KrisCynical

I just had to get that old entry off of my front page since it was over a year old.

My life isn't a hellscape anymore. 

I'll type something more significant later. lol

I've gotten a few inquiries from people about whether or not I'm at A-Kon right now because they couldn't find my table, and the unfortunate answer is no, I am not there. I had to withdraw. For the first time in 13 years. And it is killing me softly.

As I've said in my last two journal entries here, I'm far more active on tumblr now. If you follow me over there then you probably know about this stuff, but for those who don't, my personal life has been a hellscape since October 2017. At the beginning of October I blew out one of the discs in my lower back and had to suffer through six solid weeks of level 11+ pain before I was finally able to have surgery two days before Thanksgiving. The herniation was so severe and compressed one of my sacral nerves so badly that my surgeon said the nerve was actually black when he got in there to remove the herniation and relieve the pressure. I'm still dealing with slight numbness and muscle tightness in my right leg due to the nerve healing, and I had to wear a stabilizer on my right ankle for several months after the surgery because the numbness was causing me to roll my ankle slightly with every step I took, which made it balloon up like a baseball every night without a brace. 

I was recovering all through the Holidays and didn't really have any Holidays as a result.

In January I went on my family's annual WDW trip and we all caught the flu and were stuck in the room for five days, and we then spent the rest of the trip feeling crappy because we were getting over being sick. I felt cheated because I really needed that vacation.

At the end of February my oldest sister, Michelle, passed away from liver failure at only 51. Anybody who has been following me for a long time will remember that I lost my middle sister, Angeline, to breast cancer in January of 2010 at only 41. I am now the only child my parents have left. 

On the DAY that we buried Michelle's urn in the family plot at the cemetery, we found out my sweet little dog, Sushi, had late stage lymphoma with only a couple months left to live. She's only 9. Our last dog of the same breed lived to be 16. This isn't fair. 

So with all of this coupled with the fact that Sushi is at the end of her life now, I just didn't have it in me emotionally, mentally, or physically to do a huge convention and I had to withdraw from A-Kon. 

I fully intend to be back for A-Kon 2019, and hopefully in a better place mentally and emotionally if life will just leave me the fuck alone for five minutes.

 Follow me on tumblr to see life updates, picspam of Sushi, WIPs and other art stuffs.

But there's been art! Lots of figure skating art! Yeah!

If you're not into Yuri on Ice, though... sorry. Can't help ya.

And I'm not really sorry.

The main point of this post is to remind anybody who still watches me here on dA that I have a tumblr account where I am far more active. It's right here, also as KrisCynical.

I'm going to be uploading the old InuKag artwork that dA axed all those years ago due to their asinine "epilogues don't count" witch hunt policy very soon. So if you're not into Yuri on Ice -- which is what my blog is primarily about along with some politics -- there will be some Inuyasha thrown in there as well. All of my artwork is tagged with "art post" and all Inuyasha posts are tagged with, of course, "Inuyasha". If you only want to see the Inu stuff you can blacklist "yoi" because that's what I tag every Yuri on Ice post with without fail.

Updates-wise, after seven long years I finally managed to beat my depression this past fall. I no longer consider myself depressed, and the two major factors behind that are 1) finally getting my own studio space and 2) Yuri on Ice. My studio did most of the job, Yuri on Ice just finished pulling me the rest of the way out of that hole. 

My grandmother's old bedroom across the hallway from mine is now my studio, and I love it to bits. It's my sanctuary. The walls are teal with a dual toned purple accent wall, and those walls are covered in the Aladdin fine art that I've accumulated for years but had nowhere to safely display. I also have a display cabinet with all of my favorite Aladdin sculptures, glass, and jewelry. The finishing touch is a 40" TV with every gaming system I own hooked into it at once via an 8 port switch box so I can relive my retro gaming childhood any time I please (although lately all of my free time has been consumed by Breath of the Wild dear God that game is absolute perfection that I have been waiting for since I was 14 and first popped Ocarina of Time into my 64 in 1998). 

Having a place to escape to where I can work without anybody else bothering me has been wonderful for my mental and emotional well-being, and my productivity has skyrocketed back to near what it was right after I graduated from Ringling ten years ago (yes, it has actually been THAT long... I am getting old). I spend the majority of my day in here and I love it. 

Also as one last note: I will be at A-Kon this year as always. This year we're moving to the Ft. Worth Convention Center and as far as I know we're actually going to be in the same room as the dealers, which I think is awesome. Now that I'm no longer depressed I'm planning on having several new prints this year so if you're going to be there, please drop by and say hello! 

So... yeah. I think that's about it. 

Come follow me on tumblr!

<sup>So... um... yeeeeah.

I haven't uploaded anything since December of 2014 and its downright pathetic of me, I know. I have a stack of stuff to post, too... I just need to sit down and DO IT. I'm sorry, guys, really I am. So no, I haven't stopped illustrating and creating. My hands are still attached, fully functioning, and create-able. My brain is still functioning in the same create-able capacity reasonably well, too.

I guess I dropped off of dA for awhile out of being just... completely disgusted with it? Policy changes, the general atmosphere of disrespect from the admins toward all of us deviants, the ridiculous lengths and contortions they've gone through to justify NOT doing their basic JOBS (i.e. theft reports), the price gouging for the stupid CORE membership, etc. I will not fork over that much money for so little benefit, so I won't be a premium member again unless it's gifted to me for some reason or they have a good sale on memberships that's equivalent of what the price used to be.

Policy changes and the admin disrespect are directly connected with the third party theft reporting policy specifically. As usual dA tried to make this whole legitimate legal reasoning for their pisspoor response to theft reports (read: none), and most all of it just comes across as dA thinking we're a bunch of oblivious yes men idiots. For one thing, according to them there IS no such thing as art theft online because — get this — there is no physical thing being stolen. For real. Seriously. They've also basically said they won't really do anything about jacked fanart even if it's the original artist who is reporting it. Why? Because we don't own the copyright for the source material. Again, for real. Seriously.

And their reasoning for not allowing third party copyright reports? It circumvents the original artist's right to do nothing about it. I shit thee negative. An admin told me and several other people that in the comments for the "legal reasoning" admin journal post (which was all basically "these are the ridiculous reasons we've come up with to avoid doing our jobs that we're paid for as admins").

So any of you wonderful people out there who have reported stolen posts of my work over the years? You can't do that any longer here on dA because it robs me of my right to do absolutely nothing about it and let the thief continue to claim it as their own. In 12 years of being here that takes the cake for the most absolutely asinine thing the admins have ever tried to pedal to us. Because apparently they think we're all blithering idiots who couldn't find our way out of a wet paper bag. That one is STILL boggling me. Who the hell would want to do NOTHING about their own work being stolen?! I just can't with that level of stoopid.

BUT ANYWAY.

I am still around, and I am going to TRY to actually keep this place current as far as actually posting the stuff I'm doing! I may post another journal in the next few days to tell y'all about some personal and professional stuffs that've been going on for me lately (and hopefully there are still some of you around who actually care about it lol) because some of it is pretty damn cool if I do say so myself.

Which I do.</sup>