I'll be honest 2025 was the best year I've had creatively in like.... ever. Just all around I did an immense amount of work and tried so many things, got so much done. This year was primarily a year of experiments. And yet when I went back and actually started looking through the things that I had done, I was pretty flabbergasted on all the things I'd managed to do this year.

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πŸŽ‡ΛšΚš New Year's Belle drop ɞ˚ @ THANKS FOR 4K πŸŽ‡
@torrent-empress.bsky.social
-made my website
-made my first zine
-released first pages of my comic
-built a new PC
-New job
-launched a successful blog 
-volunteered in my community 
-first artfight 
-made a server 
-ran several classes/workshops
-Released fanfiction 
-didn't die
Dani Finn πŸ™ πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ πŸ“š's avatar
Dani Finn πŸ™ πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ πŸ“š
@danifinnwrites.bsky.social
Quote this with what you have accomplished in 2025, no matter how big or small
Dani Finn πŸ™ πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ πŸ“š's avatar
Dani Finn πŸ™ πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ πŸ“š
@danifinnwrites.bsky.social
Reading & writing has kept me alive this year.

Somehow, it’s been my most productive year as an author.

Here’s a guide to what I’ve published in 2025, in case you’ve lost track.

Individual links below but it’s all on itch: danifinn.itch.io

And elsewhere: books2read.com/ap/nAApPp/Da... 

1/

Tbh, after how bad the job market has been, I was just trying to do whatever to survive and with how bad my industry has completely destroyed the world for like, no reason, I also sort of came to the conclusion that I am not sure I'd like to be a part of this anymore. (tech)

And so I kind of was like.... what if I didn't try, I just did what I wanted, and did whatever dayjob for money, I'll have some stuff I'd like to do but I won't hard press myself. So I heard the idea of making a bingo card instead of a hard goals plan and did that. Nevermind this one is deepfried from constant copypasting lol


Confession: I'm a total recovering productivity bro

You would assume by my very anti-capitalist nature that I wouldn't be but truth is that I feel bad when I'm not working towards my goals, whatever they may be.

Look I am the eldest daughter from an immigrant family - the pressure is immense for me. I am in therapy.

So this year I instead tried to just use that energy to try whatever, anytime I felt that urge just ask myself what the 13 year old vampire anime girl in me wanted instead.

And y'know what? That shit worked!

Art: We made a lot of it.

From Artfight (this year was my first I didn't even know what it is was before!) to palette challenges, I had a lot of fun this year pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Here's a palette challenge and my favorite artfight piece I did this year.

Some things I tried to focus on this year were: Color theory & composition (I think I improved a lot with color, but composition I'm still working on.)

I also mixed things up by also trying out animation! Shout out to Toonsquid, a program that really helped me just get to doing it. Super intuitive

I embarrassingly tried out 3D modeling, but still haven't gotten the hang of it - though I think I'll get to it one of these days. But I have started incorporating 3D models more generally into my photobashing for references which has really leveled up my art especially for comics stuff and clip studio. Like this piece. I can do backgrounds now!!!! And even draw stuff like swords, big recommend: Here's some art where I incorporated these techniques heavily.

On top of all of this, I played around a lot with new ways to showcase my own work, like putting out this zine about my experience with BG3 and an introduction to my comic - like a real artbook I guess. You can read it on my website or at the link below [it's free lol]

Online Flipbook
Created with the Heyzine flipbook maker
https://heyzine.com/flip-book/8c07d75a05.html

My comic: I didn't make a lot of finished pages, but I did make a lot of progress

The thing that I learned about comics is that.... doing a comic completely by yourself is an insanely involved process with a lot of moving parts: There's promotion, backgrounds, sketching, inking, writing. Most comics teams have folks doing this stuff but indie artists don't! I am insane for doing this!

But I am still having fun and that's all that matters. :3 Which is why I'm having fun doing this as a hobby project. Overall I didn't get too far with the finished pages, but a lot of that is lack of discipline and routine. Although I have over 100 thumbnailed pages and even more stories done.....

