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I'll be honest 2025 was the best year I've had creatively in like.... ever. Just all around I did an immense amount of work and tried so many things, got so much done. This year was primarily a year of experiments. And yet when I went back and actually started looking through the things that I had done, I was pretty flabbergasted on all the things I'd managed to do this year.

Tbh, after how bad the job market has been, I was just trying to do whatever to survive and with how bad my industry has completely destroyed the world for like, no reason, I also sort of came to the conclusion that I am not sure I'd like to be a part of this anymore. (tech)

And so I kind of was like.... what if I didn't try, I just did what I wanted, and did whatever dayjob for money, I'll have some stuff I'd like to do but I won't hard press myself. So I heard the idea of making a bingo card instead of a hard goals plan and did that. Nevermind this one is deepfried from constant copypasting lol

You would assume by my very anti-capitalist nature that I wouldn't be but truth is that I feel bad when I'm not working towards my goals, whatever they may be.

Look I am the eldest daughter from an immigrant family - the pressure is immense for me. I am in therapy.

So this year I instead tried to just use that energy to try whatever, anytime I felt that urge just ask myself what the 13 year old vampire anime girl in me wanted instead.

And y'know what? That shit worked!

From Artfight (this year was my first I didn't even know what it is was before!) to palette challenges, I had a lot of fun this year pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Here's a palette challenge and my favorite artfight piece I did this year.

Some things I tried to focus on this year were: Color theory & composition (I think I improved a lot with color, but composition I'm still working on.)

I also mixed things up by also trying out animation! Shout out to Toonsquid, a program that really helped me just get to doing it. Super intuitive

I embarrassingly tried out 3D modeling, but still haven't gotten the hang of it - though I think I'll get to it one of these days. But I have started incorporating 3D models more generally into my photobashing for references which has really leveled up my art especially for comics stuff and clip studio. Like this piece. I can do backgrounds now!!!! And even draw stuff like swords, big recommend: Here's some art where I incorporated these techniques heavily.

On top of all of this, I played around a lot with new ways to showcase my own work, like putting out this zine about my experience with BG3 and an introduction to my comic - like a real artbook I guess. You can read it on my website or at the link below [it's free lol]

The thing that I learned about comics is that.... doing a comic completely by yourself is an insanely involved process with a lot of moving parts: There's promotion, backgrounds, sketching, inking, writing. Most comics teams have folks doing this stuff but indie artists don't! I am insane for doing this!

But I am still having fun and that's all that matters. :3 Which is why I'm having fun doing this as a hobby project. Overall I didn't get too far with the finished pages, but a lot of that is lack of discipline and routine. Although I have over 100 thumbnailed pages and even more stories done.....

Part of the problem is that thumbnails can be done on the go but lined pages have to be done on the big screen in clip studio. I'm also terrible at lettering, but I'm getting better by including dialogue in thumbnails. I have messy handwriting, but I think that writing dialogue into the thumbs actually makes it easier to see if it works naturally. Lots of dialogue actually gets re-worked when I go and actually do pages which can tilt entire page compositions!

Trying REALLY hard to avoid the Talking heads page issue - but sometimes failing. but I am pushing myself to try and push past that, but we're working through it.

The crazy thing is that I was able to do 50 thumbnails in a week where 2 years ago when I started thumbnailing my prologue it took me several months to reach that number.... so improvement is REALLL. Turn your procrastination into improvement - drawing a lot of other shit DIIIID help.

This year I finally got around to building my website - I originally just started with a few pages - but then eventually built things out to a place I'm really happy with. This was a super healing process for me because it gave me a way to engage with tech - something I'd been struggling with since my career woes, but on my own terms. I made my way through the hackathon scene when I was younger which made me really fall in love with it and this reminded me of it.

It's also a practice that encourages small changes, change a line here and there, add a page, experiment, ect. I also find that going through the small web is just generally a better experience for me than social media. Unfortunately not everyone has a website though, so I'd lose track of artists I like. This gallery for example, was made a couple weeks after I got the website up - and the comic subsite was made a little bit after.

The smallweb/indieweb/altweb, whatever y'all are calling it, is pretty dope. I've been getting more into smaller forums and I found that I really like it because it allows me to collect with other people in their full complexity - no 160 character limit - only full context!!!! It also amazed me how much the difference in not having an infinite pool of posts (no constantly refreshing posts) made a difference in my creativity and procrastination. Strongly recommend if you want a better alternative to regular social media. Shout out to Melonland in particular. (don't go in here and fuck up the vibes I will kill you, be a neighbor not a gentrifier)

I still don't fully understand JavaScript, but then I remembered something very important - that's what stack overflow is for.

This year I also started a server for art, this was structured a little differently - inspired by the Survival programs of the Black Panthers to hopefully get creatives to support each other through community run classes and accountability circles. I hoped to break away from servers that felt like showcases and instead tried to create a space for creatives where folks could learn and share.

We had a lot of success with classes in: Vtubing, OBS, 2D animation, productivity as a creative, ect.

What I've learned is that community building is exceptionally difficult to do, the energy needed to consistently recruit, facilitate, remind folks is hard, especially in this age and online. But it's incredibly rewarding. We also did fun things like gartic phone and creating a community zine!

The intention behind CAS (creative accountability server) was to create a space where artists could hang out without having to be brand or pimp their work and learn from each other. I feel as though monetization ruins a lot of spaces and wanted to try something different. I have been reading a lot of history and it felt like education + non-monetized spaces are really key to this.

I've learned SO MUCH from the people that have come through, and while not everyone has stayed I'm so grateful for this tiny community we've created. It's nice to have a space to ask questions especially and I always learn things working on art with everyone.

While I haven't been able to keep up as well with it all and am partially shifting my focus to some other orgs, that I do think have strong potential to build up folks in spaces, I am thinking about the future of CAS as the new year starts and what can be done with the space.

One of the best things that's happened - and I wasn't sure where to put this was joining the gigantic BG3 mod Path to Menzobarranzan team as a UX designer, between the tools for the modding they've made so far and how talented everyone on the team is, I'm learning a lot about what makes organizations grow and tick, and using it as a model of what can come next.

I just wanted to write some guides because I can't stand people just struggling. Thanks to Trueref for giving me my first professional opportunity! It was amazing to see my work help people. It didn't come out until after I published my blogs, but I actually wrote it before then! It gave me a bit of confidence to keep putting out work.

I'm going to be honest, I had no idea what to expect when I wrote my first blog essay here. I just wanted to talk about Sex Work and the hypocrisy of the modern internet as someone who could speak on it as a creative, a former sex worker, and a UX designer. It was experimental and honestly I was pretty afraid to put it out.

But I kind of felt bad constantly annoying people with my long threads and a blog is kind of the ultimate long thread so I figured that maybe I could try this. I had partially written this as a journal scrap when I did the Artist's Way earlier this year and then decided to expand it. It had a pretty good response and then I decided to continue a little bit.

I really didn't expect the response that I got, like at all to my next serious piece. I had written it as a sort of spiritual successor to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth but for... artists. See his whole thing was as a working psychiatrist, it's about the psychology of colonialism and sociology of oppressed peoples and it just..... reminded me of the internet. So many of the dynamics and the archetypes reminded me of the internet I had to talk about it.

I found it a little funny earlier this year when someone said to me, "tech companies hire psychologists to make the features to get you addicted to your apps! That's how evil they are." Not realizing that they referring to my position in tech as a User Experience designer. It made me think a lot about Fanon must've felt treating the Algerians as they lived through colonization from France.

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not interested in being an influencer, or working towards being a true blue content creator. I write because I can't stop, just like I draw because I can't stop, so it was weird to see people responding to my work so strongly like... actual journalists, and big artists that I really admire. I actually chose leaflet to publish my writing because I found substack too crowded and the notes feature too algorithmic and prone to context collapse. I kind of was just... trying to hide and vent to people who were familiar with me, if that makes sense.

The fact that my work was so widely shared throughout Bluesky and even other communities (I got a few discord @s who had spotted my work floating in communities well past me), seen people translating parts of my work into Portuguese and Japanese was so humbling on Bluesky, the place with no mandatory algorithm from a tiny service no one had heard of with no algorithm. It meant that people.... resonated with my work and with my thoughts.

It's hard for me to express how much this meant to me because all I ever wanted in my career in tech is to make a living wage and build the internet and technological future that I knew was possible. I had experienced such a crisis in tech because of how dismissed I was, I thought that maybe it was all worthless, I wasn't listened to. I was told to my face that no organization would want someone like me, that my way of thinking was wrong. I was told that my hobbies and interests were shameful even though I tried to hide them and never bought them up at work.

I went into 2025 thinking that, that was all true, and decided to sort of stop trying. Not with my life, but with trying to live up to the expectations of an industry that didn't want me - that I had given up my 20s to - didn't want people like me. I was just going to use the skills I had gotten to help whatever people I could in my communities and try to be.... myself. Nothing more, nothing less. I was going to just be myself, and people either liked it, or they didn't. I was going to talk my shit, about tech, about catholicism, about politics, about my favorite vampire man.

I didn't know what I wanted to do and I struggled to articulate that to anyone who would ask me, when something I did creatively succeeded. It was only after I really sat with everything that it started coming to me.

Around the time that my essay started succeeded was a weird time for me, I had recently passed some milestones that I had never thought I would pass.

A person who was well connected to the higher echelons of tech and the circles I had previously hung around in academia and I connected and I asked them about a very close friend that I had had a falling out with but was very worried about. This friend was had been showing worrying symptoms and I'd gotten some news about funding that I was worried about for them. They're a very successful person.

Me and this person traded stories about the circuit and tech, and they confirmed that I was right to be worried, about how the space chews out the brightest and kindest, destroys people's projects, and spits them out into nothingness. How it frequently destroyed the lives of young smart people who wanted to make the world better, and that my friend was likely a victim of that - his success had actually made him a target and I should reach out regardless of what had happened between us.

After, they did something curious. They offered to connect me with the same people in that circuit, who could help me implement my ideas about how to build better platforms, and get me a job.

I politely declined. Repeatedly. And assured them that I was fine on my own, they had assured me that I didn't know what I was talking about, and couldn't accomplish anything with my mannerisms and mindset. They then proceeded to have a fit in our private DMs and insult me, called me unable to understand a good opportunity, told me I didn't understand reality, even dug into my personal life and tried to scare me about the political realities of the united states. I simply told them I wasn't interested in dancing like a monkey for an industry and system that tried to oppress nearly every identity group I belong to and my allegiances were with my people.

They used Jay-Z as an example and I thought about how functionally destroyed the neighborhood my mother had grown up in Brooklyn, in part with Jay's explicit facilitation. I had been there just the week before, and realized me and my boyfriend were the only people of color walking down the crowded street. I recalled something I had thought and written about literally just the week before, about how if I could have any legacy, it would in like MF DOOM. They didn't like that and told me it was impossible - I told them I didn't care, truthfully.

I found the entire thing super odd and chalked it up to them having personal problems. After, they tried warming up to me in the shared space we had before lapsing into thinly veiled insults about my intelligence.

In private they'd made the joke that we were just Fanon and Camus debating. (For those who don't get the joke, Camus and Fanon were contemporaries in Algeria with differing stances on the Revolution and decolonization.)

For what it's worth, I think Camus is a fucking idiot and moralism is a trojan horse to far worst things. Morals aren't material, you can make your morals anything you want, really.

I decided to never interact with them again. After using the argument they'd made against me in our private DMs against them though, because I am a petty bitch. Turns out I do understand what a shibboleth is after all.

