The End of an Era
Yesterday morning, on the 27th of March 2024 my dear cat Neo passed away at an age of almost 17 years. He was the last of our Oriental cats and his passing marks the end of an era for me. Our first Oriental Longhair was Jayto, born November 27th 2003 who later got company of Nintu, a black Oriental Shorthair born August 26th 2006. Sadly, Jayto got sick and died at an age of only 3 years old, not long after Nintu came. Nintu needed another Oriental cat friend because our ‘regular’ cat Joey, who had been with us since early 1995, was not interested in Oriental cat style stickiness. And so Neo came; a black Oriental Longhair born on May 9th 2007. Neo and Nintu have been best buddies for over 13 years. They played together, slept together and went on adventures together- including our family holidays. Their personalities were polar opposites and that made them such a good match.
When Nintu died on May 7th 2020 at an age of almost 14, Neo missed his buddy so much that we adopted Yuka, a red ‘regular’ cat. He gave Neo some proper distraction with his naughtiness - hence his nickname “Geboefte” , which means criminal in Dutch.
Neo was one of the loveliest, social and most easy going cats whom I’ve known. He was timid and careful but also the most talkative and intimate. Cuddles were almost always welcome and most led to roll and belly-rub session. He had the peculiar habit to do ‘stairs sticky’ as we called it: he stood on the first or 2nd floor while you had to stand a few steps lower on the stairs with your face was at his level and cuddle him.
We often gently joked about his funny look and mannerisms. He was exceptionally small (3.5 kg at max) for a tomcat, always had a bony butt, a pronounced sternum bone that stuck out and a lean but well filled ‘sack of organs’ along with a slightly kinked tail tip. Despite his small size, his paws were proportionally huge, which was not a desired trait for the breed - but I didn’t care; I love big paws. He had a very typical quiet, calm and elegant gait with small steps and an elevated head. Quite the opposite of Nintu’s big steps and -always-in-a-rush- pace. Neo and the other Oriental cats have left us so many precious memories. These will always remain.
Neo was also the last Feline with whom I had an intimate bond. Since I moved out of my parents’ house in 2012. I was not physically living with him anymore but I came back regularly and Neo was always there to be ‘sticky’ again. Until now. The next time I’m going back, he won’t be there anymore.
But his spirit stays
To stay or not to stay
After a few months of a proper break from DA and drawing in general, I’m considering coming back to DA for now. Probably not with a weekly drawing anymore, but at least with some (mostly) Siderian drawings every other week or so. However, I have several reasons to be hesitant to come back. These reasons make me even consider removing my art from the internet altogether. I have not decided what to do yet. Maybe I stay and stick my head in the sand.
The shallow scroll-generation
Maybe I am longing for a time and a place that no longer exists. Have I become one of the old generation that is like “in those good old times”?. There is quite a sense of truth in this.
I get the strong impression that the time of personal story telling is over. I have rambled about this many times before. But the time of sharing deep, personal characters has passed. There may only be remnants left; a few people scattered around in some hidden places on the internet. Now it’s mostly fanart, eye-candy sparkle pictures and selling adoptables.
There is a rapidly growing trend of mass consumption, also in content on the internet. Many people forget to absorb and think about what they see and instead, continue scrolling at light-speed. In the same time, the internet is getting flooded with shallow content. It’s a pictures-overload in which hardly anything stands out anymore. This same kind of trend has come to DA.
This gives me the feeling that my Siderian art and stories are no longer appreciated or even seen by the majority of the people on DA and the internet. It feels like I’m throwing my deeply personal and passionate art into a void in which it drowns in the ever growing grey, careless masses. That is rather demotivating to say the least and showing art becomes pointless.
