Tinselfire

It has been quite a while since I wrote an essay for dA, probably over two years. Part of it has been due to impostor syndrome, being shy to share insights on subjects I'm in no way a master of for fear it might be passing on misinformation, but for the most part it has just been inconvenience. Most of the time I write when inspiration strikes, and with Eclipse making journal writing impossible on cell phones, there is no longer much room for spontaniety.

But spontaniety is not an issue in this case since it is one a subject that I did muse on for months before a hypothesis most unexpectedly presented itself, and then took another full year to test it.

If you are a practicing artist of any caliber, whether a hobbyist or professional, you have undoubtedly had experience with people who want to improve their craft, but for one reason or another won't. Perhaps they are under the mistaken impression that only talent matters, that it is too late to learn, that they are "too old". Or perhaps the worst, firm believers in the idea that artistic skill is a "gift" reserved for a chosen few - a belief that even a few art teachers I've worked with professionally have unfortunately inflicted on their pupils. In either case the desire to develop and improve is there, only held back by misconceptions. But chances are you have also had a potentially far more frustrating encounter with the diametric opposites: The people who just won't listen.

These are people who may be quite productive, and exceptionally confident in their own skills, vocally demanding recognition for them. But apparent to everybody but themselves, they have little or no actual skill to speak of. And more importantly, they actively reject any implication that this is the case, or any suggestions on what or how to practise and develop - often even after actively requesting feedback. They should not be confused with people who do not allow feedback in general - this is a personal decision that should be respected, as everybody creates in their style and their pace - but refers solely to people who are held back by reinforcing preschool habits in response to all but uncritical praise.

Fortunately if you have had an encounter with them, it isn't really a problem. After all, it's never really your business how people go about making or displaying their art. On the occasions where it might be, you still don't really have any obligation to say anything. On the occasions where in turn you do... Well, if you have compulsions about saving everybody from themselves somebody in the room has a problem, and it isn't them. But if you have had an encounter that has gotten rather verbally intense and perhaps had a few walls of texts thrown your way (which I may or may not be saying is a personal experience), you have probably wondered to yourself how - if? - that could have gone differently. Is there actually a way to get through?

I would say that yes, there sort of is.

But in order to explain how, I first need to go down memory lane and talk about PE class.

My first memory of physical education is pain. That is the least dramatic way I can accurately phrase it. Emphasis included.

Before there are even clear visual memories there is an overwhelming feeling of not belonging, not wanting, of just intensely resisting an imposed force doing me wrong. My oldest clear memories of it are not in the least better, just being compelled to play with others on schedule in games that - though obviously I did not have the language to express so - even as a five-year old child I could not help feel were awkwardly belittling of children's intelligence. And that is counting that I was unambiguously a pretty damn dumb kid.

If you went in as a kid with extra energy, chances are after being forced through the assortment of animal and fruit themed charardes you came back out with less than none.

My relationship with my first elementary school PE teacher is one I can only describe as abusive, and I'm grateful it only ever became verbally so. In hindsight it was a poor situation for everybody - as a child with Asperger syndrome I reacted poorly to arbitrary compulsion, and given how this was in an era when neurodivergence was poorly understood in public education, my PE teacher was not equipped to react in any way but to push back with force. Whenever I think of a gymnasium, gym shorts, track gravel, or even a changing room, I get chills and a feeling of creeping panic remembering hearing her screaming. I do not hold anything against her person later in life, understanding that at the end of the day it came down to her having no tools whatsoever to work with and largely being doomed to fail. But nevertheless, when it came down to teaching me to enjoy exercise, fail she did.

I have little to say of my PE teachers in junior high, besides that for the most part they left me be and did not make things more unpleasant than need be. My only particularly clear memory of junior high PE is from the puberty theme days, where having fallen on the AMAB side we got put through "masculine teambuilding exercises" that were in hindsight outright dangerous. Being a late bloomer and not very big at the time, being seated three metres in the air straddling a soccer goal surrounded by all sides by a sea of teenage boys who one moment jeered me for "pussying out" and not "doing it for the team" and the next cheered me like vaulting over the damn thing was in any way a meaningful action, I didn't exactly feel like I had accomplished anything. On the contrary, it just felt like being surrounded by insanity.

