Horns is a good book, people should read it.

In other news: chickens.

Sorry for not writing any stories.

Has anyone read Horns by Joe Hill, and is it any good?

Also stuff about Christmas and New Years'.

Sorry for the continuing lack of stories that will probably last until the new year or just before Christmas. I have to d***** my d******* t***** at relatively short notice in a country on the other side of the world. As you can imagine, I've been stressed out about this (even for the travel reasons), since I won't be getting back until late Christmas Eve morning and all the joy that that brings.

On the plus side I have a new computer. However, I broke my netbook, which I had Ubuntu installed on. Unfortunately my new computer has Windows 8, and I think due to the UEFI stuff (IIRC) doesn't seem to play nicely with Ubuntus pre-12.10 but the installer for 12.10 seems broken for me. This is only an issue as all of my story files are on a hard drive formatted for a Linux system, and while the netbook still works, I sort of need to keep what little battery life it has left in reserve for getting important files off it as needed (such as for the aforementioned redacted incident).

Well, to be fair I did install 12.10 first, but then the wifi didn't work; and while it did on Windows 8 I couldn't get back to that partition so had to reset the machine to factory settings and begin again.

I usually can solve these problems (I did manage to fix OS problems before) but this one has just been aggravating and I've let it slide since I've been busy with other things and not wanting to have a huge mess where I end up with no working computer I thought I'd ask here, then maybe when I'm finished with this rubbish I can happily* go back to writing nonsense.

* Happiness not guaranteed.

EDIT: Both things have been resolved now. No thanks to any of you (unless you're one of the two people I talk to frequently).

This is due to several factors: a lack of time and a lack of equipment.

Time: I've had to do a lot of stuff in recent months, and there's still stuff that needs doing but I don't want to get into that as some of it isn't "happy" and most of it is boring and just annoying and a lot of people have it worse off than me so I don't want to go into it. But principally at the moment it's for a good reason: I'm finally getting a chance to move in with my boyfriend who is inconveniently on the other side of the world from me at the moment. So as you can imagine until that happens I'll be busy sorting through stuff and handling travel, and after arriving there will be jobs to apply for, house things to get, dates to go on, etc.

Equipment: My main computer has finally stopped working completely, and I'm going to have to wait to get a new one. At the moment I have a netbook, but with the complications from writing a story based on earlier ones as well as a map I kind of need more screen space than I have presently, and don't have the options for any extras at the moment because I'll be moving and so money will be tight for a while, at least until I can get a job over there.

Anyway, that's principally why I won't be uploading stuff for a bit.

I've spent some time sorting out my stories into folders because this should make things a bit easier to read.



I'll try catching up on comments I need to reply to tomorrow.



Also may try to write more (probably Take Him To The Pit Part 4 since I sort-of have that started already) if I feel like it tomorrow.



Edit: If I do, I may write it on GoogleDocs so people can see, but I'll let you know later on if/when this happens.

I'm trying to remember a book that my school had in its library. It was a choose-your-own-adventure style book (not in that series however, one of the rip-offs); it was set at a ski lodge and was a murder mystery. The cover was (if I'm recalling correctly) black and yellow, and had a skier jumping on it.

The plot was very similar to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None

In the adventures, I remember someone releasing chlorine into the pool room in order to try to kill you (I think someone was in there that you could rescue, a woman if memory serves). In addition, if you skied away, someone would shoot at you.

If anyone can recall the title, or the author, or something more useful for searching for this book it would be appreciated.

Annoying how I can remember GOTOBED ON DARTS but not this.

Apparently I'm posting non-journal stuff again. (Some people know that I've been making other stuff, but I'm not going to be posting any of that stuff here, and probably won't post everything I make anyway.)

Spike Taylor may be a series of bits composing a story about Spike Taylor, who is a werewolf who lives in a town/city in New Zealand. It's going to be mostly action stuff and would probably make a better comic than written story, but whatever maybe later on.

IF it continues, then I'll probably write it partially in this blog format (particularly for exposition dumps and stuff where there's not a lot of action and it's mostly background fillery) and partially in a normal prose manner (particularly for action events).

