This is not a clever title

Archive Your Journal, Now.

armaina — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:26:34 GMT

There are concerning changes happening to Livejournal and I am begging you to archive and jump ship. More information on Rahaeli's Bluesky:

rahaeli (@rahaeli.bsky.social)

Okay, I will preface this with the GIGANTIC disclaimer that I promise I know how this looks, and I *swear* this is not personally motivated: If you have an old #LiveJournal account, and it has things you still care about in it, download it or import it to Dreamwidth SOON. Details:

bsky.app

Transcription below:

Okay, I will preface this with the GIGANTIC disclaimer that I promise I know how this looks, and I *swear* this is not personally motivated: If you have an old #LiveJournal account, and it has things you still care about in it, download it or import it to Dreamwidth SOON. Details:

On December 29, the current owners of LJ posted an announcement to the Russian language news community: ru-news.livejournal.com/80899.html You can drop that into Google Translate, it does pretty okay with Russian these days. If you don't want to, the summary: to comply with Russian law (they didn't admit that part but I know that's why they had to do it), users with the "Cyrillic Services" turned on can no longer post or comment unless they are inside Russia and identified with their government identity.

(There is an exception for accounts that have over 500 "social capital", which is a thing that mostly applies to the Cyrillic services, I think. I haven't kept up with their feature development. I also suspect it's a temporary exception.) I have gone through all the comments: LJ current management (remember, LJ is currently owned by Rambler, which is owned by Sberbank) is not giving out much information, but users have pieced together the following from how they see the changes behaving:

Users inside Russia who don't have Cyrillic services enabled have to turn them on. They will not be able to see any post that was made by someone not in the Cyrillic services after December 29. Users outside Russia with Cyrillic services enabled are in a bind. They have to identify with one of the systems (payment or Sber ID), but those are all mostly not an option for anyone outside Russia (payment because of sanctions, Sber ID because you need a Russian phone number, which is now almost impossible to get outside Russia).

People who don't have Cyrillic services enabled and aren't in Russia will be further isolated from Russian LJ: posts will not be visible and no one can comment across the divide. There's been no English language announcement of any of this. It is my considered opinion, from what I know of geopolitics, Russian politics, and the technical capabilities of LiveJournal, that the current owners are working to isolate any LJ user outside Russia from any LJ user inside Russia to the greatest extent possible because of changes in Russian law since 2022 and the beginning of the "three day military operation" (soon to enter year five!), they haven't been able to accept payment from anyone outside Russia since then, and the only ads they can run pay almost nothing for outside-Russia views.

I am very, very conscious of how it looks for me to be saying this, because I own and operate a direct competitor to LJ, but: I strongly suspect, from all these signals, that Sberbank is preparing to either sell the outside-Russia part of LJ if they can find a buyer, or shut it down if they can't. Because of sanctions, it will be very difficult for them to find a buyer, and most of the potential options would be deeply not great. Given the lack of advance notice for the changes in that RU news post, I suspect the sale or shutdown will come equally without notice if and when it happens.

If there is anything you still care about hosted on LJ — posts, links, icons, photos, anything — and you don't have a backup, get that backup ASAP. I have not stayed current on ways to back up. The ones I used to know of:

1. The on-site month by month export as described in this FAQ.
2. If you still have the Semagic client downloaded (or can find wherever the current version is; I don't know it offhand), it can download everything for you.
3. A third party script such as ljbook, ljarchive.pl, or jbackup.pl
4. Third party formatting services, which have mostly shut down to the best of my knowledge

And the one that makes this an ethically fraught warning for me to be issuing but that I know for sure works: my website, dreamwidth.org, has an on-site import tool to grab everything but your Scrapbook photos (which can't be accessed with the download API, sigh)

You can also import LJ communities to DW communities if you're the maintainer (not a moderator) of the source community on LiveJournal and the admin (not a moderator) of the target community on DW.

I will raise my hand and swear on my cat that my only motivation for suggesting this is helping people preserve as much personal history as possible: we run no advertising and have no investors to care about metrics, so us hosting your backup does nothing but COST us (a very tiny bit of) money. (Which we are very happy to do! I am a preservationist and I care about helping people keep their stuff safe; the cost to us to store it is negligible and we're happy to provide it.) Caution, the importer may be a little busy right now :)

But if you don't trust my motivations, use one of the other methods to save your own stuff, and in either case, use the Wayback Machine to archive any other people's entries you really care about (fanfic, posts from friends who have passed away, posts in communities with inactive maintainers, etc).

I do not, to my very great sorrow, think LJ will survive in anything resembling even its "hollowed-out shell of what it used to be" current form for much longer. And I hate what it's become, but I'll cry when it dies, because it shaped SO MUCH of my life. Please share this with anyone you know who still uses LiveJournal. It could collapse next week; it could last another two years. I think "next week" is probably too fast and "two years" is probably pushing it, a lot; that's my only prediction.

So yeah, Ditch LiveJournal. Sooner, rather than later.
I vastly prefer Dreamwidth (You can import your whole blog + comments, there.) but I also have an Insane Journal mirror (mostly for public posts)

https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/
https://armaina.insanejournal.com/

dreamwidth

armaina — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 03:41:45 GMT

If it's not become clear, I've moved my operations to dreamwidth ages ago. As of something around a month ago, LJ stopped allowing posts from DW to their service and are not communicating with DW devs to resolve this. And with everything going on, I'm glad I moved everything over to DW as I do not think this service is secure or safe in any sense of the word. Because of this I doubt I'll use LJ again.

https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/

you can follow me on dreamwidth, I'll always be there.

Intresting Roundup

armaina — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 23:36:39 GMT

First of all, I made a guide on how to rip music from audio CD with current software available
https://aniamra.tumblr.com/post/673493067089772544/ripping-audio-cds
Used tumblr because the format is just better for image and re-distribution of information.

On the 13th I made a post about the Northern Territories for Ertakar the things they did to survive in the winter and it's harshness. And then on the 14th a video essayist I like to watch named Jacob Geller posted a video on Fear of Cold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp2wbyLoEtM
Which goes into not so much fear but rather, the actual brutality of cold and contains both real and fictional accounts of death and/or injury from the cold. It was just kinda amusing to see something so timely that illustrates just why my Ertakar had developed such a rigid form of survival structure that colored their culture for centuries.

Back in 2019 around 71,000 VHS and Betamax from 1975 to 2012 that had been recorded by Archival Activist and Librarian, Marion Stokes, were digitized and placed on the Internet Archive for anyone to access.
https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo
Atlas Obscura article on the subject.
One of the most fascinating recorded shows is one called Input, a cross discussion television series syndicated in Philadelphia, that was discussions of different social and political topics at the time when it aired. Something I think really important that gives a look into mindsets of the time stretched across all different groups and professions. Like, in the episode, Who Needs To Be Normal? It sure is fascinating to see in 1969 they have the same problems with job applications then as we do now, and if anything, it's gotten worse. Just things like that.

All of this would have been lost had not been the efforts of Marion Stokes. Just, how incredible is that? Archivists are modern-day heroes, honestly.

Also read this article about Berkeley Nutraceuticals (maker of Enzyte)
https://www.businessinsider.com/natural-male-enhancement-privacy-case-2013-8
and it's absolutely unhinged business practices and the dubious practices that were involved with the case and a person's right to privacy in regard to email and other telecommunications. It was essentially because of this case that we got our full right to privacy with email, which we didn't have until 2009. It's a somber reflection on how long their method of retrieving this information could have gone on had the case not been this big and the defendant not have the means to contest it.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/781626.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Northern Territories

armaina — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 21:59:46 GMT

One thing that might pop up from time to time is that Tlakanok hails from a territory in the north, from one of the northern most territories for Ertakar. Going back to what I mentioned in the last info post, Ertkar have a slightly lower body temperature as compared to humans, and they don't tend to favor colder environments. Bundling up for the cold is difficult and cumbersome with their wings, and the cold impedes their ability to fly both due to bundling up and the high risk of frostbite on their wing membrane. Because of all this, the settlement of the north was one made in desperation, it wasn't what anyone could consider their 'first choice'.

