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FA Downtime, Critical Condition and Other Thought Garbage
11 years ago
CRITICAL CONDITION AND FULL TIME WORK
As some of you may have caught in the last two weeks visiting my streams, I've recently made the move to full-time artist. As I make the move from hobbyist projects to full scale professional quality stuff, there are some huge issues I'm running into that I never would have anticipated. Firstly is the RAM required to have open several comic pages at once running 600 DPI. I've lost work twice due to crashes, though I'm saving incredibly frequently now, though at file sizes that large it takes 10 seconds just to save (It's more annoying than it sounds). Secondly, being that I create manga and use tones, the moire effect is causing me a lot of headaches. What is the moire effect? This.
http://i.imgur.com/Jwl4VhB.png
The top image is STILL shrunken down. The original is 4x larger. When you scale down images with interference patterns that far, you get the moire effect. If you've got good software, generally it will have several mathmatical options for dealing with the moire effect, two of which are shown here, but you have no way of knowing how it will look until you save each page at the desired resolution individually to make that assessment. In the example, the first option is at least passable while the second is atrocious. And I'm having to do that with every tone, with every image I produce.
There are way more examples, and I could even go into how I need business hours, tons of notes, and a calendar just to manage commissions now, but the point is there are birthing pains associated with the begginning of my full time art career. It is in no way deterring me, but this week? Whew, baby! Making me earn every cent of my income. New respect for people who also do this full time, no doubt. Believe me, people who post personal art here, take commissions and also find time to post to paysites are working over 50-60 hours a week if I had to guess.
What is the result of all this work? Well, if you bother to read my journals you probably deserve a cookie. I can't fit cookies through the internet pipes though, so have this instead.
http://i.imgur.com/GTNtXsc.png
Can I promise I'll redo the entire first chapter? No. This was an experiment in professional quality work that revealed a lot of flaws in the original, up to and including terrible resolutions, sloppy shading, poor use of space and panel flow, lazy panels, and bad perspective. I didn't know what a register mark or A5 and B4 paper was. I didn't know how to create a recognizable character or anything about propotions. I've even redone a FEW pages and I got LUCKY here. In every other page, I've had to redraw whole panels because they were so awful. And I haven't even gotten to the end where I went full Lazy Mode (sad but true).
FA DOWNTIME AND /CONSPIRACIES/
Well welcome back everybody. Wild ride, eh? I don't know about you, but this downtime has made me extremely nervous. I'm not going to contribute a ton of time to this, but here is a timeline of the events of this past week.
http://i.imgur.com/iotRP0X.jpg
So needless to say there are some extremely important questions about this that I want answered. To me this is a serious situation.
-How reliable is a place like FA to depend on for interacting with customers?
-How could you possibly create a GoFundMe page to move FA to the cloud hours before the DDoS attack?
-Why with a GoFundMe page at your disposal would you not to link it for 3 days despite being asked?
-Why the price jump from $200 a month for better DDoS protection to a $25,000 lump sum?
-Which is obviously mostly for server upgrades and Phoenix development?
-Why would nobody claim responsibility for an attack of this scale?
-Why did FA come back immediately after you started being funded?
EDIT: Also why this you totally oblivious moron? http://i.imgur.com/bmx7AaQ.png
I could answer most of these questions if I was making baseless accusations, but I won't. Yes, the DDoS attack happened. The big question now is who attacked. Regarding the GoFundMe page being created just hours before the attack began, there are two possibilities.
1. This is the unluckiest coinscidence of all time and Dragoneer is just telling a white-lie to take advantage of a bad situation, saying that all this money is to move FA into the cloud, when it's actually for server upgrades and Phoenix funding.
2. Dragoneer knew about the attack in advance in some fashion, and took advantage of the situation to make some dollary-doos.
Keep in mind I'm not painting anyone guilty here, but even if we assume the best of Dragoneer in that this is all a coincidence, you still have to buy that he created a GoFundMe page for unrelated server upgrades and Phoenix development which he had on hand even before FA went down and linked or mentioned it nowhere, that he used the DDoS attack as a catalyst on purpose to fuel that campaign, and is being disingenuous at best when he claims it's for cloud migration. $25,000 is good for FA if it means better servers and capabilities, but the ends don't justify the means and raising money under false pretenses is still wrong. If it comes to light that FA is doing one worse and creating false flags to extort its users I would probably pay much closer attention to FA developments in the future as I take this kind of thing very seriously. Nuff said.
