I redid my about & gallery page in the last month as part of a little 20k site kiriban retrospective!

while I've had a presence online with this handle for ... gosh, 20 years and counting (neat little coincidence, those 20's!), I made my site in 2018 to forever be a safe "haven" for my artworks regardless of which social media, ~~titty bans cough,~~ or moral panics come and go. in addition, i also view my site as a necessary piece of context that lovingly hosts the art with a great deal of personality, rather than being a separate contextless entity built upon a backbone of exploitation.

... needless to say it was pretty cool looking at all the projects listed on the gallery page and seeing how many were done in the last 3 years alone.

one of the other smaller updates i deeply enjoyed was tweaking my answer to the FAQ question below. i think it's the best answer yet. :D

"Why do you draw? I don't like authority, and I really don't like it when people imply what artists should draw based on outdated ideas of being "moral" "good" or "clean". All of my favorite drawing subjects (beautiful and questionably kinky long-haired bishies, self inserts, boot and gun porn, shitposts) have incidentally also been the same subjects people have told me quite explicitly to stay away from. I guess it didn't work!

The fact I thought about this artist's statement while drawing a Che Guevara ahegao hoodie should tell you everything. :) "

my laptop is baaaaack baybee! fixed keyboard and battery and now i'm just making sure it works for a solid 2 hours before giving the thumbs up to the manufacturer because yours truly is paranoid, lul.

interesting thing: so i was using private browsing exclusively for all internet junk since i was on my mom's computer for 3 weeks, right? (while not all of my interests are nsfw, there are a great many reasons i keep all of my stuff very. very separate from under the parent's purview. :P (it was actually really good timing i went on my game design spree since there wasn't anything potentially objectionable there and the gazillion files laying around for it.)

while i knew the basics of how private browsing forcibly logs you out of sites when you close the window, i didn't realize that private browsing worked in the sense you could have a window open all day and it'd keep you logged into that site even if you closed the tab, just not the whole window. so absolutely perfect for switching between tabs, but once you step away from the laptop and close the window, you're done with that log-in session for the day.

it was annoying at first logging into every "daily" account (like discord/email/dreamwidth) every morning, but now with the laptop back, i *feel* myself already being suckered into all of those scrolls-of-zoning-out since that friction's removed now with the laptop remembering all the passwords/sites. i was making a list of all the stuff i actually accomplished in those 3 weeks and it was. a lot! creating, or actively consume media I deliberately made a point to seek out (eg finishing OG trigun).

i thought i'd miss all of my RSS feeds as well, but. man. kinda nice not getting pinged every day. kind of feels like the difference between brushing your teeth vs having brain plaque.

... fuck it i might honestly go back to using private browsing for everything, that was really pleasant actually :D

one of my tasks I set for myself while the personal laptop's in the shop (good news: it was the battery and nothing more serious. the bill is not cheap considering it warped the frame and keyboard lol, but bearable) - was to go through my "to read" list and purging it a bit.

given my to-read list has been imported (badly) from goodreads and openlibrary and going since high school, it started at a little over 1000 books. :'D this was ah, not realistic (on a good year i can average 75). and i was starting to notice a few duds on the list. the other reason I wanted to do this now, was a good 60% of my to-read list is on archive.org and I'd like to take advantage of reading it on there before the publishers ruin that site.

it's kind of funny noticing the patterns of what i'm deleting. a lot of:

YA fiction whose summaries make me cringe out of my skin
self help books whose EVERYTHING makes me cringe out of my skin ('the secret bla bla' 'how to learn bla bla' and so on). relatedly, political-ish books that clearly jumped on the 'i have an opinion about trump' bandwagon. right out.
B-tier mercenary biographies (I read a shit ton of mercenary biographies for iron crown but there is only so many that you can read before it gets tedious)
anything written after 2010, as they (imo) have a notable decrease in quality because the jury's still out on whether it Ages Good.

what's left is actually really interesting! SO MANY books made before 2010. international timeless niche cult books, and not the classics everyone's heard of. i know some people set challenges to read x amount of books by minorities but after cleaning the list this'll happen automatically, and not even with trying. i'll probably end up with somewhere around 600 when it's said and done.

most of my books can be bucketed into categories of Mil&Hist (biographies going here usually), Awareness (the same tag as on here; meant for learning stuff about science, society, and spirituality), creative toolkit (directing/drawing/design stuff), Hackin' (little tongue in cheek label for breaking apart tech; also about history/philosophy of digital stuff), Muses (heavy on the spirituality part), Fiction (self explanatory) and the newest label Censorship (focusing mostly on art censorship).