The time frame for when exactly the first trek to the north would be likely 'ancient' by Ertakar standards, I don't have the details for that and I might at one point but the point is more to cover the near-modern and modern culture that persists in the territory and how it got that way. What I do know is that it was the result of a war/territory dispute of sorts. The losers were either 'banished' or spitefully made a trek north as far away as they could from other Ertakar to establish a settlement with no competition. The north was largely untouched aside from a few nomadic groups during the warmer seasons. Despite the snow and cold in the winters, the upside was that the north hosted larger megafauna, so at least as long as they could survive the winters they wouldn't be competing for food sources like the territory the had just left.

Adapting to the harsh living conditions lead to a culture and society that very heavily centered around resource conservation and survival and their language changed to reflect this. One of the most prominent elements of this is the emergence a sliding scale of protected to expendable categories of residents which resulted in a unique pronoun structure. Those considered most 'protected' were children/teens/young adults. Next were the ones considered most virile, capable of producing strong children. After that were doctors, certain tradesmen, and hunter/soldiers, the Ertkar that the loss of which could cause a huge blow to the survival of the society. Then there was an 'Expendable' category of Ertakar, this includes the elderly, the disabled, and anyone considered difficult to take care of that would be unable to 'provide' for the colony. When resources were tight, this categorization of individuals resulted in who got priority in resources, first children, then breeders, then the workers, then the 'expendable'.

These territories might have had a 'Leader' in that same category but this wasn't common in many of the colonies that splintered out. The idea was that if their survival hinged on the leadership of a single individual then they had a poor structure, they needed multiple people that could serve the purpose of being leaders and most of them were of the mindset that they needed multiple leading forces of different skills. However there was the emergence of a special additional honorific on top of the usual one to indicate that individual was exemplary in their field and this often was regarded as a 'leadership' title.

In the current modern day, this practice is long since discarded. Advances in technology and housing made survival in the north significantly more easy, still unfavorable, but no longer at risk of decimating the population of an entire town due to one bad snow-in. As the need to conserve resource to survive through the winter became obsolete, the need to keep a protected/expendable structure faded but the remnants of it still remain in the native language of the northern Ertakar. The pronoun used for the young still remains as a sort of diminutive, the pronoun used for the virile just became the general adult pronoun. The pronoun used for doctors/soldiers/tradesmen became a sort of honorific, used to express admiration or praise of skill. The Expendable pronoun became one of an insult, not dissimilar to how we would call someone garbage or worthless but it certainly has a much more poignant cultural sting, and depending on the context used in is regarded as a slur.

The Northern territories used to be hostile to the idea of integration of new members, every new person was a new resource drain unless they had a skill or trade that could provide for the colony and level out the burden a new member would place on them. Some groups were of course, genuinely xenophobic, but even when they weren't, this caution to drains on their establishments were read as xenophobic even when they weren't. However, even from the beginning they had very good relationships with the nomadic groups, finding them a vital trade source both for goods, medicine, and news. They only visited in the summer when food and resources were abundant, they knew how to preserve food like they did, and were often removed from the political conflicts that drove those Ertakar to the north in the first place.

Where many other Ertakar cultures have a preference for fresh/raw foods with little cooking, the northern territories relied heavily on food preservation to get them through snow-ins and harsh winter months. Hunting was more than possible during these times due to hibernating animals that were easy prey, but the trek to search for them could result in Ertakar hunters loosing wings or digits from the frostbite risk of the hunt itself. This meant that those from the north have more in the way of cultural dishes and cuisines.

Towns in the north have wholly different structures from most any other Ertakar territory. Because of their need to bundle their wings in the winter, they did not make tall structures that required flight like other Ertakar did. They either created large communal housing so to help better keep warm in the winter and assist others, or they had more individual huts and used a tunnel system to avoid being out in the biting cold, which was good both for warmth and for when snow was enough to block doors and windows. (come to think of it, being grounded for the winter means the coming of spring is probably a huge deal to them, they probably have some big spring flight celebration, both to celebrate surviving the winter and stretch their wings properly after several months)

Despite the thousand year difference from the cultural structure of the ancient society to the modern day, many Ertakar from other territories regard northern territory Ertkar as 'barbaric'. Insults or references about how they're cold (hah), unfeeling, ableist, are not uncommon. This underlying negative perception makes a lot of northern Ertakar hesitant to leave the north which results in the further assumption that they are prideful and elusive and don't want to mingle with other Ertakar. But because of this 'isolation' it only makes rumors and misconceptions more prominent about Northern Ertakar culture, even in the modern day with all it's networked communication.

For example, while desperate cannibalism isn't unheard of for Ertkar during war-time, (in conflicts where Ertkar would over-kill and spoil the local fauna to starve-out the competition, resorting to eating dead Ertakar was not uncommon, not desirable. There was practiced knowledge in how to cannibalize without making oneself sick taught among Ertakar soldiers even in the modern day) Rumors were spread about how Northern Ertakar were uncharacteristically cannibalistic, about how they used their 'expendable' class to cannibalize deliberately during the winter due to their 'laziness' to go out and just kill one of the hibernating fauna instead.

The foundation of the colony migrated from the arid environments, specifically, so their phenotype goes all the way back to them, this means they share a lot of genetic characteristics with arid Ertakar. Head crests are characteristic in both Arid and Northern Ertakar, but Arid Ertakar tend to range warmer colors of white/grey/black and browns, while Northern Ertakar range more muted colors. Because of the visual similarities, Arid Ertkar might go out of their way to insist they're 'not like them', as they get accused from being cut from the same cloth. Other Arid Ertakar might instead be defensive and advocate for compassion, finding kinship in their 'cousins'. But because of this, the Arid territories can be mixed back of extremely disdainful and extremely accepting of their Northern Ertakar 'cousins'. Though sometimes the acceptance can be it's own insult, as some see it as a form of 'saving' them from a 'barbaric' society.

There are of course, positive biases. They get framed a survivors, stalwart, hardy, capable to live and preserver through anything. Sometimes there's even admiration of their ability to survive the cold year after year. But this can sometimes get them 'type cast' into soldiers, guards and forms of manual labor, regardless if what their skillset actually is.

Though admittedly it's worth noting that these biases subtle. They're very old ones so it's not as strong as they once were. But it's not gone and can still color a person's perception subconsciously.

Also in addition to everything, while the classification system no longer apply to current modern-day northern societies, some remnants of it exist in different ways, mostly in the form of rigid expectations of what one is supposed to do for the colony as a whole. For some of the smaller colonies, if you were good a fighting, strong, and aggressive, you were a soldier/guard, if you were skilled at textiles or leather working, that what you would provide, if you were good with children you spent your time with caregivers and so on. Sure you could dabble in something outside your core job, but you couldn't make that your assigned contribution to the colony. If they needed you in something else, they couldn't afford to delegate the resources of your skills elsewhere. This is one of the elements that prompted Tlakanock to leave her home.

Tlakanok was large, strong, and a skilled fighter even before volunteering for the Teotkoa project. She very much wanted to adopt, to be a mother, she had no desire to have a partner and get pregnant, she wanted to be part of the child-rearing coven (they participated in communal child-rearing, people that weren't assigned care-givers but had children, could live there while their child was in infancy, but would need to leave the communal house when the child passed a certain level of independence. The child would be left at the communal home when the parent worked, and could go back home with the parent after.) but her home town insisted they were in desperate need of her skill as a soldier/defender instead, they had enough caretakers. Instead finding a new home in another northern colony, she ventured to one of the largest cities known on the continent. She suspected there would be a far greater demand for adoptive parents in a city, especially the one where these new human aliens were that seemed to breed very fast and die very early. However she wasn't expecting the roadblocks in accepting her, a Northern Ertakar, as a mother of children. When the war between human and Ertakar started, she volunteered for the Teotkoa project to prove she would sacrifice and defend the home even if she was an outsider, and she was prepared to die to do so. However, things turned out very differently than expected.