Drop me a comment to let me know what you think, or call me a crazy sexy smut-producing raving lunatic (emphasis on sexy). What do you think about this FA bologna? What do you think about the possibility of a professional quality doujin out of me?
As some of you may have caught in the last two weeks visiting my streams, I've recently made the move to full-time artist. As I make the move from hobbyist projects to full scale professional quality stuff, there are some huge issues I'm running into that I never would have anticipated. Firstly is the RAM required to have open several comic pages at once running 600 DPI. I've lost work twice due to crashes, though I'm saving incredibly frequently now, though at file sizes that large it takes 10 seconds just to save (It's more annoying than it sounds). Secondly, being that I create manga and use tones, the moire effect is causing me a lot of headaches. What is the moire effect? This.
http://i.imgur.com/Jwl4VhB.png
The top image is STILL shrunken down. The original is 4x larger. When you scale down images with interference patterns that far, you get the moire effect. If you've got good software, generally it will have several mathmatical options for dealing with the moire effect, two of which are shown here, but you have no way of knowing how it will look until you save each page at the desired resolution individually to make that assessment. In the example, the first option is at least passable while the second is atrocious. And I'm having to do that with every tone, with every image I produce.
There are way more examples, and I could even go into how I need business hours, tons of notes, and a calendar just to manage commissions now, but the point is there are birthing pains associated with the begginning of my full time art career. It is in no way deterring me, but this week? Whew, baby! Making me earn every cent of my income. New respect for people who also do this full time, no doubt. Believe me, people who post personal art here, take commissions and also find time to post to paysites are working over 50-60 hours a week if I had to guess.
What is the result of all this work? Well, if you bother to read my journals you probably deserve a cookie. I can't fit cookies through the internet pipes though, so have this instead.
http://i.imgur.com/GTNtXsc.png
Can I promise I'll redo the entire first chapter? No. This was an experiment in professional quality work that revealed a lot of flaws in the original, up to and including terrible resolutions, sloppy shading, poor use of space and panel flow, lazy panels, and bad perspective. I didn't know what a register mark or A5 and B4 paper was. I didn't know how to create a recognizable character or anything about propotions. I've even redone a FEW pages and I got LUCKY here. In every other page, I've had to redraw whole panels because they were so awful. And I haven't even gotten to the end where I went full Lazy Mode (sad but true).
FA DOWNTIME AND /CONSPIRACIES/
Well welcome back everybody. Wild ride, eh? I don't know about you, but this downtime has made me extremely nervous. I'm not going to contribute a ton of time to this, but here is a timeline of the events of this past week.
http://i.imgur.com/iotRP0X.jpg
So needless to say there are some extremely important questions about this that I want answered. To me this is a serious situation.
-How reliable is a place like FA to depend on for interacting with customers?
-How could you possibly create a GoFundMe page to move FA to the cloud hours before the DDoS attack?
-Why with a GoFundMe page at your disposal would you not to link it for 3 days despite being asked?
-Why the price jump from $200 a month for better DDoS protection to a $25,000 lump sum?
-Which is obviously mostly for server upgrades and Phoenix development?
-Why would nobody claim responsibility for an attack of this scale?
-Why did FA come back immediately after you started being funded?
EDIT: Also why this you totally oblivious moron? http://i.imgur.com/bmx7AaQ.png
I could answer most of these questions if I was making baseless accusations, but I won't. Yes, the DDoS attack happened. The big question now is who attacked. Regarding the GoFundMe page being created just hours before the attack began, there are two possibilities.
1. This is the unluckiest coinscidence of all time and Dragoneer is just telling a white-lie to take advantage of a bad situation, saying that all this money is to move FA into the cloud, when it's actually for server upgrades and Phoenix funding.
2. Dragoneer knew about the attack in advance in some fashion, and took advantage of the situation to make some dollary-doos.
Keep in mind I'm not painting anyone guilty here, but even if we assume the best of Dragoneer in that this is all a coincidence, you still have to buy that he created a GoFundMe page for unrelated server upgrades and Phoenix development which he had on hand even before FA went down and linked or mentioned it nowhere, that he used the DDoS attack as a catalyst on purpose to fuel that campaign, and is being disingenuous at best when he claims it's for cloud migration. $25,000 is good for FA if it means better servers and capabilities, but the ends don't justify the means and raising money under false pretenses is still wrong. If it comes to light that FA is doing one worse and creating false flags to extort its users I would probably pay much closer attention to FA developments in the future as I take this kind of thing very seriously. Nuff said.
