humanist + humorist

So, hey, AO3 released a new version of their Terms of Service.

Even though 99% of it was just rewriting/reorganizing the already-established terms to be clearer, a distinct subset of social media (well, Xitter mostly) took "AO3's servers are (still) hosted in the US, and you (still) can't post anything that breaks US law" to mean something like "Project 2025 means AO3 now plans to send your fanfic-reading history to the FBI!"

I went back on Xitter for a bit just to drop corrections in people's replies. Not sure it made any difference to the overall tone of The Discourse...but I got to reassure some of the specific users who saw those tweets, at least.

Worried comments on the AO3 newspost got a stock reply about the OTW's legal plans and actual concerns coming up in the next four years. Shared that around too. It's reassuring.

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Mom watched Deadpool 1! 

As predicted, she did not care for it!

There were some individual jokes and/or cute moments she appreciated, but in general...yeah, not her cup of tea, she's no longer tempted to catch up with the rest.

Meanwhile, I impulse-bought a Deadpool-themed Christmas sweater. (In person, and I can't for the life of me find the specific design online. Not even on the website of the store where I got it.) Have worn it around the house on a regular basis since. Not just because it's fun, it is so cozy.

...I also have a cozy Moon Knight sweater that I sort of assume is from the same line, but haven't worn it as much. I want that one to last a long time, without getting ruined by drink spills, or stray claws, or Fiddlesticks sneezing all over it.

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Adventures in Hosting Your Own Website: the other day I deleted a single error log that had ballooned to 1 GB in size.

My hosting plan has 20 GB total! That's 5% of all the space! For an error log!

It was for the Piwigo instance that the And Shine Heaven Now gallery uses. Siteground emails me about updates to my Wordpress instances, and will force-auto-update them if I don't get around to it fast enough, but it doesn't do that for Piwigo. (Or the DokuWiki instance that the Leif & Thorn wiki uses.) So it was several major version upgrades behind, and while pages would still load, it would throw you about 20 errors for each one.

All of which apparently went on long enough to dump a gigabyte's worth of plaintext.

Whoof.

In happier site news, I converted the BICP comic site from Comic Easel to Toocheke, the hot new webcomic-themed Wordpress plugin that's actually getting maintained in 2024. Have already emailed the creator about some issues/bugs, and gotten one update pushed! Very promising.

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.”

Started rewatching Boston Legal for my comics-making background TV, and all the B-roll of streets and buildings is making me really nostalgic for Boston.

…but definitely *not* nostalgic for the 2000’s. The level of Cultural Discourse we were wading through, holy cats.

One standout: mall Santa gets fired when a kid says “Santa please make me normal, I like wearing girl clothes,” and Santa says “nothing wrong with that, so do I.”

And the baseline defense is “look, it’s not like he would tell EVERY kid he crossdresses! This was a special case!”

Instead of “oh ffs why *not* tell everyone? These are regular street clothes. Women wear them all the time. Every child in this boy’s class should be told that, hey, some men wear them too — maybe even Santa! — and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

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After almost a whole month of good behavior — and precisely 3 days after the original service contract expired — New Computer did the thing again on Saturday.

And then yesterday, I woke up to find it back on its old “doing the thing on Thursdays” schedule.

(Checked the update history — as I expected, there isn’t anything new corresponding to either restart.)

Is this just going to be a Technically Harmless But Still A Huge Nuisance feature of New Computer for the rest of its operational life? Signs point to “ughhhh.”

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After rewatching the first three Rebuild of Evangelion movies, I finally got to the fourth one today.

The animation is stunning. Not just the wild mecha battles, but the startlingly natural detail in tiny motions like “Shinji throws his SDAT player and it goes skittering across the ground”. And the backgrounds — they have this low-key showing-off trick where they’ll come up with a lushly detailed set, then draw it at a dozen different long-shot angles, so they have to do a new full painting every time.

Also, we spend like 40 minutes in an idyllic little farm town that’s been cultivated and defended against the post-Impact wasteland, where they apparently got Studio Ghibli to collaborate. It absolutely paid off.

How much can I talk about the plot at this point? I haven’t run into a single unmarked spoiler in the wild…which suggests that either the early viewers are being extra-conscientious, or that most people haven’t gone to the effort to see it yet.