The cancel culture of the sheeple mob
Another concern regarding sharing my Siderian stories, is the current cancel culture. You can barely voice a slightly less-than-popular opinion or an angry mob of each-other-reinforcing sheeple will attack you for being toxic, racist or nazi and they will get you banned. Apparently, you should just cancel the ‘toxic’ person without even wondering what makes them behave the way they do. You can’t use the society response to one disaster to place another neglected problem in perspective or you will be called ‘disrespectful’ to say the least. You can barely point out something that hurts you or you will be blamed for guilt tripping. You can barely point out someone’s mistake or you will get blamed for gaslighting. When you’re depressed and get clingy, you have to careful or you will get called ‘manipulative’ or ‘abusive’. Now, how does this relate to story telling? Well, I’ve seen people go haywire about stories that features less-than-perfect protagonists and stories that feature ‘toxicity’. I may nowadays get attacked for that as well. Hell, I should be careful with Håkan’s story…
So when you write characters and stories in which ‘toxic’ interactions appear, you may get lynched for “promoting such toxic content” as if what happens in the story exactly represents author’s viewpoints. Hell no. When I write the story of a particular Siderian, it doesn’t mean that I agree with everything they do or think. Sometimes rather the contrary. However, I’m not going to focus on Håkan’s story just yet. Instead, my focus will be on Stian who is a misanthrope to the core of his soul. He has good reasons. Yet, how many times have I already been attacked for pointing out the truth about the overall destructive influence of humanity on the survival of other species? It has happened quite some times that people failed to understand that when humans repeatedly harm someone of another species, that this certain someone may grow to hate humans and generalize their negative experiences. A logical response if you ask me. Yet people are a lot more understanding of humans hating other species because…the other species inconveniently tries to live alongside humans? Two standards, that is. Rather than empathizing with another animal who has been hurt by humanity repeatedly, and promoting empathy and a more respectful attitude towards other living beings in general, I get the impression that pointing out those double standards may get me and the other Siderians cancelled as well. This prospect makes me hesitant to share more Siderian stories, particularly the story of Stian who was meant to become the lead character of my novel/animation.
The invasion of AI fakeness
Aside from the above mentioned reasons to be hesitant about sharing any further art and stories, there is the rise of AI “art”. Long have I managed to avoid direct confrontations with AI and now it’s suddenly here, right in my most precious place on the internet, invading one of the most precious things in my life: art.
I have several major issues with this. I generally have a very negative attitude towards AI but that is beyond the scope of this post here. Yet remember this saying adapted from the first Jurassic park movie: “the fact that you can, does not mean that you should”.
Regarding AI and art, I have several major concerns. For example; these algorithms are fed input of millions of images to ‘learn’ the basic concepts of art in order to replicate it. Then…where do these million images come from? Google images? These AIs are not meant to render images with recognizable features of any artist’s work but it *is* feeding of existing art and I absolutely don’t want to contribute to that and allow these AIs to be ‘learning’ from my art and more importantly, the Siderians. I find this in some ways a very sneaky and silent form of art theft over which I, as the artist, have no control. Same for the NFT art theft scam, but that's yet another problem beyond the scope of this post.
Aside from this issue, I think that this will make concept artists superfluous in the long run, unless they surrender and start using the AIs themselves. Making a living of *true* art is already a challenge. As this AI shit keeps improving and accelerating itself, it will become a cheap and easy way to generate usable concept images and inspiration and that means that ‘manual’ artists become far less needed in the industry. Maybe a little niche remains, but the competition is already insane to work as an artist. People will always continue creating meaningful art with their own hands and in that sense, AI will not kill art. But it may make getting a job for the non-AI-using artist close to impossible. You will get outcompeted by AIs just like how CGI outcompeted 2D animation.
Then there is the aspect of further image flooding in which ‘manual; drawings are no longer special, respected, or even attention drawing. There is already such an image flood, let alone if this gets accompanied by more avalanches of AI produced images. What then, would motivate me to share any of my art in this tsunami of increasingly numerous fake images? I find myself already checking every new piece to see if it is made by a real artist with real feelings or if it is fake. AI can already do deep faking to in concerning ways. To the point that I have heard people ditch the science behind the current biodiversity- and climate crisis as ‘fake news’. Now some may get offended by me calling this AI “art” fake and I have seen people argue that those who give the prompts to the AI driven image generator, are still artists expressing themselves and that it’s ‘difficult’ to come with good prompts. I don’t agree. It’s incomparable to those who put hours of work into a drawing that genuinely represents one’s imagination and feelings. AI images are soulless. There is no effort put in it (except by those who programmed it) compared to real artworks. There is no passion, no feeling. It’s just a mishmash of already existing stuff. Some writers may find it useful to get images fitting their writing, but I think that the cons vastly outweigh that little pro.