This stigma against Northern Ertkar, especially Tlakanok, what she was, what she represented, is all tangled into why there was so much political weight wrapped up in her both being alive when she was ordered to be executed for the sake of peace and her having a biological child. These elements absolutely pass on to Talon being half Northern Ertakar, half of the 'berserker', her mother, specifically.

It's worth noting that there are plenty of other biases and stigmas for other Ertakar, I just haven't developed them all quite yet to be able to write it out, but these things will always be peppered in the undertones of conflict and dialog because they're just as much a moving, learning, adapting species as any of us and there will always be biases, bigotry, and misinterpretation with any group.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/781284.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Little Notes

armaina — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:19:52 GMT

- Ertakar Body Temp
Marsupials have lower body temps than other mammals because some of them have internal testes, which can range from 30℃ (86℉) to 35℃ (95℉). But sperm dies at 35℃ (95℉) so only Marsupials that keep their testicles externally would be that warm. Ertakar house all genitals internally which means that if their sperm also operates the same way other mammal sperm does, Ertkar would need to have a body temperature around 30℃ (86℉) to 34℃ (93℉) at the absolute most.

So with that in mind I'm going to cut it in half and say that Ertakar body temp averages around 32℃ (89.6℉), where a degree up or down isn't outside the norm.

They tend to prefer warmer/temperate climates, and don't do as favorably in cold ones. This is why establishments in the north are more rare for Ertakar and often more difficult to live in. Wings are difficult to wrap and warm, like you can but they take time and effort to do and then render them unusable in times of extreme cold.

Soooo what about Talon? The human average body temp is 37℃ (98.6℉), so for her I'm going to say her resting body temp is 35℃ (95℉) regardless of form.

- Ertkar Practice Concept
I mentioned this in one of my older world building entries about divination, I had an idea about a form of spiritual/divination practice that involved germinating a seed with blood and spit mixed with the soil. The idea was that either how the seed grows is used to divine one's future or, that doing so ties you to the tree and leads to a sort of spiritual symbioses. You take care of the tree, the tree enriches your life Both of those practices could exist depending on different splits if beliefs/culture. In general, practice can include more than trees, trees are just the most common as they have long lifespans that can keep up with the Ertkar's.

I wasn't sure where I was going to use it or what for I decided to use it for the culture/society Tlakanock hails from. It probably related to old practices cultivating the land. Being in the north, ensuring they had more trees to replace the ones brought down for goods and shelter. You don't want to cut down trees if they're tied to you, so you plant more that you can in addition to your personal tree.

This will probably be some significance here and there as there is a tree of this kind that Tlakanock planted on the property of the house that she and Talon lived in. Talon probably has a young tree there too, Xiktali might as well.

- Ertakar Living Arrangements
For most cultures/societies, they never really got the idea of 'owning' land. This does change in a few locations, I don't know where just yet, but on the whole the common concept is that, if there is room, there is a place for you to live. In smaller colonies/towns this is a pretty casual process, some may have a large group/communal house for new members that they can rest before building their own housing. But in large cities the housing process is very different. The city the core story takes place in has a very rigorous process of application and sorting of who gets to live where. Ground floor and specialized housing are reserved for disabled and impaired that need the access, and multi-room housing for child raising and communal living. Those are just some examples. Combined housing/workshop for certain trade skills I think are also going to be common. (might be forms of communal housing?) This has it's own drawbacks as problems with application times, malicious actors both in those applying or those grading applications, as well as the long standing problems with human integration in Ertakar societies.

Tlakanock, lived originally in the far north. I have to write down that whole cultural variation, as it's a very different way of life. Its been in my head I just haven't put it to text.

The city the story takes place in is a coastal territory. Coastal locations in temperate territories often see the highest population of Ertakar and most mixed Ertakar populations, as the combination of sea and land prey are able to sustain the larger number Ertakar without wiping out the native prey species.

- Teotkoa Healing
I think I'm going to go with something along the lines of 6x the average healing rate for humans.

- Talon Details
She retains her mass no matter what form she takes, I've estimated she's potentially around 400 pounds when accounting for her Ertakar form height, wings, tail, and the increased mass density that comes with Teotkoa muscle enhancement.

Also

Being both a hybrid and Teotkoa means Talon probably isn't compatible with any other blood other than her own. This means any transfusions would have to be done with a store of her own blood, as she might not be compatible with even plasma of others, let alone the red blood cells themselves. This means she has to do regular drawing of her own blood, and I'm not sure how often Talon has to have her blood taken to be stored away on the regular in order to make sure there's enough on standby for emergency transfusions.

For humans they can replace the amount of blood taken in 24-48 hours, and the red blood cells are replaced within 10-12 weeks so it's recommended to wait 112 days between donations. If going by the 6x recovery rate, would be looking at probably about 19 days between donations.

Blood can only be stored safely for 42 days.. at least for us. It's possible that because of the unique issue it's motivated the development of some sort of artificial blood cycling system like an artificial heart cycle to keep the bloodcells from deteriorating as fast. But this would also require some detection to account for anything that might have 'gone bad' but I'm probably going to need to research this more specifically.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/780930.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

2021 summary

armaina — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 09:45:41 GMT

2021 has been an interesting year for me, and a mostly good one, especially toward the end of the year. First, have this little art summary meme for the year.

I did a lot of experimenting this year, I started using a new sketch/finish/render style that I've grown to like and that has also given me the means to do things that are a little less tedious than my usual clean line work.

I had some rough spots, as I struggled with to find financial stability for myself and the endless black hole that is marking myself for commissions. I had a few slumps of depression that were directly related to this, because it truly is a soul crushing spot to exist in. But getting a job in September lifted such a huge weight off my mind. I was able to put all my focus into my first real mini comic, because my life was no longer consumed with making another marketable commission time or trying to wrap my head around what 'sells'. From September till now it's been this slowly ramping up Good feeling.

Because of my mini-comic, I have now set the foundation for something I've wanted to do since I was a teenager. Truly this is the first time that creating a comic truly feels within my grasp, it no longer feels like a distant mountain I'll never be able to climb. It's still huge and daunting, but it feels tangible. Even in the times in the past when I tried to start this comic it never felt this tangible. It's so important to me and it's really made me feel alive.

Tied in to that, this is the first time in.. almost two decades, I felt like there are people that actually care about what I'm working on. I've felt so alone in that respect, and it's given me this feeling of stability I can't recall if I've ever felt before. I've noticed that I've had those anxiety feelings of 'I can't draw that in front of other people, no one wants to see that' happen less and less. That's almost unheard of, for me. I still get it some times, that anxiety will never 100% vanish I think, but it's not around in the constant soul-crushing way it was before, and I think with the volume of work I've been doing and how easy it is to pick up the pen and just Draw is proof of how much that's changed for me.

2020 was a year of recovery, of finding myself again. 2021 has been a year of doing something and feeling like I might actually have a handle on things.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/779962.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I'm an outlier and should not be counted

armaina — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 20:44:04 GMT

I've always spent my life with one foot in the door of one thing and one foot in the door of another in an abstract way. Being a part of worlds and belonging to neither. Because of this I don't have experiences and preferences like other people do and so I spent my life in the belief that X doesn't apply to me or that I don't belong in Y and mostly always kinda just.. making my own place for myself. And I don't necessarily dislike it, I don't pine for the hope that I'll find the perfect 'label' for me, in some ways I like being an outlier because it means my perception is different and it's good to have different perceptions, but sometimes, that's an awfully lonely position to be in.

