razielim | Entries tagged with journal

Friends, family, gremlins. I just got glasses and it feels like taking painkillers for the first time in my life.

No double vision, no weird film over my dominant eye, actual depth perception. The clarity is nice too, but the blurriness when I take them off is so goddamn tolerable that it almost seems a waste to have gone through the trouble. The pain and tiredness without them, however, is on impact. Moment these glasses come off: I'm crippled, I'm in pain, I want to sleep, I want to never do anything ever again, I'm so tired.

I went for a walk and didn't find myself staring at the ground five feet in front of me the whole time! That wasn't the only position that was tolerable and un-exhausting. I felt relaxed. It was actually relaxing again being outside and looking at things.

I am looking directly at the screen. I am reading back what I write as I write, and I don't feel like it's too much effort to bother. Dare I say I can think more clearly? I can imagine actually having the stamina, interest, and mental capacity to start proofreading (or editing, even!) my fics again after writing them. I can open up wikipedia and read, not skim, trying to escape the whole ordeal as fast as possible. I can actually comfortably look at the screen again while typing instead of spacing out in the middle distance between my screen and keyboard. I don't remember the last time any of these things felt comfortable and relaxing.

And this is just the distance prescription, I haven't even gotten my near vision glasses meant for actual computer work yet.

I can practically taste working on my paintings tomorrow and not craving the sweet release of sleep or death after the first hour.
My life has been so much worse than I realized.

i have a pet fandom wank topic on FFA that i enjoy reading so much that when i just saw it come up again i hopped up off my chair and hurried to brush my teeth and get cozy in bed with it as a bedtime story

it's always frozen by the time i see or dememe it, it almost always has 100+ comments to read, and i'm pretty sure that the nonnies that i AGREE WITH on the issue are the ones considered to be the dapo gremlins by the mods bc they're always the topmost frozen comment in any given wank instance.

love it 🍷

One thing they don't tell you about 3D modeling is that if you're left handed, watch out! My right arm feels like I've been lifting weights all day. Don't remember the last time I had to use it this much and with so much fine motor control. My left hand, meanwhile, had so little to do, even with all the many hotkeys that I'm dead-set on committing to memory, that I'd occasionally catch it just idly holding my chin when it was time to press a hotkey. Lazy bastard. He's enjoying this new freedom, I take it.

1) Learning Blender. Finally, my complete and total inability to play with "normal" camera controls in video games is coming in handy. It's all inverted here, babey!

2) Trying to find an opening in the clouds from which to view the total eclipse and ending up all the way in Nowhere, Ohio was a fun adventure. I don't remember the 1990s movie Twister very well, but I think it was a bit like that.

3) Like I told Cosmic... the eclipse itself looked a lot like Cosmic's artwork.

4) I definitely strained or injured my good eye and got an immediate migraine from viewing said eclipse. I was the only person in my group with any problems, so I'm at a loss as to what went wrong. No holes in my vision so I doubt it's permanent retinal scarring, but it gets tired focusing on distant objects and when I look at the moon for example, I see the moon, and another, fuzzier moon, overlaid slightly to the right. So sharpness is definitely suffering considering I used to see the moon very clearly. Best I can tell, my body just didn't react well to that amount of light, even if I took all the same precautions as everyone else. Eyesight anxiety is exactly why I didn't join my family to go chase the 2017 solar eclipse, but I just couldn't help myself this time. Realllllly wanted to see it. Once was enough. (Edited to add: It's getting better! But it was scary for a while.)

Ok, this isn't the same as my wish that someone would put together vocals and lofi/triphop music to Tolkien's lyrics, but yeah, these lofi mixes of the LotR films' scores are nice.

I've been mostly offline for almost two weeks now, limiting myself to less than an hour of hurried email/dreamwidth/googling questions a day. Hoping for enlightenment to reach me, or at least find the time to pick up my bass again, but uh... maybe that happens on week three.

