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vulturaldeterminants:

Here’s something smarmy that is, in my experience, actually true: If you put something sincere into a creative work, and you put it online where people can see it, odds are that somebody will get out of it part of what you put in. Maybe not a lot of people; maybe not anyone with very worldly taste. The better you are at your craft, the easier it will be for people to receive the sincere ideas and feelings in the thing you created. But even if you’re terrible at it, there’s most of the time at least a couple people on your wavelength, and what you make could be important to them.

(via queenlua ) 

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I've been on this kick updating my links page like old fandom webrings of yore, and it's making me remember what *specifically* i loved about those 3+ hours trawls, ten, fifteen years ago ...

* you clicked on all the links.  i suppose the pages being in a different language made clicking on the links even more fun like a mystery; were you going to get redirected back to yahoo.jp? did you get the gallery page with the right series/game? about page that was incomprehensible but had the most adorable sprites on it?  doodle page? who knows!

* (it feels so starkly different now, where i have 10-20+ ublock filters blocking different parts of twitter/tumblr's UI, instead of encouraging the viewer to click around. logically i know what happened, but soulfully - what happened?) 

* being on the hunt specifically for a character or two actually mimics the gambling high of social media now, i realize in hindsight i was, absolutely blatantly looking only for zihark art, lmao. probably amassed a horde of all 100+ pix that ever existed online. that was the sweet spot, but getting a hot art of haar or volke was always pleasant - on that note, can't believe Windy's site is still around, there. Spritzer, too - gasped out loud when I saw that so familiar black page... (isn't it funny how it breaks almost every single "common" web rule these days, but still works?)

*I am surprised at how many are still up and running on fc2.com!  I would say 40% lead to a 404 or bad domain page, 20% are converted to tumblr sites, and the last 40% are actually Ye Olde JP fanart sites untouched by time.

* seeing so many of the pages being converted to tumblr pages makes me so sad; they're always slower to run, the information is less dense, the *mystery* and rough personality edges aren't there anymore. Just one of five different static gallery styles, with no bookmark page to continue the tradition. tempted to run archive.is backups on all of these, but that's time consuming...

* (I still remember this one Itachi fanartist in the Naruto fandom - the name is forgotten, but I'd recognize her sleek style instantly, a decade later. Photobucket was always the second best place to grab art if a site was down, but now that's in the shitter ... Hanakago's another closed FE site, especially that super spicy blowjob Pelleas/Micaiah I'm almost 99% positive caused drama for the webmaster 'cause the site basically shut down immediately after, awh...) 

* (god, this isn't FE specific but i wonder how Heise is doing - and all of those Chinese artists drawng shameless BL..... i feel so lucky to still have her artbooks, they feel like national treasures now that iirc the CCP's not allowing that content to be printed...) 

It's so bizarre. the more i lean into this, the more I realized how deeply i missed this tiny, tiny niche of fandom not even in my native language, and how much it shaped me and my wants.

i don't - and have never - wanted to be a pro-artist in the traditional portfolio-site-and-career sense. just always wanted to fuck around with whatever tickles the id in a corner of my own making and make sure that it lasts more than a year or two.  all the times i was least happy with my art was when I was furthest from that realization (ie trying to ~monetize~ IC) and trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.