feels nice to see concrete progress on one of my big goals. :)

i keep saying i'm done with commissions but then somebody shitpost-convinced me to draw a Che Guevara ahegao hoodie

and man

i'm sold :D

"i'll do commissions but only if they're kinky slutty long haired bishies, boot porn, or shitposts" livin da life

(via

queenlua )

real quick shout out that

prisoner_exchange is open for nominations (whether it be ships or freeform situations)~ if you want a chance for somebody to write/draw your lovely blorbo in either a captor, rescuer, or prisoner role - this exchange's for you >;3

first time i'm joining this one ~~lotta real fun fire emblem scenarios here hohoho~~

not that it "needs" a comeback

but something interesting to drawing erotica when people inevitably go 'why do you have to waste your god given talents on that / [youtube cringe reaction videos at niche kinks] / bla bla bla'

is, porny creations are, not even exaggerating, history's most relatable kinds of writing/drawings thousands of years later. we still go nice at ancient roman lewd caricature, grecian biblical self insert erotica (finger guns), clay figurines and pots with giant donguses (dongii?), and tits (hella ye). even if there's hand wringing by the prudes involved, or some kind of 'burn the witch' campaign, it's like the one thing that translates centuries after flawlessly.

~~who's talkin shit now bitches :P~~

(drawing v guilty pleasure porn ~~in honor of intsys really saying it's baby making free real estate in feh~~ and Thinking rn) (also yes this might be another fill for the week challenge. ;P i'm not even going to pretend it fits one of the prompts tho.)

finding myself watching Silent Möbius (anime from 1991), and on episode 2 rn, this is the most fucking lesbian show ever lmao. it's like if misato/ritsuko from NGE had the whole thing to themselves plus a side of weirdly spiritual body horror gibberish with streaks of mommy issues (yea, on second thought, that's also classic nge).

... all the women in uniforms are so hot .... and the animation perfectly straddles that line of hilariously cheesy-bad but also .... uncannily sharp and emotionally honest??? taking tons of screenshots. (i'm actually surprised people haven't said my art reminds them of this.) there's a vibe of 'baby's first corny but formative anime show'.

and then you get official art that looks like THIS.... [shameless whistles]

i found this through sakugabooru through a particularly good piece of animation and just keeeeept leaning around the corner. so many reviewers just completely bounce off of it either calling it boring (blade runner was way more boring imo) or ickily fetishistic (if anything it feels the least male gazey thing possible; when it does go fetishy it's always, bluntly, in a way that i'd draw it or devour with both hands. tentacles! old hot dommy women with big noses! gun porn! so many fuckin uniforms [drool]). can see so many people who liked hellsing solely for integra reasons(tm) digging this ngl.

anyway i know this is a barely coherent pre-review with one brain cell LOL ... let's hope it can keep reeling me in.

Followers who've been here for a while will remember that one of my projects in 2021-2022 was working with T to write a series of romance novels. T was the main writer, I was a mish-mosh of an editor/formatter/co-ideator/etc. It was a cool book idea, with some characters we're very mutually fond of (some were hers, some were mine), especially with putting them in a AU together. No regrets with the fun had, and we agree it was a good experience.

I say "was", as ... we learned a lot! Not enough to ultimately prevent this pen name/series from being put on ice as some of you probably have guessed from the crickets, but enough wisdom to spin up a new, air-gapped pen name elsewhere.

( the juicy deets )

More of a PSA: my "E" keycap broke off Friday so expect slow replies for a week or two until a replacement (hoping to talk with S76 in a ticket soon, though if anyone knows of a place one can buy clevo L140MU keycaps I'd love the backup). first time a keycap's broken for me so I can't help but think this is slightly shittier build quality than MBP's. though I do tend to be a hard user b/c i'm always hammering on "E' for eraser lol...

(between my credit card getting stolen, shark week, and this, past weekend hasn't been much fun.)

boy, January flew past....

it's been an interesting year so far! the definite experience of 'one step back, two steps forward'. Part of my eyes that was at risk have stabilized (knock on wood), honestly to a point that has been unheard of for me since I was half my age ... also just got my reader glasses so it seems like a very happy wrap up for now, since the whole cataracts drama got started a year and a half a go. wild, feels like yesterday.

That said we had some ridiculous tree drama where at least 10-15 trees have gone down in the past month (BIG ones, we ain't talking some shrimpy 1footers, these are trees with a diameter of 60in at the base. yeah. yeaaaah.) Turns out one of them that we were calling a widowmaker that was leaning towards the house coulda flattened the whole house and was way more diseased than we thought it was; that one we managed to cut down before it fell (given we were spooked by the others plus that whole mini power outage for a week or so when one of the branches blew the box) but it was probably going to fall in the next month. yeesh.

