Gracious Anthracite @anthracite@dragon.style

Today I was out walking
when I had a brief flash
and saw the people I was passing
as collections of cells gathered together into muscles
pulling against the bones that they grew for some cells to live inside
slithering against each other like a bucket of live eels

And it was kind of beautiful.

Is it #introduction time again? Sorta seems to be. I'd boost the old one but it's a little out of date.

Hi, I'm Peggy, and I run dragon.style. If "maintaining a Patreon to pay the hosting, putting off updating it for a year, and occasionally opening the place up for new users" qualifies as "running" it.

I am a trans lady who spends most of her time drawing complicated sci-fi comics and sort of earning a living doing that via Patreon.

Adobe Illustrator has been my main medium since 2000, it's a pretty unusual choice but it works for me.

I used to do burlesque, then pole dance, as a hobby and a way to stay fit. I miss it and should find something similar again.

You may know me from elsewhere as Egypt Urnash.

@irisjaycomics eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs eggs
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I think I have written the best reply I will ever write on Reddit. If it shuts down tomorrow I can walk away feeling fine about that.

(full text and more context, https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/146crxu/we_need_an_infernal_rite_parade/jnpq2od/)

grainy blur effect

I saw a post on /r/adobeillustrator asking how to make something like this. It's pretty easy.

Draw a shape in dark grey.
Opacity: 20% screen.
Effect>pixelate>mezzotint. I used "grainy dots" for the setting.
Duplicate the shape. Move some points around so it's smaller, leave some points unchanged, or very close to the original locations.
Make it a much lighter gr...

Read the whole post: http://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2023/06/10/grainy-blur-effect/

(Also, seriously, all that time spent answering noob questions on /r/adobeillustrator has taught me how to ask a question properly, and part of that is posting a screenshot of the ENTIRE UI. Doing that let one of the experts on the Moho forums quickly say "oh yeah there's a bunch of shit you can only do on frame 0 of a scene, and you are on frame 33". Experts at a program know how to tease meaning out of all that stuff around the edges of the screen that is just noise to Noob You.)

One hour of fucking around with the manual, and a couple of questions posted to the forum with screenshots, and I have made Baby's First Animation in Moho. Can you tell which parts were imported from the hilariously crude tutorial parts that came with the program, and which I drew myself?

It's only going to get better from here.

Making sure the Moho manual is loaded into the iPad before I go out and chill somewhere trying to get the hang of it.

The other day I spent like 4h digging around just to figure out if my current Illustrator workflow of Pencil tool + tons of Graphic Styles could be translated. It can. So now it’s time to dig deep into how this tool handles a timeline, and lets me avoid getting lost in the boring parts of animation.

on elves

so it turns out that actually elves have a LOT of kids

like they are constantly getting pregnant

but the thing is they have a strategy more like frogs than humans, when an elf is pregnant he or she is just brewing a bunch of tiny little egglets in their womb for like a single month, then they go down to the Birthing Pool and a whole host of tiny little bug-like flying critters with wings just come pop...

Read the whole post: http://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2023/06/08/on-elves/

It’s got *video tracking*, you can automatically rotoscope your boned-up drawing to a video, and it’s in the same damn program you use to draw and animate it. Sheeiiit.

After spending the last 2-3 hours fooling with Modo I am *fascinated*, I am finding a way to use it that is *so* tantalizingly close to the way I use Illustrator, except with the addition of the Z and T axes. I am definitely gonna have to spend some more time playing with this soon.

So I found out that last year's version of Moho is on Humble Bundle for thirty five bucks and hell yes I will spend thirty five bucks for the tool that "Song of the Sea" was made in.

When you open it, it loads in a short little clip. A fully-rigged character, a couple seconds of keyframes. It's a real nice invitation to just dive in and start fucking around. And it's got at *least* three of them, getting a little more complex each time - the first one's just a little boned-up guy walking around, the second has a camera move, the third's got multiple characters and a couple different shots. That is some *sweet* fucking onboarding.

Spiderverse 2 was pretty fucking gorgeous but way too fucking long. Even moreso if you add Spiderverse 3 to its running time, as instead of an ending it just slams to a screeching fucking halt with "To Be Continued". Fuck that.

Also, it had a *stunningly* short credits list, either a lot of people got elided or it was just a really tiny team.

I just watched this compilation of "imagery that looks like what you see on DMT" and I swear I have seen some of these places in @llamasoft_ox's games. 2:57 is *very* definitely a nice round of Polybius happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7OkE-Uj3Bg

dude who moderates a lot of subreddits makes a subreddit for migrating to Lemmy, gets banned for being a spammer after starting to promote it to other Reddit community mods: https://lemmy.ml/post/1152281

I can certainly make a case for this being an automatic spam detection, it's what happens in the next couple of days that's gonna really be worth reacting to.

This is possibly the saddest thing I have ever seen a c64 produce. The demoscene is now producing meditations on Getting Old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aJzSySfCZM

brb, digging up a copy of goatse for this

not really, I'd just make a picture of my fursoña with her tits pushed against the screen so hard it's starting to crack, but seriously, I wonder if anyone at Apple has thought about the consequences of letting any random person shove an arbitrary image into your phone just by calling you - I'm looking forwards to news that someone has fuzzed the heck out of this and can now p0wn any ios17 device by just calling it with a precisely-malformed "contact poster".

I am looking into #lemmy. Is anyone in the #furry scene running one? I found pawb.social and set up an account there, maybe there's others. Maybe there's ones with existing communities for #adobeillustrator and the #occult and stuff like that, even?

Also kudos to the main Lemmy instance for saying "please go join another instance, we can't handle a significant percentage of Reddit making accounts to kick the tires all at once" instead of trying to scale and become a massive centralized place like mastodon.social.

The ultimate DO THIS YOU SLACKER technique: a post-it with the to-dos plopped right in the middle of your computer's screen, so you have to work around it.

what if I just quit microblogging entirely and went back to writing blog posts

“nighthawks” except everyone is staring into their phones

has this been done

this has probably been done

Blocking Fediverse nodes for being run by TERFs is a normal part of being a queer trans lady who runs a Mastodon, and normally it is a task of little note, but it sure is saddening to block run being run by an artist you used to like before she went down the TERFhole.