The next day, I received an email letting me know that I had gotten an interview to do professional development with a prestigious organization and one of my dream companies. I had applied as a sort of experiment, a shot in the dark. It was a weird opportunity but I felt compelled to try. I didn't even know what I wanted. They asked for multiple samples of creative work, but said it could be anything, literally anything. So I submitted my most popular piece of art, a scantly clad Vampirella, and my most popular writing - the DA essay. I had used my skills in UX to polish up an interactive desktop and website prototype in Figma, and chose to omit my website. But I left enough of myself that I wasn't hiding anything much, yeah I put Astarion in there, I let parts of it look like GeoCities page in an ironic nod to my seeding on the internet.

I was sure it would scare them off, and I'd shrug it off.

I went to the group interview and eventually the individual one, I was shocked to learn that they'd loved my work, but especially had gone through my entire blog (where I had identified myself as a sex worker) and loved my very silly post comparing the CIA's Communist extermination program in South East Asia to Roblox and Bethesda's community development practices. It was probably the most opposite of corporate I could be. They told me that my strategy skills had shown through that post in particular and despite my unorthodox and eclectic influences, actually communicated a real understanding of strategy that especially made them want to pick me. I didn't even know how to react.

To be honest, I kind of freaked out. I was scared, and I felt bad for even wanting an opportunity. This was the big leagues and I felt completely lost. I was sure they'd figure out they'd made a mistake and was pretty fucked up with anxiety as I waited for their decision. I'd come so close so many times and there was usually some sort of excuse.

After a week I had sort of resigned myself to the existential anxiety with another week left before they had made a decision. I don't really watch TV much anymore but decided to throw on an episode of my favorite comfort show, The Boondocks - made by another Fanon and Black Panthers lover - Aaron McGruder who's work I deeply admire despite the fact they've basically disappeared from the public.

In that episode Huey, fails in all of his attempts to help break his friend in prison out of jail - an incarcerated Black Panther who had been sentenced to death. You should watch the entire thing, there's totally not a version of it on youtube.

When the episode ended, I picked up my phone to scroll and noticed I'd gotten an email - the decision had been made. Somehow,

miraculously.

I had made it in.

Afterwards though, I was in such shock I couldn't stop sobbing, for hours and hours. This kind is a problem when you're at your day job but I thank god for cubicles.

I had recently received a planner for the year, one I get for free for being a mod in a discord. I was struggling so much with who and what I wanted to be, my type-A personality basically neutered by the last year of chaotic experimentation. I was afraid to even set into stone what I wanted the year to be. I left my vision board undone, until the last week.

I did pick a theme though, Bloom, after the Rose that Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur.

Did you hear about the rose that grew

from a crack in the concrete?

Proving nature's law is wrong it

learned to walk with out having feet.

Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,

it learned to breathe fresh air.

Long live the rose that grew from concrete

when no one else ever cared.

I worked studiously through the exercises in the journal, specifically one about various fears and what you'd do if it happened. As a sort of exposure therapy. Amazingly enough, the next day the first two I had written came true.

I practiced what I had said and I'm alright. After a rough Christmas, I am ready to bloom.

One of my favorite songs, like ever, is called Snakeskin by Rina Sawayama - it's one of the oddest pop songs I've ever heard, sampling the Final Fantasy Fanfare and mixing it with Beethoven. It's about taking all of the pain you've experienced and making art out of it, shedding your snakeskin and making it into fashion to be consumed. It's contradictory, it's complex, it's layered. 2025 was the year of the snake and almost all of the songs and imagery I've been attracted seriously to has featured snakes this year.

Princess Nokia - Brujas

Megan thee Stallion - Cobra

But I do think Snakeskin best captures it best.

Excelsior, or whatever.

Disclaimer: Everything in this guide is amendable. I am not your God I am not a cop and I do not give a fuck what you do long-term in your own personal life as long as you are not hurting other people. Do not bean soup me. Also read the entire post before you come at me with some sort of oh I guess I can't do it because of (X). I am one regular degular schmegular girl from the Bronx with a big ass cat, not ya mom. I do have a background in User Experience design and research, professionally tho.

So if you haven't heard, the hot new thing is "Digital minimalism" a term popularized by Cal Newport's book by the same name. This is a broader trend (see digital detoxes, the hot new craze from the time before) as everyone gets inundated with absolute AI slop by the same people who constantly talk about 1984 and brave New world but apparently think it doesn't apply to them.

Digital minimalism is essentially a philosophical movement that focuses on controlling your technology, not having it control you.

But digital minimalism doesn't have to be any of that and it can also be all of that. It's up to you. Maybe you do keep Facebook or Whatsapp because it's the only way that you can talk to your cousins in your home country. Maybe you make a personal website. Maybe you have a smartwatch because it's functionally a medical monitoring device but you have the location features off and pings from texts off.

It's defining what does a good technology relationship mean to you.

How can you have a relationship with technology that is not inherently exploitative or feels bad?

How can technology help you achieve the things that you want without taking away from your life?

You will never have a perfect life but you can definitely almost always improve it, and that's what we aim for here, improvement, not perfection.

So let's get this show on the road.

• Leave guilt behind it will not help you - a lot of y'all come from (often but not always religious) backgrounds that abuse guilt as a mechanism for adherence and have adjacent mental illnesses that lend themselves to black/white thinking. You will inevitably mess up promises that you made to yourself. You will have a day where you reinstall that social media app and scroll for 3 hours. Instead of just feeling bad, take a deep breath, think about why you did that (were you anxious? Bored?) and then uninstall while you think of a plan of how to avoid it, or consider doing a compromise. (Example: instead of completely deleting Instagram, Instate an app timer with 15 minutes. Tell your friend that they can text you that funny meme instead.) Black and white thinking creates binging and purging behavior - especially if you have something like ED or OCD

• Nobody is watching you except you - meaning that the only person that you're truly liable to is maybe your family if you live with them, definitely the government sometimes bc of taxes, and really at the end of the day only really you. It's okay to decide that certain things are important to you even if other people are abandoning them, literally nobody cares and if they do they're probably a loser. People on social media are usually just ranting cuz they're annoyed.

• Google is free even if it's a little shit rn - everything that you want to do there is likely someone who has done the thing that you wanted, don't be afraid to ask questions, reach out to communities, and look for solutions to your problems nobody is going to save you. Ask your communities, for help, for support. Nobody is an island.

• You are not "fixing" yourself, you're making your environment more supportive for you. - Cut out that self-flagellation, the goal of this is to support you. Re-orienting your view of your own behavior and environment to be one where you're taking charge of things and not a victim of circumstance can introduce a better mindset that will make you more likely to keep up with habits.

It's that damn phone.

If you this far it's likely because you feel like you're addicted to social media, or just your phone in general. The reason for this is simple: phone shiny, phone necessary to engage with modern Life.

You might use your phone as your wallet You might use your phone as your bus pass you might use your phone as your map. You have your bank app here. You have your news app here. It's all in here. You're addicted to gambling, you spent too much on gacha games.

Now often the answer posited on how to fix this is to take out The individual parts of your phone that you're using to return the phone to a state of single usage device.

This is one way to do it but I do believe that it is ineffective and also creates a transference effect of dopamine redirection to consumerism. This is how you end up with $200 3DS' in 2025, $400 ipod classics, and a big old pile of unread books as the new hot item in your YouTube recommendations as acolytes state that it saved their life and got them laid or something.

Now I want to say that none of this is necessarily bad if you have the money and you really want to do it but it's worth asking yourself if you are simply just buying things for the dopamine hit, and if you're broke saying that you can't do digital minimalism because you don't have the money to.

You are the god of your own device. Meaning that if you want to you can make things behave, although it may take some beatings. You don't have to go as in depth as replacing the entire operating system or anything like that but there's definitely tweaks that you can do right now.

App notifications audit - just go through and chuck shit

Right now you can go into the notification settings and turn off a bunch of dumb bullshit because typically notifications are what gets you to look at your phone and get sucked in, so just either uninstall or severely limit the notifications of every app that isn't important. You can always adjust things later.

Your phone already has digital minimalism settings built in

On Android is this called "digital wellness" and on iPhone it's called "screentime" this is where you can limit apps and set overall limits. On Android you can even have set bedtimes where things auto turn on too.

Redo your home screen

Typically we fall into a routine with our phones, so the redesigning your home page to be less likely to lead you down the path of making you open a problematic app or social media can sometimes be fixed by moving them out of where you're used to them being. Remove gestures/icons that are close to the side of the screen near your thumb on the dominant hand to encourage different behavior and replace them with apps you might want to open instead.

The baby notebook:

Big fan of this one, just carry around a little notebook with you and doodle in it. Better yet, every time you have a witty idea or quip you would've normally posted on socmed write it down instead. Do this as often as you have impulse. Bonus points if you decorate it. I have 2, a smaller one and a bigger one that's far more in depth with sections but still fits in my purse.

Phone emulators:

I see you gachaheads out there and candy crushers, I want you to save money please. Put the money in anything else besides the hearts, in-game currency, or PNGs of waifus and husbandos. There's three decades of games you can play on your phone that are free. You can even get a little stylus and pretend you have a 3DS. I do that shit all the time.

Playing a story based game or even just a mini game game collection can give you a lot of the same dopamine hit on the shitter or waiting for the bus without pushing you into spending money on predatory companies.

You can even get like a little phone holder that resembles a game pad for pretty cheap that isn't the OUTRAGEOUS prices a lot of secondhand consoles are going for.

Music player: flac/mp3 app

I can't believe I even have to say this but like guys you know you can just download music right, directly on to your phone. You don't have to pay Spotify or Apple music. You don't have to buy an entire iPod for it. You don't have to use iTunes. Spotify doesn't have to have this grip on you, remember the sacred texts, seek deep within your soul. The YouTube rippers also still exist.

Just a rule of thumb: flac files sound better than mp3s

I use this random app I found and it even lets me fix the background which is nice.

And Malice Mizer isn't even on Spotify so I'm already doing better! You can also edit the stuff I am just lazy sometimes.

Forums as replacement for traditional social media platforms - This one is one that's going to be a little bit controversial but a lot of people who are addicted to social media are simply lonely. Online connection is not a bad thing and I think it's kind of fucked up to demonize that need since some people are genuinely isolated for various reasons, but consider that the notifications and likes systems are often not built for your benefit but instead for keeping you trapped on the platform and the short post limits encourage miscommunication sometimes. Consider moving to slower moving communities like forums unattached to larger platforms around your special interests where folks are encouraged to leave more in-depth, longer replies, and topics are allowed to stay green faster than a group chat/discord server. You are likely to come to a balance of limiting of social media time (maybe to a smaller array of platforms) while still having this craving for scrolling and reading others opinions - forums aren't built with infinite scroll like socmed platforms, they do actually end so you can't scroll forever and you're not automatically getting replies. It can act as a suboxone for social media.

RSS feeds:

RSS is essentially a way to follow a specific website or profile on a platform without having to sign up for anything, it went out of Vogue for a bit but is starting to come back now that everyone is sick of being terrorized by white billionaires with bad haircuts and worse politics. There's quite a few RSS apps out there for many platforms! I use readwise, which is a paid service but there's a bunch of others that are free like this one. Tumblr, twitter, bluesky, hell leaflet the place you're on right now also does (if you wanna sub or whatever owo)

Books & reading (will talk about the library in a second):

Ain't no shame in reading it up, whether it's dragon smut or the classics or superhero comics, just satiate your scroll need by scrolling through someone that's not the torture Nexus of social media. The kobo and Kindle apps are free, you don't need the specific devices to use them and you can purchase books directly from them without the need for a device. If you still want to get your fandom fix, I'd much rather you read Destiel Omegaverse porn or cute Beserk coffeeshop AUs on AO3 than argue in comments sections.