The story isn't very well-planned, but I have some background on the workings of all of the magical stuff like werewolves and whatnot kind of written down/in my head so at least that part should hopefully be consistent. It'll probably have a superhero-esque thing going for it, but then I just might get a bit peeved at it and chuck that idea out.

That's one of the reasons for the adult rating rather than mature. I really don't know how the character or story is going to evolve, because I have a bunch of ideas and I'm sort of going to leave it up to what works out best from those ideas.

Anyway, I'm mostly writing this story for me, because if I write for others it's just awful. It's going to probably poke merciless fun at a lot of favorite furry/TF things because even though I like transformation a lot, and furry stuff is sort-of okay too, but damn the tropes need to get kicked in the ass sometimes. I may not be successful but hopefully you'll be able to get a laugh at it or with it, because that's pretty much how I'm going to probably act on this site and that'll probably reflect itself in what I make.

Step One: Take any of the titles from the Goosebumps series.

Step Two: Change one of the words to "Brony" or "Bronies".

Night of the Living Brony
Brony Beach
Why I'm Afraid of Bronies
The Brony of Fever Swamp
My Hairiest Brony
Welcome to Brony House

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fuckwulf-on.....lp_edpp_ttl_in

This is a thing.

This

is

a

thing.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

My ears hurt from the laughing.

Truly, I don't know why artists post to this site at all.

Reading some journals and comments just makes me think everyone who isn't a bona-fide "arteest" is somehow just an ungrateful shit looking for more chances to cause artists more stress in their impoverished, tempestuous lives.

Oh wait, it's all the harassing ungrateful shits who have all the money and attention-giving that artists need.

Looking at it that way, having our paid art-slaves complaining about the "horror" that comes from notoriety and paid work is kind of rich (and not the good kind you crazy art-school-graduates will never obtain). If you want to earn money from the community then just get real: you're going to have to deal with people constantly giving you shit, and maybe the place you look to find income's probably not the best place to vent your spleen. Because you know, the rest of us who support your little fantasies with proper jobs? We have to deal with shitty clients and bosses and supervisors too. But we're smart enough to not complain about it too much at work. Then again we're smart enough to not take up art as a career, especially nowadays when art galleries get exhibits cleaned up because they're made out of garbage.

Lots of journals about stuff like this have been floating about, so I'd thought I'd have my say too.

As directed from: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3447851/

If you like pen and paper RPGs, Ironclaw is very fun. The rules are explained well and if you like story stuff then you should be good as it's got a lot of lore stuff. There's a lot of flexibility with character creation and development, and it's got some nice differences from the usual D&D stuff.

If you like numbers and rules, like I do, then it's pretty good on that score. If you're a storyfag like  blueballs does then it's great for that too.

It's got furries in it, but don't let that stop you. It's actually fun*.

The link is here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects.....e-ironclaw-rpg

*Note: any fun guaranteed, as you'll probably need good people to play it with; I mean if you're okay with boring blandness and creepy weirdoes then you should be set anyway.

http://www.indiegogo.com/Bearstronauts

I don't like platformers, and the video teetered on the border of amusing and annoying for me, but other people may be more interested. Also bears.

This has happened a few times now, where people have asked for the old stories I've posted. I used to send them but that kind of defeats the purpose of taking them down so as of now please don't ask me to do it as I will not send you the stories any more.

Unless they were requests and you are the requester.

"Jo, Bessie and Fanny's cousin Dick comes to stay and he joins t the adventures in the magic Faraway Tree. Dick is not interested at first but later on in the story he gets interested, and into trouble."

Wikipedia, on the good old "The Magic Faraway Tree".

I wish people would at least close the doors if they're going to have sex.

Especially when your bedroom is near the only two bathrooms in the house.

Especially when I'm related to you.

Especially when it's only the second time I've seen your boyfriend.

Oh well, I've been around long enough to develop super mind filter. So while I cannot unsee, I can certainly not remember vivid details as I usually do.

