Hey, let me drunkenly animate your photos in about 25 to 60 days!

honestly, i think that running monster video above is the best thing i've ever made.

but the second or fourth best thing i've ever made is being featured today as part of the Exhibitionisms.club Virtual Opening today:

http://thegameoflife.website/

it was also supposed to be at the Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Space & Time galleries here in Chicago, but COVID-19 just squashed that idea. no big deal, because websites irl places are always kind of a strange experience in first place. it's home is the browser, so as long as it's safe there we're good to go.

for once i'm going to shut my trapper about this one and not try to pre-emptively overexplain it, but i hope that you'll give it a few minutes. it is the first large-scale "project" i've completed in nearly 4 years. it has been a really hard time, but i have crawled my way back and am doing better now than i have in a long time. this website is more personal than most things i share and making it has meant a lot to me. if you like it or just want to support things i'm doing, please share it with your weirdo pals

I'm so excited to finally share The Game of Life! It's being featured today as part of the https://t.co/ptUP45eU5S Virtual Opening "B", running today from 4-7pm, as well as at Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Space & Time in Chicago, and its permanent home is https://t.co/8JXa7js46x

— Z_tbd (@weinventyou) November 21, 2020

I just saw this on twitter but might as well say here, too - I only dipped in for a bit over a day but I really like the vibe. I don't know if I'm meant to be reading it as generating a poem but I definitely did.

thank you emil.y! i think i said that on twitter to you last week, too, but just in case i didn't, <3, thank you for taking the time to check it out. i keep meaning to improve the "performance" of it, but it's been a really wild irl week, stressful and really good too. i am just tangential to something that involves that really helping people. but it feels like the opposite magnetic/zoroastrian force to 2020, and the crappy loading times of my dumb website just don't matter much right now.

at the same time, i just did a new painting that was a ripoff of egon schiele's last painting, and it came out pretty well. a friend of mine bought it for $100! it was 18x24" so i spent the whole night painting it. i got really cocky and tried a 5x5" the next day and made the worst fucking thing with colors that has ever existed! good times! the world is extremely depressing but it's heartening to know that there are always new things to work on

https://i.imgur.com/PWuh6JT.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/2a8SSqi.jpg

that's fun stuff!

https://isohedral.ca/swirled-series-the-result/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXr-DFr5vgI

please help me

My letter to my reps @DickDurbin, @SenDuckworth, @RepMikeQuigley, and the nearby @Marie4Congress, regarding @tedcruz's mocking of COVID victims and masks. Please read, retweet, and help me get their attention. pic.twitter.com/hxpxoV28lA

— Z_tbd (@weinventyou) February 28, 2021

sorry about that last update. i've been doing well since then. most of my images no longer move! my partner did a quick fundraiser with my friends while i was mourning my racist dad's death from covid, which he always said only affected "unclean" people. i have a studio now! it's called Studio TBD. this is the first thing i made completely within that space, and I have a lot more coming because i quit my job and i hope i never work for someone else ever again.

https://i.imgur.com/KFgn5d0.jpg

i also have a selling/living model that i'm trying out where i just try to meet my bare, minimal, skeletal/boney needs, just fucking barely, and then donate everything else to mutual aid and things and people that aren't fucking assholes. that's nice, but it's like "transparency" in a corporation or government: it doesn't mean shit until it actually comes to the test. but i'm trying to make like $2500 a month, total, and then everything above that is for others.

my website is also skeletal and boney and it's butt hurts because it's too boney, but it's at zachtbd.xyz, which rhymes!

Doesn't rhyme for me!

Some great stuff here, I particularly love the figures one in yr last post.

thank you emily! i enjoyed making it, and it's my largest so far (about 60"x30"), although i just rolled out a really long thin one (14"x100") that will beat it in the length category at least. it's so nice having as much space as i need

Doesn't rhyme for me!

fuuuuuck! i always forget that! i love "zed" though, i support it. :)

That’s amazing!

km, beautiful work. really love that figures one too. it's been fun to watch your (rapid) progress with physical media

thank you a Lavator, and a hoy hoy too!

