I'm learning more about the Canadian/ Québécois 80s which is so funny because it's passingly similar enough to my American experience to feel familiar without being actually recognizable.

Being here feels like gentle senility, like Are you my son? I feel like I know you, you seem nice, have we met? You remind me of my son, he'd like you.

e.g. rock from 1984 (it's in french)


and this gem is from 1982, but it sounds like modern "retro" from a year ago - like, "What The Kids Think the 80s Sounded Like, More Than The Actual 80s". I'd never heard of them, and I love this:

Here's part 3!
Thank you to every cat and character for the cameos <3

I stg furry can be exhausting. Here is a video from 2016 showing my general process.

The idea was to carry a portrait through the life of the subject.

This was made as a teaching example for a digital illustration class.
I can show you how to do it - it can be taught. Just ask.

Here's part 2!
Thank you to every cat and character for the cameos <3

There's one for each track of the album, working on part 2.
Thank you to every cat and character for the cameos <3

Track Listing:
00:00 Our Two Cats Love Each Other
03:12 Routine Affection
06:32 Sometimes They Argue But Never Do They Fight
12:17 We Benefit From Proximity
19:11 It Is Like This Every Day

Music available for free download at:
https://muleboy.bandcamp.com/album/.....ove-each-other

Track Listing:

00:00 Water Landing
04:03 Much More Alike Than Different
07:35 Empty Tank
11:27 Every Stone Worn Smooth
14:12 Crystal
17:09 1000 Years
21:25 Sirens
24:12 Each Irregular Voice Is Beautiful
29:17 Prospero

Music available for free download at:
https://muleboy.bandcamp.com/album/worn-smooth

I remember him first as Preyfar, met in passing at a convention. Big guy, but so young and new to furry, so enthusiastic. I remember his early art, and how much he was soaking up the visual culture of the fandom. This place has made a lot of community happen, and I am grateful for that and his contributions.

Track Listing:

00:00 Ampere
02:35 Days of Storage
05:08 Zero Net Energy
07:32 Superluminary
10:02 Solar
11:42 Photovoltaic
16:05 Apollo
19:53 The Self-Generation Incentive Program
22:20 Calendar Fade
25:26 Plasma

Music available for free download at:
https://muleboy.bandcamp.com/album/free

Track Listing:

00:00 Companions
01:21 Assembly
06:28 Gathering
14:36 Cadre
17:42 Team
19:13 Family
20:39 House
33:13 Camarilla

Album available for free download here:
https://muleboy.bandcamp.com/album/companions

Tracklisting:

00:00 Opia
01:53 Commont
07:15 Greebles
10:29 Morpholine
15:41 Calabria
17:43 Cultivar
19:49 Sortatio
24:43 Collatia
27:30 Abandonia

Album available for free download here:
https://muleboy.bandcamp.com/album/dreamland

The album “Mew Tiny” by Muleboy (2023)

Track Listing:

0:00 So This One Time
2:57 Toronto
7:45 Pick Ur Battles
14:19 Transmission
14:56 For Two It Us
18:50 Tangerine
19:36 Deter Me Nation
22:46 Got No Kids Just Cats
24:39 Mew Tiny
26:26 Exit Plan

Album available for free download here:
https://muleboy.bandcamp.com/album/mew-tiny

Just moved here, and it's kinda nice :)

Made for a 30-minute session at Fracture in Second Life.

Sneaks - "And We're Off"
Kiki Rockwell - "Madeline"
Yaeji - "Raingurl"
Modjo - "Lady"
Max Cooper - "Repetition" (Finding Mir Mix)
Lusine - "Just A Cloud"
Vanilla - "Sunrise" (Do For Love Interlude)
Ginger Root - "Loretta"
The Avalanches - "Because I'm Me" (Outro)

Track Listing:

00:00 The Last Bee Still Warms The Hive
03:57 The Last Signal Tower
11:00 The Last American Summer
15:19 The Last Cat on Earth
19:22 The Last Dirt Road Home
25:38 The Last Sleepless Night
29:54 The Last Vending Machine in Quiet Ruin
32:22 The Last First Kiss
35:15 The Last Dazzling Holiday
38:58 The Last Concern

It's almost a new year, folks. Good luck and love to you all :3

From 2021, what a year. This stuff helped me cope, more or less. Y'all know how turmoil can be.

Fun fact: albums shoot for around 35 minutes because that's the duration of my subway commute to work.
I also have no sense of time and will play an album to keep track of what I'm doing, like an egg timer.
(In this scenario, I am the egg.)

Temporarily out from under a very heavy rock.

