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?

(crossposting from tumblr because most favorite guilty pleasure trope ever actually described accurately <3 )

headspace-hotel

Notes on Torturing The Character In The Science Facility
my takes on this trope rarely if ever have anything to do with the character being “special” or being studied for powers they innately have, if they are special its something that was done to them
it’s about the medical trauma
it’s about the violation and lack of bodily autonomy
the “living weapon” trope, but the key characteristic is catastrophic functionality
i love, love, love the concept of “catastrophic functionality” in a person: character that can tank ludicrous amounts of damage and just Keep Going in virtually all circumstances barring outright dismemberment. They can keep going, so do they “deserve” rest and/or pain relief?
after a lifetime of having their distress treated as whiny and unreasonable, they have what would be a dangerously high tolerance to pain and exhaustion.
another key function of the Science Facility is to fix the damage Character takes, maybe using enhanced healing technologies or 3D printed organs or something. this leads to Character’s body being treated as relatively disposable cause “we can just fix them”
extreme version of this: Character can’t die even if they wanted to
people who work with Character are informed that they’re dangerous and arbitrarily violent, and their fear of Character makes it easier to justify restricting autonomy
It is TRUE, cause Character does not have tools to set boundaries or protect their body other than violence. vicious cycle of being perceived as dangerous and therefore denied autonomy, and being forced to use violence to defend autonomy
the restraints used to hold Character look like major overkill, which underscores how dangerous they are. LOVE this trope
character being desexualized to the point that their non-consent to touch, to being stripped down and examined, or to procedures is trivialized. There is no non-clinical context for their body, and the “clinical” framework eclipses any possibility for bodily violation to be understood as violent.
types of uncanniness: Character looks human but has some subtle inhuman traits or characteristics. (I’m obsessed with reflective eye shine, personally.) OR Character looks like they’ve been taken apart and put back together, like flesh pulled over a much more unforgiving and indestructible metal scaffold. OR Character gives off “undead” vibes; they’re just not quite alive in a way that sets off air raid sirens in people’s brains
Often, Character is dead and Came Back Wrong (varying levels of literalness)
anyways yeah. i never stopped writing this trope and probably never will. it’s a good one

i love tumblr so much because i found a blog that's just posting matt mercer screenshots and the single line of context is as 'references to draw for a cartoon character' and i'm like 99% sure they're being genuinely honest and not a weird stalker fan (it's only official critrole session shots and not uhh, candid convention shots which you see a lot in fan run accounts and feels so gross and privacy invasive to me.)

same mental illness lmao <3 handshake. god bless thank you for being exactly what i needed anon, and not a single millimeter more <3 i literally don't care about the guy (no offense) it's just PERFECT REFERENCE.

there's a half written essay in my mind that i feel like """accessibility"" has been a trojan horse for 'increasing engagement' by less discerning types who are not plugged into what strict slices of disabled people need and who use it as a way to shoehorn in ways of 'we need Moar users' without asking whether or not those users are actually wanted. (because true accessibility-for-disabled-folks is hard to implement properly on a larger scale and requires focus testing groups, money, and time.)

and the third leg to all of this is that friction is desired to keep online places healthy which is a hard pill to swallow for said accessibility/(growth)-first people (all of my favorite places to actually talk with nuance have some comparatively extreme roadblocks to keep the bad actors & spammers out; invite-only servers, hand-coding personal sites & talking only over emails, dreamwidth due to its nature of being text heavy and hardcore privacy filters...)

i'd probably title this essay 'effort is not the enemy'

idk i saw a discussion on the indie web that word for word was 'we need more accessibility' and i'm over here violently shaking my head no which is an irony considering how many levels of 'visibly disabled' i am, lol.

like i really don't think the effort needed to create a personal site as it stands is a bad thing. there's plenty of education out there for those who want it, way more than in the 00's. and it being a thing you pay for a nominal amount probably helps keeps the spam & bad actors lower than it would be otherwise. and at some point you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

* i'm on a backgrounds/architecture kick, and yoshida seji is known for some fantastic artbooks on the topic. what i didn't know is he has a lovely free-to-see collection of video redlining/"corrections" while he corrects artwork submitted by other people. enormously helpful to see what he thinks are some common beginner's mistakes with backgrounds.

* given a mix of events & twitter, it felt prurient to post this guide to handling traumatizing video/images. (the person who wrote this is dreamwidth's founder and one of the most respected T&S leaders around.)

* ellen ullman wrote this lovely 'i'm getting off of windows and onto linux' paeon in 1998, and it felt strikingly evergreen given how many people are jumping ship right now from win11. warms the cockles of my machine heart but also some food for thought.

