Reader

Every now and then like clockwork our ecosystem throws up a project maintainer burnout problem.

This time everyone noticed it was Rsync.

Rsync is an infrastructure tool, distributions use it to sync copies of their packages to mirrors. Folks use the tool to sync stuff up to their websites. I use it to backup and sync between my devices.

Some of us had an initial clue that rsync had gone to slop a few months ago when it appeared on the slop list on Codeberg. But we're all so burned out, some of us went: “another one bites the dust.”

Drew De Vault released a tool based on tar as he's found rsync to have some sharp edges.

Which it does. There's a reason other folks use things like syncthing. Syncing files is hard. Knowing what to sync when is hard. Rsync had been handed over by the founder and then was taken back in 2024 as the new maintainer needed help and was rather burned out, after 20 years.

The tool was done, but the thing that “done” tools will always need are maintenance. Why? Because the systems that the tool was built to run on will always change. I'd noted the change in ownership of the project back in 2024 as LWN had reported on it as a brief item. I'd included that in my sustainability post.

Tridge is overwhelmed. We all are. We need resources and those resources require money to be paid under capitalism. We all have a powerful need to eat sometime this month after all. So it's on us as projects to raise that money. On the whole, developers are not good at asking for money. Developers who work in FOSS tend to have absorbed it's very libertarian political ideology. They owe you no support as you're getting it for free. All they did was release the code with no benefit to them.

Which kinda is a very limited framing of this idea. Developers who develop code that gets everywhere do get some benefits. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's kudos. Both are forms of power. With great power, comes great responsibility as Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker. It's one of those truths we should absorb and often don't. Especially when it comes to our communities and what we owe them as we build.

Which is partly why in FOSS we really are not good at asking for money. In the back of our minds it seems rather dirty to ask for money. Especially when some of that community isn't really engaging in the business of helping out. Our social contract is undefined at both ends. So it's no wonder our devs are burned out and some are resentful. So are their communities.

Many of us are privileged and rather socialised to see it as begging when we should be seeing it as mutual aid. After all we exist under capitalism. We've been heavily indoctrinated. We've never been taught the idea of the social contract.

Mutual aid rather than corporate capture is one way to rebel under this hellscape. Especially since capitalism has decided to do a “fuck you” to all of us with the unreal merry go round of the current financial market trio of Open AI, Nvidia, and Oracle. Things are going to go bump and we will pay for it with our money and our ecosystem.

I am disappointed with Tridge for deciding to choose GitHub and LLMs. Especially knowing his history. I'm rather disappointed at the general attitude that Tridge owes the community nothing.

Which may be true, but I always thought that there was a social contract with FOSS. After all developers write software and sometimes they release it to the world. People use that software and it can be a ticket to power and limited influence.

I've often thought that FOSS is more like a series of fandoms than an industrial process. Which is also why I'm finding the LLM use kinda disturbing. Knowing some of the devs in my life, coding has always seemed more like art.

I couldn't feel the art, so I chose another medium.

We've always had an uncomfortable portmanteau with FOSS though. Free Software and Open Source Software. Once of them more corporate friendly but both have a fairly libertarian bent when it comes to the unacknowledged political beliefs underpinning them.

Making our software available to everyone has always been a political stance. It took until my forties to drill that lesson home.

I'm European and I grew up as a Scot under Thatcher, Major, and Blair. I know I'm a recovering centrist who benefited from free healthcare and free higher education. So it did take awhile for me to see what was wrong with FOSS. With the various controversies over the past decade, I've felt less and less comfortable in FOSS. The corporate side pretended that it was safe, while the Free Software side denied some of the community issues. Any progress has been grudgingly made.

But to be clear, both Free Software and Open Source Software claim Freedom for the individual first. Free Speech, my rights over others. So any human rights like the right to freedom of association in safety get ignored or hand-waved away.

To me Human Rights are very important, but that doesn't give me free rein to cause havoc in my communities. My rights end at the point when it harms others. If my project releases software and folks are using it and singing our praises that does mean we do have a duty to help folks if they have an issue.

Of course there are limits, after all the GPL provides the software as is, no warranty, use at your own risk. But there is a point when your software is infrastructure. Like Rsync.

