krad

having to walk through my parents (mom's even reasonably tech savvy; i have her half on linux) through some financial verification stuff and it's just... a nightmare labyrinth of steps, gosh. it's really making me feel for families/elderly people who genuinely would not be able to make it two steps in and have to rely on somebody hopefully??? trustworthy?? 

i have sympathy for the blue team considering how bad fraud is right now (i know several families who got their life savings wiped in the last year, shit's grim) but just.... man. my stomach twists for people who already have a fraught relationship with financial/literacy independence.

like this isn't even the kind of thing you could go to your library or church and ask for help like you could with basic email. i really fear we're leaving so many people behind...

(sorry for the downer on an otherwise good day i just, agh.)

something that's an interesting three way culture.. clash? something? to me is all of those CN tutorials about how to draw anime characters recently.

(magicleaders is a good informative one that's less ticktocky than most)

see, back when i was growing up, there really wasn't anything like that from professionals (love dA tutorials, but they hit a skill ceiling quite quick because it was usually 'a better n00b teaching other n00bs").

there's (imo) two parts to ""drawing anime characters"" decently: the anatomy, and the stylization. even if western teachers were friendly to anime styles (most weren't), all the professionals out there in the US were coming from a pure western art tradition methology and could only teach the first (anatomy) in a naturalistic way. there's a very specific style language that just wasn't translated to novices. you basically had to sneak into JP-internet (ie pre-EN pixiv) to get anything good. 

but the CN tutorials above - it's natural, especially to mature professionals and professors. so much so that they could be critiquing/red-lining a drawing that's very obviously a shota, bishie, or a catgirl (subjects that would get you a Look here), and you still get an incredibly solid theory of lighting or theory of shapes workshop lesson that accentuates the subject in terms of stylization. (a server of mine has an in-joke about "shota deer knees" if they're drawn by somebody who knows what they're doing.) 

i don't know. as somebody who got hit with the 'is that a girl or guy?' quite a lot re: bishie drawings back in the day in terms of, um, lack of acceptance? it's a pleasant change but it's just an interesting rapid shift.

dabbling in regex today to mass import/rip tags from filenames and i'm convinced this is just. wizard symbol language.

([^,]+?)(?=,\s|(?:\.[^.]+$)) like ?????

edit: oh god there's (?:(?<=/)|^)([^/]+?)(?=(?:\s*\(\d+\))?\.[^.]+$)|([^,]+)(?=,\s|(?:\s*\(\d+\))?\.[^.]+$)

i cast EXTRACT TAGS!

edit edit: can't tell if i've gotten a toothache from regex madness or not lol

there's a passage from tamora pierce's spymaster series that i think of every six months.... 

i can't transcribe it from memory, but the kickass lady knight protagonist hero from her first series is now a mom and her daughter is kinda piddlin' around the castle being a regular teenager and the whole plot of the spymaster series is when the lady knight mom (very much a go-getter) is doing Projects(tm) around the castle and decides to make 'finding something for her daughter to do' a Project and that's when said daughter decides to take off because what teenager wants that.

and it always struck me as an incredibly realistic and sympathetic dynamic to both (very much me and my mother sometimes at our worst heh) that, mm, wasn't allowed to really any protagonist back then. much less now, really. i'm mentioning this less for ~societal roles on women~ flavored and just that some of the really driven type-A career moms are, yeah, very Project(tm) oriented just to get stuff done in a way i don't really see dads do, and that's reliably a friction point as their spawn grows up especially when the question of evolving independence gets entangled, and also if said spawn has hobbies that the mom really wouldn't approve of. i also found it notable pierce wrote that when she was closer to the mom's age, so there's an element of (unusual?) understanding humility/self awareness that the author had versus trying to talk down to teenagers.

tamora pierce really was a lovely writer to exist in a certain span of time for a certain kind of reader.

    INTERVIEWER

    I worry that—in America at least—the act of critical thinking is being devalued from a cultural perspective. Do you notice that as a thinker or teacher?

    CARSON

    That’s part of the thing that made me start thinking about hesitation. The last few years I was teaching, I was teaching ancient Greek part of the time and writing part of the time. And the ancient Greek method when I was in school was to look at the ancient Greek text and locate the words that are unknown and look them up in a lexicon. And then find out what it means and write it down. Looking up things in a lexicon is a process that takes time. And it has an interval in it of something like reverie, something like suspended thought because it’s not no thought because you have a question about a word and you attain that as you go through the pages looking for the right definition, but you’re not arrived yet at the thought. It’s a different kind of time, and a different kind of mentality than you have anywhere else in the day. It’s very valuable, because things happen in your thinking and in your feeling about the words in that interval. I call that a hesitation.

