Gracious Anthracite @anthracite@dragon.style

New page of Parallax over on Patreon!

In which Olivia encounters a Goddess, and I make your eyes Bleed.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/vx10-15a-final-54492660

@dhfir

Because you can hire web developers and make a half-assed experience for everyone on every platform instead of hiring people who actually know how to use programming languages that don't live six levels of abstraction away from the hardware and maintain 4-5 versions that actually feel like native apps on their various platforms.

Everything is web-first and it's all shit now.

@thegibson

Looks like a nice one to curl up in a hammock with on a sunny day!

@Phorm

WOOOOO

Goddamnit Evernote. You spent the last couple years fucking up your apps by rebuilding them in fucking Electron and adding a bunch of bullshit that looks pretty but gets in the way of actually using them for their core uses. And you STILL have absolutely no facilities for dealing with sync conflicts beyond “now you have two copies of this note, have fun figuring out what changed!”.

@Patashu

You did it well enough to show up on the local timeline here, at least. :)

@Phoenix_Borealis

* decent materials, don't use the cheapest, shittiest paints - or the nicest, priciest ones either; shit paint is hard to work with, expensive paint is stress because you're WASTING MATERIALS OH NO

* decent tools, play with them, start to learn which one to reach for in which situation - when do you want the thin brush, when do you want the fat one, when do you want to smear it on with the palette knife?

* work bigger, this makes it easier to get details in without trying to precisely place a brush with all of five hairs exactly where you want it, and gives you more room for small mistakes

* try different paints, watercolor is a bitch because you have to get it right the first time, oil takes forever to dry, I like to use various acrylics and gouache because they can dry pretty fast and are opaque so I can cover up my mistakes

* basic art skills apply, if you have not spent any time developing your eye for proportions, color harmonies, shading, construction, composition, etc, then you are going to be wrestling with this on top of the paint - if everyone else you're painting with has a lot more of this under their belts then it is easy to look around and feel dumb - it might be interesting to ask your friends for some help, if this is the case, though there is really no shortcut besides just accepting that you have a lot of awkward beginner work to get through before it starts looking good to you, followed by a few more infinite plateaus of "I Suck Forever" when you start learning to see new things you haven't learnt to put on the canvas yet.

@coyohti

Congratulations, I wish I could manage that!

@kobi_lacroix

Sounds like you’ve been catching up on blaseball.

@Leucrotta

woah

Just when did I become someone who thinks "a serious, solemn history of an offshoot of the Temple of Satan" is "casual reading on my day off" anyway

@aearo

It means you may actually be a stinky not-dog-thing from beyond time and space, deep in your heart. I think.

I spent today taking a sad kitty with a bumpy nose to the vet. Now I am rewarding myself for successfully not absorbing her immense stress and fear during this by having cake and a cookie.

I think this may be the most gracious “It’s not FOR you” passage I have ever encountered.

(Michael Aquino, “The Temple Of Set”.)

In the VERY unlikely event of me ever becoming a real estate developer, I want to name a suburb’s streets after Cats.

No. Not breeds of cats. CATS. “I live on the corner of Rumpleteazer and Jennyanydots” cats.

If there is a railway nearby I think it is imperative that it NOT intersect or run along Skimbleshanks, just to annoy anyone who takes the trouble to chase down the reference.

@fluffy

do my homework for INTERNET POINTS!

holy crap Wacom support is actually asking for the applescript that stopped working, I guess they actually *do* want to continue supporting that interface? That's a nice surprise.

Rando on Discord: are you good at illustrator

Me: It's been my main medium for 20+ years. Probably.

Me: If you're about to ask me to do your homework, you're in luck - I'm currently having a 90% off sale on my normal rate of $10k/h.

(because it almost always IS "please do my homework" in my experience)

Someday I am going to end up in an interesting conversation with someone who notices that I always sign for credit/debit stuff with a sigil invoking Mercury.

@dzuk

It's easier to read news and imagine worst-case scenarios, or ones based on the same seemingly-unstoppable societal processes continuing to grind inevitably forwards. Coming up with stories of getting out of the current mess is HARD.

Plus yeah there's definitely a market for misery porn. How many horrible things can you find an excuse to describe in lascivious detail, as a grimdark author? You're just showing how bad it could be, honest, you're not into any of it At All!