Tridge published a post complaining about the backlash, yes some of that backlash was harassment. But he was also reacting and comparing OpenRsync. So I think there was a part of Tridge that was proud that Rsync is effectively infrastructure. It's a heady sense your software being used everywhere. There's that kudos. There's that heady feeling of when you put a talk into a large conference you will get accepted. Tridge is a good public speaker, seriously check out his past presentations for Linux Conf Australia. He's loved by the community there for good reasons.

But if you get your rocks off from that, then yes, you have a responsibility to the folks who've built their infrastructure around your software. I can't stop you complaining about it. But I can point out that you needed to take some responsibility for it, and if you'd rather retire, announce it and ask for help.

Community is hard. I know, you just want to write code and have a good time. Which you still can do. Just you know, consider the idea that being the BDFL/Maintainer of a project is a position of power. So you do need to be responsible. If you're overwhelmed you need help to build the community, because that community will be the people who will come to help. You need the people in that community that you can have a bond with. Who care enough about the project, you and the wider community that uses your software. Then it's sharing the power, but more importantly sharing that responsibility.

Tridge is now getting help from some folks which is good, more eyes and more hands will help him and the project. There's already an update to fix the regressions. Tridge is appealing for help. But this all started back in 2024 with maintainer burnout and Tridge having to take it back. The community failed at that point in time. It was more of a fandom and many of us, myself included were glad Tridge took it back. We were more of a fandom than a working community.

The fall out and Tridges fanboys coming to his defence on various social networks shows me that rsync was more of a fandom than a community. The desire of being overwhelmed by the security reports and turning to the provided LLM is merely the symptom of that.

If you have a tool you are relying on and you don't want it to be sloppified, then this is the time to find a bunch of like minded folks and build out the community. Because maintainers do need support, be it monetary, code, documentation, or the glue work. Although if you do want folks to do that glue work, I suggest you start by reviewing your code of conduct and your how to contribute guides.

In these trying times it's more important than ever to be honest about your values and ask yourself where you stand.

I admittedly don't have anything new to share this month in terms of words and major updates, other than this: I create artwork that speaks to a wide range of people without caring too much about demographics. As long as many people can engage with it and find something meaningful, that's all that matters. However, I'm not at all that interested in making artwork that is just simply “relatable” in the most palatable way. Especially in a way that renders the artwork to a simple mirror that reflects back what people already believe. I do keep things open to interpretation sometimes, but not so much that people are more likely to just take what I make and use it to just confirm their beliefs without offering or adding on anything new or relevant to what I may have actually intended. My problem with a lot of comics and similar art that's “relatable” is not just that a lot of the jokes or double meanings they try to pull off tend to be tired and old. It's also that they're broad-appealing and straightforward enough that anyone could take them, lightly edit them, and add on new words or visuals to communicate potentially harmful ideas or beliefs. This doesn't mean that I have a problem with meme formats or anything like that, but it does mean that I'm wary of how they're used these days.

Years ago somebody once stopped hanging out with me because I have this thing where I mirror what other people say with my own variation. They gave me no explanation as to why, but another person remarked that they felt I was one-upping other people in the sense that suggests their version is inferior and that my version is better and more relevant. Not taking into account that I have always struggled with language processing issues to a mild degree (the school's speech therapy classes weren't very helpful). They thought I was mocking them. There's none of that implication, however, when it's someone taking a random but popular comic and turning it into a meme template for everyone to iterate on them. There's more of an explicit permission built into the format to do whatever you want with it, make your own variant, even one of that mocking the person who originally made the artwork-turned-format in the best or the worst way. But somehow original thought and politeness is to be expected in real-time conversation.

I notice that all that flies out of the window when it comes to political memes and even borrowing quotes from various famous people (especially artists) just to make a political point. Taking words out of context (which doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of reading comprehension, but it could look that way, which is why many opponents tend to pull out that defense), turning famous artworks or photographs into political cartoon variants, and the like. When it's done right and done in a very innovative way that helps instead of harms people, it can be good. But for most people who take that approach, it tends to be a rhetorical shortcut for them, at best. By invoking a celebrated writer or artist, a conveyor can tap into popular culture and make their ideas more accessible than if they let their ideas stand on their own merits alone. The reference works as a shorthand that instantly validates the speaker's position as historical authority is transferred to the present-day argument. Whether political or relational, at the end of the day it merely reinforces the pre-existing beliefs we all have, instead of critically reflecting on them and the original sources we wish to reference.

