February 5, 2021 - Progress Report ; "Why are there so many dead Patron-content links?" ; Frozen comic pilot; Aardvark shares a strong opinion (Patreon)

Hey all.

A Cavalcade of Misfortunes and Misfires, Or: Why There's No Actual Progress To Report This Week

So for those of you who get weekly WIP updates, you may have noticed that this is a few days late. And you might also notice a discernible lack of Rachel in this post's image. This is, unfortunately, tied to the second part of this title, and why I am making this post as-close-to-public as I can get it (Patreon doesn't like public posts to have lewd images, so they require lewd images be restricted to at least Patrons).

The long and short of it is I've had a fucking terrible week. It's been nothing but setback after cataclysmic failure after headscratching catastrophe.

It all started when the Marie video was launched, and my web-dev and I realized the website was being unusably slow. This wasn't because of the video launch, though - this is something we've been struggling with for days before, but attempting to get the video up and running just highlighted how bad it had become.

Between Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening, my web-dev and I spent literally dozens of hours trying to figure out what's going on with the server. We still have no idea what the problem is - the hardware is reporting that it's more than capable of handling the task, but we've been lucky to get the server to yield even 0.2% of its raw serving capabilities in terms of filespeeds - getting it to serve a video at 100kbps is an achievement these days, when it should be able to flood the bandwidth cap we put on files easily.

We'd still be fighting it to this day, if it weren't for the fact that the Wednesday stream was a catastrophic failure. Between the stress of fighting the server, and the weeks of stress that the Tifa model was giving me (before I legitimately just gave up on the model and abandoned it completely), I decided to take on a simple and easy task of building new male models using the Hitman 2016 heads I had sieved and processed months ago.

Only it turns out that I somehow, someway, lost those heads. And more importantly, I lost the tool that I had spent 3 days writing to sieve and process them.

So all of Wednesday and Thursday was instead spent rewriting that tool. Once I finally got it working, I was dissatisfied with the results - it only yielded a third of the meshes I had gotten last time, and not even all of them were heads. So I threw out all of the work I did on the tool, and rewrote it again for a more low-tech solution. And that's being plagued by technical errors, where there are various badly-formatted meshes that crash 3dsMax. On average, it crashes every 57 meshes. There are 4300 meshes to process.

So obviously I decided that's not going to fly, and I need to figure out a new way to process the Hitman heads. But I haven't had time to do that, because it was now Friday and I needed to figure out what to do for the Saturday stream.

The original plan for the Saturday stream was to start on the Vault Liz comic, but to do that, I need male models. I made a promise that the Marie video would be the last project to use the BSAA males I currently have, and that after it I would build new male models. I intend to stick by that. Which means that I need the Hitman males to work on Vault Liz.

The plan was to build the males on Wednesday, and use them on Saturday. But since Wednesday was a catastrophic failure, I decided instead to sieve and process the heads in preparation for Saturday, and spend Saturday building the males instead as a contingency.

But due to the technical problems I have to overcome, the heads aren't ready for that either. So I had to come up with a second contingency for the Saturday stream. After racking my brain Thursday evening and Friday morning, I finally decided on a different comic - hopefully something we can put together quickly, and will still be interesting to do on-stream.

The State of The LordAardvark.com Website, Or: Why Are There So Many Dead Patron-Content Links?

This is a quick detour from the stream-of-consciousness, because what comes next quickly devolved into a very wordy and passionate rant. I don't want to lose people before relaying this information. This section is also the reason why this post is as public as I can make it.

As I said at the beginning of the last section, the webserver has been having a lot of issues lately. Tangential to those issues is that of a lot of non-film links being broken. Indeed, I've been inundated with reports of people not being able to access various Patron loops, as well as tutorial videos, technical videos, and livestreams on my Assets page. All of this is by design--unintentionally.

When my webdev and I rolled out the new Films page, we made a fundamental change to the permissions of the video files on the server. This was done to make it more secure - previously, I relied on a string of random letters in the URL to Patreon-exclusive content. This is obviously not robust at all, as just one person needs to be a Patron and get the link, and then they can share it and everyone can view the content. And people did this. A lot. And honestly, I'm fundamentally fine with it - the people who actively pirate my videos are people who wouldn't have paid for it anyways, and they might share it with people otherwise unaware of my work who do decide to support me.