Also, Discord finally broke image links like they were threatening to do. I knew all new images were supposed to be unembeddable and unhotlinkable, but looks like they now also made it take effect retroactively on old images too. I only found out because my entire BruJay comic on Ao3 is broken now. Yikesies. Really need to figure out a good place to host fanart that allows adult content, specifically for Ao3 or DW posting. Can't do tumblr either anymore. Technically, even the company I use to host my portfolio website doesn't allow sexually explicit content, so it's not really an option to host my comic there on some hidden page. I don't want to hide stuff in dark corners and hope for the best. Open to suggestions.

Also (in further "ugh" developments, sorry), Google apparently cares if adults share a bit of written erotica with each other on gdocs? The hell is wrong with the corporatocracy?

So tired of "Sex Bad!!"

I got kind of sick and tired of working on all my WIPs in obscurity, feeling a bit like I'm doing "nothing" because my painting process is a tree falling in the woods and no one's around to hear it, so I'm just sharing them everywhere I can think of this week, and now you all know that I'm being a fannish little gremlin somewhere out there.

Fanart or not, this is actually a large portfolio revamp so I can go apply to things and make more money. Tired of seeing my savings account depleting.

Trying to bully myself into going to get a new COVID vaccine this evening, but oigjoirgerg I don't wannnaaaaaa... sigh. I'm just being a big baby; now that I've complained about it, I guess I'll go. :\

Update: Got the new COVID vaccine and a flu shot too! *pats himself on the back*

One thing I always feel DW is missing is an askbox. And I remembered earlier today that there theoretically is a way that I've heard about to get "anons" and "asks" by pinning a post with approval-only comments. Which had me excited, thoroughly, right up until I realized I wouldn't really know what to really DO with that if I set it up. DW isn't very fannish in the grand scheme of things.

(I'm alive!)

My brain is doing this bizarre thing where it was a lovely, unseasonably warm and spring-like 51 degrees outside at sunrise, and when we (my brain and I) stuck our nose out there and breathed it in, savoring that bouquet of coming rains and flowers, we thought “Ah, smells like quarantine. This is just like that magical March 2020 smell when flowers were blooming and I switched from carefully studying perspective to binge-playing Pocket Camp. Maybe I should go reinstall Pocket Camp and do that instead of paint this morning. Man, I miss quarantine. Real quarantine. Simpler times. Chocolate mousse cake. Watching the backyard come back to life while journaling. Cherry blossom petals floating past the deck from the neighbor’s yard. Fresh strawberries cut up into floral gin and tonics. Eggs over easy with savory pancakes every morning. Cute little decoration game where Isabelle would actually sit outside and read under a tree instead of working all the time. Nowhere to go and nowhere to be. Spring lasted forever that year, and it was magical.”

Except that whole associative process round-house kicked me straight in the face all at once in a split second and I’m still reeling, horrified to discover, and unwilling to believe that this pack of nostalgic propaganda is what the first smell of spring brings up for me now.

I recognize that I made a special effort to not be miserable that spring, but I never accounted for the lingering fondness I would accidentally set myself up for. My first impulse is to have an even better spring, to rewire "spring” as far away from “quarantine” as possible, preferably without as much gin, sweets, and underwhelming freemium gaming, but frankly I’m terrified of ever having a good time ever again because at this point who knows how it’ll turn out in retrospect.

Twitch

Me, an ancient: searches "how do i use twitch"

I always assumed the place would look something like youtube and there wouldn't be any instructions necessary to simply watch a stream, but turns out it looks more like google calendar and when audio starts playing bc you've been clicking stuff but there's no video in sight, you have to... scroll up? hwat lmao

I'm going to try joining in on some study streams with other artists. Made it low-pressure for myself and decided I'll just sign up on the platform and join the stream without painting at first. Good fucking call.

Mayhaps... someday... I'll dare to figure out how to stream my own process. Phew boy.

