The Cartoon Fanatic

man I love the comments yall have hidden in the tags, i love reading them, yall are so sweet <3 <3

guess who just found out the difference between wax paper and parchment paper the hard way

wait what’s the difference?

one you can use in the oven safely and the other you can also use in the oven if the thing you are trying to make happens to be fire

genuinely I'm so sick of people wanting all fiction to be ethical. can we all just get a little gross with it. the point of fiction is that it's not real. we can be unethical in fiction; same goes with being perverted with fiction, being unrealistic with fiction, and being grotesque with fiction. not all fiction has to be ethical, not every character has to be ethical, and that's okay. can we stop with the puritanism. be gross. be unrealistic. be whatever. if I don't like it it's not my business as long as we're all clear that its fictional.

The Cake Wrecks blog is one that I miss.

'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then

Let me be clear: if you use AI to write fanfic, paticularly if you do so in the hopes of snapping up a tradpub deal off the basis of the popularity of your worthless slop, then you are an absolute grade A ding-dong, and may the vengeful spirits of our beloved Spirk Elders haunt you via the medium of perpetual papercuts forevermore.

I am unaware of who this is referring to and feel like a small fishing boat that just saw the dorsal fin of Leviathan off the starboard bow

That is so extremely valid, and truly I wish that I had not myself plunged into the depths and seen the truth of the Leviathan (a gigantic plastic fish effigy that's broken off a derelict Fish & Chip shop and washed into the Atlantic: a harbinger of doom in its own synthetic tongue)

So many lessons in fandom and life boil down to make your own works for love of the game, don't go looking for ways to be an asshole to people, don't lie when people ask you something that challenges you to be better, and don't fucking cheat.

After the next chapters of AYK, Clay Differs, and Gilded Loam go out, I need to take a little break from writing fanfic. Looking for jobs has not panned out very well, my industry is completely fucked and even people like me who have over 10 years of experience in the field are not finding work. AI can suck my ass. I think I want to start an online shop or a Patreon and offer novellas each month, probably smut, but they would be like $5 for 8k words, with probably three full page illustrations. I think it'd be a mix of X Reader and some original stuff between my characters. Not too sure yet. The X Reader stuff would be between reader and probably monster men type thing, maybe skirting copyright infringement so like. Springtrap but NOT Springtrap type deal haha If anyone has any ideas or anything they'd like to see from me in that vein, I'd love to hear.