#Still don't think I have a full hang of krita

[starswirly]

Ink -> Comyet

Ink aka my favorite drawing test subject :]

[firedragon1321]

Here's a full reference sheet for my squishmallow boy Soren. I made a few of these (but only for characters I draw frequently). As the protagonist of the Toon-iverse Saga (aka my magnum opus), I draw him a lot.

I'm still trying to unlearn male/female, and so all of my existing charts will have that on them (krita's text tool sucks ass- editing isn't really possible). So I reproduced his stats here-

Gender- Boy, cis (he/him)

Species- Toon (Human)

Age- 12

Height- 4'7"

Weight- 90 lbs.

There's a lot going on with him so I readmored it. There's more art in the readmore too.

Trigger warnings- Child abuse (including sexual abuse/rape), childhood trauma/PTSD, non-consensual haircuts/tonsurephobia, implied transphobia, mentions of children wielding weapons.

Soren is an in-universe cartoon character (from a fake version of Digimon called Virtumon) dropped into reality. His new reality is a lot like our own circa the early 2000s, except for demons wandering around and plenty of other toons for Soren to hang out with. Upon arrival, he was branded with the Curse of Beauty (marking on his left shoulder and in the upper right), which made him a homing beacon for demons.

Soren has a heart of gold and wants to help his fellow toons. He doesn't have a lot of physical strength, but makes up for it with his cleverness. He's not above pretending to be a helpless baby boy to get what he wants. By the time you figure out you were tricked, it's too late.

Soren's dream is to create a world where all toons can be happy and safe, in a realm where that's often not possible. He aims to accomplish this with the aid of many other toons. This includes Beck- another one of my OCs who he sees as a surrogate big brother. Their relationship is reflected in other characters, deconstructed, and reconstructed throughout a buttload of books.

Soren is also a child who stacks up tons of trauma. He often says things impulsively which can be cruel, only to instantly regret it. His age leads him to struggle with understanding aspects of the adult world (mainly sexuality, which scares him). Like all kids, he thinks he's more mature and capable than he is. He's a little precocious, so sometimes he knows what he's talking about. But not all the time.

Soren likes junk food (especially salty treats and cheesy things), horror movies he's technically not allowed to watch (twelve is basically thirteen right?) and when people he trusts give him head scritchies.

In the lower right of the sheet are a few weapons he collects and a backpack he usually wears. These items are photographs I blurred/edited since they exist in the "real world" and not the cartoon realm Soren hails from. The golden "Winter's End" is a lightsaber-like weapon designed to kill demons, which he finds after a very long journey. It can't damage anything else, though- it phases right through other objects. Though the pocket knife doesn't!

As a toon, Soren's pupils sometimes grow and contract in weird ways. He also has four fingers (and toes, assumedly). When he blushes, it's little lines as shown. His toony behaviors are pretty subdued otherwise. He's from an anime, and not one of Bo-bobo's stripe.

Soren's a bit overweight. He likes salty snacks, but they don't like him. He gained weight over the course of his cartoon's backstory. Once called to reality, he can't get any bigger- but he can't lose weight either. His hair's also very long because he has a phobia of cutting it- no thanks to the dad from said backstory.

Here's a character sheet of backstory stuff. The first design is for him at age 7-8. The second is age 10-11. The divide starts after he and his younger sister Hazel tried to build a treehouse. Hazel fell out of the tree and broke her arm. That was the start of his dad's coldness towards him, and Soren's resulting rebellion, which created a perpetual cycle of anger between them.

The short version of his backstory- Dad wanted a perfect athlete, got overly angry over the treehouse incident, Soren responded by growing out of his control. His dad wasn't happy with his long hair because of toxic masculine dogma. He even forced a haircut Soren didn't want. But his mom was fine with it. She even did his ponytail for the first time. Needless to say, he's closer to her than his dad.

And then there's the stuff I don't know how I can explain in a way the blue hellsite can understand. But I'll try my best.

