Hey guys. Life happened.

So anyways, I've got, hoo...a lot of writing here. Some smutty, some sweet, some actiony. All kinds of half-finished, collaboratively made stories.

What do I have? Lessee...

I have a love story between a reserved fat bunny and a hunky sex-addled dalmatian.

Got a 46-page coming-of-age story for a wiry little dragon who gets every big wish he ever had.

Got a Koopa family protagonist story where the villain role is reversed.

Got a...oh holy hell...how did an MLP fanfic about a muscular pony get to be over 400 pages...

Uh...

So anyway, my dear friends in the abyss, would any of you guys have interest reading the dozen or so stories I've written which may never see an ending?

In the event that anyone remembers AlphaChimaera from around here, turns out he's been posting all his old stuff to http://alphachimaera.blogspot.com/ and most of his new stuff to http://alphachimaera.deviantart.com/

So yeah! Tell your friends.

Or don't. Whatever

Hope you all've enjoyed the Harvest Moon for the last couple nights! Tonight it should still be pretty big and full, too!

So here's a little moon-related diversion to tide ya off until next year's:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/molkman/moon-waltz

Over the last decade, I've had the pleasure of spending a fair amount of time cooperatively writing with some rather talented people. In that time, it's taken me some work, but I've come to realize that nobody really likes a "Flawless" character. Now, while there exists the Mary Sue Litmus Test to gauge just how absurdly perfect your character is, this meme is for you to decide on at least a good twenty flaws to round your character out. The first fifteen are general, and then the last five are for your character's specific type, meaning you answer a total of 20 questions (Not 35). Feel free to mix and match if you feel one type doesn't address your character. Also, if you DO fill this thing out, lemme know, I'd love to read it.

Character Name:

STAGE ONE: Answer all of the first fifteen questions

1. What feature of your character's body are they most sensitive about? (Come on, everybody has this. Even people who are built like an adonis can still suffer from bigorexia)

2. What is the outright stupidest thing your character has ever done?

3. If someone were to tease your character, what would it take to make them lose their cool?

4. What is the easiest way to make your character feel completely embarrassed?

5.Speaking of embarrassing, if your character is over 18, what was the most embarrassing 'phase' they went went through in the 12-18 range? (Hyperobsessed anime fan, obsessive collection of a crappy syndicated comic, spending eight hours a day on government conspiracy forums)

6. Name a skill/sport/job that your character thinks they're outright phenomenal at, but in truth, they're absolute garbage.

7. Conversely, name a skill/sport/job that your character is naturally very good at, but that they outright loathe doing.

8. Name something (Food/movie/style/music) that your character completely adores, but that most everyone else hates.

9. Something your character hates, but everyone else loves?

10. What does your character consider to be their biggest internal demon? (Laziness, their past, the person they've become, their appearance)

11. Name an outright weird habit that your character engages in. (Eats their boogers, wipes their face/butt with their hand and then smells it, bites nails)

12. Name one of your character's vices. (Chocolate, smoking, tacos)

13. What is your character's nervous tick?

14. What is a topic of conversation that would make your character react very defensively?

15. What is your character's greatest shame/regret (That hasn't been previously addressed)

STAGE TWO: Answer ONE set of the below questions that best fit your character type

Heroic Type (For the flawless, peerless protagonist who's always right)

1. Name a self-destructive behavior that your character engages in, regardless of if they think it's okay or not. (Can be even a simple bad habit)

2. Name a condition in which your character would be needlessly/reasonlessly cruel.

3. Do they have any delusions of grandeur/Are they in denial about anything? What?

4. What is something that they are completely wrong about, but insist they're right about?

5. What is their most unpopular moral view?

Selfish Type (For the douchebag who always gets their way)

1. Who is the one person that your character will defer/submit to no matter what?

2. Name a person/cause that your character would give their life up fighting for.

3. What would the more innocent child within them think of them now?

4. What would it take to make your character hate themselves?

5. What would it take to evoke a permanent, positive change in your character?

Sad Type (For the doormats)

1. Name one thing that, when all is said and done, your character truly likes about themselves.

2. Name something that your character thinks would make them happy, but honestly wouldn't.

3. Name one way your character's sad demeanor manifests into bitterness/spite; or, if they're already bitter, name one way their sad demeanor brings out the good in them.

4. What is the biggest aspect of your character's sad nature that is their own fault?

5. What would it take to give your character a real, unshakable happily ever after?

Nymphomaniac Type (For those who let their other brain do the thinking)

1. Name a feature or perceived inadequacy of your character's physicality/performance that your character can't help but dwell on.

