mary cuntrarian

 So I talked about before just showing y'all my art and I recently redid my website so I might as well share it here. 




KatrinaEvans.Art - It's my art site/personal site. I decided I wasn't sharing enough about myself to people who followed my work and I don't want to keep my fandomy side apart from my art anymore. I used to think I had to appear professional and in order to do that had to surpress stuff about myself. But fuck that. 

I also handcoded this myself on Neocities, so please give it a look! I put a lot of work into it. I'm going to be adding more work to the portfolio page, and I want to write more blogs about my work.

If you like my work, I'm currently taking commissions and there's a page on my site with more info. I can do fanart or just something else you've been wanting! I'll be frank - I desperately need some work, so even if you just order an avatar it would be amazing. I'm also doing $15 ink pen pet portraits and you can order those on my Kofi!

Also if anyone needs a website, I can code one for you for cheap! :D

I don't know if y'all even remember me but I'm back and going to try to write here more. One reason I haven't is my laptop is this close to taking a complete shit and barely works and just isn't very fun to use. I've had to take a break from making websites cause it's such a pain and I miss it.

But I also can make posts here from my phone so really I have no excuse except too much happens all the time and I don't know where to start.

A few main things: 

• Had some pieces displayed in a local gallery downtown for a few months, I didn't sell anything but it was nice to get those pieces seen.
• I'm going to try and vend at a market coming in June because I have a lot of art to sell and still can't find a job so I need to make some money.
• I hang out at the mall a lot because my husband works at the smoke shop there, so I'm basically an adult mall rat at this point because I have no life.
• I've reached Lord level with White Fox on Marvel Rivals already, I'm autistic about playing her every time and also think she's on the spectrum. lol
• I'm obsessed with Yellowjackets and think about it all the time now. I'm caught up and I can't wait for the new season. I love Tai/Van :( :( :( I'm trying to get hubby (Mr. Strange) into it but they're not really in a binging shows mood right now. Please someone talk about this fucking show with me!!! 
• I also started reading again and have found *ahem* a lot of pdfs of books I'm interested in. I read Bunny by Mona Awad in two days and I don't know how I feel about it. I think I need to read it again and maybe make a whole post about it but basically I watched a youtube review that said it was mostly vibes, and lacking substance. I'd have to agree. I get that it was a satire but it felt so empty. I did enjoy a lot of the vibes and aesthetics but it felt like candy - cute and fun and yummy but also nauseating and just junk food. Has anyone read it?
• I don't know anymore wtf is happening in the US as a country any more, how do I even comment? It makes me so angry and want to say things I can't say online. I guess I just wanna know is everyone reading this right now okay??

What is everyone reading/watching/crafting/whatever right now? 

Just a little post for now because I like this idea!

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

I went to the library a few days ago with my partner. We'd had a lot of books for a while that were overdue, thankfully they don't charge late fees but they do charge for the books themselves after a while.

We have been getting books from the bookmobile that was coming once a month, but the library has been defunded and after November the bookmobile won't be running anymore. We're very crushed because it was one of the few things we could count on that was a nice thing to do and I really loved the driver, a nice older man who had good taste in music and books, he's now unemployed. It's so unfair, and it also needs to be said this was in the works for years so before the orange fucker was in office, Uncle Joe was working on this too.

But I digress, the books I checked out were a copy of Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer. I am in love with this man's writing in the Southern Reach series and it's going to be interesting to read his voice in a new, unrelated story.

I grabbed Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami even though I absolutely hated Norwegian Wood when I read it years ago. There was something about it that spoke to me, so we'll see how that read goes.

Also took out two compilations of Blacksad comics that I am loving so far. I kind of want to read it all. It reminds me of the homebrew D&D world my Mr. Strange has come up with. It's about a Fantasy Florida that has wild magic and is very animal folk heavy. I think the writing is pretty good if a bit fast paced but the watercolor illustrations are gorgeous and so my type of shit.

Lastly I picked up something called The Bozz Chronicles which is a collection of comics from the 80's about a suicidal alien, the art is cool as fuck and I'm into the vibes. It's very Steampunk which I don't normally go for but I'm feeling this.

Mr. Strange picked up some, of course, Doctor Strange comics, their favorite. ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ✩‧˚

(16) The Matrix + header
(12) Neon Genesis Evangelion + header


( Neo, get in the fucking Matrix. )

There is always a train, there is always a train and I am always on it, I am always on it. It is always moving forward and I am always riding it forward until it won't go anymore. I'm not driving the train but there is always a train that I am always on going forward without trying, going forward on a train that has no destination. There is always a train and I am the only one on it.

I used to live near enough a train station to actually ride it every now and then. Now I live in a backwards area that has little to no public transport. I've always found trains fun, I don't have special interest in them but when I'm riding one I feel especially interested in being there.

It seems like the most stable form of transport in that the car is literally on rails. I know very well things can go off the rails but in theory it's not supposed to (it's not supposed to) and that screech of steel on steel lets us all know this carriage is serious and feels older than the idea of travel.

