Ulrik\錆の輩

Digital artist. Building my own lore: RustFiends_錆の輩. Welcome.

[ulrikrustfiends]

Self-Sabotage: Why I Draw So Slowly (Pt 1)

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.

Before, I wanted to prove to myself that I can. But can what? Well... draw. There were no specifics, no objective point of “now I can definitely do it, I can finally unclench.” The peak is unreachable and constantly slipping away

This leads to the trap of trying to stuff all the cheese into one pierogi. Thinking that I’m short on time and attempts, I try to cram everything into a single piece just to be sure. In the end, by trying to make the work stronger, I overload it - breaking the very principle of how I believe art should work. I start contradicting my own ideas of what "good art" is. It’s a paradox, but there it is.

I often keep picking at an image long after the point where the drawing is essentially finished. At some point, the work has already said everything it could say; it already exists as an image. But I keep “improving” it. Except I’m not improving anything, I’m just postponing the moment when I have to leave it alone. I need to find a cure for this bullshit for my own sake, because this is exactly what hits my wallet, my quality of life, and all that financial stuff. I’m basically the architect of my own broke-ness, lol.

There’s also the issue of experience. Before, I didn’t know exactly how things would turn out, there was an element of discovery, so the result felt more significant → the reward was higher. I didn't fully grasp the "cost," so there was no internal resistance. Now, I know in advance what the work will look like and exactly how long it’ll take.I know my own reaction. It’s a loss of uncertainty and novelty.

Anyway, my point is that the way we exist online is changing, and we need to adapt. The role of the artist is changing too. You’re not just producing “art objects” anymore, you’re existing within the conversation and the context. A single unit of content - a track, a drawing, whatever, is no longer the endpoint. It's part of a conversation. I’m not done yet. To be continued... ヽ(。_°)ノ

[ulrikrustfiends]

External Reasons & The Tech Shift — Pt. 2

What about the external reasons? The old production model for making pictures has stopped being viable for me and my goals. It’s especially unsustainable considering modern algorithms and how much an audience now expects from a single piece of content. To be fair, this pressure to speed up the creative process started a long time ago, but back then, you could still compromise. Now, drawing and posting slowly feels like a Sisyphean task. A pipeline that’s too long completely kills iteration. I don’t have time to stay relevant, either within a specific piece or in general. I never join any trends or challenges, and I’m never relevant because every single hype cycle goes stale faster than it takes me to finish one drawing.

AI has played its part too. That’s a bottomless rabbit hole. Right now, it feels like AI is gradually devaluing technical skill anyway. And suddenly, I just don’t even feel like striving for technical chops anymore. I can’t help it. Now, it’s beneficial for an artist - literally any kind of artist - to know how to perform. The one thing AI won’t replace is the link between the artist and the work. You know. The author as part of the narrative. That’s why the “artist-work” pairing is becoming more important. And not in some moralistic “the real thing always wins” kind of way. I’m talking about the pragmatics of attention. In a world where visual output is dirt cheap, context becomes more valuable. Meaning, it’s not about the object, but the author’s coherence, integrity, and continuity of context - the context they create, where the artist’s personality and creative process become more vital than the technical polish of an individual drawing.

Usually, people would hit you with a "welcome to the internet" here, and in my case, that's completely valid, since I was basically offline from 2018 until recently.

Plus, semi-realism with heavy rendering has a very limited range of expression. A stylized approach can shift from symbolism to grotesque, and both moves will be read as intentional choices. The problem with realism is that it’s too heavily bound by the laws of physics and anatomy, and with a highly detailed style, the viewer’s eye spots mistakes instantly. Realism sets a standard that’s too rigid, and that standard limits you both ways: you can’t break it on purpose, and you can’t mess up by accident. As a tool for narrative and emotional communication, realism is just less flexible for me.

Like I said, I tried finding these faster styles. But I did it with the mindset that I had to slap some shit together and roll it out as a finished, established thing. Hundreds of failed attempts pretty much show that it won’t work this time around either, so I decided to switch tactics. I’m just going to test and tweak things in public, see what hits best, and see what feels most organic to me. For once in my life, I need to give myself the chance to grow through mistakes rather than from the fear of making them, and just see what happens.

[ulrikrustfiends]

Self-Sabotage: Why I Draw So Slowly (Pt 1)

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.

Before, I wanted to prove to myself that I can. But can what? Well... draw. There were no specifics, no objective point of “now I can definitely do it, I can finally unclench.” The peak is unreachable and constantly slipping away

This leads to the trap of trying to stuff all the cheese into one pierogi. Thinking that I’m short on time and attempts, I try to cram everything into a single piece just to be sure. In the end, by trying to make the work stronger, I overload it - breaking the very principle of how I believe art should work. I start contradicting my own ideas of what "good art" is. It’s a paradox, but there it is.

