i've been kinda in the weird state of quietly grieving the old internet this past week ngl.

basically readying myself mentally to cold turkey leave social media for good if it comes to that with the recent slew of age verification laws (since my state was included in it too). uploading identifying documents? not gonna happen. that's a red line for me. i'll fuck with VPN's/minor workarounds as long as those work but I'm one of those bastards who actually gives two shits about privacy regardless how "dead" it is lul.

social media i'm most likely to leave/most likely to enforce age verification, my guess: tumblr, bsky, discord, mastodon, itch.io (honestly i'm this close to just deleting mastodon and cara.app. they're just not worth it for me).
social media i'm least likely to leave: email (with a privacy conscious host), dreamwidth (i feel like they would fight it all to the bitter end), website (they already have the legal documents you need for website hosting, but are exceptionally privacy conscious too).

so like, i'm not just gonna up and desert my website/this diary, but it'll be much more of a "write only" approach.

i've got enough books & steam deck games backlog to last me at least another five-ten years, at least until a better version of the internet comes along. also got some delicious art projects to occupy me for about the same time, and the pen pal group all has each other's addresses. in the oddest of ways i'm actually looking forward to ~returning to offline~ since that was always kinda... my default? (i kind of like being slightly unapproachable? not in an unfriendly way that makes people feel bad, more of a chronic exhaustion way.)

grieving the potential of the internet. but i feel like it's better for me to just accept that what i knew ain't comin' back. frankly ai slop/DDoS'ing broke it irreparably the last three years. so it's a long overdue coming-to-terms. frankly i feel better already just... letting it go.

it's wild re-listening to old music when i first "got online". remember supermassive black hole by muse? i remember when it was uploaded lol.

anyway that's the soundtrack in my head for this mood. wrapping up loose ends for this next phase.

writing 'we were challenged to do this new/interesting display...' to a vendor = "fuck my stupid baka life my idiot boss added this to the to-do list, don't shoot the messenger pls'

i'm in the middle of [massive high profile dayjob] crunch which between doujin logistics and other projects has me going a lil' hrrrghghhrrgh[internal project manager anxiety screech].

i'll be fine. it'll be over in two weeks. but just. aaaaaaa.

funniest thing is my former art director bro who's working under me is ccd on the email and i know he got a chuckle out of my wording lol

it is going to be amazing when i can tell you all the absolute funniest way ever i think one can bullshit-trick your brain into enjoying backgrounds. (remind me in august.)

anyway, having a lot of fun working, drawing, reading, and gaming. i think i'm at my most content with life doing a balance of those four things and yeah, just quietly vibing in my corner here for the last few months and steadily seeing more quantifiable progress in all four of those areas (also just chatting with more friends in general behind the scenes too).

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

― Martha Graham (via queenlua )

whew, lotta things happened recently!

* FINISHED THE GUNTERCORRIN DOUJINSHI 8D (technically the official release date is tomorrow but I'm stealth-launching the page to catch any major bugs before the big announcement). i'm also hoping to do a proper post-mortem in a separate post but u can buy this grandpafucking shizz i been working on for the last year! probably the last true "big" fates creative project of mine; still love the characters so very dearly but not "i cannot stop thinking about them for three years straight" hyperfixation levels you know?

* i got laid up briefly this past week by a weird self inflicted case of inflammation when trying out new coffee that disagreed with me (lol). while resting my back, burned through the jakarta method (sobering nonfiction read how the CIA royally fucked up developing nations with a major case study on jakarta) which i had in paperback, as well as trying to finish pleasure activism (ehhh), and thought reform and the psychology of totalitarianism (also solid sobering if academic read on how mao-era interrogation/torture fucks up people, part of my larger "interrogation/censorship" study). DNF'd the diamond eye that a parent's friend gave me (apparently i cannot do "historical fiction" because it wigs me so much how authors insert thoughts into real people that they themselves probably didn't think because said thoughts feel a little uhhhh twitter flavored lol).