Volunteering:

Even if you live in small community there is a ton of opportunities to volunteer and it is a great way to meet people, or you can just plant trees, idc. For a while I just did clerical work in my local library when I was unemployed. If leaving your house is not your jam and trust me I've been there, consider other ways to volunteer like contributing to open source code, organizing online events for things you're passionate about. Point is, they weren't entirely wrong about idle hands being the devil's work.

Learn something, anything:

The dopamine you're getting from refreshing the skinnerbox of social media could be related to your fear about wanting to get validation, and I'm not a therapist, but that is best by developing internal validation systems. Here's a list of like, every free structured course from a college on the entire internet. It's like 40k of them. On everything from personal finance, to the korean language, to programming, to biblical academic studies. You do not need to go back to University to access a lot of high quality information and instruction.

You are not completely and totally bound to youtube, there are alternatives!

Make something, anything:

Start an actual blog, learn how to draw, make bread, the WORLD IS YOUR OYSTER. Making something is also a huge anecdote to getting lost in the rabbitholes, and if you're burnt out as a social media creative, sometimes switching mediums is a great way to break out of artist block.

I can already hear the whining people are about to unleash in my section: 'MY public library ISN'T GOOD. I live in bumfuck, shit country nowhereland where the library is a cardboard box filled with Donald Trump art of the deal books and a tarnished copy of the bell curve.'

I'm going to tell you how to get around that and look, if not, there's always piracy. But at least try the things I'm going to tell you. Granted, some things might be US specific here, but I've lived in a LOT of states.

If you have for, whatever reason, limited access to a public library, consider the following first:

Some libraries actually offer out of state access for free or an annual fee that is less than what would cost for sub to netflix. My home library system is on that list, and they slap so.

Also you can just! ask if you have a friend. Apps like libby let you have multiple library system cards on your library account, which for me is great. If you can share netflix passwords, you can share library cards.

So with all that being said:

1. please please please read the website for your library

I cannot tell you how many times I have gone through the website for a library system and found a free version of something I had been paying for but better 💀

LinkedIn certifications, language learning apps, craft classes (literally there is a library specific version of skillshare essentially), 3D printers, business counseling, tax prep, yoga classes, video games, a seed library, sewing machines, free museum passes, the NYPL has an entire private recording collection of all pro shots on Broadway that you can only see in person Because we're cool like that 💀

However a lot of library systems have very poor websites, some of them look nice but do not fully encapsulate all of the things a library system has to offer so you have to try to dig around. You can also just ask, but typically really going through and combing over their entire website will give you an idea. They also sometimes, because the clientele tends to be older will print out flyers but not update their websites.

2. TALKING ABOUT SOME OF MY FAVORITES DIGITAL LIBRARY SOURCES but again, check with your library:

Like if Netflix had a sexier cousin with a PhD most libraries in America use this as a service that has documentaries, foreign films, and lots of more modern award winning stuff! It's pretty cool.

Hoopla is that bitch, and is really underrated! It has a little bit of everything, more akin to a streaming service the service has movies, tv, magazines, comics, and manga. I'll be honest, in most libraries the manga selection is iffy (though getting better) BUT the comics section is fucking great. And there's no waitlist, just a limit for how much you can look at per month which is great! Unfortunately it's all trapped to the app (unlike Libby) but is great if you're looking for something to read on your phone or tablet.

Libby - the OG bitch

Like Hoopla, definitely the more popular of the two libby is used pretty much by every major library in the US and Europe. It works a little bit differently than Hoopla in that it treats digital assets like a set of a per license copies that can have waitlists, but you can borrow as many as your card allows. Which is cool. The Libby app will often also let you know about adjacent services your library offers

Yeah they even got duolingo but good ;w;

And so anyways, that's just a very very non-exhaustive list of some services a library card can offer you.

And look I get that I go by fucking torrent-empress on the internet, but even a lot of these resources are not on the internet - especially stuff like classes (even the pre-recorded ones) so it's still worth checking out regardless!

If you live in a rural area in a much larger state and do need an item or access to something that is not part of your institution, often as a tax-payer of that state you can get access to the libraries of local universities and city libraries within the state. It's a weird and little known fact, and every state does it slightly differently but its true. You have to find out through their website or asking a librarian but you can often get access to adjacent institutions that are funded with public money, even private ones sometimes!

I always say to people in my life when they are upset about something they haven't communicated "closed mouths don't get fed". Meaning that needs have to be articulated before they can be answered, I am often asked how I know about stuff, how I am so aware of the resources everywhere and here's the long and short of it: I ask, I make noise, I seek out people. The worst they can say is no, but more often even if they say no, it's a "no but you can go (here)" which leads me to find out about more things. Request things anyways, I've put in requests for libraries or books and later they were added (sometimes after I've moved but still lol)

Without getting too into the trauma, I been there, sleeping on the floor, hating my life, Bed (or floor) rotting because of depression, or a migraine flair-up, or my body shutting down out of fear. And that all sucks ass, but sometimes you gotta just consider that nobody's coming to save you.

The billionaires running these apps certainly aren't. But even 5 minutes less that you're spending rotting your brain is 5 minutes that you've taken back from silicon valley's brain drain machine. And hey, if a million people give up 5 minutes over months, years, that's a loooooot of revenue

As I said before in the beginning, black and white thinking is bad, none of this is to make you feel guilty! And there's no real right way to do Digital Minimalism, it's about doing what feels right for you. I hope this can be a jumping off point in finding a better balance with technology that I made in response to what I felt were large gaps in digital minimalism content that felt overly white, upper-middle class, able-bodied, and promoting a green-washed/Health-washed consumerism. Basically, rich people shit.

Hope it helps! Don't tell me if it doesn't!

I always said that if praised a corporation you should kill me, which is why I'm currently typing this from the afterlife. Jesus says hi.

And yet here I am, feeling adoration for the steam... Machine... Or as all have dubbed it: the gabecube.

Dropped unceremoniously like an afterthought with little announcement or fanfare, the steam machine popped into our screens and hearts like a surprise, good news for once. A shining beacon of what PC gaming could be like for normies.... But I could only think of one thing.... Linux.

As I wrote is my previous article, Microsoft is likely killing Xbox on purpose, Microsoft's main profitable business is Windows - while Linux reigns in the much nerdier domain of sysadmins, Windows is synonymous with the world of computing itself to most businesses and countries who happily pay whatever price to have it installed on their machines, use teams, and be coerced into using copilot. Windows phone failed, surface is a failure, Windows 8 is a failure, the zune was a failure, and with OpenAI requesting a bailout essentially this week, after increasing calls from financial institutions that this is a gigantic bubble - Microsoft may in fact be cooked.

A weak feeble demented King is most vulnerable to assassins lurking in the shadows, like a young noble upstart who has worked his way up the court. The king may be suspicious but is too taken with his concubines and drunk on power to catch him in the night, and his subjects too angry to object to anyone taking him out.

Okay I'll admit it I fucking hate FOSS culture, the UX sucks and the people are often worst. Free open source software they say, it'll just cost hundreds of hours of your life to tinker with and maintain.

I'm good typically I would just say I'll take the pirated windows baby with the cracked programs. Or if I like the program enough, a small subscription. But God do I fucking hate windows, He's like a husband that I've been growing to resent for years as he cheats on me and has started getting violent when he drinks. I've been planning his poisoning and what I'll do with the insurance money. What was once a hesitant marriage is like a bitter incoming divorce, no children by the mountain goats is the theme of our relationship. I hope you die, I hope we both die.

When I cry about this to friends, about how abusive Bill Gates' son is to me I get rolled eyes about how I should leave to Linux. As many abused Windows spouses have before hearing they can't take their beloved children with them to the other side. No no clip studio, you can't connect to the store

"but mother! The assets!"

"the assets are your father's. He's keeping them in the divorce."

"but mother how will you draw"

Someone in the distance:

"we have clip studio in the house"

Clip studio in the house:

screaming, vomiting, pissing, shitting

In order for any product to reach and break a Monopoly it has to appeal to normies. Normies, despite the best efforts of neckbeards, do not like Linux. They do not like tinkering. They want the magic box to do the thing. And that's where steam comes in, by trojan horsing Linux into the very usable and user friendly steam deck, they've made Linux approachable, viable even. Not just to normies but to developers who they are supplying with support to start the hard work of making Windows programs compatible with Linux. Of course, this is just the beginning. As you might have heard steam is now in the business of selling computers with steam OS installed presumably so you can get a Linux device in your home - stating outright it's a computer, very similar to the original strategy of the Xbox, which was created quite literally to bring personal computing into the home. Except the steam machine takes it a step further, by making every part of it upgradable, releasing the CAD files, and making parts widely available.

In the Jakarta method by Vincent Belvins - a historical text examining the role of Washington in shaping the third world through funding of anti-communist movements, Belvins explains how The US government supported anti-Communist capitalist militias in brutal killings against anti-capitalist forces throughout Indonesia. The campaign was so successful while keeping the United States foreign policy out of international News, that the methodology used was called the Jakarta method and repeated throughout Latin America and Asia for decades to come.

There is one bland RPG and I think it's pretty unpopular for me to say this, that is only kept afloat in popularity by the strength of its community - The elder scrolls: Skyrim.

Skyrim is at least now a remarkably boring RPG at least to me. If Skyrim came out now, it would get a 6/10. A lot of older TES fans even somewhat agree that the writing of Skyrim is worst than It's predecessor Oblivion. At the time it was monumental but quite frankly it's not that impressive story wise, perhaps I would have enjoyed it better had I not played RPGs that built upon the foundation it laid and improved it in my opinion like the Witcher 3 and dragon age Inquisition. I'm sorry okay, I just think playing elf Malcolm X as the pope is really funny and geralt is really fucking hot.

What really keeps Skyrim alive and an eternal money maker to Bethesda is the fact that Skyrim has an exceptionally vibrant modding community, by making their modding tools so open and well documented they didn't even have to fix their broken ass game and still haven't. "Bethesda jank" even becoming a loving joke within the community.

It basically doesn't even matter what Bethesda does because the community will come and make the game for them. They'll fix the bugs, they'll add new characters, they'll write new stories and implement them, all under the banner and title of Skyrim.

And now this model exists through many gaming titles: Gary's mod, Roblox, the Sims 4. Where a zealous consumer base becomes part worker on behalf of an evil company, a system is maintained through the support and approval of a company, some people may even make careers where they might've made companies just making mods.

That's a little dark isn't it? Making silly mods isn't like genocide, and no it isn't- but maybe we should think about how we're not all free actors divested from market and social forces and our passions can and will be harvested for exploitation by evil corporations to profit off of us. But hey, you probably came here from social media, so we're both hypocrites.

In the long run, It may prove to be a great thing. If more people are encouraged to tinker with their devices and introduced to the world of Linux and open source software and it poses an existential threat to Microsoft, forcing them to either adapt their practices to be more consumer friendly or, die to a user friendly Linux spectre in the distance.(steamOS please please please somehow make the clip studio store work and my soul is yours, president Newell, please liberate me from the Gates regime)

If the valve corporation can convince its own consumers to build around their own platform, one that has already had enough investment to be appealing to more scared or resistant users, then they essentially have a free volunteer army to wage war against the Microsoft imperium. With enough momentum they may even be able to whip up critical support from the FOSS Bros, and being a privately owned company, not held to the whims of a quarterly stockholder cycle instead just one machiavellian King:

they might just win.

I've been working on my comic, with a goal to finish my prologue (55 pages) by the end of the years, can I actually do it? Who knows!

I think I can, but I'm also nuts.

I've been steadily posting in my server about my challenge everyday and have been actually completing most days!

symmetry day

X-Comp

If you haven't heard through Bluesky, I'm joining the Path to Menzoberranzan BG3 mod team as a UX Person!!