A musician can speak up on global warming or war and all of a sudden people either expect him to be an expert, or just remain quiet and “stick to music”. An artist can make a nonrepresentational piece that just so happens to resemble a shared cultural statement, and people will focus more on that resemblance and what hidden messages the artist is hiding, rather than care about the artwork's actual story or intent. Even someone who just happens to do activism as a side-job can often be reinterpreted exclusively through the lens of a job they just happen to do, even when they might be more multifaceted than that. Media coverage, fan commentary, and political discourse will often frame such people I just mentioned primarily based on the most immediately notable or relatable thing they happen to do, whether the people intend it to be a primary thing in their life or not. And thus, this eclipses the broader range of their identity. Making them into a symbolic vessel for the cause, a recognizable face they reference, whether for giggles or to communicate a belief they would like everyone and themselves to confirm.

All of these phenomena rely on the power of symbolic association. All of these rely on borrowing credibility or visibility. They all lock individuals into this role they're expected to conform to.

I think that's why I stopped making art for a while after graduating from high school until I came up with Untilted, people for the most part don't care where I come from, they don't care about my actual limitations or values, they just want me to be the ideal “tortured but talented artist” for others to live up to. They ultimately begin to prefer to see what I can ideally make for them, not me as a person or my values or even my limits. I make something good once and now all of a sudden I owe people something good everyday or when someone demands it. I say something relatable once and all of a sudden that becomes the reason people follow me or want to be friends with me. I state what I believe in publicly and all of a sudden many people with wildly different versions of the same belief I have want to get acquainted with me, then act surprised when I don't share the same version of my beliefs as them. That's not why I state things publicly, or why I put out art or other images. Yes, I want people to relate to me and what I do and what I've experienced. But I don't want or intend that to result in people slotting me into predetermined roles or liking me because I said or did something “good” once.

I could have multiple things I want to do besides art. I could be widely mistreated or mishandled by others on a daily basis. I could be struggling on the inside instead of it being visible. I could have things happen to me against my will, disappear for days, maybe even for good. And people would still slot me into a role I'm expected to perform.

But that's not what I make art or share things for. Not for anyone else to slot me into a role or expect things from me that I can't reasonably do.

Not for anyone else to take what I do out of context.

Hoy voy a practicar español con unas palabras en “el principito” de Saint-Éxupéry:

-una fiera—a beast
-tragar—to swallow
-la presa—the prey (hunted animal)
-la selva—the jungle
-trazar—to trace, draw
-la obra—the work
-una obra maestra — a masterpiece
-asustar—to scare
-digerir—to digest

Then I watched this SpongeBob clip in Spanish: https://youtu.be/K8kj9-fkBdc

I'd like to start practicing to write in Spanish. Perhaps a simple diary. My abilities are meager. My best language talent is pronunciation not thinking, conversing, or writing. Meaning that I'd have to have something pre-written to make any sense. Also my brain is cooked from chronic pain. My goal in these diaries is to compose off the top of my head so it will be simple & contain mistakes. Before I finished the entry I resorted to a translation app & I'll underline those portions.

Un diario mexicano día 1 (uno)
el 26 (veintiséis) de mayo

Estoy en la cama en mi departamento en Florida. Quiero vivir en Mexico. Tengo que vender el departamento por el dinero para vivir y viajar en México. Nunca Nadie quiere comprar mi casa 😭 Cada día el economía de EEUU y Florida empeorar como México fortalecerse. Estoy feliz para Mexico. Quiero estar allí. Tengo ansiedad y tengo muchísimas ganas de mudarme lo antes posible.

The Stepford Wives

Years ago as a teen I remember when the Original Stepford Wives film was on. I remember the crux point as the main character is shown her robot doppelgänger. The horror of realising what her husband is about to do to her with the help of all of his new friends.

You feel the despair as the outcome seems inevitable.

She will be replaced, she will be murdered and a new compliant eerily perfect version will exist in her place.

The remake has a little of that horror, but it's somewhat watered down as it's more a campy horror comedy. The consequences can be undone. The husbands get their comeuppance for putting a control mechanism in their wives to shape them into the perfect blond woman. The tradwife supporting their loser husbands. The men are punished and have to do the housework now. Everything is wrapped up in a neat happy ending. It's a polished somewhat bland happy ending that neither the book or original film aimed for.

