(no subject)

[kradeelav]

past!krad: oh it'll be fun doing anthology layout in krita as a crash course and getting a taste of what 1990's graphic designers had to go through.
present!krad: who hurt you, you motherfucker (lol)

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so i'm doing lay-out (text & images) of an anthology in krita.

and oh boy is it a study in masochism if it wasn't already apparent. but there's reasons why i'm doing this beyond 'editing an explicit naziexploitation anthology on the work mac's a no-no, and krita's honestly the best art program on linux and acceptable enough to scrape by with patience and stubborness'. and that is:

i feel like we're getting uncomfortably close to the point of no return when creative programs won't let you create specific artworks.

the thing is, the technology and the precedent is definitely there. adobe's limited what you can create in photoshop since the early 2000's (CS2 i think) when it wouldn't let you scan/edit/save US dollars, and maybe other currencies. google's deleted explicit works on gdrive/gdocs before (interesting tech support ticket from the IT director of the Tom of Finland organization < isn't it unhappily a bit on the nose for whose stuff gets deleted first?). and i would bet you dollars to donuts adobe does the CSAM/CSEM photography hashing on every subscription-based version of photoshop now, likewise some free tiers of creative programs online won't let you edit "hate symbols". i'm not arguing for/against any of these, just saying that the technology and motivation is reaching a tipping point.

and to loosely paraphrase from memory the words of a lolisho art creator friend, "we're one election cycle away from lolisho being effectively banned". i don't think that's alarmist either, given how that specific art's suddenly become a third-rail topic on a lot of platforms when it wasn't, even as recently as pre 2020.

if i'm being totally honest this -the concern about art content itself being blocked from digital tools- was a good 40% of why i jumped to linux (mostly other than being truly fed up with the enshittification of both win/macs).

i feel like the other big elephant in the room colliding with the other bits mentioned above is how AI generated images blur the lines of "art" vs "real photography" for the layman. one of the objective ways you could always say in defense of lolisho art is that it had to be drawn (or written); no matter how you "feel" about it, a drawing is a drawing. computers generating a drawn style from a photograph though... opens up a pandora's box that i think, frankly, none of us are ready for. and certinally not the various legal systems of countries already dealing with a moral panic. platforms already usually err on the side of "delete/block first, ask questions later" and... i'm not wholly unsympathetic to that (moderation is a herculean task), but as an artist who regularly draws taboo stuff (and with loads of friends also doing the same), it does put my teeth on edge of various canaries in the coal mine.

like most things in life - no easy answers. but i do feel like the linux+krita stack gives one a little more runway, a little more elbow room than corporatized software.

Comments

[amado1]

Uncomfortable but true 💀 And thanks for the reminder about google docs. Do you have any memory of the private alternative we discussed ages ago?? I used it for a few months but when my laptop abruptly broke, I couldn't remember the site name or my login... I've been using Google Docs again ever since and that Tom of Finland mention just turned my blood cold.

[kradeelav]

Was the alternative protonmail's (protondrive) by any chance? :o (i've been using protonmail for the last year or so as the gmail/drive alternative with no issues.

[amado1]

I don't think so, although I know I dabbled with the email part, at least. I'll check it out.

[homobirb]

a few years back, before twitter went to shit, i remember some people freaking out about explicit fanfic on gdocs and how it could be against the tos (memories are a bit fuzzy, but that was the gist of it). i don't think much came out of it, just a short-lived "holy shit doom and gloom crisis mode" that was swiftly forgotten about. that's more written word, but it does feel like a bit of a ticking time bomb, relying on the google environment for hosting more taboo work. just like discord's community ratings and scanning messages for underage/noncon text. i think it was around that time i swapped to scrivener, and then shortly after, obsidianmd for writing fic (markdown my beloved <3), not even touching upon gdoc's continued enshittification lol

[kradeelav]

scrivner <3 i think manuskript uses markdown so i also feel you on the love for that formatting as well. :)

maybe the one silver lining to all of these corporate platforms turning sour for nsfw creatives is there'll be more of a healthy ecosystem of opprotunities, whether it's FOSS or not.

[homobirb]

yeah hopefully !! though it seems there's quite a divide between "we allow nsfw creatives" and "we allow nsfw creatives who do lolisho and other taboo topics in art," so i can only cross my fingers that the current small pockets out there that allow the latter don't shrink anymore (⁠´⁠ .̫⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠`⁠) but i might be a bit jaded lol

[kradeelav]

biggest, most sympathetic handshake back at ya in hoping they don't shrink anymore. I suppose the silver lining is the areas that exist currently are pretty battle tested by this point, and would require signifigant shake-ups to be rattled.

[vsitante]

Re: Tom of Finland GDrive--call me stupid if I'm wrong but why would a big organization save their files on Google Drive permanently? That's the thing that's screaming to me, besides the whole "whoops we deleted this without your consent, oh well." There are services that provide your own drive or servers for archival reasons. I would have hoped something as important as Tom of Finland organization would have saved a little money for that...Then again, I don't know, that's just me archiving stuff anywhere that's not GDrive (or saving it until I can download it, if push to shove)--or that GDrive was unironically the safest route for them until last year. Pondering here.

