razielim | Readings and er... Goodbye, Patreon (Reply)

I've charted out an ambitious sequence of reading for the next few months. Who knows if I'll stick to it, what with all my love for switching priorities after a few weeks, but I love the idea of this particular reading list. After finishing The Brothers Karamazov today or tomorrow, it's:

Black Against Empire (Bloom, Martin)
The End of Policing (Vitale)
Discipline & Punish (Foucault)
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)

AND THEN, The first two books I own and the next are all in my Amazon cart, but I'm telling myself that I'll only buy them if I clear everything else in the queue out of the way:

Viking Economics (Lakey) [Owned]
Saving Capitalism: For the Many, From the Few (Reich) [Owned]
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty)
Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality (Tanzi)
The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (Stiglitz)
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Acemoglu)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff)

It would be nice to get through all of these. And then take a break and read just Terry Pratchett or Harry Potter or something for a few months, feeling like I've fulfilled my learning duties and simultaneously digesting all I've read like a python, photo-bashing ideas together to see what happens. Maybe I'll throw in Black Swan (Taleb) after Termites? Might be an interesting partnership of ideas.

Anyway, so update on splitting up art motivations:

I went a whole other direction and closed my Patreon entirely. I don't want to make money off of art anymore. I just don't want to. You can't make me. I've eased off studying for a little while too, bc I'm spending too much time studying something else entirely and doing both at once was turning my head to kasha. Instead, I've decided to take this "popular fandom demotivation" period as a time to work on stuff for ancient almost-dead fandoms that I always want to do stuff for, but am ultimately undermined by my desire for validation and friendship.

Aka, I somehow abandoned my Legacy of Kain painting projects I started last year ;_;

First for a Voltron zine and then a Harry Potter one, and... I hate myself for it. I know any LoK undertakings are 50x harder for me because I have such HIGH expectations for how beautiful Raziel and Kain should look to match my mental images of them, and unlike Voltron, the canon-ref isn't good enough, and unlike HP, there's no fanon-ref that matches my vision, but... I want to really break through that barrier.

I think I believe, almost in a religious sense, that if I manage to capture Raziel's face beautifully, for several paintings in a row, that I'll have achieved a pinnacle of being able to communicate my vision of beauty. That there'll be no face too beautiful for me to be able to convey. So what might look like putting about with a random fandom is, to me... a white goddamn whale. That I keep sailing away from bc I'm a fucking weenie afraid of failure.

Hopefully I'll stay the course this time. No other fandoms to use as an excuse, or to just plain be enticed by.

I can't imagine anything more rewarding or validating than finally, after so many years, after giving up on art entirely several times, and coming back to study my ass off, after making LoK friends and growing apart from them, finally being able to capture Raziel.