There's even a few articles about it

https://kotaku.com/baldurs-gate-3-campaign-fan-mod-path-to-menzoberranzan-2000641395

I recently got to meeting up with everyone on my team this week and big things are coming as we establish norms and standards for the team.

I even made these little banners for my website

There's a full gallery update in progress and more as I work on giving the whole art section of my website an incredibly well needed facelift and add way more to the website. It'll hopefully be up next week.

Been working behind the scenes to see what I can do about finishing my bachelors since I'm so close and only had financial problems preventing me from finishing (essentially I'm only about a year out from graduating credits), spoke about turning the art community work into a legitimate independent study!

I think that's it for now, see y'all next week!

Week 2 into my experiment of limiting my social media use collided with an email from bluesky that on Friday, I was subject to a 24 hour ban for an incident from 2 weeks ago involving my anecdote about not liking a pizza..... The Australia affair continues to haunt me, with this month marking 6 years since I went to Indonesia, Australia, and Turkey for the strangest trip of my life.

Anyways, here's what I did this week:

I decided to start thumbnailing the first arc of my comic in my downtime, since they're not detailed and the arc is mostly written, I'd say I'm roughly a third through that arc, though that might change based on the middle part of the story!

first few pages were fairly bare gestures but nearing the end I got fully into the groove with some early page thumbnails I like

You can read it on my [BRAND NEW COMIC WEBSITE]

You can see at [my website] where I also got some nifty code for these little 'New badges' on my nav bar, although I think I might end up completely gutting and redoing the bar for better navigation and/or adding a sitemap.

I also now have a little place for my adoptables and pixel clubs I plan on going.

i got programmer handwriting, sorry lol

I think that's it for this week, not bad though!

Hey everyone, I'm trying something new, a different type of visual arts learning challenge that I hope you'll consider joining.

I'm calling it:

This is a challenge open to all visual artists (not just limited to drawing, but also photography, 3D art, ect.) to learn and practice the principles of Visual composition.

There will be a selected composition principle with an explainer or composition type selected everyday, although you don't have to do them in order. It's just to roll them out day to day. Try and do one everyday.

From Wikipedia:

The rule of thirds is a rule of thumb for composing visual art such as designs, films, paintings, and photographs.[3] The guideline proposes that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.[4] Aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject.

Some examples of practicing this:

here is a stick figure drawing from a better article about the Rule of thirds

In the same article here the author shows how this could be accomplished through ipad photography (which apparently had a rule of thirds grid toggle-able setting), you could also chop up two stock-photos or take some in game, or some 3D models like I did in clip studio

This is primarily a learning challenge, not for necessarily showing off. As long as you practice, it works, you are not required to stick to one medium or produce finished work, you can even take stock photos or older art and remix them, or draw stick figures, or take video game screenshots. Whatever gets you to practice that is accessible to you!

there's a screenshot from my carrie and Mr.Big Playthrough of BG3 that I put over the rule of thirds too.

Source

The main goals are: Consistency and practice, not showing off.

Feel free to ask questions to each other or see how others did theirs, you can join my server too if you want [Linked].

• Set a small, very achievable goal of 5-10 minutes to work on the challenge daily. If you don't feel like you can continue anymore, stop. You don't wanna make it something you hate.

• Incorporating the challenge into work you're already doing, like fanwork, paid work, whatever, that's great! Snap a photo on the shitter, idc!

• Share your work! Doesn't have to be in public, could be on the discord, DMs, whatever.

I'll be updating this as the month goes by with a small post with some resources/links but here's the full list in case you wanna skip around.

Full list of prompts:

• Rule of Thirds

• Repetition

• Negative space

• Symmetry

• Golden Spiral

• V-Composition

• Circular

• X-Composition

• Framing

• Triangles + Diagonals

• Rule of odds

• Line for itself

• Opposing Colors

• L-Composition

• Tunnel

• Golden Section

• Golden Triangle

• Cross

• Balanced Scales

• S-Compositions

• Y-Composition

• H-Composition

• Radial

• Spiral Section

• Focal Mass

• Z-Composition

• T-Composition

• Diagonal Composition

• Free space! (try something new or combining 2 or more comps or rules)

I had to get some help on this one because I genuinely do not know any javascript (all I had to do was slot some values in, but I had to understand like WHERE) but it wasn't hard really once I knew where shit had to go! I actually have been posting my comic on AO3 (and will continue to mirror there for anti-website heads and those who love AO3) because more exposure is not an issue! I had actually been backlinking the actual images to tumblr but now I can hotlink directly from my website so if I decide to change my tumblr or something I have more control over my data, which is nice.

I also put up a page on my website that has a little bit more information about the comic itself and some bonus art.

This is a huge breakthrough and a testament because it took me like quite a few months (like 8) to get through the thumbnails (55 pgs) of my prologue. Granted that was my first crack at making a comic in.... 15 years, but still, I'm so much faster, can pack in more detailing and now understand where lettering goes, since my thumbnails now include me actually working through dialogue.

I've been meaning to actually get back to my comic, it's not that I've been burned out on the comic itself, it's more so that the past year has been incredibly..... odd. Not in a bad way, it's more that I am just making adjustments to my living space, the political climate, and big lifestyle changes. The good news is that when I got back into it I noticed that I'm FAR faster than I used to be, which is great. It means that I haven't really wasted time. It's a marathon, not a race.

Got some cross charms and the big cross on the right is an earring I got a bit back that completely broke off and I was VERY sad about. Luckily for me I realized it could be of use later and re-used it. Sustainability win or whatever.

I have a few thoughts rolling around in my head that I'm going through, but I have 2 main ones that I'm working on. A follow up to my Deviantart essay that is more of an illustrative guide on how to build a better creative community with features recommendations and a proper UX strategy.

Oh yeah, I read too y'know? My commute is super long so I have to fill it some how. Right now I'm making my way through The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon - I feel like it's rewiring my brain. I love Fanon, maybe it's because he was a working psychologist and afro-Caribbean, his work feels very grounded in material reality and makes me feel less insane.

I'm close to the last essay and case studies but I'll carry it forward in my work.

For lighter reading, I've been reading Princess Jellyfish. I absolutely loved the anime when I was younger but was sad it was so short and the manga absolutely makes up for it.

So as you might've heard I've been trying a Digital minimalism challenge this is a little different than a digital detox. I'm not trying to purge myself of the entire urge to ever think about a social media app again - I went to Catholic schools on and off for my entire K-12 experience during the "Just Say no" dominos pizza coupon abstinence purity era of non-sex ed in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. boy do I know that abstinence doesn't work. Instead of I'm trying to practice safer scrolling.

Someone on bluesky tried to say to me, "Social media companies hire psychologists to trick you into staying on their sites."

honey, I am the psychologist, that was me, that was my job lmao.

I sometimes think I mention too much that I used to be a product designer, but then I realize people don't pay attention

Now you know why I am so adamant that UX is a psychological practice and not a visual one-

Anyways, that being said, like drugs I love drugs sometimes, but when you can't sit through a day without sparking up, that's when you know you have a problem. Overall, I do feel better and lighter and I've just been working on my website and am connecting with people and it feels very full and meaningful. I think I'm striking a very good balance.

this is not a more serious writing and I am one woman with AuDHD on the internet so this will not be spellchecked or anything. There's also probably way more you can do with the 3D models, you (or I) just have not noticed yet.

So in Clip studio you can edit most of the body type 3D models

So this is my base male model and another model that I have here that I downloaded, most people seem not to know that you can adjust the proportions

the two little guy icons in that sub-menu brings up this menu

there's a couple of cool settings here but we're just going to talk about this one, within the full body you can make the body or specific parts bigger.

If you click on the arms of the figure shown, for example you get a chance to adjust the arms.

then, if you want you can, you can register this body-type in your clip studio for further use (I do this for several models) using the "register body shape" button.

then this menu comes up to save it

and it should be whenever you put it

like mine are

I like this because it helps me keep consistent proportions.

Hi it's me I can barely draw hands, I'm trying to work on this but I keep not doing hand studies so I am forced to be reliant on 3D models.

So here's your 3D hand model. This works with any model with hands that are articulatable btw.

As you can see there's a submenu but there's what looks like a clipboard with a guy on it, you wanna click the hand-scanner

so it'll bring up your webcam (sorry dysphoria/dysmrophia havers, i'm telling you this in advance. I point mine up for this reason)

As you can see though the model does detect my fist and if you can use good lighting for the camera (I didn't turn my ringlight on for this and my window light got in the way) it gets more accurate scans of your hand

You can also save those hand poses specifically

Can't get a pose correct??? Clip studio kind of got you.

There's a few features in clip studio that they call "preview" which means they're not entirely polished yet for whatever reason, but they are somewhat usable.

One of them is called pose scanner, which allows you to pull pose data from a picture onto a 3D mode.

This gets like..... 60% of the poses correct the rest usually need some adjustment but it's fine.

so it's the same menu that the other 3D pose stuff is in-

When you click the pose scanner it'll bring up your images - I use stock photos for this specifically.

This is the stock photo I used

this is the 3D model turned to match the stock pose. As you can see it's not perfect

I'm sure you're thinking, why not just trace over the stock photo? Problem is that it doesn't allow you to:

1. actually match the proportions of whatever figure you're trying to draw consistently

2. For bigger figures sometimes the body simply cannot do that kind of shit and you don't realize it until you're already mostly filling in the details and it can throw off the entire thing.

This is what I mean - I draw big bitches, I am in fact, a big bitch.

I know for a fact that my thighs, like my character Veluthe's thighs - can struggle to hit certain poses, not for lack of flexibility but from the limitations of time and space. I can reach my ankles behind my ears easy, but it doesn't look the same to someone who is smaller and skinnier for example take this pose data -

the arms clip through the leg and waist, titties squished in a not fun way but some light adjustments I can make it look okay

these adjustments took LITERALLY 5 seconds and add a lot of naturalness to the pose that fit the actual character bodytype instead of me just struggling to draw it without having to perfectly picture it.

anyways that's it hope this helped, if it didn't don't tell me

Okay alright so I'm doing this: I'm gonna be a part of the great internet digital detox experiment or something. Basically this video saying we're all gonna do this.

I'm posting this publicly because while I do not believe shame is a useful tool all the time, it is a powerful motivator for me personally sometimes. So if I fail I know all of you will be judging me and witnessing me scroll-crash out like a junkie, and I was a girl raised by a Pentecostal grandmother and did a lot of catholic schools so I need the Jesus shame of community here to do some work.

Make your trauma work for you baby.

This is supposed to be a gentle-er detox by a guy who dropped out of his HCI PhD (ironically what I've been considering applying to) but considering that it agrees with my professional training I figure I might as well try so here it goes.

The first week's document entails the process in which we will be inventorying and picking things out to cut out, BUT WITH THE PLAN TO PERHAPS INCLUDE IT IF IT'S IMPORTANT but in a limited capacity:

• Instagram

• Bluesky

• youtube

• email

• podcasts

• music

I actually already do a limit of bluesky and instagram and all the social medias on my phone to an hour, but I still find myself going over on the computer......

Here I'm supposed to uh, envision two worlds... the red pill vs the blue pill but like in the cool anti-capitalist queer way the matrix intended not the reddit way.....

World A: where Belle does not change her behavior. I am addicted to scrolling, the entire day passes by and all I have done is argue with Australians over pizza. The laundry withers in the corner, my cat is yelling, I am hungry and dehydrated. Everything is bad, I have Trump brain. I can hear his horrible voice in my head forever. I am permanently angry. I am in hell. I click repost. I keep thinking about what I wanna do then look at my phone and then another 3 hours have passed even though it feels like it was 10 minutes.