Part of the problem is that thumbnails can be done on the go but lined pages have to be done on the big screen in clip studio. I'm also terrible at lettering, but I'm getting better by including dialogue in thumbnails. I have messy handwriting, but I think that writing dialogue into the thumbs actually makes it easier to see if it works naturally. Lots of dialogue actually gets re-worked when I go and actually do pages which can tilt entire page compositions!

Trying REALLY hard to avoid the Talking heads page issue - but sometimes failing. but I am pushing myself to try and push past that, but we're working through it.

The crazy thing is that I was able to do 50 thumbnails in a week where 2 years ago when I started thumbnailing my prologue it took me several months to reach that number.... so improvement is REALLL. Turn your procrastination into improvement - drawing a lot of other shit DIIIID help.

Web adventures: Websites are cool + the small web!

This year I finally got around to building my website - I originally just started with a few pages - but then eventually built things out to a place I'm really happy with. This was a super healing process for me because it gave me a way to engage with tech - something I'd been struggling with since my career woes, but on my own terms. I made my way through the hackathon scene when I was younger which made me really fall in love with it and this reminded me of it.


It's also a practice that encourages small changes, change a line here and there, add a page, experiment, ect. I also find that going through the small web is just generally a better experience for me than social media. Unfortunately not everyone has a website though, so I'd lose track of artists I like. This gallery for example, was made a couple weeks after I got the website up - and the comic subsite was made a little bit after.

The smallweb/indieweb/altweb, whatever y'all are calling it, is pretty dope. I've been getting more into smaller forums and I found that I really like it because it allows me to collect with other people in their full complexity - no 160 character limit - only full context!!!! It also amazed me how much the difference in not having an infinite pool of posts (no constantly refreshing posts) made a difference in my creativity and procrastination. Strongly recommend if you want a better alternative to regular social media. Shout out to Melonland in particular. (don't go in here and fuck up the vibes I will kill you, be a neighbor not a gentrifier)

I still don't fully understand JavaScript, but then I remembered something very important - that's what stack overflow is for.

Community building: A thing that should be done

This year I also started a server for art, this was structured a little differently - inspired by the Survival programs of the Black Panthers to hopefully get creatives to support each other through community run classes and accountability circles. I hoped to break away from servers that felt like showcases and instead tried to create a space for creatives where folks could learn and share.

We had a lot of success with classes in: Vtubing, OBS, 2D animation, productivity as a creative, ect.

What I've learned is that community building is exceptionally difficult to do, the energy needed to consistently recruit, facilitate, remind folks is hard, especially in this age and online. But it's incredibly rewarding. We also did fun things like gartic phone and creating a community zine!

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@torrent-empress.bsky.social

The intention behind CAS (creative accountability server) was to create a space where artists could hang out without having to be brand or pimp their work and learn from each other. I feel as though monetization ruins a lot of spaces and wanted to try something different. I have been reading a lot of history and it felt like education + non-monetized spaces are really key to this.

I've learned SO MUCH from the people that have come through, and while not everyone has stayed I'm so grateful for this tiny community we've created. It's nice to have a space to ask questions especially and I always learn things working on art with everyone.

While I haven't been able to keep up as well with it all and am partially shifting my focus to some other orgs, that I do think have strong potential to build up folks in spaces, I am thinking about the future of CAS as the new year starts and what can be done with the space.

One of the best things that's happened - and I wasn't sure where to put this was joining the gigantic BG3 mod Path to Menzobarranzan team as a UX designer, between the tools for the modding they've made so far and how talented everyone on the team is, I'm learning a lot about what makes organizations grow and tick, and using it as a model of what can come next.

Writing: I do it now, I guess lmao.

I just wanted to write some guides because I can't stand people just struggling. Thanks to Trueref for giving me my first professional opportunity! It was amazing to see my work help people. It didn't come out until after I published my blogs, but I actually wrote it before then! It gave me a bit of confidence to keep putting out work.