Will be participating in the following panel discussion at Boston Comic Con tomorrow (Sunday),
as per the description on the convention's website:

Queer Enough?
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Amphitheater
Participants: Tana Ford, Jennie Wood, Chris Goodwin, Joey Stern, Jon Erik Christianson, Kristi McDowell and moderator Brandon Sichling
Description: LGBQT comic artists, writers and reviewers discuss the current “golden age” of queer comics, the progress that has been made, and the work that still needs to be done to achieve more visibility in indie and mainstream comics.

OMG I just learned about Lotte Reiniger!

((If you already know, please forgive my late arrival to the fan party.))

1. Beautiful stills from her animations

2. Her Wiki entry

I just gave my first class to students for Introduction to Digital Illustration and I started with simple black and white images. She came up, along with Kara Walker, the general Victorian tradition of cameos and silhouette illustration, a few of my own images.

Also helped to balance out folks like Frank Miller and Mike Mignola who also make use of flat graphic visuals, but with face punching.

In general, sometimes the suggestive and detailed outline is sufficient, without further interior description.

Some things:

1. Everything I have seen about Zootopia is obnoxious to me. But I suppose "wait and see" is the answer, since any film and the promotional materials for that film are made by two different systems, often with two different agendas.

2. I'll be at Anthro New England this coming weekend, SEE YOU THERE. If you're there and want to sketch/trade/blah/lunch, please let me know, socializing is a good thing.

3. Was at QI last weekend and had fun being kinky and queer and among wonderful like-minded adults.

4. Working on a comic, like a real thing. It's coming together finally. Creating in collaboration with others is always a good thing to try. Often people address each other's weaknesses, and the result is better for it.

5. Dutch master painting from the 1600s is amazing. Such good smart sensitive portraiture. The local museum here had an exhibition. If any of you are local to Boston and enjoy crying in front of good art, let me know and we can go see stuff together.

6. Snowstorm coming. 2 feet of it predicted. Keep warm and bundled!

Things and things and more things :)

- Graphic novel stuff
- Grad school applications
- Teaching still
- Kink parties yay!
- Autumn leaves are happening, happening



1. NEW YORK:
http://www.newyorkcomiccon.com/
I will be at the New York Comicon this weekend, sitting at the table as colorist for the graphic novel FLUTTER, along with the writer and artist, etc.

If any of you are around Manhattan and want to show a donkey a good time this Friday or Saturday, let me know :)

2. BOSTON:
http://www.sgamassart.com/game-design-club/
I will be giving a talk on Modular Character Design at the Massachusetts College of Art this coming October 28 (Monday), 7pm
The talk will be amazing. If you're in/near Boston, drop by!

3. CAMBRIDGE:
http://www.micexpo.org/
I'll be attending MICE (Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo), October 17 (Saturday) in support of FLUTTER and so on.

Admission is FREE this year! Bring your comics. Make your comics. Where are your comics???



4. ARTSTUFF:
I personally just found out about these three artists that each make use of suggestion, fracturing and incompletion along with the clearly defined form. Sharing with you!



I. Antonio Mancini (1852 – 1930) Italian
ART: http://tinyurl.com/obof9d9

This was John Sargent's favorite painter, and the guy that showed him you can loosen the fuck up and it's okay. He was trained in the traditional way according to Renaissance ideals, but was also deeply interested in the hot new Impressionist stuff happening in France. His own approach was to proceed in the traditional manner of building a painting but to then stop at a point that would've been considered crude or unfinished or incomplete.

You can see this in some images that have a faint grid system throughout the piece, like this one - that comes from a technique of placing a large open frame between you and the subject (still life, model, landscape, etc.) and wrapping the frame in string horizontally and vertically to make a visual "grid". This grid you can then sketch onto your working surface and little by little transfer the bits you see more accurately. It's not a new technique, and in the end the final painting would cover all that up as just part of your working process. However, as with many things that start out as artifacts of construction, they become an aesthetic choice and Mancini like the way it looked, to see the means right there still embedded in the image. This draws attention to the surface of the image as a thing, a painting, not an illusion of a subject. The previous ideal was to minimize the surface as much as possible to make it seem like the image was window you could just reach right into. This new way of thinking about stopped you at the canvas, at the marks and smudges. It was a novel approach.

He also pushed this further, and if you see some of his later images, the "grid" from the string starts to be come less square, as he just wrapped the string more randomly, producing odd angles and slivers and triangles and shapes that seem embedded in the image more expressively, ephemerally like faint ley lines or new organizing principles for new forms.

Not only that, in many places his markmaking dissolves into what practically looks like the raw mess of the palette, all the right colors, just yet unworked into meaning, so that scrap of paper or edge of your image where you're testing your colors before you place them, that area is elaborated into the piece. All of this is showing the mechanics of the craft, instead of hiding it, which invites the viewer to step into the "studio" space as artist and feel what that's like. The image becomes much more interactive and a conversation, rather an a one way message of clarity from artist to viewer, you have to do some of the work in your eye and brain to finish and flesh out meaning from the suggestion.