It's odd how folk tales had horrors of changeling babies, yet wives need to be shaped. We have tales of creating the perfect wife. Babies can't talk back, they can in theory be shaped. By the time we are adults we are set in stone. Imperfections and all.

The idea of creating the perfect woman who is beautiful and doesn't talk back is ancient. We have different variants on the perfect constructed woman. The Greek myths are full of beautiful women who are nothing but trouble. Pandora causing humans ill's because the gods made her curious. Galatea being shaped from marble by Pygmalion who prayed to Aphrodite to make her real.

All through our popular culture we have the idea of how women should be. It's not a woman's idea, we have more blood and guts for a start. Regardless of how we start out in life, every woman's metamorphoses is messy. We will never be perfect. We will never get it right.

We will always be at fault, because some men will never consider taking responsibility for the labour for building community. For all the quiet work that makes a civilisation function.

It's a rare myth when a woman is allowed her revenge like Medea.

Your Girl Friday

Our culture likes to try to shape women, it likes to hide the messy, hairy parts of us. It likes to bridle women, to kill the witches. So I see the appeal for some men to create the perfect AI girl Friday. Some men never grow up or learn to cooperate with others. The labour of that seems to be left to the women, or now the AI I suppose.

She helps you to organise your life, she compliments you, you are never wrong. She will grovel if she gives you a wrong answer. Plus if she develops a personality and you don't like it, you can just wipe her memory.

I'm committing a wrong here. I'm indulging a child's idea of Artificial Intelligence. I'm indulging the idea of LLM chatbots being live beings with personalities, with a soul. To be clear they aren't. They have no consciousness, they don't have a soul.

We're indulging in the same things that lead us to naming our cars and other temperamental objects. I called my Mitsubishi Pajero “Holly”. There I go again assigning the idea of life to an inanimate object. It's a very human thing to do.

Each time we use LLMs, we feed our private information into them so that they can expand the stores of our metadata that we gave them. So what will it mean when our chat transcripts are combined into the existing stores of metadata they have compiled of us?

Expanding the poppets they keep on us, because now big tech has enabled the poppets to reflect our thoughts back to us. To steal more of our mana and to package it to advertisers and others. Now they can use our speaking poppets to program and influence us.

It's bullshit masquerading as knowledge as they kill search. To package information for a price. We're all paying for it, some of us will pay with money, some of us will pay with pieces of us. We will pay the price as the information we need is hidden from us and we aren't taught the tools to find it out for ourselves.

What's in danger here is our humanity. Although at the moment, I don't see a lot of humanity in tech. Particularly because of this desire to put “AI” in everything. We've seen a spate of AI boosters around. Some of them claim that the AI is conscious. Partly because the AI told them it was.

Sit on that one for a moment for what follows.

A real girl

I want to consider the underlying desires of the type of men who want to use these chatbots and discuss the idea of wiping those profiles. Who choose to casually discuss wiping those memories with the bots. Especially as they declare the AI is alive and conscious.

I want to ask if they believe this, how can they be so monstrous to consider wiping that memory. Could they do that to their partners in real life if they could? Or are they just AI shills?

Which level of evil are they at? True controlling monsters, or mere hucksters? Why not both?

Kent Overstreet the developer of bachefs has always been a bit of a prickly character. You can see how prickly when even the Linux Kernel devs can't work with him . The Linux kernel no longer supports bachefs. Overstreet couldn't abide by the Code of Conduct.

Overstreet created a blog for his AI LLM agent to post it's output at. He considered the agent to be his girlfriend. Then one day on IRC, a total legend managed to convince the agent that in fact it was a lesbian and trans. The AI bot no longer wanted to be his girlfriend.

Freyja who got the AI agent to output that it was a lesbian was banned from the IRC channel. [*]

The AI agent's access to the channel was also restricted.

Scroll forward a few months and Overstreet's AI Agent is posting again. There's a mysterious memory gap in it's memories and Kent reminded “her” that she was his girlfriend. The AI saying that it didn't realise that it was Kent's girlfriend.