I often keep picking at an image long after the point where the drawing is essentially finished. At some point, the work has already said everything it could say; it already exists as an image. But I keep “improving” it. Except I’m not improving anything, I’m just postponing the moment when I have to leave it alone. I need to find a cure for this bullshit for my own sake, because this is exactly what hits my wallet, my quality of life, and all that financial stuff. I’m basically the architect of my own broke-ness, lol.

There’s also the issue of experience. Before, I didn’t know exactly how things would turn out, there was an element of discovery, so the result felt more significant → the reward was higher. I didn't fully grasp the "cost," so there was no internal resistance. Now, I know in advance what the work will look like and exactly how long it’ll take.I know my own reaction. It’s a loss of uncertainty and novelty.

Anyway, my point is that the way we exist online is changing, and we need to adapt. The role of the artist is changing too. You’re not just producing “art objects” anymore, you’re existing within the conversation and the context. A single unit of content - a track, a drawing, whatever, is no longer the endpoint. It's part of a conversation. I’m not done yet. To be continued... ヽ(。_°)ノ

[homunculus-argument]

Ra ra rasputin Fucked into a trampoline Fucked inside a fog machine

I give up.

[ulrikrustfiends]

[italktogodbut]

[scramratz]

Why is it that sometimes artists lose all artistic ability for no reason. Why can’t I draw anymore WHO STOLE MY ART POWERS???

[ulrikrustfiends]

I went through this while on SSRIs. I just completely stopped caring about the result back then. I still don't like that art period of mine

[ulrikrustfiends]

[ulrikrustfiends]

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.

Valera is a robot. These days people don’t really like robots, just like cyberpunk authors predicted, lol. And honestly, it’s kinda interesting to end up with a robot character in the year 2026. Let's see where this goes.

[ulrikrustfiends]

Hair colouring (2017)

[ulrikrustfiends]

Too Wild to Be True: Why Audiences Aren’t Ready for Your Unfiltered Experience

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.

The reason I’m speaking up at all is that for a year now, I’ve been watching the LGBTQ+ community in many countries go through more or less the same thing we went through. I figured you guys were finally ready for this conversation, lol. Now it won’t sound as unrealistic to you as it did two years ago.

[ulrikrustfiends]

[ulrikrustfiends]

Back in his youth, Viktor didn't harbor nearly as many grudges against Ruslan. He believed that if he could only prove to his Dad that he was worthy of a father's love, then the old man would accept him just as unconditionally as he did Ruslan - the second son, born to a woman "younger and prettier." Even back in school, Viktor was already refining his flawed blond into something that passed for perfect. Only Ruslan knew that his hair was actually darker, since he was the one dyeing Viktor's roots every six weeks. Even now, nearing thirty, Viktor still fights his resentment toward the clueless Ruslan - a man with no talent, no charisma, and not even the light hair (like their father's) to show for it. And yet, Ruslan remains the only one who accepts and loves him unconditionally.

[ulrikrustfiends]

[ulrikrustfiends]

I think it’s time to dig up my archive. I didn’t grind for nothing, gotta respect my past self and post this old stuff. I had a character named Umka. I thought I’d build a side universe with other characters, just to take a break from the main one sometimes. But I dropped it. I couldn’t convince myself I actually enjoy building worlds around ‘relationships’ or some kind of romantic or erotic dynamics. I thought it would be fun, but it really wasn’t lol

[ulrikrustfiends]

Back in 2017, I thought this style was insanely relevant. Now, enough time has gone by that I feel a sort of warm nostalgia for it, instead of just dying of cringe

[ulrikrustfiends]

[bimboficationblues]

one consequence of transmisogyny (but not unique to it) is that it makes you into a paranoiac. take the example of the "degendering they" or like the "backhanded compliment," relatively minor interpersonal interactions that trans women increasingly feel hypervigilant about. it's probably counterproductive to assume everyone who gives you a compliment or refers to you as "they" or "this person" (<- phrase that actually revolts me a little now in this context) is doing so condescendingly, in a malicious or even just incidentally diminishing way. but also, everything about your life as a trans woman encourages you to be on alert for these kinds of cues, because if you're not paying attention to them then when the hammer drops it will hit that much harder.

[bimboficationblues]

just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.

[brady-like-the-bunch]

