kradeelav | Recent Entries

krad 🔞 evil hag scribbler. sometimes draws nsfw.

■ email: overlord (at) kradeelav (dot) com

call me krad; this diary (connected to my main site) was created as a home for long-form thoughts to give a sense of context, warmth, and a human quality in an increasingly in-human internet.

along with general life updates, I'll post media "loveblogs" (especially from media older than ~2005), cool links from around the web as well as new & insightful ways of approaching topics, book reviews, meme shenanigans, web 1.0 creativity (like fanshrines, custom pages, or mini projects usually related with linux), kink junk, fire emblem fangirling (mostly FE9/10/14), quotes and passages that touched me that day, and non-art projects I've done.

if we've been mutuals in the past somewhere, DM me for private access as this journal has hidden private posts. if you need content warnings for anything shown on the site or adjacently, you're not going to want to follow. I trust you're an adult and can click away if something's uncomfy, don't disappoint me.

take care of yourself, y'hear?

despite me being the one that's usually freezing in my family, the last year i've started being like a furnace temperature-wise; most likely culprit is perimenopause (which my mom is lol'ing sympathetically at :p )

anyway, recently been experimenting with setups to sleep more comfortably at night and man, one of those standing floor fans/moving air in general does not work for me.

it was pretty wild last night to point the fan in my general area on max blast and realize 30 seconds later i was shockingly tensed up, even under the covers. tried pointing it in a different corner, on the lowest volume; still tensed up especially when i felt the moving air even just on my face. the temperature itself was great but the moving air set all of the stress radars off.

(and then i remembered what it was reminding me of; operating rooms always go extra-hard on moving air around, and the forced air "up" at my face while lying flat was enough of bad memory-ju-ju with oxygen masks that there was absolutely no way i was going to sleep.)

i'm glad to know that now, but it was kind of a 'huh neat/weird how the body really does remember shit even decades later.'

i think i'll try a cooling weighted blanket next... part of my issue is i looooove ten thousand blankets on top of me so i wonder if this will kill two birds with one stone... wish me luck.

“Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.”

― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

"Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those marches and petitions while Martin [Luther King] was still alive."

- James Baldwin, No Name In The Street

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.

- (part of the) Serenity Prayer

—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1892-1971

sometimes when i get bad headaches/migranes...

while resting i visualize a boulder sitting in the middle of a river blocking the water's passageway.

and it doesn't help every time, but a surprising number of times, if i nudge/picture the water eroding away the boulder into smaller stones and unclogging the river to get the water un-stagnant and flowing again, it'll help reduce the headache. i believe i borrowed this idea back in my (secular) buddhist days when experimenting with different meditation styles.

(does this take the place of a good ol' anti-inflammatory/rest/water? no, but there's a surprising amount of psychological work -- supported by studies -- that goes along pain. not Focusing on it goes a long way.)

anyway, i'm mentioning this because it's interesting replicating that river-visualization exercise for (digital) inking -- and "feeling" where the ink feels blocked and clogged even when it feels "technically" correct otherwise. where does the ink want to pool?

like the headaches, it's actually helping shockingly often. enough that i'm mentally slotting this into my 'useful inking tips' toolbox.

something really funny about corporate design & approval chains is a 'i don't like iiiiiiiiiit / non answer' comment to a presented design could mean a lot of different things.

mostly not actually about the design itself.

a) sometimes the exec doesn't actually have a problem with the design (when you grill them on the details), they're just butt-hurt they weren't involved in the decision making process. (usually this answer comes from people very insecure about their position & know they're redundant and not mission critical). sometimes it's useful intentionally leaving in one mistake for them to hone in and pick on and be satisfied that They Had A Hand In The Shiny Thing. :p

b) sometimes the exec doesn't like you, period, even if the design is perfect, and that's their ass pull of an answer when they can't find specific things to critique. (mfw when a sales SVP was aggressively butthurt at me for ages about a previous vendor's poor installation quality even when we had already reassured him we had swapped over to a new and trusted vendor lul).

c) sometimes your better design does not fit Their Grand Vision and you have to wait until Their Vision crashes and burns into a fireball before politely presenting them with your option (again).

d) sometimes your better design got sniped by a contractor/consultant who's buddy-buddy with whoever funding the project. (currently emotionally handholding an in-house AD annoyed at this and (c). it sucks to experience. but it happens.)

e) complete radio silence can sometimes mean the exec is straight up too busy to answer / give the level of feedback quality that they want, which some designers interpret as a negative when it's actually not.

there's at least five other possibilities not about the design but it's really funny having all of these happen to me to the point when it's very obvious which one is happening.

it's a job i love but you really really do have to take your ego/"vision"" entirely out of it; the way i see it, any project involving money - i'm paid to be their pixel-pusher/very occasional consultant; the actual imaginative work happens off the clock.

