Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.
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There’s been a lot of stuff that’s resulted in me becoming increasingly more jaded & disappointed in life, but one of the biggest has to be the way AI has taken over everything online.
You can’t avoid it. Even if you try to remove it from online search results, it finds its way in somehow. It’s clogging YouTube and other video sites up like rancid grease in a pipe. At work, my coworkers & I all hate how much the programs we have to use keep pestering us with popups to use their AI services, that can’t be toggled off to just let you do your work. Even memes have been ruined by bad “cartoon” art (usually with either the waxy textures or the bizarre orangey tint that no human being would ever use). It’s kudzu, right down to sucking the nutrients away from actual original work.
But MAN, does it piss me off to see people using it in any kind of creative field. This past week, we saw one of the Marvel Comics editors that I consider a good example of a Comics Dude decide to not only make a bad blog logo with AI but also defend it as an inevitability. AI is already built on blissfully stealing art, writings, anything without attribution (let alone payment), and it’s already being used to replace human creators so the bosses don’t have to part with any money. At least until they need someone to fix the many many MANY mistakes AI made, that is.
And look, I’m not gonna lie, I tried using AI when it was new. Until I learned that it couldn’t exist without plagiarism, I thought it was a novelty. I tried to do a non-pixel-art rendition of my unread fiction’s title character, and the results were… garbage. Notably, it didn’t get the following references: specific flowers, the concepts of “gray eyes” or “green hair”, color blocking on clothes, pigtails, hair length, and desired human expression. Each one came out as a moe blob, and as a character, Val is too ornery & too fond of using body horror as a fight tactic to ever qualify as such. One came out making her look like a blonde coquette with a ginormous gold cross where her floral brooch should be. OOF.
For reference, here’s my pixel art of Val that’s the best I can do (and that’s using a base body from a long-gone website). AI could not do better than THIS:
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Not pictured: her cat or her weaponry, cuz I’m just that bad at art.
So yeah, it’s known that AI only produces trash. Yet, because it’s free/cheap trash, people keep opting to use it; it’ll never need time off for family or healthy insurance or a dependable cash flow to pay its mortgage, so the bosses will prefer it to a pesky human being. Like, right now, a long-awaited sequel to an anime I like has just been announced for the winter, its trailer is coming in October, and I am actually afraid that Crunchyroll will pick it up cuz of their continued use of absolutely horrid AI subtitles. Same for Walpurgisnacht Rising - is THAT gonna have mistranslations full of tone prompts?
We already live in an age where nothing creative feels valued, even when there’s evidence that the audience still wants new & interesting things (for a good example, look at the responses to K-Pop Demon Hunters or the rise of indie animation, even if the most popular stuff is Not For Me). AI just makes it worse, because you never know when it’ll appear out of nowhere to ruin everything. And it’s putting talented people out of work when the only real alternative is gig work delivery jobs for pretty much everyone. It’s the only thing that makes me want to quote the “hate” rant from Ellison and actually do it without mocking him.
Therefore, I promise you shall always get AI-free work from me. My stories no one reads? Genuinely awful but made by a human being. My horrible art, including the column logo that somehow took 2+ hours to look like THAT? It’s hand-crafted artisanal crap, and I’m proud of it, even if it looks nothing like the cross-stitch sampler I pictured. It’s not much, but by avoiding it & mocking it, I’m doing my part to make this bubble burst a little bit faster.
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Apparently there is a named hex code for "phantom violet". Not gonna lie, I’m kinda disappointed in how… gray the color is.
This is actually one of the more colorful examples.
Maybe it could be a reference for her eye color…?
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I initially posted this as a lightning-squared entry, but then I learned something that made me want to scream:
In the extremely slim off-chance any of my work ever got popular enough for someone to make a TV Tropes page, I would die of shame if I limited 90% of the world-building, character development, etc to Q&As on Discord, as opposed to in the work itself, to the point where my one-person work would need its own separate “Word of God” page to account for that laziness.
That’s bad, right? You can’t parse out a way to make key details about the world or characters fit organically into your work, so you just reveal it when asked on a closed-gate social media site. It speaks of a lack of planning, skewed priorities for what does or doesn’t reach the finished work, and suggests being more concerned with “connecting with fans” (who you can then coincidentally weaponize against anything that isn’t praise) than with honing your craft & telling a story. And given that this is one of those instances where I suspect either the creator or a close friend of theirs is the one doing all the TV Tropes updates regarding the work, thus making every entry feel like an attempted advertisement, it makes sense that they’d think “I saved 90% of the actual work for my Discord to make my fans feel extra special while keeping the work itself feeling hollow & half-formed” is a good thing.
Welp. This morning I learned of something worse & more embarrassing than this.
