Whatever you choose to do, we will be there supporting it.

I'm among those that found you from and followed you since the days you used to make those old works. While it still saddens me to think you left them behind so abruptly... indeed do what makes you happy, if that's what you're doing now then I am glad! Good luck with the financial situation as well, I'm afraid that isn't likely to get any better either in the US or worldwide so be attentive and take care.

100% this.

I will say that I've not followed folks to various BlueSky or Telegram stuff, as I don't have social media. But I *have* really enjoyed the animatronic and Sonic pieces you've been kind enough to upload here, so I still enjoy your works, even with the shift in tone and subject.

I hope the financial situation can get alleviated with some commission stuff, but I also still hope you can continue to do what gives you passion nowadays.

Thank you very much, I mean it. It really helps to hear when people like the "new stuff" as it were. And about social media... resist iiiiiit. I only got on there because it felt like that's where everyone was going some years ago, and FA felt like it had emptied out in terms of the number of people who were commenting or favoriting at the time. But now maybe people are exiting it. I dunno. The internet is weird.

I think most of all you take care of you and those that know and love you will give their support no matter what you choose to do. I cannot say I really know you nor really have gotten to know you but I do respect you as a person first and artist second.

I have had many commissions from you in the past, and I still treasure all of them.

Whatever you feel is right for you, please know you have my full support. Should you opt for an occasional commission, then I will be more than happy to send ideas your way.....if not then that is fine too.

Wishing you all the best for 2024. =^.^-

I didn't see a listing for a BlueSky account on your home page, is that under Animatronikki like your Telegram?

You do your best and we'll be here for you.

Ah, this explains a lot of things. Yeah, yeah... it does come to that. Spreading your wings takes a lot of nerve and thankfully you've always had it. Sadly I've made a lot of consequential decisions about my limited capacity to social media and mass-contact. I can't be there on those places, but every so often we get something, and that's nice.

I hope you have abundant success. And if you happen to puzzle out prices, I hope they wind their way here.

Okay, hot take. What if rather than your fans losing interest and abandoning you, it was actually the other way around? You rebranded and more or less walked away from FA. People are disillusioned with social media and don't want to run around making new accounts, further splitting their attention acoss a growing number of platforms. End-times depression is the new black, and nobody has the energy for that chase. You know? I hope you find what you need, and if you do then this is where it'll happen, because I think you've misidentified the problem.

I think you've misinterpreted my writing here. That doesn't strike me as a Hot Take; for the most part it's just restating what I already said. I myself said that I grew uncomfortable publishing under this name, and I started publishing under a new name on places like Telegram and social media - because that felt like the right move with the information I had on hand; they seemed to be where the other artists I know were having more success reaching people than FA. For both me and a fair number of the other artists I know, engagement on FA has dropped to a skeleton of what it was in years past, so I promise I'm not just making this up. I myself said that my interest wandered, and audience interest waned as it did. Nowhere did I characterize this as my fans abandoning me. Now you could be right that the place I'm publishing is more of the problem than I'm giving it credit for - I'm still learning, and that could well be true - but I disagree that subject matter doesn't account for a lot of diminished audience engagement, because it has noticeably diminished each time over the years that I have significantly switched gears in my artistic interests, all while I was publishing under this name, on this site. I am not impugning anyone here! I'm just pointing out that many, many people signed on for something I'm no longer doing, and many people still come to me to this day expecting fox vore or giant furries because that's what they see Ribnose as being. And a disappointing number of them are straight up bitter towards me for nothing more than not being the Ribnose they remember. Like, this happens a lot more than you may think. This name is a legitimate problem for me.

The way you phrase this makes it sound a bit too much like I'm either bitterly, or obliviously, accusing people of disloyalty and absolving myself of any causal relationship from my actions or something like that. I don't like the way that characterizes me as a person; nobody owes me their attention, and audience retention is a complex beast with manifold factors. Even your conclusion is the same one I came to - that even though my feelings on it are complicated to say the least, FA may yet be the best place to reach my audience after all. So I'm not sure what's Hot about that Take, other than it doesn't seem to give me credit for framing this situation the way I have above.