I wouldn't be surprised in the least if you ask Swedish MtF people when they knew, a fair bit of them would say being put through one of those fucking teambuilding exercises was it.

Things may have changed in senior high. Having access to a gym with machines, for the first time in my life somebody showed that PE could be about personal exercise, at your own pace without compulsion. But that was only sporadical, and most of the time the gym was off limits in favour of team sports, team sports, and more team sports. When after a bad cold early in the last year my senior high PE teacher allowed me to just skip class altogether and just exercise by walking a mile around campus for the rest of senior high, it was a great relief - and honestly, I must sadly say this was the only time in a total of twelve years that a teacher came close to addressing there was a problem.

I left schooling having learned only to associate exercise in all forms with compulsion, humiliation, and having to put up with people who I was convinced were either malicious, insane, or in either case did not have my wellbeing in mind. For the next 18 years I embraced a sedentary lifestyle, making no effort to move more than absolutely necessary, avoiding heavy lifting, and taking no care whatsoever of my diet. There have been years on end where I have subsisted on noodles, pizza and soda, or several liters of energy drink a day - and in all honestly, I could not have cared less what it was doing to my body. I was simply not interested. I had learned not to be interested. And if anybody as much as suggested I should, I did not take the suggestion kindly.

In the closing days of 2021 I saw a recent picture of AlectorFencer , an artist I greatly admire, and learned she was - to use the technical term - ripped as fuck.

Okay, I said to myself. Let's do this.

One year later:

Not the best picture I have uploaded to dA, but by a wide margain the one with the most time invested in it. 364 days to be exact.

After cutting excess carbs in January and slowly ramping up cardio, started lifting weights regularly in February and been slowly ramping it up since. Eventually shed just under ten kilos of waist flab, and built up muscle from previously being nearly able to close my fingers around my upper arms when flexed and not being able to hold a plank for a single minute. I haven't exactly done well, to be honest with myself. There have been lapses in discipline, injuries, frequent illness, economic difficulties preventing me from keeping a diet - and in all honestly being 38 years old no impressive results should be expected. But nevertheless there are results. There has been a change. From having been completely out of shape I am for the first time in my life experiencing what it is like being decently fit, and I love it.

There are many people who have kept me going throughout, among them bogatyrkhanfor his advice on diet, CaraidArt for her advice on warmups and training weak muscle groups, and drachenmagier and SouthpawLynx whose encouragement (and in the latter case convincing me to stop being overly economic and invest in some quality weights) has been invaluable. But it all begins with just one single person I admire as an artist and worldbuilder - the interests already closest to my heart - setting an example. Metaphorically saying that as an artist, it is a good thing to do. And my view changed overnight.

And that, if you are still reading and wondering where I was going with retelling my sad backstory and flexing over a rather average achievement, is the only way you get through to people who aren't listening.

You don't have to say anything. Instead of saying, just do. Keep bettering yourself, keep cultivating new skills, never be shy to share how your progress is achieved, and you will be able to reach out to a few people who would never otherwise have listened. Not everybody - that isn't happening - but the rare few with whom you share interests and passions. When people see in you somebody who is similar to themselves but more, they will learn wanting to learn. Quite possibly from one day to the next.

Ennoble yourself. It's contagious.

About two years ago, I began an effort to consolidate some of my standalone anthro and sci-fi work into a coherent setting. Since then the setting has expanded to be my main focus for worldbuilding, but except for some pitches on the dA literature server I haven't considered it important sharing any more comprehensive summary of how the setting works, since everything is very much in development. But at the suggestion of michael432 , have recognised that perhaps there would be interest.

The basics are quite straightforward: No humans or great simians exist. Mammals are intelligent and more or less anthropomorphic. Birds, reptiles, fish and other vertebrates are feral, existing in a variety of forms filling up the empty mammal niches.