Understanding AI: Facts, Myths & Protecting your Work
As the world at large continues to talk about β€œAI”, creatives from all fields are left scrambling to save their work from companies using it to build data training sets to compete with them. In this article we’ll be talking about what these technologies are, how to protect your own creative work, and how you can push back against companies stealing from artists. Today's topics How does β€œAI” work? Why are so many people against it? How does the emerging field of AI have an effect on you as an artist and creative? What can you do to protect your work from being scraped online? Β  What is AI? As it currently stands, β€œAI” or β€œartificial intelligence” is used as a marketing term for a nebulously large collection of technologies spanning from web searches to missile targeting technology used in war. β€œMachine learning”, which does still exist as a specific subsect of artificial intelligence research, was the term most commonly used prior 2023 and still does see some usage. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a global organization made up of 38 countries that is often used to assess and set global economic standards for over a billion people in much of the North America and Europe, define β€œAI” technology as A machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments. Different AI systemsΒ varyΒ in theirΒ levels of autonomyΒ and adaptiveness after deployment. Or in layman’s terms, it uses the outputs you give it to make outputs based on a previously created dataset and whatever new inputs are entered in real time.Β  So, what's AGI then?Β  You may have heard folks talking a bit about β€œAGI” or β€œArtificial General Intelligence”. This nebulous term is used for a hypothetical Artificial intelligence that could replicate and surpass all of the cognitive functions of the human mind. Many silicon valley investors, policy wonks, and governments are very excited about this possibility despite the fact that it may never exist. One would hope that this doesn’t turn into the last several tech-futures we were promised like Crypto-currency, the metaverse, and Google glass. Unfortunately for everyone else, that means a very large amount of consumer technologies could fall into that description, and with nearly every program being rebranded as β€œAI-powered” it’s safe to say that this muddies the waters quite a bit.Β  In most cases, many websites, apps, and programs that are shoving their β€œAI” branding down users throats are mostly either rebranding their current technology as β€œAI” to please investors and stakeholders, or are applying one or two distinct types of technologies. None of which are aligned with the average consumer's view of what artificial intelligence is or might be.Β Β  Idea RoundupΒ  AI is a catch-all marketing term for all sorts of technology that would previously be called β€œmachine learning”. There are multiple definitions of AI, plenty of which involve no real intelligence. AGI is a theoretical technology that people in the tech space are saying will come, though many are skeptical as other promised β€œfuture” technologies have failed to materialize. Tech companies are calling many pre-existing products and technologies β€œAI” in hopes of luring investors. Β  Generative AI and you. Generative AI technologies are a subsect of β€œAI” technologies that have been receiving mainstream use and media attention. Due to technological advances in data processing, specifically around GPUs, it’s become much more viable to invest and research in these technologies, especially after the crypto-bubble implosion has left many cryptocurrency mining centers looking for different avenues of profitability. The majority of models that are around are LLMs (large language learning models), text-to-image/video models, or vocal synthesis models. With the slight exception of vocal synthesis models which have a longer consumer existence and development history, all of these are very similar in how they function. They are built on datasets that are trained on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of images and texts. Scanning them for similarities, and creating several larger databases organized by those similarities that can be searched by corresponding text. Meaning that if you input a request for a red apple, it will search for data matching the keywords β€˜red’ and β€˜apple’ and create an amalgamation based on its network of databases to serve a numerically generated apple to you.Β  These databases require millions of pieces of (sometimes very personal) data, especially more generalized consumer AI products like Chatgpt and Midjourney, that can power their ability to recognize a wide range of prompts.Β  Exploitation and AI. Contrary to popular belief, the work of recognizing these pieces of data is not automatic. AI training does in fact require human work. Work that is often outsourced toΒ workers in the global south who are paid under 4 USD to view extremely graphic images that often leads to lifelong mental health issues. Some particularly enterprising AI startup founders have cut out the middle man entirely by secretly employing Indian workers and lying about their AI's technological capabilities.Β  This isn’t particularly new, as Amazon has had its Amazon Mechanical Turk program where humans were paid pennies on the dollar to perform tiny tasks for years. The name being inspired by a similar scandal from 1770 where a man claimed he had a magical machine that could play chess which was later revealed to be a man secretly hidden in the bottom chamber of the fraudulent device. AI is polluting the internet as well as itself. Besides the elaborate exercise in offshoring white collar work to underpaid workers in the global south with a tech patina, another major issue with the technology is that it grows largely inefficient as the databases get larger. While there are many models, such as the open-source Deepseek LLM from The People’s Republic of China or the disastrous Apple intelligence, that can be run entirely on your PC or phone, popular consumer models are constantly slurping up the internet at large and incorporating any data input into it, including personal details. This poses an existential risk not just to the concept of personal privacy in the digital age, but to the technologies themselves as the internet fills up with poorly generated videos, texts, and images. Roughly 51% of online content is artificially generated, according to research from January 2024. Making it far more difficult to find human-made content, which is in turn destroying the generative models and causing them to produce nonsensical outputs. Quite poetic, really. These nonsensical outputs cannot be patched out in the normal sense as β€œhallucinations,” as these outputs are colloquially known, are likely to increase as the models are given more reasoning skills. The technology cannot recognize context, it can only create statistically likely outputs; the technology is essentially guessing. While in a fictional setting, this might be seen as tragic, the real world suffering of the many communities affected by the data centers powering these companies is outweighing any potential positives widespread generalized usage of it might bring. So, let’s help you aid this process along to further degrade the datasets! Idea RoundupΒ  Generative AI technologies are built off of dubiously obtained personal and often copywritten data. Generative AI technologies use unethical labor practices to sift through sensitive and personal data. Generative AI cannot recognize context, it can only create statistically likely outputs. Generative AI companies are polluting internet by churning out low-quality content at an exponentially high rate. Companies investing in Generative AI are often doing so at the expense of marginalized communities and creatives. Β  Can you protect your data from AI?