Kezall ⵍⴰⵓⵔⴰ

"i read recently that over the span of 40 years, edvard munch painted six copies and many many studies of his piece "the sick child", a painting that depicted his sister dying from tuberculosis at 15. learning about this struck me in a funny way. since graduating (and honestly just over the years) my relationship with my own art has become toxic - nothing portfolio-worthy, nothing technically impressive, nothing good enough for me or anyone else. too emo. almost all the work i made in college were goofy projects about my dead brother and suddenly realised i was in the job search world with nothing clean enough to show. employers dont want to see that. thats like realising a wild animal in their office. so i just stopped. no point. started over. ive spent a lot of time since looking into design and teaching myself ad*be illustrator. something about the coldness of some vector art (specifically this facebooky graphic style commonly referred to as "corporate memphis") appealed to me. no one has a real skin color, sometimes not even a face, just shapes and blobs. impersonal and easy to produce. oh baby. only recently did it occur to me that i "could do something fun" with that "for myself". munch's "the sick child" represents a lot to me- love, grief, survivor's guilt. the fact that he did this painting over and over was a comfort - obvs i'm no legendary painter but it was a reminder to me that it doesn't automatically make you a lousy artist to use art as an exorcist for trauma. that's actually the point🤨 girl. (where was i going with this) sooo this is my "corporate memphis clip art" take on munch's "the sick child".🤷🏻‍♀️ the strongest emotion i know in a work-friendly wrapper. big sorry for the essay but i feel like this is the first piece of mine ive liked (even if it's the artistic equivalent a muzak rendition of beethoven). it's stupid and was fun to do. yeehaw. thanks 💋 maybe ill do the scream next idk."

full disclosure: there are aspects of corporate memphis that i (oceanlandworld) actually love in an artistic sense. i love the abstraction of human form, the bright flat colors, and the lineless cutout style*! and i love seeing people do creative and interesting things with this style that was developed for bland and inoffensive uses

what you wrote about packaging "the strongest emotion [you] know in a work-friendly wrapper" really captures what is striking to me about killpony's take on gentileschi's painting. gentileschi's judiths have been meaningful to me for a long time as an expression of rage against sexual predators (more info here, cw mentions of rape) and that juxtaposition of the intensity of painful feeling in an art style designed to be soft and safe is so interesting and captivating to me.

thank you again for sharing your work!!!!

men just love to run their fucking mouth about what women do or do not want without even once considering consulting any actual women on the matter

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it's just... Social media. That's it. Social media and news sites. And I'm tired of social media and I'm tired of the news.

You're right that the internet is smaller than it used to be, but there's still some cool stuff left in the corners. I'd recommend checking checking out Neocities if you haven't--it's an independent web hosting platform like Geocities of the old web, and there are hundreds of interesting and active pages discoverable both through their search function and through web buttons (links attached to small pictures with the title of a website) within the websites themselves. Here are three examples of web buttons you may find in link pages:

Most Neocities websites have link pages or button collections with anywhere from tens to hundreds of these. Don't be afraid to explore!

If you're looking for something more like a search engine, I can point you towards Marginalia. It's not a particularly smart engine, but it's perfectly usable if you've ever been taught to use search engines back when they were mostly run through keywords instead of full sentence comprehension. There's also an "about" and "tips" section on the front page with more information. The algorithm of Marginalia can be filtered by the user to allow, disallow, or require JavaScript depending on your needs, plus there are filters designed specifically to prioritize web 1.0 sites or mostly text-based ones. It is possible to search for modern websites with it, but it can return websites from just about any decade (since the invention of the web, obviously) so long as they contain the information you're looking for. For example, here are some random interesting sites I've found using Marginalia:

Native Languages of the Americas: Native American Cultures

BASIC HTML COMPETENCY IS THE NEW PUNK FOLK EXPLOSION!

Earthbound Text Labs by Bill Eager

The possibilities for discovery are truly endless.

Now you might want to know about directories. These make browsing for websites easier, but require you to read through and judge which ones to visit, as there aren't algorithms ranking the sites besides the whim of whoever coded the directory. Some of them have themes, others don't. Here are two that I've used:

Yesterlinks Directory

Ichigo Directory

Directories can be harder to come by just by surfing the net, but they aren't impossible to find. Many personal websites have their own directories of interesting sites hidden within them.

Webrings are similar to directories, but are actually more community-based. You have to register your website to be a part of a webring, usually by sending an email to whoever runs it and meeting some kind of entry criteria. For example, my personal website used to be a part of a webring called Sweet Dreams, which was for websites that heavily utilize color palettes and images of cute things, particularly sweets. Webrings will give you access to a widget upon entry that allow visitors and other members to browse between the registered websites in a massive ring, ergo, where the term gets its name. Webrings can have any theme or criteria for entry. If you can make a website about it, you can find a webring for it.

Now, you might be wondering about social media alternatives. I can't offer much, but I can nudge you towards the idea of forums. Here's one I found that could really use some traffic. I also browse a bit on MelonLand forum, which is actually closed right now--it's currently closed on Mondays--but on any other day of the week, you can find a fun community there dedicated to web revival. You can find it through MelonLand's main page. I'd also recommend checking out SpaceHey, which is a MySpace clone that's customizable and easy to use.

i live here

im a person

its okay to make noise

youre allowed to go outside

tl;dr: maintain proper posture, have feet shoulder-width apart, and think living thoughts.

actually it's been lovely to start in child's pose then transition into a full ramp plank, making sure to extend my spine with pushing heels and shoulders down. but i've been building my core muscles for a while so on this post, the How steps go through 3 types of planks with a "level up" in difficulty indicated by a ^

Another design is using 2 20x25x1 filters, taping them to the sides of the box fan and then to each other so they sort of make a triangle, then cutting cardboard to make a top and bottom to the triangle.

This was discovered as a more effective design during the 2020 US west coast fires.

https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/06/better-box-fan-air-purifier.html

Being in close contact with people who give a shit and are also witnessing the descent of our country into fascism and ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT is actually mad refreshing in contrast to the pointless noise that is the internet.

You'll make such fast friends if you:

show up

say "where do you need me"

do what they say

have a good attitude

Done. Easy. Volunteering is awesome and will put you right in the lap of the best people in your area. They're the helpers, they're the people Mr. Rogers told you about!

Doing an easy task like potting trees for a community garden or helping at a food bank will also connect you to people who are doing more, like immigrant support or things that tackle more urgent, dangerous issues going on. So you can scale up your involvement easily by just showing up repeatedly.

Or don't scale it up-- maybe you stop at helping at the food bank and you're stacking cans for a few hours. You're feeding your neighbors. That's a load-bearing part of any revolution. (I use that word optimistically.) The people you meet will be the people you lean on when shit gets worse.

AND VICE VERSA, prove that you are someone to lean ON by showing up and helping. Offer things to people. Your skills may be helpful. Already, just because we've done local volunteering, we have made at least 5 or 6 new friends, got a potential firewood connection, and WELL-PAID EMPLOYMENT (??? OMG)

(and free lunches and snacks and fruit trees) And it's healing as fuck to have people genuinely tell you, in the flesh, to your face, "I'm so glad you showed up today. I appreciate you so much. This would have been harder without you." That shit makes you feel AWESOME and REAL and PURPOSEFUL

🇬🇧 Hello there! I haven't shared my art here in a long time. For my return, I would like to make an offering of this perfectly normal cat inspired by medieval marginalia.

Tumblr's deal with OpenAI in early 2024 left a very sour taste in my mouth. But unlike Instagram which gives me hives in its current form, I still visit here often enough. Let's try this again, shall we?