Sidenote but I also don't know what is meant by "end-times depression is the new black", or how it factors in here.

My phrasing was a bit more loaded than I intended. Sorry.

As for the changes in your work, it's true that I'm sticking around out of something like loyalty rather than interest in the more recent animatronic thing. I guess I want to believe that most fans would hang on indefinitely, but it's unreasonable for me to imagine that I would be a rarity in not digging a drastic change in direction.

I'm not going to elaborate deeply on the last bit there, because I frankly shouldn't have made such a bleak statement. Just think of it as an observation that more people have less energy for mundane tasks these days.

That's okay! Text is notoriously ambiguous when it comes to tone. I just hope I don't appear like I'm bitter towards my audience, and I'm always self-conscious of appearing ungrateful when I try and frame the changes over the years. I really do consider them totally natural, and no slight against me.

I think I get what you mean a bit better - I know I sometimes feel fatigued by the landscape of the internet. I mean, you have the old gallery sites, you've got personal websites, multiple social media platforms shifting around, Patreon... so forth... It's like Zapp & Roger said. So Ruff, So Tuff, out here, baby.

Doing commissions is a lot of work, and I say that as someone who only does it occasionally to have some spare cash.

It is! I used to do it pretty much "full time" back in the day, and I managed to burn myself out on it. It's rough striking that balance.

I'm already well passed burned out, to the point where I often don't even wanna work on things for my own enjoyment.

That's exactly what happened to me, and I am so sorry to hear you're going through that. It was an awful time for me. My drive and passion *did* come back, but it took a very long time and it was hard. Like I said above, I all but stopped drawing for like a solid year, and very gradually crawled back into the saddle inch by inch.

I'll eventually get back on track. Although I've left several stories unfinished, eventually I'll return to them. Two of them I've got to, because they were paid for. Fortunately, one of the guys has been very patient and understanding. And as for the other... well, I don't know how he feels about the wait one way or another, mostly because he unfriended me on Discord and isn't responding to me on the other other place I know him from.

In fact, his disappearance was one of the contributing factors to the huge decline in my work ethic and enthusiasm, since we'd discussed this particular story idea in great detail for years together before he finally paid me for it, and I was working on it just fine, only to suddenly notice he hadn't be responding to my messages. I'd write a little and send him the story in bits and pieces, you see, and he'd reply saying what he liked or didn't like and this allowed me to get input while still writing the story, allowing me to ensure he was getting exactly what he wanted or was otherwise pleased with how things were turning out.

But all of a sudden, he wasn't responding anymore. He didn't say what he liked or didn't like about the story, because he wasn't saying anything. My efforts to contact him on Discord only revealed he'd unfriended me, and since we didn't have any servers we shared, and he'd set his Discord to ignore messages from non-friends he wasn't in servers in, he functionally blocked me. None of my messages can get through to him. I've tried sending him friend requests but they've all either been ignored or denied (it's impossible to tell which). So here I sit with this halfway finished story, already paid for, and indeed liked by other people I've either shown it to or described to... and I'm not sure if I should finish it.

Yes, he paid for it, but he's gone, so who exactly is the story for anymore? Maybe if I can remember what his E-mail address is I can refund his ass, or I can say fuck it and finish the story on general principle, but for my own enjoyment and the enjoyment of others as opposed to him despite the fact he paid for it. It's frustrating when someone pays you for something, and you're in the middle of doing it, when they vanish out of the blue and without explanation, leaving you, yes, fully paid, but unsure if you ought to finish the story and keep the money, finish the story but refund them, abandon the story and refund them, or abandon the story and not refund them. It's especially difficult to make a decision when others have expressed their own interest in seeing the story completed.

And in case you're wondering, no, he was not a stranger to me; not only had we discussed this specific scenario many times over the years, but he had in fact commissioned me twice before for stories I did in fact finish. So I have no idea why he'd pay me for a story and then disappear. So he's at least one reason I don't feel much like doing anything lately. Him bailing without explanation after I finally begin work on an idea we both loved and discussed for so long makes me feel like either he didn't really think it was that good of an idea to begin with, or that, despite his initial positive responses to the story's beginning parts, he didn't like how I was writing it. Neither of which fills me with much confidence as a writer.