At one point in his original cartoon, Soren had to crossdress to go undercover for an infiltration mission (FFVII had a huge impact on me...). The people of the real world became unhealthily obsessed with this moment. This connects to his curse and the demons. The demons choose targets based on how people in reality see toons, and create one-dimensional parodies called "thralls" based on those interpretations. Thus, Soren's Curse of Beauty, and the demon that plans to turn him into a (cis, adult, elegant, empty) thrall.

(How do the demons know how humans feel? I'm not sure. But now that I'm aware of this "missing step" in the thrall creation process, I'll figure something out.)

Beck has the same curse as Soren, and the demons threaten him with it (I can't say how because that's a huge spoiler, should I ever publish). This and leftover subliminal messaging from his father's beliefs on how men should be make Soren a little politically incorrect. But he is learning! Even if it's not personally for him, he does accept that other people like crossdressing, and he shouldn't be mean to them over it. Eventually.

Puberty also hits him pretty hard, and he has to cope with having a crush for the first time. Since one of his earliest encounters is with a major villainous faction consists of people with too much money and a lust for toons, he doesn't know how to deal with it. There's lots of toxic or scary behaviors Soren has to unlearn. He has plenty of friends to help him, so it's alright.

All this weirdness makes sense from a writer's perspective. Soren is a character I created essentially to throw all my favorite tropes at and cope with trauma. His journey is the puberty I wish I had, and the growth I accomplished since my teen years. I love him so much.

[hydrus]

Version 556

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.zst

I had an ok week. I fixed some bugs and added a system to force-set filetypes.

You will be asked on update if you want to regenerate some animation thumbnails. The popup explains the decision, I recommend 'yes'.

full changelog

forced filetype

The difference between a zip and an Ugoira and a cbz is not perfectly clear cut. I am happy with the current filetype scanner--and there are a couple more improvements this week--but I'm sure there will always be some fuzziness in the difficult cases. This also applies to some clever other situations, like files that secretly store a zip concatenated after a jpeg. You might want that file to be considered something other than hydrus thinks it technically is.

So, on any file selection, you can now hit right-click->manage->force filetype. You can set any file to be seen as any other file. The changes take affect immediately, are reflected in presentation and system:filetype searches, and the files themselves will be renamed on disk (to aid 'open externally'). The original filetype is remembered, and everything is easily undoable through the same dialog.

Also added is 'system:has forced filetype', under the 'system:file properties' entry, if you'd like to find what you have set one way or the other.

This is experimental, and I don't recommend it for the most casual users, but if you are comfortable, have a play with it. I still need to write better error handling for complete nonsense cases (e.g. calling a webm a krita is probably going to raise an error somewhere), but let me know how you get on.

other highlights

I fixed some dodgy numbers in Mr. Bones (deleted file count) and the file history chart (inbox/archive count). If you have had some whack results here, let me know if things are any better! If they aren't, does changing the search to something more specific than 'all my files'/'system:everything' improve things?

Some new boot errors, mostly related to missing database components, are now handled with nicer dialog prompts, and even interactive console prompts serverside.

I _may_ have fixed/relieved the 'program is hung when restored from minimise to system tray' issue, but I am not confident. If you still have this, let me know how things are now. If you still get a hang, more info on what your client was doing during the minimise would help--I just cannot reproduce this problem reliably.

Thanks to a user who figured out all the build script stuff, the Docker package is now Alpine 3.19. The Docker package should have newer libraries and broader file support.

birthday and year summary

The first non-experimental beta of hydrus was released on December 14th, 2011. We are now going on twelve years.

