Skylark Rogers

New episode cover just dropped! (Donations welcome~.)

Tomorrow I'll be streaming Magical Mafias Episode 22: Death Be a Revolution on Twitch. This will be the arc finale!!! Everything after here will be epilogue. See Twitch for times.

If you want to catch up, and this is a /great/ time to catch up, here's the text versions of all episodes so far.

The audio streams (except for Discord exclusives) are all archived on YouTube. The last two months of streams are available on Twitch.

As always, I'll do a Story So Far summary at the beginning of the episode.

Tomorrow's stream will /not/ have any Discord exclusives, but there will be some in a couple of weeks. If you want to catch Discord exclusives, ping me for the invite link.

( Content notes for the stream (I won't be doing warnings by scene this time, to preserve the flow, but I will respond to requests): )

Next episode will be up next week! This one's a major turning point, so now's a good time to catch up if you haven't. Here's the text versions (and links to audio versions) of all the episodes so far.

12/23 Update:
One of my favorite authors, L. Rowyn, has sent me a series of connected short stories to read aloud! So that'll be most of the episode. I'm still taking requests for individual songs to sing aloud and for flash fics to read aloud, as long as the content is such that people can play it in front of their families without too much issue.

Original Post:
Some of my listeners celebrate Christmas, and the next stream date is on Christmas. So I'm going to do something more missable, like a bonus scene or short story.

What would you like to hear? Requests welcome!!!

Magical Mafias bonus scenes and short stories that don't have spoilers for upcoming stuff are posted here: https://skylarkrogers.dreamwidth.org/tag/shorts

I do have a few non-MagMaf short stories sitting in my files.

I'm also happy to read something that isn't mine, if it's public domain or I have the writer's permission.

I can even sing! Albeit not for an hour straight, lol.

Tomorrow is Magical Mafias episode 12: Truth Without Trust. Here's the cover art! Some plot-important laundry.

See Twitch for times.

If you want to catch up, here's the text versions of all episodes so far.

The audio streams (except for Discord exclusives) are all archived on YouTube. The last two months of streams are available on Twitch.

As always, I'll do a Story So Far summary at the beginning of the episode. This will also summarize last week's Discord-exclusive stream, which could not be archived due to Twitch and YouTube terms of service. (They are still available in text here on the Dreamwidth, though.)

Tomorrow's stream will /not/ have any Discord exclusives, but there will be some in the distant future. If you want to catch Discord exclusives, ping me for the invite link.

( Content Notes )

Magical Mafias episode 10 is tomorrow! Aaa, I can't believe this has reached 10 episodes~!

See here for times.

If you want to catch up, here's the text versions of all episodes so far.

The audio streams (except for Discord exclusives) are all archived on Twitch and YouTube

As always, I'll do a Story So Far summary at the beginning of the episode. This will also summarize the Discord-exclusive parts of last week's stream that could not be archived due to Twitch and YouTube terms of service. (They are still available in text on the Dreamwidth, though.)

Tomorrow's stream will /not/ have any Discord exclusives, but next week's stream will be entirely Discord-exclusive, so ping me if you want the invite link for that.

( Stream content notes )

Magical Mafias episode 8 is tomorrow~! Same bat time, same bat channel.

This week we meet the third major student character, Marco. (Well, technically we met him last week, but only in passing.) We also get more of, well, just about everyone.

If you want to catch up, here's the text versions of all episodes so far. The audio streams are all archived on YouTube. As always, I'll do a Story So Far summary at the beginning of the episode.

( Stream CWs: )

As has been pretty obvious (and explicitly stated on my websites), I've used Midjourney to make a lot of the art for the serialization so far. However, I've decided to stop.

Midjourney has never disclosed where they get their training sets, how (or whether) they ensure they have rights to use those images, and have not publicized any filtering process they might use to ensure these don't include leaked private photos, etc. The one thing I do know is that Midjourney is now partnering with Stable Diffusion, which uses a LAION data set.

Recent news coverage indicates people searching LAION have found private medical images (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artist-finds-private-medical-record-photos-in-popular-ai-training-data-set/), ISIS executions and nonconsensual pornography (https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ad75/isis-executions-and-non-consensual-porn-are-powering-ai-art?utm_source=motherboard_twitter) in this dataset. (Vice is not a reliable news source--however, in this instance, they specifically said which searches they conducted on the dataset, so it seems believable in this instance.)

I used https://haveibeentrained.com/ to check whether photographs of my top surgery, which I publicized for educational purposes (I will not link here), ended up in the training set. Thankfully, they did not. However, a lot of other top surgery photos are in there. I don't know if anyone consented to that, but I find it unlikely. And just because some of these photos were publicly accessible enough for the scraper to catch them doesn't make it okay to use them. In fact, when it specifically comes to the trans community, there is a huge issue right now where we want to convey information to one another about procedures, including through photographs, but malicious actors have scraped, brigaded and attacked those same photographs and engaged in harassment campaigns against the posters.

For pictures I've already generated with Midjourney, I'm going to go ahead and continue with posting them. I've otherwise cancelled my Midjourney subscription. I plan to use free stock art (like I did for last week's thumbnail) and self-generated work going forward, plus commissions if the Ko-Fi reaches its commission goal. And fanart, with permission, if y'all would like to share some.

Anyway, this week's thumbnail will be something I painted myself. ^.^

Stay safe, y'all.

Streaming Magical Mafias Edit-With-Me tomorrow! Episode 5~. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Tomorrow's episode will be the last before Thairn and Illa's missions split. There will be a lot of (nonsexual) kink in this one.

If you want to catch up, here's the text versions of all episodes so far. The audio streams are all archived on YouTube. As always, I'll do a Story So Far summary at the beginning of the episode.

( Specific CWs for which I'll give warnings during the stream: )

Okay, the Ko-Fi is set up! https://ko-fi.com/post/Welcome-to-the-Ko-Fi-M4M6F1MXA To celebrate, I declare it New Avatar o'Clock.

I'll be serializing here on Dreamwidth and using the Ko-Fi as a tip jar. I decided to migrate payments over to Ko-Fi because of the recent news about Patreon. Nothing is going to be subscriber-exclusive, but tipping is wonderful and welcome. ^.^

Over the next few days, I'll start publicly posting stories here on Dreamwidth, including some stuff that used to be Patron-exclusive!

What you can expect to see posted soon:

- The first three episodes of the serial in post-edit text form

- Some bonus world-building tidbits

- Two bonus stories (Bread and Milk and Valkyrie) detailing Thairn and Illa's past.

Next Magical Mafias Edit-With-Me stream is tomorrow~! https://www.twitch.tv/skylarkrogers/schedule I'm excite!