World B: Belle has completed the 30 day declutter. I effortlessly have a week's worth of outfits planned. I have finally made all of those appointments, I am not rushing to get all my stuff ready for work the next day because I have so much time I don't need to rush. I have finally finished Racecraft because my attention isn't so bad that I can handle the heady academic text. I have finished many books really, and now I can flex my knowledge all of the time. My cat is cuddling me and we have somehow figured out a way to get them to eat their wet food. My website is popping and now I know javascript somehow. I am well on my way to writing an improved Game UX framework. I have a well-oiled posting schedule for my webcomic because I actually am working on the pages.

This is about finding out the whyyyy to why I'm scrolling, and pinging. I've actually talked about this with my therapist recently and I think it's because I'm seeking community - not an audience - community. I have not that many irl to talk about my interests with, and when I'm intellectually under-stimulated, I tend to do shit like start arguments online or scroll to numb the boredom.

I've been trying to combat this, first off, I joined the Path to Menzobarranzan team as a UX person, and I'm hoping I can force my brain to chew on that. I've tried volunteering before in the past but life tends to get in the way, I'm far more stable now and this is something that I care about, like a lot. So I'm pretty sure it'll stick.

i. Describing the trigger moment:

I'm far too tired to get up and draw or program or any of the things I typically want to do. Instead I go decide to look at youtube, but my brain can't focus on youtube so I let it play in the background while I scroll something else entirely. I look at a bunch of posts from fucking idiots after finding something on the trending tab and block them pre-emptively, though I know I shouldn't have ever looked in the first place. Trending is where the idiots live.

ii. Rewriting the trigger moment:

I get home, my phone is in its little charging box where it cannot make its siren call to me anymore, if someone needs me, I have my watch. Instead when I am too tired to get up, I reach for the Kobo where I have already saved many educational articles, pre-loaded manga and books and read a bit of that, or exist in silence or a bit of music. I feel better and get up onto the computer where I'm able to write some code. I already have hard limits on my social media through the browser so I'm not spending 2 hours on bluesky arguing. I play BG3 and rivals instead.

iii. Boiling these stories down into a simple implementation intention

• If I want to scroll, I will at least try to do it on my kobo instead, with real books and articles and something that has at least a bit of nutritional value.

• If I want to do something on the computer, I will limit myself to only a half hour of scrolling on the socials with site blockers.

• I will have other things to do at the ready like DS rom games on the phone

Okay alright, I will do this, and it will be sustainable this time. I might even learn how to meditate or something! Anyways, see you all soon!

Without getting into too much details, the past few years have been mixed to say the least - some things are better than they have ever been personally but I lost a sense of purpose.

As mentioned in my previous post, I only really returned to art after nearly a decade of absence to a radically different online landscape. I watched from a distance as the platforms I used to enjoy faded into irrelevance and came back to what was once a vibrant community turned into a sterile infinite market where every artist now felt like they were nervously manning a sales table while whispering to each other that they hate doing this.

I don't have anything to hawk besides attention I guess. I wouldn't say no to someone sending me money for the things I do but it immediately sucks the fun out of everything. I do like talking with everyone, but I do not enjoy being perceived as a guide and resource before a normal person. Which is a dynamic that I notice more and more as I connect with people and am percieved to have influence.

I'm often approached to make a podcast or YouTube channel and the thought completely horrifies me. I've had the chance to befriend a few very talented and connected people in their fields - the kinds of people who perform at Coachella or have a million followers. I've also seen their lives behind the scenes and the grass is certainly not greener on the otherside. It rotted them quietly from the inside out. The idea of being at the behest of an audience and become a vessel for their beliefs, morality, and at their mercy financially at the expense of my own personhood is terrifying.

-"Rhymes like Dimes" MF DOOM

When I started working on my webcomic it started off as a bunch of silly fanfiction stories that I had worked on, I read a lot about D&D lore to support it, make it canonically correct (to the best of my abilities) and still thought through my characters, designs. I went to the physical library to get physical books on comic theory and sequential art.

As I spoke excitedly to people in my life, even other fans, they suggested -in good and bad faith - that I turn my story into an "original" work so I could monetize it.

In one particularly cruel encounter with a former professional mentor and friend who felt dejected after I turned down a romantic advance, he told me I would never succeed in tech due to my disabilities and that I should focus on my "book" (I corrected him that it was a webcomic). I explained to him that it wasn't monetizable as a fan product and that wasn't the point. He told me to change it so it was. He never spoke to me again after that.

It was an incredibly gutting incident that cut very deep on multiple insecurities, though I realize was purely reactionary.

In the time since I've started putting my work out there again I've made so many artist friends, many who are working artists. For a bit after the complete downfall of the tech industry I wondered if I had made a mistake not going to art school. Every time I speak to my working artist friends those fears are resoundingly put to rest. Because their self-imposed fear of poverty to pursue art as a full-time career was as limiting as the morality hollowing golden handcuffs that my friends in tech often unknowingly doing shit like working with defense contractors and top institutions like MIT (funded by Epstein) for all the money our collective tax dollars could buy. Self-annihilation for independence vs societal annihilation for security.

"I get no kick from champagne

Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all

So tell me why should it be true

That I get a kick out of you"

-"One Beer" MF DOOM

I often drill down into my influences, I can't help it, I have a deeply de-constructive bent. It's something I often have to ground in reality. But I do believe when certain media comes into our lives and makes an effect on us it's usually for a reason. Could be spiritual, could just be our minds grasping for something to relate and ground itself.

Lately, I've been listening a lot to MF DOOM. If you're not familiar, MF DOOM is probably one of the most influential figures in hip as Q-tip described him once, "Your favorite rapper's favorite rapper" (as always, a white woman stole their whole tagline from another black performer years before lol)

A legendary lyricist and producer, DOOM's entire body of work is a bit of an anomaly from the past few epochs of hip hop and rap. It's incredibly nerdy, with a litany of personas he donned inspired by Godzilla and comic books. He often opted to sample Hannah-Barbera cartoons and 70s R&B records with long skits and even minute long uncut audio clips of older cartoons at end of songs. While not overtly political to be moralizing, his work was deeply tinged with references to racism and the five percenter socio-religious movement that raised him - never shying away from it or artificially neutering it.

Despite that and perhaps because of those idiosyncratic tenancies - his work is nearly universally beloved by those who are interested in hip hop as an art form. It didn't ever give him mainstream purchase, but in part that was the point. His work often called out and criticized tendencies in the genre but never signaled any particular person out, mostly because he wasn't interested in self-elevating for the sake of drama.

Instead, he wore a mask when he came out for shows, sometimes sending other people as him. Not even an original mask, a literal Dr. Doom mask. A fan character of a bigger property. He made countless personas and collaborations with different geeky names - references to comics and horror B-movies.

He never took that mask off, even when his identity was revealed. He rejoiced when he was deported to the UK and felt that nobody knew him.

He remained elusive but he remained himself, unabashedly reveling in his references and geekery and not too much was known about his private life before death - in terms of personal dramas.

When I think about the entirety of my creative output, I can't help but think, I wanna be like DOOM.

Anyways, here's some very loosely related Hades fanart of Doom

The specter of Deviantart is haunting the digital art community. Fatigued by the eternal rat race of modern social media artists have - especially as of late - spoken in wistful terms of the "DeviantArt era" when art communities were fun. DeviantArt - where many millennial and gen X artists cut their teeth online in bustling 'clubs' and sub-communities, made friendships that sometimes lasted for life, shaped their characters & stories, and even forged and discovered creative careers. All of this Inside a community of other artists - people who "got it". No need to explain when drawing an unclothed figure that you weren't drawing anything pornographic necessarily (unless you were, in which you uploaded to NewGrounds instead), finding fan-works and animations neatly organized into the many nearly endless categories in chronological order. A near infinite amount of not just tutorials, but assets, memes, and bases - mostly free to use.

Of course, DeviantArt isn't technically dead. It still exists, but its users have long gone - the organizational structure that made the search function so uniquely functional (and continued to keep content on the site relevant for much longer than the average social media post's average singular hour of visibility) now completely gutted for a modernized corporate layout that destroyed much of the charm and actual usability of the platform. The modern DeviantArt is a zombified husk of itself. Deviant only in so much that it has become a pariah amongst its modern counterparts for embracing generative "AI" against the expressed wishes of even its most loyal users. Modern Submissions to the website, where hundreds of thousands of genuine user created submissions used to populate have been crowded out by tens of computer generated files - images produced from their proprietary "AI" model - now clog up the website.

Each generated file made from the data of former artists who have long abandoned the platform, homunculuses on a blighted digital landscape, zombie content for the zombie website lingering in the hell of irrelevancy.

So the questions begs, what went so wrong? And more importantly: Why hasn't anything captured that spirit again?

In the late 90s, as the internet and personal computing exploded in popularity, the home computer and burgeoning internet spaces became the realms of customization and creativity for hobbyists. Software with customizable and adjustable features created thriving art scenes - like Winamp a free to use music player where users could easily swap out customized interfaces made by other users.

At the turn of the century, in the year 2000, comes DeviantArt - a site that hosted downloads for these visual customizations. The site called user uploads "arts" (later named "Deviations") and soon folks of all creative persuasions flocked to the fledgling platform to share all types of work, even drawings, animations, tutorials, ect.

In 2006, DeviantArt introduced the ability to designate use licenses - such as the ever popular Creative Commons license to each upload, further cementing the sharing aspect of the website. While this may seem inconsequential, the entire upload and deviation page's features represented and reflect an ideological position via its UX design that sets it far apart from its modern contemporaries. Use licenses were often displayed alongside a link to download the file itself, in which the file could be used and edited.

Alongside that, often above it, various times in the site's history, were prominently listed "clubs" that where users could go look to see similar content under similar themes - and ostensively join these communities. These communities ranged from fandoms to closed groups dedicated to a specific idea to resources and everything in between. Many of these groups were curated so closely they required a membership approval to contribute. These clubs themselves could be subscribed to by users, and would appear in users inboxes as "stacks" - collections of submissions from the club grouped together. With no algorithm dictating and amplifying already popular posts to see things a user liked - joining these communities or subscribing to them allowed users to find things they might be interested in without an enforced algorithm and sent them to a centralized inbox neatly organized.

A user who subscribed to a club for Vocaloid, for example, will not only be exposed to visual digital illustrations of the most popular Vocaloid - Hatsune Miku - from an already popular artist, but may be exposed to many Vocaloid characters, songs, animations, cosplay, tutorials, printables, ect. via every single submission to that club in chronological order, creating a more equitable point of exposure that prioritized contribution over pre-existing metrics.

Other features of the site emphasized this community-oriented approach even in how users individualized their profiles & spaces - somewhat paradoxically. At the peak of DeviantArt's popularity a premium user's profile would often be filled to the brim not just with images of their own art but a litany of graphics from various users, edits of templates from other users and HTML and CSS often written by - you guessed it - other users.

source

Source

Stamps, buttons, emojis - often emblazoned with favorite characters, witty phrases, or short videos compressed into .gif formats we were common, as were other graphics such as borders and icons. All of these various elements that might make up a page linked back to the tens, sometimes hundreds of other creators, alongside prominently displayed collections of favorited works from around the website, making every profile a constellation of user creation curated in a unique way that promoted not just the user themselves but the entire community.

A single stamp displayed by a user after one click would take the user to a deviation page (the name for upload pages) where credits would often break down the creation of the upload with a litany of links:

• The pixel base itself

• a tutorial on how the file was compressed

• the template file itself

then to the side of the deviation page the clubs submitted to would be listed.