    Nowadays people have the whole text on their computer, they come to a word they don’t know, they hit a button and instantly the word is supplied to them by whatever lexicon has been loaded into the computer. Usually the computer chooses the meaning of the word relevant to the passage and gives that, so you don’t even get the history of the word and a chance to float around among its possible other senses.

    That interval being lost makes a whole difference to how you regard languages. It rests your brain on the way to thinking because you’re not quite thinking yet. It’s an absent presence in a way, but it’s not the cloud of unknowing that mystics talk about when they say that God is nothing and you have to say nothing about God because saying something about God makes God particular and limited. It’s not that—it’s on the way to knowing, so it’s suspended in a sort of trust. I regret the loss of that.

—“Throwing Yourself Into the Dark”: A Conversation with Anne Carson, in The Paris Review 

i've been reading delightful twilight fanfiction again.

(aka charlisile since a friend made it quite compelling recently) (... between that and hetalia doujin it's very 2008 over here in krad!land). 

but it's interesting to note in shameless vampire romance stories, the implication is almost always the reader projecting on the human and the vampire as the ~forbidden romance object~. this is a very navel gazey post, but for me i've always instead strongly projected on the vampire*; and while that discrepancy doesn't bother me, it's fun picking apart the why. 

specifically, it's the older vampires, not just the more mature parents but the timeless, lived-for-centuries-enough-that-they-have-quirks vampires that always feel more relatable than the others or definitely humans.

there's certain traits these ageless Elder vampires often have. emotionally detached, sleepy, a fond (and not afraid) affinity with death, almost childish in open curiosity. completely baffled by new trends or new silly problems. also fond of whimsy. they tend to be either excessively sadistic or "true neutral" to an annoying degree when our protagonists need an ally, but they don't usually tend to pick allegiances or sides (probably because so many have faded away). there's a few characters in twilight that fits this, but i think one of the better examples of characters like this was Eve from Only Lovers Left Alive (fantastic movie; easily my top halloween film).

honestly i've never felt human; not in a self hating way, just a (similar) morbid sleepy detached curiosity that most people's experiences and thought processes are very different on average. currently reading through a different (not vampire romance, biography/essay) book where the writer is very open about her anxiety issues, her tendency to be always online, resenting the need to fit to an Image that she saw in media and magazines and what boyfriends wanted, and it struck me in her word-stream of consciousness that there was not a single priority we shared as much as it was well written; maybe that's flavoring this line of thought.

i've quipped humorously a few times (irl and here) before that going through the gauntlet of surgeries as a kid kinda forcibly and permanently reorganized my priorities to a single one: don't die. all other problems fade (or were sliced away) away into meaninglessness fairly quickly. not that there weren't scars, but clarity does strip specific types of problems at the cost of being present. 

And Eve's actress (Tilda S.) actually confirmed she was thinking along the same lines while playing Eve; a being who's been through the black plagues, lost everything (found everything), seen everything, seen history march on, and is at peace floating through time and simply bearing witness and gathering knowledge for the pleasure of it. very piscean, end of a cycle. 

but it was interesting, extremely fun, and rewarding to see how Only Lovers Left Alive handled genuine romance while still having a character like that. i'd like to see more of that, honestly. 

* ...... and why yes i have a bezi AU where bright eyes is the vampire and him the vampire hunter :p

( small blegh )

otherwise, everything's been genuinely pleasant post the flare-up. (currently playing dragon's dogma 2 DLC, working on a R18 zihark/lethe strip, waiting for main computer to come back from the shop by end of month). if anything this has been one of the happier years as of late, and you know what, i'll take that. 

watching a keyshot tutorial for vaguely work related reasons and it is so surreal seeing this thing render something basically in real time (+1 seconds of delay) when it took 24hrs to a week for the same thing just ten years ago.

like i remember when we slept under the desks overnight at [art college] for state of the art computers to do like, one frame!! and that thing just did... it!!? in front of me?? in front of my salad?? wack.

i'm writing this post as somebody who's been sitting at the "design manager" title for a few years but as of this past year have effectively been doing.... a bit more.... than that in hopes of snagging that next rung up in the next 2 months. writing this partially as a time capsule for myself, as well as maybe shedding some light on what it's like at this crossroad for others.

( Read more... )

taking my laptop to microcenter (the nerd's best buy) this week since a weird sudden increase in the fans probably means dried thermal paste and/or dust buildup is an easy low-hanging fruit to pick off (it's 4 years old, it wouldn't surprise me, and even if it doesn't solve that it wouldn't hurt longevity).

i can't wait to see the look on the tech's face when a Gurl(tm) shoves a linux laptop under his nose and show him the psensor temp recordings :D

(technically i know replacing thermal paste is ez but i'm honestly at the point i'd rather throw money at somebody to do it right while i'm wandering around and drooling at the shit in microcenter)