5 fandom things make a post (KoG, PMMM, Magic Tavern, FA, Tapas)
Episode 2 of Knights of Guinevere is out!
Things get weird, things get messy, Gwen is having flashbacks, a bunch of people are taking future drugs, characters bleed in various colors all over the place.
I put down everything else just to watch this fullscreen. Good choice. Compared to episode 1, it has a lot less worldbuilding and a lot more action, but I still look forward to watching multiple “analysis videos longer than the episode itself” to pick up all the details I missed.
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Walpurgisnacht Rising finally has a US release date! Limited theater release of January 16-19, 2027.
The internet has been amazingly good and considerate about hiding the spoilers. So far I only know what’s in the trailers, plus one character name.
Will I be able to spoiler-dodge for another 3 months? Do I risk it? TBD…
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Somehow I let myself get 2+ years behind on Hello From The Magic Tavern. (Okay, I know how: I’ve been spending my Listening Time bingeing other long-running fiction podcasts, and/or various 20-hour audiobooks.)
Recently re-joined their Patreon, so I’m catching up now. They recently started season 6! I left off close to the end of season 4, and I’m just a few episodes into season 5.
Which is why I’m almost 3 years late in saying: thank you, Magic Tavern team, for un-burying your gays.
The original burying happened toward the end of season 2, way back in 2019. It’s a good-enough show overall that this wasn’t a dealbreaker, just an “ugh, this again?” feeling. I’m sure it was originally supposed to be a permanent “this arc is wrapped up, never going to come back and revisit it” writing choice, and I was okay with writing it off as one of the show’s rare disappointments, and moving on.
(Although I did stay annoyed-enough to put my own unburying in this Yuletide fic.)
And then! Suddenly, unexpectedly, 4 years later — a canon fixit!
Good job, show.
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FurAffinity is struggling to keep up with their hosting costs. The way they talk about third-party advertisers pressuring them to censor “adult content” — and, on top of that, wasting staff time by reporting lots of normal G-rated images as “adult” — makes me pretty suspicious that this is the exact reason Clip Studio Assets flagged a bunch of G-rated materials as “adult” about a week before FA made this post.
I’m not even a user, and I still appreciate how important FA is to a huge and active section of fandom. Here’s their GoFundMe campaign. (They’ve already crushed their initial goal, and well-deserved.)
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Tapas is the latest webcomic platform to just…give up completely. It got acquired by a big corporation in 2021, so at least they kept it running longer than the buyers of SmackJeeves did! Still depressing.
I’ll give my “help, I want to move my webcomic to an independent host” post a proper update soon, I swear. In the meantime, here’s a Tapas-to-Wordpress import option. And I’ll throw in a rec for ComicFury as a solid functional hosting platform that isn’t owned by a big corporation.
This blog post has the un-inspiring info “As parent company Kakao pursues a spin-off into Kakao AI and Kakao X, Kakao Entertainment is shifting its global strategy away from directly operating low-margin overseas platforms toward IP utilization.”
Really? You suddenly figured out that hosting webcomics isn’t profitable…so you’re pivoting to AI? Remind me, is AI profitable yet?
Maybe one of these years, companies will figure out that the way you get “profitable new IP to utilize” is by cultivating a bunch of up-and-coming creators before you know which ones will be profitable. Maybe. (I’m not holding my breath.)
#artificialUnintelligence #FurAffinity #HelloFromTheMagicTavern #KnightsOfGuinevere #PuellaMagiMadokaMagica #Tapas #webcomics