harmonyfriends

[harmonyfriends]

streaming pokemon scarlet FRIDAY at 7 PM CENTRAL, be there or don't!!!!!

[harmonyfriends]

the years have made me weird and strange to talk to. but still i must post

[harmonyfriends]

was put on this earth specifically to love and cherish people shaped like this

[harmonyfriends]

musical memories of the RPG project I couldn't quite get off the ground, "Touched by the Void". always wish it came together, but I'm glad I could find and archive this stuff.

[harmonyfriends]

Skysometric Design Retrospective, Part 1

Where It All Started

somehow, after a decade on the internet, i've become one of those people who has a whole Personal Brand™. at first i leaned into it on purpose, partly because i wanted to make videos as my shtick (until i didn't), and partly because i didn't really know how else to express myself on the internet early on. these days, however, keeping up a personal brand is less about Who I Am and more that i just enjoy graphic design. making this stuff is fun!

so over the past few years since coming out and rebranding as Skysometric, i've put a lot of work into a new logo, website design, icons, video thumbnails, and even more besides. i'm pretty proud of how it all turned out! and now that most of the heavy lifting is done, i'd like to write about how it went and some things i've learned along the way. there's a lot to talk about, so strap in for a pretty long series!

but, to start, i can't talk about Skysometric without a quick history lesson about WillWare, the old me – the one who got the ball rolling on graphic design in the first place.

———

maybe this is obvious to the trained eye (or maybe not!), but i'm an entirely self-taught graphic designer. i've never taken any classes, studied design styles, learned the fundamentals, or even so much as had a single course teaching me how Photoshop works. (not that i use Adobe anymore, but you get my point!)

instead, everything i know, i learned by doing. i learned how image editing software works by making tiles and backgrounds for Mari0 levels. my fundamentals are deeply rooted in drawing mazes as a kid, so i quickly discovered how to set up grids in every image editor i got my hands on. i picked up other design techniques by attempting to imitate their logos or styles for personal projects over the years.

on the one hand, this means that i've developed a style and workflow that is wholly and uniquely my own! on the other hand, anytime i get stuck, i don't always have the tools to get un-stuck... or even the words to google it.

so instead of googling it, i used the tools i had to make all of this:

rest in peace, WillWare (the brand). clockwise from top left: logo, social media banner, video end slate, stream archive thumbnail.

what started as just a fancy logo to replace my old Sonic profile picture, snowballed into an entire branding suite across web and video! i learned a lot about graphic design as i gradually expanded these designs into my other creative pursuits. you can see so much of that self-taught style i described above in these few examples – geometric grids and graph paper, simple shapes and layers like my Mari0 work... and imitation of Google's Material Design guidelines, like drop shadows and color choices.

in fact, i leaned so hard on Material Design that, after some time, it no longer felt like my own style. anytime i wanted to branch out, i felt constrained by somebody else's design standards! so i challenged myself to find my own design style from scratch, which I called "New WillWare":

this neon light grid is still pretty dang inspired, but it's not "me" anymore.

it took a couple years of slow iteration to arrive at this neon-looking "light grid," and while it rocks, it also painted me into a corner. i had no idea how to make anything more than pretty promotional pictures in this style – i couldn't figure out how to make it work with video, webpages, or even just text, no matter how much i tried to go back to the drawing board. and my lack of formal experience made it that much more difficult to solve these problems!

so after a while, i felt pretty stuck. my old design didn't feel like my own, my new design was a dead end, and i felt like i was too invested in both to start completely from scratch again. i was simultaneously too burnt out to continue, and too scared to throw everything out and start fresh!

and then i transitioned, and started calling myself Sky.

in case you missed the *cough* subtle indicators, both of my old designs are centered around the letter W (being part of my old username and all). "Sky" does not have a W. so, uh, none of this fits anymore! even though i love this old work, and still consider it part of my history, it no longer accurately represents me or my identity. ready or not, it's time to design something new!

on one side, i felt pressure to get away from my old look, the product of a younger designer whose efforts were still the standard for my online presence. on the other side, i felt pressure to rise from the ashes of my redesign, make something of all the failures, successes, and lessons that i learned.

and thus, shedding my old brand identity and donning my new gender identity, i hit the sketchbook running.

to be continued...

