im here for a good time not a long time

Yes, trans women exist (and should be welcomed, accepted, and validated) in gay men's spaces. But let's not pretend that trans women on *double checks post* fucking grindr are being treated with respect.

Trans women helped build the gay community. Trans men helped build the lesbian community. Trans women helped build the lesbian community. Trans men helped build the gay community. Nonbinary people have helped build the gay and lesbian communities. We have ALL intersecred with each other before we had the words gay or lesbian or transgender.

Levi's said yes, actually. Assless chaps and a biker vest. Happy Pride.

Opv sona ig but it's kinda just straight up me with gross emphasis. Been loving the sonas I've seen around we should all be gross and on vacation forever

This sentiment comes up in drafting as well, where it might feel like you should 'rush' through the sketch to get to the 'good part' of rendering (the part that the viewer will actually see) a weak foundation can lead to a shoddy end result. Instead you should measure twice and cut once - spend more time in the sketch stage, and you'll have to spend less time interpreting rushed sketches or undoing mistakes in the rendering stage.

I wish I could say I follow this advice, but alas, I am a chronic rusher. It's a work in progress :')

But the immediate thing that came to mind upon re-reading that passage was our current climate surrounding AI art. The pervasive philosophy underlining the growing prevalence of generative AI and ChatGPT is that it 'saves time'. That it removes all the "busy work" and creates finished products within seconds that would take a human being days or weeks or months or even years to complete.

And yet, despite so many companies and AI tech bros jumping at the chance to believe this theory, committing to gutting their human teams in favor of robots, we're now seeing those same companies losing valuable assets - data, money, time - and scrambling to hire humans who can fix the problems caused by what they assumed would save them time and money.

It didn't, and if anything, it had the opposite effect - their lack of planning and foresight cost them more time and money than if they had just invested it properly in the first place into the more reliable systems that had been proven to work for decades. Or, at the very least, it just didn't save them as much time and money as they anticipated, because as it turns out, AI isn't a magic wand, and it does frequently require supervision and moderating to ensure it doesn't spit out the wrong information.

I think this all goes to show that the 'long short cut' method is one that's still relevant and yet has been largely forgotten in favor of our modern fast-paced world that's chasing the dragon of instant gratification.

The value of art has always hinged on the consumer, but now it's to such a degree that we've decided to cut out the artist entirely, instead giving generative AI and ChatGPT to the consumer so they can get what they want immediately, regardless of whether it's even usable or high-quality.

But the Disney renaissance films that we look back on so fondly as consumers would not have existed without the time and effort put into them.

The Mona Lisa was not painted in seconds, but rather several years of painstaking process.

The process is the result.

If you don't want to do lots of work, what are you doing in art?

Spin the wheel to find out what!

This idea was submitted by @dbnekonico!

here is all the reasons why you should use comicfury (if you aren't already) :

pretty much full control over your custom site design. if you're an HTML/CSS nerd you can go as crazy as you want with it. but for those who aren't so code-savvy, there are also simplified built-in design tools so you can create a unique site for yourself and your work. reject homogeneous minimalism design of bigger platforms, embrace tradition of mid-2000's kitchen sink site design (if that's what you want, that is).

the site demonstrates its own philosophies through its extremely charming vintage 2000's-era site design. it ain't broke so it doesn't need fixing. if it's too 'ugly' for you and wards you off from using the site, then it's succeeding at what it was designed to do.

forums! remember those??? CF sure does!

full view of your comic statistics over the past month, shown as delicious daily line graphs, separated by unique visitors, web page view, and scroll view.

hosting is free. don't want that pesky 'thecomicseries' or 'comicfury' add-on? all you gotta do is purchase your own domain name. contact kyo and they'll take care of the rest.

you can categorize your pages per chapter, making for an easier reading experience

you can include page transcripts for screen-readers as well as mouseover text

you can enable comments per upload and even manage them so that all comments have to be approved by you before they're shared publicly

archive tagging!!! i.e. you can tag uploads with relevant characters / locations / etc. so people can find specific pages easier on your site.