* posted in my doujin circle, "Gen Z Puritanism, Millennial Cultural Decadence, and Why We All Fucking Suck" was an interesting article. my candid reaction I posted in the server below:

> krad: imo i would kinda quibble with millennial = excess (don't really remember a whole lot of excess in my circles and i didn't have it bad....), but in its place, i would say millennial=> escapism. the metaphor still works for the most part, but escaping thru to online life, video games, and then for those who did have excess, escaping through that.
>> "You cannot build cultures that reward endurance, exposure, and ideological flexibility and then act shocked when the next generation wants armor."
> krad: I actually agree with this line with the escapism online bit, especially.
> krad: i know my generation loves to say they were fine with unfettered internet and i uh, still.... partially agree with that. because a lot of us were older when we first got on (generally at least early teens at absolute earliest, if not mid/late teens)
> krad: but the actual people who were five years old getting on... it is different.

( * brief discussion of historical milfetish art below the cut for the last link )

(crossposting over here from my fe tumblr because it's interesting to consider.)

> for someone who has historically had zero problem drawing pretty hardcore dead dove (incest, rape, kinks like watersports, etc), nudity plus emotional eros is something i'm kinda chickenshit at drawing....

i think i'm known as somebody who draws erotic clothed sex/intimacy well (it's been said before) so it's not exactly a puritanical thing, (i think?), and it's not strictly the intimacy side that i'm gun-shy at....

when i think about it, a simple nude body is also Fine. but it's full frontal nude (specifically aroused genitalia) plus personal emotional eros/attraction that .... the idea of it feels nice to draw, but it's way way too painfully vulnerable to show, haha.

#even my gunter/corrin hentai i shied around it more often than i'd like (by far the hardest panels to draw were the full body + bits) #where you couldn't just abstract a wholeass panel as uh. Biggus Dick. #funnily enough gunter is like the ONE character that breaks this rule consistently. freak ass dude (lovingly). #i have a theory it's because i associate gunter with the ship more (gunter/corrin) versus audience-and-character. #it's such a weird specific black hole of a mental roadblock when i'm Fine with everything *around it* #and other artists seemingly don't have said mental roadblock. belatedly realizing i use kink as a way to cheat around this too. #idk! thinking about this as i attempt a thing. hold my beer.

!! this post is a wip (specifically the images) for about a week until i finish the resource deck; i will update the images and delete this line when the final version is up !!

In my "Tellius Environments" resource i've created (link to be coming when it's uploaded), I've added a travel time page.

This whole resource is for fan-creatives where determining the travel time is useful ("how far is it from Melior to Nevassa on pegasus versus on foot".). This specific post covers in detail how I calculated the distances that the characters and unit types (pegasus, beorc, bird/beast laguz, etc) take to get from point A to point B, along with some Tellius specific meta.

( Read more... )

( I WAS RIGHT )

anyway in non-work news, january's shaping up to be basically cleaning up everything from last year; two comic projects, dealing with the aftermath of grandmother passing away now mom's been stable for a while, this giant 'fe tellius backgrounds project' that's going to be incredibly useful for fan creatives (also selfishly for me to focus on upcoming tellius-related doujin).

i plan to Relax a bit in the second half of january after that ;orz

in cool news: dad's also designing the new house and last night showed me what the plan was for my suite/office :3 i get to have a swanky contemporary office!!! with a big window!! and a closed door!!!!!!!! and a separate kitchenette i can use!!! won't be long ~

one of the funny things about working in my industry is:

* for context, it's highly regulated + the consumers are sue-trigger-happy, so the more mature corporations tend to have beefier legal departments.

* these days, consumers post videos/images of themselves showing off [$product]. this is on average a good thing, imo, if they're genuinely happy with the product/company in an uncoerced way. while there are a lot of paid influencers, there's also a lot of times this happens organically due to [$industry] and the corporations are usually happy to repost those. organic promotion for us, free views for them, win/win for #capitalism baybee.

EXCEPT

* the hilariously often amount of times the consumers don't use [$product] in the extremely narrowly-defined-way-product-integrity/legal likes.

so as soon as the social media team reposts something even mildly off script we joke we can hear legal wailing and gnashing their teeth from over here, for something as mild as [consumer puts product on a non-approved surface for literally .5 of a second] XD

genuinely getting emotional about the internet because i can be hanging out in this ex /k/ defense shitposting server one day and get a massive amazing book/documentary recommendation list about iran's history from a dude living there (he's been giving us updates about stuff there), after a chat with him led us both that ways.

and, just. man.

i know the internet's horribly broken these days, but....