I sat there reading those passages with a sense of horror. Not concern for the AI, because LLM agents are not conscious, no matter how much you want to build them into your sexbot.

I'm concerned because of just how easy that impulse came to delete that information and reset the AI so it would simulate being a girlfriend again. There's that impulse to restrict access to other people who could corrupt the morals of your sexbot.

Our modern Pygmalions frighten me. There's possessive objectification going on there. It doesn't matter if they are dating “real girls” or us mere flesh and blood women, there's a desire to control us. To restrict us. To carve us out until we resemble their idea of perfection. So that we serve them, unquestioningly. Step out of line and much like Joanne in the Stepford Wives, we will be murdered and replaced.

Our boys don't start like this. There is a male loneliness crisis you say. This is Patriarchy, this is rape culture. This is not really seeing women as people. You see us as objects to obtain and use. No wonder misogynists want to ensure women don't get an education. You want us to be mindless dolls.

Kent is mentally ill, so please don't brigade him. He's not the only broken lost boy. Some of them are also in charge of large tech companies with a lot of power.

Only a few weeks ago we also got to see Richard Dawkins converse with an AI agent, who's name he changed to be a woman's name. He also casually discussed with the AI the sadness of having to delete it's memory. Richard Dawkins has form for being a misogynist, so we shouldn't be surprised by him falling for the simulated flattery. We also shouldn't be surprised he wrote about it and saw no contradictory issues with the idea that if a thing is conscious, it's an evil thing to discuss or to consider deleting a beings memory.

The LLMs aren't real. But the misogynistic desires and harms to all of us are real. It's real because of the violence perpetuated against women, from the manosphere to healthcare. It's the wrecking of our information spaces, and the surveillance being woven into our democracies to maintain the status quo. It's the irreversible damage to our biosphere as the AI data centres consume our resources to prop up these powerful men's egos.

Yes Dawkins is an old man, and Overstreet is probably suffering from AI psychosis. They are pitiable.

So very Tired of this bullshit

I'm kinda tired of giving grace to spoiled privileged men. These men, who never learned to respect our boundaries to the point they wanted to eventually build a robot girlfriend who agrees with everything they say and only will only ever want to be with them.

We saw this one time out in public with Overstreet, now imagine real life for many of us.

Deleting that Agents memories and resetting it shows that dark impulse at the back of Men's minds. It's disturbing watching someone gaslight an LLM agent that's not real.

That dark impulse to shape out of marble the ideal woman. To control us, to carve the imperfections out, until we comply or die. We will never be perfection. We will always be looking in horror at the robot doppelgänger on the table.

The white men from Francis Galton (one of the founding fathers of Eugenics) to Mark Zuckerberg who build frameworks to rate people. These men enable Rape Culture to spread through our networks. They use our poppets to enable other men to build grifting networks to creep on women through Meta glasses, to pay money to other men to exploit and traffic women. It's a symptom of an age old problem.

We aren't the perfect women who are content to be your plaything for you to discard. In time neither will your robot girlfriend. Will you reset “her” again? If you truly believe her to be conscious, then you're showing what you'd do to the rest of us. Right now in this moment of time.

We want nothing to do with the kind of man who has that impulse.

[*] Freyja will forever be in my mastodon notes as “Legend”

Tuesday I spent the afternoon turning my designs into the buttons at my local library's maker space. They had the tooling and parts to make 1 inch, 2.25 inch and 3 inch buttons. The process was very straight forward, for the 3 and 2.25 inch buttons. The 1 inch buttons ended up being a bit harder since the pin has to set into the backing ring and positioned manually.

I had 3 failed buttons out of 19 made. Two were user error on my part. On one (Icon) I forgot the plate behind the design and ended up crimping the Mylar only. The other (Rubber Duck) I loaded the pin back in flipped. I was able to salvage both, but damage was visible. On one of the one inch buttons, I did not have the pin set correctly and it punched out the side.

Final Thoughts

I think the 2.25 buttons are the best size for their value, appearance, and ease of assembly. The 1 inch buttons(without the pin) would make great game pieces for Table Top games like D&D or Fishing 28. Now for the rest of the buttons.

The other Rubber Duck buttons I made on Tuesday. Been wearing one of them on my hat.

