silver

artfight starts tomorrow and i still just don't feel ready for it. i'm trying not to expect or hold myself to my participation last year; doing an entire six fullbody pictures with full shading and a full detailed background was actually a lot of work and i'm trying to make sure my brain actually accepts that. trying to make sure i can be okay with maybe only doing one or two attacks, and / or attacks with simple backgrounds and coloring or something. i want to do more... i wish i could, but this year has just been so immensely difficult. it's almost entirely changed me as a person internally, in a lot of ways for the worse, which is still strange to experience and makes holding myself to standards of "at least try not to be a shitty person" to be even more draining of my energy than they were before.
i don't want to be shitty to people. i want to be kind and patient with everyone. but it's so hard when it feels like the same is only rarely given to you by life in return, and all of the tiny, miniscule pinch of energy you have left to live your life has to be spent trying to reverse the effects of what often feels like everything and everyone trying to make you into the worst version of yourself.

i'm trying. and sometimes trying means you have to accept that you can't do what you wanted to do, or have to do it in a lesser way. i want to give my all to art fight again, i hope by some miracle i'll find a reserve of energy for art and will be able to just let it absorb me. i just can't expect it of myself either, as much as i badly want to match and even exceed my contributions last year.

dreading the new wow expansion a lot less now that i have a new laptop, that not only runs wow on much better graphics settings but has an enormous hard drive that i won't feasibly for the life of the laptop run into the situation i did on my older much smaller hard drive laptop, that being fucking windows updates and also wow updates crowding the laptop and eating up literally all my space. i guess my old laptop's hard drive is only 250gb but man, that still feels like a lot of room. my entire set of personal files (which live on an external disk) don't even take up half that much. i really hate how bloated software has become... hard drive space is cheaper and more available than ever so nobody fucking bothers to optimize anything.

this is a laptop specifically meant for games though, so the older laptop being the a workstation tablet kind of laptop i'm still keeping for art. someday i hope to extend its life with a linux install, as i really don't want windows 11 on that old-ass machine. i've been waffling on it for now partially because my "messing with software" anxiety is quite extreme, but also partially because of executive dysfunction garbage and nothing is pressing on me to do it Right Now. i'm sort of hopeful the eventual end of service life for windows 10 will press me at least on the executive dysfunction front to actually learn how to install linux on something.
i'm not too worried about it for now, though. i do have some concerns with how annoying getting pen pressure drivers to work will be, but that's probably my biggest worry with the whole thing. i already use krita which is made for linux so i have zero concerns with the compatibility of my art software.

idk.
i just wish the actions of other people don't constantly steal my ability to feel like existence is worth any of the effort. i'm trying very hard to keep going. i really am. but it is always a fight, always an uphill struggle, and so often i just wish i could rest my bones for a while, as unrealistic as that is. there is never a day when nothing is asked of you, never a day you don't have to spend energy just to exist at all in.
i want to have a life worth living in. i just wish i didn't have to spend every moment fighting tooth and nail for even the smallest joys to reach that.

eyy, it's the homestuck number. happy 4/13 everyone.

unsurprising to everyone, things are still hard. lost my insurance and still have no replacement, medical bills piling up, having to cancel future medical appointments. body weirdness and problems looming over me more and more, and i have no answers since i have no insurance to get the tests needed to figure out what kind of condition(s) i have and how to fix them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
this country is made to murder people, bled dry to feed the ultra-rich and they don't even need it. i detest the entire machine i'm forced to be a part of.

anyway. building this website remains my solace, though sometimes it's hard to feel like what i'm building is as worthwhile or interesting as other peoples' sites. sometimes i browse neocities, though not very often anymore due to the overabundance of css animation hell that made me realize my photosensitivity is worse than i thought. but there are websites that seem expertly put together despite their rainbow barf graphics (said affectionately) and their css animation hell backgrounds (said exasperatedly.) i won't link to them, i'd rather not draw attention to them in the sense i don't want people to be unwilling participants in my weird dissection of both their websites and myself. but they just feel so much... better than whatever i'm doing. all these artists and real webdevs who do web development professionally as their job, and do it well, and then come to neocities to make their snazzy personal websites.
i don't begrudge them or anything, and honestly often i don't even want what they're doing with their websites for my own, i just find their ideas interesting and their artwork skillful. but there's always this nagging feeling writhing under my skin as i browse, that feeling that i don't measure up. that nobody will look at their websites and then think mine is anything worth their time.

