So it turns out there's a laundry list of traits which separate humanity from chimpanzees.

It also turns out that all of them save two are shared with pigs. Those two exceptions appear to be the result of synergies between pig and chimp anatomy.

The initial story:
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-.....id-humans.html
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-human-.....-evidence.html

The accessible explanation of the evidence:
http://www.macroevolution.net/human.....l#.UiK15xaHttZ

I'm going to have to take this into account when I assume dragons are an engineered species, and not a hybrid.

I should really, in light of everything else I do, make some sort of joke pic for fathers' day. And unlike the Easter and Mothers' Day ones, I should start well in advance so when I inevitably take forever I'm not late to post.

The first suggestion I have worth repeating here is something to the effect of "Dads get 50% off taking 100% off".

There's another potential approach involving a father and his (neutered, adult) son, perhaps sharing a drink at a bar and the son makes a pun about beer nuts.

This suggestion shall remain anonymous unless was claimed here: "Dad, I got found this flyer in the men's room. Wanna go smooth with me for father's day?" I could segue into some kind of joke about wanting to be an only child for a while, but I'd need to come up with one.

Yet another idea is some kind of public service announcement or an ad - I could do it either way - either offering the fixed a whole new pair or IVF if they've reached a point in their lives they're ready to be fathers.

New ideas, or suggestions for implementing any of these are welcome.

Edit: I wanted to offer Tannim the chance at anonymity, but if he's claiming credit here, I'll acknowledge it.

Tomorrow's mothers' day.

I really should draw something for it, which my mother shall never see.

So, I'll ask my fan base - any ideas?

Opening one tab of FA - specifically, a user tab - is enough to bring "Safari Web Content" to a minimum of 40% of my CPU, with spikes over 135%. This has been crippling my computer for quite a long time, but I only now conclusively determined what it was.

What the heck, guys?

I've tried blocking javascript, both remote scripts, and completely disabling Safari's javascript engine.

You can clearly tell when I opened my homepage, and when I closed it.

Seriously, what's going on here?

Edit: I opened up the debug console, opened up my FA homepage, and no processor spike. This is now officially a heisenbug. :(

Edit: That only worked once. No useful console logs. :(

Healthy now.

Not drawing as much as I'd like, mostly because I was - and am - working on coming up with new ideas. Protip: Never subject your sci-fi fetish porn to real-world bioethics. Thoughts cannot be unthought, and that's a rather deep rabbit hole.

However, I've always had a softs spot for Wired's Found: Artifacts from the Future column; I'm working on something along those lines, and it's a fairly large project. Stay tuned...

My data loss isn't quite as severe as I feared. I lost plenty, but of my art, only two things went missing - an old GIMP high-resolution intermediate of a piece now finished, and the disk image I identified last time - plans and references.

I'm also suffering from some kind of stomach bug. :/

My encrypted art-in-progress blob is now corrupted.

I don't even know what all I lost yet.

It includes all the planning files for my upcoming drawings, however, but a lot of the older works in progress were backed up. This isn't me saying I'm giving up forever, or saying peace out, but expect delays.

Artificial wombs: is a sexless reproduction society in our future?

Like A Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex

Update:fixed.

Update:
Even Slashdot is getting in on the action.

I shan't trouble you with politics until next election day in a few years; until next time, I'm back to posting fetish pictures and tech blogs.

Spent all day canvassing, walked several miles while I got people to the polls.

But there's nothing left to do now.

Except have a beer.

Edit: And I think I'll finish a WIP. That'll be nice.

I've been actively participating in the democratic process for the last several months, cutting into my art time. I will allow myself one thin day to be political here; I imagine it's the last thing most of you want to think about with your escapism, but I want to make a point you may not hear elsewhere.

The politics of blackmail disgust me. This is hardly an unbiased source, but they were first on google, so I'll let "http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/03/1154815/-Romney-s-blackmail-Vote-for-me-or-the-GOP-kills-Congress" explain what has me simmering. Romney has more or less asked Congress to sabotage the economy if he isn't elected, without having to actually ask them to.