I've heard stories that platforms are actually having a bigger issue with AI of children now, because (womp womp) a lot of them are close or actually are just glorified CSAM, and it's getting impossible to moderate. Based on one or two people, even worse to moderate than actual CSAM, because folks can pull the "it's fake, it's art, not real" thing with it. Maybe I'm a normie, but if there's AI art of children that's indistinguishable from a photo, I'm fucking calling the spade a spade. And I've seen AI art that's actually REALLY hard to differ from a photo, so that's my stance lol. I would not be surprised if folks who hate lolisho will use the AI art of children as further reason to go "well they said it was drawings, but if AI art used real photos, then oops, it's all the same."

I don't like lolisho, but I can agree it's become more of a hot button topic in recent years. I would say the sudden forced isolation and lockdown of Covid played a part, but I'm not sure. It also doesn't help when harmless shows are starting to be judged even more harshly just because of the style. Like, I also am not a huge fan of moe style, but I can also say that shows like Clannad and K-On are harmless and won't make the normies go crazy for loli. It doesn't make you an auto lolicon if you watch those and others. If anything, I'm almost agreeing with the idea that if you start being a little holier than thou, it probably says more about you than the thing. I have an example here: https://bsky.app/profile/brainchild129.bsky.social/post/3klbb4b6aqy27

My mother and I watched Moon Phase together and I would have never pegged this to be loli. She hates lolisho waaaaay more than I do too. (She would probably report lolicon artists to the FBI if she could be arsed to lol) Yet, this show is one of her favorites and she never saw anything loli in it. She even went out and bought the DVD collection and a plushie of one of the characters that you could presume is meant to be loli. But she's a normie. She sees the characters as what the anime says they are. I do too. According to this person and one of the replies, just even having the DVD makes her a pedophile or a lolicon. Try telling that to her face, I wanna see blood LMAO.

Anyway this is getting long so uhhhhh, relevant to "programs for layout," I tried giving Scrivener a whirl once and gave up lol. Wonder how Krita would fare. Affinity Publisher shall be my beloved until it dies. I've just taken to using the basic version of a thing until it doesn't stop working, if it gets to be bad. (e.g I'm still using PS CS5 lel)

[kradeelav]

yeah that felt a little odd that an organization large enough to have a IT director would opt for that way of storage. then again, i've worked on websites for small organizations about that size too, and the sheer level of shoestring budget that they operate on (especially nonprofits) tends to mean so many corners get cut, even if everyone knows and wants better.

gosh, i really feel for those poor moderators having to deal with the AI of kids. :<

but i loved your moon phase story with you watching it with your mother, since it really is also a fantastic example of why all of these topics are so tricky to untangle or to flatten down into another "us vs them" debate when... yeah.

you mentioning affinity publisher makes me want to check into it again. having to rely on libreoffice for zine formatting's not fun XD

[vsitante]

Ya know what, fair point, great point. I haven't had the chance to work for organizations as you have, and the last time I helped a non-profit was uhhhh [hides calendar], so I keep forgetting about other factors like...cutting corners when you don't want to. Ugh, it's terrible, though.

And for sure, glad that you understood where I was coming from. A few hours after I posted my comment, I went "oh dear, I went off too much" XD As someone who loves language, the flattening of topics gives me so much psychic damage. Having read Orwell's Politics and the English Language recently gave me back some brain cells. Nothing is ever as simple in life, even though it would be nice if it were lol.


NOT LIBREOFFICE FOR ZINE FORMATTING, WHEEZES XD I love LibreOffice but oh god, I don't know how that would work. I shiver in awe at your skills. xD

As for Publisher, I really like it! While I still have IND CS5 and did get to use IND CC, in the first thing I made in Publisher, I was able to do all the things I wish I could do in IND. Without the bugs either lol. Sometimes if you're not careful, an effect you did in CMYK would export very weirdly for a digital only copy--and well, of course, if you do the thing in RGB and export it to print, lord help you. There's still some things IND still does best, e.g. justify paragraphs and paragraph styles, but Publisher is a great program. Serif (the company that does Publisher) have been able to code so that Photo (=Photoshop) and Designer (=Illustrator) can open anything from their Adobe brethren but they still haven't been able to crack the IND code. That said, the program can still at least open IDML. So it's a workaround at least.

I will say that it's at least "buy once, it's yours forever" and they've recently upgraded to a "Version 2" of the suite, which features a universal license for all programs in the suite. The only issue I've had in V.2 that is exporting takes a looooong time, especially if you have more than....50 pages lmao. The beta version is a little better, but unironically, folks have recommended downsizing back to V.1 if the export is a big issue. (If you do a file in V.2 though, there is no backwards compatibility. I think they're still looking into that.)

I haven't tested these programs because money, but if you ever test Publisher again, some folks recommend PDFMarkz and IDMarkz if you want a bit more control.

...lol, this turned into a sales pitch XD

[kradeelav]

no seriously i love the sales pitch :D i may have to poke around and see if there's a wine emulation possibility with affinity since like, as you said libre office theoretically *can* do half the stuff at least for basic zines but i want to eventually make sure whenever i leave the current job (which gives us full adobe access) i won't be SOL when it happens. XD

holy shit 'politics and the english language' slaps so hard. ty ty again for reccing that, gonna be rattling around in the brain cells for a long time.