* slowly playing through warhammer rogue trader, loving it the more i stick with it ~ for some reason i'm posting more about it on my tumblr inspo sideblog; no essays yet.

* speaking of that, got a long as hell fire emblem tellius meta essay in the works on its symbology (comparing and contrasting branded/laguz/spirit charmer marks, religious marks, heron script.) started off as a fun evening lark and quickly grew into.... uhhh.... something much larger. :D (i had been interested in this topic for ages since i've headcanon'd my self insert as a spirit charmer possessed by a demon so there's a lot of 'how do i connect this with canon in a way that respects the canon' motivation here, as well as a gigantic fondness for the base lore just by itself.)

* there are three art side projects i am REALLY excited about that aren't technically under NDA but i want to wait about a month for when I've made a little more progress before starting to talk/post about here. all of them are collaborations with cool as hell peeps <3 it's the kind of very narrowly defined, very niche collaborations i find i actually like doing (versus a generic anthology SFW call where i'm like 'what's the point of this again' lol.) 

lmao i love my work IT department, i start having weird certificate issues after an update that aren't solved by three resets and basic troubleshooting on my end - and my favorite IT bro escalates me directly to the executive support specialist skipping who knows how many levels :') 'eh fuck it, krad never calls unless if it's a kernel issue or something similar.'

( called it too. i can tell by the teamviewer shenanigans this is more than your average 'have you tried to turn it off and on a fourth time' bug )

honestly have a pretty fun laid back and fun long weekend ahead ~

* lots of drawing! there's a few smaller fire emblem related pieces i'm trying to get my artistic pipes cleaned out with before making the final push on some collaboration work (anthology, another short nsfw FE comic, some background work with a bud). back half of this year's already lined up with said straight-up dream jobs so i'm quite excited to get to them after i print this one gunter/corrin comic.

* going to meet up with a doujin circle broski tomorrow for lunch again ~! <3 likewise slept in for ages today and managed to rescue a skink (common lizard around here) that was trapped inside the house. he lost his tail but was quite excited and wriggly to be outside again, and didn't seem all that worse for the wear.

* accidentally read up on Jane Jacobs via a book review - she's so interesting as a lady economist/urban planner way back when that was predominantly a male-dominated business, and wasn't afraid to say thoughts that threw all kinds of groups in a tizzy. that line doesn't do her justice but i deeply enjoyed reading the book review and that she pushed back against both the whole McCarthy censorious era of the US government and the dudebros in her industry.

* on a more melancholic note i was reading a different article about an AI researcher/ethicist gaming out what was going to happen in the next decade and just, deeply bothered at a (paraphrased) quote of his when he was responding to a question about what he'd teach his children now that the world's changed by AI, and it was something falteringly along the lines of teaching virtues now for the sake of them versus having always taught virtues because they were for work. and i just. ??????? record scratch. i had to reread that line a few times to make sure i didn't read it wrong. just feels ... sad that the point of virtues is missed that much?

honestly i was telling my mom yesterday that the point i'll really start getting concerned about ai on a physical level is when it's starting to seamlessly work with biotechnology as implants and do what it's supposed to do there. genuinely enhanced hearing/eyesight/motor skills. to me, then it's a threat for control reasons in a level that's hard to throw a killswitch or disentangle. i mean, i'm biased about this since i have (and have had) a pretty cutting-edge hearing implant since i was two, lol - but it just ain't there on a reliable level and right now still consistently feels like it's a chatbot hooked up to a suite of apps versus pure text-based chatbots a few decades ago like omegle. the computer is still ultimately in a box and this might be a very american/southern way of looking at it, but you can still ultimately shoot the computer in a box with a gun XD

extremely morbid joke from the ex-/k/ server that made me bust a gut laughing

( Read more... )

deciding that it's a human right to gross people out
(caveat: also to walk away from it)

( as always, nuance )