I don't have a good photo of the one I'm working on now (the 60x30") one but it could be my best one if i don't fuck it up! i want to follow up with smaller ones, though. i was talking to my studio-mate/good friend and he was saying that larger format paintings are harder to sell because they dominate a wall/space, rather than being able to fit alongside existing things in people's living spaces. it makes sense! also, the larger ones are going to be around $700 or up, because they are about ($100 supplies/materials) + (20-40 hours * living wage) + shipping. that's too expensive for me. by way too much. i don't just want to be making things that i can't afford to buy myself. so i'm going to start working on some smaller canvases to bring all those costs down.

but i am going to keep doing bigger and bigger ones, concurrently, because this is the one time in my life i'll have a giant perfect space to do it in, and it feels awesome, physically awesome to do

it's like yoga for weirdos who are too lazy to do yoga

here are some other recent paintings, all from my invented Purple Haze Acres Home Run Inn "Second Chances" Residency Series in late April. these are ultra-huge, so sorry if it wrecks your ilx.css

https://i.imgur.com/XqumOjS.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/liGt3Io.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/itnoU9O.jpg

i already posted them on instagram stories a bunch of times, sorry. and i still need to take a better documentation of them before they go away (people have been nice enough to offer to buy these already, which is a great confidence boost and also kind of like a one-time New Game item buff from a kind game developer)

nice!

can definitely relate to how physically therapeutic and beneficial it is to do art that you can put your whole body into. i have romanticized throwing pottery for many years based on a few spotty experiences with a wheel, and my partner just got me a gift card to a local studio to try to make it part of my self-care. very excited.

What is your insta handle km?

How are you at making your own frames, or you getting them pre-made? Boring question maybe, but it was my contribution to helping my girlfriend through art school. Idk about the other side of the pond but here if you shop around, you can get a mitre saw (for precise wood cutting at angles), a biscuit jointer (to replicate stretcher bars that fit into each other at corners) and a air powered staple gun for uncle £100, £150 at most. The cheaper newer ones are p much as good as the really expensive ones. If you are trying to do this in a cost effective way, buying only wood and canvas could be a great saver.

i'm at @zach_tbd, but i haven't posted hardly anything on their as a "post", just as a story, which i then always forget to save as a Moment or Collection or whatever it's called there, so basically i need to start posting more on there to fill my grid up with stuff

*sweats*

i'm interested in diy stretchers at some point, but i already went a little wild a couple months ago and bought way too many at full price at blick, so i definitely need to go use those up first. there's also re-using them, which i am shockingly ignorant about and will figure out during the next 25 to 60 days

You can carefully pull the staples out and have just the canvas, only to reapply stretched fresh canvas to prime. But often then people still want to buy it on/in a frame, so you would have to think about presentation.

I have no artistic skill whatsoever but I’ve always been good with this kind of stuff. This weekend I need to figure out how the tufting gun my gf bought off a Chinese website works, with no English instructions, so she can start making colourful rugs :/

some decent footage from my high school band's battle of the bands show finally surfaced on the internet! i played drums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noc0_fZcKno

not sure if that timestamp link will work or not in ilx, but our set doesn't start until 3:20 into the video, so you should skip there unless you want some more slice-of-2002-southeast-missouri-life. in the spirit of trying to keep it legitimately positive (something i've been getting better at and which helps me deal with depression), i will just say that i'm proud of how we played back then. although no one wants high school to be the peak of their lives, that was definitely an amazing time for me, the first intense creative mode i'd ever been in, all of us, figuring it out. we sold CDs for $2.50! unfortunately our CD sucked because by the time it finally came out we had written a bunch more songs that were way better than the ones we'd just recorded. Adolescence is a strange thing. you already feel yourself slowing down in some ways, relative to the supergod bonus mode of learning you have when you're a small child. but looking back, i see how completely fucking pumped i am, in that moment, fully believing that it would always be like that from then on.

feels like a fucking miracle that i eventually completely abandoned all of that wonderful feeling, completely losing it, only to get it all back now in a different way. and i still want to play drums really badly, that's not dead either

fuck, i accidentally linked to the end of our terrible knockin on heaven's door soundcheck (the only cover). and then the first song is our worst, and then i made the biggest flub of the evening right when i counted in our first song after the intro. i sure have a way of first impressions!

the first band is not us. please, just let that be clear.

here, i should have just fucking linked to the 4 best songs, all packed at the end of the set because we made no sense.

26:32 'Turning Generation' and 'Wailing Wall'

i named both of these songs, and I had no idea what either one went. what a fucking goy! but after wailing wall you can hear some old-timer go "i've never heard anything like that" and that might have been true for us too. we thought we were doing some really new there.