Β  Generative AI works by gathering up files into their datasets, but there are things that can be done to make the individual files unreadable or unusable by datasets. While there is not a perfect solution, as research shows some of these protections may be reversed, these methods can stop less skilled scrapers and raise the overall cost of training making this sort of data unappealing to (most) generative AI companies who still have yet to make a profit and driving potential investors away as data sources dry up. Many of the solutions on the individual file level are oriented towards visual artists, if you are looking for solutions for other mediums, you may find the website and platform oriented sections more helpful. Can you protect your personal files? Glaze The most popular solution currently,Β Glaze was created by researchers at the University of Chicago. It provides protection against scraper bots attempting style-mimicry (aka, when someone tries to build models that directly mimic styles). While the program can be downloaded directly and run on your computer, it requires a hefty set up to get running for many artists - luckily, they offer a invitation only web-service that runs directly in browser and emails the result to you. Nightshade If you’re feeling particularly vindictive and you’ve got the computer rig to back it,Β Nightshade is a secondary tool created by the same researchers who have created Glaze that create false positives on the image (for example: presenting a leaf as a telephone) which degrades training sets that parse the data. Unfortunately, unlike Glaze Nightshade does not have a web-based version and needs to be run directly on device. Myst Myst is an open-source watermarking program that works similarly to Glaze that makes it more difficult for datasets to train on images by causing distortions on the individual pixel level. The primary advantage of Myst is that it is less energy/processing intensive and can be run on less demanding hardware than glaze. For those that cannot run Glaze or get an invitation to WebGlaze, but still have a compatible device, this can offer a solution, or a backup if Glaze is ever seriously compromised. Art Shield A web-based app-free solution that allows user to watermark their images with a data watermark that shields data from data engines. It also has a tool to allow users to search if their past art has been included in any datasets. Currently, it’s free to use and doesn’t require sign-ups nor invites. However, there hasn’t seemed to be any updates to it since 2023. WatermarkingΒ  If all other solutions fail or are unavailable, general watermarking can still provide very basic protection, and garbled β€˜watermarks’ tend to show up in generated images making them easily recognizable as not human created. Can you protect your website? Many artists are moving away from the social media platforms, especially ones like Deviantart and Artstation who seemingly have decided to betray their entire user base for an investor pipedream. Instead opting to host their work on their own websites. While there’s nothing wrong with this in theory, many users aren’t aware of the stances of companies they may choose to host with. Nekoweb Nekoweb, an up-and-coming threat to Neocities’ crown as darling of the Indieweb hosting, has explicitly stated that they disallow trackers and scrapers on their own homepage, and offers very similar features to Neocities (and a few more) on their premium tier for only $3 to Neocities $5 tier. Wordpress Wordpress, and their associated social media company Tumblr, previously sold their users data to genAI companies according to internal papers published by 404 media. They have since tried to backtrack on this PR nightmare of user security by offering users on both tumblr and wordpress a toggle to put a notice to disallow data-crawlers from slurping up their data. Squarespace Squarespace has been introducing genAI tools into their web-building suite seemingly without a mention of how exactly they treat their users’ data, though they have the decency to at least introduce a toggle to put a notice on your website to the large data-scraping companies not to slurp your work, similar to Wordpress. Neocities Neocities, the freemium recreation of the much beloved Geocities, has had a β€œmixed” approach to genAI as their owner has taken a β€œneutral” stance on GenAI on their blog much to the chagrin of its decidedly anti-big tech web 1.0 nostalgia-driven user base. Since releasing that blog post, Neocities has doubled down on their neutral stance, but set all new neocities websites to have an anti-data scraping text by default according to their bluesky thread. What is Robot.txt? Most of the these options, with the exception of Nekoweb who are more opaque about how they block generative AI data-scrapers, offer protection in the form of a β€œrobots.txt” plain text file applied to the website that tells scrapers they are not allowed. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that companies are listening asΒ Anthropic and OpenAI have been found to ignore these text files. Spawing Still, if you’re not satisfied by the standard issue robots.txt file, or want to create one that can be used on your self-hosted site, AI-protection startup Spawning offers a free tool that allows users to create their own text permission files with options for specific hosting platforms like Shopify. Spawning has recently been testing a more comprehensive open-source scraping blocking solution that goes beyond simply asking scrapers to respect data. This solution is currentlyΒ in beta and invite only, with a plug-in for Wordpress ready and other hosting platforms on the way. If you’re interested you can contact them through their website, and if this spooky YouTube announcement is anything to go by, it may be a much more scary threat to genAI companies than previous website level protections.Β  Can you protect your social media? As pushback from creatives of all types grows louder in opposition of genAI, as well as changing international laws regarding data privacy, platforms are offering more options on how users’ data is being used. Most are now offering various settings to prevent crawlers, scrapers, and even their own companies from slurping up their users data.Β  Each social platform hides its AI settings in a slightly different spot, but they’re usually located somewhere in your privacy or data controls. Β  Hold the line.Β  While there are no perfect solutions for creatives to protect their work, it’s important to remember that this is a collective effort on the part of creatives. The point is to functionally starve companies of the precious data of creatives in a multi-pronged effort to push back against the attempt to displace workers by making the cost of operating this technology more than the worth of investors. We’re much closer to winning than you think. We just need to hold the line as the companies fall apart.Β  Β  Belle β”‚ My Blog Digital illustrator + Product and User Experience professional. Bringing together technology and creative fields in an equitable and non-exploitative way
https://trueref.io/blogs/news/what-is-ai-really

