thebigldb - Tumblr blog

[thebigldb]

Introducing the launch of the first line of Big L shirts! My store is now open for per-order until Sunday January 15th, 11:59pm EST. Once closed, production and shipping is estimated to be 2-3 weeks out.

These were designed with love and inspired by drawings I did in August of 2022. I'm so thrilled to be offering them for everyday casual wear or a fun layering piece. They are made of 100% polyester, they are light and breathable.

The modeling photos were taken by my dad who did an excellent job capturing us wearing them out and about.

Once the store closes these shirts will not be offered again SO BE SURE TO ORDER YOURS TODAY!!

[thebigldb]

So excited to finally share this - I now have some apparel up for sale via Ad Artem!

Link to purchase is here! 💖

Use code "ARTEMFENNER" for 12% off purchases of 2 items & up! *EDIT: Looks like there's a few launch hiccups. We're getting it sorted out. Maybe I got too excited & posted a little quick lol!

[thebigldb]

Why are the only followers I’m getting robot/porn accounts??? It’s fucking annoying and does nothing for me. Literally the same issue I had last time I was on tumblr and it just makes having an account here seem so pointless. Please make it stop.

[thebigldb]

A brief summary of how user engagement is tracked on Tumblr, for the newcomer:

When you like or reblog a post, that counts as user engagement for the person you liked or reblogged from, and shows up in their notifications.  

If the person you liked or reblogged a post from wasn’t the original poster (i.e., you’re liking or reblogging a reblog), it also counts as user engagement for the original poster, and shows up in their notifications as well.  

This means that user engagement from your likes and reblogs can potential accrue to two different people, the original poster and the person you liked or reblogged from.  

Consequently, you cannot “steal” user engagement from someone by reblogging their post.  

This is one of the very few areas where Tumblr is actually functions more reasonably than other social media platforms.  

Note that this is only true if you use Tumblr’s built-in reblogging function. If you save someone else’s content to your local device and append it to a new post, you effectively become the original poster from that point on.  

This means that on Tumblr, “reblogging” and “reposting” are two different things; if you see someone complaining about “reposting”, this is not the same as reblogging.  

Commenting when reblogging does not affect any of this – unlike, say, Twitter, where quote-retweeting causes user engagement to accrue to the quote-retweet and not to the original tweet – and you can and should do so freely.  

However, every Tumblr user can see who exactly you reblogged a post from, which functions as a soft disincentive against making inane comments; if you make a dumb comment on a reblog, people who see your reblog may “back up” one step in the reblog chain to reblog a version of the post without your comment.  

Nobody understands tags, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that how tags work changes periodically and without warning.  

Tags are a divine mystery.

[thebigldb]

Inactive Twitter accounts will be deleted

So like I understand the need to free up usernames that were taken and then never used again, but what about accounts of people who died ?

Its unclear if the criteria for an inactive account’s deletion is both “No log in for years AND zero tweets made by the account as a whole,aka empty accounts”

It could very well be “No login for years and zero tweets made during this inactivity”

Which would sucks cuz theres a lot of cool stuff made from accounts who are inactive, and again, all that some families have left from their deceased loved ones is an inactive twitter account.

Back in 2019,this concern was brought up, and Twitter said they wouldnt delete accounts to free up names without making it possible to memorialize accounts of a deceased person first.

Now, Under Elon, i dont know if it will be made.

So if you know an inactive account you really loved.. make sure to save its tweets into the wayback machine, take screenshots, etc.

Just in case.

Also they dont even specify how many years. We’re left in total darkness regarding questions we have.

Also im encouraging you to please REBLOG as to further warn people.

[thebigldb]

Art vs Artist 2022 : A Reflection

Hello world and the vast void that is the internet,

I'm Linda! I've been making art for years, went to school for it, and have been working as a graphic designer for 5+ years in the screen print and decorated apparel ~industry~. Above is a little artist vs art with some of the pieces I've done this year. I've only recently been leaning into and improving upon my digital art, though I do make things using traditional mediums. Below is the same review format, but with the things I've made for a small apparel shop, plus some personal/side projects.

2022 has been the year of many major life changing events for me. I'm going to list some of the key ones below as I reflect upon the rapidly closing year:

1.) After working at a company that deteriorated my mental health through burnout and a toxic work environment for 3 years; I started a new - way less demanding - job with a different apparel shop. I had left behind my job title as "Art Director", a position and department I solely built up myself through hiring and attempts to organize and streamline the company's lack there of (not to mention the ridiculous turnover rate they had with graphic designers before I started there). My new job has been what I would call a nearly 360 turn from my previous one. It is a newer and smaller business, outsources its decoration as opposed to having it done in-house, and comes at a much much slower pace with its surges. While it lacks certain aspects of what I actually enjoyed from my previous job (like always having something to do or having co-workers doing similar things as you), it's given me the opportunity to develop myself personally as an artist and even consider the concept of making my own business. (Image below is a photo of some of floral shirts I designed, soon to be on sale)

2.) I got married to my partner of 7 years in the month of May, right before my 28th birthday. We had met through Tinder and were the first person each of us met in person from the app. It's been the most affirming, loving, and supportive relationship I've ever been in since our first date. He has helped me grow in ways I never knew I could and I am continually grateful for him and the work we've invested in each other. This has lead me to what feels like the next stage of my life; a more mature and grown identity to root myself into from past traumas. We held our wedding in our own backyard of our very first house. The planning, organization, and creation that went into our budgeted wedding proved incredibly stressful up to the day - even having to move it to our "rain date". But our wedding was better than I could've asked for, being surrounded by loved ones and everything else running quite smoothly. It will remain as one of the best days of my life along with our honeymoon trip to Canada.