(I don't know whether this will become a regular thing, simply because I'm just so reluctant to read new stories due to being tired of disappointment, but I've been meaning to write this about this story for a long time, and on the off-chance that it becomes a regular thing, I'm going to preemptively add the #1 to the title.)

What I'm going to try is to take a story that has left an impression on me. Not just ones that I've liked, though they will tend to be those as I can't stomach reading stories that I hate that often (and also that causes drama). I'm doing this because good artists get a lot of attention in the fandom, whereas writers not so much, even when the quality of the output is of compareable skill (I've tried doing both; I'm a far better writer than artist yet some of my more popular things were my terrible pictures which is just wrong, lol).

And, yes, it does take skill and effort to write something that's really worth reading.

Anyway, the story I'm going to talk about today is Knothole High: Playing for Fun by Nex_Canis. Links can be found here:

http://www.sofurry.com/view/300983
http://www.sofurry.com/user/view/profile?id=82690

So obviously there may be spoilers for the story, so you can stop reading after this paragraph if you want. Also, some of my comments are going to be principally aimed at writers, rather than readers. I used to love reading and writing transformation stories; I don't any more, and to be perfectly selfish and greedy if we had more stories like the ones I'll most likely showcase I'd want to write more. If you've seen the length of this journal, you can probably tell I have no problem with actually writing about stuff that I like to think about.

So before I begin, I should probably discuss some points about the Knothole High series in general that might be off-putting to some. First, obviously, is that it's gay canine transformation porn. Second, is that the series involves potentially underage characters of high school age (15-18), and I'm not entirely sure of the legality of the character's ages (one seems to be a lot younger than this in one of the stories), especially in some countries. Third, the stories involve conversion of straight human males to gay dogmen, and there is at least some mental transformation as well, so that might bother some people. Fourth, quite a few of the stories involve incest, lots of much older male-younger male pairings later as the story develops and some of those situations that occur in stories where characters get affected by chemicals that could probably be easily argued as (at least analogous to) rape, which might upset some people.

I think this latter point brings up an aside that's worth keeping in mind: a lot of pornography has a lot of weird and potentially illegal stuff in it, that gets really complicated when transformation is involved. Is it bestiality when a person has sex with an animal while they too are in the body of an animal? Is it incest when you've become a heavily altered personality, both physically and mentally? Is the sex illegal when age progression is involved? Is it rape when the party being coerced is positively engaging in the act when under the effect of magical/alien pheromones? etc. There's no really good answers to these questions, mostly because they don't come up in real life, so we have no precedent. Hell, we have enough problems, apparently, deciding what's rape and what isn't with real-life scenarios without jock dogmen running about with magical pheromones.

It's worth keeping this in mind, I think, when you write a story, because as a writer you've got to keep this stuff in mind: not just for the public, but for yourself. One of my stories (which is no longer available) included sex with animals of people who have been severely transformed; I'm not interested in bestiality in the slightest in real life - I don't even like the idea of having sex with even most averagely-intelligent adult member of my own species, lol - and I was using the sex as a way to denote corruption, and it kind of bothered me later on when I reread it. Some people may still have that story; the internet is forever, so even though I've taken it down someone still might have a copy of it, and it does embarrass me somewhat.

The story is one of the later ones in the series, so to provide a brief synopsis of the series in general: there is a race of anthropomorphic canines, all male, that "breed" by converting human males, through pheromones and sexual contact. They target all-male families for conversion, generally through the coach - the "alpha" - and his son. The targets transform, generally on some aspect of their pheromones. The transformation goes through five stages: at each stage the character is fully-formed, but they only remember parts of it at later stages, and at the fifth stage the transformation is permanent. You don't have to read them in order, each of the stories is pretty well self-contained, but some stories do refer to characters that are in others.

While this particular story does adhere somewhat to this formula, the family aspect of the transformee is dropped, and the focus is primarily on the relationship between two of the characters at the school: one of the (if I remember correctly) previously transformed characters, Allan, and a new human character Theo and his canine alter-ego Tom. Also differently, the central protagonist is not the character to be transformed, but Allan, who has already been transformed, so we witness the transformation through a distinct character.