I know this writing and not drawing, but creativity is creativity, and as my enthusiasm for writing dwindled, so did my enthusiasm for drawing.

Obviously I don't know this person, so I'm definitely not inside his head, but if I had to hazard a guess with the information on-hand I would be strongly inclined to believe that he didn't disappear to shut you out personally... It reads to me like a general retreat from things. Of course I could be wrong. I've actually never had someone pay me and then ghost me, only ghost me without paying for the work I'd done, which is its own kind of demoralizing. As far as I'm concerned, if that happened to me, and I'd been left to work without any input, I'd consider the work abandoned by the commissioner and mine to finish or drop. My attitude is, if someone gives me critical feedback, they're interested; if they ghost me, they're no longer interested and are forfeiting their claim to the outcome. I feel it's the commissioner's responsibility to maintain some channel for communication to me; if they won't even allow me to contact them anymore, they're relinquishing their claim to receive the finished work.

Yeah, you're probably right. After all, that seems to have happened a lot lately. There's two or three other people I know who've just collectively decided to completely disconnect from social media and other forms of online social interaction, if not quitting the Internet entirely. The issue I have is that a grand total of one of them actually said that he was doing so before he did it. Everyone else just kind of dropped off the face of the Earth.

The reason it's such an issue with me is it has happened in the past and in at least one instance, the last I heard of the guy (a friend from a Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars! forum, particularly the RP section, back when I still cared to regularly RP) was that he'd been hit by a car and had both arms broken. With no further information since then (and this was in '05 or '06 at the latest), I've been forced to conclude he was either killed or so badly injured he can't use his arms anymore. So naturally when people drop out of my life, especially if several of them all do it more or less at once around the same time, it's the cause of a lot of anxiety. Of course, I want to respect their privacy, their decision to disconnect, so to speak, but it doesn't prevent me from wishing they wouldn't.

And in this particular guy's case, I wish he'd waited until I'd finished the dang story, at least. With him, the main person who shared my passion for this idea, gone without explanation and the story only half finished, it killed me enthusiasm for it and it's taken me a while (and other people showing interest after I shared what I'd managed to write) to get me to finally start trying to continue it and finish it, however slowly and tepidly.

I do consider the story basically abandoned by him at this point until further notice, i.e., if and when he ever returns/starts replying to me again, although obviously I'm very much going to give him his space; after all, if I've learned one thing it's that when someone doesn't want to talk to you, the answer isn't to keep pestering them asking them why (which can be difficult because in my case, they rarely give a reason, they just vanish), but to back off and give them space and time so that if and when they do come back, they'll be more inclined to reconnect. Prior to learning this, I blew it really badly with a few different people, including one former boyfriend. He stopped talking to me and blocked me in some places but not others, despite the breakup being, from my perspective, amicable, and us even continuing as regular friends at least for a bit. I made the mistake of constantly hounding him for an answer as to what I'd done, and even using people as go-betweens (which was unfair to them) to try and find out what the hell the matter was, and, frankly, in the end, when I finally got an answer back from one of the go-betweens, I would've been better off not knowing, as frustrating as that would've been. Let's just say the breakup hadn't been as amicable as I'd thought, at least not from his point of view, and that the reason he quit talking to me despite promising we'd remain friends is because the behavior that led him to break up with me basically continued. From his point of view, I'd learned nothing, so he ditched me.

Though in my defense, since he lied to me about why he was breaking up with me, and did not tell me my behavior was a problem, I was never given a chance to improve myself and be a better person. For him or for myself. Which is a recurring theme with people who find some fault with me that's enough of an issue that they want to stop being my friend; they just quietly disengage. And the reason I hate this is, well, as I said, it doesn't address the problem and prevents me from even knowing there's one in the first place. Yes, I was wrong to hound him the way I did, and to involve other people the way I did, and I should've just let things lie... but I hate the "just disconnect" brand of conflict resolution because it doesn't actually resolve the conflict, it just shoves it aside and also prevents one side, namely me, from even realizing there's anything wrong in the first place. So despite the fact I bungled attempting to reconnect with this guy, I am still mad at him for never actually coming to me with his problems so we could at least try to resolve them... but many, many different friends and acquaintances have taken this route when deciding I was annoying, selfish, greedy or otherwise problematic.