This may not seem so novel to our eyes, used to sketches and roughs and so on. But this would have been a very daring and novel posture for a serious artist to take, to show what would essentially be "half-done" work as sufficient. It then starts to be art about making art as much as it is a portrait. It's a generous posture, as sketchwork tends to be, offering to the viewer a chance to hold the pencil or the brush, mentally.


II. Nicolai Fechin (1881 - 1955) Russian
ART: http://tinyurl.com/nvc8ce5

This fellow was later, and straddled the end of the 19th century and the surging rise of the 20th. And you can see it in his art, it looks like good old Impressionist fare, but then you'll see things seem very modern and could have been done last week.

What I love about this guy's work is that roving curious eye of the portrait artist. Even a quick glance through the thumbnails will show an interest in a huuuuge range of types: old, young, male, female, white, brown, black, etc. It comes across as an artist that is curious about the human animal as a subject - it seems like this guy must really and actually like people. Everybody looks handled fairly to me, and he really seems to be aware of the person beyond the academic rendering of shapes.

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine

BONUS: check out his portrait of Boris Karloff <3


III. Robert Heindel (1938 - 2005) American
ART: http://tinyurl.com/oqeegud

Much more modern, this guy was really prevalent in the 80's and is know for his paintings ballet dancers and broadway imagery. He was working in New York and this all very much part of that time and place. His stuff also has this finished/unfinished quality that looks evocative and dreamy, showing dancers practicing. Perhaps themselves unfinished as they learn the routines or stretching, etc. It all feel very casual and light. Very good, tight, focused drawing underneath, but the painted surface feels distracted and ephemeral, beautiful. Those lines and smudges and marks in some images can seem like pure abstraction, but they are the lines of fresh and old tape on the floor, marking beats and paths and stop points. The scuffing from shoes on grubby dance studio planks becomes the scuffing of paint on the canvas. So it's observed reality, but looks like abstracted painting, and serves as both, really.

Anyway, checked in for more housekeeping here.
Hope you are all doing well. Everyone says "Hi" <3

I don't know if you folks were aware of the site cghub.com before it went away. Now that url will take you to some weird conspiracy site about chemtrails and such.

BUT, the original site has apparently risen from the ashes as artstation.com.

It was started last year and serves the same function, largely as a portfolio art site for computer graphics.

The most notable feature is that the front page has a visual quilt of thumbnails that is constantly updated. Hit reload a few times to see how it works. Basically, each thumbnail represents an image that people are currently looking at. And the size of each thumbnail corresponds to how many people are viewing the same image at the moment.

So the larger the thumbnail, the more eyeballs are on the image, right then. Needless to say, a bunch of reloads in a row will show immediate trends and such, as things move around and change in size. I think it's an interesting solution for quality control, as the images that are the "face" of the site are self-sorted by the site viewers, in real time.

Looking at the site a few reloads at a time shows that a lot of the reptilian brain is at work: images of power fantasy, objectification, or fascination with expert but superficial technique, all seem to inform a large majority of the thumbnails. However, I also find that every so often, something will bubble up that breaks through this blur of imagery: something novel in theme or visual approach. It shows that while there is this pressure to make according to what the market seems to want (genre illustration), there is also a receptive hunger for new modes.

I like the churning of content and approaches on display. There is room for everything, particularly work that gives to the viewer as much as it asks from the viewer. Generosity, as a mode, is something to keep in mind for the illustrator who wants to communicate with the viewer, in a give and take dialogue - as opposed to artists making work for themselves, or only for personal expression.

I set up an account there myself, mostly to keep track of the cool stuff I'm seeing that I like. The site seems to be thriving.

Heard elsewhere that FurAffinity was sold to IMVU.

While hilarious, the news also reminded me that I had wandered off and stalled on clearing out of here.

So just now removed more stuff, and'll be more diligent about coming back to remove the rest regularly.
It's still a lot, but I'm trying to move things in related chunks.

Hope you all are doing well in your adventures :)

Hayyy, so my furriness is compartmentalized now!

Still shifting stuff over to Weasyl (same account: chrisgoodwin), but it's slow going and a little clunky. Many of you lovely folks pointed me tools that I'm using, but the bulk uploader requires more 'puter savvy than my donkey brain can manage. Something about pythons and scripts and such. I tried to download and install and run, but no dice :\

I really didn't want to have to piecemeal upload everything again, but at least it can be organized now :) Will start that along with posting new things there, too. The end state is to wrap up here, but that's going to take time.

