#project journal

[kukez]

Trying to figure out an efficient pipeline for coloring the comic. This turned out pretty nice, but took way too long and I have no idea how to replicate the results (at least quickly) for dozens of pages...

[dahliaduvide]

"His name is lost to history, but perhaps he wouldn’t mind. His motivation was a speedy payday, not posterity. A ballad that stirred the passions could sell for a penny. Sometimes he sold his work directly to the printshops, but he often took to the streets himself. He borrowed tunes from familiar songs, and had a talent for singing his work that helped him draw a crowd and sell his broadsides."

"Our modern notion of a songwriter would have been nonsensical to him, of course. His trade was partly creative, but his task was also to record and remember the familiar songs already sung, and re-shape them for new events and local happenings. He was a kind of tabloid journalist in his time. Today, we might think of him as a historian of oral traditions, a cataloger of folkways. But that’s not quite right. He was no mere archivist, no passive documentarian. He shaped and reshaped these traditions. Writing was an astonishing technology, and the reach of the printing press gave it newfound power. Oral traditions were chaotic, unfixed, unwieldy—stories forever in revision, never complete. Versions would branch without end, and older branches would be lost with time. How did the lyrics go? Well, that would depend. You could say a song existed in superposition, until someone sang it in their particular way."

"Though he would have been dismissed as a scabrous hack at the time, the ballad writer has such a knack for poetic and efficient depictions of monstrous violence that it can start to feel like he is an artist, or a proto-artist, who is governed by a bloodthirsty aesthetic. But the truth is, he may not be a single man—he may be a composite, his single authorship an anachronism. Or he may be merely a transcriber. The song’s structure and rhythm are so clean that it suggests a writer’s hand, but it could be that the story and its language were born entirely in song, from the community. Later, scholars would bicker over what counts as folk tradition, but a song’s evolutions in oral tradition and popular writing surely would have crossed back and forth countless times. The past is so foreign and strange that we should be left humble when we write our histories. Whether he is one writer, or several writers, or the people as a whole, the shape of his thoughts—his entire manner of thinking—is unreachable."

Excerpts.

Thoughts.

Truly a beautifully written article, and you should totally take the time to read the entire thing. He interweaves perspectives from performers, listeners, and even what the creators of these broadside murder ballads might have been like. Artful writing, hard thoughts, and self-examination.

This article really put into words a vital part of my vision for this project, creating modern murder ballads to draw attention to cases, raise awareness and hopefully get some justice for the Knoxville girls of today.

[dahliaduvide]

It's been longer than the summer, but I did spend all summer wanting my voice back and wondering why the hell it had disappeared in the first place. After 3 doctors, tests at 2 different hospitals, and 1 very awesome speech therapist I discovered it was...

Vocal Cord Dysfunction.

And tbh, it floored me. I've never had trouble talking! I talk loud and often! I talk to animals and inanimate objects and myself. Out loud! I also sing quite a bit throughout the day. Of course I hadn't been able to sing since last March, and my voice was getting hoarser and hoarser. There was a bit where it seemed like it was asthma, but the inhaler did nothing when I had a truly awful attack. I needed my partner's mom to tell me I was ok and calm me down.

PRO TIP: If your issue is breathing out, it's your lungs. If your issue is breathing in, it's your vocal cords and you can manage it with breathing exercises once you understand it.

I'm in such a habit of breathing with my chest that I am still doing daily breathing exercises, preparation breaths, and the occasional rescue breath just doing regular life things!

But I can sing again!

So you experience some or all of these symptoms go talk to a doc! You may have to advocate for yourself, especially if you're not a cis male, but it's worth it!

Hoarseness, trouble breathing, specifically trouble breathing in, post-nasal drip, acid reflux, nausea, vomiting, too much phlegm, disliking tight things around your neck, tight belts around your stomach, tight throat, lump in your throat, trouble swallowing, frequent cough/throat clearing, high pitched wheeze on inhale.