So besides that, what is actually going on here?

It is the far future. Scholars agree it is the year 5300 by the calender of the ancients, and scholars also agree this is not actually the case but simply convenient convention. It has been at least 3000 years since beastkind first left Terra. History has been mutilated by blackouts and revisionism.

In the mythical past is the Age of Lies, when for centuries beastkind willingly surrendered thinking and agency to machines and accepted comfortably gratifying idiocy. In this era Terra fell into ruin and countless species were made extinct over petty squabbles. The fall came when the "truth machines", unthinking and guided by rulesets their creators no longer understood, abandoned beastkind and vanished from history. Some say they went into deep space and are still out there, doing whatever it is mindless machines do when nobody is watching.

With the end of the Age of Lies begins the era of the Twelve Planets; the long, dark middle ages of beastkind among the stars. Through nuclear fusion and cryogenics beastkind crawls from star to star over years or decades.

Beastkind carves out a domain barely a hundred lightyears across of less than a hundred daughter colonies and twelve main worlds: Terra, Venus, Mars, Shanti, Shangri-La, Xanadu, Pobeda, Gorky-Azamatov, Carribal, Atlantis, Tanemura, and Martenclaw. Moments of unity are brief and there is little peace among the stars, with interstellar wars waged with enormous, fragile ships of the line and superbiblical weapons of mass destruction.

The names of space warriors from this era - such as James Okita the shiba, Cornelius Prosky the borzoi, Edris Magal the cheetah, Rahab Macchi the otter, and Orissa Xu the civet - live on as Arthurian mythical characters. But as always, their actual lived experience of war was a vision of hell.

About a thousand years before present lightspeed is defeated. The Terran neighbourhood falls into chaos as the diaspora begins.

Present day: The Great Compass era

Over a millennium beastkind has become established across nearly a quarter of the Milky Way. Four major powers exist, alongside thousands of more or less unaffiliated colonies and minor factions.

The Communion of Worlds

(Light blue on the chart.) A descendent faction of imperial Terra and still carrying the guilt of its predecessor. The Communion has elevated liberty and self-determination to nearly religious status, with the freedom from being judged based on species, breed, sex or social standing as its first commandment. Everyday life in the Communion puts great emphasis on cultural exchange, social mobility and - above all - rejection of conquest.

The price of signaling weakness does not go unpaid: The frontiers are permanently beset by wolfpacks and vermin piracy, and the peacekeeping effort is endless. For aspiring spacers military service is a tempting shortcut to the civilian officers' schools; service terms are short and bloody, and veterans are frequently treated with memory-dampening drugs to restore their sanity for civilian service. Marsupials tend to be underrepresented in the service due to differing neuroanatomy making them immune to amnestics.

The Communion is governed by the Curia, a body of planetary representatives. Individual member worlds may be parliamentary states, nation leagues, stateless societies, direct democracies, elective lifetime dictatorships, tribal councils, or anything in between: The Communion does not rank different forms of participatory rule.

Deep in the Communion sits ancient Terra, the cradle of beastkind. Now mostly a world of nature preserves and a handful of surviving museum cities, save for a pawful of splinter factions Terra is universally recognised as neutral ground.

The Hyperorian Aggregate

(Yellow on the chart.) A loosely knit federation of feudal groups on the other side of the Orion constellation viewed from Sol. The Aggregate culture intensely values aesthetics, elegance, beauty and capability, regardless of rank or location. Perhaps unsurprisingly the Aggregate is disproportionately populated by species with striking natural coats and multidimensional senses.

There is practically no social mobility within the Aggregate. The common estates are distinct from the noble knightly estates, and them in turn from the proper nobility of dukes and princes. Stratification is maintained by nobility providing for their subjects from communal stockpiles, and constant infighting between noble houses making advancement in rank seem culturally undesirable. The sentiment is mutual, with the majority of nobility treating their responsibility as a sacred duty and sparing no expense rewarding subjects who show merit.

