radioluminous

[radioluminous]

Hey, I love your art -- I was wondering if you ever posted your illustration for Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" on here? It's really evocative and gorgeously framed, and I find myself thinking of it frequently!!

Thank you for the kind words. A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka is one of my favorite short stories of all time, and it’s a very quick read. You can read it right here:

https://www.kafka-online.info/a-hunger-artist.html

Go ahead, I’ll wait here.

I’d like to take us opportunity to talk a little bit about the story, if I may.

Although there are a couple different interpretations of the story's meaning, it unambiguously read to me as an allegory for the plight of the creative, likely drawing from Kafka’s own experience. The ‘starving artist’ comparison is obvious, but there’s much more to it than that. In a departure from most other depictions in media, the plight of the artist is not depicted as something noble or redemptive, but as a sort of self-destructive madness. The hunger artist dies alone and in obscurity, his impact on the world ultimately being completely marginal and insubstantial. When questioned about why he chose a life like this, he reveals that he doesn’t even enjoy fasting, he simply couldn’t find any food he liked. That is to say, a true creative does not select this kind of self destructive lifestyle because they enjoy it; rather, it is because they cannot possibly bear to do anything else. Kafka himself, It should be mentioned, supposedly despised pretty much every job he ever had.

As some of you may know, I developed severe tendinitis a couple months ago. Mentally, September was probably the worst months of my entire life. I reflected on this story a lot –I had wrought my own self destruction, and for what? A couple of bucks? A few comics that i’ll become embarrassed of in a year’s time anyway? Unsure about my prospects for recovery, I became incredibly depressed.

But having been starved of the ability to write or draw, I had a genuine epiphany. Standing at the corner of Boston liquors in Allston, I resolved that I would muster the strength to endure this, regardless of how long it took, because what awaited me at the end was nothing short of the greatest prize a person could ask for: That very thing derided by Kafka –the life of an artist.

There is no greater pleasure than making art. I mean that genuinely, I mean that literally. No, it isn’t noble, no, it isn’t redemptive, but in a totally hedonistic and self-serving way it is simply the greatest thing that life can offer, ambrosia in the mouth, better than sex, better than drugs, better than anything that money can buy, and I feel pity for anyone unable to experience it. I am not being hyperbolic, I am not being metaphorical. I am stating this in the plainest of terms, having lived a life without it for the last couple of months.

So although my personal relationship to the story has changed in the past couple months, Kafka was right about one thing; nothing else tastes good, at least not by comparison. We must imagine the hunger artist happy.

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i cant ever find isshin when i need to and i keep running face first into headless. this is no kind of place for grandpas to be running around in

having a level 5 autism moment over sekiro (again)

#i get a little more lost in sekiro but it's hard to mind when the sequences are as fun as they are

[radioluminous]

having a level 5 autism moment over sekiro (again)

#wolfis my best friend

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lily of the valley 🌷 planning to carve these for my next stamps!

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they haven't taken a picture better than this which is kinda crazy if you think about it

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Had a dream I saw blog on tumblr with "irradiated blogs DNI" in the description and when I looked through their posts I discovered there were some blogs with "uranium code" in their css that would expose you to literal radiation if you looked at them.

#radposting #😔

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I like putting too much detail into draw-overs

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puts my massive paw on top of u

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My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency

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imagine going to a house party and ask to go to the bathroom and like theres a dark souls silver knight guarding a chest in there. and like you ask him to not look but he doesn’t respond at all. He’s not like agro, or staring at you with intent, but he’s FULLY aware of your presence and watching you like you intend to steal

[radioluminous]

Y'all, the National Alert went off a few days and now I can't stop seeing all of these weird creatures on the buildings downtown. Were they always there... or should I be worried?

[radioluminous]

Walter Linsley Meegan (English, 1859–1944)

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drawings of my cat(s) (1)

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spam emails are horrifying on an entirely different level once you actually begin to grapple with the material reality of ‘cyberspace’. how many servers were involved in dumping this message into my trash folder, where are they located, how much water goes into cooling them every day? where did the metals come from to build these facilities, who maintains them, how much labour and suffering and exploitation is required to bombard me with 50 messages a day i don’t even look at for products i will never buy? not just useless or a nuisance, but actively harming the earth & its people, and for what. zero social value, zero human communication, just capital trying to metastasise

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i follow this 1 user on twitter who posts pics of their snakes and i really want you all to look at this snake they have. i’ve never seen a snake that was built like this

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I am making a collection