Paste, paste, paste...

Clearing out some nice links:

Mastodon poll (now closed, but please enjoy the results): “Pick the best fallacy“

Interview with Rachel Manija Brown, writer turned bookstore owner: “I had never intended to open a bookshop. I always thought it was one of those idle daydreams that people who love reading and books have. I never planned to actually do it because I didn’t think it would be successful—they frequently go out of business. But after I moved to Crestline, which is a very small town in the California mountains, the little town did not have a bookshop.”

The promised official postmortem of the AO3 downtime in early March 2026 from AO3_Systems is out! (I added that link to my earlier post about the downtime.)

Speaking of AO3…I checked the backlog on some fandom tags where I hadn’t seen updates for a while because their RSS feeds glitched, and now my To Read list has ballooned by +9 pages.

Art process:

Watching a video on iconic DC writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, which led me to an interview with this quote:

“I don’t work in a formal fashion — I don’t sit and type a full script and then draw it. What I do is I plot it. And then I sit down and draw it and then I write the dialogue afterwards.”

Oh, hey, that’s what I do.

Pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone else describe making comics this way. Maybe they just won’t admit to it, because Having A Script is seen as the “professional” way to do things? But nobody could accuse Darwyn Cooke of not being a professional — and here he is, revealing this is the process that works for him.

Vindication, hah.

Cat news: The fluff has also survived his latest vet visit!

This went so much smoother than it used to in his younger years. He didn’t struggle at all once he was in the carrier, allowed the vet to pick him up and carry him to a different room for shots, and didn’t pee on anything (or anyone).

I hope that means on some level he’s internalized “the scary trip doesn’t last too long, you’ll be home safe soon, just hold very still and wait for it to be over.”

AI Video links:

“OpenAI shutting down Sora, Disney drops investment: The news comes less than four months after Disney announced a $1 billion licensing and investment deal with the owner of Sora.” That’s the ComicsBeat article, but this news has been shared all over.

The original Disney-Sora announcement had me going “yeahhhh, I’ll believe it when I see it.” I figured any attempt to do content moderation would be overwhelmed by the onslaught of “users determined to make video of Disney characters doing inappropriate things.” Did not have “the whole thing implodes before they even get to that point” on my list! But here we are.

“Rest easy, Marvel screenwriters. The video that supposedly cooked Hollywood was, get this, appears to be made by humans to hype AI.“

“Finji, publisher of beloved indie titles such as Night in the Woods and Tunic and the developer behind Overland and Usual June, says that TikTok has been using generative AI to modify its ads on the platform without permission and pushing those ads to its users without Finji’s knowledge, including one ad that was modified to include a racist, sexualized stereotype of one of Finji’s characters.“

Crimes and defamation links:

“Angela Lipps, seen here in a photo from her GoFundMe page, spent more than five months in jail for a crime she maintains she didn’t commit after AI software linked her to a series of bank fraud incidents.” (The incidents happened in North Dakota. She was verifiably in Tennessee at the time.)

AO3 spambots have pivoted from “accusing random authors of using AI” to “accusing random authors of committing IRL sex crimes.” If you get any of these yourself, go directly to the Mark Spam button. I mean immediately. Sprint like you’re training for the Olympics.

“An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.”

“The feature crashed frequently and its “sources” linked to spammy copies of legit websites, or other archived copies that aren’t the actual source page. Some sources even went to completely unrelated links that weren’t written by the person whose work they were supposedly an example of, potentially indicating that the suggestions Grammarly’s AI offers with one person’s name may be based on a different person’s work.”

And the rest:

“Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States.”

“The fact that these guys can’t shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That’s a thing I strenuously resisted doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentless bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn’t understand crypto.“

Video: “The “AI Revolution” actually started decades ago, it was just a massive lie. In this gaming history documentary, we investigate how companies like Sega and Tiger Electronics used marketing smoke and mirrors to sell the “intelligence” of the 80s and 90s.“

“Stop spending money on Claude Code. Chipotle’s support bot is free.”