On the surface the Aggregate has a paradise-like culture, but at the price of having little of the advanced industry necessary for interstellar civilization, being dependent on the export of luxury goods (such as tobacco blends and cannabioids, tea, rum, and fine art). The Aggregate regularly wages wars that have no strategic value against their neighbours in order to create scarcity. Conflicts may also spring up nearly randomly as the Aggregate makes no distinction between the will of a prince and the will of a state, and so brief and petty wars may be declared for personal reasons, or just out of spite. Aggregate culture is also aggressively ableist, with most elders being forcibly converted to cyborgs. Gender roles and expressions are also harshly enforced, although to outsiders the specifics may be nearly indistinguishably subtle.

The Aggregate is deeply theocratic with most following a variation of the mariners' creed, recognising the awesome lethality of space as the ultimate authority. As such the highest title among Aggregate nobility is Prince/Princess, as they all acknowledge even they are at their best only second.

Most share some variation of the belief that the Star Queen, the legendary founder of the Aggregate was an avatar of the cosmic awe. Or perhaps that she still is in the flesh, which would certainly not be impossible.

Savitari

(Green on the chart.) Named for the translation of "Sagittarius" in Lamarki, their dominant language, For about 500 years the Savitari were the first and only superpower of the Great Compass. The Savitari of the time embraced a culture of idle supremacy and cruelty towards outsiders for the sake of cruelty, waging countless wars of subjugation against the developing Aggregate and treating the emerging Communion as a minor vassal. Then as now Savitari culture exalted bioengineering above all else, both of themselves and their surroundings: Savitari bionics and xenografts are second to none, and few objects are not by some definition alive.

All of it came to an end 300 years ago when whether through accident or sabotage the blight struck, removing the safeguards from bioengineered items in a plague spread from star to star. The Savitari spared no expense containing the blight, depleting stockpiles of secret weapons intended for their victims and vapourizing countless stars in the effort. Today the Savitari are a rump state of their former glory. Although the fall has largely eliminated the cruel streak of Savitari culture, old victims are not eager to forget.

Present Savitari culture exists in a permanent state of emergency, being governed by a crisis chamber that automatically selects members based on set criteria. As such there is no sort of career building beyond acquiring skills useful for running a civilization under existential threat.

Savitari tend to come off as cynical and dour since, while most beasts not motivated by religion or pride recognise they are animals, Savitari base their cultural identity on recognising they are only flesh. Among the key points of universal Savitari philosophy are the concepts of Carnal Objectivity ("Living things are things") and Blood Dialectics ("Truth is revealed in gradual modification").

The Salt League

(Teal on the chart.) A coalition of primarily burrowing species devoted only to what they do best: Dig. For the Salt League digging is beyond a religion, but a basic need taken for granted. You eat, you sleep, and you dig.

The Salt League mostly keeps to itself prospecting and extracting far beyond the rest of charted space, and for the most part the major powers stay on friendly terms with them. Keeping civilization running and mobile requires an endless supply of radioactive materials, and the Salt League is more than eager to provide in trade.

The Salt League consists of the "Seven Services", ancient corpo-religious groups: Consumer Carbides, Steelclaws, Black Hill (chipmunk dominated), Mujina (Anaguma badgers), Warren Extractions (lagomorph dominated), Tekkai, and Xenon Atomics. Peace is maintained within the league in part through physical separation as their claims are widely spaced, and in part because the idea of spending time stealing from the neighbours when you could be digging is abhorrent.

What to expect

For the most part species coexist peacefully, although old suspicion from prehistory when eating one's fellows was the law of the land isn't soon purged from genetic memory. Natural hybrids are practically unheard of as most species cannot even crossbreed within their family. As such adoption is relatively common and institutional descent sometimes regarded as equal to descent by blood.

A large number of enourmous birds, fish and lizards exist, some natural and some - like the laruki above - engineered. In the Great Compass era Savitari-designed (or feral) critters that do not and perhaps should not have names are also found in far too many places.