Y’see, the Discord thing is for a web series that’s free to anyone. The actual Discord itself is invite-only via Patreon donations, but the work itself is readily available to find. It’s not… say… a published novel that squanders its interesting premise in an effort to direct people to a Reddit built around a knockoff SCP Foundation project. Yes, this is real. No, I’m not naming the book, since it’s less a novel in its own merits and more a promotion for a FUCKING SUBREDDIT.
I said before that I find the trend of selling your work with AO3/TV Tropes tag bullet points instead of actual plots to be brain-searingly awful. It speaks of both authors & desired audiences being so incapable of logging off that they cannot assess something in any other way. So having a book that basically goes “if you want the full story, put this down and go read this subReddit instead” feels like the unfortunate next step in this odious trend.
At least Trevor Roberts is working to make his Mystery Flesh Pit book a standalone, even if it’s taking longer than planned (being the at-home parent to infants does that). It’s not like he’s telling one short story and just expecting you to find the site & read that instead.
I’m anything but a book snob - my main leisure reading anymore is usually part of some light novel series, since those are relaxing reading. You lose all claim to being literati if you’ve read more than 2 volumes of Bofuri. But those don’t basically go “check out my social media if you want the REAL stories/developments” like these instances. If a work cannot stand on its own without needing its creators to channel pre-obsessive-transphobia JKR & post their own “wizard poop” variations, it’s not ready for public consumption.
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My town is holding a suicide prevention & memorial walk for the second time this weekend, and I have… complicated feelings about it. On one hand, I’m glad that it was successful enough to warrant doing another year. On the other hand, I find that these events usually aren’t for people who’ve lived with suicidal ideation like I have.
This is not to dismiss their value. For people who’ve lost loved ones or nearly lost them, they provide a good avenue to connect to others or memorialize someone. And maybe it’ll reach someone who is having some self-destructive thoughts. So I won’t dismiss them entirely.
But one of the things that I’ve found over the years is that no one really wants to hear from the person who struggled (or still struggles) with the urge to end it. I want people to understand that it’s not just one thing that will tip you into those depths, no matter how much garbage YA media insists that it is. I want them to understand that “masking” isn’t just a buzzword online but something that a lot of us do to just get through the day. I want them to understand that a superficially “good” life doesn’t magically negate this urge. I want them to understand that going “but what about meeeee” as a way to make a suicidal person feel “needed” can be indistinguishable from being guilt-tripped into living & seen as on par with an appliance instead of as a person (it certainly is for me). I want them to understand that parroting slogans like “it’s okay to not be okay” or insisting it’ll be fine if you get some exercise/drink more water/eat more veggies is not helpful and usually just insulting.
But for them to understand, they have to be willing to listen in the first place, and that ship has not just sailed. It sailed, hit a reef, sank, and became a nice artificial reef. The number of total strangers I’ve had try to “UM ACKSHULLY” my own lived experiences because they cared more about the fictions built into their heads has illustrated that vividly. And don’t get me started on specific examples, especially the IWC/Wrestlesky people who genuinely seem to think that the best way to honor Hana Kimura is to put a flower in their usernames and then act exactly like the guys who attacked her. As Rod Stewart said, “There ain’t no point in talking when there’s nobody listening.” And absolutely no one wants to hear from anyone living with ideation like I’ve been.
So yeah, I hope the people going to the event have a good time or find whatever healing that they need or both. I just know from past history that it’s not an environment intended for people like me.
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Okay, enough heaviness. Instead of a video recommendation, I have a website & ARG recommendation instead:
This alternate history story is based around the art site run by one Penny M, focusing on her favorite pop culture characters. She’s a fan of animation & puppetry in particular, so most of the characters featured will originate from there, as well as some included for some more personal reasons. Along the way, as we learn about these characters, we learn about the differences in this world’s timeline, the path of Penny’s life, and the existence of at least one cognitohazard.
I STRONGLY recommend anyone curious make a point to find the credits link on the About Us page before diving in too deep, because besides giving credit to everyone behind the site it also includes some very necessary content warnings. This work gets HEAVY and gets there pretty quickly. But it does so in an adept & effective way, with nothing feeling like it was included just to be “edgy” or “serious”.
So many themes & plot threads are resonant in different ways. How do you handle connections with friends who… aren’t so great? What do you do when they abruptly leave your life? How can the potential parent-child relationship between a creator & their creation go sour? What happens when your life’s work, or merely a work that you treasure, winds up in the legal hands of the worst people possible? Is “true crime” media inherently amoral? And most of all… Why is this one particular song objectively awful yet so very catchy? Some of the hidden works have brought me to tears with their relatability.
The art is period accurate - no “black & white rubber hose cartoons still popular in the 80s cuz we have a skewed concept of ‘retro’ art” here. We even have a character going through a brief UPA-inspired era. And it’s an ARG that actually puts some emphasys on the “G” part, with puzzles that have confounded me more than I’d like to admit but always reward you by adding to the bigger picture of Penny’s world.
If you’re a fan of art & narrative ARGs like Welcome Home, PLEASE check out Pendog Creative Library. It’s a beautiful piece and deserves more love.