Once a deviation received comments, user created emojis and reactions often featured in those comments, adding more points of exposure to other users as users often chatted or shared additional resources. A singular upload could easily detail its entire creation pipeline, uplift those who created and shared tools that made the piece possible, and showcase the creator while also linking to one or several communities. From one upload the credits may spawn tens, even thousands of other creations, linking back to a greater eco-system.

In the modern era, when a creative person wants to look up how to do something, video sites like Tiktok and Youtube are often the only place to get updated information. It is far harder to get information that is written like a guide or look up simple answers to questions. Tutorials on social media sites - especially those favored by modern internet artists like Xitter and Tumblr are often drowned out and lost in their abysmal search engines with very pared down bookmarking and favoriting features. On DeviantArt, making collections with names and folders was fairly easy. Tutorials were not just lost to the algorithm, an odd piece of content in a sea of rapid-fire posts, but instead tucked away into the tutorials section of the website - a ready-made section of the website for resources, something modern art sites very rarely have. As DeviantArt was made for customizing applications originally - documentation was needed and a robust feature-set associated with documentation, which could also double as outlets for stories and journals and updates. Tutorials didn't just keep the site relevant, it made the website viable, as users returned to the site even those that never signed up - just to view a tutorial or download a specific file. As the website allowed content to remain relevant without the push of an algorithm via a robust search function, users could spend more time on content before posting without having to necessarily feel punished by not putting out more, quicker.

The file sharing function of the site allowed users to not just post tutorials but all sorts of content that could be actually created by the user, print-outs, fabric templates, cosplay tutorials, papercrafts, cursors - all reasons to come back, create collections, and share them with others, it also allowed for increased collaboration and community creation. Pixel clubs where users could take a template, decorate it and be prominently displayed on others' profiles encouraged this sort of collaborative behavior - but it offered something of even more importance.

In the modern social media landscape there tends to be two types of users within the artist communities, who exist on a continuum: The "Popular" Artist and the small hobbyist. Now these are not distinct categories, an artist can go through either end of the spectrum through many platforms and share traits of both. The popular artist is an artist who is perceived by others to have a large amount of followers, clout - and is seen as a leader within their distinct niche. The actual numbers don't matter as this is based on perspective, many consider large artists to be over 1k while another artist may see themselves small at 10k. All that matters is that the positionality of the hobbyist is smaller than the popular artist in that community.

There creates a problem, the hobbyist who is attempting to make it to the status of the popular artist will often ask popular artists for help, asking how to achieve their style, what resources or brushes they use, and complain that larger artists don't seem to be interested in helping others in their community. On the other hand, the popular artist is simply one person and doesn't have the time to direct the many people asking them for help or resources specifically feeling that the hobbyists are entitled and there are simply too many of them.

Most modern social media sites and art sites do not feature easily accessible ways to display resources or credits, which leaves users having to repeat this sort of information - or specifically leave it buried within a website or other off-platform place, or risk using the limited space on their profiles or posts to link to resources at the expense of other information they'd like to present to followers, this pins hobbyists and popular artists as competitors rather than community members at different parts in their journeys, while this sort of dynamic can always exist due to the basics of power imbalance - it's largely exacerbated by the limitations of modern social media platforms which are getting tighter and tighter.

Youtube destroyed annotations, tiktok highly limits links, micro-blogging sites like Xitter and Bluesky simply do not have the space or linking capabilities per post to allow content space to breathe - as posts are swiped by after only a few seconds, with limited ways to save or use.

Social media sites are built for consumption, not creation.

Even on modern websites, even sites that allegedly are built for artists lack the focus or features that actually support community building, or even support other types of art other than visual anime style character art.

Sheezy.art a commonly cited "DeviantArt successor" lacks almost all of the community building and file sharing features cited, as well as more distinct categories instead relying on a tagging system.

In the melodrama between the popular artist and the hobbyist, a sizeable chunk, probably the largest portion of what would be an art community - goes largely unheard and disengaged.

It's no secret that many a modern artist were forged in DeviantArt in its heyday, but it is rarely ever considered how that happened.

While I don't have a comprehensive survey or data on how many users found DeviantArt or became artists through the site - anecdotal data suggests the process went something like my personal journey:

When I was once a wee child with unfettered internet access I was fond of another defunct website - Quizilla - a website where users made quizzes. Many users pushed the format of these quizzes into something more akin to interactive fiction - choose your own adventures and often included pictures to set the scene or better explain the looks of characters or scenes. Most of the pictures were lifted, usually without credit from other places on the internet - often times Deviantart, which is why the site implemented the option to include watermarks as this sort of behavior tended to be normalized in certain communities.

Before the wider availability of fandom merchandise, especially for foreign fandoms like anime and K-Pop, I would, like many children my age in that time period, find and save pictures and fanart of things that I liked. I printed them out, stuck them on binders, and used them as decorations on my locker or room.

Eventually, I followed the watermarked links onto Deviantart. I uploaded rough sketches of fanart but found myself wanting to emulate the artists that I admired - I couldn't afford the Copic markers popular at the time with traditional artists and mangaka ($400 dollars is insane in now money, it's definitely more insane in 2008 money). Still, nevertheless, I persisted. Seeing other artists speak of GIMP a program allegedly similar to photoshop - still attempting to edit my traditional sketches. Through the labyrinthine tutorials, journals, and comment suggestions I found a link to a pirated version of Paint Tool Sai. For my birthday I asked for the much more sensible Wacom tablet that lasted me from freshman year of High School into my college years, and while I waited I still was able to share my silly sketches to clubs on the site and get feedback and friends. I printed out coloring pages and paper dolls at the library of my favorite characters from their respective sections by other creators on DeviantArt, saved tutorials and templates from creators that I liked.

When I finally did get my tablet I was able to trade points (the DeviantArt premium currency) by creating art for others, who I was able to pay for decorations for my profile and even a few months membership to the website.

I cannot imagine anything similar to that happening to a novice artist today on any social media platform or dedicated "Art website"

Novice artists, especially young ones, do not have the same opportunities for community building and resource access. A novice artist today may have to go to 3-5 different sites to experience what I just described.

For example:

Unpolished sketches by an unknown artist are often ignored on most social media and art websites unless posted in a private community (which are often hosted on separate platforms from where art is typically showcased: i.e. Bluesky vs Discord) and specifically for critique.

This is discouraging for novice artists as the barriers for entry are simply too high for participation and as the art community gets technically bigger more privileged artists who access to resources and time to produce better quality (read: more polished work in the popular styles of popular subjects at the current moment) art that can be consumed easily.

This is an existential threat to the entire community as the novice artists, and even casual hobbyists, disengage entirely as there is simply nothing for them to do besides give adulation & money to a more popular artists without getting much in return. Novice artists and hobbyists are put in the quite frankly humiliating position of begging for attention and resources hoping to attain the position of popular artist.

This harms the popular artists as well as they often are not even as well off as others in the community assume they are (remember: there is no number or metric that defines a popular artist, it is only perception and relation to other members of the community). This alienates popular artists socially as they are swamped by requests for help, resources, and platforming - often as they attempt to sell and showcase their art to a dwindling audience of disengaged users. The hobbyists and novices often build resentment towards these popular artists, feeling betrayed and taken advantage of by those they see with more power attempting to hawk their wares.

If I was a young novice today many of the avenues for learning would be so heavily monetized and blocked off, I'm not entirely sure I would've been encouraged in developing my skills.

• Brushes locked behind gumroads, Patreons, and other highly monetized platforms away from where I would even post my art.

• If I wanted to showcase a bit about myself and my friends - I would likely have to make a separate caard or strawpage, or learn how to code on Neocities, many of those resources to learn how to code paywalled or filled with unhelpful ""AI"" features.

• I'd only have 10-40+ minute video tutorials with sponsorships to learn from, which would be very difficult with my then undiagnosed ADHD

• I'd find it hard to make friends on the endless amount of fast moving discord servers, where unless there were explicit events with templates I couldn't outperform the more advanced artists.

• I wouldn't have a way to be rewarded for my participation in the community without hard cash or have a way to reward others.

• I wouldn't be able to afford any premium features of any platforms and wouldn't be able to compete with the many commission offerings asking for real cash.

• The user of drawing bases - something that was once normal, though I never personally engaged - would be considered "Cringe" despite the fact that it was a perfectly ethical (if credit given) and valid way of creating that can act as training wheels for the inexperienced creators to make something closer to their vision while they built up their skills.

Finally, if I ever wanted to engage with creative works outside of my specific niche of static character art and the tags that I personally knew of, I'd have limited opportunity to do so on any major art platform or social media.

I would've missed the opportunity to have my artwork exposed to the cosplayer who'd found my Gakupo fanart through a shared Vocaloid fan group and cosplayed it or the pixel artist that I traded my points to for a pixel portrait to display on my profile. I wouldn't have had the opportunity to uplift my friend's art of my favorite characters in a unified way.

If I were a novice artist today, my only way to contribute would be to upload a picture, like some posts of artists I already follow, and hope to god that others would do the same in return.

And that, my friends, is how an art community dies.

DeviantArt has been bleeding out for years, part of it is platform trends: DA struggled in the industry move to mobile, lost out to more general platforms with more advanced feature stacks like tumblr. Its association with younger users killed its "cool" factor over time. Several layout changes like the baffling abolishment of its categories were unpopular with users. While some of these changes and developments were genuine mistakes and at times out of the control of DeviantArt - many could've been easily avoided by listening to the communities of the website: User testing the newer layouts, not implementing a generative ""AI"" feature in direct conflict with many in the community.

Although, the users isn't always right, sometimes they don't even know what they want.

While I often refer to myself as User Experience professional - in truth the proper term for what I do and am best at is Product which encompasses User Experience (UX). I have no idea why tech, allegedly known for its ruthless dedication to efficiency and utilitarian culture, chose the most vague and non-descriptive names in existence for these positions, but in all of my autistic pedantry cannot help but clarify the meaning of these terms as I'm constantly embarrassed by the leagues of "UX/UI" professionals content to allow the world to think of us as pixel pushing glorified graphic designers. (No offense to graphic designers)

Put concisely, User Experience is the study and application of psychology, design, and interaction between a user and a piece of technology - this is often an explicitly visual interface - but a common non-visual interface example would be a voice assistant.

Product is the apotheosis of business analysis, UX, and Engineering. Ideally a product professional is able to harmonize all three of these elements into a product offering that is able to:

• Be a viable, sustainable, profit creating product with a good market fit.

• Be useful and beneficial to the user

• Continue to grow and scale with its userbase

In my professional opinion DeviantArt failed at all three of these basic product tenants over time.

However, nearly every other modern art site attempting to pick up the former crown of DeviantArt has somehow fared no better, mostly by listening to its users too much.

While many art sites have attempted to pick up where DeviantArt has stumbled off, a particular attempt caught a lot of attention lasts year after Meta's platform changes, Twitter's implosion, and the general malaise towards larger social media platforms after their toxic embrace of Generative "AI". Put together by a handful of artists including the notable Zhang Jingna and a handful of volunteers, visual artists fled to the app in droves with a record number of signups and then only a few months later - many artists have told me they scarcely even remember the site. Simply using it either as a portfolio website or have stopped visiting or updating it all together.

An Instagram/Twitter hybrid.

Artfol, a similar platform suffered a similar fate, and Artstation - a place similar to Cara favored quietly by art professionals as a sort of Instagram/Linkedin hybrid often used as a portfolio also failed to achieve mainstream popularity as a home for the online art community, bleeding out similarly to DeviantArt after introducing generative ""AI"" features against the wishes of its own userbase.

Artfol, another Instagram clone.

Elite Capture - a term discussed by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in his book of the same name is described as:

“the presence of unequal access to power— some have greater access to power (by virtue of their lineage, or caste, or economic wealth or gender or some other reason) and consequently the ability to influence the transfer of funds/resources disproportionately.”