37:08 37'Quiet Type' and 'Time and Temp'

i wrote most of both of these songs, and also the little connecting interlude, and it used to be our fan-pleasing set closer routine. i think these songs were pretty good for a 18-year-old! they were our radio hit pop punk songs, and generally people would go wild for them

i don't know if this is interesting to anyone. if it is, i have lots of stories, but also, i realize that everyone is at work or school, while i just kind of go on a nostalgia trip in the afternoon

i fucked up the first link again.

you guys, i'm done posting. it's over

lol, on "turn generation" the song ends because i lose my drumstick and can't get it back

a friend of mine is friends with the wh1t3 r4bb1t5 drummer and i keep asking him to ask about the "original drummer". love that story

oh god, please don't! ti think there was another drummer involved, and i only practiced with them like twice. god - what is that story? i can't remember where i posted it. the honest way for me to put it was that i would have been a decent drummer for the band they quickly became afterward, but that instead i chose to try to become a blastbeat grindcore drummer overnight to fit in with their previous band's sound. but, given the title of this thread, sometimes my stories go a little haywire.

actually, i didn't "decide" to play like that, come to think about it, i was asked to replicate the old drummer's parts because they were playing all the time. then i did that at an 80% proficiency level (ok more like 65%), awkward weeks passed, and then suddenly it was the new band and they were an indie rock band and the previous singer had been sacked. i'd like to think that maybe they looked upon me as an indicator of the futility of the other road

anyway, xp diamonddave, i doubt the current drummer or the one before knows me at all. plus i had a falling out with that crowd when i was 21 because i got really drunk (sigh) and started yelling at everyone for being too much of a hipster and how they were fake. i thought that one might blow over but then i moved and never really talked to any of that crowd much more

haha he would never-- just a bit of gentle ribbing between us about how his friend STOLE YOUR INDIE ROCK STARDOM. he's from "como" and mentioned texas chainsaw one time and i told him how they kinda turned into wh1t3 r4bb1t5

xp lol. also just wanted to echo that your latest projects look awesome and sounds like you're doing great

hey zack, was brian b the bass player then? he's a buddy of mine from college

thank you! really appreciate that! and some good news, i got my first big painting commission! 60x40", and i have photos of the room it's in. it's right by a giant window with lush vegetation, and the rug is incredible so the color palette is already set - bright and ready for blotchy color fields! i am nervous but also listening to ambient music, everything is ok.

yes he was. i have some funny stories about him (all good - he was an amazing person and the first close friend i had who read more than i did (by a lot))

i think he was still in HS when i first met him? or just out? alex was even younger

cool! Brian is my age so he prob graduated HS in 2000? We haven't been in touch in many years but he was always one of my conduits into some cool music scenes

https://www.instagram.com/zach_tbd/live/

i will probably be painting here a lot. including right now. my goal is for it just be a place where you can drop in for a minute, no big deal. and i'll probably be either painting or walking around talking to myself. or to Tobey. i split a studio with him. come watch me be a dumbass

I dropped in but the screen froze after about 10 minutes - was connected via browser rather than phone.

anyway it was cool!

i will never stop

i will, probably. but i think it would be fun to be able to "drop in" pretty often and see things because they usually take weeks and take all sorts of forms along the way

fukkin instagram and their audio filter though - i think it crashed me twice or even three times before. i realize now i have to listen to jamz on headphones :(

i like the new paintings a lot btw, especially the doors of perception one.

haha, thank you!

i am sitting here looking at 3 in progress right now, wondering what the fuck i am doing

making art!

https://i.imgur.com/ZxeDzjm.jpg

one possible future of the first 1000 posts on this thread, once photobucket or tinypic is sold a few more times:

Hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites.

This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a now defunct video hosting service. https://t.co/JOBPQmPx7m

— Motherboard (@motherboard) July 22, 2021

thanks to silby and jaq and others, i was able to make more money than my living costs this month, and i just sent @nitaslovetrain (on instagram, also on venmo/cashapp - she rules) $1200 to cover ACs for 8 families in chicago. i'm trying to be ok with saying that out loud, because i want other people to see that and think about either donating themselves to something else, or adopting some sort of similar model for themselves. the model is that you just send any money you make beyond your living costs to other people. it's flexible - what are your living costs? even that in itself is hard to define. but whatever it is, just take that as your own starting point and change it.

or you could send a smaller portion of your excess wealth to other people. 50% 10% 5%. but maybe at least some %. this is my gimmick, because i think it's a good thing for people to do in general, and also because maybe it will convince some people to send me $ for my art more readily, because i will never, ever, be one of those gigantic rich assholes