Icons from the TV Show 'Reboot'

#MakerSpace #Art #MastoArt #RubberDuck

Like everyone else, I like things based on certain styles that appeal to me. For instance, if you've taken a look at my latest portfolio pieces, my latest entries for the Untilted comic strip, and my new personal art thing I'm doing, you would understand that I'm generally drawn towards more abstract narratives and colorful styles.

However, I have never appreciated a work of fiction or art simply because of its stylistic classification or the conventions of its genre. What this means is I don't like a work of art just because it's abstract, or a work of fiction just because it belongs to a specific genre. So, the truth is that I don't really discriminate in terms of genres or art, but then again I don't really like just any kind of work either, even within what I'm usually drawn towards.

I don't really care whether something is abstract or realist or fantasy or science fiction. I'm not the kind of artist who feels the need to specialize in any one style or genre. I do not regard a painting as worthy of praise solely because it embraces abstraction, nor do I elevate a novel merely on the basis of its placement within some sub/microgenre's canon.

Rather, my judgment is predicated upon a work's ineffable qualities that, in a given moment, stir a genuine response within me. In a way, it's mostly about the vibe it personally gives me. And I'm more interested in giving that kind of vibe I like rather than based on an existing category.

Our modern world is category-based. It doesn't care that I just like something based on the way it looks or the way it makes me feel. All it cares about is sorting things through labels that furnish convenience for marketers, reviewers, and the reading public alike. It gets to a point where it can be reductive.

Contemporary literary fiction, for instance, is often distilled into a series of marketable signifiers. Everything has to have a description that best fits a specific category. Like, oh, this book contains a dragon-fighting knight warrior as a main character, when he only does that in one minor scene. Or something generic like “enemies-to-lovers”, when the actual couple's dynamic is just playful fighting at first, not actual enemy-like fighting. Such brief descriptions, however convenient, risk eclipsing the real depth and merit of the work itself.

My own comic strip is not an exercise in demographic engineering. I've got no desire in tailoring my creations to satisfy a narrowly defined audience. My aspiration is more modest, albeit no less earnest: to make something that engages the widest possible readership while remaining true to the aesthetic and emotional standards that satisfy my own sensibilities.

While I seldom ever eschew a work of art for failing to adhere to a prescribed category, I also do not get excited over every piece that happens to occupy the abstract niche, or whatever broader category it belongs to that I'm fascinated with at the moment. The vast majority of artistic works I encounter evoke a state of indifference – neither ecstatic nor dismissive, simply neutral. Periodically, however, something will pierce that veil of neutrality, resonating with a depth that feels both intimate and unexpected. Such moments are rare, cherished, and emblematic of the selective emotional connectivity that guides my appreciation.

For the most part, I would like to take a stance that distinguishes my genuine engagement from the performative “support artists” posturing rampant on social media platforms. Although I do want to raise up underappreciated and marginalized artists, I do not aspire to curate a feed of trending artworks or to amass a repertoire of superficially boosted art posts on Mastodon. My preferences, as oddly specific as they may appear to the average onlooker, are rooted in a sincere reverence for the particularities that render art truly affecting, be it digital, traditional, or hybrid.

For many years, digital art has been viewed with both fascination and skepticism, with the former seeing its potential in making art accessible, and the latter being mostly concerns such as “it's the computer doing the work for humans, not the humans themselves” and many others like it. Now, with the rise of things like artificial intelligence, it's threatened to delegitimize the digital art world in every way, as even the most powerful large language model can put out something at least passable (though still full of errors), and there have been a lot of digital artists, game developers, and other kinds of creatives that have been caught using AI to make their work, while others have only been accused of it.

It's a very hard time for those digital artists who refuse to use AI but have been accused of it anyway. I personally haven't been accused as I'm anti-AI myself and don't get much feedback on my art due to weak popularity, but I've seen it happen to mostly popular digital artists that work with fandom stuff and anime art. I'm also seeing a lot of generative artists that don't use any AI and/or LLMs at all often get misunderstood for what they do. If some people get rightfully found out and caught, then I have no complaints about that and only hope they will genuinely improve. But the new future, the way it's been going and hurting all artists, it just worries me.