In more simple terms: even in more marginalized communities, people with more resources will prioritize their own interests and direct resources when building community structures to their own benefit rather than to the benefit of the overall community.

This is rarely done on purpose - but artist communities and platforms crafted by professional artists have only perpetuated and amplified the problems from social media by failing to consider community building, resource sharing, and accessibility to hobbyists, novice users, and non-creatives as a priority in building a shared space.

These problems permeate the culture of creative communities like a viral born illness, with clear symptoms:

• The near extinction of non-digital visual art in online spaces

• Hyper-monetization of all resources and reduction of the forms to better fit monetizable platforms

• The scattering of smaller communities in more niche creative genres (like pixel art, yarn work, and cosplay) onto different platforms and forums isolated from each other

• Overall increased competition between creatives

• Most worryingly, the propagation of a highly contentious "commentary" sub-community where artists are encouraged to socially punish other users, promote negativity, and otherwise at best make money and gain popularity off of serious abusive situations (turned into "drama") that should be in the purview of trained professionals and at worst act as a carceral kangaroo court to litigate personal drama by weighing personal audiences against each other.

Ironically, within Táíwò's book this is also described:

"Even outside of work, social media features such as likes, shares, and retweets play the role of points in games. Over time, these simple metrics threaten to distort or take the place of values (say, the wish to meaningfully contribute to discussion or to take pride in the quality of one’s work) that might otherwise have inflected our behavior on these platforms."

When artists now are now asked, after years of being on social media platforms and these lackluster art sites, what their dream art website looks like.

They describe a store.

A store that is allowed to sell pornography also.

A place where they can display their wares, take payment in the form of currency and likes, and maybe - often as a distant third - have the ability to share the work of their friends.

To be frank - it's embarrassing.

For a group of people, many of whom ostensibly identify as anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, queer, ect. The lack of imagination regarding how to build a sustainable platform of creatives that isn't just a set of personal stages for panhandling is actually buckwild.

In the words of one of my favorite creatives - Aaron McGruder - creator of The Boondocks in his speech to black youth about the media in 2003:

"Please take responsibility for yourself"

"This is not a motivational speech because I'm not a motivational speaker"

and also

"You better figure this out or I'm moving to Cuba."

I refuse to believe a group of people who pride themselves on their imagination, worldbuilding, media literacy, and creativity cannot come up with a better system than this. Both because it feels like common sense if thought about for more than two seconds and because we have many successes and failures in recent memory to have learned from at this point. DeviantArt being the prime example.

While I mostly withdrew from online art communities after about 2013 to focus on my career in tech, I only returned truly after the great crypto-crash of 2023 triggered a cascading series of layoffs in which I was left with a devastating gap in my life after losing my job that I had worked a decade to get. Only after a year was a certain white haired vampire able to heal me (you can read more about that here) and I started seriously rediscovering my art side after years of sporadic drawings throughout the years left to rot on tumblr and Instagram. I eventually created enough to create a fan webcomic and have been working on that in my free time ever since.

The online art landscape I returned to online was radically different, colder, and more difficult to penetrate. While I have collected more followers than I have ever had only platform put together on Bluesky (3.6k), my art still underperforms anything I had ever posted on Deviantart where I often got hundreds of likes per post to my 200 DeviantWatcher follower count despite honestly improving greatly.

Don't tease me for my username, I was 13.

But take a look at the stats for this average old art during the "peak" years of DeviantArt of an old original character versus a my most "successful" (above average) fanart post on Bluesky

When broken down statistically - my posts on DeviantArt averaged 40-70 interactions per art posted anywhere from 30-60% of my overall watcher count.

My average highest art post on BlueSky of all time is roughly 10% to my overall user count - with the average sitting at around 1-2% engagement. Roughly in line with the averages for across all modern social media.

This means that any user under 100 followers is likely getting absolutely no engagement - and since comments are rarer than ever - rarely no interaction.

This is not normal, nor sustainable long term.

Surprisingly, the platforms my art does best on - and I receive the most engagement on are contradict the common wisdom of many online artists.

Yes, yes, I've heard it all, Meta is evil, Facebook is dead and unusable. Reddit is a bastion of Nazis and hell. Hope you all stop using Youtube then.

Anyways, the place I've recently posted where I received the most genuine attention and embrace of my work - especially my comics tend to be within Facebook fan groups despite the fact that mainstream fandom is often thought to be contained on other more modern platforms.

Older platforms, especially those with features built around communities like Reddit's subreddits and Facebooks Groups and Events simply have more diverse (read: not completely professionalized) engaged communities and more engagement as a result, in my opinion.

While that's a bit controversial, I'm sure many engaged in more niche forums and communities would also agree.

Though there is one Art focused community that I think has the DNA of DeviantArt.

After getting more into the bluesky art community, I was exposed to Artfight, the annual month-long artgifting event where people draw each other's characters, for free as part of a gargantuan competition.

The Discord alone has over 400,000 members - a number that I didn't even think Discord servers could hold, meaning that the website itself is likely far bigger.

When I looked around the site though, I didn't just see the old culture of DeviantArt - I felt it.

The lack of monetization and prioritization on actual creativity oozed through every part of the website, whether through the HTML/CSS customizable profiles, the template assets made from community members to be used for thumbnails of finished art - it actually feels like a community built on resource sharing. Crediting is built into the interface and highly encouraged and everyone is working towards a similar goal - It's not DeviantArt in its heyday exactly, but it's a fuckton closer.

While Artfight has apparently had a host of their own development and management challenges - I can't help but think that the community and its explosion of growth indicate a move in the right direction.

Or at least a deviation from the new normal.

The entire game industry seems up in arms about Microsoft's seeming abandonment and "blunders" in recent years and Carrie Bradshaw voice I couldn't help but wonder, did Microsoft already win the console wars?

Now, you might be like, Belle! They're killing their own industry though, why would a company do that?

Because Microsoft is an operating software company, not a gaming company.

Xbox was only created to threaten Sony because they couldn't buy Nintendo in response to the PS2 - because Sony considered the PS2 a computer (even going so far as to sell linux discs with it). The entire Playstation brand was a way to trojan horse person computers and internet into more homes, through popular MMOs like Phantasy Star Online. Later the "failure" of the PS3 was because after capturing the gaming market, PlayStation intended to try and go further and take over media market by replacing the need to buy a Blu-ray player, introducing more personal competing technology into more homes.

In response to this existential threat from Sony, Bill gates got like, hella mad and made DirectX - an API that made it easier to develop games in English (similar products at the time only existed in Japanese).

Around the same time, Microsoft was caught by the US government for trying to do a big naughty by trying to fully monopolize the internet browser market.

If you could consider for a moment, the time that we're in, and a few facts about Microsoft:

• Microsoft is OpenAI's largest investor with over 14 billion invested so far.

• Windows 11, an AI filled mess with users actually still going back to windows 10.

• Despite that fact, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 several years earlier than its predecessors despite nearly half the market (40%) still on Windows 10

• Despite the push for AI in nearly everything even the IMF, the Bank of England, and many other global financial institutions are warning that the AI bubble is about to burst.

If gaming is the trojan horse for operating systems, then they've got a hell of a competitor in Valve's deep investment into Linux - who have finally started breaking the open-source OS alternative into the mainstream by making windows games compatible with Linux via Proton, and the growing popularity of Linux based SteamOS.

The shift for Xbox to focus in on PC gaming instead of selling consoles makes a hell of a lot more sense when you consider that Microsoft is facing an existential financial threat to both their bread and butter OS business, and their need to kill Valve's momentum.

The need is no longer to get devices into homes - the need is to now make sure that the devices are running Windows - in some way shape or form. It would also explain why Microsoft keeps buying indie darlings and unceremoniously killing them even after doing well. Oh and Games too. Can't have competition if you buy and kill them like Henry the 8th when his wives bore a daughter.

Problem is that corporate strategy like that tends to rustle the jimmies of regulators if they catch wind, especially when you have a habit of doing so. But if you can just whine and cry that good games aren't enough to sell consoles, and you keep telling the media that - you have a really good paper trail for when the regulators hit you with an anti-trust lawsuit. And they'd have good reason to be fearful, because their good compatriot Google didn't make it through their last lawsuit.

So when you have your Xbox branded laptop with windows 12 come in the mail that forces you to talk to an AI chatbot to find a game, at least you'll know what happened here.

That is, if we make through the bubble popping at all.

When I first started as a camgirl, it was well before the explosion of Onlyfans and the subsequent discourse around its normalization. Truthfully, I just wanted some money, was in between jobs, and hadn't fully realized that I had a disability that was making it hard to actually keep jobs.

Originally I thought it was just performing sexual acts for money, but as I went through forums and guides written by well-worn and successful camgirls, I realized that what we were selling wasn't sex, but relationships. For many clients (of which I did also have female ones too!) sex wasn't the point, it was sex from you specifically. There's a misconception that people who engage with camgirls are primarily engaging for sexual content and while that's partially the case, the existence and proliferation of erotica, pornography of all types, and sex toys of which the likes I've never seen camgirls are still fairly popular.

In a foreshadowing episode for later developments in labor disputes, I remember when the first major virtual camgirl, Project Melody, started making her way onto chaturbate. It was incredibly controversial as camgirls clamored about having to compete with a 3D anime girl and that this could spell doom for the entire industry of real girls who had put their images on the line (quite literally) at great risk to themselves. And yet, things eventually evened out and the girls learned to live with their new anime co-workers, and surprisingly, Melody didn't inspire the leagues of animated 3D models that others had feared completely conquering the site. The discourse about melody was strong and divisive amongst the camworkers of the site, many of whom felt that she should be banned, and those who were unthreatened. The argument from those who were unthreatened was that what they were selling simply wasn't just sex, but a chance to connect to an authentically human person, they weren't even selling the same product.

As I amassed a small following of regulars, besides being naked, it was far more like acting like a naked variety show host, an erotic performer who riled up her crowd and played games with them, attracting applause (and hopefully tips) night after night. While I did run into quite a few people with niche and sometimes outright disgusting kinks, the ones that tended to stick in my mind were actually the folks who truly stuck around because they wanted people to talk to, they were often the most polite and the more generous clients. People who asked to play video games with me, or asked me to read them leftist literature and talk about space. There's a reason one of the most expensive and popular services in the community is the "girlfriend experience" a block of time where you can essentially rent a worker and they will act as your romantic partner with text messages, phone calls, and the like. Ironically it taught me more about psychology and user experience than any bootcamp or college class.

The vitriol to sex workers and sex work specifically is something that I need not go into, it's legislative, it's pervasive, it's a historical fixture. We are the whore, but we are also the Madonna soiled.

We're either the penultimate symbols of exploitation, coerced damsels, predators, gold-diggers, or if you ask those who are on the other side, we're the most empowered, powerful, brave, and virtuous of all women out there. The truth for most of us, is somewhere in the middle.

When Sex work went online the online understanding of camgirls specifically was less that we were brainwashed, and for many misogysts was that we were now the exploiters, taking advantage of sad and lonely men and draining them of their money. That we pretend to like men, provide them with a sense of safety, friendship, and connection with the explicit purpose of using them financially and that, that is somehow an especially novel and violating act that makes us especially evil. We need either white knights or to be burned at the stake.

It might surprise you to know that despite my recollection of sex work as mostly neutral, I did actually hate it. And the part that I liked least was having to feign closeness to people or ask them for money explicitly. It is also the reason I hated sales, and why I don't think I could be a therapist. I felt the same sense of existential dread in enforcing my tips structure in my chat or trying to get someone into private paid chat as I did having to go door to door to ask for donations for the non-profit I had once worked for, or asking trying to cajole passing folks to my sales table so that I could meet my quota and not get fired, stumbling around with an ipad as a poor family on food stamps told me they couldn't afford the installation fee for internet.

