Yes! I think we’re back! It’s been way too long. Ok, so here’s what happened:

Last year, my hosting contract came to an end. Renewing it was exponentially more expensive, so I looked elsewhere. I found a host that I thought would work out great and be the home for SykoGrafix for a long time. Thanks to a special promotion, the price was excellent. Maybe too good to be true? I had no major issues with that hosting provider, getting transferred over and all set up again was a breeze, but there was something wrong with the site itself that made it difficult to update. Probably a coding error on my part, or something changed after an update that caused WordPress to not work properly and I couldn’t post unless I went through a number of convoluted steps. That totally drained any enthusiasm I had for maintaining the site, and I just never got around to fixing it as I was busy with other things. Anyway, one year later, it wouldn’t matter anymore! The host I had moved to announced it was going out of business. One could say that this pretty much confirmed it to be a scam in the first place, but considering what I paid at the time, I say that I got my money’s worth out of the deal, so it didn’t really affect me. It was annoying that I’d have to find a new home and go through the transfer process again (which seemed to be particularly arduous this time around), but that’s over now and we’re here! And I’ll be here for good long while. Better yet, for some reason, everything works again! I didn’t change anything about the site itself, but now I can more easily update whenever I need to.

At any rate, now that I’m settled it, I do feel like this place could use an update. I want to redo the front page, change the graphics, and make it easier to add new artwork with some kind of automated gallery feature instead of having to make a new separate page for every image I want to upload. So I’m looking to get into that starting in the next couple of months.

Speaking of changes, the whole art world sure has changed a lot in the past year alone. The encroaching spread of generative artificial intelligence and the decomposing hellscape that social media has become recently has made life as an artist even more challenging. Times are changing, often in terrible ways, so the only thing that can be done is change with them. That said, I am vehemently opposed to using generative AI to create art. I’ve experimented with it enough to know how it works, and I’ve decided that I won’t be using it as a creative tool to make images. Largely because there’s nothing that a computer can come up with on its own that is going to exactly match my vision for my art. I don’t know how much I can specifically do to stop it, but out of principal, I won’t be complicit in allowing my work to be used to train generative AI to do anything. So I’ll be looking into everything I can do to prevent that from happening. That will also take some time to set up. Because of how X formerly known as Twitter has gone full bore into exploiting its users to train AI, I will not be using it as much. You can find me on the new sensation, BlueSky!

So, there’s a lot to do. At this point in time, I’m not teaching right now, just doing commissions and other stuff. So I might be out of a job, but at least the site works again!

Sayonara.