2 columns, (b) didn't collapse to 1 column when you weren't practically fullscreen on desktop, (c) had spaces to keep all my widgets and menus, and (d) didn't have clashing colors in places that non-paying users weren't allowed to customize.

Came out pretty nice, I think.

The theme is Bouquet. The header image and the purple background are customizable. All the pink is one of two pre-set options (the others are blue and orange), which thankfully coordinates with the header pretty well.

Apparently it's also infinite-scroll and I don't know how to turn that off, but oh well, you can't have everything.

* * *

Bumped up to the next-higher dose of Wellbutrin a couple months ago, and it's been a smashing success.

Before the switch, it had gotten to the point where I was sleeping 10+ hours a day, and could feel the not-getting-anything-done. (Doesn't help that I have a longer Day Job workweek these days -- it's great in most ways, but having it eat up all my awake time was a bit of a drawback.)

First week on the new dose, I felt refreshed, could focus way better, and was able to draw more than I got to do in probably the whole month before.

Turns out taking the higher dose too many days in a row leaves me not sleeping enough...but by now I've got the hang of swapping in the lower dose before I start to feel too wired, and it's balancing out really well.

* * *

The last Leif & Thorn Kickstarter alternately feels like it happened forever ago, and like it just ended last week.

The first unbound proof arrived a whole month ago, in November:

I ended up tweaking both files, and asking for a new proof of just-the-cover. (There was some tricky color correction involved -- you don't know exactly how it'll come out in CMYK until you see it in person.)

So the new one arrived...and somewhere between the file I sent and the paper coming out of the printer, the colors got changed in ways I didn't do. Not in a way they would notice when quality-checking, either -- it looked perfectly-balanced, which is the problem, it's supposed to have a purple tint.

(Volume 1 was pink-tinted. Volume 3 -- the one with the magic vine attack -- will be green. Volume 4 is shaping up to be red.)

The company blamed an equipment failure, apologized, and sent a free replacement. I now have 3 separate copies of this cover, and the books themselves are gonna be in production...any day now. Depends on when people come back from vacation.

* * *

I drew 2 full pages ahead in BICP!

Then decided the events of those pages should be bumped back to happen after other events. Which leaves me in the fascinating position of "two pages of scanned and fully-polished lineart, still hasn't gotten me ahead re: the page I'm supposed to post on Monday."

...One of my New Year's resolutions is to actually finish the series in 2020. Fingers crossed.

* * *

Marshmallow Fluff continues fluffin' along.

I did a family visit that left him alone for the weekend, and he seems to have coped just fine:

No special Christmas dinner for Fluff, because he started turning up his nose at canned food a while back. I figure it's a good thing -- he's no longer afraid of imminent starvation, so he feels secure enough to be picky -- but it really cuts down on my "treats to provide for special occasions" options.

He also sometimes sits on one end of the couch while I'm sitting on the other! And almost relaxes. I get the joy of having a judgmental mop staring at me.

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THOR'S INSPIRATIONAL SPEECHES ARE NOT ADMISSIBLE IN COURT

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