Fandom AU

Achievement unlocked! A post full of my centaur characters got reblogged with "centaur AU" tags, I'm assuming for the stucky ship judging by the rest of the blog :D

Don't get me wrong, I don't encourage tagging my characters with unrelated stuff, but as an inevitable result of posting art publicly, it's still kind of fun and neat.

Snow

So I kept waking up last night because of how unusually warm it was in the house. I really don't sleep well with the heat going overboard. Kept wondering if someone turned the temperature up before bed or if the sudden temperature drop caused it to work overtime though that's not ever really the case. In the morning, I go downstairs to do yoga and.... the front door is wide fucking open.

Snow everywhere. Yes, in the house. The entire hardwood foyer is soaked. Winter boots, soaked. Leather boots, soaked. Interestingly, only my shoes suffered this structural sabotage. Certainly explains why the heat was working overtime. Flipped the winter boots upside down over a vent and they should soon be dry enough to enjoy a walk in the snow that fell overnight. Leather boots I was really worried about because the water stains looked terrible, but I put some shoe trees in them to absorb the moisture inside and shape them and then gave them a polish with leather conditioner and they look pretty good actually. Luckily my other leather shoes were unharmed because I only have one pair of shoe trees. Fun adventure! I announced I was officially excused from shoveling the driveway because I'd already done my snow shoveling for the day. :D

SFC

Off to go do snowflake challenge #2!

Oddly rich text posting has not been working for me? Is this a thing? It's half annoying and half nostalgic for back when I used to do a lot my fandom stuff in mobile safari in my parked car or between classes and had to html everything. You know, back when I took fandom blogging seriously with lists and links and recs and stuff. I don't necessarily enjoy it though...

So anyway I quit my job bc Tarot cards told me to (this is sort of facetious), fucked off to Europe (for the first time!) for a month bc I jokingly texted my little brother asking if he wanted to go after his college semester was over and he said yes, so like... a week later my job ended and I just grabbed him, bought our tickets and some lodgings and WENT without any plan in mind (no, this isn't even a little facetious it's exactly what happened). Then I spent a couple months hardcore painting Legacy of Kain shit, like, DETERMINED to become amazing and idk become the LoK painter or some shit, and then I dropped a clock on my head and got a concussion and couldn't paint at all for 2-3 months. I'm back to being able to paint a decent amount without too many headaches so long as I do it on iPad and not my desktop/laptop (??), but I can't write well yet and I start to get confusion/nausea/headaches/irritation quickly after typing a couple sentences, so idk brain injuries are weird.

Tumblr being NSFW-unfriendly still sucks. Still kind of smeared over five million different platforms with posting my art bc some have shitty resolutions, some don't allow porn, some allow people to pay me money for original content, etc. There's not any one perfect solution. I'm kind of into BNHA now tho so that's nice. I've missed having a contemporary fandom. Still no idea what I'm doing with my life. For a while I was saying "I'm an illustrator" when people asked me what I do, these days I just say "I'm retired" bc frankly, that's the mood. I know I'll eventually run out of money, but. ????????????????

Never taken Mucinex before because I've never really had this sort of cold before, so I just did what the doctor said - one dose of the plain kind every 12 hours. BAD IDEA. Very poor sleep. And of course I still woke up with the sunrise like normal. I think just one dose in the morning will be My Thing. Cough up a lung during the day, but get some much needed REST during the night.

In other news, I'm making a drastic life change on the full moon, and by the dawn of the new moon, I'll wake up a free, if terrifyingly untethered, man. Low-key because I pulled some Tarot cards that didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Feels right. Feels good. Feels authentic.

My hobbies include not having enough time to read all of philosophical canon and therefore making do by piecing together the very compelling explanations of redditors with casual essays, bursts of reading the philosophers that are my actual target readings in order to prime my brain for accepting them, marathon powering through an entire text once in a blue moon, stepping back, reading some Nietzsche, reading unrelated fiction/nonfiction, and then again re-tackling the whole heap of processes.