Would it be worthwhile to move over journals too, I wonder? Not all the personal bullshit because that's dumb, but the technical posts about art and such have seemed useful to folks.

- - -

Speaking of which, TMI time!

So this past weekend S. and I went and had a ball at Queer Invasion. Each time we've attended, it's been incrementally more interesting and challenging, much like your basic RPG.

The technical 101 is: Doms exert control. subs yield control. Tops give sensation. Bottoms receive sensation. The top/bottom thing can subdivide to sadists who enjoy giving pain, and masochists enjoy receiving pain. Top/bottom can also refer to sexual roles.

These are all different things that can mix and match - they don't mean the same thing. You can be a Dominant masochistic sexual top: making somebody hurt you while you fuck them, for example. Or engage in D/s without pain - or even without physical sensation at all, just emotional interaction. It's all very modular and optional, and people into kink end up versed in separating these things out and managing their chosen interactions like grown-ups.

Some folks really go in for the mental blah and the dominance games and such, and that's cool, but it's not really for me. I've found that I have the best time hurting people who want to be hurt, without roleplay or side trappings. I don't use coded safewords because to me, "No" means no and "Slow Down" means slow down, and "Stop" means stop. I'm happy to communicate plainly, and am not interested in forcing anything or being "Sir". There are some folks who want to feel abused, but I'm not interested in that situation, or restraints or gags or other means of control. I have no interest in control, but violence - and with the right partner, it's like dancing :)

Anyway, I don't need most of the categories to have a good time, and am something of a pure sadist at QI. This has resulted in rather positive experiences, with a lot of mutuality and affection. And it's been my welcome discovery that pure sensory masochists do exist and that I can get along well with them very well.

S. says that pure sadists are rare, because most people are interested in some aspect of D/s. But that can be a lot of overhead for somebody who wants the endorphin rush of a beating, but doesn't want emotional entanglements or sexual complications or feeling worthless/helpless. I apparently am the guy for just that thing :) So I was approached this time by folks who all saw me play previously and were interested in a scene this time around; I was kept rather busy!

This time around I seem to have leveled up among folks known to be heavy masochists. So I was able to play with each partner as hard as I wanted until I was exhausted - which was really startling and thrilling for me. I was also surprised by the physical range of expression, as well. Tall and gaunt, short and soft, buff and solid, smooth or hairy. One partner was built like a truck, extremely dense and muscular, and it was like hitting a wall - that was amazingly freeing for me. In general the people I interacted with this time gave me permission for wonderful release and venting.

I have previously been able to provide a kind of catharsis for my partners, but this time around they weren't pent up at all - if anything these folks were giggling or happily moaning from the start. I think I was the one to enjoy the greater release this time, and I was able to get out all my tension and anger and blah :)

Another benefit from playing with highly experienced bottoms was that they taught me some advanced stuff I wouldn't have picked up before with more casual bottoms: like how to punch tricky places (along the ribs or to the face) and different kinds of choking. I also learned about pacing an overall evening of scenes: these were folks who were going to be playing heavily all night, so they were aware to save some places on the body for later, develop some places already focused upon in previous scenes, and varying sensation from top to top.

A downside is that more casual bottoms avoided me for play. I was approached by a profoundly attractive person who wanted to say that they like watching me and wanted to let me know they enjoyed my scenes, but were regretfully not into such heavy impact play personally. I said thank you and that I appreciated the feedback. I almost mentioned that I could simply not play as hard to accommodate this preferences - and I would have. But then realized that eagerness to please was a kneejerk reaction and I didn't have to - I didn't have to compromise myself to make everybody happy simply because they were nice to me. This was a profound realization.

Perhaps needless to say, the heavy masochists were uniformly kind, chill people. Very warm and agreeable and down to earth - I can imagine that you don't have much to be stressed about if you know yourself that well - not exactly zen masters, but you get the idea. No self-deception. If you're honest with yourself about what you need and want, you can find other likeminded people and get on with it consentually and responsibly.

Other minor stuff happened, but I feel like I'm rambling now and the above was the most central experience, really. I did feel more "among my people" than an interloper this time, and enjoyed many moments of beauty and humanism.

- - -

Hmm, what else. It's snowstorming now, Boston is freaking out because: oh noez, snowz. Should make for a cozy work-from-home day tomorrow. Socks and cats and soup and tea and pixels. The wendigo is at the door!

S. and I are going off to another kinky sexy Queer Invasion for the holiday weekend.

Should be fun times, why are none of you people attending :(

I have some stuff already lined up but not enough to fill the whole three days.

Typically it's a one day thing, so I'll have to make some friends and new situations on the spot - will report back!

Pls don't crash the site while I'm gone, kthanks.