Fandom is the most important thing in the modern media industry. Fans buy the products and advertise the brand, but are also the primary source of feedback. The media is what the community forms around, but the community is what feeds the media.

But the relationship between a work’s copyright holder and its fan community is structurally antagonistic. The IP holder and members of the fan community have fundamentally different interests which sometimes align but sometimes don’t. The rightsholder depends on the goodwill of the fandom, but at the same time there is always danger of the community being attacked by the rightsholder. The law creates is an implicit hovering threat of legal violence, and the profit motive encourages bad actors to pull the trigger. This doesn’t mean the relationship has to be antagonistic in practice, but it means there is always an underlying potential for conflict that has to be reasoned with. The threat is always there.

There is a productive tension here. Fanwork can serve functions official work can’t, and the community surrounding a work is one of the main things that gives a work “value”, in a base economic sense. They’re the ones buying the products. Media companies are desperate to have more fans because that directly translates into their ability to make money.

Likewise, the health of the franchise matters to the people who love it, and official recognition of fan communities can be a good thing. Fan work can be elevated, talented creators can be brought on as part of official projects, etc. Official recognition can serve as a badge of honor and help platform and encourage talent and creativity in the community.

But the deciding factor in whether the creator/fan relationship is healthy or exploitative is whether the community is allowed to be independent. Media and fandom can have a symbiotic relationship, but as soon as the corporation tries to exercise control over their fans, it turns into an ugly hostility.

The corporation cannot own its customers. The Sonic fandom can’t be a SEGA product. The Mario fandom can’t be a Nintendo product.

One of the most important merits of fanwork, discussion, and criticism is a plurality of perspectives, and the ability to present and analyze work through truly pluralistic viewpoints. This is why things like fan comics, fan games, fan resources, and fan events have been so extraordinarily valuable. They represent legitimate plurality where the community manages and supports itself.

When we were maintaining The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, this is something Bambosh and I talked about in our conference panel. While it may make sense for there to be an official collection, this would be subject to the IP holder and their vision of how to work should be presented, potentially narrowing the focus and scope of the work. One of the obvious dangers is this can lead to the marginalization and demonization of specific viewpoints the corporate interest doesn’t agree with, regardless of their artistic and intellectual merit. The fan-centered archive and the creator-centered archive fill fundamentally separate functions.

If the IP holder insists that all aspects relating to discussion of a work go through one unifying authority, this is an assault on the community and represents an act of aggression against fan-run fan-space. The author cannot be allowed to control all avenues for literary criticism of their work. The community cannot be governed by the same people it serves to police. If there is a demand that all work that exists be brought in under a single umbrella of control, this is a dangerous and precarious arrangement.

“Intellectual property” is often used to justify this, as if real people become an asset owned by companies just because they expect them to buy their product. Companies have a financial interest in protecting their brand, their image, but that does not give them authority to regulate the people involved, even as they represent that brand.

I know I talk about this a lot, but game companies love trying to try to claim a right to control how people play the games they already own, and it’s abhorrent. The community around a thing is a community. It’s not a thing, it’s not property, it’s not something money or copyright or anything else has a right to control. It’s people. People are people first and property never.

It does not matter how much or how little work is encapsulated by official support. A unification of community spaces through a central governing authority with the ability to enforce policy and preference is an existential threat to that community.

Stuck At Home Con was a wildly successful Homestuck fan convention run and organized for fans, by fans, with no official support or affiliation. As soon as official corporate representatives showed up they started making demands, and the whole thing fell apart in an ugly incident.

The threat of a community being beholden to a franchise is a true danger even before that authority proves itself dangerous and untrustworthy by deed. The danger is structural; it is a trap prepared and ready to spring. Even if the current leadership is well-meaning, that power can be replaced and existing structures can be hijacked to suddenly abuse a good faith relationship.

Fans are not the media’s property’s lieutenants, they are its guardrails. Their job is to encourage the good and discourage the bad. That can only happen when they stay financially and organizationally independent.

When someone exerts control over others, that’s hostility… unless the person is “their own”, and then it’s expected. As soon as a company has the ability to control something they have an obligation to leverage it to their benefit. If a fan criticizes a company, that’s normal discourse. If criticism comes from a company’s own PR manager, that’s the company failing to control its own people. Voices turn from discussion and community into forces capital has neglected to exploit. The difference between someone being independent and someone being an organ of an institution is not semantic, it is stark and extreme.

It’s especially important to set a good example of this with media with a young audience, many of which don’t know any better. We don’t have to put up with that and so we absolutely, positively must not.