Aka my endgoal is actually rather facetious. It's to be able to get through a book called The Penetrated Male. But to understand that book, I need to be more comfortable with Foucault, Derrida, and D&G. But to understand those on a deeper level than what their texts and reddit can provide, I need to dig further into Saussure, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. But to really dig into all the aforementioned motherfuckers, I feel I need to at least tangentially understand Kant, Hegel, and a whole array of other bastards, but that's way beyond my patience, and usually delegated to skimming brief overviews. AND ALL OF THIS WOULD BE REALLY GREAT AND EASY IF PHILOSOPHY WAS MY PRIMARY HOBBY, OR AT LEAST ONE OF THREE MAIN HOBBIES. But it's just one hobby out of twenty and probably not even in the top five.

*aggressively hyper-synthesizes understanding*

Also if anyone loves Shakespeare and can recommend specific editions, that would be amazing. I want to read some tragedies with good explanations, discussions, contemporary translations, or an introduction, and really get a good grip on his work and language. I think I found some good recs online, but I'm always skeptical. Also going to be reading Paradise Lost finally.
Can you tell I'm trying to finally stop being a weenie and tackle writing LoK fanfic?

If you're wondering, yes, yes I have completely set aside all my plans for reading about economics and state-sanctioned discipline for the time being. Typical.

Sigh. I feel like it's been hard lately to find friends online. It's been hard irl with everyone getting married and spending all their time with their spouses, and now it's hard in fandom for reasons I can't wrap my head around yet.

Idk, it's just been a rough time for feeling a part of a tribe lately.

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.

I still strongly love the idea of fandom, it's been such a lovely social circle, hobby, and creative outlet all rolled into one. But I can't deny that, despite my motivational post, I'm unexcited about the whole prospect of moving forward into decentralized fandom.

Not being able to reach all the people I want to reach in one single location means to me that a decoupling of my artist instincts and my fandom interests is absolutely vital to my happiness. Sounds easy, but I know it's not. Nothing convoluted that you tell yourself you should do or should feel is easy, and attacking it head on is always misguided.

What I will do is focus more on studying the things I'm interested in, enjoying growth and specialization that has nothing to do with outside validation. And entirely separate from that, I'll interact more with fandom as a hobby, letting my content creation take a whole-ass backseat. I can't forcefully separate my drives of creation into A and B but I can certainly sequester creation to just A until such day that it overflows into B from excess of love rather than compulsion to keep things the way they were before fandom as I knew it went belly-up.

So new art will probably go on Patreon only, where it'll be up used in lessons and tutorials.
New writing will come when it will, if at all, and it will hopefully come from a place of dicking around rather than taking myself seriously.
And I want to spend more time crawling through fic recs and Ao3 ship tags looking for human connections through stories.

Current Mood: mellow

I value political liberty and political rights (freedom of thought, speech, conscience, and the press, the right to vote, civil equality) more highly than economic liberty and economic rights (property rights, freedom of enterprise, freedom from want, economic equality). I’m in favor of progressive taxation and generous public provision of education, pensions, and health care. I think people should have enough to eat and a roof over their heads, even if they haven’t done much to deserve it. I reject the idea that the market is the singular bedrock of society while everything else is a parasitical growth. I want government to do something about environmental degradation and gross social and economic inequality. I’m a secularist and a supporter of equal rights for women and gays. And when it comes to wanting World Peace, I’m practically a Miss America contestant. So I’m a liberal. — Hendrik Hertzberg

A paragraph that addresses the different kinds of freedoms that exist. Political liberty and economic liberty might sound like a monolithic mass of freedoms, they’re both after all, a kind of “liberty,” but if you read libertarian thought at any length, you’ll quickly realize that the two concepts are entirely distinct for some people, and one and the same for others, which is the root of a lot of disagreement. Here’s the blog response of a conservative to the above paragraph:

Hertzberg’s description of liberal values struck me as fundamentally fair. Conservatives such as me don’t think that people should receive generous education, pensions, and health care when they haven’t done anything to deserve them. We think generous welfare causes people to become parasites, whereas the free market encourages people to be self-reliant. We want government to encourage equal opportunity, but we don’t want it to enforce equality by redistributing wealth. Although conservatives want World Peace, we believe that freedom isn’t free. And finally, I have to admit that conservatives are less willing to protect the environment and less likely to insist on the separation of church and state.

