Burst Reach #25

posting through it

Hi, hello. I didn’t sleep well last night. We’ll get into that later. First let’s get those June announcements out of the way one more time. Apologies to subscribers who saw this stuff in the last few newsletters:

The Cryptozoologist group exhibition at HollerHouse opens next Friday, June 7th! I painted the Grafton Monster of West Virginia for it! This is the first art show of the year I’m a part of and I’ll be super late to the reception because of work! Damn.

The next day, June 8th, is the Wytheville UFO Fest, where I’ll have Grafton Monster prints along with some other new stuff hopefully.

Friday, June 14th is CorpoReality, an all-new performance by Embodied Art Dance where we’ll be dancing and doing figure drawing in the Reece Museum at ETSU as part of their ongoing Embodying Culture: Women in Appalachia exhibit. It’s free and I’m super excited about the new dances we’ll have! We’ve been hard at work rehearsing and it’s all coming together! I’m especially pumped about the duet I’m a part of as a creepy not a deer. We may get to perform that at another show in July too…

Okay, that’s all of that out of the way. What else was I going to write about…?

I’ve just downloaded Glaze and Nightshade, two new anti-AI programs designed to protect your artwork and poison AI trainers when they scrape your work. With Meta rolling out their own AI BS and making opting out nigh impossible, it’s pretty much a necessity if I want to keep using social media to share my work. For all that it sucks, Instagram is still kinda my favorite because it’s a purely visual feed and I’d like to try to keep using it. I’ve abandoned Twitter altogether, using BlueSky as a replacement, and it’s SUCH an improvement, but people still aren’t really using it as much yet. Threads is just brands and influencers and owned by Meta and I hate it, but I’ll post art there sometimes too because…I don’t know. I want to overhaul my website and relaunch my Etsy shop, when I have the energy for those. I have this newsletter too, of course, but I’m not terribly consistent with it as you’ve noticed.

The point being: the internet ain’t what it used to be, tech bros are making it actively worse in so many ways, making it so much harder for artists and I don’t know what to do about it, but despite all of that I keep thinking about returning to making a living from art because y’all...I’m struggling with this job.

I’ve been out of training for about a month now. Every time I think I have my footing and that I’m doing alright, I lose it and things go wrong. There are just weird new complexities every day and it’s a lot. I JUST got my benefits last week and I should be trying to see a dentist and eye doctor at least. I actually just tried to call my old dentist just now, but no luck. Oof. ANYWAYS, I’m trying to stick with it, especially because I AM finally in a place where, thanks in part to extra art income and such, I’m making more money than I’m spending for the first time in years, and with a big bill coming up this weekend and my credit card needing to be paid off, quitting now would be absolutely foolish, but I also just keep wondering how long I can hang on.

Either way, I think I do need to dip back into art more and refocus on some things I wanted to attempt last year and never got around to. I just finished a short, fully painted fantasy comic for a friend’s magazine, and it was way out of my wheelhouse but exciting to work on, and I think I’d like to do more of that. Here’s a panel:

The first two pages are up on my Patreon, and the final page will be up later today or tomorrow, when I can get around to it.

Okay, I’ve been working intermittently on this thing all morning and I have to start work in less than an hour, so here are some other bursts:

Furiosa is good. Not as good as Mad Max: Fury Road, it’s still too heavily tied to that movie and doesn’t do enough to stand out from under its shadow, but it’s still one hell of a movie, and I forgot just how cute George Miller is when he talks about filmmaking? I hope he lives forever.

I realized there’s a second season of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur on Disney+, and the first episode was great. I’m excited to watch the rest, the show is so stylish and cool. It’s the 2D TV version of the Spider-Verse films, just visually incredible.

I’m listening to Chappell Roan for the first time this morning since I’ve seen so many friends lose their minds over seeing her live recently. I’m into it. Between her and Orville Peck performing earlier this week (my wife took off work early to go see him at the last minute), Asheville has been a hotspot for killer queer music artists, dang.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got. Time for call center work. Take care, y’all.