"Itoi: The colors for MOTHER were actually a proposal from my designer. He came to me and said, "I've got this option and that option," so I asked him, "Well, what do you think?" and he told me, "Personally, I think this one is the best."

That's generally how I work. I ask the person doing the job. On the surface, it may look like I'm trying to be even-handed or something, but I definitely play favorites. But the thing is, if the person actually doing the work says that's the one!, I can usually get behind it.

You see, someone on the outside looking in might have all kinds of different opinions. Maybe they dislike muted colors, who knows. But when someone actually involved in the project—that is, the designer himself—says they want to do something with a certain level of passion, there's always a reason for it. A deep, fundamental reason. Just like rolling over in your sleep.

—Rolling over?

Itoi: Yeah. I've been making the point lately that rolling over in your sleep isn't a random action; there's a real, fundamental reason behind it.

Itou: Really?

Itoi: Take the way I'm sitting right now… even this pose is a kind of "rolling over in your sleep."

Itou: Ah, I see what you mean.

Itoi: In other words, I'm sitting like this because my body has an actual necessity to be in this posture. It's the result of a struggle between two things: the fact that I'm being watched by others, and my own internal necessity. I believe the future of "creative work" lies in how much we can tap into and breathe life into that kind of raw instinct."

https://shmuplations.com/itoimiyamoto/

my (gallery) site had been acting kinda sluggish for the last ~6 months and long story short i knew it was due to me getting close to what tegalog can realistically store image wise.

i wasn't worried because there's a limited amount of artwork i want visible online, realistically. it was time to purge. but i also found i forgor to compress some really big comic pages and wow it's amazing how much of a difference that makes when you self host versus rely on social media lol.

anyway spent a third of today deleting / compressing / reuploading some of the big offenders, and deleting some old art that i feel like doesn't reflect me & where i want to go (it'll always be in the zip folders for the curiosity/data hoarders tho).

my proudest compressing was from a 3.2MB file to 32KB. :D
didn't even loose much quality imo.

(don't need advice, just amused.)

"In 1664, the Abbé d’Aubignac attacked Homer, arguing that The Iliad and Odyssey were incoherent, immoral, and tasteless poems, cobbled together out of an oral folk tradition. "

- The Odyssey, Emily Wilson

omg we proudly stan the literal bedrock of western literature for also being ""immoral"" "problematic tasteless degen" work too along with our own work :D;

“loving off-script, hot-blooded and mammalian, bodied, muscular, with your ribs aching. The kind of love that makes you offer your heart up— plump and flushed. Love that asks to eat you whole.”

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Horse Girl”

i had the epiphany today that FF16's convocation(?) black cloak/robes reminds me exactly of OrgXIII and akatsuki cloak/robes back in the day especially with its enduring popularity relative to the rest of the game / most other series.

time is a flat circle etc

it's a little funny but most of my cursory financial knowledge comes from two sources:

a) a group of 80-90 year old grandmas who were the most ruthless day-traders i still have ever known and made a Buttload of money being one of the last real generations where you could manually do that. (from them, learned what a P/E ratio is, how to read yahoo finance, etc).

b) Poasting on hacker news up to 2022 (knowing what ZIRP funds are, Series A/B funding, etc)

ngl? the grandmas were way more financially literate. XD also made the best cookies to snack on.

man i loved talking with them. they brought me in as a speaker one time to talk about cybersecurity 101 when i was a teen.

making pretty good headway on the project stack!

* you've heard me talk about the doujin circle i'm part of a few times here; along with some public projects this coming year, we quietly got the main site online -- more as a placeholder homepage for some of those projects: vanillacollective.org there's a high chance you'll see me reference this site and said projects next month, since there's at least two/three that haven't been released yet. :)

* starting a double tellius ironman run & let's play (pictures/text) over on my FE tumblr for the next few weeks (the link's not easily copy-able but the dedicated tag is "krad loveblogs tellius"). might be of interest re: ironman gameplay (tl;dr where either you let characters perma-die without resetting the level, or you restart the entire game), general meta notes, and also because it's my plan to talk very extensively about the tellius' casts character designs/color choices, which has always had some influence on how i design characters. at the current pace, hitting port toha by friday/saturday, which as you know, i'm quite excited about <3

* incidentally, finishing the gunter animatic this week before my brain gets taken over by zihark again. :p i'm doing an experiment where i slowly drip out 15 cells over the course of this week; all the artworks were quite gorgeous, it was a lot of artistic effort, and it feels like such a shame to bunch them all into one or two posts especially when i was not looking forward to trying to figure out how to make a gif work smoothly. the fact it has a good chance of higher engagement than usual isn't something i'm passing up either.

