u/SeaTie

This literally just happened to me and it's not the first time I've dealt with this.

Dude knocks on my door. Dog goes nuts. Kids go nuts. They all rush to the door. So I have to answer it just to get everyone to chill.

I open the door. Greeted with a solar sales asshole standing on my porch with his face GLUED to his phone.

Solar asshole: "Hey." While looking at his fucking phone.

Me: "Uh. Yeah. Hi."

Solar asshole, face still on his phone, does not acknowledge me.

Me: "What can I help you with?"

Solar asshole: "Yeah...uhhhhh...." typing shit on his phone.

"uhhhhhhh...." type type type type "...uhhhhhhh..."

At this point I move my leg to let my very growly dog stick his face out of the door and see what's up.

Solar asshole: "Oh yeah. Hey. My name's Trent. I'm uh, here with uh...*COUGH* Blualuiereuaeugjhsolar and just wanted to let you know about this special offer from the power company..."

Me: "Yeah, I'm gonna stop you right there. I didn't catch what company you're with and I don't care because I can tell right now you guys are not sticklers for details. Because if you were you would have noticed THIS 'No Soliciting' sign, and THIS 'No Soliciting' sign, and the one I've got posted at the front of the walkway right there...so there's no possible way I can trust you guys on my roof. So I'm not interested. Do not come back and knock on my door again, okay?"

SLAM. I'm so tired of these guys...

And I tell you what, even if you ignored all of my No Soliciting signs and knock on my door, I'm still not going to be a dick to you. I'm ONLY going to be a dick to you if I answer the door and you're typing shit on your phone. Asshole, YOU knocked on MY door. Don't knock on my door then IGNORE ME while you're sending a text you fuck!

And yes, to all the people who say "Why even answer the door?" ...because we have lots of neighbors who drop by, delivery people, friends, you name it...the dog and kids all go nuts and get super excited whenever the doorbell rings. And the sales guys...they all know to stand out of the way of the Ring camera where I can't see them.

Stupid websites, stop asking me for OTHER WAYS to sign in. I don't want to give you my phone number. I don't want to setup Passkeys. I don't want to log in with my face. I don't want to login via a SECONDARY email.

I want to log in with my stupid password. That's it. 99% of the sites I need to login to have ZERO data worth protecting anyways. If someone HACKS into my Chipotle account the only thing they're gonna find is how many goddamn burritos I eat a week.

...so quit trying to TRICK me into giving you more of my personal data. I know what you're doing. No, you can't have my phone number or my face. Just let me login and be on my way.

So I picked up the Art Coach’s stuff here recently and I had a decent time with it. Really I was just trying to support another artist and I do like the stuff he posts on social media. The courses themselves were good but a bit more scattered than I was hoping for. At the end of the ‘basic’ course he has a few daily draws that are very random and that’s really what I’m looking for.

I like all his social media stuff where he shows: Here’s how to draw a forest fire, a bird’s nest, an octopus, a snail, a wolf, a log, a building. I find it really relaxing to not have to pick a subject or dissect it myself. It’s almost like building Lego.

I would like to find something similar that’s maybe a bit more advanced. I love ball point pen stuff, cross hatching, that kind of thing. Happy to pay for a course that shows to to block out and draw just any old random thing that you can follow along with.

But kind of want to skip all the ‘here’s how to draw a circle’, ‘here’s how to draw a human body,’ ‘a bowl of fruit.’ I understand the usefulness of those exercises, but I’ve done them all a bunch. Like I can confidently can draw a bowl of fruit and shade a sphere.

I like drawing lots of different things and learning how to shade / detail it all because I find it interesting.

You know...there's nothing that drives me more crazy than crappy client feedback.

Obviously there's GOOD client feedback, and some times you get feedback that you disagree with but you gotta just suck it up and do it...

...but some times you get client feedback that's so inherently WRONG it's just painful to make those edits.

I'm working on this poster for a client and their response was "We love it. We have a few minor changes, nothing art direction wise."

...cue a bunch of art direction changes.

And it's stuff that I cant even fix like:

Client: "We want you to use different photos for these specific athletes."

Me: "Sure, can you provide those photos?"

Client: "No, we cannot. Just use different photos of those players."

Me: "I need high quality photos of these players to make this work. So we either need to get a photographer or I can hand draw them but that's going to take a lot of time."

Client: "Yeah, we don't want to do either, just use different photos of those guys."

And it's like...goddamnit. I had to bend time and space just to make the original SHITTY photos you gave me work and now you want to me to materialize photos out of nothing to make it happen??

How about you just be cool with the photos I put in there? They look amazing. You can trust me on that because I'm the fucking artist you hired to pull this off. At some point you need to trust that what I'm giving you is of the highest possible quality and that my actual taste and knowledge is what you're paying for.

Anyways...so I guess I'm jamming shit photos into this thing now and giving them what they want but I REALLY hate when people hire me because they like my work but then proceed to try their damndest to make it look like crap.

I'm a digital artist. I love Photoshop, photo-manipulation, digital painting, 3D design, etc.

But now because of AI I have to record everything I do so people believe I actually made it...never mind my extensive portfolio and notable art achievements that date well before the creation of generative AI.

But I find recording my screen super obnoxious and time consuming:

- I have to remember to turn it on which I often forget.

- I feel EXTREMELY self conscious while it's recording. I feel like everything I do I need to TEST first instead of just exploring if something works.

- It takes up a ton of freaking space on my harddrive. Seriously, even like a short 10 minute clip is like 2 GB. Maybe there's a setting I can tweak to tone that down...but since Photoshop already eats hard drive space for the scratch disk I'm constantly having to stop and juggle files.

- I have to edit the stupid video. I hate editing video.

- Once I'm done and post it online...the goddamn AI is just going to steal it anyways.

I'm kind of sick of this. I like making art...and I like sharing it with other people. But I HATE that I have to now prove that I actually made it.