Here are some stuffs that I read about AI in art (yet I disagree with some aspects)
https://alexanderwales.com/the-ai-art-apocalypse/
https://www.deviantart.com/natekeith/journal/Top-5-Misconceptions-of-Ai-Art-927192082
https://magazine.artland.com/generative-art/
To stay or not to stay
So yes, these three aspects make me hesitant to return to DA and to even share stuff on internet together. Once it was my dream to publish my Siderian story in one way or another. Preferably some sort of movie or series and now that I have discovered 3D art in Blender, I think that this is becoming sort of possible. All I wanted is to show people the Siderian side and hopefully this could lead to people empathizing more with predators and respect them. The latter seems a rather hopeless course as well, but that’s a different topic. I thought, maybe showing the Siderians would make it possible to find like-minded friends. Yet, when I was at high school, I was totally fine not sharing any of the Siderians with anyone and I kept drawing and writing anyway, albeit at a slower pace. Now I find myself on the knife edge between that dream and my concerns. So:
Do I really want to share my precious art and Siderian stories this mass-consumption driven audience that doesn’t seem to care? Do I want to throw my precious Siderian art/stories in this void?
Do I want to risk getting cancelled or attacked for showing certain Siderians who have an unpopular viewpoint?
Do I want to risk my images getting fed into AIs without my consent?
Should I still continue to expose my most personal art those few who still deeply care about Siderians and who are interested in my art?
I don’t know yet. For now, I have made a FurAffinity, Buzzly, and Toyhou.se account. I still have an account on Tumblr that I barely use. I have made new accounts with the intention to continue sharing my art and stories and I will see if that motivation to do so remains strong enough.
Goodbye for now
<rant>
People never grow tired of wolves, lions and dragons. But apparently that’s not the case for Siderians. Whatever I post related to Siderians will get received poorly compared to the level of appreciation that my art once got and compared to other artists with similar skill levels and styles. Digital, traditional, highly detailed master pieces, quick lively drawings, with or without background scenery, spiritual or everyday life themes, with or without back story, detailed anatomy studies, it all just doesn’t matter to the seemingly indifferent DA audience.
I’m not speaking of those few who persistently keep faving/commenting my (Siderian) art. I deeply appreciate that and I’m very sorry to disappoint you but I’m going to leave DA for at least a few months. I may come back in September. I will keep checking messages regularly and you can always note me if you really want to see more drawings, because I will not quit drawing, I just quit sharing for a while. I may also go around dropping some comments/favs on other artists’ unseen work.
Anyway, I just need to rant as I’ve done about this many times but it still frustrates me from time to time. First, DA f*cked up the website with this epic failure called eclipse. So, team , it seems that this mess has chased away yet another one of the ‘old generation’. I’ve been on DA since January 2007; 15,5 years (partly on another account). I have seen a lot of changes, most of which I appreciated and most had indeed improved the site. But this…so-called eclipse modernization? No. I tried to get used to it, I tried hard to find things to appreciate, but no, I failed. The strange algorithms, the change of interaction dynamics, the cumbersome inefficient phone-biased in-your-face interface…I’m done with all that for now.
Also, I won’t change that I’m now primarily focusing on drawing Siderians and anything related to them, no matter the consequences of people losing interest for some mystical reason other than the great decline of DA. So save yourself the effort of lecturing me about drawing something else. I *need* to draw Siderians for my own mental well-being (long story short). When/if I come back - I will see how sceneries from the Siderian world are received, but if that does poorly too – I don’t know if I can continue to be bothered with DA anymore. I may continue to use it as a secondary platform, but maybe the farewell if for good. Then I will also give up premium membership because this mess is no longer worth my money.
The response, or more the lack of it, on my last drawing drove me over the edge of “enough”.
See here - a deeply personal drawing to which I attach quite some emotion:
I don’t care much that much about views. I care more about the view/fav ratio and that has gone abysmally low. So what bothers me more is when people HAVE seen it (like 4000 views in 2 days – how did that happen?) but then seem to not care to fav/comment. They are are likely to be like “ugh…uninteresting drawing of a boring looking animal”, *scrolls to next sparkle wolf/lion/dragon picture*. The views/favs ratio on my art used to be 1 to 4 with about 200-400 favs (up to 700-800, even on Siderian art), before shitclipse and my own great decline. Drawings that did poorly had a 1 to 10 ratio at the worst but still at least 100+ favs. But now this last one: 1 to 100 and the number of favs barely reaches 60 on my recent work. What does that feel like? Well, that the audience thinks it sucks. What is it in my last drawing(s) that is so bad that it’s absolutely not worth favs, except from maybe my closest (yet shrinking) core of watchers? 5000+ views but so few favs is no longer an algorithm thing or are all of these just ghost views from people scrolling thumbnails? Yet how come that this one got seen much more than my other work (with 1000/2000 views). So yes, it is irrational but I do feel this as if my art is no longer appreciated. I’m also done putting the effort in telling myself that this is DA’s mess up and not a decline in art quality on my end. I know that the latter is true but I’m just fed up with the disappointments over and over again. I’ve seen stats declines among other artists, but I haven’t seen such abyssmal drops and among many others, the stats seem to have evened out or even increased. My stats keep falling and are heading towards the absolute zero point.
