Heads up- we’ll be making a major security release for Sharkey later today (between 1745780400 and 1745787600) in coordination with Iceshrimp and Misskey. Please make sure to update your instances as soon as possible.

On the outside maybe you do like the other do so you be called normal. But when in your own room when no one watching you can do anything you like, wear anything you want, or just be your self without anyone judging you. Because your own room is your small kingdom

#Art #DigitalArt #Krita

Moin.
Bin ja gerade in #Japan.
Meine Bilder habe ich unter diesem Link parat.
Also wer Interesse hat?

https://albums.ente.io/?t=WBjEyQ7d#9VLvKNNRT54hjkz9LiRfDegq1xqLuttV7fxs6crvN3Xf

#Fotografie #GooglePixel6a #Canon6DMark2

Can I rant a little bit please

Why is design going to shit with companies.

You know I am in the market for a new Backpack. I dearly love my deuter Gigant backpack. But its start show its several years at this point. UV-Lighting wasn't nice it turning it brown over time. There are some holes here and there. I just want a new one.

Its actually the second one as well since my first one got stolen while I was doing Vacaytion...

So I thought why not go with Deuter again? They are durable and nice though maybe a bit pricey. But I never had a zipper break on me on that backpack. And it generally held up super well. Even though I use it daily.

I know I got the more boring design back then but they had cool options.

The new Gigant looks neat feature-wise. They made some nice improvement I think. But the new design is kinda lame.

First up their iconic logo changed. The double d logo was kinda neat since they could add a splash of different color it, also was actually stitched on. Now? Nope, hope you like boring flat logo!

The pack also looks less fun I think. Yes they have colors besides black (but I was not able to find the other colors yet for sale only black)

The green/gray one looks kinda fun. Also whats up with the Gigant SL (seemingly slightly older than the new one as it uses old logo) being marketed at women specifically? Its a pack. Atleast you get fun colors again.

I need to check what makes it specifically for women lol. It seems like the same pack to me...

God I hate fashion. Good I can just wear what I want and be fun and colorful

[Read in full on NHAM]

Imposter Syndrome

The other day, I was listening to an interview of the lead singer-songwriter of a hugely successful band (that I had never heard of, see below), during which he described the difference in his view between a hobbyist and an artist.

The gist of his point was this: hobbyists mainly engage in their hobby for fun, while artists make art because they have to, are compelled to, even though making art is often an extremely fraught and painful and laborious process riddled with angst, thankfully interspersed with moments of exhilaration.

This struck a chord with me, and got me thinking (again) about the whole notion of what it means to be a “real artist” and more specifically, a “professional artist” or musician.

In a market-driven economy where you have to have something to sell in order to literally not die, it’s hard to separate making art from the problem of staying alive making a living.

And so the public, and even artists themselves, tend to think an artists’ worth is measured in sales.

Which is obviously bullshit.

Because the percentage of artists who make a decent living from their art has always been tiny. In the olden pre-internet days for instance, bands used to make pennies on the dollar on record sales, and only once they’d paid off the recording studio and marketing costs fronted by the record labels.

Musicians who have the drive and stamina to find gigs (if they actually can or want to gig in the first place), market promote themselves online and IRL, make throwaway TikTok videos and/or sell merch (no comment) in order to eke out a living are worthy of admiration and praise for their dedication and perseverance, but those activities have nothing to do with making art, and everything to do with not starving to death.

Hopefully, you’ll agree with the following claims: 

• There are tons of “great artists” you have never heard of (see above), sometimes because they toil in total obscurity. 
• All of the artists you love and admire were once one of them. 
• There are maybe a few true, once in a lifetime “geniuses” out there that we don’t know about because they aren’t geniuses at self-promotion, or are busy herding sheep or harvesting rice or moving furniture or selling truffles*. 
• When it comes to emerging from obscurity, inspiration and perspiration count, but probably not nearly as much as sheer luck (as in when and where you were born and in what milieu, and as in pure serendipity). 

It follows that there is absolutely no difference in terms of artistic worth between an artist who makes a living from their art and an artist who makes a living doing something else.

None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

You can be a hobbyist with or without a day job, but having a day job doesn’t make you a hobbyist.

Being forced to find a day job sucks, the day job may also suck, and even if it doesn’t, it steals time and energy away from making art which definitely sucks, but that says everything about the society we live in, and absolutely nothing about the artist or their art.

Children create art with a passion and without compensation, beyond the feedback they crave, because their basic needs are provided for.

In a post-capitalist solarpunk utopia (or think Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, or Star Trek), an artist would be someone who chooses to devote most of their free time and energy to making art, without worrying about food and shelter (or Klingons).

Or as Oscar Wilde put it:

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse.

Useless isn’t a pejorative. It’s a badge of honor. It’s what makes art special.