Also, Barack Obama is the first sitting president to express support for marriage equality, and I look forward to seeing how that goes.

Edit: I am going to be so incredibly glad when this whole mess is done with.

Apple just rolled out not one but two new iPads after the old one was out for only six months. QED.

I keep checking my email and news feeds expecting to find news the world has changed overnight. I'm finding myself vaguely bored on days it has not.

Today I shall simply lust for a new computer I don't have to putz with like my "Wintendo".

Don't disappoint me, tomorrow.

(Edit: A "wintendo" is an appliance for playing games. It just happens to run Windows. While it may be a general purpose computer, it is not used as such in order to reduce maintenance requirements.)

---

Day 2: Raspberry Pi drivers go open source. Scientists invent germline genetic engineering method to prevent children from inheriting horrific genetic diseases, give children 3 genetic parents; waiting for FDA approval.

Day 3: I forgot to update, oops. Boeing test-fires a prototype EMP-warhead missile, and the Raspberry Pi goes entirely open source.

Day 4: Navy field-tests robotic missile boat. Humanoid robot built by DARPA, tested on the same sort of physical tasks found in the Japanese TV show "Ninja Warrior".

Day 5: Mike Pondsmith announces a new Cyberpunk, a game about the decadence and decline of the West. NPR does a story on the same subject the same day.

Day 6: Japanese company builds Tachikoma-style wheelchair; capable of walking on its wheels. Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveils the 20 petaflop Titan supercomputer, 10 times faster than their previous computer. Oakley gets into the augmented reality business with HUD goggles.

Day 7: It was All Hallows' Eve, and I spent more of the day hoping something supernatural would happen (and volunteering) instead of reading the news. But apparently there's a plasma-jet electric rocket engine on Kickstarter.

Day 8: I was going to stop this, but Vanderbilt University is building a new robotic exoskeleton. It's lighter, sleeker, and where the Cyberdyne HAL is activated by your muscles, this one activates your muscles. In addition to its own motors, it improves the body - muscle tone and bone density - of its operator, instead of letting them get out of shape by relying on the exoskeleton. They also expect it to be cheaper than the alternatives. I may yet have my hardsuit.

Trend?

Day 7 Edit: Yeah, trend. In the 90s, I'd hear about maybe one of this sort of thing a month, tops. Whether this is a result of improved communication (Internet) or improved productivity is beyond the scope of this study, but bears further examination.

Oh, and happy Samhain, Haloween, All Hallows' Eve, and … okay, it's actually All Saints Day now. I planned a celebratory picture of a fairly technically challenging nature, and I'm unhappy to say I may have to do this one entirely digitally. It will be late. Or maybe it'll be on time for Haloween 2013, I don't know. I do know it'll involve zombies (and/or a localized outbreak), dry humor, and beer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandst.....aarathi-prasad

If you've seen what I draw, you'll understand what I mean when I say, "I am completely unsurprised".

I've been registered since just about new years' of 2006, playing the same avatar since the turn of the millennium, and my character's been, if you'll pardon the pun, more or less fixed for the last five years.

Why don't I have a ref sheet yet?

It's like the Constitution of the United States versus the Constitution of Britain - one nicely concise document, versus a hodgepodge of law and court decisions that have sort of accreted into a ... I can't really call it a document, actually.

That may be my next real project.

Class is out.

Maybe I should draw something.

I never said it out-loud before, but in light of recent events I would like to make it obvious: drawing freaky porn is cheap therapy. What I draw is significantly different than my wishes for the future, though there is quite a bit of overlap. Sitting down and drawing something raunchy tends to make any stress I have pent up go away quickly and efficiently.

http://www.klisoura.com/images/survey/fsgfc2.png

See, this is why we need an image-embed tag (especially one that works inside a URL tag).
Link still works anyway.