2. Name an actual feature or inadequacy that, if others had to be brutally honest, they would see in your character.

3. How deeply has your character's insatiability damaged themselves/their feelings/those they care about?

4. What does your character consider the most frustrating or inhibiting thing about their cravings?

5. What is an instant, overwhelming turn-off for your character, and/or what is a turn-off for your character that they know they should consider a turn-on, but just can't?

Okay. So this message is going out to nearly TWO THOUSAND people. Assuming that one in twenty of you actually check your incoming journals, that's still around ONE HUNDRED of you.

So here's how it goes. I want new things to color, however, I'd like to get a few things straight.

1. I am exhausted when it comes to coloring meaningless smut. So no bits, tits, or holes, please. That also means BOUS's (Bulges of unusual size).

2. Minimal fetish content. Muscle is fine. Fat is fine. Yanno, like the two things I just did. But I'm not taking on colorings to be a vehicle for porn.

3. I've done the math. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I have been indirectly and directly to blame for enough orgasmic product to fill an inflatable pool. Easily. Personally? I'm not incredibly proud of that.

4. That's not to say I might not cave in and throw up a giant dong occasionally, but it IS to say that I'm probably not interested in coloring YOUR giant dong.

5. I want meaningful content. Find me pieces that mean something. Point me to artists that evoke something within you. I know it's douchebag thing to ask for, but I'm not interested in wasting my time with more of the same.

6. For the record, I never stopped coloring. I just haven't been credited for it.

7. Yes. I am a hypocrite, or a douchetaco, or whatever you feel like calling me if you disagree. I don't really care, I want something to color.

So if you're reading this. Yes. You there. You sitting there. I'm telling you to do something. I know most of you guys are at least partial subs, so if I tell you directly to do it that might work.

Gimme content.

Gimme content or I really have no reason to make content. And as awfully conceited as it sounds, it seems you guys prefer content over no content. I disappear from the world without a word for five months and my stuff racks up 2000 faves for SOME damn reason.

Come on. Please?

For those of you who may be wondering:

Yes,  Shenanigan is open for commissions, and yes, I am managing all the initial paperwork. Notes should be sent to me so we can make sure you get what you want, and then I'll come back with a quote.

There is no set number of slots, but there is some level of first come, first serve, so don't dawdle too much!

Hello you creative folks! After Achilles and I announced our collaborative plans last, and launched our little contest, we had one heck of a response. If only we had the time to do all of them...

Our three winners are  BruBearBrown ,  ritz and  bluebloodred

Congrats! Your sinful ideas will be turned into fully-realized stories by us soon. One of us will be contacting you soon to clarify details, or to talk out which idea exactly we're going for if you submitted more than one!

The timetable for completion isn't set yet (free stories and all), but there'll be movement on this soon. You shouldn't be waiting very long to see the first one!

Everyone else, we just want to say again how overwhelmed with the response we were, and that we had a pretty tough time choosing between the different pitches. Some of these really piqued our interests, but more than once they were the kinds of stories that only one of us was geared to work on. We DO hope we get to work with each and every one of you in the future to make your ideas happen, 'cause once we get through these, we should be opening up for commissions proper!

Stay tuned for the announcement of our joint-account name, and further story commission prices. It'll be reasonable!

- Achilles n Dodoki

Okay, quick show of hands:

Who else here wants to be in a gay relationship that doesn't involve buttlove? And if not buttlove, then what?

Lately I've been finding that a lot of guys I know aren't interested in "Conventional" gay relationships. They don't want to go to clubs, they don't want to attend parades, they don't want to do the backdoor nasty.

I'm finding that a lot of them just want closeness, emotional understanding, compassion, and varying degrees of passion. For some, just being sexually attended to is plenty; for others, they just want a best friend for life who they can be every part of themselves around, with snuggle benefits.

Are these people the minority? Or do a good percentage of gays want emotional intimacy more than a pair of cheeks to ram?

Good art is a crap shield for being intolerable, and "If you don't like it, don't click it" is not a cover-all for posting whatever you damn well please, particularly when it has a high chance of upsetting people.

I was going to expound on this, but there's really no reason to. People don't come here to be preached at.

But I will say, that in many ways, FA is in a sorry state of affairs. The social side of this site is cruel and maladaptive, and I'm sorry for whatever I may do to perpetuate it.

I just came here to try and make good friends.

(You know the saddest thing about this journal? Is that I need 1,500 watchers and 30k pageviews to post it)

So yeah...I kind of need an image.

A non-smut image, preferably of a guy who has musculature on him. And it needs to be clean linework.

So that I can use it for my tutorial on cel-shading. And while I technically could just re-use images I've done, I don't really care to repeatedly gank other people's stuff via Fair Use in order to get my lessons across.

So...anybody have anything? Anything where all parties involved in the linework are fine with me working on it?

Anyone?