On the other, happier hand, I've been heads down at work on this new animated series that's launching and slowly exhaling one pregnant breath cuz this was one of those 'we gotta make money on this, since we're banking a lot on it' initiatives at work. it seems to be paying off above expectations! all i care about lol. Even putting that aside it's been a busier than usual month there. @_@ Tired.
( Art-wise, the biggest projects in the mix right now for Q1 ... )

(sauce)

kojima, you mad lad ....

( weary social media kvetching )

one thread and one shorter post crossposted from my nsfw twitter (as I periodically delete those).
both somewhat on the topic of thought crime discourse, taboo art, and a warning to younger folks given my past background ..

( thread one )

last two weeks i've been all-consumed with finishing FALKE's pages ... tonight is the last one ~

it's been a nice headspace, actually, wake up, dayjob, coffee+hot chocolate+coffee, skedaddle out of work an hour early to work on falke, supper, finish up falke page, send over to the writer for approval. The edits are just doable enough for me not to feel stressed, but involved enough to distract me from any news that's not my quiet little haven which is a win win.

i'm a bit tired though, between a mildly stressful work week, that, and family members coming over this upcoming weekend leaving not a lot of time to recharge. That said, I have a new game+ of Portal ready when there's time again in the early-afternoon before supper, so the laptop gaming will happen quite soon. :3 Finished Portal once ages ago in college, got halfway through Portal 2 but never finished it, so there'll be a lovely bit of re-discovering there ... hoping it'll work with the PS3 controller on linux.

Been in a big "finishing all the projects/tasks" mood and slowly actually completing things for once ... doujin-circle christmas card will also be finished soon, ditto with the fire emblem secret santa exchange, then the radiant dawn (fe10) playthrough I started at the beginning of this year.

my gf also got me watching House of Dragon (we're about to watch Ep6) after she spammed me gifs of "eyepatch dude" XD the fact I discovered him and dr. kiriko in the span of a month when they look virtually identical (gestures at icon) is hilarity to me, and will probably get roasted in an artwork very soon. lord she knows my taste in fictional men (not in small part b/c her taste is pretty similar too).

i hope all of you have found a thing that's been steadying and calm for you recently. :>

something interesting i've been noticing about people's Angst over twitter lately (~~me in the corner safely sandwiched between RSS feeds/discord/email/dreamwidth: [munches on popcorn, might be enjoying the schadenfreude]~~) is how the different kind of site ... UI friction? shapes who goes to what site.

like apparently (this is heard third-hand, your mileage may vary) young folks on ticktock find Ao3's lack of an algorithm much less dreamwidth utterly baffling at minimum to outright hostile. meanwhile? heck i count on dreamwidth's clunky friction as a feature-not-a-bug to keep people addicted to algorithms away. this whole move this past year of me fading away from social media was kind of hinged on that. my limited time hangin' on mastodon also def makes me aware of the specific kind of people who like that platform as well. (kind of, "super online" younger people who are techies who like the short format? it's a bit grating to me, personally, and I'll probably migrate off of it as soon as i can figure out how to follow private blogs via RSS.)

frankly, i was a bit spoiled with the folks on deviantart in my younger years being there for the art (and then slightly later, a little of creative-fandom) as well. but there's another example of how the UI of a gallery focus first acted as a filter for a type of personality.

so it's going to be sociologically interesting which ... generational slices inevitably migrate away from x platforms to y ones. the internet's fragmenting again, given how facebook/twitter have been eroding lately. there's been a trickle of a funnel of people getting tired of social media and building their personal sites; i'm hopeful we'll see more. but it's also tempered by the fact that it's a very rare/specific type of personality that would have the curiosity and self-gumption to knuckle down and learn code to get off of social media.)

(personally, that's another thing i count on, too. the folks who have that curiosity by and large tend to have a better grasp on reality vs fiction. not always! but by and large.)

sorry i've been weirdly quiet lately, talky brain just shut all the way down temporarily outside of work meetings, but what i HAVE been doing for the last week ...

prepping for that paid (!!!) workshop talk i got invited to (apparently they forgot to tell me it was paid lul)

chilling on /r/NCD because it reminds me of the better/online-poisoned-in-a-funny-way parts of /k/ except less racist cussin' (win win)

did u know Ferenc Pinter (god tier italian illustrator/designer that i'm 99% sure was a bootfucker fetishist lol) had a tarot deck? me neither and oops this'll be my second tarot deck :')

downloading every scan i can get my hands on from Ayami Kojima's black jack doujins from a different pen handle b/c dr. kiriko gives me a feral fictional bishie boner in an all consuming 'want to eat the sleazy fucker alive' way that i didn't even know i still had in me since sephiroth :D;
- i haven't even watched black jack but i have audibly lol'd that my id somehow hit on the military anesthesiologist which is kind of on the deeply ironic free spot of 'is this dinging the kink or the trauma part of your brain' (yes) (but like, in a delicious way lOL)
- like just look at this slurpee dinner!!!!!!!!!!!!!