I'm going to be honest, I had no idea what to expect when I wrote my first blog essay here. I just wanted to talk about Sex Work and the hypocrisy of the modern internet as someone who could speak on it as a creative, a former sex worker, and a UX designer. It was experimental and honestly I was pretty afraid to put it out.

Camgirls for Kids - Multi-hyphenate
A whore's treatise on the "for the children" era of the Internet
https://torrent-empress.leaflet.pub/3m2rchqqsmc2e

But I kind of felt bad constantly annoying people with my long threads and a blog is kind of the ultimate long thread so I figured that maybe I could try this. I had partially written this as a journal scrap when I did the Artist's Way earlier this year and then decided to expand it. It had a pretty good response and then I decided to continue a little bit.

I really didn't expect the response that I got, like at all to my next serious piece. I had written it as a sort of spiritual successor to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth but for... artists. See his whole thing was as a working psychiatrist, it's about the psychology of colonialism and sociology of oppressed peoples and it just..... reminded me of the internet. So many of the dynamics and the archetypes reminded me of the internet I had to talk about it.

I found it a little funny earlier this year when someone said to me, "tech companies hire psychologists to make the features to get you addicted to your apps! That's how evil they are." Not realizing that they referring to my position in tech as a User Experience designer. It made me think a lot about Fanon must've felt treating the Algerians as they lived through colonization from France.