So, after all that, why is this story good and/or interesting?

First, it's written very well: both from a technical standpoint, but also from a narrative standpoint.

I've read a lot of stories that have been ruined because people don't understand how to write English well - either through a lack of education, or because it's not their native language - and while I appreciate this, if you want people to read your stories then making them not just readable, but easily readable is key. I'm sure you can get help from a native English speaker or a better writer if you need the assistance; even if it means having to write a story for the reviewer in repayment. There are free word processors with built-in spellcheckers that you should be using, at the very least. They're not perfect and won't help with a lot of things, but it's at least a good start.

This story, however, is a very good read. There's very few actual problems with the writing: the spelling is great to excellent, as is the punctuation and grammar and syntax. It's so easy to read that it's incredibly pleasant.

I've also read - and, embarrassingly written - so-called "stories" which are pretty much transformation scenes padded out. Now, some of this is the fault of sites for calling these text submissions all/mostly "stories" or "poems" and not just "writing", and I can perfectly understand the reason for just writing this since that's really a lot of what people want; but more often than not they're passed of as stories. Stories generally have not just events, but some kind of central conflict or issue or something other than just a bunch of actions which make someone turn into something else.

This story does this, and it does it (for the most part, I'll explain the exception since it's an issue by itself) very well: the central conceit is that Allan has fallen for both Theo, a shy drawer and artist-type, and Tom, a more jocular character who, while "hot", in response to Allan's asking about drawing, says "Drawing? That's for sissies." (Yes, yes, I'll get to this in a while). So you have a classic love triangle with a twist: the two characters that one is in love with are in the same body. He can literally only have one - Tom - though feels more attached to Theo; but he can't have Theo, because as the change progresses Theo will turn into Tom through just being with Allan and because of what Allan is.

This is what makes the story stand out so much, and is why I like it so much. It's a love story where the characters don't immediately fall in love and everything's totally okay and sex sex sex. The main character has to worry about the relationship and the problems that crop up because relationships: this is very real, but yet vastly underplayed in stories of this type. I know why this happens - a lot of these stories are fantastical wish-fulfilment, and pretty much just porn - but I think this story proves that, not only can we have stories that fulfil fantasies and are actual proper stories, but that we're undervaluing our own interest as readers by encouraging the "just porn" stories. You don't need to have a relationship, or a big love-triangle or worry over everything, but if everything is too easy for the main characters because of the transformation, then the characters and the story aren't nearly as relatable and so less fulfilling.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with the story: the ending, which I feel is a huge cop-out. Essentially, it turns out that not only is Tom an artist, but he's even a better artist now, and paints wonderfully whereas Theo "just drew". I know why it's done - it's the only "good" way out where the main character gets to have his cake and eat it too, so to speak - but in my mind this really undermines the rest of the story. The main character goes through this anguish over what to do about the two "guys" he's in love with, but ends up getting the best merger of both without any apparent downsides.

This really bothers me about a lot of transformation stories. Again, I know why it's done; it's nice to get the body and everything else you want, especially when real life is so damned hard and difficult and depressing very often. But at the moment, practically every single transformation "story" is this fantasy wish-fulfilment.

But more importantly, from a reading perspective, it's boring. Getting a wand waved over you so you had the life you want is certainly appealing, but it's not realistic, and actually a dangerously deluded mindset to get into. That's why we need the less "happily ever after" stories in our fandom; to help balance the huge amount of others out. And I don't mean ones where people just end up as others hypno sex toys either, since some people actually do consider that a "happily ever after".

Not only that, but you've gone through this adventure with Allan, where he's been worrying over this "choice" - losing someone he loves either by making him leave forever or by embracing his other half - and then losing all that emotional investment with a plot twist at the end that makes everything magically okay.

Before people get the wrong idea, I do like this story (aside from its ending) a lot. Hell, I spent a couple of hours at least working on this journal about this story, and you don't invest that amount of time into stuff you can't stand or just find meh. Or at least I don't; unless it's for some other reason like punishing yourself for buying a terrible game.