3.) Within these incredibly positive life changing events, we were struck by the devastating lost of my beloved cat Newton in the month of September. I have never experienced such grief in loosing a pet and continue to be surprised by the inevitable force of sadness that still comes months later (though it hits less frequently). He was the first cat I ever owned and the first cat my now husband and I cared for together. I met Newt in a time I was fired from my first job as a graphic designer and was house/cat sitting for a friend of a friend. They told me they had been feeding a large white cat for some time and was working on bringing it to a shelter (they couldn't take him in because of the already live-in cat I was sitting for). Thankfully when my husband met Newt he agreed to house him in his apartment (I think it was instant love), which also in turn lead me to finally moving in with him. Newt brought me so much comfort, love, and joy - even from the moment we first met he was very affectionate. I had no idea that after 3-4 good years he suddenly fell ill to a chest condition with little hope of recovering. I had always thought he'd live out to a ripe old age since he was only 6-8yrs old when we adopted him, I thought he'd be there whenever I have my first kid at least. But within the unknown chaos of life it didn't happen that way and I lost my best bud very suddenly over a course of an emotionally exhausting month. I could continue on about how much this has hit me, but I won't. It's taken much time to feel easy again and still does sometimes when I look back on the many photos of him still in my photo gallery. On the brighter side, we still care for and are grateful to our little black cat Nadja who had only just come into Newt's life a year or so earlier. We are also grateful that the two were able to meet and get along for the time they had - it benefited them both to have each other even if briefly.

Within these 350 days of 2022 a lot has happened and that's not just within my little individual personal life. World events, news and social media, and technological developments have and will continue to be a huge presence in our lives. But to that point, these things that happen and surround me ultimately effect not just my life and others, but has chipped away at how I perceive myself to the world (mainly a lonely ghost). There is a never-ending frustration with continuing to keep myself present and even "relevant" online as I am an artist and someone who takes joy in creating and sharing art. I cannot live without it at this point, but I have very lingering to no connection to anything irl resembling a community of my peers or fellow artists. This may as well be concluded as lack of trying or will of involvement, so where else can we attempt connection if in person is too much? The internet of course. But - the results are the same because I have not felt like I made any progress of gaining any type of following or what some may call mutuals (save for the one or two and those I know irl) in the however many many years I've been around. Maybe I'm inconsistent, maybe I don't interact as much as I should to gain those connections, maybe I'm too slow or uninteresting, or maybe I assume too much. It could very well be the overwhelming algorithms present on many social platforms and/or the almost infinite amount of people present. But here I remain and continue to try things as best I can with as much as my ADD & depressed brain can handle. I've already put a lot of time, effort, and thought into this post (with multiple considerations of letting it rot in drafts). Inevitably though, the ending of the Gregorian calendar always brings energy of trying again in the next, the flicker of motivation to renew and promise something different. Things, of course, are always changing for better or worse. Things are always growing with or without an audience, and that's what I try to remind myself of. If doing things means spending all my energy to appeal constantly to something so vast and unpredictable, then I think I've been doing it wrong. 2022 has been good to me in many ways and has also crushed me in others. But all these things that will carry over with me into 2023 are ultimately hopeful, strong, and ready to keep on keeping on. If you've made it this far and somehow got through all of this text; Thank you so much. I appreciate you and your time and hope you found some sense of rapport. If you feel like it, check out my art or website - or even reach out if you want to. I have plans in the next year and remaining weeks to market myself as an artist and who knows how that will balance out with the life I keep. I hope you are well and take time to reflect and rest yourself in these dark cold winter months. I'll be back.

[thebigldb]

There’s a protest going on against AI art over on artstation, so I feel like now is the time for me to make a statement on this issue! 

I wholeheartedly support the ongoing protest against AI art. Why? Because my artwork is included in the datasets used to train these image generators without my consent. I get zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use, and are a commercial product. 

Musicians are not being treated the same way. Stability has a music generator that only uses royalty free music in their dataset. Their words: “Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues.” Why is the work of visual artists being treated differently?

Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration. Those two are not the same. My art is literally being fed into these generators through the datasets, and spat back out of a program that has no inherent sense of what is respectful to artists. As long as my art is literally integrated into the system used to create the images, it is commercial use of my art without my consent.

Until there is an ethically sourced database that compensates artists for the use of their images, I am against AI art. I also think platforms should do everything they can to prevent scraping of their content for these databases. 

Artists, speak out against this predatory practice! Our art should not be exploited without our consent, and we deserve to be compensated when our art is exploited for commercial use. 

[thebigldb]

wip - thinking about wall art….

[thebigldb]

Persephone and Aphrodite concept.

[thebigldb]

She blinded me! With Science!!

[thebigldb]

"i've been working, the whole day long. getting older - while you stay young." Lust for a Vampyr - I Monster

[thebigldb]

"take me back, oh drunken gods of slaughter. you know i've always been your favorite daughter" Cassandra - Florence + The Machine