#or easier

[saints-salvation]

I think the thing that people who use AI for any creative endeavour don't realise is that talent isn't the middleman between the self and art, its passion.

[babymorte]

focus on what’s good for you, not what’s familiar

[theshatteredsilhouette]

one thing I wished I’d learned (and accepted) sooner as an artist is that using tools you have available to you isn’t “cheating”. 

can’t draw circles for the life of you? Trace that glass on your paper. And the digital equivalent of dropping in a circle shape is just as valid. 

wanna make a background but don’t want to draw every tree? Whether it’s physical or digital, stamp those trees in. 

find yourself relying heavily on your undo shortcut? So what? It’s there. Use it. Take advantage of it. Let it free you from fear of mistakes. 

you’re not less of an artist because you drop in a fill colour instead of painting it in manually. You’re not less of an artist because you use rulers for your straight lines, or use a blender for your shading. 

use the tools at your disposal. They are there for a reason. Not everything has to be difficult to make it worth it. 

[phantomsoot]

me, listening to any crane wives song: now how can i make this about c!wilbur

[blackwoolncrown]

Consider me that much more compelled @head-smashed-in-buffalo-thighs

[commanderbunnbunn]

let’s have a little fun. There are no rules, just do what your heart tells you. It can be as long or as short as you want, but it should be the first workable thing that pops into your head from your chosen fandom upon hearing the title.

[apollowned]

In 2021 one of my resolutions will be to improve my internet hygiene, and having started the process already, I wanted to share a bit of why and what I am learning.

For one, in 2020, there seems to have been a mass amount of leaks and hacks; having gone through the google security check and one with Mozilla Firefox, a lot of my information has been found in places it shouldn't have been. I don't think I am unique in this.

This information got me to go through all the accounts saved through google and Mozilla, and the more I scrolled, the more uncomfortable I became. Genuinely, I cannot remember ever buying something from SHEIN, and yet apparently, I have an account there. An account that was compromised.

I figured because I clearly don't need it, I could delete my account instead of resetting the password. Let me tell you, that was not as simple a process as it should have been. It frustrated me how hard I had to work to no longer have an account with this site, so I decided it might be time to delete some more of my accounts. I went to Abebooks, where I had bought one book before and will likely never use again, and tried there. I had to email customer service directly to get my account deleted. There was no other way. Not because my account was special, or something had gone wrong, the only way they let customers delete their accounts is if they write out an email of complaint to customer service.

It seems pretty obvious why I am being forced to go through all these hoops. The harder it is to delete an account, the less likely people are to go through with it and the longer corporations will theoretically hold on to business and information. Of course, this pissed me off and felt scammy as hell, so it has just made me more determined to delete my accounts.

In fact, the difficulty has inspired me to delete all the accounts that I can find that I no longer need or probably won't need. I mean, it isn't like I can't make another account if I change my mind, and all of this makes it very clear to me how deep the desire to keep information is. If they want it so bad, then these corporations shouldn't have it.

I have boycotted Amazon for years, yet I still have an account there. There are websites I don't even recognize, and for some reason, they know me.

I like the internet a lot. I don't want to delete myself from it, but I’m tired. Tired of being seen as a commodity, tired of my email constantly being full of sales from companies I don't care about. Tired of not caring about internet security because I entered the internet when I was a kid and had no idea why I should be careful with my information, and it seems too late to start now.

I want to start caring, even if I just remove a couple of the thousand roots corporations have dug into my life.