Fan projects must be independent, and they must be allowed to operate without being coerced or threatened by an IP holder holding a gun to their head. Fandom is not a labor force or a brand asset. It is a community of free people. Its independence is not optional, it is the keystone holding the relationship together. Any time a brand starts demanding control over the communities of people around that, you need to understand that as the hostile threat that it is.

When I was a kid I learned about Lindenmeyer Systems and the fun tree patterns they create. I even followed a Twitter bot that generated and posted random pretty lsystem renders.

These are similar to fractals, except unlike traditional fractals they don’t usually expand within a fixed space, they either continue to grow or loop back intersecting themselves.

Meanwhile I spent most of my time in school and needed something to occupy my hands with. I did a lot of notebook doodling, except people notice those. But I did have graph paper. And graph paper gives you enough structure to draw lsystems by hand. So I did, a lot.

I probably went through a notebook every two years, and I can’t remember once ever drawing an actual graph. This was when I was a child in childish ways and hadn’t yet learned about dot paper. Oh, misspent youth....

There are a couple interesting things about this mathematically.

First, there’s only really one interesting space-filling pattern to draw on graph paper, which is forking off in two 45 degree angles. Anything that doesn’t fit on the coordinate grid (like incrementally decreasing line lengths) becomes irregular very quickly. The main option to play with different patterns is by setting different starting conditions. (Seems like it’d get boring quick, right? I spent the rest of the time trying to apply the Four color theorem in an aesthetically satisfying way. Still haven’t solved that one.)

Second, drawing on a coordinate grid means using Chebyshev Geometry, where straight lines and diagonal lines are considered the same length. So a circle (points equally far apart from a center point) is a square. This is also sometimes called chessboard geometry, because it’s how pieces move on a grid.

¹

Also, because I’m drawing this by hand, I can only keep track of visible tips. So if tips collide I count them as “resolved”, even if mathmatically they’d pass through each other.

But I kept hitting the end of the graph paper.

I was bored in a work meeting this week and ended up doing the same thing, and it made me wonder about the properties of the pattern. Did it repeat? Did it reach points of symmetry? I thought it would be fun to whip up a tool to run my by-hand algorithm to see.

There are lots of web toys for lsystems but none are designed with these graph paper constraints. So just as an exercise I built my own from scratch, and it’s pretty good at drawing my high-school pattern.

The answer to the pattern question is: it depends on the starting position! If you start with one line you start to see radial symmetry, but if you start with two lines facing away from each other (as in the animation) it’s more interesting. Neat.

Each generation is considered a state frame that keeps track of lines (for rendering), buds (for growing the next iteration), bloomed_buds (for bud collision) and squares (for line collision).

For the Chebyshev geometry I just keep every line at a 1.0 length and let the trigonometry functions round up.

I didn’t actually implement a parser for formal Lindenmeyer syntax, I just defined everything recursively in pure Javascript, using a definition to encapsulate details about the pattern:

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const definition = {
  at(bud) {
    const lines = []
    const buds = []

    for (let angle of [
      bud.r - 0.25,
      bud.r + 0.25
    ]
    ) {
      const rads = Math.PI*angle
      let len = 1
      let xy = [bud.x + len*Math.sin(rads), bud.y + len*Math.cos(rads)]
      if (chebyshev) xy = xy.map(Math.round)
      lines.push(xy)
      buds.push({x: xy[0], y: xy[1], r: angle})
    }
    return {lines, buds}
  }
}

Then rendering is done recursively:

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function get_frame(generation) {
  if (generation < 0) throw Error(`Invalid generation ${generation}`)

  if (!frames[generation]) {
    const frame = structuredClone(get_frame(generation - 1))

    const old_buds = [...frame.buds]
    const new_buds = []
    const new_squares = []
    for (const i in old_buds) {
      ...
    }
    frame.bloomed_buds = [...frame.bloomed_buds, ...old_buds]
    frame.squares = [...frame.squares, ...new_squares]
    frame.buds = prune_buds(new_buds, frame.bloomed_buds)

    frames[generation] = frame
  }

  return frames[generation]
}

There’s a slight complication to doing this cheaply with lines: on paper, there are cases where lines intersect, and in those cases I stop at walls, even if it means drawing a partial line. Doing that kind of collision detection here in vector space would be very complicated! And without it the pattern loops back on itself and doesn’t look as good, and definitely doesn’t match my notebooks:

The solution for this was very simple collision detection. The final program keeps tracks of which squares are “occupied” and breaks branches any time they’d collide.

I uploaded it to my stash if you want to play with it. As an added constraint I wrote everything by hand in one single-file html page.