One can ask why do I care about stats? Well, anyone who has decided to post their art online, obviously does this with the reason to show it to others. So then you want to get your sharing to be rewarded with at least some attention. Otherwise – why bother showing it? The sad thing for me is that the non-personal, generic pieces do much better than my more beloved Siderian pieces that I care mostly about. Like this blackbird. I nice drawing, yeah. Buy I’m not caring much about my *art* getting popular or not. So therefore, I won’t just draw something to satisfy an audience that I no longer care about. What I care(d) about was sharing Siderians and the depth of their stories and souls and finding like-minded friends who connect to the Siderians too.
So yes, it stings that this original stuff is no longer appreciated. Especially on this last drawing that has a very deep personal meaning. I thought to post more stuff of my dear Siderian named Torstein this month, but now I won’t. Let this piece of him (the one I linked above) that is named “Return as a king” (how ironic) be the last one that I’ve posted for now. As the DA audience and the staff turns their back on me, so will I turn my back on them. I’m very sorry for those of you who still care but as I said, I will remain active with notes/messages and you can always ask me about unpublished art because my sta.sh is full of it. I may go around on your gallery and drop favs-comments because by now my circle of close followers has shrunken to the point that I know who is who.
Anyway just saying it again: I’m not voicing this to get more meaningless advice about my art or about staying on DA. I have made my decision. The only useful advice may be what other art platforms are worth trying. Yet feel free to share your own frustration regarding DA’s great decline.
So yeah, I won’t quit drawing and I may still share some of it but I’m not sure where. I think I will use the following months to explore other platforms such as Fur Affinity, Art Station, Toyhouse, maybe Buzzly.art and I may even give Tumblr another try.
</rant>
But some other news:
See my fursuit on Castlefest 2022 (NL)
I have sort of finished my fursuit (a quadsuit of my true Siderian self). See here:
On these photos there were still some issues with the suit that I’m working on or have already fixed such as whiskers, a misshapen ear, some issues with the padding/wrinkling of the fur and I needed to trim the beard into a more pointy shape. I may also change the mane, as the fur at the side of the head looks a bit too thin and short compared to how I see myself. Same goes for the rather minimal tail-fur.
So for any Dutch folks here on DA who may be interested (or not):
I will attend Castlefest (the Netherlands) on the 6th and 7th of August 2022 and I will wear my quadsuit.
I will at least wear it on Sunday the 7th and maybe on Saturday too (depends on whether we can get a parking ticket for Saturday).
My 3D animation ambition
Years ago, somewhere august 2013 I tried the free open source 3D program Blender and wanted to learn 3D modeling and animation. However, back then the interface sucked to such an extent that I quit. But the idea never left my mind. Four years ago, I bought a new gaming laptop, again with the idea that it should be capable of handling at least some 3D work. Yet, work and life happened and I didn’t come to it aside from some sculptures in Scultptris - see the siderian refsheet. However, recently I bumped some videos of the new interface and was mind-blown. And now that I finished my fursuit and my PhD, I wanted to give Blender a try again. Indeed…the interface has improved tremendously! By now, there are tons of good beginner tutorials and I have finally made a proper start with it. So anyone who knows Blender, quite likely knows the donut tutorial by Blender Guru on YouTube. After I completed following every step from the tutorial I just ruined the realism by creating a radioactive, black burned Falkner -style donut. I’ve also roughly sculpted the head of my Siderian fellow Matthias in Blender (detailed enough to serve as a ref, but I wasn't bothered to do all the inimini details). See here:
I still have long, long way to go as I’m still a supern00b and 3D art is very complicated. But if I can teach myself to make a fursuit and to do programming for my current science job, then I can teach myself to model and animate in Blender. So in the future I want to focus a lot more on realistic 3D modelling and animation of Siderians. Yes, Siderians. Again. Because I still have a story to tell, whether people want it or not. I want it. That’s what matters, so I do it.
Where and how I post it, I don’t know.
So…maybe…see you around again…somewhere.
Norway: the country that hates Nature.
Do you associate Scandinavia with vast wilderness? Do you think that in Scandinavia, wild animals thrive on the these immense Northern lands? Then you’re very wrong.
