I do not have much to say this month, but I am glad that Pip, our Founder, and Christian, our Associate Editor, have messages for our readers.

A Reminder from the Founder: I understand that we have a wide range of viewers who are interested in our site. Some of them may even have a prurient interest in the images we post. While there is no way to actively bar such viewers from visiting, we would like to remind them that Pigtails in Paint is not, nor has it ever been, a child erotica site. We occasionally post artistic nude or demi-nude images of young girls in order to challenge the stigma against artists portraying kids in the nude, and to demonstrate that this sort of portrayal has a long and respectable pedigree through the entire history of art. Thus, if you are simply coming here to get some kind of lewd pleasure from gawking at naked underage girls, then I daresay this blog is not for you, and I courteously ask that you go do your ogling elsewhere. There are, no doubt, plenty of sites on the web that cater to your tastes. But if you insist on hanging around, then we ask that you keep your sexual comments to yourself. They are, at the very least, disrespectful to this site, its editors, and most importantly, to the artists who create this wonderful art, the girls in the images, and, by extension, all girls. Moreover, they directly threaten the integrity of the site. In short, they have no place here. We always welcome comments and questions that are insightful, informative or even challenging, providing they are respectful and conform to the rules and goals of this blog. Anything outside of that will be summarily deleted. Thank you.

Announcement from the Associate Editor: Christian has worked for more than one year to review, correct and update the whole contents of Pigtails in Paint: categories, tags and all posts. He still has to check the pages (see the menu under the banner at the top).

First, the categories and tags were reorganized and simplified to make searches easier and more efficient. Redundancy has been eliminated; there is no more overlap between tags and categories. Thus a “Tag Cloud” has been added to the right column to allow searching among the most frequent tags. The scope of existing tags has been extended (for instance “Feminism” instead of “Feminist Art” or “Parent and Child” instead of “Mother and Child”). New tags were created (for instance “Bigotry and Hysteria”, “Censorship” and “Destruction of Art”). There was a severe problem of tag duplication, with a single tag name corresponding to several distinct tags, each encoded differently in the system; the duplicates were removed, so posts needed to be retagged. For categories, the previous hierarchy (see here) was simplified from 7 groups to 4. The group “(C) Subject Themes & Special Presentations” and its categories were removed, since they are in fact covered by tags. The groups “(A) The Editors’ Journal / Maiden Voyages (Essays, Notes and Site Updates)” and “(D) Media” were merged into “(A) Topics”, with further categories added into it. The two groups “(E) Artists by Name” and “(F) Artists by DeviantArt Username or Similar Designation” were merged into “(C) Artists by Name or Username”. Some artists were included in both groups, by their name then by their username; in this case the two categories were merged under the form “Name (Username)”. The group “(G) Famous Girls in Art by Name” became “(D) Girls by Name”, so it grew by including “not famous” girls. Finally, the group “(B) Art Styles, Periods, Schools & Movements” did not change. This is true also in a negative sense: since Pip gave up the task of categorizing and tagging posts in November 2015, and Christian is not a specialist in art styles, all posts published since do not have any category from this group. We need an art style advisor to suggest new categories to include in this group, and to indicate art style categories to be assigned to posts dealing with art.

The biggest task was to review all posts for any type of defect or problem. This happened frequently with those from the first version of Pigtails in Paint hosted by WordPress (between February 2011 and September 2012): since the editors could not have a general backup of the site, individual posts had to be recreated by copying and pasting from various sources under varying formats, leading to frequent errors and inconsistencies. Some updates are indicated by an editor’s note: merging posts, adding images or providing better versions of them, answering queries about subjects or artists. But there was also a silent work of fixing a wide variety of problems: obviously updating categories and tags, correcting misprints and errors of language, repairing broken or dysfunctional hypertext links … but also badly positioned anchors for links, line breaks inside paragraphs, wrong vertical spacing, missing images, an image with a caption located to the right of it, images linking to other images or to web pages (normally every images links to its file, allowing thus to see it in its full size), parasitic code in the source file, normalizing the format of old comments manually copied from the WordPress version, etc.

Some previous errors may have been overlooked, or some new errors may have been introduced during the update, so if readers see any type of problem in a post, they can alert us, either by using the contact form in the ‘Contact Us’ page or by emailing Christian at the address shown here.

Flavie Flament Review: A reader informed me of an interesting review about Flament’s book accusing David Hamilton of sexual misconduct published shortly before he committed suicide.  Ed: Unfortunately, a link to that review cannot be included here because the organization publishing it advocates the legitimacy of pedophilia.

I would like to emphasize that I concur with Pip and add that not only lewd comments will be deleted, but simple frivolous comments and opinions about the beauty of the girls lacking any other substance will also be trashed.  In the case of legitimate comments of a sexual nature, such information and insights should be expressed in a clinical manner, again to emphasizing a respectful attitude.

I would like to offer my personal thanks to Christian for his diligent work the past couple of years.  The completion of his project means this site is more of an integrated whole than it has ever been since its inception.  I recall how relieved I felt when all the old lost posts from the first incarnation were finally replaced.  Other technical improvements to the site will be announced as each is put into place.  -Ron