When people bring up topics with the intent to include the group, either by polling their experiences ('Has anyone ever experienced this?') or by making a statement that's ('Shoutout to everyone that is this and turned out doing that!') intended to rally the like-experiences I'm so often in this place of 'almost but not quite' and I don't know if that different way of experiencing or the result of, is part of the conversation. But... I kinda want that outlier experience of mine to be accounted for because maybe someone else is like that? So there's this thought that goes through my head 'do I speak up to be accounted for this experience that isn't what others experience or do I keep my mouth shut and just let the people in the clearly defined groups have their comradery or commiseration or whatever the tone of the context is.' More often than not, I just let people rant or rave about the topic in their agreement and acknowledge I wasn't 'invited' to the conversation by way of not having the same experience. (and as a sidenote, I'm very well aware of the difference where an outlier/out-group experience/input isn't helpful, I take no offense to that, that's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to open-ended topics/discussions/polling that doesn't inherently exclude something.)

Sometimes I do speak up, I do make the comment because I feel like maybe it's important to contribute to the conversation or the topic felt open enough that me saying something wouldn't sound self-serving or de-railing. And I get some sort of remark around 'I guess you're just an exception' in so many different words or phrases. Sometimes it can be derisive, sometimes it can be friendly but... what do I even say to that?

Should I stop? Should I no longer throw in my perception/experiences? If I'm an outlier does that mean I'm not part of the conversation? Am I exempt from the conversation by default and other conversations where I am the exception, going forward? It's more confusing in spaces where it's light-hearted not derisive because if it's derisive I'll just shut up and store that knowledge that it's not welcome away for future similar experiences. But when it's friendly 'teasing' I laugh it off but like.. what else can I do? No one says anything else to follow it up that they want to hear about my exception/experience so like.. I don't. And I go back to hesitating if I should speak up again even in places where it's supposed to be friendly because I was never given any further indication that I should say anything.

But at the end of it all, whether I say something or don't say anything at all, the fact that I have this whole conflict in my head at all really just makes me feel that very specific kind of alone, all over again.

If it's not been obvious enough to people that know me, or even so far in this journal, this is a big reasons why Half-Breeds resonate with me. They're these in the middle of two worlds and belonging to neither. Outlier experiences that don't fit in any one experience that they originated from. Heck they might not even fit with other half-breeds of the same type because of the range of experiences is so varied. It's why the only things I can relate to are the things I make myself, because no one else is going to be able to cover the niche experiences and feelings I have, I can't trust them to. I can only rely on myself to represent the things I feel.

And the thing of it is, it's not that I want any kind of box or label to belong to. I just.. want to be accounted for. Even if I'm the only one, and there's no word or label for it, it's nice to be accounted for, acknowledged, or heard.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/779634.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Apps and Scripts

armaina — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 20:22:30 GMT

I've been so preoccupied with things in my life I haven't sat down and really focused much. It's a good preoccupation though! So have a jumble of subjects and links.

First, Apple has been putting the pressure on Tumblr again to 'get rid of the porn' on the app, and it's lead to some of the most frustrating posts and wild accusations of people that clearly don't understand how the whole process works. Luckily, one former dev of Tumblr spoke up about the changes and why things are the way they are and I just love when devs talk about behind the scene stuff.

https://sreegs.tumblr.com/post/671649355334336512/alright-lets-talk-about-apple-and-tumblrs

What I find even more fascinating is one of the dev's older topics about the history of Tumblr's Ads and this really sheds light on just how badly Tumblr was gutted by Yahoo/Verizon.
https://sreegs.tumblr.com/post/670206966670458880/whats-up-with-tumblr-ads

The devs that works on Tumblr genuinely loved their service and they wanted so bad to provide something good but being acquired by Yahoo ate them from the inside. It makes me so angry when I see comments about how 'the staff doesn't care', because they do, they always do. The people that 'don't care' are usually one or two people at the top that aren't even in development, like accounts, shareholders, or the board that only want to know if something will give them money in the end. The people that make the staff posts, that try to manage the sea of tickets that can be anything from valid to reactionary, the people that are on the bottom of the chain, don't deserve the ire that people direct toward them when someone on the board made a decision to add/get rid of/change a feature.

It was honestly very sad to see the volume of people making comments like 'I always forget there are real people behind the site'. Like... How do you forget that!! (I know how, it just makes me sad.)

It makes me think about how most humans really do love to know how things are made and while we have so many videos about how things are physically constructed, there's very little out there that talk about things like, software development. Too many people have this assumption that things are made by popping in a few plugins, or having code auto-fills, and that's just the people that have the barest knowledge of coding but no real experience.

https://medium.com/@krave/apple-s-app-store-review-process-is-hurting-users-but-we-re-not-allowed-to-talk-about-it-55d791451b
Things like this post on Apple's review process from 2015 show that 'just do ____' isn't as helpful a comment as you think it is, since the process of getting an app approved by apple is not a pleasant one.

I really do wish more devs would speak up about the really stupid and inane issues they've had to deal with in changing or adding even the 'simplest' sounding things. Software runs so much of our lives and most people have no clue what all goes into it, giving people the wrong impression of what it is and we really need more accessible information about all of this u_u

Slightly adjacent in the scripting field, going to the subject of making websites.

If you look for 'how to make a website' sources you either run into videos or things like this
https://www.studentartguide.com/articles/how-to-make-an-artist-website
that amount to 'just install wordpress' and not really.. the basic ins and outs of scripting your site.

There's this little search project someone is working on that is a search engine that tries to find text heavy websites to find things that might be ignored by your other search engines these days.
https://search.marginalia.nu/
It is still in the works but I love projects like this so much!!

I searched 'how to make a website' and while there was a lot of unrelated hits as a new experimental service like this is meant to be, but I came across these two charming sites.
https://www.thesitewizard.com/gettingstarted/startwebsite.shtml
http://www.shira.net/web02-start.htm
Still not exactly what I'm looking for but getting closer. They're just nice little spots frozen in time and I appreciate it.

Sometimes I wonder about making a 'how to make a website' documentation but I have no idea if I have the bandwidth for that. But I can at least make a few more fun Moyra's Web Jewels conversion templates for people to learn from because the best way to learn is to get some simple, easy to follow scripts and pull it apart yourself.

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WebWork, Writing, and Odditites

armaina — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 15:19:50 GMT

Me, idly one morning: 'I really need to figure out how to make an XML Site Map'
30 min later: Cool I have a sitemap now :O

After way too long I finally got around to throwing down something on the projects page that had been an empty link for ages.
http://armaina.com/projects.html
So now I have something in writing for real on my website that shows any stranger wandering onto my site that I'm doing more than just pretty drawings and there's a purpose and pointing people into directions based on my synopsis.

Also going to figure out how to make pages display specific custom details when in their link preview on things like Discord or Twitter. And I still need to make my favicons. I may not like the current state of web 3.0 social media nonsense, but I have to adapt to it, either way. Also going to try to brush up a bit on my CSS beautifying, I want to make it look just a little bit more 'sleek', something a bit less amateurish, if I can. I have my function down, it's easy to navigate, it works, and now that all my pages are in, it's time to see if I can get it a little fancy and learn something new.

I've been doing kinda NaNoWriMo this month. It's more so that I've made a promise to myself to open up my growing list of WIPs and text files and work on them to some degree. The point is less to write one thing or hit 50K, but just to make myself set aside the time to write more in general. It's a habit I need to do more often in general, just like I would with art, so that I can get my scripts rolling at a steady pace. Glad to say it's been going well and I'm at least writing something. And the sooner I have a lot of somethings, the sooner I have a finished product.

Apart from that, been busy with all the above and work. Work is still going great, and all my co-workers are just fantastic!

And now, have a stack of links to things I found interesting or cool.