Taking off my clothes was actually the easy part.

Yet, the SWERFs and redpill podcast bros would have you believe that I and my fellow workers were the spawn of satan incarnate, disparaging the cause of women everywhere by simply doing my job and having the absolute audacity to ask for compensation for it. Don't you know giving men sex in exchange for shelter and protection should only be done under the banner of the church and state? Put on a wedding dress and save the lingerie for your honeymoon slut!

At the end of high school was the dawn of what I dubbed ‘the playthrough era’. Suddenly people started watching playthroughs of other people playing video games and it was seemingly a big deal. I didn't really understand it. I still mostly don't on an emotional level. I always preferred watching edited silent clip compilations of funny moments in video games, or silent playthroughs, skipped through to the exact part where I had gotten stuck in a video game if I needed to. Other than that, YouTube was mostly a place I watched funny animated clips and downloaded music from. I found the timbre of the popular voices of the time,"WHAT'S UP GUYS WELCOME BACK TO MY CHANNEL" quite literally overstimulating and irritating. (And I still do. Who would've guessed years later that I had an autism diagnosis waiting for me?)

But as the years went by the phenomenon only seemed to get more and more ubiquitous. Once upon a pandemic, my roommate at the time who was a fairly well-known music producer who had befriended a few of these popular letsplayers came to me in tears about one of these video game players, a fairly large one at that with millions of subscriptions that had been accused of soliciting minors. They came to me in tears assuming that I would clearly know who this person was -- I didn't. Eventually years later I'd watched an hour long "documentary" about this sordid episode, one of an entire cottage industry of "Dramatubers" who specialized in recounting the lives and downfalls of these entertainers. Every single day, one of these "letsplayers" and "streamers" turned out to be grooming minors for sex, sometimes even flying out to see them, sending child pornography, scamming their fans (who were mostly children), introducing them to gambling, getting them into white supremacist far-right ideologies. A shooting in New Zealand where the shooter triumphantly screamed "subscribe to PewdiePie" before opening fire on a cadre of innocent people.

Entire communities associated with specific games like Smash or Minecraft became in-community jokes for their explicit association with pedophilia. And yet, all of this seemingly normalized? I was a bit confused, truthfully.

When you go to the average twitch streamer's livestream and compare it to the average camgirl's chaturbate or myfreecam's stream, if you were to strip the pages of all their colors and logos, they'd look very similar. Almost the exact same functionality in fact: a video livestream next to a running chat filled with bots that list menus of things for the performers to do for a certain price, such as shouting out the users, changing the music. The both can message the users directly and direct them out of the website to another platform where they can purchase goodies or sign up for a monthly subscription. Sometimes you even get the subscriptions free with a connection to another account - the first hit is always free, of course.

In the 1980s, as Tv saturated American life nearly completely after Reagan deregulated children's advertising laws, a cottage industry of children's media soon consumed the landscape: transformers, Jem and the holograms, GI Joe, countless others. These often low-quality animated TV shows (sorry y'all, Jem's music was fantastic but the show had like, 4 frames of animation an episode) served as little more than walking advertisements for children's toys. Parents of course, were up in arms about the lengths that capitalism sought to not-so-subtly brainwash their children via storytelling. Toys were created and stories became vehicle of which they could be sold, ethics be damned.

Of course, this changed after laws in the 90s pushed for children's programming to be more educational and banned the promotion of toys during the actual episodes, leading to a second animation golden age in the 90s. (As many millennials can attest to).

Still though, the streaming & social media era has yet to see a palpable legal pushback that has ended in any meaningful legislation despite far more dangerous social trends emerging, such as Meta's knowing induction of Eating disorders in young girls or youtube's algorithm radicalizing youth into mass shootings. Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and Christopher Hitchens morphed into Alex Jones, youtube "social experiments" and "pranks" and Ben Shapiro, who morphed into Andrew Tate, Asmongold, and Jubilee debates. None of the core ideas have really changed - minorities are too sensitive, women are whiny bitches, and we all love a good troll, although it is little bit interesting that the faces have gotten a little more diverse. Now the middle aged man telling us women are dumb bitches on the conservative platform is a Muslim mixed black man! Progress! That's identity politics baby.

As the internet moved into American households via dial-up or through mobile connections and as new media created new types of stars in the constellation of pop culture, things got a lot more personal. The most common future 'dream job' for children stopped being sports star or astronaut and became "streamer' or "influencer". That's not entirely surprising or noteworthy in itself, culture changes often.

What is noteworthy is how these people monetize themselves, advertising dollars, lucrative brand deals, and of course, direct donations. In the age of livestreaming specifically, livestreamers unlike their actor and model ancestors before them far more reliant on the direct donations and audiences buying their merchandise. And unlike their cartoon televsion counterparts, they have direct access to the children in their chatrooms and comment sections, and no laws or even industry standards governing how they should interact with their often child audiences.

It's not uncommon for these personalities to build entire careers off of sharing intimate details about their lives, building relationships with their audiences that blur the lines between personal and professional, with much of their content simply being that of watching media or video games together. The "parasocial relationship."

The parasocial relationship as defined by Psychology today:

"Parasocial relationships refer to one-sided relationships in which a person develops a strong sense of connection, intimacy, or familiarity with someone they don’t know, most often celebrities or media personalities."

But when an audience member has a direct line to a livestreamer, can they tell that it's one-sided? Are we to blame children who think that their favorite streamer really does like them when they directly reply to their questions in chat, @ them in their discord server, and they return day after day?

We live in an increasingly lonely society. Children are born to increasingly smaller families, often as only children, with extended family becoming more rare, farther away. Children are 62% less likely to go out to play a few times a week than they did years ago. Yet, American schools are increasingly eliminating recess from schools, with many towns and cities enacting anti-loitering laws that effectively eliminate children from public life unless they can somehow pay to be there. Even adults are feeling this effect, with loneliness rates through the roof. Those who seek to completely blame technology seem to ignore that even if every phone was seized tomorrow the children would still be thrust into a world that hardly has a place for them, less so if they are poor.

On the internet, netizens are even less kind to these wandering children who invade their spaces like invasive plants looking for a place to grow - crowding out more frail native fauna. They choke the ecosystem, suddenly NSFW creators are pushed out to make previously adult spaces “child [advertiser] friendly”. Marginalized adults and literal children are positioned as ideological enemies vying for the same space and people tell parents - the overworked parents who can barely afford childcare or the roofs over their head - to watch over their ‘crotchfruit’ better. Parents snap back to marginalized people who have no choice but to exist on these platforms to earn a fraction of living that they shouldn't have to cater to smut peddlers and queers. The government continues to defund after-school programs and parks. The children wander about all the same without a digital park having outgrown the snakepits of Roblox and baby games - no Habbo Hotel or IMVU to graduate to and no real park that they can't risk getting arrested or shot at for being 12 with a toy gun and happening to be the wrong color or existing and making too much noise.

In comes the streamer, who already likes what they like, the cool older adult who always is available to spend time with them and can exist in their headphones, lest they disturb their parents or the neighborhood with their laughter and screams. 5 bucks is enough for a twitch sub or a lunchly box, nearly four times less than tickets to the movie theaters with friends that will inevitably lead to coordinating schedules with busy, stressed out parents because there are no more buses in their neighborhood. They are misunderstood in school, where their classmates are all using chatgpt because they don't think they'll survive the climate wars anyways or get a job.

And puberty fucking sucks, despite what their nostalgia stricken elders tell them.

And so, the child watches, and learns, and chats. They beg their parents for hoodies of their favorite inside joke, and their parents fearmonger as they listen to podcasts from the NYT about trans youth and doctors, apparently 'grooming' them into identities they can't understand. Meanwhile, their child is learning that their favorite gamer guy says that Palestinians come from an inferior culture, or that PewdiePie is really sorry about paying people to hold signs saying,"death to all Jews" as a joke, he swears! They play around in twitch with custom emojis they've got, and suddenly at 15 their favorite streamer is messaging them and they speak exchange snapchats. They enthusiastically send over nudes and promise not to tell anyone. Another child in the discord starts listening to a guest who was on the stream a few months ago, who on their stream talked about how women are naturally submissive and science says that black people have naturally lower IQs. Soon enough the topic moves over to women with Onlyfans and camgirls. Lazy exploitative bitches, who take advantage of lonely men who are isolated and steal all their money. The child nods in agreement and tells the others at school.

In the ironic ouroboros of content, much is made about the camgirl, who sits on livestream enticing an audience with her tits out into buying time and content.

But hey, I mean at least our clients are adults.

• Recess Is Good For Kids. Why Don’t More States Require It?

  Several years ago, a team of sociologists flew from California to an East Coast school to observe the kindergarteners’ recess for their research. The team waite…

• Medical Minute: Children Spend 35% Less Time Playing Outside Than Their Parents Did

  Kids today spend 35% less time outdoors than their parents. Experts say early exposure to nature boosts happiness, focus, and creativity.

• 'Anti-play culture' limits children's' time outside, report finds

  Reading University chancellor Paul Lindley said "no ball games" signs were indicative of the problem.

• YouTube loses advertisers over “wormhole into pedophilia ring”

  Epic Games and Disney pull ads over pedophiles’ comments on videos of children.

• Dr. Toon: When Reagan Met Optimus Prime

  In the world of animated children's programming, free enterprise and Federal regulations were not always the best of friends. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was often called upon to

• Kidscorp | Children's advertising: what are the rules, laws and controversies?

  Explore the main rules, laws, and controversies in children’s advertising, and how brands can stay compliant while reaching young audiences.

Okay, y'all got me. I won't join substack because it's filled with nazis, unlike Twitch, Youtube, tumblr, which definitely did not have their ranks filled with people pushing white genocide conspiracies and took 10 years to ban Alex Jones, their no. 1 user for years being a man who was shouted out during a white supremacist shooting or anything....

But, since I've always been on the fence about monetizing my rambles, it's time to try out some alternatives.

The truth is that it has always been apparent that bluesky didn't have a real "place" because it was a leftover of the crypto-boom. They've tried to hide that sordid little history but their angel investor being Blockchain Capital and all of their talks of "de-centralization" left their little digicoin grabby handprints all over each press release about ATprotocol.

That doesn't mean that I think ATprotocol is a *bad* idea necessarily, I was already algorithm agnostic at that point having been a UX designer who'd read too many books with names like Weapons of Math Destruction and Manufacturing Consent.

My natural curiosity has gotten ahold of me, it'll probably kill me one day. My boyfriend always says I act like a cat for a reason.

Who can blame me?

The internet fucking sucks right now.

But none of you want to leave, come on, admit it. Forums still exist, neocities and nekoweb and indie hosts are booming with teenie boppers looking to relive a past they weren't even swimming around in their daddy's balls for - but everyone is addicted, the western world's opium wars in reverse - Tiktok's illegal now or something.

The truth is that I'm prepping for the inevitability of crackdowns - not just of social media platforms, but of Internet Service Providers themselves. We're starting to see a virtual mason-dixon line form along porn laws and things are only going to get worst in the incoming years until we're forced to decentralize, we may even see the emergence of new internet protocols - a callback to the era before HTTP's pre-eminence as the ultimate "internet" that we see today.

So here I am, practicing HTML and CSS again, making websites, working on webrings, writing longer missives to train my attention - and trying out places that might not be popular just yet. The kinds of websites and services that may die out and find new life later on in the features of other places.

I hope that you'll consider coming along for the ride as I start working into this new era of the digital - it's gonna get real fucking weird.

Oh and consider visiting my website or subbing on here, I'll be detailing my longer thoughts as things progress.