Hi guys, I’ve just been stressing about job hunting while I was/still gone. How’d it go? Well, most local job postings are on frickin Facebook. One has to wade through a ton of spam and scam posts, then when you apply to something that seems legit, THEN they ghost you and/or offer lower than minimum wage. Also my personal info is probably out there somewhere, no need for governments or Discord for that…🙃

I don’t mind min wage, but alas, the norm around here is 9 hours (including lunch) and 6 days a week. I’ll have to accept that… but at least keep to the legal min wage geez. Anyway, I’ve decided to stop stressing about it while still sending job applications. Lemme do art practice for a couple of days before I come back for real because I’m sick of this crap.

At least I’ve been getting some interviews (and getting much needed interview practice from those), but damn I’ll be honest, being an artist has been my “job” for years and y’all know I’m worse than part-time with that. After I’m done firing a few job applications here and there for the day, I’m gonna spend the rest of the day drawing. Time to full-ass it instead of half-assing it not only because drawing for a living might be my only form of survival, and I am also livid at the local jobs. Same case if I ever get employed: I’m going to keep drawing after work if I can.

Discord sux?

Speaking of Discord, I of course do not approve of the ID verification. Protecting the kids? PUH-lease. We should probably look for alternatives, although only Discord has Patreon integration for now, as well as other stuff that I hooked into Discord like Zapier (the one which shares new posts/art to Discord). Thanks soooo much for this annoyance Discord, really fits your name.

According to this Reddit post (sorry for sending you to Reddit), my personal top picks are Stoat and Matrix, but after reading the comments they also seem to have their own problems. What do you guys think? Wanna try them out? It’s starting to look like I might have to (re)start the Cat Nine forums if worst comes to worst, although I don’t mind that since I’m more of a Youtube/forum commenter than someone who hangs out in Discord tbh. With how things are going with governments and privacy, I have a feeling private forums will make a comeback in the future, if they’re not already here.

PC upgraded

Oh yeah while I was gone I’ve finally upgraded my 13-year-old PC, albeit they’re used parts. Partly for art work since my computer slows to a crawl if I’m using 3d reference models or moving things around while working on a large image. The other reason is for gaming since my GPU is having a hard time on Palworld even with minimum settings AND it’s been reaching max temps since I have never repasted my 9-year-old GTX 1050. The repair shop was asking for like $40 for the repaste… and I didn’t want to risk doing the repasting myself. Also, I’ve been worried about the recent RAM and GPU prices, and it was already high when I decided to upgrade. I don’t mind, I think this “new” used PC will serve me fine for another decade.

Meanwhile, my old PC is now relegated as my Unraid server so nothing was wasted. Not sure what to do with the GTX 1050 yet, but I think I’ll try repasting it now that I have another GPU.

Anyway, old vs new specs!

• CPU: i5-3570 to Ryzen 7 3700x
• GPU: GTX 1050 to RX 6600
• RAM: 16GB DDR3 to 16GB DDR4

Boy I thought there wasn’t gonna be much difference moving forward like 7-years in terms of technology, but… it’s so much faster! I got the used computer for about $200, and the RX 6600 for $144. I don’t buy stuff much and I haven’t bought PC parts in a long while, but even I could recognize that was a steal. I even rode my bicycle an hour away just to personally pick up the GPU, but that was also an excuse to ride my bike for the weekend lol.

I’m still on Windows 10 of course. I’ll only use Windows 11 if I’m forced to, otherwise I want to avoid the AI slop they’ve been pushing.

So I should be able to work slightly faster like I mentioned. More exciting reasons are using more advanced 3d models for reference, or create them my own using Blender 👀. I got no 3d modeling skills at the moment though.

Moving on to Linux?

Since I mentioned Windows, I might as well mention my interest in moving to Linux (specifically Linux Mint).

I’ve tried it out and liked it so far, but unfortunately Clip Studio doesn’t have a Linux version. And yes I’ve tried to get it to work with Wine, but CS just doesn’t play with it well, and I don’t really want to learn other art software in the meantime. I’m crossing my fingers that there won’t be any Windows 10 vulnerabilities in the future…