The one problem with the tool (besides being bare-bones) is it renders the output as an SVG instead of a bitmap on a canvas. This “feels right”: they’re lines, might as well make them vectors. But on high values browsers have performance issues rendering very large quantities of DOM elements.

I’d rewrite the renderer to draw to a canvas instead except I like the idea of the infinite SVG canvas specifically. The point was to escape the edges of the graph paper, remember?

But I’d already abstracted line drawing so the line coordinates were stored in state frames, so it was easy to write an alternate renderer using the canvas API.

https://stash.giovanh.com/toys/lsys.html

Here’s an advertisement I got from a game company named Rogue Duck Interactive.

Rogue Duck Interactive@rogueducknet

Start your cozy airport security job!👮🏻‍♂️

Weigh and scan bags, ask passengers questions, and if you are not convinced, search their luggage for dangerous items.

Wishlist on Steam!

Thu Aug 28 05:05:07 +0000 2025

The game they’re advertising here — which they neglect to name outside the screenshot — is “Nothing to Declare.”¹ And it caught my eye, because there’s problems.

Recently we’ve seen sweeping attempts to censor the internet. The UK’s “Online Safety Act” imposes sweeping restrictions on speech and expression. It’s disguised a child safety measure, but its true purpose is (avowedly!) intentional control over “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”. And similar trends threaten the US, especially as lawmakers race to more aggressively categorize more speech as broadly harmful.

A common response to these restrictions has been to dismiss them as unenforceable: that’s not how the internet works, governments are foolish for thinking they can do this, and you can just use a VPN to get around crude attempts at content blocking.

But this “just use a workaround” dismissal is a dangerous, reductive mistake. Even if you can easily defeat an attempt to impose a restriction right now, you can’t take that for granted.

Deltarune came out! Weirdly, that’s kind of a problem? People who care about the game have this immediate need to stay off social media so as not to be spoiled. There is a rush to for anyone who ever wants to play the game to do so immediately, because if you don’t the Internet will ensure you don’t get a blind experience. You’re forced to binge it or be spoiled.

I was just thinking about chapter 2, and how I would’ve loved to have found the secret twist for myself, even though it was hidden away a little. If the game has indicated there was something to find, people would have found it on their own. Instead, I’m willing to bet the experience for the vast majority of people was finding out online first and then reproducing what they saw for themselves.

SUPERHOT VR released in 2017. Then in 2021 the game’s entire story was removed.

What’s happened here is fascinating, but somehow nobody has talked about it seriously. Because it’s censorship in a video game — a topic the gaming community cannot be normal about — it is nearly impossible to even think about the issue through all the noise. Anyone aware of this topic at all seems to be screaming about Woke, or complaining about games becoming “political”, as if “political” is just a switch you can throw to make media worse.

Wikipedia summarizes the discourse as:

The choice to remove these games led to the game getting review bombed on Steam, with some users claiming that Superhot Team was giving in to “snowflakes” and others believing it to be a form of virtue signaling

But this is insane! A historically significant VR game — one of the greatest of all time — had one of its defining characteristics removed, without any explanation or replacement. This isn’t some Stellar Blade fake controversy, something weird happened here. There are real, understandable things to object to, and none of them are right-wing culture war buzzwords.

AI is a huge subject, so it’s hard to boil my thoughts down into any single digestible take. That’s probably a good thing. As a rule, if you can fit your understanding of something complex into a tweet, you’re usually wrong. So I’m continuing to divide and conquer here, eat the elephant one bite at a time, etc.

Right now I want to address one specific question: whether people have the right to train AI in the first place. The argument that they do not¹ goes like this:

When a corporation trains generative AI they have unfairly used other people’s work without consent or compensation to create a new product they own. Worse, the new product directly competes with the original workers. Since the corporations didn’t own the original material and weren’t granted any specific rights to use it for training, they did not have the right to train with it. When the work was published, there was no expectation it would be used like this, as the technology didn’t exist and people did not even consider “training” as a possibility. Ultimately, the material is copyrighted, and this action violates the authors’ copyright.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this argument and its implications. Unfortunately, even though I think that while this identifies a legitimate complaint, the argument is dangerously wrong, and the consequences of acting on it (especially enforcing a new IP right) would be disastrous. Let me work through why:

I love murder drones. I think they’re such great little guys. Bring me a robot maid and I am yours forever, etc. But watching through the series itself actually took me a few stabs, and I think it’s due to a few design decisions that make following the plot unintuitive and add some friction to what’s otherwise a very fun show. So I want to talk a little bit about that friction, even though the entire thing is still a good time overall.