Drop me a comment to let me know what you think, or call me a crazy sexy smut-producing raving lunatic (emphasis on sexy). What do you think about this FA bologna? What do you think about the possibility of a professional quality doujin out of me?
And here I remember when your entire HARD drive was no bigger than 50MB, because yes I am that old. Thats also how much a FULL INSTALL of the original Starcraft was. Now my project file is just as big. Haha.
I used to work IT too, I feel your pain.
The latest mobos with the latest DDR support go up to 128 GB RAM capacity. That is insane. What would you even do with that? Might as well just get a SSD.
1) Reliable, but I wouldn't depend exclusively upon it. Set up a presence elsewhere for backup; Weasyl, Inkbunny, and email are all good resources. One should never put all their eggs in one basket.
2) Contrived coincidence... or, the more likely reason, which I'm not gonna state for fear of being modded.
3) Could honestly be a case of dropping the ball and being an absolute idiot for a bit. But again, it seems suspicious.
4) Seems like it could be a bribe of some kind, or potentially some kinda black-market stuff goin' on. Nobody needs a 25k lump sum except for lottery winners and black market salesmen.
5) *shrug*
6) Claiming responsibility is risky. It's easy to have your IP tracked, so somebody claiming to take part in a ddos against four separate websites would have a lot of people trying to figure them out. It'd be too big a gamble, and the lack of an identity can actually do more to inspire fear. Of course, inspiring fear is as usable a trait for hackers as it is for... well, certain leaders trying to keep their followers under control. *ahem*
7) According to the graph, didn't FA come back some time -before- they started being funded? Or is there some sort of delay between payment and funding confirmation? This part honestly doesn't look very suspicious unless there's a delay, which would mean that FA would've come up within an hour or even minutes after having received funding... which is shady indeed.
I honestly think that #2 is the more likely of the two options. A few furries have way too much money to blow, and a bunch of other furries' businesses are utterly dependent upon FA. If the site were, say, held hostage for a while to reduce business and simultaneously cut off commissioners' access to their investments, and suddenly a way for these business-furs and commissioners to spend money to magically make a difference suddenly arose, well...
The timing is pretty damn shady. Dragoneer has been involved in a lot of REALLY questionable activities in the past, including but not limited to covering up illegal activity, so the likelihood is, well... unfortunately very, very possible.
I just added this, which totally makes me furious. The idea that someone could post something like that an hour after the site gets funded is ridiculous.
As I said earlier I'm inclined to believe 1 myself, but either way its shitty.
And no, the graph doesn't even have uptime on it. This is before the site going up. If you look, the pings are off the chart. This is after their hosts facilities went back up but the site was still inaccessible.
...Well, that pretty much confirms my suspicions. As if we needed any more reason to think that 'Neer was a dirty bastard.
Fact 'o the matter is that he's very obviously spending money that was donated for the explicit purpose of servicing Furaffinity, whether directly or indirectly.
I don't know what kind of job he works, so there -is- the possibility he got paid today by his workplace (if he has one), so that added funds to his "Buy a cintiq" pool... but even if that's the case, it's made of money he would've normally spent for keeping FA up and running, which should be pretty damn possible anyway given all the ad revanue this place has to draw in. That means that at best, he's piggybacking off of FA's users' donations so that he can use money normally spent on the site on himself instead.
At worst, it means he's -directly spending- the money that the populace donated to bring FA back up. At -worse still-, it could even mean that he may have temporarily shut down FA himself to save money on the expenses for keeping the site going, while simultaneously opening up the donations to maximize profits. Now I'll admit, suggesting -that- much is going out on a limb, but I have plenty of reason to suspect that 'Neer isn't above such practices. As does much of FA, really.
I don't trust 'Neer enough to keep an open mind about him, after some of the things he's done or tried to cover up.
This is the only part of your post I'd say I vehemently disagree with. Saying that Neer shouldn't be able to buy nice things because he has a site to run is stooping pretty low. Regardless of whether or not he's guilty we can always take the high road. If its bought with his own money great, but him posting that at this particular time and not refuting Iron_Raptor's allegations shows a complete lack of awareness. And that's all it really proves for now.
What I'm saying is that he shouldn't be using money he'd normally spend on the site to do so.
Say you make 500 USD a week.
If you spend 250 USD a week on bills...
Another 100 USD a week on groceries...
And then 100 USD a week to maintain a site, leaving 50 USD for spending on whatever...
And people donate money to help you out with the website charges?