And to keep rolling with Oscar’s metaphor, you could say that an artist with a day job is a gardener with a day job, while a “professional artist” is a gardener whose day job is working as a florist. I really have a hard time seeing a meaningful difference, even if both arrangements have particular pros and cons. Some “professional artists” will be full-time, full-blown horticulturists or even farmers who have to cultivate (at least in part) whatever will keep their business afloat, while artists with a day job can tend to their flower beds or vegetable gardens without any such market pressure, time and energy permitting of course.

Don’t get me wrong: it took decades of music-making for me to get rid of my imposter syndrome and to be able to call myself an artist without adding air quotes, even though (or maybe because) I never dreamed of fame and glory.

So, freed at last from market-induced imposter syndrome, but not from the need to survive, the one extracurricular activity that artists probably should be involved in, is educating the music-loving public: 

• So they stop confusing fame or notoriety with artistic merit. 
• So they stop valuing quantity (of sales, views, plays, followers, etc.) over quality. 
• So they stop seeing indie artists specifically as “mere hobbyists” who make “amateur” and presumably crappy art (do I actually need to convince anybody that there’s plenty of crappy “professional” art out there?). 
• And ultimately, so they come to realize that indie artists are in fact the cool kids on the block 😎. 

This is a cultural battle, that can be won, collectively, because the tools and infrastructure and public do exist to circumvent toxic intermediaries.

Only then will music lovers be able to entertain the notion of supporting indie artists directly on fair platforms in sufficiently large numbers to make it possible for a lot more artists to make a modest living, or at least enjoy a fancy meal once in a while.

---

*After finishing the first draft of this post and while searching for a link to the story about how John Cage financed his music-making by finding and selling truffles, I stumbled on this fabulous article that I had totally forgotten about (and had I remembered it, I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this one 😅) and which I heartily recommend: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student by Max Alper.

#article #FairTradeMusic #ImposterSyndrome #IndieMusic

Special Post für @desea

> „Last Gender – Nicht länger namenlos“ erscheint bei Crunchyroll auf Deutsch

Chat es ist endlich passiert. Das letzte Gender. Abolish Gender!

Der Manga klingt zumindest mal interessant für fedi-people. Hier ein Link zur News:

https://www.manga-passion.de/news/12212/lizenz-last-gender-nicht-laenger-namenlos-erscheint-bei-crunchyroll-auf-deutsch

new plant

I'm enjoying European spring much more than spring in Toronto.

Just realised I didn't post all of my comic on Mastodon, which means i have lots of content to post!

#throwback #comic #comicstrip #toronto #torontosnow #torontosnowstorm #spring #Torontospring #snow #wind #rain #mastoart #mastocomic

Today Melissa Lewis over on BlueSky pointed out that the font used in the infamous “You wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy campaign was actually designed by Just van Rossum, whose brother, Guido, created the Python programming language (https://bsky.app/profile/melissa.news/post/3ln7hx5rhcj2v)

She also pointed out that the font had been cloned and released illegally for free under the name “XBAND Rough”. Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (https://web.archive.org/web/20051223202935/http://www.piracyisacrime.com:80/press/pdfs/150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).

So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!

@mametsuko wird das lieben. Einfach cute!

RE: https://mstdn.social/@sumikai/114379677729276091

Miffy, bzw. in den Niederlanden Nijntje, bekommt einen eigenen Themenbereich im Huis Ten Bosch Park. #japan #Nijntje #miffy

https://sumikai.com/nachrichten-aus-japan/huis-ten-bosch-eroeffnet-miffy-bereich-zum-70-geburtstag-354830/

Happy Easter! I dressed like this about two weeks ago and a young woman asked me if I was dressed for Easter and I said... I didn't even think about it. #art #doodle #MastoArt #ArtistsOnMastodon #HikArt

just an fyi my new resource for alt-text writing is available in both English and German!

https://micr0.dev/alttext/
https://micr0.dev/alttext-de/

@stefan Finally managed to write together that blogpost. While you can read it here on fedi I generally recommend reading it writefreely itself. Fedi might not like how I just hot-linked the images from my nextcloud, so they appear quite small on here. The images might take a bit too load upload at home from my nextcloud ain't the best

Here is the link if you need it: https://write.lightnovel-dungeon.de/a-long-way-to-my-first-proper-self-made-cosplay

#Cosplay #Sewing #LLENN #GGO

TIL. LanguageTool isn't really working with libreoffice anymore. But there is WritingTool based on LanguageTool that works with LibreOffice. The world of forks is sure interesting...

#writing

The UK now has the world's first ETCS-enabled steam locomotive, because we're a very silly country.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/19/nobody-has-done-this-before-britains-beloved-steam-trains-trial-pioneering-technology

Happy Easter!

well, a dragon is a little big to handling a chicken egg. maybe something a lot bigger would fit better :D

dragon is @Akulatraxas

#art #painting #Easter #dragon #holiday

When designers think outside the box. Studio Ghibli designed this DVD case to make it look like the characters are checking their reflection in the water.
Sweet!

#manga #studioghibli #dvd #characters #design