you can run a goddang BLOG on your comic site so that people can read what you've been up to! or don't, it's your choice!

clear filters for NSFW content. the filters do what they must to inform your audience as intended, outside of that, your comic will not be taken down, flagged, or suppressed in search results just because it contains violence or boobies.

they are strictly anti-AI

they do not make licensing deals with third-party companies, so the only 'competition' you have are other indie creators like you, no Marvel or DC nonsense

you're free to embed ads and/or donation buttons on your site and CF will not take off a single cent of it for themselves.

the front page goes to Recently Updated by default, all the other tabs are simply Popular Now and Popular Overall. there's also a Random button if you want to be surprised with something new. while this might seem like a bad thing for people who prefer custom filtering, this unbiased layout prevents the common visibility issues / favoritism / etc. that happen on other platforms.

but if you DO want to find something new that fits your specific tastes? just use their search bar, unlike on Webtoons it actually does what search bars are supposed to do! within the search page you can pick and choose whatever genre tags you want, and you can filter out major NSFW flags you're not comfortable with seeing.

COMICFURY HAS A SCROLL VIEW SETTING THAT YOU CAN ADJUST IN YOUR SETTINGS. THE PLATFORM IS ALREADY DESIGNED TO BE CONSUMABLE ON YOUR PHONE. IT DOESN'T NEED AN APP.

ugh man i'm so sorry for popping off on this very innocent and well-meaning bystander but what did i JUST say

when i say it's a webcomic platform that knows it's a webcomic platform

that's it. no asterisk. that's the POINT OF THE MEME.

it is a website for reading and hosting webcomics. there is no app. and that is why it works.

i realize this might just be a consequence of me being Old™️ compared to the average webcomic consumer / artist, but do y'all know how destructive phone apps have been and still are to webcomic culture? because not only is developing a phone app EXPENSIVE AND TIME-CONSUMING, but it's pretty much impossible to have phone apps now that aren't managed and funnelled through Google and Apple.

that means CENSORSHIP. and CORPORATE INTERFERENCE. and FINANCIAL INVOLVEMENT. which is entirely opposing to WHAT WEBCOMICS ARE.

as soon as indie sites based around free content develop apps, there's a very clear shift in how that site continues to operate, prioritizing corporate standards and profit over usability and community. because otherwise, they can't justify the creation of the app in the first place, and they can't very well maintain that app on account of how expensive it is to do so.

in fact, i can even attest to this from experience! y'know Tapas? the friendly competitor to Webtoons?

this platform used to FUCKING SLAP and then guess what? they released their phone app. and in doing so, they immediately lost the entire fucking plot. their ad revenue program turned to shit, they started prioritizing their advertising and growth towards paywalled comics over the free to read ones, they started restricting the content that was allowed on the platform for the sake of 'brand friendliness' and most of all, they started caring more about what INVESTORS saw rather than what the average user experienced.

and i'm sure that's a heavily biased opinion in which i'm choosing to cast blame on one specific thing instead of all the various things that led to the downfall of this fuckass platform (and i could talk about all those things at length too) but guess what? i don't give a fuck if it IS biased, because i've been there and back and lived to tell the tale and the common denominator in the enshittification of all these major platforms i'm goddamn MEME'ING ON was the phone apps. and most of all, the normalization of corporate involvement which happens the MOMENT you build an app for the Google and/or Apple store.

modern phone apps are NOT about accessibility, they're about money and metrics. that's it.

again, big apologies to the person who left these tags in the reblogs because i know they didn't mean any ill will of it.

but EVERY FUCKING DAY i see y'all complaining that webtoons and tapas are garbage, that they don't let you consume NSFW content without censoring the fuck out of it or removing titles entirely from their platforms, how they progressively tighten paywalls and increase ads to force every last cent out of you, but never ONCE do y'all realize THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

comicfury doesn't have or need a phone app for the same reason that AO3 doesn't have or need a phone app. to put it simply - because it's pointless, a waste of money and effort, and it would just destroy everything that's great about the thing that i'm trying to promote to you in the first place.