Online Shifts
I was gonna post this as a thread on twitter, but then I remembered, I don't post my thoughts on platforms like that for a reason. I don't want to have any further incentive to check notifications, I don't want to deal with uncharitable interpretations of my personal thoughts, I don't want to have to think about who I'm replying to, I just don't want the stress!
But I do have this place!
I noticed, by chance of posting about an inPRNT sale, that (and I haven't looked that deeply into it) twitter's AI tool will be changing policies and removing the option to opt out of posts being scraped. Or something like that. As a result, lots of artists I follow are understandably jumping ship. And of course I'm very aware that this is one of many, many reasons factoring into people losing patience with the platform, especially now.
My gut response to the AI thing specifically is... at this point, my art is online and in enough places that there is a very small chance it hasn't already been scraped by AI, if it wants to. There's such little legislation in place right now, and there's been so many cases of companies flagrantly breaking copyright laws, that I doubt me checking a box on a platform's settings doing much of anything.
I've come to terms with it. That's not to sound hopeless or excuse what's happening. I don't think it's ok. I do hold the belief that this is unsustainable- legally, economically, environmentally- in the long run. But for the time being I have to be okay with it happening in order to be comfortable continuing to share my work online. I still benefit so much from creating artwork, and I have people that value my artwork and the fact that it's made by me. That's motivation enough.
If I've learned anything from being online for all these years, it's to spread your net wide and not trust any one platform to last forever, or for their owners to act rationally. After back-posting art on Bluesky (I've been going back through all my art files dating them to make this easier), I might bail on twitter. Not sure yet. It would be more over how I feel about its owner than anything else.
Bluesky is much less bloated and seems to have a lot less unsavoury people, but I don't really have any more desire to spend time on it outside of posting my art. I don't want to catch up on feeds. I don't care!
Additionally, if I've learned anything from the birth and death of Cohost, it's that I can take matters into my own hands. Yes, it ultimately was not sustainable. But being on Cohost prompted me to be more independent, to be more aware of dark patterns, to use social media as a tool and not invest my emotional energy into them. My emotional energy is for my creative work.
Coding Stuff
I finally finished my art galleries! At least, the stuff that was on my previous site build. Still want to add more pieces to a few sections, now that my art filenames are all sorted by date and a lot easier to look through. I also still want to make a pony section, and maybe make a sketchbook section or something.
The galleries load sooo much faster now that I'm using a different, smaller WebP image for the thumbnail, along with lazy loading. Previously I'd just made every image 1000px wide and used the same image for the thumbnail and full image. I had the worst of both worlds (slow loading and bad image quality). Full images are either JPG or PNG at a larger size.
I can kind of tell now how large a file's going to be and if it will need to be converted to JPG by the style; the more gradients and colours the more compression it'll need. Flat and limited colours like the images in my Avian August 2022 gallery all were small enough to do just fine staying as PNGs!
I did still do all these conversions and resizing manually with GIMP and Squoosh... I swear I'll figure out how to automate this, I just need the brain space to read more documentation, lol.
Also, in trying to make the current page/tab styling as automated as possible, I think I got a little javascript to stick in my brain!! The javascript for Zonelots and Rarebit is actually starting to make some sense to me! At the very least, it's not all entirely gibberish to me anymore. That's pretty exciting. If I can think of more javascript related things I want to implement on my site, I think I have a path to learning.