A Kraxn is Viennese slang for an old jalopy, junker, or rattletrap. As a young lad, my grandmother regularly used this word to describe her vehicle. Eventually we developed own our vernacular, and Kraxn became synonymous for any old but useful tool. Amongst those I am close to, I still use this term – so its only fitting that kraxn become the name of this blog.

Likewise, blogs are now crusty old tech that are rapidly replaced by various aspects of social media. These platforms have wrapped their tentacles around our attention. They enslave many to put on their best public face, reverberate inside others echo chambers, or force them into using unwanted/unwarranted technology. A blog, though an older technology, can give users an anonymous voice and control over technology.

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Kraxn.io was a blog I kept from late 2018 to early 2020. This includes my art (for example, Sketch-A-Day), music samples, a little bit of technical writing, as well as thoughts on existence. I originally wanted to keep it anonymous, but know I am fine with this blog being associated to vonnagy.com now. Because I used this for Sketch-A-Day, it also showcases my best blogging effort – blogging consecutively or one year!

For more technical details, I used textpattern for the first iteration of this blog, and luapress for the second iteration before importing everything here into wordpress. There is much to be said about both systems, I am only begrudgingly going back to wordpress now. Textpattern is a very minimal blogging system; it still uses a mysql database, but everything else is  ‘hackable’ in the best sense of the word. It doesn’t have as many plugins as as wordpress, however, you’ll be doing your own tweaks to everything (but this can be fun). Its actively maintained and has a decent community.

On the other end, Luapress is a dynamic website generator. You essential write your blog post in markdown. Its great for writing – but a little more daunting if you want to use media (photo galleries are a bit of a pain).  It is fast, simple, stable, and so long as you are focused on writing, its a great tool. Unfortunately, its no longer being maintained, so though it is stable, you’ll have to hack your way through the source code to get things done your way. I also used luapress on my asylon.org website.

So this will be the final home of Kraxn.io – here are the complete posts from my blog from 20 August 2018 – 03 April, 2020:

• Sketch of the Day Theme: ear (9/28/2019) - Auditory-tactile synesthesia – certain sounds can induce sensations in parts of the body.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: wind (9/27/2019) - A wind up duck toy – referenced used.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: pirate (9/26/2019) - quick charcoal sketch of a pirate.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: balance (9/25/2019) -
• Sketch of the Day Theme: casino (9/24/2019) - Kraxn’s Urinal Pokies
• Sketch of the Day Theme: think (9/23/2019) - After Apple’s wildly successful ‘Think Different’ campaign, they wanted to diversify into other categories such as personal hygiene. Unfortunately the resulting product campaign was a complete flop.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: tunnel (9/22/2019) - From the Viennese Imperial Crypt, this is a quick study of one of the tombs in the underground tunnels. Charcoal.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: escape (9/21/2019) - A sinking keyboard, with one ESCapee.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: kitchen (9/20/2019) - Charlotte’s first tinder date proclaimed he was a ‘wizard in the kitchen’. She was both impressed and terrified to never use the app again. coloured pencils and ball point pen.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: ticket (9/19/2019) - A sloth at the ticket counter, life in the slow lane.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: honey (9/18/2019) - Sir Edmund Hillary was a beekeeper.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: young (9/17/2019) - My wife / My Mother-in-law illusion.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: drum (9/16/2019) - The Zildjian Kingfisher of Papua New Guinea uses a wet fish to create a unique percussive sound on the hollow leaves of the tom-tom tree. Every spring, the forest goes wild with drumming. Not to be outdone, the females line up by hundreds to the best drummers and start gyrating fervently. Only the best males […]
• Sketch of the Day Theme: pet (9/15/2019) - I feel like I missed out on my childhood by not having a my pet monster
• Sketch of the Day Theme: wash (9/14/2019) - Medieval Kutsikakuela, Estonia: witches were given the puppy-face-wash test. It was believed witches couldn’t experience joy, so if they laughed they were set free. None were ever executed.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: danger (9/13/2019) - Today’s sketch of the day comes from the Château d’Angers (see what I did there?) This is a quick study of the beast spewing frogs from his mouth from the Tapisserie de l’Apocalypse within the Château. Sketched with a number 8 pencil.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: scare (9/12/2019) - Just a quick pencil one for today – scare for scarecrow.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: koala (9/11/2019) - The 80’s hit ‘Safety Dance’ was inspired as a warning for beach ravers to not dance near burrowing koala dens. This is not a great sketch, but I wasn’t into it today.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: alien (9/10/2019) - After 10 years of unexplained cattle mutilations caused Uruguay’s beef production to slip by nearly 18%, the beef industry took matters into their own hands and started to breed their cattle with the spanish fighting bull (toro de lidia). The result was a smashing success: in the next 3 years cattle mutilations dropped 98.6%, beef […]
• Sketch of the Day Theme: pop (9/9/2019) - A Hungarian folk remedy by gardeners to keep hedgehogs (európai sün) from mating in their prize gardens is to throw paprika soup filled balloons at them. See this reference
• Sketch of the Day Theme: Monkey (9/8/2019) - The “stoned ape theory” by Terrence McKenna suggested that human consciousness evolved when great apes took psilocybin mushrooms. Read more about it at the Big Think. Done with Charcoal and colour pencils.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: electric (9/7/2019) - In the 1960s, Chile used cameras on condors as a drone system to photograph football games. The practice came to an abrupt end when it was discovered that electric pulses where sent to its abdomen, forcing it to defecate when it flew over Peruvian fans.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: galaxy (9/6/2019) - So I just didn’t feel like drawing anything too space age – so today’s theme Galaxy is an intergalactic grocer name Møe. The text on image from top to bottom, left to right (some is not very legible): Galaxy Møe’s subpar market It’s a blackhole of savings!!! We are too cheap to be cheerful Preloved […]
• Sketch of the Day Theme: police (9/5/2019) - In Australia, Police use Emu to track lost backpackers in the Outback. Emus have advantages over dogs in that they can cope with extreme heat and have greater accuracy of differentiating humans from other animal carcasses. Pencil.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: table (9/4/2019) - The table tortoise (Aldabrachelys mensam magnam) was the only known nordic tortoise. Though vikings used shells as shields, their extinction was exacerbated by IKEA harvesting shells for coffee tables in the 1950s. Some say the yellow oval in the IKEA logo came from the top the table tortoise’s blonde coloured shell. Sketch in Charcoal
• Sketch of the Day Theme: date (9/3/2019) - No romance out of today’s theme, this is the brutal reality that kids face when getting tricked into eating at date. This was a super fast (less than 5 minute) sketch, so not much quality here. Used a standard pen for this drawing
• Sketch of the Day Theme: glasses (9/2/2019) - Today’s theme was glasses, and the artwork of Kenyan Cyrus Kabiru served as superb inspiration for the topic. He takes discard items and transforms them into timeless works of art that you can wear. This was drawn using #8 Pencil.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: mountain (9/1/2019) - Today’s silly story – in the Tyrolean Alps, if a man kicks the first trout he sees in the springtime, he will have luck with the ladies for the rest of the year. Done in blue ink – pretty tough, you can’t hide your mistakes and there were several here! Nonetheless it was pretty fun […]
• Sketch of the Day Theme: snake (8/31/2019) - This is an ayahuasca inspired snake – many of those who partake in an ayahuasca cermony (which involves a natural form of the psychedelic DMT) report seeing a terrifying but ultimately benevolent cosmic serpent. This was done with a pen.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: prom (8/30/2019) - I felt uninspired today, so instead of doing something romantic for Prom. So i here’s very quick dirty PROMetheum barrel and a homeless guy warming up beside it.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: texture (8/29/2019) - I was originally going to go something with the Catherine Wheel song texture. In the end, I came across some art by Martin Witt, and saw a buffalo. I referenced a few shaggy buffalo for this image. I used a blunt charcoal pencil for this.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: desk (8/28/2019) - Done with colour pencils and & 4,5,6 pencils. Just a quick one of me sitting behind my desk. Its referencing some of my previous sketch-day-sketches.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: famous (8/27/2019) - A very quick sketch – the theme was famous so I combined a few things. “World famous in New Zealand” is a advertising catchphrase for L&P soda. Recently sketch-a-day member Sally reached a year of sketches, so she is ‘world famous on sketch-a-day’. The next in line is user NevadaSeaworkers, hiding behind the L&P bottle.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: thanks (8/26/2019) - This bird will probably give thanks due to imping – the grafting of new feathers into damaged feathers. Was more of interesting theme than a good sketch for me today.
• Sketch of the Day Theme: bus (8/25/2019) - I lost interest in this pretty quickly after I drew it; theme today was bus. I drew a busker with a bus behind it (the driver is on his mobile phone). I am not sure what the story is here, so I leave it up to the user. This was sketched with a number 4 […]