Like many, I had an imperfect 2023. I've no complaints, but IRL problems from 2022 cut into my free time and energy, and I regret that it impacted my hydrus work time. I had hoped to move some larger projects forward this year, but I was mostly treading water with little features and optimisations. That said, looking at the changelog for the year reveals good progress nonetheless, including: multiple duplicate search and filter speed and accuracy improvements, and the 'one file in this search, the other in this search' system; significant Client API expansions, in good part thanks to a user, including the duplicates system, more page inspections, multiple local file domains, and http headers; new sidecar datatypes and string processing tools; improvements to 'related tags' search; much better transparency support, including 'system:has transparency'; more program stability, particularly with mpv; much much faster tag autocomplete results, and faster tag and file search cancelling; the inc/dec rating service; better file timestamp awareness and full editing capability; the SauceNAO-style image search under 'system:similar files'; blurhashes; more and better system predicate parsing, and natural system predicate parsing in the normal file search input; a background database table delete system that relieves huge jobs like 'delete the PTR'; more accurate Mr. Bones and File History, and both windows now taking any search; and multiple new file formats, like HEIF and gzip and Krita, and thumbnails and full rendering for several like PSD and PDF, again in good part thanks to a user, and then most recently the Ugoira and CBZ work.

I'm truly looking forward to the new year, and I plan to keep working and putting out releases every week. I deeply appreciate the feedback and help over the years. Thank you!

next week

I have only one more week in the year before my Christmas holiday, so I'll just do some simple cleanup and little fixes.

[ardate]

4, 8, 9, 30 :]

4. Fav character/subject that's a bitch to draw

Honestly? Humans as a whole, still. I started art a long time ago, originally mostly focusing on animals and creatures, til I started drawing humans sometime in middle school - and I never stopped drawing them since! But yet, somehow, even though by now I probably have drawn more humans and human-adjacent characters than not with all those years, beasts are still much easier and come more naturally to me. Maybe those very early years wired my brain this way hbghb

8. What's an old project idea that you've lost interest in

Oh holy fukc so many of those uuuuuuuh,, right now the one that comes to mind is this old story I had made up in middle/highschool - something about a kind of death land, a sort of limbo, and the ghost lords that 'ran' it; and the main character having to go through it to bring his love back from the dead (orpheus and eurydice inspired). And though even then I wasn't particularly optimistic about my chances of going through with it, I really wanted to make a comic of it! Obviously, never happened. I should redraw those old OCs one of these days hgbghb

Have a sneak peek of what my art (and one of my ghost lords) looked like back then. Not the full pic cuz even just sharing this lil tidbit is hurting my ego

9. What are your file name conventions

I've been meaning to change it cuz it's no longer organized enough for my taste! My file themselves don't have any fancy names, they're usually just named after their subject (like 'demoman_sketch' or 'pernelle_portrait' or 'morribel_reference' etc). Of course, no accent in the file names since that renders them unstable and makes it easier for them to get corrupted, same (to a lesser extent) with spaces, so I always use an underscore instead.

So rather than by name, my organization goes by folders: • First off I have a folder per art program (one for Photoshop, After Effects, Corel Painter, Krita, etc), each of which have two folders, 'Unfinished' and 'Finished'. The latter usually only has the PNG renders, while the Unfinished folder houses the PSD (or other) files. Sometimes I'll have a 'Done' subfolder there for the files of pieces that i've finished, but most of the time they'll hang in there in the middle of WIP files forever • And in those Un/Finished folders, I have subfolders for the subject of the art piece (one folder per fandom (like TF2, Rayman, etc), a folder for commissions, one folder per original story, etc) so I can easily find what I'm looking for.

I plan on changing my naming conventions though, keep my folders but name my files with dates at the beginning (year/month/day), then theme (fandom/story/commission, etc), and then the piece's name.

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated

I'm... Not sure? 🤔 To be honest I post my art to share it but I don't really have expectations regarding its reception from the public... I used to! Back when I was on deviantArt. And honestly it sucked, getting legitimately upset when an art piece didn't get enough digital attention, not enough internet points. But I've grown past it years ago, so I don't really have many feelings if a piece does badly anymore. I've had OC pics get like 2 likes and nothing else and I felt fine with it ghbgh

Don't get me wrong I still want them to do well, I still want people to reblog my art, and nothing brings me more joy than comments in the tags because that's a direct reaction to my art, which always feels very personal and legitimately touches me. But not having expectations means I don't really feel disappointed as much

The last time I've had the thought 'oh i expected this to do better' was for my HLVRAI zine piece, but that's about it!