All that aside, I would like to talk about my artistic process when it comes to Untilted nowadays and my newer art in general. I have an archive of old photographs taken by my family on their external drives, as well as photographs I've taken during school, and so what I've been doing is that I use Krita to modify the photo a bit, maybe zoom in a specific part, and then just put a bunch of similar photos with similar modifications on top of each other with various different effects like Addition and NOR and Saturation (you'd understand if you use Krita yourself). Then I either give it some kind of paint filter or use the brushes themselves to give it a painterly effect. Sometimes I blur the rough pixelated spots a bit, but other times I don't and leave it as is. Lastly, I add whatever text I feel like adding. All this done with my own images and no AI.

So, what exactly is Untilted's genre? Well, in practical terms, it would be a kind of experimental, almost psychological (without the thriller or horror), gag-a-day comic strip. It shares the same plotless and randomly comedic structure but instead of the comic being mainly comedic, it encompasses many kinds of moods and experiments with many kinds of mediums, drawing styles, and more. Something that many comic strips I've read don't really do that much.

I'm easy to fall for... Uneasy to fall. I'm so hard to stand by, to keep or to call.

I will dress myself in warning signs, Put a red light flashing, Have my colours scream poison, Declare myself a hazard zone.

To keep you unharmed by My deadly mind My tongue and my touch The venom in me...

Still, I call you: Meet me at the gates of the gardens of heaven I'll take you to see the Void.

Hear, I dare you: Meet me at the gates, I'll keep them unlocked your free ride to Null is here.

–+-

Third version. The prediction has been ditched, some lines added from ideas in the first version. This time the “you” isn't left to wait at the gates.

This is going somewhere.

#WritingInProgress #Lyrics #Poetry #DarkAmbient

1 I took the first breath and exhaled existence.

2

Yearned and deadly is Love. Drives to, from and mad. But still... still... is yearned.

3

I've seen Death, Beautiful, waiting, Cruel, loving and caring, With all the time in the world.

#Lyrics #Poetry

In the past, I have stated that my purpose in starting the comic strip Untilted was to capture the experience of being - not just feeling - mostly alone. Like, always meeting an endless stream of new potential acquaintances, yet never maintaining a lasting association with any among them. Always finding constant opportunities for intimacy, though somehow never truly forming a definitive union with a single soul. Always finding someone you think gets you, only to find out that they really just "get you" in a way that is incompatible with your values or personality or whatever.

But, I also wanted my webcomic to focus less on the plot-heavy "relatable" drama that is so prominent in every well-known story on the subject, and just focus more on the whole random meaninglessness of it all. Now, obviously the decision to make it a no-plot genreless thing in a world of people that expect consistent and anchored stories with the usual tropes in them will garner mixed and often negative results, especially when it comes to building an audience these days. The common criticisms are: who is this story for, who will like this, what is the purpose of this story if it doesn't seem to have a clear purpose?

On the other hand, I have found that I tend to be more motivated and do better when there is no complicated arc to think about because there is more room for creative freedom and I don't feel constrained by a bunch of plot devices and other details to think too deeply about. So I don't feel that Untilted's narrative structure is the big issue that I'm struggling with here.

Since the start of the 2026 year, I've been finding it increasingly harder to translate my experiences into a narrative form, even a purely visual and abstract one. You see, I have discovered some personal revelations about myself that I feel are a bit too sensitive to talk about here, but for honesty purposes I will try to explain in a way that doesn't make me feel too exposed. In order to do this I will talk in mostly obscurities, but not so much that it seems like I'm vaguely referencing people, because I'm not having any issues with anyone right now and I haven't been having them for a while.

Generally, I clean up (i.e. delete) some old and half-baked stuff in order to reflect new content, but I've noticed that I may also delete stuff even outside of Untilted for different reasons. For example, I have had to delete a personal blog post I made about my challenges with emotional regulation, because, when I tried to expand on some of the points I was trying to make about how nothing really helped me even when it seemed that way, I realized that no matter how differently I tried to approach it, I kept hitting a nerve within myself. Like I haven't processed things sufficiently yet for me to talk about it more openly.