Some cultural species separation occurs for purely ergonomic reasons as beastkind comes in a wide size range, from the smallest rodents and insectivores at around 120 centimeters tall to massive creatures like cattle and bears towering over 230 centimeters. The Solar Commonwealth, a regulatory body, classifies beasts in three size groups with 1 being the smallest - and by population, the largest. True megafauna has always been rare and, whether through discrimination or self-imposed seclusion, does not widely participate in interstellar civilization.

Interstellar space travel is fairly common, comparable to international flight. Only one form of superluminal flight exists, luxon conduction, achieving pseudo-FTL through luxon reference points by interrupting time dilation. Although formalized routine luxon conduction is both complicated and dangerous: Ships must first accelerate conventionally to a sizeable fraction of lightspeed before the "catapult" is fired, allowing highly multiplied acceleration beyond c, and similarly bleed off speed to below c before resuming conventional travel. A perceptional shift all species experience somewhat differently occurs when in conduction as logical certainty and information transfer do not function predictably beyond c. There is no way to observe what happens to ships that are lost in transit.

FTL is also really only "fast" since most colonies are quite close. Even with the fastest ships, hypothetical travel straight across the Milky Way (impossible in practice due to a massive gravimetric maelstrom at the galactic core) would take nearly a decade. Intergalactic travel is impossible with current technology as the intergalactic medium has no drive reference points.

Space travel still abides by Newtonian physics - regardless of speed or destination ships spend the second half of the journey with the stern pointing ahead. There is no true artificial gravity: Ships simulate axial gravity under thrust, or - on larger ships and stations - with rotation when coasting or in orbit.

Ships are minuscule compared to earlier eras, since FTL has eliminated one way trips. Most private ships are shorter than 200 meters. All starships also have some degree of streamlining and, with the exception of highly specialized designs, fins in order to retain stability in superluminal flight where instellar medium behaves like liquid.

Within a system, only physics and imagination impose limits on the size and shape of spacecraft. Most craft are specialized: Starships are usually not capable of planetary landing, and to circumvent the complicated economics of vertical landings and starports most large landers are seaplanes.

Intelligent robots exist, produced by the ancient Elektronika group. Cybernetics and cures for most diseases and injuries exist, although true immortality remains elusive. A process for repeatedly and consistently restoring aged bodies to adolescence is ancient technology, but remains unattractive since it functionally creates a new person.

What is out there?

Nobody knows. Although with millions of worlds charted amino acids and even complex proteins are dime a dozen, there is no sign of non-Terran life, present or extinct. Not even the smallest microbe. Nothing. Perhaps beastkind is truly alone, or life from other worlds is simply currently out of reach. Whichever it is spacers' tales are as tall as ever, and there is no denying something strange is going on in the perhiphery of civilized space.

You just have to go out there and find out.

This is presented as is. More to come.

Got a Twitter account. Same name as elsewhere. Short and sweet news.

Don't get me wrong. I'm never leaving Deviantart, nor am I intending to focus on other platforms. But one of my reasons for joining first dA, then Artstation, then most recently FA and Buzzly for a brief stint before its implosion was to gradually work on my general online shyness. And I feel it has been a while since I lived up to that promise.

No art will be posted exclusively to Twitter.

Yes, I went out of my way to select a provokative title. And at the same time, it is probably nowhere near as provokative as it needs be. In all honesty I'm angry; and I have had plenty of time to consider that it is not without reason.

Recently I have been getting a lot of recommended artwork that uses a very similar style and format, sometimes even down to the structure of the titles - highly verbose ones. And to nobody's surprise, the tags - when they are used - tend to include "dalle2", "midjourney", and the likes. In other words these pieces are not actually painted, but generated from a prompt by expert systems drawing from databases and algorithmically adjusting for natural results.

This is something I thought would be a difficult question. By all means it still is, only on closer inspection there is not one, but multiple drastically distinct questions at play.