backing up/deleting my gdrive and found what i think is the very first zihark i ever drew back from 2006 and this other amazing time capsule of a drawing that i must bless y'all with:

I LOVE YOU VERY UNIRONICALLY 2009 KRAD AND I HOPE YOU'D BE PROUD OF ME ;A:

i am outlining/writing a workshop talk i got invited to (:D :D :D ) via my IRL name/title and so far there is:

lenny faces
"become ungovernable" as a line unironically (on a page about separating corporate art from the real art)
possible rickrolling or ORLY memes
most of my anonymous designer resource tips
"i still draw my favorite anime character from when I was 13, don't @ me about personal style"
oblique mentions of furry art (i promise it's truly relevant)
[in general channeling my best charity.wtf energy]

(i am genuinely having so much fun this is either going to be the best one they've ever seen or go down in infamy lol)

happy samhain~

i've joined at least two (2) cybersecurity-adjacent mailing lists almost completely by accident slash "ooh shiny" inclinations, and this 100% feels like a continuation of learning Cool Stuff by osmosis just by diving into the linux-y world. is this the early days of the "krad becomes a sysadmin completely against her will" fable for the ages? :P
- (if i had to become one, i think the area i'd focus on is like.... sysadmin-y for tor-but-just-personal-art/anticensorship-sites, like i feel like there could be some fascinating overlap there. been meaning to set up an onion mirror for my site for a while too for the lulz.)
- relatedly, i've mentioned Snowflake (tor extension) here before, but didn't know until recently if you have the icon visible, it turns green when somebody's using your connection safely. it's been green a lot more lately. really unexpectedly heartwarming to glance up every now and then in the last few weeks while the iranian protests/(revolution?) have been going on and know there's a real good chance at least one of those green blips is somebody getting info out there and circumventing censorship.

also relatedly i've been bulking up on using krita for my art almost exclusively for the last month (ever since one of my two USB ports on the drawing laptop finally stopped working) and the transition from like, 2010 era photoshop has gone shockingly well? every day i'm all 'oh my god you can DO THIS WITH FREE SOFTWARE??" (seriously there's a paint-bucket fill tool in krita that blew my fucking mind that basically erases any need to do "flats") ~~bitches who complain about oss have no idea the life of luxury they've been living with my god~~. the painting brush engine alone makes me want to paint hardcore again. it's crashed once or twice for me but less so now that i installed the non-developer version, and, admittedly, based off how many times photoshit crashed/, krita beats it pretty easily on those metrics too. :P like, PS on the relatively new mac computer crashes almost weekly lol.
- i know 'year of the linux desktop hurrrr' meme is a little ah, overused, lol - but i actually do really think there's a new wave of non-developers who are getting so fucking sick of micro$hits/apples "rent a computer as a service" stunts that they're willing to try something new, and if companies like System76 was more well known to sidestep the issue of 'how to build a linux machine that doesn't have weird incompatibilities with drivers' - oh man. i know i'm not the last one that's not going back.

been grinning like an idiot for the last day off and on because this pakidge came from littlegamersartshop ~ the sticker went immediately on this laptop and i've got the keychain right next to my collection of his cipher cards .... yes i have a problem, what of it lol. it's really well made, and having a physical piece of the charming part of 90's with resin phone charms is just lovely on a lot of sentimental levels for me. the very kind shop owner makes these for all FE characters across the series too, btw!

I have long since lusted after that leatherman!medic illust for a great many Reasons, and may have gone on a shopping raid of scumsuck’s works after discovering it again. ergo: this lovely little care package just came in the mail today, appropriately for the spooky season ;)

total sweetheart of an artist, and the website alone is #indieweb goals ~ go check it out: scumsuck.com

(that krad doodle TaT! my kokoro~)

something that's been cool about this year is that i finally have been unfucking my general daily process in some pretty major ways.

the results have been mostly offline, but the notable evidence y'all may notice is actually staying on top of responses for once (both dreamwidth, physical letters, and emails); if I do take a while to get back to responses it's usually in under 4 weeks or two versus "years" or "never" lol. big difference. sending zine circle cards .... shipping out zines ... etc.

( Read more... )

krad

new artist's statement?

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KTS* postmortem

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january updates

lol. lmao even.

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finish lines ...

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monthly update, october edition

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the process glowup

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