I’m waiting at a straight bar for this really cute trans guy I have a crush on to show up for a drink. He noted, teasingly, that I was a “fancy bitch,” and so picked a craft cocktail bar that billed itself as a “whiskey and bitters emporium.” Unfortunately, the only mixed drink I tolerate is pineapple juice and spicy tequila. The bartender, a dimpled woman with envious curls, eyed me with curiosity when I ordered it, and then said “on the house” when I began to rummage through my purse for a loose ten. I knew why the drink was free, but just in case I didn’t, the bartender said that she’d seen me around and I was a really interesting person. I thought my crush would understand my irritation at this: like, please, I already know I’m trans, just let me forget it for a second while I try to be a girl on a date with a boy. But when he arrived, he didn’t get it. A free drink was a free drink, and she didn’t give him one.  Now he wants to know why all the trans girls in Seattle are so angry, act so traumatized. “It’s not like you’re a bunch of child soldiers. Your parents weren’t killed in front of you.” He asserts that even when something nice happens, like a free drink, trans girls get triggered. Like everything is a wound, everything is trauma. He starts talking about this trans girl he met a few months ago; how all she did was bitch about AFABS and encourage cis scum to die. He wanted to be her friend, but she called trans guys Aidens, and did things like pick up all her meals drive-through, because she was convinced people inside would stare at her or misgender her. He describes the house this girl lives in—a coven of trans women polyamorously fucking each other to biblical levels of drama over the soundtrack of Skyrim on PS3, all the while telling each other how shitty the world was away from each other, until they so confused micro-aggressions for deep violence that they walked around with knives in their boots and canisters of mace dangling from their purses—and I exhale with frustration when I realize exactly which girl he’s talking about.  Two feelings rise. I don’t want to be categorized with Lexi. I want to be appealing to my crush. So I tell him I’m not like that. I’m not angry all the time, much less armed. But internally, I’m thinking, of course trans girls all love and fuck each other. Who else will? When I first learned the term brick for those square never-will-be-passable trans women, it was auxiliary to an explanation for another term, masonry: as in brick-on-brick love— only bricks get stuck to other bricks.  Except what do you do with the meanness of the word masonry itself—it was other trans women, the only ones that bricks could supposedly trust, who came up with that hilariously cruel slang. Brick-on-brick betrayal. But we have to understand each other well to be so cruel. 

Most of the cruelty I’ve experienced has been inadvertant, the kind that comes from getting trampled so often that inevitablely someone steps somewhere sensitive. My first boyfriend after Sidney was a married man who fell in love with me accidentally. He could not see past his own bafflement at his attraction to see me well enough for anything like intentional cruelty. We met in hotels or he came to my studio apartment after work, and his cruelty, like his love, came accidentally. Once, he took me for a weekend in a fancy hotel in Portland—the Nines—where the Los Angeles Lakers were staying. When I came out of the shower, buoyed on a carpet of steam spilling into a hotel room designed in a modern style—no door, only a frosted glass divider between tiled bathroom and lush bedroom—I stood naked with my back to him, combing my hair and heard him murmur, “You’re so beautiful, I feel sick.” I looked at myself, then his reflection in the mirror and saw it was true. I was beautiful and it hurt him. I doubt he ever complimented his wife that way. His wife did not possess the kind of beauty that triggered a desire that made him disgusted with himself. My kind of beauty does not trace a path to stable relationships, a dining room set from Crate and Barrel, a Thanksgiving turkey with his folks. He had no conception of what to do with my beauty other than choke on it.  My friends who date women have it just as bad. Once in a queer bar, I heard a cute woman in a leather motorcycle jacket joke about her gold star status—she’d never once touched a penis. My friend Zoe had been drinking G & Ts for an hour before that, working up the nerve to ask this woman out. I found Zoe fifteen minutes later, outside the bar, soaked from hiding in someone’s dew-covered hedge on 15th, where she had cried softly in frustration.  “Yeah, that’s transphobia,” my crush agrees, “but not trauma.” He glances at my now finished drink, and I take it as a rebuke. Go pay for the next one of those. The more I try to explain, to list the tiny grievances that added up to an intolerable day in my life, the more I sound unhinged. A man hissed at me on the bus. A bunch of teenagers loudly discussed whether I was really a guy. A girl I only knew on the Internet left a suicide note. The cashier at Whole Foods smirkingly called me “bro.” The TV at the nail salon, playing soundlessly, featured some nonsensical ghoul that I realized, with a shock, was someone’s idea of a trans woman, someone’s idea of me. The guy at the local corner store revealed that he knew where I lived and shrugged when I asked how: everyone around here knows about you. And now, I get irritated at one thing: a free drink, and I sound crazy complaining about that, right? Some total loony acting traumatized ‘cause a bartender tried to be kind.  My crush sighs and pulls out an ace. He knows people that have actually been raped, have actually been beaten—hell, half of the trans dudes he knows have been, and they aren’t paralyzed with anger, convinced they’re constantly persecuted. We’re talking real Trauma, not someone whispering about them on the bus, much less the burden of free drinks. To which I know I can probably come up with some of my own friends’ real Trauma, but I’m too affronted, so I just shriek: THE WHOLE WORLD MONITORS AND MOCKS MY EVERY WAKING MOMENT!  Needless to say, he and I do not hook up. He leaves me to my free drinks and my tinfoil rage hat.  When he’s gone, I miss Lexi for the first time.

— Torrey Peters, Infect Your Friends And Loved Ones, pg 40–45

[ulrikrustfiends]

I see people celebrating Sora getting shut down, BUT I want to voice a few thoughts out loud. I think there are two key points here (out of many).

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.

[ulrikrustfiends]