* i fell into having fun with ren'py for about 48 hours last week as part of a 'can i do this?' curiosity drive with recreating the fe9 dialogue window + making some custom sprites. :D loads of fun, will eventually post some screenshots of said sprites. the hardest part of truly recreating the dialouge screen is moving the nameplates & darkening the non-speaking characters which is going to require some python finagling, something i don't have the bandwidth for at the moment. while i have no real desire to do a visual novel any time soon, it's nice to have the skills now already there on standby.

* in smaller projects, finished a smattering of one-off FE illusts (some senri kita inspired), continuing to do doujin thumbnails, having a Meeting(tm) on thursday about some long term life shifts and if i have the financial wiggle room for them, getting the $portfolio website tightened up if i need to yeet myself from the dayjob in a hurry, progress on haus stuff is continue to move along in the background, etc.

all good stuff to happen, but still hoping to continue to pare down said list because i want to read more again!!

lowkey tickled to be a small part of the current EN-fandom doujinshi revival :3c

of all types of art mediums/projects, it's probably the one i'm surprised to have gotten the most sustained emotional satisfaction from, despite the outsized effort involved.

there's buzz lightyear of star command on sakugabooru today??????? omg omg omg

i feel SO VINDICATED with my childhood taste in shows because i still feel that was pretty dang solid animation wise!! :D that nos-4A2 episode ... top tier corny but slightly genuinely scary shit!

lil' funny my very real 2 year plan is 'peace out (of so many things) and literally become a bog hag hermit'

i've been slightly joking about going through a midlife crisis but uh, this is suspiciously resembling the 'buy a boat and peace out to the middle of the gaddamn pacific ocean' stereotype some engineers have.... :D;;;;

that said i do think this is going to -oddly- be a lot better for mental health since it's actually a bigger/more varied space than where i'm holed up currently (and i've been on a trending positive upswing of self-improvement even here over the last five years; think the key really is discipline in tackling areas of life where one's unhappy and trimming out the deadweight).

it's also interesting to reflect how there's always been a major life change about every 5 years for me; high school, college, the pre-covid first five years of work, the current stint.

lord, i'm ready for the next one. it's going to be busy for a while.

my dad is really sincerely great but there are moments when i am ngl a little shocked he hasn't darwin awarded himself out of the gene pool XD

> we're discussing the unfortunate quote for fixing an old ass furnace apparently at high risk for carbon monoxide leakage, as we just found that out
> he's been trying to weasel out of not having to pay
him: ok so what happens if you don't uhhh do anything?
[me and mom simultaneously, instantly] you die. :l

(anyway. i'm writing the check for this one. yeezus.)

marquis elmdore is really such krad bait i literally said 'oh no' out loud at the tv when he first showed up lmao

look at me krad

you are not immune to a gorgeous sexy villain bishie

you have not been immune since 2003

:P

lowkey considering commissioning a low-poly silver cobra headed cane for myself just to complete the 'haxxor with a pimp stick' aesthetiq i got going right now.

... i'm either going to immediately regret this or be inseparable from it lmao

i blew a gasket at somebody irl today and actually got outright yell-y partially to make a point (no real worries tho - it was mostly if not entirely justifiable, they even said 'i'd be just as mad about it at you if the roles were reversed', it was out of care re: their safety, we made up with no real feelings hurt, etc)

but it was kinda .... nice? to realize in hindsight/during it that 'oh huh i can actually be that intense on demand. neat. socking that away when i need it.'

especially considering i'm like ... usually on the other end of deadened emotions and/or the living embodiment of the placid pleasant ^_^ face 99.9% of the time. (honestly extreme emotions are annoying to me because they actively take so much energy and i can't stand the shakes afterwards, usually i'm like... why. literally what's the point when they're not an Useful action. not entirely healthy, i know, working on that, and am actually much better than where i was even five years ago.)

even funnier since this very morning several managers/bosses were talking about how they've literally never seen me annoyed much less mad at work and how of anyone i embodied 'be positive' (l o l).

krad

Sticky: Introduction

ok but why does the body have to keep a score lol

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weeb ouroubouros

yin and yang, but monay

february projects

got another one lads ~

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fft times

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