This post about The Brave Little Toaster and a theme of Faith, but not strictly faith in the religious sense.
https://walonvaus.dreamwidth.org/139434.html

A video of a test-concept of full-on artificial muscle structures on a robotic arm. While non-viable for real prosthetic work in this day and age, it's really cool to see functioning mechanisms like this for personal reference in super future robotics concept/design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guDIwspRGJ8

Been hearing about Crypto and NFTs and have no idea what's up? Want a remarkably thorough breakdown about that everything means? Here you go.
https://antsstyle.medium.com/why-nfts-are-bad-the-long-version-2c16dae145e2

We still have no idea how Eels reproduce and that's wild
https://nautil.us/issue/88/love--sex/eels-dont-have-sex-until-the-last-year-of-their-life

Speaking of Oddities, I've really enjoyed the chill vibes of this old tech Videographer for a long time now, and I think more should too. He's got this fun Oddware series where he reviews Odd and Unique old hardware. I recommend pretty much everything he does but his Oddware is a nice place to start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBtETkJeqmY&list=PLB9FA1979AB986522

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Stoic Women

armaina — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 14:27:05 GMT

I've been laying down for about 4 hours, had maybe about an hours worth of sleep and am not going to sleep soon so I'm rambling since I have some stuff on my mind. Stream of consciousness about personal favorite characters, women characters in media, character archetypes, and alienation for my preferences.

So I filled this thing out yesterday.

Fun exercise, good time. (even though I feel like I'm missing some important ones from some obscure media but eh, close enough.)

Though in sharing it with other people and seeing their preferences it always makes me starkly aware of how much of a disconnect I have from others. You see, I notice that unless the other person creating the chart is a lesbian woman, most everyone fills the chart with 95% men and it throws into stark contrast why I feel so alone. This is not to begrudge anyone's preferences, that's not what this is about, it's about constantly feeling like the odd one out and hoping for some place to find more people I have resonance with.

Got me thinking a lot about the type of characters I resonate with, the type of women I like to see and some of my sadness of how some of those women get perceived by others. I've heard people refer to Major Mokoto Kusanagi as 'boring' despite the subtle emotional depth she carries if you pay attention. I saw statements on tumblr referring to AppleJack as selfish after the episode where she closed off her friends out of a sense of duty, obligation, and the shame of failure at fulfilling those tasks. Watching fanon take a woman soldier and making her a cardboard cutout while pouring endless amounts of emotional depth into characters with only barely as much lore as her. Women soldiers and guardian archetypes are few and far between, and when they exist they're either written poorly, barely a participant in the story, or when they are written well, often wildly misinterpreted by the fanbase in a way that makes me feel alienated by society as a whole.

The type of 'emotionally closed off character who thinks they don't need friends and/or is closed off because they're convinced they'll hurt the people close to them' narrative I'm looking for, shows up in men all the time. And I know why that is, men are often pigeon holed by society to be those stalwart protectors and in general are less encouraged to make bonds or display emotional vulnerability so of course these stories would exist to express that anguish. And it's a role that I'd like to see more with women because that's something I relate to. But if I ask for characters like this I'm either provided women that are written poorly or women that don't fit the stalwart guardian archetype at all. It kinda makes me think back to when I asked for music with themes/lyrics about a woman being dangerous and not in a sexy way but like in the way you see men talk about being dangerous and about 3 people even understood my question at all.

There aren't a lot of stories where a woman's emotional journey from being closed to opening up is truly explored in a fashion that doesn't hinge on romance and domestication. Sure there's some 'used to be shy now opened up because friends' narratives, but what I'm looking for is the specific kind of 'I'm emotionally closed off because I have to be this way to protect other people' emotional journey. Raven from the Teen Titans animated series is one of the few examples of emotionally closed-off woman with fear of great power opens up and trusts friends narratives without it being hinged on romance. And in Lower Decks Beckett is more of the opposite where while not stoic, uses bravado as a shield and friendship is a key to helping her confront that and be most honest with herself emotionally. Adora in She-Ra, Princess of Power has a bigger romance hinge but at least it's interwoven with her connection with her other friends so that it doesn't feel like red romance was the only source of her emotional growth.

The other big fumble I see that drives me nuts is when they try to make cool women that don't need no-body, and treat it like raising the bar by just being cool is all you need. Teela in the new He-Man series is a great example of how bad a fumble it is. They tried giving her this arc that seemed to be this commentary to how she was relegated to a 'less important' role than in the main cast, but they just made her angry with no real goal or resolution. And in what could have been a good emotional arc they flubbed it with this weird 'I'm not afraid of anything because I'm afraid of my own power RAR' and it wasn't even in a 'I'm afraid of hurting other people if I become unhinged' kind of way, it was just in a conceded 'I'm so incredible I frighten myself' kind of way. Which would have been fine if that's what they were going for, but the framing made it feel like we're supposed to interpret this as some sort of.. empowering moment, and it's just weird.

I often make a point in games with a cast of characters to have at least one woman I can connect with. It's one part of what I need and one part of a bit of a personal protest. I don't want to just Settle for men to be the only owners of the narrative I seek, I'm allowed to let this matter to me, just as anyone else is allowed to want and seek the narratives that matter to them.

It brushes up against the other more personal issue I have with people trying to place this identity of masculine upon me. There are all these weird microaggressions I've had over the years that have started to stack. People giving me masculine nicknames, titles, and terms that I accepted for a while then put a hard stop to because after a time it was like any woman-related title was being avoided and it felt like I wasn't seen as a woman. Jokes about who the man was in the relationship because I was assertive or aggressive in conversation. Someone's suggestion that I get a binder when I lamented the fact that I had difficulty finding a bra in my band size for small breasts. (and the constant suggestions in second life for flat chest, as in no-breasts, mods when I explicitly lamented not being able to find small breast mods. Small Breasts and No Breasts ARE. NOT. THE. SAME.) When people that have known me for years, that have known my pronouns for years, start referring to me as They for no discernible reason. All these things make me feel like I'm being robbed of something that is deeply important to me. Just because I don't look/present/act/talk the way you think women should doesn't mean you get to strip me of being a woman, stop trying to take that away from me.

'but you could be a nonbinary woman'

No

Shut
Up

My not aligning with what the society I'm living in says makes a woman, is not my problem. The fact that other people don't get it and feel this need to corral me into another box they think I belong in just to wrap their head around me is their problem, not mine. I am not adopting a term just to make other people more comfortable or accept me as I am. I am just a woman, I'm allowed to have this title, I'm allowed to own this as it is, I'm allowed to have this matter to me. I'd rather be misunderstood than be something I'm not.

So I look to women characters that share the things that resonate with me. Both because they fill me with joy and maybe that I'm not that much of an anomaly, that there's gotta be other people that feel like I do that understand and appreciate this kind of presentation of woman.

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doing well

armaina — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 23:55:32 GMT

Been a couple weeks into my new job and I'm really enjoying it.
The atmosphere is great, the job is chill, and my co-workers are wonderful. I can pick up shifts whenever I like and it's just dang nice. I had a bout of anxiety spirals because my brain was convinced that this good thing is fake and won't last but that seems to have leveled out, now. Also weather has been starting to slide into more manageable temperatures which means I can do stuff with a little more freedom.

In media/entertainment realm, recently watched all of Boardwalk Empire over the last few months. Was reminded why it's so difficult for me to watch live action shows: I cannot keep up with who's who because most of them look the same to me unless they have unique features. Everyone had suits and I could barely tell half the cast apart. Still, good watch. Also watched all of Squid Game, good but heavy series, also had the same problem of not being able to tell certain characters apart unless they were uniquely interesting in some way.

Watched Centaur World and it was delightfully genre subverting, extremely well animated, and an impressive amount of intrigue. To describe it without giving too much away, think of an Isekai, except the lead character is Just A Horse. Got into Lower Decks and Season Finale for season 3 actually made me tear up?? I've really been enjoying that series so much, I heard it was good and I was not expecting it to hit the right notes with me like it did.

Also apparently the Foundation trilogy has series now?? I started reading the first book some time ago and now I'm kinda curious how they'll portray things because there's some stuff about the concept that's so funny to me it's silly to think how they'll 'modernize' it but I could write a whole post about that..

Been playing games here and there, doing Destiny 2 stuff, made a new Minecraft map, pick at Valheim from time to time.

