Weekly Update - 308 - 2/2/26 (Patreon)

POLL! - Gonna try and close it out by this weekend, so I can hopefully get the art done this month and not be TOO late for lovey season.

I'm entertained by the current leaders: Kiva x Skye x Xane. Kiva and Max had an early wave of support though, and it hasn't gone unnoticed! I'm well aware I've not given those two the love they deserve of late. Never fear! There's plenty of time left to get your votes in! And I'm counting likes on comments this time too, don't forget. Characters mentioned in the comments will also have a higher chance of showing up on future polls, even if they don't win this time!

Comic this week - God Slayers - Page 243

Other Drawing: Gifty chinchilla for Quinn

Playing: Ratopia, WoW

Ramblerant:

I guess at some point Patreon spontaneously decided my account is 18+ again. Oh well. Nice of them to notify me (they didn't). I've got no way of knowing what I posted that some rando (or more likely an alg or an AI) found offensive. I'm guessing one of my characters displayed a little too much fur. The scandal! How HIDEOUSLY sinful! Someone put some pants on that dog, lest the devil devour thine souls!

rolls eyes

Doesn't really matter though. The only difference, from what I understand, is that it means my account is no longer "discoverable," because it's now 18+. Again. It was originally, but I asked them to make it General back when they required us to submit our IDs online to be 18+ creators, and at the time, they accepted my request. Because I don't really post anything that's very spicy here. But the ID thing eventually became a requirement regardless, so it's a moot point now. So, like... no free advertising for me, I guess. Which, probably didn't actually do anything for me anyway. At the end of the day, though, I make content that's intended for an adult audience, and I try my best to keep what I post HERE relatively safe(ish) for work, usually. I prefer the freedom to draw whatever I like and tell my stories however I choose, and I'm trying to walk the line between mild (so my art can be shared as broadly as possible in wholesome circles) and spicy (there's no two ways about it, spicy simply gets more clicks on the internet.) Except wherever that line is remains totally 100% subjective and can vary wildly from region to region, culture to culture, person to person, day by day and mood by mood, so... whatever. I'm just gonna keep making art while trying to abide by Patreon's policies to the best of my ability. I'm not about to lose any sleep over it.

Frankly, when it comes to moderation, I feel for Patreon and their employees. I used to work in a job where people could report "inappropriate" content and we'd have to investigate and make a judgement call on a case-by-case basis. Whether or not we did anything came down to a subjective interpretation of vague company policy by an individual near-minimum-wage employee based on whether they felt the reporter made a compelling enough argument. It was super rare that anything reported was a clear-cut violation of policy. The vast majority of reports fell into a grey-zone where they were only "kinda" inappropriate, usually from a certain perspective. Most people weren't actually TRYING to violate a policy, they were either just ignorant that there WAS a policy, trying to make their friends laugh, or having a little fun with wordplay, and then they got reported by someone that was having a bad day.

Every once in awhile the report was just outright fraudulent because someone was just upset and acting like a child, so each report did have to be ACTUALLY looked into, and in those days that meant involving an actual employee in each report because automation hadn't come far enough yet to handle that for us. It often meant manually delving through logs to find out what was actually said, rather than just trusting the reporter. (That makes me sound super old but gods like, technology has moved FAST in even just the past couple of years -- I promise we had computers, internet, digital logs and digital tickets!)

The sheer breadth of content we had to moderate also meant that nothing was done about offensive content UNTIL a report was made. And when something terrible slipped through the cracks long enough to get spotted by someone, and they subsequently went off to bitch about it loudly in public, it attracted all kinds of awful attention DESPITE being a clear violation of company policy that we would have absolutely done something about had we been told first. Then the department heads would hear from their bosses that the company has upset some litigious group with too many bored lawyers somewhere and the department heads would have to get involved so they could pretend like they matter, so they'd slightly reword the policy (just kidding, they'd force the middle managers to do that) so it said the exact same thing in a slightly different way and then they'd have to waste a bunch of company time and money putting us through training we didn't need (LOL - the middle managers would have to do that as well, the department heads weren't actually good for anything).

Of course, enforcing the policy as written to the letter ALSO attracted all kinds of awful public attention, because certain content could be "offensive" to certain snowflakes, so it might get reported despite it being in spirited good faith to other groups. And let's be honest, the policies were probably intentionally written to be vague, specifically to allow for the inconsistent enforcement of them, because management knew these policies were going to be enforced by a bunch of overworked and underpaid workers that were barely out of school. Most likely, if the policy got too specific, you'd get "rules lawyers" who'd try and look for loopholes so they could argue their blatantly offensive dogshit isn't TECHNICALLY a policy violation. Because people just be like that sometimes.

But, for example, say there's something that depicts a certain minority group in a neutral or positive light. Such a thing is often "offensive" to overly sensitive ignorant shitbags that can't stand the idea of anyone being loved when nobody has ever loved them. So if a tired, overworked employee then bans said thing with the click of a button to close out their last ticket of their 14-hour long night because it was so angrily reported and because thing technically violates the obscure, long-standing policy of "don't even TOUCH this topic with a ten-kilometer pole," it could set off the GLOBAL community because it is viewed as an overly oppressive or insensitive act from the Company, which results in broad public outcry and gets all the lawyers frothing and the department heads get involved again (via middle managers) to waste YET more company time and money. True story, actually, though it wasn't my ticket. I just worked there at the time and got to experience all the internal fallout, which was largely performative, but it was still a huge waste of company time and money. As far as I know, nobody got fired over it though, so that was nice.

I guess what I'm trying to say is... like... just... you can't trust complainers, man. EVER. (I say, fully aware that this entire ramble is TECHNICALLY one giant complaint). And nothing makes anyone more cynical or sociopathic than working in any amount of customer service for any amount of time, so always, ALWAYS treat your CS reps nicely and with the utmost respect. I remember even having just ONE pleasant interaction with a customer would make my entire day, because it was JUST. SO. FUCKING. RARE. But it'd always make me switch from wanting to stab literally every human to only wanting to stab most of them. And that's IMPORTANT! That is an important mindshift. This ramble has become a rant. It's now officially a Ramblerant. Ramrantble. Rantmble. Rembrandt. Ramtble... Ramlbt. Ramblerant.

So the moral of the story here is "Fuck corpo bullshit." But also that censorship/moderation is a super complex problem with no simple solution. We, as humans, love our simple solutions to complex problems though, so we just let our fists become ham and we begin to punch until the problem is invisible. It's still there of course, it's now just buried in all the other problems we caused by being... ya know, HAM-FISTED. But nah, just leave all that hard, complicated decision-making to the minimum wage employees! Simple! Great job, department heads, that's how you earn those multi million dollar bonuses.

Though, I'm sure these days corps probably just want to make AI do all the censorship and enforcement for them. Which makes the whole thing even MORE opaque and enigmatic. Let's just outsource ALL of our thinking to a black box of mysterious function, barely understood EVEN by the people that made it. What could possibly go wrong?

EH. Life wouldn't be any fun if everything made any sense anyway.

Those of you who like spicy food know where to go.