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πŸŽ‡ΛšΚš New Year's Belle drop ɞ˚ @ THANKS FOR 4K πŸŽ‡
@torrent-empress.bsky.social

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not interested in being an influencer, or working towards being a true blue content creator. I write because I can't stop, just like I draw because I can't stop, so it was weird to see people responding to my work so strongly like... actual journalists, and big artists that I really admire. I actually chose leaflet to publish my writing because I found substack too crowded and the notes feature too algorithmic and prone to context collapse. I kind of was just... trying to hide and vent to people who were familiar with me, if that makes sense.

The fact that my work was so widely shared throughout Bluesky and even other communities (I got a few discord @s who had spotted my work floating in communities well past me), seen people translating parts of my work into Portuguese and Japanese was so humbling on Bluesky, the place with no mandatory algorithm from a tiny service no one had heard of with no algorithm. It meant that people.... resonated with my work and with my thoughts.

It's hard for me to express how much this meant to me because all I ever wanted in my career in tech is to make a living wage and build the internet and technological future that I knew was possible. I had experienced such a crisis in tech because of how dismissed I was, I thought that maybe it was all worthless, I wasn't listened to. I was told to my face that no organization would want someone like me, that my way of thinking was wrong. I was told that my hobbies and interests were shameful even though I tried to hide them and never bought them up at work.

I went into 2025 thinking that, that was all true, and decided to sort of stop trying. Not with my life, but with trying to live up to the expectations of an industry that didn't want me - that I had given up my 20s to - didn't want people like me. I was just going to use the skills I had gotten to help whatever people I could in my communities and try to be.... myself. Nothing more, nothing less. I was going to just be myself, and people either liked it, or they didn't. I was going to talk my shit, about tech, about catholicism, about politics, about my favorite vampire man.

I didn't know what I wanted to do and I struggled to articulate that to anyone who would ask me, when something I did creatively succeeded. It was only after I really sat with everything that it started coming to me.

About what's next: The Rose that Grew from Concrete

Around the time that my essay started succeeded was a weird time for me, I had recently passed some milestones that I had never thought I would pass.

A person who was well connected to the higher echelons of tech and the circles I had previously hung around in academia and I connected and I asked them about a very close friend that I had had a falling out with but was very worried about. This friend was had been showing worrying symptoms and I'd gotten some news about funding that I was worried about for them. They're a very successful person.


Me and this person traded stories about the circuit and tech, and they confirmed that I was right to be worried, about how the space chews out the brightest and kindest, destroys people's projects, and spits them out into nothingness. How it frequently destroyed the lives of young smart people who wanted to make the world better, and that my friend was likely a victim of that - his success had actually made him a target and I should reach out regardless of what had happened between us.

After, they did something curious. They offered to connect me with the same people in that circuit, who could help me implement my ideas about how to build better platforms, and get me a job.

I politely declined. Repeatedly. And assured them that I was fine on my own, they had assured me that I didn't know what I was talking about, and couldn't accomplish anything with my mannerisms and mindset. They then proceeded to have a fit in our private DMs and insult me, called me unable to understand a good opportunity, told me I didn't understand reality, even dug into my personal life and tried to scare me about the political realities of the united states. I simply told them I wasn't interested in dancing like a monkey for an industry and system that tried to oppress nearly every identity group I belong to and my allegiances were with my people.

They used Jay-Z as an example and I thought about how functionally destroyed the neighborhood my mother had grown up in Brooklyn, in part with Jay's explicit facilitation. I had been there just the week before, and realized me and my boyfriend were the only people of color walking down the crowded street. I recalled something I had thought and written about literally just the week before, about how if I could have any legacy, it would in like MF DOOM. They didn't like that and told me it was impossible - I told them I didn't care, truthfully.

I want a legacy like MF DOOM - Multi-hyphenate
Or, why I haven't put out more "original" work
https://torrent-empress.leaflet.pub/3m3djrtht3222

I found the entire thing super odd and chalked it up to them having personal problems. After, they tried warming up to me in the shared space we had before lapsing into thinly veiled insults about my intelligence.

In private they'd made the joke that we were just Fanon and Camus debating. (For those who don't get the joke, Camus and Fanon were contemporaries in Algeria with differing stances on the Revolution and decolonization.)

For what it's worth, I think Camus is a fucking idiot and moralism is a trojan horse to far worst things. Morals aren't material, you can make your morals anything you want, really.