On the creative front I took a bit of a slowdown after the comic pages which I'm still very happy about and I've been doing a lot of personal mental work on the larger comic. I've got a WIP script that I worked on that I'm not sure if that's what will happen next or if I'm going to start somewhere else, but it was burning in my brain so I at least wrote it. Trying to keep myself writing whatever pops up instead of telling myself I 'can't' until I 'do the other thing first' because that just prevents me from making anything at all. But I'm working on it, even if there's not much obvious to be seen from it, yet.

All-in-All, doing well.

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Ibrida: Prelude comic

armaina — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 01:59:50 GMT

For the last 4 weeks I've been working on and off on a short, 6 page comic to serve as a teaser to a more long-term comic I'm currently working on. This is my first real, serious effort to making a comic and I'm pretty happy with the end result for having no prior practice in making comics. I've learned a lot about using Clip Studio for this and I think I have most it's features figured out now, and it's been invaluable in painless paneling. I think I've more or less settled on my style but I'm still debating on if I'll color block my pages as it can add an extra hour or two to each page but I also like the look so this'll take some consideration. But otherwise, this is the most confident I've ever felt toward the idea of making comics, like it's a real and tangible possibility for me to achieve.

This little vignette this serves both as a form of foreshadowing and setting the stage for the world the comic will take place in and the conflicts that may be present in the story to come. Features characters Tlakanok and Xiktali.

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more title word splatter

armaina — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 21:23:06 GMT

Putting to words some of my digging about my title problem as I go.

I started out with reverberation, since that has the 'feel' that I'm going for, something carried out and also mirrored/found as it continues. And I stumbled across these two phrases that mean about the same thing.

concatenation of events
causal nexus
"A situation in which the solution to one problem creates a chain of problems, each making it more difficult to solve the original one"

Which this feels close but I need to figure out a way to convey this that doesn't mean that it's explicitly about problems. Sometimes there are problems but sometimes it's just.. a thing, neutral that becomes either a problem or a solution, later.

Though I could use concatenation or the Latin concatenātiō as a title for the 3 comics as a collective, like Concatenation Trilogy.
Concatenation meaning
"A series of links united; a series or order of things depending on each other, as if linked together; a chain, a succession."
All the stories are interlinked because they take place in the same universe at different points in time, and all the choices made will show up in the other comics (Pretroians being the least as it's the oldest in the timeline)

But then I started thinking if the theme of all of them is going to be the ripple effect then I feel it's out of place to name Talon's story about that something related to that. So now I go back to naming the comic about her about the state of belonging in multiple states and yet neither and you'd think there'd be a word for this but for the life of me I can't find this.

So I thought of looking up dissonance and dissecting that like Dissonant Harmony or something to that effect, but that felt too flowery on it's own for a title and a little too abstract.

Then I thought, maybe I'll start with the word Hybrid and check out it's origins and see if I can dissect something from that. Latin is Hibrida, and has an alternate form of Ibrida
And.... I really like Ibrida.

What stuck out to me was that it starts with an I just as Talon's last name does, Iskan, which was just... made up sounds and I didn't establish a meaning to it. Her last name has gone through like three different changes but that was the name I stuck with and could never seem to change even if I wasn't sure I liked it or not. Then I thought.. what if I made 'hybrid' or 'mongrel' the meaning of her last name all along.

I don't want to title the comic Iskan, but Ibrida sounds like it'd fit like a title...

When I started writing this I didn't think I'd actually find a solution but, this is being written 'live' as I dig through words. It feels really anti-climatic that I'm just kinda figuring out something so simple all along. But I may re-name all my instances of 'cycles' to Ibrida and see how I feel about it. But, this might finally stick for once.

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The Agony of Titles

armaina — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 20:20:35 GMT

I've always had difficulty with naming things. Naming characters usually takes me days, weeks after their creation, longest streak I've had was 6 years of a character unnamed even after being drawn and written. Because naming is committing something to them that, to me, is more permanent than a visual design. I know well and good I can change things if I wanted to but let's face it, it sure is a pain to go through all old instances of the thing and re-name it to prevent confusion. So when it comes to titles of things, it feels even more permanent than a character name and so the pressure to get the right name, escalates.

Of my Three comic concepts, 2 are named. One is Pretorians, the title comes from the name of the focus group, the units known as Pretorians, simple enough. The other is Starship Lollipop, the title of the ship the cast resides in, named after a joke of The Good Ship Lollipop (despite such a song not existing in the universe). These are easy enough names and I don't see them changing so I'm pretty committed to them, but it's the remaining story, the one I plan on releasing first that I find myself unable to put a title to. The comic that is supposed to be for Talon's story, the one I talk so dang much about, still doesn't have a title I can commit to.

Back when I first constructed the concept for it and was like 'yeah I'm gonna make this a story and not just an imagination in my head' I was like.. 13, and at the time I had picked the name 'Demon's Legacy' because oh ho ho, lead character is a berserker and a killer so people would call her a 'demon' and the story is about her legacy, the usual teenage cleverness. As I got older it felt more and more tacky and I kept it for a time because I had nothing else to name it but eventually I scrapped it. Ever since then I've not been able to think of a name that really.. fits. Right now if you look at my toyhouse or wiki, the information is categorized under the placeholder name of Cycles, but I definitely do not want it to be called that. So now I'm going to talk out-loud about what I'm trying to achieve with the title eventually.

The general theme of the story is supposed to be around the ramifications of choices made in the past and how they effect the future. The good, the bad, the malicious and well-intentioned. While the story's focus is on characters related to the Teotkoa project (another thing that took me years to name and was only named 2 years ago), I don't want to name it Teotkoa because the story is more than just that. Some themes in naming I wanted is something that had the same meaning as 'ripple effect' but I can't seem to find or create a word that I'm happy with that achieves this meaning. There are stories that explore this theme in a time travel sense, such as 'A Sound of Thunder' and 'The Butterfly Effect' and I don't want to get tangled up in either of these. It's not about changing the past, it's about living with the consequences of one's actions.

The other themes of the story have a lot to do with societal conflicts, there is heaps of social interpersonal conflicts peppered throughout the story. It's not just Humans vs Aliens social conflicts, there are social conflicts for the families of the victims of the previous war, social conflicts for the Ertakar's own social divides that existed long before the arrival of humans.

Finally of course, it is Talon's story. She is a culmination of all the themes I expressed above. Both victim of the choices made from the past war and privileged from it, both Human and Ertakar, and also none of those things. Technically I could just name the comic Talon, but that feels weird? Another theme of title might be the something that encapsulates this theme of being in two states but belonging to neither. Hybrid is too broad a term I think and doesn't convey the right thing. A word like Oxymoron, but a little more specific to an individual or experience. I could technically use the word 'Jal-Kar' as the title as that's the term used for the forcibly genetically altered Human/Ertakar hybrids that lived on after the war, but that still doesn't feel like that has the right kind of presence. Maybe the word I want exists out there but I have no idea how to look for it, or maybe if I can construct it. It doesn't even have to be a single word, if I could think of a phrase that encapsulated this state of being that'd likely work.

I guess if anyone knows words or phrases or even some way to construct a new word that conveys these themes you can give a suggestion, maybe something will give me a boost to figure out a title. (maybe with any luck I can figure out the title once and for all before my prelude comic is finished)

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Outtings and Comics

armaina — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 05:20:50 GMT

Firstly thank you all for the well wishes, I had way more response than I was expecting so I was admittedly a little surprised, so thank you.

Yesterday I decided to celebrate my good news by going out and just doing SOMETHING. Hung out at the library for a bit, sad that Think Spot isn't open to the public yet but it was nice to have a change of scenery even if I didn't DO much. Also discovered one of the shopping center buildings had been now filled with a small asian market on one side and a bunch of little Korean eateries on the other side. Had a very rich risotto with bulgogi that I couldn't finish but made for good leftovers today :O Really looking forward to having the money and means to get out more often and just do whatever the heck I want, even if it's nothing more than just walking around and having a bit of scenery change.

