Quote from: Aether on June 04, 2020, 08:51:16 PM

Congo rats.

Was this a on purpose or the most legendary misspelling of all time

Congo rats is a meme version of "congrats" created on New Flood. It's possible that it originated as a typo.

I only drink plain water and have been for about 5 years now. I can't have most flavored types of drinks. Also, I don't like the way caffeine makes me feel.

And yet racial inequality and systematic discrimination is still a pervasive and ingrained problem that hasn't dissappeared.

No one here is positing the notion that innocent lives need to be ruined to see any significant change, at least not seriously. But this instant jump to riots and looting being the main focus of concern, when it's actually a symptom of the rotten system, is a serious misalignment of where the priorities should be.

The point is not to encourage the violence by making it out to be a necessary evil to create change within a rotten system.

If you don't believe innocent lives need ruining, then I don't understand how you can say that "the system makes it necessary."

If your biggest concern right now is civil unrest and property damage as a response to state officiated murder then there's not much else to tell you other than that your priorities and moral compass have exited the Earth's atmosphere.

Innocent people are being beaten, shot at, and having their businesses destroyed. You don't believe all of that is somehow necessary do you?

I really don't understand how destroying your own community is supposed to help it, but I don't necessarily think that rioters are trying to help the community anyways. It's a shame that those peacefully protesting will have their cause sullied by the actions of a  violent minority of people and that their protests will be shut down to stop the violence.

The thing is, I imagine a lot of riots are instigated by police showing up in riot gear to protests where rioting hasn't happened. I do wonder if they avoided doing that would a riot even break out to begin with.

Escapism for my exceptionally boring life. And I guess I tend to like animated media because I'm also an artist.

I really regret not learning to play one growing up tbh, but now all practice time in my life is dedicated to visual art and virtually nothing else.

My dad is a jazz/metal bass player, and you would think that would've influenced me into wanting to be a musician as well but I was a dumb kid who didn't want to do anything but play video games until I was in high school and finally decided to take drawing more seriously.

I guess it's easy to forget this site is almost 6 years old now.

Deej tries to purge the remnants of the old userbase every 4 months or so

Deej still exists?

I may have a workaround for the hitch up. Don't think of it as practice. I'll tell you why.

I've posted a few bits of my work here, and if you've seen them, you may be surprised to know that I personally can't draw for shit, moderate at best. My work is the result of over a decade of experimentation and combining all of my favorite digital mediums together into one piece. I use 3d rendering programs and models, stitched real world photography, and a few custom scripts and brushes I made to distort and recombine all of my images together into one thing. It's all actually a very big process when I get going. Imagine what it was like for me when I didn't know anything and I was teaching myself how to do all of this for the first time.

I learned how to do all of this through practice, of course, but I didn't view it as practice. To me, I wanted to nail the imagery I imagined. Every time I made a new image, it was my chance to push my abilities and knowledge further and get one step closer to achieving my desired result. I think if you start to view it as simply practice, you add rigormoral to the process, which sucks the fun out of what you do. Of course, art is a balance between rigor and fun. When you work, don't think too much of the technical details. Just focus on doing. Making something come alive and captivating. You'll learn as you work anyway.

Unfortunately my current goal is to learn to draw human anatomy which is basically entirely practice. I don't really plan on doing any fully composed character art until I've progressed more. I've got a ton of ideas to put to paper (or digital canvas) but they're all on hold right now until I have achieved the skill required to execute them how I envision. A little bit of practice everyday isn't as enjoyable as drawing things I am comfortable with but I can handle that much so long as I can just maintain the motivation to draw period. That's my biggest issue, honestly. For a while now I've felt like doing virtually nothing. Not just art. I haven't practiced just about all of my hobbies for months. The only thing I've really been doing lately is sleeping, lurking on forums, and watching crap on YouTube.

Quote from: Aether on May 21, 2020, 07:11:48 AM

Is it obvious yet that I keep hesitating to start practicing bodies?

Just do it. Start with rough sketchy shapes, and don't worry about refining the image. It's fine if it looks like complete shit.
Just remember, loose and sketchy. Using basic shapes can help a lot too.

It's not actually that I'm too worried about the sketches being shitty. I can draw bodies decently well as long as I have a reference (obviously still nowhere near perfect). It's just that the task of practicing new things in general seems really tedious and tbh depression is really screwing with my motivation to do anything productive, but that's how it goes I guess.

I'm actually going to try to suck it up and commit to drawing at least one full body pose a day. Hopefully other circumstances won't wreck my determination as they have been for a while now.

i am happy to see it's still doing well.

You're the first person I've seen suggest that the current state of this site is "doing well."

More stuff.





Is it obvious yet that I keep hesitating to start practicing bodies?

Quote from: Aether on May 20, 2020, 08:06:55 AM

Your mental state can be negatively affected simply by having too much or too little of certain vitamins, or just having a poor gut micro-biome. You don't have to have a chronic condition. If fact research over the last few years has shown that depression and diet are often linked, and even just taking probiotics has helped people just as well as taking anti-depressants.

If you just don't take care of your body at all, then it won't be able to function properly. You'll have greater levels of pain, increased fatigue, imbalanced hormones, a myriad of various issues that aren't going to be overcome until you actually start to take care of your body.

again, you're cheating the argument

obviously, if you're in the hole, there's nowhere else to go but up—but that's not the conversation

when it comes to my fitness, i'm not in any sort of hole right now, so this doesn't even apply to me

I'm not talking about whatever your current condition is. I'm talking about being genuinely unhealthy. If you aren't experiencing any of the issues I listed then I would not define you as having poor health. But if you don't at least make some attempt to take care of your body then it's inevitable that you will end up with one or more of these issues.

It's your body, you treat it how you want to. I just don't believe you're going to have lasting happiness if you don't take care of it.

Quote from: Aether on May 20, 2020, 07:31:48 AM

Quote from: Verbatim on May 20, 2020, 07:17:35 AM

Quote from: Aether on May 20, 2020, 07:10:50 AM

I don't see how someone can be physically unhealthy and it not affect their mental health in a negative way. Physical and mental health are very interdependent. My personal experience with this fact is very visceral.

this is a graver insult to the intelligence of humanity than i could ever personally muster up

What, are you trying to say that the two things aren't interdependent?

i'm saying it's a sign of lower intelligence if you don't actively try to put the mental at the forefront

you're not your body

Okay but that doesn't negate the fact that if you are physically un-well your mental well being will be negatively impacted.