So...I quit WoW, and it seems suddenly I have a lot more time to be productive.

In the last...oh...five months since I've last put anything up, I somehow managed to get a thousand faves and over 140 watches...including some from some very prominent people. I feel very lucky to have such a prominent following, and I'd thank all of you individually...except a half-year late pageshout is kind of classless...

But it's all still appreciated.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm probably going to be gearing my colorings towards more tame things. What that really means is things will be more or less the same, just less impractically large wangs.

Welp, that's enough from me, I need to get back to work! The real joke here is having 1500 watchers and only about 20 of them ever seem to say anything.

So...yeah! I can't really be sure if you guys like Achilles and my writing, but with Big Job and Glitch yielding over 16,000 and 4,500 total views, respectively, I would assume we're doing something you guys like.

So first of all, thanks. Thanks for making our collaborating, as far as I know, the most successful writing on FA. It's a really big boost to know we can do something that major, regardless of the content. Feel free to comment below about the stuff you like and don't like, and direction for future stories.

Secondly, we're soon to be putting up more writing, and following the tradition of an accompanying image, I'd like to open the floor to any artists who'd like to contribute to the group. We'd send you the to-be-posted story so that you can determine what you'd want to illustrate, as well as advise changes. I'd manage coloring if needed, and you could post the story with credit wherever you like. Because, really, the imagery is what holds the story together.

So yeah! Let me know!

This is a journal about technique for artists, but also for those of you out there who commission artists and then hand them a pre-made color palette and then say "USE THESE EXACT COLORS OR I WILL BEAT YOU WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR LIFE."

I might do an illustrated example of this if anyone cares.

Anywho. Somewhere in the dozens of renditions I've done, I notice that there's...a fair amount of inconsistency between pieces. Sometimes I feel I've really nailed down the coloring for a piece, like when I do Trig's stuff, and other times I feel like a complete amateur, often when I do something for an artist I've never colored under before.

It wasn't until I started coloring my own character that I discovered the problem.

No color style is universally applicable.

Yep! What works for one art style will not explicitly work for another style! And that goes WELL beyond just how brightly or harshly or dimly or softly you shade something.

Take for example the first rendition of my sona. This was done with dim, muted colors which don't drift far away from each other. Later, I colored Unknown's version, and ended up using significantly brighter colors. I liked them so much that I went back to the first rendition and slapped them on. And you know what?

They looked terrible.

I couldn't fathom why this was. Why should it matter what the lineart looks like if the colors work well together?

But it's true. No set of colors, actual colors, is able to be applied to every art style and look good.

I hate to pick on someone for an example of this, but if you take a good long look at Docwolph's stuff, you'll notice that, despite the strong linework, and technically perfect colors and shading, the overall finished product ends up looking...stilted. The highly-polished sheen of the colors just doesn't seem to digest well with the lines.

In the same breath, some of the most notable artists on FA do wonderful coloring which have VERY little going for them on a technical level. But again, it's because the colors work with the style.

I guess what I'm saying is...artists, if you don't like how your color work is doing, change it up. You might be doing better than you think. And commissioners, let pallets be loose guidelines, not strict instructions.

This.

That is all.

Oh great, a journal about ratios. Who the hell's gonna read it?

In my time on FA, I've become aware of a strange trend which I have come to call the Rule of Tens.

That is to say, one fave for every ten views.

It seems that no matter how many watches you have, or how 'established' you are, that as long as your work holds to/around the rule of tens, you can consider it a successful piece.

Now, of course, the exact ratios vary depending on circumstances, such as that smut typically gets more views per fave than normal art, and that this rule only applies to visual art pieces (Written smut can be successful at a mere 1:50 ratio in some cases)

The rule seems to lose credibility after the 2,000th view, though, but I think at that point you could say that your picture has at least generated a fair amount of interest.

But this rule is a good gauge for people who aren't established, people who may only get five faves and fifty views. If that's the case, you're doing just fine! The direction of your art is going in a good way, and if you can manage to consistently get more than 1 fave per 10 views, then it's likely that you'll become more noticed in the fandom as a whole.

Of course, I can't really be sure how that works, accounting for amount of time between uploads, but it just seems to be a general rule. Really popular FA artists also often break the ratio for obvious reasons.

On a side note, I wonder if I should start faving the pieces of art I'm interested in coloring...

For some reason I can't explain, it seems that the point in time I have the most motivation to do a coloring, is when there is some level of surprise involved. I like doing a whole coloring for artists or people, and then showing them the finished product, sort of like a present all wrapped up and ready.

However, when I ask in advance, or am asked to do one by someone else, my morale just drops through the floor. It's not that I don't want to do these colorings, it's that I have much less drive to focus on them. They get pushed aside, even if they're for friends, or have high priority.