i don't even want to need the validation of random people. i suppose humans are hard-wired to seek comfort and validation from their social group, but i just want to make my website for me. and both the nature of my species and also my many, many fucked up experiences have forced me to care at least somewhat, as making sure i fit into other peoples' acceptance was critical to my survival for decades, crushing myself to fit into their boxes even though it killed me to have to do.
i don't know, i didn't even want this to go that deep, and it's kind of an aside anyway. i'm just kind of tiredly unfond of looking at other peoples' fancy websites and feeling inferior even though i don't think my own website is inferior. i guess it's partially the dilemma of i do like a bit of slow animation over some things but not to the extent most people use it, it bothers my eyes so much if not used very carefully.

i feel this with my art too, and it's part of why i just stopped drawing entirely aside from artwork for this site. part of, a facet of many, many problems that have made me loathe doing artwork for a very long time now, but it was always a dual-edged sword of both hating my own mediocrity and hating how little anyone seemed to care about my work. it was crushing to spend a year and a half deep studying anatomy, working hard against my inability to visualize anything in 3D at all, to encapsulate the entire human form in my mind, and just. there was so little reaction. the difference between this and my website work is i feel pretty comfortable with where my website is and like if i wanted to be a bit more advanced with it i feasibly could within a timeframe that feels satisfactory. meanwhile with art, i never feel like i make headway that matters. you can study anatomy deeply but still have years to go on linework, sense of form, use of color, use of positive and negative space, how the eye flows around an entire piece... i'm just tired of it all. i just wish i could wave my arms around a bit and make a picture appear exactly as it does in my head.
ironically, it's so much fucking easier to do that with my site. my layout was written from a blank css file by me, from a simple vision of a layout i wanted in my head. i just did it, and after a few fixes it just worked. why can't art be like that? god, i fucking hate art so much.

anyway. this keeps getting off topic. it's just bewildering and annoying to have this feeling like i don't measure up to others' work when the logical part of my brain is like no, i like my site the way it is best, i don't even want it to look or act like this site at all. i don't want to change my site to be like theirs. theirs is nice, but i like mine best.
i guess it's really rooted at the feeling of never measuring up to others' judgment. maybe that's all it is. and i'm used to that, i've been disappointing pretty much everyone around me since i came out of the womb just by being myself, so it's nothing new. it's just tiring. tiring to feel like what you have to offer isn't what people want. and you don't even want to rely on other peoples' judgment and acceptance, you just want to be happy with yourself regardless of what other people think. but it's just so exhausting.

bleh.

oh well.
in better news, today i discovered WoW's battle pet system for the current expansion had a secret new feature, which is a lot of the wild caught pets in the overworld have alternate rare colors, with 1 shade being incredibly rare at a 1% spawn rate.
i had accepted i would probably spend quite a while looking for the black-furred variant of the treeflitter but after maybe the fifth battle there she was!

(image enlarged so you can see her better. graphics are kinda wonky because my PC is 6 years old with a very modest card even when it was new, and i intentionally moved her to an area without grass objects to make her even more visible.)

her name is Midnight, and i'm very excited to have her. i may hunt for the other shiny rare pet colors later, but casually. this was the one i really wanted, and i'm glad she came to me so readily.

(source: monsterkissed @ tumblr.com)

watching the AI art debate thing on twitter is a special kind of torture if you’ve ever attempted any irl political action in your entire life because it’s a train wreck of people trying to enact a movement against something and methodically picking every worst possible argument you could hope to make, constantly shifting the battleground from concrete territory you can actually Win into highly subjective areas that nobody in the conversation can ever decisively win

all AI art is ugly is a pointless cul de sac you have to re-argue whenever anyone makes even a half-decent picture, any commercial art AI should have to demonstrate that it’s only working from public domain artworks is material, practical and doable. all AI artists have no passion is a great way to give those people an avenue to argue you’re just being cruel and bitter (or for AI artists who also use traditional mediums to flat-out refute), any art produced commercially by an AI should have its prompts recorded so we know they didn’t invoke another artist/their IP to make it is a thing you can make laws and regulations about. AI art is soulless fake art unlike Real art from Real artists gives your opponents the easy opportunity to paint you as a backwards out of touch academic snob disconnected from everyday people (and uh, as an academic snob myself, good luck decisively solving the “what is real art??” debate for the first time in human history), an AI can’t have any kind of conversation with the commissioner to understand their vision, it can’t truly understand what its making so feedback and precision won’t be on par with a real human, so if you want something accurate and personal it could be an inferior service for your money is a tangible concern that anyone looking to buy art should be aware of, whether or not an AI can make a pretty picture is less important in practical terms than whether it can make the exact picture the person buying wants

you can spend all day arguing that as a human artist you have Soul and that your work has Life, or you can argue that as a human artist if the client wants their fursona’s right arm a little more to the left or for their expression to have more sassiness in it then you can just do that for them instead of arguing with a robot over what an arm is or the complexities of anthro marmoset facial features