My mate Kat recently posted - on her new ƂʆϘϭ - about her Summer of Flops: going on a tear watching movies that were financial or critical failures. In the post she mentions a “Zine” she wrote about the topic months ago and handed out on real actual paper to real life humans.
My Art by screenbeard
Zines aren’t a thing any more! Yet here Kat is, acting like they never went out of fashion - like blogs didn’t kill them before Facebook killed blogs. She even graciously sent me one, despite the soaring postage prices.
Zines are so old school. I remember being part of a group who wanted to put out a zine at Uni. I think they were so old-school then that we wanted to do a “digital zine” on the university web hosting. That was my fist experience with HTML, and I think it sparked something. I wish I could find those old files now to share just how bad it was, although the writing and art that the people in the group contributed was really very good1.
Before that zine I thought that while an art career was never in my future, at least I might learn how to create art and start making it some day. Like music, I thought it was a skill you could pick up through practice, and like music, I thought that once you had the skill, you’d want to do it.
But I never wanted to practice, and ended up convincing myself that I just am not into art (or music), and don’t have it in my bones. Which is sad.
But recently I’ve been hit by a couple of examples like Kat’s zine that have made me consider that I may have cut myself off from learning what art even is.
CJ the X is a youtuber and musician that has done a number of videos that exalt art to a place I’d never thought to place it. In their video about the 7 Deadly Art Sins they breaks down the many reasons one might fail to commit art, and how the sins rob you and the universe of something singular that only you can provide.
You are a nonfungible individual.
We are the original bored apes. The boredom is the pain of existence, the club is the collective unconscious, and the yacht is NFTs. Your specific perception of the universe and the potentialities that lie under your skin, your little imagination lightning rod that detects like the ghosts of hitherto unrealized dreams, it is not replaceable!
There’s not going to be another one of you. So if you’re not going to put in the work to make that idle fantasy that could have been real real, it will not exist.
— CJ the X, 7 Deadly Art Sins
CJ the X talks about art in these terms in all their videos and despite myself I find it inspiring, even though I barely know what it means to be inspired.
The most creative times in my life have been writing code and writing two full stories I’ve felt proud of. I can’t convince myself that code is art, although I’d be open to arguments if anyone cared to make one to me, but if I squint hard enough I could call those two peices of writing “art”. One was a stage play I did when I took some extra year 12 classes one semester. The play is lost now - I can’t find the print out or the file backups - but it earned me the only A I ever got in highschool.
The other is a series I posted here about a ‘lil guy who is a badass space adventurer who dies in the second chapter. The story was fun to write because I constrained myself to writing tiny micro-chapters with a specific structure, but the story spiralled out and I stuffed it full of the tropes and sci-fi story beats I love, and it’s absolutely the best thing I’ve ever done.
But I didn’t finish it and post the end anywhere. I wrote the ending, and there were only a few tiny chapters left, but I never typed them up and published them and I still can’t identify why I didn’t just put them out there into the world to be their own thing. The Deadly Art Sin of greed - hoarding the final scraps so the story could be mine and only mine and I wouldn’t have to ask why no one else was enjoying it like I was.
So I’ve spent some time building out my own journaling software so I can keep writing these little posts and trying to do a art again, and I will post the remaining chapters and you can yell at me on mastodon if I don’t put them up soon.
Another good friend Ruben wrote about writers using AI images to acompany their posts. I admit I’ve been tempted to see AI image generation as a way to overcome my own lack of artistic talent and if I’d been at all active in the last two years may have actually used some on my own site. But as he says:
But to the writers specifically who are dumping garbage in their vegetable crisper, I’d implore you to reconsider. You don’t need them! Eschewing (gesundheit) an image entirely is preferable. Heck, even a stick figure or a bunch of shapes thrown together in LibreOffice Draw would be more useful and charming than anything these slop machines are puking onto your site and stinking up the joint. You—and by extension, your words—deserve more.
— Ruben Schade, Press button, receive slop
That snapped something in my brain and I vowed I’d put a little dinky art of my own on posts from now on. It’s why my come-back post included a very bad drawing of me at my computer, and why I didn’t just destroy the picture immediately when I finished it, but actually posted it on the internet for everyone to see. I’m not proud of my art, but it’s my art. And it won’t ever be perfect but I have to learn how to keep making it and giving it to the world.
you can’t prove it wasn’t ↩