Your spending money shouldn't inexplicably increase from 50 USD to 150 USD that week. Seeing as you own the site, you still hold the responsibility to keep it up and running unless it's entirely a fan-funded site. If you wanna make the site entirely fan-funded and claim so, then sure. But when that's not the case, then your usual weekly budget shouldn't be put into a rainy-day fund. It should be saved for future situations on the site itself.
At least, that's the way I was taught growing up. I don't expect everyone else to share my beliefs there, but it sounds like a pretty reasonable expectation to me.
I don't expect everyone else to share my beliefs in that case, but it sounds like a pretty reasonable belief to follow, in my opinion.
Now him using it as a convenient excuse to get money out of people while they are still shaken from the attack that is 100% something he would do. That said even though there will be a slew of anger journals, fix fa journals I'm leaving fa for x website etc Little to nothing will change I believe the majority of furs will continue to hang out here and do business create drama etc. This isn't even the worst downtime fa has had, furs just seem to forget all the bad things that neer and his cronies have done/ any previous down time that has happened by and large. This makes the perfect environment for people like neer to take advantage of and abuse people.
So I guess in closing and I'm sure someone will argue about this with me. I have to say neer and his antics are just a sympton of a larger problem with the fandom and if we are ever going to actully make real changes to things we would have to look inwards first instead of chasinbg after people like neer who if even ousted would just be replaced by someone the same or worse.
final few notes:
I do agree the attack feels odd to me I have yet to pin it down but I have not seen anyone mention it or claim responsibility in my usual haunts and considering how many websites were affected That is VERY odd.
Have I ruled out foul play, Not at all I just think neer is the wrong tree to be barking up.
I bet almost no one remember's fa's self inflicted week of read only mode that happened awhile ago or going even way way back the fact that there was a 50/50 chance in the early days that fa would be up or down every day.
I have forgotten more things that neer has done then the average fur can actually remember him doing and that's just kinda sad.
Fa continues to be the most frequented fur site despite its long checkered history concerning its staff/ stabilty. I think the only thing that could kill fa at this point is something extreme like it coming to light that a hacker had stolen everyone's personal info in a attack or maybe the site going sfw only as porn is what keeps many people here.
Anyways no one really knows what the future holds but its still fun to guess :0
Additionally yes fear is useful but one also has to take into consideration the larger the attack the more likely someone is to brag/ people just end up figuring things out. the internet stores evidence of everything you just Gotta know how to find it lol
Additionally don't forget its mostly unknown except to maybe other staff how much fa pulls in per month from the ads people post cus you can sure as fuck guarantee neers not running those out of the goodness of her heart.
Sorry for all the posts things keep bubbling up in my memory after I finish each post lol
FA doesn't pull in that much with ads. Neer says this and I believe him. Most of the ads are users advertising themselves and the prices are right there for anyone to see.
At the end of the day its his site, that said it is still good to remember stuff like this if you have to deal with him, at the ed of the day all I have written here is still more or less just opinions unless I provide screenshots etc and to be blunt I just don't care that much, I am interested in seeing how the aftermath of all this plays out though.
One Quick trick on the patterning (that works for some but not all people's work flow) to avoid the moire effect is to just define the patterned regions as a mask on a full layer of the given pattern, save the image WITH the masks and layers. Now when you shrink an image, if a texture gets really crappy due to moire, just replace the patterns that went to crap with an unshrunken version of them, or if you prefer a different texture that might look better on that scale.
Another trick is if you work with standard sizes (say always draw at x resolution, scale down to y) then create a standard pallet of patterns specifically for your (x to y) standard working/scaling operation. Just grab a bunch of textures you link, shrink them by the corresponding standard amount, and chuck all the ones that become ugly, save the rest and use them exclusively when working in these standards. This way there are no pleasant surprises, you know how everything will look before and after.
Out of curiosity when might we get to see the new and or redone CC stuff, and what form might it take?
The timeline just doesn't add up.
1. Neer did nothing wrong, you'll find any reason to hate FA.
2. lol u r gunna get banned 4 saying the truth but srsly fuck neer.
Neither are reasonable positions. Neers not gonna go around banning people who voice well thought out and reasonable concerns even if he knows he is innocent. I just want people following me to know where I stand on this. Extortion is wrong. Raising money under false pretenses is wrong. And if for some reason it gets any worse than that, I don't want my watchers to think my ire came out of nowhere.
It's not. Clearly. We've known this for years. FA is not a shop-front, it's a fan site. Some people make a nice bit of money on it sure, but is it reliable? No.
I can't answer your other questions, but this seems to be your #1 concern, and I think you're absolutely right to be concerned.