Solitary

SHOT AND CHASER page 160 is up! Page 159 updated for continuity.

Seeing a steady rise of people using the library as we carry through summer break, so here's a quick thread from a staff member on little things you can do (for free!) to make life easier on staff. Let's go!

SHOT AND CHASER page 159 is up!

rsvp

SHOT AND CHASER page 158 is up.

SHOT AND CHASER page 157 is up!

I know it's movin' real slow lately; please bear with me. Somehow, Palpatine got me lettering 6 books simultaneously

SHOT AND CHASER page 156 is up. Just a transitional moment. Page 155 updated for continuity.

Also Kickstarter for SWEET ABILENE is live!! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bigbigtruck/sweet-abilene-a-short-funny-erotic-comic-made-with-love/

Those videos that are like “sorry millennials but gen alpha thinks side parts/skinny jeans/high ponytails/whatever are cringey” are so painfully embarrassing can you IMAGINE being in your ENTIRE THIRTIES and caring what a twelve year old thinks about you??

via @wearebabygroot

So p/atreon is amping up its lockdown on nsfw material, gumroads is amping up its nsfw material-

Pornhub is currently not available in texas.

KOSA keeps coming closer to getting actually passed-

Can people please just admit that nsfw is being driven underground? That adult artists are being banned and pushed out of their spaces?

And dont start saying "oh just the yucky stuff." No, this is *ALL* Nsfw.

We are losing spaces left and right...

Not only that, it feels like we creatives are being killed. And that isnt exactly hyperbolic.

Paypal implemented taxes not that long ago, a hit to those who use it. Artists especially. Midjourney and other ai, stealing artworks, having people think less of artists.

Platforms kicking and banning artists left and right.

It feels like being an indie creator is being choked out of possibility. That you have to be born rich and lucky for your creative dreams to come true.

"oh you're just a porn addict its not that bad"

Its not that bad until your stuff is banned.

We had ROE VS FUCKING WADE thrown out the window. You dont think we could have LGBTQA+ rights thrown out too!?

The internet is becoming SO HOSTILE to creatives of all sorts. Its fucking heartbreaking.

Its like we're entering nsfw prohibition of the internet, buy a 160 dollar keychain for a 'free' picture of a dragon fucking a Volkswagen 😭

Exactly. And if people think it's just 'porn' being banned, they're wrong.

The lgbtq community is going to be the first to be thrown under the bus, especially with states like Missouri proposing laws where teachers are not even allowed to address a trans student by their preferred pronouns.

In other states, merely dressing as you identify is now being deemed as 'pornographic' and a crime.

It doesn't matter how 'wholesome' you think your queer art or writing is. It's going to be lumped in with anything lgbtq, and as far as the alt-right is concerned, it will be seen as immoral 'porn'.

This ban is the alt-right taking yet another step over the line to see how hard we will fight back.

Give. Them. Hell.

KOSA is the next step, and if it passes, we're fucked.

There is a planned lawsuit against mastercard nsfw policies (as it all trickles down on every monetized platform that USED to host nsfw) i hope it goes somewhere https://www.tumblr.com/taikeero-lecoredier/745142469891670016/lawyer-up-literally-i-think-itll-be-the-only-way?source=share As for KOSA,take the time to learn about it and help fight against it https://www.tumblr.com/taikeero-lecoredier/709890130733826048/these-twos-bills-are-very-bad-for-the-future-of?source=share

Also, for the people still uncertain what counts as 'nsfw'

Michaelangelo's David counts.

The Willendorf Venus counts.

Every millennia old stone or bronze statue depicting nude men and/or women. Every painting, every tapestry, every painted vase.

This isn't just 'icky porn', it's stuff that is entirely nonsexual depictions of nude human bodies too.

(I'm pointing this out bc every time I see this argument SOMEONE chimes in with 'oh but they don't mean REAL art!'. Yes, yes they do also mean your narrow definition of artistic nudity as well)

all of this is important & true but worth mentioning that the first people being thrown under the bus in online sexual content policies are sex workers. we can’t leave sex work out of these conversations.