And I guess I can understand it insofar as nobody wants an argument and they must feel it's best to just quietly disconnect, rather than confront me, which might result in a fight (after all, I do have a short temper), but I feel like it's selfish of them to do so because they're only taking their own need to be rid of a source of anxiety in their lives into account, not how I might feel when they one day just stop talking to me and disappear from my life. And in one case, not telling me I was being annoying and difficult to work with got me disinvited from a podcast because two of the three regular participants didn't like me but only told the third one who did like me, and he didn't tell me, either, evidently either to spare my feelings or because he felt that it wasn't his place to convey the private opinions of his two friends, but in any case none of it filtered back to me, and all I knew was that I stopped being invited to participate. I only found out the truth after finally confronting the main guy who was the host, and the only reason he told me was because the podcast was ending pretty much right afterwards, with no new episodes being done. It was shitty of them to do, and he picked a shitty time to tell me the truth. When it was too late for me to even try and be better at getting along with the others. But that's how people have always handled me; just shove me aside and try to forget about me.

But as mentioned, I've learned the hard way that regardless of how shitty and unfair it is to have people do this to me, it is unwise to pursue the matter, even when I feel I deserve an explanation (and regardless of whether I do or don't). It only makes this worse. So with regards to this guy who commissioned the story, I've sent him basically one final message showing that I've tentatively begun working on it again because of interest other than his, I have no intention of trying to contact him further as, as you say, by bailing when he did, despite the fact he paid, I don't feel like I owe him either a finished story or a refund (and, interestingly, he has not asked for one). If I finish the story, it'll be for myself and for others who have expressed interest in the idea.

Honestly, if you can do what makes you happy more power to ya. I'm sure there's plenty who'd agree. I know i've gone to read your tumblr posts.

Hey, thank you - that really means the world to me. I know they're weird little projects, and I don't update them as much as I should, but Pizzeria Circus is so dear to my heart and I believe so much in the story I'm telling there. However slowly.

Updating at a pace you're comfortable with is key to even updating at all. And i like this 'weird little project' Pizzeria Circus is a hoot! Love what i've read so far. You need a good story that humanizes animatronics like that. And as for telling the story slowly. 'good things come to those who wait.'

That's really the central idea to it, yeah! I always feel FNAF dropped the ball on some really crucial storytelling elements - like, really several, I don't consider it a very well-told story despite being into it - and one of them was worshipping the story's villain while critically sidelining the story's victims. That seemed wrong, you know? So Pizzeria Circus is the story of the souls left behind and how they overcome their situation!

I couldn't agree more, the story of the games gives more info for the villains than anything else. There's a bit of info for certain victims like Vanessa. But not much else i mean, one of the most striking info for the victims being that the soul in chica was the first! I'm glad to see something from the perspective you're creating.

I always loved and admired your art over the years and while the animatronics work is not my core interest, I truly believe real art with a spirit like that can only happen when the artist's passion is with the project.

Please continue going with your heart 🥰!

I also do agree with some other comments here, many people don't like to engage on multiple social media platforms, so you will not be able to bring everyone over from one place to another in any scenario. Maybe two FA accounts, one for your heart and passion, one for bread-winning / nostalgia might be an option.

That may well be the way to go! I’m still deliberating, but two accounts here is definitely an option.

Totally up for tossing some cash atcha for art at some point! Hope you find a way that works comfortably for you.

What you're going through sounds pretty rough. I understand not wanting to create certain things anymore with your artwork.

I hope that you will be able to find a good way to continue with the artwork that you do have a passion for.

I wish you luck with things. And I hope that this new year will bring you good opportunities and good fortune.

Known you such a long time which has been lovely. It's strange to realise these things and does bring a downer to it.

I don't believe it would be healthy to draw subject matter you do not like as I feel it would demotivate further. I know that you might not be able to be picky with you draw in regards to money/bills.

You're the best <3.

I hope the money and art situation work out to help pay towards your expenses.