Ulrik\錆の輩

This post is strictly introspective. I want to be able to come back to it, reread it, and remember that by making this thought public, I’m trying to pin it down - so I don’t spiral back into endlessly picking at the work.

The moment has come when I can no longer afford to spend so much time drawing slowly and meticulously. I KNOW, almost no one even sees what I draw, because I only post a tiny fraction of it. But this post is more of an internal note - a way to mark this moment for myself, including publicly

My “slow style” evolved not only because it fits the aesthetic standards I hold myself to, but likely also as a way to keep the work from entering the world. The longer you draw, the longer you can avoid facing your own reaction to it. Perfectionism often disguises itself as “I just want to make it as good as possible,” when in reality, it’s a form of avoidance. And I’m a master of avoidance, as you know. I feel safe behind a heavy render. It takes up all the space and leaves no room for the question: what’s actually underneath? Is this a reluctance to face the places where I still haven’t fully formed as an artist? Where did this come from? The old school (I mean the 2010s) taught us to act like we’re in an office. I’m a merchant, here’s my product in the window. You show up with something “finished,” polished, and every piece is obligated to justify the very fact of its existence. But damn, the modern way is to basically live on the internets - it’s a habitat now. And it feels like a return to an even older style, just without that 90s and early 2000s cyber-optimism. Too bad it's gone (But that’s a separate topic and I have plenty to say about it).

I cling to the “slow style,” the massive rendering, realism, and meticulousness because it’s part of the identity the old school drilled into me. It feels as if simplifying is a form of degradation. And that’s probably the main toxic bullshit in my head. Switching to a fast and light style feels like a blow to the ego. Now I know it’s total bullshit. I personally look for and save mostly light-styled art, technical polish isn’t the first thing I care about, not even the second.

This is Valera. Valera still has eyebrows here. Then back in 2018, I did a character design review and decided he didn't really need them.

Yesterday I wrote about something that’s slightly related to a topic I came across here today, a post saying that readers and critics have forgotten how to perceive a speculative premise as an independent idea. Any fictional conflict is immediately equated with real-world politics or specific social groups.

My situation, however, is that I can’t seem to translate the real-world experience of a group into a fictional format.

When I was leaving Russia, I used the services of lawyers who handled specific human rights cases. There, I crossed paths with a trans woman who was a journalist. She told me about her experience with conversion therapy. Her relatives had her committed there against her will for an indefinite period. This was April 2023. The bill banning gender transition had been introduced but not yet passed, and the official “extremist” label for the entire LGBTQ+ community was still a few months away. So, this girl told me how she spent nine months in a rehab facility undergoing conversion therapy. Nine months of torture, from which she eventually escaped by literally running through forests and fields.

I felt it was worth documenting. Didn't overthink the 'why', it just seemed necessary to track it. At the moment when the state dropped the act and declared us internal enemies, a lot of creepy shit started happening that you just can’t unsee. And, as it turns out, recording it is a problem of its own.

I thought: okay, I’m an artist, I make comics. You know. But the thing is, this girl's story is a sadistic torture of the mind and body of a living human being, and there are no fucking words for it.

The most fucked up part is that Western and European audiences read this as sadistic content. Every culture has its own representative canon of what is marked as “realistic” and what is automatically pushed into the realm of exploitation, horror, or edgy shock content. What is “permissible” is dictated not by logic, but by the collective experience of the environment.

To put it bluntly, different audiences have different "markets of realism." In some places, realism is a divorce, depression, an emotionally distant father, school bullying, and one uncomfortable family secret. In others, “everyday life” includes things that, to a more sheltered viewer, look like excessive directorial sadism.

This creates a state of narrative impasse - a problem of the horizon of plausibility.

Firstly, the reader accepts a story as “possible” not because it is objectively possible, but because it fits into their existing mental maps of the world (Shout-out to the original post).

Secondly, this is linked to testimonial injustice - epistemic injustice. This is when a person's testimony is given less weight not because it’s been debunked, but because the bearer of that experience exists outside the "norm." If you talk about this kind of violence from within the environment, they effectively tell you: “You’re either dramatizing, or your perception is warped, or you’re just retelling an internet horror story.” Reality is turned into an allegedly problematic aesthetic choice. I’ve been dealing with this for years.

Privileged viewers often perceive violence as an anomaly rather than a systemic infrastructure. It seems to them that if something horrific happens, there must be exceptional circumstances. There’s a political layer here, too. The center of the world loves to think of its norm as universal. If something sounds “too wild” in their cultural field, it isn’t immediately recognized as a local reality of the periphery. It first passes through a filter of exoticization. It’s not “this is happening,” it’s “this is some dark regional extreme of yours.”

As a result, a person from a harsher environment ends up in a trap of double alienation: they lived through it, and then they have to prove they didn’t invent it for effect.

By the way, my lawyers were later attacked. They managed to get the fuck out of Russia even earlier than I did.

Let’s start with the big picture. Sora didn’t fail, it just hit a ceiling of infrastructure costs and legal constraints. One of the reasons: businesses can’t officially use generations that reproduce real faces or copyrighted IP. We all know all that shit can be bypassed, and lawsuits are pretty much inevitable. What does this mean? “Yay, no more deepfakes”? No. They’ll just be shifted to open-source models, a largely unregulated space where accountability is blurry and you can generate basically any kind of prohibited content.

Commercial models implement policy compliance: restrictions on protected content, tracking systems (watermarking, provenance), and verification processes. I’m talking specifically about those watermarking experiments in models like Gemini and similar systems. Open-source models most likely won’t bother, or at least not anytime soon, lol, not until it’s strictly enforced by law. And when your face, voice, or IP gets hijacked for whatever purpose, there might not even be a clear party to sue, and actually verifying or proving anything becomes a nightmare.

That’s the first bitter pill to swallow.

The second is that Sora is being sidelined because OpenAI is moving away from fun stuff and focusing on enterprise integration. We’re talking B2B products, tools that plug into workflows, automate tasks, and directly impact operational efficiency. And you know what that means. Yeah, that’s human jobs on the chopping block.

Long story short, Sora didn’t die because it was bad, it’s being phased out so things could get even worse.