In general:

It’s wild and twisty, but, you know, in on-brand-for-Eva ways. There’s some setup that doesn’t pay off, some payoffs that weren’t really set up, but each chunk ranges from “competent” to “deeply satisfying.”

There were characters who got to be so happy that you figured they definitely wouldn’t make it through an Eva film alive (did I mention there are people living in a Ghibli village??). A surprising amount of them pull it off anyway. Sometimes the TV-series lore gets punted off into space. Other times, they go so hard with the callbacks, the original titles are literally flashing on screen.

I will spoil this: the penguins are okay. This movie knows which questions are really essential to answer, and it delivers.

Made a post last night about how I think the computer is okay, came home from work this afternoon to find it did this again. I know, I know, I jinxed it.

No issues found! You didn’t find any issues the last four times, either! Why do you keep doing this.

Gaaaah. Should I even try to do a full reinstall? Contact Dell customer service and sit through however many hours of troubleshooting they’d want to do? Or just give up and live like this?

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…and, in a completely unrelated bonus vent:

Chris Chan, long-time Webcomic Person and generally infamous Internet Personality, has been trending on Twitter for a bit. For entirely horrible reasons. If you don’t want to read about elder abuse and mental illness, don’t go digging.

But given that she has like a 20-year history of being egged/goaded/manipulated by trolls into doing awful things for their entertainment…my first thought on hearing bad news about her is “wonder which sociopath talked her into thinking this was ok.”

(For anyone who wants receipts, there’s a comprehensive documentary series on YouTube that goes through the trolling in detail. And by “comprehensive” I mean “59 parts so far, each about 40 minutes long, and it’s only caught up through 2017.” The creator just put it on hiatus, because they don’t want to seem like they’re taking advantage of a terrible situation for hits — which is a principled move, good for them — but here I am linking to the back catalog anyway.)

Seriously, in a better healthcare system Chris would’ve been taken into some kind of professional care at least a decade ago, for her own safety. Let alone anyone else’s.

And I hate how sure I am that the instigators are never gonna see any consequences ever.

Three months after this post about getting a new computer, and things are going swimmingly. There was a building issue for a while with a Mysterious Hidden Process steadily filling up hard drive space, but this forum post had the fix, and poof, my free space went from 29 GB back to 129 GB.

I also did a writeup about Paint Shop Pro 7 back around that time, and figured it deserved its own post.

And hey, it pairs really well with this recording of the strip-creation process! Not quite start-to-finish, but most of the “cleanup-flats-shading-effects” process. (Light Quarantine Flashback spoilers.)

Programs you’ll see in use:

• Legacy version of PSP: cropping, lineart cleanup, flats
• Newest version Clip Studio Paint: tiled patterns, perspective effects, anything that uses nice brushes or complex assets
• Either: shading, adjustment layers
• Legacy (pre-subscription-model) version of Photoshop: files saved by Clip are just different enough to be unreadable to PSP, but re-saving them in PS fixes that

And here are the functions of PSP that make it extra-useful for basic comic-strip operations, i.e. the reasons I’ll keep using the program as long as it will run…

• Opens real fast. Not as much of a bonus since I got the high-powered New Computer, which can even open Photoshop quickly, but still nice
• Lets you paste on the layer you’re working on. I do a lot of “copy this bit of the lineart and paste it over that other part,” and if they generated a new layer every time, I’d be constantly stopping to merge them all
• Same with adding text  — which I write in another program, so it can be insta-copied as text into a transcript (I fully expect Clip Studio to add an “export all text into a plaintext file” option one day, it’s such an accessibility gimme!, but we’re not there yet)
• Lets you paste a selection with one color erased to transparency. Lots of white backgrounds I get to auto-erase
• Color/pattern settings don’t have to be universal, they can be different for every tool. So there’s a lot less referring back to the palette — you can just pair 2 lineart colors with the pen, 2 flat colors with the bucket, 2 shading colors with the brush, and then one-click switch between all of them
• Keyboard-shortcut instant toggle between layers. Based on their order, regardless of layer names (lowest is ctrl+1, next is ctrl+2, etc). Working on one layer when you notice something needs fixing on another — toggle over, fix it, toggle back, without your eyes/cursor/attention being pulled away to rifle through the layer window
• Switching between “view all layers” and “view current layer” also has an instant shortcut. No matter how many layers you have, pick one and see it alone in a couple of clicks, no need to go through and individually hide all the rest
• This one isn’t about PSP working better, since Clip and Photoshop both have much more powerful vector tools…but PSP draws 99.9% of the lines I need that for, and it’s the one I already know, which saves me the effort of getting used to a whole new “click these points and drag those handles to generate this curve you have in mind” system

I could make a whole list of features where Clip and/or Photoshop have a fancier version, which is useful when I need to get fancy, but for a lot of these average daily operations, it’s overkill.