Florida absolutely means Michelangelo’s David. Florida is also famous for its “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

In fairness to Florida, I was googling for “Alabama Michelangelo David,” because I was sure it had happened here. Alabama legislators passed their own “Don’t Say Gay” bill two years ago, and are currently being assholes about a trans worker at Space Camp, who a parent called a “freak.” Don’t even get me started on book banning.

If you give them a chance to restrict the internet, they will take it. All of this is connected. All of you are correct.

I'm just going to leave this here, because this woman said what I've been trying to articulate for ages much more effectively and succinctly than I've been able to

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

SHOT AND CHASER page 155 is up.

yeah we're in one of those slow-moving parts of the story rn

SHOT AND CHASER page 154 is up! oh honey no

I love getting to design randos.

Also the SWEET ABILENE kickstarter should launch as soon as I'm done designing the cover! There is a small Early Bird discount tier that Patreon supporters will get first dibs on, jsyk.

I think the best way to fight this AI shit is just to support actual creators. The cat's out of the bag with AI; our data's going to be taken and used without our consent whether we like it or not, so maybe we should put efforts into holding up those who create their own stuff. Comment/interact on people's writings and art. Make it worth them posting; make it clear that what the people are interested in isn't generated stuff, but things that people have actually done themselves. It's a drop in the ocean, but showing creators that it's them that deserve the support at least serves to cut off a tiny bit of oxygen to these AI hogs - and make a difference to creatives who are trying against hope to share with a community.

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

There's a lot of chatter in the notes going "oh so it's Blockchain/crypto/NFTs", and while there are absolutely parallels, I would caution against making a 1:1 comparison. Namely, because I don't think it's accurate to conclude AI will die like NFTs.

To keep it very simple: NFTs were for stupid people. (AI is also for stupid people, but its audience expands beyond just stupid people.)

Even the underlying Blockchain technology backing NFTs/crypto, which has some merit for specific use-cases, was an extremely expensive and complicated solution for a problem which largely did not exist, or was solved much more readily by other means. In fact blockchain tended to introduce more problems than it solved. So its investors were not people who saw a roadmap to how it would produce value. Its investors were people who saw blockchain as profitable because it's blockchain. And fad hypes die on their tautological nature.

The vast majority of money that went into the NFT/crypto space came from individual Reddit-dwelling tech bros with an unearned ego and disposable income from their not-yet-recessed software job. It bubbled, it popped, and because it solved no problems and created no value, it's just been languishing on the life support of crypto enthusiasts still willing to pump money into it.

And now, there are absolutely strong parallels here. The buzzword-of-the-day hype. The non tech-savvy CEOs eager to integrate with it like a dog who's heard the word "treat." A large amount of capital pumped in from believers. The high upfront expense at the vague promise of future profit.

But the death knell for that blockchain world, in my opinion, is the fact that it truly solved nothing, created nothing new, and produced nothing of value. It's a zero-sum game that can never exceed the monetary value of what was in total invested into it.

AI is different, and scarier, because it's garnered the hype and yet also produces something of reasonable value. An AI-article, even if shitty, is money-earned from clicks and money-saved from not paying a writer. Same for art. Even charitably, if not applied in a gruesomely dehumanizing way, the AI that can summarize a worker's emails and organize their spreadsheets and create documents for them means a worker whose productivity skyrockets and thus, the companies reap the profits.

(This could, of course, backfire, if shitty-generated AI articles make a company bleed out their whole readership and if AI productivity tools make massive errors that cost companies huge amounts of money. But it remains that, unlike blockchain-hype, the AI space is clear about what potential for profit it's aiming to achieve.)

The stark difference in my eyes is evident by WHO is investing in AI, who was not present in crypto/NFTs/blockchains. Dumb startups are eternal, and invested in both, but the megacorporation tech companies did not even sniff at the crypto craze. Most people there knew it was stupid. But AI has the big tech names like Microsoft and Google fighting each other with elbows and knives trying to pull ahead because, whether it will succeed or not, they clearly see HOW it promises profit.

The difference is huge between the crypto space, funded largely by random individuals with a niche interest and pockets of tech startup space, and AI, which is being funded by every tech corporation powerhouse on the planet right now.