The aspect of the author’s description that I found most interesting was that liberal’s prefer political liberty while conservatives prefer economic liberty. Liberals believe in restricting economic liberty to ensure that political liberty can exist and even thrive, whereas conservatives believe that political liberty cannot thrive or even exist without economic liberty. — Mike Kueber

Kueber doesn’t address here in which way his beliefs actually represent liberty, but they certainly do - the economic kind. The kind where you’re not bound to pay for anyone other than yourself. No matter how personally distasteful you find this belief, that is a kind of liberty, and I think a lot of arguments would become more productive if we spent more time in thinking about which freedoms we value more than others and why.

I hope that more discussions in coming years will wrestle with the idea of compromise. Morals - liberal, conservative, sexual, whatever - owe a lot to the instinct to impair the competition. It’s important that when we look at ideals, including our own, we evaluate how much of them is compromise, and how much of it is unreasonable self-interest, and respond to those ideals based on their spirit of compromise and mutual understanding rather than much we personally relate to the underlying principles.

The more I paint, the more I realize I have no clue what I'm doing tbh. I guess that's just how the brain is designed - you lose conscious awareness of what you do know.

I still half expect that every time I run into a problem, I'll strain a little and then gasp and say "Wait, I know how to fix this! I learned it last month!" and then magic will happen. While that does occur occasionally, most of the time, I just keep chugging along, solving problems I used to not know the solutions to without realizing they're even there until I get to one I'm completely unfamiliar with, and then I'm staring at it thinking "Well, shit, if I didn't have a deadline, and I wasn't afraid of getting distracted and falling into ADHD googling hell, I'd go spend five hours learning about this, but as it is, we'll have to just fix this up with some duct tape and pray." And just like in real life, sometimes duct tape is a miracle worker that works and puts the problem out of sight, out of mind forever because it just happened to be the best fix. But sometimes it's glaringly ugly and draws your attention to it forever to remind you of your failure.

So I guess that... it still is the case that the best way to tell how much I've improved is not how I feel during the process, but how much the final product pleases me compared to the previous few. And in this case... I think I've definitely stagnated since March and really need to get back to studying, because my satisfaction with my final drafts has definitely dropped off since I started working only on full pieces.

I don't think literally anyone will appreciate me diverting my attention to yet another site instead of just hunkering down and providing tumblr with content, but I suspect I wouldn't be escaping so much if I felt fulfilled. Something's missing. What that something is, I don't know. First spending so much time on discord, now poking around here... Maybe I'm just trying to find a path back to authenticity, which I feel like I've wandered away from in the past year or so.

One way or another, I'm going to re-fall in love with the fandom hobby.

Ah.... for now, I think that means just making things. Rather than... participating in things, per se. I'm disenchanted with the idea of zines. All the stress of work and deadlines, with none of the feedback and support of just doing something for a community you're part of. Keeping things under wraps might be necessary for the concept of a zine, but I've found that it's pretty lonely.

I think I'm just in another state of flux. I don't know what my main fandom is anymore, or what my main ship is, or who my community is. I don't know how to make my footing precipitate back out of the mix. :')

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Over time, we became less human and more... divine.

Entries tagged with journal

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FFA Lullaby

New Tag: Blender Bender. Gabriel goes nuts on the 3D.

Eclipse & Blender

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Impromptu WIP sharing week!

Askbox

Hello... spring...

Snow Day wheeee

Twitch

Fandom AU

Snow

SFC

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New Moon, New Me

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Readings and er... Goodbye, Patreon

On Decentralized Fandom: wondering if any of it is worth it.

Varieties of Liberty

The more you learn...

Yet another account for yet another purpose

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October 2025

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