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Lightning-squared round! Because if you write down the intrusive thoughts, they go away. We all learned that from social media.
Today in “Bluesky is full of idiotic hypocrites”, we have the same people rightfully angry that a Marvel higher-up is cool with AI taking artists’ jobs turning around & sharing an ugly obviously-AI-generated fake Peanuts meme.
Sorry, can’t be excited about the new big indie animation trailer. The creator still needs to learn how to act like an adult & not a perpetual Tumblr child before I can respect anything she makes, and “omg she’s totally sticking it to her old corpo bosses” is telling me that her well is just as shallow as the “Tumblr child” description implies.
I do like being able to sub-post here, cuz I know that the main subjects of my frustrations on social media can never be arsed to read beyond a sub-headline at most.
Today in “Bluesky Is Somehow Worse than Xwitter Sometimes”, the exact thing that I wrote about last week - people defending & championing eugenics movements fueled by visceral loathing of the overweight existing in public based solely on which political alignment is doing it - is happening without pushback. It was so, SO much worse than just “healthy lunches & exercise”, and if you STILL think that’s the case, it’s cuz you weren’t a fat person during that whole era & probably participated in the condescending concern trolling.
Given how much of Arc 1 of Magia Record that Magia Exedra cut out, I’m fully expecting them to trim down Arc 2 as much. Trying to figure out if there’s a faction that they’ll just drop entirely… I do feel bad for anyone who didn’t play MR, cuz Exedra is leaving so much of that story & its characters on the table that it’s low-key depressing.
Watching people go from “let’s avoid being antisemitic” to “actually, the Holocaust didn’t go far enough, cuz if it did we wouldn’t have Israel now” thanks to one champagne socialist streamer & his gaggle of hangers-on has done more to turn me away from the online left than anything else. And the worst part is that they’ll refuse to see that this shift has happened or they’ll try & justify it as somehow being acceptable.
Man, who knew that getting all of those project kits pre-tariffs was actually a smart idea and not just me giving myself shopping-related dopamine hits!
Outside of Crunchyroll’s current AI bandwagoning, I am looking forward to MGRP Restart finally being adapted. It’s tied for my favorite arc in the series (alongside Jokers) and was responsible for making me a fan of the books.
Ever have that one celebrity/movie that you alone seem to hate, yet they keep giving you justifiable reasons for it, like shilling for AI as somehow being ultra-feminist? “OMG Elle Woods would hate this!” No, this is the exact kind of “girlboss” BS that you've been cheering all along, in fiction AND reality. Grow up and admit it already.
Horse-girl game update: I don’t really care for the whole thing with Mayano & her constantly flirting with her trainer, but at least, if you’re playing the trainer as female like I am, she comes off as an over-excited lesbian disaster instead of a weeb fantasy. Bit of respect to them for not changing it.
Somehow, the zucchini plant that I deliberately planted in my back garden is already dead & never bore fruit, but one that managed to plant itself in the front garden walk of my house is thriving nicely & has multiple flowers.
Why are you there?! Your home is in the back, not next to the azaleas!
We're still gonna cheer for every ace character that turns up in media, even when it's clear that the creator made them ace to underline their creepiness and/or villainy, huh? This is why I gave up on y'all, just absolutely no standards.
I swear, if the thing that makes me finally get into Homestuck is learning that apparently one of the characters makes herself a mighty battle gown out of her many unfinished knitting WIPs… actually, no, that’d probably make perfect sense for me.
Ex-colleague, I appreciate the friendly check-ins when you want something, but I’m not about to forget how you basically left me flailing for a year with your short-notice departure & now I’m sure half the company thinks I’m a dolt cuz of it.
I am extra avoiding your knitting event if the poster is (a) very obviously made with AI art and (b) has it spelled “KINIT” by the plagiarism bot.
Building off one of the pieces above, I just thought back to one of the worst Very Special Episode issues of a comic that was supposed to be about bipolar disorder & mental health where one character talks another down from being suicidal by talking about her brother’s death. To be precise, she talks about how upset SHE was by his death & how much it hurt HER, with no real attempt to discuss him except as a source for HER pain. The fact that Darci & I were the only people who found this to be insulting & gross instead of “omg so powerful & important” will always stick with me. That shit was written with a supposed therapist’s input. A therapist okayed that fucking shit as an effective way to make a suicidal person feel valued & worthwhile. Maybe if you’re eternally 13 years old it is, but the internet has actively discouraged maturing, so here we are.
Low-key disappointed that the new Street Fighter movie wasn’t cast entirely with wrestlers.
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And that’s it for another week. Here’s your traditional closing cat picture, since I WILL make anyone reading this far appreciate my cats. Appreciate them, dammit! APPRECIATE THEM!
People think he’s mean just cuz he hates being photographed, but I swear he’s a big cuddlebug.
See you all next time and thank you for making it this far!
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