You may have been diagnosed with asthma, panic attacks, anxiety disorder, PTSD, or some other obstructive pulmonary issue. VCD is easier and less invasive to deal with than any of those things, and the tools you use for VCD can help with the symptoms of all the other things it could be.

Your voice is you, in so many ways. Losing it is scary. Feeling like you can't breath is scary, whether you're actually in danger of suffocating or not. In the past, VCD wasn't even recognized as a medical issue. Since it occurs most often in women, it was thought to simply be an aspect of hysteria.

Don't let the patriarchy steal your voice and make you blame yourself for it, reach out, get help. You deserve it.

ngl this is so me

[thedollcabinet]

MSD Tripp-esque Pants Journal

Well I'm gonna restart the blog, beginning with some sewing!

I've started a pair of pants for my ResinSoul MSD guy! I'm using the goth pants' pattern found on the linked page.

I've done the mockup for these and was relatively content with the result. I've adjusted the leg length for my guy.

I'm worried about the fabric leaving marks on the doll... might've been smart to use a buffer/lining fabric, lol.

Currently I'm at the stage of ironing seams before continuing construction. And ironing is the thing that kills all momentum with my projects sooooo we'll see how long it takes to pick this up again lmAO

[swan-song-production-blog]

Here I am, two days later regurgitating what I had word vomited out onto kitchen checks at work and hadn't had time to get posted here yet...

Life is funny, isn't it? The struggle on this project is mainly within myself. The sweet spot that spawned it: a well of emotions unpleasant and necessary to find my way. Climbing out of them was the inspiration for making this in the first place. As my life moves forward, it grows, with each day better than the last. I wouldn't say I am complacent or settled in contentment. A better observation would be slightly afloat in euphoric moments and I need to reel myself in and focus.

Now that I have been letting myself enjoy my life, I need to find the balance. Attending the Detroit International Festival of Animation on Saturday rekindled my fire (not that it had been extinguished, just dimmed) to get this back on track. Seeing the films that people had poured their hearts into displayed on a theatrical scale and triggering responses out of the audience! The laughs and reactions... That is the goal: Connect with the audience through the film.

I'm charting my way through the dark while blind at times, but each journey is unique to itself. I'll never be exactly here again, so I'll treasure each step for what it is. As far as preparing for next semester, I finally was in a position to order an external SSD portable drive, so hopefully it will help with productivity and workflow as far as Adobe program's project files are concerned. No more broken file paths when trying to work on different devices! It should arrive on Thursday. I never know how to do things the "correct" way, but I will find "my" way.

By now the drive is here, because it is now Thursday. Let's try to get everything moved onto it and test it out, since this is where this project is going to live for the next year.

[catnippackets]

ideas for casual low-stress art projects if you want to work on something creative during the new year

dream journal: you can either write down every single dream you have so you can look back on everything, or just write down the best ones and add little drawings or collages to embellish them

weather blanket/scarf: create a legend for which colour matches each temperature/weather and then knit one row every day so by the end of the year you have a little reminder of what the weather looked like this year

junk journal/scrapbook: collect misc things like labels/ads/stickers/receipts and make little collages with them in a book

everyone add on ideas

[slfcare]

ten questions to ask yourself, discuss with your closest friends or journal about:

↝ what does your admiration look like? is it free of jealousy?

↝ where do you feel your emotions, physically within you? does your anger live in your hands or your gut? is your sadness light or heavy?

↝ what do you feel holds you back from taking the steps you know you should be taking but aren’t?

↝ is there something that has happened recently which is still bothering you? why do you think this is? what do you wish happened instead?

↝ what kind of media have you been consuming lately, and how has it really been affecting you?

↝ are you where you hoped you’d be a year ago? are you okay with that?

↝ what areas of your life need a deep-clean? your literal closet? your social life? your habits? your attitude? your camera roll?