I've been rewatching Neon Genesis Evangelion and before you roll your eyes I can tell you it's one of my most favorite things in the world, so you should feel bad. There are a lot of scenes at the train station or scenes on a train. To me it always represented the characters lack of agency, that no one in the show has any control over their lives nor even understand what they're doing and to what end. There are important moments that happen at train stations, in the show, in real life. I proposed to the love of my life at a train station, I've had panic attacks that felt like the end in trains, in buses, in the back of taxis. Once I got on the wrong bus and it changed the course of my entire life.

I moved across country with my mother when I was ten years old, on a train. My father was on the other side of that train, behind me, and if we had never left...

A lot of shit happens on trains. And cars. A lot. I read Lolita for the first time on a train, on a long trip, and it felt apt. I had been an emotionally abused child that was pulled from this safe place and that to somewhere I didn't know and back again. Never given agency or asked where I wanted to be, where I felt comfortable.

I've been rewatching Evangelion because I'm depressed. Because I feel like I've lost all control of my life and while the world continues to burn around me, I just want to watch something worse. Something beautiful and raw, but worse. It's the same reason I watch horror, to feel comforted by the surreal absurded unreality of it all. But I need hope and hope is television to the sad elder millennial. Hope is media, in small doses, here and there, the good shit that gets into your bloodstream and changes your dna. Or something more scientific sounding.

I think I've lost my train of thought.

(Edit: Recently watched The Matrix Revolutions since I posted this... There is always a fucking train.)

I've been listening to a lot of Lord Huron. Probably too much. Recently I became obsessed with the Southern Reach trilogy, now four books total with the new one. Lord Huron might be one of the most Area X-core bands because they do work as companions. I could put on "Time's Blur" on repeat through reading the entire first novel and it would probably sync up like those old urban legends about albums syncing up to movies. "Looking Back" seems to be from Old Jim's pov, and "What Do It Mean" could be the anthem of the series. Or "Not Dead Yet".

Anyway, because of this combination I've been thinking about death and decay probably more than I should be. Specifically the death of the internet and the decay of our online footprint. The path of our lives we weave through the world wide web is long and winding and strange. It can also be frozen in time, or placed in a sort of stasis.

Does anything truly die on the internet?

Last night I was on the Wayback Machine using an old "Dollzmaker" to well, make a doll. (If you'd like an example or to make one yourself, go ham.)

When I was in middle school aged (and high school, let's be honest), I used to spend way too much time on these Dollzmaker sites. I remember for a while my mother and I only had WebTV which didn't let you do much online. Think of a crappy Chromebook with your television as the monitor. You couldn't save files to a hard drive or download software. I remember begging users online to make me custom dollz in Photoshop, which I barely even knew what that was at the time.

I'd later graduate to using Photoshop, and getting a real computer, but I stayed obsessed with those dollz. I would stare zombified at the screen dragging and placing little assets to Frankenstein myself together. Killing my eyesight one pixel at a time.

Those little shiny bitches used to be my whole personality. They represented me as I couldn't be at the time, or how I thought I couldn't be. Pretty, sexy, wearing wild cool clothes. I was plain and too poor to ever get the sort of clothes I wanted.

The internet is like a living organism. Like the Crawler in Annihilation, it thinks and writes and records. I'm not talking about AI, more about the metaphorical idea of the world wide web. The terroir of it. Things would die forever if humans didn't keep cataloguing them, if we didn't invent things like the Wayback Machine to revive decaying web pages.

How much of the internet is in us, and us in the internet?

People talk about their online footprint all the time but I can feel mine like a tether. I don't think I've ever said anything too bad, mind. I most likely said dumb things out of ignorance. Probably some not so feminist speak? What i mean though when I say I feel it like a tether is pulling at me is somewhere along the web is a line from the first moment I logged onto a computer that leads up directly to my last breath. Isn't that fucking weird?

I hold so much nostalgia for the experience of searching for and making those Dollz. The memory is buried in my mind like mushrooms growing in the dirt. But somewhere deep in all that code is me, as well. I've found old flickr accounts, livejournal entries, cached webpages with my old childish usernames burrowed somewhere in the page text. I've changed the internet in small ways, and in ways more obviously and also imperceptibly, it's changed me.

Last night I burst into tears making one of these Dollz, thinking about how one day the only things left behind to prove I ever existed will be the ghost of me online. It was a random intrusive thought that hit me to my core. One day this little pixelated, inappropriately dressed icon will represent me somewhere when I'm not here anymore.

In the Southern Reach trilogy, doppelgängers and inconceivable monsters replace the dead. Nothing, floral nor fauna, every truly dies. It just shifts, and evolves.

In Lord Huron's new album, The Cosmic Selector v. 1, the narrator in the first song sings about "living outside of my body and mind". Is that what we're doing? Leaving behind memories, dreams and nightmares to keep us immortal?

There's something about the new album that has carried on from almost every other Lord Huron album, but in a good way. The theme of a lonely traveler who is forever looking for some mythical other half. "Is There Anybody Out There" says "i'm alone in this place, and i stare out into space, and i feel something strange, like my world has changed."

Just like Control, like Gloria, like the biologist and my technological footprint. Like Saul. Our histories change us, decay us, and become us.