Sunday, July 3, 2016

Ain't Misbehavin'

I've been accused on Twitter by Ryan Whorton of stealing my Twitter avatar from Highway Blossoms, a visual novel developed by Alienworks.

While it's not unusual for people to use the uncredited artwork of others as part of their Twitter identity, it hasn't happened in this case. No Highway Blossoms materials I have seen use a joined H and B design (the closest I can find is an adjacent, differently-styled H and B in their devblog's favicon), and the first post on the Highway Blossoms blog is about a year after the first post on my own blog, which has been using a joined H and B since it began.

Highway Blossoms was not announced until September 2015. My blog's first post is from October 2014. User Victor Hedrust has made a graphic summarizing this situation, and here's a timeline of logos used. When Whorton made this accusation, I explained my objections and he didn't respond. Later he blocked me, leaving me unable to reply to his accusations directly.

Having blocked me, he communicated his art theft claim to Allen Thomas, a writer for Comicosity (who appears to be engaging in discriminatory hiring practices). I tweeted a rebuttal of Whorton to Thomas, but have received no reply. Although I am not presently blocked by Thomas, elsewhere on Twitter he describes his use of Twitter's mute function, leading me to believe that he may have responded by muting me. Note that Whorton misleadingly used this image to represent this conversation, creating the false impression that I provided no specific refutation.

I've asked Alienworks for comment.

Edit: Comment from Alienworks.