But when the new Films page came online, we had a more-or-less free way to both make the videos more secure, and more importantly mean I don't have to maintain 4 separate web pages per video, which is what the previous system involved. With the new system, it's just fire-and-forget, one website to manage all of the videos. I set up the permissions once, what Patronage levels get access to what video files, and the rest is handled by the system. A dream come true for someone as pathologically lazy as I am.

Unfortunately, in moving to the new system, we naively and prematurely set the permissions too strictly. It's simple: everything on the Videos domain that's inside the "videos/public" folder is available to anyone; Inside the "videos/1080p" folder is for the 1080p Patrons; and Inside the "videos/2160p" folder is for 2160p Patrons.

But what about everything on the Videos domain that isn't in any of these folders? Say, "videos/tutorials"? Or, more relevant to most of you, "videos/loops"? Well, the general approach to security in these cases is "if it's not covered by an explicit permission, then deny all access to it." Public, 1080p, and 2160p all have explicit permissions. Tutorials, loops, etc? They don't.

And so they've fallen under the umbrella catch-all of "don't allow access to any of them." And unfortunately, it's not quite so simple a fix, because the move to the new Films page reorganized the file-structure and moved things around. And even if it didn't, there are so many different folders that I've scattered videos across over the years. The configuration would be filled with literal dozens of exceptions to this otherwise simple permissions scheme, and it'd end up being a complete mess and a total nightmare to maintain.

That is why there are so many dead links. We naively and foolishly only thought about the Films part of my Videos domain when we were putting together the new Films page. It didn't even occur to us at the time that there are a lot of non-Film videos that I serve, because it's been so long since I've made anything other than Films. And so we simply didn't account for them.

The fault is entirely on us, and I apologize sincerely for it. As I noted earlier, my web-dev and I are still knee-deep in fighting the server and trying to get it to a state more than limping along. Unfortunately, getting the server to work at all is more important right now than trying to get a bunch of legacy links that only a fraction of people are even aware of working.

I have aspirations to update the placeholder Galleries page that I made for my comics to become a cousin to the Films page - like the Films page, it would serve both public-facing and Patron-only loops, tutorials, photosets, etc simultaneously. It would handle permissions automatically, so there'd be no link-trawling like there is now (or used to be, before we broke them altogether). And then ultimately, we'd set up redirects so that any of the non-film broken links just redirect to the new Galleries page with a "what you're looking for is probably here, good luck finding it!" message (and broken film links the same to the new Films page.

I say "I" have aspirations, because I haven't actually discussed this with my webdev. Again, just getting the server working is our top priority.

On the subject of the Galleries page, and the comics it was built to support, that leads us cleanly into the next subject:

The Saturday Contingency Contingency Comic, Or: The Frozen Comic Pilot

Recall that, before the website-update detour, I ended the progress-report section by saying that I've decided on a separate comic to do for this Saturday's stream. Well, that is where this post's image comes from.

For this new comic, I've decided to recycle an old Princess Zelda film idea I had into a comic. Obviously I'll never get to build that Zelda film due to Nintendaddy hating fun, but it's a shame to let the idea go to waste. So I am repurposing it onto Elsa (and spinning a derivative idea to Anna).

Beyond just recycling the idea though, I have also decided to take a very stylized approach to the construction of the comic. I've wanted to do Frozen content for a long time (there's a reason I built the ladies, after all), but the problem has always been that they have very stylized faces (those classic huge Disney eyes), of which I don't have any other characters that fit the aesthetic (not even Overwatch is that cartoony), let alone generic characters.

But a revelation hit me last night while trying to sleep: I've encountered more than a few comics that not only get away with never showing male faces, but are even able to be dense in dialogue and even narrative, entirely without male faces ever being shown.

So I decided to tackle the technical and creative challenge of building a comic without male faces ever being shown. Using a combination of height difference and creative framing, no face above the nose will ever be shown for any characters that aren't Elsa and Anna - you'll never be able to tell I don't have characters with freakishly huge eyes, because you'll never see the eyes!