This is a great story, and easily the best of the series: it has a good central classic conflict with a twist that you can only really get in a transformation story; it has a genuinely empathic main character and good support characters; you have the novelty (and novelty and variety are good things) for a transformation story of having the protagonist be the witness rather than the target of the transformations; the writing quality is very high; the sex, from what I can recall, happens at appropriate times; the main characters both seem to start off as gay, or at least fine with acting in that way, which avoids a lot of the potentially unpleasant undertones that more forced orientation transformations can cause; the attraction and relationship advancement seem to happen at a reasonably good rate. Also, if buff gay dogmen and transformations into such are hot, then you'll probably find this story delivers at least okay in that area (it's kind of hard to recommend people on the sexual content when it's very subjective, and I tend to not like reading a lot of actual intercourse stuff due to it being overdone in stories). But the ending, while not surprising, is disappointing; and it probably wouldn't have bothered me if the rest hadn't been so good.

So kudos to Nex_Canis. I provided links at the start to both the profile and the story earlier, if you missed that, so you should go check it out if it sounds like your thing. And here's hoping for more stories of at least this caliber in the future.

If people want to argue or discuss, feel free to do so; I can't promise prompt responses as my life's a bit twist-turned upside-down at the moment with stuff, but I think it'd be worthwhile at the very least.

Also if you want to recommend stories (that other people have written, preferably) that you want me to have a look at, I'll be more than pleased. I do have some other ideas about other stories to write stuff like this about, but I'll just wait to see how this one goes down. It's a bit of effort to write this much, and if people aren't going to bother reading it then there's no point in me doing so.

Thank you for your time,

automata out.

I just finished this today.

To win this game, you must "give pearl necklace to demon".

Potential responses to this from the demon:
* “Most fine, master! But ‘tis not enough. I will do a great service, and are not great services bought at great price?”
* “Very nice, but not enough!”
* “Ah, truly magnificent! Keep them coming.”
* “Almost halfway there, oh worthy one!”
* “Oh, such beauty! Your generosity almost overwhelms me!”
* “Truly I shall do thee a wonderful service when thou hast finished!”
* “Truly you are most generous! But still, this is yet not enough.”
* “A fine gift, mighty one, you have almost reached my fee.”
* “Wondrous fine, master! But one treasure is yet to be given!”
* “This will do for my fee. ‘Tis a paltry hoard, but as you have done me a small service by loosing me from this wizard, it will suffice.”

It's as immature as hell, but nobody was around and I had to tell someone. Plus if it gets more people to play IF/text adventure games, so much the better.

I always feel weird favoriting porn or nude pictures. Mostly because I don't favorite it because of that, I just like the picture regardless of the genitalia exposure or not. It bears no correlation to what I find "exciting", though I don't usually find much furry art arousing anyway. But it still makes me feel weird, like I'm saying "Yeah, I find this hot" when I really don't.

Also stories, I don't usually favorite them because I found them arousing; I do because they've been well-written in general and I enjoyed reading them. (Actually in my experience writing tends to fall apart a lot more in porn than not-porn because writing with the explicit purpose of arousal towards some fetish generally requires you to ignore a lot of common sense and have to cut out a lot of decent stuff.)

I'm not saying that people shouldn't put in sex or nudity or whatever. I don't really care, you can do what you like. But I think it does complicate things for some people if you include it.

Then again this is FA where making it porn may make it up to an order of magnitude more palatable, and a bunch of artists get money off of making masturbation material for others, so... yeah.

Okay going to start again. At least with the watching/favoriting.

I probably won't be posting anything any more; pretty much the only comments I'll get will be unhelpful towards what I want to get out of this so there's no point. This is just a reminder to myself that this is the case, since I know nobody's going to read this.

But then I might change my mind. I did draw a rather nice satyr, but I'm not going to upload it because it'll probably get creepy comments which would be unwanted given the inspiration.

And nothing of value was lost.

[EDIT]

Another wipe, this time including everyone that I watch that I don't talk to regularly otherwise, whom I'll leave on just in case they want me to look at their page for whatever reason.