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We don’t know how to be an artist, let alone a profitable one, but dammit we are still here. Our Vtuber hiatus has paradoxically seen a number of streams, and will continue to. in part because not streaming for months on end feels like neglecting a muscle. The nature of letting a muscle fall out of use has a similar effect to letting a skill fall out of use, even a casual one. Spend enough time not talking to people in front of you and only on the computer and you’ll find talking to strangers outside to be much harder than it used to be. From Vtubing to writing email, to taking up space in social situations; off loading or avoiding engaging in a thing will naturally lend towards struggles when returning to it. Its been on our mind a lot these days. Stories of AI psychosis terrify us. The aspect of talking to a thing that is deigned to mirror you, make you feel right all the time, and encourages paranoia of other people sounds like a nightmare, a nightmare of frictionlessness. A nightmare of diminishing ability. Although we don’t use gen-ai we think the dynamic of convenience lulling you into letting skills or interactions atrophy is the major hurdle of living in this society right now and trying to avoid that inverted cradle is a major part of our existence right now.
Skills and muscles can atrophy. We’re terrifyingly aware of this what with the horror stories of Hikkikomori, burned out gifted kids, or people who lost their social skills to covid we’re privy to or have experienced. Despite being a much foretold friend of bluey We’re terrified of regression. Regression of social skills, of artistic skills or possibilities, bodily autonomy, not to mention cognitive function. We’ve felt our possibilities for ourselves stretch a lot lately: Spending an increasing time outside of our house, interacting with people, moving our body through martial arts and keeping up with a spew of doctor and hospital appointments. Its been challenging to say the least; we’ve been seeing a lot of what we’ve neglected hurt to attempt again, let alone keeping it up when we come up against friction. We’re trying to embrace friction and inconvenience. Which is a tough order, particularly for a mind like ours. Particularity because accessibility and convenience are linked. Now that we’re getting out more, we wanna make sure we balance our art and online presence with living in meat space instead of neglecting one to compensate the other. Unmediated ADHD makes that a hard mode run.
We made a to do list to finish before we go back to streaming regularly but as time goes by it feels like the list of goals are drifting farther away. We haven’t committed to schedule but we do still stream sometimes; a compromise of sorts to keep the “I should be doing this”-isms at bay. But not prioritizing streaming is really important for catching up on our other art. Not to mention we find being an artist rather slippery, what with the moving goalposts of what one can post and where, and the managing of attention to try to circumvent hypothetical and possible harassment. And who could forget the anxiety of being plugged into the collective unconscious of whatever algorithm organized subculture one happens to operate exist (and the stress of “breaking containment”) So we find ourselves spread in a lot of directions and to be honest a lot of time we shut down and don’t do anything; stuck in statis. Drawing has a particular ability to pull us out of that, so thats a silver lining. Its hard not to feel like a failure as a creator. That we’ve fallen off and spent too much time licking our wounds. But until we give up permanently that remains to be seen. The world changes so much and so do we. This month has certainly felt like that. Like things are still changing with us and stuff hasn’t settled.
While we could go in any number of directions with the increased creative free time that streaming less allows us we found ourselves increasingly invested in a creative idea we had and have been carrying a torch for this past year. The most selfish project we are working on and has taken up a considerable portion of our time has been Isn’t this Familiar Supposed to be my Subordinate. A light novel-manga-ish hybrid in the magical school genre in a very dystopic fantasy sci-fi fusion setting. The Character at the top of this newsletter is Lycurgus Hamlet, a Black wild fortune Mage. We scryed him a four card spread tarot reading, and drew him drawing it himself, with the help of his Familiar, Melanophie. The reverberation between the art and our world and this esoteric way of organizing thoughts was so weird. The vagueness and mysticism of astrology and tarot and how it applies more to you the more you give yourself to it and shape the possibles for yourself within it. Like the opposite of cold reading. A tarot reading can be like a Rorschach test. Applying the meaning of the reading to ourselves or Gus was troubling. But of course its not real and I can disregard it. But at the same time its a game; trying to see how your current mind state or circumstances fit within the frame work of the reading and trying to see if anything useful can be gleamed out of it. We find the process much like reading something into or out of art. It can be caustic when you take it too literately (like when someone panics seeing the death arcana in a reading). You are reflected in the art or in the cards, but you are not created by them.