Today, I put some work into a small prelude comic that is meant to usher in the larger project I'm still chewing on. The script is 600 words, 36 lines of dialog, which has leveled out to 6 pages. It sets the concept for the catalyst that will be present in the story and manages, at least I think, to convey a complete thought without being too confusing (I hope) or spelling things out unnaturally.

Also it was nice to be able to have that dialog and be able to figure out where my panels are and to naturally have the last page have everything fall into place with the right pacing without feeling like I'm squishing too many panels to fit the final page or that I have too much empty space in the last page. It's that kind of long-term pacing that always makes me a little scared about comics. I felt really comfortable about working on it by the time I was done? That's a really nice feeling to have, and the first real inkling of saying to myself 'yeah you know what, I think I can do this.' Of course, this is just the thumbnails, not the pages, so we'll see how that goes. Also, this template has been a great help, I don't think it would have been nearly as easy to plot out without it.

When I have it all done I'll post it, but not until all the pages are done. (and hopefully working on it will get me brewing about how to start the actual comic itself. Not to mention, figure out what the heck I'm even going to title it.)

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Mostly Free Music

armaina — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 21:47:32 GMT

It's been a while since I've done a PWYW album dig, so have a few that I've ran into recently, mostly a range of techo, synth, and rock

https://untitledburial.bandcamp.com/album/r
https://dan-terminus.bandcamp.com/album/last-call-for-all-passengers
https://astronoid.bandcamp.com/album/astronoid
https://avandra.bandcamp.com/album/descender
https://abigailwilliams.bandcamp.com/album/walk-beyond-the-dark
https://sidewalksandskeletons.bandcamp.com/album/forbidden-files

Pretty much all of Dynatron's albums
https://music.dynatronsynth.com/

not free but Master Boot Record's albums are like a 1$ or 1₤
https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/

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Labels as Culture

armaina — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 21:24:24 GMT

I've said this in random spaces to friends and in some servers but I think maybe I'll put into words in a singular place here, and that is, the concept that labels can be Culture just as much as Identity, and the two things are very different.

This thought first came to me way back when I was reading Erica Moen's Dar Comic some time in the mid-2000's (it ran between 2004-2009). She had recounted an experience where she goes through the experiences in her life and how a long time was spent being a lesbian, but when she fell in love with a man she had a personal crisis regarding what her identity was now and how she still felt about Lesbian and how it still felt applicable despite the new attraction. That was the first instance I personally had of the concept, 'maybe the identity doesn't resonate with you anymore but it still feels right because the culture of that identity was intrinsic to you'. I didn't talk about it much because being cishet having any insight on lesbian identity is often met with extreme hostility, (I know Erica herself received a lot of backlash at the time over it.) and just in general I didn't have many 'use cases' to formulate my thoughts.

As the years went on and I had more and more trans friends in my life, both people transitioned and others new to finding themselves, and in interacting with them I found more instances this disconnect between the identity and culture of a label. A few would mention feelings of crisis when they felt longing for spaces where they were a different gender, fearing it undermined or somehow canceled out their current identity. Things like "I still feel at home at the thought of girly sleepovers, does that mean I'm not really a boy?" an oversimplification of course but you get the idea. And I was thinking to myself 'no, those feelings of longing and comfort are not some sign that, that identity from the past is you, it's because they were good experiences in that culture and it is unrelated to your identity'. And this solidified my perception: Labels can be both identity and culture.

This experience most commonly happens when people go from having their formative experiences in one label's space and then flip to another label's space. If you had a good time, of course you're going to have a nostalgia, comfort, or fondness for those spaces, but that comfort and familiarity doesn't mean the identity that was associated with that space still applies to you, but the culture absolutely does. In more common experiences, growing up in certain religions might make you resonate with the religion's culture you grew up with (if your experiences were positive), even though you've long since left the faith and no longer ascribe to it. There's a lot about LDS culture I grew up with that I do miss, and sometimes I find myself still going 'we' when referring to Mormons or talking about the stuff I used to do, but it is very much not a part of my identity and hasn't been since I was about 17. But the culture? The culture is absolutely still there in my experiences and my inclination, it's still something I look back on with fondness and there are aspects about it that still hang around in my life to this day. *motions to the fact that she's been journaling since she was 8, an extremely Mormon culture thing*.

Labels are both Identity and Culture. A label can be used to signify to yourself and to others what you are, it can be affirming things that are intrinsic to you so that you can share them easily with others. But, a label might resonate with you not just because of the identity others associate with it, but because the space and culture it provided were things that either meant something to you, or fit exactly the kind of space and culture you had been looking for, even if the identity it's supposed to represent, didn't line up. And in the inverse, a label's meaning might be exactly you, but the culture might not be what you're looking for and that's not an indication that you can't have that label but rather that you don't fit the culture of the label, but that doesn't mean you have to avoid the label if it really resonates with you, and it's fine to admit Yes to the label, and No to the culture. That can often feel hollow, of course, people often look for camaraderie in their labels and find distress when there is none, but it's an option that is available for those that it makes sense to.

I think recognizing that disconnect between Label the Identity and Label the Culture, would to a lot of good for people finding themselves and really identify what they're looking for both in themselves, what they want to represent themselves, and what culture is comfortable to them. As well as acknowledge the complicated and varied experiences we all have as people and why even though there are Majority Agreed-Upon Words That Represents Something, it does not apply to all people in the same way.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/773500.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Envy

armaina — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 00:36:31 GMT

This video is so dang good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPhrTOg1RUk

ContraPoint's Envy. It's almost 2 hours long, but it's so worth watching through. It really does cover a lot of important topics and perceptions that are getting worse in the modern day and it really does line up to my statements that the Publicness of us with social media is what has made us all for the worse. While I had not pinned envy as one of the potential vector points when I talked about it, I agree now that it's part of it.

One quote that's real important:
"I wish more people could feel things, without rushing to a 'rational' defense of the feeling."

I feel this sentiment so much. The whole reason I'm as emotionally healthy as I am is because I permitted myself to feel every ugly feeling I got as well as identify it. I was fully aware there were some petty and spiteful feelings I had, but I allowed myself to feel them rather than beat myself down because I felt them or try to justify them. They were just A Thing I was feeling and I needed to let myself feel it out until it leveled and I could go back to the problem and address it, rather than address the feeling. And I agree that I wish more people would just accept that they're going to feel things they don't like, and it's just the experience of Being.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/773370.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Aged Media

armaina — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 00:40:00 GMT

Been reading peoples rants/thoughts/posts on the elevation of children's media over adult media and I've been thinking about something lacking in a lot of Mainstream adult media, specifically in western adult media.

If you aren't already aware I'm a lover of cartoons, I watch vast amounts of cartoon media, I often prefer it over live action things, even when it comes to adult media and admittedly, I do find a lot of content aimed at children to be more interesting and engaging than content aimed at adults. This is not because I find children's content to be 'better' than adult content, but because the move to adult content for the west often leaves behind something present in most children's cartoons today: long-term plots.

It should be said that this trend in children's cartoons did not used to be the standard. They used to be one off goof with a vaguely connecting thread, it wasn't until the late 90's and early 2000's did bigger shows like Beast Wars and Gargoyles begin to shift the format of children's programming. Gargyoles especially, for me, was the first time I had seen such takes on story telling and I was hungry for it. Then with the introduction to anime it only grew from there, and the western producers saw that influence as well and began to emulate it. Shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender is a culmination of these changes in media in the early 2000's not just in style but in story-telling.

When you start dipping into western adult media you find less and less that have over-arching plots and more singular episodes with the occasional throwback to past event. Adults that grew up with the slapstick of Loony Toons and Hana-Barbara for their media went on to make Sitcoms and Case a Day crime TV shows. I know this was partly because at the time television standards intentionally wanted each episode to be watched without context. It's really sad to think about how the generation before television was perfectly fine with radio dramas that arced over several episode, then that form of story telling evaporated as radio dramas died off.