↝ where are you headed in the next few months? how do you wish you could adjust your course?

↝ what is something you want to be more honest about?

↝ what moves you?

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I came here for the silly haha doodles, but I've stayed for the absolutely blazing commentary in the tags. Your analysis of this story is so so so good! Thanks for all the work and thought you put into this!

I am just a silly little comics blog. I am not hiding anything in the tags, no way. Never.

[thestarfishface]

(Buys another new notebook) Surely this one will fix me

[kukez]

Slipping these in-world advertisements of everyday tech in the comic to dump lore and expositions. Their products/technology are kinda crucial for the story, but can't really be naturally explained in dialog so this is a nice little shortcut and good worldbuilding.

[dahliaduvide]

This is not an attempt at confessing my life's traumas, as much as examining the cultural themes relating to my experiences.

Reexamining music about violence from the perspective of a survivor.

It is also an attempt at expressing uniquely feminine pain and anguish that has long been ignored by genres that examine male pain, such as metal, industrial, and most all of the *cores that emerged from them, but including blues, country music, and English language folk music. Experiences unique to humans having children, but also those of violation, lack of physical dominance, disenfranchisement, erasure, demonization, stolen agency, navigating narrow social constraints, etc. These experiences are not unique to women universally, but in our culture here in the USA they are had most often by women and other oppressed groups.

I've been fascinated with murder ballads since I was a kid listening to 60s folk revival and country western music with my parents. Fascinated in a kind of thrilled and afraid way.

How many times did I hear the words of Delia's Gone before I realized it held a passive threat?

I wanted to know what kind of power these songs had. I did what I do best, I dug into as many old sources as I could find to understand where these songs came from. I learned about broadside ballads and Child ballads and the Roud folk song index. So there is history, just not mine.

I learned that Delia was a real murder victim.

There was also an Ellen Smith and an Omie Wise. There are two different Frankie and Johnnys. The unnamed shes, hers, hims, and theirs. And of course the victims and killers who lost their names to lyrical meter and are now known only as Molly, Polly, Jenny, Maggie, Margaret, Willy, William, Tom, or Johnny.

Because that's the thing about these songs, a lot of them started as news- a kind of news based entertainment that would of course be hard for any modern person to understand. People who heard them wrote their own versions with different words, different melodies, different rhythms.

My life is a lot, with no break in the storm in sight, but digging through these fragments of pain help me keep things in perspective. I'm lucky enough to have access to meds and a therapist that I really get along well with, but I don't feel comfortable with the kind of raw expression I'm working towards with this project.

Right now I am focused on what I see as the beginning phase: Warming up and refining my musical ideas by performing traditional songs, covering modern songs in a "traditional" style, and rewriting traditional songs to examine them with a better understanding of history.

Some big inspirations for this stage of the project:

It's been almost a decade since I've been in a band, and I've never worked solo before, so it's slow going to say the least. But I am also enjoying working on this musical project more than any I have done in the past. No matter how many times I move on to work on something else I always come back to this music.

I'll be using this space to gather research materials, workshop song ideas, fuck around posting aesthetic stuff, ramble pointlessly, and share drafts of my songs.

If you are interested in following this project's development, follow my tumblr and whatever social media accounts you prefer.

It may be awhile, but you'll hear from me. 💜

[abyssalzones]

okay so a while back I mentioned I was really unhappy with the older designs I had for the pines twins, so I decided to completely re-do them. not sure why I didn't give them both glasses in the first place honestly. hey have you noticed how often I just draw characters standing in a white empty space

[dulledtalons]

he said it

[wolfwafflez]

What do you guys think of my Fear Entity junk journal series?! Obviously I think some came out better than others, but as a whole series, I’m very happy with it.

Let me know which is your favorite!

[threewordusername]

the monster became a poet X: the monster became a poet

d.b.a

[plaidos]

Knox Country, Kentucky -- Project Zomboid