Familiar is a passion project smashing together some of our biggest inspirations; namely Made in Abyss , Berserk , Naruto and The Stormlight Archives. Familiar is about the culture shock that is adulthood, and how some folks come to reject it and in effect reject systems of hierarchical control. We wanna explore wonderful and fucked up and gory themes of self fulfillment and defilement. Its gonna have age regression, age progression, age stasis, tf, monster fucking and...well a lot of stuff. We can’t wait to have more to show other than our creative process and character work. But for now thats most of what it is aside from unreleased writings. In some sense we are still “playing with our toys” as we’re toying with character dynamics, creating lore, and trying to find our feet with it. Its certainly a long term project and is sure to be worked on in the background of whatever we do. The trouble is actually having it in the background.
Even though familiar isn’t what any audience we’ve cultivated is looking to us for we feel really strongly about it. And its become a special interest as any long form piece of art probably should be. But its incredibly selfish to pursue that and only that with what we’ve build up with streaming and what we strive to do for video essays. Good thing (or maybe bad) that we still wanna work on other things. We do fear our interest in streaming, video essays, original art, music , and game development?? will mean we won’t finish anything. But the funny thing is even when we can’t work on anything else we can always work on Familiar. Its what we work on in our sketchbooks when we’re outside in the world. As a project its the thing creating the most momentum. Which is great right now but dangerous to rely on.
Since we haven’t released anything concrete for it its still filled with limitless potential, unburdened by the gravity of execution. But all the same, enthusiasm for it almost seems to create its own energy somehow. Which in current year is something we cherish since the state of the world and our own place within it saps our spoons and motivation. And its the stuff in the world we cant effect on our own that so often plummets our willpower. We wanna work on our resilience in spite of that crushing weight but the absolute state of being a trans person right now, a disabled person right now, and so much more, is a drag. We move inches at a time.
We have spent a lot of our time glorifying the state of being online and are very invested in our internet presence, in the handle Fuffbyte and in expressing ourselves to the fullest. While also acknowledging that living only online is imbalanced and unhealthy, But damn is it hard to live isn’t it? I mean I can’t even be sure when I go out if I’ll feel safe using the bathroom. Even before covid we embraced the solitude of the net and understanding we found in places like the furry fandom, queer community, anime and vtuber subcultures. We saw a lot of bad but also found really important people too. We’ve been housing secure for multiple years but its been hard to feel secure. And outside is so hostile we’ve often felt on the defensive. The more the world denies trans people dignity the more it takes a sustained effort to participate in flesh space. Add stuff like masking and even some lefty spaces feel less welcoming. But the alternative; retreating, makes our world smaller.
The world has been small for us in a lot of ways. Both online and off. Not taking up space for fear of offending someone or causing problems somehow. But we’ve found ourselves taking up more space than usual outside. We spent time in the hospital this month, for 3 and half days to asses if we have epilepsy since we’ve been having seizures for years. It was humbling to interact with people outside of the usual spaces we’re used to, but uncomfortable being away from our computer so much. But being forced into an unfamiliar environment, and talking to people, some coming in an out of rotation was a shock to our social system, but also the point of our visit was to seek understanding and to communicate our experience, literally pressing a button every time we had a seizure, highlighting our abnormality instead of trying to mask it. So we didn’t have the ability to deflect so it made us feel really vulnerable.
We don’t seem to have epilepsy but we do have something thats causing our..episodes. Its likely a condition that we’ll get into somewhere else but it seems to be a result of trauma and our body self regulating stress. The problem of this condition has generated a lot of anxiety that led to us going out less, not wanting to risk shutting down in public. But as we went outside less our capacity to handle stress both in the flesh and on the net backslid. Being stuck in bed with electrodes on our head only allowed to get up mostly to use the potty, getting sleep deprived and occasionally getting lights flashed in our face to cause seizures was harrowing and people kept apologizing or giving us condolences about our situation. But we have done worse to ourselves for longer over the years since covid and we couldn’t help thinking that there were times while making art on the internet where we had been really hurting ourselves with how we made our world smaller and participated in our own isolation.
