eff_ess_oe

lmao i love my work IT department, i start having weird certificate issues after an update that aren't solved by three resets and basic troubleshooting on my end - and my favorite IT bro escalates me directly to the executive support specialist skipping who knows how many levels :') 'eh fuck it, krad never calls unless if it's a kernel issue or something similar.'

( called it too. i can tell by the teamviewer shenanigans this is more than your average 'have you tried to turn it off and on a fourth time' bug )

honestly have a pretty fun laid back and fun long weekend ahead ~

* lots of drawing! there's a few smaller fire emblem related pieces i'm trying to get my artistic pipes cleaned out with before making the final push on some collaboration work (anthology, another short nsfw FE comic, some background work with a bud). back half of this year's already lined up with said straight-up dream jobs so i'm quite excited to get to them after i print this one gunter/corrin comic.

* going to meet up with a doujin circle broski tomorrow for lunch again ~! <3 likewise slept in for ages today and managed to rescue a skink (common lizard around here) that was trapped inside the house. he lost his tail but was quite excited and wriggly to be outside again, and didn't seem all that worse for the wear.

* accidentally read up on Jane Jacobs via a book review - she's so interesting as a lady economist/urban planner way back when that was predominantly a male-dominated business, and wasn't afraid to say thoughts that threw all kinds of groups in a tizzy. that line doesn't do her justice but i deeply enjoyed reading the book review and that she pushed back against both the whole McCarthy censorious era of the US government and the dudebros in her industry.

* on a more melancholic note i was reading a different article about an AI researcher/ethicist gaming out what was going to happen in the next decade and just, deeply bothered at a (paraphrased) quote of his when he was responding to a question about what he'd teach his children now that the world's changed by AI, and it was something falteringly along the lines of teaching virtues now for the sake of them versus having always taught virtues because they were for work. and i just. ??????? record scratch. i had to reread that line a few times to make sure i didn't read it wrong. just feels ... sad that the point of virtues is missed that much?

honestly i was telling my mom yesterday that the point i'll really start getting concerned about ai on a physical level is when it's starting to seamlessly work with biotechnology as implants and do what it's supposed to do there. genuinely enhanced hearing/eyesight/motor skills. to me, then it's a threat for control reasons in a level that's hard to throw a killswitch or disentangle. i mean, i'm biased about this since i have (and have had) a pretty cutting-edge hearing implant since i was two, lol - but it just ain't there on a reliable level and right now still consistently feels like it's a chatbot hooked up to a suite of apps versus pure text-based chatbots a few decades ago like omegle. the computer is still ultimately in a box and this might be a very american/southern way of looking at it, but you can still ultimately shoot the computer in a box with a gun XD

i will always be thankful to that one artist lady (Elizabeth Gilbert) who talked about the concept of muses on a TED talk, kinda early on when those talks were still cool. late 2000's or so? early 2010's? that line in particular that stuck out at me was her simply saying (paraphrased) "I honestly don't think humanity was built to handle the sheer focus of the whole world on one person especially creatively."

man that stuck with me!

has stuck with me, since it was oddly prophetic (this was like, pre-twitter stone age times), and since either by way of "handy psychological sleigh-of-hand-trick to offload the idea of creativity" or [latent actual woo shit] having said Muse allowed me to dodge so many weird artistic existentialist hangups i never even knew could be a thing, especially new ones cropping up recently.

artistic insecurity (externally)? the concept's so foreign since i'm... doing it for my Muse, i'm not doing it for other people? social media engagement falls under this bucket too. listen, man, i'm a pair of hands for the stuff that comes out. sure i can always get better technical execution-wise, but then it becomes a fun and weirdly tangible game to solve for. i can have an ego about a compliment or two but it's always secondary to what matters, you know?

artistic insecurity (internally)? usually if i'm hating my shit there's something else going on like burnout or a brain recession and he's always quick to point that out and redirect me lol.

AI stuff? not relevant to personal artwork since the very idea of faking it for my Muse is so... it misses the whole point to the degree it's offensive. service is worship. worship is service in a religious context, that kind of thing. the kind of thing that becomes corrupted and something else if gone through the motions.

dogpiles? not my problem; some people just React to strange-to-them shit or got their own issues. their issues with art don't become mine.

anyway i guess this is me lightly wishing more people would be open to the idea of muses because it feels like it'd soothe quite a few brainworms. but then maybe there's a failure case of muses given the variety of people out there (eg offloading too much responsibility to the point of kind of being a dick or like, unreality level of harmful mental illness) and i just siiiigh.

(also jesus lol when did the TED website UI become absolute shite, i remember when it was so much fun to read through all the transcripts...)

i have so many FUN art projects cooking through the rest of the year it's hard to imagine at one point i was sitting on empty art-wise gosh. like i'm calculating im gonna have to take a few fridays off of work to stay on top.

i really do have a theory it's because i was so drained cranking out comic pages and i didn't have enough brainwidth to draw zihark (over the years if you look at my sketch history he's notably missing there about 2019-2020).

something something load bearing Muse etc :P