The comic itself will be a first episode of a miniseries that may or may not be continued, depending on how it goes and how it's received, detailing Elsa's journey from regal queen to submissive slut, and Anna's evolving from naive princess into venerable dominatrix.

On that note, I don't generally make a habit of pre-emptively addressing preconceptions or criticisms of projects--I prefer to let the art speak for itself, and let individuals interpret it as they will--but due to the ambiguous nature of this particular character arc, and the paths that certain popular stories with a similar thesis have taken, I want to address this pre-emptively:

This will not be a story of abuse or coercion.

And this is where I split the section, because holy shit did this get ranty. I don't apologize for any of it (as I say near the bottom of this section), but I do acknowledge that not everyone cares about my opinions, and so I want to properly mark it.

The Difference Between "Breaking Women Into Becoming Sluts" And "Women Embracing Being the Sluts They Always Were", Or: Aardvark Shares A Strong Opinion.

There will be no themes of peer pressure, or substance abuse, or any external factors that outwardly influence the characters into behaviors or patterns that they would otherwise never be inclined to pursue. There is the use of magic to facilitate and escalate behaviors, but these behaviors are always internally driven, and are present and demonstrated before any magical intervention is used.

This is not a story of a character being broken, reduced, and/or objectified. Instead, it's a story about characters overcoming their inhibitions, their fears of being judged, their anxieties regarding societal norms, and pursuing what they've always wanted to do. These aren't prudish women turned into sluts by their circumstances and environment - these are sluts who have been boxed into being prudish against their nature. Their journey isn't one of breaking down their morals and principles and being reduced to sex objects - it's one of building up their confidence and the strength to defy social standards and embrace who they really are.

Put simply, this isn't a story of breaking characters down. It's a story of building characters up. The message isn't that of punishing women for enjoying sex, but instead encouraging women to be who they are - and if they are naturally promiscuous, then they should be as promiscuous as they want!

Again, this isn't something I normally do, getting ahead of conceptions and critiques of a project. But this particular subject matter is something that I have very strong opinions about. In particular, I despise the fact that this idea has so many times been adopted into a negative story punishing women for enjoying sex, and sending a message that sex is only for degenerates not worthy of being considered people.

The idea of sex-negative porn is something that boggles my mind, and frankly it disgusts me how prevalent porn that chastises and demeans the pursuit and enjoyment of sex is. People should be encouraged to enjoy and want more sex, not insulted for enjoying and wanting sex. An industry literally built on the idea of people wanting and enjoying sex shouldn't be actively attacking the very people it glorifies.

I apologize for wedging my opinion in here unsolicited, but I'm not sorry for holding this opinion sincerely and so strongly. It is an idea that is prevalent--nay, dominant--in literally all of my work, from the (more) subtle Marie Rose casually exploiting her oral sex skills to fish for subscribers for her video-game streaming in Alternative Advertising, to the very blunt delivery of the line "Shame never earned a woman a damn thing" in No Gods, No Kings.

 That last line isn't just a spicy line cooked up arbitrarily for a video. It is literally the fundamental pillar on which all of my work is supported by. Shame is a destructive tool used to enforce social norms, and the stigma around sex--especially around women enjoying sex--is a cancer in our cultures the world over, one that I would like nothing more than to see permanently excised and retroactively considered as abhorrent and archaic a practice as slavery and spouse-beating are considered today.

I guess on that note, since I'm sure I've already fired up a certain demographic, might as well put torch to bridge and make it final: if that is the kind of content you look for from me, then I'm not sorry to disappoint you. I will never make that content. And if that disappoints you enough to withdraw your patronage and take it elsewhere, then please, by all means, let the door hit your ass on the way out. I want no association with people who support, encourage, or even legitimately believe in shaming women for their sex lives.

I'd sooner burn my Patreon to the ground than ever willingly become a cog in such a hateful and destructive social machine.

On that very spicy note, I end this post. I swear, when I started writing this post, it was intended to just a glorified "lmao I got nothing done this week #yolo; here's why; and here's at least something I'm planning to work on, to make up for literally doing nothing this week but fighting various things and losing." Instead, it turned into a 3000-word behemoth of a post. Oops.

Until next week, everyone.