So we’ve leaned into online life a lot more than we should. And a lot of it is what you don’t see but probably have experienced yourself. Anxiety spirals from global news or the hostile media attitude of the day. The moral panics, the feeling of not doing enough. The feeling of infighting in every community we’re in, inspiring paranoia and distrust. Worrying that any private argument could become into a public callout. It causes an anxiety thats certainly made us retreat at times.
Its easy to be subsumed in the nihilism that making art is useless, especially at a low skill level that’s hard to monetize. And the ever present urge to submit your ego to mindless consumption machine is always an option and it offers much less friction than struggling through making something. The more time we’ve spent away from the infinite content and conflict nexus the more we’ve felt resistant to spiraling, or maybe we’re just adding to our stamina gauge. Either way, Its really helped in accomplishing things since our greatest hurdle is executive dysfunction.
We’ve had a lot of stuff hanging in our ledger of planed things that are much more relevant to this post than our life balance but its interrelated. See isn’t this familiar is the exact kinda thing that years ago we would daydream about and maybe yap about to a friend or two but nothing more. But as we’ve spent more time less involved in screens and more offline or semi-offline to be honest (being in a coffee shop drawing with my phone on the table for instance) we’ve found our thoughts with room to breath. Most of what we’ve cooked up for Familiar is on literal paper in a growing hoard of notebooks and sketchpads. many character designs lore fragments, bios and plot points. Our agoraphobia is still pretty strong but finding local community like we keep saying is important is increasingly on our plate. We’ve been spending a lot more time in spaces with others and its really been grounding. The internet by comparison is anti gravity; hard to tether oneself, easily at the mercy of the slightest force.
in simplest terms what are thinking of having these updates every month like a newsletter. And we’ll release it with a bit of art and samples of what we got going on. Fragments of personal life we feel up to sharing. We wanna stop begrudging making update posts, fearing no one will read them, or worse someone will and feel there wasn’t even a point. But I guess thats just comes with the territory. Lets continue to shake off that anxiety and do it scared. So our to do list!
so life happens and a number of life events this month, like going to the hospital for several days or submitting to the art show. Which was called art all night. It was a 24 hour gallery open to anyone and without any censorship rules. We could probably do a whole write up just about the experience. But having our art on a wall, alongside other artists was infinitely validating, and a major step in our art journey. We’ve been seeing folks like us, finding very little room to take up space online because payment processors and moral panics; talk about having their art exist offline more. We are still timid about it but this was a major step for us.
we haven’t made progress on these so far but there is still like a week left of the month!
Again, a week left, and not sure what we’ll create about but we need to shake off the rust we have on video production.
this is a goal that for sure will rollover to next month, as we still haven’t found a guest for said episode. However the vod of resistance to extiction's 2nd episode is up if u wanna watch/listen to our podcast about survival. Last topic was trans day of visibility in the middle of a hellscape.
Soooo The day we’re posting this is drowning day!
We’re prepared for streaming later today and decided to play fear and hunger 2, as the cruelty of that game is perfect for such a day of remembrance. We did a piece of art for Drowning day whose location is loosely based on the docks from Termina. The sona presented is our body’s sona we came up with last year as a knock on effect of the Undertale 10th Anniversary memory flower art thingie. Its funny how such a dark game can provide such comfort. If you wanna know more about Drowning Day and why we “celebrate” it, TL;DR: its a day we lived. Its a day we almost died. And its a day every year where we renew our lease on existence. Staying around, esp in the current awful climate is a challenge, and our traumatic history doesn’t make things any easier, but it is a small comfort to observe this every year and have the energy to keep going and to use it as a moment to tell people in rough situations to stick around.
Outside our art we’ve got some personal responsibilities such doctors visits and taxes. Really happy to be done with taxes this year but pretty mad about owing the government momeny despite the fact that we’re poor. Being a self employed artist is more punished than being a billionaire. We actually had to ask someone for money to pay it off. Its pretty humiliating (bad kind).
We are still trying to exist beyond the scope that we assumed we had to stay in. What that means for our art we don’t know but in the physical world it means showing up more, participating more, being involved in our community and staying on top of our health. We’ve taken up some martial arts and self defense lessons recently. So we have an actual reason to leave the house more often than to get groceries. We’ve found some queer spots in our local community and orgs that try to better the lives of poor people. Its slow but its progress. I think thats a sufficient menu for our plans this month, and what to expect to see from us if anything. This is also great as intentional to do list , so two birds with one stone.