She’s Been Living In A Hardware Store World

Hardware Store girl needs a name still.

Late yesterday night

Page 111 of Greyfriar’s Isle, “She’s Been Living In A Hardware Store World”, is live for paid Planet Nude subscribers. It’ll be available to everyone else in a week.

Earlier

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan (Si apre in una nuova finestra) has updated with “Town Crier Network mentioned”

I’ve got some longer articles planned to post here, but once again, I’m shelving them for this week. Here’s some articles that other people have written.

Items of Interest this week

Dear adult creatives: Paykings won't accept your business. Don't even try. (Si apre in una nuova finestra) - DCS Tuft, Darkchibishadow

There is a false perception on the web that making money off adult content is "easy" and "quick" money. I've found the opposite to be true. More and more governments and corporations are cracking down on legal art and content than ever before and I've lost almost all of my ways to get my e-books to my fans and readers. I've had to move my archives before, several times, so I'm unfortunately very used to the process I'm going through right now: but it always hurts and it's always time consuming and there's becoming less and less places to flee.

For fun, check out the screenshot of Paycloud’s list of prohibited content, which includes some items that it’s reasonable to prohibit, but also “Fantasy (cat ears, fairies etc)”.
I’ve mentioned a few time before that this newsletter is hosted on Steady, which is hosted in the EU, where I have some say in how the rules get made. But the race to the bottom affects people here as well, sometimes worse. And one downside to Steady is that it is still beholden to PayPal as its payment provider. It should do something about this, by which I don’t mean also offering Other PayPal (Stripe). Get a European payment system in place, as soon as you can.

That's the corporate end. Here's what governments are doing:

The Internet Coup: A Technical Analysis on How a Chinese Company is Exporting The Great Firewall to Autocratic Regimes (Si apre in una nuova finestra) - Interseclab. Don't get too hung up on the fact that this is about the specific surveillance and censorship tools that are being built and used in China. Other governments want this technological capability, or want it. And it works, and they understand that, and how, it works. See “How to stop playing Chat Control Whack-a-Mole”, above.

And here’s what platforms are doing:
Our Stop Censoring Abortion Campaign Uncovers a Social Media Censorship Crisis (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

We analyzed these takedowns, deletions, and bans, comparing the content to what platform policies allow—particularly those of Meta—and found that almost none of the submissions we received violated any of the platforms’ stated policies. Most of the censored posts simply provided factual, educational information.

Finally, and still on the same overall theme, this is just heartbreaking:

There's a part of me that will never forgive the tech industry for what they've taken from me and what they've chosen to do with it. In the early days as the dawning horror set in, I cried about this almost every day. I wondered if I should quit making art .[… ] I did nothing to these people, but every day I have to see them gleefully cheer online about the anticipated death of my chosen profession. I had no idea we artists were so hated—I still don't know why. What did my silly little cat drawings do to earn so much contempt? That part is probably one of the hardest consequences of AI to come to terms with. It didn't just try to take my job (or succeed in making my job worse) it exposed a whole lot of people who hate me and everything I am for reasons I can't fathom. They want to exploit me and see me eradicated at the same time. 

So once again, this week’s list of Items of Interest is all about raising the alarm about the State of Things. Last week, I mentioned I’d been asking about good news about the state of tech in particular, and got only one reply that I barely understood. Over on Bluesky, someone I follow asked the same question and while there were a lot of answers, one that came back a few times was “I love how awesome AI is” and I had to just close the browser tab and think about that for a while. This overview of problems (Si apre in una nuova finestra) with Generative AI is actively updated and it’s surprising how many of the articles listed in it I’ve already read (and co-sign).

To leave you with something funny while still staying on the theme: LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025 (Si apre in una nuova finestra), making Mark Zuckerberg look like the fool he is.

And… while updating the subscriber list for this newsletter, I noticed that Zaftig Pink (Si apre in una nuova finestra) was a subscriber. He's another one of my Planet Nude colleagues, and also makes his own webcomic set in “The worst nudist resort in the world”. And it's a pretty bad resort! But it could be much worse! It could be, like, a theme park where the insides of the water slide are lined with the teeth of the unfortunates who got stuck there, and where the 15-year-old, untrained lifeguards got to see so much traumatising stuff during their long, long shifts that they had to resort to heavy drinking at night to cope (Si apre in una nuova finestra). I'm sure this wasn't funny to the people experiencing it, but forty years on, it's darkly funny to hear about this. And a friend of mine actually went there as a kid, and he thought it was hilarious. So that is something that I gotta admit has got better over the past decades: theme parks are much safer. Not that I'll be getting into a roller coaster any time soon, that's not my idea of a good time.

Earlier still

Today’s Blast From The Past is Confusion over communicative ability and names (Si apre in una nuova finestra). At the time I originally posted this in 2018, it was a sign-of-life update, because I hadn’t posted in more than six months. Things have got a little more regular since then. Read on from the link or binge-read Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan from the start. (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

And the full page:

See you next week, when I'll probably be talking about… BLACK SABBATH! I'm doing a deep dive into their music right now.