This blog post from 2016 describes the truth about Scandinavia and particularly the worst of the countries, Norway, very well. Well worth reading:
http://doendsjo.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-country-that-hates-its-own-nature.html
Now in 2022, every line in the blogpost, is still true. If not worse.
You would expect that in such a big country as Norway, but also Sweden, that there is room for a balanced ecosystem in which a variety of top predators have enough space to sustain a healthy population. No. This is more the situation elsewhere in Europe, where predators such as wolves, are slowly returning. It's not the case in Scandinavia and particularly not in Norway.
The wolf population in big, big Norway is about 60 wolves (individuals who don’t have part of their territory in Sweden). Now, 25 can be murdered. Last January, Nature conservation organizations tried to stop this murderous course of the government through a trial. They won the case: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/norway-wolves-saved-for-this-year-as-animal-rights-groups-fight-cull
Yet somehow, surprise surprise, the government got their will through, thereby violating the Bern Convention and international agreements to protect the already dwindling biodiversity. The Norwegian government fought hard to murder. Very hard. For what? To "dampen the conflict". Right. Between …who? This only worsened the conflict. In this process they even violated their own d*mn law by now allowing "protected" wolves to get murdered in special zone in which they said to prioritize wolf protection. What a bullsh*t Yet they found some tiny loophole in the law so that animal welfare and protection does not count for predators. Only for sheep or the animals that they *like*.
Only hours after the government got what they wanted; the first young male wolf paid with his life (see photo). And more families are going to get torn apart.
In Norway, there is the strange (not even old) tradition that sheep farmers throw about 2 million sheep out in the wild, completely unsupervised. About 85.000 die just because they cannot adapt. Only only 18% is attributed to *potential* predator attacks. In about all other European countries, sheep are either guarded by dogs and/or a shepherd or are kept behind (electric) fences to…prevent conflict. But the Norwegian sheep farmers can apparently not afford it. But they can afford a to drive a Tesla.
Then there are the hunters who complain about competition with predators over prey and about predators killing their hunting dogs. No shit, you’re intruding their territory and harassing them with your loose dog, smartass. Oh, and every year Norwegian hunters kill between 30-40.000 moose - mostly for sport and a bit of meat that humans don’t even need. Wasn’t it a growing and environmentally necessary trend to reduce meat consumption? Humans are not obligatory carnivores and can go perfectly fine with less or no meat at all. So, one wolfpack kills on average 120 moose a year. Yet, the argument that wolves kill too many moose is flung around in order to justify the extermination of wolves and other predators by these hideous people.
How sick and greedy can this attitude be? And now I’m only speaking about large predators, wolves in particular. Another example is the sick wolverine hunt where they GPS-collar females, to find their den and then shoot mothers with pups in the head. Let's not speak about the totally unnecessary seal pup murder and the whale hunt, or the complete depletion of herring and thereby pretty much emptying the fjords of fish. Or the convenient forgetting that certain areas are protected against building more water-driven powerplants that have a tremendous negative effect on ecosystems. Because...everything and everybody (read: non-human beings) has to yield for human greed and uncontrolled growth (sounds like a particular disease, does it?).
I moved to Norway 10 years ago because I couldn’t stand the high human density in the Netherlands (where I was born). But sometimes I wonder I should leave this f*cking country that hates Nature. But where else can we still find Wilderness? That’s getting increasingly rare on this human infested planet.
So whoever has the idealized image of Norway as a wild country: here is the UGLY TRUTH. Please spread this and find another country to admire wilderness, but not Norway. Better go to Romania or something. I want this scandal to become internationally known. Please openly speak about it and make this known: SHAME ON NORWAY.
The Guardian already noticed this wolf slaughter - hopefully more news channels write about it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/15/finland-sweden-norway-cull-wolf-population-eu
Once upon a time
There was a village where niche-artists lived happily, sharing their art.
Villagers loved them and embraced their uniqueness.
Until king Mass Consumption came to power.
He aimed for conformity among his people and saw a threat in the deviating niche-artists.
He sent prince Algorithm to enforce his rules.
The niche artists rebelled, gathering their fellows to stand against the king's power.
The king outlawed them but the niche artists resisted, fighting for their home and passion.
But the other villagers liked the new rules and turned against the niche artists.
“Why are we still here?” a niche artist asked their fellows.
“I don’t know” another sighed. “Soon we can only hide, leave or perish”.
Stripped from their homes they disappeared.
King Mass Consumption became the hero, having provided safety for people in his country.
Years later prince Algorithm became king and he further eliminated all irregularities.
The people celebrated the conformity and they lived happily ever after.