[harmonyfriends]

Ew i opened my heart and something crawled inside

[harmonyfriends]

that person was genuinely very like. suspicious of people's motives and healthiness around the concept of fictivity in a way that rubbed off on me in a way that's sucked to have to deal with, which is a shame because they also gave us some of the very best advice for dealing with DID ever. sad

I've seen an argument before from someone I used to respect that this kinnie-system-no-agency thing is primarily a subculturally learned phenomenon and it's liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike I dunno it's shit I was doing when I was a kid before I knew the words "kinning" or "system" or "plural", before the Tumblr usage of any of those words, and it's shit i learned to repress quickly when I got on the internet because that sort of thing got ruthlessly mocked on the message boards that were available to me at the time for socialization. so if the only agency I can exert over it is whether or not to repress it it does seem like a real phenomenon to me. and I have to reject, for the sake of my OCD if nothing else, that there was some kind of "original sin" or "infohazard" in me allowing myself to think about myself as a system with the capability for fictives in the first place

[harmonyfriends]

I've seen an argument before from someone I used to respect that this kinnie-system-no-agency thing is primarily a subculturally learned phenomenon and it's liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike I dunno it's shit I was doing when I was a kid before I knew the words "kinning" or "system" or "plural", before the Tumblr usage of any of those words, and it's shit i learned to repress quickly when I got on the internet because that sort of thing got ruthlessly mocked on the message boards that were available to me at the time for socialization. so if the only agency I can exert over it is whether or not to repress it it does seem like a real phenomenon to me. and I have to reject, for the sake of my OCD if nothing else, that there was some kind of "original sin" or "infohazard" in me allowing myself to think about myself as a system with the capability for fictives in the first place

[harmonyfriends]

I still got it

[harmonyfriends]

You really, really don't need to be cheerleading Disney and Universal here. It honestly doesn't matter how much you dislike AI art — if the court rules in favor of the corporations, the implicit expansion of copyright law will do a million times more harm to the arts than fucking Midjourney ever could.

Like. There is no definition of copyright that does not permit AI training, but does permit fanworks. The latter is much more clearly derivative than the former. You do fanart? Fanfic? Disney's pointing a gun squarely at your head and you're cheering because it might hit the AI artists behind you too.

And beyond that, do you know what happens to AI generation if Disney/Universal win this? They aren't opposed to the technology in principle! They'll be able to use their exclusive rights to a vast corpus of art to make their own AI, for their own purposes. Who does this help? Companies who want to reduce employment costs and disenfranchise the working artist. Who does this hurt? Well, it hurts independent AI users. Congrats, your anxiety over commission prices is gone now, not that it was well-founded to begin with. It also hurts anyone who wants to make use of fair use doctrine forever, so I hope none of what you were selling was fanart of copyrighted characters.

I've never made a secret of being rather more open to generative AI as a technology than most people in these online spheres. But for fuck's sake, you really don't need to like AI to realize that this lawsuit's success would be a terrible thing to happen to art! If you've found yourself on the same side as Disney, that should be a clue that you might wanna review your thinking!

[harmonyfriends]

OHHHHH WE ARE EATING WHAT THE FUCK

I'm dead

[harmonyfriends]

Homeless LGBT Couple REALLY REALLY needs help this month! (PRIDE Edition!)

Hey, everyone.

My little family is still homeless, we've been very sick on and off this last month, and there's been a terrible heat wave. We've been struggling with affording food, important bills are encroaching, and we need shelter to recover in and so I can use my medical equipment. I'm asking around where I can for help making ends meet and keeping out of the heat so we can recover. I'm looking for work and now that I have my driver's license again, I will hopefully have a better time finding something I qualify for but I really need help surviving that long. Things have been incredibly difficult for us and I'm really burning out hard. Any help is greatly appreciate. Please share this if you can.

PayPal: @garbageconnoisseur CashApp: $garbageconnoisseur Venmo: @garbageconnoisseur I also have Zelle, so ask for that if you need it. Please no hate or unsolicited advice. I do not have the energy to deal with it and you will be blocked.

[harmonyfriends]

live now

in a bit I'm gonna do a Switch 2 Eve Eve Whateverstream to pass the time. we'll start with Pokemon Legends Arceus shiny hunting til I get bored, then move on to random other Switch games. sound fun? join me in a bit

[harmonyfriends]

in a bit I'm gonna do a Switch 2 Eve Eve Whateverstream to pass the time. we'll start with Pokemon Legends Arceus shiny hunting til I get bored, then move on to random other Switch games. sound fun? join me in a bit

[harmonyfriends]

The looming launch of a console that is objectively less exciting and more frustrating than most other console launches I've lived through still rendering me nonfunctional/paralyzed with anticipation making me feel like this

[harmonyfriends]

God let me live another day and i'm making it your problem. I WANT FOOD.

[harmonyfriends]

tumblr: constantly be aware of your own privilege. constantly be aware of your capacity of be evil. hey i know you really like that new piece of media but make sure you're aware of all of the problematic elements all the time. hey i noticed you reblogged a post from a designated Bad Person so please make sure you do a thorough background check on everyone you reblog from to make sure they're not bad, otherwise people might get the wrong idea about you. always be aware of everything bad that's happening in the world all the time because silence is violence. i see you not reblogging this post btw. activist burnout is a privilege so be aware of that. xyz people are required to reblog this post. if you're not constantly fighting against designated Bad People you are inherently complicit and therefore a Bad Person.

people with ocd: