one very sad thing that happened with reddit (and probably also with stackoverflow) is that people somehow decided that deleting their comments was the best solution for protesting like it was going to change someones mind. they just made searching for past information a pain and the company still ended up getting money while still killing it slowly.
a better form of protest would have been a mirror of the information somewhere else and make some kind of collective effort to make it a direct replacement for it (the archive, not the live site) and avoid having to go through a chain of only "deleted" comments. we are very aware this would require an enormous effort and if we had that kind of organization the problem would probably had not exist anymore tho, but we are very frustrated about this alot.
this really boils down on having all information in a central place owned by a corporation that can do whatever it wants to do with it is very very bad idea, but now is SO or discord or other 20 sites we are not aware of, so doubt it will change in the short term.
@regn im interested if stackoverflow restoring deleted comments breaks safe harbor laws.
I wish I remember the lawsuit that had recently ended when I saw the stackoverflow's AI annoucement happened. The plantiff had been ordered to stop doing something because they were exercising editorial control over content, which they cannot do.
I personally think "stop contributing to stackoverflow" was the best form of protest.
@regn ill be real
I felt the same way. Then I just started doing it at the encouragement of @boobs_idiot .
I really recommend just tracing some (real) people. You don't have to share it. You can also focus on things you think are interesting. The worst case scenario is it just takes longer to learn other things.
@regn ill be real i just. sorta started doing traces of reference images with some minimal edits for about 3 images before trying to tackle an image with only referencing it. I followed this guide for a bunch of suggestions. https://burningdownthehou.se/process/panels
first three are my traced works, the fourth is my latest piece. all of which is heavily referenced and basically 2 or 3 months worth of effort. I've doodled before but not really of people and i always quickly gave up because i couldn't love my output.
some parts of this art style are designed to be easy to draw, but i think a big thing with learning is also that you don't HAVE to learn everything all at once. its not required. All of this is done with a non-screen tablet in Krita.
there was a tumblr post about how you should "just do it scared" (read: with anxiety and badly) if you can't do something. I think this is very good advice for art because I wouldn't have done this much without allowing myself to do a poor job or to do it "wrong".
@regn id probably recommend doing more traces of irl references and just fucking try and draw things you want rather than what you're "supposed" to to be a good artist. you can learn that when you feel more confident with your craft or even like, never. maybe you won't be the worlds greatest artist but technical skill isn't all there is to art.