Wow, really been a long time since I've used this feature huh? Guess I ain't been doing much with FA as I used to...then again, with my health as it is, I ain't exactly been putting a high priority on my 2d work, alas.

Anyway, with everything that's been going on everywhere, between Twitter descending into a cesspit, Cohost shutting down, other places hanging on by a shoestring and a prayer...it's about time to do the whole "platform diversification" dance again, huh?

As it happens, I've already made a BlueSky account to get onboard - two of 'em in fact, with possibly a third planned! Gonna be using them somewhat more now, especially since I've kinda gotten into different styles of content creation that aren't exactly ideal for FA, at least not the way I do 'em.

For my 2d artwork, a bit of 3d modeling stuff, and the occasional promo vid for my VR-based assets, you can go to my main account here: https://glenskunk.bsky.social

For my spicier VR-derived malarky in photo and video form, with collaborations and other kinds of goodness, you can find it here: https://twunkskunk.bsky.social

As for my more hardcore erotic artwork (like my FA alt account), that one will be a bit longer in coming along; I'm waiting for a tagging/ID update to BlueSky to go fully live to make that happen so as not to ambush people with the wilder stuff right out in the blue.

As an aside, I've also been debating with myself if I want to lockdown my Twitter accounts and remove all the stuff I posted on 'em to prevent future scraping; between the removal of opt-out for their machine learning tools next month and their changes to the way the block feature works, Twitter no longer feels like a particularly safe or sane place to post (not that it was ever really safe or sane, especially not the past few years...).

If you'll forgive me for speculating for a moment, I suspect the block feature changes and the removal of the opt-out for Grok 2 training is linked; given the tendency for a lot of us artists on there to block AI scraping accounts whenever we find them (to say nothing of the folks who push out endless AI-generated imagery), it makes me feel that the block change was done specifically to allow those scrapers to keep working even if they've been blocked. The management of Twitter is doubling-down on their ML tools in my view, and while I believe the problems with harassment and stalking are definitely worrying effects of the block change, I believe the main goal was to make sure the AI scraping could get the training data they needed regardless of the wishes of the people who make the artwork being trained on.

That basically leaves a lot of us artists with three options - lock/private out Twitter accounts and severely limit who can and cannot access our stuff, add Glaze and/or Nightshade to *all* of our uploads, or up stakes to platforms not so gung-ho about machine learning and training their AIs on their users' content. That last one seems to be the option a lot of folks are taking, with many going to the trouble of deleting everything from their Twitter accounts, locking/privating those accounts and changing the passwords to keep malicious actors from appropriating their online presence for their own gain. We already have problems with scambots and impersonators in the Twitter creative space; can you imagine the damage someone could cause if they got a hold of your original Twitter account to start shilling crypto or machine learning scams?

Will I go through with any of this? At the moment I'm undecided, but the way things are going, it's not a possibility I can ignore or be complacent about. I am definitely planning to move everything that was specific to Twitter over to BlueSky and elsewhere; hell, in the case of two accounts it's already begun in earnest.

And as for FurAffinity? I'm even less decided on that point...I don't really know enough about the current explosion to really say one way or the other that leaving here or staying would be good ideas, but personally speaking it isn't the same anymore. Maybe it's just the aging talking, the carpal tunnel syndrome, all the other madness in my life...I dunno.

Heh, this turned into a bit of a ramble huh? But then got a lot to cover and a lot of space I can fill...but let's end it here for now shall we? I may still post a few odds and sods here, but truth be told I don't consider much of the 2d stuff I've made recently to be particularly worth posting here, too black and white, no color...maybe I should fix that.