The first of the two questions I find most relevant is whether or not AI-generated art should at all be an option, and although I think this is by far the more difficult of the two and would prefer the answer remain in the air, I find myself giving a cautious but certain yes. Perhaps it is due to a lifetime of priming; as an old cyberpunk enthusiast I consider AI development an immensely important science, and that - if it does not sound too dramatic - the development of technology that is mentally and philosophically comparable to organic equivalents is ultimately beneficial, although perhaps (read as: likely) in ways that we today cannot imagine or might find abhorrent if we could. AI generated art, and other immediately visible results understandable to technical laymen, is an important aspect of generating popular interest in the technology. There are also the immediately useful aspects: For example, for artists who suffer from aphantasia, AI-generated art is a useful drafting tool. This I warmly approve since every step closer to understanding of the brain, no matter how small or roundabout, is a step worth taking.

So to answer the question in plain English, yes, AI-generated art should definitely be a thing. If it should be in any way restricted, it should only be in the same way that existing technologies like deepfakes, photomanipulation, or the trusty old X-Acto knife is, when it comes to the potential for realistically faking disinformation.

The other question gets a firm no. If the only thing you have to show is AI-generated art, you are not an artist. You have no business calling yourself an artist, and you do artists a disservice if you do so.

This is definitely not the first time a statement like this has been made, and it will not be the last; and although probably everybody has claimed that this time is different from the ones before, I daresay this actually is distinct. Less than 50 years ago there was the claim that acrylics, being distinct from oil (the predominant fine art medium of its day), did not constitute "real" art.

I shouldn't really need to provide an example of why this is absurd. But I enjoy the opportunity to share an old favourite.

In much the same way, in the past few decades claims perenially surface that digital art isn't "real" art, with a variety of arguments presented.

Again, I shouldn't need to provide an example of why all such arguments eventually boil down to absurdity. But I feel like it.

There is however one aspect that distinguishes all other artwork from AI-generated art: Attribution.

When creating a work of art, you have actually produced what you create. Regardless of skill level, regardless of effort, regardless of result or recognition, you have undeniably made what you put your name on; and it is representative of what you as a person can achieve at present and strive to achieve in the future. When generating art from a prompt, you have not. You have simply told somebody else - in this case, a machine - to make something for you. If for any reason the other entity does not cooperate, as is inevitable as the algorithms are blackboxed, you simply have to be satisfied with what you get. You are not controlling the medium: The medium is the only part in the relationship doing any work and, frankly, you are at its mercy, dependent on it.

If you use AI-generated art as a tool to improve your workflow, by all means, nothing wrong with this. If there was, we would still be urinating on things we enjoy to convey their importance to our fellow mammals. But if you call yourself an "AI artist" and nothing else, you are not an artist to begin with. The fanboy shunned by other fanboys who does nothing but compulsively MSPaint random Nickelodeon characters together, without regard or even with disdain for artistry or effort, is still an artist creating what he puts his name on. No different in that regard from Leonardo, Donatello, or any of the other masters whether or not they received the ultimate honour of having a ninja turtle named for them. You, however, are not an artist - you are the person pestering artists to work for exposure, and turning to an obedient machine that won't turn you down.

You are this person:

https://www.deviantart.com/comments/1/822324672/4796547521

You are free to be this person. But don't call youself a surgeon just because you got your tonsils removed for free.

I always enjoy seeing interest in subjects close to my own heart. But today, I am also utterly stunned by the response to my latest picture featuring starship designs; both the number of favourites and the interesting discussion that followed.

Find it, for a lack of better word, heartwarming as I strongly feel that at its best, science fiction may not only be enjoyable, but may also inspire viewers to look beyond the artistic liberties and cultivate an interest in the actual science. Imagination is after all not just a tool for pretending, but one of the first steps by which we may better ourselves and the world around us.

I want to return some of the response, and finding that among the people who faved are many outstanding artists, I have curated a few in the hope that others may experience the same as I have. There are far too many to include all, but I have tried to keep an even mix of subjects and styles represented.

Continue to be a mutual inspiration and keep the spirits of curiosity and self-betterment alive, and together we each pull a little of the weight on the journey to the stars.