So: Clip has all these sophisticated content-aware fills — great, but you don’t need any of them to handle black-and-white lineart. Photoshop will let you do all this precise warping and twisting of vector text — sure, but I don’t need Fisheye Perspective Skew for the “click” of a door opening, just a little tilt and it’s fine. Both of them have amazing brushes; I don’t need any of them for basic cel-shading, it’s all covered by “freehand selection” and “multiply fill.” And so on.

And listen, if you got your start in CSP or PS (or any of the freeware programs still being updated), and learned digital-art skills there from the ground up, your workflow probably developed to fit that program anyway. So maybe none of this sounds like a huge improvement on what you’re used to.

But if it might be valuable, or sounds intriguing, or you feel like trying something new, or you’re just really into retro programs by defunct companies that are so well-coded they still run after 20 years and 5 OS upgrades…I’m gonna leave this link here. Have at it.

Last month I had a computer scare, and figured it was time to finally suck it up and get a Windows 10 machine. So I’ve been setting that up for…the past week.

(To be fair, most of that is the inchingly-slow process of “uploading mountains of data to my new cloud backup.” Which…I probably should’ve gotten years ago.)

New machine on the left, old machine on the right. I’ve had the old one for almost 9 years — it’s a tank, it’s been hauled around on interstate journeys in planes, trains, and automobiles. New one is breezily light. Screen is only about an inch narrower, but the chassis is so thin I feel like I’m going to snap it in half:

Process being supervised by my Executive Assistant. His only opinion so far is that he really wants to chew on the new power cord.

Perks:

• Program migration has gotten buttery-smooth. I auto-synced a heap of settings with individual cloud accounts for Clip Studio, Firefox, and Torch. Manually copied and imported the same for Photoshop. Followed my own 9-year-old notes for “if program X doesn’t install right, use hack Y,” and they still hold up.
• Better speakers! The old ones were fine, but I actively looked for better ones when comparison-shopping, and yeah, the sound is noticeably richer.
• More horsepower, more RAM, better graphics card. I haven’t switched to making art over here, and that’ll be the real test, but some little things are noticeably smoother already.
• Yeah, OneDrive is gonna be really convenient. Lovely boost to the ol’ peace of mind. Had to wrestle with Windows over the default settings it desperately wanted to shove me into (especially when it tried to upload 7 GB on a wireless connection), but I think I’ve got it sorted.

Drawbacks:

• It has 4 USB-C ports…and that’s it. The product description promised USB Classic ports, but apparently that’s not part of the machine, it’s a separate USB-to-USB-C dongle that hangs off the side. Gonna need to buy more gear just to have my mouse and my scanner connected at the same time.
• No ethernet connection port, either. The wireless isn’t bad, but sometimes — say, when you have a heap of files to sync — you want the alternative.
• Not sure I’ll feel comfortable traveling with this thing unless I buy it a whole solid protective casing to carry it in. (You know, whenever travel becomes an option again…)
• Still trying to get a few things to sync right. Clip Studio materials haven’t shown up. Firefox tabs appeared briefly, then all went poof.

The old computer still does everything just fine, which is…unusual. All my previous laptops have needed replacing for urgent, non-fixable reasons. This one — well, maybe the next time it shuts down will be the last, where I can’t convince it to reboot no matter what I do? Or maybe it’ll keep working smoothly for years. I have no idea.

Trying to be proactive, though, and switch as much work as possible to the new machine. Which is looking like it’ll be almost everything. Even my ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro has installed just fine.

Then the old computer can stay around as, basically, “an unnecessarily powerful DVD player.”

(The new one doesn’t even have an optical drive…which, okay, that’s more forgivable than the lack of classic USB ports, but I did watch one DVD earlier this year.)