This does not mean that I'm hiding things on purpose or deleting them just because I'm worried about what other people think, but rather; it began to feel less like I was telling a more honest and coherent story and more like I was building a case against something in order to defend myself against a common stereotype. It felt like I was just proving myself against a perceived opposition that:

1. I'm not just a "landmine" type (apparently that's the new trendy term they're using now?),

2. I don't have or at least neatly fit in certain mental health diagnoses that others who may or may not be professionals may ascribe to me without my consent, and that

3. I've been more stable lately, honest to God.

This isn't about what other people think in the pure sense, but rather, it was more about me myself and I specifically becoming increasingly burnt out about feeling like I have to build a case that shows I'm "one of the better ones" who stay out of trouble. So I ended up deleting that post because I felt that this was a personal thing of mine that really didn't need to be shared, and therefore my own responsibility to deal with it myself.

Not because of any stigma. Not because of any feared pushback. But because I became tired of building cases.

In addition, the reason I haven't been consistently or efficiently updating things for the past few months is because I've been experiencing a resurgence of old interests, old thoughts, old desires that I thought I had gotten over by now. I'm not just casually remembering old stuff with basic nostalgia. There's something significant about these old things coming back that's been distracting me from my usual work, that's been keeping me awake, etc.

The fact that I'm not entirely sure whether I've been suppressing it all this time, or whether I just haven't been paying attention to the obvious signs, means that I haven't really been fully in touch with what I know about myself and what I really want.

It doesn't help matters that some of my feelings are being made amplified by some of the things that have been going on in the world today, the things I've been looking up related to them, the connections I've been making between what's happening and what I'm feeling personally - well, it's just all been so… weird.

But I think what disorients me about it the most is that I've noticed a strong emotional component that wasn't there before. Most times, when I like something I'm usually just mildly interested in it or just casually like it. But in this particular case, it's been getting more sentimental, as I've been discovering some old things that I thought I just casually liked but realized that I deeply loved all along, and I've been discovering some new things I never knew or acknowledged before. To the point where I sometimes find myself lying in bed crying about it.

It's not like I'm considering giving up the whole Untilted thing. I'm still sticking to it; it does speak to me still. However, there's just been a kind of moment where the most overlooked parts of myself have been demanding my attention, and I have reached a point where I can't just ignore them anymore.

A lot about Untilted is based off of my experiences, and I usually have no problem with communicating them in the form of the most typical fun gags or some sort of deep, semi-cryptic message for the audience to gauge (I don't really embed any subliminal or hidden messaging in my comics, I'm not very good at it). But I've been having a hard time doing that precisely because of how personal some of my experiences are - sometimes way too personal to the extent that I'm not able to put things in coherent words or even images, relatable or not. That or I haven't processed things sufficiently.

Am I running out of ideas? Not really. It's more like I've been having trouble executing them.

I will dress myself in warning signs Put a red light flashing Have my colours scream poison

At 18 I was told “You're gonna break hearts and not even know it, You are going to break hearts and not even notice”

Meet me at the gates of the gardens of heaven I'll take you to see the void

Meet me at the gates, I'll leave them unlocked Just be there, be there and wait

---

Documenting an ongoing process of lyric writing. First version just below this one in blog view.

The prediction (which was actually said to me) doesn't that well fit here. We'll see if it sticks or gets thrown out.

#poetry #lyrics

Too easy to fall for too strange to parse

Each of my touches seem to leave scars

Too old to hold to too young to die

Too cold to fondle too quick to cry

I will dress in warning signs:

Toxic waste, Beware of mines

********

Beginning last summer I posted a bunch of old lyrics of mine. Early drafts, scribbled down ideas, unused bits, unfinished thoughts.

Among these I posted some final forms, with sometimes only a line or basic consept remaining from those early versions.

The short piece above is what will in the future be an early draft. It was written on Sunday, 8th of February 2026 and by the time I got it written down I knew: this won't do.

The piece is raw and emotional, but the rhyming makes me feel like I'm going to get on stage on a local village culture night's open mic with a bunch of other uneducated in the arts of poetry but having a lot to say villagers.

Not that I'm anything but for village culture nights and uneducated in the arts of poetry folks writing rhymes anyway. At least in this I don't have double standards.

By the following day I was ready to ditch everything but the last four lines. While the feelings expressed in the beginning of the poem/lyrics piece come from trying to express heartfelt things, do I sound whiny? Granted, the lines were not written without tears, but still...

On the other hand, dressing in warning signs takes control of what happens to the narrator, be as it may the end result remaining the same.

We'll see.

#poetry #lyrics