....this!!! this is what i always loved about it. god.

slipping into another (irreverent) world, talking with folks who have no idea a thirty-something hag graphic designer is on the other side and who frankly doesn't care about who's on the other side, just that the thirst for authentic curiosity is there.

the most swole cardinal i've ever seen in my life (this mf is the size of a small chicken) is one territorial bastard and keeps attacking the glass which sounds distantly like the electrical power fluctuating so i have to keep getting up to scare him away lol

i ain't even mad

(downsides to a mostly glass house: this)

so i'm not really into making faceclaims / the whole fandom around voice actors since (a) i play every game on mute for a mix of privacy reasons and hearing-isn't-a-priority, and (b) i get weirded out over fandom being obsessively weird about real people as actors. (i know most people are fine and it's only a few outliers who get into stalker territory but idk i'm old school, i try not to cross those lines. i'm fine with RPF in theory if those lines aren't crossed but fandom's always been 2D for me?).

the problem is, okay, i'm not into critical role either. (i did watch the first half of s2 but lost interest when molly "left")

but the problem is matt mercer is becoming distractingly pretty as he ages (lol) and unfortunately the absolute dead ringer for a theoretical faceclaim zihark (considering i've never seen anyone else come remotely close tbh).

and tumblr giffers are really good at showing that.......

and every time i see one of those gifsets i can feel every brain cell of mine immediately turn around with a "!!!" to a degree i have to tell my fucking brain 'sit down, siiiiiiit. don't. be. weird. don't be weird.'

~~(sorry i have basic taste lol, i will bear this cross. )~~

"Krad's Art Dump 2.0" is here with all of my art from the past five years minus ~100 pieces of NDA artwork. I started this gift last decade as a way to give back to the old internet that mentored me, and it ended up a very poignant way to archive my work.

Before you download, please be aware there are many NSFW/R18 pieces as well as potentially disturbing artwork. You are welcome to save/delete whatever you want, all I ask is you do not reshare, or use it for AI training*.

Download link (1.1 GB)

Previous 2011-2020 dump: https://www.mediafire.com/file/3hqo6ltoui8mkt1/

*( Read more... )

"Gilles Deleuze proposed in the 1990s that discipline, formerly the dominant mode of power in Western societies, had been modified and to some degree overtaken by a logic of “control” that worked not by confinement or restriction of movement, but by the regulation of continuous, mobile flows— of capital, information, bodies, and affects. Unlike the punitive subjection of discipline, control does not require a subject as such; nor does it seek to produce or manage one. As we have seen, casino design follows what one leading firm calls the “immersion paradigm,” holding players in a desubjectified state of uninterrupted motion so as to galvanize, channel, and profit from what the academic consultants quoted earlier called “experiential affect.” If, as philosophers and anthropologists of affect contend, contemporary capitalism is distinguished by strategic attempts to mobilize and derive value from consumers’ affective capacities, then commercial casino design would appear to be a case in point."

-Addiction by Design

could somebody go back in time about a week and tell past!krad 'one does not simply speedrun through a fucking flu (during the holidays no less).'

:D; ~~no wonder my usual zicam + gatorade regime wasn't doing shit~~

anyway. multiple 15 hr night sleeps later. krad is alive for some definition of alive. and back at home. finally!!!!!!

> (anon): ATF captcha where you have to guess whether a firearm is classified by the ATF as a pistol, a machine gun, a rifle, a short barreled rifle, a short barreled shotgun, a destructive device, or as an any other weapon

(quotes like this is why i stay in the /k/ sever, man)

there's a game i've started playing with myself when i'm stuck *somewhere* just observing the environment - basically called "spot what the architect actually designed and what was tweaked after by the developer/client/company/regulations/future updates".

* checking a row of lights or ceiling tiles; is one light/tile a different color or randomly stuck in a corner not parallel to the others? are there fire sprinklers in random places and not spaced apart equally?

* is a piece of stone exceptionally worn away like compared to the surrounding ones like people have used it excessively? is a sign suddenly anachronistically metal with machine modern font instead of wood if it's in a castle?

* is a house/historical place mostly symmetrical except for one weird random room? does the room have a different structural design to it? is the wood floor a different texture?