This mindset gets me in a bit of trouble, too, because I have a few images that I've worked on, that will never see the light of day. Namely, because the artists either don't like other people coloring their stuff (financial reasons or otherwise), or are upset because I didn't ask in advance.

The latter boggles my mind, though. How is it bothersome, that an individual who thinks highly of your skill, spends a chunk of time in attempt to improve the quality of your piece, in order to pleasantly surprise you? I don't post without permission, anymore, and I more or less only show the completed colorings to the artists for approval.

Why is it some kind of affront that I didn't ask in advance? There are no legal reasons not to, as under the terms of fair use, I can color whatever I like as long as I make no money off of it. I don't post it, thereby meaning that I don't disregard the artists in order to bolster some level of inane popularity. So why? Why is it that 2-6 hours of work, which is essentially the physical manifestation of a giant compliment, seen as offensive or thoughtless?

So yes, given how it seems some of you absolutely LOVED the writing  achilles and I did together, we're going to be putting more of it up.

However, this time, we'd like to know.

What species would you like the guy getting huge to be?

And what species would you like the guy in charge of that growth to be?

Just a simple query.

Do you people actually want to know anything about me? Because this community is really confusing me. The tens of thousands of hits on my page and colorings dramatically contrast the amount of communication which comes my way. I was going to write a big end-of-year journal, but given how little actual back-and-forth I seem to be seeing here, I can't begin to fathom more than four people reading it.

Am I wrong here? I mean, is this universal to FA?

I'm honestly confused. And I realize that the moment this journal sounds whiny, I might as well shoot my foot, because bawwing is not allowed here. So I'll just be direct.

Just...SAY SOMETHING. Ask me questions about my work, myself, about what's bugging me, or tell me something you'd care for me to know. Ask about my giant to-do list or the things I've already made. State that you're a lurker or something.

I mean, come on, you guys owe me that much, as I'm sure I've managed to retain at least six minutes of your attention before now...

And don't be shy with the replies, either.

So yeah...

Seems I've gotten permission to post up some stuff that's liked by some pretty...awkward tastes. Mind, I've always wanted to do some CTF, but I realize that that kind of content would clash hugely with what I've become known for doing.

Thing is, I also want to do a number of other pieces that are a bit more...odd. Like vore and CV and the like.

However, I don't want it to clash with everything else I've done so far.

If I post it up in scraps, you'll all get a notice anyway, and interested people won't remotely know it's there.

If I post it on my normal page, people who don't want to see will see, and people are bad about paying attention to the warning labels on art.

So...yeah. Not quite sure what to do here, and I really don't want to make a second account.

Yep! He's taken me on as his colorist. We're going to be collaborating on a variety of things for a while. How long, exactly? Long enough for me to get out a proverbial boatload of colorizations, that's for sure.

So if you like 'em big, or you just love  chemicalwolf's style, don't go too far, I'll be spiffing up his works, old and new.

I, for one, am wildly excited. It took a while, but I've finally got a line-artist to work under! And WHAT a line-artist!

Thanks for all your support, guys!

Yeesh. I hope this actually gets people's attention. It seems that the fact that I advertise FREE COLORINGS here seems to not get communicated.

I mean, yeah, I have a few stipulations, but come on. Fat furs, inflation, vore, muscle, hyper. There are a ton of these that are really well done, and NOBODY here even has a request to see a piece colored?

It doesn't even have to be one done for you! Just one you like! I'll ask the artist if I can do it!

At the same time, I KNOW I still have a good workload, but do you know how daunting it is taking on all those individual panels? I'd like a nice single-shot break!

Come on, people, just throw them out here.

JUST BECAUSE THERE ARE A LOT OF COMMENTS DOES NOT MEAN I AM DONE HERE. KEEP ASKING, KIDDOS.

This is more for me than anything else.

 ozkangaroo - (5) Comic
 infernous - (1-3) Sketches
 demont - (10) WG/Macro Series

My work is generally unfocused, meaning that I pick up and put down whichever one of these I want for however long I want.

This is currently what's on my plate, but by all means, my requests are still open. I like having a broad number of projects to work on, it keeps me from getting weighed down by just one.

Now that I've finally finished up on the Lodoss/Cooner series, what should I do this time?

I was thinking of doing DrakeMOhkami's IF series he did for Rakeesh, but that would pretty much lock me from any other projects in the meantime.

And this is a suggestion box. I can say no.

Areas I'd be fine with are Muscle, Hyper, Inflation, Fat, Soft Vore, CV, Inanimate, and preferably have all of this kept to the male side of things.

That's all I do. Nothing you see here will be drawn by me. I take no credit, and I'm just trying to make lineart a little more awesome. I can do more than just put down flat colors, too.