My hard drive is now failing in-depth diagnostics, but is still reporting SMART status as good.

All my work-in-progress is locked up in my backups for the time being, so please pardon my lack of activity lately.

Learned from someone on IRC that there's a trick to getting Copics to make large areas of uniform color without streaking - spray the paper down with a mist-bottle. My first experiment with it has gone reasonably well so far, but I've got preliminary results - Uniformity Matters. The more even your mist is, the less it's going to randomly bleed, since the bottle I have isn't as even as it once was, and the tendency for ink to bleed over into other areas was essentially random. Also, it tends to make them go on wetter, though not quite as wet as Prismacolors. Lastly, it does not eliminate banding by itself, but it gives you a little more time to keep the color front dry, which in larger regions is simply impossible (and larger complex ares, where you don't want to color over something else and using the 2" wide Copic marker is impractical) - making them go from flat-out impossible to merely difficult, as they would be with Prismacolor or Sharpie.

Turns out this is what I was looking for: http://www.copicmarker.com/blending.....pecial-effects

Copics don't lay down ink as fast as Prismacolors (or sharpies, somehow) so they recommend going around in little circles to soak the paper the way Prismacolors do on the first pass.

Do I feel like trying again? Maybe, probably not. Not today, at least.

Tangentially, does anyone have any idea where I can get CS5 on clearance when CS6 comes out? I've got a line, but the line is unreliable and likely to get sold out from under me, so I'm trying to cover my bases.

Monster, in this case, being defined as "Adobe".

Good news: I got Lion working after six hours of fuckery.
Bad news: Apple is no longer covering up for Adobe's (and others, to be fair) lack of cross-compiling for Intel; I lost access to Photoshop CS1.1. Got any good, free alternatives folks?

So, as it turns out, the first peer-reviewed study on the furry fandom is only recently published ("Furries From A to Z" specifically, was published in the journal Society & Animals volume 16 number 3, in 2008; "A to Z" is amusingly a concatenated "Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism"). You can have a look, if you're curious, and if you're used to the typical academic paper, this is actually a fairly good read. Since this is the first study on furries to be started since the fandom's inception, and only the fifth use of the word "zoomorphism" in the published literature to date, this is a very broad-overview kind of paper working toward defining "What the hell is a furry anyway?".

The author's WikiFur page can be found here: http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Kathy_Gerbasi

The good news: Apple pushed a driver/scanner driver update.

The bad news is that it still crashes upon attempted scan.


FFfFfFFFffffffuuuuuuu....

So, it turns out in the last 24 hours, I bitches about the last software update breaking my scanner, asked for help, was mocked for a mac user, and lost a watcher over my response to same.

I have been given shit for being a mac user at least every other week for the last five years. I don't know how else to say this - if you're not actually giving me crap, please don't joke about it.

It is not funny any more. Sadly FA doesn't support scrolling, flashing wavy color-fading epilepsy text, or I'd use that too.

It's not that any particular event is even above the noise threshold. However, the pattern starts wearing away at my patience until it becomes irritating, and unless it eases up, I will not stop being irritated about it. To continue the analogy, chronic inflammation causes cancer.

Remember folks, Jesus says: don't be a douche.

Maybe I've not been too productive lately, but I'm developing a (short) backlog. You see, I have a problem.

My old scanner, a Canon Pixma MP260, seems to no longer work with OSX 10.6.8 - the latest driver causes crashes every time I try to do a high-res scan, though all the preview and adjustment steps before that work fine. After that, the preview stops working until I reboot.

Canon's software can be finessed into producing a usable image, but it's about ten times more work to grab the scan and I'm still trying to figure out the finer points.

Anybody else have any idea what the fuck? The drivers aren't so old as to be Rosetta code, after all, so I shouldn't be running into that, but I can't and won't spring for new hardware right now.

For what it's worth, I have an old scanner - I think it's a Canon CanoScan LiDE 25 - in my closet, in case anybody thinks that may be easier to hook up.