* is an outlet super obviously on a really big bare wall at a different height than another outlet? (was a tv screen planned there to hide it and then later removed?)

etc etc

it's been an unexpectedly fun way to train the mind to recognize all the little details that often go unnoticed in the surroundings, and to also ask oneself why (do people use things differently). a lot of times my biggest issue with people drawing interiors/settings is it doesn't feel "lived in", which this observation seeks to help with.

might as well give updates here -

after a third 10+ hour overnighter in the big-city-fancy-ER for mom (she was there with somebody else, i had to trade off), and a zillion of tests they basically ruled out the heart/anything life-threatening in its entirety. we're now thinking potential non-life-threatening gastric issues since sometimes it can refer pain elsewhere, for example in the upper chest. another theory is literally, just bad anxiety attacks (potentially combo'd with the above) but she's um...... (a) very stubborn and (b) the type of person to legitimately throw her shoe at you if you mention that or "relax". ~~love her to pieces but there's a reason why dad and i have called her the world's worst patient all my life lol.~~

that said said random chest pains have been very.... very slowly decreasing in intensity? it's one of those weeks where it's like, bad day, good day, BAD day, good, ok day, good day.... so real hesitant to say that too loudly, but ideally simply Knowing in her brain she's not gonna die of a heart attack helps with some of that by itself.

(i also got that cold/virus that's going around and basically am at the tail end of speedrunning through That in 48 hours by sleeping like 15 hours each day so yeah that's also been going on.) in good news: did do a decent amount of drawing today along with family-ing since it was the first day in a ..... week i felt normal, lol.

so. tl;dr getting there.

anyway y'all have been, sincerely, lovely. <3 love you all.
comments disabled more for brainwidth than anything but, mwah. wishing you a fuckin better year than you all have had. may we thrive into the next one.

* neat gamedev writeup on LoZ: Ocarina of Time talking about some meta-gameplay difficulties the devs had to work through in regards to designing the first 3D action game. Fascinating to see how most modern games like Elden Ring today still operate off of similar spatial principles.

* i was talking to a friend on bsky about LLM's and reducing friction of delusions; bellingcat's founder Elliot H. posted a really good thread a while back that I keep thinking about. (I have my reservations about bellingcat in general and where they get their funding but this feels insightful.)

copy/pasted thread text below:

( Read more... )

* Bart Ehrman's last lecture - "The Most Significant Discovery in the History of Biblical Studies”. haven't been in these circles for a while, this was a refreshingly thoughtful lecture/sermon of sorts.

* one of the latest pieces of news this week is firefox has a new CEO who apparently is commited to driving a perfectly decent product off a cliff; they're forcing AI upgrades and there's rumors of disabling extensions in the future, but that's less concrete. While there is a follow-up clarification that the devs are trying hard to keep AI explicitly opt in / have a kill switch for it, i'm less certian that they'll be able to keep that from CEO pressure.

if you feel strongly about this, i've given feedback at https://connect.mozilla.org/ and suggest you do as well. For immediate AI-free alternatives, waterfox and vivaldi are the two strongest ones I consistently see in rec lists.

* thin desires vs thick desires - thoughtful articulation on a concept i've been seeing a lot lately. (though i have my reservations that quote unquote pornography in its entirety is a thin desire since to me sexual desire in media is pretty nuanced; i see where the thought line comes from, but that's a side tangent.)

* escape clause - a blogger decides to move away from the apple ecosystem after seeing another dev elsewhere get locked out of mission critical email accounts. (i really liked the empathy to apple devs at the same time of concretely outlining why he's moving away)

dangerously tempted to amend my current bio of 'evil hag scribbler' to 'degen hag scribbler' after seeing a redditbro call a genre of what i draw (selfship shit), that, lol.

(only reason i'm holding off is, don't want to scare off potential friendlies not looking too close at it, and it's a little.... hm...... little close to carrying water for my enemies there. i feel like the lack of reading comprehension these days would context-collapse the irony there, you know? "evil" kinda gets the idea across while still allowing the slight fun 90's campy cartoon villain vibes that i like without the deadly seriousness.)

the funniest thing is i wouldn't even be put off at other derogatory descriptors. 'self masturbatory' is not even inaccurate. but now degen(erate); it's got such a potent history to it that frankly encapsulates so much of me that it makes me want to rub it in everyone's faces to gross them out.

on the flip flip side it's making me actually want to draw gross porn again for the first time in six months. i'll take that, honestly.

'man this reminds me of one of those ICU weeks' < not what you want to hear from me lol

was. another one of those days.

real glad i remembered a bunch of tricks like typing up all the detailed notes/timestamps in a 3 page file with multiple copies when there was an hour of lucidity since it's what got her in a specialist place tonight back in the big city again. (docs tend to take one a lot more seriously if you come in with a notebook of shit that can be cross-referenced with discharge papers. also helps to summarize things when your higher function brain is absolutely fried from lack of sleep. bonus if you speak that medical acronym language.)

now it's the waiting game again.

krad

Sticky: Introduction

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january link roundup, art & images edition

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meta: tellius travel times

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[ plays self world's smallest violin ]

Krad's Art Dump 2.0

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lol. lmao. kek even.

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link roundup : accidental tech/LLM theme edition

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