I decided to never interact with them again. After using the argument they'd made against me in our private DMs against them though, because I am a petty bitch. Turns out I do understand what a shibboleth is after all.

The next day, I received an email letting me know that I had gotten an interview to do professional development with a prestigious organization and one of my dream companies. I had applied as a sort of experiment, a shot in the dark. It was a weird opportunity but I felt compelled to try. I didn't even know what I wanted. They asked for multiple samples of creative work, but said it could be anything, literally anything. So I submitted my most popular piece of art, a scantly clad Vampirella, and my most popular writing - the DA essay. I had used my skills in UX to polish up an interactive desktop and website prototype in Figma, and chose to omit my website. But I left enough of myself that I wasn't hiding anything much, yeah I put Astarion in there, I let parts of it look like GeoCities page in an ironic nod to my seeding on the internet.

I was sure it would scare them off, and I'd shrug it off.

I went to the group interview and eventually the individual one, I was shocked to learn that they'd loved my work, but especially had gone through my entire blog (where I had identified myself as a sex worker) and loved my very silly post comparing the CIA's Communist extermination program in South East Asia to Roblox and Bethesda's community development practices. It was probably the most opposite of corporate I could be. They told me that my strategy skills had shown through that post in particular and despite my unorthodox and eclectic influences, actually communicated a real understanding of strategy that especially made them want to pick me. I didn't even know how to react.

Okay I'll talk about the Gabecube (the Skyrim method is what I'm calling it) - Multi-hyphenate
Could this be.... The year of the Linux?
https://torrent-empress.leaflet.pub/3m5krxoxjlc2a

To be honest, I kind of freaked out. I was scared, and I felt bad for even wanting an opportunity. This was the big leagues and I felt completely lost. I was sure they'd figure out they'd made a mistake and was pretty fucked up with anxiety as I waited for their decision. I'd come so close so many times and there was usually some sort of excuse.

After a week I had sort of resigned myself to the existential anxiety with another week left before they had made a decision. I don't really watch TV much anymore but decided to throw on an episode of my favorite comfort show, The Boondocks - made by another Fanon and Black Panthers lover - Aaron McGruder who's work I deeply admire despite the fact they've basically disappeared from the public.

In that episode Huey, fails in all of his attempts to help break his friend in prison out of jail - an incarcerated Black Panther who had been sentenced to death. You should watch the entire thing, there's totally not a version of it on youtube.

Without spoiling it completely, Huey ends the episode by saying something that stood with me.

"Maybe there are forces in this universe we don't understand. But I still believe we make our own miracles."

When the episode ended, I picked up my phone to scroll and noticed I'd gotten an email - the decision had been made. Somehow,

miraculously.

I had made it in.

Afterwards though, I was in such shock I couldn't stop sobbing, for hours and hours. This kind is a problem when you're at your day job but I thank god for cubicles.

I had recently received a planner for the year, one I get for free for being a mod in a discord. I was struggling so much with who and what I wanted to be, my type-A personality basically neutered by the last year of chaotic experimentation. I was afraid to even set into stone what I wanted the year to be. I left my vision board undone, until the last week.

I did pick a theme though, Bloom, after the Rose that Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur.

Did you hear about the rose that grew

from a crack in the concrete?

Proving nature's law is wrong it

learned to walk with out having feet.

Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,

it learned to breathe fresh air.

Long live the rose that grew from concrete

when no one else ever cared.

I worked studiously through the exercises in the journal, specifically one about various fears and what you'd do if it happened. As a sort of exposure therapy. Amazingly enough, the next day the first two I had written came true.

I practiced what I had said and I'm alright. After a rough Christmas, I am ready to bloom.

One of my favorite songs, like ever, is called Snakeskin by Rina Sawayama - it's one of the oddest pop songs I've ever heard, sampling the Final Fantasy Fanfare and mixing it with Beethoven. It's about taking all of the pain you've experienced and making art out of it, shedding your snakeskin and making it into fashion to be consumed. It's contradictory, it's complex, it's layered. 2025 was the year of the snake and almost all of the songs and imagery I've been attracted seriously to has featured snakes this year.

Princess Nokia - Brujas

Megan thee Stallion - Cobra

But I do think Snakeskin best captures it best.

Excelsior, or whatever.