I think the closest we've gotten with adult media in the west are things a few stand out shows like Stargate, Lost, Heroes. HBO and Stars began making more series with over-arching plots like Boardwalk Empire or Game of Thrones, but it feels like shows of that caliber are few and far between. And too often they find themselves ruined by trying to be as shocking as possible. Either that or they get so caught up in being 'realistic', paired with seeing live action as the more 'mature' form of story telling. I admittedly prefer cartoons because it's easier to suspend disbelief in a fantasy setting as a cartoon, but cartoons are often regarded as frivolous, intended for comedy. And for the adult cartoons that aren't comedy it's like they try to go off the deep end in gratuity, they don't feel like they even want to have fun. The Castlevania Netflix series has been the closest I've seen to a western adult comic series that while gory, still manages to be fun and isn't full of dread.

Sometimes it feels like that soon as the gate is lifted to make something for adults, there's a need to saturate it in as much death and sex as possible. Like someone binging on alcohol the first time they're allowed to have it, and in doing so the drive for nuance in other forms of conflicts and complexities of life gets lost. This doesn't happen with all adult western media, of course, but the ones out there that tackle complications like moral greys and trauma with both nuance and optimism are few and far between. It's why Anime is still so sought after, it has a wider gamut topics covered at different target groups so there ends up being more variety.

I don't gravitate toward children's media more because I think it's inherently 'better' because it's aimed at children, I gravitate toward it because there's a vacuum in the kind of story telling I'm looking for in adult media. A good example of what I'd like to see would be something like, bringing back Batman Beyond for another season but on adult swim so they don't have to shy away from topics like processing grief of death, trauma, and intimacy, while still having an underpinning of hope and humor present in the original series. I'd like more western cartoons aimed at adults that dive into nature of existence and philosophy like Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I'd like more adult media that still knows how to have fun and doesn't find shock value the only value of being an adult. I want more adult media to tell stories.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/772427.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Art Fight 2021

armaina — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 18:36:57 GMT

Temporary Body Mods

armaina — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 18:03:39 GMT

I don't know why this took me long to consider but I realize with how she can be patched up to a pretty 'normal' state after injury, (as explained in a previous entry) this would also mean she could add and remove any piercings or body mods at any time with practically no consequence.

There are practical applications for this, such as getting piercings/mods if under-cover to use them as identifying marks that can be removed after the fact and throw off anyone trying to find her after the fact, but also just to experiment and have them for fun if she wanted. Could even get wing membrane piercing for fashion attire reasons but I don't think she'd go through the effort much. I don't think tattoos would really work tho, there may be rejection issues with the ink, I'd have to do more research on that to see if ink triggering an immune response, I think it does because you can be allergic to it. But like if she doesn't have a problem accepting the ink, getting rid of tattoos is just a matter of.. removing epidermal and re-grafting. Not exactly fun, but you'd never know there was anything there after all said and done. But that would be so much more time consuming than piercings.

And a slight note to add to this: She can't have metal in the pierce sites when they're healing as her body will reject even surgical steel, there is specific material that are tooled for her specifically to be supports that won't be rejected by her body. Once it's healed over it's fine, she doesn't have a metal allergy, the issue is specifically related to her aggressive immune system.

But in that vein starsallegory suggested corset piercings between her wings so I drew that.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/771626.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

social constructs

armaina — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 20:18:44 GMT

Philosophy Tube has JUST posted a video on Social constructs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koud7hgGyQ8

A lot of people I know are already familiar with this concept, but if anyone has ever heard the phrase Social Construct and never really understood it, I recommend watching the video.

I'm admittedly a little self-satisfied in that a lot of the things discussed are things I've been aware of and deliberately want to play with in world building. As I stated before, Worldbuilding for my Ertakar was how I really self-actualized just the depths of how much a construct everything is, so I'm a little chuffed a world building exercise in the form of Earth AU's was used to help teach the concept.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/770807.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Talon References

armaina — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 03:46:59 GMT

I thought I posted this ages ago, but I didn't so now I am. Over the past year I finally put together reference sheets for my oldest character. I've had her for far too long and I had not a single ref sheet for her ever completed, and for the first time I actually have completed ref sheets.

I'm sure as you can see, she's one of those characters that's 'deceptively' simple. Not complex in colors and patterns, but just a lot of little details that are easy to get wrong without the right guidance. It was really nice to get these all done.

The other big thing was, that in doing these reference sheets I finally decided for certain what her face markings were. They had been eluding me for some time but I figured it out and I'm so dang happy with them, the way they pull everything together now when I'm coloring her is just so nice and it's great feeling that everything is correct. It's nice to have something that feels so right in that regard.

So yeah that's it, I got her refs all done and it's nice to finally have them! Shameless profile page links:
http://wiki.armaina.com/index.php/Talon
https://toyhou.se/10725.talon

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/770232.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Making Old, New

armaina — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:58:56 GMT

There was a very popular thing to do back in the mid 90's that was only possible because of the fact that almost all monitors were 800x600 for a long time. It was a trick where you used a background that would be the perfect size to make it look like your web-page had borders on each side.

This specific technique is, of course, not possible to do anymore now with how monitors are getting up into the 4K side of things, and for a while I've wanted to re-create this look, using more modern scripts and techniques. So naturally I had to find a page using one of Moyra's old backgrounds and re-tool it.

https://rowen.tripod.com/xena/battlecry.html
Here you can see for yourself exactly what these layouts look like, now.

http://armaina.com/layouts/greekborder/
And after spending a few hours in it today, this is my final result. I cut up the image, made PNGs with transparent shadows for each of the boarders, then made the textured background it's own element to tile. The rest is, of course, just me messing around and spending more time making the elements prettier than I needed them to be.

All in all I'm pretty happy with the result, learned some new things on a personal level in the process. (my code gets a little nicer looking every time I try digging into these things) I would like to find more of Moyra's old stuff like this to splice up and script them into little things like this for people to be able to download and use for themselves if they so want. Will make little layouts of my own, eventually, but this is a fun endeavor, and I'd like her work to live-on... (unless she ever comes back..)

*longingly looks in the direction of Moyra's Web Jewels archive*
"I just want her back"

Outting

armaina — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 22:16:41 GMT

Yesterday I said it was raining and the temp had dropped and I wanted to go outside.. so I did. I had some money from a commission that after my monthly payments for next month would still have money left over so I decided to actually use it since I so rarely had the opportunity to do that. My usual spot I like to hang around when I have free time is this Main St pocket where the Arts Center is. There are a lot of specialty shops there so they're fun and interesting to look around at and it had been so long since I was there.

Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum at the arts center that I had no idea was there and also was free admission so absolutely checked that out. It's a very small showcase but this time it was a feature of small assortment indigenous artists. But one that stuck out to me was a feature from Angel Cabrales. It was an assortment of sculptures, multi-media light and sound. One of the pieces was a set of two timelines, one of the history we know and one of speculative history where the Americas banded together and fended off the colonists. That speculative timeline you can see fueled in his science fiction work. His website is a little bare but you can find photos from his pieces of the 'Uncolonized' exhibit on his Instagram.

There was a Thai food place and I hadn't had Thai in so long got myself some pineapple curry which was fantastic. I need to take Z to this place when we get a chance, is tasty good. And then I found a bakery to get a Treat which ended up being a frosted circus animal cookie rice crispy treat. Then I tooled around the comic shop and sorted around antique stores, which there are, so many. I love the antique store that's just packed with stuff.

It was really nice to go out and just look and mill around. Though walking around did drive home just how unfit I am. I was doing better with the Harkins job before due to the cleaning theaters being some active work for me, but the pandemic really cut that back. I need to find more means of just getting out and walking, less worried about doing that now that I'm vaccinated. Even if it's just making laps around the apartment complex.